Writing good multiple-choice questions is devilishly difficult. Ours focus on the most important things we want children to remember from previous lessons. Ideas for retrieval practise tasks for languages inspired by ‘Retrieval Practice’ by Kate Jones Majority of the templates collated by http://learninglinguist.co.uk/ . Over the course of the six weeks, continue to cover the same five to eight concepts, theories or terms in your questions, but pose the questions in different ways. I worked with the British Council as Connecting Classrooms Co-ordinator 2015-2016. I was a WJEC History GCSE Examiner 2014, 2015 and 2016. Organiser and host of #TeachMeetNorthWales & #TMHistoryIcons. Voted as a finalist for the 2018 Middle East Education Influencer award. Another role I really enjoyed was being a Governor on the Advisory Board at Manor Hall International School Al Ain, Abu Dhabi from 2017- 2019.

There is a short but useful video by the Learning Scientists that explain the concept and benefits of interleaving that you can view here. Author and director of No More Marking, Daisy Christodolou delivered an excellent ResearchEdHome presentation where she spoke in-depth about how students should use flash cards to support their long term memory and learning. Daisy focuses on the example of using Anki to create digital flash cards and she also promotes the concept of mixing up flashcards in terms of topics and subjects to make it more challenging, effortful and effective with interleaving.Keynote speaker: I have presented at various high profile events across the UK and. Events in the UAE include a keynote presentation at the UAE University focusing on innovation across the curriculum and I am delighted to be the keynote speaker at the Abu Dhabi Teaching and Learning Conference in February 2020. I have also presented at Qatar, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Hong Kong with upcoming presentations in The Netherlands and Kuala Lumpur. I think the best way to explain this finding is by thinking about the relative difficulty of the two tasks. Retrieval Grids include spacing: Students are challenged to retrieve the concept or answer to a question. Each box is color coded for the time when students first learned or encoded the concept: concepts from the last lesson are in blue, last week in red, two weeks ago in green, etc. Space it out! While this takes place, I’ll whizz around the classroom and make a note of any common misconceptions. The whole episode takes around five minutes. Psychologists (and teachers!) have known for a long time that a little bit of stress is a good thing in terms of student performance. However, too much stress can be debilitating and hinders performance.

Topical – Given the current drive to become more research-engaged in education, many teachers will find something they’re interested in in this book. Try throwing in some questions where the answer is already correct (ie where something is the same in both dimensions) and see if they notice! Memorise this… Within that lesson, there will be some key facts that we don’t want the children to forget. So the very first thing that we do at the start of the next lesson is ask all children to answer the question, “According to myth, who founded Rome?”A knowledge/fact test can work well at clearly identifying areas of strength and areas of weakness or development for students. This knowledge, for both the teacher and student, about what students can and can’t recall is very powerful and useful. However, knowledge or fact tests repeated continuously can become boring, mundane and that then supports the idea that retrieval practice is simply about regurgitating isolated facts when that is also another myth – not true. And psychologists point to competence as an incredibly powerful driver of long term motivation. As we get better at things, we start to enjoy them more.

A knowledge organiser is a good learning tool to start from here, as it should include the core information. One of our favourite features of this book is that it is well designed, making it easier to read. Several illustrations summarise the key points – a very clever nod to Dual Coding, discussed in the book as well. UsefulnessSecond, we can consider how well connected and robust the knowledge is – known as ‘storage strength’. Don’t make questions on flash cards too ambitious. I am not implying that flash cards questions should be easy, but a long essay style question is obviously not suitable. Extended questions should be used for practice essays or essay planning; flash cards should be used as one method, not the only method of revision. Keep flash cards concise and clear. In the classroom, this means that we shouldn’t be entirely surprised (or cross) by our pupils struggling to recall their initial learning from yesterday’s lesson. Indeed, it is an inevitable and perfectly natural part of the learning process.

If you have already read this book or are looking to expand your knowledge of teaching practices further, we recommend reading: Finally, a question that I have been asked and one I am still reflecting on is whether students should create their own flashcards or use existing pre-made cards available? This is a difficult question because my initial response would be to encourage students to create their own flash cards. If teachers create flash cards for their classes this can potentially become a huge workload issue as they are very time consuming to create and could also take away a valuable opportunity that will benefit students, especially if they continue with higher education and will need to study independently in the future. It may seem counterintuitive, but that effortful struggle is exactly what produces the strengthened retrieval in future. We’d love to see how you put this practical Kate Jones retrieval practice resource to use in your school. Tell us about the impact of retrieval practice in your classroom by tweeting us at @teachwire.

There is a temptation to say that retrieval practice is common sense but I don’t think it is. If it was simply common sense I and many other teachers would have used this strategy much sooner and students would be using it to revise instead of resorting to less effective and time-consuming methods such as re-reading and highlighting. Flash cards are a very useful revision activity for many reasons. They work across all subjects, they can be used with the recall of facts, dates, quotes, definitions and more. They are a very simple technique for learners to use – low effort but high impact. As well as being an effective learning strategy flash cards are also popular with students. In a research survey carried out in 2018 more than 50% of college students reported that they do use flash cards to study.