As a Science department we are always looking to find ways to improve outcomes for pupils. The GCSE results over the past few years have been steady and stable but as is the nature of the dedicated team of teachers in the department we are always looking to improve. How can we convert D’s into C’s or as is coming up secure grade 5’s as a minimum for pupils and then high grades for the most able.
To help the department I decided to look at what other schools and teachers were doing and what research might work in our school.
It had to start with me developing my understanding of how pupils learn and how teachers can create the perfect condition for this to happen in the classroom. As I have no background in psychology I was a real beginner.
Dylan Wiliam said “Cognitive Load Theory is the single most important thing that teachers should know about.” I started to look into it.
Professor John Sweller is responsible for the development of Cognitive Load Theory and this link shows the man himself explaining it better than I ever could.
It seems that pupils will remember more things if there working memory is not overloaded and one of the ways of doing this is by storing more information in their long term memory. This is a very simplistic statement and to get a brilliant explanation of how this works I read Daniel Willingham’s superb book; “Why Don’t Students Like School?”
I turned my attention to finding out effective ways of storing more information in to the long term memory of pupils.
Our first attempt at this as a department has been to develop knowledge organisers for the topics that we teach. Knowledge organisers have been around for a long time but I didn’t know that they could be used as a technique to build up amount of information in the long term memory. I feared that they were a piece of paper with all the information that was necessary for the topic and were in essence a cheaper, less effective revision guide. We have done things differently. As a department, we spent one of our INSET days creating knowledge organisers for the GCSE topics. As this is our first attempt, we know that we will need to edit them as we go through but we wanted to get started.
Knowledge Organiser example from SMCA
Each pupil gets the relevant knowledge organiser. The teacher identifies a specific section of the organiser for the pupil to “self-quiz”* for home-learning. In the next lesson, the pupils will be given a low-stakes test** on the area that they have self-quizzed.
Peter C. Brown: Making it Stick
Will it build up long term memory and reduce cognitive load? We don’t know yet. Watch this space!
*Self-quizzing is a technique that I picked up on a visit to Michaela School. I highly recommend the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers” for more information on this.
**Low-stakes testing is a part of our trial since I have read so much about the benefits of retrieval practice as a way of learning this. I highly recommend this podcast from The Learning Scientists.
Author:
Miss C Hetherington
http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/2017/9/6/episode-2-retrieval-practice
Science T&L @ SMCA 