Paper: Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning

Paper: Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning

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6. The four ingredients of retrieval

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Introduction

  • 1. Introduction
  • My model of a Learning Episode
  • 2. The benefits of online courses
  • 3. Getting the most out of the course
  • 4. Where are you at?

How does memory work?

  • 1. The new theory of disuse
  • Podcast: Robert and Elizabeth Bjork - Memory, Forgetting, Testing, Desirable Difficulties
  • Paper: On the Symbiosis of Learning and Forgetting
  • 2. Retrieval and storage strength
  • 3. Learning versus performance
  • Paper: Learning versus performance
  • 4. Desirable difficulties

Desirable difficulties

  • 1. The Testing Effect
  • The forgetting curve
  • Paper: Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning
  • Paper: Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping
  • 2. The effortful act of retrieval
  • 3. The Spacing Effect
  • Paper: Using Spacing to Enhance Diverse Forms of Learning
  • Paper: Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention
  • Blog: Optimal Time For Spacing Gaps
  • 4. The Interleaving Effect
  • Paper: Interleaving Helps Students Distinguish among Similar Concepts
  • 5. How not to tap into the benefits of desirable difficulties
  • 6. Making sure these difficulties are desirable

Four retrieval opportunities

  • 1. The Carpenter et al (2012) paper
  • Paper: Using Spacing to Enhance Diverse Forms of Learning
  • 2. Introducing my four ingredients of retrieval
  • 3. Where am I supposed to find the time?

Scheduling the content of retrieval opportunities

  • 1. A question...
  • 2. It won't be perfect
  • 3. Three factors to consider when scheduling in retrieval opportunities
  • 4. What do we want our students to remember?
  • 5. Creating a retrieval schedule
  • Blog: Retrieval Practice Update
  • Blog: Spacing Concepts, Facts and Skills
  • 6. Including flexibility

Deciding the difficulty of the content of retrieval opportunities

  • 1. A question...
  • 2. Ramping up the difficulty
  • Podcast: Naveen Rizvi – Part 1: Scripted lessons, examples and social media

The illusion of retrieval

  • The illusion of retrieval

Ingredient 1 - Starters

  • 1. The start of a lesson
  • 2. Do students take Starters seriously?
  • Podcast: Mark McCourt: Teaching for Mastery
  • 3. Are our Starters worth taking seriously?
  • 4. Helping students take the start of the lesson more seriously
  • Podcast: Julia Smith: Teaching GCSE resit and the 5Rs approach
  • 5. Where do you get your Starter questions from?
  • 6. My favourite sources of Starter questions
  • Link: Corbett Maths
  • Link: Maths Box
  • Link: Maths teacher hub
  • Link: SSDD Problems
  • Link: Mr Chadburn
  • Link: Diagnostic Questions
  • Link: Maths Bot
  • Link: Maths4Everyone
  • Link: Maths made easy
  • 7. Starter structures
  • Link: R-infinity starters
  • Link: MathsBot retrieval starter
  • Link: Mini White Board
  • Resource: Do now (blank) by Nathan Day
  • Resource: Do now (example) by Nathan Day
  • 8. Starters and Atomisation
  • 9. How long should my Starter last?

Ingredient 2 - Homework

  • 1. Three questions...
  • 2. What we used to do with homeworks
  • 3. What our homeworks look like now
  • 4. An interesting homework resource
  • Link: Interleaving & spacing the GCSE Mathematics curriculum

