The Sunday Scaries
If you’ve ever spent a Sunday evening with a heavy case of the "Sunday Scaries," you’ll know the feeling. It’s that specific brand of dread that comes from looking at a mountain of unmarked mock exams while nursing a lukewarm tea. It’s a career built on constant planning, the pressure of Ofsted, and the endless work of building a pedagogical toolkit that (hopefully) allows students to retain their learning for the long run.
In the teaching world, we often see students who think "studying" means dragging a fluorescent yellow highlighter over every single line of their revision notes. By the time they’re finished, the whole page is glowing, but they haven't actually processed any of the information, they’re just left with soggy paper!
We are Alice and Faye, and not too long ago, that was our reality. Alice was a Head of Business and Law, while Faye taught Maths as a KS3 Lead. Like many who move into engineering, we didn't leave education because we lost interest in teaching and learning. We left because we wanted to build the tools we desperately wished we’d had when we were standing in front of a whiteboard.
Joining the engineering team at Genio has felt like a natural evolution. In the classroom, you can help one class at a time. Here, releasing a new feature feels like you are handing a better set of tools to thousands of students at once. We’ve traded the staff room for the sprint, but our mission remains the same.
Our Obsession with Retrieval Practice
One of the first things we bonded over at Genio was our shared belief in Retrieval Practice. In the simplest terms, most traditional revision, like rereading or highlighting is, "input" based. Retrieval Practice flips this on its head. It is the act of deliberately recalling information from memory. Every time a student "retrieves" a fact or a concept, it changes and strengthens that memory, making it more durable and easier to find the next time they need it.
Coming from a Business and Law background, I have seen many students struggle to retain the complex property offence law or dense economic theories required for their A-level exams. They would spend hours "inputting" information, only for it to vanish the moment they sat down for a mock exam.
To combat the "highlighting" trap, we revolutionised the way my department worked. We dedicated the first 10 minutes of every single lesson to retrieval, using flashcards handed out the moment students walked through the door. We didn't just quiz what we’d done the day before, we’d intentionally recall topics from up to 12 weeks ago.
A 12-week timeframe is scientifically supported as a crucial period for establishing long-term memory. Using weeks of consistent, spaced recall, information moves from our short-term "working" memory and starts to be deeply stored in the long term memory. By tracking this progress, we saw a marked and dramatic improvement in our exam based results. It proved that learning isn't just about what you can put into a student's head, it’s about how many times you can help them practice getting it out. At Genio, we use our teaching background to ensure our features move students away from passive highlighting and towards this high-impact, active recall.
Delivering the "Quiz Me" Updates
Teaching maths, I lost count of the number of times I told students ‘Maths is like an art, you need to practise it!” when seeing students ‘revise’ by just reading over their notes. They could follow a worked example and understand it, but the moment the scaffolding was removed, the knowledge wasn't there. This is exactly why retrieval practice is so important and why I have been so excited to work on our new Collections Quiz Me feature that we've been building at Genio.
Before developing the feature both students and faculty were surveyed about how and why they use quizzing.
64% of students said they use quizzing primarily to reinforce and remember information. The majority of students also said that they find general broader questions useful as well as more specific questions when testing their knowledge. Faculty members stated that the reason quizzing matters is that it forces students to actively retrieve information from memory. Not just re-read it or highlight it. Actually retrieve it. This reinforces something we know from the research and our own experience in the classroom: quizzing isn't just a review method, it's a cognitive tool that fundamentally changes how knowledge is stored.
So what did we actually build?
The most significant update we've shipped is the ability for students to generate a quiz across an entire collection or module, rather than being restricted to only testing a single event or lecture at a time. This might sound like a small change, but pedagogically it's a big one.
Exam preparation isn't about knowing each topic in isolation. It's about being able to dig into what you’ve learned, make connections, and retrieve the right knowledge under pressure. A single lecture quiz gives students an immediate checkpoint after learning something new, while a module wide quiz challenges them to retrieve across a broader range of material. Both have their place, and having both means students can quiz with purpose at every point in their revision and exam preparation.
We have also enhanced the feedback we provide in our quizzes, breaking it down by each event or lecture. Getting a question wrong is only useful if you understand why and know what to do next. Clear explanations paired with a direct link back to the relevant lecture mean students can move from identifying a weak spot to addressing it in a single click.
Every stage of these updates, from initial design discussions to the final implementation, was shaped by one question: does this support the important cognitive work of retrieval? We're confident the answer is yes.
The Genio Learning Community
One of the best parts about working at Genio is that the 'teaching' hasn't actually stopped. Unlike many tech firms that focus solely on output, learning science isn't just a box to tick, it's embedded into everything we do. It's our bread and butter.
Our team of engineers, designers, and product and learning specialists meet regularly to discuss learning science topics on cognitive load theory or new studies on memory, and how we as a team can achieve our own overall goals and learning objectives. It’s a constant dialogue that keeps the engineering team grounded. It ensures we are building features based on how humans actually learn, rather than just what looks flashy in a demo. It’s the logic of engineering paired with the heart of education.
This blog was crafted by Alice and Faye from the engineering team at Genio.
