In my last post I talked about how a number of factors
throughout an academic year can help inform what you plan, how you plan it, and
ultimately why you would plan it that way.
It took into account a lot of experience, trials, research and an
underlying understanding of teaching. In
this post, I look at how knowing a little bit about cognitive science, psychology
and neurology can affect the way in which you plan learning. It’s always interested me how something I
teach students’ one day can be forgotten only a few days later. How is it that something I was so confident
was memorised (or learnt) by students seems to vanish so quickly. And that will be the underlying theme running
through the posts. How can we actually
(or as best as we can) get the stuff we teach learnt in a way that students
will remember it for a long time to come?
Now I may be speaking out of turn, but knowing
how to make things 'stick' so that they can be retrieved at a later date, and
methods we can plan into our lessons to do this, should at least cross our mind
when putting a plan together. You may not do anything out of the
ordinary, but understanding how the brain works (that is if we actually really
know how it works?) could help make what we plan to do to, and how we plan to
do it, be that little bit more effective.
But first, here’s a summary of three background pieces of information
you should be aware of:
It’s all a
bit…..chemical-ly?
In a short sweet summary, the brain creates memories or
templates through the release of various chemicals in the brain. The two main ones are glutamate and
dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical that
as teachers we want students’ brains to be releasing to ensure what we are
teaching actually sticks. It’s essential
for making templates and connecting neurones to have this present in
learning. But how? Well dopamine is predominantly released in
two ways. One of them is stress. Although stress releases dopamine, it
actually floods the brain and causes future problems. It releases other chemicals that inhibit
learning and actually affect the areas concerned with memory. A more appropriate way is through reward and
anticipation of reward (Curran, 2008).
As a teacher this can be created by the level of challenge and the way
we involve students in learning. I’ll
talk about it a little later. The main
message here though is that if we create a highly stressful environment for
students, we shouldn’t be surprised if things don’t stay in students memories
for long.
The brain has a
working memory, and it’s a really important part if we want things to stick.
In essence, when students are learning in your
classroom they initially use their working memory to process and filter what it
is you are teaching them. The working memory however has limited space
and can get very crowded very quickly. It can also get filled up with
distractions or irrelevant information which is why students sometimes
misunderstand or can't remember things.
"Working memory is the workspace in which thought
occurs, but the space is limited, and if it gets crowded, we lose track of what
we're doing and thinking fails"
(D.T.Willingham Why Don't Students Like School)
Now the working memory deals with the ‘here and
now’. It’s what students use when
forming an understanding as we teach them or explain something. Information resides in here as students make
meanings or develop understanding. When
the conditions are right, this information can then be transferred to the long
term memory.
Working memory is
a key player in getting information into our long term memory
Daniel T. Willingham in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? explains
that working memory and long term memory work hand in hand with each
other. When the working memory is
dealing with new information, it calls upon the long term memory for relevant
background information to help make sense of it. Once the working memory has thought about it,
understood it and made meaning of it, there is a good chance that this
information is committed to the long term memory. This is a very basic analogy and isn’t as
simple as it sounds. If it were,
students’ would remember a lot more than they already do. But they key message here is that information
needs to be attended to in the working memory otherwise there is little chance
of a lasting memory ever happening.
So how do we do this?
1 - The working
memory is limited in space though so we need to consider this in our planning.
It is therefore really important in planning to ensure
that when an element of learning is taking place, we don't over complicate it
or create unnecessary distractions. Ensuring that the attention of the
student is purely on the learning is something that should be considered when
planning. Will the example you give or the task you design actually alter
the students focus elsewhere and away from the topic in hand? Nuthall in
his book discusses how students’ recollection of information can be affected by
the type of activity we design. He
states “sometimes memory for the task itself is longer lasting than the content
the task was designed to teach”. Willingham
also gives a great example in his book where a teacher creates a task that
resulted in students creating PowerPoint presentations. Sounds normal
yes? The point he raises though is many students focused on the quality
of the PowerPoint (the animations, fonts, pictures) and focused very little on
the content they were learning. Obviously the level of learning and what
could be remembered about the topic at a later date wasn't very high.
