This section provides an overview of the most relevant findings from academic research on education. After watching this you should be able to answer the following questions:
The slides for all of this section are available below. In addition I have produced a short handout containing an activity guide, where you can tick off each activity as you progress through the material.
If you manged to notice the change on the image of the aeroplane straight away I would recommend watched these short videos as an additional example of the limitations of attention. Both Simons and Wiseman have researched and written a lot on this topic.
This quiz contains the questions from all other quizzes on this pages.
Now that you have completed this section it would be valuable for you to put this new knowledge into practice. I have two recommendations, the first aims to join up these separate chunks of knowledge into a more connected understanding, a schema. The second aims to build a useful skill out of the knowledge by getting you to put it into practice.
If this were a taught course I would now be scheduling activities and group work to provide support, feedback and encouragement for cementing this knowledge and turning it into a useful set of skills by applying it to a real world situation. As this is self-study it is up to you to build on the facts and ideas you have and turn it into something useful.
The first activity is to explain this to someone. Go and find a colleague or friend and tell them as much as you can, from memory, allowing them to ask questions especially if they don't understand a part of it. Before you do that, or if you can't find someone its good to run through your explanation on your own first. While you are giving your explanation do not look at the slides or your notes. After you have finished you should check back to see what you have missed and try again.
The second activity is to go through some teaching material (ideally something you have taught before) and evaluate it against the ideas of how students learn including the challenges of cognitive overload, the benefits of dual coding theory, the determinants of learning speed, etc. This would be a good activity to do as a pair if you know someone else who would also be interested in doing this.
By necessity this 'further reading' section covers the breath of the whole course - all parts of all sections. Hence there are a lot of recommendations listed below. The ones at the top of each list are the ones I think you should start with but all are excellent.
I would strongly recommend the first two shorter articles. They have a very different presentation style but both do a great job of providing a strong case for the style of teaching advocated here and provide extra information that I have not included in the videos above.
A lot of the detail on how memory works comes from chapters 13 and 14 of Hattie & Yates, again this goes into a bit more detail than I do and hence is a good source to provide further detail, I also borrowed heavily from Efrat Furst's work for this material.
Putting Students on the Path to Learning (Clark, Kirschner, and Sweller 2012). This builds a rigorous case for providing lots of guidance when teaching and in justifying this position gives a great overview of how student learn.
Teaching With Learning in Mind (Efrat Furst) a series of easy to read blog posts by a cognitive-neuroscience researcher on how memory works and how learning/thinking changes our memories
Study Strategies to Boost Learning (Dunlosky 2013) is an excellent review of the advice to students, it covers a lot of the same ground as article 2 (above) from a completely different angle. Table 1 is an excellent summary of the effectiveness of studying techniques. If you want an academically rigorous treatment of the same topic see Dunlosky, John, et al. 2013
The Science of Learning (Deans for Impact 2015) A very condensed bullet-point summary of key findings from research on how students learn, probably too short to be much more than an overview or a reminder but an excellent list nonetheless.
Cognitive load theory (Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation 2017) The best overview of the topic I’ve come across. Read this if you still find the topic confusing after reading article 2 above.
How Students Learn (Brown 2004). A summary of the different approaches in education research. It’s not clear when each of the approaches are most valuable so not the most immediately useful but does help to put academic research into context.
Ambrose et. al. 2010. This book picks a few of the most important findings in educational research, then provides clear practical suggestions based upon the evidence.
Hattie & Yates 2013. This provides a much broader look at the field, by necessity this means each topic is covered in less detail but this will give you a good general framework for how students learn and help you judge the effectiveness of teaching techniques in general. If you wanted to continue down this line of inquiry I would recommend a previous book by Hattie (Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses) Kraft 2018 will give you a much more nuanced view of what effect sizes can tell us and should be read alongside the Synthesis of Meta-Analysis.
Clark 2014 provides an accessible and actionable overview of the research on effective explanations and a little on effective practice. If you want a more academically rigorous treatment of the same topic see Mayer 2014 (but I prefer Clark). A short summary of the research findings is given on page 8-9 of Chapter 1 of Mayer 2014.
Visible Learning Feedback is a research based and actionable review of how to design courses that contain effective two-way feedback. This ends up covering the testing effect/spaced repetition and a fair amount on student motivation. If you want an academically rigorous treatment of the same topic see the systematic review of meta-analyses that this book was based upon (The Power of Feedback).