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Getting the Details Just Right: Retrieval Practice

Andrew Watson

August-28-2023

Getting the Details Just Right: Retrieval Practice

As we gear up for the start of a new school year, we’re probably hearing two words over and over: retrieval practice.

That is: students have two basic options when they go back over the facts, concepts, and procedures they’ve learned.

Option 1: they could review it; that is, reread a passage, or rewatch a video, or review their notes.

Option 2: they could retrieve it; that is, ask themselves what they remember about a passage, a video, or a page of notes.

Well, the research verdict is clear: lots of research shows that OPTION 2 is the winner. The more that students practice by retrieving, the better they remember and apply their learning in the long term.

This clear verdict, however, raises lots of questions.

How, exactly, should we use retrieval practice in classrooms.

Does it work in all disciplines and all grades?

Is its effectiveness different for boys and girls?

Does retrieval practice help students remember material that they didn’t practice?

Do multiple choice questions count as retrieval practice?

And so forth.

Given that we have, literally, HUNDREDS of studies looking at these questions, we teachers would like someone to sort through all these sub-questions and give us clear answers.

Happily, a research team recently produced just such a meta-analysis. They looked at 222 studies including more than 48,000 students, and asked nineteen specific questions.

These numbers are enormous.

Studies often get published with a few dozen participants – which is to say, a lot less than 48,000.

Researchers often ask 2 or 3 questions – or even 1. I don’t recall ever seeing a study or meta-analysis considering nineteen questions.

As a result, we’ve got a lot to learn from this meta-analysis, and can feel more confidence than usual in its conclusions.

The Big Picture

For obvious reasons, I won’t discuss all nineteen questions in detail. Instead, I’ll touch on the big-picture conclusions, highlight some important questions about practical classroom implementation, and point out a few surprises.

The high-level findings of this meta-analysis couldn’t be more reassuring.

YES: retrieval practice enhances long-term memory.

YES: in fact, it enhances memory of facts and concepts, and improves subsequent problem solving. (WOW.)

YES: it benefits students from kindergarten to college, and helps in all 18 (!!) disciplines that the researchers considered.

NO: the student’s gender doesn’t matter. (I was honestly a little surprised they studied this question, but since they’ve got an answer I’m reporting it here.)

I should note that these statistical results mostly fall in the “medium effect size” range: a hedges g of something like 0.50. Because I’m commenting on so many findings, I won’t comment on statistical values unless they’re especially high or low.

So the easy headline here is: retrieval practice rocks.

Making Retrieval Practice Work in the Classroom

Once teachers know that we should use retrieval practice, we’ve got some practical questions about putting it into practice.

Here again, this meta-analysis offers lots of helpful guidance.

Does it help for students to answer similar questions over multiple days?

Yes. (Honestly, not really surprising – but good to know.)

More specifically: “There is a positive relationship between the number of [retrieval practice] repetitions and the [ultimate learning outcome], indicating that the more occasions on which class content is quizzed, the larger the learning gains.”

Don’t just use retrieval practice; REPEAT retrieval practice.

Is feedback necessary?

Feedback significantly increases the benefit of retrieval practice – but the technique provides benefits even without feedback.

Does the mode matter?

Pen and paper, clicker quizzes, online platforms: all work equally well.

Me: I write “do now” questions on the board and my students write down their answers. If you want to use quizlet or mini-white boards, those strategies will work just as well.

Does retrieval practice help students learn un–tested material?

This question takes a bit of explaining.

Imagine I design a retrieval exercise about Their Eyes Were Watching God. If I ask my students to recall the name of Janie’s first husband (Logan Killocks), that question will help them remember his name later on.

But: will it help them remember the name of her second husband? Or, her third (sort-of) husband?

The answer is: direct retrieval practice questions help more, but this sort of indirect prompt has a small effect.

In brief, if I want my students to remember the names Jody Starks and Vergible Woods, I should ask them direct questions about those husbands.

Shiver Me Timbers

So far, these answers reassure me, but they don’t surprise me.

However, the meta-analysis did include a few unexpected findings.

Does the retrieval question format matter? That is: is “matching” better than “short answer” or “free recall” or “multiple choice”?

To my surprise, “matching” and “fill-in-the-blank” produce the greatest benefits, and “free recall” the least.

This finding suggests that the popular “brain dump” approach (“write down everything you remember about our class discussion yesterday!”) produces the fewest benefits.

I suspect that “brain dumps” don’t work as well because, contrary to the advice above, they don’t directly target the information we want students to remember.

Which is more effective: a high-stakes or a low-stakes format?

To my astonishment, both worked (roughly) equally well.

So, according to this meta-analysis, you can grade or not grade retrieval practice exercises. (I will come back to this point below.)

Should students collaborate or work independently on retrieval practice answers?

The studies included in the meta-analysis suggest no significant difference between these approaches. However, the researchers note that they don’t have all that many studies on the topic, so they’re not confident about this answer. (For a number of reasons, I would have predicted that individual work helps more.)

Beyond the Research

I want to conclude by offering an opinion that springs not from research but from experience.

For historical reasons, “retrieval practice” had a different name. Believe it or not, it was initially called “the testing effect.” (In fact, the authors of this meta-analysis use this term.)

While I understand why researchers use it, I think we can agree that “the testing effect” is a TERRIBLE name.

No student anywhere wants to volunteer for more testing. No teacher anywhere either.

And – crucially – the benefits have nothing to do with “testing.” We don’t need to grade them. Students don’t need to study. The retrieving itself IS the studying.

For that reason, I think teachers and schools should focus as much as possible on the “retrieval” part, and as little as possible on the “testing.”

No, HONESTLY, students don’t need to be tested/graded for this effect to work.

TL;DR

Retrieval practice — in almost any form — helps almost everybody learn, remember, and use almost anything.

As long as we don’t call it “testing,” schools should employ retrieval strategically and frequently.

Yang, C., Luo, L., Vadillo, M. A., Yu, R., & Shanks, D. R. (2021). Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 399.

Using “Worked Examples” in Mathematics Instruction: a New Meta-Analysis

Andrew Watson

August-21-2023

Using “Worked Examples” in Mathematics Instruction: a New Meta-Analysis

Should teachers lets students figure out mathematical ideas and processes on their own?

Or, should we walk students through those ideas/processes step by step?

This debate rages hotly, from eX-Twitter to California teaching standards.

As best I understand them, the arguments goes like this:

If students figure out ideas and processes for themselves, they think hard about those mathematical ideas. (“Thinking hard” = more learning.)

