Research School Network: Recall and Retrieval Practise – Maths Chartered Teacher and Subject Lead for Maths at Meols Cop explains how she has developed recall and retrieval practise with KS4.

Beth Kearns – Chartered Teacher and Subject Lead for Maths at Meols Cop High School explains how she has developed recall and retrieval practise with KS4.


There are hundreds of sources of information regarding recall and retrieval: Make it Stick, Rosenhine’s principles of instruction, The learning scientists @AceThatTest, Craig Barton’s ​“How I wish I’d taught Maths” to name a few places of where my inspiration has come from!


Recall practice is something that I am always thinking of taking further. I was looking for more efficient ways of carrying out my low stakes quizzing in maths, in particular, a way to better track as and when content was being recalled. Around 18 months ago I came up with what I like to call my ​“Recall Planner”. The Planner is an Excel document containing two sections.


1. The Topic List

2. The Recall Map


The Topic List
At the end of each week I plan to list a maximum of five mathematical topics, concepts or ​“skills” that have been covered in class during that week. For the purpose of the rest of the blog I will refer to them as skills. These skills are normally what has been covered in lessons that week, however if there are any spaces in the map, I will sometimes fill them with other skills. These extra skills are usually areas of weakness for the class that have been identified from assessments, homework tasks or other activities in class that week.


The planner has enough space for 72 weeks of skills. My year 11 class are currently on week 49 and I started listing for them during their first week of year 10. Here is a screenshot of a section of their map:

Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the weeks…


Week 1
In Year 10 we started the first week on the topic of Pythagoras’ Theorem. I am careful to be quite specific in what I input into the topic list. In the week of pythagoras I have included ​“Converse Pythagoras” and ​“Pythagoras problems” – for example where students have to calculate a missing length or perpendicular height first, before calculating the perimeter/​area of a triangle. It is important that I am specific as possible here and I will come back to this when I talk about the design of my low-stakes quizzes later on. The last skill in that week is ​“expand double brackets”. This won’t have been first taught in that week but was perhaps a skill that cropped up during the week on a homework/​5 a day and I identified that it was a weakness for students and so needed to be popped into some low stakes quizzes at a later date.


Week 42
Here you will see that this week is highlighted yellow. This is due to the fact that there has been an assessment this week and new content hasn’t been introduced. So instead I have filled the topic list with 5 areas from the GCSE paper that students should have ​“nailed” but in fact haven’t. For example, ​“tiles on the floor problem” any Edexcel Maths teacher will know the type of question that I’m talking about here! Now I have identified, after perhaps some feedback/​intervention with the students after the paper, that re-teaching doesn’t need to happen here for this type of question, but perhaps the students would benefit from seeing a similar question in some recall quizzes further in the weeks to follow!


The topic list is also a really informal record of what content has been covered with that class each week. Handy to look back on from time to time.


The Recall Map


The other section of the recall planner is a recall map (shown below). The aim of this map is to demonstrate which set of skills should appear in low stakes quizzes each week.For example, in week 10, the skills that would appear on the low stakes quiz that week are skills that were originally introduced in lessons during teaching weeks 1, 5 and 8 (a maximum of 15 skills altogether). Each time a set of skills appears on a recall test, the time until it next appears is increased. This is due to the evidence promoting spaced practice. Each set of skills will appear in 3 weeks’ worth of low stakes quizzes. (This is again important for any skills that have been identified as weaknesses during assessment weeks, as those skills appear on three low stakes quizzes as well to give the students extra practice).

After each set of weekly skills has been recalled three times they are then grouped together in blocks. E.g. Block A contains skills from weeks 1 – 4. Now, it is impossible to keep recalling everything – you would never get through any new content! But I do try to come back to these groups after longer intervals where possible. For examples in week 16 of the recall map, I already need to complete a low stakes quiz containing skills from weeks 7, 11 and 14. But there is a little yellow box reminder on the map there that if I have any space in my quiz, or a new homework to set, or space on my 5 a day activity it could be worth including some skills from Block A.

Structure of the Recall Practice
In the past I have used several different structures for retrieval practice. I previously designed online quizzes using software such as Socrative, recall quizzes where questions were projected onto the board using PowerPoint, and teacher paced questions read aloud. Online quizzes have worked well for me in the past, however I decided to move away from online testing due to time constraints. The process of logging students on to laptops or iPads to complete the tests took up too much valuable curriculum time. I now use printed recall quizzes, this is for several reasons. Firstly, it ensures that the completion of the quizzes is student-paced, and there is no decreased engagement from students having to wait for others to finish before they can move onto the next question. Secondly, it allows me to ask a wider variety of questions as there are no restrictions on the type of question that can be included. Finally, each question is clearly visible to each student. This was not always the case when questions were projected onto the board. Each printed test is one A4 double-sided sheet consisting (normally) of a maximum of 16 questions. An example of one of the printed recall tests is shown below.

I make one quiz each week for each of my year 10 and 11 classes. Thanks, as always to Mr Corbett @Corbettmaths. I am continually snipping questions and diagrams from his website which saves me valuable time. I also often snip directly from exam papers or Edexcel Exam Wizard if I’m looking for a specific style of question. This used to take a lot of time but after 49 weeks I am getting much quicker! Plus you tend to remember where particular questions are situated on exam papers (yes I know that sounds sad!) Again I will mention the importance of being specific on the topic list, this ensures I include a variety of different questions and topics can be presented to students in a variety of ways.

Completion of the quizzes and importantly feedback of answers to students can take up to a maximum of one full lesson each week. This is a lot of curriculum time, but it is time well spent in my opinion. After all, what is the point in continuously presenting new material to students if they are never going to remember it.