No parent sends their children to school to put them through stress, experience anxiety, or lose self-esteem. Every educator desires that their students learn what they teach. However, both teachers and students, albeit for different reasons, must learn on their own. This is not a criticism of our education, but an understanding. We can do more to ensure that every student and teacher succeeds. This includes increasing each student’s capacity and curiosity to learn, rather than ranking them against each other or attributing their struggles to bad habits.
Successful educators continually improve their teaching methods by utilizing evidence-based instructional practices and scientific discoveries about learning.
Learning is complex. It depends on a myriad of cognitive skills, emotions and behaviors, and prior knowledge. Fortunately, the field of cognitive science has amassed a great deal of evidence about how we learn (the science of learning) and how to facilitate learning through teaching (the science of teaching). Unfortunately, much of this mountain of evidence is trapped in academia, isolated from professional development, and largely missing where it is most needed-our classrooms. Here are some suggestions for applying this knowledge in the classroom.
Cognitive Science-Based Strategies for Facilitating Learning
1. Prepare the brain for learning. While tests are often used to measure performance, they are also powerful tools for promoting learning. Before we teach the material, how does the science of learning look at tests? It helps students learn material better because it signals to their brains that something important and upcoming is coming. This is called initiation. Look for opportunities to incorporate initiation questions into established classroom practices.
2. Activate students’ attention filters. Learning requires “active processing” because information can only be processed and memorized through our attentional filters. Learners must then choose what information to include in their working memory, actively engage with the material and be able to learn it.
Realize that only a small portion of what you teach is actively processed, and that more information is processed when you engage students in the material you teach. Engage students with predictions, purposeful novelty, and clues that indicate importance.
3. Pre-teach jargon to avoid cognitive overload. Teaching often involves new terminology. Cognitive multimedia theory tells us that students learn better when terminology is introduced before content is learned. This helps avoid cognitive overload, which can result when new content is paired with new terminology, preventing students from effectively mastering both at the same time. Consider using flashcards at the beginning of a unit rather than waiting until the end of the unit.
4. Incorporate frequent, spaced opportunities to retrieve information and skills. We begin to forget what we have learned soon after we learn it. The forgetting curve illustrates how learned information decays over time. We can use retrieval exercises to combat forgetting and form reliable learning.
Retrieval practice is the process of extracting stored memories from long-term memory and transforming them into working memory for continued processing and use. Spacing is the strategic use of delays in learning trials. It is effective because it requires extra cognitive effort to recall material and creates multiple retrieval pathways to aid in memorization. Ask questions about last year, last month, and last week.
5. Alternating between two subjects after a moderate recall of one subject. We are used to working in an occluded manner. Our textbooks are designed that way. We learn by filling in the blanks, and we often teach by presenting the material in a step-by-step fashion; these methods don’t help much with learning. The interleaved approach challenges the traditional methods of teaching and learning in a much more effective way. As you might guess, it requires just the opposite.
When tasks or skills are mixed together in a lesson or session, the brain has to work harder and memory connections are strengthened. The key here is to alternate after moderate review; avoid switching too often. How much is too often? There is no one formula that is universally applicable across age groups, disciplines, and cognitive profiles. As a general rule, don’t intersperse more than two or three topics per lesson, and switch topics every 15-20 minutes or so.
6. Engage students in active information generation. Students are usually tasked with answering questions that can be found in the text or other content provided. Refinement, another type of retrieval, requires students to describe the content provided by using many details. It works by activating and establishing connections to prior knowledge. Creating opportunities for students to make connections between different ideas and concepts and to consider how they are similar or different.
These strategies only scratch the surface of the daunting task many teachers and students face today. By studying cognitive science more deeply, teachers can become experts in how to teach (the science of learning) and teach content (academic content). The science of learning supports the important work that many are already doing.