A child or young person’s education should help their mind, body and talents be the best they can.
Article 29 of the UNCRC
In recent years, across educational fields of every shape and size in England, there has been an eruption of engaging conversations discussing and debating the issue of cognitive science and our classrooms. We’ve seen of late an emergence from the profession to publicise ‘best practice’, taking form in a multitude of ways, from ResearchEDs, to large scale government funded studies and reviews. Whilst the EEF (2021) [GR1] has provided us with evidence reviews, Agarwal and Bain (2019) [GR2] have continued to contribute to the discourse on the ‘cognitive sciences’, insisting it is what underpins powerful teaching. Recently, however, I decided, on a much smaller scale, to see what I could add to the debate, drawing upon my classroom and children to find out a little more.
If I was asked to pin down what triggered me to open, what would become a cognitive science can ‘of worms’, it would be something I subtly noticed about not only where the conversations were coming from but from whom. I was often struggling to locate studies situated specifically inside primary classrooms, or even find evidence where children had been invited to contribute their ‘experiences’ of it in action to the narrative. I set out to construct a study to change this, choosing to specifically look into retrieval practice, a named cognitive science strategy.[GR3] Retrieval practice, I discovered, is described as having many benefits, not just in terms of its low cost implementation (forming often as low-stakes quizzing) but most importantly being depicted as ‘a promising approach that teachers should consider’[GR4] . As a humble teacher, who was I to argue with its reputation, especially as it has even been heralded as a teaching and learning ‘power tool’[GR5] . Furthermore, a consequence of being at the helm of a diverse classroom setting, retrieval practice seemed a potential best fit cognitive science intervention to interrogate, due to how it is described continuously across the discourse as for being low stakes and even inclusive. More importantly, I wanted to focus specifically on not only its impact, but children’s experiences of it in action and decided I was going to place a specific focus on children with Special Educational Needs (SEN). I invited them to become my co-researchers, as I sketched out my initial action research cycle.
Standing on the other side of my study, I am not sure I was ready for what I was to discover. I set out carefully constructing my retrieval practice intervention design, to be situated, diligently, within the previous discourse I had delved into. I hung tight onto this notion of ‘low stakes’ ensuring that what I perceived to be low stakes, underpinned the intervention I was implementing as part of my first research cycle. However, very quickly, I became troubled by the children’s tears and cries of ‘I can’t’. Throughout this initial retrieval practice intervention, it was evident within my carefully crafted and triangulated data collection methods that these children were not experiencing this as a ‘low stakes’ quiz at all, far from it in-fact. And, when I opened up avenues for conversations about what they had experienced, the words: ‘test’, ‘hard’, ‘failed’ dominated their dialogues. Not one of my children suggested that they had perceived any benefit to this particular retrieval practice structure, and they defied any notion that it was helping them ‘remember’ anything. In fact, one even insisted it made their brain ‘forget’ things.
It was not all doom and gloom, and I certainly did not slam my classroom door in the face of retrieval practice. The project continued, and I used the following research cycles, driven by the children’s opinions and voices to co-construct other structures which resonated with a retrieval practice intervention design. The children put forward their wish lists, drawn from how they learn best, and the intervention began taking other forms, from games, to even becoming is a co-dependent cognitive experience. My role was to simply keep an oversight and ensure what was being presented was still structured to evoke previously taught and practised knowledge and thus support their retention.
The results were positive and for those non-believers in qualitative research studies, I even managed to draw upon some post assessment data to prove it. In my opinion, the greatest result was the impact it had on my learning. It was a lesson that exposed a ‘complication’ within the vast realm of the cognitive sciences and their application within our classrooms, especially when they are simply done to and not with our youngest, yet most important stake holders. It reaffirmed how important it is that we check in with our children and make space for them to share what they experience teaching and learning to really feel like. And finally, it proved why yet again, why teachers, in my opinion, are particularly well-situated to be our future researchers.
Post originally published by the Nottingham Institute of Education