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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Written by Kristian Still,Test-Enhanced Learning: A practical guide to improving academic outcomes for all studentsis an informative guidebook that explores the wealth of evidence behind and the benefits of test-enhanced learning, spaced retrieval practice and personalisation.Detailing the most up to date research into improving learning and retention, it takes us on a journey into test-enhanced learning, spaced retrieval practice, motivation, metacognition and personalisation. In so doing, the book provides a blueprint for all teachers and schools to improve the academic outcomes of their students and to achieve this in ways that improve the motivation of learners and reduces the workload for teachers.Kristian Still has been developing these ideas with his classes for many years and has achieved considerable success in terms of thedirect learning gains, and improved assessment grades of his pupils and the indirect gains instudentsgrowing confidence in lessons, with a wider group of pupils contributing to class and improved classroom behaviour. Consequently, students are finding greater comfort in class and experiencing less pressure or underpreparedness when a question is asked.The book is supported by the freeRemembermoreapp which uses digital flashcards as an aid to deliver the learning gains of personalised, spaced retrieval practice, providing teachers with insights into the effectiveness of their own teaching. It also contains a number of practical case studies from teachers using these techniques and the app to produce great results in their schools.Spaced retrieval practice is a highly effective but counter intuitive revision technique in that it involves forgetting and relearning knowledge.Test-Enhanced Learningprovides a blueprint for motivating students to adopt this technique in favour of seemingly easier but less effective techniques such as re-reading. Moreover, theRemembermoreapp does most of the convincing for you. It is a tool, not only to provide the flashcards for retrieval practice, but also to demonstrate the power of the technique to pupils.The book goes a step beyond mere retrieval practice, offering a fresh approach to test-enhanced learning, both pretesting and post testing, supported by real, classroom-based routines that have been tried and tested by both Primary and Secondary teachers across a range of subjects. Exploring the research behind test-enhanced learning, it reveals that both pretesting and post testing (retrieval practice) offers improved memorisation and secures long-term learning.Suitable for all teachers in all settings.
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A
Praise for Test-enhanced learning
Such a thoughtful look at an incredibly important topic of education. As a classroom teacher, I appreciate the deep dive into the research while also its accessibility to the classroom. Test-Enhanced Learning is a text all teachers, no matter their subject or level, can benefit from to improve instruction and learning in their classroom.
Blake Harvard, The Effortful Educator, advanced placement psychology teacher
In a power-packed compact volume, Kristian Still presents an extraordinarily well-researched guide to support teachers as they practically employ retrieval through quizzes, self-tests and other memory-stimulating activities. Test-Enhanced Learning is about how putting memory to the test can be applied in a host of learning situations. Through the use of an authentic teacher voice, case studies from a variety of contents and levels, and helpful summarisation points, Still manages to communicate a treasure trove of research in a way that educators can digest and readily apply.
Margaret A. Lee, educator, consultant, co-author of Mindsets for Parents
To say that this book is incredibly rich is an understatement. Written by a teacher, for teachers, Kristian Still has written a book that provides useful insights in multiple layers. In its entirety, the book eloquently distils significant amounts of academic research into accessible chapters for the busy teacher wanting to understand more about the science of learning, memory and testing. However, the book is also cleverly written in a way that moves beyond the research into day-to-day practical application. Each chapter ends with a bullet-list summary of its content and then a case study depicting how its content manifests in a real-life classroom. All of this, alongside well-placed honest reflections and enlightening anecdotes from the author’s own exploits into test-enhanced learning. With so much to offer, why wouldn’t you read this book?!
Jon Gilbert, Professional Development Director, The Two Counties Trust
This book is a fascinating exploration of the testing effect in practice. Finely balancing research and case studies, it will provide food for thought for any teacher or school leader interested in learning more about this important subject.
