Using regular, low-stakes tests to secure pupils' contextual knowledge in Year 10

Lee Donaghy was concerned that his GCSE students' weak contextual knowledge was letting them down. Inspired by a mixture of cognitive science and the arguments of other teachers expressed in various blogs, he decided to tackle the problem by teaching and testing knowledge more intensively. The result was a rapid improvement in secure factual knowledge in tests, and a clear manifestation of the benefits in students' ability to call up and deploy that knowledge in extended written answers...