It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally back with part 2 of that topic! I think that sharing this in the late summer is actually a pretty good time, given that many projects will be undertaken across the coming academic year. Perhaps you already have research in mind – if so, I hope this provides food for thought.

A brief recap – what is action research?

By action research, I mean research that reflects on and attempts to inform one’s own practice. It is carried out by the practitioner, rather than someone external, on their own students and in their own context. Overlapping terms that are widely used include practitioner research, practitioner enquiry, or teacher research.

Projects tend to be narrower and more classroom-focused than a lot of other education research. There are many things that could be researched, but examples might include:

• Checking to see whether a change in classroom organisation impacts on student behaviour or motivation, for example by giving questionnaires to students;

• Trying out a new form of group work and analysing the outcome based on test scores;

• Interviewing parents about their children’s experiences with primary-to-secondary transitions.

It’s easy to see the potential of doing very grounded research in real contexts. How much better does it sound to find out about behaviour in my own class than from the broader research literature, for example? This is the promise of practitioner action research.

However, as I raised in my earlier post, there are real risks of bias. Many interventions are studied by practitioners that already think that they are a good idea.

Consider, for example, the idea of flipped classrooms or technology use – they tend to be researched by enthusiasts rather than sceptics. Coupled with rather wobbly research methodology, and there is a lot of potential for educators to see what they want to see. Learning myths may persist because people find this pseudo-evidence from action research. These are the perils that I referred to before.

Why Errors Occur: A Scenario

Let’s consider a scenario to further illustrate how flawed conclusions can be drawn from action research:

Bob decides to explore the spacing effect (see update #39). The class does one task with spaced practice and one without, and test results are then compared using a statistical test. Bob concludes that spacing has not made a difference.

How should Bob respond? According to the logic of action research, they have a finding that is relevant to their unique context, and should decide not to apply the spacing effect in future because it (apparently) didn’t work. They may also be encouraged to share this with others as an example of good practice (🤯).

That would actually be a major mistake. We know from the broader research literature that the spacing effect does work. This leads two possibilities:

1. There is something about Bob’s context that is so unique that it overturns decades of research on learning and memory.

2. The experiment was flawed, leading to a false negative. For example, the sample size (limited to the numbers in a class) could be too small to detect a statistical difference, the tests may have differed in their difficulty level, or a lack of experimental control might have distorted the findings in any number of ways.

I would be very strongly inclined to believe possibility #2! Of course, the same logic holds if the teacher does find an effect. This is perhaps even more misleading and hard to avoid – people expect intervention X to work, their results show a difference of some kind, and so they conclude that their research has provided evidence for intervention X.

The problems are exacerbated by the fact that most teachers are not experts in research methodology and statistics, and may lack experience, too. That is before we consider issues about research ethics, which are also riskier with inexperienced researchers.

In defence…

But wait, you might ask—didn’t I actually write a book about research for teachers? Well, yes!

It might sound like I have really changed my mind about teachers engaging with research, but that’s not so. My 2019 book The Teacher’s Guide to Research (more here) does not suggest that teachers should blunder into research projects without ethical scrutiny, make changes on the basis of tiny samples, or share findings that lack sound evidence to support them. It also doesn’t suggest ignoring the existing theory and evidence on an issue!

In fact, The Teacher’s Guide to Research does not focus just on teachers doing research, but also engaging with it. There will often be more to be gained by engaging with existing research evidence on an issue than by carrying out your own project.

Take reading, for example. I think that a primary school teacher would be much better off reading reputable systematic reviews of research into reading than trying to figure out how reading develops via action research with their own class.

However, once a teacher has begun to understand the theory, the existing evidence as well as key areas of uncertainty, they may start to generate important questions that can help the education community as a whole understand how ideas are best implemented.

On balance, is action research a good use of time?

There no doubt are cases where good projects are done and where teachers have learned something useful. But we have to balance the time spent on this with other things that they could have been doing, such as:

• Reading up on learning and memory;

• Working on their classroom management skills;

• Developing better explanations and questioning;

• Upgrading their curricular knowledge;

The points are arguably more core to successful pedagogy than the majority of action research topics.

However, I still believe that engaging with research is highly valuable and motivating for teachers – at times even transformative. Even a poorly conducted study can be a good learning opportunity, and act as a stimulus to read evidence and to engage with the science of learning community.

And if we want to start engaging with research, then trying it out ourselves is definitely one of the best ways to understand the methodology of the research that we read.

So, I’m perfectly happy for all educators to engage in action research. I’d just warn against reading too much into findings – at least while one’s understanding of methodology is still developing.

This leads me on to the final part of this series of posts – where I talk about guidelines for successful projects. You can check it out next week!

Please consider sharing this post with relevant colleagues! Thank you!

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All the best for the week,

Jonathan

Last week: Episodic and Semantic Memory

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Memory in education

A starting point is the definition of memory as a concept. If you ever find yourself trying to defend the relevance of memory to education, it’s worth noting the breadth of its definition as seen by mainstream psychology and cognitive science.

By this view, the role of memory goes far beyond the retention of facts. Human memory is involved in (Squire, 2004):

• Perceptual learning

• Skills & habits

• Emotional responses

• Memory for events

• Facts and understanding

And more … In short, anything that has a lasting impact on what we know and can do.

The role of memory in pedagogy or studying, therefore, should not be reduced to meaningless rote memorisation. When learners repetitively try to remember facts (which obviously can and does happen), this involves applying memory in a very narrow way, and one that fails to take advantage of how learning works best.

In most situations, we remember things far better if they are meaningful, contextualised, and practised in varied ways.

Associative links

When what we learn forms associative networks of understanding, we are using semantic memory – memory for what we know and understand. A new stimulus is linked to or contrasted with existing knowledge and skills. By forming such associations, new ideas become meaningful.

In contrast – as proposed by Tulving (1972) – remembering a specific event or piece of information leads to an episodic memory. This is a memory for a specific event or happening, such as the first time we were told something or when we experienced something in our lives.

For example, knowing that rivers are filled with fish or that you can sometimes swim in them draws on your semantic memory. You know it, but perhaps don’t recall a specific occasion when you learned these things. Recalling a particular time that you fished or swam in a river (if you ever did such a thing) draws on episodic memory.

Examples

If the previous points are not entirely clear, try testing yourself on the five statements below. For each one, ask yourself: “Can I vividly recall the event of learning this?” or “Do I just know the fact?”

1. What you had for dinner last night.

2. A bicycle has two wheels and pedals.

3. The weather on your last birthday.

4. That Paris is the capital of France.

5. A conversation you had last week.

When I’ve shown these to learners who are new to theories of memory, most find it easy to recognise that some of these things involve semantic memory and others episodic memory.

And although researchers have moved towards seeing the systems as closely intertwined, the idea that they have distinct features has persisted (Renoult et al., 2019).

In education

In education, goals are usually more aligned with deep knowledge (semantic memory) than with retaining isolated facts (episodic memory). What we really want from our students is a deep, interconnected understanding of how things work.

However, the experiences that lead to this knowledge can result in episodic memories. At the end of a class, for example, the students will leave with a memory of the specific activities and conversations that they have just had.

How does the learner get from one to the other?

This is an interesting and complex question, and one that is sometimes studied with reference to the brain systems involved. I won’t get into that aspect, but in general terms, the specifics and the conscious episodic memories tend to fade over time (at least for most people) while the gist of a concept is incorporated into semantic memory.

