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What the evidence says about retrieval practice and the Do Now

Asking students to recall earlier work, a little and often, has strong support from memory research and a thinner record in real classrooms. This page sets the laboratory findings beside the classroom evidence, and shows how the five-question Do Now in our schemes uses both.

Long read · 9 minute read

The first eight minutes of a lesson in our schemes nearly always go the same way. Students answer five questions from memory, some on the last lesson and some on lessons from weeks before, then mark their own answers from the slide. It can look like a settling activity. Its job is practice at remembering, and the research behind that is strong in some places and narrow in others.

What retrieval practice is

The Education Endowment Foundation’s 2021 review of cognitive science in the classroom gives a plain definition: “Retrieval practice describes the process of recalling information from memory with little or minimal prompting.” It sets this against recapping, “where the teacher reminds pupils of previous learning rather than asking learners to recall it themselves”.

In an English lesson the difference is easy to hear. A teacher who reminds the class that Dickens calls Scrooge “solitary as an oyster” is recapping, and the teacher is the one doing the remembering. The Do Now for Lesson 7 of our A Christmas Carol scheme prints the simile with its first word missing, so every student has to find it.

What happens a week later

One experiment shows the effect clearly. In a 2006 paper in Psychological Science, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke describe how 180 undergraduates at Washington University learned a short prose passage. One group read it in four five-minute study periods. Another read it once, then spent three ten-minute periods writing down as much of it as they could recall, with no feedback on what they had missed. A third group read it three times and recalled it once.

Five minutes after the last session the readers did best: they recalled 83% of the passage, against 71% for the group that had practised recalling. A week later the order had reversed. The readers recalled 40% and the recallers 61%, with the third group in between both times. The readers had also been more confident than either of the other groups that they would remember the passage a week later.

That confidence explains a lot about revision. Re-reading feels like learning because the page grows familiar. Writing in American Educator in 2013, John Dunlosky reported that he and four colleagues had reviewed ten study strategies and rated practice testing and distributed practice the most effective of them. On re-reading he was blunt: “Despite its popularity, rereading has inconsistent effects on student learning”.

The 2006 study was a laboratory experiment with university students, one passage and a wait of one week. A GCSE course lasts two years and ends in closed-book exams. Whether the finding holds in a Year 10 classroom is a separate question, and it is the one the EEF set out to answer.

What the EEF found in classrooms

The EEF’s review, by Thomas Perry and colleagues, counted only retrieval studies done in schools. Its summary for teachers is cautious. “When compared to no recap activity at all, the evidence for using quizzes is moderate and generally positive.” Against re-reading and recapping, “Most studies that compare quizzing to forms of re-study or recap have a positive impact”, though “there are high levels of variation in the evidence and some negative results”. It also raises a doubt that it comes back to later in the same section: “There are also questions about whether retrieval practice is as effective for more complex or subtle learning beyond rote factual recall.”

Its verdict is that low cost, sound theory and mostly positive results make retrieval practice “a promising approach that teachers should consider”. On cognitive science in schools as a whole the authors are blunter. The summary warns that “Findings from the lab do not always translate into effective teaching and learning in the classroom”, and the full report says that without classroom evidence, practice “can only be said to be evidence-informed in a weak sense”.

The doubt about complex learning matters most to English teachers. Retrieval practice keeps knowledge within reach: the plot, who says what, quotations, terms, a few facts about 1843. The marks in a Literature essay come from what students do with that knowledge. A Do Now can make sure “solitary as an oyster” is there when the essay needs it. It cannot write the paragraph.

Spacing: why the questions reach back

The same review looked at spacing, which means returning to material over days and weeks instead of covering it in one block. It found 18 studies of spacing across days and lessons and concluded that “the evidence suggests a small positive impact across pupil ages and subject areas”, with a warning: “Substantial variation is found between study results with a significant number showing either no impact or a negative effect.” In only six of those studies were students taught by teachers.

Spacing and retrieval pull against each other a little. The review notes that “Spacing lessons might make pupils less able to retrieve information”, and it asks for difficulty to be planned so that “pupils should be able to retrieve at least some of the content they are tested on”. A question nobody can answer gives nobody any practice.

Dunlosky explains why spaced study feels worse at the time. Students “become familiar and facile with the target material quickly during a massed practice session, but learning appears to proceed more slowly with distributed practice.” Students judge their learning by how the session felt, and spacing makes the session feel harder.

