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Book 'Formative Action: from Instrument to Design'

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Book 'Formative Action: from Instrument to Design'

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Formative Action: from Instrument to Design - The formative action school

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Authors Rene Kneyber René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch [...]

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Teaching a sense for quality is a strategy you employ to help students understand the learning objectives.

A way you can accomplish this is by...

Comparing examples

Demonstrating a think a loud

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Formative action is goal-oriented action, but how can students assess if they have achieved a particular goal?

When you pass a ball, and it reaches the receiver, then you can tell from the result whether you did well or not. The feedback is implicit, and also easy to grasp.

But with many academic assignments, the answer to the question "Did I make it?" is a lot more complicated. If you have to write a letter, or a reflection report, or answer an exam question, you can't automatically tell whether you did well or not by looking at what you wrote down.

In order to more effectively self-regulate towards goals, and process or give feedback along the way, it is beneficial for students to develop a 'sense for quality'. In this blog I will discuss what a sense for quality is, and what strategy is effective for developing a sense for quality.

A sense for quality in teachers

You might not be aware of it, but as a teacher you will have developed a lot of sense for quality. Not only through expertise in the subject, but also by gaining assessment expertise.

The latter you develop naturally as a teacher in your working life, as you have to perform hundreds, if not thousands, of assessments per year. Assessment expertise not only gives you insight into what range of quality you may find (what is best, what is worst, and what you can broadly expect from students); but you also gain a skill whereby you can still grade different executions of an assignment along a similar bar, i.e. two assignments may have been executed quite differently and still have the same degree of quality, e.g., a 7 out of 10.

It is this expertise, in addition to your subject knowledge, that you rely on when formulating feedback as a teacher. Although there are different terms for this type of expertise, at The Formative Action School we refer to it as a sense for quality.

Why develop a sense for quality in students?

A disadvantage of expertise is that you can also develop the "curse of knowledge": it can be difficult to put yourself in the shoes of novices. You look at the same thing, but you see different things. The curse of knowledge means that the lack of a sense for quality among students can be an underestimated problem, which can leave teachers wondering why you should spend time and effort developing it at all.

The answer to that question is two-fold. The first point is that a lack of sense for quality can get in the way of the independence. Students will be unable to assess for themselves where and how their efforts on an assignment could be improved. Of course, as a teacher you can take on that role, and be a circulating "sense for quality". But apart from whether that is realistically feasible, there is also the question of desirability: Do you want a better product, or do you want the person in front of you to become more capable of making a better product on their own? By giving expert feedback too often, you undermine students' independence and learning. [ see our free chapter on transformative feedback]

The second point is that in the absence of a sense for quality, the feedback you give might not be effectively processed. Feedback may be very clear to us as experts, but may be too difficult to understand for our students.

A sense for quality with more complex tasks

These two points hold up especially when the tasks require more "higher order" skills such as analysis, synthesis, creativity, evaluation and critical thinking and have a more holistic quality, a sense for quality of students becomes even more important. If a student has to write a narrative essay, there are a lot of quality aspects to this: from sentence structure to spelling to grammar, but story construction and creativity are also important. The quality of an essay is not the sum of all these factors, but lies in the whole configuration of those factors. You then have to consider everything, and judging whether something is "quality" involves a lot of implicit knowledge.

If a student has to make a success of such a complex task on their own, it is important that they have a good sense of what they are working toward, and what they need to pay attention to along the way.

Criteria and rubrics do not replace a sense for quality

A common way to clarify what quality looks like is through the use of criteria and rubrics.

Quality criteria (or success criteria) describe which criteria a task must meet. While criteria obviously provide more guidance for the learner, many will still struggle with the question of when it is exactly right or good enough, even though these criteria can be very clear to an expert.

An attempt is often made to get around this problem by using rubrics. In these you describe what a student has to do to meet each criterion, and classify this description by level (e.g.: insufficient/satisfactory/good).

A rubric is, of course, clearer than a list of criteria. But a possible disadvantage of rubrics also immediately becomes apparent. Given their descriptive nature, rubrics contain an excess of text, and that will scare many students off. But even those who read it all may still question what exactly is meant in some of the boxes.

Rubrics are well-intentioned, and you obviously want to give students guidance in how they are assessed. I wouldn't want to propose that we do away with them outright. But if we want students to develop a sense for quality, more is needed.

Developing a sense for quality with exemplars and dialogue

To instill a good sense for quality in students, the use of exemplars is necessary. Here you show how others (for example, last year's students) completed a particular assignment, and you use these exemplars to have a structured conversation with the class about it. Both activities are necessary: Using exemplars communicates things that can't be communicated well in other ways; looking at and comparing exemplars provides insights that sometimes can't easily be put into words. And dialogue is necessary because other students may have insights you wouldn't have come up with yourself: their perspective provides a kind of second-opinion to your own assessment.

Several benefits emerge from research on this

1. Students start to more profoundly understand exactly what is expected of them in an assignment.

2. Students better understand what the teacher's expectations are. In research by Hawe and colleagues, they found that first-year students had a better understanding of what constitutes good writing style and content, how deep the content should be, what quality looks like, in what detail answers should be given, and at what level they should write themselves. Students will begin to better understand what also counts, but what cannot be captured in criteria or rubrics.

3. By using exemplars, students become more aware of their own work and thinking. They "translate" the insights from the exemplars into their own work and become more aware of what they are doing. In other words: they develop improved self-regulation through the use of exemplars.

In addition, there are two more interesting side effects:

4. Reflecting on exemplars motivates students and gives them more self-confidence. You can see that others have been successful before you: so what others have achieved, you could achieve yourself.

5. Possibly, it also improves students' understanding of the lesson material, at least as long as the exemplars also relate to the lesson material covered.

Using exemplars

Using exemplars and talking about them is best done as early in the process as possible, e.g. before students start a task, but not so early that they can't make sense of it yet.

There are several ways to employ the combination of exemplars, dialogue, and criteria/rubrics, and I will outline some ideas below starting with the nature of exemplars:

1. Use constructed anchor exemplars. You want to show students "typically" good work, and typical mistakes and problems to talk about them. These exemplars are already "in your mind" as a teacher: because of your expertise, you have an image of what is a good example, a bad example, and where things can go wrong. It may be worthwhile to construct these yourself and use them as a topic of conversation.

2. Use exemplars from former students (anonymized). Of course, option 1 can be a lot of work, and often many exemplars are already at hand. Probably students have submitted work before. You could use this (anonymously, of course) as a topic of discussion. Should any "interesting" anchor exemplars be missing, you can still add them.

3. Use current exemplars (if there is enough social safety in the group).

If there are enough good exemplars and interesting mistakes, current work of students can be used. Then, of course, there must be sufficient social safety in the classroom and the work must be anonymized. If these conditions are met, they often enjoy looking at what others have done and learning from it. Moreover, if you apply this strategy in a series of assignments, the class can also see for themselves which progress they are making.

A possible drawback

Of course, one possible drawback is that students will focus on a particular exemplar without too much thought. For example, in graphic arts, you can imagine that students will end up submitting products that are quite similar to the "good" exemplars. Should that be a problem for your specific subject (in graphics arts, creativity and originality is obviously important), you can choose to grab exemplars from a different assignment (with enough similarities), or modify the assignment slightly from what you have as exemplars.

Using rubrics and criteria

Rubrics and criteria can play a positive, structuring role in this type of conversation in a number of ways.
1. Use dialogue about exemplars to build criteria or rubrics together.
Consider starting a conversation without criteria or with an empty rubric. By watching and talking about the exemplars, students can create criteria for themselves, and fill a rubric. This can culminate in a plenary session with one list or criteria or a rubric, but with the advantage that students will understand what it is about.
2. Use dialogue about exemplars to understand criteria.
It is a quite the art form to have such a conversation result in a list of criteria that also makes sense and is correct. And sometimes the requirements are just fixed, too. Suppose that, for some reason, you cannot deviate from an imposed rubric: you can use exemplars to make clear to students what the rubric means.
3. Have students/students apply criteria to sample work.
Another strategy can be to have students apply the criteria to (carefully selected) sample work. By assessing someone else's work, they develop a certain degree of expertise.

In conclusion

Regardless of the benefits, you're obviously not going to show exemplars and have a dialogue about them for every purpose. But for more complex tasks and assignments, it can be worthwhile. A sense for quality is helpful for the self-regulation of students; allows them to make better use of feedback; and makes them able to give each other better feedback.