What can help this to happen? Educational experiences that cause us to notice differences, to make sense of tasks and to reflect on meaning. For example, one benefit of interleaving (see update #96) is that it involves contrasting subtly different examples.

Examples like interleaving show that while the process of semanticisation (yeah – what a term, right?) is not conscious, it can be supported via careful pedagogical choices.

Another example, famous for decades from the work of Piaget, is that children benefit from disequilibrium, as this forces them to reorganise their knowledge in order to accommodate conflicting information. In more everyday terms, they try to make sense of something that seems weird, and their knowledge changes accordingly. Such experiences don’t have to happen in the classroom, but they can.

As some of you may realise, all of this shows that semantic memory is based on schemas (see update #59), and that developing it involves the organisation and interconnection of knowledge (e.g. knowing what things link to and why they matter) just as much as it involves taking in new knowledge.

The ultimate goal, often, is expertise, and it has been widely recognised that experts differ from novices in the organisation of knowledge as well as in the amount that they know.

More on that last point another time!

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Welcome Back (and Book News)

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I couldn’t wait to get back to things, and as I mentioned back in July, one of the first topics I’ll hit relates to the concepts of episodic and semantic memory – key concepts in the science of memory, but less fully covered in discussions of pedagogy compared to ideas like cognitive load and desirable difficulties.

Look out for that next week.

The following week, I’ll also be returning to the idea of practitioner ‘action’ research. I’ll cover some of the key pitfalls, but also provide some guidelines in a pair of new posts (following on from one that I wrote back in December – see update #131). I hope that these posts will be well timed for anyone who is undertaking classroom-based research in the coming months.

Book update

My forthcoming book, The Psychology of Education, is a textbook aimed at students of Education, particularly those new to the subject (either undergraduate or postgraduate). It is also very relevant to teaching courses and to teachers and other education professionals. I think it would be a very good resource for a CPD library, too!

Example topics that each have their own chapter include: Working memory, long-term memory, motivation, reading, writing, learning theories, brain and development, to name but a few … in short, a lot of core psychology/education content over 22 chapters in total.

The current status is that I have sent off the final edited draft, so the book is in production, and I will be dealing with copy-edit queries and proofs in the coming weeks. It therefore won’t be published for a few months yet, which is not great news for anyone just beginning a course next month – sorry! However, it will be out in plenty of time to review it ahead of the next academic year.

→ Publisher’s page here

Memory and education seminar

A wee reminder that I’m running a 1-day seminar in Glasgow on the theme of memory and education (broadly defined!). It’s free to attend. More info below:

Memory Seminar 2026 Cfp

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Link to attend the event:

→ Click here

Recommended read

Before I sign off, here is a recent read that I enjoyed and which is very relevant to readers of these updates:

Smith, M. (2026). Smarter: Lessons from the new science of learning. David Fulton.

Marc Smith is an author who I’ve worked with in the past, and whose expertise includes both memory and social-emotional side of learning. It’s a very readable and valuable book, and I’ve already cited it myself! You can also find Marc’s Substack posts here.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Summer Recap and What’s Next

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Some highlights include a series of posts on learning myths, a few posts on interleaving and spacing, a couple of recent ones on potential areas of confusion in cognitive science. Most recently, as you may have seen last Monday, I shared the first co-authored post that I have done here (on variation and creativity).

There were a few posts on a Higher Education theme, including on lecturers’ understanding of learning and on university study skills. I also shared a couple of more philosophical updates, including a pair of posts about the purposes of education about potential misconceptions of cognitive science.

There were also posts on teacher research, digital distractions, classroom questioning, and more!

Full list from academic year 2025–26

So, these are the posts since last summer, in order, oldest first:

• Update 118: Welcome back to M&M updates

• Update 119: The dangers of digital distractions

• Update 120: Motivation: Fuel for self-regulated learning

• Update 121: Combining retrieval practice and generative learning

• Update 122: Retrieval practice and generative learning: Classroom implications

• Update 123: Getting to grips with cognitive science and education

• Update 124: Does retrieval practice cause forgetting?

• Update 125: Combining Interleaving and the Spacing Effect, Part 1

• Update 126: Combining Interleaving and the Spacing Effect, Part 2

• Update 127: What makes a difficulty desirable? Philosophical reflections

• Update 128: The learning styles myth

• Update 129: More on the learning styles myth: Classroom Implications

• Update 130: Why learning myths matter

• Update 131: Promise and pitfalls of practitioner action research

• Update 132: Welcome back to memory and metacognition updates

• Update 133: Interleaving, metacognition and children

• Update 134: Purposes of education

• Update 135: Purposes of education, part 2

• Update 136: Applying cognitive science to questioning – timing

• Update 137: Does retrieval practice work in real classrooms?

• Update 138: hould lecturers know how learning works?

• Update 139: Areas of confusion in cognitive science, part 1

• Update 140: Getting ready for college

• Update 141: Areas of confusion in cognitive science, part 2

• Update 142: Can a teacher do research?

• Update 143: Desirable difficulties, variation and creativity

Next up

So, what next? Even just listing the posts reminds me of a few things that I’ve been meaning to get around to, but now it will have to wait until after the summer!

In particular, there are two posts where I am planning to write one or more follow-up pieces. As already mentioned recently, I have more areas of confusion in cognitive science to cover. I also plan to revisit the topic promise and pitfalls of practitioner action research, which I had intended as a 3-part post, with the second part delving more into the pitfalls, and the final one suggesting some guidelines.

Other areas I plan to get to after the summer include

• Episodic and semantic memory – a very well-established idea in the science of long-term memory, but rarely covered in CPD for educators;

• Flawed applications of metacognition. I often hear about schools setting metacognition as one of their learning goals or policies, but the specifics often leave a lot to be desired. Likewise, I’d like to share more practical guidance on study skills.

So, all in all, lots to think about and write about!

Summer plans

My other immediate plan is to disappear on holiday. I’ll be staying in Scotland, and plan to go to Arran (shown in the image above) – a magical place, and one that my wife’s family have a very long connection with.

Other than that, I will be pressing on with various research projects, including the school-university transitions work that I mentioned recently.

I’m also nearing the final stages of my Psychology of Education textbook (currently working through some edits following feedback on the first draft). I’ll share more info on that next month.

Memory and education seminar

Before I sign off, just to mention that I am running a 1-day seminar in Glasgow on the theme of memory and education (broadly defined!). Somewhat philosophical in tone, but very much open to cognitive science issues, too. Are you interested in presenting or just coming along for the day? It’s free to attend. More info below:

Memory Seminar 2026 Cfp

232KB ∙ PDF file

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I hope you get a break at some point, and have a great time if so. Thanks again for reading!

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Desirable Difficulties, Variation and Creativity

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This week the update has been co-authored by the fabulous Dr Claire Badger of InnerDrive. Claire and I previously worked on a book (Creativity for Teachers), and I reached out to her when I began drafting the post. She was kind enough to contribute her ideas and knowledge. It will also be published on the InnerDrive blog.

The concept of desirable difficulties has become well known among those interested in the links between cognitive science and education. We wanted to take this further today, by making at least a tentative link to creativity.

Just to remind you, desirable difficulties are features of a task that make things harder for students, leading to more errors, but are helpful for learning over the long term. Spacing out practice is an example of a desirable difficulty, as explained way back in update #10:

“The reason that desirable difficulties help is that they make practice more similar to real life. Instead of being predictable, passive and short-term, it becomes varied, active, and requires the retrieval of previously-learned memory and skills.” (read more).

Difficulties such as the spacing effect can boost both retention of studied material and transfer of that learning to new situation, in comparison with easier strategies such as re-reading. That’s what makes them desirable.

