The Learning Scientists Part 4: Effective Strategies to Support Teaching and Learning

In the last three episodes, we’ve explored some different aspects of the cognitive psychology behind how we learn. Today, we’re taking that context and applying it to six strategies to support your teaching and your students’ learning.

In this episode, Dr. Althea Need Kaminske and Dr. Megan Sumeracki, two of The Learning Scientists, begin talking about these six strategies:

• Spaced practice, repetition spaced out over time

• Interleaving, interspersing different topics in a lesson

• Retrieval practice, working at accessing memory

• Elaboration, connecting new learning to previous learning

• Concrete examples, providing supporting information

• Dual coding, using visuals 

A synopsis of these strategies and resources to help use them is at this link and you can find the full research paper at this link. They dive in more deeply with hosts Josh and Paula about spaced practice, interleaving, and retrieval practice and will further explore elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding in next week’s final episode of this series.

Learn more about The Learning Scientists at learningscientists.org and learn more about the Arizona K12 Center at azk12.org.