Top 20 Principles: Thinking and Learning

Students' beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functions and learning.

Students with a growth mindset focus on learning goals, are more willing to take on challenges, and rebound more easily from negative feedback and failures compared to students with a fixed mindset.

To foster a growth mindset among students, teachers should:

• Convey to students that performance can be improved with added effort or the use of different strategies.
• Be judicious in their use of praise, particularly when a task is moderately easy.
• Recognize situations in which students expend minimal, modest or incomplete effort as signs that students might fear embarrassment.
• Hold high expectations for all students, not just the most successful, and offers of help to all students, not just those who are doing poorly.

What students already know affects their learning.

Students come into the classroom with preexisting knowledge from everyday experiences such as social interactions with peers and/or other settings. For that reason, learning consists of either:

• Adding existing student knowledge (conceptual growth — due to consistency between existing and new knowledge).
• Transforming student knowledge (conceptual change — due to inconsistency between existing and new knowledge).

Challenges for teachers include addressing and mitigating the effects of student misconceptions, particularly when students (like anyone) can be very reluctant to change familiar thinking that is incorrect.

Teachers can be strategic when dealing with student misconceptions by:

• Precipitating cognitive conflict in the minds of students by helping students recognize the discrepancy between their own thinking and correct curricular materials or concepts.

Student's cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development.

Students are capable of higher level thinking and behavior in some knowledge domains more than others, especially when they have access to more capable others or challenging materials, and are situated in familiar contexts.

In designing instruction, teachers can facilitate high levels of student reasoning by:

• Encouraging students' reasoning in areas where they already have substantial knowledge.
• Presenting topics and domains pitched at a moderate distance beyond students' current level of functioning.
• Using heterogeneous groupings to allow for interactions with higher level thinkers.
• Recognizing and facilitating challenge for those at the highest levels of achievement.
• Familiarizing students who lack such experience with the culture of classrooms and schooling practices.

Learning is based on context. Generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous; it needs to be facilitated.

Student transfer or generalization of their knowledge and skills is not spontaneous or automatic; it becomes progressively more difficult the more dissimilar the new context is from the original learning context. Moreover, students' ability to transfer learning is an important indicator of the quality of their learning — its depth, adaptability and flexibility.

To best facilitate and support proper transfer or generalization of student knowledge, teachers can:

• Make connections between students' current knowledge and the teachers learning goals.
• Teach a topic or concept in multiple contexts.
• Help students recognize similarities and differences between contexts.
• Promote learning by understanding rather than just considering the surface level elements of domain.
• Help students apply learned knowledge to the real world.

Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice.

The transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory is an effortful process, accomplished through different strategies. Practice is key to this transfer process. Effective practice involves attention, rehearsal and meaningful repetition. As a result, this knowledge can reach automaticity, allowing for focus on more complex knowledge or skills over time.

Teachers can elicit, encourage and maximize effective student practice by:

• Using reviews and practice testing.
• Providing students with a schedule of repeated opportunities for rehearsing with tasks that are similar or using several methods to approach the same task (interleaved practice).
• Designing tasks with students' existing knowledge in mind.

Clear, explanatory and timely feedback to students is important for learning.

Occasional and inattentive feedback does not help students feel motivated or understand the curricular materials better. Instead, student learning improves with regular, specific, explanatory and timely feedback.

When providing feedback to students, teachers should:

• Be clear about what the students are or are not understanding related to specific learning goals.
• Reference what students need to do to achieve those learning goals.
• Compare and explain any incorrect responses to correct responses from quizzes and practice tests.
• Use positive tone in offering feedback.
• Provide frequent praise following small degrees of improvement when students are learning a new task or struggling with an existing one.

Students' self-regulation assists learning; self-regulatory skills can be taught.

Student self-regulatory skills, such as attention and organization, can help to master materials to be learned. Although such skills may increase over time, they are not subject only to maturation. These skills can also be taught or enhanced.

Teachers can help students learn self-regulatory skills in several ways:

• Clearly present lessons' goals, tasks and criteria for success.
• Break tasks into smaller and meaningful components.
• Exercise adequate practice, processing time and activity for long-term retention.
• Help students identify short- and long-term consequences of their decisions.
• Use cues to increase student attention.

Student creativity can be fostered.

Creative approaches to teaching with increased student engagement and modeling of real-world application can inspire a zestful learning process. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that creativity is something "you either have it or you don't," creative thinking can be developed and nurtured in students, making it an important outcome of the learning process for both students and educators.

Teachers can foster creative thinking in students by:

• Valuing diverse perspectives.
• Seeing highly creative students as enthusiastic rather than just disruptive.
• Using activity prompts such as create, invent and discover.
• Promoting questioning, challenging prevailing beliefs, making unusual connections, envisioning radical alternatives, and critically exploring ideas and options.
• Providing opportunities for problem-solving in groups.
• Modeling creative thinking.