Kieran Mackle, teacher, author, host of the Thinking Deeply about Primary Education podcastB
Still’s Test-Enhanced Learning is the product of an intense three-year journey. Firstly, as an experienced educator, he has continued to adapt and hone his pedagogical practice in the classroom to study how testing, memory, spacing and interleaving can truly bring about the very best outcomes for his students. This has been paired with incredibly in-depth academic research on how we best study, learn, store and retrieve information. Still has presented some of these ideas before through his articles and presentations but having such a comprehensive overview of test-enhanced learning in this book is quite the achievement. Beyond the theory and research, Still also includes clear takeaways for the classroom and practical examples are explained through different case studies. This book is a must-read for any classroom practitioner who is keen to make the best use of test-enhanced learning and a testing routine to motivate their students to achieve.
Jon Wayth, MEd, Head of Upper School, El Limonar International School, Murcia
Retrieval practice is an essential topic for every teacher and school leader to understand. As it has gained in popularity (a quick Google Ngram search shows exponential growth in the use of ‘retrieval practice’ since 2000), educators around the world are looking to get their hands on no-nonsense, practical solutions for embedding techniques that harness the testing effect into their specific contexts. Still’s Test-Enhanced Learning has provided educators with the primer and the blueprint for doing so. Through perceptive descriptions and illustrative case studies, Still takes readers on a journey through the research and related concepts of this powerful area of evidence-informed instruction. The result is a book that is accessible to both new and long-time enthusiasts of the science of learning. For a field that has often vilified testing while embracing fads, folk theories and other foolishness, this book is, if not a miracle, a giant step in the right direction.
Zach Groshell, PhD, instructional coach and teacher, blogger, author, host of the Progressively Incorrect podcast
This book is an accessible and enjoyable encyclopaedia of test-enhanced learning. Kristian explores all the facets of test-enhanced learning including the usual suspects in up-to-date detail plus feedback, motivation, metacognition, illusions of competence and more. Not only has Kristian done the reading, thinking and trialling in his classroom, he’s also spoken to the researchers about their work and motivations. The result is a rich combination of their insights, providing suggestions for educators that they can use to guide their practice. This, in combination with practical case studies from exceptionally thoughtful teachers, brings the research to life. I’ll be coming back to this book time and again!
Sarah Corringham, Associate Dean, Ambition InstituteC
This is a unique and long-awaited book. While it’s been a few years now that schools have known about the top cognitive science teaching strategies, we’ve all been waiting for an in-depth analysis of their application in real classroom contexts by a practising teacher – one where the students’ own psychologies, faced with a new and challenging about-change in how to learn, are noticed, developed and described. These are real field notes, backed by a comprehensive and interconnected familiarity with the relevant research.
Kristian Still’s book is comprehensive, personal, analytical, practical and a positive validation of the impact of integrating and adapting teaching strategies to fit the context in which they are applied. I highly recommend this book and consider it to be a launch of a new era in which context and techniques are intelligently integrated.
Oliver Caviglioli, co-author of the Teaching WalkThrus books
Kristian has weighed, tasted and sampled the complex ingredients within the subject matter. The format in each chapter affords you the option of digesting the content as either a set menu or a mezze, in accordance with your bespoke needs and appetite.
Dr Sean Warren, co-author of Living Contradiction: A Teacher’s Examination of Tension and Disruption in Schools, in Classrooms and in Self
Test-Enhanced Learning is illuminating, informative, applicable and actionable for teachers in all aspects of their job. Terminology, theories and concepts are clarified with concise explanations and examples. Readability and utility are enhanced with key takeaways and a case study at the end of each chapter. The signposts to one seminal paper per subtopic testify to Kristian’s consideration for the time-poor teacher striving to be evidence informed. Refreshingly balanced discussion throughout protects against lethal mutations; Kristian does not shy away from conducting his negative controls!
Mitigating the desirable difficulties of testing, motivation is the golden thread running through the book; vital yet impossible to spontaneously or forcibly generate. Instead, it emerges along the learning journey only when preceded by success. Success leads to belief in the process, motivation emerges, engendering commitment from which achievement will follow, building confidence. And confident learners will not only reap individual benefits, they will enrich the classroom.
