Activating Prior Knowledge and Retrieval Practice

Activating prior knowledge and retrieval practice are important in teaching and learning. It's not just about transferring knowledge from teacher to student, but also retrieving knowledge from students' long-term memory. Research shows that retrieval practice helps students learn. Activating prior knowledge is crucial for new learning to stick. One way to do this is through a brain dump, where students write down everything they know about a topic before the lesson. New learning needs to connect with existing knowledge to be stored in long-term memory. Activating prior knowledge and retrieval practice. When we consider how children learn and therefore how we teach, we often consider skills such as explaining, modelling and demonstrating. All of these elements are primarily targeted towards the transfer of knowledge from the expert, the teacher, to the novice, the student, and adding knowledge to students' long-term memories. However, we need to ensure that the same focus and planning is given to the transfer of knowledge back out of our students' long-term memory, retrieval, and realising that this is just as important as the initial learning itself. Consistent research has shown that retrieval practice can benefit pupils' learning. The evidence that underpins retrieval practice highlights its potential to support pupil learning. Activating prior knowledge is a fundamental factor in the success of new learning. For learning to take place and stick, it has to be constructed upon existing knowledge within the long-term memory. One way of doing this is the brain dump, getting children to write down everything they can remember about a topic before the lesson begins. This is a great way to see what children know and can be used to base new learnings on. If new learning has nothing to connect with, it will not be stored in the long-term memory, no matter how effective a teacher's initial instruction is. New learning equals new connections.