And, they feel emotionally invested in their discoveries. (“Emotional investment” = more learning.)

Or,

If students attempt to figure out math ideas for themselves, they first have to contemplate what they already know. Second, they contemplate where they’re going. And third, they have to (basically) guess until they figure out how to get from start to finish.

Holding all those pieces — starting place, finish line, all the potential avenues in between — almost certainly overwhelms working memory. (“Overwhelmed working memeory” = less learning.)

Therefore, teachers should walk students directly through the mathematical ideas/process with step-by-step “worked” examples. This process reduces cognitive load and builds schema. (“Reduced cognitive load” + “building schema” = more learning.)

Depending on your philosophical starting place, both argument might sound plausible. Can we use research to answer the question?

Enter the Meta

One problem with “using research to answer the question”: individual studies have yielded different answers.

While it’s not true that “you can find research that says anything,” it IS true — in this specific case — that some studies point one way and some point another.

When research produces this kind of muddle, we can turn to a mathematical technique called “meta-analysis.” Folks wise in the ways of math take MANY different studies and analyze all their results together.

If scholars do this process well, then we get an idea not what ONE study says, but what LOTS AND LOTS of well-designed studies say (on average).

This process might also help us with some follow up questions: how much do specific circumstances matter?

For instance: do worked examples help younger students more than older? Do they help with — say — math but not English? And so forth.

Today’s news:

This recent meta-analysis looks at the benefits of “worked examples,” especially in math instruction.

It also asks about specific circumstances:

Do students benefit from generating “self-explanations” in addition to seeing worked examples?

Do they learn more when the worked examples include BOTH correct AND incorrect examples?

So: what did the meta-analysis find?

Yes, No, No

The meta-analysis arrives at conclusions that — I suspect — suprise almost everyone. (If memory serves, I first read about it from a blogger who champions “worked examples,” and was baffled by some of this meta-analysis’s findings.)

In the first place, the meta-analysis found that students benefit from worked examples.

If you do speak stats, you’ll want to know that the g-value was 0.48: basically 1/2 of a standard deviation.

If you don’t speak stats, you’ll want to know that the findings were “moderate”: not a home run, but at least a solid single. (Perhaps another runner advanced to third as well.)

While that statement requires LOTS of caveats (not all studies pointed the same direction), it’s a useful headline.

In the dry language of research, the authers write:

“The worked examples effect yields a medium effect on mathematics outcomes whether used for practice or initial skill acquisition. Correct examples are particularly beneficial for learning overall.”

So, what’s the surprise? Where are those “no’s” that I promised?

Well, in the second place, adding self-explanation to worked examples didn’t help (on average). In fact, doing so reduced learning.

For lots of reasons, you might have expected the opposite. (Certainly I did.)

But, once researchers did all their averaging, they found that “pairing examples with self-explanation prompts may not be a fruitful design modification.”

They hypothesize that — more often than not — students’ self explanations just weren’t very good, and might have included prior misconceptions.

The Third Place?

In the third place came — to me, at least — the biggest surprise: contrasting correct worked examples with incorrect worked examples didn’t benefit students.

That is: they learned information better when they saw the right method, but didn’t explore wrong ones.

I would have confidently predicted the opposite. (This finding, in fact, is the one that shocked the blogger who introduced me to the study.)

Given these findings and calculations, I think we can come to three useful conclusions: in most cases, math students will learn new ideas…

… when introduced via worked examples,

… without being asked to generate their own explanations first,

… without being shown incorrect examples alongside correct ones.

Always with the Caveats

So far, this blog post has moved from plausible reasons why worked examples help students learn (theory) to a meta-analysis showing that they mostly do help (research).

That journey always benefits from a recognition of the argument’s limitations.

First, most of the 43 studies included in the meta-analysis focused on middle- and high-school math: algebra and geometry.

For that reason, I don’t know that we can automatically extrapolate its findings to other — especially younger — grades; or to other, less abstract, topics.

Second, the findings about self-explanations include an obvious potential solution.

The researchers speculate that self-explanation doesn’t help because students’ prior knowledge is incorrect and misleading. So: students’ self-explantions activate schema that complicate — rather than simplify — their learning.

For example: they write about one (non-math) study where students were prompted to generate explanations about the causes of earthquakes.

Because the students’ prior knowledge was relatively low, they generated low-quality self-explanations. And, they learned less.

This logic suggests an obvious exception to the rule. If you believe your students have relatively high and accurate prior knowledge, then letting them generate self-explanations might in fact benefit students.

In my own work as an English teacher, I think of participles and gerunds.

As a grammar teacher, I devote LOTS of time to a discussion of participles; roughly speaking, a participle is “a verb used as an adjective.”

During these weeks, students will occasionally point out a gerund (roughly speaking, a “verb used as a noun”) and ask if it’s a participle. I say: “No, it’s something else, and we’ll get there later.”

When “later” finally comes, I put up sentences that include participles, and others that include similar gerunds.

I ask them to consider the differences on their own and in small groups; that is, I let them do some “self-explanation.”

Then I explain the concept precisely, including an English-class version of “worked examples.”

Because their prior knowledge is quite high — they already know participles well, and have already been wondering about those “something else” words that look like participles — they tend to have high quality explanations.

In my experience, students take gerunds on board relatively easily.

That is: when prior knowledge is high, self-explanation might (!) benefit worked examples.

TL;DR

A recent meta-analysis suggests that worked examples help students learn algebra and geometry (and perhaps other math topics as well).

It also finds that self-explanations probably don’t help, and that incorrect examples don’t help either.

More broadly, it suggests that meta-analysis can offer helpful and nuanced guidance when we face contradictory research about complex teaching questions.

Barbieri, C. A., Miller-Cotto, D., Clerjuste, S. N., & Chawla, K. (2023). A meta-analysis of the worked examples effect on mathematics performance. Educational Psychology Review, 35(1), 11.

“Teaching” Helps Students Learn: New Research

Andrew Watson

August-14-2023

“Teaching” Helps Students Learn: New Research

Not even two months ago, I admitted my skepticism about a popular teaching technique.

While I accept that “students teaching students” SOUNDS like a great idea, I nonetheless worry about the practical application of this idea:

Understanding a new idea requires lots of mental resources. Explaining a new idea requires even more. All those cognitive demands might overwhelm a student’s WM.

Even if students have the mental resources to accomplish these tasks, how can we be sure that their peers are — in fact — LEARNING the new ideas they’re being taught? For instance: what if the student-teachers misunderstood the material they’re meant to teach?

