By Alison Stone

Alison Stone teaches Human Anatomy and Physiology and AP Biology at Central Bucks High School – West in Doylestown, PA. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and the 2015 recipient of the Outstanding Educator Award from Stephenson University. Alison has a passion for using evidence-based practice to improve student outcomes in her classroom. She can be found on Twitter at @alisonstoneCBSD.

When my in-person classes suddenly ended on March 12th, like many teachers across the country, I felt adrift and without a clue as to how to proceed. After the initial shock, I remembered that I had a pair of extra paddles stashed in my boat that could direct my instruction: retrieval and spaced practice. While I am not an expert in best practices in distance/digital learning, I do know that these strategies have been tested in a variety of conditions. There is no reason why they would not work during distance learning in an emergency.

I became interested in the applications of cognitive science research in the classroom three years ago. After listening to the Learning Scientists Podcast, I began purposefully planning my instruction around evidence-based strategies that improve learning. At the beginning of each of my courses, I explicitly teach the six-strategies for successful learning with specific focus on spacing and retrieval. I spend one 90-minute block introducing the strategies. Throughout the semester I clearly identify the strategies as we use them in class, purposefully using vocabulary such as spacing, retrieval, dual coding, and metacognition.

Under normal circumstances I see my students daily for 90 minutes for one semester (AP Biology meets for 3 quarters). During distance learning I see my classes 2 times a week for 60-minutes of synchronous time and I set work for a 90-minute asynchronous session. Students have two classes a day Monday-Thursday; Fridays are reserved for catching up on work and social emotional learning.

Spacing and retrieval practice are two strategies that have the greatest support by cognitive science (1). Spacing (distributed practice) means spreading study sessions out over multiple days (rather than cramming). Spacing helps to defeat the forgetting curve that is a natural part of memory (2). Retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall information from long term memory. The “testing effect” supports the idea for retrieval for learning; during tests or quizzes, students are forced to retrieve memories from long term memory and as a result they learn from this activity (3).

As I would in my normal classroom, I start synchronous Microsoft Teams lessons with retrieval practice. Retrieval is the hard part of learning, so I assign prerecorded videos or reading during asynchronous time and use synchronous time for student practice and clarifying misconceptions. Distance learning has forced me to experiment with new digital resources to keep my daily routine fresh. Microsoft forms (or Google forms) are simple to create and easy to share. I like to post the link while I am waiting for my students to join our live Teams meeting. I frequently embed retrieval tasks and  survey questions to promote metacognition. Another tool that I use frequently is Kahoot. Kahoot is a quizzing/game platform. Kahoot is easy to use and the website is currently offering a free upgrade to teachers. It is easy to search and edit Kahoots other teachers have created. You can play Kahoot live or you can set quizzes for students to work on asynchronously. Polleverywhere is another excellent tool that is easy to use and to share with students. I like Polleverywhere because it can be anonymous, putting less pressure on students to give the right answer. I also like it because I can embed pictures where students can drop pins to identify something on the image – which is handy for anatomy and physiology. I do not use their word cloud feature as much, but I think it is another great way to visualize the knowledge of the whole class. Other interesting quizzing game software that I’ve occasionally utilized are Quizizz and Gimkit.  All these tools are great for “quizzing” retrieval.

Brain dumps for retrieval are another tool I use frequently in my classroom and wanted to experiment with ways to do them virtually. One way is to have students complete a brain dump and send a picture, this can be done pretty easily using Padlet. Padlet makes it easy to type comments, upload files, take pictures or videos, and record audio. Teachers can set a Padlet to only post publicly once approved. I may tell them all to respond but then only post one or two responses of the best responses per prompt, this helps to lower the stakes for students. Another tool for brain dumps that I have used with mixed success is Microsoft Whiteboard (Google’s equivalent is called Jamboard). I can share a whiteboard with my whole class, and we can all be writing on it at the same time. This tool is can be glitchy but has lots of potential. For example, I premade a whiteboard with several unlabeled heart diagrams, during my Teams call I had the first half of students in my class choose a heart and write their name next to it, then the second group of students wrote their name next to someone they wanted to work with. I gave them 1 minute to collaboratively label all the structures they could remember on their diagram. It was nice to create some collaboration in conjunction with retrieval practice.

I suspect that because of the emergency transition to distance learning and a lack of access to research on best practices for online learning, students may not be able to acquire much new learning. That is why I believe it is essential to focus a portion of each daily assignments on topics for review. During asynchronous time, I always assign some type of brief quiz. For these quizzes I use Canvas. Through Canvas I create question banks for each topic. This is helpful because I can ensure that each time they take the quiz they will see a mix of new and some old questions. Incorporating content from earlier in the year helps my students retain what I know they learned when we were still doing in person classes. Another activity I assign, a challenge grid, comes from Kate Jones (4). Again, this was something that I was doing prior to shut-down so students were comfortable with the task.

Students can ink right on the grid or just answer on a blank piece of paper, take a picture, and email it to me. In Outlook, I set up a rule so that as soon as their email comes into my inbox, Outlook auto responds with an email containing the answer key for immediate feedback.

Emergency distance learning has challenged me to the core and while I do not think it will ever replace learning in the classroom, there are still ways that we can “make learning stick” during virtual lessons. Distance learning lessons in the future will require a thoughtful approach focused around best practices for learning. We owe it to our students to take the time to explicitly teach cognitive strategies, paddles that will help them learn in any pond, river, lake or ocean and then practice what we preach whether it be in a brick and mortar classroom or in the virtual world.

References

(1)    Weinstein, Y., Sumeracki, M., & Caviglioli, O. (2019). Understanding how we learn: A visual guide. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

(2) Horvath, J. C. (2019). Stop talking, start influencing: 12 insights from brain science to make your message stick. Place of publication not identified: EXISLE PUB.

 (3) Duchastel, P. C. (1979). Retention of Prose Materials: The Effect of Testing. The Journal of Educational Research, 72(5), 299-300. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1979.10885176

(4) Jones, K. (2018, December 1). Retrieval practice challenge grids for the classroom [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://lovetoteach87.com/2018/01/12/retrieval-practice-challenge-grids-for-the-classroom/