Links to creative thinking

So, how do desirable difficulties interact with creativity? One connection is fairly simple – the more we learn, the more potential we have to come up with new creative ideas. This is because higher-order skills such as creativity depend on knowledge stored in long-term memory.

One connection with desirable difficulties, therefore, is that any technique that leads to better retention in memory will indirectly be good for creativity.

It seems obvious when you put it that way, perhaps, but in our experience, this is not reflected in educational practice and discourse. Quite the reverse – memory-focused strategies are often seen as being in opposition to creativity. This is a false dichotomy, because:

• If you remember more, you have more basic building blocks from which to form new creative ideas;

• The evidence suggests that eminent creativity, for example by scientists and composers, tends to draw on an extensive period of learning.

You can read more about the links between memory and creativity in update #28.

Variation

Of course, having new creative ideas is not just about recalling from memory. You also need to make new connections among those ‘building blocks’ – putting old ideas together in new ways.

This can be helped by practising in a varied way, while rote repetition is unhelpful. Interestingly, varied practice is also a desirable difficulty, as studied by researchers like Robert Bjork (e.g. Bjork, 1994):

“Critical information needs to be multiply encoded, not bound to single sets of semantic or situational cues” (Bjork, 1994, p. 188).

Variation in the way we practice leads to ideas sticking better in memory, and improves the flexibility of those memories. We are more likely to recognise the relevance of previously learned ideas, and to apply them in new ways.

It’s a short step from there to creativity!

Indeed, creativity researchers Gube & Lajoie (2020) have contrasted the effects on expertise of repetitive practice with practice that is more varied:

• competence gained through simple repetition leads to a lack of flexibility in thinking;

• rote repetition leads to routine expertise – learners can do a familiar task well, but they lack flexibility;

• varied practice leads to the ability to transfer and innovate.

Overall, what this means for educators is that we should look for ways to vary practice, especially after basic mastery has been achieved. This could include mixing up the context of tasks, changing the location, making problems look superficially different, combining topics, and much more.

Adaptive Expertise

Routine expertise brings with it a certain level of automaticity. It frees up cognitive resources, making the expert more efficient in their thinking and actions. However, this can come at a cost, as routine expertise is highly domain-specific and doesn’t transfer well to other tasks.

For example, you might have a favourite meal that you can pull together very quickly without the need to consult a recipe book. However, you may struggle when faced with an unfamiliar kitchen or without access to your usual ingredients.

This situation contrasts with what is known as adaptive expertise. Adaptive experts have interconnected, flexible knowledge which allows them to respond more effectively to novel situations. A cook with adaptive expertise will have a much deeper understanding of why recipes work, and when faced with a change in circumstances, will be able to swap out ingredients and adapt the cooking methods to create a successful meal.

Within education, routine expertise might make students very efficient at a limited set of problems or tasks but put a ceiling on future progress. For example, a formula triangle in Science or a paragraph structure such as PEEL (point, evidence, elaboration, link) might help students be successful in the initial stages of learning but such students will probably struggle when required to complete more complex calculations or write a more original and analytical essay.

If we want our students to build adaptive expertise there are several things we can do. Varied practice, as discussed above, is one approach. Another is to carefully consider the nature of the supports and scaffolds that we provide. Simplicity and repetition can be valuable in the early stages, but we need to consider when these scaffolds are no longer required, pushing students out of their comfort zone so that they do not become overly reliant on familiar strategies.

Uncertainty

A further approach to building adaptive expertise in students is to make use of uncertainty in the pedagogical process.

There is plenty of research to support the idea that randomness and disorder can contribute to creativity (see e.g. Kim & Zhong, 2017; Stefl & Rohm, 2017). But how do we introduce uncertainty into schools without things descending into chaos?

Researcher Ron Beghetto (Beghetto, 2019) suggests that this might be achieved via ‘structured uncertainty’. Beghetto does not argue for the complete removal of structured activities where students are required to work through routine tasks. However, he does argue that if we never allow students to grapple with uncertainty, we are ultimately doing them a disservice.

His suggested approach involves what he calls ‘lesson unplanning’. Assuming that most learning activities can be thought of as having four elements – problem, process, product and criteria – lesson unplanning involves removing one of these elements to create some uncertainty:

1. Problem – students could come up with their own questions or problems to tackle;

2. Process – asking students to come up with multiple ways to solve a problem;

3. Product – varying the format of the outcome, such as replacing a past paper question with a video tutorial or debate;

4. Criteria – rather than relying on published mark schemes linked to high stakes assessments, could the class come up with shared criteria on what ‘good’ would look like for a particular assignment?

An important caveat is that students must have sufficient knowledge before embarking on lesson unplanning. If students are struggling with basic ideas, then introducing uncertainty is likely to cause confusion and potentially embed misconceptions.

So, whilst uncertainty is not usually included in lists of desirable difficulties, it deserves to be considered as a strategy that, although it may result in a dip in short term performance, ultimately leads to deeper learning. Particularly if your goal is to develop creative and curious students.

And all the best for the coming week,

Jonathan and Claire B.

Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.

I’m interested in how we act as (sceptical) consumers of research, how we stay open to adjusting our own ideas as we learn more about the evidence. I’m also very curious about what role teachers play in doing and sharing research.

My experience

Although my degree was in Psychology, I didn’t immediately start to apply these ideas to my pedagogy as a school and university teacher. I suppose I saw psychology research and teaching as two rather different worlds. Like a lot of new teachers, my practice was probably heavily influenced by tradition and by my own experiences, as well as by some of the fads policies of the time!

It was only when I began to get frustrated by practical issues such as forgetting and student underperformance that I began to look deeper into ideas like long-term memory and the spacing effect, and saw how potentially transformative these could be.

Nowadays, I consider myself both a teacher and a researcher, and I am sure there are plenty of other professionals who receive these updates similarly straddle these roles, even if not equally.

Recommended talk on the issue

The fascinating talk below by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, shared with the Centre for Educational Neuroscience a few months ago, reflects well on these issues and comes from someone who has studied the issue of teacher research engagement. The title is, ‘How can teachers become learning scientists, and why would this improve education?’.

The big question that Dr. Tokuhama-Espinosa asks is why research on mind, brain and education has not been become better embedded in teacher education and in the education professions more generally. She makes several key points:

• Barriers include time, complexity of the ideas, consensus, and leadership;

• Teachers need to read (and produce) more ‘translational science’, including good books on cognitive science – such as Agarwal & Bain’s ‘Powerful Teaching’ (and perhaps also blogs like this one?);

• All of this requires changes to leadership.

The whole video is worth a watch!

Engagement in and with research

Being a teacher and a learning scientist could mean different things. It could involve:

• Engagement with research, reading it and trying to apply it;

• Sharing ideas and influencing practice to become more evidence-based;

• Carrying out your own research.

Where are you in the process of engagement with and in research? Do you carry out anything that you would consider to be research (or enquiry) of your own? If not, perhaps that could be something to explore in the next academic year.

Here’s an article co-authored by Dr. Tokuhama‐Espinosa if you want to find out more about her work in this area:

Tokuhama‐Espinosa, T., & Nouri, A. (2023). Teachers' mind, brain, and education literacy: A survey of scientists' views. Mind, Brain, and Education, 17(3), 170–174.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Areas of Confusion in Cognitive Science, part 2

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In a recent post, I raised some areas of confusion in cognitive science. These are not outright neuromyths, perhaps, but they are areas where people may take a good idea and misinterpret it.

