http://www.rcsthinkfromthemiddle.com/formative-assessments-strategies.html

Our brains are wired to forget, but there are research-backed strategies you can use to make your teaching stick.

Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget—highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick.

In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss—the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to “optimize decision-making” in chaotic, quickly changing environments. In this model of cognition, forgetting is an evolutionary strategy, a purposeful process that runs in the background of memory, evaluating and discarding information that doesn’t promote the survival of the species.

“From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory,” explain Richards and Frankland in the study. “Rather, it may represent an investment in a more optimal mnemonic strategy.”

The Forgetting Curve

We often think of memories as books in a library, filed away and accessed when needed. But they’re actually more like spiderwebs, strands of recollection distributed across millions of connected neurons. When we learn something new—when a teacher delivers a fresh lesson to a student, for example—the material is encoded across these neural networks, converting the experience into a memory.

Forgetting is almost immediately the nemesis of memory, as psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in the 1880s. Ebbinghaus pioneered landmark research in the field of retention and learning, observing what he called the forgetting curve, a measure of how much we forget over time. In his experiments, he discovered that without any reinforcement or connections to prior knowledge, information is quickly forgotten—roughly 56 percent in one hour, 66 percent after a day, and 75 percent after six days.

So what can be done to preserve the hard work of teaching? After all, evolutionary imperatives—which prune our memories of extraneous information—don’t always neatly align with the requirements of curriculum or the demands of the Information Age. Learning the times tables doesn’t avail when running from lions, in other words, but in the modern world that knowledge has more than proved its mettle.

The Persistence of Memory

The same neural circuitry appears to be involved in forgetting and remembering. If that is properly understood, students and teachers can adopt strategies to reduce memory leaks and reinforce learning.

MIT neuroscientists, led by Richard Cho, explain the mechanisms for synaptic strengthening in a 2015 article, also published in Neuron. When neurons are frequently fired, synaptic connections are strengthened; the opposite is true for neurons that are rarely fired. Known as synaptic plasticity, this explains why some memories persist while others fade away. Repeatedly accessing a stored but fading memory—like a rule of geometry or a crucial historical fact—rekindles the neural network that contains the memory and encodes it more deeply.

Researchers have also learned that not all new memories are created equal. For example, here are two sets of letters to remember:

1. NPFXOSK
2. ORANGES

For readers of English, the second set of letters is more memorable—the more connections neurons have to other neurons, the stronger the memory. The seven letters in NPFXOSK appear random and disjointed, while ORANGES benefits from its existing, deeply encoded linguistic context. The word oranges also invokes sensory memory, from the image of an orange to its smell, and perhaps even conjures other memories of oranges in your kitchen or growing on a tree. You remember by layering new memories on the crumbling foundations of older ones.

5 Teacher Strategies

When students learn a new piece of information, they make new synaptic connections. Two scientifically based ways to help them retain learning is by making as many connections as possible—typically to other concepts, thus widening the “spiderweb” of neural connections—but also by accessing the memory repeatedly over time.

Which explains why the following learning strategies, all tied to research conducted within the past five years, are so effective:

1. Peer-to-peer explanations: When students explain what they’ve learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016).
2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016).
3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Practice tests can be low stakes and ungraded, such as a quick pop quiz at the start of a lesson or a trivia quiz on Kahoot, a popular online game-based learning platform. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016).
4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don’t have to think about what strategies to use—they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015).
5. Combine text with images: It’s often easier to remember information that’s been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II with a map of German military expansion can reinforce that lesson. It’s easier to remember what’s been read and seen, instead of either one alone (Carney & Levin, 2002; Bui & McDaniel, 2015).

So even though forgetting starts as soon as learning happens—as Ebbinghaus’s experiments demonstrate—research shows that there are simple and effective strategies to help make learning stick.

This project investigated whether participation in a group cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) anxiety program assists children on the autism spectrum to function better at school, including their anxiety, mood, social skills, and academic outcomes.

https://www.autismcrc.com.au/reports/improving-school-functioning-reducing-anxiety-children-spectrum

http://teaching.monster.com/benefits/articles/8761-22-tips-for-teaching-students-with-autism-spectrum-disorders

https://www.iidc.indiana.edu/pages/Teaching-Tips-for-Children-and-Adults-with-Autism

Educational resources

When students are monitored regularly and targeted teaching is planned and implemented in a timely manner, fewer students succumb to the Matthew Effect (Rigney, 2010) whereby the gap between struggling learners and their year level peers widens rapidly and, with each passing year, is more difficult to close.

