British Science Week 2023 – Connections: Building Long-Lasting Knowledge through Retrieval Practice

With British Science Week 2023 celebrating the theme of 'Connections', Murray Morrison, the founder of Tassomai, explores how this relates to practice, revision and the foundations of Tassomai.

We are constantly making connections between the ideas we encounter in our daily lives. These connections help us make sense of new information and integrate it into our existing knowledge base. However, not all connections are created equal. Some connections are fleeting, while others can last a lifetime. 

What I learned in my quest to build the ultimate learning aid was that there is a science to making better cognitive connections through retrieval practice that can lead to longer-lasting knowledge and improved learning outcomes.

My personal eureka moment

The development of my model - which became the software, Tassomai - came from making a connection in my own life and experience: while my “day-job”, teaching and tutoring meant helping students study new subjects and prepare for exams, I leant on what I had absorbed in my other work as a professional musician and an amateur athlete - that adaptive repetition, revisiting skills and using immediate feedback to improve were the key techniques that drive elite performance. My insight - and the eureka moment for me - was to connect these “physical world” techniques to learning applications.

What is retrieval practice?

Retrieval practice is a common learning technique that involves actively recalling information from memory. It has a similar effect in knowledge building to a musician’s scales practice, itself a standard warm-up even for those at the top of their fields. This process in the learning context helps to reinforce the connections between ideas, making them more durable over time. Just as the musician’s practice should not be the same every time - or random, retrieval practice can be structured in a variety of ways, including spaced, interleaved, and scaffolded practice.

What is spaced practice?

Spaced practice involves revisiting a topic of learning in multiple sessions over time, rather than cramming all of the material into one long study session. This technique has been shown to be particularly effective in building long-lasting knowledge. When we space out our learning, we give our brains time to consolidate the connections between ideas, making them more resistant to forgetting. As an analogy, the tennis player who practises only their forehand for 3 hours straight will not only find their forehand doesn’t improve much more than it would if they’d done 30 quality minutes, they’re likely also to injure themselves. Much better to make that part of your practice something you do frequently in manageable sessions and keep coming back to it.

What is interleaved practice?

Interleaved practice involves mixing up different types of material within a single study session. For example, instead of studying all of the vocabulary words for a language exam in one sitting, you might intersperse them with grammar exercises and reading comprehension questions. This technique helps to improve retention simply through making the work less monotonous, but it also forces the brain to actively switch between different types of information, developing better flexibility, making learners more adaptive and helping them to make connections between the different topics or disciplines in which they are studying. 

Again to our tennis analogy, mixing up shots in practice means you can practise for longer without getting a strain (or getting bored), you develop a better ability to adapt and improvise and you can start to apply the techniques you develop in one area to a different skill.

What is scaffolded practice?

Scaffolded practice involves gradually increasing the difficulty of the material as you progress through a learning sequence. This technique can help learners build their confidence and develop a sense of mastery over the material. As learners become more comfortable with a particular set of concepts, they are gradually challenged with more complex or nuanced ideas, allowing them to build deeper connections between the concepts over time.

The comparisons to other types of practice here are more obvious perhaps than with the other techniques, but needless to say, you don’t start playing Chopin until you’ve mastered Chopsticks.

Connections

Together, these different types of retrieval practice can help to build stronger, more durable connections between ideas. However, it’s important to note that retrieval practice is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Different learners may benefit from different types of retrieval practice, depending on their individual learning capabilities.

This is why when I built Tassomai , a key tenet was always to measure and respond - to adapt the way the program set its challenges so that each student who had an account was able to make the maximum possible progression, rather than trying to fit to an arbitrary standard. I thought about how I practised (even between different instruments I had different approaches), and how I was coached, and tried to make Tassomai be that perfect practice partner for my students.

At the heart of the design, however, was always to make the retrieval practice aspect something that kept students engaged, moving forward and building connections - ultimately to create really solid bases of knowledge that would act as a platform for them to reach their potentials and truly excel.

Since I built Tassomai - several years in the process before we launched v1 ten years ago - we’ve seen the same ideas around the science of learning gain far greater traction in the education space: retrieval practice and the associated techniques are now embedded into all schools’ CPD. Not our doing, of course, but it has been great to see how we have all aligned in this same pursuit. We now serve hundreds of schools and many hundreds of thousands of students have taken part in our courses. Each week over 12 million retrieval practice questions are answered on Tassomai in England alone… with each one making a new connection that just might change a life.

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