This practice guide describes ways teachers can support students to organise their knowledge in memory and understand the connections between the ideas they learn about.

Students develop knowledge throughout their lives, drawing from their life experiences, family and community connections, and what they learn at school. When students have opportunities to organise and re-organise their knowledge and understanding, they develop mental models in long-term memory that become easier to recall and apply widely in increasingly complex ways.

This practice guide will help you understand how to: 

  • use strategies and techniques to connect knowledge within a lesson, across a sequence of lessons, across areas of learning or with prior knowledge already retained in students’ memory 
  • support students to develop deeper understandings, with greater meaning, relevance and a growing ability to apply their learning. 

Keywords: student learning, science of learning, teaching practices, how students learn