Rosenshine’s daily review

Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, published in American Educator in spring 2012, opens its list with “Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.” He reports that “The most effective teachers in the studies of classroom instruction understood the importance of practice, and they began their lessons with a five- to eight-minute review of previously covered material.” His tenth principle is “Engage students in weekly and monthly review.”

Two cautions apply to this evidence. Part of it comes from studies of the teachers “whose classrooms made the highest gains on achievement tests”. Studies like these describe what those teachers did; on their own they cannot show that the review caused the gains. The experiment he describes, in which teachers were trained to spend eight minutes a day on review, was in elementary school mathematics, and the review included checking homework and practising skills until they were automatic. His daily review is wider than a quiz.

Keeping the stakes low

The EEF summary describes short, low-stakes quizzes as “a cheap, easy-to-implement way of recapping material”. Its list of formats includes “recitation of quotes or definitions”, which is much of what an English Do Now asks, and it adds that “Quizzing or low-stakes testing may also reveal misconceptions.”

That is the case for marking at once, in the room. A wrong answer put right two minutes later has told the student and the teacher something useful. We would not record the scores.

How our Do Now runs

Every lesson in our schemes starts with a Do Now, apart from the end-of-unit assessment and the feedback lesson after it:

  • five questions, each answerable in under a minute, with the answers in the teacher notes and on the slides;
  • eight minutes in the lesson timings for most lessons, which leaves time to mark as well as answer;
  • students mark their own work from the answer slide, which shows one answer at a time, on your click;
  • questions on the last lesson and on earlier ones, and in the first lesson of a unit, on what students know from Key Stage 3.

The questions reach further back as a unit goes on. In A Christmas Carol, the Do Now for Lesson 3 covers Lessons 1 and 2. By Lesson 10, on the Ghost of Christmas Present, it goes back to Lessons 2, 4, 6 and 9:

  • Belle’s missing word in “Another idol has … me” (Lesson 9: displaced)
  • what Belle says the new idol is, and what she means (Lesson 9: “A golden one”, money)
  • what the Ghost of Christmas Past carries under its arm (Lesson 6: a great extinguisher)
  • which thinker argued that population grows faster than the food supply (Lesson 2: Thomas Malthus)
  • what Bob Cratchit tries to warm himself at in Stave 1 (Lesson 4: the candle)

The Malthus question earns its place. The model paragraph at the end of Lesson 10 needs that fact in its Why, where Scrooge’s talk of the “surplus population” meets the spirit’s overflowing feast, and the Do Now puts it back in students’ heads about half an hour before they need it. The questions come in a few kinds: a quotation to complete, a moment to place, a word to define, now and then a fact about the writer’s world.

The Do Now feeds the rest of the lesson. The notes for Lesson 3 of A Christmas Carol start students on Securing if they chose the literal reading in the hinge question or struggled with the Do Now, which is one way the three levels of support are assigned on the day. For the three set texts, each week of the deliberate practice booklets also opens with five check questions on that week’s reading, answered from memory, which you can use as the Do Now.

For writing your own questions, Writing a Do Now that does its job has the practical rules.

Where the evidence runs out

  • The evidence is about remembering. The EEF could not say whether retrieval helps with “more complex or subtle learning”, which is where Literature marks are. We use the Do Now for what students must know and keep the interpretation for the paragraph.
  • Most classroom studies were run by researchers. Of the 21 studies in the EEF review that compared retrieval practice with restudy, one was delivered by ordinary class teachers.
  • It costs time. In our Macbeth scheme the Do Now has eight minutes in each of 22 lessons: 176 minutes, nearly three hours of a six-week unit. The EEF notes that revisiting earlier content “may also encroach on the time available to teach new material.” For closed-book exams we think the price is fair, and it is still a price.
  • Our own Do Now has not been tested in a trial. It is built on the principles above, and we claim no more for it than they support.

What we would do

Keep the Do Now short and the answers quick: five questions, about eight minutes, one answer revealed at a time so students mark as they go. Ask what today’s lesson will need, plus one or two things from weeks back that most of the class can still reach. Note the questions most students got wrong and ask them again a few lessons later. Leave the analysis to the What–How–Why paragraph at the end of the lesson, where it earns the marks.

Sources

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