Category: Schemas
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Novel experiences: do they help students learn?
Why is it that when we provide students with novel experiences in lessons (designed to make ideas memorable) that students often only remember irrelevant bits of the experience rather than the idea we were trying to teach? Here are some examples: Teacher’s intention: wanting maths students to understand vectors through using a snakes and ladders…
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Building on what they know
What are the best conditions for helping pupils build on what they know? In this blog we look at updating memory through a process of reconsolidation and what this might mean for teaching pupils. Updating memory If our memories are going to serve us well (i.e. make accurate predictions), they need stay relevant. This means…
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Schemas determine what we learn
I’m teaching the class about a poem we’ve read. I tell them the poet is writing about love. But instead of writing ‘love’, the poet uses a different word… a euphemism for love. The poet has repeated the same line with the euphemism in it across every verse. “Why have they done this year 10?…
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Catalyse learning using schemas
Teachers are in the learning business. One way we learn is by storing knowledge for the long term through a process called ‘consolidation’. Consolidation has been dubbed the “core force of knowledge accumulation” (Shing & Brod, 2016, p.4). Consolidation = learning. Memory consolidates into networks called schemas. Schemas = our prior knowledge. In this blog…
Evidence for Educators 