Peers can intimidate. If teachers have “first day of school” anxiety dreams, imagine how students feel when they must take on the teacher’s job. (And: they don’t have our training and experience.)

So: while I think it’s possible that students benefit from teaching their peers, making this pedagogy successful will take LOTS of preparation, skill, and humility.

Today’s Update: Does the Audience Matter?

Happily, Prof. Dan Willingham recently highlighted a new study exploring this pedagogical question. Specifically, researchers wanted to know if it matters whom the students are teaching.

College students in China watched a two-minute video on synapses, specifically:

how signals are transmitted across neurons in the human nervous system and the role of action potentials, calcium ions, synaptic vesicles, neurotransmitters, sodium ions, and receptors.

After a few extra minutes of prepration, they then “taught” a lesson on this topic.

One third of the participants explained chemical synapses to 7 peers;

one third explained to 1 peer;

and the final third explained to a video camera.

Students in all three groups were instructed that the peers would have to take a test based on these explanations.

So, what effect did the audience have on the student doing the explaining?

Results and Conclusions

The researchers had hypothesized that the presence of peers would ramp up stress and reduce the benefits of this teaching methodology.

For that reason, they suspected that students would do better if they taught their lesson to the video camera instead of to live human beings.

Sure enough, students who taught to the camera did better on basically every measurement.

They offered more thorough explanations (Cohen’s d values here ranged from 0.95 – 1.23: unusually high numbers).

They remembered the information better an hour later.

They transferred their understanding to new questions more effectively.

They felt less stress, and lower cognitive load.

As the authors write: “minimizing the social presence of the audience [by have students teach to a camera] during teaching resulted in maximizing learning outcomes.”

Classroom Implications

At first look, this study seems to suggest that — sure enough! — students DO learn more when they teach.

Alas, I don’t think we can draw that conclusion.

First: this study didn’t measure that question. That is: it didn’t include a control condition where students used some other method to study information about synapses.

This study DOES suggest that teaching to a camera helps more than teaching to peers. But it DOESN’T suggest that teaching (to a camera, or to peers) helps more than something else.

Second: I’m not sure that the verb “teach” makes sense in this context.

The students explained synapses to a camera, and they believed that another student would watch the video and take a test on it.

I suppose we can call that “teaching.” But that’s a very niche-y version of it.

And, in my experience, it’s not AT ALL what teachers think of when they hear about this methodology. More often, students break up into groups to study small parts of a process, and then circulate and “teach” the other groups what they learned.

Third: how would this “teach the camera” plan work in the classroom?

The “explain to a camera” approach might work better than an “explain to peers” version. But I imagine at least two practical problems.

#1: logistically, how does it work? Do I have 25 students explaining to 25 separate cameras simultaneuosly? Do I have a separate place with cameras where students go to record?

#2: In this study, researchers told participants that other students would watch their videos and be tested on their understanding.

Presumably this statement made the teacher-students quite conscientious about their explanations. For that reason (probably), they thought harder and therefore remembered more.

That is: the camera method helped students learn largely because participants believed that others relied on their teaching.

If, however, I use this strategy in my class, that causal chain (conscientiousness –> thinking –> remembering) could easily break down.

Either I DO use those videos to help other students learn — in which case I have to review and critque them scrupulously;

Or I DON’T use those videos — in which case my students know they don’t really have to be so concientious. (Reduced conscientiousness –> reduced thinking –> reduced memory.)

These practical questions might sound mundane, even grouchy. But I’m not trying to be grouchy — I’m trying to help my students learn material!

TL;DR

A recent study suggests that college students benefit more from “teaching” if they teach to a camera than if they teach peers.

Although I’m inclined to believe these results — they certainly make a lot of sense — I still worry that a “students-teaching-students” pedagogy sounds better in theory than it might work in practice.

Wang, F., Cheng, M., & Mayer, R. E. (2023). Improving learning-by-teaching without audience interaction as a generative learning activity by minimizing the social presence of the audience. Journal of Educational Psychology.

My Detective Adventure: “VR Will Transform Education” [Reposted]

Andrew Watson

August-08-2023

My Detective Adventure: “VR Will Transform Education” [Reposted]

Our blogger is off this week. He asked us to repost this piece, because he’ll be chatting with these researchers again soon!

A friend recently sent me a link to an article with a click-baity headline: something like “Virtual Reality Will Change Education Forever.”

Her pithy comment: “This is obviously nonsense.” (It’s possible she used a spicier word that ‘nonsense.’)

On the one hand, I’m skeptical that ANYTHING will change education forever. Heck, if Covid didn’t transform education, who knows what will.

More specifically, ed-tech claims about “transforming education” have been around for a long time. Their track record doesn’t dazzle. (Smart boards, anyone?)

On the other hand, I always like to find reserch that challenges my long-held beliefs. After all, if I can’t learn from people who disagree with me, who can I learn from?

So, I followed my usual process.

In essence, I switched into Detective Mode, and started asking lots of questions.

If I ask the right questions, I thought, I’ll get a much clearer picture of potential educational benefits of VR.

Act I: The Investigation Begins

When I reviewed the article my friend sent, I noticed a troubling gap: the article didn’t link to underlying research.

As I’ve written in the past, this absence creates a red flag. If the article champions “research-based innovation,” why not link to the research?

So, I asked my first detective question. I emailed the author of the article and asked to see the research.

How simple is that?

Obviously, any resistance to this request — “sorry, we can’t share that at this moment” — would underline my friend’s skeptical verdict: “nonsense.”

However, the author responded immediately with a link to a research summary.

A promising development…

The Plot Thickens

This research summary showed real promise.

In brief:

Some college students in an introductory Biology course followed the typical path — readings, lectures, labs. (That’s the “control group.”)

Other students in the same course followed an alternative path: readings, lectures, supplementary Virtual Reality experience, alternative labs based on the VR experience.

When researchers looked at all sorts of results, they found that students on the alternative VR path did better.

That is: not only did the students enjoy the VR experiences; not only did they engage more with the material; they (on average) learned more.

However — and this is a BIG however — this research didn’t look like it was published.

In fact, when I asked that direct question, the article author confirmed that the research hadn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Now, the topic of peer review creates LOTS of controversy. The peer-review system has MANY troubling flaws.

However, that system probably reduces the amount of deceptive nonsense that gets published.

I almost never blog about research that hasn’t been peer reviewed, and so I thought my detecting was at its logical end. The VR claim might not be ‘nonsense,’ but it didn’t yet have enough published evidence to strengthen it.

