Psychologist Pooja Agarwal, who has researched how various brain-based strategies to improve learning work in actual classrooms, describes the strong effects of "retrieval practice"--the practice of encouraging students to retrieve and "pull out" information they have learned from memory. Check out these powerful strategies.

The image of the student with ADHD as Dennis the Menace is an outdated stereotype. Some students with ADHD are restless and disruptive, notes the author, but many others who suffer from this disorder are quieter, more distracted and more passive, and not productive or consistent in their work. Thomas E. Brown, a well-known expert on ADHD, shares a…

Although students vary in their abilities and interests, "hyper-individualizing" the curriculum in an attempt to accommodate these differences is not the best way to help each student excel, write Willingham and Daniel. Drawing on educational research, the authors give examples of several cognitive must haves (things that the cognitive system…

According to a 2010 report by ACT, "Only 31 percent of students are performing at a college-and-career reading level with respect to successfully understanding complex text" (p. 5). This statistic demonstrates what educators know: Middle and high school students face numerous challenges in reading, understanding, connecting to, and…

This critique of E.D. Hirsch's book, "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," argues that because Hirsch confuses memorized facts with learned facts, he ignores the importance of constructing meaning and fails to realize that students will not remember what they do not understand. (TE)

This article is E.D. Hirsh's response to a foregoing critique of his book "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know." He argues that the distorted image depicted by Estes, Gutman, and Harrison obscures the promise of the cultural literacy initiative to improve learning in our schools. (TE)

A group of concerned educators evaluates the well-publicized arguments for teaching students to be culturally literate. They argue that content and process instruction are inseparable and that teacher preparation and student assessment should both reflect a more thoughtful fusion of content and process. (TE)

Successful students use a learning style that involves thinking deeply about what they are studying. Several teaching techniques that can encourage this are discussed. (Author/MLF)

Learning is about making connections between subjects, across disciplines, over time, and from individual to universal experience. Our school system is not geared toward connectivity. Knowledge is divided into discrete subjects, and the day into fixed periods. Six questions facilitate students' movement from experience to subjects. (MLH)

Neuropsychology professor Steven Petersen describes what scientists are finding out about brain development, synaptic growth and wiring, intentional and incidental learning, the role of emotion in learning, and declarative and implicit memory systems. Neuroscience has only the broadest outline of principles to offer today's educators. (MLH)

Archaeology and cultural anthropology show that humans developed many discrete skills (social, technological, natural history, and language intelligence) over the past million years, but only recently have combined these into "broad" intelligence. Understanding learning is a key issue. Metacognition, the ability to consider one's…

Dramatic developments in brain research and imaging technology are rapidly advancing our understanding of the human brain. The new biologically based brain theories suggest that "nature" dominates "nurture" and that many current beliefs about instruction, learning, and memory are wrong. This article explains neural Darwinism…

Research identifies two interrelated memories--one that retains facts and symbols and one that retains motor and problem-solving skills. These and other findings challenge educators to determine what students should memorize, to help them move from random memorization to creating useful concepts, and to teach students to use memory in problem…

Reports on a study of four Australian 11th-grade biology students that used stimulated recall to evaluate student thinking processes.The study confirmed the complexity of the teaching-learning process. (MD)