One common issue in my classroom was that my students forgot most of the contents we had revised at the beginning of the year. Whenever we encountered exercises that recycled grammar or vocabulary previously taught, they struggled to remember. Luckily, they took notes in their notebooks, which served as a refresher of the lesson.
I figured that students forgetting the content was linked to them not being able to transfer what they’d studied to outside-the-classroom situations. This also impacted their learning curve, which was more challenging to rise, as they are advanced-level students. Normally, students’ learning curve goes up when they are beginners and amateurs in the subject, as most of the topics are new to them. This, however, is not the case when they reach a proficient level, as their curve becomes flat (Xu, 2009). Although I made my best efforts to provide enough practice for each topic, to make the class as lively as possible, with spaces for questions and mistakes, it appeared the impact was only for the short-term. I needed to make their learning last long so they could transfer and raise their learning curve.
In light of the issues above, I made myself the following two questions:
How could I make learning last long?
How could I help students be able to transfer their learning to outside-the-classroom situations?
I realized I was making things too easy for them, too clear, too obvious. Although it is common to believe that good teaching means making learning feel effortless, uncomplicated, research says otherwise. In order to make learning more durable, a lesson must include desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994). This term means making students think hard enough so it is not frustrating but challenging when solving classroom activities. The magic behind desirable difficulties is that, when students make an effort to apply what is being taught or to recall what they have studied, neuron connections strengthen.
A good way to apply desirable difficulties is through retrieval practice (Agarwal, Nunes, & Blunt, 2021). What this means is that students try to retrieve the concepts without looking at their notes. As teachers, we normally ask students at the beginning of each class what they remember from the previous lesson. Although this constitutes part of retrieval practice, it only benefits the person who responds to the questions since the rest doesn’t go through the struggle of recalling (the desirable difficulty), which makes learning stick.
Something else I discovered was that many of my students believed they already mastered the content once we had revised it (even when their final exam would say otherwise). This is known as the illusion of fluency (Agarwal & Bain, 2019). This is the belief you know something when in reality… you don’t. Perhaps, because the class was understandable, students believed they didn’t have to practice it much to master it. BIG MISTAKE. What research suggests doing in such cases is practicing metacognition - Yes, one of those fancy (yet) cliché commonly used words in education. The rationale was making students aware that they actually didn’t really know what they thought they knew (in a nice way). This was done by making them reflect on their knowledge.
Having understood the whole situation, I started to change my teaching practice accordingly. So, I took four actions to improve my practice. These techniques have been taken from the book “Powerful Teaching:Unleashing the Science of Learning” by Agarwal & Bain (2019):
4.1 Metacognition Sheets: In order to help students realize they knew less than they thought they did, I took a metacognition sheet template. Basically, it shows the contents revised throughout the year. On the two left columns, students choose the contents they think they know by marking “X”. After they have chosen the topics, they proceed to respond to the questions they marked. Interestingly, many of them had to erase a mark because they realized they didn’t know as much as they thought. Inevitably, this made them reflect on their own learning and knowledge, with which I addressed the “illusion of fluency” issue.
4.2 Retrieval Techniques: In order to produce desirable difficulties and make their learning long lasting, I used “Brain Dumps”. This is a technique through which students write everything they remember from a topic in a certain amount of time. Then, they compare with their peers to see similarities and differences. Doing this at the beginning and end of the class has certainly helped students retain more information. Another technique I use with my students is “board quizzes”. Basically, I would put a white page inside a transparent bag. Then, I would give one to each student. After that, I would show a question and students would use the page as a board on which they write their answers with a whiteboard marker. This activity has helped them see their gaps in learning, which is why I normally do it at the beginning of the class.
4.3 ABCD Curriculum Order: It is really common to introduce a topic and then provide a mass practice so students learn it and once we consider it has been mastered, we move on to the next topic and the cycle begins again. Since I noticed this was not being effective for my context, I started to mix up all the topics (Kornell, 2009). This helped with students transferring their knowledge, as they were constantly retrieving the topic for longer periods of time. As a result, in one day, we would practice a little about different topics we had been studying.
After implementing this for a little more than a month, I could see two main changes:
5.1 Students retained information better. Despite having revised more than 5 topics, they made better connections when they encountered previously taught topics in class. Similarly, they were able to better recall vocabulary and structures. This was visible in their vocabulary quizzes, which showed an increase in the number of words they could define and provide examples of.
5.2 Students started to actually use the content outside the classroom. This was by far the biggest accomplishment I had. It appeared learning had become memorable. This might be because of students constantly retrieving the information, which made it easily accessible for them to use.
As interesting as it sounds, there are still some challenges to overcome:
6.1 Learning feels slow, and students can perceive this. Since I was not giving them mass practice, we were reviewing the same content in little chunks for some time, more than they had normally studied topics in the past. This is not something bad really, all it means is that you might feel students are not progressing or they are not learning. But it is important to remember that the reward comes at the end of the process.
6.2 I must admit it required some preparation. The materials for all the contents of the unit should be ready, as I would be making one every class. This, however, was just at the beginning.Then, it becomes easier once you have started.
Despite the challenges, I strongly recommend this practice for teachers going through the problems I described at the beginning of this article. Although the effects may vary given the differences in teaching contexts, research has well documented the positive impact of the practices I have herein outlined.
Want to dig a little more into this? I’ll leave two books I can’t recommend enough that provided me with practical tools and a better understanding of my situation:
Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019). Powerful teaching: Unleash the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press.