Boost Student Memory

As teachers, we’ve all been known to haunt the front of our classrooms at times, delivering our lecture and expecting our students to take notes and follow along – perfect, still, and quiet. This teacher-focused method of instruction is outdated, however, and the focus has since been rightfully shifted to student autonomy in the classroom. This means that students remember what they learned better when in charge of their own learning. It is the teacher's job to facilitate the overall experience.

At first glance, a disgruntled parent might read that and think, “Oh, so teachers don’t even TEACH anymore, do they?” That’s not true at all. Best instructional practices continue to evolve the more we learn from evidence-based studies about student learning. One result of these studies is the above pyramid which shows the percentage of knowledge a student retains when taught using various passive and participatory teaching methods. Let’s break down the pyramid.

At the top, we see the outdated Lecture style of teaching results in only 5% knowledge retention among students. Clearly, this is the LAST thing we as educators want to do in the classroom if we want them to remember a word we say or do well on exams.

Moving down the pyramid, with a slightly better knowledge retention rate of 10%, is Reading. Think of old, stuffy classrooms with rows of seats, a chalkboard, and a teacher looking down their nose while students copy words from the dictionary or a textbook. The students are daydreaming of lunch, vacations, socializing, laughter, or anything but the dull task in front of them. There is no creative output, so it makes sense why students would only remember 10% of what they learned.

At 20%, we have Audio/Visual. An example of this is when a teacher plays a video for their students (which should always have captions for English learners and students who need textual cues). This 20% category is better than the previous 5% and 10%, but we’re still in the passive category of teaching.

Moving further down, we have Demonstration with a 30% knowledge retention rate. This is when the eccentric science teacher shows students a cool chemical reaction at the front of the classroom. Students will remember the thrill of the reaction, but may not remember the exact chemical equation that caused it.

Finally we’ve reached our participatory teaching methods, which are most effective for student knowledge retention. The worst of these for overall retention, at 50%, is Discussion Groups. Although 50% of the classroom may not remember the information long-term following a group discussion, the result is high enough to include in your lesson plans for the 50% that will retain the information long-term (in addition to the following methods).

The next best category, with a knowledge retention rate of 75%, is Practice by Doing. This is when the student dissects a frog in their biology class and gets firsthand knowledge of what the inside of a frog looks like. They would likely remember how 75% of the parts function by the end-of-the-year final exam. However, what if that same student had been made to instruct their peers on what functions each of the parts served? That’s where the magic really happens, as we move into the final, and best, category…

Fittingly, the final category and the one with the highest rate of knowledge retention is Teach Others, at 90%. When students are given the opportunity to creatively and passionately teach what they’ve learned to others, they are transformed into experts themselves. As we all know, our own art of teaching requires a deep understanding of subject matter along with responsiveness to individual student learning styles. When we teach our students to teach others what they have learned (using these same effective instructional strategies), they will cultivate a sense of responsibility over their learning and become subject masters in your classroom.

We as effective educators need to keep this Knowledge Retention Pyramid in mind when delivering our instruction. So, how do we go about delivering instruction based on this pyramid? After using a variety of participatory teaching methods to instruct our students, the key is to give students autonomy in deciding how to present the information back to their peers in a formal (or informal) assessment (or project). I always give my students the option to create whatever they want, and I am consistently impressed by their work, whether it’s a movie, a Slides or Canva presentation, a song, a rap battle, a book, a skit, or others.

When we use our students’ strengths to our advantage, our classrooms, our students’ lives, and our own lives are transformed. When my students are happy, learning, and gaining confidence in their newfound expertise, my heart fills with warmth and carries me back to my classroom, again, and again, and again.