And then, an AMAZING thing happened: the lead researcher emailed me to say she would be happy to talk with me about the study.

Over the years, I have occasionally reached out to researchers to be sure I understand their arguments.

But no researcher has EVER straight-up volunteered for such a meeting. And I mean: EVER.

The Payoff

Honestly, I’d love to transcribe my conversation with Dr. Annie Hale and Lisa Fletcher (“Chief of Realm 4”) — both at Arizona State University because it was both fascinating and inspiring.

Because you’re busy, I will instead boil it into three key points:

First:

Hale and Fletcher have done — and continue to do — incredibly scrupulous research.

For instance, in the description above, I put the words “control group” in quotations marks.

I did so because of Hale and Fletcher’s insistance. The two groups of Biology students had somewhat similar academic experiences.

But the research paradigm required enough differences to make the words “control group” technically inappropriate.

Hale and Fletcher insisted on this precision throughout our discussion. For instance, they regularly pointed out that a particular calculation suggested a positive result, but didn’t reache statistical significance.

In other words, they highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of their own argument.

This habit, it my view, makes them MUCH more reliable guides in this field.

Second:

Here’s a shocker: Hale and Fletcher do not claim that virtual reality will transform education.

No, really, they don’t.

The headline of the article my friend sent me made that claim, but the researchers themselves don’t.

Instead, they make a very different claim. The alternative Biology path included at least three big changes from the typical path:

Change #1: students had the VR experience (and their lab was based on that experience)

Change #2: the key underlying biology concepts had been translated into stories. For instance, this “narratively-driven virtual reality” includes an imaginary species called the Astelar. (Some of the students got QUITE protective of these imaginary creatures.)

Change #3: the TAs in these alternative path classes got special training, inspired by Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.

We can’t know — and, Hale and Fletcher don’t say they know — which of these three parts made the biggest difference.

We can tentatively suspect that these three elements working together produced all those learning benefits. And, Hale and Fletcher are planning lots of further research to confirm this tentative belief.

But, they’re not trying to get VR goggles on every forehead.

Key Point #3

Here’s one of my mantras:

Researchers isolate variables. Teachers combine variables.

In other words: research — as much as possible — looks at the effect of just one thing.

For instance: “mid-lecture aerobic movement improves learning in college students.”

However, teachers juggle hundreds of variables at every second. All those isolated variables studied by researchers might not provide me with useful guidance.

For instance: if I teach in a business school, my formally-dressed students might not appreciate my insistance that they do jumping jacks in the middle of the lecture hall.

My particular combination of variables doesn’t helpfully align with that isolated exercise variable.

Here’s my point: Hale and Fletcher seem to be changing the research half of this paradigm.

In their research, notice that they aren’t isolating variables. They are, instead, looking at combinations of variables.

VR + stories + Lemov training –> more learning

In fact, if I understand their argument right, they don’t really think that isolating variables can produce the most useful results — at least not in education research.

After all (and here I’m adding my own perspective), if teachers combine variables, shouldn’t research also look at combinations?

An Early Verdict

I set out on this detective adventure feeling quite skeptical. Both the initial claim (“transform education!”) and the absence of links made me all-but-certain that the strong claim would implode. (Example here.)

However, by persistently asking reasonable detective questions, I’ve arrived at a very different place:

VR + [concepts as stories] + [Lemov-inspired TA training] just might produce big learning gains, at least for some students.

And — crucially — a thoughtful, precise, imaginative, and cautious group of scholars is exploring this possibility in detail.

As I said back at the beginning, I’ve always got something to learn.

This post was edited on April 7, 2023 to correct Lisa Fletcher’s title.

The Unexpected Problem with Learning Styles Theory [Reposted]

Andrew Watson

August-01-2023

The Unexpected Problem with Learning Styles Theory [Reposted]

Our blogger will be taking the first two weeks of August off.

This post generated plenty of conversation when he published it last October.

I recently read a much-liked Twitter post that said (I’m paraphrasing here):

If you try to debunk Learning Styles Theory and you face unexpected resistance, start looking for the profit motive.

Hmmm.

To be clear: learning styles theory just doesn’t have plausible research support.

If and when we can debunk it, we certainly should.

But, in my own experience at least, teachers who believe the theory often do so with the best of motives.

Mocking those motives — or, even worse, implying believers have wicked motives — seems unfair. And, likely to prove counterproductive.

Yes, grifters exist. Yes, we should call them out. But most teachers who offer “unexpected resistance” can explain why — for reasons that have nothing to do with profits. (Honestly, if teachers were driven by profits, would we have joined this profession?)

Surface Plausibility

In the first place, MANY teachers learned about Learning Styles Theory in their education programs.

In fact, Blake Harvard — “The Effortful Educator” — searched the websites of 9 major schools of education, and found that MOST referenced Learning Styles Theory positively.

Can we be surprised that teachers believe what their professors teach them?

Equally important, this theory seems to align with much of our classroom experience.

After all, daily classroom life suggests that students learn differently. Some students respond well to this approach, while others need another approach entirely.

So, it seems that Learning Styles Theory (helpfully?) explains these differences, and (helpfully?) suggests a coherent way to respond to them.

Why wouldn’t teachers believe a theory that a) we learned in graduate school, and b) aligns with our daily experience?

Getting Personal

In fact, “unexpected resistance” to Learning Styles Theory often stems from an even deeper source.

Many dedicated teachers have been relying on it for years. Often, their self-definition as a good and caring teachers begins with or includes their fidelity to this theory:

“My students know I care about them because I tailor my instruction to their learning style!“

When we tell teachers that we simply have no evidence to support the theory (and, to be clear, we don’t), we’re not simply asking them to change what they do and believe.

Instead, we are — in effect — asking them to admit their their exemplary teaching practice was (at best) useless, and (possibly) detrimental. FOR YEARS.

That admission, of course, is incredibly painful and troubling.

For us to mock teachers (“look for the profit motive!”) for this painful struggle … well, I simply don’t understand how that approach will help. I can’t remember the last time that mockery helped me change my teaching practice for the better.

Plausible Alternatives

If we shouldn’t accuse people of being charlatans (hint: I think we mostly shouldn’t), how should we contradict these misbeliefs?

As I’ve written before, I do think this is a very difficult problem.

We really should contradict those false beliefs, but I’m not at all sure that doing so encourages people to adopt new ones.

My current approach relies on these steps.

First: rather that asking teachers to stop believing one thing, I encourage them to start thinking about something else.

