A FEW THINGS COGNITIVE SCIENCE TEACHES

US ABOUT EFFECTIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING

Rebecca Brent
President, Education Designs, Inc.
Cary, NC
Richard M. Felder
Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering
North Carolina State University

In the past three to four decades, cognitive scientists have discovered a lot about the learning
process—what happens in the brain when we learn something and what methods and conditions
of instruction promote learning. This paper reviews some of the principal findings of the
scientists, outlines practical teaching strategies based on those findings, and reviews evidence
that those strategies are indeed more effective than traditional instructional practices.

What is learning? What conditions of instruction promote it?

Learning something—a fact, a concept, a physical or mental procedure—means storing

information in long-term memory so that it can later be retrieved. The easier the retrieval, the
better the learning.

The question, “How should I teach to promote my students’ learning?” leads to two other
questions: “What can I do to increase the chances that something I teach will be stored in my
students’ long-term memory?” and “What can I do to make stored information easier for the
students to retrieve when they need it?” The following highly simplified outline of the storage
and retrieval process suggests several answers to those two questions [Ambrose et al., 2010;
Brown et al., 2014; Felder & Brent, 2016a; Sousa, 2011].

Information reaches students through their senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and
smell. If a controller in a student’s brain judges that a sensory input is potentially important, it
passes it to the student’s working memory, where all conscious processing in the brain occurs.
Working memory can hold roughly four chunks of information at any one time, with each chunk
spending on average 20–30 seconds there before being either stored in long-term memory or
discarded. An executive controller in the brain evaluates the relative importance of the chunks
currently in working memory and makes decisions to either store them in long-term memory or
discard them. Information can be considered learned only once it has made it to long-term
memory.

Each time new information enters working memory, the controller searches long-term
memory for relevant previously stored information and makes its store/discard decision using the
following prioritized criteria:

1. Emotional associations. The greater the number and intensity of a student’s emotional
associations with new information, the more likely the information is to be stored.
2. Relevance to the learner’s interests, goals, and prior knowledge. The more stored
information (that is, prior knowledge) the controller finds relevant to a chunk in working
 memory, greater the probability of storage. If the chunk has emotional associations for a
student, such as connections between it and the student’s interests and personal goals, by
the previous criterion storage becomes even more likely.
3. Comprehensibility. Even if new information is rich in relevance for students, if they can’t
make any sense of it, it will almost certainly not be stored.

Storing information in long-term memory is a necessary condition for the information to

be considered effectively learned, but not a sufficient condition. If information has been stored
and a need for it later arises (for example, during an examination), if the learner cannot retrieve
it, it might as well have never been learned. That observation leads to still another question:
“What facilitates retrieval of stored information?”

An important cognitive science finding is that information entering long-term memory is

not stored neatly in a self-contained cluster of neurons, but rather as a distributed neural network,
with links between neurons and to other networks containing related information. When a chunk
of information is first stored, its neural links are generally weak, and a controller searching for
information related to a new entering chunk may have trouble retrieving it. However, every time
the stored information is retrieved, its neural connections strengthen, and subsequent retrieval
becomes easier. The effect is greatest if the retrieval activity is challenging and the retrievals are
spaced over relatively long intervals rather than in closely-spaced bursts. If the retrievals are
triggered by class activities, assignments, or quizzes, the teaching strategy is called spaced
retrieval practice or test-enhanced learning.

These observations barely scratch the surface of what is now known about the learning
process, but they are sufficient to suggest some sound teaching and studying strategies. The
techniques outlined in the rest of this paper will be familiar to most followers of the pedagogy
literature. The cognitive science findings provide theoretical support for them and shed light on
why they work as well as they have been shown to do by empirical research. More details about
how to implement them can be found in the cited references.

Recommendations for instructors

• When you introduce new course material, connect it to the students’ interests, goals, and
prior knowledge. [Felder & Brent, 2016a, pp. 58–60]

As we noted, the more connections new information has to things the student already
knows and (especially) cares about, the more likely the information is to be stored in long-term
memory (i.e., learned).

• No matter how many connections a new chunk of presented information has to a

student’s prior knowledge, if the information is badly presented, storage is unlikely.

The third condition that favors storage of new information (after emotional associations
and relevance) is comprehensibility. Students are unlikely to store information they don’t
understand. If a lecture is confusing or boring or if an assigned reading is unintelligible or loaded
with extraneous information, not much learning is likely to take place.

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• Use active learning. [Felder & Brent, n.d.; Felder & Brent, 2016a, Ch. 6]

The low information processing capacity of working memory limits the rate at which
students can absorb new information. Whatever that limit is, it is orders of magnitude lower than
the rate at which students are bombarded with information in a classroom. It is therefore almost
impossible for a student to absorb more than a small fraction of the content of a nonstop lecture,
even if it is a good one. For a class session to be effective, the students should be given
opportunities to process presented information—to reflect on it individually and to apply it
individually or in small groups. In other words, the optimal class session consists of lecturing
interspersed with student activities—that is, active learning.

A 2014 National Academy of Science meta-analysis of hundreds of research studies

concluded that active learning outperformed traditional lecturing in promoting almost every
conceivable learning outcome except rote memorization [Freeman et al., 2014]. After reviewing
the results, Clarissa Dirks, the co-chair of the U.S. National Academies Scientific Teaching
Alliance, said “At this point it is unethical to teach any other way.” The previous paragraph
suggests why such good results are obtained when active learning is used.

