How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice

How Learning Happens introduces 32 giants of educational research and their findings on how we learn and what we need to know to learn effectively, efficiently, and enjoyably. Many of these works have inspired researchers and teachers all around the world and have left a mark on how we teach today. Now updated to include a new section on Memory and Cognition with five new chapters, this revised second edition explores a selection of the key works on learning and teaching, chosen from the fields of educational psychology and cognitive psychology. It offers a roadmap of the most important discoveries in the way learning happens, with each chapter examining a different work and explaining its significance before describing the research, its implications for practice, and how it can be used in the classroom – including the key takeaways for teachers. Clearly divided into seven sections, the book covers: Memory and cognition How the brain works Prerequisites for learning How learning can be supported Teacher activities Learning in context Cautionary tales Written by two leading experts and illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli, this is essential reading for teachers wanting to fully engage with and understand educational research as well as undergraduate students in the fields of education, educational psychology, and the learning sciences.

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Memory and cognition 1. Working memory 2. Opening the black box 3. Ah yes, I remember it well 4. "What you know, you know" 5. Do you know what you know? Metacognition Part 2: How does our brain work? 6. A novice is not a little expert 7. Take a load off me 8. Dancing in the dark 9. An evolutionary view of learning 10. One picture and one thousand words Part 3: Prerequisites for learning 11. What you know determines what you learn 12. Why independent learning is not a good way to become an independent learner 13. Beliefs about intelligence can affect intelligence 14. … thinking makes it so 15. How you think about achievement is more important than the achievement itself 16. Where are we going and how do we get there? Part 4: Which learning activities support learning 17. Why scaffolding is not as easy as it looks 18. The holy grail: whole class teaching and one-to-one tutoring 19. Problem-solving: how to find a needle in a haystack 20. Activities that give birth to learning Part 5: The Teacher 21. Zooming out to zoom in 22. Why discovery learning is a bad way to discover things 23. Direct instruction 24. Assessment for, not of learning 25. Feed up, feedback, feed forward 26. Learning techniques that really work Part 6: Learning in context 27. Why context is everything 28. The culture of learning 29. Making things visible 30. It takes a community to save $100 million Part 7: Cautionary tales 31. Did you hear the one about the kinaesthetic learner … ? 32. When teaching kills learning 33. The medium is NOT the message 34. The ten deadly sins of education 35. Lethal mutations: the dirty dozen