RETAIN. REVISE. RECALL. REPEAT.
Dave Taylor
Director of Teaching & Learning at Archway Learning Trust - NPQEL Passionate about challenging social disadvantage, building character and educational excellence.
The most important training session for teachers and school leaders in the age of high stakes 'knowledge exams'.
How do you ensure your students retain the crucial knowledge required to succeed in Grade 9-1 exams?
Spaces still available on 16th June training, and other dates throughout 2017-18. Better still, plan it in for your INSET.
RETAIN. REVISE. RECALL. REPEAT.
It's exam season again, and so begins 'the final push', where manic, sleepless teachers perform the annual rituals of high-speed dictation, lunchtime cramming and all-hours-intervention for their largely ambivalent students, forsaking all the CPD and training they've ever had because, in the immortal words of Daniel Bedingfield, 'We've gotta get through this'.
But this year is different. More than any Year Group in recent memory, the class of 2017 are sitting 'Knowledge is Power' exams, and their ability to retain, revise and recall specific information will determine their success. The prominence of knowledge is only going to increase for the classes of 2018, 2019 and for many years to come.
Now, we teachers love W.B. Yeats' maxim that 'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.' Of course, Yeats didn't invent this maxim: he found it in his own 'pail', which was filled with classics, including good-old Plutarch, who wrote in the first century that 'The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.'
For many teachers, especially those following the debates and polemics that swarm around The Michaela Community School and the growing prevalence of 'Knowledge Organisers', imparting knowledge can feel a little like 'the filling of a pail'. Teachers prefer to think of themselves as inspiring fire-starters rather than janitorial pail-fillers. But this is an idealised and unhelpful dichotomy of the learning process: skilled educators have always both filled and ignited.
So, to maximise their students' chances of success in these 'knowledge-centric' exams, teachers and schools need to understand the most effective and efficient ways to both fill the pail and light the fire.
Core Teaching has developed a practical and inspiring training day, delivered through Dragonfly Training, which examines and shares research and best practice with teachers which help them prepare teenage brains to RETAIN key information, REVISE it efficiently and effectively and RECALL it in the exam hall. The research base for this training centres on answering three questions:
RETAIN - How does the teenage mind RETAIN information?
REVISE - What does research show about ineffective and effective revision?
RECALL - How can teachers ensure the right details can be readily recalled in the stressful exam situation?
RETAIN: How does the teenage brain retain information? (the science bit)
Teachers find students fascinating and infuriating in equal measure: their capacity to switch between brilliance, idiocy and apathy in adjacent thoughts is what makes every hour at the chalkface so wonderfully unpredictable. But neurological studies into the functions of the adolescent brain prove that it's really not their fault: during adolescence the brain is undergoing a period of exceptional interconnectivity or 'plasticity'. Their brains are literally changing, often in mid thought.
Plasticity
Plas-tic-ity is the capacity of the brain to physically change as it embraces new learning. New connections form as a result of synaptic activity between neurons and the structure of the existing synapses then also change. Any new learning alters the physical construction of the brain, connecting pre-existing knowledge together with new and strengthening the overall function of the brain. During adolescence the human brain has it's greatest plasticity, which makes those GCSE years the optimum time to learn new things. If you want to know more about synaptic plasticity, there is a useful summary here.
The key to harnessing this plasticity for educational purposes lies in novelty: it is new learning that increases the synaptic interconnectivity between neurons. But in recent years, teachers have often been encouraged to 'cover' all the new content in Years 9 and 10, and keep the final terms of Year 11 for revision - going back over stuff. It may seem reassuring for teachers and students alike, but, neurologically, it is exactly the wrong thing to do when students' brains are at their most receptive.
Revision which simply covers old ground completely misses this 'once-in-a-lifetime' opportunity for 'the lighting of a fire' at the very point that the human brain is full of kindling.
