Making Retrieval Practice a Classroom Routine
By regularly working in activities that get students to recall content they’ve learned in the past and apply it, teachers can ensure deeper understanding.
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Go to My Saved Content.An often-overlooked learning strategy—despite lots of strong research indicating its efficacy—is retrieval practice. When teachers build retrieval practice into classroom routines with activities that get students revisiting and unpacking concepts they’ve already learned, their brains are better primed to remember content—and their comprehension is deepened.
In Leah McGinnity’s fourth-grade class at Sugarloaf Elementary School in Frederick, Maryland, students are in the midst of a geometry unit about angles. But her math warm-up, Blast From the Past, presents students with two problems about place value and fractions—topics the students haven’t seen in a couple of months.
“Students are going to forget what you taught them if you don’t keep putting it in your [instruction],” says McGinnity.
She gives everyone a few minutes to work on the problems independently and then asks students to share their thinking. “I call on a lot of different students for each problem so that we can actually talk through their strategies,” she says. “So not only are we focusing on problems that we haven’t talked about recently; they also have that math discourse with each other while we’re going through the warm-up.”
As Learning Science Partners cofounder Jim Heal points out, retrieval practice is about more than checking for understanding. By having every student work through the problems, requiring them to recall exactly how to do them, the teacher is strengthening something called a memory trace.
“We have our working memory, which is the site of thinking, and it’s very, very finite. And then we have this seemingly infinite long-term memory. The more times you go to your long-term memory to pull a piece of information back into your working memory, [the more] it strengthens the memory trace between those two parts of your mind. And strengthening that path is part of the act of learning,” Heal explains.
By creating routines based in retrieval practice that regularly invite students to revisit—and apply—concepts they’ve learned in past lessons, teachers help them cement their learning. Research shows that spacing out those sessions over time is most effective.
McGinnity takes it one step further by explicitly talking to her class about how learning happens. “I think that it’s important for all of our students to understand how their brains work, and the fact that if I teach you something once and don’t come back to it and you don’t understand, you’re not a failure… we just haven’t set your brain up for success.”
This video is part of our How Learning Happens series, which explores teaching practices grounded in the science of learning and human development.