Research School Network: Can hotel room numbers become mobile phone numbers?

When I first started to look into retrieval practice some useful examples were provided to me by the learning scientists. How memorable something is can be described in two ways, as retrieval strength and as storage strength. The learning scientists @AceThatTest discuss the differences between the two here.

I found the above diagram particularly useful. If we focus in on both high retrieval and storage, the example given is a current phone number. The idea being that (most of us) can recall our own mobile phone number. And can recall this on demand – perhaps even after not recalling it from a number of months. So how did this happen?

I remember getting my first mobile phone and immediately starting to try to memorize my mobile phone number. Then for the next few days I was constantly regurgitating that number to my friends. Once the initial ​“number giving” had been done perhaps there was a bit of a break but importantly for one reason or another I had to recall it again, and again and again. Now as time goes on I rarely have to now recall my phone number – most friends/​colleagues/​organizations now have this number and therefore there is no need!

However, importantly, there is still the odd occasion that I may have to recall this number – I recently moved house and so had to provide it to utility companies. I hadn’t recalled it for a long time, but had I forgotten it – of course not! The number has strong retrieval strength and still strong storage strength. It doesn’t matter how long it has been since the last retrieval.

Now let’s take another example. A hotel room number from a previous holiday. Now after checking in at reception I was given a room number. And for the remainder I didn’t have to go back to reception each time to ask them what the number was- I’d remembered it. But did I have strong storage strength? Could I still recall that number 6 weeks after the holiday? Well I didn’t try! But the answer would probably be no, and I certainly can’t remember it now.

So why am I talking about hotel room numbers and mobile phone numbers?

Well, in the context of the classroom. Often we feel that students have ​“learned” something because they can recall or produce work on that skill for a series of lessons. For example, I recently taught a series of lessons on straight line graphs with year 7. We studied a series of lessons on recognizing, plotting and interpreting straight line graphs. And at the end of the topics I was pretty confident that student had grasped these skills.

Exit questions and a traditional end of unit assessment helped to confirm this. But had students really ​“learnt” the skills. By undertaking an immediate exit question and assessment was I not just asking them to recall their ​‘current hotel room number?’ Were these skills really committed to their long-term memory? Kris Bolton mentions the importance of long-term learning here and quotes ​“learning is a change in the state of long-term memory; if nothing has been changed, nothing has been learnt.”

Of course, something has taken place here as these students were in a better position to answer this type of question than they were before this series of lessons. But has this topic become a mobile phone number? In my opinion, no. Before I started my research on retrieval practice I would’ve been the first teacher to say those lines ​“I know they can do this, they learnt this last month, how can they not remember!” Again, it comes down to the difference between a mobile phone number and a hotel room number.

Now let’s imagine a different scenario. Imagine I returned from the holiday and was immediately asked to recall my room number, I would like to think I would remember it! Then imagine a couple of days passed and I was asked again, and then a few more days. Because I was been asked to recall the room number on separate occasions the storage strength for this number would become stronger, until perhaps I could recall it after any given length of time had passed.

And so we arrive at retrieval practice…

Here is a link to my earlier blog where I first introduced my trial. We are now 6 months on!

At the end of the second term I designed a cumulative assessment on socrative in order to test students’ knowledge on the first 4 chapters. This was given to both my set 7.1B and my colleagues set 7.1A who are a control group in my trial. As previously mentioned in my first blog when these students arrived to us in year 7 we created two parallel sets in order to directly compare the impact of the trial.

Here were the results showing results from the end of chapter tests and the cumulative chapter 1 – 4 assessment.

This gave me a lot of points to consider. At first glance I thought, Wow! That’s amazing the treatment group has beaten the control by over 20%. Then I looked further and realized the treatment group beat the control in every one of the original chapter tests. So thought Oh no! I can’t say that the retrieval has had any impact because the treatment group were just obviously better in the first place! What a waste of 4 months!

Then I proceeded to look further into the trends of the data and my faith was somewhat restored. Yes the treatment group ​“beat” the control group in the original chapter tests. Their overall average from the first 4 tests was 76 for 7.1B and 65 for 7.1A. But directly comparing those averages with the cumulative scores does show one subtle yet important difference.

My point here being that 7.1B actually improved their average score by the time of the cumulative test, and 7.1A did not maintain their average score, in fact it actually decreased.

Of course, we can only make certain inferences from these results, there is a heck of a lot of bias that could creep in here. However, on the surface, as all of the research has suggested, retrieval practice can help to increase long-term memory retention and increase storage strength over time.

After completing the cumulative assessment on the first 4 chapters, I decided to keep going with the next three. So we are now focusing our recall sessions on the first 7 units of work. It is important to note, that this doesn’t cover the whole of the curriculum that has been covered this year (mainly due to time constraints) and I’ve had to look further into how this sort of model could be applied to an entire years’ worth of units (more later!)

This is what the retrieval map looks like now.

This is a slightly simplified version in order to just show the instances of recall (light pink boxes), and the spacing gaps (coloured blocks). You can see that in some weeks more than one unit is covered in the retrieval because of the nature of the cumulative recall.

So where next? Above all else, this trial has really made me think about curriculum design, and in particular the use of assessment with students as they commence KS4. Traditionally, we have used assessment for tracking purposes, and to gain an idea of whether students have a solid understand of that particular unit of work. But again, I have discussed the pitfalls of this above. Yes we gain an insight into their level of understanding at the particular point in time (more often than not, soon after first teaching) but do we really gain an idea about long-term retention? In fact, this sort of assessment could lull us a teachers and students into a false sense of security. Is there not a better way?

So I got my thinking hat on, and started to think about what I really wanted the purpose of my assessments to be.

To check understanding
To improve long term memory retention
To provide continuous and cumulative revision throughout the year
To identify areas of weakness and to provide students with feedback for improvement
To encourage pupils to revise/​study
So I put this altogether and started to come up with a recall map. This is an example of a new recall plan that I have derived for our year 9 students:

You can see from the plan that our KS4 curriculum is still organized into units or chapters, but the biggest change is that I have built in some recall quizzes throughout the year. These quizzes are not based on the content that has just been taught in order to allow some ​“forgetting” to happen. The overall aim is to embed skills and knowledge into long-term memory through the use of cumulative and spaced quizzing. I still find the use of the word ​“quiz” important. As I feel it helps to promote the idea of low stakes testing, and that the focus of completing the test is for further learning rather than tracking purposes.

The below diagram better demonstrates the spacing of when each unit is recalled. I would hope that this could then be extended in the future throughout years 10 and 11 in order for repeated practice and recall of all units studied.

So that is where I am currently up to.

I am almost certain that this new recall plan will not solve all of the problems of forgetting-this would be far too naive. We do already use 5 a day activity at the start of every Maths lesson in order to recap key skills but I do believe that further quizzing needs to happen and my head is already buzzing with ideas of how to implement these opportunities in my lessons. I am looking into tying in quizzing with homework in order to further embed the importance of self-quizzing and recall.

Watch this space…

Beth Kearns (Research Lead – Meols Cop Research School)

@MissBKearns