By our late teens and early twenties, synaptic activity decreases as the brain matures and becomes more efficient: a natural and healthy 'pruning' activity to ready the brain for the challenges of adulthood. However, research shows that synapses 'exercised' by novelty and challenge survive and even strengthen. These stronger synapses store and retain more information and forms better connections to other learning, which is exactly what we need them to do if the students are to recall the information in exam conditions.
So, the teenage brain retains the information which creates the most synaptic activity - through novelty of information, experiences and/or approaches.
For a much more developed and cogent description of the adolescent brain, see this wonderful TED Talk by Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore:
REVISE - What does research show about ineffective and effective revision?
It is a common misconception that bamboo provides the panda with no nutritional value. That's not quite right: bamboo does provide nutrition, just pitifully little of it. A fully grown panda must eat around 38kg of bamboo every day just to meet their energy needs, which is the main reason they have evolved to lead such sedentary lifestyles.
Working with teenagers seems to me to be a lot like working with pandas. I'll let you do the work on that one. The similarities are especially clear when we look at independent learning and revision: left to their own devices, students are over-reliant on what I call bamboo revision strategies, principally:
- re-reading their notes,
- highlighting key details in their notes, and
- summarising the highlighted parts of the notes.
I call these bamboo revision strategies because of their pitifully low neurological value. Students swear by them because there is an outcome which physically resembles the original learning - it 'looks' like new stuff. And because students like these approaches so much, teachers and parents tend to trust them as well, taking confidence from the belief that students have 'done their revision'. But the lack of synaptic activity involved in simply going over the same information again renders them almost (but not entirely) pointless - they are neurological bamboo.
Effective Revision Strategies - the research
The most impressive and comprehensive research I know in this field is in the paper Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology by John Dunlosky et al (2013) .
Click here to read the paper.
It's bad form to cherry pick one detail from such thorough research, but I'm going to: the table below captures the paper's key evaluation of effective learning techniques that could be used for revision.
Their findings support the idea that the big three bamboo revision strategies - rereading, highlighting and summarising - are of limited neurological value. Moderate value strategies include elaborate interrogation, self explanation and interleaved practice. The highest educational value is placed on distributed practice and practice testing. Let's explore those techniques.
Five learning and revision techniques that make information stick
According to Dunlosky et al's, here are the five most effective learning strategies for retention, in reverse order.
5. Self explanation
In essence, a metacognitive attempt to recreate the brain's synaptic interconnectivity, rather than considering new learning in isolation, students start by linking it to what they know already. When students learn anything new, the need to connect it with previously retained learning, through careful (perhaps indexed) note-taking and/or by mapping learning together.
Interconnected mind-maps are a visual representation of self explanation. They're not as successful as some of the strategies below, but they're significantly more valuable than highlighting notes, because they are forcing the interconnectivity, and ensuring improved retention.
4. Elaborate Interrogation
Dunlosky et al describe elaborative interrogation as 'prompting learners to generate an explanation for an explicitly stated fact' such as “Why does it make sense that…?”, “Why is this true?”, and simply “Why?”
In this way, elaborate interrogation supports the integration of new information with existing prior knowledge and beliefs. Students get into the habit of challenging the perceived wisdom of their learning, meaning the new knowledge is not simply accepted, but considered and explored.
3. Interleaved Practice
This one doesn't need much explaining: the brain retains knowledge much more successfully when revision tests different content in a single revision session.
The image below shows typical 'massed' approach to revision: revising one subject or topic all evening, varying across the week. This, like the bamboo revision strategies, feels reassuring to the students: they get the impression that they have 'done' their revision. They might have re-read, highlighted and summarised all their notes on one night, but the likelihood of them remembering what they highlighted by the following evening is slim.
Replacing this with a schedule of interleaved revision (one scene from Macbeth, then a few Maths questions, then Spanish vocab for 20 mins and finally one source from History) will create an increase in synaptic activity and significantly increase retention. An interleaved revision schedule would look more like this:
The variation in both content and skills required for the different subjects creates much more synaptic activity, and thus retention of the details is increased. Variety is also more engaging for the student, meaning it is likely to be a more efficient and enjoyable use of their time. Explaining the logic of simple changes such as this can make a significant difference to students ability to retain the information they are revising.
