Glossary: the terms this library uses

Reference pages are lookup material: definitions and data, kept current, lightly argued. Each entry gives the working definition this library uses — deliberately plain rather than exhaustive — and points to the page that treats the idea at full depth. Where a term is contested in the literature, the entry says so.

Learning science

Automatization — the process by which a practiced skill comes to run without conscious attention, freeing working memory for higher-level work. Indiscriminate: it compiles whatever is practiced, including bad technique. See hunt-and-peck fossilization.

Cognitive load — the total demand a task places on working memory. Instruction fails when load exceeds capacity; the theory's practical business is managing which parts of a task consume attention. See cognitive load theory.

Desirable difficulty — a condition of practice (spacing, interleaving, testing) that slows apparent progress while improving retention. The adjective is load-bearing: difficulties are desirable only when the learner can succeed through them. See desirable difficulties.

Interleaving — mixing related-but-different problem types within practice rather than blocking them by type. Improves discrimination between methods at the cost of feeling harder. See interleaving.

Mastery learning — advancing on demonstrated competence rather than elapsed time; the class of models where the unit is "can do X," not "sat through week 4." See mastery learning.

Metacognition — thinking about one's own thinking: planning, monitoring, and evaluating one's learning. Among the highest-leverage teachable skills in the evidence base. See metacognition.

Retrieval practice (the testing effect) — strengthening memory by pulling information out (recall, quizzing) rather than putting it back in (rereading). One of learning science's most replicated findings. See retrieval practice.

Spaced repetition / spacing effect — the finding that practice distributed over time beats the same practice massed together, and the scheduling systems built on it (expanding intervals timed near forgetting). See spaced repetition.

Transfer — applying a skill learned in one context to another. Famously hard to get; supported by varied practice, explicit abstraction, and meeting ideas in multiple representations. See transfer of learning.

Working memory — the small, temporary workspace where conscious thought happens; capacity is severely limited (a handful of items) and is the bottleneck cognitive load theory manages. See cognitive load theory.

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) — Vygotsky's band between what a learner can do alone and cannot do at all: the region where instruction and difficulty should live. Underlies adaptive-difficulty design. See desirable difficulties.

Digital skills

Caret navigation — moving and selecting within text by keyboard (Home/End, word-jumps, shift-selection) instead of mouse pointing. The most under-taught high-frequency skill in computing. See keyboard shortcuts.

Computational thinking — the problem-solving practices programming exercises: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithms. Contested term: claims that it transfers broadly outrun the evidence, and this library grades those claims where it makes them. See computational thinking.

Digital native — the claim that children raised with technology acquire deep digital skill by exposure. The research verdict is unusually clean: fluency with interfaces does not become understanding of systems without teaching. Used in this library only as the name of the myth. See the digital-native myth.

Filesystem model — the mental model of files as things that live in one place within a tree of folders, with names, types, and paths. No longer acquired by osmosis in the app era; foundational to file management, saving, and the command line. See file-management mental models.

Hunt-and-peck — visually-guided two-to-four-finger typing. Self-assembles under time pressure, automatizes like any practiced skill, and then resists replacement — the reason typing instruction is a race against habit. See hunt-and-peck fossilization.

Keyword thinking — the search skill of translating a natural question into the terms an answer page would contain ("imagine the page you're hoping for; type its words"). See query formulation.

Lateral reading — evaluating a source by leaving it: opening new tabs to see what other sites say about it, the method professional fact-checkers use. Contrast vertical reading (inspecting the page itself), which the checklist era wrongly taught. See lateral reading and SIFT.

Touch typing — typing by motor memory with all fingers, eyes free of the keyboard. The automatized ceiling-raiser; contrast hunt-and-peck's visual dependence and lower ceiling. See typing benchmarks by age.

WPM (words per minute) — typing speed with a word standardized as five characters, spaces included. Meaningful only alongside accuracy, which is why this library reports both. See typing speed norms and accuracy first.

Online safety

Digital footprint — the persistent, copyable, searchable trail of a person's online activity, including what others post about them. The permanence lesson underneath sharing decisions. See permanence.

Grooming — an adult's staged manipulation of a child toward abuse: trust-building, isolation, secrecy, escalation. Taught to children as pattern-recognition on the tactics, never as stranger-danger. See the safety pillar.

Phishing — messages impersonating trusted senders to extract credentials, money, or clicks. Recognition is trainable pattern-matching (urgency, mismatched senders, too-good offers), and simulation is its natural classroom. See phishing recognition.

Dark patterns / deceptive design — interface designs that steer users against their interests: disguised ads, guilt-wording ("confirm shame"), buried opt-outs, nagging consent. Teachable to children as a spotting skill. See consent and dark patterns.

Privacy and procurement

Data minimisation — the principle (and, under GDPR, Australia's APPs and the state principles governing government schools, the legal duty) of collecting only the data a purpose actually requires. The design principle behind zero-PII architecture. See zero-PII memo.

PII (personally identifiable information) — information that identifies, or can be combined to identify, a person. The definitional edges (device IDs, behavioral profiles) matter more than the acronym suggests. See the privacy pillar.

Zero-PII architecture — designing a system so it never collects identifying data, making breach and misuse structurally impossible rather than procedurally forbidden. The strongest answer a vendor can give to the privacy question. See why zero-PII.

Curriculum shorthand

ACARA / Digital Technologies — the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, and its F–10 technologies curriculum this library maps against. See the Australian mapping.

CSTA standards — the (US) Computer Science Teachers Association K–12 standards, the most-referenced international CS framework. See CSTA mapping.

ICILS — the International Computer and Information Literacy Study, the large-scale international assessment whose results repeatedly falsify the digital-native assumption. See the digital-native myth.

Missing a term you expected? The pillar indexes are the fuller map; this page carries only the vocabulary the library leans on repeatedly.

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