Quizzing

Thanks to the recent books, blog posts and Twitter feeds, the mystery behind how to retain knowledge best and most effectively has been simplified to a few very simple techniques. However there is still a lot of work to be done in ensuring that these techniques are taught to all teachers and most importantly to all students.

The most effective techniques are excellently described on the Learning Scientist blog and in the book “Make it Stick” and I would direct any teacher there first if they would like to improve their knowledge of the subject. So instead of using this blog post to go through what the techniques are, I will instead go through how we intend to use them.

As a department we are focussing our efforts on two key revision strategies for long term retention, the first is spaced retention practice through self-quizzing and the second is elaboration. So how are we going about doing it?

The principle is that every homework will be set around students writing and completing self quizzes in a quiz book. These quizzes will be based on the key factual knowledge for each topic, which is summarised in a knowledge organiser. Once the students have written several quizzes, they will then be in a position to go back and quiz themselves on previous learning at home with very low input from the teacher and creating the spacing affect required for effective revision. We have given students a tracking sheet at the front of their quiz books so they can monitor their scores in different tests. See the example below: 

We are also focussing our students onto the importance of elaboration when they are preparing their self quizzes, so not only that they write the quiz but first read the information explain it back to themselves or someone else and then check their explanation. Only after this point should they write the quiz.

As a team we have made sure that we have explained to the students why they are doing this, in the first week of term, teachers took half an hour out of their lessons, to educate students on why we do self-quizzing, for example explaining the difference between working and long term memory, the limited capacity of working memory and why spaced practice is much more effective than massed practice.

In the first few weeks of term we will be carefully scrutinising the quality of the quizzes but hopefully after some feedback and more modelling students will understand then best way to quiz and over the course of a year build up a powerful revision resource enabling students to revise independently and also diagnose weak areas in their knowledge.

Graham Dakin