Skill: quochungto/bookforge-evidence-based-classroom-designer (version 1.0.0)

--- name: evidence-based-classroom-designer description: | Design or redesign any course, class, or training session using evidence-based instructional principles. Use this skill when a teacher, instructor, or instructional designer wants to improve student retention and achievement through classroom design, course design, quiz design, or active learning strategies — even if they don't mention "retrieval practice" or "spaced repetition." Triggers include: instructor wants to reduce failure rates in a gateway course; teacher finds students forget material within days of a lecture; instructor relies on midterm and final exams as the only assessment; teacher wants to move from passive lecturing to active learning without losing content coverage; instructor wants to close the achievement gap between well-prepared and under-prepared students; course designer wants to embed low-stakes quizzing into a curriculum; teacher wants to raise student performance on Bloom's higher-order thinking levels; instructor wants to redesign student engagement without adding complexity. Works for K-12 teachers, university professors, corporate trainers, and instructional designers. Do NOT use this skill to build a personal study system for a single learner (use retrieval-practice-study-system), to create a practice schedule alone (use practice-schedule-designer), or to audit a single learning activity for difficulty structure (use desirable-difficulty-classifier). version: 1.0.0 homepage: https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills/tree/main/books/make-it-stick/skills/evidence-based-classroom-designer metadata: {"openclaw":{"emoji":"📚","homepage":"https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills"}} status: draft source-books: - id: make-it-stick title: "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" authors: ["Peter C. Brown", "Henry L. Roediger III", "Mark A. McDaniel"] chapters: [8] tags: ["learning-science", "cognitive-psychology", "evidence-based-learning", "teaching", "classroom-design", "instructional-design", "course-design", "quiz-design", "active-learning", "student-engagement"] depends-on: - retrieval-practice-study-system - practice-schedule-designer - desirable-difficulty-classifier execution: tier: 2 mode: hybrid inputs: - type: document description: "Course syllabus, lesson plan, curriculum outline, or description of the current course structure and assessment approach" tools-required: [Read, Write] tools-optional: [] mcps-required: [] environment: "Any agent environment with file read/write access. Instructor provides course details or uploads a syllabus." discovery: goal: "Audit the current course design against 6 evidence-based criteria, then apply a 4-part teacher protocol to produce a concrete redesigned course plan with an assessment calendar, specific intervention designs, and a transparency script for students." tasks: - "Gather course details: subject, level, class size, frequency, current assessment structure" - "Audit current design against the 6-criteria learning environment checklist" - "Apply the 4-part teacher protocol (explain, teach, create difficulties, be transparent)" - "Design specific interventions: quiz schedule, reflection exercises, interleaving plan, Bloom's audit" - "Produce redesigned course plan with assessment calendar and student transparency script" audience: ["K-12 teachers", "university instructors", "corporate trainers", "instructional designers", "curriculum coordinators"] triggers: - "Students are forgetting material within days of a lecture" - "The only assessments are a midterm and a final exam" - "Failure rates in a gateway course are too high" - "I want to move from lecturing to active learning" - "I want to close the achievement gap in my class" - "I need to embed low-stakes quizzing into my curriculum" - "My students don't retain what they learn" - "I want to redesign my course for better student engagement" not_for: - "Building a personal study system for a single learner (use retrieval-practice-study-system)" - "Designing a spacing schedule only (use practice-schedule-designer)" - "Auditing a single learning activity (use desirable-difficulty-classifier)" environment: "Course-level: syllabus, lesson plan, assessment calendar, or instructor description of current course structure" quality: completeness_score: accuracy_score: value_delta_score: --- # Evidence-Based Classroom Designer ## When to Use You are an instructor, teacher, or course designer who wants to improve how much students actually learn and retain — not just how much is covered. Typical situations: - Your gateway course has high failure or withdrawal rates, and you suspect the problem is the assessment structure, not the students - Students perform adequately on exams but forget the material within days — they're cramming, not learning - Your course relies on high-stakes midterm and final exams as the only practice and feedback mechanism - You want to introduce active learning but don't know which specific interventions are worth the effort - You teach a high-structure discipline (biology, engineering, economics) and want to help under-prepared students succeed without lowering standards Before starting, verify: - Is a course outline, syllabus, or description of the current course structure available? (If not, ask the instructor to describe the course: subject, level, class size, number of meetings, current assessments) - What is the instructor's primary concern? (Failure rates, retention, engagement, achievement gap, workload?) **Mode: Hybrid** — The agent designs the course structure, intervention calendar, and transparency materials. The instructor executes and adapts them to their specific classroom. --- ## Context & Input Gathering ### Required Context (must have — ask if missing) - **Course description:** Subject, level (K-12 / university / professional), class size, meeting frequency, total duration → Check for: uploaded syllabus, course outline, pasted description → If missing, ask: "Please describe your course: what subject, what level, how many students, how often do you meet, and how long does the course run?" - **Current assessment structure:** What assessments exist? When are they scheduled? What weight do they carry? → Check for: exam dates in syllabus, grading breakdown table, assignment list → If missing, ask: "How are students currently graded? What assessments exist, and when do they happen?" - **Primary concern:** What is not working, or what does the instructor want to improve? → Check for: explicit problem statement in the prompt ("students forget," "high failure rate," "passive lectures") → If missing, ask: "What problem are you trying to solve with this redesign?" ### Observable Context (gather from environment) - **Subject type:** Affects intervention design (procedural vs. conceptual vs. declarative material) → Look for: course name, discipline cues, learning objectives in syllabus - **Existing active-learning elements:** Prior attempts at quizzing, group work, or reflection exercises → Look for: in-class activities section of syllabus, assignment descriptions ### Default Assumptions - If class size is not specified → design for a class of 25-40 (adjust if instructor clarifies) - If no assessment structure provided → assume two high-stakes exams (midterm + final), no low-stakes practice - If no primary concern specified → focus on the most common problem: low-stakes practice is absent and students rely on cramming ### Sufficiency Threshold ``` SUFFICIENT when ALL of these are true: ✓ Subject and level are known ✓ Current assessment structure is described (or default assumption is acceptable) ✓ Primary concern or goal is stated BLOCK if: no subject and no description — cannot design interventions without knowing what students are learning ``` --- ## Process ### Step 1 — Gather Course Profile Collect and record: 1. **Course basics:** Subject, level, class size, meeting frequency (e.g., 3x/week × 15 weeks), total seat time 2. **Learning objectives:** What must students be able to do by the end? At what cognitive level (recall, application, analysis, synthesis)? 3. **Current assessment calendar:** When do assessments occur? What types? What percentage of grade? 