The Brain Science Behind the SIR Techniques

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 connections 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 Creating sticky touch on the concept of desirable difficulty and what it means learning starts with for implementing the SIR techniques with students. building stronger The Path to the Mailbox connections between neurons in the brain. Creating sticky learning starts with building stronger connections 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 mailbox 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 connections 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 information 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 ( 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 Long-term memory is memory, but because you didn’t need to remember it, it never virtually unlimited. 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 cognitively demanding.

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

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