Dylan Wiliam on Building Student Knowledge | Literacy and the Science of Learning

Our memories grow stronger when we work to retrieve them. That’s why flash cards and pop quizzes are effective: they prompt students to recall and access information from their memory bank. What other instructional tools and techniques help students remember what they’ve learned, and how can teachers put these to use?

Host Dylan Wiliam takes a deep dive into four vitally important principles that are rooted in cognitive science and receive far less attention than they deserve: retrieval, spacing or distributed practice, metacognition, and interleaving. These concepts are brought to life by guests Patrice Bain and Zach Groshell, educators who have used them in the classroom and written books on the topic.

Bain offers a strong overview of memory-building instructional moves, which she calls “power tools.” They include asking students to think about what they’re learning while jotting notes (metacognition), guiding class discussions that focus on material learned a week and more ago (spacing), and teaching varied aspects of related content in a single study session and requiring students to “switch gears” (interleaving).

“Too often as teachers we concentrate on putting information into our heads. What if instead we concentrated on pulling information out?”

Groshell identifies some common teaching practices where these principles most readily apply: turn-and-talks, exit tickets, and Do Nows, which he recommends include a mix of current, recent, and past content. He also discusses common study techniques that are less effective, like re-reading notes or highlighting a text, because they draw on a student recognizing something familiar, not accessing knowledge from their memory stores. 

“Recognition and familiarity are really bad cues compared to: if I can retrieve it, if I can have someone test me on it and I can verbalize it or I can write it down. These are much better signs that I'm learning the material.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Transcript

Dylan Wiliam

Have you heard of “the five minute university?” It’s a pitch from a character in Gilda Live—a Broadway show. A priest, Father Guido Sarducci, played by Don Novello, complains that education, no matter where you are, it's all the same. 

Archival clip - Guido Sarducci 

It’s all just memorization. And it don’t matter how long you can remember anything. Just so you can parrot it back for the test. And I’ve got this different school I’d like to start. Something called the five—minute university. [audience laughter] 

Dylan Wiliam

In five minutes, for twenty—five dollars, Guido Sarducci promises you’ll learn everything the average college graduate remembers five years after leaving school. 

Archival clip - Guido Sarducci

Say if you want to take Spanish, what I teach you is, “¿Cómo está usted?” That means, how are you? And the answer is, “Muy bien.” Means, very well. And believe me, if you took two years of college Spanish, five years after you're out of school, “¿Cómo está usted? Muy bien,” is about all you're going to remember. [audience clapping]   

Dylan Wiliam

The clip strikes a chord with many because we are all aware of things that we used to know, but can no longer recall. Rather like footprints in the sand that have been washed away by the tide.

Welcome to the Knowledge Matters Podcast, Season 3: Literacy and the Science of Learning. This is episode two. I’m Dylan Wiliam, co-author of Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival. In this episode, I will tie how memory, recall, and learning are deeply intertwined. 

Most of us think about memory like the phrase “use it or lose it.” This sense that things we used to know but can no longer recall are lost forever. Like, how to play an instrument, divide fractions, or name world capitals. While the core idea is sound, in fact the way that our memories work is a bit more complicated than this.

Consider the learning of foreign languages. Most Americans will have studied a modern language in school, typically Spanish or French. Although older listeners may have learned German or Russian, and more recently, Japanese and Chinese have become quite popular. 

Whatever the language, it is almost certain that you were taught the names of parts of the body. The question is, can you remember them now? Specifically, can you remember the word for “ear”?

Typically, fewer than 20% of people are confident they can do this. The rest assume that the memory has faded away entirely. But this is not quite right. If they were shown a list of parts of the body in the language they learned, they would likely recognize the word for “ear” immediately. This wouldn’t be possible if the memory really had faded away entirely. The memory is still there. What is hard is retrieving it.

