5 principles to enhance any students learning

A summary of ‘Understanding How We Learn’ by Weinstein, Sumeracki and Caviglioli.

How we learn is a hot topic these days. Cognitive psychology is slowly making an impact on education but, very slowly. In this post I want to get you ahead of the curve by sharing 5 principles which, if your child is struggling to pick things up and reach those top test scores at school, will immediately boost your child’s learning capabilities.

Principle 1: Repetition Enhanced by Spacing

Many students want to reread information daily until they remember it. But this strategy leads to quickly forgetting and the classic situation, when they arrive at a test and go ‘blank’.

This is where spacing comes in. Research shows that the space, or time between exposures to information is more important than repetition itself. This is because, as information begins to fade, triggering your memory acts to consolidate (remember) it. After each memory triggering event, it’ll take longer to forget.

So, by rereading daily, you never truly get the chance for information to fade and then trigger your memory, thus, your memory isn’t consolidating for the long term.

Principle 2: Elaboration

This is to prevent a scenario in which students feel they are being constantly bombarded with new information and they can’t keep up. By simply asking them ‘how does this information link to things you learned previously?’ it forces the student to ‘elaborate’ and anchor what they are currently learning to things they already know.

Knowledge then begins to appear like a map, much easier to navigate. It stops appearing like thousands of facts thrown all over the place.

Principle 3: Concrete Example

This is an easy one but often overlooked. Many concepts, especially in science, are abstract. If I talk to you about a football, you immediately have an intuition of what it is and how it behaves. So, if I said something like, ‘there is a football and it does not bounce’ you can immediately say ‘that’s a bad football’. There’s no mental gymnastics here. However, an atom, most students have no intuition of what this is and every fact and statement about atoms can seem like random ideas. Tonnes of jargon.

By providing carefully crafted examples one can develop a real feel for the abstract concepts and then the student can invest themselves into learning, rather than struggling.

Principle 4 : Visuals, another classic but often done wrong

Most of the time visuals are used as a way to make boring black and white text into a stimulating source of information. And that’s valuable, our brains prefer to absorb information that stimulates the senses. In fact, it is how we absorb information all day, by seeing, hearing touching, smelling and tasting. Black and white text just doesn’t compare, no wonder it’s easy to forget info in a textbook but even easier to remember what happens in an entire film without ever trying to remember.

All this said, there is more to visuals. The idea is to code the information in two ways, in words and pictures, thus building associations that improve memory. Associations are stuff of memory champions. It’s a skill to be developed, and well worth developing as our brains love to encode and absorb information in this way. It’s so easy and smooth.

Take these two lists below. Try to remember the first list of words in order, give yourself two minutes. Then give yourself 2 minutes to write out what you remember and note how many you get in order. One word out of order means your count stops there. Did I mention the order was important?

Instructions for the second list come later, try not to peek until you’ve fully completed this first list. How many did you get?

First list

1. editor
2. health
3. location
4. literature
5. government
6. understanding
7. elevator
8. photo
9. historian
10. guidance
11. assistance
12. relation
13. engine
14. volume
15. leadership
16. perspective
17. housing
18. product
19. article
20. drama
21. database
22. youth
23. engineering
24. bedroom
25. sample
26. internet
27. unit
28. member
29. goal
30. Finding

With this second list (below) the same rules apply. But this time try to imagine each word clearly, it has to be a clear image in your mind, and build a story with each word in order. For example, if the first three words were horse, hairbrush and diamond I might do something like:

There was an absolutely gargantuan horse, with a million hairbrushes combing it’s mane, each made out of pure expensive diamond.

Ridiculousness is fine, your imagination actually loves it and improves memory. Give yourself 2 minutes again to memorise the list and then two minutes to write out what you remember in order by recalling the story. How many did you get? It normally improves vastly and feels much easier.

Second list

1. speaker
2. performance
3. photo
4. guest
5. medicine
6. politics
7. payment
8. combination
9. hotel
10. instruction
11. analysis
12. grandmother
13. introduction
14. vehicle
15. presence
16. charity
17. queen
18. grocery
19. menu
20. selection
21. garbage
22. shirt
23. restaurant
24. description
25. error
26. article
27. distribution
28. emotion
29. video
30. manager

Principle 5: Retrieval

This is the big one which nobody likes to do. But it works. It’s recalling information rather than rereading it. It’s going through the pain of trying to remember rather than simply looking it up again. This one really forces the neurons together and builds strong memory. But it’s effortful and rarely adopted by students.

The only way to make students actually do this is by making it fun, somehow, and training it as a habit so it’s the first thing they think of when trying to learn.

Currently I am building essential resources for the GCSE syllabus to naturally incorporate all these principles - taking down the barriers to learning for students and also retraining them in the ways of learning experts. These skills will stick with them for life.

And these resources have been refined over the last 7 years of teaching, in which I’ve been personally working with students on science and maths and getting their feedback on how best to integrate these principles.

I just want to help more people and currently testing these special resources mostly though online tuition. If you’re interested please email [email protected].

And if nothing else please join me here on Linked In to keep getting, what I hope are, insightful posts.