Retrieval practice involves teachers providing frequent opportunities for children to remember what they’ve learned, often through low-stakes testing, so that it becomes deeply embedded and eventually takes less effort to recall.
In this way, retrieval practice remoulds teacher assessment into a learning strategy, asking pupils to think hard to access, and in turn reinforce, the curriculum content they’ve been taught.
Retrieval practice can take many forms - from multiple-choice questions to diagram labelling - giving teachers a variety of options to integrate into their daily teaching practice.
How does retrieval practice work in the classroom?
For teachers looking to implement retrieval practice in their classrooms, former Tes columnist and head of geography Mark Enser has some simple ideas.
The first is to “think back, plan forward” when you create low-stakes quizzes, he says. Teachers should pick questions from previous topics that help pupils to recall the information they will be applying in the current lesson.
Another option is to give pupils an image that relates to a previous topic and some prompt questions for discussion. Questions should be open-ended so pupils are required to use a wider range of their accrued knowledge and understanding from previous lessons.
Enser’s third strategy is based on BBC Radio 4’s Just a Minute game: pupils should speak for one minute on a previous learning topic without hesitation, repetition or deviation. Teachers can listen out for any misconceptions and address these while the topic is fresh in pupils’ minds.
The fourth activity is also inspired by a game: Connect 4. Enser recommends giving pupils four seemingly disparate topics and asking them to find as many links between them as they can.
And finally, he suggests teachers rethink homework: rather than setting homework that supports what pupils are currently learning in class, they can promote retrieval by setting work on previous topics.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement.
To achieve this, it summarises the best available evidence for teachers; its Teaching and Learning Toolkit, for example, is used by 70 per cent of secondary schools.
The charity also generates new evidence of “what works” to improve teaching and learning, by funding independent evaluations of high-potential projects, and supports teachers and senior leaders to use the evidence to achieve the maximum possible benefit for young people.
