2 Smart Test Prep Strategies You Need to Use with Your Students [Episode 183]

Heidi  0:00

This is episode 183 of Teacher Approved.

 

Heidi  0:07

You’re listening to Teacher Approved, the podcast helping educators elevate what matters and simplify the rest. I’m Heidi.

 

Emily  0:14

And I’m Emily. We’re the creators behind Second Story Window, where we give research based and teacher approved strategies that make teaching less stressful and more effective. You can check out the show notes and resources from each episode at secondstorywindow.net.

 

Heidi  0:29

We’re so glad you’re tuning in today. Let’s get to the show.

 

Emily  0:37

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re sharing two smart test prep strategies that you should try with your class, and sharing a teacher approved tip for maximizing your learning tools.

 

Heidi  0:51

Let’s start the episode with a Try It Tomorrow, where we share a quick idea that you can try in your classroom tomorrow. Emily, what is our try it tomorrow prompt for this week?

 

Emily  1:01

This week’s try it tomorrow is to have fun with your praise. When you’re checking for understanding during a lesson, try ending with something like give yourself a pat on the back if you got that right. And then once students are used to that one, you can add a little surprise and delight by mixing it up. Give yourself a pat on the elbow if you knew the answer, or give yourself a pat on the nose if you tried your best. It’s a simple way to bring a little fun to the day.

 

Heidi  1:28

I also liked to add in a bonus with something like, give yourself a pat on the nose if you got that right, and give yourself a pat on the ankle because I love you, or because you’re a cutie pie. And then, of course, you know, you’ll get a mix of giggles and groans, but for that three second investment of time, you really get a big payoff in student engagement.

 

Emily  1:48

I love that. If you like this idea or anything else we share here on the podcast, would you take a second and give us a five star rating? Ratings and reviews are one way new listeners find us. So every rating and review is a huge help to us.

 

Heidi  2:03

Today, we are continuing our three week series on Test Prep. Yay. Everyone’s favorite. As a reminder, our goal with the series is to share strategies that will help students remember what they learn and be able to recall it in the future when it’s needed.

 

Emily  2:18

And sure they’ll need to do that for the test. But even more importantly, we want them to be able to access this knowledge they’ve learned anytime they need to.

 

Heidi  2:28

In last week’s episode, we shared our number one favorite strategy for smart test prep, which is retrieval practice. If you haven’t listened to that episode, go back and check it out, because retrieval practice is an essential tool that you will want to use frequently.

 

Emily  2:44

Retrieval practice is any activity or exercise that requires students to recall information from their memories. And what’s so amazing about retrieval practice is that it strengthens the neuronal pathways in your brain that lead from long term memory to working memory. So what that means is that every time your students have to work to recall information from their memory, it becomes easier and easier for them to recall it when they need it.

 

Heidi  3:11

This week, we’ve got two more smart test prep strategies that will enhance your retrieval practice. The first strategy is spacing. Spacing means doing multiple sessions of retrieval practice, but it’s just spaced out over time.

 

Emily  3:25

Yes, spacing is basically the opposite of cramming, and studies show that it really does make a difference for long term retention of information. Cramming might result in higher scores on a test the next day, but spaced practice results in higher test scores over time, meaning the information from spacing is retained much more effectively.

 

Heidi  3:48

And we don’t want our students to learn new information and skills just for this week. I think we’ve all had that problem in the past. We want them to keep that new knowledge forever. Sure, we hope they’re going to do well on the end of year test, but this is so much bigger than that.

 

Emily  4:02

And luckily, spaced learning doesn’t have to take more time or require working harder. It just means that the time spent learning is spread out over a longer period of time, and the students will then remember things for longer. Sounds like the perfect example of work smarter, not harder, right?

 

Heidi  4:20

Well, one way to incorporate spacing is just recalling a previous time that something was learned and connecting it to today’s lesson. Remember last month when we talked about landforms? Think about that for a minute. Now, turn and talk about it with your neighbor. How do you think landforms relate to today’s lesson about waterways?

