Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travellers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to the ninth episode of season four.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the Earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
Along with this acknowledgment and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of Indigenous artists, and today we are sharing the picture book Métis Christmas Mittens, written and illustrated by Leah Marie Dorion, with the Michif translation by Norman Fleury.
The holiday season has always been a very special time for Métis families. A family-oriented people, the Métis often didn't have money to buy expensive presents, but instead made practical items with much love. In this spirit, award-winning author and illustrator Leah Marie Dorion takes readers back to the Métis tradition of making mittens for loved ones. Métis Christmas Mittens is a touching ode to Métis family life, accompanied by Leah's distinctive and evocative art. Add this title to your home or classroom library today. And now on with the show.
[00:01:33] Kate Winn: Listeners, you are in for a treat with our guest here this week on Reading Road Trip. Blake Harvard is an AP Psychology teacher at a public high school in Alabama. He is in his 20th year of teaching and is very interested in reading research and applying findings from cognitive psychology in the classroom to improve instruction and learning. Blake is the author of a new book, which I will be asking him all about today. I read this and I loved it, Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning, which is available wherever you purchase books online. Blake is also the author of the Effortful Educator, which is a popular blog with over 1 million hits. Welcome to the show, Blake Harvard.
[00:02:12] Blake Harvard: Hi, thanks for having me.
[00:02:15] Kate Winn: As I mentioned, we want to talk about your book. Before we dive in, I do want to mention to listeners that they might want to have a paper, pen, pencil, something ready to write with and something to time themselves with handy. Listening to a podcast, I'm quite sure probably whatever device they're using to do that will also time for them, but we will get you to try something a little bit later so you might want to have those things handy. Let's jump right into the beginning of your book. Blake, on page four, in fact, you introduce a really clear diagram that speaks to the factors that go into learning new material. And we're going to be talking a lot about the terms on that page. So could you walk listeners through that diagram before we go any further?
[00:02:54] Blake Harvard: Yeah, certainly. On page four, right off the bat. Because the first part of my book is about memory, there are two parts. The first is about memory processing, and it's about what every human pretty much goes through to place information in long-term memory, which is, as educators, that's where we want the information to go. This is from Atkinson and Shifrin, right.
[00:03:20] Blake Harvard: Their memory processing model, I believe that was in 1968 when they kind of devised this. And it kind of works from the top and works its way down, right.
[00:03:31] Blake Harvard: If you're looking at the diagram at the top, you've got learning materials. There's got to be something to learn in the classroom, and to have any chance of learning it, you've got to sense it. Now, most of the time in a classroom, that sensation is either seeing it or hearing it. In most classrooms, right.
[00:03:50] Blake Harvard: We want to make that as easy as possible for them to sense it right off the bat. If they sense it, then it moves into what's called sensory memory, which is a very fleeting storehouse of memory. We're sensing 24 hours a day. Our body is never not sensing.
So, but, but we don't obviously remember everything that we sense. We have no chance of doing that.
So not only do we have to sense it, but the next step is we have to decide what to pay attention to, what we attend to. And that's a major aspect of my book, is attention.
I think that's probably where we lose most of our students in the classroom. We can get them to sense it, they can hear it, they can see it, but are they actually attending to it?
If they sense it and they're choosing to attend to it, then it can move into a storehouse called working memory.
Again, working memory is fleeting. There's a capacity limit for that.
And if we just leave it there in working memory, it fades away and it's forgotten. But through elaborative rehearsal, through what a lot of literature calls retrieval practice, we can move that information pretty robustly into long-term memory, which is where again, we want everything to get. We want everything to be in long-term memory so that they can essentially, you know, remember it forever, right.
[00:05:09] Blake Harvard: That would be a goal. And to be able to use it and apply it in different situations, you know, and that's kind of the, the bottom of that processing model. But you've got to start from the top. You got to sense it, you've got to attend to it, and then you've got to work with it. You've got to rehearse it in order to get it into long-term memory so it can stay there long-term for use.
[00:05:30] Kate Winn: That's perfect. Thank you. I'm going to be asking you more about attention, working memory and long-term memory. That's kind of how we've organized the questions for this interview. And for that, we'll be talking, for each one of those about things you refer to in your book as choke points and pitfalls. For each of those. What is a choke point? What is a pitfall, before we move forward?
[00:05:51] Blake Harvard: Yeah. So this is from the work of Dr. Steven Chu out of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
He did a fantastic paper on this.
And choke points are limitations on human memory. They are aspects of memory along that path that I just described that every human is bound by.
They're just limitations on human memory.
A pitfall is something that we as humans typically do that is also kind of a barrier or a hurdle to memory.
So the big difference between those two is that with a choke point, everyone's bound by those. Pitfalls, as humans, we choose to do the wrong thing and that harms our ability to remember.
[00:06:40] Kate Winn: That's great.
So I do want to warn listeners that as we talk about attention and we talk about working memory and we talk about long-term memory, I'm going to be asking Blake just for little tastes of some of the things he talks about in the book. We could probably do an hour interview on cognitive load or an hour interview on retrieval practice. But we're just going to do little bits and pieces just to kind of get you interested. And then I highly encourage you to go and get the book.
But let's start with attention. So you mentioned in the book, a choke point is that mental effort or concentration is a limited resource. So what are we talking about in terms of a limit and how can we avoid or help students avoid that cognitive overload?
