Wax On, Wax Off Retrieval Practice
Three recent studies show why retrieval practice needs better questions, better timing and better support.
Back when I was a kid, everyone wanted to learn karate. I can’t now recall whether the yearning came before or after watching The Karate Kid, but the film definitely heightened my desire. In order to survive some vicious bullying, Daniel LaRusso wanted to learn karate, and so did I. Instead, Mr Miyagi had him polishing cars, sanding floors and painting fences. Wax on, wax off. Sand the floor. Paint the fence. Despite Daniel’s frustration, we know Miyagi isn’t really exploiting him for free labour. We know the chores must somehow be training — we’re just waiting for Daniel to catch up.
Then comes the reveal. Miyagi throws punches and Daniel’s arms move almost before he knows what he’s doing. The chores weren’t chores at all. The movements had been encoded in his body. Daniel had been learning without knowing he was learning, and suddenly all that apparently pointless activity had meaning.
It’s a brilliantly seductive idea. Expertise, smuggled in under the cover of mindless routine. Mastery, acquired through obedience — the body learning what the mind doesn’t yet understand. The scene offers one of the great fantasies of education: if students perform the right actions often enough, meaning will eventually reveal itself.
There’s some truth in this. We can learn habits, movements and routines before we can explain them. Fluency often precedes our ability to analyse. We sometimes understand what we’ve been taught only after repeated practice has ingrained the pattern. But there’s also something deeply misleading about the fantasy. Daniel’s routine works because Miyagi understands exactly what the movements are for. The hidden structure is only hidden from Daniel (and maybe from us) but not from the teacher.
If we were to strip out Miyagi’s understanding all you’d be left with is a kid performing monotonous routines. Schools are full of these routines, where the original purpose has been lost and no one’s sure why we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing.
Ritual without meaning is mimicry
Whenever a practice is mandated, there’s an inexorable tendency for it to lethally mutate. I’ve argued this before about retrieval practice.
But the problem isn’t that retrieval becomes ritualised. Rituals aren’t empty. They have deep symbolic meaning preserved through repeated form, marking what a community values and making significance habitual. A Remembrance Day silence isn’t just two minutes without speaking. Standing, stillness, the poppy, the sounding of the Last Post: each repeated element carries meaning because the form has been preserved. The ritual teaches attention, gratitude and collective memory without needing to explain itself from scratch every year.
Of course, not everyone involved in a ritual understands it in the same way. If we don’t explain why we’re asking kids to be silent, why should they take it seriously? In religious traditions, the congregation may not grasp every symbolic layer of the words, gestures and timings. Rituals often require a priest class. Someone has to be inducted into the mysteries, to know why this word is spoken here, why this action comes before that, why the form matters.
The same is true of classroom routines. Students don’t need to understand the New Theory of Disuse before they can benefit from retrieval practice, any more than Daniel LaRusso needs to understand defensive blocking before building muscle memory.1 But the teacher needs to know. Structure can be hidden from novices but not from the teacher responsible for implementing the practice.
In this sense, retrieval practice probably should be ritualised. Students should come to expect that remembering is part of learning, that forgetting isn’t shameful, that answers need to be produced rather than merely recognised, that errors can be repaired, and that important knowledge will return. A well-designed ritual reduces uncertainty and helps students internalise the rhythms of successful study.
The danger isn’t ritual but mimicry. Mimicry results in a cargo cult, copying outward form with no understanding of the underlying purpose. Five questions appear, five minutes pass, answers are revealed, green pens are deployed, and the lesson moves on. It looks as if retrieval practice has happened, but the mechanisms that make it work are missing: no real search of memory, no successful struggle, no feedback worth having, no planned return. The movement is retained but the meaning is lost.
Three recent studies help clarify what gets lost in the move from ritual to mimicry. The first asks whether retrieval practice is working for all students, especially those most likely to struggle. The second asks whether we’re retrieving isolated fragments or the relationships that make knowledge usable. And the third looks at whether our systems reward spaced return or merely task completion. Together, they suggest that retrieval practice requires more refined judgement and deeper understanding of the essential processes.
1. Not yet for all students
The first of these studies, “Trends in testing effect research: from lab to classroom, but not yet for all learners” by Wilschut, Sense and van Rijn, captures the state of play neatly. Testing effect research, they state, has travelled from tightly controlled laboratory experiments towards more authentic classroom settings, with the field moving from proving the effect to investigating how it works within the messiness of real classrooms.
