Research School Network: Improving Secondary Science: Strategies to Retain and Retrieve Knowledge An exploration of the EEF’s guidance report

Recommendation 4 of the EEF’s Improving Secondary Science report, is to ​‘support pupils to retain and retrieve knowledge.’ Remembering vast amounts of information is crucial to success in science, so how can teachers make sure information sticks in students’ long-term memory? The guidance report provides several recommendations and here are our take-aways:

Pay attention to cognitive load
Our working memory is where we hold information that we are actively processing – and its capacity is limited. When undertaking a new task, perhaps with lots of new information, the working memory can often become overwhelmed. Not only can this lead to frustration and loss of motivation, but the material is unlikely to find its way into the students’ long-term memory.

When we are aware of the consequences of cognitive overload, we can take some steps in the science classroom to avoid it. For example, we can predict when a lesson might include a complex task and require lots of knowledge to be successful. Then in previous lessons, we can sequence the new information so it is not presented all in one go. Imagine a practical in which you were to explore rates of reaction. Before even attempting the practical, there is a wealth of required knowledge to be successful. Students need to know what a chemical reaction is, what a reactant or a product is, they need to know what collision theory is, they need to be able to use complex equipment, they need to understand the safety rules in the lab or classroom, they need to be able to plot data on graphs, to interpret it, to be able to explain and evaluate what is going on…and so on! When too much new information is introduced at once, there is a danger that any new knowledge doesn’t stick because there is too much to think about.

Another area where cognitive load causes problems with understanding is the split attention effect. We have many diagrams in science, all of which often introduce new concepts and terminology. In this simple diagram of a plant cell, students have to move between the diagram, to the number, to the term. Far better to avoid attention being split and to label the diagram with the terms.

Revisit knowledge
There is lots of evidence that we should revisit information to ensure that it is retained in long-term memory, but there are some particularly good ways to do this. If you allow for a passage of time before revisiting a topic, it allows for a period of forgetting. The gap can be a day, a week, a month, but the key is to build in this time as part of your study of a topic – studies show that spaced practice such as this is more effective in the long run than massing practice together.

Another effective way to revisit previously studied material is by using retrieval practice. This is when something learnt in the past is brought back to mind, and can take the form of a quiz, a practice paper, or even free recall. It’s more effective than simply rereading the material. Providing that feedback happens after the retrieval practice, this can be a very effective strategy. This can be used as a strategy in class and also has massive benefits when explicitly shared with pupils, along with practical strategies e.g. the Leitner system.

Encourage pupils to elaborate
Pieces of information are not isolated, rather they are held in schemas, complex architectures of knowledge stored in long-term memory. We make sense of new things by placing them somehow within these representations. Elaboration is a strategy whereby we consciously associate material we want to learn with previously learnt material, or where we help material to be retained in the long-term memory by making links between different pieces of information. One form of elaboration is elaborative interrogation, which asks pupils to generate an explanation for an idea previously learnt. It can help to retain information, but it can also help to make sense of this information. If a student was to restudy photosynthesis, they could ask ​‘how’ and ​‘why’ questions to support their understanding. Some of these questions can be generated by the teacher and specific to photosynthesis: Why does photosynthesis only take place in daytime? How does the concentration of carbon dioxide affect the rate of photosynthesis? How do low temperatures affect the function of enzymes? There are also a number of generic questions that can be applied to multiple tocs, such as: What do I already know that helps me to understand this? How does this topic link to other topics? What else do I need to know in order to make more sense of this?