[00:07:19] Blake Harvard: Yeah. So again, at different parts along this path of learning and memory, we're limited. So for instance, I'll just throw out some of those limitations. With attention, we can only consciously attend to one stimuli of information at a time. So for instance, you can either be choosing to pay attention to me right now and listen to the words that are coming out of my mouth and give that your attention, or if someone, you know, if you're on a subway and someone next to you is having a really interesting conversation, I may be speaking, but your conscious effort may be on what are they talking about, right.
[00:08:01] Blake Harvard: So that's a limitation of attention. We can only auditorily, we can only choose to consciously focus on one thing. The same thing visually. We're consciously taking in information from a visual standpoint, right. Light. Light waves. But we can only consciously attend to whatever we're focusing on. There's still that stuff going on in our peripheral vision, but that's not what we're focusing on. And if we're not focusing on it, we're much more likely to miss it and not remember it.
Other choke points along this memory path is in working memory. Our working memory can only hold so much information.
When we overload, that when we present too much information to students in a classroom, their memory kind of has to choose what am I going to pay attention to? What can I house in my working memory right now for memory? And what's kind of going to be forgotten because there's not enough room for it.
That's another really big. In the classroom, at least another really big limitation or choke point of memory.
Those are probably two of the bigger ones, again, attention and working memory that we deal with in the classroom.
[00:09:11] Kate Winn: And a choke point that you mentioned, narrow focus of attention limits learning. And then in the book, you talk about some specific attention distractors. Would you mind telling us what some of those distractors are and maybe how in our classrooms we can try to avoid those?
[00:09:25] Blake Harvard: Sure. Yeah. So there are a lot. If you're in a classroom, you know that there are a lot of attention distractors. Some are very obvious just from an environmental standpoint. Some are very obvious. You know, if students are on their Chromebook or on their laptop and they're on the wrong website or they're looking at what they're not, that's going to steal their attention, right.
[00:09:50] Blake Harvard: The intercom can be an attention stealer. If they're looking out of the windows and seeing what's going on outside, that can be an attention stealer. Right. So like from an environmental standpoint, there are attention stealers, but then also from, from how we design our instruction, there can be attention stealers, how we present information.
There are different effects of cognitive load that we know make it more difficult to, to learn. Seductive details effect is one of them. For instance, if I'm trying to explain a certain concept and to explain that concept, I tell a story from my personal life.
Now, I'm not going to say that that's just all bad, right? Because it's bringing a concept to life, and that's great. But as teachers, we got to make sure that the focus is as much on the concept that they need to learn as it is on my story. Because what sometimes happens is that students will focus on the funny story I told and not realize that it connects to this concept that we're talking about and what they really need to learn.
Redundancy effect is another limitation of attention.
So, for instance, if I'm presenting something on my television or on my board for my students to write down or whatever, if I've got words up there for them to read, I shouldn't also be talking to them because, again, there's a limitation on conscious memory here. And they can either read that information that's on the board and consciously take that in, or they can choose to focus on the words that I'm saying and not consciously taking the words that are written down.
So we've got to be, when we design instruction, we've got to be conscious and aware of those sorts of things. Like, what are we asking our students to do cognitively? Are we asking them to split their attention? Are we asking them, are we putting them environmentally in the best situation for them to pay attention? Or in how we design our classroom, are we creating hurdles to attention before we even do anything?
And as obvious as some of these things seem, I think rightly so. I mean, teachers are tasked with doing a lot of things, right.
So sometimes we get lost in the weeds and forget about some of these obvious things that impact attention. And as I very strongly believe, and as my book will attest to, if we're not focusing on attention, we could be losing them, and then nothing else really matters at all.
[00:12:17] Kate Winn: I know you mentioned classroom environment in terms of being a distractor, and I was just wondering, does research tell us anything about best practices when it comes to things like seating arrangements and decor and that sort of thing and how they may or may not distract?
[00:12:33] Blake Harvard: Yeah, certainly. So I wrote something. Gosh, I don't know, a few months ago, probably on seating arrangements, and there was a journal article, kind of a meta analysis, a small meta analysis. But it looked at, I think, eight different studies on seating arrangement and its impact on learning. And what it essentially came down to was, what's the goal of the lesson?
And what I mean by that is, is this a lesson where students are primarily taking in a lot of information, a lot of new information that they need to make sure they understand, or is the task at hand to do something with information, create something, you know, transfer of knowledge, use it to do something.
And through looking at these eight studies, and these studies were from elementary school all the way up into high school, what they noticed is that if the task is, let's take in a lot of information, let's take in information, then it's better that the seating arrangement is more in that rows sort of standard, if some would say traditional setup, right? Because it almost forces the student to face the front, no other distractions, and pay attention to me or the teacher, where that information is coming from. But if the task is to, okay, they know the information now, now let's do something with it, and you want them to work with other people, then of course, maybe the group setup is the better choice for that. So it really comes down to what, what's the task? What do you want them to do, right?
[00:14:10] Blake Harvard: And that's what should drive your seating arrangement more than just a standard.
This is what I believe is right, necessarily right.
And then here's my take on what we're putting up in our classrooms. Is it better be worth them looking at because it could be stealing their attention, right?
[00:14:31] Blake Harvard: So, and I'm not saying. What I'm not saying is take everything off your walls. It should look like blank cinder wall, you know, you know, cinder block. That's it. That's certainly not the case. Like, I understand teachers, especially at the elementary level, they want that classroom to feel a little homey, a little inviting. Of course. And what I'm saying is, is that put that stuff maybe towards the back of the classroom when the students are, their attention is drawn to the front of the classroom where the instruction is coming from right.
