15 Quick (and Mighty) Retrieval Practices

When it’s time to review material, many students opt for strategies that are the mental equivalent of “push-ups on your knees,” says psychologist Daniel Willingham.

Students crave the satisfaction of easy wins. They think, “I want to be able to do a lot of push-ups. But when I do those really hard ones, I can barely do any of them,” Willingham told Edutopia in 2023. “When I do push-ups on my knees, I can do lots of them, and I can do them really fast!” At study time, students turn to similarly breezy approaches that don’t push their limits, like rereading textbooks, highlighting old notes, or watching a few review videos online.

But to genuinely commit information to long-term memory, there’s no replacement for active retrieval—the effortful practice of recalling information from memory, unaided by external sources like notes or the textbook. “Studying this way is mentally difficult,” Willingham acknowledged, “but it’s really, really good for memory.”

The effort pays off spectacularly, according to a rich body of research. While passive review strategies like rereading lead to rapid forgetting, “a single session of retrieval practice can generate memory improvements that persist for 9 months,” according to an authoritative 2022 literature review, while “the positive effects of retrieval over multiple sessions can last for at least 8 years.”

From low-stakes quizzes to review games to flash cards, there are a variety of effective retrieval practices that teachers can implement in class or recommend that students try at home. Drawing from a wide range of research, we compiled this list of 15 actionable retrieval practices.

But before we dive in, a note on timing: Research suggests that retrieval practice is most effective when sessions are spread out over time, rather than repeated in quick succession. While “there is no universal ideal spacing schedule,” according to the 2022 review, “longer spacing schedules can be beneficial after information is already well learned and must be retained over a long delay.” Thus, consider spacing out your class’s retrieval sessions over days, weeks, or even months, depending on the complexity of the material and its significance in the context of the discipline you teach.

Get Flash Cards Right

Flash cards are a longtime favorite among students—and, if used well, they’re also a powerful form of retrieval. As early as second grade, according to a 2023 study, flash cards can help students memorize information like multiplication facts more effectively than other mnemonic strategies, including songs and chants. 

When studying with flash cards, studies suggest that students often move on from each card too quickly. For long-term memory storage, tell students that they should accurately recall the information on a card four or five times before they file it away.

Give Quick, Dread-less Quizzes

Much to the chagrin of students, quizzes and tests rank among the most commonly implemented forms of retrieval practice in schools, and decades of research testify to their effectiveness. “When students engage in testing, they actively retrieve information from memory, reinforcing existing retrieval routes and establishing new ones,” researchers conclude in a comprehensive 2023 review of dozens of studies. “This process strengthens memory and facilitates better long-term retention of the material.”

To harness the benefits of testing without the associated stress, administer low-stakes or even ungraded quizzes. When quizzes are decoupled from dread, “learners feel more comfortable taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from them,” the review’s authors write. 

You can sprinkle ungraded pop quizzes into a lesson, but be sure to give students feedback on their performance so they understand what they got wrong and right. All sorts of quizzes are useful, according to the 2023 review: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, cued recall, clickers, knowledge contests, and more.

Upgrade Your Highlighting

Students love to highlight, using blunt-tipped, multicolored markers to make sense of unfamiliar academic texts. But when the approach is divorced from more active follow-on activities like self-testing, summarizing, or thoughtfully consolidating notes into study guides, research on the topic confirms that it has little academic merit.

That said, students can dramatically improve their results by learning to highlight more selectively and by coupling their highlighting with active retrieval practices like self-quizzing or summarizing from memory. A 2022 study finds that when students receive just a few hours of coaching on highlighting best practices—like only highlighting main ideas and adding thoughtful annotations in the margins—their baseline highlighting skills can improve by 325 percent.

Dump It All Out

Perhaps the simplest classroom retrieval practice is the brain dump. 

“After 10–20 minutes of instruction, pause and have students write everything they remember from memory,” suggests world language teacher Maureen Magnan. This approach “taps directly into research showing that reframing ideas in your own words immediately after exposure dramatically strengthens memory,” writes high school English teacher and researcher Cathleen Beachboard. Alternatively, at the beginning of class, you can “instruct students to write everything they remember from class the day before,” proposes high school biology teacher Bonnie Nieves. After a brain dump, students can turn and talk with a peer to compare what they both remembered, revealing gaps in their own understanding that will further consolidate learning.

Make It a Picture

Representational drawing of solar systems, cellular organelles, or tectonic boundaries can help students commit material to memory. Artistic skills are irrelevant, according to the research; what’s important is reconstructing learned material in a way that makes sense to students, and even the most rudimentary sketch should improve recall. 

Be careful when the new material is complicated; misconceptions can easily slip into students’ representational drawings, causing them to encode inaccurate information. For this reason, a 2022 study recommends that teachers sometimes opt for a more collaborative drawing process, in which the teacher stands at the whiteboard (ready to redirect the class as needed) while students dictate what should be drawn.

Use Maps to Reveal Gaps

Representational drawings—sketches meant to capture the details of a physical object—are an excellent way to reinforce basic information but “lack features to make generalizations or inferences based on that information,” according to a 2022 study. When tackling more complex academic concepts, like the water cycle or the branches of government, students should opt for organizational drawings like concept maps, anchor charts, or sketchnotes. Creating them requires the artist to “represent relationships among ideas,” which can boost comprehension fourfold, the researchers found.