That isn't to say though that we give up using variety and being creative
in lessons (because this is an important part of remembering which I will talk
about later), but the suggestion is to work on the content first, refine it,
learn it and plan it before putting it into a new context (a poster,
presentation, leaflet). Therefore the learning in lessons, and time to
create drafts, will need time carefully planned into it and come prior to
starting such activities. Getting students to think about, analyse and
design what goes into a presentation before they hit the computers is a
consideration that should be taken on board.
2
- Knowing things makes it easier to learn new things
Ok that again is a bit simplistic but the constant
theme coming through Nuthall, Willingham and the work of Bjork is that having
prior knowledge helps understand new knowledge much easier (although Nuthall
does go on to say that if students of different abilities have the same
learning experience they will learn just as much as each other). It is though very difficult to know how much
prior knowledge each individual has. In
my last post I talked about the importance of knowing the prior attainment of
your group and using this to inform future planning. But this is normally in the form of data and
doesn’t tell you what they really know.
There is the possibility of planning in pre-tests or other introductory
activities but maybe we could make the initial planning that little bit
simpler. One consideration is the
careful planning of what is taught first and the sequences/pathways that
follow. The tip is to build upon prior knowledge so logically ordering
what is taught first so it snowballs and draws upon old information can easily
be mapped out before starting a unit. Building upon prior knowledge and
learnt information makes learning new topics easier. This is down to the
fact that new knowledge retrieves and builds upon the older information
to form new connections. The order doesn't have to be linear though and
by using hooks, larger questions or starting with a broader concept, we can
start with a wider idea which we can begin to learn about. So is there a logical order in your subject? Is there something that is vital to know
first?
3
- We can make using the working memory more efficient
This is more of a rationale rather than a tip. As my earlier quote from Willingham explains,
if there is too much going on in the working memory, students can lose sight of
what is going on and the process fails. Although
there are no known ways to improve working memory, there is advice to using it
more efficiently. If working memory has
a limited space, crowding it with numerous pieces of information can make the
learning more difficult and less likely to be remembered (as I touched upon
above). A lot of new information we learn is done so by combining or
linking to existing understanding or background knowledge. By making what
you teach more likely to be stored in the long term memory, it is easier to
retrieve it again in future when you need it and is more space efficient (for the working
memory) when doing so. It therefore makes learning new information more
achievable, especially when you need already learnt information (background
knowledge) to do so. So planning to commit as much information as
possible through these suggestions can make the learning of new information
easier. Makes sense to me.
4 - It will only
stick if you think about it
Willingham in his book talks about the importance of
getting students to think about the knowledge they are paying attention to.
He explains that “your memory is not a product of what you want to
remember or what you try to remember; it's a product of what you think about”.
It is therefore important we take his tip and “review each lesson plan in
terms of what the student is likely to think about”. If we are to help
commit what we are teaching to students’ memory to be recalled later, we need
to ensure the level of thinking is high throughout. Unfortunately, many a
lesson in my early career rarely had students thinking hard about anything at
all. Should I have been surprised when test scores weren't great?
So the step forward (in my case using SOLO taxonomy) is to constantly
check planning before hand to evaluate the quality and depth of thinking that
progresses through the lesson. Am I hitting the surface and background
information at the right times to build up background knowledge, and then
working with it at a higher level later on to compare, evaluate, analyse and
predict? Willingham also talks about the fact that it's not just the
level of thinking taking place, but the making meaning of what is being thought
about. Are the activities we have planned to use actually the most
effective to help them understand what the information means? This
involves clever task design to ensure this happens. The use of concept
maps, challenge, well thought out questions and carefully planned tasks need to
become part and parcel of what I do. So, if the lesson I have planned
doesn't make students think, or even understand the meaning of what is being
taught, then it's back to the drawing board!
5 – Pitching it
right
As I said earlier on, the challenge that students are
faced with when learning can help improve the likelihood of longer lasting
memories to be formed. Willingham talks
about solving problems (in a wider sense) and engaging students in cognitive
work. If students aren't actually
thinking and making meaning then it won’t be learnt. He also warns that “without some attention, a
lesson plan can become a long string of teacher explanations, with little
opportunity for students to solve problems”.
So reviewing how challenging the lesson will be is again a really
important point. Have you pitched the
work right? Is there too little
opportunity for students’ to think and be challenged?
