In this interview, cognitive scientist Dr. Janell Blunt shares how she uses mini whiteboards for retrieval practice with students in her college psychology classes, and we discuss implications for K-12 teachers.
How retrieval practice is distinct from reading and reviewing notes
Why erasers are key for low-stakes retrieval
How to use retrieval practice over time, so students retain beyond the short term
How retrieval practice works with higher-order questions—not just factual recall
Why “metacognitive judgment” makes us think retrieval practice isn’t working, even though it is
Strategies to Learn and Upskill More Effectively on LinkedIn Learning
Visit Dr. Blunt’s page at RetrievalPractice.org
Full Transcript:
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:09):
Welcome everyone to The Teaching Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program, Dr. Janell Blunt, to talk about mini whiteboards for retrieval practice. Dr. Blunt, welcome to the teaching show.
Dr. Janell Blunt (00:20):
Thank you.
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:21):
Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do, and then let’s get into talking about retrieval practice and using mini whiteboards.
Dr. Janell Blunt (00:27):
Yes. I am a cognitive scientist, which means I have a background in research, understanding best practices in the classroom. So conducting controlled experiments, both in the laboratory and in the authentic classroom. I am also an educator. So I am in the classroom. I teach about four classes, so probably like most of you in the classroom most days of the week.
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:48):
Good deal. And you teach at the university level, is that right?
Dr. Janell Blunt (00:50):
Yes. Associate professor at a university in Indiana.
Dr. Justin Baeder (00:54):
Wonderful. And I was reading your chapter that you contributed to the book, Smart Teaching, Stronger Learning. And I was intrigued by the fact that you are using mini whiteboards with college students in a psychology class that you teach. Is that right?
Dr. Janell Blunt (01:07):
Yes. Love the whiteboards.
Dr. Justin Baeder (01:10):
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think probably we’ve all seen that maybe at the elementary level, maybe kindergarten, or maybe middle school math. But college, honestly, I’ve never heard of anybody using mini whiteboards at college. Are you the only one or has this caught on among your colleagues?
Dr. Janell Blunt (01:24):
It is catching on. I am preaching the good word about whiteboards to pretty much anyone who will listen. And it has been a great success. So my area of research in the chapter that you’re mentioning is all about retrieval practice.
And so retrieval practice is calling information to mind instead of, say, rereading something, which is kind of our default. And so I use whiteboards as a way to encourage students to practice retrieval on their own.
So the number one thing I have observed in the classroom is that students are going to do what you model for them in the classroom outside of the classroom. So if I’m standing there in the classroom saying, “Okay, we’re going to learn about the neuron today and I want you to go home and practice retrieval.”
Well, if I’m modeling for them just sit and listen, then when they go and study on their own, what they’re going to do is just sit and read the book or re-watch a lecture video.
(02:14):
So I brought in whiteboards as a way to get them to practice retrieval in the classroom.
And what I have found is that it’s like a disease in a good way. They start using these whiteboards everywhere.
I actually teach a section to the nursing students at my university about how to prepare for the NCLEX. And several of them had had me before in an intro psych class.
And when I told them about whiteboards, those who had had me actually whipped out their own whiteboards because they just love using the whiteboards.
And what you can do is you can simply start a class by saying, write down three things you remember from last class. You can pause a class 10 minutes in and say, “What are three things we just talked about? “
Or you’re going to have more focus questions, which is what I do.
(02:56):
I might say, “What does SSRI stand for? “ And they have to retrieve selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a concept in neuroscience.
I might say, “What is the death ritual practice in this custom?” I’m thinking about that nursing class right now.
So the whiteboards are versatile and can be used for any kind of retrieval practice.
Dr. Justin Baeder (03:15):
So a crucial thing here that I’m starting to pick up on is that this is not about taking notes or looking up information.
The critical thing here for retrieval practice is students are retrieving it from their own minds and writing it onto the whiteboard. Is that fair?
Dr. Janell Blunt (03:31):
Exactly. And the whiteboard really, on one hand, it’s not magical, but on the other hand it is because when I do this on paper, the students don’t seem to see as much value in it.
And from my experience, it seems to be that the whiteboard eraser is key. So students are a lot more comfortable making mistakes because you’re going to make mistakes.
I just asked you, we spent five seconds on the neuron and now I just asked you, draw a picture of the neuron. Where’s the axon hillock? You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to forget.
And so having the whiteboard at their personal desk helps make it easy to say, “Okay, I missed it this time. I’m going to erase it. It’s gone. No problem.”
Dr. Justin Baeder (04:10):
Right. It’s not a permanent record. It’s not a test that they’re turning in. It’s always going to get erased. So there’s kind of a lower stakes. Is that part of in?
Dr. Janell Blunt (04:16):
Yeah. And we know that low stakes retrieval is really important.
So any retrieval where you’re actively recalling things from your memory is going to find some boosts in your learning, but a lot of times people think, okay, that means more exams. And that’s not what I’m saying.
And that’s why I like the whiteboard is because there is this transient nature about it.
So you can retrieve something, erase it, move on. Mistakes, they’re gone.
Learning has happened. Let’s move on to the next thing, because what we know is that retrieval practice actually reduces student anxiety.
And so by incorporating the whiteboards, that helps reduce anxiety, increases retrieval practice, and that boosts their final learning.
And it’s also had this bonus side effect of improving engagement with students.
Dr. Justin Baeder (04:59):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s a busy place, the classroom when students are writing on their whiteboards. Absolutely.
And talk to us a little bit about the timing of the retrieval, because one of the things I’ve been reading about as I’ve learned about retrieval practice over the past year, (completely outside of my formal education, I will say—I’ve never, ever heard of retrieval practice in all of my years of school).
