Stick the Learning

Stick Learning the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Solution Tree Press would like to thank the following reviewers:

Lety Amalla Executive Director of Student Programs Midland ISD Midland, Texas

Charlcy Carpenter Math Teacher Burns Middle School Lawndale, North Carolina

John D. Ewald Education Consultant Frederick, Maryland

Kelly Hilliard Math Teacher McQueen High School Reno, Nevada

Lauren Smith Elementary Curriculum Coordinator Noblesville Schools Noblesville, Indiana

Rea Smith Math Facilitator Rogers Public Schools Rogers, Arkansas Kate Stavish

English Teacher Loudon Country Day School Leesburg, Virginia

Rachel Swearengin Fifth-Grade Teacher Manchester Park Elementary School Olathe, Kansas

Emily Terry

English Teacher Kinard Middle School Fort Collins, Colorado

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download the free reproducibles in this book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

italics.

About the Author

Changing Profession

Science of Learning

Effective and Efficient Educator

Overview

1

An Overview of the SIR Techniques

The SIR Techniques

The Brain Science Behind the SIR Techniques

Benefits of Using the SIR Techniques

2 Spaced Repetition

Spaced Repetition in the Research

Spaced Repetition in the Classroom

Applying Spaced Repetition to a Learning Target

Applying Spaced Repetition to a Lesson

Applying Spaced Repetition to a Unit

Spaced Repetition to Multiple Units

Spaced Repetition Overview

3 Interleaving

Interleaving in the Research

Interleaving in the Classroom

Overview

4 Retrieval 63

Retrieval

5

The SIR Quick Start Guide

Ask Students Daily What They Remember

Assess Students Frequently With CIAs

Student-Generated

Case Study of the SIR Techniques in Action

Epilogue

Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions

Repetition

and Resources

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Saunders, EdD, serves as state assistant superinten dent for district support with the Arkansas Department of Education. Previously, he was an assistant superin tendent for Benton Public Schools in Benton, Arkansas. He is the former assistant commissioner at the Arkansas Department of Education for Research and Technology. Before that, he served as superintendent at the East End School District. Since starting his education career in 1997, he has been a high school principal, mathematics teacher, and athletic coach in various schools across Arkansas. Eric is a resultsfocused educator with a passion for learning and student success. Outside of the K–12 setting, he has served as an adjunct professor for graduate education classes at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.

As assistant commissioner, Eric presented across the United States on topics ranging from data-driven decision making to the future of education. Additionally, he worked with state and national leaders to support educators and students regard ing student information systems, technology access, and the science of learning. Eric is a member of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators Legislative Committee to help monitor and shape educational policy. He believes strongly in a results-based approach to education, with student achievement being the focus, which allows him to support schools and districts in increasing stu dent achievement.

Eric received his bachelor’s degree in secondary mathematics education from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, as well as a master’s degree in education and a doctorate in education from Harding University.

To book Eric Saunders for professional development, contact pd@ SolutionTree.com.

INTRODUCTION

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

—Isaac Newton

It’s no secret that teaching is a challenging profession. But one of the most con sistent difficulties educators face is ensuring students retain what they learn.

I’d be willing to bet you’re familiar with this struggle. Do you spend a con siderable part of the school year reteaching topics students covered the previous year? Do you frequently have to reteach material in the spring to ensure students are ready for the high-stakes test? Do you review the results from the high-stakes test given in May and notice that students scored low on an essential standard or a learning target you spent a substantial amount of time on early in the year?

What if I told you the following?

• Carefully scheduling when students re-engage with information would increase student achievement. Would you do it?

•

By simply rearranging the order of problems, students could learn more. Would you do it?

• Giving students a quiz instead of reteaching material could increase student performance. Would you do it?

If these are matters you (or a teacher you know) have wondered about, keep reading. If you’re open to making simple yet effective changes to your teaching practice, keep reading.

Education is rapidly changing, and teachers and students need brain-based instructional techniques to help them make the most of their time and create deep learning. This book aims to provide techniques to create sticky learning— knowledge that stays with students for the long term.

This introduction discusses some of the factors driving change in education and the need for teachers to evolve their practice to meet increasing demands.

By adopting brain-based techniques endorsed by scientific research into learn ing, teachers can become more effective and efficient educators. This book offers three proven techniques—spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval—to save teachers time, increase student achievement, and stick the learning.

