For Teachers

How to reflect When asked to reflect on an experience, what questions do you ask yourself? In the book, Make it Stick [6], neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold comments:I’d go home that night thinking about what happened and what could I do, for example, to improve the way a suturing went. How can I take a bigger bite with…

For today’s VLOG post, Cindy interviewed Jessica Jackson, Director of Professional Learning for the Learner Variability Project @DigitalPromise. In this video, Jessica talks about the concept of learner variability and walks through all the fun tools available through the Learner Variability Project, and in particular the Learning Variability Navigator. The Navigator is an evidence-based guide…

The ResultsA regression analysis showed that prior knowledge predicted final test performance for new items, but only in the domain that they had prior knowledge for. People who came into the experiment with a stronger background in cooking learned more “new” facts about cooking, but not football. Similarly, people with a stronger background in football…

Let me phrase those results a different way. Taking the same amount of time and energy that it took to write the normal quiz for a class and just distributing those questions across a couple different quizzes was more beneficial than writing and answering (and grading?) additional quiz questions. Educators: Quiz your students. Absolutely you…

A brief explanation of the cognitive and neuroscience We have an excellent neuroscientific understanding (1) of how long-term memories are stored and made more robust by retrieval practice. Explicit memory represents the memories and knowledge that we can consciously retrieve.  The subset of explicit memory, known as semantic memory, is the long-term memory of facts and…

By Megan SumerackiFor over a century cognitive psychologists have been studying spaced practice and retrieval practice, resulting in a great deal of evidence that these two strategies work very well to improve student learning. However, no single experiment or paper is going to be able to answer, in full, the question “how does this strategy…

By Althea Need KaminskeAs we prepare for the start of another academic school year, now is an excellent time to think about how to include inclusive teaching practices in your course. There is no one right way to use inclusive teaching practices in your course. Instead, inclusive teaching involves a deeper understanding of the interaction…

 1.      Education for sustainable development, UNESCO (@UNESCO)This is an excellent general resource that provides an overview of many aspects of the importance of sustainability in education. There are many stories from around the world with examples of climate change education. Resources on this website can be used as material in the classroom to engage students with…

Most likely to be retained was the use of video for pre-recorded lectures which were used to deliver the more didactic aspects of teaching, in line with the flipped learning model. Academics regarded this as an effective way to ensure the time students spend physically with their tutors and peers can be reserved for digging…

by Cindy NebelThe six strategies for effective learning are, indeed, effective, but only to the degree that students actually use them. And in order to change behavior, we have to consider motivation. Now, motivation is an entire area of psychology and not one that we pretend to be experts in. There are many different motivational…