Remembered More – personalised spaced retrieval

Planning is essential however plans are pretty useless.

Teaching Holes by Louis Sachar for the first time, the scheme of learning was written with plenty of wriggle room. However in the final two weeks of teaching barely resonabled the plan. The school’s Matilda production (which was so good) needed two extra sessions for rehearsals, in addition to the planned dress rehearsal, not accommodated in the scheme. Two evening performances meant the pupils were understandably a little jaded towards the end of an already busy term. We had Covid cases, absences and I had recruitment and interviewing duties the final two weeks – which meant we had to muster a sprint finish. Only for our last lesson of the week, of the term, Friday 2pm, so lose three boarders, preparing for an early collection. Nevertheless, we went ahead with our RememberMore Centurions “tough mudder.” and from a class of 16 we had 9 complete pupil profiles.

Centurions Tough mudder

Our end of term quiz leverages the benefits of “test expectancy.” That is, expectation of any kind of test, enhances the processing of studied material. It is an important motivator driving students to commit more effort to prepare for subsequent tests. And there is a slew of research on this. (Agarwal & Roediger, 2011; Szpunar, McDermott, & Roediger, 2007; Yang, Chew, Sun, & Shanks, 2019).

This is our second tough mudder and pupils now have the benefit of both foresight and experience. The pupils know to expect it and in my opinion worked harder and were more focused lesson-to-lesson, week-to-week. A little reminder about “tough mudder II” was all that was needed to refocus the classes’ attention, should we get too distracted in class.

10 x two minute rounds of 10 retrieval prompts from a set “deck”. Set, answered, marked in a lesson. This time around, a much bigger deck – 395 cards on Holes. In addition to daily mini classroom quizzing and weekly quizzing, personalised learning was set as a 20 minutes per week homework task (11 x 20 – 220 mins) using RememberMore. Minutes invested could be “rolled over.” Tracked every Thursday.

Results (Weekly investment and Mins vs Score)

Delivered on the last Friday of a busy term and tough final week for both the pupils. 13 weeks include the early release of the deck over Xmas and the week of half term. Remember minutes could be invested and accumulated, and many pupils did just that. It meant that we hit the ground running at the start of term.

I will let you draw your own conclusions from the data. One student was certainly motivated by his disappointing half term mini assessment score! He also happened to be a leading role in the production.

Here are mine:

• 6 of the nine pupils invested more time than was asked of them.
• Student performance was breath-taking, 90% of approaching 400 cards. (I am genuinely, professionally curious how this accessible knowledge, will be applied in the written task.)
• Investing in personalised spaced retrieval practice pays dividends.
• You need to have reviewed the cards to have learnt the cards.
• Time investment correlated more highly with performance than prior knowledge / standardised score.
• RememberMore’s predictive power was strong – also given that the last few weeks use of RememberMore was severely depleted given commitment to the production.

Veni, vidi, vici. – “I came; I saw; I conquered”