 

Emily  4:38

The book Powerful Teaching that we mentioned last week likes to call this idea Blast from the Past, and I think that is a helpful name to remember it. Just giving your students an opportunity to remember a previous lesson is a quick and powerful way to incorporate spacing into your lessons frequently, and with a cute name like that, you’ll remember to do it more often, and when you say it, the kids will know what you’re talking about. Like it’s just a perfect name for it.

 

Heidi  5:04

Another way to incorporate spacing is with low stakes or no stakes quizzes. We mentioned the strategy last week as a way to add more retrieval practice, but a simple way to get extra bang for your buck with quizzes is to make use of spacing.

 

Emily  5:19

Right, let’s say you want to come up with five questions for your quiz. Include a question based on yesterday’s lesson and another question from a lesson last week. Keep going back, and you can pull questions from everything you’ve already covered.

 

Heidi  5:32

By making your students dig into their memories for answers. You’re giving their little minds an extra workout. That way, they are getting the learning the learning benefits of spacing, as well as the benefits of retrieval practice.

 

Emily  5:45

And keep in mind that students aren’t naturally drawn to space learning. It can feel less productive because there is some forgetting between learning sessions, but weirdly, we want them to forget. The forgetting is what creates the opportunity for retrieval practice, and so you can remind your students that it feels hard because they have started to forget, but that’s a good thing.

 

Heidi  6:08

When you are learning new content, it’s best to keep learning sessions close together. Then once students have some familiarity with the material, you can wait a few days after a lesson and then start your first space learning practice, and after that, you can space it out even farther.

 

Emily  6:24

Now don’t overthink this strategy. You don’t need an exact schedule of reviewing content every two days and then every 10 days and then every 60 days. Truly, any spacing between learning the material and having to retrieve the material is going to boost kids’ learning.

 

Heidi  6:39

Now the second smart test prep strategy that will enhance your retrieval practice is interleaving. It sounds complicated, I promise it’s not. Interleaving, just means mixing related but distinct material during study or practice. Can you explain this, Emily?

 

Emily  6:55

Yes. So for example, instead of practicing only multiplication problems over and over and over, a student might solve a mix of multiplication, division and addition problems in one session. And this method helps the brain make connections between different concepts, and it improves long term understanding. And interleaving can be done with any concept, including memorization, sports, vocabulary, history. It’s not just for math practice.

 

Heidi  7:23

So when college baseball players were asked to practice hitting three types of pitches, 45 pitches were either blocked by tight meaning they had 15 fastballs in a row, 15 curve balls in a row, or 15 change ups, or the pitches were interleaved. So they went fastball, curveball change up, and then mixed all of that up. When the practice was blocked, when they all had that same type of pitch in a row, the batter only had to change their hitting strategy every 15 pitches, but then, with the interleave practice, the batter had to retrieve batting strategy for each pitch. That interleaved practice led to superior hitting on a final test, where they had to hit pitches of each type without knowing the type in advance, just like they would have to in a real game.

 

Emily  8:09

And what’s so cool about interleaving is that research shows that just rearranging the order of questions without changing the number or type of questions can increase an even double learning. So here’s another example from a research study. 24 fourth graders were given a tutorial on how to calculate the number of faces, edges, corners and angles in a prism. Half the children practiced with problems where they had eight problems about calculating prism faces and then eight problems about calculating prism edges, etc. The other half of the children practiced the same problems, but the problem types were interleaved. They might start with an edges question, then the angles question, then faces and so on. The group that had all the same question types grouped together, did score higher when tested immediately after practice, but when tested 24 hours later, the interleaved practice group scored almost twice as high as the blocked practice group. That blows my mind.

 

Heidi  9:07

These results are actually so cool and important for a bunch of reasons. First, they show that interleaving works. Second, they show that the interleaving effect is long term. It can last up to several months, and there’s less forgetting over time. Even with extra study time, interleave students still did better on tests than students who had similar questions all blocked together.

 

Emily  9:30

So how can we apply this to our classrooms? Let’s imagine a typical grammar practice page where students are asked to find the adjective in each sentence. They know what they’re being asked to do, and they can kind of just cruise through the page, perhaps without even needing to think very much about it.

