27 Ways To Improve Retention In Your Students

By / / Teaching / New Teacher
27 Ways To Improve Retention In Your Students

What Are The Best Ways To Improve Retention In Your Students?

by TeachThought Staff

How you can help students retain what they learn? What sort of teaching strategies, curriculum mapping techniques, or other changes can you use to help them remember and apply information?

Most broadly, this is a matter of understanding and transfer. The more complete a student’s understanding, the less likely they are to ‘forget.’ One way to think about understanding is to think of it like a tent–or rather the stakes used to anchor a tent into the ground on a windy day. If the understanding is ‘deep,’ the stakes are less likely to come out of the ground when the wind blows, whereas topical ‘understanding’ can become unanchored more easily. It’s not driven as deeply.

Transfer matters as well–more so than the more general idea of ‘practice.’ Can a student use knowledge in a new and unfamiliar context, and more importantly, will they do so unprompted?

In an attempt to create a more specific taxonomy to help you measure understanding, we developed our TeachThought Taxonomy for Understanding, 36 ways to help students wrestle with, rethink, and explore “how they get it.’ That taxonomy, however, is complex (we need to release a 2.0 version, and we plan to).

For something a bit more grab-and-go, there is the following infographic from Mia MacMeekin. It offers 27 ways to enhance student retention of understanding. Its strength lies in the diversity of the ideas, from painting and singing, to focusing on the big idea, to using games and even visual cues like different fonts and typography.

Have any you’d like to add? Add yours in the comments below.

27 Ways To Enhance Retention In Your Students

enhancing retention

27 Ways To Improve Retention In Your Students

  1. Snap shots
  2. Big idea
  3. Master
  4. Posters
  5. Add spice
  6. Walk
  7. Paint
  8. Practice
  9. Mindmap
  10. Sing
  11. Write
  12. Picture
  13. Games
  14. Connect
  15. Pin-It
  16. Talk
  17. Typography
  18. Make
  19. Scaffold
  20. Read
  21. Accessible
  22. Steps
  23. Practice
  24. Listen
  25. Try it
  26. Store
  27. Partner

27 Ways To Improve Retention In Your Students; image attribution flickr user miamcmeekin