[00:15:01] Blake Harvard: Or again, if you have stuff up on the wall that they can see, make it about the instruction. Make it about something they need to know, right.
[00:15:10] Blake Harvard: Anything that is not paying attention to what they need to pay attention to could mean they miss it, right. Whether it be something on the wall or something going on outside.
So just, you know, when you're designing your learning environment, make sure you're aware of those things.
[00:15:29] Kate Winn: Another pitfall relating to attention: multitasking and distractions greatly reduce learning. So I always used to consider myself a multitasker until science told me, no, no, you're not.
But, you know, for example, I like to walk on my treadmill and work on my laptop, on my little treadmill desk that my dad made for me. But something I understand from your book, you know, that feels really efficient to me. But because walking is an automatic action, this might be a little bit of an exception. I don't have to think. Think about how to walk. I don't have to actually attend to that.
So maybe I am kind of getting two things done at the same time. But you can't truly watch a TV show and study at the same time. Am I getting that right?
[00:16:17] Blake Harvard: Yeah, so you're right. So when we say we can't, like, science tells us that we cannot multitask. And when I tell my students that, inevitably they say something along those same lines. Like what? I can.
I can walk and chew gum at the same time, or I can, you know, ride my bike and talk on the cell phone.
But as you've already pointed out, one of those things, at least one, maybe both, it's not requiring conscious effort, right.
[00:16:43] Blake Harvard: Like, walking is an automatic muscle memory sort of thing. Like, once you're past the age of, like, two, your brain doesn't necessarily need to think about that very much. You're not going left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and concentrating on that as you walk down the hallway.
So when we say multitasking, what we really mean is your brain can't focus on two things that it needs to focus on at the same time. And how I show this to my students is very simple. I will have them do something like, I'll have them get a pen or a pencil in both hands, like, one in the left hand, one in the right hand.
And I'll say, all right, you can multitask. Then I need you to write cat with your left hand while you're also writing dog with your right hand.
Those are two very simple tasks, right.
[00:17:29] Blake Harvard: Since you were in kindergarten, you could probably write cat and dog. Well, now you're in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade. Write cat and dog at the same time then. And obviously, because those aren't muscle memory, you know, sorts of activities for them, they have to try and focus on both of them. They can't do it, or they can't do it efficiently at all, because that's, that's an attempt at multitasking is two things that require conscious effort at the same time. You just can't do it well.
[00:17:59] Kate Winn: And an argument you might hear is, well, I'm just kind of going back and forth between the two things, and that's fine. But you make a really interesting point in your book about task switching, and you've got a cool activity on page 46, super fast. People might want to even want to try this with their students if they're trying to prove this point. But I thought it would be fun if we just get listeners to try this. So Blake, can you just ask them to do what they need to do for this activity?
[00:18:26] Blake Harvard: Absolutely. So as you mentioned, yeah, a lot of the times when people think they're multitasking, they're actually task switching, which means just kind of like really quickly going back and forth between the two tasks that require conscious effort. And unfortunately, a dangerous but common example of this is texting and driving.
You can't do that. You can't make that text and consciously focus on that while also focusing on driving. You're going back and forth between the two tasks and that's unfortunately what makes that quite dangerous.
So, yeah, so here's an experiment that a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Yana Weinstein, did with her students.
And yeah, she did it with her college-age students, but I do it with high school students. I can easily see you, seeing you could tailor this to do. This was middle school and probably even elementary school.
And it's very simple, but it really proves the task, the point of we're much better trying to get one task done and then the other than trying to do both at the same time. So here you go. So if you got that pencil ready, I'm going to ask you to do something and I want you to time it. All right? So you need to get a timer ready.
So the first thing I want you to do, all right, I want you to time yourself as you count from 1 to 26. Right? Okay. So you're going to count from 1 to 26 and time that and just hold on to that time. Alright?
[00:20:04] Blake Harvard: The next thing I want you to do is I want you to time yourself again. So you've got your first time perfect. I want you to kind of add on to that here. And I want you to recite the Alphabet from A to Z.
Okay? So you're going to start that timer up again and then you're going to say the Alphabet from A to Z and you can record that time also or you can just add it to the first one. All right, so do that.
All right, perfect. So now you've got a total time that it took you to do both of those tasks.
First, you counted from 1 to 26 and you've got a time you counted from it or you've recited the alphabet from A to Z, and you've got that time, and you can kind of add those times up, and you've got that total time to do that task.
All right, now what I'd like for you to do is I want you to alternate back and forth between letters and numbers.
So you're going to, you're going to get from A to Z and you're going to get from 1 to 26, but you're going to alternate between the alphabetic, the letters and the numbers. You're going to go A1, B2, C3. And what I want you to do is I want you to do that and I want you to time that task.
Ready? Go. All right.
[00:21:24] Blake Harvard: If you've done that, let's compare your times there.
[00:21:28] Speaker D: Right.
[00:21:29] Blake Harvard: Compare your times between how long it took you to do the numbers and then the alphabet at one total time there. And then compare your time with the alternating back and forth between the two, right.
[00:21:43] Blake Harvard: I will guarantee you that you are much faster at doing the numbers and then the letters versus when you did alternating numbers and letters. And also, I can almost, I'm almost positive 100% that you are way more accurate when you did one task and then the other, right.
[00:22:03] Blake Harvard: Once you got to like M13, N14, like, it starts to get a lot harder, right.