Dr Kerensa Ogbe, Assistant Head for Teaching and Learning, Clifton CollegeD
This well-researched book draws together so many elements related to testing and retrieval in an informative and insightful manner. The extensive range of relevant research from which Kristian quotes contains numerous pearls of wisdom as well as phrases that capture the essence of the argument that he presents, including ‘the steady creep of improvement’, ‘the valley of disappointment’ and how ‘performance during learning is a poor predictor of future performance.’ Kristian pulls together much of the thinking related to cognitive science that is currently popular but does so with depth and understanding and, crucially, practical application.
A most welcome book for the teacher looking to deepen knowledge and improve their teaching based upon detailed research and written in an engaging and informative style.
Dr Keith Watson, education consultant and coach
E
Test-enhanced learning
A practical guide to improving academic outcomes for all students
Kristian Still
Edited by Pete Henshaw
Foreword
Testing in education has a troubled history (Stobart, 2008) and there has been a regrettable mistrust and even aversion to testing in some quarters, including from many teachers. Tests have acquired an unfortunate association with damaging forms of accountability, including top-down, managerial forms of school leadership and heavy-handed, highly questionable use of data in schools. Many teachers even steer clear of the T-word, preferring to talk about quizzes, progress checks and assessments, or ensuring that it is accompanied by its less-threatening companion, ‘low-stakes’.
This troubled image and history notwithstanding, countless teachers have come to understand the power of tests as an educational tool and adopted tests as a key component of their teaching pedagogy. It helps that the concept of assessment for learning (or formative assessment) is now widely understood – although it is quite demoralising to think that, after two decades of being part of the received wisdom and evidence base about effective teaching, ‘formative assessment remains the exception rather than the rule in most classrooms’ (Wiliam, 2022: 134). What has crept up on teachers, particularly in the last decade, is the idea of assessment as learning. Sometimes this term is used as a way of helping us better understand the relationship between assessment of and for learning within formative assessment (Earl, 2012); but there is a more fundamental sense in which assessment could and should be seen as learning. Over the last decade, a large body of literature on the benefits of testing (Roediger et al., 2011) has become connected with and articulated through the language and conceptual toolkit of cognitive science. The evidence is clear: testing raises pupil achievement (Perry et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2021).ii
Let us consider the current relationship between cognitive science and education. We have a mountain of strong evidence from cognitive science which provides robust and fundamental principles for learning and memory. I, like many others, am convinced that teaching and learning are unlikely to be successful if not in line with principles of memory and learning that are well-established in cognitive science. It is understandable, therefore, that teachers have been exploring the potential insights that cognitive science has to offer. Over the last decade, there has been increasing awareness of key results from cognitive science and a growing body of literature seeking to connect these to practice. Cognitive science is becoming a common focus for professional development, and many teachers are – individually and collectively – taking ideas and strategies from cognitive science and applying them in their classrooms.
These are exciting times, with a huge amount of innovation taking place and real optimism about the potential benefits of cognitive science in education. There is, however, a problem. The evidence suggests that we are still some way off realising the potential of cognitive science. There is presently a large gap between, on one hand, the laboratory and the controlled conditions of classroom trials and, on the other, the everyday reality of teaching. We have not yet created practical, scalable models of cognitive-science-informed professional development or school improvement that have demonstrable and sustained impact when tested in realistic conditions (Perry et al., 2021). Challenges also apply at a more local level. Teachers are still wrestling with conceptual and practical questions about how insights from cognitive science can be translated into classroom practice and embedded for lasting improvement. The gap between research and practice remains large.