And then there's the neurology side (as highlighted by
A. Curran). If I want to get the brain cells firing I also need to go back to
the fact that the level of challenge needs to be pitched adequately in order to
create an emotional response (emotion improves what is remembered). In a
very (and I mean very) basic summary, to learn new things we need chemical reactions
involving the release of dopamine to be present. Dopamine is normally
released when a reward is present. The emotion and reward of learning,
and resultant dopamine release, is essential to commit knowledge to the long
term memory. It's the chemical which binds the neurones together to
create memory so is essential I help (if I can) to get them firing and dopamine
released. Pitching a task too easy creates no real reward. Why
would it? There simply isn't a reason for that feel good feeling to happen.
On the flip side, creating a task so difficult and without clear steps to
achieving it students feel helpless and see it is not achievable is also not
conducive (but don't make the task easier, make the thinking around it easier).
Again, knowing your group and planning to push individuals to create new
meanings is another sure fire way to commit information to the long term
memory. Planning to get that dopamine release isn't going to be easy, but
pitching challenge is surely the way forward.
6 – Three is the
magic number
In his research that focused on how students actually
learned in classrooms, Nuthall found that students who were exposed to a new
concept on three different occasions and in a variety of experiences, stored
the information in their memories for longer.
He states that:
“We discovered
that a student needed to encounter, on at
least three different occasions, the complete set of the information that
she or he needed to understand a concept.
If the information was incomplete, or not experienced on three different
occasions, the student did not learn the concept.”
Now using this principle, Nuthall was able to
successfully predict what students would learn/remember with an accuracy of
80-85%. An important warning though is
that simple repetition will not be sufficient.
The three different experiences must come in a variety of mediums and
ways. Variety is therefore the key. He also stresses that one great explanation
is not enough. So why three times? Well he explains that new concepts aren’t
transferred from the working memory into the long term memory until enough
information has been accumulated to warrant it to make the move. Students need to have sufficient
understanding, knowledge of meaning and be able to link it to prior knowledge. So in planning out a topic, will students
really encounter a concept a minimum of three times each in their own varied
way? If not, this may also be a reason
for things not sticking.
7 – If you don’t
use it you lose it
This is a saying that I have heard for many years but is not
quite right. It's true that things become harder to remember as Willingham states when he says "we forget much (but not all) of what we have learned, and the forgetting is rapid". Bjork (who I will introduce in a moment) along with Curran explain that it’s not a case that previously
well learnt information we haven’t thought about is simply removed from memory. They say it is not as simple as that. Obviously our long term memory doesn't have
an infinite capacity (do we really even know how much it has?), but one thing is for sure, if we
don’t get students to revisit things, the connections or ‘route’ to them
becomes weaker and more difficult. Bjork
talks about the fact that these things simply become harder to retrieve. In some of the work by Bjork, subjects
struggled to remember information they had learned a long time ago. When presented with possible answers or cues,
they suddenly remembered. It wasn’t that
the information was lost. It was just
harder to find or retrieve and the prompts help with the process. So how can we ensure that we can help
students learn something so that it is accessible a long way down the line
(like during the exams period?). As
point 8 states, ione consideration could be ‘Practice, practice, practice’.
Interlude – Intro
to Bjork
I thought it might be beneficial to stop for a moment and
explain a little bit about Robert Bjork.
Some of what I will now talk about use slightly different terminology
and I wouldn’t want to confuse examples. One of the things that has got
me most excited is the work of Robert Bjork, the Cognitive Psychologist from
UCLA. He poses some VERY clear considerations of how to tweak planning to
improve long term memory. Much of his work is not just applicable to the
planning of lessons, but is also very important to long term planning of schemes, units or whole courses.
Bjork's work ties in with Willingham's research in a number of places.
Bjork talks a lot about long term memory and the fact that what goes in
there is dependent on two indices: its storage strength (SS) or its retrieval
strength (RS). He talks very clearly about the importance of creating an
environment where any new information is done so in a way that SS and RS is
high. Designing lessons where both (or even one of them) are low, could
make remembering this information very difficult. So what are these two
elements and how to they link with planning?