My hopeful theory: the more time they’re thinking about, say, working memory, the less time they’re thinking about Learning Styles Theory.

Second: I don’t contradict in public. I try to chat with believers one-on-one.

Honestly, this approach includes perils. If I don’t contradict in public, others might believe that theory does have merit.

However, as noted above, I think increasing shame reduces the likelihood that new advice will stick.

Third: I provide research, and ask lots of genuinely curious questions.

I hope that peer-to-peer curiosity will ultimately change more minds than more confrontational strategies.

To be clear, I’m not certain that my approach has more merit than others. I certainly have no research suggesting that it will work.

But experience tell me that “supportive listening” beats “questioning motives” as a motivational approach.

If you’ve got suggestions and strategies, please share them!

Open Classroom Plans: The Effects on Reading

Andrew Watson

July-23-2023

Open Classroom Plans: The Effects on Reading

I’ve written frequently over the years about the effects of classroom decoration on learning.

The headline is: althought many teachers have been trained to DECORATE, those decorations can distract students and thereby reduce learning.

We’ve tested this question for students from kindergarten to college.

We’ve tested them in different disciplines.

Heck, we’ve even tested them over very long periods of time (15 weeks!).

Sure enough: students don’t get used to decorations. Instead, they continue to be distracted and to learn less.

To be clear: I don’t think classrooms should be utterly sterile. But, I do think that research suggests we should take a “less is more” approach to decoration.

This set of findings raises an important corollary: are there other kinds of distraction that should worry us?

How about: distractions from other students…

Experiments Past

Enthusiasm for open classrooms began — I believe — in the 1960s and ’70s.

The basic ideas are:

Philosophically speaking: open classrooms feel less authoritarian — more student-centered than teacher-centered, and

Pedagogically speaking: they allow for a greater variety of combinations and collaborations — across grades, for instance.

The potential hazards, of course, are DISTRACTION. Having all those people and all that noise might make learning much harder.

Of course, this question isn’t easy to research. To do so, we would need…

… large groups of students who

… spend substantial learning time in both environments, and

… measurements that track their relevant academic progress.

Honestly: that’s A LOT to ask of a study.

Crunching the Numbers

I have good news!

A group of scholars in Australia have undertaken just such a study, looking at 7-10 year-old students in several schools.

In this study, researchers tracked classes that switched from open to enclosed to open classrooms (or, the other way around) over three terms.

The measurement of interest: reading words per minute.

Of course, this measurement makes good sense. We teachers REALLY CARE how well our students can read. And this particular measurement correlates with all sorts of academic outcomes.

So, what did the research team find: The envelope please….

Fully two-thirds of students improved more in enclosed classrooms than in open classrooms.

For some students, the classroom difference didn’t matter.

For a few — those with especially good attention, and/or academic background — the open plan resulted in greater improvement.

Those seem like impressive numbers.

Final Thoughts

I’ve looked around for research that contradicts this finding (a habit of mine), and so far I haven’t located anything persuasive. (If you know of such a study, please send it my way!)

Truthfully, I haven’t found lots of research in this field at all — many studies date from the ’70s and ’80s.

In brief, I think we have one very compelling data point. In this study, open classrooms reduce learning for most students, especially those who most need help in school.

If that result holds up with further research, we should be strongly inclined (in most circumstances) to teach students in the self-contained classrooms that foster learning.

Learning How to Learn: Optimists and Realists

Andrew Watson

July-14-2023

Learning How to Learn: Optimists and Realists

In schools, optimism helps teachers a lot.

At the beginning of the year, my students JUST DON’T KNOW all sorts of things: how to write a good essay; how to analyze Macbeth; how to define “gerund.”

In all likelihood, your students don’t know things too.

Because I’m often an optimist, I trust that — by the end of the year — they WILL KNOW all those things, and lots more. So, I suspect, are you.

Our optimism prevents despair. (“They’ll just never learn the …”)

At times, however, that optimism can build unreasonable hopes and expectations.

For instance:

I hear a GREAT DEAL of enthusisam about the concept of teaching students “to learn how to learn.”

If students know all the cool stuff that we discuss at Learning and the Brain conferences, surely their academic lives will be better.

The optimist in me says: “that sounds GREAT.” The realist in me says: “I want to slow down and ask some pointed questions…”

A Core Principle

I make my living by explaining cognitive science to teachers. I talk about working memory and attention and retrieval practice and prior misconceptions and executive attention…the list goes on.

When I think about explaining cognitive science to students, I return to this vital question:

Realistically speaking, can students DO SOMETHING with this information?

If the realistic answer to that question (have I written “realistic” often enough?) is not an emphatic “YES,” then I’m very hesitant about sharing it.

For example: retrieval practice.

By now, this blog’s readers know that actively calling information to mind (“retrieval practice”) enhances learning — especially when compared with rereading (“simple review”).

I could link to dozens of sources, but — to keep things simple — I’ll simply highlight this book review, and this website.

Obviously, we teachers should use as much retrieval practice as we reasonably can.

But: should we tell our students about retrieval practice, so they can “learn how to learn”?

Let’s go back to my guiding principle:

Realistically speaking, can students DO SOMETHING with information about retrieval practice?

Well: obviously YES.

Students can…

… make flashcards

… quiz one another (rather than review their notes)

… outline a chapter from memory (rather than reread the chapter).

Students have ALL SORTS of ways to make retrieval practice their own, and to benefit from it.

So, it makes sense to tell students about this part of cognitive science.

In truth, I tell my students about retrieval practice at the beginning of every year. (I once had a student THANK ME for doing so much retrieval practice. No, I’m not making that up.)

In this specific case, students can absolutely “learn how to learn.”

Next Question

If students should learn about retrieval practice, what about other “desireable difficulties”? What about — for example — spacing and interleaving?

You know the drill:

Realistically speaking, can students DO SOMETHING with information about spacing and interleaving?

Honestly, I have my doubts.

Students have relatively little control over their practice schedule. They practice when their homework requires them to do so.

In other words: they can’t simply decide to do half their “gerund” exercises tonight and half later in the week. They have to do them when I assign them.

So: it’s on me (and other teachers) to design our syllabi to space and interleave practice.

But, for the most part, students can’t do much with this information, so I don’t make a big deal about it with them. (I’m relieved to know that Bradley K. Busch largely agrees with me on this point.)

Yes: students should probably know about spacing and interleaving so that they can manage their college study habits well. But until they get to college, that information doesn’t offer them much practical guidance (except in unusual circumstances).

