{"id":5900,"date":"2020-11-03T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=5900"},"modified":"2020-11-02T20:48:53","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T01:48:53","slug":"but-how-do-we-know-if-it-works-in-the-classroom-the-latest-on-retrieval-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/but-how-do-we-know-if-it-works-in-the-classroom-the-latest-on-retrieval-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"“But How Do We Know If It Works in the Classroom?”: The Latest on Retrieval Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve heard so much about retrieval practice<\/strong> in the last two years that it seems like we’ve ALWAYS known about its merits.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But no: this research pool hasn’t been widely known among teachers until recently.<\/p>\n

We can thank Agarwal and Bain’s wonderful Powerful Teaching<\/a> <\/em>for giving it a broad public audience. (If you had been attending Learning and the Brain conferences, of course, you would have heard about it a few years before that.)<\/p>\n

Of course, we should stop every now and then to ask ourselves:\u00a0how do we know this works?<\/em><\/p>\n

In this case, we’ve got several answers.<\/p>\n

In addition to Agarwal and Bain’s book, both Make it Stick<\/em><\/a> (by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel) and How We Learn<\/em><\/a> (by Benedict Carey) offer helpful surveys of the research.<\/p>\n

You could also check out current research. Ayanna Kim Thomas recently published a helpful study<\/a> about frequent quizzing in college classrooms. (It helps!)<\/p>\n

All these ways of knowing help. Other ways of knowing would be equally helpful.<\/p>\n

For instance: I might want to know if retrieval practice helps in\u00a0actual classrooms<\/em>, not just in some psychology lab somewhere.<\/p>\n

Yes, yes: Agarwal and Bain’s research mostly happened in classrooms. But if you’ve met them you know: it might work because they’re such engaging teachers<\/em>! What about teachers like me — who don’t quite live up to their energy and verve?<\/p>\n

Today’s News<\/h2>\n

A recent meta-analysis<\/a> looked at the effect on retrieval practice in actual classrooms with actual students. (How many students? Almost 8000<\/em> of them…)<\/p>\n

Turns out: retrieval practice helps when its studied in psychology labs.<\/p>\n

And, it helps when vivacious teachers (like Agarwal and Bain) use it.<\/p>\n

And, it helps when everyday teachers (like me) use it.<\/p>\n

It really just helps<\/em>. As in: it helps students learn<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

A few interesting specifics from this analysis:<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>: retrieval practice quizzes helped students learn more when they were counted for a final grade<\/em> than when they weren’t. (Although: they did help when not counted toward the grade.)<\/p>\n

Second<\/strong>: they helped more when students got feedback right away<\/em> than when feedback was delayed. (This finding contradicts the research I wrote about last week.)<\/p>\n

Third<\/strong>: short answer quizzes <\/em>helped learning more than multiple choice<\/em> (but: multiple choice quizzes did produce modest benefits).<\/p>\n

Fourth<\/strong>: announced quizzes helped more than unannounced quizzes.<\/p>\n

and, by the way<\/p>\n

Fifth<\/strong>: retrieval practice helped middle-school and high-school students more than college students. (Admittedly: based on only a few MS and HS studies.)<\/p>\n

In brief: all that good news about retrieval practice has not been over sold. It really is among the most robustly researched and beneficial teaching strategies we can use.<\/p>\n

And: it’s EASY and FREE.<\/p>\n

A Final Note<\/h2>\n

Because psychology research can be — ahem — written for other psychology researchers (and not for teachers), these meta-analyses can be quite daunting. I don’t often encourage people to read them.<\/p>\n

In this case, however, authors Sotola and Crede have a straightforward, uncomplicated prose style.<\/p>\n

They don’t hold back on the technical parts — this is, after all, a highly technical kind of writing.<\/p>\n

But the explanatory paragraphs are unusually easy to read. If you can get a copy — ask your school’s librarian, or see if it shows up on Google Scholar<\/a> — you might enjoy giving it a savvy skim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve heard so much about retrieval practice in the last two years that it seems like we’ve ALWAYS known about its merits. But no: this research pool hasn’t been widely known among teachers until recently. We can thank Agarwal and Bain’s wonderful Powerful Teaching for giving it a broad public audience. (If you had been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":5905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15,12],"class_list":["post-5900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-classroom-advice","tag-retrieval-practice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5900"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5907,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900\/revisions\/5907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}