Can classroom tests be used as more powerful learning tools?

John Dewey, a prominent educational activist said, "When teachers speculate, reason, and contemplate using open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility, they will act with foresight and planning rather than base their actions on tradition, authority, or impulse."

With that in mind, the teacher as a reflective practitioner is reminded about how we must always question why we are doing something, if it is as impactful as it could be and is there anything that we need to change and/or improve on.

Dewey also said, "If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow" and bearing that in mind, rethinking classroom tests, their purpose and how they are used is one area due consideration.

The pedagogical strategy involved in classroom tests is retrieval practice. 'Rote learning' was the first thing that sprung to mind when initially reading about retrieval practice. On the face of it, the concept seems too good to be true – Students retrieve information previously studied, they then answer questions routinely. By being regularly quizzed, those very same students will learn more. It seems simple! However, the execution of this practice is key.

Retrieval Practice involves providing students with frequent opportunities to recall prior learning through low-stakes or no-stakes activities, so that 'knowledge' becomes deeply embedded in their long-term memory. In this way, retrieval practice remoulds teacher assessment into a learning strategy by asking pupils to think hard to retrieve, recognise the relevance of and reconstruct the curriculum content they’ve been taught, within a new context.

Karpicke and Grimaldi (2012) put it like this "…if a person has learned something, it means they are capable of using information available in a particular context, referred to as ‘retrieval cues’, to reconstruct knowledge in order to meet the demands of the present activity".

About seven years ago, a former student returned to talk to a cohort of post 16 students. She spoke about her chosen pathway after school, how she had won a place at University of Oxford to study Law, and after gaining a First-Class honours degree, went on to become a barrister.

During the Q and A session, she was asked what her big take-aways were from her school days. I was taken aback to hear her say that the strategies and routines she had used to learn her weekly quota of law materials at Oxford, were the very ones she had practised in our classroom History tests during her schooltime. At the time, I believed these were simple knowledge tests.

She explained that when she began her studies at university, she would be given substantial amounts of literature to learn with a deadline. An example of how she actioned some of the strategies were when she identified 'retrieval cues' in the material, enabling her to recall knowledge and then reconstruct it into compelling arguments during tutorials. Sometimes, there are lightbulb moments in education and for me, this was one of them. I started reflecting.

Prior to this, I had always seen these knowledge tests as having some use, a vague type of ‘brain gym’, useful for learning knowledge. I had not considered the significance of what was happening to the brain.

Karpicke and Grimaldi (2012) measured student performance by asking a group of students to re-read material over and over again and then asked the students to complete another task by reading material once and then writing down everything they knew. Five minutes after learning the topic, all of the students sat an exam. Student performance in the re-reading condition was 83%. This compared favourably to the retrieval practice condition which averaged 71%.

However, after one week the pattern completely reversed; student performance in the retrieval condition was 61%, whereas the re-reading condition averaged 40%. In other words, by using re-reading strategies students lost more than half of what they had learned in the space of a week. On the other hand, students who engaged in a simple retrieval activity retained over 60% of what they had learned in the same time span.

Karpicke and Grimaldi also tested perception. When they asked the students 'How much will you remember in one week', the students overwhelmingly predicted, they would know more after the re-reading exercise; the opposite to the actual results and we see that time and time again in work by cognitive scientists; students think they will remember something well after re-reading however the reality is, they actually forget most of it. Students present this ‘illusion of fluency’ by repeatedly using the same techniques however the success of the method does not improve.

Retrieval Practice forces us to explore the knowledge we have and pull it out to examine what we know. So, rather than an 'illusion of fluency', we see a struggle going on to retrieve and it is this very struggle or a level of ‘desirable difficulty’ that enables knowledge to fix in our long-term memory.

Recognising how significant this is, could we therefore argue that teachers have a responsibility to provide the right conditions and the right opportunities to enable this struggle to take place? And perhaps too many graded, high stakes in-class assessment are not the right way to deploy this powerful learning strategy?

How does this look in the classroom and what does this mean for assessment?

We activate Retrieval Practice whenever we ask students to pull information from long–term memory. The simple act of retrieving helps students remember more, for longer and with greater accuracy. Doug Lemov defines Retrieval Practice as "the process of causing students to recall information they’ve learned after a strategic delay."

The Low Stakes nature of this approach is important. Retrieval Practice is just that, Practice. Students are not graded or shamed. The memory tests should take a variety of forms. They are taught with a growth mindset philosophy, reminded that forgetting is part of the struggle to remember, and it is called a process of 'desirable difficulty'. In considering this, we must shift our efforts to assessment for learning practices, enabling students to focus on recalling and applying the knowledge, rather than focusing on how they will be measured in a summative way.

Engaging students regularly in Retrieval Practice, with multiple, ungraded activities makes it feel low stakes. Frequent Retrieval Practice builds students comfort with forgetting and confidence in improving. So, let's try to change the fixation on regular grading and instead focus on helping our young people to remember, retrieve and learn as effectively as possible.

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