How students can train their memory to retrieve facts fast and accurately
Our guest blogger is Kit Betts-Masters, Director of Learning Science at Abbeyfield School in Northampton, and the science teacher behind “Gorilla Physics”, a YouTube channel dedicated to helping students get the top grade in their exams. Kit has used Tassomai in his school since 2017 and is a big fan of the program so it made sense for us to support his channel and to invite him to share some tips for exam success.
Educators know the key ingredient for exam success is an excellent working memory.
The task of memorising everything for every one of their exams can seem pretty daunting for students. But cognitive science has come to the rescue and we now know what the most effective way to train the memory is!
Especially as students go from lesson to lesson mastering new skills at an incredibly high rate; five hours every day, learning brand new things! It's amazing what students can do after just a few minutes of instruction.
But it must be so frustrating for them when they get into their exams and they just can't remember how to solve that problem that they could do easily in the classroom when they learned it.
To answer the questions in exams students need to be able to bring factual information back into their working memory and use it to solve problems. And we know that working memory is pretty limited, we've only got room for between about 4 and 7 facts in our mind at any one time!
But we know also that the long-term memory seems to have no limit to how much it can store, and retrieval practice is the best way to get information stored permanently in that long-term memory
Watch the latest Gorilla Physics video, supported by Tassomai.
Learning means coding new information, accurately, into the long-term memory. Tassomai is built to use the best technique to do this: retrieval practice.
In my latest video I talk about the benefits of retrieval practice. Retrieval practice is effectively memorising something by repeatedly quizzing yourself on it.
You see every single time you try to retrieve a fact, even if you don't get it right the first time, you code that bit of information deeper and deeper into your long term memory.
And once you've mastered that piece of information, you'll never forget it. Importantly you'll be able to effortlessly and accurately retrieve it under pressure in the exam.
Tassomai lets students fit retrieval practice into their day. It gamifies the learning, so that students get rewarded for the best practice; spaced, interleaved, repeated, retrieval practice.
Tassomai helps students to get into the habit of self-quizzing, and helps them to know their own strengths and weaknesses.
All this makes Tassomai a powerful learning tool, making use of all the recommended effective revision techniques from the best evidence that we have.
Kit Betts-Masters
@gorillaphysics on Twitter