While good readers gain new skills very rapidly, and quickly move from learning to read to reading to learn, poor readers become increasingly frustrated with the act of reading, and try to avoid reading where possible (Rigney, 2010).

Monitoring student literacy progress against agreed expectations is central to targeted teaching (Goss, Hunter, Romanes and Parsonage, 2015).

The purpose of monitoring is to provide information about student learning. This information can be used by teachers to evaluate their teaching. It can also be used by students to assess their own progress. Monitoring is the general word that describes the specific ways you plan to pay attention to, and track, your students’ progress (Department of Education and Training, 2015).

Alignment of assessment, pedagogy, curriculum and literacy in the classroom is the most proactive approach to acknowledging the diverse learning needs of students and improving teacher practice and student outcomes. Continuous monitoring of students’ ability to apply literacy understanding and skills in the curriculum supports teachers in reflecting on what’s working and what isn’t. This enables them to either maintain or alter current teaching practices to ensure students are achieving at the standard expected of them in classroom tasks and assessment.

The P-10 Literacy continuum and Early Start are tools for helping teachers to monitor literacy progress.

The P–10 Literacy continuum ‘identifies the literacy skills and understandings regarded as critical to literacy success. It maps how critical aspects develop through the years of schooling by describing key markers of expected student progress’ (NSW Department of Education and Communities, 2010). By mapping students’ current abilities on the continuum, teachers are better able to meet students’ literacy learning needs and plan for longer-term progress through intentional instruction against year level expectations.

Early Start is a suite of literacy materials for use across the early years of schooling:

• on Entry to Prep
• end of Prep
• Year 1
• Year 2

Schools and teachers can use Early Start to generate purposeful data about literacy achievement, track progress and measure growth for Prep to Year 2 students.

Resources:

https://learningplace.eq.edu.au/cx/resources/file/1424052a-7684-4a39-97de-98e8ca7740ce/1/html/starting-points.html

Continuum can be found also in OneSchool

Why grand conversations?

“…student engagement in discussions

about text results in improved reading

comprehension, higher level thinking skills,

and increased literacy motivation.”

(Gambrell, 2004)

Oral language is the foundation for the complex literacy skills that are critical to

a child’s success in today’s knowledge society. The capacity to analyze rich text

(including media and digital representations), to explore different perspectives, to

negotiate meaning and to critically question authors (and authorship) are all expectations

of today’s literate learner. This monograph, building on Gordon Wells notion of

“grand conversation,” explores the kind of talk that enables students to meet these

expectations and build the comprehension skills that are the foundation for high

levels of literacy.

https://team.oneportal.deta.qld.gov.au/sites/prdss/framework/professionallearning/Document%20Library/Grand%20Conversations%20in%20Every%20Classroom.pdf

I have recently been reading Make it Stick The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel and it has some interesting insights into learning that I thought I would share.

Chapter 1: Learning is Misunderstood

• Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.
• We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not.  When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.
• Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also the least productive. By massed practice we mean the single-minded, rapid-fire repetition of something you’re trying to burn into memory, the “practice-practice-practice” of conventional wisdom.
• For true mastery or durability these strategies (rereading and massed practice) are largely a waste of time.
• Retrieval practice – recalling facts or concepts or events from memory – is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading.
• Simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes.
• Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.  Space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.
• Try to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt. (Pre-assessment and inquiry based learning)
• The popular notion that you learn better when you receive instruction in a form consistent with your preferred learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the empirical research.
• In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness. (check ins and feedback)
• New learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.
• Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.
• People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organise them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery.
• Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hard-wired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability.  But every time you learning something new, you change the brain – the residue of your experiences is stored. (Growth Mindset)
• Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
• If rereading is largely ineffective, why do students favour it? Rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create the illusion of mastery.

Creativity is more important than knowledge – Albert Einstein

One cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply – Robert Sternberg