A Changing Profession

Educators face many challenges and assume many roles. In addition to the role of instructor, for example, a classroom teacher often takes on the duties of a coun selor, caregiver, diagnostician, and more. Because of these demands, teachers can find it very difficult to get everything done. In their report Changing Expectations for the K–12 Teacher Workforce, writers for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2020) state:

Increased expectations for learning, combined with the demand to create a responsive learning environment that supports the needs of diverse students, call for innovative approaches to instruction that may differ substantially from teachers’ own experiences as students or their preservice education. (p. 3)

The COVID-19 global pandemic shone a spotlight on a stark reality: already overburdened teachers suddenly had to enforce masking and social distancing, assume personal health risks, and navigate virtual learning (Pressley, 2021). Those who returned to school after the first year of the pandemic faced new challenges due to staffing shortages, low morale, and unprecedented pres sure to bolster student achievement (Gewertz, 2022).

Doing more of the same will not get better results and will only exasperate teachers and their students.

If teachers are to fulfill the expectations of their changing pro fession, they’ll need new tools to adapt. Doing more of the same will not get better results and will only exasperate them and their students. I’m not proposing adding yet another burden or new initiative to a teacher’s already full plate. Without any foreseeable change in these trends, educators must look for more effective and efficient ways to succeed.

The Science of Learning

If you are a teacher, chances are you studied education in college but didn’t spend much time on the science of learning—namely, cognitive science about how students learn and practical implications for teaching. As education research ers Laura Pomerance, Julie Greenberg, and Kate Walsh (2016) point out, many teacher preparation programs focus on the history of education, laws, rules, and other topics while omitting cognitive science. While education and learning over lap, they are not always the same thing. All too often, teachers adopt and repeat practices in the classroom without questioning them because they are traditional; they are “the way we do school.” To be effective in terms of learning, teachers should seek continuous improvement in their practice by studying and applying the science of learning.

While education and learning overlap, they are not always the same thing.

When I first began studying the science of learning, I did not intend to upset beliefs and practices I had developed during my career in education. However, the more I learned, the more I realized some common practices in the profession, including my own, are outdated and counterproductive. I’m talking about practices like dedicating days to individual topics, blocking groups of questions, and reteaching content. While these practices are widely accepted, they do not create effective or efficient learning.

Although decades of research identify techniques that are effective and efficient for learning, findings by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have not become standard practice in many classrooms. Beth McMurtrie (2022), senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, notes:

Scholarship on teaching and learning has grown exponentially over the decades, encompassing thousands of experiments, stacks of books and journal articles, and major initiatives to bring the science of learning into the classroom. . . . And if habits and preconceived notions about teaching remain unchallenged, say teaching experts, there’s little reason to change.

The reasons for this are nuanced and complex. I understand teachers do not have the time to constantly sift through the evolving research on the science of learning or the structural support to implement it. The good news is they don’t have to. I am committed to doing that legwork and sharing my passion for the science of learning in a way that makes it simple to help educators do their jobs and ultimately support students.

Teachers spend a considerable portion of their time reteaching concepts that students have forgotten or did not fully learn the first time. Doing this makes it difficult to cover all the material required for that course or school year. While teachers may never be able to eliminate all reteaching, they can reduce the time they spend reteaching by using the techniques in this book.

Although decades of research identify techniques that are effective and efficient for learning, findings by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have not become standard practice in many classrooms.

Stick the Learning serves as a bridge between research findings and the classroom. Focusing on the application of three research-proven techniques—spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval—this book guides you through implementing these practices in your school or classroom to increase student achievement and save you time. The first technique, spaced repetition, is spacing out the learning of a topic over time and revisiting or re-engaging in the material at standard intervals. The second technique, interleaving, refers to alternating topics on an item-by-item basis so that no topic is repeated in back-to-back questions. Retrieval, the third technique, is intentionally cueing students to recall information. By implementing spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval (what I call the SIR techniques), you can expect greater learning outcomes from your students. In addition, research shows that the SIR techniques increase retention, application, and trans fer (Bjork & Bjork, 2020; Butler, Black-Maier, Raley, & Marsh, 2017; Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013; McDaniel, Thomas, Agarwal, McDermott, & Roediger, 2013; Pan & Rickard, 2018). Therefore, your students will not only remember what they learn for longer amounts of time but also be able to use that information in various contexts.