Therefore, "developing a sense for quality" as a strategy should not be seen as time-consuming: it can literally buy you time. Moreover, it is also often an indispensable part of the educational process.

Read more?

You can read more on developing a sense for quality in our book.

If want to know more on how formative action can contribute to self-regulated learning, read our blog here.

Someone who has done amazing work on a sense for quality is Ron Berger. See this podcast for example.

Teaching Walkthrus contains a lot of interesting takes on developing a sense for quality.

René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch Education Council.

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Developing a sense for quality - The formative action school

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In order to self-regulate and give or process feedback during lessons they require a sense for quality. In this blog we discuss...

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Organising feedback is a strategy you use to make students more independent in the learning process.

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Turning Formative Assessment into Action

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Podcast - Formative Action with René Kneyber and Valentina Devid, Mind the Gap, Ep.75 (S4, E12)

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Podcast - Formative Action with René Kneyber and Valentina Devid, Mind the Gap, Ep.75 (S4, E12)

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Formative Action with René Kneyber and Valentina Devid, Mind the Gap, Ep.75 (S4, E12) - The formative action school

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Authors Rene Kneyber René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch [...]

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Elevating teaching and assessment Welcome to The Formative Action School Empowering educators with innovative teaching and learning strategies. Join us for practical courses and workshops to transform your teaching approach. To Free e-Courses Learn more Blogs & Books Enrich your knowledge and skills More books e-Course Learn at your own pace Learn from experts Learn [...]

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What is the process of formative action?

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What is the process of formative action?

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Formative action is to collecting information from the learning process of students, to make (better) follow-up actions based on that information.

Formative action can be used for...

Retrieving prior knowledge

Retrieving misconceptions/problems

Finding out whether your instruction/explanation has landed

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REPOD - René Kneyber and Valentina Devid on the power of formative action - The formative action school

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Authors Rene Kneyber René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch [...]

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De didactische routekaart als kompas voor formatief handelen

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What is constructive alignment and backward design?

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What is constructive alignment and backward design?

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With a strong curriculum, you want to ensure alignment between:

Goals

Assessment

Padagogy

To tailor this as effectively as possible, it is helpful to design backwards. You start with your end goal, then your assessment, and finally your pedagogy. Creating a pedagogical roadmap (PedRo) can be useful in this process.

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De didactische routekaart als kompas voor formatief handelen - Toetsrevolutie

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De woorden formatief handelen hebben, vijf jaar na de introductie ervan door René Kneyber, een vaste plek veroverd in het onderwijswoordenboek van veel scholen en opleidingen. Dat is natuurlijk fantastisch! Het risico van een dergelijk populair concept is echter dat er vele misvattingen kunnen ont…

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Blog: Five core principles for formative action

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Blog: Five core principles for formative action

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In the last twenty-five years, formative action - or formative assessment - has become a common part of education . Yet there still appear to be many misconceptions and ambiguities about what formative action is, exactly, and how it can be used effectively by teachers. In this blog, we want to share five core principles of formative action. These principles clarify what formative action is, but more importantly, also indicate what it is not.

Below we will discuss the following five principles of formative action:

1. Not a method of assessment | but a method of pedagogy

2. Not going gradeless | but constructive alignment

3. No time-consuming data collecting | but time-saving in practice

4. No transmission feedback | but transformative feedback

5. Not a packed and incoherent curriculum | but a clear and coherent curriculum

1. Not a method of assessment, but a method of pedagogy
Not a method of assessment
In the Netherlands we stopped using the term formative assessment, a term that is widely used and by which this particular teaching approach has become known. The term however creates the misconception that it is about testing or grading rather than pedagogy. Teachers would say things like: "your grade for this subject is the average of three formative tests" or "he missed the formative test, so he has to make it up on Friday afternoon at four o'clock". And these are not statements that fit the pedagogy that we advocate when we speak of formative action.
Method of pedagogy
We started using the term formative action because it is a pedagogical method that ensures that teacher and students can get a better handle on the student's learning process, in which both teacher and student have a role to play. Formative action makes it quicker, easier and more precise to check if what has been explained by teachers has actually been mastered, so that it becomes clear what the next step in the learning process should be.

In doing so, formative action is goal-oriented action: you are always thinking about the question, 'what information do we need now in order to decide on the next step in the instructional process?' And what do I want students to think about right now? That way, it's about the student's learning outcome and here the learning process is the focus, not the teacher's schedule, the handbook's approach, or the grade the student receives.

Moreover, "formative" is not a characteristic of a test or assessment moment, but the characteristic of a decision you make based on information gathered from students. Formative action involves looking at where the student is at the beginning of the learning process and using that information to determine what a good next step might be. The teacher or student can use the information gathered to make a more informed decision about the next step in the learning process than would have happened without it[1[i]].

Summative assessment, by contrast, is related to whether learning has actually occurred (mastery) and is preferably planned at the end of a learning process, so that a student also has time and practice to achieve mastery.
Practical tips

Before class, think carefully about at what point you need information to determine whether students have mastered the material sufficiently to proceed.

You can use all sorts of ways to retrieve that information (a whiteboard, raising fingers or an online tool such as Padlet or Mentimeter), but in all cases: think about the goal first, and only then follow up with the tool with which you want to retrieve the required information.

It is advisable to apply the maxim that you can proceed on to the next topic when about 80% of the students have mastered the material.

Use diagnostic tasks and questions in your lessons to check if students have mastered the material.

Check for specific misconceptions that you know are common to the topic covered. Discuss with colleagues which misconceptions are common in the topics you cover.

2. Not going gradeless, but constructive alignment
Not going gradeless
Sometimes teachers or school leaders say, "We no longer grade student work at school, because we work formatively," or conversely, "We don't want to start with formative action, because we don't want to get rid of grades." While it certainly not helpful to grade students in a process of formative action, because this will usually stop the learning, you can still grade students work at the end of a learning process. Even when you have employed formative action during that learning process.

Schools sometimes take up formative action because they believe their students are being given to many tests and exams. When there is too much focus on assessment, it quickly leads to - what we in The Netherlands call - "sweating, achieving, forgetting," where a student will study hard, the knowledge is stored in their memory long enough to pass a test, but disappears from memory immediately afterwards. Indeed, putting less focus on grades can be a very healthy development for a school, because this can have a positive impact on their long-term learning.

Still, a reduction in the quantity of grades does not immediately mean working entirely without grades. At the end of a lesson series, it is useful for both teachers and students (and their parents) to know whether the learning objectives have been met. So while it can be a very good idea to put less emphasis on grades and assessment, and using and designing tests and exams in a more focused way, summative assessment, and thus grades, can certainly exist alongside formative action.
Constructive alignment
Even when teaching according to the principles of formative action, the learning process can be concluded by an assignment or test whose results are used for a summative decision, for example in the form of a grade. Formative action is, in part, about better aligning the learning goals that the teacher has set with the activities that help the student achieve those learning goals, and the assessment that measures whether the goals have been achieved. This process is better known as "constructive alignment".

If you want to reduce assessment pressure at school, you can use fewer summative assessment moments. In some cases, the time spent on summative tests can be replaced by time for pedagogy, e.g. by working towards better mastery through repeated recall. This is the case, for example, when there is a so-called sub-goal, e.g. when students need to expand their vocabulary in order to maintain a conversation in French, or when students need to be able to apply certain concepts in order to analyze a social problem.

But formative action is not a substitute for summative assessment. Formative action and summative assessment are two different processes with very different goals, ways of gathering information and "game rules", and therefore cannot replace each other. When there is too much assessment pressure or there are too many summative assessments in the curriculum, there is a "testing problem" to be solved, and that cannot be done by pedagogical processes. Also it is not beneficial to just replace the graded summative assessment with a gradeless 'formative assessment'. The risk when that does happen is that the processes of formative action are secretly deployed as summative tests after all; that is explicitly not the function of formative action and can lead to an unsafe learning climate due to the clouding of the processes.

So it is important to design moments of summative assessment well and think carefully about what you want to assess. Summative exams or assignments can be very valuable at the end of the learning process. A grade can be good evidence to a student to which extent the learning objectives have been met. It is then seen not as a moment of reckoning, but as a moment when the student can also celebrate that the learning objective has been achieved and is capable of independently solving a particular task or question.
Practical Tips
- Start by formulating your main and subgoals: what should students master (independently) for your subject? Pay attention to the use of observable and active verbs. These can be found, for example, in Bloom's taxonomy. Consider what you want your students to memorize. Based on this you can determine what information you need to assess whether goals have been met: the assessment. Only then you can figure out which interim checkpoints you want to build in to make sure that you and the students can see whether they have mastered the material and/or are on the right track.

