I was amazed this week when reading about the transfer paradox. I’ve put some chosen excerpts of this article as my No.1 takeaway for this week. You can see them below.

I also really enjoyed Harry Fletcher-Wood’s concise piece on considerations regarding moving learners from novice to expert status. Harry includes in his piece some interesting medical examples, with implications for teachers.

Some immediately actionable changes to multiple choice questions are outlined in takeaway 3. I’ve already applied some of these in writing an upcoming test for my physics students.

Takeaway 4 is an interesting article by Dylan Wiliam about some of the limitations of education research (specific comments made about class size research), with some sensible advice about what edu research can be used for, despite these limitations.

The final three takeaways speak for themselves. That said, I’ll be looking at the intervention outlined in takeaway 7 in more detail. Could this help my Y12 students deal with stress?

Enjoy the read.

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The transfer paradox. When efficient communication of concepts is less efficient

Having my mind blown by the ‘transfer paradox'. Van Merrienboer, J. J., Kester, L., & Paas, F. (2006). Teaching complex rather than simple tasks: Balancing intrinsic and germane load to enhance transfer of learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(3), 343–352.

Here's how they suggest getting around this challenge

However, there's a key point here. the cognitive space that you free up through your load reduction instruction MUST be utilised to increase germane load.

Here are some great questions to consider when you're trying to do this.

And here are some studies that used prompts, problem type description, and infrequent feedback in order to do this. I'll be checking these out

This idea of using freed up cognitive space for more purposeful and targeted schema building on the part of my learners has prompted a lot of thinking for me. Looking forward to diving more into the nitty gritty of how to do this!

Supporting learners to move from novice to expert, via @HFletcherWood

Considerations for writing good multiple choice questions

(Note: The full 12 page summary of research on multi-choice Qs is here)

What's education research good for? via @DylanWiliam and @the RSAorg

How can calling a task a ‘draft' increase academic risk taking? via @ddmeyer

Fifty writing prompts to get your students thinking, via @edutopia

An intervention that could help students deal with the stresses of Y12

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