Whether you are a teacher, administrator, instructional coach, or curriculum developer, the findings and applications in this book can make you a more effec tive and efficient educator. Teachers learn to immediately apply these techniques in the classroom. Administrators and instructional coaches learn to implement these techniques in staff professional development and in collaborating to increase student achievement. Curriculum developers learn to include the techniques in the curriculum mapping process to maximize what students learn and when they learn it. Additionally, this book is not subject or grade-level specific. These neuroscience-derived methods increase students’ long-term retention, applica tion, and transfer across subjects and grades from kindergarten through college (Dunlosky, 2013).

The Effective and Efficient Educator

The classroom teacher’s role has changed dramatically from its twentiethcentury foundations. Historically, students did not have access to all the informa tion they could ever want at their fingertips. Now they do. Before the internet, teachers were viewed as a source of knowledge. When students had a question, they did not have many other sources outside of the school or public library from which to get answers and turned to their teachers.

In an internet-connected world, there is more knowledge readily available than any one teacher could ever know. Students now go online to search for answers instead of going to their teacher. However, technol ogy has not replaced and, I believe, never will fully replace the teacher. Teachers are uniquely placed to support students in developing the critical thinking skills necessary to determine valid and reliable information found online from the unreliable and invalid. In addition, students need a trusted adult to go to with their social and emotional needs. They also need a skilled professional adept at developing a curriculum to guide them down the path of learning.

Students will always need someone to go to with their social and emotional needs as well as someone highly skilled at developing a curriculum and guiding students down the path of learning.

Instead of being the source of all knowledge, teachers must know how to organize and present information in the most effective and efficient ways. By effective, I am talking about increasing learning by retaining knowledge and skills over time and trans ferring it to new situations. Since educators are in the business of learning, it is essential that student learning be the measure of effectiveness. By efficient, I am referring to how a practice saves time. Thus, if a student could learn the same amount of material in half the time using a different practice, the time-saving technique used would be considered efficient.

You will find that adopting effective and efficient practices doesn’t require you to add to what you are already doing, but rather adjust current practices. By incorporating these ideas, students will retain more knowledge from the begin ning of the year at the end of each year and carry that knowledge with them to future years, thus increasing the amount of time the teacher spends on gradelevel content. This enables you as the teacher to save time and creates a viable curriculum for your students.

Chapter Overview

This book will show you how to implement the evidence-based teaching techniques of spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval. In the following chapters, I explain what the techniques are, give an overview of the science behind them, and teach you how to implement them in your classroom. I’ve included occasional questions you can use to quiz yourself and provide a baseline of understanding on what you’re learning.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the SIR techniques—what they are and why they are effective and efficient for long-term learning. I cover the basics of how the brain creates strong connections to store and retrieve memory. I discuss what spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval look like in practice. Finally, I examine benefits of using the techniques, such as automaticity and higher-order thinking.

In chapter 2, you’ll become familiar with spaced repetition. I explore how research uncovers five elements that make spaced repetition successful: (1) spaced conditions, (2) spaced sessions, (3) long intervals, (4) small segments, and (5) scheduled intervals. I show you how to implement spaced repetition with a learn ing target, in a lesson, in a unit, and over the course of multiple units, including tools to support you at each level of implementation.

Chapter 3 discusses interleaving, a technique more effective than blocking. I discuss how to implement interleaving in the classroom with various types of assessment and homework assignments.

In chapter 4, you’ll learn about retrieval, which is any time a student recalls information. Retrieval is much more effective than rereading and restudying, and it supports students’ higher-order thinking. I illustrate how to implement retrieval in the classroom using class discussion, bell ringers, exit slips, assessments, and questioning techniques.

While chapters 1 through 4 show how to implement the SIR techniques over time, chapter 5 offers a quick start guide with tips for immediate inclusion in the classroom. You can use the techniques right away by asking students daily what they remember, assessing students frequently, and implementing student-generated quizzing. The chapter ends with a case study of the SIR techniques in action.

Finally, the book concludes with an appendix addressing frequently asked ques tions about spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval.

