In the book Make it Stick, the authors discuss a number of research-based strategies to help instructors create meaningful learning experiences for their students. One of the strategies – retrieval practice – has been shown to increase retention. Think of retrieval practice as frequent and low-stakes testing.
The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval—testing—interrupts forgetting.
Brown, p. 20
And while interrupting forgetting has benefits for learning, frequent low-stakes testing also helps to attenuate students to quizzes and testing:
Frequent low-stakes testing helps dial down test anxiety among students by diversifying the consequences over a much larger sample: no single test is a make-or-break event.
Brown, p.42
There are dozens of different ways to implement low-stakes testing. In the current landscape of remote learning, consider using polls in Webex (or a tool like Kahoot! or PollEverywhere).
For implementation, consider this passage from Make it Stick:
Make the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself. Students find quizzing more acceptable when it is predictable and the stakes for any individual quiz are low. Teachers find quizzing more acceptable when it is simple, quick, and does not lead to negotiating makeup quizzes. Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration. These might be exercises that require students to wrestle with trying to solve a new kind of problem before coming to the class where the solution is taught; practice tests that students can download and use to review material and to calibrate their judgments of what they know and don’t know; writing exercises that require students to reflect on past lesson material and relate it to other knowledge or other aspects of their lives; exercises that require students to generate short statements that summarize the key ideas of recent material covered in a text or lecture.
Make quizzing and practice exercises count toward the course grade, even if for very low stakes. Students in classes where practice exercises carry consequences for the course grade learn better than those in classes where the exercises are the same but carry no consequences. Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems.
Brown, p. 226
Dr. Pooja K. Agarwal also talks about low-stakes testing in her book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning, too. While much of her work focuses on K12 schools, her point still resonates:
As soon as students’ Mini-Quizzes have been collected, provide immediate feedback by going over the answers. (These are low-stakes or no-stakes quizzes − at most, they are worth five points; sometimes I don’t grade them at all.) I conduct an analysis of the Mini-Quizzes after school; students know I conduct this analysis, which encourages accountability for their answers. Handing the Mini-Quizzes back the following day allows for double retrieval: the day of the Mini-Quiz and the following day as we go over answers again.
Agarwal, Location No. 1,645
The point is that the retrieval practice does not need to be laborious; it merely needs to be consistent and engage all students.
Let’s close with a perversion of a timely adage: quiz early, and quiz often.
Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019). Powerful teaching: Unleash the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
Brown, P. C., Roediger III, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.
