The end of the semester can be stressful for students and teachers. With midterms, diagnostics, benchmark testing, and state end-of-course testing looming, teachers have to decide how much of their limited instructional time to dedicate to preparing students for these tests that cover months of content. While no magic formula exists, we can leverage high-impact instructional strategies like retrieval practice to maximize time and better support our students. Let’s examine three examples of low-prep, high-impact activities that employ this strategy and why they work.
Why Retrieval Practice Works for Test Review
For test review to be effective, students need to be able to gauge their level of understanding of the material and their readiness to translate learning into performance. Yet, traditional review strategies such as re-reading or highlighting notes may lead students to overestimate their mastery, so they spend insufficient time studying. In contrast, activities based on retrieval practice create desirable difficulty—introducing a moderate level of challenge into learning activities, forcing the brain to work harder to process and encode the information, yielding better long-term memory. Thus, when students engage in active recall, they engage with a more challenging and active task. This effortful process provides an immediate measure of how much students remember while strengthening their memory. The time spent in class on review is more meaningful without needing extra time to create that meaning.
How to Implement Retrieval Practice Review Activities
#1: Retrieval Practice Challenge Grid
A retrieval practice challenge grid is a game-show-style board with retrieval practice prompts. Questions that refer to older topics are worth more points than those for more recent topics. While all you need is the board with questions for students to engage, consider creating an interactive game using this Canva template. This format encourages a more focused approach and creates intentional pauses so students can assess their mastery of that content before moving on to different material. This deliberate space for ongoing reflection is a powerful study tool for students.
View this sample Algebra 1 retrieval practice challenge grid for inspiration.
TIP: The interactive game format is particularly useful for students in a virtual environment because it serves as an asynchronous resource that students can work through independently and return to for repeated practice. Including links or referencing additional support they can use to extend their review as needed also allows students to use this practice as a study aid.
#2: Retrieval Practice Wheel
Randomize the retrieval practice topics students will review by using an online spinner such as Wheel of Names (reviewed here). You can spin the wheel and have all students work on the same topic, or share the link so students can spin and select their topics. Prompt students to write quiz questions to test their classmates based on what they remember about the selected topic. Encourage them to try this without using notes initially, only using resources to confirm correct answers.
TIP: You can also try this as a quick interlude in the middle of a non-review-day lesson. Each time we ask students to engage in retrieval, we are helping them strengthen their memory trace, which is the neural connection to that information.
#3: AI-Supported Brain Dump
Leverage AI by using SchoolAI (reviewed here) to create a chatbot called a Space, where students interact with a chatbot during a timed brain dump to start a class review. Read this TeachersFirst blog post for support in prompt engineering when writing the AI instructions; at a minimum, include the chatbot’s role and explicitly identify its task. Here is a sample prompt:
“This space will act as a place for students to brain dump all the information they remember about greatest common factor and least common multiple. If students stop writing, ask additional retrieval questions about how this connects to the distributive property or prompt students to create examples of problems using GCF or LCM. This brain dump will last only 2 minutes. Keep the student writing and answering questions about this topic the entire time.”
TIP: Follow up these brain dump sessions with time for student reflection. Ask students to rate how much they could remember and give them space to decide how much additional review they feel they need.
Bonus: Leveling Up with Spaced Practice
Incorporating test reviews as spaced practice rather than massed practice opportunities will increase the desirable difficulty of retrieval practice tasks and boost their instructional impact. Massed practice, or cramming, can lead students to develop an “illusion of knowing” where they feel they understand the material because it’s fresh in their short-term memory. Still, their long-term memory and understanding of the material are not improved. In contrast, learning scientists note that “ in spaced sessions, students engage in increased effort to retrieve the information, which improves the durability of learning.”
What are your ideas for incorporating retrieval practice into your cumulative review with students? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments so we can learn and grow together!