Retrieval practice beats re-reading, and it isn't close

Two years ago I cut roughly forty per cent of the slides from our systems physiology course and replaced them with questions. Here is what happened.

The change

Each fifty-minute session now opens with three questions drawn from the previous session, answered on paper, ungraded. No preamble, no recap slide.

• Students retrieve rather than recognise.
• I get an immediate read on what did not land.
• The cost is about six minutes.

The result

End-of-semester scores on the cardiovascular block rose, but the more interesting number was retention: on a delayed test twelve weeks later, the retrieval cohort held onto substantially more than the cohort that got the recap slides.

The effect is not subtle, and it is not new. It has been in the education literature for decades. What is new is that we finally stopped ignoring it.

If you teach a large course and change one thing this year, change this.