More tips from Kate Jones
Video transcript
okay kate what’s tip number two please okay so tip number two is about designing effective retrieval cues and i’ll talk about something called the encoding specificity principle have you heard of that oh no it sounds fancy i’ll have a fancy a bit of jargon like that i love it already okay yeah well there’s a lot of jargon isn’t there so um well this principle ever endel tolving he is one of the leading experts with human memory he’s credited um for making the distinction between episodic and semantic memory so semantic memory being knowledge of information and facts and data and so on and episodic memories are from episodes in our life tulvin calls episodic memories memory time travel because it’s so powerful and it’s connected to an emotion that you can often remember how you were feeling where you were and who you were with so tolving is really well known for that work but then also he’s well known for his work with encoding and retrieval although there is some researchers who who disagree with his work which i’ll i’ll touch upon and then i’ll tell you so where i stand on it but the key idea with this encoding specificity principle is that in order for a retrieval cue to be effective it should be present at the encoding stage now this is where not everybody agrees in terms of i think it’s generally agreed that if a cue is present in the encoding stage and retrieval stage it will help retrieval practice but it doesn’t necessarily have to be although it would have to be present in both so are you with me so far so if i was to i think so i’m going to need some i’m going to need some practical examples at some point following i think i’ve got made around the theory so far okay well let me also give you this example this helps as well um so what we ask students to recall is a target memory if i asked you what did you have for lunch yesterday you said oh my wife and i we went to a restaurant and i saw my friend nope that’s not what i asked craig i’m asking what did you have for lunch the target memory is what you ate and that can happen in school where we ask a question and the answer is relevant because you’re talking about where you went to a restaurant but it’s not what i’m after okay so what we need to do is we need to be mindful of that when we design retrieval cues that we’re specifically targeting the target memory and i will give you a practical example so i teach history and i teach the tudors every year and i’m really passionate about my subject and i told the class that i’d just been to the tower of london and i saw the plaque that says amberlynn was executed here and i told them all these stories and anecdotes from my trip and then when it came to the retrieval task as you can imagine they included that in their answers that miss jones was at the spot at the tower of london no i don’t want you to recall that information so it doesn’t mean that we can’t include anecdotes but we just need to be really clear about what the target memories are so if i’m teaching specifically about henry viii and he closed the monasteries i will put up a photograph of the ruins of a monastery now i know my students have to recall this later so this will become their target memory at this point i’m not going to go and start telling stories and anecdotes i’m going to purely focus my explanation on what they need to recall later so they’re encoding this information that i hope will be their target memory later now later when some time has passed and i want to find out what my students can recall about the closure of the monasteries if i put up that exact same photograph that i use in the encoding stage that tolving is saying that that will help and improve their retrieval because i’ve used the same cue so there’s a few things there that to sort of unpick that i’ve been very aware of saying you will need to remember this information and i will be quizzing you on this which when i’m talking about tower of london i need to make very clear this is just me telling a story and i’ve used that exact same cue now the reason why people allen badly don’t necessarily agree is because i could still ask my students to recall information without that photograph and they would so it’s not that we have to have it present but with younger students or students with learning difficulties and we want to help them and boost their the success they have then we can do that by providing the same or similar cues at both stages so that example helped a little it has it has it’s opened up a couple more questions okay i’m fascinated by this brilliant stuff this so i’m assuming you’re certainly not saying that we shouldn’t tell stories right because we know stories are a good way to get kids into where and so on so so where do you draw the line is it you kind of tell the story but then say okay now this is the bit i need you to remember how does that work practically yeah you’re absolutely right and stories can be great um that the fact that my students all remembered that is a testament to stories as well um and there’s other purposes of school um of course learning is a change in long-term memory but i want my students to be interested in the subject to find out more to go to the tower of london so i’m not suggesting that we we don’t tell those stories and things like that that’s part of us as a teacher and our character but what we do need to say to students is when we do a quiz i’m not going to ask you about this or when we do retrieval tasks maybe before we begin we can say okay i know i know what probably happened here but i don’t want to know about my tower of london story because we we if we especially if we tell a story and the class have reacted whether they’ve laughed or they’ve been shocked they’re going to remember that so we either say at that point okay yeah i’m happy to share this with you but when it comes to the recall this is this is not relevant or just before we do the recall a reminder and this is where younger students really struggle so another example that i had was the the braindom writes on everything you know and i did it with year eight and i did it with year 13 and my older students were really sophisticated answers and my younger students wrote henry viii was fat i had a ginger beard he had six wives i was like why are you writing this after everything i’ve taught you i said but miss you just said write down everything that we can remember that’s why they need the guidance the cues the prompts and the support initially a primary school teacher told me that they’d it with the topic of plants they said well what do you remember about year four when we when you learned about plants but