Explainers

This explainer describes how creating connections with students over time can help develop trust and positive relationships to support learning.

This explainer provides an introduction to the role of knowledge in learning, implications for effective teaching, and describes how building background knowledge facilitates higher-order thinking and learning outcomes.

This explainer provides an introduction to explicit instruction, with a focus on explaining how it contributes to positive outcomes for students’ learning achievement and dispositions.

This explainer gives a brief introduction to cognitive load, focusing on ways to manage it for effective and efficient learning.

Understanding the cognitive science behind how students learn to read and the research on effective instruction makes it easier for educators to align policy and classroom teaching with evidence.

Explicit instruction breaks down what students need to learn into smaller learning outcomes and models each step. It allows students to process new information more effectively.

In formative assessment, you gather and interpret information about student learning as it is happening in your classroom. It helps you to adapt your teaching to meet student needs. 

Spacing and retrieval involves separating learning over multiple lessons and providing opportunities for students to recall what they have learned. This helps to commit learning to long-term memory.

Mastery learning is a way of designing units of work so that each set of tasks focuses on a particular learning objective and students must master a task to move onto the next one.

Explanations of commonly used terms related to education evidence and research