There is a poster on a wall in your school. Six strategies from the Learning Scientists: spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, dual coding. Good science, well drawn, and it has been there long enough that nobody reads it. Because the poster tells pupils what to do at home, and the question in the staff room was never that. The question is how you run those strategies with a class of thirty, on a Tuesday, with the material of that lesson.
The research has had an answer for twenty years, and it is not «teach a study skills unit». A way of learning sticks when it is practised inside the subject, with that lesson’s material, and when the teacher names it. Not in a separate lesson about learning. In the lesson about photosynthesis.
Where a strategy sticks
Three sources that schools cite themselves say the same thing. The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance on metacognition and self-regulated learning (2018) boils the research down to seven recommendations, and three are about place: teach strategies explicitly, model them, and have pupils practise them in the subject. Generic «learning to learn» programmes get a warning in so many words.
John Hattie and Gregory Donoghue (2016) looked at two hundred and twenty-eight meta-analyses on learning strategies. Their conclusion: strategies work, but differently per phase of learning, and they belong in the content, not in separate lessons. What you do at the start of a topic (activate what pupils know) is not what you do when the material has to stick (retrieve it from memory) or when it has to be applied to something new.
And the Dutch Kennisrotonde, a service that answers schools’ questions from the research, puts it as advice: tie the strategy to the subject or the lesson goal, model it, let pupils practise. Cognitive strategies are mostly subject-bound. Only planning and monitoring cut across subjects.
None of this is an argument against advisory. It is an argument for the subject lesson as the place where it happens. A cooperative structure does exactly that: the material is the lesson’s, the way of learning is the structure, and the sentence the teacher says aloud is its name.
Seven ways of learning, as the class hears them
On LudensFlow every structure shows «What you’re training now» on the board, with a name and one sentence. The names are written for the class, not for the textbook: a fourteen-year-old hears «from memory, book closed» where we say retrieval practice. These are the seven, in the order of learning. Put them next to the poster, not instead of it: the poster says what, these say how it sounds in a room.
What do you already know? First you pull up what you already know. New things stick better to something familiar.
In your own words. You put it in your own words and explain it. If you can explain it, you understand it.
Until it runs on its own. You do it again and again until it runs on its own. Then your head is free for the hard part.
From memory, book closed. You pull it from memory without looking. What you retrieve yourself stays.
Use it somewhere new. You use what you know in a situation you haven’t seen before. That’s exactly how a test asks it.
Check what you’ve got. You show what you understand and where it’s still fuzzy. Then we both know where to go next.
Plan first, then check. You say first how you’re going to do it, then check whether it went that way. If you know your own approach, you can improve it.
Behind the seven sit twenty strategies from the research, in two tiers: the core, with a high or moderate rating in Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) or a research line of its own, and the support, which helps on top of the core and distracts when it replaces it. The poster’s six are all in there; «dual coding» and «concrete examples» are in the second tier, with the word «supporting» beside them. The whole list, one source per strategy and the structure that trains it, is on one page; the link is at the end.
One example per subject
The same structure trains something different in math than in history, and that is how it should be. Five examples, each with the sentence the teacher says aloud.
Math: interleaved practice. Rohrer and Taylor (2007) had students practise math problems mixed rather than by type, and found double the score a week later. What goes wrong most on a test is not the arithmetic but seeing which type the problem is. Which approach? has the class sort mixed problems without solving them: which approach fits, and what tells you. The sentence: «Until it runs on its own.»
Biology: predicting. Before the experiment everyone writes down what will happen and why; only then does the class watch, and a drawn pair explains. Whoever has predicted first watches differently. Predict – Observe – Explain. The sentence: «What do you already know?»
Languages: retrieval with spacing. For vocabulary and rules the evidence is the simplest of all: retrieval from memory, spread over the week, beats everything (Cepeda et al. 2006; Roediger and Karpicke 2006). Flashcards in pairs, the same set ten minutes every week, the cards that came back as homework. And for sentences instead of words: Copy Me, where one gives an instruction in whole sentences and the other makes it from the words alone. The sentence: «From memory, book closed.»
