Congratulations – you have found my old blog!
For my latest articles about education, memory, metacognition, I recommend subscribing to my Substack. It's free! https://firth.substack.com
In most psychology and related courses, learners are expected to write short essays or extended exam-style answers about research studies or theories. I want to share some tips about how to structure this type of essay. It will be especially useful if you are a student in your final years of school (e.g. A-Level, AP, Higher), as well as for college and university students.
Read MoreI bet you give some talks, classes or lectures where you explain your material really well. You have nice slides, you give an eloquent and passionate account of the material, and most of it is pretty interesting. The thing is – how much will your learners remember in a few weeks time?
Read MoreRecently I gave a lecture on desirable difficulties focusing especially on variation and spacing, linking to this article by Robert Bjork. I also covered the limited benefits of overlearning. In the follow-up tutorial, students (2nd year undergraduates) were asked to come up with questions. Here are their questions, together with my responses.
1) In what circumstances is variation most valuable?
Variation is valuable in circumstances when the eventual use of the knowledge or skill is unpredictable. If you know exactly when and how you are going to use what you have learned, then varying the practice becomes unnecessary. For example, if you For example, if you drive a Mini and plan to do so for the rest of your life, then there is no need to practice with other types of car. If you are only every going to hit a golf ball in the driving range then you don’t need to practice hitting the ball off a slope, off sand, out of long grass etc. However if you would like a more flexible skill that would allow you to adapt to unexpected situations, then you should vary your practice.
2) It can be difficult to use variation all the time in the classroom, so how can you judge…
Read MoreI’ve just finished conducting interviews for the PGDE course that I teach on here in Scotland. Although I obviously can’t share anything relating to our current applicants, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what I look for in a teacher, and what you might need to think about if you are (or someone you know is) thinking of entering psychology teaching in the future.
I have taught psychology for most of my career, beginning at around the time that it was first introduced to schools and colleges here via the (at the time) new Scottish Higher and Intermediate qualifications.
Since then, the subject has steadily grown – especially at school level. When I started it was relatively unusual for secondary schools to offer the subject at all, and when they did, it was usually done via a school-college partnership, with pupils travelling in to an FE college once or twice a week.
That still happens, but it's now…
Read MoreA is for active learning. That is to say, learning that involves the students doing something, rather than sitting and listening to a teacher or instructor talk/lecture. Of course, it’s a little difficult to define what that something should be – what counts as active. If listening to a talk isn’t considered active, then is reading? What about filling in a worksheet? In short, there is near universal agreement that active learning is a good thing, but defining it is another matter. A pragmatic approach is to ask, ‘what does the learner need to do?’ If it is the teacher/instructor that is doing all of the work, then the activity is probably not an example of active learning.
B is for brain, and there are no shortage of people who will tell you that educators need to understand the brain better, or that their preferred education ideas are ‘brain based’. Of course, the brain does underlie all of a student’s…
Read MorePerhaps surprisingly, what people believe about learning and memory is often very different from the scientific consensus.
For example, in a large-scale survey of members of the public, Simons & Chabris (2011) found that over 80% of participants believed that amnesia sufferers forget their own name. This is actually not the case – the memory loss tends to affect recent events rather than their personal identity or childhood memories. In the same study, 63% of members of the public agreed with the idea that memory works like a video camera, while 48% agreed that once you have experienced an event and formed a memory of it, that memory does not change. None of these ideas are supported by mainstream psychological science; a linked study of psychology researchers found 0% endorsement in every case.
Memory seems to be fundamentally counterintuitive, and there are many other myths and misconceptions…
Read MoreI became interested in teaching when I was an undergraduate, through the experience of giving talks to my Honours class and leading small seminars – I found that I enjoyed explaining concepts and research to others. If you also enjoy working with others and sharing your knowledge of Psychology, perhaps you should consider a career as a school psychology teacher or college lecturer. I will try to explain in simple terms how best to follow these paths, and what might be involved.
It used to be very difficult to get into Psychology teaching at school level. To teach in Scotland, it is necessary to complete a teaching diploma and be accredited by the General Teaching Council, Scotland (GTCS), and historically, this proved to be something of a barrier for graduates with a single honours degree in Psychology. Until recently there was no professional graduate diploma in education (PGDE) in the subject in Scotland; some psychology graduates trained…
Read MoreThis week the annual Scottish Learning Festival took place in Glasgow, and together with five fellow educators I gave a presentation on the value of psychology to younger learners. Together, my co-presenters and I represented the University of Strathclyde, four local authorities, and Education Scotland.
I’ll share a summary of our talk in due course, but in the meantime, here are some basic reasons why I think that all schools can and should offer psychology to their pupils – at any age!
1) The study of psychology is a basic part of understanding reality.
Why would we teach learners about the external world – history, geography, chemistry, and so forth – but never teach them about…
Read MoreDespite its long history, visual imagery has at times been neglected in the study of memory and learning. Behaviourist psychologist J. B. Watson considered it to be unimportant, with mental images seen as mere shadows or 'ghosts' of the verbal behaviour involved in language (Paivio, 1969), and visual processing was absent from the classic ‘modal’ model of short-term and long-term memory. However, from the late 1960s onwards, researchers such as Gordon Bower and Allan Paivio began to promote its use as a study strategy, and explore the psychology behind it.