An Overview of the SIR Techniques

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. It . . . makes you think that after all, your favorite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded. . . . Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

—Walter Bagehot

There’s a disconnect between research-based techniques for effective learning and techniques that education traditionally endorses. The techniques we as teachers rely on in the classroom frequently don’t align with those that scholars and scientists recommend. To improve, we must carefully look at some of our current practices and compare them to evidence-based research to determine if what we are currently doing benefits students the most. Without an understanding of practices based upon results—namely, evidence of learning—we are destined to continue to apply techniques that may be ineffective or, even worse, harmful to learning.

In this chapter, I provide foundational information about the SIR techniques. I explain the basics of the science behind the techniques, specifically how the brain creates strong connections that facilitate storing and retrieving memory. I show you what spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval look like in practice to provide context before studying each in more detail in the remaining chapters of the book. Finally, I discuss benefits of using the techniques, such as automa ticity and higher-order thinking.

Quiz Yourself

Which of the following is the most effective learning technique?

a. Summarizing

b. Rereading

c. Highlighting

d. Practice testing

The SIR Techniques

Aiming to understand how students can use effective techniques to better regulate their learning, psychology scholars John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham (2013) con ducted a meta-analysis on the following ten popular learning techniques.

1. Elaborative interrogation: Students explain in their own words why something is true.

2. Summarization: Students create a condensed version of the learning topic, including the main ideas.

3. Keyword mnemonic: Students associate new information with mental images of similar-sounding words.

4. Rereading: Students go back over material they have previously read.

5. Distributed practice: Students learn information over the span of several learning sessions rather than all at once in a single learning session, thus spreading learning out over time.

6. Self-explanation: Students explain what they are doing and thinking in the learning process.

7. Highlighting: Students underline, mark, or notate important information as they go through material.

8. Imagery for text: Students imagine a scene or create a mental image of information as they read text or listen to narrated text.

9. Practice testing: Students take practice tests or quizzes on the information they are trying to learn.

10. Interleaved practice: Students complete randomly ordered problems rather than problems grouped by similar content.

After reviewing almost four hundred studies, Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) cat egorize each technique based on the impact on student learning. The two techniques that stand out as being the most effective are distributed practice and practice testing. As Dunlosky (2013) writes in a separate article, the highest-rated strategies “help students regardless of age,” and “they can enhance learning and comprehension of a large range of materials” (p. 13). Most importantly, Dunlosky (2013) contends, “They can boost student achievement” (p. 13). Another technique that places closely behind distributed practice and practice testing is interleaved practice. In contrast, some of the techniques Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) find to have the lowest effect on student achievement are summarizing, highlighting, and rereading.

Despite Dunlosky and colleagues’ (2013) findings, many teachers have not been exposed to more effective practices (Boser, 2019), and students frequently report using ineffective methods such as highlighting and rereading (Morehead, Rhodes, & DeLozier, 2016). Teachers rely on tra ditional techniques and, believing them to be effective, endorse them to students; students continue to use them because it’s what they’ve learned to do. Without a reason to challenge the status quo, the cycle continues.

While different researchers use a variety of names for distributed practice, interleaved practice, and practice testing, for the pur poses of this book, I use the terms spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval, respectively. Together, these form the acronym SIR.

Many teachers have not been exposed to more effective practices, and students frequently report using highlighting and rereading.

• Spaced repetition: Spacing out the learning of a topic over time and revisiting or re-engaging in the material

• Interleaving: Alternating topics on an item-by-item basis so that no topic is repeated in back-to-back questions

• Retrieval: Recalling information

Research affirms the SIR techniques are three of the most effective learning techniques to increase long-term retention, application, and transfer (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Ebersbach & Nazari, 2020; Lyle, Bego, Hopkins, Hieb, & Ralston, 2020; Wang, Zhou, & Shah, 2014). Advocating for spaced repetition, cogni tive scientists Shana K. Carpenter and Pooja K. Agarwal (2020) write, “Students who engage in spaced practice learn the concepts better and also show enhanced understanding—not just memorization—of how the concepts apply to new sit uations” (p. 6). Cross-cultural communication scholars Tatsuya Nakata and Yuichi Suzuki (2019b) conclude that interleaving increases retention as well as application and transfer. And, regarding retrieval, learning science researchers

Steven Pan and Timothy Rickard (2018) find that practice testing increases transfer more than any other strategy they studied, calling it “the most potent training technique known to learning science” (p. 710).

