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Knowledge Organisers

What are they and how to use them

Rosehill: A place to learn, grow, and thrive Respect. Kindness. Responsibility.

What are knowledge organisers?

Knowledge organisers provide a summary of the key facts and essential knowledge that pupils learn within a unit of work or a curriculum subject. They should be simple and easy to use with key information broken down into easily digestible chunks. The topic details a a short summary of the themes covered within the knowledge organiser, key terms are the words that pupils will learn about and in the future be able to recall through retrieval practice. The useful links section is available to help embed essential knowledge.

How can parents/carers support learning at home using a knowledge organiser?

At home you can talk to your young person about their day at school including their wellbeing and learning across the various subject areas. Look at knowledge organisers with your young person and have conversations around them including:

Ask them to explain a key word or term to you, the content of a lesson, what questions were asked, what did the class discuss, what activities did they do and if they have covered similar topics in other subjects in school.
Quiz them on the content or get them to quiz you!

Why use knowledge organisers?

4. Knowledge organisers create opportunities for spaced retrieval practice

Spaced practice refers to a specific practice concerned with timing – ‘when’ it’s best to learn. Is it better to spend seven hours on a Sunday to practise a skill before a test or to space those seven hours out as one hour sessions across seven days?

Many studies have looked into this and the evidence is clear: it would be far better to practise for seven one-hour sessions than to practise for seven hours the night before.

From the experiments by Ebbinghaus, we know that the rate we forget newly learnt information is quick. Assuming 100% recall, it would only take (on average) for knowledge retained to fall to 58%. After an hour the retention rate has fallen to 44%. Is it any wonder that that pupils forget things?

Luckily, there is a way to interrupt this forgetting and that is by systematically recalling that information which we wish to be learnt. This is known as retrieval practice and is far more effective in the long-term than simply restudying something (more on this later).

When we retrieve information, that memory trace becomes stronger and the rate that we forget something decreases. The more we space out our learning, the more time it would take for us to forget something.

Knowledge organisers are excellent tools to ensure that some of this spaced practice takes place.

Ahead of a summative assessment at the end of a topic you can inform pupils that some of the questions will refer to previous learning; pupils can then refer to the knowledge organiser to access and practice those topics.

This is especially important when dealing with topics in maths that you know do not get equal teacher time. With many popular primary maths schemes of work like White Rose Maths blocking their units, it is entirely possible that after two weeks on measurement in Year 5 the pupils will not encounter it again until Year 6.

By continuously testing those areas that do not get our equal attention, we can ensure that the retention of these units happens across the year, not just in the unit.

5. Used appropriately, knowledge organisers can increase retention of facts

This comes down to their core purpose. Our working memory can only take in so much information at one time and for our pupils to be successful in a range of subjects they need to have a large store of factual knowledge in their long-term memory.

Our minds have adapted to take this information from our long-term memory into our working memory without sacrificing much space within our working memory, but children need to develop this skill.

A child who has been taught their times tables is far more likely to get to grips with equivalent fractions as all their working memory can attend to the fractions. A child on the other hand who is not secure in their multiplication facts will have to juggle both the multiplication facts and their relation to equivalent fractions in their working memory.

This can overload the working memory, stressing its cognitive load and lead to pupils not learning what they should.

With a knowledge organiser providing the key information and, providing the pupils use them correctly, these facts can then become part of a pupil’s long-term memory.

How to use knowledge organisers

4 top tips for using knowledge organisers

1. For the knowledge organiser to be successful, pupils will have to put it away

A consistent finding in cognitive science is that of the retrieval effect. This has demonstrated that, when talking about long-term learning, the act of studying something for a session and then writing down everything from memory about that topic is far more effective than just constantly re-reading something.

The latter gives us an air of familiarity about the topic and deceives us into thinking we know the material better than we actually do. To make sure that we do know the material, the knowledge organiser has to go away and a blank sheet of paper has to come out!

Alternatively, a family member could test pupils by asking questions from the knowledge organiser. This is the best way to help pupils retain more of the information they’ve learnt.

2. Give the knowledge organiser out at the start of a topic

As mentioned earlier, pupils who have greater prior knowledge of a unit are likely to learn more from the teaching of that unit. This is because knowledge is generative (sticky) and new knowledge is good at hooking onto this pre-knowledge.

