The Learning Scientists review: the study advice worth printing

The Learning Scientists translates cognitive-psychology research into classroom materials. Its six-strategy collection offers posters, slides, bookmarks and prompts for retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, elaboration, concrete examples and dual coding. You can get a usable lesson starter without making pupils install an app.

Principles are not a magic timetable

Retrieval practice asks a learner to bring knowledge to mind rather than reread it; spacing distributes that practice over time. Those are actionable ideas. The site supplies an accessible poster and presentation for each strategy, and its downloads page also links to versions in other languages.

Crucially, the authors caution that their resources do not fix every educational problem and cannot predict a student's grades. That honesty makes the advice more credible. A poster on the wall has no effect if the learner still spends every revision session passively highlighting notes.

Use the licence as written

The Six Strategies materials carry a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives licence. Schools may share them with attribution for educational use; they may not redistribute edited versions. If you want a localised worksheet, make a separate one rather than removing or changing the authors' original poster.

• Start with one strategy, such as a short low-stakes recall task at the start of class.
• Return to it later so spaced practice is actually spaced rather than taught once and forgotten.
• Share the original resources with credit, and evaluate the pupil's work instead of counting poster downloads.