4. **Current in-class structure:** Lecture-only? Group work? Discussion? Problem sets? 5. **Student population:** Are they primarily well-prepared, mixed, or under-prepared? Are there equity concerns? **WHY:** Intervention design must be calibrated to the specific constraints of the course. A 25-person seminar meeting twice a week calls for different mechanics than a 200-person lecture hall meeting three times a week. Gathering specifics first prevents generic recommendations that cannot be implemented. Output: A course profile summary (3-5 sentences) confirmed with the instructor before continuing. --- ### Step 2 — Audit Current Design Against 6 Criteria Evaluate the current course against each criterion. Rate each: **Present / Partial / Absent.** | Criterion | What to look for | Research basis | |-----------|-----------------|----------------| | **C1. Low-stakes retrieval practice** | Frequent quizzes, self-tests, or recall exercises that occur during the course (not only at midterm/final) | Testing effect: retrieval consolidates learning and arrests forgetting. Quizzed material retained at 92% vs 79% for non-quizzed in Columbia IL study | | **C2. Spaced and cumulative review** | Assessments or exercises that reach back to prior material — not only the most recent unit | Spacing forces reconstruction from long-term memory, strengthening the neural pathway. Cumulative quizzing builds complex mental models | | **C3. Interleaving across topics** | Topics or problem types mixed across sessions rather than blocked by unit | Interleaving requires students to "reload" prior knowledge and identify which approach applies, building discrimination and transfer | | **C4. Consequences (low-stakes)** | Practice exercises count toward the course grade, even at very low weight | Students in graded low-stakes practice classes outperform students in classes where the same exercises are ungraded | | **C5. Transparency about how learning works** | Instructor explicitly explains why desirable difficulties are used and what the research shows | Students who understand the mechanism tolerate the discomfort of effortful practice and persist longer | | **C6. Calibration feedback** | Students receive timely feedback that reveals what they know vs. what they think they know | Without calibration, students rely on fluency illusions and study the wrong material. The "illusion of knowing" is the primary cause of exam failure despite adequate study time | For each criterion rated **Partial** or **Absent**, note the specific gap (e.g., "C1 absent: only two exams, no in-class quizzing"). **WHY:** Most course designs fail on C1 and C2 — they schedule high-stakes practice too infrequently and too late. Students in low-structure courses (lecture + two exams) have no mechanism to discover gaps before the exam, no incentive to practice distributed retrieval, and no feedback on whether their self-assessed confidence matches actual mastery. The audit makes the specific gaps visible before designing interventions. For detailed difficulty classification across all six strategies (including generation, elaboration, variation), invoke `desirable-difficulty-classifier` OR apply the 6-criteria audit above directly. Output: A filled audit table with Present/Partial/Absent ratings and gap notes. --- ### Step 3 — Apply the 4-Part Teacher Protocol Apply each of the four protocol elements to the specific course. For each, produce a concrete implementation plan — not just a principle. #### Protocol Part 1: Explain How Learning Works Design a brief transparency module to deliver at the start of the course (or first class). Include: - **The testing effect:** Explain that retrieval practice — not rereading — produces durable learning. Students who quiz themselves retain far more than students who reread the same content. - **Desirable difficulties:** Explain that the discomfort of struggling to recall something is not a signal of failure — it is the mechanism of learning. If quizzing feels easy, the interval is too short. - **Growth mindset tie-in:** Explain that intellectual ability is not fixed. Effortful learning changes the brain. Setbacks are information, not verdicts. - **Course-specific preview:** Tell students exactly which practices in this course are intentionally difficult and why (e.g., "The daily quizzes in this course are harder than you might expect. That difficulty is the point."). *Example — Wenderoth's framing:* "The whole idea of the testing effect is that you learn more by testing yourself than by rereading. I know this contradicts how most of you study. So I'm going to model it in class, and I'm going to show you your results over the semester so you can see it working." **WHY:** Students who understand the mechanism tolerate the discomfort of effortful practice and persist longer. Students who don't understand it interpret quiz difficulty as unfairness and disengage. Wenderoth's research shows that students who are told they "have the illusion of knowing" and understand what that means come to her with solvable problems rather than complaints about trick questions. #### Protocol Part 2: Teach Students How to Study Design at least two study strategies to explicitly teach (not just recommend): - **Free recall exercise:** Assign students to spend 10 minutes at the end of each class writing everything they remember from that session — without notes. Then check their notes and identify gaps. *Wenderoth assigns this daily; it guides what students bring to the next class.* - **Testing groups (not study groups):** Restructure any group work so the group wrestles with a question together — books closed — rather than having the most knowledgeable person explain to the others. *Wenderoth finds that testing groups build exploration and understanding; study groups build dependency.* - **Summary sheets:** Assign a weekly synthesis artifact — a single page illustrating the week's material with connections, arrows, and key ideas. This forces synthesis across a week of content before it fragments. *Wenderoth uses cartoon-style physiology sheets; the format can be adapted to any discipline.* For detailed retrieval practice implementation for individual students, invoke `retrieval-practice-study-system` OR apply the free recall and self-quizzing pattern above directly. **WHY:** Students are not taught how to study effectively and tend toward the least effective strategies (rereading, highlighting). Explicitly modeling correct study technique — rather than assuming students know it — is a prerequisite for the active-learning interventions in the course to work. Students who don't know how to retrieve cannot benefit from a high-structure course. #### Protocol Part 3: Create Desirable Difficulties in the Classroom Design 3-5 specific interventions drawn from the following menu. Select based on the audit gaps (Step 2) and the course constraints. **Intervention A — Daily or bi-weekly low-stakes quizzes** - Format: 3-5 questions at the start or end of class; closed notes; short-answer preferred over multiple-choice - Timing: Every class, or every other class — not only at exam time - Content: Mix current material with material from 2-3 sessions ago (cumulative reach-back) - Grading: Count toward course grade at very low weight (e.g., 15-20% total, drop 3-4 lowest) - Ground rules (critical): Set clear rules at the start of term — e.g., 4 free absences, no makeups; students either take it or they don't. This prevents negotiation overhead that makes quiz systems unsustainable. *Example — McDermott (Washington University):* 4-question quiz in the last 3-5 minutes of every class meeting (28 meetings, 2×/week). Anything covered to date is fair game. Students drop 4 quizzes; no makeups. Quizzes = 20% of grade. By end of semester, students report quizzes helped them keep up and discover gaps early. *Example — Sobel (political economics):* Cumulative low-stakes quizzing throughout the term. Each quiz can draw from any material covered so far. Students build incrementally complex mental models rather than cramming disconnected units. **Intervention B — Pre-class generation exercises** - Before the class where a new concept is taught, assign a brief problem or question the students cannot yet fully solve - Students wrestle with the problem before seeing the solution; they arrive primed to receive instruction - This "generation effect" produces stronger encoding than reading the explanation first *Example — Matthews/West Point Thayer method:* Students read for specific learning objectives before each class; class opens with a quiz on those objectives; then students "take to the boards" — higher-order questions requiring integration, worked at the board in groups; one student per group gives a recitation to the class. Zero lecture. The grade rests on consistent daily