Consult colleagues about the most appropriate moments to collect information from students. This will give you a better view of the moments in a lesson series when this is needed. Even better, construct what we call a PedRo: a pedagogical roadmap.

Make use of the test effect: when students try to retrieve information from long-term memory, they are already learning; even when students cannot remember the information.

Let the learning material reappear to students as often as possible. The more repetition, the better the learning is remembered. For tips on how to apply this, you can read theory on a spiral curriculum (e.g., The hidden lives of learners by Graham Nuthall from 2007).

3. No time-consuming data collection, but time-saving in practice
No time-consuming data collection
Many teachers are fearful that formative action mainly means a lot of extra work. Based on the idea that it is important to monitor student progress, teachers sometimes tend to collect data on where individual students stand in their learning process all the time. This is a very time-consuming activity, which, moreover, is not always effective.

First of all this takes responsibility away from the student, and this is counterproductive considering formative action is meant to help students progress on the road toward autonomy. In addition to this, collecting data can get in the way of actually acting on the data. Information from the processes of formative action provides teachers or students insight into what the next step in the learning process should be at that exact moment.
Time-saving action in practice
By integrating processes of formative action into your lessons, it will become clear to you whether students have sufficiently mastered the material you have taught. That way you know whether you can continue or whether the students will for example need extra practice. This way, as a teacher, you constantly fine tune your lessons to students' levels of mastery.

Of course, not every student moves at the same speed and not every student needs the same amount of practice or explanation. Nevertheless, it is not necessary as a teacher to keep precise track of each student's development. The group as a whole often gives an overall impression of the mastery of the learning objectives.

Again, you can use the maxim that when 80% of the students give the right answer, you can move on. Obviously, you should not leave the remaining 20% to their own devices, but the rest of the class need not wait for them. In other cases, half the class will need additional instruction while the other half can already move on. By letting students keep track of what their follow-up action should be, this ultimately ensures that they are more independent in shaping their own learning.
Practical tips

Provide diagnostic questions that give you information at a glance. Whiteboards can be very helpful in this regard, but various online tools can also help.

Give the answer options colors or other codes, which students keep themselves. Each code corresponds to a different follow-up action, e.g.: extra practice with topic 1, extra practice with topic 2, move on to topic 3.

Take a pictures of student answers. You can discuss these (anonymized!) answers with the whole class. All students then write down the feedback that they can use for their own work.

The more often you work this way, the more students will get used to monitoring their own learning and thus the more you can leave it up to the student.

4. No transmission feedback, but transformative feedback
No transmission feedback
The general idea about feedback has long been that feedback should follow a task as quickly as possible and be very detailed. However, recent research shows that this is not (necessarily) optimal. For example, it appears that feedback that is too detailed produces little learning. One reason for this is that the learner is left with little to think about.

The ideal timing of feedback is also up for debate. In some cases it is pleasant for the student to receive feedback as soon as possible, so that the student immediately knows what he is doing well and what he can work on further. However, feedback that comes too quickly can make students dependent, because then they do not have to struggle and think about the next step themselves. Thus, as a teacher, you actually take learning opportunities out of students' hands, which is also referred to as learned helplessness[3[ii]].
Transformative feedback
In many cases, feedback is given at the end of the learning process, as a kind of final judgment on the final product. Many teachers have an endless collection of essays, posters, exams and papers in storage, filled with well-meant feedback, which was never looked at by students: a sad waste of the teacher's investment and the student's learning opportunities. Research[4[iii]] shows that when feedback is given in addition to a grade (i.e., at the end of the learning process), students do not look at the feedback at all. The impact of that feedback is very small, while the teacher's investment in it was very large.

However, when feedback is given during the learning process, it becomes the starting point of the learning process: the student can still apply the feedback in a new phase of the learning process. When students are given time to incorporate the feedback into the next version, the feedback has a landing spot and finds ground. Interestingly and paradoxically, feedback has more impact when it is incomplete, because the student has to think about the next step to take.

At The Formative Action School we like to say: Feedback is information makes you think, before you act upon it.
Practical Tips

When designing your lesson, think about when you give feedback and how you you're your students to process it. Consciously thinking about this ensures that you are more focused in offering a process in which the student is structurally encouraged to learn from feedback.

Make sure the adjustments students make in response to the feedback they receive are immediately visible by, for example, sharing the improved version in class or writing it in an online tool.

Make use of exit tickets, e.g.: a question at the end of your lesson about the material taught. To limit the amount of work for yourself, you may choose not to review all exit tickets, but to look or scan randomly to see what the most common errors are. You discuss those errors the next lesson in class (without naming students' names, of course).

Make sure students develop a sense for quality (read our blog, new link) so that feedback has a good "landing spot".

Make use of peer feedback. Be sure to work with students on quality awareness here so that students are capable enough to give good feedback.

5. Not a packed and incoherent curriculum, but a clear and coherent curriculum
Not a packed and incoherent curriculum...
The school year has begun, the learning paths have been determined, the scheme of work created. In our experience, many schemes are full of excercises that must be completed because they are used in the subject books, which leaves very little room for delay. As a result, teachers sometimes feel they have too little time for formative action. If one exercise has taken too long, all the other exercises can no longer be carried out. Thus, exercises are reviewed and then the teacher quickly moves on to the next, regardless of the outcome of the previous one. If the teachers don't do this the run the risk of not completing the program. But in doing so this creates the risk that students are constantly doing separate assignments and the connection between assignments and the main goals is lost - in a so called cycle of non-learning.
... But a clear and coherent curriculum
When exercises are completed but nothing is done with the outcome (e.g., extra explanation or practice to increase student understanding), precious learning opportunities are lost. If a student does not master the basics, the foundation on which to build further becomes very shaky, and eventually that will break the student down: the further a subject goes into depth, the less students will understand it.

This is why it is essential to strive for a thorough understanding and mastery of the subject matter. It is better to cover less content and make sure it is well understood by students, than to cover a lot that is not adequately understood. This requires choices to be made that will sometimes hurt, and it is essential that the conversation in a subject department, like English or biology, should therefore be about what the core objectives are for their field as a whole. When there is consensus on the "what" of the subject, it becomes possible to look at what components really need to be mastered by the student. In many cases there might still be quite a few subjects that are, upon close inspection, not so essential for mastering the final objectives. Therefore, always determine the end goal first, and from there on reason and design your way back to what is necessary for the mastery of these goals to be covered. In doing so, make sure that students take their time to achieve that mastery.
Practical tips

Engage with colleagues from your department about the "what" of your subject.

Think about the goals you want to achieve with your lessons. Are all assignments from the method necessary to achieve these goals?

Dare to make choices! Always choose quality over of quantity.

Get in touch with colleagues from other schools via social media and education platforms and discuss how they approach their curriculum design. This can often be quite enlightening!

Conclusion

The impact of education on the learning process of a student is greater when the learning process of the student focuses on the visible output of the thinking process of students, rather than on what is offered by the teacher. In other words, student mastery rather than teacher activity. When you as a teacher dare to take control over your time and make choices about what material you do and do not cover and give students the opportunity to think for themselves about his next step, student will become more independent. Eventually being able to shape their own learning processes. Formative action thus focuses on shaping students toward autonomy with self-efficacy, isn't that what education is about.
Want to know more?
Read our book - Formative Action: From Instrument to Design

Read the blog - Our model for formative practice (new link)

Hilly Drok is a trainer, educational consultant and director at The Formative Action School. She also coordinates the Formative Action course for School Experts. She has been a Dutch teacher for 14 years and pioneered the implementation process of formative action at her high school. She is currently working on the topic of self-regulation.

Flemming van de Graaf is a social studies and social sciences teacher. He aims to use his practical experience to inspire colleagues within his own school and at other schools to teach more effectively using formative action. Flemming is also a trainer for The Formative Action School.

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Five core principles for formative action - The formative action school

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In the last twenty-five years, formative action - or formative assessment - has become a common part of education . Yet there still appear to be many misconceptions and ambiguities about what formative action is, exactly, and how it can be used effectively by teachers.

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Blog: How can formative action contribute to self-regulated learning?

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Blog: How can formative action contribute to self-regulated learning?

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Rene Kneyber, Valentina Devid, Hilly Drok

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How can formative action contribute to self-regulated learning? - The formative action school

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Formative action can contribute to self-regulated learning. In this post we detail what the mechanisms are.