[00:22:09] Blake Harvard: So instead of multitasking, the point of that is, is what you're actually doing is your task switching. And when you task switch, it usually takes more time anyway than just devoting your time to doing one task and then the other. But then it's also more error prone. And something else these researchers found, which is very interesting, is that when you task switch from one to the next, there's actually slightly.
You're probably not going to remember as much. Your brain's not going to latch onto as much while you're task switching anyway. So not only is it worse for time, it's less efficient. It's also less effective overall and it's more error-prone. So don't do that. Teachers don't create situations where your students should do that, right.
[00:22:55] Blake Harvard: I'm a big proponent of keeping the classroom and the environment very simple. That doesn't necessarily mean easy, but it's simple. Like, they know the task at hand and they can do that task and that can cut down on this, some of this attempt at multitasking. And, you know, we haven't talked about this yet, but like I talk to my students about, you know, I'm talking about doing this in my classroom, but your brain in my classroom is the same brain you've got when you're studying at home.
So if having an environment with lots of stuff going on and lots of stimuli and lots of sounds is bad at school, guess what? It's also bad at home.
So, you know, you need to try to create as much as you can an environment at home that is free of distractors so that you can study properly at home, too.
[00:23:47] Kate Winn: Thank you so much for all of that, Blake. So that's what I wanted to talk about in terms of the attention, choke points and pitfalls. I mean, of course, all of these are connected. But moving on more specifically to working memory.
Working memory has a limited capacity. What is that capacity? And how can chunking help with this?
[00:24:08] Blake Harvard: Absolutely. So, yeah, in the working memory. So there are two limitations of working memory.
There is a limitation on how much stuff it can hold.
George Miller is one of a researcher from, you know, 60, 70 years ago, I believe, who said something like, it's. It's between five and nine bits of information. He called them bits of information.
But much More recently, in 2010, a researcher by the name of Cohen said it was more like four chunks of information is about all our working memory can hold.
[00:24:38] Speaker D: So that's one limitation, how much it can hold. But there's also a limitation on how long it can hold that information, right? It can't hold it forever. Maybe 15 to 20 seconds.
So, like, if I, here's how I demonstrate this with my students. And I. So I'm giving you an abbreviated version of something I do with my students.
So I tell them, hey, I'm going to read off a list of digits, right? The first time, the first digits I read off will be four. Then I'll go to five digits, six, seven, eight, and ultimately nine digits.
No, I'm sorry, ultimately ten digits.
But what I say is, is, hey, after I read off these digits, these numbers, I want you to write them down on a piece of paper, right? So I'll read off the four digits. You know, it may be whatever, 8, 6, 2, 3.
And they write down 8623. And at first they're like, man, this is easy. No big deal. And then we do five digits, and it's still pretty easy. Six digits, probably still pretty easy. But once we get to 7 and 8 and 9, they can, you can almost physically feel. Of course, it's not actually. You can't actually physically feel it, but I can see it on their faces, trying to hold all those digits in their head before I get to the end, so they can write it down. And they can, they can see the limitation of working memory right there.
And by the time we get to eight digits and certainly nine digits and especially 10 digits, I may have one student out of 30 that can hold all that in their brain, in their working memory, before it's time to write it down. A lot of the times, nobody can get to 10 digits, right? And it's just highlighting to them that your working memory is limited in capacity. And again, that's something you can very easily design to show your students in class. There's nothing complex about that. But to your point about chunking, here's where, this is the really cool thing is with chunking information, making it meaningful and making each one of those chunks mean something to the student, that almost like opens up more working memory. Let me explain how. So we do the four digits, five digits, six digits, seven, eight, nine, 10 digits, right? And we get to 10 digits, and by that point they are, they're barely trying. They're like, I know I can't do this, right? I couldn't do eight digits. I know I can't do nine. I know I can't do 10. And I say, I promise, if you'll stick with me, let's do one more 10-digit. Just one more 10-digit, and I promise you, you'll do better at this one. Okay, fine, I'll try.
So then I read off our school's telephone number, right? And I say, all right, here's the 10 digits, 2, 5, 6, 2, 1, 6, 5, 3, 1, 3.
And they write it down, and miraculously, it's still 10 digits.
But because it's chunked like that, at least half the class will remember it, right? Now, what adds to this, and think about your area code, where you may live, is that when they hear the first three digits, which for me, our area code is 256, well, their brain goes immediately when they hear that, they don't. Or their brain doesn't go 2 and 5 and 6, it just goes area code.
So now that those three digits are just one thing, and when three becomes one, now our working memory, it doesn't have more capacity, but we've got more area left, right?
And that really is a really intriguing way of showing them that by chunking information, making it meaningful, in this case, it's an area code. But when we can get similar information together, right? And build that background knowledge that way, what that does is that creates more space in working memory for other stuff to add to it, right?
Something the research tells us is that it's easier to add new information to other information that's similar to that than to start off with nothing, right? Because then you're not adding it to anything. And your working memory can be overloaded really quickly at that point.
[00:28:36] Kate Winn: Thank you. A pitfall relating to working memory. Students often prefer the least effective study strategies for long-term learning. And this may also come from the fact that their teachers probably also thought these strategies were effective and maybe taught them to use them.
You know, for example, I had read about some of this in Dan Willingham's great book Outsmart Your Brain. And of course, my daughters love whenever I read a book that has anything possibly to do with them and I sit them down and try to share, I get the eye rolls. Oh, what did you read now? But I've got this great information to share about studying because, you know, they're deep in tests and exams, they're teens.
