The Emotional Learner

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    • Where does the brain store memories?

      The question is more complex than you might think. First, we need to ask if memories are stored at all. The brain isn’t a movie camera, or even a filing cabinet! Recalling a memory involves the reconstruction of the original event. Memories are never accurate, no matter how much we think they are. We add…

    • Book Review: Metacognition and Study Skills: A Guide for Teachers.

      By Jonathan Firth, 2025, Routledge. Metacognition is a much-misunderstood concept. It’s often poorly defined and haphazardly implemented, yet it underpins all learning because it relates to a person’s understanding of how learning happens, and if we know that, we are much better equipped to learn more effectively.  American developmental psychologist John Flavell describes metacognition as…

    • Interleaving and Collaborative Learning: A Remedy for Cognitive Overload?

      We know from decades of research that some learning strategies work much better than others. The learning sciences often cite three specific strategies that, when applied correctly, can result in huge learning benefits: spaced (or distributed practice), interleaving, and testing (or retrieval practice). Broadly speaking, these three techniques create what we call desirable difficulties: the…

    • 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…