One possible result is an oversimplification of the research that leads practitioners to apply a particular technique only in one situation where it could apply to many, thus missing out on its full benefits. An example raised last time would be assuming that retrieval practice (see update #36) can only be applied via a quiz.

Worse still, a lethal mutation may result – a distorted version of the technique that is less effective, not effective at all, or actively harmful to learning.

The key idea here is that if we are going to apply evidence to education, the way that techniques are put into practice must stay faithful to what the evidence actually shows.

Last time I wrote about three issues: retrieval practice, interleaving, and cognitive load theory. Below are two further areas that can cause problems.

Issue 4: Is it really dual coding?

Dual coding has become widely known as a cognitive science technique in education. It is also rather notorious for being easily misinterpreted and conflated with learning myths. Consider, for example, this post by Megan Sumeracki: ‘Dual coding vs. learning styles’.

Rather than replacing text or complex ideas with visuals (as may be recommended to people who are mistakenly viewed as ‘visual learners’), the point of dual coding is that the visuals are in addition to text (the clue is in the name, really!).

Further, the visual needs to be processed, with the processing providing support to understanding. Again, it’s not really dual coding if the learner does not need to make sense of both the text and the image, and can ignore the latter:

• Bad application: A pretty illustration on a Powerpoint. This does not lead to dual coding.

• Better application: A diagram or animation showing how neurons connect together. The visual supports meaningful understanding, enhancing information that the student can learn from the text.

Issue 5: Getting spacing wrong

Compared to interleaving, the spacing effect always strikes me as a pretty simple idea. One of the most common questions I am asked is, “How long should we space things out for?”. This depends on various factors, but in general, the greater the spacing, the better!

A bigger problem arises when people think that spacing is just about putting gaps into their schedule. When a student is studying for exams, for example, they may assume that studying an hour from 10–11 a.m. and then another hour from 2–3 p.m. is better than studying two hours from 10 till noon. That is not what the spacing effect shows. In many cases such a gap would be unnecessarily long, and could mean that the student’s study approach is inefficient! In short, spacing is more about when material is practiced, not about studying less overall.

As Nate Kornell says in this article, a similar flawed assumption would be that reading five chapters one per night is better than reading all five in one day. This might perhaps be true, but again, that is not what the spacing effect research shows. The effect is about practising the same content after a delay.

So, for example, if you want to practice a musical scale, the spacing effect helps to suggest how different practice sessions of the same scale could be scheduled

Of course, studying intensively is associated with other issues, too (fatigue, mind wandering, etc), but these are separate issues that would apply even if the practice was scheduled optimally.

(Read more on the spacing effect here: update #39).

I’ll sign off with some further reading on dual coding:

Paivio, A. (2006, Sept 30). Dual coding theory and education [conference paper].

I hope that helps. Again, I am not quite done on this issue – I will tackle further areas in a future post. I’d also love to know your thoughts and examples.

Hope you have a great week,

Jonathan

Last time: Getting Ready for College

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I thought I’d follow this up with an example that is of great interest to me: study skills, and how new students adapt to college and university contexts. This is of notable relevance to school practitioners as well as to lecturers (not to mention parents and the students themselves!).

Unfortunately, it appears that many learners do not cope well with the changed demands and expectations of college courses compared to high school. Depending on the course, such demands may include:

• A different level and style of reading material;

• Increased independent learning;

• More need for note-taking, e.g. during lectures;

• A greater emphasis on process, methodology and analysis than on mastering a defined set of content.

As such, the transition to HE can be very challenging and, at times, highly stressful (Worsley et al., 2021). Naturally, in times of stress, people rely on tried and tested strategies, and many may be unaware that the guidance that served them well in the school system can actually undermine their university performance.

Researchers Nel and colleagues, in a study carried out in South Africa, wrote: “students are increasingly underprepared for higher education studies ... particularly learners from disadvantaged backgrounds” (Nel et al, 2009, p. 974). This mirrors findings in the USA and elsewhere.

Current research

I’m looking at this exact issue in some of my own work. I’ve spent time over the past year interviewing our first year students with a view to finding out their study habits, their views on learning, and what they have learned from previous context.

I hope to publish the findings in due course. Initial findings suggest that students vary widely in terms of how well prepared they have been in their earlier studies and in terms of the study strategies they are using now. Many draw heavily on parents and friends for advice on how to study and how to approach assessments – potentially disadvantaging first-generation students.

You can perhaps see in the above example that if practitioners are to carry out research in their own teaching contexts, it really helps to have some familiarity with learning, memory, metacognition, etc. The research I’ve just described is explicitly informed by the work of Kornell & Bjork (2007) on self-regulated learning.

A potential outcome from this research is to feed into advice given to incoming 1st year students next year, thus providing a helpful feedback loop between research and practice.

A related project on which I am working with several faculty colleagues is looking in detail at the way that school assessments here in Scotland are structured, and using this to guide lecturers about incoming students’ likely assumptions and expectations.

If anyone out there would like to find out more, or even to collaborate as this research develops, I’d love to hear from you.

Next time I will return with part 2 of my discussion of areas of confusion in cognitive science. Many thanks to those who commented on the first part!

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Areas of Confusion in Cognitive Science, part 1

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However, it’s worth noting that many myths are based on a kernel of truth that has been misunderstood. For example, the idea that some people are ‘right brained’ draws on some real differences between the left and right sides of the human brain, but extend this into an oversimplified and unhelpful way of categorising people, distorting the basic science (Hines, 1987).

Cognitive science myths

Unfortunately, cognitive science is not immune to myths of its own. As with other areas of science, valuable ideas can be distorted and misunderstood, and those misunderstandings can spread through the teaching professions.

This relates to what by Ed Haertel has termed lethal mutations, as explained in this post by Kate Jones at Evidence Based Education. Lethal mutations are changes that modify an idea from the research in ways that harms its efficacy or even leads to it becoming harmful rather than helpful.

I thought I’d contribute to this discussion with my own take on misconceptions about cognitive science that I’ve noticed. Some of these might not be true lethal mutations (you can be the judge), but they strike me as significant oversimplifications of cognition research.

Issue 1: Distortions of Retrieval Practice

Retrieval practice is perhaps the best-embedded idea from cognitive science. In the dozen or so years since I first explored the research on this issue, I’ve seen a massive change in awareness. Many teachers today appreciate that it is worth testing their students to help knowledge to stick, that they should keep this low stakes.

I perceive a popular misconception, however, in conflating retrieval practice with tests. It seems that many people forget that that things like classroom questioning and discussions lead to retrieval (if structured properly). Retrieval practice is not always about quizzing, which is a key reason why researchers moved away from an older term, ‘the testing effect’.

Issue 2: Distortions of Interleaving

I’ve heard interleaving described as one of the hardest topics to understand. I think the reason could be that teachers immediately assume that it’s about mixing up topics. In fact, the research evidence does not do this at all. Perhaps the term is the problem – the term ‘compare and contrast effect’ has been used in some research papers, and might be a better name for it.

The key idea is that interleaving needs to contrast relevant examples so that students see the difference between them. There is no interleaving benefit if unrelated information is mixed together.

(Read more here: update #14).

Issue 3: Distortions of Cognitive Load Theory

Like retrieval practice, cognitive load is pretty well embedded into the awareness of teachers, at least in some sectors and countries. However, it is also widely misunderstood. I could (and probably should) write a full post on that issue!

The key idea which makes sense, and which most people get, is that working memory is limited and can be overloaded, and it makes sense to manage how much we ask learners to think about at a given time.

