Building Better Learners
A look at using the science of learning
Many of the faculty I’ve worked with teach using the techniques that worked for them when they were students or the way that they were taught. Unfortunately, some of those techniques aren’t supported by science. In this post, we’ll explore applying the science of learning in the classroom. Teaching students the science behind how they learn can help them to make smarter choices when faced with the temptation of using AI as a shortcut. This is especially true if you normalize struggle and help your students embrace friction and desirable difficulties.
If you’ve never explored the science of learning, I strongly recommend the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L Roediger III, and Mark A McDaniel. It is available in multiple formats (I listened to it with the Libby app) and is a very engaging read. It looks at how learning works with the goal of helping the reader learn how to learn. You can extrapolate the techniques recommended in the book to apply in your classroom or consider another book to address it directly. Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain was my entry into the science of learning in the classroom, and has lots of examples for both K12 and higher ed. The book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity n the College Classroom by Kelly A Hogan and Viji Sathy doesn’t address the science of learning directly, but the techniques that they recommend for making classrooms more inclusive are based on it.
Once you have a solid understanding of how learning works, you can do two things with that information:
Teach your students about it
Use it in your classroom
Tell Your Students
You can’t assume that your students will show up in your classroom already knowing how to learn. They may have had a teacher who helped them understand how learning works, but often that isn’t the case. Spending part of a class session introducing the concepts will help all of your students, regardless of what they know about how they learn. If you don’t feel comfortable teaching the concepts yourself, The Learning Scientists have plenty of resources (including videos and downloads) on their website that you can share with your students.
Use It In Your Classroom
Ideally explaining to students how learning works will motivate them to start using better study skills. Regardless, you can help students to understand the effectiveness of these principles by using them when designing your course. Below we’ll explore a few ways you can do that. Check the footnotes for helpful links and time saving tips.
Lose the One and Done Quizzes and Tests
Testing once on a topic then moving on does very little to support long term retention of material. This is especially true for students who ace the test (unless they used science of learning techniques to prepare😊). Students benefit from retrieval practice and friction1 to help make learning stick. There are different approaches you can take to this depending on how much time you want to spend. A few suggestions:
Leverage the LMS and use a test bank to generate quizzes that students can take as many times as they want (If your LMS allows, require a break between retakes to enforce spaced practice)
Encourage the students not to look up the answers if they take the quiz online. Since they can retake it, its okay if they miss and the struggle to recall will help with long term retention
If you give in class quizzes, allow retakes during office hours or have a designated class period for retakes
Don’t’ Assume They’ll Remember It
If you expect the students to retain something for later in the semester, then consider using spaced practice. Let the students know that question on previous topics are fair game on current quizzes. Consider using low stakes weekly quizzes and pulling in a question or two from earlier quizzes for each one. This may also encourage students to get help on questions that they missed because they might see it again later.
Mix Up The Problems
Interleaving has been shown to boost learning in the long run because the students must make a conscious decision on how to approach each problem. You can add problems from previous concepts to keep students on their toes. Simply solving multiple problems of the same type results in shallow learning.
Get Metacognitive
Consider adding reflection to your exams and/or assignments. Following a test have the students reflect on what went well and what went didn’t go so well. Have them look at how they prepared, what worked and what they can do differently next time. Reflecting on learning and its impact is a great way to help reinforce what they have learned2.
Jumpstart the Brain with a Pretest
Retrieval practice (essentially a form of testing for learning) is a great way to learn. Recent studies3 have shown that a pretest – given before any teaching has happened is a great way to “prime the pump” for learning. A pretest can get students thinking about the subject and what they know/don’t know. It may spark their curiosity, and it also might help them to have a good sense of where their knowledge gaps are.
Oops!
Build in opportunities for students to learn from their mistakes. What that looks like will depend on what and how you teach, but a few things you can try include:
Complete/Incomplete assignments that can be resubmitted until they are correct4
Drafts submitted for credit with feedback given before the final paper or project is due5
Retakes of exams to earn back partial (or full) credit
Brain Dumps
The term/idea comes from Powerful Teaching, but I love the concept of pausing to write down everything you know at regular intervals. This can be applied to reading or videos, but also in lecture courses. If you teach a class with a lecture component ask the student not to take notes while you are speaking, then pause your lecture every 5-10 minutes and have the students write down everything they remember (or fill in guided notes if you are willing to create them). Do this throughout your lecture. You could also encourage the students to draw the concept rather than write about it. If it is something that can be drawn rather than (or in addition to) written about, have the students make a sketch in their notes. This alternative approach to recording information can help solidify it in memory6).
Sketchnotes Example
The sky is the limit on creative ways to apply the science of learning in your classroom. Some of these suggestions may take time to implement, but should result in time savings down the line as you spend less time reteaching concepts. If you leverage your LMS, then you should be able to reuse things in future semesters, so you can think of the time you spend as an investment.
What About AI?
AI can be great for generating quiz questions if you don’t have access to a test bank for your course. The sample prompt below is from Ethan Mollick’s Substack One Useful Thing – Using AI to make teaching easier & more impactful.
Prompt:
You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will make good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will then ask me two questions. (1) First, what, specifically, should the quiz test. (2) Second, for which audience is the quiz. Once you have my answers you will construct several multiple choice questions to quiz the audience on that topic. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an "all of the above option." At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer.If you don’t want to use AI yourself, you could encourage your students to use it as a study buddy – a tool to help them with retrieval practice.
Prompt:
You are an expert in _________. You are helping me to prepare for an exam on ________________. Please ask me 10 multiple choice questions to help me prepare for an exam. Pause after each question to allow me to answer then evaluate my response and explain why it is correct or incorrect.Example:
You are an expert in American History. You are helping me to prepare for an exam on the revolutionary war. Please ask me 10 multiple choice questions to help me prepare for an exam. Pause after each question to allow me to answer then evaluate my response and explain why it is correct or incorrect.AI can Also be used as a brainstorming partner to help you apply the science of learning in your classroom.
Prompt:
You are an expert in the science of learning. I am looking for ways to apply the science of learning to my teaching in my ______________ class. Please suggest 10 different ways that I can apply the science of learning and give an example of each.My Recommendation
Today’s recommendation is James M Lang. He is the author of Small Teaching, Distracted, Cheating Lessons and much more. He writes frequently for various higher education publications including the Chronicle of Higher Education and his Substack is A General Education. If you want to see what he has to say about the Science of Learning check out his essay Want Good Grades? Ditch that Highlighter (written for students).
Friction has been popping up quite a bit lately. If you want to learn more check out The Future of Education is Personalized (
To get your students to take the reflection seriously consider giving them some kind of low stakes credit
The article 6 Foundational Ways to Scaffold Student Learning looks at pre-testing in #5. The journal article that they reference is Pretesting versus posttesting: Comparing the pedagogical benefits of errorful generation and retrieval practice.
Grading work as complete/incomplete can be a real time saver, especially if you change your approach to feedback. If it is a problem set, you can pre-work the solutions and attach them as needed. If a lot of people are making the same mistake, give the feedback to everyone in class. If it just a few people, instead of giving feedback invite them to your office hours
Feedback given along the way on scaffolded assignments has the potential to save time by catching and correcting problems early in the process resulting in stronger finished products
I didn’t touch on Dual Coding here, but it is another great approach to learning. Asking students to sketch something rather than describe it in words (or do both) can reinforce the learning