“Imagine holding a hollow glass ball with walls so thin that even your lightest touch bursts it, shattering it into a thousand pieces.”

These are the words of my mentor and head of department. He was describing the resilience of our students, who all come from a Cheshire town with high levels of social deprivation and a growing literacy gap. The low levels of literacy and low resilience lead to behavioural challenges in and out of the classroom, which often present as a low motivation to learn.

There are numerous ways in which we are tackling this, but one specific area I have been involved in is literacy in science.

We identified this as the greatest barrier in transferring classroom “learning” into success in summative assessment. And we responded by embedding the philosophy of “resilience by design” into our curriculum.

What exactly is this?

At first, it essentially meant that we redesigned the opening 20 minutes of our lessons. So, in a typical unit, the first lesson began with the key terms for the topic arranged in a matrix on a PowerPoint slide. The teacher then described a key term using relevant exam language: for example, “I am the organelle, which contains the genetic information.” The students studied the list of key terms, seeking the answer and, hopefully, then displayed it correctly on their mini-whiteboard. The process was repeated 15 to 20 times with high-frequency praise, a fast pace and a growth mindset around any misconceptions that arose.

Lesson two worked in a similar way, this time expanding the list of possible key terms. As students’ resilience increased, we encouraged them to record their answers in their books, thus relinquishing the safety net of the mini-whiteboard and allowing the possibility of failure as the answer was not so easily rubbed away. The teacher fed back the first three answers, before targeting students to share responses and justify their reasoning.

Finally, in lesson three, students were presented with nothing more than a selection of key words. Using the knowledge gained in previous lessons, they freely recalled appropriate definitions or explanations with minimal assistance or cues. For example, providing only one cue of “osmosis” for students to share all relevant knowledge relating to the term. Feedback was gathered as a class, with students collating information from their peers, with the expectation that all students contributed during this phase.

Sumeracki and Weinstein (2018) suggest that this form of free recall may improve learning more than cued recall. However, should students fail to recall a lot of the information, impact on learning is reduced.

This is why we approached free recall in the above way. We focused on improving the retrieval success first, by providing additional context to the information that we desired students to recall. And we also considered the average successful quiz score before progressing to free recall. Moving too early would risk disaffecting low-resilience students - and moving too late, students may voice boredom from a lack of challenge. Rosenshine (2012) suggests that achieving 80 per cent success or above is the appropriate time to progress as students have been sufficiently challenged and are, in fact, learning the material.

The evidence supporting the use of quizzing in classrooms as an effective consolidation strategy is strong. When re-exposing students to concepts and knowledge during retrieval quizzing, we, in turn, space learning over time. By providing time for students to forget presented information, we can distribute practice of an idea or skill (Pashler et al, 2007).

For those who view this sort of quizzing as boring or not engaging, here’s the thing: our students say that retrieval quizzing is their favourite part of their lesson, as they are initially successful, enjoy the challenge of increasingly complex key terms and are no longer discouraged by new language when it is presented.

However, that is not to say that everything went smoothly. Our approach was essentially a large multiple-choice question, and, as such, it did not always lead to effortful retrieval of information (students were able to guess from the clues). Therefore, our students were not always making the necessary gains in storage strength.

As such, we became increasingly dependent upon the key-term grids to ensure initial success, usually to simply make sure that students were sufficiently motivated and to minimise challenging behaviour from a collapse of resilience.

So, we needed to increase the level of challenge by reducing our cues during questioning, without curbing the motivation of our students.

How did we do it? We explained to our students the importance of effortful retrieval from memory and we began to remove the key-word grids. Needless to say, the students were not happy with this at the start, but they soon relished the challenge.

And we quickly began to see the benefits. One group of triple-science students has not seen a prompt grid in months - and they take great pride in that fact. Another Year 8 group was found boasting to their history teacher about their ability to recall quark structures of hadrons and their understanding of the Pauli exclusion principle, as a result of our literacy quizzing. Year 7 students were also heard bragging that their class could use the word “pluripotency” correctly when describing stem cells. A culture of challenge and competition between science groups has ensued ever since.

We were able to vary the challenge through increasing the spacing of our questions over time and reinstating the cues when beginning a new topic, before repeating this “phased-cue reduction” process again.

The future for our school lies in converting our students’ improved scientific literacy into extended responses and closing our numeracy gap. We are encouraging our students to convert answers from key-term quizzing into their extended practice questions around fundamental ideas in science and we are gradually embedding standard form conversions, percentage calculations and unit conversions into our key-term quizzes.

Every minute is precious in lessons, and balancing time spent delivering content with time spent retrieving information is a problem we are striving to resolve. There may be a golden ratio between retrieval and delivery to be found, but, like our students, we still have much to learn.

Lewis Stewart is a secondary science teacher and director for research in Crewe, Cheshire

This article originally appeared in the 17 July 2020 issue under the headline “Why a quiz could be the answer to building resilience”