Dawn Cox is a secondary teacher in Essex, England. She blogs here and can be found on Twitter @MissDCox.

My school has started implementing a whole school approach to learning, based on what cognitive science suggests might be successful strategies. I’ve been working with colleagues on a set of ‘Principles for Learning’ that give teachers and students some suggested methods to use from ‘day 1’ of learning something. These methods are all based on evidence from cognitive psychology, although we had already decided to frame them under four areas that are slightly different than the six strategies.

We decided to frame the strategies in terms of 4 principles: Test, Transform, Link, and Space. Relating these principles to cognitive psychology, “Test” maps onto retrieval practice, while “Space” maps onto spaced practice and interleaving. “Link” includes techniques based on dual coding and elaboration, whereas “Transform” could be thought of as encouraging transfer.

We also decided that an additional point (“knowing what you need to know”, superimposed in the center of the diagram above) was crucial, because if you don’t know what it is that you already know and what you need to know, you don’t have a concrete starting point. You may learn things that aren’t needed or confuse yourself with additional detail. My own students like the fact that I give them the specification outline and all the keywords they need to know for their GCSEs (American readers – see this post for an explanation of these important exams in the British education system); this way, they know what they’ve got to learn.

We elaborated each of the 4 principles with the kinds of things that teachers could do to use them in lessons, as well as the kinds of things students could do to use them during private study. It was very important for us to keep it as simple as possible. The principles are equally for teachers as they are for students (in our case, kids aged 11-16), so they both need to easily understand and apply them.