This distinction between how well things have been learned, and how easy they are to recall at any particular time, is at the heart of our current understanding of memory. This concept was developed by psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork. How well something has been learned is called storage strength. We can think of this as how well an item in memory is connected to other items in memory. I talked to Patrice Bain, author of Powerful Teaching. 

Patrice Bain 

Just because we see something doesn't mean we know it. And this so often leads to ineffective study strategies. For example, when students reread before a test and think that they are ready for an exam. So here's a question I like to pose. If you had a piece of paper and pencil in front of you, could you draw the Apple logo? How often do we see the Apple logo? It's on our phones, it's on our computers. It's an apple, right? Who can't draw an apple?

But surprisingly, often we cannot do that even though we have seen it so, so many times. And it's because we have seen it but it doesn't mean we know it. And we usually don't know it until we can retrieve it. And this is something that I think is so important for teachers to be able to make sure that there are many opportunities for retrieval, for students to understand if they know it or not before a big exam ever happens.

Dylan Wiliam

Retrieval is an often forgotten element of learning — though incredibly important. Patrice was also a classroom teacher in Illinois for 25 years. Just recently, she reconnected one of her students. 

Patrice Bain

In the last month, I happened to run into a student that I had not seen in 22 years. It was totally unexpected. And uh, his first question was, “Mrs. Bain, do you remember who I am?” Which is a bit of a nightmare [laughs] for any teacher to get that question. But I did, fortunately. And within seconds, he started rattling off all of this information that he had remembered from my class when he was only 11-years-old. All of this information was in his long—term memory that he could access on a dime. Obviously, no study, no preparation, but it was there.

And I feel as teachers, it is — well, first of all, we work so, so hard as teachers. And we want our students to remember. That is the goal of being able to have our students use this knowledge, to retrieve this information. And so we owe it to ourselves as teachers to understand the whys and the hows. And I believe it's our duty to impart this information to our students.

Dylan Wiliam

However, the fact that something is somewhere in our memory doesn’t mean it is easy to recall—that depends o n what is called retrieval strength. Things like the word for “ear” in a language that we studied years ago, the first telephone number we learned as a child, the license plate of our first car. These are high in storage strength, but often low in retrieval strength. We might not be able to recall them, but we would recognize them pretty quickly. 

On the other hand, most people can usually remember the number of their hotel room while they are staying there. But unless the number has some special significance, the number is unlikely to be remembered a month later. The number is, while staying at the hotel, high in retrieval strength but low in storage strength. It won’t be remembered, or even recognizable, a month later. 

So what techniques can be used to improve storage strength, since it’s so important? Patrice’s classroom was the first in the US where cognitive scientists studied how students learn in an actual authentic classroom. The research resulted in four principles to improve student learning, which Patrice likes to call power tools.  

Patrice Bain

The four principles that we studied, the first was retrieval. Too often as teachers we concentrate on putting information into our heads. What if instead we concentrated on pulling information out? And that's retrieval, being able to have students access this information.

But we also know that as soon as we learn something, we start forgetting it. And so we need to be able to go back and revisit retrieval. And that is spaced practice or spacing. And that's the second power tool or research principle. 

A third is metacognition. And to me, the way I define it, is it's helping students discriminate between what they know versus what they don't. Too often, students don't have an opportunity to test what they know until there's a high stakes exam. And instead, if we can space out retrieval throughout the course of study and give  students those opportunities right then and there: Do I know it? Or do I need to focus more time on this? To me, that is a real advantage of metacognition.

The fourth one is interleaving. And interleaving is where we are able to compare and contrast similar items. Often, interleaving is thought of as being used in math, but in my world history classroom with 11-year-olds, instead I would use interleaving as um //essential questions.  

For example, if we were studying revolutions, I would start my course of the unit with an essential question such as: How did the lives of working people change as a result of revolutions? And as we studied the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, we could look at that essential question through an interleaving lens. So by the end of a unit of study, the students could write an in depth essay on: How did the lives of working people change as a result of revolutions?

