The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of a Knowledge Organiser: A Brief Summary and Example

I’ve been reading about Knowledge Organisers for over a year now. I have always been intrigued as to how they might be properly embedded in the everyday practice of primary teachers. In this post, I want to outline what a knowledge organiser is and why they are worth using...there's a link to one of my…

6 retrieval practice strategies to use everyday

My last post showed the research base for the benefits of the testing effect, more appropriately referred to as ‘retrieval practice’. There is a vast wealth of resources now available to teachers that can aid their use of retrieval practice in the classroom. Building on a recent paper by Firth et al (2017), here are…

Summative Testing to Retrieval Practice: clarifying terms and outlining classroom benefits

The words ‘assess’, ‘test’, ‘exam’ and ‘quiz’ often have negative connotations to us as teachers and most certainly for our pupils. They can be stressful, anxiety provoking and feeljudgmental. However, in my last post, I ended with this: …Ebbinghaus (1885/1964) claimed that we can ‘interrupt’ forgetting by recalling information over time, spacing our retrieval out…

Why do our pupils forget what we teach them?

In the classroom, as a teacher, forgetting can be particularly confusing. It’s a conundrum when pupils can vividly remember the visitor who came in Year 3 with weird Viking swords, yet three years on, they can’t remember the answer to 7 x 8 to complete a column multiplication calculation.