It’s Time for Learning Science to Drive Education Policy
It’s time to embed learning research into policy, according to a new report. Pulling from neuroscience, psychology and brain science, among other disciplines, learning scientists have found, for example, that learners have to “actively engage in constructing new knowledge and skills,” best done through a “dynamic interplay of emotion, motivation and cognition.” And once something’s learned, students need to be able to move that information from their “working memory” to their “long-term memory,” a process that can be helped along by the teacher who guides them through making connections from what’s newly learned to “prior knowledge” and the use of “appealing examples that demonstrate the usefulness for solving real-life problems.”
