Exam Study and Retrieval Practice

Depending on your school's semester structure, you are either right on top of exam time or will be shortly after Christmas (so I probably should have written this last week).  For those in content knowledge based classes, the best thing you can give your students is the chance to retrieve information from their brains.  

Why?  Because that's how we cement the knowledge in our brains.

It's a technique known as retrieval practice.  It isn't new; it has worked for hundreds of years. But the science revealing how powerful a strategy it is has only been published in the last decade. According to the website retrievalpractice.org, “Retrieval practice is a strategy of deliberately bringing information to mind,” and it is a powerful tool for memory and fluency.

While we typically think of flashcards and whiteboards for retrieval, there are many other methods that we can employ in the classroom.  Using a variety of methods, from brain bombs and summary sheets to Socrative, Quizlet, and clickers to think-pair-share, you can engage students in retrieval practice while preventing boredom.  In my BodyPump classes, Matt will sometimes stop and watch us cary out a movement without his cues. I’ve certainly never been bored when he engages us in this type of retrieval.  On the contrary, I feel empowered to succeed on my own.

Why does it work? Here's where I'll examine just a little bit of neurology.

Your brain cells are surrounded by a layer of fat, called myelin. It serves two purposes:

1. Insulating the nerve to prevent electrical signals from traveling to the wrong place. You wouldn't want a signal intended to contract your heart muscle to go to your bicep instead.
2. Enabling fast, efficient communication of signals. The denser the myelin, the quicker the signal travels.

When practicing a new skill or rehearsing information, the myelin layer around the neuron thickens (myelination), enabling faster communication the next time that pathway is activated.  In physical skills, we call it muscle memory, but muscles don’t remember things as they are just meat.  This thing we call muscle memory is simply a well-myelinated pathway, made of multiple neurons.  According to Stanislas Dehaene, the physical changes in a neuron when memorizing and practicing, strengthen the interconnections between them, “making it more likely that this set of neurons will fire in the future.” 

In the class I take with Matt at the Y, the routine is changed every six weeks or so.  When we first start a new routine, we are an absolute mess.  Hardly anyone in the class is doing the same thing as our instructor, Matt, in spite of the fact that he is cueing it well.  Two weeks later, most of us are getting it mostly right most of the time because we now have pathways that connect one move to the next due to myelination.  The same is true of academic learning.  As we retrieve the memory, we grow the myelin, allowing us to retrieve it more efficiently the next time we need it.  Thus, the old adage, “If you don’t use it, you lose it” is true because when we don’t practice something, we lose myelin or don’t myelinate the neuron in the first place.

I'm not suggesting that we use rote memorization alone.  The learning is obviously "stickier" if we connect the information to meaning.  But that can be done during retrieval.  Encourage students to go through their flashcards more slowly than they usually do, pausing to ask, "Why is this the answer?" or "Why isn't it a different answer?" As Kevin Washburn says in The Architecture of Learning, “Data not processed is short-lived.”  He makes the point that knowledge and thinking cannot be separated from each other if there is meaning to the content, which is why we often talk to ourselves (even if it is only internally) while attempting to learn something new. In How We Learn, neuroscientist and author Stanislas Dehaene describes how brain imaging reveals this “processing depth effect,” explaining that deeper processing activities activate areas of the prefrontal cortex that form loops with the hippocampus.  He does not advise one preferred method of deep processing but says that “all solutions that force students to give up the comfort of passivity are effective.”

It became trendy a few years ago to downplay retrieval and knowledge. People called it "drill and kill" because, for some reason, we believe things more if they rhyme.  As an experienced teacher, you know it works. Research from both neurology and psychology demonstrate that it works. Use it early, often, and without shame.

Since people Maybe we should start calling it "drill for skill."

Exams - Change Your Outlook

When exam time approaches, teachers and students alike tend to view it rather negatively.  At best, we view it as a necessary evil.  At worst, we view it as torture on the level of being punched in the face repeatedly for a couple of weeks.  Neither of these perspectives nor the spectrum between them provides for quality learning or joy. 

