Retrieval is the foremost foundational skill taking place in our classrooms. My favorite memory of the retrieval effect goes back to a waitressing job I held in grad school. In retrospect, I spent far more hours waitressing to pay for my M.Ed. than I did on the Boston College campus. To fund my education habit, I worked at a farm‐to‐table restaurant called Armsby Abbey in the 2010s. It was the height of a “slow food” boom, which refers to the made‐to‐order nature of a kitchen, but never the service. At Armsby Abbey, we were expected to memorize all of the farms and an exhaustive list of ingredients on an ever‐changing menu. Our customers always had a lot of questions.

“What animal did the Blue Ledge cheese come from?”

“Goat.”

“What was the apple‐fed cow's name?”

“George.”

“How fresh are the strawberries?”

“I picked them myself, this morning.”

A shift at Armsby Abbey might sound like an episode of “Portlandia,” but it was my reality for five years—and I loved it. My family rarely dined out at restaurants when I was growing up, with the exception of my birthday. At Armsby Abbey, my palate blossomed. I learned to love pastrami beef tongue, smoky blue cheese, gobs of bone marrow spread on toast, and pickled watermelon rinds. Every shift felt like my birthday, with new oddities to explore.

We were routinely tested by management on pickle lists, allergens, and farmers' names. Coming straight out of grad school, this level of study felt natural. The career servers teased me about my binder full of flashcards and T‐charts, but I knew what worked for me. A lot of them could memorize the list of 22 rotating draughts, the soup du jour, and the specials with just one glance. I, on the other hand, would ask my colleagues to quiz me in the back while we polished silverware and brewed coffee. The owners even went so far as to leave certain information off the menu to encourage guests to engage in conversations with us about the food. By the end of my tenure, I had a personal story for every farm—an asset that Google could never provide to my customers.

It made sense why the lifers had such powerful memories; practice really does make perfect, or close to it. This learning phenomenon is called the retrieval effect. Put simply, if you hope to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you should practice retrieving knowledge from your memory. The more you practice, the more capable your memory becomes. Without the frequent assessments at Armsby Abbey, whether they came from guests or management, I would not have been forced to routinely draw the information from my memory. Had I simply read my responses to customer questions from a cheat sheet tucked into my notepad, I would have never had to activate my memory. This would be the student equivalent of studying by reading the textbook over and over again—a practice that cognitive psychologists deem one of the least effective modes of retaining information.

At the restaurant, even when I forgot the beekeeper's town of origin, or heaven forbid, the flavor profile of a foraged elderberry, I was forced to practice drawing the information from my memory by finding the answer to guests' questions. The same principle follows suit for K–8 students in the classroom. The more they practice remembering something, the more firmly that content becomes lodged in their brains for the long term.

Contrary to popular thought, the brain is not a muscle, but our long‐term memories can be trained like a muscle with frequent and deliberate practice. Our long‐term memories are capable of building stamina in the same way a marathoner gains endurance as she delves further and further into her training. Her very first 10‐mile training run might feel brutal, but come race day, mile 10 will have her feeling light on her feet. Alternately, our working memories are limited. An adult's working memory generally hits capacity at four new pieces of information. The best teachers are able to help students move as much information as possible from their working memories to their long‐term memories.

Another name for the retrieval effect is the testing effect. We normally think about testing as measuring student learning, but what we learn from the literature on retrieval practice is that it can actually be a potent tool to promote student learning. This is because tests force students to engage in memory practice. Rather than just viewing tests (and quizzes) as learning measurement exercises, researchers have pointed to them as highly effective learning tools. Frequent assessment breaks allow students an opportunity to transfer information from their working memories to their long‐term memories.

I'll be honest, when I hear “the testing effect,” it evokes a wave of foot‐tapping anxiety from deep within me. (Quick, somebody hand me a paper bag to breathe into.) It makes me think of standardized tests I have taken, and the standardized tests my students have to take. But the testing effect doesn't really refer to these kinds of high‐stakes, one‐off exams; it refers instead to the practice of “testing” student memories in frequent, low‐stakes ways throughout the school year. We can get the testing effect in everything from daily reading quizzes to oral exams, to gamified online assessments.

