Summer is a time for family, reflection, and ... professional development. This week, I had the opportunity to meet with the other AP Psychology teacher at my school, Mindy Garis. During our discussion, we identified potential areas of improvement in our classes. One aspect that we kept circling back to was our weekly reading assignments. My students have become more and more resistant to completing the assignments and I have not seen any data that suggesting that they are having a long-term, positive impact on my students' learning. This is a problem.
My Current Practice (aka Reading Notes are the Bane of My Existence)
I'll be honest, I am a HUGE fan of Cornell notes. I was introduced to them at an AVID conference years ago and I was all in (or "pig in" for you "Grey's Anatomy" fans or District 155 folks). I love that they provide opportunities for spacing, dual coding and summarizing. The students have to do something with the notes! The curse of being an AP teacher is the sheer volume of material that I need to teach every year. I rely on the reading assignments to cover the content that I do not have time to cover in class. However, my data was showing that the reading assignments were not very effective. Even when a student took detailed notes from the book, they did not consistently demonstrate their understanding of the material nor were they able to transfer the knowledge to in class activities and assessments. So I was left with the question, what is a research-based strategy that I can utilize to make my reading assignments more effective?
This summer my self-imposed professional development revolves around the principles of cognitive psychology. I am obsessed with a newly released book called Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. If you read one PD book this summer, this should be it. I have post-it note after post-it note filled with research-based strategies that are easily implemented and proven to help my students learn better. One of my main takeaways from the book thus far is that I need to spend less time putting information into my kids head, and spend more time getting it out.
According to the authors,
"We typically focus on getting information into students' heads. On the contrary, one of the most robust findings from cognitive science research is the importance of getting information out of students' heads. Based on a century of research, in order to transform learning we must focus on getting information out - a strategy called retrieval practice." (Agarwal & Bain, 2019, p. 28)
I have been teaching for 17 years, how did I not know this?! The idea that I could teach less, and the students could learn more was truly a paradigm shift.
New, Improved and Research-Based Note Taking Solution
Now I had a potential solution to my problem; retrieval practice. How could I change my weekly reading assignment to harness the power of retrieval practice?
To change my reading assignment into a retrieval assignment,
1. I identified the content that was covered explicitly in class. My readings are assigned concurrently with my taught lessons. For example, if we are learning about neural transmission one week, then the pages covering neural transmission are assigned that week. Here's what my old reading assignment looked like.
2. I incorporated retrieval practice at the beginning of the assignment. This portion of the assignment is CLOSED book (which I guess is kind of ironic for a reading assignment) & covers the portion of the reading that was covered in our class lecture. The students are given a retrieval strategy, like a Brain Dump, which requires them to demonstrate their mastery of the topic. If you are looking for some strategies, check out
www.retrievalpractice.org.
If the student knows the information, they can then skip this portion of the reading. The benefit of this approach is that it requires the students to retrieve what they know (with the book closed) and asks them to process their learning (metacognition). If the students did not know the information, they are asked to read the pages in the book and revise their notes. I require them to make their revisions in a different color pen (shout out to Blake Harvard @effortfuleduktr for the inspiration). This ensures that the students can differentiate between what they knew and what they had to review. Once the assignment is turned in, I provide elaborative feedback on the notes.
3. The second section of the reading assignment covers new information that either will not be covered explicitly in class or will be covered at a future date. I like to provide the students with note-taking options for this section. Some possibilities are Cornell notes, a synthesis activity, a definition and application table, a practice free-response or guided questions. In the following sample assignment, I asked the students to choose between Cornell notes and a Venn diagram.
4. Lastly, I add the topics from the second section (or newly learned information) into my retrieval practice activities for the next week. A new strategy that I learned about in Powerful Teaching was the Big Basket Quiz. A Big Basket Quiz is, quite literally, a big basket full of questions from which a few (3-5) are pulled at random. These could be questions from prior lessons or previous assessments. This would be a perfect way for the students to assess their own learning and track their progress. These "quizzes" are point-less; the focus is on the growth of student knowledge.
Here is what the finished assignment looks like: Retrieval Practice Reading Notes: 3A pp 51-63. (This is designed for the Myers' Psychology for AP book 1st ed). It covers topics 2.D - 2.H in the new course description.
I am interested in hearing your thoughts on this post and the assignment. Have you struggled getting your students to complete their reading assignments? What strategies did you use? Do you have ideas about how I can make my assignment better? I'd LOVE to hear them!
I would like to thank some fellow teachers for helping me flesh out this idea: Mindy Garis @mgarispsych and Trevor Fritz @MrFritz8. Learning is rarely a solitary journey and I am lucky to be surrounded by educators that both challenge and support me.
Thanks,
Cori
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