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In this article I will discuss the connection between desirable difficulties and feedback. How can we use feedback to create better outcomes in the long term?
When we teach, we tend to make the learning process as smooth as possible. By giving clear instructions, students are successful, and thus more motivated and satisfied. But by using such an approach, performance in class may be good (students show mastery), but that does not necessarily mean result in mastery in the long term (e.g., for one of the next chapters).

In fact, oftentimes it is the other way around. Under certain conditions performance during lessons can be reduced to achieve greater results in the long term. These 'conditions' are called desirable difficulties.

Example of a desirable difficulty

An example of such a difficulty is to ask students to create a "brain dump". Give them a blank sheet of paper and have them write down (without peer discussion or other help) everything they can remember from their previous lesson.

This is not necessarily fun. It will frustrate students because they cannot retrieve everything. Some may simply end up with a blank sheet. But the act of retrieval makes students remember the lesson material better, even if the retrieval attempt partly fails.

Instead of nicely wrapped gift, an escape room

Effective feedback is often considered as nicely wrapped, personalised gift. If you work hard as a feedback giver you can create the ultimate 'gift' for the students to unwrap. If you tell them exactly what to improve, students learn more. However, more recent research shows us that although this is an appealing thought. It's actually not very effective for most learners. Effective feedback makes students think, before they act upon it. By making the instructions to clear, students think less and therefore learn less.

In short, effective feedback should feel more like an escape room and less like Christmas Eve.

In the following I will discuss different ways of organising feedback as desirable difficulties, and how that can improve student thinking .

Deliberately frustrating feedback

Receiving no feedback versus receiving feedback

As a student, you want to know: "Am I on the right track?" Indeed: if students receive immediate feedback after each task completed, they do better during class. And no doubt that makes them feel good. But researchers Fyfe & Rittle-Johnson (2017) found that students who received no feedback showed better mastery of the material learned after a week than the group who had received feedback, presumably because they were (cognitively) processing the assignments more deeply.

What is striking about their study, however, is that there was also a group that did extra poorly when they did not receive feedback. So for some students, not getting feedback was very good, but for others it was extra bad. According to Fyfe & Rittle-Johnson, this mainly had to do with prior knowledge already present. The more you know, the better to use "no feedback" as a strategy, since external feedback can get in the way of internal thinking mechanisms.

Precise and detailed feedback?

Suppose you are a student who has written an essay. How would you prefer to receive feedback on it? Most students will prefer to receive it as detailed as possible. The teacher has pointed out exactly what needs to be changed, and where you made language mistakes. Good, detailed feedback is also good for student satisfaction. And by giving focused and brief feedback, you increase the likelihood that more will be done with it.

But according to Dylan Wiliam, among others, that's not necessarily the way to go. Because in the end, you don't want a good product (the essay); you want students to get better at essay writing (a better producer)! Good feedback, therefore, encourages the learner to think profoundly, and thus has an element of frustration. You can achieve this, for example, by giving feedback based on criteria. Provide a list of criteria that a good essay should meet and give students 0, 1 or 2 points.

Or, for example, write all your comments on post-it's and then give the essays and their corresponding post-it's to groups and then have them figure out which post-it's belong to which essay.

Audio-feedback

Another option discussed in Naomi Winstone's book is the option of audio feedback. You record the spoken feedback, send it as a file to students, encouraging students to listen to it and actively incorporate your comments.

I'd listen to it and write my own comments and then I'd go back through it a second time looking at the notes I had written for each paragraph ... and I'd think of things in my head that I could put (in). (Merry, & Orsmond, 2008, p. 4)

In summary, the best feedback is not necessarily informative, but encourages learners and students to construct more coherent meaning.

Individual versus whole-class

When he was in the Netherlands in 2018, Dylan Wiliam said that one of his biggest mistakes was that in the past he put too much emphasis on individual, personalized feedback. A good idea in theory, but obviously unworkable in practice, because what teacher has the time to give each student feedback individually?

Whole-class feedback offers interesting advantages. As a teacher, you can dwell on common mistakes, or on excellent or less excellent examples, giving students an idea of what is required of them. Students must relate your comments, or the conversation that ensues, to their own product or work, which can potentially lead to deeper processing.

For an example, take a look at this nice blog on whole-class feedback in practice.

Peer feedback versus teacher feedback

Students are generally not keen on peer feedback. They need to be able to trust the "source," and they trust their peers less than they trust the teacher. But again, what feels familiar or trustworthy is not always necessarily helpful for better understanding.

"In the study by Yang, Badger, and Yu (2006) revision initiated by teacher feedback was less successful than revision initiated by peer feedback, probably because peer feedback induced uncertainty. Teacher feedback was accepted as such but proved to be associated with misinterpretation and miscommunication, whereas reservations regarding the accuracy of peer feedback induced discussion about the interpretation. Students' reservations prompted them to search for confirmation by checking instruction manuals, asking the teacher, and/or performing more self-corrections. As a result, students acquired a deeper understanding of the subject. In contrast, teacher feedback lowered students' self-corrections, perhaps students assumed that the teacher had addressed all errors and that no further corrections were required. ( Yang et al., 2006)"

In conclusion

The connection between the concept of desirable difficulties and feedback has of course been made by Bjork before, but in this blog post I detail how desirable difficulties helps me better understand some of the findings surrounding feedback.

As with other desirable difficulties, some caution is necessary. Of course you don't want to totally demotivate your students. And clearly, you want to support students appropriately enough. If you have to use through quick, immediate feedback, so be it (e.g., with novices or slow learners). But if see the opportunity, it doesn't hurt to make feedback deliberately thought inducing.

The main premise of formative action is after all that it encourages learners to be active and thinking. Challenging learners to think for themselves about what that next step in the learning process should be, is another part of the strategy set.

In our book on formative action we have a full chapter on transformative feedback. You can download the chapter for free here: https://ecourse.formative-action.com/course/formative-action-free-course

René Kneyber is a former teacher of mathematics, and currently a trainer, advisor and board member of The Formative Action School He has written and translated more than fifteen books, including Flip the System: Changing Education from the Ground Up. From 2015 to 2022, he was a crown member of the Dutch Education Council.

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Feedback and desirable difficulties - The formative action school

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What is the relation between desirable difficulties and feedback? Read our thoughts or download a free chapter from our book.

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Building Thinking Classrooms in History

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In his book Building Thinking Classrooms , Canadian mathematician Peter Liljedahl argues that too little thinking is done by students in the average lesson. Often, instruction is given by the teacher, practised together and then copied independently by students. All thinking steps are thereby made by the teacher; students often only imitate.

According to Liljedahl, this can be done much better: by using large white boards and sheets that require standing collaboration and thorough thinking about solutions to problems. Liljedahl's book was written for maths teachers, but his ideas can also be used in other subjects. We therefore saw opportunities for our subject, history, to apply the principles introduced by Liljedahl and start working with maths boards. In our view, this approach also has great potential in other (business) subjects.

Building Thinking Classrooms

Two historians, Arjan and Thijs, are sitting in the staff room reading a maths book. It sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but it turned out to be a recipe for success! We had heard of Liljedahl's book and tasted enthusiasm about his ideas, but it was still maths education, not history. Still, we ventured into the book and soon saw possibilities.

Liljedahl has his students solve problems in threesomes - standing at a non-permanent vertical surface (or: a fixed whiteboard and 'erasure sheets' as we like to call them) and using only one marker. This change of setting immediately invites collaboration. Especially when Liljedahl also adds the rule that you can only write down what someone else says. To master this process, he starts with mathematical puzzles. But how do you do this with other subjects, such as history?

Independent thinking

For our subject, the independent collaboration and feedback between students particularly appealed to us. We were busy preparing our students for the final history exam. In doing so, we expect quite a lot from students: a lot of knowledge, all kinds of complex skills, and also that they are independent enough to assess how best to prepare for this in their own time. "Good luck everyone, we'll see you in the exam hall!"

So for this final exam to be a success, students need to be able to give feedback to themselves pretty well. For example, they need to be able to question themselves: 'What exactly is expected of me in this subject? What do I already master well and what do I still need to work on? And how do I tackle that, if my teacher can't help me with that?" Fortunately, there are quite a few ideas on how you as a teacher can guide your students towards that independence, for example by using a feedback process. But Liljedahl's ideas require quite a different way of working, which made us curious.