The problem lies when simplification and reduction of content is seen as always desirable. This is not what the theory says – cognitive load researchers recognise that complexity is both necessary and desirable. Intrinsic load is the term for the key aspects of a task that can’t be removed. Further, germane load relates to useful forms of load, such as examples and visual cues that help the learner to make links to existing knowledge. These should not be cut out, and we shouldn’t be aiming for learning to feel easy.

I’ve also observed a lot of educators misunderstand the timescale of cognitive load. Working memory is really brief – a matter of seconds. Learners feeling overloaded over hours or days, this is a completely different issue, and therefore links to different theoretical concepts.

What are your thoughts on these points? Do you agree that they are common misconceptions? And could some of the guidance and CPD on these issues be leading to these or other mistakes arising?

I’ll tackle a further three areas next time. I haven’t quite decided which ones to cover, though, some that I have in mind include:

• Dual coding

• Spacing effect

• Metacognition

• Schemas

Suggestions/preferences? Perhaps you can suggest some more – if so, I’ll endeavour to cover those, too!

Hope you have a great week,

Jonathan

As a bit of further reading, here is a post I wrote a while ago about the left brain vs. right brain myth, mentioned above:

Firth, J. (2021). Creative neuroscience: The left-brain/right-brain myth. https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofeducation/blog/creativeneuroscience/

Last time: Should lecturers know how learning works?

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As you can imagine, I’m very interested in the question of how much educators should know about learning! That is, after all, the purpose of these updates – sharing more about the nuts and bolts of how learning works.

I agreed with this point that the authors make at the outset:

“The primary goal of many faculty engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning is simply to improve the classroom environment for students so that learning is more effective … These faculty, however, are often not experts in the field of learning, and, pressed for time, may rely on strategies that contradict recent research on teaching and learning …” (p. 79).

They follow this with an argument about the complexity and extent of learning research, highlighting a practical problem that practitioners face in terms of where to start (and stop). How much you need to know before you are ready to do T&L research of your own is a complex question, and one that mirrors debates around teacher action research in schools.

I was a little concerned by the position they land on, however:

“ … we argue that SoTL practitioners do not need to be fluent in all areas of the science of learning. Rather, they need to be good consumers of the literature and be aware of how to translate this work into classroom behavior.” (p. 80).

I am not convinced by the argument that educators can be consumers of research without knowledge. This implies that they can figure things out as they go along, using their intuition. It’s a skills-over-knowledge argument.

Granted, it does depend on what the authors mean by terms such as ‘fluent’. It’s notable that they don’t say ‘experts’ in the quote above (which I might have been more inclined to agree with).

I can also accept a pragmatic argument that it’s impossible for all educators (most very busy with their own specialist areas of knowledge and practice) to become experts in the learning sciences – something that’s a big ask even for a PhD student in the field.

All the same, there is a value in knowing enough that you recognise your own errors and have an awareness of key pitfalls.

We know from other research that many university instructors have misconceptions about learning (e.g. Fragkaki et al., 2022), and that learning myths are widespread in published research to which they may be exposed (Newton, 2015).

I’d therefore argue that it is well worthwhile for SoTL practitioners and other educators to become equipped with the fundamentals of learning phenomena and methodology, and that it’s feasible to become at least a well-informed generalist, if not an expert.

Doing so will help them to engage as critical consumers of research literature, in line with Steiner and Hakala (2021)’s proposal, as well as helping advance the research by engaging in scholarly debates about how findings can be applied in local settings.

It could also discourage lecturers from wasting time investigating discredited fads and learning myths.

Learning basics?

What are your thoughts – to what extent is it necessary for educators to understand learning? Could we see teachers, lecturers and other professional educators as well-informed generalists? What is your own experience of this issue?

Steiner, H. H., & Hakala, C. M. (2012). What do SoTL practitioners need to know about learning? Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 9(1), 79–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.9.1.7

You might also be interested in this post that I wrote, which has a short list of things I suggest that every educator should know.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Does Retrieval Classroom Work in Real Classrooms?

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As you probably know, retrieval practice is the process of actively recalling information to mind, for example when a learner self-tests or answers a teacher’s questions (see update #36).

For example, if I had asked you to remember what retrieval practice means rather than summarising it for you, it would have been an example of retrieval practice in action!

Retrieval from memory can happen in many situations. While we often associate it with quizzes, students also retrieve from long-term memory during activities such as discussions.

Classroom evidence

As you may know, much of the key research on retrieval practice – for example the work of Roediger and Karpicke (2006) – has been done in laboratory settings and on college students. It’s therefore worth asking what this looks like in real classrooms and across different age ranges. Are the same benefits still found?

This was the question asked in a review by Moreira and colleagues (Moreira et al., 2019), which included both children and older students. All of the studies reviewed were in authentic classroom settings.

A nice aspect of the study was that it separated out different ways of implementing retrieval practice.

The main findings were that:

• Multiple-choice tests showed strong benefits;

• Gap-fill tasks also helped, and more so if feedback was given, though only two studies had used gap fills;

• Short-answer tests showed mixed results especially among younger students, with benefits clearer if feedback was provided;

• For free recall tasks, the evidence was very limited, despite this being a widely used approach in lab studies.

Impact on children

On balance, the study endorses the use of retrieval practice when teaching children. It did express some concerns about the benefits of short-answer questions, but this largely focused on studies that did not provide feedback on answers, which is unlikely to happen in real classrooms.

I also think that the difficulty level of short-answer questions is hard to calibrate, and we know that in general, desirable difficulties can become undesirable if they are too challenging.

What is the comparison?

Probably the issue that has given me the most food for thought from this paper is the question of what retrieval practice should be compared to in classroom-based studies, including the presence or absence of feedback.

• In lab settings, it’s common not to give feedback (i.e. to tell participants what the correct answer was after an attempt), as this can make it unclear whether it was the process of retrieval or the repetition of the correct information that made a difference.

• However, in real classrooms, however, I’d imagine that it’s overwhelmingly common that students do get feedback after a quiz, meaning that failing to provide this makes the setting less authentic.

So, what should be the condition to which retrieval is compared? In lab studies, it’s often silent re-reading. But how likely is it that teachers choose to do this instead of giving students a more active task?

It probably depends on the context, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. For me, the key thing is that retrieval is compared to something that a teacher might reasonably choose to do with the same class and the same period of time. Studies that have compared it with concept mapping (discussed in update #23) are a good example of this.

When educators plan and teach, they are constantly choosing between one option and another, and we need to have studies that mimic these choices in an authentic way. This review highlighted a shortage of such studies. However, there have been relevant new publications since the review was done, and I’ll return to those soon!

The reference is below.

Moreira, B. F. T., Pinto, T. S. S., Starling, D. S. V., & Jaeger, A. (2019). Retrieval practice in classroom settings: A review of applied research. Frontiers in Education, 4(5).

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Applying Cognitive Science to Questioning: Timing

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I thought I’d pick up on the issue of questioning. I’ve discussed this before (see update #106) but there’s much more to say on this key facet of pedagogy.

In the previous post, I made links with:

• Retrieval practice, particularly when whole-group questioning is used (e.g. with the help of mini whiteboards);

• Self-explanation and other techniques that prompt learners to think more deeply and make conceptual links.

These examples show that while questioning can be used to check for knowledge (a formative assessment strategy), it also plays a role in what is studied to be retained securely and flexibly in memory.

There are many more links that can be made between questioning and cognitive science, however. Here are couple of major ones to start with, and I will share more very soon.

