Do Your Students Remember What You Teach?
Announce a quiz in class and you will most likely hear a collective groan, but did you know that frequent quizzing or regular “retrieval” practice can increase student performance by an entire letter grade?
In the day of “Go Google it,” we tend to minimize the importance of learning facts. After all, we hear so much about the importance of higher level skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and creating. While these are all very important, without the foundational knowledge, facts, and context, how can we expect students to perform these desired higher-level actions? And critical thinking can really only be taught in context, so students must have a basis on which to think before they can be successful (see Daniel Willingham, Critical Thinking: Why is it so Hard to Teach?).
And while higher stakes exams can help us assess foundational content knowledge, students may not know effective strategies to prepare for those exams. Simply reading the text, listening to or watching lectures, and “taking notes” on what they hear or read is often not sufficient preparation for exams, and certainly not effective for being able to remember the factual content to use it later. Telling students that their methods of studying are ineffective are also not going to change their behavior. Your instructional, assessment, and feedback methods can make a big difference in how much students learn and remember.
Based on important research into memory, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (see The Power of Testing Memory), as well as James Lang (see Small Teaching) offer immediately applicable lessons for teaching that do not require major changes in your day to day, but deliver powerful changes for your students to help them learn better and remember longer. Key is the concept that practice retrieving information from your brain leads to better performance in retrieving information from your brain! This simple idea can fundamentally transform how you teach in simple and bite-sized changes you can make in any course you are teaching now.
In a study of middle school students, researchers found that the students “scored a full grade level higher on material that had been quizzed than on the material that had not been quizzed” (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, 2014) and the effects lasted at least eight months after the material was taught. In another study over multiple semesters in a chemistry course, the instructor spent ten minutes at the end of every class requiring students to write a short answer to a question. They turned in the paper, the instructor looked through them for misunderstandings (but did not grade the work), and addressed any issues at the next session. In the semesters where students participated in this activity, the rate of students who failed or withdrew from the class dropped from 35% to 17%.
So how is it done? Here are a few techniques for implementing this in your class next week:
- Ask students at the beginning of class to summarize what you covered in the last class session. This can be oral or written (there are a few additional benefits to having it written).
- Pose questions as you teach that require all students to answer. Try polling in your lectures!
- Ask students a question at the end of class to check their understanding. This can be done on an index card or with a Twitter post.
- Conduct frequent quizzes online or on paper (short answer is better, but even multiple choice is better than not quizzing). These do not need to be graded as long as feedback is provided for misconceptions.
- Space out your assessments. Weekly or even daily quizzes require students to regularly practice retrieving foundational knowledge.
- Require students to think. Ask questions and then be quiet and let them answer. They can “pair and share” to discuss with a neighbor, use the Catchbox to give an answer in a large auditorium, or you can call students to answer or lead a discussion.