Storage strength - 'How well learned something is'. It makes
perfect sense that learning something in depth increases the chance that it
will be stored in the long term memory. The better it is learnt the
greater the storage strength. If it has high storage strength, it is
pretty likely that it will be stored in the long term memory ready to be
'retrieved' at a later date.
Retrieval strength - 'How accessible (or
retrievable) something is'. In very simple terms, retrieval strength
works a little like this: The better you learn something, the higher the
storage strength, the higher the retrieval strength. Retrieval strength
is your ability to recall, or retrieve, information at a later date. Now
retrieval strength decreases over time which is why a few months or years down
the line we find it difficult to remember something even though it is on the
tip of your tongue. If something only has a low storage strength it will
decrease quicker than something which you have learned well and ultimately has
a high storage strength. Obvious to say then that if you want to remember
something a long way down the road, you need to ensure what you learn is high
in both SS and RS.
But what implications will this have on my teaching?
How can I plan to have both of these? Well Bjork identified a
number of conditions which over time increase the chances of high SS and RS -
which in turn leads to information being retained for much longer. Now
Bjork warns that these principles “slow down the apparent learning, but under
most circumstances help long term retention, and help transfer of knowledge,
from what you learnt to new situations”. He dubbed these conditions desirable
difficulties. These conditions are purposely difficult and
challenging to the students and assist in long term learning. Whether you
see 'rapid and sustained progress' in 25 minutes is unlikely. But short
term effects are not the goal here (and neither is it mine). So how does
Bjork’s work tie in with the others?
Let’s get back to the tips.
8 – Spacing it out
(carefully mapping out practice, practice, practice).
Willingham and Bjork both have similarities in a lot of
their work. Willingham talks about the
need revisit work and states “It is virtually impossible to become proficient
at a mental task without extended practice”.
It is important then that things we want to stay retrievable in the long
term memory need to be engrained in it adequately. Practicing and repeated learning of a task
can help make that information stick. It
also makes it more accessible in the long term memory and this helps new
learning and the function of the working memory more efficient. We therefore need to ensure that repeated
practice is planned out throughout the year to ensure that a topic is revisited. A way to do this (as agreed by both
Willingham and Bjork) is space out learning and times when we come back to a
topic. As Bjork explains:
“It is common sense that when
we want to learn information, we study that information multiple times. The
schedules by which we space repetitions can make a huge difference, however, in
how well we learn and retain information we study. The spacing effect is the
finding that information that is presented repeatedly over spaced intervals is
learned much better than information that is repeated without intervals (i.e.,
massed presentation).'”
In numerous studies in this field, Bjork and other
researchers have found that the revisiting a topic multiple times over an
extended period has a huge impact on the long term learning. Obvious hey?
But do we always plan to do this? Bjork explains that by spacing out the
intervals between revisiting a topic, we are encouraging the retrieval strength
to decrease (The new theory of disuse - Bjork & Bjork 1992). He also
promotes that we plan to have the duration between intervals increases each
time as well. But why do this? Research showed that information
with a high storage strength, which was allowed to lower in retrieval strength
over time, actually improves the subsequent learning of it when revisited.
The brain stores this information much better the second, third, forth
time round and improves the retrieval strength as it goes. The act of
trying to remember what we almost forget is a good thing for memory.
Therefore planning to revisit topics and working out an optimal gap
between revisiting it (increasing in length each time so it is almost
forgotten) can have a very high effect on the long term learning of it.
From a planning perspective, it is therefore vital that topics are mapped
out through units and schemes, with opportunities for them to be revisited or
recapped. Although this may seem time consuming to plan, or logistically
a bit of a headache, the long term benefits can be far greater than simply
blocking topics together (massing practice which ultimately results in very
poor retention and retrieval strength) which is something we, and a lot of
other schools, currently do.
9 – Interleaving
Now if I spaced and revisited topics from a course using
the previous idea, you might quickly realise that you would run out of
available time in your curriculum. A way
to ensure that spacing is done more efficiently is to weave numerous topics
together throughout the year. An example of this may be linking a topic I
cover at the start of the year, say gender in sport, with a topic I teach a few
months later, sponsorship in sport. This process is called interleaving
and requires the learner to constantly reload information from the long term
memory. A more extreme version of this may be to teach gender in sport,
then age in sport, then diet in sport and so on, until finally returning to
recover gender in sport, age in sport......etc. As you can see, this
could be logistically impossible with the time constraints of a 2 year GCSE
course. At a first time of trying this very different approach it could
also be perplexing for students. Instead, using the principle of spacing,
combined with my initial example of interleaving, can result in a very exciting
programme of study. It steps away from the blocking of topics (massing
practice) and allows for retrieval and storage strength to be increased.