Questioning and the spacing effect

While we sometimes think of the spacing effect in terms of delays of days or weeks, early research like Glenberg (1976) or Ross and Landauer (1978) studied much briefer time gaps between items – seconds or minutes. This is exactly what happens in a single lesson or practice session. It can inform an educator who wonders: how long should I leave it before repeating a question or example?

Ross and Landauer (1978) note that the spacing effect is “remarkably robust in both scope and size”. They add that “two immediately successive presentations are hardly more effective than a single presentation, while two well-spaced presentations are about twice as effective as one” (p. 669).

The benefits are apparent. In practice, educators can consider asking a question – or repeating one – after a short delay. This could include:

• Rather than asking a question immediately after students engage with an explanation or text, waiting until after the subsequent task.

• Repeating a question that students got wrong, but waiting a few minutes to do so.

• Interleaving questions on topics B and C, so that a few seconds pass before students hear another question on topic A

I feel that these and other applications can become habits in classroom situations, but can also be supported by simple tweaks to planning.

Review and exit questions

Are there benefits of asking review questions at the end of a class, tutorial or lecture? Following on closely from the points above, delayed practice, even if the delay is rather short, could make the practice more impactful. It therefore makes some sense to repeat questions (or ask similar ones) when a class is near its end.

I do have some reservations about commonly used ‘exit tickets’, though, when used formatively to (supposedly) demonstrate that learning objectives have been achieved.

The trouble is that this demonstrates performance, not learning (see update #89). It does not account for forgetting, and is tapping into the retrieval strength of memories rather than their storage strength.

Correct answers on such exit tickets could also generate metacognitive errors among both students and teachers, leading them to mistakenly think that the material is permanently stored in memory after the initial lesson or lecture, when in reality, a lot of forgetting is likely to occur.

So, while end-of-class questions are useful as delayed practice, it’s important that they are not seen as the end of the process. Repeating the questions after a further delay (e.g. after 1–2 weeks) would be an improvement, helping to achieve further consolidation and highlighting the extent of forgetting to students.

As I’ve focused on the spacing effect today, I’ll share a classic paper that had a big influence on me during the early days as a teacher, when I first began to think about applying the effect in the classroom:

Dempster, F. N. (1988). The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research. American Psychologist, 43(8), 627–634.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Purposes of Education, Part 2

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The book title is The Psychology of Education, and it will cover a broad range of issues. However, as I’ve been redrafting the final chapter, I’ve been reflecting particularly on the topic I shared last time. It seems to me that by applying psychology to education, there is the potential to improve things, not just in formal education but across society.

That has to be the aim, anyway. Is it realistic? I guess that depends on how much we believe that psychological interventions can change people, for example by impacting on knowledge, skills, metacognition and how well people think.

Critical Thinking

In the context of learners’ capacities (or skills) that I discussed last time, arguably the most discussed is critical thinking. I see this term so often in educational contexts: posters in school corridors, curriculum documents, course goals for students at university, and many more.

What is the basis for the appeal of critical thinking?

1. One is that it’s supposed that critical thinkers will play a useful role in society, perhaps helping to solve future challenges.

2. Closely related is the idea that lacking critical thinking makes citizens prone to faulty thinking. For example, Pennycook et al. (2023) have discussed how cognitive sophistication can make people resistant to science and political misinformation.

There is also, it seems, a more negative reason: it is widely assumed that the knowledge covered in academic courses is subject to the unpredictability of the future in general and of career paths in particular. What’s the benefit of studying chemistry, for example, if I am not going to be a chemist?

This is a tough question to answer, and the most common response I see is that even if you don’t use your knowledge of chemistry, the process of learning it will at least develop certain thinking skills.

An obvious problem with this is that it’s hard to justify the place of any particular subject as part of the curriculum if they all develop the same transferable skills (e.g. critical thinking).

Much to unpack

Like a lot in education, the ideas above have a lot to unpack. And while the answers can’t be found in cognitive science alone, there are a few relevant principles we can consider:

Teaching skills through subjects

I previously mentioned Willingham’s view that critical thinking can’t be taught. However, a more positive view of transfer in cognitive science is that it can be achieved if we go about things the right way (see update #114). It is widely agreed that when it comes to study skills, these are most effectively developed in the context of particular disciplines, rather than as generic courses. Likewise, creativity is often seen as domain specific (see update #28)

In a similar way, it makes sense that we would develop critical thinking in the context of academic subjects and other activities. It might make sense to stop viewing it as a broad skill but rather as as a set of many sub-skills that depend on the domain – a person can be good at thinking critically about science, for example, but poor at thinking critically about politics.

How useful is knowledge?

Second, just because a student is not planning to be a chemist (for example), can we conclude that it’s really not useful to know about Chemistry? There are any number of ways that (well-chosen) knowledge it could come up in one’s life. Further, knowledge is a prerequisite to thinking (which is really Willingham’s point about critical thinking being hard to teach – it’s hard if we don’t know enough!).

I think Schwarz and colleagues put this in quite a balanced way: “A goal of much formal schooling is to provide students a foundation of knowledge on which they can build new knowledge once they leave school… Except for very narrow training, people will need to continue learning new ideas and skills once they have left the confines of immediate instruction. People grow into their jobs, they change jobs, and the world changes around them” (Schwartz et al., 2009, p. 37).

To conclude

In general, I agree that critical thinking is important, but I’m not keen on the educational discourse that constantly lionises this skill without taking account of how it actually functions on a cognitive level. While strategies can be developed, it makes more sense overall to view it as tied to memories and knowledge. It is also worth considering the many different processes and contexts it involves, rather than seeing it as one generic skill.

Perhaps that means we can celebrating subjects for what they teach, rather than always looking for skills to justify their place in the curriculum.

So … back to book writing/editing! I’ll share more about that another time (possibly after my deadline).

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Purposes of Education

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Education

First, it’s worth mentioning that education, as a concept, can mean a lot more than schooling, and is not confined to formal education, either. Books educate us, for example, as do films, conversations with friends, parenting, and much more (see this post by one of my colleagues for more).

Within the realms of formal education we can have an interesting conversation about purpose, given that these forms of education are set up and (typically) funded by the public.

Here’s a quote I shared in a previous post on transfer:

“ … much of the financial and human investment in education has been justified on the grounds that formal schooling helps inculcate general skills that transfer beyond the world of academia...”

(Barnett & Ceci, 2002, p. 613)

So, what are schools, universities and colleges for? No doubt they have purposes that are not strictly educational such as their childcare function. I won’t get into those issues here.

However, at least if curriculum documents are to be believed, a major goal of the endeavour as a whole lies in the need to develop and equip (future) citizens. That is, helping learners to develop the knowledge and skills that they will need as useful members of society.

Understandably, this is sometimes expressed in terms of certain dispositions or capacities; learners should become creative, critical thinkers, reflective learners, motivated and curious, and so forth.

Memory does not tend to be the focus of such documents or discussions, except perhaps as something that we need to get away from – boring, passive memorisation, and so forth.

However, I think this just reflects a rather simplistic and inaccurate view of what memory is. At least according to mainstream psychological definitions of the term, anything that we learn and retain is represented in long-term memory. This means that any educational experience that causes learners to become more curious, reflective etc must, somehow, impact on memory. If you get better at a skill, that depends on memory, too!

What’s more:

• It’s impossible to think critically without retaining relevant knowledge in memory (Willingham, 2008). For example, how could someone critique a conspiracy theory about vaccines unless they had retained the relevant scientific facts?

