Beyond grades: retention of school knowledge and learning assessment in the early years

Abstract

Schools generally know what students got right at the end of a unit, but they have less information about what students are still able to recall and use a few weeks later. This article begins with that difference, which is common in everyday school life. Knowledge retention is discussed as an issue involving teaching, curriculum, and learning assessment. To examine it, two public sources were revisited. First, the 50 classroom experiments compiled by Agarwal, Nunes, and Blunt (2021) were analyzed, with attention to how many involved the early years of elementary school and to the time between instruction and the final assessment. Second, the results reported by Franzoi et al. (2025), obtained with fifth-grade students working with History content, were reorganized for pedagogical interpretation. Only five of the 50 experiments involved the early years of elementary school. None examined what students were still able to recall after seven days or more. In Franzoi et al. (2025), retrieval practice outperformed rereading by 18.4 and 26.4 percentage points, depending on the phase analyzed. When the same strategy was maintained and only the interval between activities was changed, from one to four days, the difference was 1.3 percentage points and was not statistically significant. The available evidence is limited and does not justify turning a single experience into a general rule. Even so, it raises questions about a common practice: assuming that content has been learned simply because students performed well shortly after studying it. The article argues that schools need to examine what remains available over time, rather than only what was answered correctly on one occasion. Planned revisiting, cumulative activities, and delayed assessments may provide more consistent evidence. Further Brazilian studies are also needed in regular classrooms, using curricular content and longer follow-up periods.