2. Distributed Practice
The thinking behind this, the second most effective revision strategy, comes from German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote about the exponential nature of forgetting. See this great infographic for more.
Ebbinghaus' (rather obvious) conclusion was that there is a decline in memory retention over time. This downward arcing curve traces how information is lost when there is no attempt to retain it - see the dotted lines.
His studies highlight the effect of 'distributed practice' on memory retention. By returning to the material, or reviewing, across 'distributed' timescales the information can become permanent: the brain recognises that this information needs to be brought forward at any time. It's like your brain being in a state of perpetual OFSTED readiness, but, in terms of brain capacity, being 'ever-ready' only serves to strengthen the brain.
By varying and prolonging the time between practice, students actually allow 'forgetting time'. When the brain is tasked to recall this information after several weeks, it is required to retrace the synaptic activity that first retained the information. And the more frequently you come back to a topic, especially after several weeks or even months, the clearer your memory is. Smart, isn't it.
1. Practice Testing
It's reassuring to think that good old-fashioned self-testing is Top of the Shop when it comes to retaining learning. It seems almost too easy, but the research is clear. Teachers know it is our ability to pose challenging questions that deepens a students understanding and keeps the knowledge at the forefront of their mind. We need to train the students to do this without us.
For effective revision which best enables RECALL, the humble Flashcard is king.
Teachers can provide the questions and the focus, but it is most effective if the students create the cards for themselves or one another - questions on one side, answers on the reverse.
It's not only flashcards that work this way: students can work their way through past exam papers independently help – always direct students to the relevant resources on exam board websites. They can devise their own tests, quiz each other over social media, respond to or even create multiple choice tests online.
Practice Testing works best when students work with at least one other person, which stimulates much more synaptic activity than simply re-reading notes. If nothing else, get you students proficient in Practice Testing.
RECALL - How can teachers ensure the right details can be readily recalled in the stressful exam situation?
Well, I don't want to be too obvious here, but reading research like that contained in this blog is a good place to start. Understanding the cognitive processes involved in retaining information makes a teacher more likely to organise learning to make it stick.
Five useful tips for teachers to ensure learning sticks.
Avoid Bamboo revision. Explain to students that the big three - re-reading, highlighting and summarising - are of minimal cognitive value, then reassure them that slight changes, such as creating a mind-map linking disparate learning will be much more successful.
Keep teaching until the end. Resist the temptation to simply 'revise' for the final term. Yes, you will want to cover the content reassuringly early, and your professionalism requires you to ensure no-one is left behind, but finishing the syllabus too early is counter-productive. Keep learning new, fresh and vibrant and it will stick. Maybe add some critical thinking to supplement the learning - novelty will help students recall the information much more readily.
Distribute and interleave revision and exam practice. Explain the evidence base and the cognitive benefits, and then practise what you are preaching: revisit disparate parts of the syllabus to keep the interest and to stimulate the synapses. Talk up the links within the learning in class, and explain that you expect them to do the same in their revision.
Develop students' ability to explain their learning and interrogate perceived knowledge. Teachers ask great questions, and developing the students ability to do likewise is going to pay dividends in the exam hall. Always get them to as 'why' something is the case, and not simply accept and write down what you say.
And the most important thing you can do:
Teach the students how to test themselves: show them how flashcards work and give them the first set as a starter; explain how they can get friends and family to test them intelligently; share online resources which will quiz them in different ways, such as cloze, multiple choice, rank-ordering; encourage students to establish safe online forums where they can test each other. Link this to distributed practice by encouraging students to self-test at irregular intervals.
Good luck filling the pails and lighting the fires.
Spaces still available on 16th June training. Details here https://lnkd.in/ggnrYZQ
Or plan it in for your September INSET here https://lnkd.in/g8YXfwf
Sources and further reading:
With enormous thanks to the following resources, all of which give a much more detailed acount of aspects of this article.
https://thinkedu.net/blog/the-forgetting-curve-interleaving-vs-blocking/