Incorporating retrieval practice into daily note-taking

How one high school Spanish teacher helped students remember more

Taking notes gets an upgrade to improve students’ memory of what they learned

The problem:

Last year Andrew Shimrock, a sophomore Spanish teacher at The Episcopal Academy in Newtown, Pennsylvania, noticed that his students weren’t able to easily recall Spanish vocabulary and verb conjugations. Students spent most of their time in his class taking notes—but the teaching and activities he’d designed weren’t doing as much as he wanted to help students get more Spanish into their long-term memories.

“I was pretty frustrated over the last two or three years with students’ memory,” Shimrock told me in a recent interview. “In learning Spanish, memory is incredibly important. It's hard to be able to converse and actually communicate your ideas if you can't remember some of the words, verbs, high frequency words—and even the way you conjugate a verb.”

“I tell students all the time,” he continued, “if you want to be a convincing language speaker—if you want to travel, if you want to be able to actually say you can speak Spanish—you're going to have to be able to remember in the moment, without looking at a dictionary or your phone.”