In my classes, we read a little Scripture at the beginning of each period.  Right now, we are reading through the book of Mark because it is my favorite Gospel.  Yesterday, we read the passage in which Jesus tells us that the most important command is to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."  I've been a Christian for 36 years, so this is not the first time I've studied this verse, but because I was reading it to a class, it struck me as related to academic pursuits more than it usually does.

Scholarship is an act of worship.  Whether you are studying science, math, history, English, foreign language, or anything else, you are studying God's work.  He speaks through His creation, and when you study it to the best of your abilities, you honor Him.  Changing your view of the work He has put before you will make you learn it better, but it will also give you more joy in the learning. 

Christian teachers, please do not present exams or any kind of work to your students as drudgery.  They see what you model, and if you work with a poor attitude, they will too.  Present exams as a sacrifice to the Lord.  They will find meaning in it when they do.

Exams Teach More Than You Know

Disclaimer:  I am a middle and high school science teacher, not a neurobiologist.  I am well aware that the learning process in the brain is far more complex than I am portraying.  This is painted with very broad strokes because this is, after all, an educational blog and not a neurology text.

"It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Exam Week" really should be a song because, for middle and high school teachers and students, it can't be Christmas until midterm exams are over.  To see some of my students blogs on the issue, click here.

It happens every year.  A middle school student tells me that exams are unnecessary and don't tell you anything because they can't study for all their subjects at once.  They are always very proud of their amazing argument, backed up with something their mom said about how they shouldn't be under so much pressure at their age.  Much like the "When am I ever going to use this is life?" question, it doesn't actually matter what my answer is.  They came in knowing that they were right and nothing will convince them otherwise.  Since you read this blog, I will assume that you care what the answer is.  Exams are about the pressure.

The initial learning process is a long and complicated brain experience.  It involves categorizing new knowledge into categories you established from prior knowledge, blending the old information with the new to give it meaning, and recording that meaning in a biochemical process in your brain.  Because the brain's real estate is limited, there is competition for what will remain and what gets tossed.  Your brain simply must throw out some things, or you would waste valuable space on remembering what the people in your line at the grocery store last week were wearing.  In the simplest of terms, your brain decides to keep the things you revisit and dump the things you don't.  That's why songs stay in your mind.  That's why review matters.  It has even been theorized that one of the purposes of sleep is to give your brain time to decide what it should forget from that day without taking in new input in the process.

What does this have to do with pressure and exams?

First, you are obviously revisiting information that you learned earlier in the semester.  This tells your brain that it should hold onto this information next time it is sorting out what you should forget.  It tells your brain that this information is more important than the tweet your read yesterday and never looked at again.  Second, the pressure of the exam schedule tells your brain that this matters enough to stress over.  The brain isn't likely to drop those things you are stressed about when it goes through information triage.  It is why you remember the fight you had with your friend long after you forgot the color of the carpet in the conference room.  Emotion (even stress) causes your brain to record more permanently.  The pressure increases the learning.

Another thing that exams teach you is the ability to plan for the long term and short term simultaneously.  This is an important adult life skill.  Your parents prepare for the short term (packing lunches for tomorrow) and the medium term (what groceries to buy for this week) and the long term (how much money to budget for food).  They do it all the time.  They didn't develop the ability to do this the day they turned 21.  It is a skill that is built.  One of the ways you build this skill is to balance studying for exams (a couple of weeks away) with doing the homework that is due tomorrow.  This will keep you from living your life by the "tyranny of the urgent" principle.  Many adults live anxious lives because they are only doing what has to be done RIGHT NOW.  If you have developed the skill of planning ahead, your life will be less stressful.

As I began writing this, I had a strange memory of an episode of Boy Meets World.  I know that's weird, but stick with me.  Mr. Feeny had made a very difficult exam schedule (because, in TV world, the history teacher is apparently able to make the exam schedule).   Anyway, the students revolted against this unfair schedule.  They vandalized his house, etc.  In the scene below, Corey goes to talk to him about the vandalism and to request that he make things easier.  As always, Mr. Feeny's wisdom came through, so I will end with it.