Ingredient 3 - Low-Stakes Quizzes

  • 1. Two questions...
  • 2. What I used to think
  • 3. The benefits of testing
  • Paper: Ten Benefits of Testing and their Application to Educational Practice
  • Link: The testing section of my research collection
  • 4. Topic-specific versus cumulative
  • 5. What our Low-Stakes Quizzes look like
  • 6. We call them quizzes not tests
  • 7. We tell students why we are introducing Low-Stakes Quizzes
  • The forgetting curve.png
  • 8. Where possible we print the quizzes out
  • 9. Students do the quizzes initially in silence and on their own
  • Paper: The Testing Effect in a Social Setting: Does Retrieval Practice Benefit a Listener?
  • 10. The quizzes are not open-book
  • Paper: Strengthening the Student Toolbox
  • 11. There is a time limit
  • 12. If students finish the quiz early
  • Resource: Prompts of students finish early
  • 13. Research into confidence
  • Resource: Confidence versus accuracy
  • Resource: Girls versus boys
  • Resource: Confidence at different ages
  • 14. Two benefits of assigning confidence scores
  • 15. What confidence scores look like in low stakes quizzes
  • 16. Confidence - what other schools do
  • Resource: Low Stakes Quiz (blank) by Nathan Day
  • Resource: Low Stakes Quiz (example) by Nathan Day
  • 17. Confidence - what other schools do - Extra!
  • 18. Going through the answers
  • 19. Who marks the quiz?
  • Book: What does this look like in the classroom?
  • 20. Start with your highest confidence errors
  • 21. Two issues with corrections
  • 22. Review cards
  • Thread: Review cards
  • Podcast: Oliver Lovell: Planning, running a maths department and Cognitive Load Theory
  • 23. Review cards - what other schools do
  • 24. Paired discussion
  • Resource: Paired discussion prompts
  • 25. AfL check
  • 26. What to do with the marks?
  • 27. Content - same or different?
  • 28. Content - how difficult?
  • 29. Sources of questions for Low-Stakes Quizzes
  • Twitter: Using Dr Frost for Low-Stakes Quizzes
  • Link: Corbett Maths
  • Link: Brockington College Homework booklets
  • Link: Miss B's resources
  • Link: Maths Box
  • Link: Diagnostic Questions
  • Link: Maths4Everyone
  • Link: CIMT MEP materials
  • 30. Who writes the quizzes?
  • 31. Messaging to students
  • 32. What do students say?
  • 33. LSQ-DQ Combo
  • 34. Quiz-Homework-Quiz combo
  • 35. Making Low-Stakes Quizzes work

Ingredient 4 - Future Learning Episodes

  • 1. A question...
  • 2. What is interleaving really about?
  • Blog post: Authentic Interleaving In Mathematics Lessons
  • Link: Interweaving by Will Emeny
  • 3. High-value topics
  • 4. Interweaving during Atomisation
  • Resource: Midpoint of two numbers
  • 5. Interweaving during Fluency Practice
  • Link: Increasingly difficult questions
  • Resource: Brackets questions
  • Resource: Sequences questions
  • Resource: Graphs and geometry
  • Twitter: Miss Konstantine
  • 6. Interweaving during Intelligent Practice
  • Resource: Positive integer powers
  • 7. Interweaving during Method Selection
  • Resource: Percentage operations
  • Resource: Factorising quadratics
  • 8. Interweaving during SSDD Problems
  • Resource: SSDD Problem with two points
  • 9. Interweaving during Goal-Free Problems
  • 10. Interweaving using UKMT questions
  • Link: UKMT questions on Diagnostic Questions
  • 11. Golden Interleaving Rules

Other things to include in retrieval opportunities

  • Other things to include in retrieval opportunities?

Software to improve retrieval

  • Software to aid retrieval
  • Podcast: Daisy Christodoulou - Teachers versus Tech
  • Podcast: Ollie Lovell interview
  • Link: Anki
  • Link: Guide to Anki
  • Link: Anki essentials
  • Link: Quizlet
  • Link: Tips for using Quizlet
  • Link: Dendro
  • Link: Ollie Lovell blog post on Dendro

Useful links - from others

  • researchEDHome 2020 Daisy Christodoulou: How to remember anything, forever
  • Damian Benney: Using Desirable Difficulties to make learning easier (rEDLoom)
  • 10 Techniques for Retrieval Practice by Tom Sherrington
  • Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab - videos and research summaries
  • How to not screw up retrieval practice by Adam Boxer
  • Why do we forget stuff? Familiarity vs recall by David Didau
  • Memories are made of this by Dylan Wiliam
  • Interleaving: are we getting it all wrong? by Mark Enser

Conclusion

  • 1. Where to next?
  • 2. Wrap-up
  • Course feedback
  • Course certificate
  • My online courses

Useful links - from me

  • My research paper collection
  • Book: How I wish I'd taught maths
  • Book: Reflect, Expect, Check, Explain
  • Mr Barton Maths website
  • Mr Barton Maths Podcast
  • Diagnostic Questions
  • Variation Theory
  • SSDD Problems
  • Maths Venns