And so between retrieval, and spacing, and metacognition and interleaving, we're really able to, to have students learn the information, to be able to retrieve the information. So that 22 years later they can, they can still bring up this information.

Dylan Wiliam

This distinction between storage strength and retrieval strength matters. When students are flicking through the pages of a textbook that they read yesterday, they may feel that they know what they are seeing. But it may be just that the retrieval strength is high because they read the same pages yesterday. In other words, it  might be because storage strength is high—we really have learned it. Or it might be because retrieval strength is high—it is easy to recall because we were reminded of it recently.

The problem is that when we bring something to mind, it feels the same whether we have really learned it well, or whether it is simply because we were reminded of it recently. While there may be times when remembering something just long enough to pass a test is important, in education, we are mostly interested in learning for the long term. Obviously re-reading the things we want to learn does improve how well we know them, but there is a better way to achieve the same outcome: retrieving things from memory makes the memory stronger. 

Most of us think about our memories as something akin to a hard disk. When we commit things to memory, it is like storing things on a hard disk. When we recall them, it is like retrieving information from the hard disk. But human memory does not really work like this. 

When we get information from a hard disk, the disk itself is unchanged. However, when we retrieve things from memory, it actually makes the memory stronger. Successfully retrieving things from memory has a greater effect on memory than re-studying them. 

This is why techniques such as flash cards, which have been used by everyone from kindergarteners to medical students, are so effective. When students test themselves with flash cards, they are retrieving information from memory. This has a stronger effect on learning than just re-reading what is on the cards.

Our current understanding of how memory works has one final wrinkle that is important to bear in mind if we want to make teaching effective. It’s that the harder it is to retrieve something from memory, the greater the benefit of successful retrieval. 

So if we tested ourselves with flash cards for ten minutes every day for three days, it would actually be less effective than testing ourselves for ten minutes every other day. While the total of thirty minutes of self-testing is the same, the results are different. When spaced out over five days the material would be less familiar, so retrieving that information would be harder, resulting in a bigger increase in knowledge and greater learning. 

I wanted to examine how the techniques Patrice discussed—retrieval practice, distributed practice, metacognition, and interleaved practice—can work for teachers and students in the classroom. So I spoke to Zach Groshell, a teacher in Tacoma Washington and author of Just Tell Them. Here he is on retrieval and metacognition.  

Zach Groshell 

Retrieval practice is basically testing the knowledge that is already in long term memory, bringing it into working memory so that students think about it again, and that's gonna make that memory trace even stronger. 

Some of the best formats available include things like brain dumps, which is a format that I didn't know about as a teacher. So something as simple as saying to students in a prompt, want you to write down in your notebook everything you remember about yesterday's lesson. I want you all to be constantly thinking about what we're learning. I know it's hard to put in the effortful sort of uh thinking to bring back—like why can't I just tell you? But when you write down in sort of a free recall type format in your notebook, you're bringing that into your working memory and that's going to make it stronger.

As a teacher, I'm circulating and I'm collecting all of this formative data of: What do they remember? What comes easiest? What parts of the content do I need to focus on for the next part of my lesson? So it serves the purpose too, for the teacher, of being able to inform next steps in their teaching.

There's a lot of different techniques teachers do, but they might not think of them as retrieval practice. Turn and talks, for example. You can have students chatting about the content all you want, but just having the turn and talk be: Turn to the person next to you. What is everything you remember about yesterday's lesson? Or what do you remember about the story we've been reading? And then having them, you know, verbally retrieving all of that, all of that prior knowledge.

And also, I like to go around the classroom with some post-it notes. I like to post-it on certain students' desks, just a small cue, just like remember we're talking about Canopic jars. Remember the sarcophagus, right, in our—our unit about ancient Egypt? And sometimes just that cue creates like a cascade of thoughts where all the students in their notebooks, pencils are moving bringing into working memory all of those past things we've learned. 

