How many times have you heard teachers complain that students couldn’t remember what they learned yesterday, let alone last week or last month? Retention of learning is a big issue and one that must be addressed. This year my department is trialling some key stage 3 homeworks that directly tackle the issue of pupil retention of learning and I thought you may like to take a look at our practice.
We shouldn’t get frustrated when pupils do not retain learning from one day to the next. They are human and some experiments carried out by the German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus show that all humans forget things at an exponential rate. His famous Forgetting Curve illustrates the idea nicely and demonstrates that if you