🧠 The Science of Learning

The research behind how children actually learn — spacing, retrieval, mastery, motivation — and the myths that refuse to die.

• Cognitive load theory: designing for the bottleneck
  Working memory holds a handful of items; everything you teach passes through it. What cognitive load theory says about worked examples, split attention, redundancy — and why pure discovery fails novices.
• Deliberate practice: why hours alone don't make experts
  Ericsson's real findings beneath the 10,000-hour folklore — the four conditions that make practice deliberate, what the debates settled, and why 'more time on task' is the weakest instruction in education.
• Desirable difficulties: why learning that feels harder often works better
  The Bjorks' framework that explains spacing, testing, and interleaving in one move — why conditions that slow visible performance can deepen learning, and how to tell a desirable difficulty from a plain one.
• Feedback: the highest-leverage move in teaching, and the easiest to fumble
  What the feedback research actually supports — the four levels, why praise isn't feedback, the grades-vs-comments finding every marker should know, and timing questions answered honestly.
• The forgetting curve: what Ebbinghaus actually found, and what to do about it
  The shape of forgetting, the modern replication, why forgetting is the trigger for the best-timed practice — and the savings concept every teacher should know.
• Growth mindset, honestly: what survived the big replications
  The original findings, the large preregistered studies that found much smaller effects, the meta-analytic dispute — and the two practices that survive regardless of how the debate resolves.
• The science of learning: a working map for teachers
  The pillar guide: which learning-science findings are strong enough to build on, which are contested, and which are myths — with links to the full evidence review for each.
• Interleaving: why mixed practice beats blocked practice
  The evidence for shuffling problem types instead of drilling one at a time — where the effect is strongest, why it feels worse while working better, and how to interleave without chaos.
• Mastery learning and Bloom's two-sigma problem
  What happens when students only move on once they've actually learned the thing — Bloom's famous challenge, forty years of evidence, and why prerequisite graphs beat linear schemes of work.
• Metacognition: teaching children to run their own learning
  What thinking-about-thinking actually covers, the strong evidence for teaching it explicitly, the illusions it corrects (fluency, overconfidence) — and why it beats most interventions per minute spent.
• Motivation: what self-determination theory tells classrooms
  Autonomy, competence, relatedness — the best-supported account of why children engage, what controlling environments cost, and the design rules it implies for lessons and learning software.
• Multimedia learning: how words and pictures combine (and collide)
  Mayer's research program in one page — the principles with strongest support, the dual-channel model behind them, and why 'more media' so often means less learning.
• The 10,000-hour myth: what the rule gets wrong about practice
  How a nuanced finding about elite violinists became a magic number — the averages-vs-individuals problem, the practice-quality clause everyone dropped, and what to tell children instead.
• The goldfish myth: no, attention spans haven't collapsed to eight seconds
  The untraceable statistic behind a decade of headlines, what attention research actually measures, the real and different concern about media habits — and why the myth harms lesson design.
• The digital native myth: growing up with screens doesn't teach computer skills
  Why the generation that swipes before it walks still can't type, name a file, or judge a search result — the international evidence against the digital native assumption, and what it means for schools.
• The learning styles myth: what the evidence actually shows
  Visual, auditory, kinaesthetic — the most persistent myth in education, why the matching hypothesis fails every fair test, and what to do instead of styling your lessons.
• The left-brain/right-brain myth: hemispheres don't make personalities
  Where the myth came from (real split-brain science, badly extrapolated), what the neuroimaging actually shows, why 'right-brained learner' labels harm — and the kernel of truth worth keeping.
• The multitasking myth: switching isn't doing two things at once
  What actually happens when children 'multitask' — the task-switching costs, the media-multitasking research, the overconfidence finding — and the singletasking habit worth teaching instead.
• The overjustification effect: when rewards backfire
  The famous preschool drawing study, the meta-analytic verdict, and the design rule for classrooms and edtech: reward the journey's byproducts, never make the trinket the point.
• Retrieval practice: testing as a learning event, not a measuring one
  The testing effect explained: why pulling knowledge out of memory strengthens it more than putting it back in — and why a review that shows the answer isn't a review at all.
• Spaced repetition: the most reliable finding in learning science
  Why practice spread over days beats practice crammed into one session — 140 years of evidence, what the effect sizes mean for your classroom, and how to use spacing without special software.
• Transfer of learning: the hardest problem in education, stated honestly
  Why skills so often stay where they were learned — near vs far transfer, the identical-elements tradition, what actually helps (varied practice, explicit bridging), and the claims to distrust.
• Worked examples: why novices learn more from studying solutions than solving
  The worked-example effect, the fading sequence that operationalizes it, the expertise reversal that ends it — and how 'watch one, complete one, do one' compresses thirty years of research.

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