Week 7 Assignment: Paisley Harris
Personally I feel that Retrieval Practice is the most effective for long term knowledge on
a topic. For myself, and in tutoring others, I have found that doing retrieval activities such as,
self-quizzing, practice tests and explaining a concept to another person, are the most helpful way
to solidify information in your brain. I think that it works because it actually requires you to
remember information and to store information in your long-term memory. Many times in
school, I would learn as much as possible for a test, but be unable to recall the information after
the class had finished. I think in the interest of actual learning, retrieval practice is important
because it implants the knowledge deeper in your memory/brain. It also helps you practice the
actual retrieving of information which can help you a lot in the future when trying to recall
information.
As for incorporation in the classroom, I would use a few strategies: mini-quizzes, practice
question booklets, group studying. For the mini-quizzes, they would be on the previous day’s
lesson. These would help students recall previous lessons and help me assess for understanding.
Practice booklets could be a take-home or in-class activity at the end of a unit to help students
prepare for the test/consolidate knowledge. For group-studying, I would have each student
explain a concept to their group to the best of their recollection. This would help them practice
retrieving the information. Additionally, in the lecture Dr. Fenesi talked about how this strategy
can be detrimental to learning if we reinforce incorrect information. To combat this in the
classroom, I would give my students an answer key to use. With older students, they could be
trusted to properly use the answer key and so I could assign homework booklets of practice
questions with an answer key attached. For younger kids, we could do shorter self-quizzes in
class to practice Retrievals and the answer key could be given out after they had finished.
Peer Review
I reviewed Joaquim De Sousa’s assignment this week. They submitted their work to me on
October 30th at 8:06pm.
Two components of the assignment that I found particularly interesting and insightful were:
1. Gives specific examples of how he will apply the strategy in his classroom.
2.
References the lecture material to support his argument.
One way that I can see myself applying my peer’s strategies to my own teaching is:
As I also chose spacing as the most important strategy, it is useful to me that he included
strategies to employ spacing in the classroom. I will consider his strategies in the future.