It is in this context that Kristian Still’s Test-Enhanced Learning picks up the challenge of bringing cognitive science to bear on our understanding of testing and its role in enhancing learning. If you are wondering about how you can help your classes ‘remember more’, and what the cognitive science evidence base really says about the role of testing in education, you are not alone. Happily, you have picked up the right book: it is a superb contribution to the current movement to realise the potential of cognitive science in the classroom. It connects a detailed and up-to-date understanding of the science to the complexity and nuance of classroom practice. It introduces and explains concepts, principles and evidence from across cognitive science, summarising a large and often technical evidence base with clarity and accessibility. Woven into this is a discussion of the implications and questions for practice, which is further reinforced by case studies of cognitive science in practice at the end of each chapter. Oh, and if all that wasn’t iiienough, Kristian has taken all these insights about testing and cognitive science and built them into the RememberMore platform and app – which you can use, for free, in your own classroom. To connect research and practice in this way is impressive – and a lot easier said than done.
Allow me to comment a little more on the more general challenges of translating and embedding cognitive science in practice, and some of the issues that must be navigated. What has proved particularly difficult for those connecting cognitive science and practice is staying true to the research while relevant to the classroom. Many attempts have produced a compelling and practical account of what cognitive-science-informed practice should look like, but have lost sight of the science. Teachers are provided with a toolkit of strategies and principles that are ostensibly supported by an impressive evidence base but – while plausible – are filtered through the lens of the author’s teaching philosophy and classroom experiences. In fact, the cognitive science does not provide much concrete detail on what classroom-ready activities and teaching and learning strategies should be. This is because the research has prioritised scientific control over realistic, everyday classroom conditions, and it has set up experiments that optimise rather than road-test classroom strategies in action. The research is, therefore, in many respects a poor guide to the practicalities of how cognitive-science-informed teaching and learning can be applied in typical classroom conditions.
To reap the benefits of cognitive science, teachers must understand principles of memory and learning and have a clear conception of what the research does and does not show. The research is not ‘oven-ready’ (to coin an infamous phase used by a former prime minister) and it is often difficult to see at what point scientific theory stops and teacher expertise must pick up. In this context, there are dangers of a too-reductive conception of cognitive science and an over-reaching conception of its contribution to pedagogical theory. Top-down and reductive accounts of the science can over-ride and undermine rather than enhance professional expertise. We still have some way to go until we can confidently say what cognitive science should look like in the classroom while remaining firmly grounded in the evidence. It is still worth teachers going back to the principles and evidence provided by the research to reach their own conception of cognitive-science-informed practice.
The opposing issue is that there are also many accounts of cognitive science that have remained true to the research while losing sight of the practice. Researchers have a tendency to underappreciate how much work and expertise is needed to put guidance into practice. Most jarring is how little cognitive science has to say about subject content, the individual differences ivof children and young people, the dynamics of classroom teaching, and other facets of high-quality teaching such as formative assessment, classroom management and fostering classroom dialogue. Many important educational questions are treated as an afterthought and/or issues that can be readily resolved by teachers. The science, while technically sophisticated, can often be quite crude and impractical with respect to accounts of classroom practice, certainly as compared to the sophistication and concreteness of teachers’ educational expertise and experience. What is needed are accounts that inform educational thinking and problems with powerful evidence from cognitive science, exploring educational theory and practice and cognitive science side by side.
Test-Enhanced Learning is a serious, honest and thought-provoking investigation into the interface between research and practice. It provides an evidence-informed and practical theory of the role of testing that connects the powerful idea of retrieval practice to a host of related concepts, including spaced practice (and successive relearning), interleaving feedback, metacognition, motivation, personalisation and much more. It also does important work to show the role of retrieval practice across stages of learning – to potentiate, encode and maintain learning. This moves us to a more nuanced, three-dimensional and powerful conception of testing as an educational practice. It is to his credit that Kristian has not shied away from the technical detail, complexity and uncertainty of the science. The research is often technical and hard to interpret. As a result, this book will challenge as well as inform. Equally, he has not strayed away from practical questions about what test-enhanced learning looks like in the classroom. Practice is uncertain, complex and messy. The ‘takeaways’ at the end of each chapter are hard-won conclusions from wrestling with the evidence, and the case studies are testament to the process that unfolds when principles and strategies from cognitive science are put into practice. Any account of what cognitive science looks like in the classroom that doesn’t challenge you is offering an overly simplistic view of the science, of practice or both.
