In the short term, your students will hate retrieval practice. They will hate the feeling of not knowing an answer or getting things only partially correct. But the science is clear: it works.

Our job is to interrupt this forgetting, by using effective strategies to prompt children to retrieve information from memory. Embed multiple-choice quizzes into your classroom practice This challenges their short-term recall and allows you to challenge their ability to succinctly express knowledge they have retained. 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.First, always begin a lesson with retrieval practice – a short quiz, including five, multiple-choice questions of previously learnt material.

It may seem counterintuitive, but that effortful struggle is exactly what produces the strengthened retrieval in future.

Evidence-based education resource

In this episode of The Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez speaks to Pooja Agarwal about what retrieval practice is and how you can start incorporating it into your classroom right away. You can probably understand this article very easily, but if you sat a test on it next week would you remember all, or even most, of its details? Probably not. Second, we can consider how well connected and robust the knowledge is – known as ‘storage strength’. It is for this reason that, as part of our curriculum design at Reach Academy Feltham, we have embedded regular multiple-choice tests and quizzes into our curriculum design to help us reap the benefits of retrieval practice.

These changes are possible because of how well-researched retrieval practice is. Cognitive scientists have spent decades investigating its use as a memory technique. Though nothing in science is ever beyond question, the positive results across a vast number of studies certainly seem to suggest it’s an effective method. New discoveriesRe-reading is, cognitively speaking, easy to do. Reading is easy. When we re-read material we have a voice in our head saying, “Yes, I got that”, no problem. 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. These results have since been repeated in multiple contexts and under a huge variety of conditions. If you’re teaching a mixed-ability class, try and include some questions that all students should be able to answer. You can also include some more challenging ones that require more in-depth answers. 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.