Test Them Before They Forget

I am still reflecting on my visit to Kanagawa Sohgoh High School last week. As I have reflected I am impressed at how the Japanese education system encourages students to retain and remember what they learn. I feel that in many ways the American education system indirectly encourages students to forget. We have a “Test them before they forget” mentality. First, we have frequent quizzes because we are afraid that they will forget. Second, we review the content before tests because we have assumed that they have already forgotten the material and we need to remind them before they take their test. Third, the curriculum that students are being exposed to is disjointed enough that they really can forget what they learned after the test. Finally, our summer is two and a half months long and students will forget much of what they learn if they don't use it for this long of a time period.

How the Japanese Education System Encourages Retention 

1. Integrated Curriculum: I mentioned in my last post about how integrated the Japanese curriculum is. If you are constantly pulling in previous ideas, you will not only remind students of these ideas, but through more connections the ideas will be deeper and be seen as more important to remember.

2. The teacher that I talked to only gives one test per semester (they have three semesters per year). Therefore the students are expected to remember and retain what they learn for many months instead of a few days.

3. The summer break is a few weeks long, not a few months. I don't know what the exact length is. But when I mentioned to a fellow Japanese Science teacher that we have two and a half months off in the summer his jaw dropped.

My Reflection

From the first point, I am going to find ways to integrate my curriculum. Not only within units, but also within the curriculum and past year's curriculum. This probably means that I will need to pull away from my textbook because it doesn't provide enough of this kind of integration.

This second point is really interesting. I don’t know if I am ready to adopt this assessment practice. I am embarrassed to say that I spend almost as much time reviewing and assessing as I do teaching. If I tested less often then I would be requiring students to retain and remember the material longer and I would also have more time in class to not feel rushed through the curriculum and time to make connections.