Perhaps one day we will be able to embed the lessons of cognitive science into educational resources and technology, or absorb them into the collective knowledge of the profession, in a way that makes them invisible and taken for granted – analogous to the way that the computer software and hardware I am using to write manages to render this text despite my complete ignorance of its inner workings. At present, though, I think there is some way to go and a value in intrepid teachers grappling with testing at the level of fundamentals. That is, teachers should be able to design their own teaching and learning with knowledge about how cognition, memory and vtesting work. The key contribution of cognitive science in support of this is to provide teachers with a powerful set of concepts and principles for learning that we can trust. Test-Enhanced Learning doesn’t provide an oven-ready pedagogy or list of ‘top tips’ that you can put in place next Monday morning (but will have forgotten about by Wednesday). What it does is introduce, explain and explore what cognitive science reveals about testing and learning – equipping you to think scientifically and expertly about memory and learning.
The synthesis of educational and cognitive scientific knowledge is an incredibly challenging but important frontier for education. Equally, it is imperative that the profession develops a sophisticated conception of assessment of, for and as learning. Teachers becoming experts in testing should be as unremarkable as sculptors being handy with a chisel. Referring to learning as ‘test-enhanced’ would be as redundant as describing a television as being in colour. Kristian describes all that is test-enhanced learning and RememberMore as his ‘edventure’. Personally, I am delighted that there are edventurous teachers out there who can push forward our thinking and practice about the myriad and powerful ways in which tests can enhance learning.
Dr Tom Perry Associate Professor, Education Studies, University of Warwickvi
Acknowledgements
I will miss my 6:30am Friday morning calls with Pete Henshaw, a journalist and editor specialising in education and first editor of this book. Not only did the book benefit from his inquisitive questioning and editorial, I did too.
My thanks to Dr Tom Perry, Sarah Cottingham and Helen Webb for their conversation and critique: Tom for always cautioning me not to over-stretch the contribution of educational research, Sarah for sharing her expertise in educational neuroscience and advocacy, and Helen for always reminding me that teachers have to be able to apply this knowledge within the complexities of their own classroom. To the nine teachers who contributed a case study and much more in between – Helen Webb, Kirby Dowler, Dan Rosen, Helen Pipe, Andy Sammons, Kristian Shanks, Anoara Mughal, Ambra Carretta and Ben Windsor – thank you for sharing your insights and experiences from the chalkface. And, lastly, to the pupils in my classes, thank you for your honest critique and enthusiasm for test-enhanced learning. Is there a more powerful endorsement than pupils committing more of their discretionary time than they are asked for to keep a teacher motivated?viii
Contents
Introduction
It all began with Othello
In December 2021, in an article for secondary education magazine SecEd, I made the case that despite the ‘wealth of evidence’ (Agarwal et al., 2021: 1438) about the ‘reliable advantage’ (Yang et al., 2021: 299) of test-enhanced learning – more commonly referred to as the testing effect or retrieval practice – it is actually far more complicated than it is often presented as being and that ‘retrieval practice alone is not enough’ (Still, 2021). In that article, I argued that retrieval practice offered ‘more than just improved memorisation skills and securing long-term learning’, and encouraged teachers to exploit unsupervised, personalised spaced retrieval practice and to leverage the wider indirect benefits of testing. I argued towards adopting a set of learning principles or test-enhanced learning.