We therefore decided to each try this out in our own classes and make answering exam questions central to working with erasure boards and sheets. For groups of around 25 students, for Thijs this meant - in addition to the fixed whiteboard - sticking seven loose erase sheets scattered through the room to the walls. Arjan, with a fixed, private classroom, had a better deal: he mounted eight fixed whiteboards on the walls! And what happened next? The following is a sample of our lessons, with the me-person alternating between Arjan and Thijs.

A sequence question

Every history exam starts with a sequence question, so I show six numbered events on the IWB asking, "What is the correct chronological order?"

1. Young people opposed to consumer society regularly slept on Dam Square. Older Dutch people were annoyed by this.

2. After the German occupying army officially surrendered, German soldiers opened fire on the celebrating crowd in Dam Square.

3. Napoleon put a definitive end to the Batavian democratic revolution by appointing his brother Louis as king. Louis chose the town hall on Dam Square as the royal palace.

4. Only after citizens expelled the Roman Catholic administration from the old city hall, the city switched to the Protestant camp during the Revolt.

5. When Hotel Krasnapolsky opened, its electric lighting and conservatory constructed of iron and glass made it a paragon of the new, industrial era.

6. During the Golden Age, the Koopmansbeurs was built so that merchants could meet and do business in the products from Asia and America.

Students are randomly divided by me into groups of three (or four), confer with each other and also use the erase sheet as a notepad. Soon there were scribbles like: A. 1960s, B. WWII and C, 1800s. In other threesomes, there was a lot of deliberation, but only slowly an answer appeared on the board.

Not immediately showing the right answer

Now, of course, as a teacher, you can simply show the correct answer. That will produce euphoria or minor, but much more important than this result are the thinking steps made by the students. How do you tackle such a question as a group of three? Why does some groups only show the answer "6-4-3-5-2-1" and others a whole list of years and other scribbles?

What emerged: answering the question became a lot easier for the students who used the erase sheet as a draft paper than for the group who tried to keep all six events in memory. So this already provided valuable and useful insight for the students who did not use this answering strategy before. Useful for during your next test or exam!

Working with sources

Another very important skill in history is working with sources. In an exam, students can score around 70% of the points on source questions, and perhaps more importantly, being able to assess aspects such as reliability, representativeness and perspective of text and image sources and their creators also develops an important form of critical thinking in students in the long run.

Each trio is therefore given one source, for example a propaganda poster from Nazi Germany, along with the question, "What characteristic of National Socialism can be seen in this source?" To answer this properly, it is necessary for pupils to know which characteristics fit National Socialism.

So the first task I give to the groups of students is to list these characteristics. Students are given two minutes to do this. Only then do we ask the question of what it is actually about and I give students three minutes to formulate a good answer.

Walking around and observing

There is busy discussion in the trios and occasional peeking at the other boards. The first group quickly finishes and is satisfied with naming one characteristic: "leader principle". In another group, I hear a very critical conversation. "We need to formulate this better, because now we don't mention the source," I hear them say. Meanwhile, I walk around and look at what is being written down here and there.

After the three minutes, I stop their work. The students now have to move to the next board and are given a different colour marker to correct their neighbour's answer. They are given two minutes to do this and again animated conversations ensue. Curlicues and stripes appear on the boards. Some groups are very satisfied, others very critical.

The feedback is running out

Since the feedback seems to be "running out", I choose not to include another round of feedback between students, but now discuss the assignment in class. I look around the class at the different groups. "Which answer is the best?", I ask the group, "And more importantly, why do you think so?" In the conversation that ensues -and looking at the erase sheets- I find out:

- there are two groups that did not find the right feature;

- three groups found the correct attribute but did not use the resource properly; and

- two groups formulated a completely correct answer.

Developing a sense for quality and self-regulation

Attention focuses on one of the completely correct answers. "What makes that answer from group 6 correct?" I ask the students. Slowly but surely, students complement each other: they name the correct characteristic of National Socialism, the clear reference to the source and the linking of the answer to that which is asked as elements of a correct answer.

In this way, students develop a sense for quality. What does a correct answer meet? How do you build it up, what does it look like? The different levels of the group answers -from very good to a lot less- are thus immediately visible in the classroom.

Perhaps equally important is the fact that the answers are quickly wiped out again afterwards. The mistakes that had been made do not haunt the students: in this way, we create a safe practice ground.

Practising answer strategy

"Why did I actually start with the first question, the brainstorm on characteristics?" I ask.

A student: "That way, you are actually already thinking about the question that comes next."

Me: "But you hadn't seen that question at all, had you?"

Another student: "No okay, but we needed that information for that second question, even though we didn't know it beforehand."

Sometimes students think they get stuck when they see a difficult resource and skip the question. By including an intermediate step like this, students can prepare themselves for such a question and gather the knowledge they need. If this is clearly listed, the follow-up question becomes a lot easier.

Of course, they can use that answer strategy very well during a test or exam! Thus, working with erasure sheets and discussing assignments afterwards also potentially contributes to students' degree of self-regulation.

What are the benefits?

Besides improving students' answer strategies, working with erasure sheets also brings other potential benefits.

1. Learning from each other

"I really learn a lot from this" and "It is quite insightful to speak to people you never speak to otherwise" are frequently heard reactions from our pupils after working a few times with erase sheets. By discussing a lot with each other, listening carefully to each other and asking specific questions - after all, you can only write down what someone else says, and so you have to make a good translation - pupils constantly hone their knowledge and skills.

2. Focus on growth

"I keep getting better at this!", jubilated a senior student after the erasure sheet exam training. This was not misguided self-congratulation: she really did get better at analysing sources and formulating answers, a more than satisfactory final exam showed.

Because "wrong" answers never haunted her but she could start and deliberate with a clean slate -and a new group- on each assignment, she taught herself step by step more quality awareness of good answers and ways to get there. So a large part of her worries were taken away by herself, without the need for a teacher!

3. Welcome variety

"Finally something different!" may not be a strong substantive argument for working with erase sheets, but the variety in terms of form is often very welcome to pupils. Standing and working in groups is sometimes even perceived as a relief among all the individual, seated and silent forms of work.

As a teacher, however, you can also get a little too carried away with your enthusiasm... As one student said: "Yes, sir, those sheets of erase paper are nice once in a while, but we really don't need them every lesson". So try to find out at which moments you think working with sheets of erase paper adds value to the learning process and when it does not.

Practical tips

Now suppose you got excited by this story: where do you start?

1. Choose whiteboards or erase sheets

Now, not every classroom can be furnished with multiple whiteboards on the walls. We have no shares, but a simple solution would be rolls of whiteboard film: static sheets that stick to almost any surface. These work best on smooth surfaces: on a brick wall or other rough walls you will get very crooked handwriting.

2. Ensure a safe working atmosphere

Besides suitable material, working together in threesomes or foursomes also requires a safe and work-oriented atmosphere. In the beginning, there is a lot of looking around and there are often groups that think they can chat a bit without getting down to business. However, this becomes immediately (painfully) obvious when discussing the assignments afterwards and focuses a lot of uncomfortable attention on the group that actually wanted to duck away. In our groups, by the second assignment, this was enough for those students to start working in earnest anyway!

3. Give clear instructions

Give students clear instructions on how to work on the boards or erase sheets, at least these:

- there is one marker that rotates;

- only write down what others say;

- you may delete only after consultation.

This way, you emphasise the need to work together and learn from each other.

For some (follow-up) assignments, "check with other groups and discuss" or "shift 1/2/3 groups for the next assignment" are suitable supplementary instructions.

4. Start simple

Start with a simple brainstorming task where students can write down many examples. This way, there is busy deliberation, the marker rotates and the board fills up. In this way, you quickly learn the principles of working on the board with an assignment that requires some thought, but is not that complicated. Later, you can introduce more complex assignments, for instance with sources and/or multiple questions.

Do our students and we now stand by the erase boards and sheets for the whole lesson? Certainly not! After all, we're still history teachers who also love to tell a good story and take our pupils to other times. But the presence of the erase boards and sheets also reminds us that it is not always about our story, but mainly about what the pupil does with it. In doing so, we make our class not only a listening, but also an active and focused thinking group of students.

Sources:

Liljedahl, P., Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning (2021)

Thijs Risselada is a history teacher. He wants to share his positive experiences with formative action in the classroom with other teachers and schools. Thijs is therefore also active as a trainer at The Formative Action School.

Arjan is a history teacher, and also a trainer at The Formative Action School.

