Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

by James M. Lang

With that prospect in mind, I dove into the literature of teaching and learning in higher education with new eyes, seeking small-ball recommendations that were both easy to implement and well supported by the research. Over the course of many months this search led me through the work of cognitive psychologists who study the mechanics of learning, to neuroscientists and biologists who helped me understand some basic aspects of brain science, and to research in learning-related fields such as emotions and motivation.

They stem from very basic principles of how human beings learn and hence cross both discipline and content type—whether you are teaching students to memorize facts or formulae, to develop their speaking skills, or to solve complex problems.

First, they had to have some foundation in the learning sciences.

Books like Daniel Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory; Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School; or Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel's Make It Stick present the results of research in neuroscience and cognitive theory in ways that spell out their implications clearly for teachers and learners.

Second, these learning principles had to have a positive impact in

real-world educational environments—higher education ...

Finally, I had to observe the principles directly myself somehow, either from my own experiences as a teacher or learner or from direct observation of other teaching and learning environments.

And as I will argue in the conclusion, search for ways to evaluate the effects of your small teaching changes, and determine whether they belong in your permanent teaching repertoire.

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.

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.

We need factual material in our memory for every cognitive skill we might want to teach our students.

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

But tests, thought about in the most general way possible, are actually memory exercises.

Testing here simply means forcing learners to recall learned information, concepts, or skills from their memory.

retrieval effect and retrieval practice

Memory Lab of Henry L.

Roediger at Washington University in St. Louis,

First and foremost, the authors explain, it demonstrated the potency of retrieval practice: “The kids scored a full grade

level higher on the material that had been quizzed than on the material that had not been quizzed” (Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel 2014, p. 35).

But I can't leave this paragraph without highlighting these results one last time: a brief (and ungraded) multiple-choice quiz at the beginning and end of class and one additional quiz before the exam raised the grades of the students by a full letter grade.

Daniel Willingham, “Memory is the residue of thought”

In the three semesters in which he did not conduct these end-of-class assessments (which he derived from Angelo and Cross's justly famous book Classroom Assessment Techniques) the rate of students who failed or withdrew from the course was 35%.

But even when students are frequently providing wrong answers, as they did for Rogerson and will do in your classes—and as long as you provide them feedback to help them correct their mistakes—the results of these experiments are hard to dismiss.

Long-term memory is rather like having a vast amount of closet space—it is easy to store many items, but it is difficult to retrieve the needed item in a timely fashion”

The more times we draw it from memory, the more deeply we carve out that pathway, and the more we make that piece of information or experience available to us in the future.

You can find a number of variations on closing questions for a class in Classroom Assessment Techniques (Angelo & Cross, 1993)

First, make sure that closing-question activities are processed in some way.

If neither of these options is available, make sure you address the question from the end of the previous class at the beginning of the next class.

The more frequently that your students have to check in and offer some demonstration of their learning, the more often you are giving them retrieval practice.

Retrieval practice will help your students retain foundational material, which they are most likely to encounter in introductory or entry-level courses in your field.

Frequency Matters The first and last implication of all of this research on retrieval practice is very straightforward: the more students

practice retrieval, the better they learn. Frequency matters.

As always, 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.

I was looking at the bowl matchups and trying to call to mind whatever I could remember about wins and losses throughout the season, I noticed something striking: the games and teams about which I had the strongest and clearest memories were the ones about which I had made predictions earlier in the season.

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

“Unsuccessful retrieval attempts,” wrote the authors (by which they mean incorrect predictions of the second half of the word pair), “were, remarkably, more effective than was spending the same time studying the answer to be recalled later” (p. 994).

In other words, taking a few seconds to predict the answer before learning it, even when the prediction is incorrect, seemed to increase subsequent retention of learned material.

Bjork concluded from this experiment that “giving students a pretest on topics to be covered in a lecture improves their ability to answer related questions about those topics on a later final exam” (Carey 2014b).

“The brain does not store facts, ideas, and experiences like a computer does, as a file that is clicked open, always displaying the identical image. It embeds them in networks of perceptions, facts, and thoughts” (Carey 2014a p. 20).

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.

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

[Predictive activities] reshape our mental networks by embedding unfamiliar concepts…into questions we at least partly comprehend…Even if the question is not entirely clear and its solution unknown, a guess will in itself begin to link the questions to possible answers. And those networks light up like Christmas lights when we hear the concepts again.

First, when students are asked to make predictions or given pretests on course material, in the ways that happened in Bjork's experiment, they have a clearer understanding of what their final assessment might look like—and that, in turn, might improve their subsequent study activities and preparation strategies.

Second, prediction activities might help us recognize more accurately the gaps in our knowledge.

The small teaching approach would seem to point toward the direction of those quick daily (or perhaps weekly) pretests as the least disruptive to a normal schedule and as the easiest to incorporate into a normal teaching routine.

If 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.

In all cases of pretesting, you should make absolutely clear to the students the purpose of what you are doing so that they don't feel as if you are unfairly asking them about material they haven't learned yet. Talk to them about the power of prediction and be transparent in your use of it, especially in activities that might look or feel like graded assessments.

Students cannot answer questions like this with simple plug-and-chug–type knowledge; they have to possess a conceptual understanding of the problem to make an accurate prediction. They have to reason with a formula rather than just repeat a formula.

Stay Conceptual