Delayed Practice

Delayed practice is as it sounds - practice of a topic is done some interval of time after the topic was covered in class. In many instances, teachers give students practice questions to work on immediately after learning a concept, and author Henri Picciotto suggests that you “lag” that practice or homework until a later time. 

In practice this involves having your students work on questions from a previous lesson (perhaps something that occured last week) instead of working on practice questions that align with the topic of the day. 

This partly works because it forces students to retrieve understanding of the concept (see retrieval practice for information about this) and research has shown that retrieving after a delay causes better retention. Below is an example of what a typical lesson structure looks like compated to one with lagged practice/homework: 

In short, to do this teachers simply do not assign homework on a given topic until they have spent several days on it in class.

This has some considerations (and benefits!):

• More students will understand the topic because they will have revisited it a couple of days before doing practice problems. Once they have a better understanding, practice problems will be more attainable for students. 

• The topic is covered over a longer period of time - which is helpful for any student that needs more exposure to understand a concept. 

• The portion of the lesson where students learn the concepts is under the control of the teacher - who is best situated to help students take their next steps. Relying on practice problems to acquire new ideas means this is often done at home or in a place where the teacher cannot be of assistance, which is rarely beneficial. 

• Some students may find this policy odd at first, but they quickly get used to it.

Henri Picciotto

Information from: https://tapintoteenminds.com/spiralling-guide (Kyle Pearce and Jon Orr) and Henri Picciotto

Back to the Retention Strategies page.