Concept maps can be as simple as writing down a dozen key terms inside bubbles, then drawing arrows linking related ideas, along with brief annotations describing their relationships.

Play Jeopardy!

We’ll take “Geometric Shapes” for $500, Alex.

Review games are another popular—and fun—form of retrieval. Today, there are plenty of easy-to-use platforms that allow teachers to host simple review games, including Kahoot, Gimkit, and Blooket. You can easily set up an every-student-for-themself competition to see who can win the most points, or start a collaborative review session by breaking students into teams to play Jeopardy! 

Create your own Jeopardy!-like game board at JeopardyLabs.com, or re-create it using Google Slides. Here’s a Slides template that teachers can copy and modify.

To Cultivate Divergent Thinking, Try Hexagons

Sometimes, successful retrieval practice can look like a puzzle—specifically, a puzzle made of hexagonal pieces. In hexagonal thinking activities, “students are given a pre-made set of hexagon tiles with vocabulary terms and concepts from a unit,” writes assistant professor of education Simone Nance. 

In small groups, students work together to make connections between the provided hexagons; “If two tiles touch, there must be a conceptual connection the group can articulate,” Nance explains. As students arrange the hexagons and annotate the connections between them on the surrounding paper, they tend to make unusual, highly creative connections—and develop an enriched mental model of the content that they can draw from later.

Spin Up an AI Bot to Self-Test

Quizzes, as we’ve already established, are a great form of retrieval practice—so great that students should quiz themselves at home, not just at school.

In fact, researchers have found that students who self-test can score as much as 34 percentage points higher on in-class assessments than students who simply review the material. 

Today, enterprising students are turning to AI to generate practice quizzes tailored to their needs. A student can ask ChatGPT to produce 10 multiple-choice and three short-answer questions about the Spanish-American war, set a 10-minute timer, then have the bot grade their responses or even cross-examine them when they fail to answer correctly. 

As students practice with newly learned material, AI bots can quickly respond to their mastery level, increasing or reducing the difficulty of questions to keep students motivated and engaged.

Teach Someone (or Something) Else

Time and time again, research shows that teaching material to a peer is one of the best ways to sort through that material in your own head, translating the desire for social acceptance into focused effort and deepening the understanding of the peer who is teaching—a phenomenon called the “protégé effect.” 

In class, teachers can harness the protégé effect with activities like group presentations, Jigsaw lessons, and turn-and-talk exercises. At home, students can review the material by teaching it to a friend or family member. If none are available, though, chatbots offer a great alternative; students can tell a chatbot everything they know about a particular subject and prompt the bot to ask them probing questions that poke holes in their understanding.

Revise, Don’t Reread

Often, students like to study by rereading their class notes—a passive strategy that is ineffective for long-term retention. This approach is likely to leave them with gaps in their understanding: A 2023 study finds that the average student’s notes only capture “46% of main ideas and supporting details.”

Instead, recommend that students approach their notes from the mindset of active revision, suggests education researcher Jane Shore—reorganizing them, correcting any mistakes they encounter, identifying outstanding questions they may still have, and performing independent research to fill in any gaps. This revision process doesn’t have to happen alone; in fact, a 2016 study found that when students review and revise their notes with a peer, this leads to deeper understanding and better test performance.

Play Charades

On its surface, having a student perform silly motions in order to act out a concept may not sound like a rigorous form of retrieval. But as students watch the pantomime, their brains run through all the content they’ve learned in an effort to identify the right concept.

Pictionary has the same benefits, writes psychology teacher Matt Kuykendall. In one Pictionary session, one of Kuykendall’s students drew a head and a speech bubble, then crossed out the speech bubble and drew an arrow to the head. “Their teammates successfully identified the clue as ‘localization of function’”—the idea that different brain areas are responsible for different cognitive processes—“since they were able to make a connection between their prior knowledge of this research and the drawing on the board,” he writes.

Stop and Jot

In a more targeted, time-boxed form of brain dump, “Set a timer and have students ‘stop and jot’ in response to a prompt,” proposes Magnan. 

You could ask students to write about how one newly learned concept relates to one they learned a while back, for instance, or even connect new material to their own personal lives. “These low-stakes writes foster relevance and creativity while tracking progress through word count or proficiency goals,” Magnan says.

Write Your Own Quiz

Rather than finding a premade practice quiz tucked into your learning management system, students will think more deeply about material by brainstorming their own quiz questions, which you can collate to create a single, collective quiz. Alternatively, students can pair up and quiz each other.

In a 2020 study, students who took the time to create their own study questions scored a full letter grade higher on a test than those who simply restudied the material. “Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content,” the lead researcher told Edutopia, as “one has to reflect what one has learned and how an appropriate question can be inferred from this knowledge.”

To get students to generate deeper questions that go beyond yes or no, ask them to think back on the topics that they found most challenging, then pose questions beginning with “How,” “Why,” or “Explain…”

Tweet It (or Bluesky It!)

Summarizing material forces students to reflect on what’s most important, consolidating their understanding. In fact, students who write a short summary after a lesson can outperform peers who simply review the material by 86 percent on a follow-up test.

Concision is a valuable, highly productive challenge. Professor of English education Todd Finley recommends having students summarize the lesson’s central takeaway in a 280-character (unpublished) tweet, while teacher Sarah Cook limits students to just six words, much like a newspaper headline. That’s a tough limit, but it forces students to process (and re-encode) all of the material before settling on the gist of it: “They really have to think about what is most crucial to say,” she writes.