The Best Method of Review to Increase Student Retention

Teachers are under so much pressure to have their students do well on standardized tests. So, the question is how do teachers even begin to help their students actually retain information? For me, the answer was reviewing my content in a cyclical manner.

I have been teaching for over a decade and I finally saw success when I implemented spiral reviews as warm ups in my classroom. I would like to put a disclaimer up front and center. Spiral reviews were not the answer for every one of my students, but these reviews did help a majority of my students.

Let’s start at the beginning. At my first teaching job, I was handed a 1-inch binder of the “curriculum” the previous teacher used. I opened the binder to find most of the pages were blank and the ones that weren’t were merely used as scratch paper with no context of the problems. I was shocked! Straight out of college, I was completely lost on how to help my students. Let’s just say I learned a ton in my first-year teaching.

My next few years were spent learning how students learn: what methods work, where mistakes and misunderstandings happened, what is the best way to explain this process, etc. I eventually realized my students were just learning the material for the chapter assessment and then they would forget it. I was literally watching the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” playing out before me.

About this time, my administration was pushing for teachers to implement the practice of bell ringers or warm ups. Most teachers, as well as myself, would use this time to review skills needed for the current lesson. I began to create weekly papers to hand to my students that had 2 questions per day for them to complete that pertained to that day’s lesson. I would then collect these at the end of the week. This worked as a quick reminder for my students how to do the prerequisite skills needed, but severely lacked increasing long-term recall.

Our school's next initiative was to incorporate higher order thinking (HOT) questions into our lessons. So, I revised my weekly warm up questions. I had Monday to Wednesday with the basic 2 question skill review, then Thursday and Friday were adjusted to the HOT questions. These questions were still related to the skills needed for the current lesson. This change did help students think more deeply about math, but long-term retention was still an issue.

I finally decided, after 3 years, to completely overhaul my thoughts on how to use warm up questions in my classroom. I decided to spiral the questions' content. Let me clarify what I mean by spiral. I would start with basic information students should know from previous classes. For example, in algebra 1, I would start with a rectangle and ask students to divide the shape into 7 parts and shade 3 of them. I know this seems elementary, but the first few spirals were used to teach the procedure of my warm ups as well as give students confidence in math class. Below is the first spiral review I use with my class.

After 2 or 3 weeks of basic review, I added the content that we had been learning about. Again, for algebra 1, this started to include order of operations, evaluating expressions, and combining like terms. So, in the 4 - 5 weeks of school, students were reviewing concepts from previous grades as well as content from the first weeks of school. I would continually add concepts about a week after students were first introduced to the material. At the same time, I would add questions from previous chapters and grades. By the end of the first quarter, students were not only reviewing previous grades’ content, but also content of the first 3 chapters WEEKLY. Below is the 4th spiral review I use with my students in the first quarter.

I continued the process of rewriting my warm ups with previous content for the rest of the year. I kept the same structure of some days practicing only skill recall and other days incorporating HOT questions. At the end of this first year, I finally started to see increases of students' scores on standardized tests as well as students’ long-term recall. Over the years I have continually adjusted the questions to fit with my school’s curriculum, the pace of my teaching, and the rate at which my students learn. 

Here is what my students are reviewing in the 7th week of the 3rd Quarter: dividing polynomials, function notation, slope, multiplying binomials, simplifying radicals. And those concepts are just in the first 3 days of the week!

Last year, I was blessed enough to have a remediation teacher help me once a week. Her job was to work with the lowest 3 - 4 students to help them with understanding our most recent content. At the end of the school year, she told me the reason my students were seeing so much success in Algebra 1 and on the end of the year state test was because of my spiral reviews.

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