History: turning a text into questions. In the review by Rosenshine, Meister and Chapman (1996) this was the strongest prompt there is: pupils who use the six words (who, what, where, when, why, how) to make questions about what they read. Read and Ask: A reads a passage aloud, B answers without reading along, A points to the sentence. The sentence: «In your own words.»
Advisory: plan first. Here advisory can do something the subject lesson does not: make the plan out loud. Before exercise one a pair fills in the sheet of Pair Coach: what, who, when, why, what for. Then one solves aloud and the other asks within half a minute «what are you doing now?». Name it in advisory, train it in math. The sentence: «Plan first, then check.»
What works less, and why it is recommended so often anyway
Summarising. Taking notes. Highlighting. Rereading. Drawing a mind map. These are the tips every study skills unit gives, and in the review by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) they rate low, with highlighting and rereading at the very bottom of the ten techniques studied. Why are they recommended so often, then? Because they feel like work. A highlighted page looks finished and a reread text feels familiar. But recognising is not the same as being able to retrieve, and the test asks for the second.
The mind map deserves its own sentence, because it is so often sold as the clever version. Karpicke and Blunt (2011) had students learn a science text, one group with a concept map, the other by retrieving the text from memory. A week later retrieval won on every measure, including the questions about links, exactly where the mind map should have been strong. Barbara Oakley says it to students in plain words: notes, summaries and mind maps distract from the core.
That does not make a scheme forbidden. It makes it a support, not a substitute. The same scheme filled in with the book closed is retrieval, and that helps a lot. Filled in with the book open it is organising, and that helps moderately. That is why «organising in a scheme» sits in our second tier, with «supporting» beside it.
A separate learning-to-learn programme is what the EEF, Hattie and Donoghue and the Kennisrotonde all advise against. A structure inside the subject lesson does the opposite.
What you see afterwards
After the lesson the reflection card asks one question about the way of learning the class trained. For retrieval: «What did the class retrieve without the book, and what did not come?» With yes, partly, no, and your own words if you want them. And your class’s page shows how often it has trained each way of learning this year, and which one has not come up yet. Not a grade and not a verdict: a mirror, so you can see that the class has retrieved five times and never once applied it to something new, when that is exactly what the test asks.
The first time, nothing more is needed. Find your subject’s row, start the structure with tomorrow’s material, and say the sentence aloud. The board does the rest.
The seven ways of learning, the twenty strategies behind them, per subject the three with the strongest evidence and the structure that goes with each: ludensflow.com/en/leerstrategieen.
Sources
Education Endowment Foundation, Metacognition and self-regulated learning: guidance report (2018, updated).
John Hattie & Gregory M. Donoghue, Learning strategies: a synthesis and conceptual model, npj Science of Learning 1 (2016), 16013.
Kennisrotonde (NRO, Netherlands), answers on self-regulation and reading comprehension in secondary school.
John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan & Daniel T. Willingham, Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1) (2013), 4–58.
Jeffrey D. Karpicke & Janell R. Blunt, Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping, Science 331(6018) (2011), 772–775.
Doug Rohrer & Kelli Taylor, The shuffling of mathematics practice problems boosts learning, Instructional Science 35(6) (2007), 481–498.
Nicholas J. Cepeda, Harold Pashler, Edward Vul, John T. Wixted & Doug Rohrer, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis, Psychological Bulletin 132(3) (2006), 354–380.
Henry L. Roediger III & Jeffrey D. Karpicke, Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention, Psychological Science 17(3) (2006), 249–255.
Barak Rosenshine, Carla Meister & Saul Chapman, Teaching students to generate questions: a review of the intervention studies, Review of Educational Research 66(2) (1996), 181–221.
Barbara Oakley & Terrence Sejnowski, Learning How to Learn (2018); Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky & Terrence Sejnowski, Uncommon Sense Teaching (2021).