All in For Teachers
We have been writing a lot about the top two learning strategies that cognitive psychology has brought out: Spacing and retrieval practice. Both learning strategies have accumulated a vast amount of scientific evidence, making us confident to recommend these strategies to teachers and students. However, it is important to keep in mind...
I became a high school speech pathologist after earning a Master’s degree in Speech and Language Pathology. When I was in school, Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs) didn't learn a whole lot about orthography. We learned many things...
The concept of desirable difficulties describes the idea that students need tasks that challenge them to the right degree in order to learn best. Some have criticized this theory for being circular (1). That is, when a learning task is easy and later performance is low...
Interleaving can be a confusing topic and is often confused with spaced practice. In laboratory studies, we can disentangle the effects of interleaving and spacing to show that they are both helpful on their own to produce learning (1). However, in classroom ...
Diagrams can help students learn, especially when students connect verbal information (like words in the text of a lesson) with the diagrams (1). But getting students to make these connections can be tricky because you can’t look at a diagram and the text at the same time!
Dual coding, or combining visuals with words, is one of the 6 strategies for effective learning. The idea is that by combining a visual representation of an idea with a verbal representation of an idea, we will be able to learn the idea better. (Of course, this can be ...