 

Heidi  9:46

If we want students to be able to identify adjectives and understand when to use them, a more effective practice would require students to identify two different parts of speech, for example, maybe adjectives and adverbs, and then explain how they know which word is an adjective and which one is an adverb.

 

Emily  10:04

Either way, the students are doing a single practice page, but having to think about and compare two options makes the learning go much deeper into those little brains.

 

Heidi  10:13

Interleaving, as you probably can guess, works really well in math too. When practice problems are arranged so that the same strategy can’t be used to solve consecutive problems, students have to think about the nature of the problem. They have to learn not only how to do each procedure, but recognize when to use it, just as they’re going to have to do for tests and in their real life, for the rest of their life.

 

Emily  10:38

Interleaving is most effective when it’s used to mix up similar topics. This encourages students to discriminate between those subtle differences in similar ideas, concepts and problems. Interleaving unrelated materials is less meaningful, so combining anatomy and German questions is probably not going to be that helpful.

 

Heidi  10:59

I guess, unless you’re studying to be a German doctor, maybe?

 

Emily  11:02

Yes, in that case, it’s probably good.

 

Heidi  11:06

Now, if students are just barely learning about adjectives or anatomy, interleaving problems can create some frustration. We all need a certain amount of repetitive practice to become familiar with any new skill. But once students have some competence with the topic, interleaving helps students learn to transfer those skills to new contexts, which is exactly what we want to have happen.

 

Emily  11:30

So retrieval, practice based, practice, interleaving. It sounds like we just gave you a lot of work to add into your day, right? But it doesn’t have to be. Because guess what technique can incorporate them all. It’s our favorite, spiral review, of course.

 

Heidi  11:46

So spiral review is just another term for spaced retrieval practice. With spiral review, students are asked to recall material that they have learned from the past. That’s exactly what spaced retrieval practice is. Plus, if you incorporate multiple types of questions into your spiral review you’re getting the benefits of interleaving too.

 

Emily  12:07

Oh yeah. In our spiral review products, we include several question types on a single page to make sure students are getting the boosts that come from spiral review spacing and interleaving.

 

Heidi  12:19

We call our spiral review materials, morning work, because that’s how we started our days. But you can do spiral review at any point of the day, and you could also use our quote morning work at any point in the day. The key is, however, that you actually have to do it.

 

Emily  12:35

Maybe you can use spiral review to start a lesson or end a lesson, or you can make spiral review part of a transition back into your classroom. It’s so handy to have a regular task after recess or after planning time so students can get started on it as soon as they come back into the room. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter when. Just schedule a time that works for you and make sure it happens every day. Protect that time.

 

Heidi  12:59

This is especially important as we head into testing season. It might feel overwhelming to add one more thing to an already packed day, but I promise that there really isn’t a more valuable way to use those 10 minutes than using it for retrieval practice, especially with spaced and interleaved content.

 

Emily  13:18

If that sounds complicated, just remember your goal is to choose content that students haven’t seen in a while and mix up similar but related concepts. So students have to really think about the nature of the problem.

 

Heidi  13:29

These test prep strategies are much easier than they seem. The more you use them, the easier it will be to think this way when you’re planning.

 

Emily  13:37

Remember, the more retrieval practice opportunities, the better, and including spacing and interleaving is key to maximizing student learning for testing season and beyond. If you want some help adding these tools to your classroom, make sure you check out our morning work spiral review pages. We have sets for first through fifth grade.

 

Heidi  13:56

We would love to hear how you apply these strategies in your classroom. Come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

 

Emily  14:04

Now let’s talk about this week’s Teacher Approved Tip. Each week we leave you with a small, actionable tip to elevate what matters and simplify the rest. This week’s teacher approved tip is have a BBQ. Tell us about this, Heidi.