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Building Thinking Classrooms in History - The formative action school

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How do you use the Building Thinking Classrooms Approach in history? Two history teachers explain how they use it for exam preparation.

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Blog - How do you help students integrate desirable difficulties into their learning?

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Blog - How do you help students integrate desirable difficulties into their learning?

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In a previous blog, I talked about desirable difficulties: what they are, what they can look like, how to use them in formative action and how they can contribute to self-regulated learning. After all, desirable difficulties are what you want to use in your lessons to ensure that not only short-term performance takes place, but that long-term mastery develops in students.

Desirable difficulties thus create learning. Despite the fact that not every student thinks learning takes place in school, it takes place in school. You might have students in class who ask if they can go home earlier "because they still have so much to learn for the test week", or who say during class, "I'm not going to do this now, because I'm only going to learn at home (or at homework assistance)". For these students, it is good to know that precisely those desirable difficulties used during lessons make for really deep learning!

Self-learning at home

But learning does not only take place at school. At home, too, it is important that students use effective strategies and do not just keep reading over the material in the book or make summaries where they overwrite half (or sometimes even the whole!) book.

In this blog, I want to take a closer look at how you can guide students in using desirable difficulties in their daily learning practices. After all, when learners start doing this themselves, it will contribute to long-term learning as well as give them knowledge on how to learn most effectively; and they will benefit from this for the rest of their lives.

But how do you help students with that?

Unfortunately, because desirable difficulties do not feel comfortable and are also ineffective in the short term, they are usually not preferred by learners. Therefore, it is extra important to impart knowledge of the strategy, confidence in the strategy and commitment to the strategy to learners.

How you can help your students learn to make better use of effective study strategies, I will outline below using the so-called KBCP framework and the Study Smart Programme developed by the University of Maastricht .

KBCP stands for Knowlegde, Believe, Commitment and Planning. According to this framework, it is important that learners have knowledge, belief and commitment to make the strategy their own. It then involves working with learners to plan when, why and how they will apply the strategy in their own learning.

The Study Smart programme adds to the KBCP framework how actual behaviour change can take place , by looking at the obstacles students face and how they can be overcome.

The Study Smart programme relies more on the learner as an active participant in that process, and the experiences of those learners to understand how they can change in learning strategy use. The creators of this programme recognise that integrating desirable difficulties into one's own learning is a long-term process that requires regular reflections and support for behaviour change.

Below, I list what is needed to support students in moving towards using desirable difficulties in their own learning. Here, I combine both approaches.

Knowledge

First of all, before a learner starts using a desirable difficulty, he or she should get sufficient knowledge from the teacher about how the strategy works. As a teacher, you subtitle what the learning strategy entails, how it can be used and why it is important to use it

Example of explicit instruction in retrieval practice

For example, in my Dutch subject I might want students to pick up what exactly arguing is at the beginning of a lesson series on an argument. I could also tell them, but I know that it is much more effective to have students actively retrieve the knowledge themselves. I also know that, in principle, students should have the required knowledge about discourses. But even if they didn't know it, they would benefit from thinking about it themselves before I tell them about it, utilizing the pre-test-effect .

So I might say to my students at the beginning of the lesson, "In a moment, I'm going to ask you to write down as much as you can of what you remember about arguments. With this, we are taking advantage of the test effect by doing a retrieval practice (what) through a so-called brain dump.

I deliberately do this at the beginning of the learning process () so that your prior knowledge is activated. It is important to activate your prior knowledge first before learning more about a topic, this makes it easier for the new information to hang on to existing information in your head. It doesn't matter if you don't come up with the right answer, even if you can't remember anything, trying to recall it already makes for more learning gains ().

I will give you a sheet of paper and you can write down everything you remember about speeches on it for two minutes. Trying to recall from your long-term memory already makes the knowledge stick better, so try to recall as much as you can (how)."

Metacognitive aspect

In this way, you have explained to students what the strategy gives them cognitively. In addition, it is good to mention the metacognitive aspect. This can be done, for example: "Moreover, retrieving knowledge makes you more aware of how much knowledge you actually have and how much you will have to learn about this subject later on. If it takes you a lot of effort and you can only pick up a little, you know you still have some work to do!"

Feedback on retrieval practice

Incidentally, formative action also has a role to play here. After all, ideally you want the retrieval of information to be insightful not only for the learners, but also for you as a teacher, as you do in formative acting. That way, you can make sure that students don't build on the new knowledge based on misconceptions. Obviously, you want to get these out of the way as soon as possible.

Making the information insightful can be done, for example, by asking a targeted question and having it answered on a wipe-off pad or in a digital tool such as Padlet, Quizizz or Mentimeter. Once you have made students' thinking insightful in this way, you can provide students with feedback the moment the prior knowledge contains misconceptions. Then you can give learners the right knowledge and have them practice it properly.

Example of explicit instruction in varied practice

"In a couple of minutes we are going to practise with different formulas for calculating a cone, a cylinder and a cube. Ideally, you might like to practise each formula so much that you have completely mastered it before moving on to the next one. Then it might seem like you have mastered it, but when you then get them mixed up on the test or in a practical situation have to decide for yourself which one to use, you still don't really know it.

Therefore, after explaining what these different formulas mean, we are going to practise them right through each other. This will feel less pleasant, but by having to think harder about which formula to use when, you will eventually develop a better mastery! Unfortunately, it does take a little longer to master it properly, but once you understand it, you won't forget it so quickly!"

But even if you have told all this and subtitled how to deploy and use desirable difficulties, you can't assume that learners will actually start using these themselves during learning. Learners are often very persistent in their misconceptions about what constitutes effective learning.

Students make wrong assumptions because they overestimate long-term learning AND it feels more useful to use ineffective strategies. For example, a survey of 117 students found that 84% of those students use rereading as a learning strategy and only 11% test themselves and that students preferred cramming to varied practice, despite the fact that they performed better when they had varied practice .

It is therefore important to make the misconceptions very explicit. To do this, the Study Smart method suggests asking your students to collect evidence of their study methods, for example by having them take pictures of a study situation that is typical for them, writing a reflection of the internal and external factors that influenced their study situation.

You can use this information in a conversation with students, setting out very clearly the misconceptions of the ineffective learning strategy, as well as the research-based benefits of effective learning strategies.

"When you highlight important information from a text, it feels very meaningful. You feel that you are learning well. The paradox, however, is that you are not learning! Your brain thinks: "Good, that information is stored, I don't need to do anything else with it and I certainly don't need to actively remember it! (see also this Youtube-clip).

It therefore makes much more sense not only to mark, but also to make sure you actively recall the information from memory. To do this, after marking, you can ask a classmate or housemate to quiz you, or make your own flashcards, writing an important concept on the front and explaining it on the back.

Every card you get right, you put away, cards you don't get right, you put at the bottom of your pile. Just until you have played all the cards away! Of course, don't forget to repeat this process several times at increasingly long intervals between practice moments, otherwise you will forget the knowledge after all!"

To make tangible the extent to which a learning strategy has worked, you can ask the whole class to learn something on the same topic. You ask one half of the class to do this by using an ineffective strategy, such as rereading. The other half of the class should use an effective strategy, such as quizzing themselves using questions you have prepared. You then give students a diagnostic test in class two days later. You compare the results of both groups, with students being able to see the effect of the effective strategy through the group averages.

By having a conversation with learners about the difference between what these learning strategies did, you can help learners face the fact that desirable difficulties may have felt less effective and less comfortable in the short term, but will give them more learning gains in the longer term. Organising this feedback is essential for sufficient belief in the strategy.

Commitment

But even if students understand what the strategy means and believe it is effective, they are not going to use it automatically. They will still have to start committing to it. This is because knowledge and belief is not yet enough to give up old habits. This has to do with idiosyncratic beliefs that people generally have. They think: this does indeed sound very sensible, I also quite believe it works for many people. But not with me, because it works differently with me! (see also Anique de Bruin's inaugural speech on this subject).

Your students will have to develop a positive attitude towards the strategy as well as towards the investment they have to make in it. After all, a new strategy like this takes quite a bit of investment: they have to master it well, it has to become their default, they have to get over the idea that it is ineffective (because it doesn't yield as much in the short term and because they may have idiosyncratic experiences) and they have to overcome the pain it takes.

It can help to exchange experiences with classmates to find out whether it is really necessary to use all those difficult strategies to pass the test, whether it is normal to overtest yourself before a test and if their classmates do all that too, what strategy they think works best and what that looks like for them.

