In the past decade or so, interest in the science of learning has exploded.
Findings from cognitive science now underpin everything from the Department for Education’s Early Career Framework to Ofsted’s curriculum research reviews.
As a result, understanding more about how our brains work, and what that means for teaching and learning, has become an increasingly important part of teachers’ professional development.
However, the sheer volume of research makes it tricky to keep up to date with new findings.
So, here are four studies you might have missed that could make an impact on what you do in the classroom.
Education research to help teachers
More evidence for interleaving
Interleaving involves practising multiple concepts within a single learning session.
Academic research has repeatedly found that this approach can benefit learning, yet the practice is not as widely used as it could be, with many teachers still preferring to teach curriculum content in blocks.
One reason for this, suggests Dr Faria Sana, an assistant professor at Athabasca University in Canada, might be because most experiments into the effectiveness of interleaving did not take place in real classrooms. And so, along with Veronica Yan, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Sana set out to help build up the evidence base from actual schools.
In their 2022 study, which took place over four weeks, 155 high school science students took a weekly retrieval quiz, which tested half the concepts they had just learned. The quiz style alternated each week so that by the end of the four weeks, each student had completed two blocked and two interleaved quizzes.
The blocked quizzes tested students on a single topic, while the interleaved quizzes presented a mixture of topics from various lessons.
A month after the final quiz, students were tested on the concepts covered in the four weeks.
Students correctly answered an average of 47 per cent of the questions on which they had not been quizzed. This jumped to an average of 54 per cent for questions from blocked-concept quizzes and 63 per cent for questions from interleaved-concept quizzes.
“These quizzes added only 10 to 12 minutes of class time each week and yet led to sizable and sustained learning benefits a month later,” the researchers concluded. This shows, they add, that interleaving, which is “a small addition to classroom practice - one that does not require additional teacher training, is cost-effective, and is not time intensive - can yield powerful, long-lasting effects on student learning”.
Gestures during learning
Do physical movements, such as hand gestures, help to cement our understanding?
In 2021 a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, led by Icy (Yunyi) Zhang, set out to explore this idea.
Three groups of participants were asked to watch an instructional video showing distribution using histograms.
The first group (the control group) simply watched the video.
The second group watched the video overlaid with red bars, which appeared 18 times. Wheachn a bar appeared, the presenter held her hand in a vertical or horizontal position to connect a graph to the concept being described in the video. The participants were instructed to imitate the presenter.
The third group (the content-mismatch group) watched the same video, but with red bars that appeared incongruously to what was being described in the video.
After watching the video three times, all participants took a short quiz. The match group scored 4.4 out of 5, outperforming the control group (4.0) and the mismatch group (3.8).
The researchers concluded that using hand movements that are linked to the material being taught ensures that students are active, rather than passive, recipients of information, and that this has a positive impact on their learning.
It was not a large study, but the findings echo other research that suggests students learn better when they make spontaneous gestures or use their hands and arms to imitate the gestures of the teacher.
Studies have also shown that preventing students from gesturing while solving a problem can hold them back compared with students who are free to use their hands while they think, so this is another thing for teachers to bear in mind.
Reflection in learning
Earlier this year Giada Di Stefano, an associate professor at Bocconi University in Italy, revised and republished a study he originally led in 2014, which looked at the effect of reflecting on learning after a lesson.
The researchers defined reflection as taking time to synthesise, abstract and articulate the main points of the learning.
In the study 202 adults completed two rounds of an online maths brain teaser under three different conditions: ”reflection” (in which participants took a few minutes to write what strategy they used or might use in the future to solve problems before starting the second round); “sharing” (participants were told that their notes would be shared with future participants); and “control” (participants completed the second round of brainteasers without another activity in between).
The researchers found that participants who had time to reflect performed an average of 18 per cent better on the second round than those who were not given time to reflect. They concluded that this shows that learning is more effective when we take time to deliberately focus on thinking about what we have been doing.
This process, they added, builds our confidence in achieving a goal. Their message is clear: at the end of a lesson, it pays to get students to stop, reflect and think about their learning.
The pen is mightier than the sword - and the keyboard
When Pam Mueller, a psychology graduate student, left her laptop at home, she was forced to use pen and paper to take notes in a psychology lecture. Surprisingly, she felt she had got much more out of the lecture that day.
The inkling that there might be something different about writing led Mueller, now at Princeton University, to collaborate with Daniel Oppenheimer, of the University of California Los Angeles.
Although the research was conducted in 2014, its findings have taken on new relevance in recent years, as education moves increasingly towards digitisation.
Mueller and Oppenheimer conducted three experiments that involved students taking notes either with pen and paper or on a laptop, before completing a test.
The pair found that laptop use can negatively affect performance on educational assessments, even - or perhaps especially - when the computer is used for its intended function of easier note-taking.
Mueller concluded that when you take notes by hand, you process information and then write it down in your own words, but when you are typing, you tend to transcribe large chunks of lectures verbatim. That initial selectivity of using pen and paper, she determined, leads to long-term comprehension.
So, while typing has a place in the classroom - especially in our digital age - it’s also important to stress to students the value of picking up a pen.
Surendra Verma is a science writer based in Melbourne, Australia
