The spiral curriculum approach

Spaced practice and the spiral curriculum Elizabeth Mountstevens, Sir John Lawes School, UK When the new GCSE science curricula were introduced in 2015, the chemistry department at Sir John Lawes School took the opportunity to tailor the curriculum to our needs. Our specification - OCR Twenty-First Century Chemistry - has a narrative-based approach in which content is arranged not in traditional disciplines but by the context in which it is studied. For example, one module about chemicals of the natural environment includes both the reactivity of metals and the bonding between and within molecules. We adapted this structure by bringing some related ideas together in order to explore their connections. When our first cohort sat their mock exams, we were disappointed in their answers on the knowledge recall questions and realised we needed to make changes to enhance long-term learning. Shortly afterwards, I was introduced to Dunlosky’s paper on study skills, ‘Strengthening the s