By: Megan Smith & Yana Weinstein

Researchers have learned a great deal about how students learn on their own and in the classroom, and much of this research can be applied to educational settings. One of our primary goals is to make this research on learning more accessible and create free evidence-based resources for teachers and students. To meet that goal, over the past few months we have been working on creating resources in different formats based on 6 learning strategies whose effectiveness is backed by decades of cognitive research:

Spacing (1)

Retrieval Practice (2)

Elaboration (3)

Interleaving (4)

Concrete Examples (5)

Dual Coding (6)

All 6 of these strategies have evidence supporting their effectiveness, but some do have more evidence than others. For example, there is a lot of evidence supporting retrieval practice and spacing, whereas elaboration has more limitations. These certainly aren't the only effective learning strategies, either! We focused on these 6 because a recent report (7) found that few teacher-training textbooks cover these principles. Students are therefore missing out on mastering techniques they could use on their own to learn effectively. With our resources, we're trying to bring information about these particular learning strategies to teachers and students in easy-to-use formats.



So far, we've designed single-page instructional posters that cover all the strategies - one poster per strategy. These posters were illustrated by former educator Oliver Caviglioli. We released the posters just last week, and since then have already seen thousands of downloads. We've been amazed at the excitement generated by these posters - multiple teachers have even shared pictures of their freshly printed posters on social media!