And one of the things I’m hearing is that retrieval over time matters. So on what time scales, are you asking students to retrieve something you taught them five seconds ago, five minutes ago, five days ago?
Take us into some of the utility of the various timeframes there.
Dr. Janell Blunt (05:34):
All of the above. And what I love the most about retrieval is that it’s not expensive.
It doesn’t require revamping anything that you’re doing and it can be used at any time point.
So you’re going to get the most benefits from retrieval after a delay.
So if you wanted someone to know something for a minute from now, then retrieval isn’t your best strategy.
But if you want something to stick, not just in this moment, but tomorrow and a week and a semester, or even as students move up from second grade to third grade, that’s where retrieval is useful.
It’s really good for long-term meaningful learning. So in the classroom, that might look like starting off a class with a retrieval of something that we did last class instead of saying, “Okay, last class we talked about A, B, C.”
We say, last class, three things, what were they?
(06:20):
I’ve also used it to say, all right, last month, what are some things we talked about?
Because I want students to be able to be successful, not only in this course, but in the courses that require the foundational knowledge from this course in later years.
So it could be minutes ago, it could be yesterday, it could be weeks or months ago. I might even in upper division classes say, “Think back to your intro psych class.”
I know that’s a long time, but remember what we learned about this and students will practice retrieval on those whiteboards, erase their mistakes, practice again, and then we’re smooth sailing.
Dr. Justin Baeder (06:55):
I wonder if one of the barriers to implementing this kind of very obviously beneficial practice is that we think it’s too low level.
Do you ever get pushback on that, that people say, “Well, I don’t really need students to just recall information. That’s low level. We needed to be doing higher-order thinking.” What’s wrong with that argument against retrieval practice?
Dr. Janell Blunt (07:14):
I certainly get that. And there’s a couple of responses that I have to it.
And the first is back in 2011, I conducted an experiment where I looked at a really good technique, concept mapping, where you make nodes and diagrams and you kind of connect those things. Really good for elaboration, and compared that to retrieval practice and found that retrieval practice produced more learning on verbatim questions like you’re saying.
Okay. So I told you this, can you remember that? Great. But we want to see students not just regurgitating stuff, but applying it. So for that reason, it also included questions that were inference questions.
Now, this is requiring you to make connections between two concepts. You’ve got the content, but can you bridge that gap? We want students to do that.
You could see how concept maps might be really helpful for that because that structure is kind of making you think that way, but how could retrieval just repeating from memory, could that possibly do the same thing?
(08:07):
And yes, it does. We also used applied questions. So here’s this new concept you learned about the setup of your digestive system. How might we apply that to bath towels? I mean, it’s like really a stretch.
And we see for both verbatim, for inference and replied questions that retrieval practice produces long-term learning. So not just not in that session, but two weeks from now we call people back and they do really well on all three questions.
Dr. Justin Baeder (08:33):
Love it. Well, that makes sense to me because the higher order tasks aren’t instead of the lower level information. They require that information, right?
You’re synthesizing the information that you know, and if you don’t know the information, you’ve got nothing to synthesize.
Dr. Janell Blunt (08:47):
Yeah. And there’s this other piece that we know about retrieval is that it does not ... When you practice retrieval, you don’t have the feeling that it’s working.
And we call this metacognitive judgment. So when you’re thinking about your learning and you’re practicing retrieval and you think, “I don’t think this is really creating this meaningful long-term learning. This isn’t doing it for me.”
And that is actually incorrect. We ask students in the lab and in the classroom, how much do you think you’re learning with retrieval practice or a variety of other techniques?
And time and time again, we see that retrieval practice makes students feel like, oh, this isn’t working, but yet it’s the exact opposite.
So in this case, we’ve got to not trust our gut and not rely on intuition when choosing strategies because it doesn’t feel like it produces learning, but time and time and time again, that’s the pattern that we see.
We feel like it’s not working, but long-term meaningful learning on a variety of different questions, we see big boosts.
Dr. Justin Baeder (09:38):
I think we’ve made a great case here today for mini whiteboards.
If people want to actually get some for their class to use, students may ultimately decide they want their own as your student did, but presumably we’re going to start with a class set.
What’s the best way to get ahold of some class whiteboards?
Dr. Janell Blunt (09:55):
My personal recommendation is just to go on Amazon and they’re actually not that expensive. And I was kind of surprised at first that they’re really inexpensive to get the eraser, the marker, and the board all for pretty good price.
If you are a real low budget, another thing you can do is take a sheet of white piece of paper, stick it in a sleep protector, get some dry erase markers, and you’ve got your own whiteboard that can even fit into a notebook, which may be handy for students.
So you can have this very portable, very low budget way. So what matters is not the material, but that you’re practicing retrieval, so doing things from memory.
Dr. Justin Baeder (10:30):
Dr. Blunt, if people want to learn more about your work or find you online, where are some of the best places for them to go?
Dr. Janell Blunt (10:35):
I have a LinkedIn course, and so you can find that on LinkedIn.
It has a variety of different strategies that we cover there, including retrieval practice, sleep, interleaving, expertise.
I also highly recommend RetrievalPractice.org. There is a collection of cognitive scientists there, and we are all happy to help you be the best teacher that you can be, be the best student that you can be.
And so RetrievalPractice.org also has free resources for the book that Justin was talking about. So there’s sources.
If you don’t have time, you are so busy as educators. I know we’ve got a little cheat sheet for you that gives you fast tips if you want to get started right away with the science of learning.
Dr. Justin Baeder (11:11):
Well, thank you so much for joining us on the teaching show.
Dr. Janell Blunt (11:15):
My pleasure. Thank you.
