A review is a planned opportunity for students to bring prior learning back into their working memory.

The more often students retrieve information, the easier it is to recall. When students review, they are engaging in retrieval practice. It is especially effective when the retrieval is spaced out, with a schedule (distributed) over time (Dunlosky 2013; McDermott 2021). This is known as spaced retrieval practice.

Spaced retrieval practice is bringing knowledge or information to mind from memory – as opposed to rereading, relistening, or rewatching. Spaced retrieval practice is used to strengthen students' prior learnings from the unit, Stage or previous stage. The purpose is to help students remember the learning for longer. Embedding regular, spaced, and thoughtfully designed reviews into your teaching routine helps students build durable knowledge, making future learning easier.

A review should be challenging enough to require effort in recall but achievable enough to make success possible.

Typically, a review:

• is short in length
• is developed and facilitated by the teacher about content previously taught
• features a range of question types and the answers to questions.

A review is not:

• revision
• studying notes
• asking ‘what did we do last lesson?’
• reteaching.

Review has been shown to benefit all students, in particular, students’ organisation of knowledge, fluency in recall, complex thinking and application skills (Rosenshine 2012; Agarwal et al. 2020).