And the next…

Sadly, I think most information from cognitive science fits in this latter category.

That is: TEACHERS should know about working memory. (Teachers should obsess about working memory.)

But, I don’t think students can do much with information on this topic.

That is: when they’re experiencing working memory overload, they don’t have enough working memory left to get metacognitive about working memory reduction strategies.

The potential solution, paradoxically, exacerbates the problem.

Heck, it took me YEARS to figure out how to apply my knowledge of working memory limitations to my teaching. It seems somehow unfair to ask students to accomplish a task that challenged me so greatly.

Heretically, I don’t think that students really need to know much about mindsets either. Instead, I think TEACHERS and SCHOOLS should create policies and practices with this theory in mind.

Those mindset posters probably don’t do any harm.

But if they’re not enacted by the teachers’ words and decisions, that contradiction makes the students’ knowledge useless.

Telling students about mindsets (probably) doesn’t help them learn how to learn. Behaving and speaking as if we have a growth mindset helps students learn.

An Alternative Perspective

I’ll say all this in a different way: I believe teachers have a distinct and vital role in students’ learning.

Students have their work to do — obviously. And we have ours.

Those two roles sometimes overlap. But just as often, they remain distinct.

We should know our subject.

And, we should know from cognitive science.

In those few cases (retrieval practice!) where students can use that knowledge immediately, we should eagerly share it with them.

In the more common cases where they can’t (e.g.: Posner’s tripartite theory of attention; dopytocin), we should put it to use, but not burden students with extraneous cognitive load.

This perspective might not be uplifting and optimistic, but I hope its realism will ultimately help my students learn better.

Andrew Watson

July-09-2023

Introducing “Schema Theory”

In the last few years, I’ve increasingly wondered if “schema theory” just might work a special kind of magic.

If I understand it right (and if it’s true), then schema theory unites two distinct topics:

the cognitive science behind good teaching, and

the curriculum.

Because that result would be, ahem, SPECTACULAR, the theory merits careful attention.

In this post, I’ll try to explain:

What schema theory is,

Why teachers should care, and

What its limitations seem to be.

I’m thinking of this post as the first of a series: I hope to flesh out this concept more substantially over time.

What Is Schema Theory?

Schema theory models the mental structure of knowledge.

In other words: if I say that I know something, schema theory tells me what that knowledge might look and act like in the mind.

This theory rests on two key points.

First: a schema comprises a vast, interconnected web of declarative and procedural knowledge.

So, if I say “I know what a ‘pet’ is,” I’m claiming to have a “pet” schema. That schema includes declarative/procedural knowledge:

Specific animals: dog, cat, goldfish, hamster.

Concepts, like “tame” or “belongs inside the home.”

Procedures, like “take for a walk” or “clean the litterbox.”

Second: in those schema, the bits of knowledge function together fluently, which is to say automatically.

If I tell a friend that I’ve gotten a new pet, she would IMMEDIATELY know a) that I’m talking about a particular group of animals, b) that my furniture might be in peril, and c) that our early morning walks might be disrupted if I’m bringing a dog along.

She doesn’t have to stop and think her way through all those pieces. They spring instantly to mind, because she has activated the “pet”schema.

Similarly, if I told her I’d gotten a pet lion, she would IMMEDIATELY think

“Lions aren’t typically pets!”

“I wouldn’t want a lion inside my house!!”

“I wonder who has to clean THAT litterbox!!!”

Those thoughs all happen unprompted because I’ve violated the “pet” schema, and she’s trying to make “lion” fit into it.

To review these two key points:

LOTS of intricately connected declarative and procedural information,

used FLUENTLY/AUTOMATICALLY together.

That’s a (very basic definition of a) schema.

Why Teachers Should Care About Schema

Two reasons (at least).

First:

We teachers often struggle to identify our goal. Do we want our students to…

… achieve today’s learning objective?

… demonstrate proficiency in the curriculum?

… meet the state standards?

If yes, which of these goals takes priority?

In my view, the concept of “schema” brings all those goals together.

When students build effective and useful schema, they unite granular bits (say, “learning objectives”) into larger coherent and fluent wholes (say, “the curriculum” as a way of meeting “state standards”).

In other words, no matter which way we think about students’ acadecmic and curricular progress, we can talk about “schema.” Conversations that once seemed fragmented and incoherent can come together into a complex, thoughtful whole.

Second:

Cognitive science helps us understand the strategies that most effectively build schema.

How do we get all those small bits (“cat, dog, clean litterbox, tame, not lion”) to fit together so they operate fluentely as a whole (“pet”)?

Well, let’s talk about working memory. And retrieval practice. And generative learning. And desirable difficulties. And…

In other words:

We can use the same conceptual structure (“schema theory”) to unite the content we want to teach with cognitive science.

We’ve got one big framework that captures both curriculum and pedagogy.

That’s (potentially) AMAZING AND HELPFUL.

Just imagine how clarifying such conversations could be.

What Are the Limitations of Schema Theory?

In a word: research. As far as I can tell, we ain’t got much.

When I ask about the research basis for schema theory — asking for a “research basis” is a hobby of mine — I get incomplete answers.

Some folks refer me to scholars who wrote in the 1950s (or 1930s). That’s an interesting theoretical basis, but it isn’t current psychology research.

Others point to individual studies here and there. (Anderson 1983 gets a lot of attention.) But those individual studies — in my view — don’t (yet) remotely add up to strong support for the theory.

One scholar I spoke with responded with this question: “well, how would you research the theory? What study would you do?”

That’s an important question…but in this field we focus on research-based assertions. We can’t simply wave away the need for research.

I’ve been trying to make sense of this research field in recent months; I’m currently working with a friend to organize it all.

So, here’s the conundrum I face:

Schema theory could be spectacularly useful.

We don’t seem to have lots of research making a strong case for the theory (although LOTS of people act as if we do).

Of course, at Learning and the Brain, we’re ALL ABOUT the research. Until I see more, I’m always hesitant to espouse the theory — no matter how useful — too strongly.

Some Additional (Unrelated) Notes

First:

Oddly, schema theory lives a double life.

In Britain, it’s old news. I believe they went through a “schema theory” phase 20 years ago, and now Brits (well, Brits on eduTwitter, anyway) talk about schemas as if we all know what they are.

In the US, almost no one talks about them at all. (I am, as far as I know, the only person in Learning-and-the-Brain world to do so regularly).

