On-linee etiquette Gadjets in our life We spend an increasingly large amount of time online these days, personally and professionally. At the end of 2021, Ladders

Learning Strategies

Education has always been a process of trial and error. Since the beginnings of education, educators have experimented with different learning tools, techniques, curricula, and learning strategies to optimize the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Some efforts have been more successful than others, of course. But how many of them are based on science with a robust body of research behind them?

​
To those outside the field the answer may be surprising: the learning strategies in place in most classrooms are not backed by a proven and solid research foundation.
Take the example of “learning styles.” For decades, the notion of “learning styles” has circulated among educators, administrators, and education policymakers. This is the idea that each student has a particular way they learn best, whether visually, verbally, kinesthetically, or in other ways. When instruction is tailored to an students’ learning styles, according to the theory, they learn better. The theory certainly sounds plausible, but no rigorous ​evidence actually supports it. Students do have preferences about what kind of teaching they prefer, but they don’t seem to learn any better in the preferred style. That preference is more likely just a reflection of a preference for something the student already does well, like writing or drawing.
Education research, despite a number of successes, too often falls down this path, theorizing about learning strategies and then implementing them without sufficient study to back them up. 
Going forward, the nation’s education system needs to improve the research and implementation process. The big questions are these: How do we start producing better knowledge about how to best educate our children? And how do we translate this body of research into classroom practice and appropriate learning strategies? This should include education not just in content, but in the practice of learning itself. In other words, students need to learn how to learn as well as learning content. 
Enter our project “Science of Learning: Research Meets Practice.” The goal of the project was to get the science of learning into the hands of teaching professionals as well as parents, school leaders, and students. The Learning Agency and its partners brought teachers and researchers together as a first step toward a tighter and more productive relationship between education research and education practice.