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Culturally - especially with the rise of neoliberalism - many people believe that high increasing motivation gives rise to greater success.
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Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi's contribution to understanding learning - pointing out that motivation is the outcome of success, rather than what is commonly believed: learners must provide motivation before than they can be successful - is to my mind so simple, and yet so powerful. Flow – The Psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, Harper, 1990 |
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Reduce the need for testing, we make assessment for learning low stakes and we reduce the need for future pre assess by tracking how new learning is embedding, that is we do assessment of learning, that is retrieval practice. During the pre assess process we encourage the teacher to explain to the learner its purpose is to find out what the learner knows and what the teacher should teach next, not to judge the learner.
We expect want learners to get over 80% in of their timely practice retrieval practice questions correct - so feedback is more likely to be successful - sometimes we need to reduce the number of layers which are regularly requiring feedback.
However we encourage teachers to discourage learners from giving themselves a score on their retrieval practice assignments.
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Distributed Practice: i.e. retrieval practice
Practice Testing: self testing or past exam question
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Both the high utility methods: retrieval practice and practice testing techniques are essential the same: practice questions + attempt to recall + feedback triple |
Medium utility
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The 1st is lower stakes than the 2nd, so for low attaining learners, who are more likely to be demotivated by high stakes testing, retrieval practice should prove most useful. |
Medium utility
Interleaved Practice: mix of a few techniques during a study period
Elaborative interrogation: thinking about “why”
Self-explanation: linking new information to known information
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Although medium utility 1 is similar to the high utility methods because it is essentially a practice question + attempt to recall + feedback, interleaving doesn’t wait for a night sleep between teaching and attempt to recall. The medium utility methods 2. and 3. encourage the learner to consolidate and reconsolidate existing and new learning in their memory, whereas all the low utility methods do not. |
Low utility
Highlighting: highlighting or underlining whilst reading
Imagery: formal mental images while reading
Keyword mnemonic: use of acronyms to assist learning
Summarisation: Writing summaries
Rereading: Rereading text, which has already been read
Both the high utility methods: retrieval practice and practice testing techniques are essential the same:
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The 1st is lower stakes than the 2nd, so for low attaining learners, who are more likely to be demotivated by high stakes testing, retrieval practice should prove most useful.
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Medium utility |
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Low utility
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*Write the answer on the reverse of the flash card or write the book and page number the answer can be found ** Write cards so the question side can covered with thin paper which is written on - so cards can be reused |
(6) why most learners don’t need the proposed interventions
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Common obstacles are:
Hence in our opinion although RAG recording of exam performance may be better than nothing, but they are not a good use of the teacher's time |
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Once the teacher has spent time re-establishing pre-requisites skills, in order to teach something harder, both the department and the teacher want to "get on and make the most of it". Part of why schools use a teach-each-topic-once-a-year SOL is that it avoids “wasting teaching time revising” and means the teacher needs to do less differentiation and they can teach from a common beginning point.
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but isn’t this another way of saying that teachers are encouraged by the SOL to teach in a way that avoids
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noticing of forgetting?
Teaching a "large bite or several small bites” rather than a "small bite" will be a more efficient use of time providing most of the learners retain most of the new learning. Sweller’s research says that teaching better becomes learning if the teacher teaches the correct grain size.
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The less a learner knows and the smaller their working memory capacity is the smaller the amount of new learning the learner is likely to be able to learn from each topic at a time.
By learn we mean: learn within the lesson and retain after the lesson.
An annual scheme of learning makes learning harder for low attaining learners, as they often have "nearly but not quite remembered the pre requisites" before they are asked to use those pre requisites, not just for the next step of learning, but also for one or two steps after that. With a teach-each-topic-once-a-year scheme of learning we are asking the lowest attaining learners to follow the learning style which works for the highest attaining learners. Thinking of sport, it is like asking a swimmer with arm bands to follow the training regimen of member of the swimming team.
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Learners at or below the lower quartile can usually remember the learning of the lesson for 2 1 to 4 days, - so homework and testing are far less likely to make well timed retrieval practice.
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