How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

Susan A. Ambrose, Michele DiPietro, Michael W. Bridges, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman, Jossey-Bass, 2010.


Discussion by George Pullman


This struck me as an extremely useful book. While much of it may seem like common sense to people who have been teaching for years, the authors render this common sense explicit and offer research to back up its validity. While this text is definitely worth reading in its entirety, below are some salient ideas to whet your apatite. Page numbers are absent because I read this book and developed quotations from it via the Kindle App. If you are new to teaching, you definitely want to read this book.

• Because students come to think of writing as a “one size fits all” skill, they misapply conventions and styles from their general writing classes to disciplinary contexts in which they are not appropriate. For example, they might apply the conventions of a personal narrative or an opinion piece to writing an analytical paper or a lab report. 
• Because students learn most effectively when they connect new knowledge to prior knowledge, it can be helpful to begin a lesson by asking students what they already know about the topic in question.    
• Ask Students to Make and Test Predictions 
• Ask Students to Justify Their Reasoning  
• Novice and expert knowledge organizations tend to differ in two key ways: the degree to which knowledge is sparsely versus richly connected, and the extent to which those connections are superficial versus meaningful. 
• A key difference they found was that the good problem solvers were far more likely to monitor their understanding while they studied, that is, to continually stop themselves as they were reading to ask whether they were understanding the concepts just presented      
• Research has shown that good problem solvers will try new strategies if their current strategy is not working, whereas poor problem solvers will continue to use a strategy even after it has failed
• Students who believe intelligence is fixed have no reason to put in the time and effort to improve because they believe their effort will have little or no effect   
• Be More Explicit Than You May Think Necessary    
• Tell Students What You Do Not Want
• Check Students’ Understanding of the Task 
• Provide Performance Criteria with the Assignment   
• Provide students with ample practice and timely feedback to help them develop a more accurate assessment of their strengths and weaknesses     
• Provide Opportunities for Self-Assessment    
• For complex assignments, provide students with a set of interim deadlines or a time line for deliverables that reflects the way that you would plan the stages of work.
• Remember that planning is extremely difficult for novices. 
• Have students create their own plan.    
• Instead of solving or completing a task, students could be asked to plan a solution strategy for a set of problems that involves describing how they would solve each problem.
• Have Students Do Guided Self Assessment 
• Require students to reflect on and annotate their own work   
• What did you learn from doing this project? What skills do you need to work on?