These kinds of low‐stakes memory practice exercises, or retrieval practice exercises, can solidify the knowledge base around which students begin to build complex networks of information in their long‐term memories. The research about testing that we will consider in the following section refers to learners who are recalling information, concepts, or skills from memory in regular, short bursts. Later, when I talk about testing, I won't be referring to high‐stakes final exams or standardized state benchmarks—I'll be talking about the kinds of quick activities that can take place in six minutes or less. These retrieval practices will refer to small teaching activities that can be implemented with minimal grading and little planning.

WHAT'S THE THEORY?

Recall the introduction to this part in which Bloom's Taxonomy is discussed. Retrieval practice supports the mastery of material at the base level of the Taxonomy, but that material is no less important than any other echelon of learning. Through retrieval, we solidify in our minds the facts, concepts, information, and basic skills that enable us to do our deeper thinking. Retrieval provides the foundation required for creative application and innovation.

The introduction of the Common Core Standards in 2010 did not just alter the content deemed most significant for American public‐school students. The Common Core Standards aimed for the application of content across disciplines through writing and speaking in order to show a deep understanding of the material. This shift fed a public misconception that we had done away with memorization in schools—the biggest scandal since teachers stopped teaching cursive. In reality, the memorization of foundational information became more important than ever before.

Shortly after the rollout of the Common Core Standards, Arizona State University Researchers Peter Rillero and Helen Padgett acknowledged that education was moving away from rote memorization in favor of deep conceptual learning (2012). Still, Rillero and Padgett championed a key finding: “The role of prior knowledge is important to deep conceptual learning, as it may support or hinder learning new material” (2012). The prior knowledge they refer to here is what we can support through retrieval practice. When students are encountering new ideas, or facing new challenges in their learning, they will be best equipped to meet those challenges when they have a solid foundation of facts, information, and basic skills in their brains—and not just in their Google search histories. The stronger their long‐term memories become, the more capable their working memories are of processing and holding new information.

The Memory Lab of Henry L. Roediger at Washington University in St. Louis has dedicated its work to test‐enhanced learning and the belief that retrieval practice enhances long‐term retention. But once again remember here that “test‐enhanced” learning does not necessarily refer to those fingernail‐gnawing experiences that we might associate with the word testing. In fact, the findings of the Memory Lab have been used by many teachers to identify small ways in which they can incorporate retrieval practice into their classrooms on an easy, everyday basis.

Three strategies that help students do this were discussed in a paper published by Roediger in 2018 in collaboration with Psychology Professor James S. McDonnell and Washington University doctoral student Oyku Uner. The first strategy, pausing to formulate a summary of a textbook chapter after reading, proved far more effective than merely rereading the chapter. But note that these summaries have to be conducted from memory, and not just from looking at the material again. Summaries like these are sometimes called brain dumps or free recall exercises; students read the text, close the book, and then write a short summary of what they remember. Simple, fast, easy—and effective.

Next, Roediger and his colleagues suggested spacing out retrieval practice. “The longer the spacing, the greater is learning for the long term” (Roediger et. al., 2018). In other words, it's much better to engage in retrieval in three six‐minute activities throughout the week than it is to engage in one 18‐minute session on Friday. The more we space out our retrieval practice into different sessions, with time elapsed between them, the more effective that retrieval practice will be. For example, you might ask your students to retrieve something a few times during the first week of exposure to help them transfer the information from their working memories to their long‐term memories. Then, you'll still want them to come back to the information a few additional times in the coming weeks and months to ensure it has been adequately lodged in the long‐term memory.

Finally, Roediger and his colleagues recommend interleaving or layering the study of related topics, rather than engaging in the massed repetition of a single topic (2018). As New Today contributor Mary Ellen Flannery puts it, “If you were coaching a new basketball team, would you ever have a single 45‐minute practice on a Monday and then expect your rookies to win a game the following Friday?” (2021). Of course not. Likewise, educators should not teach a new skill one week, then follow up with a test the following week and expect positive results. For example, if I were to teach my students the basic skill of writing a thesis statement, I might introduce the main strategies and have students practice retrieval through some low‐stakes quizzing. Good start. But over the course of the year, as I am introducing new writing strategies, I should continually return to the skill of composing a thesis, and each time I do, I would ask them to remember the basic skills they have learned. Returning to thesis‐writing time and time again in new contexts will be more effective than asking students to write seventeen thesis statements, one after the other, during the first month of the school year.