participation. **Intervention C — Board work and active recitation** - Assign student groups to work through higher-order questions at the board (or equivalent: whiteboard apps, shared documents) - One student per group explains the group's answer to the class — recitation, not just written output - Keep questions at analysis/synthesis level (Bloom's level 4-6), not just recall **Intervention D — Bloom's taxonomy answer keys** - For each major exam or assessment, provide a Bloom's-level answer key: one answer for knowledge-level recall, a more complete answer for comprehension, a deeper answer for analysis, and the strongest answer for synthesis/evaluation - Ask students to locate where their answer fell on the taxonomy and identify what they would need to know to reach the next level *Example — Wenderoth:* Students receive the Bloom's key with their graded tests. They identify their level for each answer. The exercise shifts the question from "did I get it right?" to "at what level did I understand this?" and produces a specific, actionable study target. **Intervention E — Learning paragraphs (periodic writing)** - Once or twice a month, pose a synthesis question at the end of class ("How is X like Y?", "You just got your test back — what would you do differently?") - Students write a 5-6 sentence response. Low stakes. Collect and read; comment in the next class so students know they were read. - Purpose: stimulate retrieval and reflection before the week's learning is lost; give science or technical students deliberate writing practice. **Designing the spacing and interleaving structure:** For detailed spacing and interleaving schedule design across topics, invoke `practice-schedule-designer` OR apply this pattern directly: - Map topics across the course timeline; identify where topics are currently blocked (all of Topic A, then all of Topic B) - Restructure to alternate: introduce Topic A, introduce Topic B, return to Topic A at a higher complexity level, return to Topic B, etc. - In physical or life sciences: align this with the vertical curriculum structure (e.g., Columbia IL: six simple machines in middle school → underlying physics in high school → applied engineering problem solving later) **WHY:** Research consistently shows that students in high-structure classes (daily/weekly low-stakes practice) outperform students in low-structure classes (lecture + two exams) — and the gap is largest for under-prepared students. The key finding from Wenderoth's biology experiments: high-structure classes significantly reduced failure rates in gateway biology while simultaneously raising performance on Bloom's higher-order levels. The mechanism is that low-structure courses leave students to self-regulate their study, and most students self-regulate poorly until they have been taught otherwise. #### Protocol Part 4: Be Transparent Throughout Ongoing transparency (not just at the start of the course): - After each quiz, briefly explain why you designed the question the way you did - When students struggle with a difficult question, name the difficulty: "This question is designed to be hard to recall — that difficulty is producing stronger encoding right now" - When quiz grades disappoint, redirect from blame to calibration: "This tells you something accurate about what you know. That's the point of doing this now rather than at the final exam." - Reference student language: if a student says "that was a trick question," use it as a teaching moment about the illusion of knowing. *Wenderoth's observation: students who understand the illusion of knowing come to office hours with solvable problems, not complaints.* **WHY:** Transparency is not a one-time orientation. The discomfort of effortful practice recurs throughout the semester, and students need a recurring framework for interpreting that discomfort as signal rather than failure. Without ongoing explanation, students who struggle will attribute difficulty to bad teaching rather than effective learning design. --- ### Step 4 — Design Specific Interventions Based on the audit results and the 4-part protocol, produce: **4a. Quiz schedule design** - How many quizzes, at what frequency, on what content reach-back window - Ground rules (free misses policy, no-makeup rule, weighting) - Sample questions for the first 3 quizzes that demonstrate the cumulative reach-back pattern **4b. Reflection exercise plan** - Which reflection exercises to use (free recall, learning paragraphs, summary sheets) - When in the class period they occur and how long they take - How they are collected or reported (written, verbal, whiteboard) **4c. Interleaving plan** - A revised topic sequence showing where topics are interleaved rather than blocked - Identification of which topics have natural conceptual connections that make interleaving high-value **4d. Bloom's level design** - For at least one major assessment: a Bloom's-level answer key template showing what a knowledge-level, comprehension-level, and analysis-level answer looks like for one representative question - Instructions for distributing this key to students post-assessment **WHY:** Without concrete artifacts — a quiz schedule, a sample question set, an interleaving map — instructors revert to their existing structure because it is familiar and low-effort. The interventions must be specifiable enough to execute in the first week of class. --- ### Step 5 — Produce Redesigned Course Plan and Assessment Calendar Produce a complete redesigned course plan including: 1. **Transparency module** (first class): 10-15 minute script or outline explaining the testing effect, desirable difficulties, and how learning works 2. **Assessment calendar** (full course): When each type of assessment occurs (quiz, exam, reflection exercise, summary sheet), what it covers, and its grade weight 3. **Intervention calendar** (weekly): For each week of the course, which specific interventions occur (e.g., Week 3: 2 quizzes with reach-back to Week 1; board exercise on Topic B; summary sheet due Monday) 4. **Ground rules document**: The course-level policies for low-stakes practice (free misses, no-makeup rules, weighting) 5. **Student-facing explanation**: A 1-paragraph explanation for the syllabus or first-day handout that tells students why the course is designed the way it is **WHY:** The goal is a course design that can be handed to another instructor and implemented without additional planning. Generality disappears at the level of execution; specificity is what makes redesign actionable. Output: Write the redesigned course plan to `redesigned-course-plan.md`. --- ## Inputs | Input | Required | Description | |-------|----------|-------------| | Course description | Yes | Subject, level, class size, meeting frequency, duration | | Current assessment structure | Yes (or default assumed) | What assessments exist, when, what weight | | Primary concern or redesign goal | Yes | What is not working or what the instructor wants to improve | | Course syllabus or outline | Preferred | The document to audit and redesign | | Student population description | No | Mix of prepared/under-prepared; equity concerns | ## Outputs | Output | Format | Description | |--------|--------|-------------| | `redesigned-course-plan.md` | Markdown | Full redesigned course plan with all 5 components from Step 5 | ### Output Template: redesigned-course-plan.md ```markdown # Redesigned Course Plan: [Course Name] **Instructor:** [Name or role] **Course:** [Subject, level, class size, meeting frequency] **Primary concern addressed:** [e.g., "High failure rate in gateway biology"] **Redesign date:** [Date] ## Design Audit Results | Criterion | Rating | Gap | |-----------|--------|-----| | C1. Low-stakes retrieval practice | Present / Partial / Absent | [gap note] | | C2. Spaced and cumulative review | Present / Partial / Absent | [gap note] | | C3. Interleaving across topics | Present / Partial / Absent | [gap note] | | C4. Consequences (low-stakes) | Present / Partial / Absent | [gap note] | | C5. Transparency about learning | Present / Partial / Absent | [gap note] | | C6. Calibration feedback | Present / Partial / Absent | [gap note] | ## Interventions Selected [List of 3-5 interventions from Step 3, with brief rationale for each] ## Transparency Module (First Class) [10-15 minute outline or script] ## Assessment Calendar | Week | Assessment | Type | Covers | Grade weight | |------|-----------|------|--------|-------------| | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ## Weekly Intervention Calendar | Week | Quizzes | Reflection exercises | Board work | Other | |------|---------|---------------------|------------|-------| | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ## Ground Rules Document [Policies for low-stakes practice: free misses, no-makeup rule, weighting] ## Student-Facing Explanation (for Syllabus) [1 paragraph] ``` --- ## Key Principles **1. Low-stakes retrieval practice is the highest-leverage classroom intervention** The single most impactful change a teacher can make is to add frequent, low-stakes retrieval practice — quizzes that happen during the course rather than only at the end. The Columbia, Illinois middle school study found 92% retention on quizzed material vs. 79% on non-quizzed material in the same class. McDermott's university course achieves this with 4 questions in the last 5 minutes of every class meeting. The investment is minimal; the learning gain is substantial. **2. High-structure courses close achievement gaps** Wenderoth's biology experiments show that high-structure classes (daily and weekly low-stakes exercises) significantly reduce failure rates in gateway biology courses while simultaneously raising Bloom's-level performance. The gap narrows most for under-prepared students — those without a prior history of effective learning habits. High-structure is not remediation; it is structure that helps all students and helps struggling students most. **3. Consequences matter, even at very low stakes** Students in courses where practice exercises count toward the grade — even at minimal weight — outperform students in the same course where the exercises carry no consequences. The exercises being identical means the difference is purely in motivation to engage. Low-stakes grading is not coercive; it is the signal that the exercises are real, not optional. **4. Transparency is a design element, not a nice-to-have** When students understand why effortful retrieval feels uncomfortable and why that discomfort signals learning, they tolerate it and persist. When they don't understand it, they interpret difficulty as unfairness and disengage. Transparency is not soft pedagogy — it changes the behavioral response to difficulty and determines whether the rest of the course design can work. **5. The Thayer method proves high-structure scales across disciplines** West Point's Thayer method — specific learning objectives before every class, daily quizzing at the start, board work on higher-order questions, student recitation — has been sustained across almost 200 years and multiple disciplines. Matthews's courses run with essentially zero lecturing. The method works best for students who need structure to develop study discipline, and it scales from elite academies to Riverside Military Academy's more varied student population. **6. Cumulative reach-back builds the mental model, not just the fact list** Sobel's cumulative quizzing approach allows any quiz to draw from any material covered to date. This is not review for review's sake — it is the design mechanism that forces students to build connections between concepts over the course of the term, producing complex mental models rather than isolated fact recall. The final exam is never a shock because the student has been practicing toward it all semester. --- ## Examples ### Example 1: University Gateway Biology Course (High Failure Rate) **Scenario:** A biology professor teaches a 150-student introductory biology lecture course that serves as a gateway requirement. Failure and withdrawal rates are around 30%. The course currently has 2 midterms and a final exam, weekly readings, and a lab section. Most students rely on cramming. **Audit result:** C1 absent (no low-stakes quizzing), C2 absent (exams are not cumulative), C3 partial (topics are sequential, not interleaved), C4 absent (no graded practice), C5 absent (no explanation of learning principles), C6 partial (exams provide calibration, but too infrequently). **Redesign interventions selected:** - Weekly 5-question quiz (cumulative, 20% of grade, 3 lowest dropped) - Daily free recall exercise: 10 minutes at end of lecture, written, no notes - Bloom's answer keys distributed with each graded exam - Transparency module in week 1 (testing effect + growth mindset) - Summary sheets due every Monday (illustrate prior week's material) **Expected outcome (based on Wenderoth's results):** Statistically significant reduction in failure rates; higher-order thinking scores on exams improve; under-prepared students show the largest gains. --- ### Example 2: High School History (Passive Lecture Problem) **Scenario:** A high school history teacher with 28 students finds that students are disengaged during lectures and score poorly on unit tests despite apparently paying attention. The course has 8 unit tests across the year, plus a final. No quizzing between tests. **Audit result:** C1 absent, C2 absent (unit tests are not cumulative), C3 absent (one unit at a time, fully blocked), C4 absent, C5 absent, C6 partial. **Redesign interventions selected:** - Bi-weekly 3-question quiz (reach back 2 units, 15% of grade, 2 lowest dropped) - Board exercise: students assigned to groups, each answers a synthesis question on whiteboards ("How did the economic causes of WWI compare to those of WWII?") — one student explains to the class - Vertical topic curriculum: re-expose earlier units at greater complexity as year progresses - First-class transparency module with student-friendly language **Assessment calendar shift:** From 8 disconnected unit tests to 8 unit tests + 14 bi-weekly quizzes with cumulative reach-back + 4 synthesis writing exercises. --- ### Example 3: Corporate Professional Training (Post-Workshop Forgetting) **Scenario:** A corporate L&D team runs a two-day sales training workshop for 40 new agents. Participants rate the sessions highly, but sales managers report that skills and knowledge are not visible in behavior 30 days later. The team suspects the workshop format — intensive lecture + role play, then nothing — is the problem. **Audit result:** C1 absent (no retrieval practice after the workshop), C2 absent (no spaced review), C3 partial (topics covered across 2 days but not interleaved), C4 absent (no consequences for post-workshop engagement), C5 absent, C6 absent. **Redesign interventions selected:** - Replace the final half-day of the workshop with a generation exercise: participants work on a real case before the solution is presented - Schedule 3 follow-up quiz modules at 1 week, 3 weeks, and 6 weeks post-workshop (mobile-delivered, 5 questions each, draws from workshop + prior quiz content) - Brief transparency segment on day 1 of the workshop: explain why the difficult generation exercise is the point, not an obstacle - Interleave the four training topics (sales, marketing systems, business planning, brand advocacy) across both days rather than covering each in sequence — adapted from Farmers Insurance's new-agent training model **Expected outcome:** Knowledge and skills are visible in behavior at 30 and 60 days because the design includes distributed retrieval practice after encoding, not only during it. --- ## References - `references/case-studies.md` — Detailed case studies: Wenderoth (University of Washington biology), Matthews/Thayer method (West Point), McDermott (Washington University), Sobel (political economics), Columbia IL school district results - `references/bloom-taxonomy-implementation.md` — Bloom's taxonomy levels with classroom examples, Wenderoth's answer key template, question classification guide for creating higher-order quiz items - `references/design-checklist.md` — Printable 6-criteria course design checklist with rating scale and redesign prompt for each criterion - `references/transparency-scripts.md` — Sample first-class transparency scripts for university (biology/sciences), high school (humanities), and corporate training contexts; student-facing language for syllabi ## License This skill is licensed under [CC-BY-SA-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Source: [BookForge](https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills) — Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel. ## Related BookForge Skills Install related skills from ClawhHub: - `clawhub install bookforge-retrieval-practice-study-system` - `clawhub install bookforge-practice-schedule-designer` - `clawhub install bookforge-desirable-difficulty-classifier` Or install the full book set from GitHub: [bookforge-skills](https://github.com/bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills)