So as teachers, some of us were taught how to present material. Some of us maybe didn't even get a good job with that. But in terms of teaching the kids how to study the material, a lot of us don't even know what research says about this or what the best practices are. So one example I'd like to talk about is the difference between rereading, which I always used to think I was studying, when I was rereading, and I think a lot of kids think, yep, read it five times, done, heading outside.
But what's the difference between that and actual retrieval?
[00:29:49] Blake Harvard: Yeah, this is a fantastic point, and I second everything you've just said, especially about teacher development, is that a lot of the times we're just repeating what we did.
But in actuality, the research shows, over a century of research shows that that rereading, right, that that's usually, that is the number one study method of most, most students is rereading or just simply highlighting important information as they reread their notes.
Now to be fair, that's better than doing nothing, right? But what I tell my students is that if you're going to spend the time studying, if you're going to sit there for 30 minutes, you might as well use the most effective method, right? You might as well not get the bang for your buck for spending that time doing it. So the problem with rereading is that mechanically your eyes can be scanning those words, right? You can be sitting, you can be reading that book, and your eyes can be scanning and reading those sentences. But while your eyes are doing that, your brain can be thinking about what's for dinner. Your brain can be thinking about, what am I going to wear to school the next day?
How often, and I know we've all done this, how often have we read a paragraph about something and then thought at the end of it, I have no idea what I just read. No, my eyes scanned the words, right? But my brain, my consciousness, is mentally somewhere else, right? So they can be separated with reading and rereading. And that's the problem. And when notes, another aspect of this is that notes are sometimes familiar to them, right? They'll remember writing them. And in their brain they're thinking, yeah, I already know this. So they're also hurrying through it because it's so familiar to them. But when things are so familiar, we stop giving it our conscious attention sooner than if it's something that needs our effort.
So re reading, not so great for studying. Okay. Retrieval of information is by far, research tells us this again, a century of it tells us that this is probably the most advantageous method for studying.
So retrieval practice is very simple. It's literally retrieving memories from long-term memory to use it.
So how can we retrieve memories?
We can answer a question, right? Answering a question is retrieval. If I give my students a question about, right now we're talking about different research methods. So if I give them a question about correlations or correlation coefficients or scatter plots, right? In order to answer that question, they've got to retrieve that information from their brain. And they can either do it or they can't do it. And it's very crystal clear to them.
They either they know it or they don't know it. There's no lying to themselves. There's no. It's a very, I say it's an honest assessment. If I'm just rereading about correlations and scatter plots, right? That, that takes so little effort and I'm not really proving anything to myself by reading that, right?
[00:33:03] Blake Harvard: And generally speaking, the more we consciously. The more effort we put into retrieving that information, the better those memories are going to be.
The less effort we have to put in, like when we reread, the less benefit we get, right? And that's obviously not good. So I am telling my students all the time, and I'm trying to get them used to this, that studying is actually answering questions.
Studying is having a discussion about a topic, right? It's, it's whatever is making you retrieve information and use it. And I tell them, the more you retrieve it and use it, the easier it is for your brain to retrieve it and use it, right?
So there's a reason that most of my classes start with a review of what we did the day before, because I want them to try to retrieve that important information 24 hours later, right? The next day in class. And if they retrieve it then, and then they retrieve it on a quiz that we do, and then they retrieve it again when they're studying for the test. It's going to be very easy for them to retrieve it on the test.
But if I just present it in class to them one day and then we never talk about it again, and then, boom, it's test day, and I expect them to be able to retrieve it, There's a high probability that their brain has forgotten that, they haven't rehearsed it and they're not going to remember it.
So I think it's part of my job as a teacher to tell them about, obviously, retrieval practice and another very important one, spaced practice, but then also to model it for them and show them, hey, this is how you do it. And it doesn't have to be like, we're not. We're not rocket surgeons in here, right? You're just using your brain. You're retrieving information, and that is the best way to study. And I know it's not fun to get things wrong. It's a lot easier emotionally to just reread your notes because you can't get that wrong, right? I can't get that wrong. I'm just rereading notes. It's not fun to get it wrong when you go over it. But I tell them, you rather try now and get it wrong on a review or get it wrong on homework than never try it and get it wrong on the test, right? It's when we're practicing, that's the time to get it wrong. And that's true of anything. So like an analogy, right? If you're learning a ballet recital performance, right. You'd rather get it wrong in the practices than get it wrong on the, on the stage during the performance, right?
[00:35:32] Blake Harvard: Learning's the same way. Get it wrong in practice. And research actually tells us that even if you try and practice to answer the question and you get it wrong, when you get that feedback of the right answer, you're more likely to get it right the next time.
So try and get it wrong now so that you don't get it wrong on the test.
[00:35:51] Kate Winn: I love that everything we're talking about is so applicable throughout the grades because, I mean, we're talking about you with AP Psychology and I'm a kindergarten teacher, so we're talking about everything in between. And I know, just speaking of retrieval practice, my most viral social media post ever was this super short little video of the students coming in my classroom door. And there was a sticky note with the latest letter and sound that we learned. And they were all just tapping it going, mmm, mmm, as they walk through the door. And so every single time they went in or out the door, they were, they were doing that retrieval practice. Right. So that's so important. You mentioned the spaced practice too, so I wanted to ask you about that next, the importance of that, and I know you've got a neat suggestion for exit tickets that connects to that as well.
[00:36:38] Blake Harvard: Yeah. So right along with retrieval practice, another, another really important strategy for learning is spaced practice. You may have also, or may also hear it be called distributed practice. So in common vernacular, in the classroom, it's kind of the opposite of cramming for a test, right.