Another example of applying interleaving strategies was described by cognitive scientist Pooja Agarwal and Chicago middle‐school math teacher Anne Agostinelli. They analyzed interleaving in the mathematics classroom because they took issue with textbooks introducing large blocks of problem sets focused solely on new skills. In these cases, they witnessed students “plug and chug”—falling into repetitive and predictable routines that did not require deep processing (Agarwal and Agostinelli, 2020). With interleaving, students were asked to tackle a range of problems, leading to far greater long‐term retention of concepts.

Agostinelli grew especially fond of applying interleaving to her middle schoolers' homework assignments. Each week, she assigned five problems for homework, two of which referred directly to her current instruction and three that referred back to earlier content. Agostinelli praised the ease of interleaving, “It took remarkably little effort on my or their part,” she concluded. “By organizing information in more meaningful ways, and applying powerful tools that are supported by cognitive science research, we can lessen the pressure and strengthen the confidence, joy, and performance in our classrooms” (Agarwal and Agostinelli, 2020). Not only did interleaving improve retrieval, it made her curriculum planning and preparation more efficient.

The means by which new information is introduced can also impact retrieval. Daniel Schwartz, Catherine Chase, Marily Oppezzo, and Doris Chin of Stanford University examined a common instructional sequence in K–8 classrooms intended to help students retain new information (2011). They found most teachers begin new units of study by telling students about a principle or skill and then assigning a series of directly related questions or problems. Schwartz, Chase, Oppezzo, and Chin sought alternatives through an experience‐first approach. “The mechanics of these alternatives withhold didactic teaching at first,” they explained, “lest it undermine the processes of discovery” (2011). While initial test performance was the same for eighth‐grade students regardless of telling‐first or experience‐first approaches, long‐term transfer proved far more common among the experience‐first group. The researchers found that telling‐first caused students to zero in on one problem at a time, while experience‐first caused them to seek out similarities and make their own connections—a surefire path to long‐term memory (2011).

You might wonder whether all of these retrieval activities, even if they are very low‐stakes, would just make your students anxious all the time. You might therefore be as surprised as I was to learn that giving your students frequent opportunities to engage in retrieval can actually lower their anxiety about testing. Henry Roediger was part of the first team to examine the relationship between retrieval practice and classroom test anxiety. In a survey of 1,408 middle and high school students, the study found, “For classes in which retrieval practice occurred, 92% of students reported that retrieval practice helped them learn and 72% reported that retrieval practice made them less nervous for unit tests and exams” (Agarwal et al., 2014). Despite researchers' suspicions that students would prefer to limit the number of tests taken in schools, results showed that more regular retrieval practice actually decreased their testing anxiety.

Retrieval comes down to familiarity and consistent practice. Whether you are taking orders in a restaurant or studying for a final exam, retrieval practice will help the long‐term memories of your students to strengthen and improve over time, preventing the need to “cram” for exams. “When it comes to the trade‐off of time versus content,” say Agarwal and Roediger, “think about it this way: If students remember more, you save time by reteaching less” (2018). Your first and quickest entry point into the practice of small teaching, then, is to find as many ways as possible to inject into your classroom small opportunities for your students to stop, think, and draw from their memories whatever you want them to learn most deeply.

IN SHORT

• The levels of Bloom's Taxonomy are not a hierarchy; they are building blocks. Without achieving one level of thinking, it is nearly impossible to arrive at the next.
• The Common Core Standards are skills focused, but that does not mean content knowledge is irrelevant. The more prior knowledge of content a learner possesses, the easier it becomes to apply a new skill within that content area.
• Summarizing new information is a more powerful path to the long‐term memory than rereading the new information.
• Spacing out retrieval practice is more effective for moving new information to the long‐term memory than engaging in one long retrieval practice session before an exam.
• Refer back to information introduced earlier in the year on a regular basis. Do not compartmentalize units of study.
• Students who grapple with new information or a new skill prior to direct instruction will have an easier time transferring it to their long‐term memory than students who receive direct‐instruction first.
• Retrieval practice through frequent quizzing and testing actually makes students less anxious, rather than more so, for high‐stakes assessments.

