In the article Helping children remember what they have learned – 1 it was suggested that children can be encouraged to write down at the end of each day (or later, when they are used to this approach, at the start of the next day) what they learned in a particular lesson.
Going on from this, it is possible to extend the activity by asking the children to give a mark for the lesson, explaining to them what each mark means.
For example (and depending on the age and experience of the children) you might say they could give a mark of 3, 2 or 1 for how much they can remember of the lesson. There is, of course, no checking of the accuracy of the answer, but if the children are encouraged to think about the lesson for a moment this in itself is a good way of preparing them for the next step in their learning.
In short we are making children think about what they learned today and yesterday, and it is that thinking which helps secure the knowledge in the long term memory and also helps the children consider the whole process of teaching and learning and make it make sense to them as a continuum.
This can lead on to children giving the previous day’s lesson a mark out of ten and discussing what helped them learn, or why they didn’t learn.
In short it is a process for enhancing the use of memory in children. Thus, instead of memories being available for recall by chance, the children are starting to see links between different things they have learned. This additional review of what has been learned makes the learning more active and the memories easier to recall.
As they get more and more used to the process the children should be able to complete a chart that looks like this…
| The Subject | What I learned | (0 for none, 1 for a little, 2 for quite a bit, 3 for all) |
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If you have any comments on using this idea, or indeed if you have ideas of your own which help children enhance their learning ability, we’d love to hear from you. We won’t publish anything you send us on this website (or anywhere else) without your express permission.
You might particularly be interested in our series ‘Learn French with Luc et Sophie” which is a story-based approach to teaching French at Key Stage 2. It uses similar self-assessment techniques to help the children identify and focus on what they have learnt.
Here are some other articles you might find of interest in relation to this topic.
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