You may be interested in an Action Plan where you focus on constructing materials and instruction in a way that maximizes knowledge retention for your students (this would be especially helpful for disciplines where learning foundational terminology or concepts is central to your course outcomes). Below are resources designed to help you share these evidence-based techniques with students.

Be sure you click on the titles, as they are links out to additional information and resources.

Effective Study Techniques

The Department of Psychology at UC-San Diego has compiled an overview of research-supported study techniques that you can both share with your students and build into your course design. This resource covers spaced practice, retrieval practice, interleaved practice, self-explanation, and more. You might consider embedding one or more of the Effective Study Techniques Videos in your course for student viewing; here’s one example.

Retrieval Practice

“Retrieval Practice” is a fancy term for something you and your students may already do: test yourself without referring to notes or other sources. But there are ways to do it efficiently and effectively. Check out this interactive video (which you can also embed directly in your D2L course if you like!).

Make it Stick

Many of you are familiar with the book Make it Stick, which covers several evidence-based practices for effective learning. You can get an overview of what the book covers, along with some ready-to-use downloadable free resources, from the website Retrieval Practice: Make it Stick overview and free downloads.

You can also  go to the Make it Stick website to watch three video conversations with the authors (covering three key principles from the book). Be sure you take a look at the Media page, where multiple podcasts, videos, and publications are available to review. One or more of these might be useful to share with your students!

Pretesting

While we still have a lot to learn about this technique, researchers have been studying whether pretesting on material that has not yet been covered can actually improve memory retention when the student is taught or views the material later. There are some theories about why this appears to be the case: surprise over getting information wrong may trigger student interest, for example, in learning what the correct answer is. Other theories are that this plays into the “desirable difficulty” touted by the Make it Stick camp (see above), and that the low-stakes nature of this kind of pretesting conditions the brain for optimal learning. Read recent research about pretesting if you want to consider using it in your classes:

Seabrooke, T., Mitchell, C.J., Wills, A.J. et al. Pretesting boosts recognition, but not cued recall, of targets from unrelated word pairs. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 28, 268–273 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01810-y

Organizational Strategies

The ways students choose to organize information can play a significant role in their ability to retrieve and use it. Here are a few effective organizational methods for memory retention:

Chunking

The reason why our phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and credit card numbers have breaks between digits, chunking helps us hold information in working memory long enough to apply in more complex learning applications or string together longer memorizations (e.g., a theater performance or musical recital).

Method of loci

The method of loci is popularly known as a “Memory Palace.”