[00:36:56] Blake Harvard: Where I got a test tomorrow. So I'm going to study for two hours tonight and I'm just going to cram it all in there right now. To be fair, again, cramming is better than not studying at all. I'd rather you cram than do nothing.
But again, if you're going to do it right, we might as well do it right.
So instead of studying for two hours the night before, how about you go out like three or four nights and only study for like 15 minutes? So if we got a test on say, Friday, how about Monday night you study for 15, Tuesday night for 15, Wednesday for 15, Thursday for 15, and believe it or not, you haven't studied for two hours.
But those smaller increments that are more spaced out, you're more likely to remember that information on Friday on the test. It's what I've kind of already mentioned. The more you retrieve a memory and the more you use it over time, the easier it is to retrieve it when you need to.
So spaced practice is just that. So when I again, when they come into class every day and they do a review, that's spacing out the practice from yesterday, when they've got a quiz to do on that material two days later, that's spacing out the practice.
So anything to again have that conversation with them and talk to them about, hey, this is way better than just the night before studying. For learning, for what we know about cognition and the brain and memory. Like, do this. And then of course, we model it. We model it in class.
One of the, one thing I wrote on my website, gosh, probably years ago now that kind of took off a little bit, is this thing that I call last lesson last week and last month. Now, obviously you can tailor this to however you want to do. It I've also seen people do like last lesson last week and last unit.
So it doesn't obviously have to be exactly a month ago.
And what it does is it helps students to practice over time.
So, you know, if I were going to do this activity tomorrow in class, what we talked about today would be the questions in last lesson, right? And then obviously what we talked about last week would be a couple of questions in last week, and then what we talked about last month would be in last month.
And what's interesting about this is that the questions that are last lesson will in a week's time become the last week questions, and then about a month from now will become the last month questions. So it's having them revisit those especially important concepts and ideas over and over and over again.
And one thing I did, which I really, when I did this in class, I did not know what the outcome was going to be. But I did a last lesson last week and last month, and then I wanted to see how well students did. What did they get right? First I asked them, so if I gave you last lesson last week and last month on the just, before we even do it, which ones do you think you're going to get? Right?
[00:39:52] Blake Harvard: Okay. And inevitably, they said they thought it'd go in order. I'll get more or less lesson questions correct, then last week and then the ones I'll do the worst on will be last month.
But and this was, I mean, it's so cool when these things, I'm a nerd about this, but when it actually when you show them in class and you can see it on their face, it's incredible.
But so we did last lesson last week and last month and overwhelmingly they did better on the last month questions. And the reason they did the best on the last month questions because again, we talked about it in class. They answered it when they were last lesson questions. They answered it when they were last week questions. They probably answered it on a test.
And now they're so they've, they've practiced retrieving that information over time, many, many, many times.
So they actually did the best on last month. And then second, they did the best on last lesson, actually, because that was kind of the freshest in their mind. It was from yesterday. And they actually did the worst on last week because they'd gone over it a couple of times, but it was still about whatever, seven days old, five days old, and that kind of that light bulb moment for them seeing, oh, wow, spacing out this practice, retrieving this information several times, like, okay, Coach Harvard is actually telling us the truth. He's not just saying this because he wants to say it. It actually works, right?
[00:41:13] Blake Harvard: And I think that is, that's obviously huge for student buy-in. And of course, the conversation after we talk about this turns to now, don't just do this in psychology class. This applies to learning in your history class. This applies to learning in your English class, science class. Like it, again, the brain you use in here is the same brain you use anywhere. So use these things everywhere because this is what the research tells us works the best overall for most students.
[00:41:41] Kate Winn: And again, you know, applicable in kindergarten. I remember you had messaged me, we talked about the book a bit. And then I remember sitting in my house reading the book and coming across that, that format for the exit tickets. And I remember just thinking about how every few weeks I reassess my students on their letter-sound knowledge. And at the beginning of our scope and sequence, they learn, you know, a spells a, m spells m, and some of those. And so usually those are the ones that they know the best. We've been, they've been retrieving them the most and the longest. And whereas I find that, you know, they don't necessarily know the one that I taught that morning or the day before, where you would think I just taught you that one today, you can't remember it or yesterday. Right. But they haven't retrieved it enough, which. And I remember messaging you and saying, oh my gosh, this applies to kindergarten too, which is interesting.
[00:42:29] Blake Harvard: Exactly.
[00:42:30] Kate Winn: Another strategy that you share is the brain book buddy strategy. Can you share what that one is?
[00:42:38] Blake Harvard: Absolutely. So one thing I noticed over time is that students are really good at giving themselves a false understanding of what they know.
So for instance, if I had my students come in and I gave them a 10 question, you know, 10 questions to answer, and I said, all right, so answer these 10 questions and they answer to the best of their ability, right.
[00:43:05] Blake Harvard: We go over them, and as we're going over them, they write in all the right answers. So maybe they didn't get them all right? But as we go over it, they write in all the right answers.
Well, I was noticing that when they leave my class, after doing that, because they've got all 10 answers, guess what? They believe I got all 10, I know all 10, right.
[00:43:23] Blake Harvard: When in reality they didn't know all 10 until we went over the answers, right.
[00:43:28] Blake Harvard: So what I started doing is this. I call it brain book buddy. And people do it in different ways, but this is just how I do it. So what I have them do is I have them go through that same assignment, 10 questions, and the first time through, they can only use their brain. And what I mean by that is they don't get any outside help. It's only what they know. If the test were today, this is what they would get, right? And let's just say they go through it using only their brain, and they get, they write the answer down for six out of ten, all right?
