Retrieval Practice, Generative Learning & The New Spec Writing Paper

In Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies That Promote Understanding, the authors, Logan Fiorella and Richard E. Mayer, define generative learning as,

‘…helping learners to actively make sense of material so they can build meaningful learning outcomes that allow them to transfer what they have learned to solving new problems.’¹

One of the strategies described to foster this benefit of generative learning is self-testing. Testing as a means to learning is quite à la mode in the edublogosphere now, referred to also as retrieval practice. Retrieval Practice has its own website (http://www.retrievalpractice.org/) courtesy of @poojaagarwal and even a great guide to read over.

As regards to boundary conditions for self-testing, Fiorella and Mayer say,

‘In general, free-recall, cued-recall, or otherwise open-response practice tests appear to be more effective than practice recognition tests, such as a multiple-choice test.’²

According to the authors the reason for this could be because of a generation effect that occurs when a learner is forced to generate an answer being more powerful than the effect generated by the learner having to only recognise the correct answer from a choice.

I’ve started trialling setting output tasks where, after handing the books back, I give the students 10-15 minutes to do a free-recall test on the formation of a tense, for example, without looking back at any notes or text books.

Allowing for time for students to write all that they can about the present tense, for instance, and then taking the books in later to identify common misconceptions and to see how each student has interpreted the tense (I sometimes provide prompts like its formation, irregulars and meaning in English) has allowed me not only to use testing as a way of hopefully making the retrieval of everything to do with the tense more accessible in future but also to focus on seeing how well the students have made sense of the tense and developed a meaning of it in their own words.

It’s been a subtle shift from the traditional Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time which focuses on students correcting and redrafting work solely without much of a reference to using this time to promote generative learning outcomes through practice testing of concepts which were covered in previous lessons. The students have responded fantastically well to this and we have also adopted these free-recall tests as extension tasks in class; students going to a blank page and writing all that they can about a tense covered last week, term or year.

This is something that in terms of preparing students for the one-off writing exam I am considering using with more frequency next year. Not only these free-recall types of testing to do with previously taught grammar concepts but interleaving topics with free-recall tasks which focus on students writing under real-operating conditions-see Gianfranco Conti’s blog on 16 tips for effective grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom.³

The writing exam is the area that I have been looking at recently. The following below are a set of writing tasks which mirror the types set by AQA. I will write about some simple ways that I will be using these to promote retrieval practice and support the students ahead of this one-off exam in a future post. If anyone would like me to email them these practice tasks please let me know.
 

Notes

¹Logan Fiorella and Richard E. Mayer, (2015) Learning as a Generative Activity Eight Learning Strategies That Promote Understanding, New York, Cambridge University Press. p. vii.

²Logan Fiorella and Richard E. Mayer, (2015), p. 119.

³ https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/new-post-16-tips-for-effective-grammar-teaching-in-the-foreign-language-classroom/