Retrieval practice is not the "glorified path to rote learning."

It's the key to thinking. Get retrieval practice right, at home and at school.

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Today’s letter is going back to the bedrock of the science of learning with educator Patrice Bain, author of books like Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning and Powerful Classrooms. A decade ago, Bain’s Illinois 6th grade world history classroom was among the first to test how retrieval practice—repeatedly pulling information from memory to ‘make it stick’—worked outside of a lab. Read on for how the results of that study have shaped Bain’s message to teachers and parents about how children learn.

It’s not only the new October chill in the air I’m feeling this week—there’s a vibe-shift happening as well. Edutopia’s new video on making retrieval practice a daily routine tipped me off to a change in the force. What is that I’m feeling? If the PBL-heads at Edutopia are paying attention to the science of learning, is something bigger shifting?

I think it is. I’ve got some news stories coming up, backing up my spidey-sense that more people are paying attention to this growing body of evidence. My theory: districts, teachers and schools might be expanding beyond the science of reading, and the science of learning may well be spreading.

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Getting retrieval practice right, at home and at school

A little more than a decade ago, cognitive scientists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel wrote in their seminal learning guide and international bestseller Make it Stick that “learning is a three-step process.”

When students learn successfully, they first encode information in short-term memory, consolidate it through memory traces into long-term memory, and then retrieve that information from long-term memory to update that learning and apply it when they need it.

Every time students are asked to recall a fact, plug in a formula to a math problem, or provide a detailed explanation for something like the main causes of World War II, their research showed, those pieces of learning become easier to remember and more durable over time, as well as more likely to be successfully applied in solving new problems. Recalling information from memory strengthened retention.

Patrice Bain was a sixth grade world history teacher in Columbia, Illinois, when Roediger and McDaniel approached her with a proposition. They wanted to test their retrieval practice theory, which had been successful in controlled lab experiments, in a real classroom. Bain’s teaching would remain exactly the same, but researchers wanted to see whether students who were asked to retrieve key facts and ideas from what they learned—through low-stakes, “no grade” quizzes spaced throughout a unit—performed better on that same material on the end-of-unit test.

Bain said yes to multiple semesters of daily quizzing, and was blown away by the results (so were Roediger and McDaniel). Students scored on average a full grade level higher on the material that had been quizzed in class compared to the material that hadn’t. “It took averages from C’s to A’s, simply by having some retrieval in there,” Bain told me in a recent interview.

Buoyed by all this success, Bain got curious: how much could students remember of the entire year’s history? Bain and research assistant Pooja Agarwal surprised students at the end of the year with an ungraded “pop final.”

“We found that if retrieval had been used through the course of study, [students] remembered 79% of what I had taught that year—without any prompts, without any studying,” Bain said.

Retrieval practice has since become one of the core tenets of the science of learning—it helps students manage cognitive load when learning something new, helps strengthen background knowledge, and has remained one of the most successful evidence-based techniques for studying.

Since that first experience in her social studies classroom, Bain has been on a crusade to get teachers, schools and even parents and families to understand the power of retrieval practice for learning. She has written several practical guides to using retrieval both in classrooms and at home, including Powerful Teaching, co-authored with Agarwal, and A Parent’s Guide to Powerful Classrooms.

Whether you’re a retrieval master or new to the concept, here are Patrice Bain’s 4 Big Ideas to successfully implement one of cognitive science’s most durable techniques for learning: