INSPIRE - The OSC Instructional Model

I’ve written about retrieval practice several times in other posts but here I just want to make it easy to lay out various alternative methods for the process of reviewing your students’ knowledge and understanding.   Before doing that, I would suggest that there are some key principles:

1. Involve everyone:  Good techniques involve all students checking their knowledge, not just a few and not just one at a time as you might do when questioning.

2. Make checking accurate and easy:  it should be possible for all students to find out what they got right and wrong, what they know well and where they have gaps. Every technique involves students testing their knowledge and then checking their work for accuracy and completeness. (This is not the same as giving students extended mark schemes to mark longer assessments which, for me goes beyond a simple retrieval practice activity)

3. Specify the knowledge:  Where appropriate, it’s better if students know the set of knowledge any retrieval will be based on, so they can study, prepare and self-check. It must be possible for students to check their own answers which has implications for the way the knowledge requirements are laid out.

4. Keep it generative: students need to explore their memory to check what they know and understand; this means removing cue-cards, prompts, scaffolds and cheat-sheets; it means closing the books and thinking for themselves.

5. Make it time efficient: The idea of each technique is that they can be used repeatedly in an efficient manner without dominating whole lessons.

6. Make it workload efficient: None of these methods involve the teacher checking the students’ answers, creating unsustainable workload.  A teacher might choose to check the occasional test but that’s no use for routine practice.