Without this foundation, there is nothing for knowledge to ‘hook’ onto, and so the new knowledge risks falling out of our minds. As teachers, we know that many pupils’ prior knowledge of a topic can vary and the home environment is one culprit for this.

To ensure that all our pupils have a chance of being successful in an upcoming unit, I recommend that knowledge organisers go out a week before beginning teaching (maybe longer if the new unit coincides with a longer break) and sections of the knowledge organiser are given for pupils to learn that relate to the first few lessons.

This way, there is a likelihood that all pupils have at least a baseline of prior knowledge which the new knowledge can attach itself to. However, this won’t happen by osmosis; this leads to my next tip.

3. Teach pupils how to use their knowledge organisers effectively

When introducing knowledge organisers for the first time, it is important that we teach pupils how to use them properly. This includes telling them the ‘why’. I have with previous classes told them all about working memory and long-term memory and the link between prior knowledge and new knowledge.

This certainly gets some buy-in from the pupils and allows them to see that I am not just being Gradgrindian in my teaching outlook. Another crucial part is telling them about retrieval practice and helping them understand that to be successful, they will need to recall this information without using an organiser.

This is important as research into retrieval practice has shown that participants who had several sessions of retrieval practice believed they would remember less than those who took part in the research and had several sessions of simply re-studying information.

This means that pupils over-estimate just how much they think they will learn. This makes taking the time to ensure your pupils know how to use knowledge organisers properly paramount.

For pupils to understand just how powerful knowledge organisers can be, they need to be able to use them and then work beyond them – coming back to that blank piece of paper!

4. Test regularly (but in the right conditions)

You need to make sure that your pupils know that you mean business when you provide a knowledge organisers. That means that from the get-go low-stakes quizzing begins – the next day if possible.

It should not be many questions – 5 at the most; doing this everyday after the knowledge organiser has been handed out will mean that your pupils know that they are expected to learn it. To get the conditions right, the pupils need to not feel threatened by the test (which is why we use the friendlier-sounding ‘quiz’ rather than ‘test’).

This further means marking and score collection should not be a ‘public’ activity; this risks making the quiz high-stakes again.

What we are aiming for here is for pupils to strengthen their memory, not for us to be assessing constantly. Other ways to get the conditions right are to make the quizzes time effective; I’d suggest that the ideal time is around 5-7 minutes to complete and mark a quiz.

It’s also important to ensure that everyone is able to take part in these quizzes. This could be done through writing the quiz on paper and giving it to the pupils, or having multiple choice questions with pupils holding up the correct fingers to show the correct answers/writing their answers on mini whiteboards.

Feedback must still be given to the pupils, as we do not want pupils recalling the wrong information. Two ways this could happen could be the teacher simply going through the answers, or the pupils self-checking answers by using the knowledger organiser that is in their books.

Of course, this latter way will only be effective if the learning culture in your classroom is right and the pupils are not tempted to cheat.

How to write a knowledge organiser

It is important to note that when the term ‘knowledge-rich’ is talked about this does not simply mean facts.

There are two types of knowledge – declarative and procedural. Knowing the difference between these two will help make it clearer which knowledge should go into your knowledge organiser.

Declarative knowledge is simply factual knowledge. In the domain of mathematics, this would be your number bonds, times tables, knowing that all angles in a triangle add to 180 degrees etc.

Procedural knowledge involves being able to know procedures. So “how do I do 3 digit by 2 digit long multiplication” or “how to find the missing angle of a triangle if 2 are already given to me”.

When designing knowledge organisers it is unlikely that pupils will garner much understanding from procedural knowledge being on there. That is just an attempt to replace a teacher with a piece of paper and it will not work.

We therefore want to focus our knowledge organiser on declarative knowledge as it’s this knowledge that will unlock the procedural knowledge and make that learning much richer in the classroom.

In terms of what these would look like on the page, there is definitely no set format and I think it would be wrong to try and force all teachers to use the same format as they should be.

It is preferable that you adapt your knowledge organiser to the needs of the of the unit, rather than follow an arbitrary format.

Why are we using knowledge organisers?

At Rosehill High School, we are using knowledge organisers to help structure essential knowledge, help improve retention of facts, provide home learning opportunities and to help support retrieval practice.

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