[00:43:59] Blake Harvard: Okay. You're at a six out of ten. Perfect. All right, highlight those that you did with just your brain.
They highlight those six now, and at least for my students, get out your notebook, right? Because we took notes on this. We talked about this. You have resources on this.
Take out your notebook and let your notebook, number one, confirm your answers on the six you already got. But then number two, let your notebook fill in the four you didn't know. All right? So they do that. They may see that one of the ones they thought they got right, they got wrong. So they highlight that. They make sure they know that. And then let's just say now, after using their notebook, they can answer nine out of ten.
So their brain knew six out of ten. Or really five if they got one wrong, their notebook confirmed that, and now they're at nine out of ten. But there's still one that they don't know. They didn't know it, their brain didn't know it, and their notebook didn't know it. So then I have them turn to a buddy or buddies, however you want to do it.
And I say, all right, confirm all your answers, and if there are any that you didn't know from your brain or your notebook, ask your buddy or get your buddy to explain it to you, right?
[00:45:09] Blake Harvard: Because obviously, that's also great for the buddy, because if the buddy is explaining to a student how to do something, then they're retrieving it themselves, too. So it's great for them.
[00:45:20] Speaker D: All right?
[00:45:21] Blake Harvard: And then so after that, they're left having all 10 answered, but they've highlighted the six that they use their brain in one colour. They've highlighted the three or four that they did using the notebook in another colour. And then if they had to use their buddy for one, they've highlighted that in a different colour. So when they look at their paper, they can see what they really knew, what their notebook knew, and then what their buddy knew but they didn't know. And then that brings in a lot of conversations for some, some metacognition here, because I'll say, all right, well, you wrote it down in your notebook.
Why didn't you know it? Right?
[00:45:59] Blake Harvard: Because sometimes they think, hey, I wrote this down. I got it.
So what are the sorts of things that you're writing down in your notebook but you still don't know? Right?
[00:46:10] Blake Harvard: Why didn't you get that down, though? Or for the one that isn't even in their notebook? I'll say, well, why didn't you get that? Did you get up and go to the bathroom? Were you absent that day when we talked about that? Like, think about it. And if you were absent, what are you going to do to correct that in the future?
[00:46:24] Blake Harvard: Take ownership of what you're doing here. And it has them to really think about their learning and has them to really kind of introspect there a little bit and consider they're learning outside of the. There were 10 questions. I got all 10 answers. Now I got them right. I know it. And it really makes them think about stuff. And at the beginning of the year when I'm first introducing it, it eats up a lot of time to work through it. But after a month or so of doing it, they know brain book buddy right off the bat. And they're going through it on their own. They'll go through with their brain on their own. They'll get through. They'll highlight, they'll take out their notebook, and then they'll sit and wait for a buddy to be finished so that they can converse with them about that. And it goes off rapid fire. And it is a, it's an incredible thing to see. Really. It's lovely to see.
But what it did is overall, the purpose of that is that so students can begin to think more intentionally about their studying and their, their learning. But also it's. It's so that they can give themselves an honest assessment and not really, like, lie to themselves about what they know.
[00:47:29] Kate Winn: In the book, you also mention a connection between retrieval practice and test anxiety.
[00:47:34] Kate Winn: Could you just tell us a little bit about that?
[00:47:37] Blake Harvard: Yeah, so rightfully so, some people experience test anxiety, right?
Obviously, this idea of, I've got a test coming up, and they get anxious about it.
Dr. Pooja Agarwal, who has herself written some fantastic stuff, she's got a book out with Ms. Patrice Bain called Powerful Teaching.
Great book.
But Dr. Pooja Agarwal did a study on this retrieval practice and test anxiety. And what that research pretty much found is that with more practice of retrieving information right before the test, that actually reduced test anxiety.
And I would reason, now this is just me. I would reason that the reason for that is that the student that experiences test anxiety, they usually experience test anxiety because they feel unprepared or they feel like they don't know the information and that kind of creates the anxiety there.
But when you've been asking yourself questions over and over again and you feel prepared, then the anxiety you may feel with taking that test or that assessment kind of lowers itself a little bit.
So what Dr. Agarwal's research kind of found is that with more retrieval practice, the anxiety actually went down for a lot of students, whereas intuitively we may think the opposite happens, but that's not the case.
[00:49:06] Kate Winn: I think that's really important for people to know. Thank you. And so, last point on working memory.
[00:49:11] Kate Winn: Before we wrap up with a question.
[00:49:13] Kate Winn: About long-term memory, you have some tips for teachers on improving our multiple choice questions. Obviously, you know, really a go-to on assessments, maybe not just because they're easy to mark, but can you just share a couple of ways that we could maybe enhance our multiple choice questions to make them a bit better?
[00:49:30] Blake Harvard: Absolutely. Yeah. So I understand some teachers kind of thing. Multiple choice questions are they're not great and when they're not great, they're not great. Right. Like everything in education, when not used correctly is bad.
But there are some certain ways that I use multiple choice questions that gets more out of it, right.
[00:49:51] Blake Harvard: I think one of the first knocks on the multiple choice question is that people can guess. And that's true.
[00:49:56] Speaker D: Right.
[00:49:57] Blake Harvard: If I've got A through D and I don't know the answer, I can guess C and that might be the right answer. And I may get it right, but only because I guessed. So again, when I'm using multiple choice questions, especially for studying, is I'll ask them other tasks. I'll have to provide them with other tasks to do. So for instance, if I give them a question and C is the right answer, it starts out with, okay, choose the right answer, boom, C.