Teachers can structure their instructional and assessment practices in a way that endorses these techniques; in turn, students can adopt them in their own learning habits. These techniques are free. They save teachers time. They empower students to learn more and make it stick long term. They are effective for gaining knowledge and mastering skills, they apply across all subjects, and they extend to all age levels (Dunlosky, 2013). Applying them in your classroom will undoubtedly benefit you and your students.

The Brain Science Behind the SIR Techniques

To fully understand how and why the SIR techniques work, let’s explore some basic brain science, starting with memory. Creating sticky learning starts with building stronger connections between neurons in the brain. Thus, if teachers want students to retain information for longer periods of time, the students must perform activities and learn in a way that builds better connec tions between neurons.

Let’s take a closer look at the brain’s mechanism for building stronger connections—the path to the mailbox, so to speak. Then we’ll examine how the memory systems store and retrieve memories. Finally, we’ll touch on the concept of desirable difficulty and what it means for implementing the SIR techniques with students.

Creating sticky learning starts with building stronger connections between neurons in the brain.

The Path to the Mailbox

Creating sticky learning starts with building stronger connec tions between neurons in the brain. How do we build better connections between neurons? Researchers at the University of Queensland (n.d.) explain, “Connections can be made stronger or weaker depending on when and how often they have been activated in the past. Active connections tend to get stronger, whereas those that aren’t used get weaker and can eventually disappear entirely.”

Consider a metaphor to imagine how this works. You’re standing on the edge of a grassy field. On the other side of the field is a mailbox. What would happen if you walked across the field to the mailbox using the same route every day for two weeks? A path would start to form. The more you walk the path, the more firmly it is established. The location you start from is neuron A, and the mail box is neuron B. The path between these two points represents the connection

between the two neurons. Retrieving a memory is like walking to the mailbox. The more times you retrieve the memory, the stronger the connection becomes. To be clear: the priority is not to gather all the mail at once but to establish a permanent path to the mailbox.

Let’s revisit our SIR techniques and see how they relate to the metaphor.

• Spaced repetition: Recall that this technique involves spacing out the learning of a topic over time and revisiting or re-engaging in the material. If you only walk to the mailbox once, you don’t establish a path. However, if you walk it repeatedly over the span of days, weeks, months, and years, the path will be there whenever you need it.

• Interleaving: This technique consists of alternating topics on an item-by-item basis so that no topic is repeated in back-to-back questions. This is equivalent to walking from point A to point B to retrieve a single letter from the mailbox at a time. It’s inefficient if your goal is to gather all the mail at once, but it’s very efficient for forging a permanent path.

• Retrieval: This technique is about students recalling information. Specific retrieval techniques, such as assessments or questions, can be seen as paving the path with small rocks. Just as paving the path ensures that it remains intact over time, retrieval creates a stronger and longer-lasting connection between neurons.

Thus, when you repeatedly walk the path over time (spaced repetition), continuing to start from the beginning and rewalking (interleaving), and making it more permanent by paving it with small rocks (retrieval), you are building a pathway that makes a memory stronger. The path to the mailbox is a helpful metaphor to illustrate Dunlosky and colleagues’ (2013) findings: implementing the three most effective techniques, the SIR techniques, creates sticky learning.

Memory Systems

Now that you understand how the brain creates stronger and longer-lasting con nections between neurons, let’s explore how the brain accesses memory. The brain has two primary memory systems: short-term memory and long-term memory.

Short-term memory is limited and keeps information available to use for a very short amount of time. Researchers find the brain can hold between three and nine items in short-term memory at a time (Adams, Nguyen, & Cowan, 2018).

Short-term memory is limited not only by the number of items but also by the amount of time it can hold information. While it varies from person to person,

the time limit on short-term memory is approximately eighteen seconds (Revlin, 2013). To experience this yourself, try to remember a phone number, including the area code, which is around ten digits (depending on your location). Look at a random phone number, turn away, and try to repeat it. Notice that it’s not easy to remember all ten digits relying solely on short-term memory.

Unlike short-term memory, long-term memory is virtually unlimited and keeps memories for as long as we may need them (Camina & Güell, 2017). When we need to access information from long-term memory, we can recall the informa tion and use it for a short amount of time (in our short-term memory), but then we must “forget” it (move it back into long-term memory) to make room in our short-term memory for new information. You can only work with information in short-term memory. Thus, if something is in long-term memory, it must be temporarily called to the short-term memory system to be used (

Long-term memory is virtually unlimited.