Second:

Technically speaking, the plural of “schema” is “schemata” (think “stigma/stigmata”). Very few people actually use that word. Some say “schemas.” Others use “schema” as both singular and plural.

Third:

If you know from schema theory, you’re quite possible vexed that this post is so inadequate.

I haven’t linked to Dr. Efrat Furst’s specatularly useful website. I haven’t linked to Sarah Cottingham’s immensely helpful blog post.

I’ve even left out the famous restaurant example — everyone’s go to for explaining a schema.

This frustration has merit, because I’ve barely introduced a complex (and potentially vitally important) topic.

If you have studies you want to share, books to recommend, websites to laud, PLEASE let me know.

I’ll keep working out my thinking, and I’m hoping you’ll help me along the way.

Andrew Watson

July-01-2023

Should students “teach” other students?

You will often hear about an exciting strategy to help students learn: they should teach one another.

Imagine a unit on — say — “siege warfare.” And, imagine that my student (let’s call him Lancelot) learns enough about siege warfare to teach his classmates about …

… its strategic and tactical requirements,

… the benefits and detriments of siege warfare,

… the changes in siege warfare over time,

Well, Lancelot has LEARNED A LOT about the topic.

Even better, if Lance learns enough to teach this material effectively, that extra level of mental lift will no doubt benefit his understanding.

It seems that “students teaching students” could result in deeper learning. What’s not to love?

What’s Not To Love

Long-time readers know that I struggle to accept uplifting advice. If a teaching suggestion sounds really heartwarming and feels really good, I worry that all that feel-good warmth has distracted me from the skepticism that is my job.

In this case, “students teaching students” SOUNDS so wonderful. For that reason, I feel compelled to ask some tough questions and offer some downbeat assertions.

First Concern

We know that humans have limited cognitive resources. For instance, adults have alarmingly small working memory capacities — and most of our students have less than we do.

How should Lancelot use those limited resources of his?

I — as the teacher Merlin — could ask him to focus on learning the topic.

Or, I could ask him to divide those resources: use some working memory to understand the core ideas, and some working memory to think about effective explanations and exercises that will help his classmates learn.

Sadly, the more WM that goes to teaching others, the less that Lance has to understand the topic.

Or, if Lance uses all his WM for understanding sieges and none for teaching, then his teaching will be really ineffective.

After all: who knows better than teachers that good teaching requires LOTS of cognitive resources.

In other words: I worry that asking Lance to teach his peers will have several bad outcomes:

Either: Lance won’t understand the topic well;

Or: his classmates won’t learn very much;

Or: both.

I might not like that conclusion; it certainly isn’t heartwarming. But a basic understanding of working memory’s limitations makes it hard for me to reject this perspective.

Second Concern

When I ask Lance to teach the other knights at the round table, I’m asking him to do two distinct mental tasks:

First: he has to understand siege warfare (or covalent bonds, or exponent rules, or…)

Second: he has to repackage that understanding into specific explanations and tasks that help others understand. (After all, that’s what teaching is.)

Note, however, that if Lance doesn’t understand covalent bonds, he can’t possibly teach that concept to others effectively.

For that reason, I (teacher Merlin) need at least one additional step:

I need to ensure that Lance understands the chemistry REALLY WELL before I set him off on his teaching question.

Here’s the kicker: our students typically are novices in the topics we want them to learn. Because Lance is a novice on the topic of covalent bonds, he simply CAN’T KNOW whether or not he understands them well.

As a beginner, he doesn’t understand enough to know if he understands.

Unless I structure my unit plan with great foresight and lots of double-checking, it’s likely that I’ll ask someone who simply cannot know if he knows to teach his classmates.

Whether or not I have helped Lance learn, I almost certainly have fallen short on my responsibility to ensure that Lance’s classmates learn.

Thoughtful Pushback

Because I’m the luckiest guy on the MBE planet, I spent this last week working with 50 teachers in an online workshop. We discussed working memory and long-term memory and attention and schema theory — and all their myriad classroom applications.

Honestly, they were one of the most thoughtful and engaging groups I’ve ever worked with.

When I explained my skepticism about “students teaching students,” two participants pushed back with thoughtful rejoinders.

One said (I’m summarizing, not quoting):

When parents ask me how they can help their children study, I say:

“have them teach you the topic we worked on in class. Even if you don’t know a lot about it, you’ll know enough to be able to spot the weaknesses in their explanations, and to ask follow up questions.

And, you’ll get to know more about their school lives!”

Another said (more summarizing):

I have my students teach each other as a kind of review.

That is: each of them uses marker to draw a particular diagram (say: the digestive system) on their desks.

Then, they rotate to the next desk, and annotate in a different color: they add, they ask questions, they suggest updates.

Then, they rotate again, and add in yet a different color.

So, when a student gets back to her original desk, she has learned SO MUCH from her peers. And, she has helped her peers by making her own annotations.

In other words: we have LOTS of reasons to ask students to teach others.

“Teaching” vs. teaching

These comments helped my clarify my thinking, because they force me to define “teaching” more precisely.

In the first place, I should say that I think both of these teachers’ strategies are EXCELLENT. In both cases, students are — basically — using retrieval practice to review material.

That is: both teachers have already taught the concepts to their students. When students explain ideas to their parents, or recreate and annotate diagrams on desks, they must re-activate their prior knowledge.

In this case, students don’t simply review concepts (“review” = less effective). They retrieve concepts (“retrieve” = more effective).

However, neither of these excellent strategies precisely fits my definition of teaching. When I think of teaching, I think of…

… explaining a concept or procedure to someone who doesn’t yet know or understand it,

… with the result that this person does know or understand it.

So, for instance, the strategy of “teaching parents” succeeds whether or not the parents understand. The goal isn’t to benefit the person being “taught” (the parent), but to benefit the person “teaching” (the student who’s doing the explaining).

Or, the strategy of “teaching the digestive system” probably succeeds because the teacher ALREADY taught the material. The students aren’t providing original instruction; they’re reviewing (and perhaps adding to) knowledge they got from the teacher.

In other words: I worry about “students teaching students” depending on the definition of “teach.”

Having students explain ideas to someone else sounds like a great idea — as long as I don’t need “someone else” to understand.

Having student review ideas with each other sounds like a great idea — especially if Merlin already explained those ideas in detail.

TL;DR

Teachers should certainly invite students to explain their thinking to other people.

We should ask them to review with one another.

But, except in unusual circumstances, Merlin should teach Lance — and all the other round-table knights — before asking him to explain or review.

