I became a high school speech pathologist after earning a Master’s degree in Speech and Language Pathology. When I was in school, Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs) didn't learn a whole lot about orthography. We learned many things...
Weekly Digest #68: Desirable Difficulties
The concept of desirable difficulties describes the idea that students need tasks that challenge them to the right degree in order to learn best. Some have criticized this theory for being circular (1). That is, when a learning task is easy and later performance is low...
The Key to Interleaving: Jumble It Up!
Interleaving can be a confusing topic and is often confused with spaced practice. In laboratory studies, we can disentangle the effects of interleaving and spacing to show that they are both helpful on their own to produce learning (1). However, in classroom ...
GUEST POST: Elaborative Interrogation – What if Students Can’t Produce Useful Elaborations?
Diagrams can help students learn, especially when students connect verbal information (like words in the text of a lesson) with the diagrams (1). But getting students to make these connections can be tricky because you can’t look at a diagram and the text at the same time!
Weekly Digest #67: Dual Coding in the Classroom
Dual coding, or combining visuals with words, is one of the 6 strategies for effective learning. The idea is that by combining a visual representation of an idea with a verbal representation of an idea, we will be able to learn the idea better. (Of course, this can be ...
Retrieval and Spaced Practice Sound Great, but Are They Just for Memorization?
We recently received this question at a workshop we ran for K-12 teacher and leaders. After hearing the research on spaced practice and retrieval, one might wonder: What do these strategies do to students’ abilities to make inferences, apply what they know, and think creatively?