Very few items that enter our short-term memory get placed into long-term memory. As an example, let’s use the gate number for a flight you took three years ago. You needed that information for a short period of time; you didn’t need it for future reference. The gate number was in your short-term memory, but because you didn’t need to remember it, it never went into your long-term memory.

Let’s revisit our SIR techniques and see how they relate to short- and long-term memory.

• Spaced repetition: When students revisit the information, they bring it from long-term memory to short-term memory.

• Interleaving: If students answer blocked questions (for example, five questions in a row about the same learning target), they only need to remember the information once to answer all five questions; therefore, the information stays in short-term memory. However, when students work on one problem, shift to a new problem, and then return to a problem related to the first, they must load the new information. In this way, interleaving requires students to move information from long-term to short-term memory.

• Retrieval: Retrieval can take many different forms, such as the Socratic method, quizzes, or assessments. In each of these, retrieval requires students to bring information from long-term memory. Students actively pull information from memory as opposed to passively receiving information.

Pause for a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned so far. Are there ways you already use spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval in your classroom? Are there times you consciously or subconsciously avoid using the SIR techniques because they are challenging? They are definitely not traditional. For example, look at your lesson-plan map and see how things are organized. Or look at your homework assignments or assessments. Are the items or questions grouped by topic? If so, you could be missing out on the benefits of the SIR techniques. While they’re not always the easiest or most preferred, these techniques can help your students learn more and ultimately make you more effective and efficient. The challenging element of the SIR techniques has a name: desirable difficulties (Bjork & Bjork, 2020).

Desirable Difficulties

Despite their high efficiency and effectiveness, spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval may not feel natural or comfortable for students (Biwer, de Bruin, Schreurs, & oude Egbrink, 2020; Vaughn & Kornell, 2019). Also, research shows that classes where students rate the teachers the highest are not the same classes where students learn the most (Kornell & Hausman, 2016). It seems that students’ most preferred techniques for learning are not always aligned with those that are in their best interest, perhaps because these SIR techniques are more cog nitively demanding.

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork (2020), a husband-and-wife team of neuroscientists, name those practices that are in the best interest of students desirable difficulties The more you strain or push your brain during learning, the greater the chance you will remem ber something (difficulty). However, merely making something difficult does not equate to more learning (Bjork, 2016); the difficulty must be in a form that enhances learning (desirable). Desirable difficulty is not about learning methods that are pre ferrable despite being difficult—it’s about tasks that are difficult and enhance learning, regardless of whether students prefer them.

The more you strain or push your brain during learning, the greater the chance you will remember something.

Spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval may not be the most enjoyable or most comfortable techniques, but they do produce more learning. Students may, at first, resist these methods because they are more demanding than practices they are accustomed to (Biwer et al., 2020). However, over time, the neural paths get so well built that students recall information almost effortlessly. Professors of neurology Adrian Haith and John Krakauer (2018) note that this effortless recall of information—called automaticity—eventually allows students to recall information

without even trying and sometimes without even knowing they recalled it. What is interesting is that the better you know something, the less effort your brain uses (Haith & Krakauer, 2018).

Desirable difficulties are a key feature in explaining how the SIR techniques facilitate application and transfer. Bjork and Bjork (2020) note, “Conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create challenges (i.e., difficul ties) and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer” (p. 477). Additionally, psychology scholars Mark A. McDaniel, Ruthann C. Thomas, Pooja K. Agarwal, Kathleen B. McDermott, and Henry L. Roediger III (2013) find that introducing desirable difficulties improves stu dent performance on application questions; when used with feedback, they “can promote learning that is deeper than just retaining a particular answer” (p. 368).

Despite the challenges of implementing the SIR techniques, it’s well worth the effort for both teachers and students. Now that you understand the difficulties involved, let’s take a closer look at the benefits you and your students can expect to receive from incorporating spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval in the classroom.