path: references/bloom-taxonomy-implementation.md
content: # Bloom's Taxonomy Implementation for Classroom Design

Source: Brown, Roediger, McDaniel — *Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning*, Chapter 8; Bloom's taxonomy developed 1956 by committee chaired by Benjamin Bloom.

---

## The Six Levels

| Level | Name | What the learner does | Sample verbs |
|-------|------|----------------------|-------------|
| 1 | Knowledge | Recall facts, terms, definitions | Define, list, name, identify, recall |
| 2 | Comprehension | Explain underlying facts and ideas in own words | Describe, explain, summarize, paraphrase |
| 3 | Application | Use knowledge to solve problems | Apply, demonstrate, solve, calculate, use |
| 4 | Analysis | Examine ideas and relationships; make inferences | Analyze, compare, contrast, distinguish, infer |
| 5 | Synthesis | Combine knowledge and ideas in new ways | Design, create, construct, formulate, compose |
| 6 | Evaluation | Use learning to judge ideas based on evidence | Evaluate, critique, justify, assess, argue |

Most traditional lecture + exam courses test primarily at levels 1-2. High-structure courses with retrieval practice and board work push students toward levels 3-6.

---

## Wenderoth's Bloom's Answer Key — Template

For each exam question, provide four answers keyed to Bloom's levels. This is distributed to students with their graded exams.

**Example question (physiology):** "Explain how decreased blood pressure triggers aldosterone release."

| Level | Answer |
|-------|--------|
| Knowledge | "Decreased blood pressure triggers the release of aldosterone from the adrenal cortex." |
| Comprehension | "When blood pressure drops, the kidneys detect reduced perfusion and release renin. Renin triggers the angiotensin-aldosterone cascade, ultimately stimulating aldosterone release from the adrenal cortex." |
| Analysis | "The response to decreased blood pressure involves a multi-step hormonal cascade (renin → angiotensin I → angiotensin II → aldosterone) that is regulated by negative feedback. Aldosterone increases sodium reabsorption in the distal tubule, which draws water back into the circulation and raises blood pressure. The cascade is a designed correction mechanism, not a simple on/off switch." |
| Synthesis/Evaluation | [Full mechanistic answer integrating the RAAS pathway, downstream effects on potassium excretion, interaction with atrial natriuretic peptide as a counter-regulatory system, and the clinical implications for patients with heart failure or hypertension.] |

**Post-exam instruction to students:**
"Look at your answer to each question. Find where it falls on this taxonomy. Then identify: what specific knowledge would move your answer one level higher? That is your study target for the next unit."

---

## Designing Questions at Each Bloom's Level

### For quizzes (daily/bi-weekly)
Target levels 1-3. Quick to answer, easy to grade, appropriate for the frequency.

- Level 1: "Name the three components of the RAAS cascade."
- Level 2: "In your own words, explain why interleaving is more effective than blocked practice."
- Level 3: "A student is cramming for an exam two days from now. Which of the following study strategies would produce the most durable retention? Why?"

### For board work and recitation (in-class)
Target levels 3-5. Require integration and application; worth the discussion time.

- Level 3-4: "You are designing a study schedule for a medical student with 4 weeks before a comprehensive exam. What principles would guide your design?"
- Level 5: "Construct an argument for why a high-structure course might actually widen the achievement gap rather than narrow it. What evidence would you need to refute that argument?"

### For major exams
Include a mix of levels 2-6. Provide Bloom's answer keys for all questions.

---

## Classifying Your Existing Questions

To audit where your current exam questions fall on the taxonomy, ask:

- Can a student answer this by recalling a memorized fact or definition? → Level 1
- Can a student answer by restating the text in their own words? → Level 2
- Does answering require applying a concept to a new (not previously seen) problem? → Level 3+
- Does answering require identifying relationships, making inferences, or distinguishing between cases? → Level 4+
- Does answering require producing something new or making a judgment based on evidence? → Level 5-6

**Warning sign:** If more than 60% of your exam questions fall at level 1-2, the course is testing memory, not learning. High-structure interventions (retrieval practice, board work) are most valuable when paired with assessments that require students to use what they know.


path: references/case-studies.md
content: # Case Studies: Evidence-Based Classroom Design in Practice

Source: Brown, Roediger, McDaniel — *Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning*, Chapter 8 ("Make It Stick: Tips for Teachers")

---

## Mary Pat Wenderoth — University of Washington, Biology

Wenderoth teaches physiology and introductory biology. Her course design is the most fully documented example in the source book.

### Interventions

**Transparency at the outset.** Wenderoth opens every course by teaching students about the testing effect, the principle of desirable difficulties, and the illusion of knowing. She explains that highlighting a textbook in four colors — while it looks like work — is largely wasted time after the first read. She models retrieval in class by posing a question every 5 minutes and instructing students not to look at notes: "Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think about it yourself."

**Free recall (daily, 10 minutes).** Students spend 10 minutes at the end of each class writing everything they remember — on a blank page, without notes. They must sit for all 10 minutes even when they run out of ideas at 2 minutes. After 10 minutes, they check their notes and focus on what they forgot. This drives the agenda for what they bring to the next class.

**Testing groups.** Wenderoth transforms study groups into testing groups. In a study group, the person who knows the most explains and the others listen — producing dependency and shallow encoding. In a testing group, the whole group wrestles with a question together without opening any textbook. Wenderoth sends one student to the whiteboard to explain a concept they feel uncertain about; the rest test that student by asking questions that lead toward the full answer. All textbooks stay closed.

**Summary sheets (weekly, due Monday).** Students submit a single page on which they illustrate the prior week's material — physiology-appropriate format: large cartoons dense with callouts, directional arrows, blowups, labels showing "this causes this, which causes this, which feeds back on those." The sheet forces synthesis across the week's content and requires students to understand how systems are connected, not just what they are called.

**Learning paragraphs (monthly, low stakes).** On Fridays when she judges the workload reasonable, Wenderoth assigns a 5-6 sentence response to a synthesis question: "How is the GI tract like the respiratory system?" or "You just got your tests back; what would you do differently next time?" She reads every response and comments on them in class so students know they were read. Purpose: capture a week's learning before it fragments; give science students deliberate writing practice.

