UALI Important References

make-it-stick

The following are important references used by all three UA Learning Initiative Programs: Faculty Learning Community (FLC); Student Advocates for Improved Learning (SAIL), and the Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES). 

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning 

Make it Stick outlines principles that help faculty and students understand what is known about how people learn. Namely:

  • “Learning - acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities;
  • Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful;
  • Rereading text and massed practices of a skill or new knowledge are among the least productive study strategies;
  • Retrieval practice - recalling facts or concepts or events from memory - is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading;
  • Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning;
  • All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge;
  • Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning;
  • People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect the model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery; and
  • Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.” (Brown, et al., 2014).

Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

Small Teaching argues that we can look at a small set of principles from the learning sciences in order to create incremental--but very powerful--changes in how we help students learn.

Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning | Lang, J.M., 2016

Small Changes in Teaching: The Chronicle of Higher Education

In this series, James M. Lang highlights some of the concepts discussed in his book, Small Teaching. He states that simple changes in our pedagogy — in things like course design, classroom practices, and communication with students — can have a powerful impact on student learning.

Small Teaching: The Chronicle of Higher Education | 2016

Strengthening the Student Toolbox: Study Strategies to Boost Learning

Dunlosky reports that in his years of research he has discovered learning strategies that have been proven successful and should be part of the "Student Toolbox" to boost learning. This article presents ten learning strategies for students and then expands on their usage.

Strengthening the Student Toolbox: Study Strategies to Boost Learnin | Dunlosky, 2016