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20 psychological principles for teachers #5 “Learning is dependent on practice”

2016-02-04T10:08:30+00:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

This is the fifth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 5: “Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice.” Whenever the going got tough, my mum always used to remind me that 'practice makes perfect'. Well, I'm delighted to say it turns out she's wrong. Sorry mum. Practice makes permanent. What we repeatedly practice we get good at, and if we practice doing the wrong things, we'll get good at them. So, while practice is certainly necessary for us to acquire long-term knowledge and [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #4 Context

2015-06-29T14:55:29+01:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

This is the fourth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 4: "Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated." The fact that learning occurs in context is well established. Our ability to retrieve information is heavily context dependent - we link it to related subject matter, times, places, people and feelings. I've written before about the variation effect and troubling finding that students often struggle to transfer what they have been taught from one [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #3 Development

2015-07-07T20:02:04+01:00May 27th, 2015|psychology|

This is the third in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. This time it’s the turn of Principle 3: Students’ cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development to come under the microscope.  Most teachers' understanding of cognitive development begins and ends with Jean Piaget. Piaget's theory that all children pass through a predetermined sequence of developmental stages has bewitched and bedevilled education for almost a century, guiding how we structure schools and curriculums. Here's a brief summary of Paiget's four stages: Sensory-Motor (0-2) In the beginning, a child's understanding of the [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #2 Prior knowledge

2015-06-01T09:40:24+01:00May 26th, 2015|psychology|

This is the second in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology For Pre-k–12 Teaching And Learning. This time it's the turn of Principle 2 – What students already know affects their learning to come under the microscope. You can see the other principles here. Students' minds are not a blank slate; when they arrive at school they already know stuff. According to Nuthall, whenever teachers begin a new topic, students already know about half of what they're told - it's just that they each know a different 50%. Obviously enough, this prior knowledge affects how students acquire new knowledge [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #1 Mindsets

2015-06-01T09:39:30+01:00May 25th, 2015|psychology|

We are what we believe we are. Benjamin Cardozo A few weeks ago I posted a brief summary of The Coalition for Psychology for Schools and Education's report, Top 20 Principles From Psychology For Pre-k–12 Teaching And Learning. Since then I've been reading through the research they cite to see how far I agree with their conclusions. First up for investigation is Principle 1 - Students’ beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning. Much of what the report says will be familiar to anyone who's come across Carol Dweck's Mindset. "Students who believe intelligence is malleable and [...]

The Testing Effect is dead! Long live the Testing Effect!

2015-05-20T10:50:21+01:00May 20th, 2015|Featured, psychology|

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Feynman Yesterday we were told that the much vaunted testing effect (which I've written about here) has been effectively shown to be useless in improving the learning of 'complex' material. Tamara van Gog and John Sweller's provocatively titled paper, Not New, but Nearly Forgotten: the Testing Effect Decreases or even Disappears as the Complexity of Learning Materials Increases explored the 'boundary conditions' of the effect. The abstract of the paper says, [One] potential boundary condition concerns the complexity of learning materials, [...]

Top 20 principles from psychology for teaching & learning

2015-05-09T08:40:11+01:00May 9th, 2015|psychology|

The Coalition for Psychology for Schools and Education haves released a new report detailing what, in their opinion, are the most important and useful psychological principles teachers ought to be aware of. They break these principles in five areas: How Do Students Think and Learn? 1. Students’ beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning. 2. What students already know affects their learning. 3. Students’ cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development. 4. Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to [...]

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