Over at the Creating Passionate Users blog there’s a great (lengthy!) post about ‘learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science’. When I started reading it I thought it was going to be a re-hash of things I’d heard before, but it actually gives some genuine insights and great advice. The topics it covers are:

• Talk to the brain first, mind second.
• Learning is not a one-way “push” model.
• Provide a meaningful benefit for each topic, in the form of “why you should care about this” scenario.
• Use redundancy to increase understanding and retention.
• Maintain interest with variety and surprise.
• Use conversational language.
• Use mistakes, failures, and counter-intuitive WTF?
• Use the filmaker (and novelist) principle of SHOW-don’t-TELL.
• Use “chunking” to reduce cognitive overhead.
• Since stress/anxiety can reduce focus and memory, do everything possible to make the learner feel relaxed and confident.
• Use seduction, charm, mystery to build curiosity.
• Use a spiral model to keep users engaged.
• Don’t rob the learner of the opportunity to think!
• Use the 80/20 principle to reduce cognitive overload.
• Emotion matters!
• Never underestimate the power of FUN to keep people engaged.
• Use stories.
• Use pacing and vary the parts of the brain you’re exercising.
• Remember, it’s never about you. It’s about how the learner feels about himself as a result of the learning experience.

My favourite of these is the argument about introducing ‘redundancy’:

The example above shows the same thing being presented in three different ways. It’s something which I’ve tried to do (when I have remember and have time) in my teaching, ever since realising that I was, at times, not taught in a way that I learn best when I was at school/university. I tend to learn best from a combination of diagrams with detailed explanations. Others may learn best from bullet points with diagrams. What’s important is that the learner is presented with a number of ways of understanding and remembering information.

I also like the section about ‘chunking’ information. It’s something I’ve heard about but never really consciously planned for in my teaching:

Remember, we have very little short-term memory (RAM) in our heads. The standard rule is that we can hold roughly 7 things before we must either commit some of it to long-term storage or toss it out to take in something new. And the things you hold in short-term memory vanish as soon as there is an interruption. You look up a phone number, and as long as you repeat it to yourself and nobody asks you a question, you can remember it–usually just long enough to dial the number. By the time you finish talking to the person on the other end of the line, the number is long gone.

Chunking takes fine-grained data/facts/knowledge and puts them into meaningful or at least memorable chunks to help reduce the number of things you have to hold in short-term memory, and increase the chance of retention and recall.

I suppose that this ability, or the amount of information contained within those ‘7 things’ increases with age. So 11 year-olds may be able to hold 7 simple facts whereas 16 year-olds may be able to hold 7 fairly complex statements. It’s worth bearing in mind! 8-)

So have a look – it’s worth a visit even if you’ve heard about these things before. There’s no harm in being reminded about good practice! :d