**Bloom's taxonomy answer keys.** For every graded exam, Wenderoth provides an answer key organized by Bloom's level: one answer reflecting knowledge-level recall, a more thorough answer reflecting comprehension, a more complex answer reflecting analysis, and so on. Students receive the key with their graded tests, locate where their answers fell on the taxonomy, and identify what they would need to know to reach the next level. This shifts the post-exam conversation from "did I get it right?" to "at what cognitive level did I understand this?"

### Results

High-structure classes (daily and weekly low-stakes exercises) compared to low-structure classes (traditional lecturing + high-stakes midterm and final):
- Significantly reduced student failure rates in gateway biology courses
- Narrowed the achievement gap between poorly prepared and well-prepared students
- Showed exam performance at higher Bloom's taxonomy levels
- Finding on consequences: in classes where practice exercises count toward the grade (even at very low stakes), students achieve higher success over the course of the term compared to classes where the exercises are identical but carry no grade consequences

---

## Michael D. Matthews — West Point, Engineering Psychology

### The Thayer Method

Developed almost 200 years ago by Sylvanus Thayer, an early superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy. Still in active use.

**Structure:**
- Specific, explicit learning objectives are set for every class meeting — students know exactly what they are expected to master before attending
- Responsibility for meeting those objectives sits with the student, not the instructor
- Every class opens with a quiz on the learning objectives from the assigned reading
- On most days, students "take to the boards" — assigned to groups, sent to slates covering all four walls of the classroom, given a higher-order question to answer
- Higher-order questions require integration of ideas from the reading and application at a conceptual level — not just the quiz-level recall
- One student per group gives a recitation to the class, explaining how the group answered the question; the group's work is then critiqued
- No conventional lecturing; every class meeting is organized around student generation, demonstration, or group problem-solving

**Matthews's approach to reading:**
"If you've read every word of this chapter, you're not being very efficient." Students are instructed to read for answers to specific questions — not to slide their eyes over the words. Efficient reading is targeted retrieval practice, not passive reading.

**Key result cited by Matthews:**
The method is especially effective for students who are not self-motivated to work outside of class — the high-structure requirement creates the discipline that some students lack. Echoes Wenderoth's finding that high-structure courses help under-prepared students most.

### Student example: Cadet Kiley Hunkler (Rhodes Scholar)

For MCAT preparation, Hunkler created learning objectives in her head for each course block, then read toward those objectives rather than reading every word. "I took a practice test every three days, saw what I got wrong, and adjusted." She describes this as "shooting an azimuth" — periodically checking whether you're on course toward your objective. Her approach: understand constructs, not memorize facts. "What is this question asking, what's the broader theme here, and does that match up with what I've outlined for this section?"

---

## Kathleen McDermott — Washington University at St. Louis, Psychology

### Daily Quizzing System

**Course:** Human Learning and Memory — 25 students, meets 2x/week, 14 weeks

**Quiz format:**
- 4 questions, given in the last 3-5 minutes of every class
- Questions address the high points of the lecture, the readings, or both
- Any material covered to date is fair game — not only the current session
- McDermott draws from past material when she judges it was not fully grasped

**Ground rules (set explicitly at the start of term):**
- Students may drop 4 quizzes across the semester — no questions asked
- In exchange, absences need not be justified
- No missed quizzes will be made up — ever
- Quizzes count for 20% of the course grade
- Two midterms + a final exam; the last two exams are cumulative

**Student response over the term:**
- First few weeks: students email asking for makeup accommodations for legitimate absences
- McDermott reiterates: 4 free absences, no makeups
- By end of semester: students report quizzes helped them keep up with the course and discover when they were getting off track early enough to correct

**McDermott's framing for instructors:** "The key with quizzes is to establish very clear ground rules for the student, and make them manageable for the professor. As a student, you're either there and you take it, or you're not. For the professor, no hassling over makeup tests."

---

## Andy Sobel — Political Economics (University-Level)

**System:** Cumulative low-stakes quizzing throughout the course.

**Principle:** Any quiz can draw from any material covered so far in the course, not only the most recent unit. This forces students to maintain and build on prior learning throughout the term rather than treating each unit as a self-contained episode to be learned, tested, and forgotten.

**Effect:** Students build incrementally complex mental models over the course of the semester, strengthening conceptual learning and developing deeper understanding of relationships between ideas and systems. The final exam is not a shock because the student has been continuously practicing retrieval across the whole course timeline.

---

## Columbia, Illinois Public School District

**Initial research:** Collaborative study with district middle school teachers to test the effects of integrating low-stakes quizzing into curriculum.

**Results:** Teachers who participated in the research adopted the practices; teachers who did not participate but observed results adopted them anyway.

**Expansion:** Research extended into history and science classes in the district's high school. Frequent retrieval practice is used both to bolster learning and to help teachers focus instruction on areas where student understanding needs improvement.

**Curriculum redesign:** The district is redesigning curriculum with the Common Core State Standards, vertically aligning sciences curriculum so students are re-exposed to subjects at various stages of their school careers — producing naturally spaced and interleaved instruction. Example: Middle school students learn to identify the six basic machines and how they work; they return to these concepts in subsequent grades, learning the underlying physics, and later how these tools combine and apply to different problems.

**Key result cited in Chapter 2 (testing effect):** Students who were regularly quizzed on science material retained it at 92%; students who were not quizzed retained 79% — a 13-percentage-point gap from a low-cost, low-effort intervention.

---

## Farmers Insurance — Corporate New-Agent Training

An example of interleaving applied at corporate scale.

**Structure:** 1-week intensive training program for ~2,000 new agents annually. Four training topics: sales, marketing systems, business planning, brand advocacy.

**Design:** Rather than covering each topic in sequence (all of sales, then all of marketing, then all of business planning), the four topics are interleaved throughout the week. Each session cycles back to previous topics in a new, enlarged context — requiring participants to recall what they learned earlier and apply it to the new situation.

**Effect:** At each return to a topic, understanding deepens and new skills take form. Participants learn to integrate the four domains rather than treating them as separate disciplines. A tool introduced as a social icebreaker (FORE: Family, Occupation, Recreation, Enjoyment) morphs across the week into a sales prospecting framework — the same idea, deepened through repeated application in different contexts.

**Key principle illustrated:** Interleaving is not randomness — it is deliberate sequencing that forces participants to reload prior knowledge at each return, building the mental model progressively rather than accumulating isolated units.


path: references/design-checklist.md
content: # 6-Criteria Course Design Checklist

Source: Brown, Roediger, McDaniel — *Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning*, Chapter 8

Use this checklist to audit any course, training program, or instructional design. Rate each criterion and use the redesign prompts to address gaps.