Feedback from that article led to a series of further articles in the same organ; the series then led to this book. In Test-Enhanced Learning, I will first explore the wealth of research, report the direct and indirect benefits of test-enhanced learning and review the ingredients of test-enhanced learning (i.e. cognition, repeated retrieval practice, spaced learning, interleaving, feedback and elaboration, successive relearning, metacognition and motivation), both inside and – just as importantly – outside the classroom. A review that ultimately points to the inherent inefficiencies of learning and the potential gains of personalisation. This review of the research (both laboratory and applied) is tied with my efforts to employ test-enhanced learning in my own classroom and with other teachers around the world.2
Second, I outline my efforts to make personalised spaced retrieval practice available to teachers, educators and learners through RememberMore. This has three connected component parts. First, classroom.remembermore.app is an open and free web portal for creating bespoke classroom quizzes for teaching, retrieval and self-study in seconds (yes, seconds!). RememberMore. app is a digital flashcard system that boosts learning and reduces teacher workload. Importantly, it adopts confidence-based assessment to personalise spaced retrieval practice, thereby increasing retrieval gains. It also enables both teachers and learners to categorise and tag knowledge, providing a structure to organise knowledge and support interleaving. Finally, RememberMore includes a ‘dashboard’ that presents learner and flashcard insights via a graphical user interface to help inform teachers, teaching and learning. It is also the platform to quiz your understanding and the knowledge acquired in reading this book. Where would a book about test-enhanced learning be without a quiz about it?
Context is king
You may be expecting this introduction to start with an outline of what inspired me to dedicate most of my professional learning to investigating test-enhanced learning. However, my interest in this area of research started out with me simply trying to find a solution to what my pupils needed most at that time, which was being able to access knowledge to better understand the texts being taught in class. With clearly observable impact on pupil attainment and classroom culture, that interest led to reviewing the research more critically, connecting with researchers, while road-testing and iterating my own classroom practice. Finally, after three years’ intensive work, I was asked to write this practical guide to improving academic outcomes for all pupils.
For context, I was returning to England from overseas after the new academic year had started. I was joining an oversubscribed, inclusive comprehensive secondary school with a pupil intake that reflects a wonderfully diverse and vibrant local community, in the third week of term as a full-time teacher of English (my second subject, having studied sports science (BSc) and kinesiology (MSEd)). I felt remarkably like I did when I started my teaching career. It was a school with a strong moral purpose, principled leadership, and defined and embedded school values: challenge, creativity, commitment, cooperation and courtesy.3
Even with 20-plus years of teaching experience (eight years as a head teacher and senior leader), I knew that I would still need time to establish myself in a new school, and I didn’t have all that much time to prepare – I was due to start teaching the following day.
Prior to meeting the classes, I put together a basic class profile (names, photos, prior attainment data and background), reviewed the long-term curriculum plan and schemes of work, and read the school’s behaviour policy. The classes I would be teaching were predominantly low prior attaining, and a number of pupils had accumulated higher than average negative behaviour points. Just for good measure, I was (we were) nomadic – teaching in various classrooms throughout the school over the teaching week.
Following just a handful of lessons, the challenge was clear. The curriculum was rightly ambitious. I was new to the school and ‘we’ needed time to establish a positive classroom climate (made all the more difficult by often arriving to class at the same time as the pupils) and learning routines. In addition, it was evident that many of the pupils would benefit from experiencing success in lessons, as too many were more focused on what they couldn’t do than what they could.
That first Friday evening, I was late home having made a lot of positive phone calls home and quite a few phone calls to introduce myself to parents/carers. A worthwhile investment, even with a busy weekend ahead of me.
With the unit outline already stuck in the front of the pupils’ exercise books, I hurriedly built a basic knowledge organiser that defined and shared with pupils the substantive knowledge and explicit vocabulary from the scheme of learning that I expected them to learn. The process of building the knowledge organiser was as much for my professional learning as it was for the pupils, having not taught the assigned texts previously. I asked the pupils to add this to the back of their exercise books, as both a reference document and a tool for self-assessment.
I originally introduced a low-stakes retrieval practice (testing/quizzing) lesson starter routine (with self-assessed marking) as a practical solution to managing the chaotic arriving-at-the-same-time lesson starts – and to give me the opportunity to log in to the teacher’s computer, take the register and set up the upcoming lesson. Equally, I was very aware of the wider benefits of test-enhanced learning – and the ‘high utility’ of both retrieval practice 4and spaced or distributed practice more specifically1 – but this was as much about managing the learning as it was about leading it.