• Thinking reflectively is a form of metacognition. Indeed, expecting people to be reflective learners without teaching them how is wishful thinking, and may be setting learners up to fail. There is ample evidence that learning the strategies involved in reflection is valuable; this, of course, is part of metacognition.

• None of the capacities get us anywhere unless they transfer to other situations, as stated in the quote I included near the start. We can never ensure transfer, but we can make it more likely to occur via the design of learning experiences that involves certain types of practice (including practice with desirable difficulties – see update #99), as well as – you guessed it – knowledge in one’s long-term memory, and metacognition (Bransford et al., 2000).

Overall, I don’t object to any of the broader goals of education. Indeed, I very much subscribe to the value of things like creativity and critical thinking. It’s just a mistake, in my view, to neglect the discussion of how these things operate on a cognitive level.

In terms of critical thinking, there is a lot about this that we don’t know for sure, but there is some really promising research on how we can support our learners to be critical thinkers. I’ll delve into this next time!

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

A reminder of my CPD session on evidence-informed classroom questioning: Evidence-Informed Classroom Questioning – 19 February, Glasgow

Last time: Interleaving, Metacognition and Children

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Interleaving

I recently went to one of UCL’s online educational neuroscience talks. The focus was on interleaving, and the speaker was Professor David Shanks. I was really interested in the work that he shared, much of which was on younger learners – a real gap in the research literature – and on metacognition.

In general terms, Prof Shanks reported on recent work that supports the impact of the interleaving effect. The experimental work has shown that young children also benefit from interleaving like adults do (see update #14 for more); it’s a consistent effect (over blocked practice).

One forthcoming study gave children from Grade 1 to Grade 5 examples of penguin species to learn. As expected, they learned the species better if their practice was interleaved, which meant that they switched frequently from exemplars of one species to exemplars of another. The goal, of course, was for the children to learn to reliably identify species correctly.

The researchers also looked at metacognition. Bear in mind that learners typically misjudge the interleaving effect (e.g., Yan et al., 2016), assuming that blocking is the better strategy.

Interestingly, this new research found that very young children (Grade 1) were more likely to interleave than their older peers (Grade 5). This meant that metacognitive judgements and control got worse as the children got older. The researchers found a similar pattern when parents were asked to plan a practice order for their children: it was more likely to feature blocked practice as the children got older.

I wonder if this in some way reflects a tendency towards disorder and exploration in learning with very young, with greater categorisation and explicit, defined goals tending to appear later, and culturally assumed to be appropriate...? It’s interesting to speculate.

You can watch the video of the talk at this link (YouTube).

One other thing to mention is that I have an on-campus CPD session on evidence-informed classroom questioning. Find out more and sign up below:

Evidence-Informed Classroom Questioning – 19 February, Glasgow

You can get an idea of what to expect from the session by referring back to update #105!

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Welcome Back to Memory and Metacognition Updates

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As you can see, it took me a little while to return to my updates this month. A major reason for this is that I am working on a book. It’s taking up a lot of my writing time! The book is called The Psychology of Education, and will be published by Open University Press. My deadline is March, so, as you can imagine, I am really focusing on this at present.

I’ll keep you updated with my writing progress. When the book is done, I hope it will be a useful resource for students and educators alike, as it will cover a lot of fundamental psychological issues (including, of course, memory and metacognition!).

Plans for the year

What else can you expect from these updates this year? Here are a few things that are on my mind currently, and which I intend to get to:

• The latest evidence on strategies for building self-regulation;

• More examples (classroom and everyday) of how to support transfer;

• Making use of the spacing effect – what to space out, and for how long? – as well as other desirable difficulties;

• How educators can engage with (and in) research to support their planning, questioning and more;

• Learning myths, misconceptions and flawed metacognition.

Let me know if there are other issues that you’d like to see me cover. I will also be re-sharing some of the best of my older posts that you might have missed.

Next time

Next time I will say more about interleaving, and discuss a recent talk on that subject that I attended. This topic remains, at least in my view, still quite under-explored, though the evidence base is growing. I recently wrote a paper on how it can be applied to lectures, and I think there is much more to be done in terms of unpicking the concept, explaining it to educators, and exploring its applications.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Promise and Pitfalls of Practitioner Action Research

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What is action research?

By action research, I mean research that reflects on and attempts to inform one’s own practice. Often, the focus is on changes to areas that are perceived as problematic. For educators, it might involve:

• Gathering data on student engagement;

• Investigating an innovative new aspect of practice, such as a use of educational technology or a form of group work;

• Exploring changes to assessments or types of feedback given;

• Gauging student responses to a new short course.

In short, any aspect of pedagogy in a teacher or instructor’s own context could be a suitable subject for an action research project.

This means that such projects tend to be more classroom-focused than a lot of other education research (although it is just as applicable to educators who are not classroom based). Action research is less likely to focus on things like policies, funding, sociological theories, and so forth.

How are these projects done?

How an action research project is done – its methodology – is where we start to see another major difference between this and other forms of research:

1. Action research is carried out on one’s own teaching. For example, as a lecturer, I could study my own students to see how they feel about practice questions.

2. Action research usually aims to act on the findings. So, if my student feedback suggests an appetite for more practice questions, I could introduce this later in their course or the following year.

3. As the above suggests, action research often aims for improvements via a series of iterations over many years. This is less commonly the case with traditional forms of research.

It’s easy to see the potential of this approach. The relevance is high, and it has the potential to impact on important and problematic areas.

Important or misleading?

As I touched on last time, there are potential issues with action research, too. Consider the following scenario:

Jake has heard that group work is better for learning. He tries out an increased level of group work with his science class, then gives learners questionnaires to evaluate their experience. Most say that they enjoy the new format, and Jake concludes that it is motivating and effective for science learning.

Unfortunately, I have come across many studies a bit like this terrible example! The problem, often, is that the practitioner action researcher has already decided that something helps before they ‘research’ it.

I am sure you can see how this could easily lead to apparent support for learning myths like the ones discussed recently, and, indeed, for a swathe of practices that are either ineffective or actively harmful.

This shows that engagement in action research can’t be a shortcut, and should not be conducted in ignorance of existing research and theories (just as other educational research should not be ignorant of practical contexts).

Of course, we don’t want biased and flawed research being used to inform practice, a problem which could be amplified if flawed findings are shared more widely.

However, this must be weighed up against the potential benefits such as contextual relevance of action research findings, as discussed above. There may be knock-on benefits, too; as a teacher-researcher myself, for example, I began to read widely about cognitive science findings and debates, leading to me carrying out my first research into interleaving and the spacing effect. This model could therefore lead to greater research engagement by those who carry it out.

So, as I see it, there is promise to the approach, but also significant pitfalls.

This will be my last update for the year, and I hope it was food for thought!

In the New Year, I will delve into this a little more, and share my view on how action research is best carried out. It should be helpful to you or any colleagues who are planning to undertake a research project in the coming months.

In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday when it comes, and many thanks for reading.

🎄🌟🎅🏽🎁🎄

Jonathan

Last week: Why Learning Myths Matter

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To my mind, the issue is not just that specific myths about how people learn should be discouraged. The fact that they’re so prevalent in the first place also indicates an issue with the accuracy of how people think about thinking (and learning).

In short, we don’t seem to have an intuitive insight into how learning works, even when it comes to our own learning or that of our classes.

This is a quote that I often share with students:

“…the fact people can be sorted based on their self-reported impressions about what works for them does not make them right about what works for them. One can measure opinions and call them “styles” or anything else you want to call them; the important question is whether doing so provides any predictive leverage.”

