XFacebookYouTubeLinkedInEmail

psychology

Humans can’t multitask

2020-01-19T11:34:32+00:00January 23rd, 2017|psychology|

One of the highlights of my day at researchED Amsterdam was hearing Paul Kirschner speak about edu-myths. He began his presentation by forbidding the use of laptops or mobile phones, explaining  that taking notes electronically leads to poorer recall than handwritten notes. The benefits of handwritten over typed notes include better immediate recall as well as improved retention after 2 weeks. In addition, students who take handwritten notes are more like to remember facts but also to have better future understanding of the topic. Fascinatingly, it doesn't even matter whether you ever look at these notes - the simple act of making them appears to [...]

Does ‘brain training’ increase intelligence?

2016-11-08T11:34:38+00:00November 8th, 2016|psychology|

In my last post I outlined the differences between fluid and crystallised intelligence and argued that fluid intelligence (Gf) - the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge - is fairly fixed, whereas crystallised intelligence (Gc) - the ability to retrieve  and apply information stored in long-term memory can be improved relatively straightforwardly by teaching students knowledge and then giving them practice in retrieving and applying this knowledge in a variety of contexts. This is a shame because as Daniel Willingham says in Why Don't Students Like School? The lack of space in working memory is a [...]

Making kids cleverer

2016-11-05T16:10:08+00:00November 5th, 2016|psychology|

One of the real problems with improving education systems is that there tends not to be much agreement about what education is actually for. I've written about this issue before and have made clear my view, education should exist to make children cleverer. Clearly this in part depends on a belief that it is actually possible to make children cleverer , no matter their starting point. So, what evidence is there that we can become more intelligent? Everyone knows about Carol Dweck's immensely popular theory of the growth mindset; that we can become cleverer by believing we can become cleverer. This is certainly [...]

The trouble with transfer: How can we make learning more flexible?

2016-10-24T12:22:16+01:00October 17th, 2016|learning, psychology|

I define learning as the long-term retention of knowledge and skills and the ability to transfer between contexts. The retention bit is fairly straightforward and uncontroversial: if you can't remember something tomorrow, can you really be said to have learned it? As Kirschner, Sweller & Clark put it, "If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.” Transfer though is a bit trickier. In essence it's the quality of flexibility; can what you know in one context be applied in another? As Daniel Willingham says, "Knowledge is flexible when it can be accessed out of the context in which it was [...]

The Trouble with Transfer – my #rED16 slides

2016-09-10T20:53:10+01:00September 10th, 2016|learning, psychology|

Today saw another triumphant outing for Tom Bennett's grassroots conference, researchED. This year I ran a session investigating the research into how we transfer what we learn between different contexts, the slides for which, along with hyperlinked references to the studies I've cited, are below. ResearchED 2016 The Trouble with Transfer from David Didau The high point for me was that Paul Kirschner said the presentation was "pretty good". I will write up an explanation for these as time allows over the next few days, but for those who can't wait, turn to Chapter 6 of What Every Teacher Needs To Know About [...]

What every teacher needs to know about… seating plans

2016-09-09T08:50:06+01:00September 9th, 2016|planning, psychology|

Remarkably, the rather excellent Teach Secondary magazine haven't yet seen through me and are still running my half-baked ramblings. Here's this month's pale offering. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a teacher in possession of a large roomful of children must be in want of a carefully crafted seating plan. Secondary schools have normalised the idea that children should sit in the same seat every lesson. Seating plans may be a great way to learn students’ names, keep order and establish routine, but they may be undermining children’s ability learn. Ideally, we want our students to go off into the [...]

What Dr Fox teaches us about the importance of subject knowledge

2016-09-04T19:23:11+01:00September 4th, 2016|psychology|

In 1970, psychologists and psychiatrists were invited to a lecture on "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education." The lecture, supposedly given by Dr Myron L. Fox, a graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a student of the great John van Neumann, was actually given by an actor who knew nothing about either Game Theory or Physical Education.The audience of MDs and PhDs were in fact unwitting subjects in a study conducted by Donald Naftulin, John Ware, and Frank Donnelly on 'educational seduction'. They were divided into two groups; one group was given a lecture by an actual scientist [...]

Robert Coe’s foreword for #PsychBook

2016-07-19T21:42:14+01:00July 19th, 2016|psychology|

Right. It's done. What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology is off to the printers tomorrow and should be available in the next few weeks. It's always a tense time when what you've written is exposed to the full glare of real readers. You never really know what the reaction will be like, but it's been very encouraging to have secured Professor Rob Coe's services to write a brief foreword. If for some reason you're not aware of who Rob is or why he matters, not only is he the director of Durham University's Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM), he has worked closely [...]

The limits of growth mindset

2016-05-30T10:54:25+01:00May 30th, 2016|psychology|

What's the difference between success and failure? Effort, of course! As everyone now knows, all you need to ensure you're a success is a shed-load of hard work and the belief that you can do anything you set your mind to! Yay! I want to be an astronaut! This is mindsets-lite: the undifferentiated and naive belief that the right kind of thinking leads to wonderful things. Like most well-intentioned educational fads, there's a kernel of truth in these sorts of claims. Hard work does make a difference; beliefs do matter. As always, though, reality is a little more complicated than that. To shed [...]

Coming soon…What every teacher needs to know about psychology

2016-05-26T08:42:28+01:00May 25th, 2016|psychology|

Over the past few months, Nick Rose and I have been working together on a new book which sets out what, in our admittedly biased opinion, every teacher ought to know from the field of psychology. Luckily, Nick is a psychology teacher (with a background in para-psychological research. Yes, really!) so at least one of us knows what we're talking about. We think the book is important because over the past few decades, psychological research has increasingly made strides into understanding how we learn, but it's only in the last few years that those working in education have started to become aware of these insights. [...]

The value of testing – on the back of a postage stamp

2016-03-07T20:58:22+00:00March 7th, 2016|psychology|

In an effort to spread the word about some of the most robustly researched psychological effects which can be used to support learning, I've been having a go at creating gimmicky memes. This one is on the 'testing effect', or as it's sometimes called, retrieval practice. I've written about the testing effect before here and have discussed some of the recent research evidence in more depth here. But for those who are understandably unwilling to trawl through my back catalogue, I'll briefly explain the 4 points made above 1. We often think we know things which we have in fact forgotten. This is [...]

Learning about learning: What every teacher needs to know

2016-03-02T08:34:17+00:00February 3rd, 2016|psychology|

When I trained to be teacher I was told little or nothing about how children learn. Because a lot of what we intuitively suppose about the process of learning is often flatly contradicted by cognitive science this was a huge handicap. Since you can't think about stuff you don't know, I spent all my time pontificating on the process of teaching, but lacked the theoretical framework and knowledge base to consider how my students learned. I don't think I'm alone in this. Over the past few years I've discovered an awful lot through reading various books and academic papers which has given me the ability to start thinking [...]

Toggle Sliding Bar Area
Go to Top