How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

by Susan A. Ambrose et al. (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

Seven Principles

How Learning Works bridges the gap between cognitive science research on understanding, memory, and skill and conventional classroom practice. Its seven principles address prior knowledge, connections among pieces of knowledge, motivation, the elements of skillful fluency, practice and feedback, the social environment of the classroom, and metacognition.

Organizing Knowledge

On how students organize knowledge, the authors describe the "complex network" of domain-specific knowledge that experts map mentally. Students approaching new content begin with "sparse, superficial" connections, and teachers can guide them to build more and richer links. For example, rather than handing students a simple list of minerals to memorize, an instructor can provide several categories, and students are shown to have better recall. In my own student days, the days before a test were filled with my own "slicing and dicing" of the material, but students as a whole are shown to succeed more when the instructor provides an "advance organizer" at the start of a unit.

The Hidden Skills in a Task

On skill mastery, the authors note that instructors must grasp that a task may require a broader and more advanced range of skills than first assumed. Working in a group, for example, adds demands absent from individual work: communication, negotiation, and dividing a task into shareable components. Furthermore, practicing component skills in isolation doesn't adequately prepare us to integrate them; we also need practice with the integration. Both principles caution against assuming that what works for an expert, including our own past study habits, will work for students, and both ask instructors to make the hidden structure of knowledge and skill visible.

🏠Blog home