In December 2021, in an article for secondary education magazine SecEd, I made the case that despite the ‘wealth of evidence’ (Agarwal et al., 2021: 1438) about the ‘reliable advantage’ (Yang et al., 2021: 299) of test-enhanced learning – more commonly referred to as the testing effect or retrieval practice – it is actually far more complicated than it is often presented as being and that ‘retrieval practice alone is not enough’ (Still, 2021). In that article, I argued that retrieval practice offered ‘more than just improved memorisation skills and securing long-term learning’, and encouraged teachers to exploit unsupervised, personalised spaced retrieval practice and to leverage the wider indirect benefits of testing. I argued towards adopting a set of learning principles or test-enhanced learning.

Feedback from that article led to a series of further articles in the same organ; the series then led to this book. In Test-Enhanced Learning, I will first explore the wealth of research, report the direct and indirect benefits of test-enhanced learning and review the ingredients of test-enhanced learning (i.e. cognition, repeated retrieval practice, spaced learning, interleaving, feedback and elaboration, successive relearning, metacognition and motivation), both inside and – just as importantly – outside the classroom. A review that ultimately points to the inherent inefficiencies of learning and the potential gains of personalisation. This review of the research (both laboratory and applied) is tied with my efforts to employ test-enhanced learning in my own classroom and with other teachers around the world.

Second, I outline my efforts to make personalised spaced retrieval practice available to teachers, educators and learners through RememberMore. This has three connected component parts. First, classroom.remembermore.app is an open and free web portal for creating bespoke classroom quizzes for teaching, retrieval and self-study in seconds (yes, seconds!). RememberMore. app is a digital flashcard system that boosts learning and reduces teacher workload. Importantly, it adopts confidence-based assessment to personalise spaced retrieval practice, thereby increasing retrieval gains. It also enables both teachers and learners to categorise and tag knowledge, providing a structure to organise knowledge and support interleaving. Finally, RememberMore includes a ‘dashboard’ that presents learner and flashcard insights via a graphical user interface to help inform teachers, teaching and learning. It is also the platform to quiz your understanding and the knowledge acquired in reading this book. Where would a book about test-enhanced learning be without a quiz about it?

Context is king

You may be expecting this introduction to start with an outline of what inspired me to dedicate most of my professional learning to investigating test-enhanced learning. However, my interest in this area of research started out with me simply trying to find a solution to what my pupils needed most at that time, which was being able to access knowledge to better understand the texts being taught in class. With clearly observable impact on pupil attainment and classroom culture, that interest led to reviewing the research more critically, connecting with researchers, while road-testing and iterating my own classroom practice. Finally, after three years’ intensive work, I was asked to write this practical guide to improving academic outcomes for all pupils.

For context, I was returning to England from overseas after the new academic year had started. I was joining an oversubscribed, inclusive comprehensive secondary school with a pupil intake that reflects a wonderfully diverse and vibrant local community, in the third week of term as a full-time teacher of English (my second subject, having studied sports science (BSc) and kinesiology (MSEd)). I felt remarkably like I did when I started my teaching career. It was a school with a strong moral purpose, principled leadership, and defined and embedded school values: challenge, creativity, commitment, cooperation and courtesy.

Even with 20-plus years of teaching experience (eight years as a head teacher and senior leader), I knew that I would still need time to establish myself in a new school, and I didn’t have all that much time to prepare – I was due to start teaching the following day.

Prior to meeting the classes, I put together a basic class profile (names, photos, prior attainment data and background), reviewed the long-term curriculum plan and schemes of work, and read the school’s behaviour policy. The classes I would be teaching were predominantly low prior attaining, and a number of pupils had accumulated higher than average negative behaviour points. Just for good measure, I was (we were) nomadic – teaching in various classrooms throughout the school over the teaching week.

Following just a handful of lessons, the challenge was clear. The curriculum was rightly ambitious. I was new to the school and ‘we’ needed time to establish a positive classroom climate (made all the more difficult by often arriving to class at the same time as the pupils) and learning routines. In addition, it was evident that many of the pupils would benefit from experiencing success in lessons, as too many were more focused on what they couldn’t do than what they could.

That first Friday evening, I was late home having made a lot of positive phone calls home and quite a few phone calls to introduce myself to parents/carers. A worthwhile investment, even with a busy weekend ahead of me.

With the unit outline already stuck in the front of the pupils’ exercise books, I hurriedly built a basic knowledge organiser that defined and shared with pupils the substantive knowledge and explicit vocabulary from the scheme of learning that I expected them to learn. The process of building the knowledge organiser was as much for my professional learning as it was for the pupils, having not taught the assigned texts previously. I asked the pupils to add this to the back of their exercise books, as both a reference document and a tool for self-assessment.

I originally introduced a low-stakes retrieval practice (testing/quizzing) lesson starter routine (with self-assessed marking) as a practical solution to managing the chaotic arriving-at-the-same-time lesson starts – and to give me the opportunity to log in to the teacher’s computer, take the register and set up the upcoming lesson. Equally, I was very aware of the wider benefits of test-enhanced learning – and the ‘high utility’ of both retrieval practice and spaced or distributed practice more specifically1 – but this was as much about managing the learning as it was about leading it.

Early reflections

Was it easy? No. Did the pupils thrive on the low-stakes retrieval practice starters? Not at first. (We will discover that there is much more to test-enhanced learning than low-stakes retrieval practice starters.) What I can immediately share with you, however, is that pupils are more receptive to ‘quiz’ and ‘quizzing’ than they are to ‘tests’ and ‘testing’, that ‘retrieval practice’ doesn’t mean all that much to them at all, and that pupils know little about how they learn or the difference between performance and learning, and would much prefer to adopt more familiar learning strategies or none at all.

The truth is that the pupils found it hard, effortful and, with only nominal reward in the opening half a dozen or so lessons, a little deflating. I would have to be honest and say that the pupils were not entirely convinced. I would later learn that I had not only missed a critical step, but I was also missing a lot of the knowledge and know-how that we will cover in this book. We will come back to this in detail later.

For now, I knew why we were investing in these high-utility, evidence-informed practices and the wider benefits of test-enhanced learning, but just the teacher knowing why is insufficient. Nor is it just the doing that matters, but how well you are doing it. How you know how well you are doing it is equally important. Still, as I will outline, there is more to consider beyond retrieval and distribution or, for that matter, the spacing of test-enhanced learning. The good news is that you will be much better informed than I was.

Coming up for air

By the end of the first term (12 weeks, or 60 or so lessons later), I had started to earn the pupils’ trust and routines were more established (if arriving at the same time as the pupils ever gets much easier). Together, we had travelled through the ‘valley of disappointment’ (Clear, 2018: 20) – that is, the period of investment where teachers and pupils feel discouraged, having put in hours of effortful practice and experienced nominal results, preceding accelerated benefits. I had also gained some important practical pedagogical insights on the use of quizzing: on the benefits of every pupil having a directed focus and working independently through a routined lesson starter quiz, the style of questions or cues that were most effective, the breadth of questions to...