How Long and How Often to Review Material
CPD: The CRAFT of Assessment (by Michael Chiles), topic 2.2.1
Strategies for Generating Reflective Learners
There are no specific guidelines for when students should review information learnt. But according to research, the most beneficial time to recall information is at the point when we’re about to forget it.
Advice to give students
- An effective approach to advocate to our students is that doing short bursts of retrieval every day - in bursts of 30-60 minutes - will be more beneficial than one long seven-hour session.
- The following slides will contain two strategies for producing reflective learners from Barak Rosenshine's ‘Principles of Instruction’ paper.
Strategy 1 - begin by reviewing
- Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning. Daily review can strengthen previous learning and can lead to fluent recall.
- Rosenshine highlights from the research that the most effective teachers began their lesson with a five to eight-minute review of previously covered material.
- Teachers use this review time to reflect on vocabulary, formulae, events or previously learnt concepts.
Strategy 2 - extensive practice
- Engage students in weekly and monthly review. Students need to be involved in extensive practice in order to develop well-connected and automatic knowledge.
- In his paper, Rosenshine indicates that expert teachers create regular opportunities for pupils to rehearse and review information and, in time, improve learning by recalling information with increased automaticity.
The problem with NOT reviewing
- If pupils must work hard to recall previously learnt material whilst learning new material, this can make it difficult for the new material to be received and encoded correctly.
Test yourself on How Long and How Often to Review Material
What sort of retrieval sessions should students be aiming for?
How long did the most effective teachers in Rosenshine's research spend reviewing previously covered material at the start of a lesson?