News

Following up on our recent Lethal Retrieval Practice Mutations – the excellent Scientists in the Making (Ms.Sam) has offered up some practical considerations from a teacher’s perspective that we thought were worth sharing. There’s an interesting insight on ‘Diminishing Cues’ Retrieval Practice (DCRP) – a sort of scaffolded retrieval technique

The insightful Carl Hendrick has produced another interesting read looking at potential lethal mutations of retrieval practice.  Sparked by some new research that shows limited benefits when using retrieval practice with highly complex materials, he flags that we need to be careful not to inadvertently mutate what we know works.

“Congratulations to Thinking School Network Hub, Danescourt Primary, who have just had their Estyn report published. So encouraging to see their “Spotlight” (an area of identified innovative practice) as the school “embedding a culture of reflection and challenge in learning …..  This highly effective approach enables most pupils to think

There’s an interesting new paper that explores how the use of learning strategies, particularly ineffective ones like highlighting and rereading, can be understood through the lens of habit formation, rather than solely through deliberate, rational choice.  Of particular interest was the suggested behaviour-change techniques for actually improving learning strategy. These

If you aren’t a user of mini whiteboard (MWB) then this is worth a read to see what you might be missing out on spoiler – efficiently identify individuals and by default the class’s understanding of a topic to then enable you to shape what you teach next). Specifically we

Despite all the evidence showing spaced retrieval and revision is better for long term learning than cramming. Students, even if they know this to be true, typically ignore it, particularly low prior performing students. That clearly irks (rightly so!) research types, who look to have been in turbo mode attempting

For ‘Retrievalists’, this has the scope to be one of the most useful posts we’ve come across in a while.  Because, whenever, we deliver a session on memory – one of the questions that we always seek to address is how often and at what intervals should we be spacing

During training, whenever we introduce teachers to why forgetting is a good thing, there is always a sense of disbelief. That’s despite it also seeming to give great comfort to almost every educator who has experienced that, “But they knew this all yesterday. How could they possibly have forgotten it

We recently flagged an excellent overview of attention regulation skills, which was great on the principles but whose scope wasn’t to cover practical classroom strategies. So, conveniently those clever people at Edutopia have just released “30 ways to bring calm to noisy classrooms”. There are a couple of the usual

Given what a killer it is for learning, we’ve long thought that there isn’t enough importance placed on how to teach for “The Transient Information Effect” – when important information disappears before learners can process it. And so, we were excited to receive this incredibly timely substack from Dr Nidhi

The team at the Center for Curriculum Redesign have released an excellent read that looks at the complex concept of executive functions (EFs) and their crucial role in learning. The paper seeks to clarify the current splurge of research in EF, and proposes a user friendly framework that defines EFs