One of us recently had the lucky opportunity to attend and present at a researchED conference – one of a series of conferences put on by a very engaged grassroots teacher organization. While Tom Bennett collects blogs and presentation slides to ...
A Student's Journey Through Learning: How Can Cognitive Psychologists Help?
Last week, I gave a talk at researchED Math & Science at Oxford University. I have never been to a conference where the attendees seemed so genuinely excited! The place was buzzing as we prepared for the opening speech. ...
Weekly Digest #14: How to Encourage Students to Transfer their Knowledge
For the past two weeks we have been discussing transfer and how difficult it is to achieve, despite being a common goal of educators. We hope that walking through some of the research on transfer helps to clarify why knowledge transfer is a complicated ...
What's Transfer, and Why is it so Hard to Achieve? (Part 2)
Last week, we talked about near transfer. This week, we’re going to talk about…slightly-further-away transfer. Obviously, no-one actually calls it that; in the study that we describe, it was referred to as “far” transfer. However, there is no consensus on what ...
GUEST POST: What Causes Test-score Inflation? Comparing Two Theories
Ask most anyone inside U.S. education—in the “education establishment”—about “teaching to the test”, and they will tell you that externally imposed high-stakes tests induce teaching to the test. Moreover, teaching to the test—replacing instruction on subject ...
Weekly Digest #13: How Teachers Implement Retrieval in their Classrooms
Over the last couple of weeks, our digests have focused on standardized testing. We published a digest of divergent views on standardized testing, and last week we published a digest about how to make standardized testing better. This week, we step ...