Quiz Yourself

When an expert and a novice are performing the same task, which one’s brain uses the most energy?

a. Expert

b. Novice

The Benefits of Using the SIR Techniques

When some people learn about the SIR techniques, they may hear the word repe tition and immediately think of old-school drills. This is not the case. For example, interleaving requires doing the opposite—not doing the same skill back to back repetitively. In addition to helping students retain information for long periods of time and producing application and transfer skills, the SIR techniques offer several key benefits. In the following sections, we’ll discuss how the techniques enhance automaticity, higher-order thinking, and other learning improvements.

Automaticity

A group of scientists (Haier et al., 1992) at the University of California, Irvine, recruited volunteers to play the video game Tetris (Nintendo, 1989)—in which the player encounters a series of different shapes and tries to pack them together without any gaps—hoping to find out if the brain works less when the subjects know more. The scientists scanned the subjects’ brains as they played Tetris for the first time. Then they sent them home for four to eight weeks of practice with the game. After the practice interval, scientists scanned the subjects’ brains again as they played the game. By the time of the second scan, the subjects had naturally become quite good. Richard J. Haier and colleagues (1992) include an image of the side-by-side brain scans (https://bit.ly/3P7Puoa) showing how the sub ject’s brain exerted more energy when it was unfamiliar with the game and less energy once the subject had become a more expert player.

What does this mean for students? As students build automaticity (that is, effortless recall of information), their brains work less to remember foundational knowledge and skills, freeing them to devote their neurological resources to other learning and activities (such as application and transfer). While the previous study on Tetris is highly regarded and frequently cited, more recent studies by researcher Hyunkyu Lee and colleagues (2012), as well as scholars Diana J. Gorbet and Lauren E. Sergio (2018), produced similar results.

As students build automaticity, their brains work less to remember foundational knowledge and skills.

It is important to note, though, that simply reinforcing knowl edge or information does not directly translate to increases in application and transfer skills. Cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal (2019) finds that students must intentionally work with application and transfer to build those skills. Therefore, teachers should support students in first building a solid foundation of knowledge before expanding to questions dealing with application and transfer. Teachers should not expect students to apply and transfer knowledge during an assessment if they have not previously tried applying and transferring that knowledge.

Higher-Order Thinking

Created by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in 1956, Bloom’s taxonomy has served educators for many decades as a guide for classifying learning outcomes and objectives. Teachers use the taxonomy for creating assignments, increasing a lesson’s rigor, designing assessments, planning project-based learning, and more (Armstrong, 2010). Although the taxonomy has been updated through the years, most recently in 2001 by education researchers Lorin W.

Anderson and David R. Krathwohl, the overall framework has essentially remained the same. The updated taxonomy is often illustrated as a pyramid with remem ber at the base and create at the apex (https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/ blooms-taxonomy).

Students start with the remember stage and move up the pyramid—through understand, apply, analyze, and evaluate—hopefully ending with the ability to create. However, without a firm foundation in remembering and understanding, students are unable to evaluate or create. By using the SIR techniques, students build a strong foundation of knowledge and are better able to recall information. In doing so, they are able to apply and transfer that information in the upper level of Bloom’s taxonomy.

Without a firm foundation in remembering and understanding, students are unable to evaluate or create.

Another foundational tool educators use is Norman Webb’s (2002) Depth of Knowledge (DOK). Developed by senior research scientist Norman Webb in 1997, DOK helps educators assess how to create a rigorous environment where all students can learn at a high level (Aungst, 2014). DOK classifies an activity or task into four levels according to the complexity of thinking required, as shown in figure 1.1.

Though this book focuses primarily on remembering and recalling, the benefits of the SIR techniques are not limited to the bottom level of Bloom’s taxonomy or level 1 of Webb’s DOK. Applying the techniques is beneficial not only for build ing knowledge but also for building transfer skills, an essential goal of education.

As students adopt the SIR techniques, they will move up on Bloom’s taxonomy and Webb’s DOK; not only will students know the information, but they will also be able to apply and transfer it to new situations.

While you do not see the words apply or transfer in the four levels, in Webb’s (2002) foundational description of DOK, the ability to apply is found across all four levels. For example, in mathematics, applying a formula is regarded as level 1. At level 4 in reading, students must take information and apply it to a new task. At level 4 in science, students must transfer existing knowledge to solve new problem situations. Therefore, the ability to retain, apply, and transfer learning is evident in both Bloom’s taxonomy and Webb’s DOK.

