The Emotional Learner

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    • Video: The Friday five #2

      Still not entirely sure what to call this series; Friday Five, Five on Friday? Anyway, here are five tips to help you overcome procrastination. Other videos are available on the channel, so please consider subscribing.

    • Regular testing improves outcomes

      The role of testing in education is always going to divide opinion. My position on the matter had always been clear, in that regular low stakes tests or quizzes not only aid learning but also reduce test anxiety by normalising something that, in essence, isn’t normal. Test anxiety is, in part, the result of the…

    • Video: The friday five #1

      For the first of the Friday Fives, I look at 5 tips to help you learn better.

    • Instructional design: Working memory & expertise reversal

      Working memory limitations indicate that we should design learning in such a way as to reduce cognitive load. Working memory is a resource with limited capacity and duration – there is only so much we can attend to at any one time. This is not just a proposal of working memory theory – it’s also…

    • Becoming Buoyant

      Exciting news! Becoming Buoyant: Helping Teachers and Students Cope with the Day to Day is due for publication next month (July 2020). It’s taken me about five years to write this, indeed, I began investigating resilience well before I began writing The Emotional Learner. If you’re a regular visitor to the this site or you’ve…

    • What are non-cognitive skills?

      The term non-cognitive skills has become increasingly prevalent within education over the past few years. But what do we actually mean by non-cognitive, how do these skills differ from cognitive ones and is any aspect of learning truly non-cognitive anyway? The roots of non-cognitive skills lie in the writings of sociologists Samuel Bowles and Herbert…

    • Re-evaluating Failure

      Failure is still seen as something to feel ashamed of rather than a vital component of eventual success. The need to succeed first time and our propensity towards perfection, however, can often lead to either the illusion of success or act as a barrier to it. Failure is ubiquitous, it’s experienced by everybody, from students…

    • 10 Podcasts to Educate & Entertain

      I don’t listen to as many podcasts as I would like to, so I asked people on Twitter to recommend some. Here’s a list of some of my favourites and suggestions from the Twittersphere, in no particular order. PsychCrunch The podcast of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. This is the place to start if…

    • Memory: A Curious Journey

      When we discuss memory, particularly in the context of learning, we usually refer to psychological models, such as the Working Memory Model of Baddeley and Hitch or the earlier Multi-store Model of Atkinson and Shiffrin. At a push we may refer to Cowan’s Embedded Process Theory or discuss working memory from within models of instructional…

    • Academic Buoyancy: Is there something missing?

      There’s something that’s been bothering me for little while now. It’s been around seven or eight since I started writing about academic buoyancy (if you’re curious you can read my 2015 Psychologist article here) and I’ve said quite a bit about the 5Cs – the qualities that seem to be more prevalent in students who…