Say, I Wanna Know
My First (Big) Foray into the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning in the Classroom
The Context
This blog reflects a primary focus of our work this year in EA’s Center for Teaching & Learning related to integrating Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) work in PK-12 schools. SoTL seeks to systematically investigate classroom practices, moving from intuition to evidence-based insights. Inspired by recent conversations at the Learning & The Brain Conference and the increasing calls for a more formalized "Science of Teaching," this piece details a specific investigation into constructive retrieval—a teaching strategy blending retrieval and elaboration to deepen students' historical thinking and understanding.
The Problem
Teaching history has consistently highlighted for me students' challenges with moving beyond isolated memorization. They often memorized historical terms individually but struggled to meaningfully connect these ideas. Without these crucial connections, they missed important elements of historical thinking—particularly causality and understanding change over time. Simply put, students could see individual trees but rarely grasped the broader forest. While in previous years I had leaned heavily on methodologies inspired by the American Historical Association’s 2016 Tuning Project, these strategies had been adjusted intuitively rather than investigated systematically. At the core of our Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) work and formal CTL Scholars program is the mission to “turn intuition into investigation, and story into study.” This was a natural entry point as I returned to the classroom for 2024-2025.
The Inspiration
The inspiration for this investigation came from everyday experiences in the short and long terms. First, my class roster suggested the need for highly structured activities in support of student learning. Whereas in years past I had taught a number of AP or Honors courses (which meant student motivation was frequently hyper-charged) this particular group would require more direct instruction and targeted teaching to support their learning. They are an enthusiastic bunch with wide-ranging perspectives, ideas, and great energy, but I couldn’t simply rely on Harkness-like methodologies and expect learning to happen. But so too was I inspired by my own kids, particularly the 10-year-old who knows more historical facts than most students in high school, but sometimes cannot weave together a coherent narrative to demonstrate why these facts matter. Further, as a staunch advocate of teacher-led research and after having been out of the classroom for a year, I wanted to model the exercise for others to gain inspiration from, and to test my own intuition about this specific kind of intervention in a history class. Lastly, and somewhat serendipitously, the research paper Constructive retrieval: Benefits for learning, motivation, and metacognitive monitoring dropped mere weeks after I had begun my investigation.1
All of these instances reminded me of the inherent human capacity and desire for making connections, sparking the idea to translate that same enthusiasm for interconnectedness into my teaching.2
The Intervention
From September through April, my classroom became a lab for testing constructive retrieval strategies with fifteen 11th-grade students. We focused on a carefully curated list of 50 foundational historical terms (e.g., mercantilism, nullification, Social Darwinism). Our core activity—“Connect the Dots”—occurred once per eight-day schedule rotation. Students first defined each term independently (retrieval), then constructed paragraphs or concept maps to explicitly connect these terms historically.3 We closed with a collective reflection to illuminate the webs of causation students had formed, reinforcing understanding through peer dialogue.
To measure impact in as many ways as possible, we employed three methods:
Monthly emoji surveys (😃/😐/😞) for confidence checks
Targeted multiple-choice questions embedded into unit tests
Rubric-based analysis of short-answer and essay responses.
The Results
The constructive retrieval approach yielded tangible benefits across several dimensions:
Metacognitive Awareness: Students’ monthly emoji confidence surveys indicated growing self-awareness and monitoring of their own historical understanding. There were far more smiley faces for terms on which we had explicitly practiced constructive retrieval.
Enhanced Assessment Performance: Students experienced a sharp increase in their performance on multiple-choice questions directly related to the retrieval terms. For terms that we did not explicitly practice constructive retrieval, students performed at a 58% success rate. On questions relating to terms that we did proactive constructive retrieval on, students performed at a 71% success rate.
Improved Analytical Writing: Written responses on assessments demonstrated significantly greater depth, reflecting an increased ability to apply historical terms contextually and analytically. So too did these terms show up more frequently in comparison to the control terms.4
Study Habits: Perhaps most gratifying, students reported improved study practices beyond the classroom, applying constructive retrieval strategies independently. This likely had a compounding impact on student performance as the year progressed.
So What Have We Learned?
Ultimately, this investigation confirmed my intuition about the value of deliberately combining retrieval and elaboration, providing a practical pathway for helping students navigate and appreciate the complex forest of history rather than merely memorizing individual trees. Moving forward, I would optimize the terms by aligning them closely with each unit's essential question, enabling students to perceive the narrative arc of history more cohesively.
This was not without its hiccups, however. Early in the process, students faced significant challenges with retrieval. Recognizing this, I adjusted my instructional strategies to support more frequent successful retrieval, creating conditions where elaboration could effectively build upon this foundation.
The key takeaway (for me) is clear: activities designed around constructive retrieval not only enhance memory but also foster deep historical thinking. I plan to continue implementing this approach, anticipating similar beneficial outcomes in any course that emphasizes and requires systems thinking. This journey has reinforced the importance of persistent inquiry and genuine curiosity as central elements in effective teaching. The continuous desire to explore and improve remains essential to our practice—we're always trying, always seeking to understand.
Note: If you've been around this blog, you know the drill—titles are borrowed from song lyrics or titles. It’s a tradition. Today’s inspiration comes from Nick Waterhouse’s 2012 track, Say I Wanna Know. It’s the live version because, well, live music just hits differently. Plus, I really do wanna know.
Tino Endres, Shana Carpenter, Alexander Renkl, Constructive retrieval: Benefits for learning, motivation, and metacognitive monitoring. Learning and Instruction, Volume 94, 2024.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475224001014
This idea of interweaving inspiration is particularly crucial I think. In early iterations of the study design, I was simply seeking to replicate things from the vast array of Science of Learning literature. But classrooms are different spaces than labs. And even if the research was done in a classroom, these were likely very dissimilar from my own classroom. Blending together areas of inspiration, and being open to the multiple realities in front of me, were critical.
One might dub this step as a kind of elaboration or generation. It doesn’t match the research paper exactly, nor did I want it to. But it worked to promote the historical thinking I often found lacking in the classroom.
Working with AI to help with identifying and coding terms in the written work was incredibly helpful in this regard. I could do an entirely separate post on the development and evolution of that work flow.