 

Heidi  14:18

Well, this sounds like it’s gonna be messy, but I promise it’s not. This is an idea from the book that we mentioned earlier called Powerful Teaching. And it’s by Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain, and there’s a link to it in the show notes if you wanna check it out. So a BBQ is a big basket quiz or a big bin quiz. I guess you could do big box quiz. This is a quiz that contains questions from today’s lessons and this week’s lessons, but also previous weeks, right? So hello, we’re getting all that spacing in. And this can be done really simply by adding a question to the basket each day, and then you just pull out five random questions to answer. Each day, maybe at the start of your lesson or the end of your lesson.

 

Emily  15:02

In order to keep this as effective as possible, you might want to have separate baskets for math topics and language topics. And then whenever you do your five questions, just make sure to leave time to discuss the answers. If you remember from last week, correcting misconceptions right away is really important so that that misconception doesn’t stick.

 

Heidi  15:22

And then after you use a question, you can just put it back in the basket and pick another random five questions the next day. And the nice thing about having all of your math questions in one basket and all your language arts questions in a basket is you’re getting that interleaving by mixing up similar topics. So win, win, all over the place for what five minutes of effort?

 

Emily  15:39

Yes, and even if you don’t get that done every day, all of the times that you do do it will be awesome. It’s just the more you can get, the better. And just do it as much as you can.

 

Heidi  15:50

Maybe cut the strips ahead of time. I could see that being my downfall, not having the paper cut out.

 

Heidi  15:57

Alright. To wrap up the show, we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

 

Emily  16:02

I’m giving extra credit to the book Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten. And I have barely seen any episodes of the Barefoot Contessa, but I love a good memoir, so I just thought this would be fun, and it did not disappoint. I highly recommend the audiobook, so you can hear it in her voice. Ina has had such an interesting life, and I love hearing how she creatively solved the challenges that came along in her life so that she could see some really unique opportunities that seemed like out of reach, but she found ways that she could have those opportunities. And she’s had such an interesting life. So it really almost makes me want to start cooking more.

 

Heidi  16:41

Almost.

 

Emily  16:42

Almost. But I did go on my DVR and record some Ina Garten Show. So it does make me at least want to watch some more cooking. We’ll see if eventually that leads to doing more cooking. What’s getting your extra credit, Heidi?

 

Heidi  16:57

Well, I want to co sign the book because I also just listened to it.

 

Speaker 1  17:02

We didn’t even know that we were both listening to it at the same time it was.

 

Heidi  17:06

It’s very interesting. I don’t even know if I’ve seen the Barefoot Contessa. I knew who she was, so I must have seen some of it.

 

Emily  17:12

Yeah, I knew who she was. I just like, I don’t think I ever watched an episode.

 

Heidi  17:12

Yeah, I really want to go back. I really want to see the Mel Brooks episode now.

 

Emily  17:19

Yes. I’m really interested in that, in that more recent show she was talking about, where it was sort of more like an interview show too. Yeah, I want to watch those.

 

Heidi  17:28

All good things. But I’m also giving my extra credit to something much, much less glamorous than the Barefoot Contessa. I’m giving extra credit to Fiber Well sugar free gummies.

 

Emily  17:39

Oh, wow, getting wild and crazy.

 

Heidi  17:43

It’s just been such a handy find. I thought I’d pass it on. If you also have a doctor who has told you you need more fiber, these are an easy way to do it. Two little gummies have five grams of fiber. They’re pretty tasty, not too sweet. So I thought they’re a win. And my motto, of course, is keep your colon happy so, I’m known for that.

 

Emily  18:05

Get that tattooed.

 

Heidi  18:08

Stitch it on a pillow.

 

Emily  18:09

There we go.

 

Heidi  18:11

That is it for today’s episode. Use the smart test prep strategies of spacing and interleaving to make your retrieval practice as effective as it can be, and don’t forget our teacher approved tip for making a big basket quiz.

 

Heidi  18:27

We hope you enjoyed this episode of teacher approved. I’m Heidi.

 

Emily  18:31

And I’m Emily. Thank you for listening. Be sure to follow or subscribe in your podcast app so that you never miss an episode.

 

Heidi  18:37

You can connect with us and other teachers in the teacher approved Facebook group. We’ll see you here next week. Bye, for now.

 

Emily  18:44

Bye.