---

## How to Use

1. For each criterion, assign a rating: **Present / Partial / Absent**
2. Note the specific evidence that supports your rating (or the specific gap)
3. If rated Partial or Absent, use the redesign prompt to plan your intervention

A course with all 6 criteria rated **Present** is a high-structure, evidence-based design. A course with 3 or more rated **Absent** is a low-structure design and is likely producing high forgetting rates and poor transfer.

---

## The Checklist

### C1. Low-Stakes Retrieval Practice

**What it requires:** Frequent quizzes, self-tests, or recall exercises that occur *during* the course — not only at midterm and final. Students must retrieve information from memory, not recognize it from a list.

**Rating criteria:**
- **Present:** Quizzes occur at every class or every other class; short-answer or recall format; cumulative reach-back built in
- **Partial:** Occasional quizzes but not systematic; or quizzes exist but are low-frequency (once per unit)
- **Absent:** Only midterm and final; no in-course retrieval practice

**Redesign prompt if Absent or Partial:**
"Add 3-5 question quizzes at the start or end of class, at least every other meeting. Use short-answer format. Draw from current material plus material from 2-3 prior sessions. Count toward grade at 15-20%, drop 3-4 lowest."

**Research anchor:** Quizzed material retained at 92% vs. 79% non-quizzed, Columbia IL middle school science study (3-semester study).

---

### C2. Spaced and Cumulative Review

**What it requires:** Assessments or exercises that reach back to prior material — not only the current unit. Students are required to maintain and build on prior learning throughout the term.

**Rating criteria:**
- **Present:** Quiz and exam content draws from any point in the course to date; earlier material returns in new contexts; final exam or capstone is explicitly cumulative
- **Partial:** Some reach-back in quizzes but exams are unit-by-unit; or spacing exists but is unintentional
- **Absent:** Each unit is fully self-contained; no assessment requires prior material; all quizzes and tests cover only the most recent content

**Redesign prompt if Absent or Partial:**
"Redesign quiz content windows to draw from any material covered so far. Make the final exam explicitly cumulative and explain to students that this is how the course works from day one. If covering a new concept, ask at least one quiz question that connects it to a concept from an earlier unit."

**Research anchor:** Sobel's cumulative quizzing builds incrementally complex mental models; students who practice cumulative recall build stronger conceptual frameworks than those who compartmentalize.

---

### C3. Interleaving Across Topics

**What it requires:** Topics or problem types are mixed across sessions rather than blocked by unit. Students must "reload" prior knowledge when switching topics, which strengthens discrimination and transfer.

**Rating criteria:**
- **Present:** Topics are explicitly interleaved; the course returns to earlier topics at greater complexity levels; the syllabus shows vertical alignment or spiraling
- **Partial:** Some interleaving occurs in labs or projects but lectures are blocked; or interleaving is occasional, not systematic
- **Absent:** All content is strictly sequential; each topic is completed before the next begins; no deliberate spiraling

**Redesign prompt if Absent or Partial:**
"Map the course topics and identify where natural conceptual connections exist across units. Restructure to introduce Topic A at a basic level, introduce Topic B, then return to Topic A at a higher complexity level with Topic B as context. Use the Columbia IL vertical alignment model as a template."

**Research anchor:** Interleaving produces better transfer to novel problems than blocked practice because it requires students to identify which approach applies — the same discrimination required in real application.

---

### C4. Consequences (Low Stakes)

**What it requires:** Practice exercises count toward the course grade, even at minimal weight. The exercises being graded (rather than purely optional) is the mechanism that motivates engagement.

**Rating criteria:**
- **Present:** All practice exercises carry a grade contribution, even small; the grading policy is stated clearly in the syllabus
- **Partial:** Some practice is graded; some is optional; students can achieve a high grade without engaging with low-stakes practice
- **Absent:** All practice exercises are optional and ungraded; only midterm and final count toward the grade

**Redesign prompt if Absent or Partial:**
"Make all low-stakes practice count toward the final grade, even at 10-20% total. Use a drop policy (drop 3-4 lowest) rather than a makeup policy to make the system sustainable for you and the student. State the policy explicitly in week 1."

**Research anchor:** Wenderoth's research: students in classes where exercises count toward the grade achieve higher success over the term than students in classes where the exercises are identical but carry no consequences.

---

### C5. Transparency About How Learning Works

**What it requires:** The instructor explicitly explains why the course is designed the way it is — including what the research shows about retrieval practice, spacing, and desirable difficulties — and continues to reference this throughout the term.

**Rating criteria:**
- **Present:** First-class orientation module covers testing effect and desirable difficulties; instructor references the design rationale throughout the term when students encounter difficulty; student-facing syllabus language explains the design
- **Partial:** Brief mention of why quizzes are used, but no detailed explanation; instructor does not revisit the rationale when students struggle
- **Absent:** No explanation of course design philosophy; students experience difficulty without a framework for interpreting it; complaints about quiz difficulty go unexplained

**Redesign prompt if Absent or Partial:**
"Add a 10-15 minute transparency module to the first class. Explain the testing effect, the illusion of knowing, and what desirable difficulties are. Reference the design rationale each time students encounter a difficult exercise. Provide student-facing language in the syllabus explaining why the course is structured this way."

**Research anchor:** Wenderoth: students who understand the illusion of knowing bring solvable problems to office hours rather than complaints about trick questions. Transparency changes the behavioral response to difficulty.

---

### C6. Calibration Feedback

**What it requires:** Students receive timely feedback that reveals what they actually know vs. what they think they know. Feedback is actionable — it shows specific gaps rather than just a score.

**Rating criteria:**
- **Present:** Quiz feedback is provided at or within one class meeting; students can compare their recalled answer to the correct answer; Bloom's-level answer keys distributed with major assessments
- **Partial:** Grades are returned but without itemized feedback; or feedback is delayed too long (> 1 week) to be actionable
- **Absent:** Students receive only a letter grade or percentage; no diagnostic feedback on which concepts were missed or at what cognitive level

**Redesign prompt if Absent or Partial:**
"Return quiz feedback within the same class meeting or the next one. For major exams, distribute Bloom's-level answer keys so students can identify what cognitive level their answer reached and what they would need to know to improve. Use quiz data to identify topics where student understanding needs re-teaching."

**Research anchor:** Without calibration feedback, students rely on subjective confidence (the fluency illusion) to guide study decisions — and overconfident students study the wrong material.

---

## Summary Scorecard

| Criterion | Rating | Priority for redesign |
|-----------|--------|----------------------|
| C1. Low-stakes retrieval practice | | |
| C2. Spaced and cumulative review | | |
| C3. Interleaving across topics | | |
| C4. Consequences (low stakes) | | |
| C5. Transparency about learning | | |
| C6. Calibration feedback | | |

**Interpretation:**
- 6 Present: High-structure, evidence-based design
- 4-5 Present: Good foundation; address remaining gaps
- 2-3 Present: Low-structure; significant forgetting likely; start with C1 and C5
- 0-1 Present: Low-structure design; students are almost certainly cramming; prioritize C1, C4, and C5 as the minimum viable redesign


path: references/transparency-scripts.md
content: # Transparency Scripts for Course Design Communication

Source: Brown, Roediger, McDaniel — *Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning*, Chapter 8

These scripts are starting points. Adapt tone, examples, and specifics to your course, level, and student population.

