Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

One of our first and most important tasks as teachers is to help students develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas—without doing so, we handicap considerably their ability to engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating and creating.

As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham argued, you can't think creatively about information unless you have information in your head to think about.

Students who don't bother to memorize anything will never get much beyond skating over the surface of a topic.

the retrieval effect means that if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory.

the students who performed the best were the ones who had to put the most active thought into their answers through short-answer questions.

the students who had the opportunity to engage in what the authors call “focused restudy” did perform better than the students who had no activity at all.

the students who scored the highest on the last short-answer test were the students who had taken previous short-answer tests. This could mean that the similarity in format between the two types of questions produced the better learning results.

The quickest method for cultivating retrieval practice in class takes the form of asking questions, either orally or in writing, about material that either you or the students have covered already.

follow the lead of Annie Blazer: she begins each class with a single student providing a 3–5-minute summary of the previous class, and each student does this at least once per semester

prior to launching a lecture or course activity for the day, ask students to provide you with the highlights of the reading or work they have completed the night before. Students in my classes engage in brief writing exercises along these lines at the start of almost every class.

one of the benefits of asking students to complete questions in writing, as opposed to just orally, is that it demands participation from all students.

focus on the key concepts that you want students to take away from the class session, and favor writing over oral

questions whenever feasible.

you might consider asking the same question at the beginning and end of the class.

you ask students to make a prediction about course material you are about to present (an activity we will consider in the next chapter), you could conclude the class by asking them to revisit their prediction from the beginning of class,

You are helping them remember information, and this will benefit them only if they take the time to draw the information from their brains and not their notebooks.

advocate filling out the course schedule section of your syllabus with as much detail as possible. Include phrases or even sentences that describe what will happen in the different units of the course so that students can keep the syllabus as a living document that guides them throughout the semester.

Have your students pull out their syllabus, and then point them to a previous day's content and ask them to spend a few minutes writing down what they remember about it.

Hence when you are considering how to incorporate retrieval into your teaching repertoire, look first to the lower-level classes you are teaching.

Frequency matters. The easiest way to implement frequent practice is through regular quizzing.

Align Practice and Assessments

Give frequent, low-stakes quizzes (at least weekly) to help your students

favor short answers or problem solving whenever possible so that students must process or use what they are retrieving.

Open class periods or online sessions by asking students to remind you of content covered ...

Close class by asking students to write down the most important concept from that day and one question or confusion that still remains in their minds (i.e., the minute paper).

Close class by having students take a short quiz or answer written questions about the day's material or solve a problem connected to the day's material.

Use your syllabus to redirect students to previou...

you can help them recognize the value of those quizzes by teaching transparently. Tell them what the research says about the value of quizzing and retrieval practice and about your decision to use it.

making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.

The researchers gave students in Bjork's introductory psychology class short multiple-choice pretests before some of the lectures in her course.

students performed around 10% better on questions from the subject areas in which they had been pretested than on those on which they had not. Bjork

the authors described their three-part sequence with the catchy phrase pause–predict–ponder.

prediction, like many of the active learning interventions in this book, especially helps new learners.

And that, according to one basic understanding of human knowing, is what constitutes knowledge: the web of connections we have between the things we know.

Experts have dense weaves of connections between all of the facts and information they know, and novices have sparse and incomplete ones.

When new facts are woven into a dense network of connections, they are implanted there more firmly and are more likely to be activated in multiple contexts.

predictive activities prepare your mind for learning by driving you to seek connections that will help you make an accurate prediction.

I have seen no specific formula for how immediately the feedback has to arrive. It seems likely that the sooner it arrives the better—if not in the same class session as the prediction activity, then at least by the next class period.

giving your students pretests on course material they are about to learn. You could do this in an endless variety of ways: a major pretest at the beginning of the semester, equivalent to the final exam; smaller pretests prior to each unit of the course; or even very brief pretests prior to that day's lecture class.

you want to help direct students toward the type of learning that will serve them well on the major assessments for the course, the same question format should be used for both pretests and full-length assessments.

ask essay questions, ask an essay question—but perhaps one that can be answered with a short response instead of a long essay. You don't have to grade the pretests individually, but you should give immediate feedback on them.

It should go without saying that pretests are not graded, but you could certainly collect them

You could even do the pretesting orally, in a discussion format, by throwing out the question and allowing 5 minutes for students to give responses.

Even without formal testing or the use of clickers, you can always ask students to make informal, in-class predictions about any course material to which they are about to be exposed.

Ideally, you will both ask for the prediction and give them the opportunity to explain why they made it; doing so will require them to examine their thinking and might help them recognize fluency illusions. Even more ideally, after you give them the answer you might ask them to explain why their predictions did or did not hold true.

Even disciplines that are not explicitly driven by narrative likely have narrative moments, in the form of key historical developments in the discipline or famous experiments, all of which would lend themselves to prediction and subsequent content exposure.

Predictions can close a class as easily as they can open them, but in the case of closing predictions you are pointing students toward the material that they will be reading or studying for homework.

You might spend 5 minutes at the end of a class raising one of those questions and asking students to respond to it either orally or in writing.

The following principles can help guide the creation of prediction activities in your classroom.

Stay Conceptual Remember that part of the reason predictions work is that they require students to draw up whatever knowledge they might have that will assist them in making their prediction.