Teach For Long Term Learning by Retrieving from Students’ Long Term Memory

A pupil who understood something perfectly in October can stare blankly at the same question in May. Getting it into long-term memory was only half the job, and we forget a surprising amount within a day.

The other half is getting it back out. Spaced practice brings pupils back to material just as they're about to forget it. Interleaving mixes topics up, so they have to work out which idea fits. Low-stakes quizzes become a way of learning rather than a test. Each time you come back to something, pupils do something new with it: teach it, draw it, quiz a friend.

Most useful of all, you can teach pupils to do this for themselves. Self-quizzing, elaboration and reflection work far better than rereading notes, and pupils who know that revise better.