How can we develop learning strategies that facilitate knowledge recall and long-term memory as an enhancer to exams performance?

Within the teaching profession, there is a consensus that national curriculum has been far more demanding since 2014, when the government initiated reform to make the curriculum “rigorous, engaging and tough’ (Richardson, 2014). The rewritten National Curriculum required pupils to learn their twelve times table by the age of nine, alongside complex scientific theories such as climate change and evolution. Within this policy context, it has become increasingly important to improve students’ ability to recall a large amount of complicated information. For the past few years, Nightingale Academy (NTA) has developed a variety of interventions and after school learning clubs with the aim of assisting pupils towards their GCSE exams. Despite all these efforts, we did not witness significant change among our Year 11s end-of-year results. NTA therefore decided to further investigate how knowledge recall and long-term memory can be enhanced.   Research on m