How Learning Works

Watch

• The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli ↗TED-Ed
• After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver ↗TEDx Talks
• Learning how to learn | Barbara Oakley | TEDxOaklandUniversity ↗TEDx Talks
• How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media | Duolingo's Luis Von Ahn | TED ↗TED
• The Biggest Myth In Education ↗Veritasium
• The Science of Thinking ↗Veritasium

Read

• How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart TeachingSynthesizes cognitive psychology and education research to distill seven actionable principles that explain how students learn and how teachers can design effective learning experiences.Susan A. Ambrose
• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful LearningChallenges conventional study habits by distilling decades of cognitive science into practical techniques that improve retention and transfer of knowledge.Peter C. Brown
• The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of LearningBridges neuroscience and pedagogy to show how understanding brain function can transform teaching strategies and deepen student learning.James E. Zull
• Mindset: The New Psychology of SuccessExplores how beliefs about ability—fixed versus growth mindset—shape learning, resilience, and achievement across education and life.Carol S. Dweck

Voices to follow

• John D. Bransford ↗Co-author of 'How People Learn,' a foundational work on learning sciences.Cognitive psychologist and educator
• Linda Darling-Hammond ↗Renowned for her work on learning theory and effective teaching practices.Education researcher and policy expert
• Richard E. Mayer ↗Pioneer in multimedia learning and cognitive theory of multimedia learning.Educational psychologist
• Barbara Oakley ↗Co-creator of the popular 'Learning How to Learn' course and author on effective learning techniques.Engineering professor and learning science educator

Glossary

• MetacognitionThe ability to think about one's own thinking, understanding how one learns, and planning or monitoring learning strategies for better outcomes.
• ScaffoldingTemporary support provided to a learner to help them achieve a task beyond their current ability, which is gradually removed as competence increases.
• Spaced PracticeA learning strategy that involves distributing study or practice sessions over time rather than cramming them into a short period to improve long-term retention.
• Retrieval PracticeActively recalling information from memory during learning, such as through self-quizzing or flashcards, to strengthen memory and enhance long-term retention.
• SchemaA cognitive framework or mental structure that organizes knowledge, concepts, and relationships, helping learners make sense of new information by connecting it to existing understanding.
• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)The gap between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance or collaboration from a more knowledgeable person.
• ElaborationA learning technique that involves connecting new information to prior knowledge or creating additional details and examples to deepen understanding and improve memory.
• InterleavingA learning strategy that involves mixing or alternating practice on different topics or skills within a single study session to improve discrimination and long-term retention.

Threads 6

Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Typography & Graphic Communication Arts & Design

  Weirdly, an ugly, hard-to-read font can help you remember more. The extra effort of decoding the letters forces your brain to work harder and lock the information in deeper. So a slick, easy design and durable memory can actually pull against each other, a twist researchers call 'desirable difficulty.'

• Language Acquisition Literature

  A toddler soaks up their first language effortlessly, just by being surrounded by it. Yet you sweat through years of classroom drills to learn a second one. The reason is painful: school teaching works against the very immersion, constant real-life exposure, that made you fluent as a baby in the first place.

• Risk, Failure, and Resilience Business

  Protect a system from all stress and it grows brittle; protect a student from all difficulty and their learning gets brittle too. A bit of struggle, like being forced to recall something you almost forgot, is what actually makes knowledge stick. 'Desirable difficulty' is just antifragility, getting stronger from stress, applied to your brain.

• Exercise Science Health

  Muscles grow only when you strain them a little, never from sitting comfortably, and memory works exactly the same. Forcing yourself to recall something you half-forgot is the mental version of lifting a heavy weight. Lazily rereading your notes feels easy, but easy is atrophy: the memory quietly wastes away.

• The Math Behind Machine Learning Mathematics

  Cramming all night lets you nail tonight's practice questions but flop on the real exam, because you memorized instead of learning. Machine learning calls that 'overfitting.' Spaced-out practice feels slower and less productive, yet it's the version that actually sticks for the test, the same fix, called regularization, that stops an AI from just memorizing.

• Games, Play & Interactive Media Arts & Design

  A fractions-game study reviewed by the What Works Clearinghouse used number-line tasks with feedback on answers. It provides a specific way to examine how practice and feedback support learning, and whether performance transfers to an assessment. Evidence for one tested design is not evidence that all games teach effectively.

  Sources: Institute of Education Sciences — What Works Clearinghouse, study 90638 ↗