Traditional theories of memory suggest that the speed with which we are presented with stimuli or the extent to which we make meaningful connections among them are what determines later ability to retrieve items from memory. The focus is often on lists of words…
Read MoreA lot of the study advice that students and school pupils get is next to useless. Some is actually counterproductive, includes the learning myths, such as finding a ‘learning style’ (learning styles actually don’t exist - but this doesn’t stop many schools from pushing the idea relentlessly!)
In addition, advice often unhelpfully focuses on getting students to sit down and study, without actually telling them how to do so effectively. All too often, study tips focus on making study plans, starting early, drinking lots of water, or just generally working harder.
Cognitive psychology has shown that in order to use your study time effectively…
Read MorePsychology in the Classroom: A Teacher's Guide to What Works came out around this time last year. Co-authored with Marc Smith and aimed at both new and experienced teachers, it’s a guide to how psychology research on areas such as memory, creativity and motivation can be applied to classroom practice.
In the run up to working on this book, I had become increasingly interested in applying cognitive psychology to education. Although I have a degree in Psychology and had been teaching the subject at school level since the early 2000s, I hadn’t initially applied it to teaching my practice. However, as time went on my reading had increasingly focused on areas of psychology that have a link…
Read MoreThere have been a lot of discussions about interleaving and spacing on Twitter this week, which is great. It’s always good to see teachers engaging with research, asking questions, and trying to make their practice evidence informed.
As I have just been working on a systematic review of research into interleaving, I though I’d share a couple of things that I think are easily overlooked when people apply interleaving to their classroom practice (including by me, when I first came across the idea!):
Interleaving seems to be beneficial because it allows learners to contrast different problems or examples…
Read MoreI’m often asked by new or prospective Psychology students (or their parents) if I can recommend some interest-based reading to extend their understanding or prepare for a degree. Here are a few options, all of which are chosen to be interesting, easy to read, and very relevant to studying Psychology or related disciplines.
They vary a lot in their style and authorship (some by researchers, other by journalists and the like), and I certainly don’t endorse everything that they say, but they are all interesting, well-written, and collectively would give a useful overview of the subject. In alphabetical order…
Read MoreHaving only a day or two to go until your exam is not ideal, but at some point we all get to the stage where there is very little time left. Whether you have been working systematically through your learning and revision all year or have left it all a bit too late, there are still several important things that you can do at this stage. The following applies to the final day before the exam and will be expressed as such, although if you are planning ahead, these revision tasks would be best begun with two days to go!
Your main focus at this stage should be…
Read MoreIf your exam is close, it’s time to really focus. There’s no room for procrastination, but you do still have enough time (if you use it well) to seriously upgrade your level of detailed knowledge as well as your exam technique. This post explains how evidence from the science of learning can help you make the best use of the study time you have left.
The first thing you should do is to make sure you have all of the materials you need. This includes your textbook(s), classroom notes, sets of flashcards, your own summaries or concept maps based on your reading, and any available past…
Read MoreI thought I'd share a slightly extended version of my answer to a question about spacing and interleaving from the CogSciSci email group.
The question asked what spacing and interleaving might look like in practice when teaching science (I have written about these two concepts in much more detail and in ways that apply to multiple teaching subjects in my book Psychology in the Classroom).
The spacing effect means that when study and re-study are separated...
Read MoreThe quality of teaching matters to how well pupils do at school. So how do we, as a society, encourage high-quality and experienced teachers to stay in the classroom rather than leave the profession or move into management? This question was addressed by the Scottish Government's recent report, 'Teacher Workforce Planning for Scottish Schools', and also featured in the initial findings from their panel of international advisers...
Read MoreEvidence-based education is the idea that research of various kinds should be used to inform decisions about teaching and learning. It is conceived of as an alternative to teaching practice that is guided by intuition and/or experience.
An educator’s job includes a huge amount of decision making. For example, what should be taught today? What about tomorrow? What type of homework should be set, and when? How can the teacher maintain discipline effectively? Evidence-based education aims to tackle these questions pragmatically on the basis of past findings, and is sometimes referred to as a "what works" approach.
Read MoreThe testing effect is a well-known psychological phenomena whereby people remember things better if they are tested on them. The benefits don't stem just from getting feedback on right or wrong answers - although that can help too. It appears that the process of retrieving information from memory actually helps it to be consolidated. In other words, a test can make the memory more secure and less likely to be forgotten.
So what role should tests play in the learning process? This phenomenon can certainly be applied to self-testing during revision; students who do this appear to get better grades (see Hartwig & Dunlosky, 2012). Self-questioning of a text has also been linked to…
Read MoreCan teachers engage in research? And if so, should they be supported in doing so?
It has been great to be involved in the launch and running of Scotland's first school-based research centre over the past two years. This work has included running a research conference for our senior pupils with external visiting speakers, establishing an ethics approval procedure for teacher projects, and managing a number of collaborations including a research fellowship for visiting researcher Anna Beck of the University of Strathclyde.
My own experience is that teacher research is valuable but not always valued. Engaging in research is one of the most valuable CPD activities I can think of, boosting my skills while making me more aware of…
Read More