According to the developers of the Study Smart method, students' motivation to use desirable difficulties will remain low the moment it does not get them higher grades and their classmates do not use these strategies. Reflecting on how the strategy helps the student towards their goals is therefore very important in this step.

And using classmates in that reflection, by letting students discuss their insecurities and resistance with their classmates, essential for real behaviour change.

"For today, you all had to learn words, using flashcards. Sit in a group of four and discuss with each other:

How you went about it. How many times did you repeat the cards? Did you repeat them until you knew them all? When did you stop? Why was that the moment for you to stop?

How you felt about using this technique. What did you feel when you used it? Frustration because it didn't work well, for example, or enthusiasm because you knew it well?

What it delivered. Do you know the words better now than you knew them before? Can you remember them longer? Or perhaps you haven't experienced any learning gains?

How you would approach learning next time? What of this technique would you use again? Would you rather use a different technique? Which one and why that one?"

Plans

If you want desirable difficulties to become standard techniques that students use themselves, you can help them plan these techniques when they are doing their homework at home. You can do the planning in class by thinking together about which task the pupil will use the strategy for, what exactly it looks like, why they are using it. The pupil then implements the technique himself at home and the next lesson you reflect together on how that went.

Keep in mind that pupils generally do not like using desirable difficulties and they are likely to fall back into their old behaviour quickly. Therefore, keep planning together and reflecting together on the techniques used until it is ingrained.

"At the end of this lesson series, you will have an oral in which you can talk about your future plans in Spanish. We obviously want you to have enough vocabulary by then to be able to do this, but also to still know it next year and when you leave school, because it's going to take you too much time the rest of your life if you have to look up all the words every time! Therefore, we are now going to make sure that you really master this vocabulary list.

To ensure this, we need to start practising the material now in a staggered way, also allowing yourself time to functionally forget the material . Choose three moments this week at intervals of at least a day and a half when you will rehearse yourself using the flashcards. Make sure you set aside half an hour in your diary for this each time."

Replacing habits

It is very difficult to completely jettison or replace an old habit. How many people struggle with quitting smoking or snacking or adding the gym to their weekly repertoire. What can help in instilling good (learning) habits is not to completely replace the old habit, but to add something to it.

In learning behaviour, this could look like this: some students really enjoy summarising by transcribing half the book. It gives them grip and they believe in it, even if you have told them it does nothing for their long-term mastery.

Instead of discouraging students from this behaviour, challenge them to add desirable difficulty. After making the summary, get them to have a classmate go over some crucial concepts or explain to someone else how the different concepts in their summary relate to each other. That way, the student can keep the grip, but still teach themselves effective learning behaviour.

But where do I find the time!

Perhaps you as a teacher are now thinking, "Sounds all very sensible and effective, but in what time am I supposed to do all this! I'm already running out of time with my overcrowded curriculum!" A very logical thought and unfortunately, I cannot take away the enormous pressure on the curriculum.

However, it is good to remember that the more you and your pupils use desirable difficulties, the better the knowledge will stick in the long term and the less you will spend on endless repetition. And that ultimately saves you time in that overloaded curriculum!

I myself wish I had made more use of varied practice of verb spelling during my lessons, for instance. Because in my own lessons, I was explaining 't kofschip from bridge class to havo 5; year after year in the same way. And every time my students said they understood it and every time I had to explain it again the following year. Anyway, it could have saved me a lot of time by thinking better about where in my lesson design I would integrate which desirable difficulty.

Notes

Hilly Drok is a trainer, educational consultant and director at The Formative Action School. She also coordinates the Formative Action course for School Experts. She has been a Dutch teacher for 14 years and pioneered the implementation process of formative action at her high school. She is currently working on the topic of self-regulation.

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How do you help students integrate desirable difficulties into their learning? - The formative action school

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How can we teach our students to employ more desirable difficulties in their learning? Read these tips from our expert Hilly Drok.

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No pain, no gain – on desirable difficulties

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No pain, no gain – on desirable difficulties

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Imagine you teach chemistry and want your students to learn the periodic table so that they can analyse chemical behaviour more easily. You therefore want them to memorise the periodic table. However, you also know that students are not going to do this on their own, so you motivate them by giving them a test.

The students learn the system by heart, almost all achieve a pass and in the next lesson series, you want to build on this knowledge... but suddenly they have all forgotten it! Meaning, you can start again ... from scratch.

Extremely frustrating for you as a teacher - because this way you can't progress in your lessons - and also very inconvenient for the students - because they lose valuable lesson time and never become independent in their learning this way.

Your students should have used more effective learning strategies: desirable difficulties. In this blog, I will outline what desirable difficulties are, why they are so important, what they can look like, how they are used in formative action and how they can contribute to self-regulated learning. In a subsequent blog, I will give a practical interpretation of how to help your students use these effective learning strategies in their own learning.

Ineffective learning strategies

Many students apply ineffective learning strategies when learning: techniques such as cramming or rereading that in the short term ensure that they have the knowledge in their heads, but do not ensure long-term mastery. While we teachers are all about that long-term mastery: we assume that we can build on the knowledge we have previously imparted to our students, and we naturally wish the same for our students.

Not infrequently, we are disappointed. Annoying for us, but quite disastrous for our pupils, because ultimately they will also have to shape their own learning well and for that, first of all, an important knowledge base is needed and, on top of that, it is necessary to master the right strategies, to ensure that they can also evaluate their own learning well and adjust their learning accordingly.

What are desirable difficulties

Desirable difficulties - introduced by Bjork are indispensable in effective learning. Desirable difficulties are learning techniques that are not necessarily comfortable, but are enormously effective and ensure long-term mastery and learning. Examples of desirable difficulties are retrieval practice (retrieving information from long-term memory), spaced practice, and interleaved practice.

Active retrieval

So in retrieval practice, which translates as active retrieval, you ensure that students themselves actively retrieve information from their long-term memory, for example by having them review words or recall what was covered in the previous lesson.

Spaced practice

When using spaced practice, make sure there is time between different exercises on the same topic. For example, by presenting students with a number of tasks on Pythagorean theorem, then letting the topic rest for a while and having them complete tasks on Pythagorean theorem again a week later.

This gives students a chance to almost forget learning material. When they then recall the material from their long-term memory, it sticks all the better. This can also be seen in Ebbinghaus' well-known Forget curve. As a result, Bjork and Bjork call forgetting the friend of learning (see this video). So it is better to have students practise on something three times for half an hour than dipping in for one session of an hour and a half.

Varied practice

Varied practice means alternating different topics, rather than presenting them in isolation. So instead of first giving ten exercises on the present tense verb, then ten exercises on the past tense verb and then ten exercises on the past participle, mix them up. This way, students will get frustrated at first, because it is harder to think of which rule to apply when. But once they master it, they will have mastered it more fully.

Formative action and desirable difficulties

An important basic principle in formative practice is that it is about mastering rather than covering(see also this blog). If the main goal in teaching is to finish the book or the study guide, without keeping in mind whether that pace and level of difficulty suits the class you are teaching, then you are in fact just throwing knowledge over the fence.

The fact that all the material has been covered (or thrown!) does not mean that mastery is taking place among pupils! Of course, you want pupils to acquire knowledge and skills that will benefit them throughout their lives. That is why it is also important to use desirable difficulties: that way, you work towards long-term mastery.

Retrieval and spaced practice in formative action

When you are doing formative practice, you are undeniably using desirable difficulties, such as active retrieval (retrieval practice) and spaced practice.

Indeed, in step 2 (thinkand generate) of the process of formative action, learners must all retrieve knowledge from their own minds, without aids and without consultation. The active retrieval of information (retrieval practice) further solidifies knowledge schemas in long-term memory.

The effect achieved with retrieval practice is also called the test-effect. By capitalising on the test effect, you ensure, as it were, that the knowledge is better perpetuated and also more agile to use, because the 'paths' in the brain on the way to the knowledge become more passable.

In step 5 (verify, reflect & predict), you will perform another retrieval practice, and depending on your design, you might also perform spaced practice here, if you choose to perform step 5 just a little later in the learning process to make the best use of the forgetting curve.

Transformative feedback as desirable difficulty

Transformative feedback, which involves learner thinking and is more work for the receiver than the giver, also causes learners to have to be more active in processing feedback and think more.

You can do this, for instance, by not writing all kinds of instructions on the students' work, but letting them ask you a feedback question themselves: what are they still in doubt about and would they like feedback on? Or by indicating to a student: in your first paragraph, three verb forms are misspelled, look up which ones. In this way, the student is thinking, which deepens understanding.