MODELS

The biggest barrier standing in the way of retrieval is time. Let retrieval become a consistent part of your routine by devoting just six minutes per day. The following models allow you to incorporate retrieval in bite‐sized moments during both synchronous and asynchronous instruction.

PRINCIPLES

Building a base of foundational content material is pivotal for students in the earliest years of their education. Start by incorporating regular opportunities for retrieval with the simplest material on your syllabus. The following principles intend to guide you through the models of small teaching retrieval, but they can be easily tailored to your own grade level or discipline.

SMALL TEACHING QUICK TIPS: RETRIEVING

Memory retrieval exercises are brief. You can carve out a moment or two in every class period, but the most effective use of your time will likely come at the opening or closing of class. Regular quizzes or writing prompts are my preferred form of retrieval practice.

• Use bell‐ringers and do nows as an opportunity to ask students to recall information from the previous class session. Try the three‐two‐one approach. Ask them to recall three key details, two lingering questions, and one thing they want to know more about.
• Use exit tickets at the end of class to ask students to write down the most important takeaway of the day.
• Compile key questions throughout the school year for “Big Basket Quizzes.” Draw old questions from the basket at random throughout the year to supplement regular assessments.
• Use polling platforms to pose questions for the class in a low‐stakes environment. Continue adding questions after each unit until you have a rich database that is representative of your full course.

CONCLUSION

In my first year of teaching, I decided it was important to let my students take some ownership over the curriculum. Students would preview the following week's text every Friday and select three potential words for our weekly vocabulary list. They'd write their choices on a sticky note, sometimes campaigning with their seatmates to choose the same terms. When the bell rang, they'd smack their sticky notes onto our classroom door and head off for the weekend.

I still remember the delight of one struggling reader named Catherine who arrived at our classroom on Monday morning to find her word, loquacious, on the official vocabulary list. It became an inside joke between the two of us. She'd be chatting off‐topic during class months later and I'd give her my teacher‐stare.

“Sorry Miss,” she'd say, “I'm just feeling loquacious today.” I couldn't help smiling.

Last week, I ran into Catherine at a Red Sox game. She is 25 now, and a far cry from the pre‐teen who sat in my classroom so many years ago. Without skipping a beat, she walked over to me and said, “Miss, do you remember me? I'm your most loquacious student!” How could I forget?

I have met many teachers who take great pride in never “teaching to the test.” I made similar remarks at the start of my career. I wanted my students to get lost in the magic of literature and debate. Why taint their youthful curiosity with constant quizzing?

Flash forward to dozens upon dozens of class discussions with students who had not actually done the reading, but were very skilled at faking their way through, and then retained none of the salient information by the end of the school year. No matter how many cute projects or lively class periods resulted, I came to understand that if I had not contributed to the long‐term memories of my students, then I had failed them.

On days when I lose sight of the lasting impact educators can have, I like to return to the words of one of my mentors, Superintendent Erin Nosek:

I think working in education is the best job you can have, and I mean that sincerely. Every day, we get the opportunity—whether it's as a classroom teacher, a paraprofessional, a cafeteria worker, or a superintendent—to impact the lives of children. That is a very special calling and a unique opportunity. Our collective responsibility in education is to support the development of children so they can maximize their potential and pursue their dreams. We need students to have access to the content and resources that are important to them. We need students to build a foundation so that when they graduate, they are ready for whatever they choose to pursue. We also need our students to feel physically, socially, and emotionally safe, and to ensure that they have whatever support they may need. We are trying to educate the child from a very young age all the way up to high school with the goal of everyone graduating and receiving all that they need in order to maximize their potential. I'd argue that it's the most important job you can have. It's really special.

I understand looming fears that you might be compromising your educational philosophy in some way by incorporating routine retrieval. The truth is, retrieval practice will help students master the foundational knowledge they require to revel in the wonders of your content area and engage in deep, intellectually charged discussions. It takes no more than six minutes a day. Your students will be grateful for the consistency and accountability. Be transparent. Tell them what you expect them to know. If our tests are based on the learning standards, there's certainly no shame in teaching “to” them.