And then we're gonna ask them lots of metacognitive type questions: What parts did you remember well, you know? What did you miss? How can we strengthen those areas that you didn't write down? And as we sort of collect that knowledge around the room, now we can really start to have, like, a class discussion around the things that we need to work on a lot more. 

Dylan Wiliam

These techniques make the content of lessons stickier. Students are more likely to connect what's coming in the new lesson with what they learned before. 

The third of Patrice Bains’s power tools is called distributed practice—sometimes called spaced practice. Distributed practice is sort of the opposite of cramming for a test. Cramming feels good at the moment, but are you really getting information into your long term memory? If studying is spaced out, you will remember better.

The last of Patrice Bain’s power tools—interleaved practice—incorporates teaching multiple skills or different, but related content, in a single study session. By getting students to “switch gears” during a single study session, it makes the memory stronger. 

Zach Groshell recommends teachers start every lesson with a “do now” or entry task when they come into the classroom.

Zach Groshell 

And when you give students like, three to five questions of previous material. Perhaps one of them is a little more recent, two of them are maybe just from last week, and maybe that last question's really gonna make them dig deep into last month. What you do is you create a format in which the students, number one, it's logistically really helpful because the students  can start the lesson in a calm way while you take attendance. 

But also, it's gonna get everyone thinking about previous material every single day. Every day you have baked into the schedule some distributed practice and some mixed practice where even some of the items, maybe the students are gonna do a bit of discriminating between the different items. 

When teachers do this and they get their students constantly retrieving old information, kids will say, like, “We've already done this, right? “We've done this a million times, “Why does this keep coming back?” My answer is, “Because it's my job to help you remember this.” [laughs] Also because this is what — this is what good learners do. Effective learning involves constant practice of old material mixed in with, sometimes, with new material.

Let's think about the end of the lesson as well. We often end our lessons with exit tickets, right? And that exit ticket is really uh, usually just an assessment of what was taught. But it's not too difficult to simply add in one or two questions—maybe multiple choice, maybe short answer that just is of old material. And what you do there is you, you get an assessment of what they did during that lesson, which is their performance, but you also get an idea of old material and whether or not long-term retention of the material is happening at the end of the lesson.

Dylan Wiliam

There’s another technique Zach said is powerful, but not used often enough. And it’s what I like to call the most important development in educational technology since the slate: the mini white board. 

Zach Groshell 

I would recommend that teachers think to use these tools, and having a routine in which students know after you've done a little bit of teaching, “All right everybody, whiteboards out. What is the capital of Sudan? Three, two, one.” And I look around and I scan and I get all that information I need while also embedding retrieval practice in a very systematic way in all of my lessons.

Because as a teacher I'm gonna constantly want—be wanting to prompt students to retrieve old information. And it's really hard to get around to everybody's books and see, see what they know. And if we're only calling on one student at a time, you only get that one student retrieving. 

And I've seen teachers who were skeptical of this uh innovation, uh adjusting midway through their lesson. “Oh, wait, everybody whiteboards down. Let me just show you one more thing, right?” And all of a sudden the teacher is being responsive and responding to the knowledge in the classroom. 

And we can get kids talking about their answers once that —“Why did—Why was his answer almost correct? Let's go over to Jamie right now.” And I feel it brings a crackle to life when it comes to engagement and it brings all students' answers in so that not the kids who are most confident are the ones dominating the discussion, but everyone gets a chance for a turn.

Dylan Wiliam

The basic principles about how our memories work, that Patrice and Zach talked about, lead us to a number of instructional principles that can help our students retain knowledge more effectively. These were highlighted in the study Patrice talked about earlier. 

In particular, the researchers were looking for what might be called low hanging fruit—study techniques that were easy to use, could be used by most students, were effective across different learning conditions, and worked with different ways of assessing student achievement, like memory tasks and comprehension questions. 