• Provide spaced retrieval practice to your students. [Felder & Brent, 2016a, pp. 116, 197]

A common approach to teaching is to introduce a new topic to students, give some

lectures, readings, and assignments on it, include it on an examination, and then move on to
another topic. This approach may be adequate to prepare some students for an examination on
the topic, but it is supremely ineffective at enabling them to retrieve their knowledge after the
exam, such as on the final exam or in a follow-on course.

If you consider certain information really important and want your students to be able to
retrieve it long after you first teach it to them, give them spaced retrieval practice in it.
Periodically include it in class activities, quizzes, and assignments, frequently while you are
teaching it and with decreasing frequently after you have moved on to other topics. Obviously
you can’t apply that intense treatment to every bit of information in the course, so reserve it for
the knowledge and skills you know the students will need in future courses and their careers.
You can’t guarantee that when those needs arise, all of them will be able to retrieve the
information, but the spaced retrieval practice will greatly increase their chances.

Our final recommendation to instructors is that they share the information that follows
with their students.

Recommendations for students

• Avoid multitasking while studying—you’re not as good at it as you think you are.

An approach to studying practiced by many students is to carry on several other activities

at the same time. While the students are attending a lecture or doing an assigned reading or
preparing for a test, they are also texting, listening to music, surfing the Web, watching
television or a streamed movie, and possibly all of them together. When asked if the recreational

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activities interfere with the studying, they generally say no, explaining that they are “good at
multitasking.”

They are almost certainly wrong. A growing body of research clearly demonstrates that
mixing studying with other tasks has a negative impact on learning and academic performance
[Weimer, 2012]. That finding is consistent with what we know about brain functioning. The
limited capacity of working memory makes it impossible for people to focus consciously on
many things simultaneously. If students are trying to understand something difficult, most or all
of their roughly four working memory slots are likely to be occupied with chunks of information
related to what they are studying. If they are also texting or watching TV or listening to music,
they cannot simultaneously process what they are trying to study, and they either lose important
information or need much more time to complete the studying.

A better alternative for studying is to use the “Pomodoro” approach [Cirillo Company,
n.d.] Students set a timer for 25 minutes, during which they commit to do nothing but focus on
their studying. When the timer goes off, they may reward themselves with a drink, a snack, a
nap, or some time on their smartphones or laptops or televisions. When they’re ready, they set
the timer for another Pomodoro and do it again.

• Use spaced retrieval practice when studying for examinations. [Felder & Brent, 2016]

The main study method used by STEM students is rereading. Shortly before an exam the
students reread their textbooks and lecture notes, look over worked-out solutions of past
homework problems and old tests, and imagine that they’re ready. They’re not. Rereading notes
and worked-out solutions is like listening to a well-delivered lecture. Everything looks logical
and clear, and it is easy for students to imagine that they could recreate all of it themselves. Only
when they try to do it without looking back at a reference and fail do they realize that they have a
problem.

The weakness of rereading as an examination study strategy is that it doesn’t require

retrieval of information from long-term memory, and so doesn’t strengthen the neural networks
containing the knowledge and skills needed for the exams. That observation is the key to a much
better study technique—namely, spaced retrieval practice.

How can students give themselves retrieval practice? If the exam will test recall of factual
information, the students should work individually or with study partners to prepare and take
self-quizzes in the form of flash cards or sets of multiple-choice or short-answer questions,
noting questions they miss and returning to them in the next study session. If the exam will
involve quantitative problem solving, the students should take as many challenging problems as
possible and try to set up the solutions individually without looking back at existing solutions.
For each problem, they should stop when all that remains is routine but time-consuming
mathematical analysis and numerical calculations, and go on to the next problem. When students
get stuck on a problem, if they have the solution they can look at it and then put the problem
aside, and if they don’t have the solution they can just put the problem aside and get help on it
later. Either way, they should return to problems they couldn't solve at least a day later (the
“spaced” part of spaced retrieval practice) and try again to solve them without looking at the
solutions.

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 Obviously, this approach to preparing for tests will not work if the studying begins the
night before the exam. Our final recommendation for students is, therefore, to start studying for
exams—especially problem-solving exams—at least a week ahead of time. Both empirical
research and cognitive science almost guarantee that the Pomodoro approach to studying
combined with spaced retrieval practice will improve students’ academic performance. Perhaps
the best thing you can do for your students (and while you’re at it, your children and
grandchildren and anyone else you know who is having academic difficulties) is persuade them
to adopt this approach to their studies.

References

Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M.W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M.C., & Norman, M.K. (2010). How
learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Good practical strategies and the research that supports them.

Brown, P.C., Roediger, H.L., & McDaniel, M.A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful
learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Strategies for effective teaching and effective studying
based on modern cognitive science.

Cirillo Company. (n.d.) The Pomodoro technique.

<https://cirillocompany.de/pages/pomodoro-technique>.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (n.d.) Active learning: An introduction.

< www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Tutorials/Active/Directions.html >.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016a). Teaching and Learning STEM: A practical guide. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.

Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016b). Why students fail tests: 1. Ineffective studying." Chem. Engr.
Education, 50(2), 151–152. <www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Cognitive1.pdf>.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S.L., McDonough, M., Smith, M.K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., and Wenderoth, M.P.
(2014). “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410–8415.
< http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410>.

Sousa, D.A. (2011). How the brain learns (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Highly readable
summary of cognitive neuroscience, with extensive teaching tips based on current understanding of brain
functioning.

Weimer, M. (2012). Students may think they can multitask. Here’s proof they can’t. Faculty Focus.
September 26. <https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/multitasking-confronting-
students-with-the-facts/>.