Early reflections
Was it easy? No. Did the pupils thrive on the low-stakes retrieval practice starters? Not at first. (We will discover that there is much more to test-enhanced learning than low-stakes retrieval practice starters.) What I can immediately share with you, however, is that pupils are more receptive to ‘quiz’ and ‘quizzing’ than they are to ‘tests’ and ‘testing’, that ‘retrieval practice’ doesn’t mean all that much to them at all, and that pupils know little about how they learn or the difference between performance and learning, and would much prefer to adopt more familiar learning strategies or none at all.
The truth is that the pupils found it hard, effortful and, with only nominal reward in the opening half a dozen or so lessons, a little deflating. I would have to be honest and say that the pupils were not entirely convinced. I would later learn that I had not only missed a critical step, but I was also missing a lot of the knowledge and know-how that we will cover in this book. We will come back to this in detail later.
For now, I knew why we were investing in these high-utility, evidence-informed practices and the wider benefits of test-enhanced learning, but just the teacher knowing why is insufficient. Nor is it just the doing that matters, but how well you are doing it. How you know how well you are doing it is equally important. Still, as I will outline, there is more to consider beyond retrieval and distribution or, for that matter, the spacing of test-enhanced learning. The good news is that you will be much better informed than I was.5
Coming up for air
By the end of the first term (12 weeks, or 60 or so lessons later), I had started to earn the pupils’ trust and routines were more established (if arriving at the same time as the pupils ever gets much easier). Together, we had travelled through the ‘valley of disappointment’ (Clear, 2018: 20) – that is, the period of investment where teachers and pupils feel discouraged, having put in hours of effortful practice and experienced nominal results, preceding accelerated benefits. I had also gained some important practical pedagogical insights on the use of quizzing: on the benefits of every pupil having a directed focus and working independently through a routined lesson starter quiz, the style of questions or cues that were most effective, the breadth of questions to cover, how many questions to set, whether to report or not report scores, the use of timers, how to transition to teaching the lesson, the potency of relearning, and the importance of self-assessment and low-stakes routines generally.
Perhaps most importantly, the pupils could now reference tangible learning gains for themselves – directly in what they knew and could remember and in their improved end-of-unit assessment grade, and indirectly in how they felt about themselves as successful learners and how they approached their learning. (We will explore the direct and indirect benefits of test-enhanced learning throughout the book.) The end-of-term pupil feedback review responses were largely positive too. Pupils reported a growing confidence and ‘security’ in lessons, and on reflection, a wider group of pupils were now contributing to class and we were all benefiting from the routined start to lessons. We have to remember that these were particular pupils who were largely indifferent to their learning – or shall we say bruised by their experiences of English teaching, possibly of education generally.
Outside of class, I leant heavily of the knowledge and expertise of my department colleagues, and I continued to read research journals and the blogs of practising educators like Blake Harvard (@effortfuleduktr and theeffortfuleductor.com). I paid closer attention when guests on the Mr Barton Maths Podcast (www.mrbartonmaths.com/podcast) or Ollie Lovell’s Education Research Reading Room Podcast (www.ollielovell.com/errr) mentioned memory, cognition or retrieval practice. The research clearly supported the performance gains of test-enhanced learning, of the testing effect and of retrieval practice, and it also signalled the benefits of spaced or distributed practice and interleaving (all covered in depth in later chapters of this book). What I rarely encountered was research connecting with metacognition, motivation and, given the speed of digital adoption at this 6time, personalisation (where learning is adapted to meet the needs of each learner).
The last point, personalisation, irked me. The fabulous work of Professor Graham Nuthall in The Hidden Lives of Learners (2007) (the only education book I have read three times) remained ever constant in my thoughts when reading the broader test-enhanced learning research.2
Our research has found that students already know, on average, about 50% of what a teacher intends his or her students to learn through a curriculum unit or topic. But that 50% is not evenly distributed. Different students will know different things, and all of them will know only about 15% of what the teacher wants them to know.
