By R. Burnett, teacher of Geography
As part of the lesson study CPD, I did research
about knowledge and recall. I was particularly interested in why students struggle to remember and
utilise their case studies in the exam. Part of this is down to lack of
revision, but I wanted to research what we could do in the Geography department
to help students remembering these factual case studies.
From my research, I
selected three techniques, which I would like to use over the next term to
help my students to remember the case studies.
The first technique is called "practice testing": I
plan to test my students regularly over the course of the term. The research
suggests that regular practice test helps students to store the knowledge in
their long term memory.
The second technique is highlighting/underlining the
case studies. Over the next term, I am going to get students to highlight and
underline important points from the case studies, for example how many people
died in the Boxing Day Tsunami etc. The research suggests that action of
highlighting or underlining important points helps students to remember them better and that they make the key facts stand out of the text.
And finally the third technique is "distributed
practice", which consists in revisiting a topic several times over a long period of time.
I plan to revisit certain case studies that our students are
expected to know. The research also suggests that, to master or truly learn something,
students need to revisit and be given sufficient time to practise and learn the
piece of information over time.
To conclude, these three techniques will hopefully encourage
students to remember and use the important points from their case studies in
their mock exams in November.
Comments
Post a Comment