They selected 10 different study techniques to investigate. Some, such as re-reading and highlighting, were chosen because students frequently reported using them. Others, such as practice testing, were included because there was evidence that they were effective, but not widely used. 

So I asked Zach why students often like to use techniques that feel useful, like re-reading, but that have little impact on learning. 

Zach Groshell

They, they might feel just, just on the basis of familiarity with the topic that they know it well enough that they can do fine on the test, you know. And this constant kind of re-exposure to material tells them, or just highlighting your notes, re-reading your notes, “Yeah, I recognize it, so I must know it.” But we know that it's—recognition and familiarity are really, are really bad cues compared to if I can retrieve it, if I can have someone test me on it and I can verbalize it or I can write it down, these are, these are much better signs I'm learning the material. 

So I think a lot of times it's the teacher's job to really reveal to the students through metacognitive prompts, like which areas are you missing? Oh, compare that to what you actually were able to do in our retrieval practice? Were you overconfident in your prediction before we did the brain dump, right? And now that you know that, what kind of study strategies do you need to use to ensure you embed this?

We do have to bring this science of learning to students as well. And we have to coach them to be better learners alongside focusing on the content. 

Dylan Wiliam

Something I’ve heard from teachers is that when they use these techniques—like the mini white board—they discover their class hadn’t understood as much as they thought. This is something that a teacher should want to know. But it also means you have to re-teach something, which you don't feel you have the time to do. 

Zach Groshell 

I acknowledge that a lot of teachers will say that there's just too much already. There's just too much to teach. But whatever you're gonna teach, you've got to teach it properly, right? You've got to teach it so that they can remember it. And so um, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get this experience of, “Wait, let me go back a little bit. Let me try to re-explain that.” And then, “Okay, on your mini whiteboards or in your, your pairs, turn and talk, go, let's try that again.” But then what you're going to get is the experience the next day of the kids remembering what you taught them, right. 

And so I, I don't buy into the idea that you—that, uh, you're actually teaching less. What I think you're doing is that you're teaching much more effectively and efficiently by ensuring that every kid has a chance to get to mastery during those lessons. You do that and the kids uh the next day will just need a little bit of cueing, a little bit of prompting, and you can start to build. So that you're building on top of old understandings as opposed to just cover, cover, cover, and they never really learn any of it.

Dylan Wiliam

Of course none of these study techniques are relevant if students are not motivated to learn. But again, the way that students, and indeed adults, think about motivation can get in the way of effective learning. We tend to think about motivation as if it were an amount of something that students have in their heads. We say that one student succeeded because they were motivated, while another did not because they were not motivated. 

But psychologist Daniel Willingham discovered how much you want to learn something has zero impact on whether you learn it or not. What matters is the kind of mental work that you do, like spreading study over a number of sessions, mixing up study techniques in a single session, and testing yourself. You’ll actually hear more from Daniel later this season. 

More importantly, recent research has shown that while motivation may cause achievement, the reverse is also true: achievement also causes motivation. In fact, some studies have suggested that the impact of achievement now on motivation in the future is actually greater than the impact of motivation now on achievement in the future. Ensuring our students have a solid base of knowledge not only allows them to think more powerfully, it also builds motivation for future learning.

In the next episode, Doug Lemov will talk about two underrated but influential factors of reading comprehension: attention and fluency. 

The Knowledge Matters Podcast is co-hosted by me, Dylan Wiliam, along with Doug Lemov, and Natalie Wexler. To learn more about my work go to: www.dylanwiliam.org. That’s Wiliam with one L. To download a copy of my book, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival, visit bit.ly/knowledgerevival. 

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Learn more about this episode and their work at knowledgematterscampaign.org. There, you can find curriculum resources, blogs, and sign up for their newsletter. 

To catch all of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, Season 3: Literacy and the Science of Learning, make sure you subscribe to the Knowledge Matters Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.