What do neuroscience and psychology have to do with education? Both are fundamental to teaching and learning. Education changes the brain: every time you learn ...
Recent advances in neuroscientific methods have led to an increased understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying cognition and behaviour. In turn, this has...
The US ‘decade of the brain’ in the 1990s saw the launch of a number of educational programmes that claimed to be ‘brain-based’. These were usually unscientific...
The Centre for Educational Neuroscience (Centre for Educational Neuroscience, n.d.), a collaboration between UCL/IOE and Birkbeck, quote a Royal Society Report:...
Retrieval practice, or reconstructing knowledge by bringing it to mind from your memory, has been shown by numerous researchers to improve student learning (see...
Retrieval practice in the form of multiple-choice testing has been shown to be successful as a learning strategy, including in the primary classroom (McDaniel e...
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has recently become ‘The Next Big Thing’ in teaching. Dylan Wiliam tweeted on 26 January 2017 that he had ‘come to the conclusion Sw...
I recently explained to a colleague about how engaging with cognitive science has helped me develop as a teacher.
‘Interesting... but what does that look li...
Whenever I talk about the power of visuals, I am very keen for the audience to understand I am not referring to particular people, or to the myth of ‘visual lea...
Interleaving refers to the benefits of sequencing learning tasks so that similar items – two examples of the same concept, say – are interspersed with differe...
Like all secondary schools nationwide, we awaited the unveiling of the new linear GCSE and A-level qualifications with a mixture of emotions. Whilst looking f...
Last summer our faculty decided to re-write our Key Stage 3 science scheme of work (SOW). It had become apparent that our students were severely lacking fluency...
Amanda Spielman (Spielman, 2017) has said ‘at the very heart of education sits the vast accumulated wealth of human knowledge and what we choose to impart to th...
Teaching and learning approaches that make use of retrieval, interleaving, spacing and visual cues have been found to enhance students’ performance, but are not...
Thinking about the problem
Ask a group of children, young people or adults to identify an object they haven’t seen before and it isn’t long before we hear phra...
Within the teaching profession, there is a consensus that national curriculum has been far more demanding since 2014, when the government initiated reform to ma...
What does research say about memory?
Scientists and psychologists have spent years developing numerous models to try and unpack how our memory work. Whilst d...
On a societal level we often see sleep as an afterthought, taking time away from our other pursuits. To an adult, this may be staying late in the office. For ...
An extract from an article that first appeared in Education Week on 22 September 2015. Reprinted with permission from the author.
For many years, I secretly ...
Theory and research often don’t offer simple answers, which can be frustrating for practitioners, and it is easy to oversimplify the original research. In the c...