(Pashler et al., 2015, p. 123).

The idea that people can have strong but inaccurate views on ‘what works’ is food for thought, and should cause us to be wary, even as experienced educators, to go with our intuitive judgements.

Empirical evidence

An obvious alternative is to proceed in an evidence-based way, using empirical evidence to plan for learning.

Indeed, this is what many of my memory and metacognition updates are based on. Why, for example, do I recommend applying retrieval practice or the spacing effect? The reason is that a strong body of research suggests that these strategies are helpful to learning in a range of contexts.

Again, this is not always obvious. Just as most people commonly accept neuromyths such as learning styles, they often reject or avoid desirable difficulties like retrieval and spacing (see update #99). This shows that intuitive judgement is an unreliable way to proceed.

Through engaging with the evidence, I’ve become wary of my own judgement too, and now try to think with the evidence rather than following more automatic assumptions.

If evidence is more helpful than intuitive judgement, this suggests that educators should, where possible, become more research engaged if they are to make smart judgements about pedagogy, assessment, curriculum and so forth.

Perhaps it also points to a role for teachers engaging in research of their own – something that has become popular in recent years.

I am certainly in favour of well-conducted practitioner action research. However, I have a few concerns, too. If action research is flawed, it could reproduce the same biased intuitive assumptions that I mentioned above, with educators seeing what they want to see.

I’ll say more about the promise and pitfalls of practitioner research in the next update. In the meantime, here is the link to a book I wrote a few years ago on teacher research engagement:

Firth, J. (2019). The teacher’s guide to research. Routledge.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: More on The Learning Styles Myth – Classroom Implications

Please note that my slides and similar materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.

Many educators and researchers in cognitive science research are dismayed that so many people appear to believe that students can be categorised by learning style. It’s also quite hard to get people to reconsider their views on the issue.

I raised some of the problems with the idea in my previous post. Today, I want to share my own experience with this idea, and explore how it might (or might not) impact the classroom.

The Problem

One thing that I suggested last time was that many people who believe in learning styles may not be teaching in a way that reflects this. I thought that this statement deserved further explanation.

It could be seen as a tentative hypothesis for why (according to the likes of Newton & Salvi, 2020 and Hattie et al, 2024), belief in the myth does not necessarily lead to poorer classroom outcomes (indeed – some excellent teachers endorse it!).

After all, educators’ beliefs can only have an impact on student outcomes if they act on those beliefs.

The issue is this: the concept of learning styles implies that we should identify sub-groups of learners and then teach them in entirely different ways. This, of course, is hugely challenging to do. A teacher is given a class/group and they need to teach everyone in that class, and it’s almost impossible to deliver three or more versions of the same lessons to subgroups. Therefore, I don’t think that many teachers are actually doing this. I have never observed anyone teaching or planning in this way (self-regulated learning is a different matter!).

So, what is actually happening?

I think that many teachers who endorse learning styles may simply be aiming to include a variety of tasks in their lessons. For example:

• They may assume that including images will help to ‘cater for the visual learners’, and therefore include more pictures alongside text on slides.

• They may include some movement-based tasks such as carousel-style classes for similar reasons.

• They may also build in auditory or language-based tasks (very easy, as most curricula already have plenty of these).

I would suggest that in practice, what this amounts to is not very different to what the non-believers are doing, and it’s therefore not really surprising if belief in learning styles has little impact, positive or negative.

In practice, visual images if done well (dual coding) will be helpful to everyone, not just supposed ‘visual learners’. If done badly (distraction/cognitive overload), they will be harmful to all.

This means that many of the changes and decisions (such as they are) that teachers make on the assumption that they need to cater for learning styles will stand or fall on the design of the tasks themselves. If they are bad tasks, they will harm learning. But likewise, since they are delivered to everyone and not just an identified subgroup, well-designed tasks will help all learners.

This is why an educator can endorse learning styles and still teach effectively. It’s a distraction, a waste of time, and rather embarrassing professionally … but probably not enough to undermine their general classroom effectiveness.

As I mentioned, self-regulated study is different. There is the potential for real harm if students are guided to only study via visual methods, or whatever.

All in all, I am suggesting that how teachers interpret and choose to enact a myth may matter more than how strongly they believe in it.

If anyone is keen to explore this further via empirical research, I’d be very interested! Perhaps this could involve asking teachers who endorse LSs to talk through their lesson plans, explaining how they allowed for it in past lessons. Talk to me if you are doing work of this kind or want to launch a new project!

That’s all for now. If you want to keep reading on this issue, here’s a blog post that I wrote a while ago that delves into the issue of why learning styles questionnaires can’t be trusted:

Firth, J. (2020). Am I a visual learner? https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/education/blog/amiavisuallearner/

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: The Learning Styles Myth

Please note that my slides and similar materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.

The connected implication, of course, is that people learn best when they receive information through this preferred modality. “I’m a visual learner,” many students say, “and so I learn better through diagrams than from reading a text.”

The Problem

There are several problems with the concept of learning styles. To some up some of the key ones:

• It’s very easy to overestimate the role of individual differences in how we learn. Does everyone really learn so differently? We may have different preferences, but that doesn’t mean that systems like attention, working memory and long-term memory are fundamentally different from one person to another.

• How we learn material best is really a function of the material itself, rather than of the learner. We learn maps visually; we learn Jane Austen’s novels through the written word; we learn to throw a basketball kinaesthetically.

• The theory as a whole is unfalsifiable and unscientific (this is my response to anyone who says, “We just haven’t found enough evidence yet”). The VAK theory of learning styles and related theories have been given a more than fair chance to prove their utility and have failed to do so. It’s not a good idea at this point to insist that it must be true and keep trying to find supporting evidence. That is not how science works.

• Flawed metacognition, for example in learners incorrectly believing that they learn only through visual information, is going to influence study strategies, making the belief in learning styles a distraction/waste of time at best, and at worst biasing students towards less effective ways to study.

I touch on most of these issues in the blog post below, which may be a suitable one to share with students:

Blog: Learning Styles Reconsidered

Does it actually matter?

Some researchers (e.g. Newton & Salvi, 2020) have suggested that it’s unclear what difference a belief in learning styles actually makes to students or educators. Could it be the case that, for all its flaws, the concept doesn’t make all that much difference to learning or teaching?

After all, it’s often the case that a person’s beliefs don’t dictate their behaviour in practice (just ask any social psychologist). People with beliefs about tolerance and kindness don’t always enact these 100% of the time. So it’s possible that teachers who agree with learning styles in principle – or, indeed, other wacky things about learning – might not be teaching in a way that reflects this.

All the same … I am of the view that it is rather unprofessional for teachers to espouse incorrect views of teaching and learning. It’s a bad look, and it would certainly make me cringe if my colleagues were telling students to find their learning style!

As I’ve mentioned before, I also think it’s a good idea for students to develop accurate metacognition – to learn how learning works.

It’s a relief if this myth doesn’t make a huge difference to attainment overall. All the same, it’s still preferable to stamp it out if we can. There remains the possibility that some students will be led astray by this idea.

Perhaps a reason this doesn’t happen more is that the idea is sufficiently vague that few make a serious attempt to put it into practice.

Below is a paper that played a major role in debunking the learning styles myth, and which features some really eye-opening stats about what a lucrative industry this has been for some companies and consultants:

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: What Makes a Difficulty Desirable? Philosophical Reflections on a Key Concept

Please note that my slides and similar materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.