Poor Rates of Retention and Transfer
Steel Wagstaff
Want some depressing news? What do students remember from a course a few months after they’ve completed it? The research shows that in most cases the answer is “almost nothing.” While it’s unrealistic to expect all of our students to remember all (or even) most of our lecture content, most of us want to believe that our teaching does make a substantial difference in our students’ development, that what we do and say can positively impact their long-term memory and that what they learn in our context- and discipline-specfic class will be useful to them in other parts of their lives (what educators and psychologists call positive transfer). The researchers who have studied the difficult problems of content-knowledge recall and skill transfer have found that there are things that you can do, even in large lecture classes to positively impact what students learn (and retain) even after they’ve taken your final and destroyed thousands of brain cells over their winter or summer break.
Solutions:
One surprising research finding from the past few decades has been that testing seems to have an almost magical ability to improve student learning. Researchers don’t understand exactly why they work in this way, but in several studies, students who are asked to take a quiz or test immediately after a lecture were found to have much higher rates of long-term retention, for both factual and conceptual knowledge.Students do experience considerable anxiety about tests and quizzes, some of which is probably productive, and some of which probably isn’t, but here’s the remarkable thing: testing seems to have the same positive impact on learning even when their results aren’t heavily weighted as part of their final grade. Cognitive psychologists have come to describe the effect as “the testing effect” of “testing-enhanced learning.” David Myers describes some of the basic principles behind the testing evidence in this engaging 5 minute film:
UW-Madison psychology professor Brad Postle recently received a DoIT Engage award to implement a testing-enhanced learning plan in a large undergraduate lecture course he teaches and found that it had a dramatic effect on student performance, doubling the number of ‘A’ grades earned in his course compared to prior semesters, drastically reducing the number of students who failed the course, and improving overall performance. You can watch a brief video in which Dr. Postle describes the project’s impact on student learning at the DoIT engage site.
When it comes to applying the evidence for testing-enhanced learning in your large lecture courses, here’s our advice: use quizzes, exams, and tests as regular parts of your lecture plan, including for non-evaluative purposes. Many instructors on the UW campus and elsewhere, particularly in STEM courses, have begun integrating student response systems (a fancy name for clickers and clicker software) into their lecture plans, with positive initial results. Regular low-stakes tests and quizzes provide crucial self-assessment and evaluation opportunities and allow students to practice/demonstrate content mastery. Composing these exams can even be a collaborative assignment for students. Ask students to make up a test or suggest test questions that require higher-level thought about concepts contained in their reading assignments. Put learners in groups and ask them to take each others’ tests. Students can then discuss their exams tests with partners, verify answers, question wording, see if tests relate well to the reading assignment, and share particularly good (or difficult) questions with the whole lecture session.
