I Made a Retrieval Practice Machine For You!

One figures this kid did a bunch of retrieval practice at school.

As a teacher, I am agreeable to many things. Here are two of them:

1. Retrieval practice is a useful thing to do when learning a subject.
2. Most retrieval practice schemes are too effort-intensive for me to use in my own practice.

I’m not going to get into it here, but there’s a lot of research to support point 1. If you want, you can read a very readable presentation of it here. The link also demonstrates my feelings around point 2. There are a variety of retrieval practice strategies discussed, but many of them are just not where I’m going to spend my effort-bucks as a teacher. In the most memorable one for me, a teacher shares how she puts retrieval prompts into a fishbowl and pulls them at random for retrieval practice quizzes. As the year progresses, she adds new prompts, removes some of the old ones, and keeps others in place. That sounds like a great system, and one I do not have any capacity (or talent!) to do in my own practice.

But I can program a spreadsheet to do basically the same thing…

Here, for you dear reader, is a Retrieval Practice Spreadsheet Machine (RPSM). What does the RPSM do? The thing described above without any physical media. The instructions explain what to do, but it’s not complicated:

1. You put the prompts you want to…