Unfortunately, sometimes educators do not put enough emphasis on building knowledge in their rush to get to application and transfer. As psychologist Robert Sternberg says, “One cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply” (as cited in Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014, p. 12).

Think back to the Tetris study; by engaging in the game frequently between test 1 and test 2, participants laid a foundation for recall. By having that recall, and achieving automaticity, their brains didn’t have to work as hard and could instead operate on higher-level tasks. Teachers see the same thing happening in the class room: the better students know something, the less energy their brains use to access that information, freeing up energy to use elsewhere. For a real-life exam ple, think about asking a group of kindergartners for the answer to 2 + 3 and then asking a group of high school seniors the same question. Which group needs to exert the most mental effort to solve the problem? The high school seniors would answer the question with much less effort than the kindergartners. The high school seniors’ brains have more resources to obtain the result of 2 + 3 in an application or a transfer task. This same idea applies to teacher-assigned tasks that utilize the various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy as well as Webb’s DOK.

Physiologically, if students are struggling with remembering, it is almost impossible for them to apply and transfer that information. Therefore, if teachers use the SIR techniques to build knowledge or increase recall, they support students’ ability to reach the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy or Webb’s DOK.

Additional Benefits

Scientists have studied the SIR techniques for many years. Though the techniques are not new, they are nontraditional. In addition to automaticity and higher-order thinking, research shows additional benefits of using the SIR tech niques. The techniques have been shown to:

• Improve decision making (Helsdingen, van Gog, & van Merriënboer, 2011)

• Support organization of content (Arnold & McDermott, 2013)

• Increase metacognition (Brown et al., 2014)

• Boost student confidence (Agarwal, D’Antonio, Roediger, McDermott, & McDaniel, 2014)

• Raise students’ grades (Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015)

• Enhance student engagement (Agarwal et al., 2014)

• Build inductive reasoning skills (Kang & Pashler, 2012)

• Lower anxiety (Agarwal et al., 2014; Szpunar, Khan, & Schacter, 2013)

• Help students identify similarities and differences (Rohrer, 2012)

• Improve students’ ability to decide what knowledge to use (Bjork, 2016)

• Boost focus and reduce distraction (Metcalfe & Xu, 2016)

The wealth of benefits students and teachers receive from using spaced rep etition, interleaving, and retrieval makes them ideal techniques for use in the classroom. In the context of a quickly evolving educational profession that exerts many demands on teachers’ time and rigorous expectations for student achieve ment, these are powerful and timely tools.

Summary

It’s time for teachers to take advantage of the brain-based learning techniques that studies have been endorsing for decades. Now that you know how the brain’s memory system works, you understand why spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval are effective and efficient. In addition, you know what benefits teachers and students can expect as they implement the techniques. So, what’s next? The following chapter offers you a deeper look at spaced repetition and teaches you how to implement it in your classroom.

Stick Learning the

Brain-Based Teaching

Techniques to Increase Retention, Application, and Transfer

How do students retain what they learn and apply it at high levels? Achieving sticky learning—learning that lasts for the long term—doesn’t have to be complicated! In Stick the Learning: Brain-Based Teaching Techniques to Increase Retention, Application, and Transfer , author Eric Saunders introduces three research-backed techniques that help students remember information and transfer it to new contexts: (1) spaced repetition, (2) interleaving, and (3) retrieval (SIR). Through these effective and efficient SIR techniques, teachers ensure the knowledge they impart endures long into students’ future. K–12 teachers will:

• Learn about the brain-based SIR techniques

Access activities to implement the SIR techniques in the classroom

Understand the importance of utilizing repetition and interleaving

Increase student achievement

“Today’s teachers have access to a wealth of teaching and learning strategies. Eric Saunders infuses one of those pedagogical approaches— direct instruction—with brain-based research and teaching techniques to clarify and improve engagement with students. Teachers will find support and understanding from Saunders’s new take on a traditional teaching style.”

Summit Professor of Learning Technologies, Research Center for Educational Technology, Kent State University

“A helpful guide featuring researchbased practices for teachers, instructional coaches, and specialists!”

Executive Director of Student Programs, Midland Independent School District, Texas

“A superb overview of the latest insights in learning, beautifully informed by neuroscience. Highly recommended!”

—Barbara Oakley

Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Oakland University; author, A Mind for Numbers

—Richard E. Ferdig

—Lety Amalla