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Language: en
Testing.
Students dread it.
Many educators say it steals precious teaching
time.
But what if more testing is actually the solution
to better learning?
I have some really bright students who couldn’t
tell me what we had done a month ago.
They could copy.
They could copy really well, but if you asked
an essential question, they wouldn’t know
how to answer.
What transformations occurred during the Middle
Ages?
So to improve her students’ memory, she
tests them—every day.
Names on top, number one through five.
I just take whatever we did the day before,
I put it in a basket, I pull 5 things out.
It makes the students so accountable for their
learning.
They have to know the information.
They have to retrieve this information.
Number one.
What is the term for a grand church?
This isn’t a high-stakes test.
It’s a mini-quiz.
Bain won’t even record the scores.
And number five.
These quizzes prompt students to fetch information
from memory.
We should be trying to retrieve the information,
getting it out of memory rather than trying
to cram it into memory.
Cognitive psychologists Mark McDaniel and
Roddy Roediger have spent decades studying
memory and learning.
They say if long-term memories aren’t used
often enough, they can fade.
But not if they’re retrieved frequently.
Turns out that retrieval practice is extremely
effective for creating robust memories.
Whereas traditional studying techniques, like
highlighting and re-reading notes will get
you by on the short term, but you’ll forget
the information quite quickly.
So you need other strategies.
McDaniel and Roediger conducted a multi-year
study at Columbia Middle School.
Patrice Bain was one of the teachers in the
study.
What is feudalism?
Governing and organizing a society based on
land and service.
Oh, I like that.
The results of the study were clear.
By giving regular, low-stakes quizzes, students
performed better on graded tests administered
days to weeks later.
In other words, their recall often improved.
Testing’s here to stay, so teachers have
to optimize how they use it.
It has kind of been my mission to take this
research, this cognitive science, and turn
it into these simple strategies.
These are strategies that just about anyone
can use.
All of these changes are so minor.
Implementing them requires very little modification
to the existing curricula and to how teachers
spend their time in the classrooms.
At least some educators seem to agree.
Roediger says that many teachers have already
adopted the approach.
To use testing to promote learning as it happens.