Nuthall (2007: 35)
I knew that, for all its benefits, the quizzing routines I was teaching were still being presented to the entire class – questions to many pupils and questions fishing for a correct response. Yet, what Nuthall kept on emphasising was that learning is highly individual and we need to ensure that new knowledge firmly connects to and integrates with previous knowledge, which is difficult, at best, when each pupil has unique prior knowledge. By the end of this book this will sound all too familiar. Was personalisation a potential solution to Nuthall’s research observations 13 years later and to classroom questioning ineffectiveness and inefficiency?
In search of a personalised solution
In search of a more personalised (sometimes referred to as adaptive) quizzing or retrieval practice solution, I kissed quite a few frogs before settling on perhaps one of the most accessible flashcard platforms – AnkiApp (Anki is Japanese for memorisation). First, of course, as a digital solution, distributed or spaced practice came baked into the software. Second, it also meant pupils had access to the anywhere-anytime learning to which we have become accustomed. (Hold that thought!) My account showed that I had first used Anki in 2017, some three years previously. I also seemed to recall that Daisy Christodoulou – the author of Seven Myths About Education7(2013) and other education titles, former head of assessment at Ark Schools and now director of education at No More Marking – was an Anki fan, and used the app to try and prevent forgetting what she had read.3 So started a mini research enquiry to investigate the suitability of Anki to support personalised spaced retrieval practice as a core component of my teaching.
With a full term under my belt, come January 2020 I would be faced with the additional challenge of teaching Shakespeare’s Othello. This would be the teaching experience that became the driving motivation for the design and development of RememberMore, the digital flashcard system I mentioned back at the start.
Why knowledge is essential for learning
Having attended more than a handful of Professor Paul Kirschner’s presentations, read his papers and books, and listened to him interviewed on various podcasts, it would be impossible not to be influenced by his eloquent expertise and infectious enthusiasm. Rarely does he fail to reference the work of American psychologist David Ausubel and that ‘the most influential factor for learning new things is what the learner already knows’; prior knowledge to you and me. According to Ausubel, new things that we want or need to learn must be connected to what we already know. Kirschner (2022) hits the nail squarely and firmly on the head when he says: ‘The more you know, the better you learn and the more you learn, the easier it gets!’ If your pupils do not have the basic ‘hooks’, or relevant prior knowledge, to which to attach more complex information, they will very quickly find themselves adrift in the lesson.
Back to teaching and the introduction of Othello. Here was a multicultural, all-boy Year 8 class with very little to no prior knowledge of Shakespeare or Elizabethan England, or the issues encapsulated by the play, and even less motivation to study it. Although a good number of pupils see value in their learning and some may seek clarification or your help, some may do nothing, at ease with being adrift, while others may seek to derail the learning to mask their sense of vulnerability and avoid further academic bruising. Without some basic background knowledge of the play and Elizabethan England, much like the protagonist Othello himself, the class were going to be in for a tough learning experience.8
Take two – the spring term
I had the substantive knowledge prepped on a knowledge organiser and on hand within Anki, making knowledge available to pupils both in and out of the classroom. I may not have realised it back then, but it was unwise not to take account of both metacognition and motivation when teaching – and inconceivable when employing test-enhanced learning. That is why there are three chapters in this book dedicated to these important components of learning, too often passed by in general conversation around retrieval practice.
As before, the course outline was stuck in the front of the pupils’ exercise books and the knowledge organiser in the back. In addition, we had a deck of flashcards available via Anki for quizzing in and out of class. We were now building on an emerging metacognitive belief that quizzing, test-enhanced learning and retrieval practice worked for these pupils, both directly and indirectly.
You see, when I set out on this ‘edventure’ (if Shakespeare can make up words, I would like to think we all can) with these academically bruised Year 8 pupils, I hadn’t explicitly told the learners why or how
