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The fundamental principles of learning are built on the relationship between working memory and long-term memory. Working memory is where new information is processed. Unfortunately for students, it is small and has a limited capacity. This means it can easily become overwhelmed, with information quickly forgotten. To demonstrate just how small our working memory is, let’s try an experiment. Without looking at the front cover, can you see if you can remember the spelling of the authors’ surnames? Despite seeing that information only moments ago when you picked up this book, most people can’t recall it with 100% accuracy. A bi-directional relationship exists between working memory and long-term memory. Students do not always transfer information from their working memory to their long-term memory. One of the aims of teaching is to get students from the left boxes to the top right one.

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Retrieval Practice can take many different forms, such as low-stakes quizzing, multiple-choice tests, flashcards, mini-whiteboards, past papers or even verbal question + answer. Unfortunately, memory is not permanent. The brain is constantly editing and rewiring, which means over time misunderstandings can develop. Regular retrieval practice can help guard against this. As well as memory editing, it also fades. One round of retrieval practice is not enough to secure the memory long term. Using a range of different retrieval practice strategies over time can help strengthen our current existing connections. Multiple studies have found that retrieval practice aids learning. It would therefore be a good guess to assume that students often choose to use it. However, their relationship with retrieval practice is a bit more complicated than that. Despite its effectiveness, retrieval practice is not the method of choice for most students when it comes to their studying.

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The “Spacing Effect” is one of the longest and most enduring findings in cognitive psychology. It was first detailed in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus who found that humans tend to forget large amounts of information if they only learn something once. Looking back, his study was pretty revolutionary, and as a result of the rigorous scientific method he employed, the results of his research are still being replicated over one hundred years later. Spacing has consistently been found to be one of the best learning strat egies, with a good number of studies finding a 10–30% improvement in memory retention. This is because to commit something to memory takes both time and repetition. Researchers have tried to find the optimum amount of time to leave between revisiting content, but have been unable to come up with a definitive answer.

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Due to the limitations and constraints of working memory, it is easy for cognitive overload to occur. When this happens, the learning process is hindered as the student is less able to transfer as much information to long-term memory. Although autonomy can be a good thing, as a species the authors tend to struggle with too much choice. For example, one famous study found that jam sellers sold more jam when they offered only 6 different flavours, compared with when they offered 24. With so many different effects that relate to cognitive load theory, it is easy to be confused about the differences between them (ironically, leading to a cognitive overload about cognitive load theory). The Split Attention Effect occurs when the presentation of information forces students to spread their attention too thin.

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We are living in a golden of age of education embracing evidence and research. The increase in interest from teachers in cognitive science has been unprecedented over the past few years. In the quest to become even more evidence-based, more and more teachers are reading research papers and debating them. Teacher Zach Groshell created and shared a version of this table on social media. It explores which elements of cognitive science are mentioned in a range of teaching and learning reviews. It is genuinely amazing to think how some of the smartest people in education, who have spent a huge amount of time and energy researching this stuff, have come to a pretty similar conclusion about our best bets for teaching and learning. It is rare, in such a diverse and complex field as education, that we achieve such a consensus.

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Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction have become increasingly popular in education over recent years. They offer general guidelines and suggestions as to what effective classroom teaching is grounded on. Likewise, cognitive science has also become a mainstay of education practice. Cognitive science is messy. It’s interlinked, complicated and often several areas overlap with one another. This is why a single intervention is unlikely to be completely effective or efficient. Often the authors need to consider several elements and how they combine and contribute to learning. In an age of knowledge-rich curriculums, where there is a lot of content to cover, teaching in small steps can feel slow and counterintuitive. Due to working memory being so easy to overload, presenting too much information at once can be overwhelming and stressful. Covering new material in small incremental steps allows students to build up their schemas, which in turn, reduces the burden placed on working memory.

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Convergent questions are ones that may have several “correct” answers that lie within a commonly accepted range. An example would be “Why did William the Conqueror invade England?” The student has to work harder to answer it. These questions help develop broader knowledge and can help add context and nuance to a student’s understanding. At a higher level of cognitive thinking the authors have divergent questions. These are similar to hypothetical “what if” questions. There are technically no correct answers, as the question is more concerned with how students use their knowledge base, imagination and analysis. Pre-Questions are an example of asking questions to capture attention and increase interest. This is when you ask a question before teaching the content. Elaborative Interrogation is asking questions after you teach the content, with the specific purpose of helping students link the current content with what they already know.

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Many researchers have found that constructive feedback is an incredibly powerful tool for promoting children 2019s social, moral and intellectual development. In terms of giving feedback, it is helpful to know that researchers have identified four different types of feedback that one could give. Feedback on the process, which is about the strategy and decisions they made to complete the task, often leads to deep learning as it can act as a prompt to seek out more information. It is generally felt that corrective feedback is best delivered quickly, so as to help students stay on task and not let any misconceptions take root. One other factor to consider is the length of the task a student is being given feedback on. The longer the task, the more beneficial it may be to delay feedback.

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Resilience has been used to cover a whole range of behaviours and areas, from well-being, to coping with exam pressure, to independent learning. The evidence suggests that in order to create an environment where resilience can flourish, the authors need to set the level of challenge high, but to also complement that with high levels of support. It is the perceived negative consequences that follow from that failure that stress them out. Numerous studies have found that high levels of fear of failure can lead to lower self-esteem, avoiding challenging tasks, being pessimistic and even cheating. Evidence suggests that it is most common in those with low self-esteem, low academic confidence and low self-regulation and those with high fear of failure, depression or rebellious streaks. This may well be accompanied by having a high fear of failure and low self-esteem in the long run.

Pages: 11

Research has found that being on your mobile phone too much negatively hinders your ability to concentrate, reduces the quality and quantity of sleep, whilst increasing stress and fear of missing out. Although possible to have a net positive if managed very carefully, there is now a wealth of evidence that mobile phones in the classroom actually lead to a learning loss. Given that so many students are on their mobile phone for such long periods of time and feel stressed when apart from it, it is good to reflect on what they are doing whilst on it. Given that so many check their phones straight away in the morning and sleep next to it at night, not having mobile phones in the classroom might be a prudent and worthwhile policy to explore. When most students think they are multi-tasking, what they are actually doing is switching between tasks very quickly.

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Key factors to consider when deciding on interventions.

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Numbers can be quite an abstract concept, and until children learn the principles that underpin how to count correctly, numbers can be challenging for them to understand. The One-to-One Principle is fundamental because young students have the tendency to either “skim”, which is when they miss an object due to counting too quickly, or “flurry”, which is when they count the same item several times. The Stable Order Principle helps mitigate the trickiness of the English language, as the names of numbers don’t always have a pattern. For example, eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen don’t follow the same “rule” as fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen. Ever since the Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit highlighted metacognition as one of the most cost-effective ways to help students improve their learning, more and more schools have started to try to develop their students’ metacognitive skills.

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Most teaching and learning books do not contain information about thinking biases, as they haven’t been studied extensively in education yet. And yet, they are often the silent assassins that can severely restrict learning, as our own (and our students’) thought processes are not always the clearest or the most rational. There is no easy or quick way to overcome these thinking biases, as most of the time the authors don’t even realise they are happening. But it is possible to help mitigate their effects. First, they have to acknowledge they all have these biases, as intelligence/wealth/race/gender does not make any of us immune to them. Secondly, by interacting with a diverse range of people (both in terms of experience and background) they can escape their own echo chambers, which tend to be fertile breeding grounds for thinking biases.