Retrieval practice, the next educational fad?
Having spent 5 years teaching internationally, predominantly the English exam board courses, what shows that the student has learned is based primarily on his or her success in the end-of-year external examinations. The focus is on getting information into students’ heads (and then have them recall it during the exam). Now having also seen how students often revise, there is a prevalence of re-reading their notes, getting the highlighter out, and feverishly highlighting passages. These are all designed in some way to get the information to stick. Now as I keep telling the students, these techniques, generally do not work. In fact, the opposite is true : when information comes to mind easily when reading a textbook and feels like yeah I am learning something, that information is easy to forget. All too often my students revise topics they already know well! In other words, just because a student is learning something quickly and easily does not guarantee they’ll remember it. In