A final note. I think graduate students should be able to learn concepts independently and explain them well enough for others to understand. That’s their professional goal.

Perhaps college students can do so…although (remembering my own overconfident college days) I worry that this strategy might not succeed.

In my view, K-12 students almost certainly can’t meet the 2-part definition of “teach” above — certainly not without LOTS of careful training and review.

A final, final note.

This blog post (atypically) cites no research. I’ll start looking at research on the topic of “students teaching students” and report back.

If you have suggestions of studies you like, please let me know!

Oops, Twitter Did It Again: Creativity and the “Positive Manifold”

Andrew Watson

June-20-2023

Oops, Twitter Did It Again: Creativity and the “Positive Manifold”

I’ve written before that edu-Twitter can be a great help to teachers. I myself regularly learn about fascinating research, and practical teaching applications, from the wise accounts I follow.

Of course, Twitter is also notorious for its edu-nonsense. (No claim about learning styles is too outlandish for the little blue bird.)

I ran across a tweet thread recently that captured this complexity; it strikes me as a healthy reminder of Twitter’s features and foibles.

Here’s the story…

Extraordinary Creativity

A well-known tweep (with 10s of thousands of followers) recently recounted the following story:

An engineer who specialized in designing racing-car engines saw a contest to devise an advertising slogan.*

On a whim, he decided to enter. Drawing on principles from engine design, he conjured up an out-of-left-field slogan that captured public imagination and made the product a best seller.

Now a newly minted ad-executive, this engineer embodies the “positive manifold” as described by psychologist Charles Spearman.

In brief, the “positive manifold” suggests that the strengths of cognitive abilities are correlated; so, skill at race-car design correlates with skill at devising advertising slogans.

In other words, the tweep writes, “expertise gained through specialization is transferrable.”

This story captures several themes beloved by twitter – especially the joyous flexibility of creativity. Skill at anything, in this school of thought, benefits skill at anything else – because “expertise gained through specialization is transferrable.”

When applied to schooling, this argument suggests that students don’t need to learn any particular stuff.

As long as students are learning something, the expertise they gain by learning that something will help them everywhere else. (Again: expertise is transferrable.)

Early Doubts

This approach to creativity has lots of appeal. However, research has tended to contradict it.

Here’s why:

The human mind includes several alarming cognitive bottlenecks.

On the one hand, our long-term memory is functionally infinite. We can know and remember an astonishingly large amount of stuff – both skills and procedures.

On the other hand, the part of the mind that combines pieces in new ways is alarmingly small.

This cognitive function, called “working memory,” just doesn’t have much space.

For instance:

If I ask you to put FIVE random words into alphabetical order in your head, you can probably do so easily enough.

If, however, I ask you to put TEN random words into alphabetical order, your working memory will start smoking and (temporarily) explode.

Creativity, of course, requires combining pieces in a new order – that is: it requires working memory.

Unless someone has organized and consolidated a VAST amount of information in long-term memory, it will be difficult to execute this highly demanding working memory task.

In other words: this story about an engineer-turned-ad-executive sounded really unlikely.

Contra the tweep’s claims, expertise gained through specialization is NOT transferrable to another specialty. Knowing a great deal about racing-car engines almost certainly doesn’t help create catchy advertising slogans.

Not So Fast

Cognitive scientists generally agree that expertise can’t be transferred, and that creativity requires lots of expert background knowledge.

But remember: the tweep has cited Spearman’s “positive manifold.”

In fact, he notes that a well-known Learning and the Brain speaker has written about the positive manifold.**

If my own organization is touting this concept, surely I should value its application.

Now I have an embarrased confession:

I’ve never even heard of the “positive manifold.”

Given my alarming ignorance, perhaps I should simply admit my prior beliefs about transfer and creativity were wrong.

Instead, I looked up “positive manifold.”

Turns out: the positive manifold has NOTHING TO DO with transfer of expertise.

Spearman found that various measures of intelligence correlate with one another. People who study intelligence write about “g” — a “general intelligence” — because the various subscales on intelligence correlate.

Of course, that finding does not remotely suggest that expertise in race cars correlates with (or causes) expertise with advertising. Spearman never said any such thing.

He was investingating the NARROW topic of intelligence testing, not the BROAD question of creativity and transfer.

But wait: what about that Learning and the Brain speaker?

Sure enough, his book devotes about a page and a half to “positive manifold.” Those pages explain that various measures of intelligence correlate — and says nothing whatsoever about creativity, or about transfer of expertise.

Savor the Irony

Here’s the larger perspective: someone who clearly has Twitter expertise (10s of thousands of followers) claims to have another kind of expertise: expertise in creativity and psychology research.

However, his first kind of expertise does not transfer to the second kind of expertise. He doesn’t know enough about psychology to know how little he knows. (This mistake might sound like Dunning-Kruger to you…)

And so, when he writes that “expertise gained through specialization is transferrable,” we should notice that:

First: he’s almost certainly wrong, and

Second: his own tweet thread is an example of his very wrongness. His expertise did not transfer.

I should note, by the way, that I haven’t investigated the story about the engineer. It’s possible, I suppose, that lightning struck in this one case.

However, teachers and school leaders should absolutely NOT act as if this one anecdote matters for education or curriculum design.

And this episode should remind us: Twitter can offer intriguing suggestions…but we should always investigate them skeptically.

* As is typical on this blog, I’m not identifying the tweet I’m criticizing. My goal is not to name/shame an individual, but to raise alarms about common practices. This tweet is just one example.

** Again: I’m being vague so as not to identify the tweet.

Older posts

Newer posts

The Big Picture

Making Retrieval Practice Work in the Classroom

Shiver Me Timbers

Beyond the Research

TL;DR

Enter the Meta

Yes, No, No

The Third Place?

Always with the Caveats

TL;DR

Today’s Update: Does the Audience Matter?

Results and Conclusions

Classroom Implications

TL;DR

Act I: The Investigation Begins

The Plot Thickens

The Payoff

Key Point #3

An Early Verdict

Surface Plausibility

Getting Personal

Plausible Alternatives

Experiments Past

Crunching the Numbers

Final Thoughts

A Core Principle

Next Question

And the next…

An Alternative Perspective

What Is Schema Theory?

Why Teachers Should Care About Schema

What Are the Limitations of Schema Theory?

Some Additional (Unrelated) Notes

What’s Not To Love

Second Concern

Thoughtful Pushback

“Teaching” vs. teaching

TL;DR

Extraordinary Creativity

Early Doubts

Not So Fast

Savor the Irony

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