It also allows juxtaposition of various topics and deepens understanding.
Planning out the course more effectively using this principle can be
easily done. The use of SOLO taxonomy in my personal lesson design also
assists the achieving of this. It does require careful mapping out, but
reworking schemes this way ensures SS and RS increase. A winner for long
term learning.
10 – The testing
effect
“Taking a test often
does more than assess knowledge; tests can also provide opportunities for
learning. When information is successfully retrieved from memory, its
representation in memory is changed such that it becomes more recallable in the
future and this improvement is often greater than the benefit resulting from
additional study.”
Being asked to retrieve information alters your memory
so information becomes more re-callable in the future. Bjork
identified testing as a method that can help make this happen.
This isn't testing purely for assessment though, although it can serve
both purposes if needed. The process of testing allows the connections
towards that piece of information to strengthen, and therefore be easier to
access than other methods. It can be done in a number of ways. Here
are three which I will be planning to use over the year:
If we start in a logical order, Bjork found that
testing prior to a topic or unit can has an improved resulting effect to long
term learning. This is an easy enough task to put in place and can be
planned for at the start of any new topic. “Although pretest performance
is poor (because students have not been exposed to the relevant information
prior to testing), pretests appear to be beneficial for subsequent learning (e.g.,
Kornell, Hays, & R. A. Bjork, 2009).” It in itself provides cues for
the then to be learnt information which makes it more learnable.
Using testing within lessons is also an effective
method to increase long term learning. As stated earlier, the process
forces the brain to retrieve information from long term memory and can make
future retrieval quicker. It's effect can be very powerful (in one study
students remembered 61% of information from repeated testing compared to 40%
from repeated study - Henry
L. Roediger, III, and Jeffrey D. Karpicke). Adding tests as a
starter, mid lesson activity or even plenary are very easy to organise and
implement. But what type of tests are best? Although there are no
sure fire answers, Bjork found the use of multiple choice tests to
have a higher effect. As Bjork explains “Little and E. L. Bjork (2010)
argue that when students do not know the answer to a multiple-choice question,
they may try to retrieve information pertaining to why the other answers are
incorrect in order to reject them and choose the correct answer. It is this
type of processing leads to the spontaneous recall of information pertaining to
those incorrect alternatives, thus leading the multiple-choice test to serve as
a learning event for both the tested and untested information.” Therefore the use of multiple choice and
working out the various options, helps improve the retrieval strength and
subsequent long term retention.
Finally, Bjork identified that using tests and quizzes
with students and their peers is a much better way of ingraining information to
the long term memory than simply hitting the books. I personally have
already found this an outstanding revision tool as explained in an earlier
post here.
Using testing as a desirable difficulty in the revision season can again
increase retrieval strength.
11 - Final
consideration: Mnemonics and other ‘tricks’ can help
Something we covered with students in our Learning to
Learn course where simple memory tricks to help students remember
information. Now if there is information
to be learnt, which requires little thought or seem meaningless together, a way
to remember them is to use mnemonics or acronyms. Because these pieces of information need to
simply ‘be known’ in order to progress onto future learning, the use of these
strategies can be very helpful in these instances. So as Willingham explains, we shouldn’t be
afraid to use them when suitable. The
same can be said for approaches like chunking.
If you don’t know what it is, it’s a method by memorising information by
grouping things by association. An
example might be by remembering all of the fruit, then the stationary, and then
the sports equipment from a long list of words.
The working memory works better when it isn’t overloaded. By chunking numerous topics, this counts as
one piece of information in the working memory, not several individual
pieces. It therefore makes for an
effective, and efficient, quick little method to share in class.
If we believe what these principles say, by focusing on the way we plan in a slightly different way, we could be improving the chances that students learn information for the long run. Hopefully these methods allow students retention rates to improve, rather then being forgotten only a few days, weeks or months later.
Links and further reading:
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