by Grant McWalter 18

really really happy and really really confident. Then I realised that all the other people in that set were really good. I started to get worse and worse test scores and I realised that I wasn’t doing as well as I hoped to be. Then I started to feel really down about it and I’d get upset with my parents and stuff… Now that I’ve been moved back down, it’s just a bit sad, but I guess in a way it’s kind of expected.' (Pupil C)

Some of the most interesting results concerned gender. The associated confidence increase for Mathematics higher set pupils was noticeably lower for girls than for boys, which, along with the literature on this topic (Boaler, 1997), could prompt further research within the Mathematics department about improving girls’ maths confidence at the top of the cohort.

Overall, the results of the questionnaire show that pupils support ability grouping in our school. Pupils overwhelmingly reported that they felt they were in the right set for English and Mathematics and that the way that school sets pupils is fair. Pupils reported enjoying subjects in which they were set by ability, whereas support for mixed-ability classes was less clear-cut.

Concluding Remarks

It appears that there is little effect of setting at Key Stage 3 at Berkhamsted and, as the students are supportive, there seems to be no reason to make any changes. At Key Stage 4, the picture is more complex. Despite the highly statistically significant association between low academic self-confidence and lower sets and the indication that being in a lower set may have a negative impact on your progress in Mathematics, there is no clamour from the pupils to change the system. Instead, further research is needed into whether low academic self-confidence is a causal result of set placement and how the Mathematics department can mitigate against apparent under confidence amongst its brightest girls. Repeating the quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design with future cohorts would be useful, in order to establish statistical significance of the effects found in this study.

BIO Grant McWalter has been teaching at Berkhamsted for five years. He has recently completed a Masters in Teaching Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Disciplinary Retrieval: A Case Study in English Literature

The capacity for retrieval practice to strengthen long-term retention of previously studied information is one of the most well-established principles of cognitive science. Dating at the very least to the 1880s and Hermann Ebbinghaus's experiments on memory and the forgetting curve, in which he outlined that revisiting information slows down the otherwise rapid decay of recall, retrieval practice is now a mainstay of current approaches to pedagogy. Featuring, for example, in the excellent, albeit ubiquitous, Barack Rosenshine's 'Principles of Effective Instruction' (Principle No. 1 and 10) as well as the work of Bjork and Bjork (2014) and their concept of 'desirable difficulties', it is for good reason that retrieval practice is now a routine part of lessons.

However, such popularity comes with its downsides. A recent EEF study on retrieval practice, for example, found that the impact in the classroom was perhaps not as effective as one might have hoped or assumed. Examining this outcome in a 2019 article, Professor Robert Coe suggested this discrepancy between aspiration and practicality, could perhaps be traced to what Steve Higgins (2018) calls the 'Bananarama Principle: ‘it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it'. Coe suggests that it is one thing to demonstrate the efficacy of retrieval practice in small scale research studies, but another matter entirely when one transfers this wholesale to be implemented into the classroom. There are, Coe indicates, bound to be frictions that have nothing to do with the underpinning cognitive science, which is incredibly robust, but rather the way in which it might be enacted. Whether, as he suggests, it might be teachers are generating retrieval based purely on factual recall (which are easier and less time consuming to produce) rather than those that require students to interrogate the information they are recalling or whether chosen questions are too easy and therefore lacking challenge, Coe's post issues a timely reminder that thinking generically rarely results in the kind of gains we might desire. Whilst the solution is certainly not to abandon retrieval practice, which is a highly effective strategy and a key aspect of a teacher's arsenal, one way forward might be to remind ourselves, as in most areas, that the way forward lies in rooting our practices and strategies in the disciplinary traditions of the subject in which they are to be enacted. We should not then think of retrieval practice only as a generic, transferable strategy, but rather as something that specific teachers enact in specific classrooms for specific subjects. We should perhaps think of disciplinary retrieval. With this in mind, I would like to offer a case study for what exactly this might look like in my own subject of English, although the underpinning principle that retrieval ought to be treated as a strategy rooted in and enacted through disciplinary traditions is applicable to any consideration of retrieval practice.

With this in mind, a natural starting point would be to ask ourselves what might we want retrieval practice to look like in English? One direction to take would be to use gap fill exercises for key quotations students need to learn or factual recall relating to context or author biography. There is certainly nothing wrong with this, and knowing such information and being able to quickly recall key quotations