The most important strategy for your coaching institute success - Retrieval Practice

Have you ever thought about the secret of successful coaching institute?

Is it marketing? No!

Are teachers the secret?  No!

If you ask this question to the CEOs of any successful coaching institutes, they will say that its process and methodology

In Today’s blog post we will explain one of most powerful method “Retrieval Practice or Testing effect” and how this will help students to understand the concepts well and clear the exams.

Retrieval Practice:

Most of the teachers try to push the information into student’s memory by repeated teaching without assessing student’s knowledge.

Retrieval practice is a learning strategy to get the information out of the student’s memory. Teachers need to devote more time for testing the students with proper feedback.

This is also called testing effect or Test-enhanced learning. It has proven to improve the long-term memory.

How to implement Retrieval Practice in your classroom?

Tests should not be conducted immediately after the learning period. There should be a delay in conducting the tests.

Tests should be summative (Low stakes) and motivate students to learn further.

Practice Spaced Retrieval practice to improve the long-term memory of the students.

Provide Proper Feedback:  Institutes conduct regular class tests, but only a few of them evaluate the answers and provide feedback to the students. (You can consider conducting web/mobile based tests since conducting offline class tests will consuming more resource and effort from your side.)

We’ve conducted an experiment with one of our clients. 100 students of two groups were given a test on the mobile phone in the classroom.

One group of students were given the detailed explanation after the test and another group wasn’t given any explanation after the test.

One week later, both the groups were given the cued-recall test and noticed that group given with explanation performed better in the final test.

Why is Retrieval Practice beneficial for students?

Helps later retention.

Identifies gaps in knowledge. Testing helps students learn because it helps them understand what they might not know so they can allocate future study time accordingly.

Causes students to learn more from the next learning episode. When students take a test and restudy the material, they learn more than they would if they restudied without taking a test.

Improves transfer of knowledge to new contexts. Repeated testing not only increases retention of facts and concepts learned but also increases the transfer of knowledge to new contexts.

Improves metacognitive monitoring. Testing causes students to become less overconfident in the judgments of learning (even to the point of underconfidence). Because tests generally improve metacognition, educators should encourage their students to self-test during while studying.

If you are already practicing the retrieval practice, please share your experiences in the comments.