The Role of Retrieval

I thought this article from Eide Neurolearning -- When Knowledge, Creativity, and Retrieval Diverge ---was interesting.

Information retrieval is not as catchy a notion as attention these days, but it is a distinct process in the brain, and it what you are asking students to do when you ask them to repeat back what they learned in class or from their homework. ....

....although a student may be very good at synthesizing information (parietal), he can also be quite weak or slow at retrieving stored information from memory (prefrontal). This in fact is more the norm than the deviation for high IQ kids. Their prefrontal lobes are slower to develop.

Charlotte Mason appears to have placed quite a bit of emphasis on retrieval, without using the term, because narration and the exam process are both examples of two different types of retrieval -- short term and long term. Several of my children have disliked immediate calls for retrieval (narration) but have fared better with a longer-term form of retrieval.

I read that Waldorf, for instance, has the child listen to a "main lesson" one day, retell the next, and produce something the day after. In other words, knowledge/retrieval/creativity are separated into three distinct processes. The Ignatian method has the prelection/review/demonstration of mastery paradigm (sorry for the jargon, it just slips out) which probably is a way of ensuring that retrieval is built into the process. To put it in English! the Ignatian method explicitly sets an example for retrieval. I think that Charlotte Mason might possibly think this too "teachery" but I can see a place for it, particularly for those children with a very rich interior life who have trouble bringing it up to the surface.

Some of my children have been quite blank when asked to give a narration on a particular book, but later have shown that the book was pivotal in their development. The example that comes to my mind is my daughter and St Thomas Becket. We studied him when she was eleven. At the time I remember being discouraged that there was almost no visible impact. Years later she could narrate the whole study and reflect on how it shaped her ideas.

HomeschoolJournal is down presently for maintenance, but Ragamuffin Rosie has a post called Just Breathe which is her musings on how this process works in her family.

And JoVE recently blogged on Testing in response to my post on exams. We are both interested in the "organic" aspect of the testing situation -- how it can be helpful in the natural learning life of a child (rather than being an invasive, artificial ranking system, as it so often becomes in institutional schooling systems).

Tribe of Autodidacts wrote about testing too (I am collecting these as I come across them on my Google Reader)

Another philosophical post, when I am really supposed to be writing my story! and around the USA at least, everyone is probably sitting back and relaxing after Thanksgiving....sigh.