This is another example of desirable difficulty: students have to be actively engaged, it is harder for them than feedback handed to them on a silver platter, and it may take them longer to master the material, but they learn more in the long run.

Paradox of desirable difficulties

Students will not, of their own accord, easily choose to use desirable difficulties in their learning process. For one thing, it doesn't feel comfortable at all to have to recall something from memory that you can just about reach, or start on another topic when you've barely just understood the first one.

Many students prefer comfortable learning strategies to desirable difficulties - even if the teacher tells them time and again that these are less effective. It just feels safer to mark the important text or read it over again than to quiz yourself or explain it to the neighbour.

In addition, it is also true that desirable difficulties in the short term yield less learning gain. If you offer the tasks on the different verb forms in a blocked fashion (first ten tasks on person form present tense, then ten on person form past tense, finally ten on past participle), students will undoubtedly answer the tenth question correctly and seem to master it immediately.

If all the questions on the different verb forms are mixed up, they might not answer the tenth question on the person present tense correctly. Students will soon think this makes it better for them to avoid desirable difficulties, when in fact it confuses learning and performance.

Learning and performance

Indeed, deep learning is different from being able to perform in a single moment. Imagine, someone asks you to memorise a login code for a moment, until she finds her phone and can store it in there. The best thing you can do then is to keep repeating that login code over and over again. In effect, you are mashing it.

If she asks you to repeat it after three minutes, you do so effortlessly. However, if she asks you again two months later what that code was, you won't remember; you were able to perform well in that one moment, but no learning took place.

If you open a new checking account, and you get a new PIN, you will have to recall that code from your long-term memory at different points in time. You might have to cheat at first, but as you have to dig up that code from your memory over different periods in time (depending on your spending pattern), at some point you won't even have to actively think about what your PIN was again: learning has taken place.

Effective learning vs short-term performance: an example

It works the same way with learning lessons in school. Suppose you want students to increase their vocabulary in French so that they can more easily hold conversations in French on different topics, you can give your students a test that covers different words.

As long as they are not properly supervised, students will most likely choose to cram in the words just before the test and probably get a good grade. However, if they then have to apply these words to speaking six months later, they will have completely forgotten them and you can start all over again.

It is more effective to regularly bring those words back into lessons, by actively retrieving them from students' memories. In this way, deep-rooted understanding will occur, which will also allow students to use this knowledge in an agile way, i.e. in different situations and contexts.

Undesirable difficulties

So effective learning actually only takes place when it hurts a little, but that does not mean that every difficulty in learning immediately leads to better understanding. When a learner has too little prior knowledge or so much new knowledge comes at a learner that they are cognitively overloaded, they also certainly experience difficulties, but no learning takes place in this process.

It is therefore important that the difficulties do lead to deeper understanding or perpetuation of the understanding. This is only possible if the learner does manage to link it to existing prior knowledge . So the requested thing must be possible but slightly beyond the learner's immediate reach.

Determining whether a difficulty is undesirable

It is very difficult for a learner to determine when it is a desirable difficulty (recalling something you were told a week ago feels uncomfortable and also less effective than just reading it back in your notes, but makes a lot of sense) or an undesirable difficulty (trying to see a connection between three complicated concepts that you actually didn't understand very well all to begin with just won't work and is also then also not useful).

Two important conditions for desirable difficulties are that pupils 1) do have to think harder about the material but 2) that the desired result is achieved in the end. As a teacher, it is therefore important to always check whether pupils are being challenged but you are not asking the impossible of them.

Benefits of desirable difficulties

On balance, it is quite understandable that students often choose easy learning strategies. It hurts less and, moreover, it provides them with what they are looking for in the short term: enough mastery to pass the test the next day, for example.

Yet there are also considerable advantages for students to use desirable difficulties during their learning. The main benefit is deep-rooted understanding. At first glance, it does not necessarily seem necessary for learners to memorise knowledge for longer than the test; their goal is often a passing score anyway.

However, if they make sure the knowledge is in long-term memory, then they make the subsequent learning easier for themselves. They have created new prior knowledge, to which it is even easier to attach new knowledge and so their knowledge network only expands further. And of course: the more you learn, the more fun learning becomes.

Desirable difficulties and self-regulated learning

In addition, making desirable difficulties explicit also contributes to better self-regulated learning. Some students tend to use quantity cues (as Anique de Bruin calls them, for example in this podcast) to determine whether they have learnt well enough: "I studied for three hours, so now I must know it well enough" or "my summary covered six A4s, so I learnt well". Needless to say, these are not the right conclusions.

Incorrect causal attribution

Even after learning, learners who have little understanding often misattribute their comprehension: for example, they attribute their success or failure to external factors beyond their control or to factors that say nothing about their mastery ('it's a short text, so I think I get it').

When students apply desirable difficulties in their learning, they have a better grip on their actual mastery. They can then rely on quality cues: 'I can clearly explain all the connections between the different concepts, so now I understand it well enough.'

Grip on own learning

As learners improve their attributions, they can also assess themselves more adequately. So they have a better view of their learning process, gain a better knowledge of what is still needed in that learning process. Because they test themselves they know better where the gaps in their knowledge are, and when they have understood it well enough. They thus get a better grip on their learning process.

Improved self-efficacy

It is plausible that when pupils have more control over their learning process, their confidence in their own abilities will also increase. However, because this has never been researched, so there is no scientific evidence on this. We do know from research that perceived learning (how much pupils think they learn from a strategy) increases if they use that particular desirable difficulty more often .

Furthermore, desirable difficulty leads to greater success in the long run. It takes a while for students to experience this success, because at first, it mostly feels very uncomfortable and seems like they will never master it.

However, if they persevere, with help from their teacher, they will find that they master the subject matter better than if they do not use desirable difficulties. We know from studies that when you experience success that you do not externally attribute, you feel that you can handle it. So it could very well be that desirable difficulties also contribute to increased self-confidence .

Self-regulatory capacity

Moreover, it is known from research by Pintrich and de Groot that learners who believe they are capable, which they experience after using desirable difficulties, use cognitive strategies more often, and are more self-regulated in the sense that they make more use of metacognitive strategies . Moreover, these learners are more likely to persevere when faced with difficult or uninteresting tasks.

But beware!

We would like pupils to be in charge of their learning. Desirable difficulties can help pupils do this, and in this way pupils can learn in a more self-regulated way. Yet, as a teacher, you cannot expect this from pupils too early in the learning process.

A precondition for being in charge of your own learning process is to have sufficient knowledge of the content: you cannot assess whether or not you have mastered something if you do not know exactly what the task involves. Therefore, in addition to sufficient content knowledge, sufficient quality awareness is also essential.

Only when students have a quality sense of what strong work should meet, and when they are able to do so, can they judge well enough whether they meet it. So keep in mind differences between beginners and experts.

Take-away messages

Desirable difficulties help students in their learning. However, they will not start applying them on their own accord because they feel ineffective and uncomfortable. It is therefore important that you, as a teacher, have sufficient knowledge of which learning strategies are effective, use them and instil them in your teaching;

Pupils are beginners and therefore cannot yet grasp what is expected of them and when they have reached sufficient mastery. You can help them master the knowledge properly by using desirable difficulties in your teaching;

When you act formatively, you make use of desirable difficulties. So for optimal mastery, make sure you use formative action as much as possible;

Only when students have gained a deep understanding of how to learn effectively are they also capable of self-regulated learning. So through desirable difficulties, give your learners the opportunity to create deep understanding. By subtitling the desirable difficulties, you also ensure that learners are able to self-regulate learning, as it also gives them the tools to take charge of their own learning.

How to ensure that you help students take ownership of desirable difficulties in their own learning, I describe in this blog.

Notes

Hilly Drok is a trainer, educational consultant and director at The Formative Action School. She also coordinates the Formative Action course for School Experts. She has been a Dutch teacher for 14 years and pioneered the implementation process of formative action at her high school. She is currently working on the topic of self-regulation.

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No pain, no gain - on desirable difficulties - The formative action school

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Desirable difficulties are a fundamental part of a learning process. How can we encourage students to employ them?

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The perfect introduction to our model for formative action. We'll explain how it works and help you design processes for your lessons.

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As consultants ánd teachers, we have plenty of experience with formative action. We've assisted thousands of teachers in implementing formative action in their lessons, and we're happy to share all our insights with you!

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In this online course you will learn about our new five step model.

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A presentation by the educational architects, the little sister of the formative action school.