they just started listing plants in their garden so they really do need these these cues to be specific and helpful to keep them on track got it got it two more questions about these cues if this is okay kate so the first and would it be sensible to assume that that like a kind of chain of events would be to use the queue during the encoding phase then use the queue again the first time we asked kids to retrieve with the ultimate aim that then perhaps further down the line we can remove the queue is that the plan that’s absolutely it so that we by the time because i say this with primary students in schools that they should use free recall but towards the end of the topic where they’ve got more knowledge more confidence they’ve done retrieval tasks and had success so they know what they can recall from that experience what type of things to write and include but yes the ultimate goal is obviously not to have any retrieval cues and that they can answer a free recall question because if you think about it if this if i was doing this with an exam class they’re not going to have that picture of the monastery on an exam paper in a final assessment so and we don’t just want students to only be able to recall information about monasteries when they see that photo so this is just that initial retrieval stage where we do want students to experience success but like scaffolding you take that away gradually perfect probably here is kate you’ve opened up every time you speak i keep thinking of more questions here because you’re saying such good stuff so i’ve got to squeeze in two more if that’s okay uh the first is do we know anything about what cues work better is it is it visual cues tend to be best in this encoding phase or do auditory cues work as well is there any insight that into that oh there’s so much because there’s there’s unintentional cues and we encounter them every day in life when we smell something or hear something and that’s something that we sort of need to be mindful of in the class and that’s why when a class can become crowded it can provide these unintentional cues whereas what the teacher needs to do is provide the intentional cues and think very carefully about this now what i do in terms of my cues is i use a variety where i will use images but i will also perhaps in a different task use keywords as well because i want my students to be able to use that terminology so i’d probably use the images first students with english as an additional language um the queues are so important and actually for students with send the queues are really important and that’s something that i’m looking into at the moment um it’s that i think that frustration that eal students feel with the treatable practice because it slows that process down because of the translation the searching for the words that’s why the prompts do help them all the students can also have prompts but the prompts could be a sentence starter or a structure or a layout so the prompts that we use will vary with the classes but there’s also something called the q overload principle which if we provide all the principles coming at you today if we provide too many cues then it just diminishes the effectiveness of retrieval practice because obviously we’ve just given them all the answers and and making the retrieval practice not that challenging but again this is something where the research won’t have the answers the teacher will the teacher will know how many cues to use and actually the teachers got a lot of power they can next time remove or reduce the amount of cues or if a class is struggling in that moment they can just increase the cues with a verbal prompt with writing something on the board with putting another picture on so we can really have control and influence of how many cues we use when we use the queues when we take the queues away there’s quite a lot actually there i am writing a chapter at the moment about retrieval cues so that’s why it’s it’s very fresh in my mind that’s amazing i promise this is the last question of these these cues okay i found this absolutely amazing stuff this i’m really interested in these unintentional cues and i’ve experienced this myself where the kids seem to really understand mathematics when it’s taught in the classroom when they’re sat next to the same person when they’re in the same room and then they go into the exam hall and okay maybe it’s the stress of the exam but also all of a sudden it’s an unfamiliar environment they don’t have those kind of familiar things around then it all goes to pieces is is this a thing and should teachers be aware of these unintentional cues and is there anything as teachers we can do to kind of break them and stop them having this potentially detrimental effect yes and the really difficult thing about this is that what might be a cue for one person might not necessarily be a cue for another and this is why it’s very challenging for teachers and man i know you’ve talked i don’t think you like displays do you is that right don’t go down there okay don’t go down that path it’ll all be kicking off there but that’s again why we they do need to be really careful uh about the displays because when they are having an environment that is different they haven’t got those cues that they’ve been relying on which is interesting because i’ve seen retrieval practice happen and the students glance at a display because the displays are acting as retrieval cues so i think at this moment i’ve still got a lot more to learn about the unintentional cues i just think that teachers need to be mindful of this especially with the learning environments um and also just the more that we ask questions and we make observations um and focus on the intentional cues the things that that really matter that will actually support them but as i said it’s so difficult and again my life now i’m learning about memory and i do i smell something and it reminds me of something from years ago and that’s that an unintentional cue that we just have in our life all the time and this is something that can actually be really distracting and we know this as well with with little things that have interrupted a class um a teacher told me about how the class could hear this the ice cream van and everything just went wild and that’s you know the sound is that an unintentional queue of of ice cream and what that tastes like so the only thing that we really can do is is be mindful of it think about our environment and then just think carefully what intentional cues am i creating that link with the encoding stage and will directly help students to remember the target memory so that’s all like linked together quite nicely