---

## University / Sciences (10-12 minutes)

*Intended for: First class of a gateway or introductory course. Instructor has added daily or bi-weekly quizzes and active learning exercises.*

---

"I want to spend the first 10 minutes of this course talking about how you learn — not what you're going to learn in this class, but how your brain actually stores and retrieves information. Because most of you have been using study strategies that feel productive but aren't, and this course is designed differently.

Here's the first thing you need to know: rereading does not produce learning. I know that sounds wrong, because rereading feels like it's working. When you reread your notes or your highlighted textbook, you get more fluent with the material. It starts to feel familiar. And familiar feels like knowing.

But familiarity is not memory. The feeling that you know something is not the same as actually being able to use it. There is a term for this: the illusion of knowing. It is one of the most reliable predictors of exam failure despite genuine effort. You've studied for hours; you feel prepared; you fail the exam anyway.

What actually builds durable memory is retrieval — the act of pulling something from memory when you can't immediately see the answer. This is called the testing effect, and it is one of the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology. When you struggle to recall something, you strengthen the memory pathway to it. When you look at your notes and recognize the answer, you do not.

This course is designed around that principle. We will have short quizzes frequently — more often than you probably expect. Those quizzes will sometimes cover material from several weeks ago. They will often feel harder than you expected, especially early in the course. That difficulty is not a sign that you haven't studied enough. That difficulty is the mechanism.

Another thing you should know: your intellectual ability in this course is not fixed. When learning is effortful, it changes your brain. When you struggle with a concept and eventually grasp it, you are literally building new connections. Students who persist through that struggle become stronger learners over time. Students who interpret the struggle as a sign they don't belong in this discipline — and give up — are misreading the signal.

There are a few specific things I'm going to ask you to do in this course that may feel strange. I'm going to ask you to write down everything you remember from class for 10 minutes with your notes closed. I'm going to send you to the board to explain things you're not sure you fully understand. I'm going to ask you questions about material we covered three weeks ago.

All of these are hard. All of them are working.

I'll explain my design choices as we go. If something feels difficult or frustrating, come see me — and come ready to talk about what specifically you don't know. We can work with that."

---

## High School (8-10 minutes)

*Intended for: First day of a high school course. Teacher has added bi-weekly quizzes and changed some class activities from passive listening to board work or writing.*

---

"I want to tell you something about this class before we get started. This class is probably set up a bit differently from what you're used to, and I want to explain why so you don't think I'm just trying to make your life harder.

Here's the honest truth about studying: most of what you've been told to do doesn't work very well. Highlighting your notes in multiple colors. Rereading chapters before a test. Reading your flashcards over and over until you recognize the answers. None of these are actually good ways to learn something permanently. They feel productive — and that's the problem. They give you the feeling of knowing without the actual ability to remember.

What actually works is harder. It's testing yourself — trying to remember something before you're sure you can. It's writing down everything you can recall about yesterday's lesson without opening your notebook. It's working through a problem before I've explained the solution. It's being asked about something you learned three weeks ago.

All of those are uncomfortable. They all feel like you're failing. You'll hit a wall at two minutes during a free recall exercise and think "I don't know anything." That's normal. That's the point. Every time you struggle to pull something from memory, you're making that memory stronger.

In this class, we're going to do quizzes — short ones, pretty often. These aren't meant to trap you. They're meant to give you and me accurate information about what you actually know. They're also worth a small part of your grade, because I want you to actually do them. But no single quiz is going to define your grade.

I'll always tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing. If I ask you to do something that seems weird or hard, ask me. I'll explain the reason."

---

## Corporate / Professional Training (5-7 minutes)

*Intended for: First session of a multi-day workshop or training program. Facilitator has added a generation exercise or pre-class challenge.*

---

"Before we get into the content today, I want to be transparent about how this training is designed, because it's probably not what you're used to.

Most professional training follows the same format: expert presents content, participants listen and take notes, everyone rates the session highly, nothing sticks. That's not a criticism of the trainers or the participants — it's how we've been conditioned to think about training. But the research on memory is clear: passive listening followed by nothing produces almost no durable learning.

What produces durable learning is retrieval. Testing yourself. Generating answers before you've been given them. Coming back to the same content multiple times over days and weeks rather than absorbing it in one sitting.

This training is designed to do those things. In about 20 minutes, you're going to be handed a problem you don't yet have all the tools to solve. You're going to work on it anyway — in groups. That generation exercise is not a trick. The struggle of working toward a solution before you've been taught it makes the subsequent instruction significantly more effective. You'll encode it faster and retain it longer.

We're also going to follow up with you over the next several weeks with short check-ins that revisit what you learned here. Those are not tests. They're scheduled practice — the mechanism that converts a workshop into a skill.

The goal of all of this is simple: we want what you learn here to still be in your head and your hands 60 days from now, not just during this week. Everything we're doing is in service of that."

---

## Student-Facing Syllabus Language (1 paragraph)

*Adaptable for any course level. Insert into the course philosophy or assessment section of the syllabus.*

---

**Version A (University):**
"This course uses evidence-based instructional design. You will encounter frequent low-stakes quizzes, exercises that require you to recall material without notes, and questions about content from earlier in the semester. These practices are intentional. Research in cognitive psychology consistently shows that the difficulty of retrieving information — rather than recognizing it — is precisely what builds durable memory and transferable understanding. The quizzes are not meant to trap you; they are the mechanism by which you learn. If the approach feels unfamiliar or frustrating, please come to office hours — and bring specific questions about what you don't yet understand."

**Version B (High School):**
"In this class, we use research-backed learning strategies that may feel different from other classes. You'll take short quizzes regularly, including on material from earlier units. You'll sometimes work through problems before I've shown you the solution. These activities are harder than rereading your notes — and that difficulty is the point. Every time you struggle to recall something, you're strengthening your memory of it. I'll explain the reasons behind everything we do. Ask me if something doesn't make sense."

**Version C (Corporate / Professional):**
"This training program uses spaced retrieval practice to improve long-term skill retention. You will receive brief follow-up exercises at 1, 3, and 6 weeks after the workshop. These are short (5 questions, ~5 minutes) and are designed to maintain what you learned rather than test your performance. Participants who complete the follow-up exercises consistently demonstrate stronger retention and application 60 days post-training than those who attend the workshop only."


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