And then I may say, all right, so I want you to change the question so that A is the right answer. So now they've got to think about A.
Think about why A isn't the right answer for that question and change the question to make A the right answer. And that's. There's some good cognition going on in there when you're doing that, right.
[00:50:43] Blake Harvard: And you could do that with A, you could do that with B, you could do that with D.
Right. Same sort of thing. That's also kind of something I do where I'll reverse engineer the multiple choice question, where I'll give them the right, I'll give them all the answers. And I want them to write a question making all of the answers right. So again, write a question making A the correct answer. Write a question making B the right answer, C the right answer, D the right answer. So they're there. It may be one question, but they're doing four or five different things with that information. And they're doing a lot of comparing and contrasting too, some really good stuff from a cognitive standpoint.
Something else I'll do, and I asked my students this today is, you know, I was talking about again, correlations in class and stuff like that.
But I asked them, I gave them a multiple choice question. I said, what do you think is the most popular wrong answer? Like people that get this wrong, what do you think they choose and why?
Okay. And again, that gets them. If they can answer that question, you know, they can pick out the right answer, but they're also thinking about what other people are thinking about. And why is this answer the most likely answer, wrong answer that people will choose? So they're also thinking about, well, why is this almost right, but it's not quite right?
Just anything to get your students thinking more with the information is great.
So there are lots of things you can do, like reverse engineering the multiple-choice question. What's the best wrong answer you can ask them to illustrate a wrong answer if that's, if that's something that, that works.
There are just so many things you can do like don't, don't throw out the multiple choice question just because they can guess.
Create stipulations where they can't guess and they're using everything right. Like imagine having a study guide or something with 10 multiple choice questions.
All of them have four possible answers, right? So that's 40. 10 times 4, that's 40. And then they've got to do something with all 40 of those answer choices. That's a lot of studying in 10 multiple choice questions. And you can get a lot of good out of that.
So, you know, I'm, I'm not teaching to the test, but I also know that in May, my students, my AP psych students have to take an exam with 75 multiple choice questions on it. So I better be practicing that. So that's what kind of led me down the road of I can't throw out the multiple choice questions. I've got to learn how to use them smarter. And that's, those are just a couple of ways that I do that.
[00:53:17] Kate Winn: Yeah. And here in Ontario, our provincial testing does involve a lot of multiple-choice questions as well for, for reading, for writing, for math. So that's definitely important. And again, I got some ideas for kindergarten from this.
[00:53:28] Kate Winn: For example, some of the science units that I use have little multiple choice assessments at the end where I would sit with the students. I mean, I could do a whole group, but I don't. So I, I pull them back and I'll, number one, it'll say, you know, for example, we did a unit on farming. And it'll say circle the picture of the animal. And so they have to pick which one is the animal and circle it or you know, circle the picture of the crop. And so I could see myself saying, okay, well why is a shovel not a crop?
And making them actually, you know, well, because it didn't grow, you know, like, just to see what more I can get out of them using some of the other choices, even in kindergarten I could see being, being really interesting. Okay. As we are approaching the end of our time, last thing I want to ask. We talked about attention. So they have attended to it. We talked about working memory. They're working with it in their working memory. We're hoping we're getting it to long term memory. But a final choke point that you mentioned is that forgetting occurs in working memory and long-term memory. What can we do to make sure that they're not forgetting when it's in long-term memory?
[00:54:30] Blake Harvard: You're exactly right. Yeah. Kind of a misnomer about long-term memory is that, well, it's in my long-term memory, it's there forever.
But that's not the case. We don't remember everything long-term. We may remember it for a while, but over time, what happens is called storage decay. And it's one of those things where if you don't use a memory, it kind of decays and can, you know, figuratively deteriorate.
The best way to combat that, just like the best way to combat deteriorating muscles, is to use them.
Now I say that, but your brain is not a muscle like your biceps are a muscle.
But think about it like that, in that the best way to keep a memory fresh is to continually keep using that memory.
So again, that just leads us right back into that retrieval practice and spacing out the practice.
Because if we don't use it over time, even if it's in long-term memory, it can still be forgotten.
So if it's something that I know is especially important because, you know, it's always on the AP exam or it's constantly a confusing concept for my students, then we're not just going to revisit it when we're preparing for that one unit test, we're going to revisit it again and again and again throughout the semester because I don't want those memories to fade away or to decay. So yeah, just because it's there in long term memory, it's not there forever. You got to keep using it or you might lose it.
[00:56:03] Kate Winn: Blake Harvard, thank you so much for being here this week on Reading Road Trip. I highly recommend all educators pick up a copy of your book, you Do Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning. It's short, it's visually appealing, it's a great, nice read and I think we can all learn a lot from it as educators. Thank you again for being here with us.
[00:56:26] Blake Harvard: Oh thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.
[00:56:33] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season four episode nine with Blake Harvard.
Now it's time for that typical end-of-the-podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and of course we welcome any social media love you. Feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is this momloves on Twitter and Facebook, katethismomloves on Instagram and Kate Winn on Blue Sky. Make sure you're following the Reading Road Trip podcast so you don't miss a single episode in this jam packed season. The finale of our season will be released next Monday morning. We couldn't bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind-the-scenes support from Brittany Haynes and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario.
I'm Kate Winn and along with my co-producer, Dr. Una Malcolm, we hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence-based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun.
