The Emotional Learner

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    • Cognitive reserve, brain health, & longevity

      Your brain is an exceptional organ. Weighing in at around 1.4kg (a little heavier than a bag of sugar), with 86 billion neurons, or brain cells, and around 100 trillion connections, it far exceeds the capacities and capabilities of the most sophisticated supercomputers. It’s also a very greedy organ, consuming around 20 percent of your…

    • New Book Incoming

      Smarter: Lessons from the New Science of Learning is out on the 22nd December. As with my other books, I’ve drawn from the science of learning to provide what I hope is an accessible yet critical account. You can order from Amazon Or directly from Routledge Description (from the publisher): What does cognitive psychology really…

    • Deep Reading equals Deep Processing

      Do you read? I mean, really read? A 2024 survey by the Reading Agency found that over one-third of UK adults have abandoned reading for pleasure altogether. That’s a pretty worrying statistic for a nation that prides itself on its literacy levels. But literacy statistics can conceal a more worrying decline in what is generally…

    • Anxiety and Cognitive Load.

      There’s a tendency within the teaching and learning professions to only view cognitive load from the perspective of Cognitive Load Theory. This is wholly understandable, seeing as CLT provides a useful framework from which to design more effective learning environments by taking evidence from cognitive psychology into account. But what about factors that negatively impact…

    • When prior learning helps and when it hinders

      Over fifty years ago, the American educational psychologist David Ausubel stated that ‘the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows’ (Ausubel, 1968). To paraphrase Ausubel, once we know that, we can then teach (and learn) accordingly.  According to Hambrick and Engle, this view espoused by Ausubel is ‘one of the…

    • To Interleave or to not Interleave?

      We know timing is important for learning. But time isn’t just about the duration of short-term and working memory; it’s also the spacing out of learning so that we can exploit the way we retain learned information. We call this the spacing effect. A related phenomenon concerns the order in which we present information. For…

    • Unpacking the spacing effect

      The spacing effect is a curious beast. It’s certainly not new, the general premise dating back to Robert Hooke’s lecture to the Royal Society of London in 1682. Despite Hooke’s contribution, the phenomenon is generally attributed to Ebbinghaus’s memory experiments, published in 1885. That still makes it an old idea. Adolf Jost then confirmed these…

    • A Cognitive Approach to Questioning

      A particularly potent view within the learning sciences posits that learning in generative (see, for example, Fiorella, 2023; Enser & Enser, 2020). In this respect, learners are viewed as generating understanding by, amongst other means, connecting new information to what they already know. This notion is consistent with our instinctual views of learning and gels…

    • Genetics and learning

      If there’s one topic in education guaranteed to lead to fierce debate, it’s behavioural genetics. Opposing sides take up their positions based on nature or nurture; whether academic achievement is based mainly on heritability or environmental influences.  Publications such as Robert Plomin and Kathryn Asbury’s G is for Genes and Plomin’s more recent Blueprint: How…

    • Book Review: Immoral Education: The Assault On Teachers’ Identities, Autonomy and Efficacy

      Simon Gibbs, Routledge 2018 Simon Gibbs has written a compelling and timely account of the UK teaching profession. With teacher recruitment numbers falling and many teachers leaving the profession, this book is certainly a welcome addition to the growing number of works exploring the impact of so-called neo-liberal ideologies on the role of teachers. Early…