The Learning Hub Blog

Teachers regularly design learning experiences with the hope that students will think deeply about new ideas, make meaning, and extend their abilities. Yet students often disengage not because they ar...

Last week’s blog zoomed in on the why behind retrieval: when students pull ideas from memory (rather than just re-read), they rewrite their brains for better retention and transfer. This week is all a...

 Cognitive engagement deepens when students reconstruct knowledge through retrieval practice rather than re-read or re-watch material. Testing is one method of retrieval, but retrieval is much more th...

From Theory to Practice

In last week’s blog, When Learning Feels Hard: The Science of Productive Struggle, we explored how moments of effort and uncertainty are not obstacles to avoid but essential c...

Teachers and students often interpret their struggle with content as a sign that something isn’t working. Maybe the directions weren’t clear enough, the task was too complex, or the scaffolds were ins...

Last week, we explored the difference between behavioral and cognitive engagement—between being busy and actually learning. This week’s focus is on practical moves for the classroom. These are “Use-It...

Teachers often equate a quiet, compliant, and industrious classroom with learning. Students appear attentive, complete their work, and respond when called on. These contribute to a well-managed classr...

When David Ausubel described obliterative subsumption, he reframed forgetting as something other than failure. According to his theory of meaningful learning, new knowledge doesn’t float around in iso...

“Most of what we learn meaningfully is not lost but transformed.” — David P. Ausubel, The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning (1963)

When David Ausubel introduced his theory of meaningful ve...

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: a proficiency scale isn’t just a scoring tool. It’s the blueprint for how we design instruction and assessments that let us certify learning at specific levels. When...

A proficiency scale is often wrongfully considered a tool to help change grading practices. This might be because they are often considered a necessity for implementing standards-based grading practic...

“Classroom assessment [is] anything a teacher does to gather information about a student’s knowledge or skill regarding a specific topic,” Marzano, R. (2010)

In competency-based education (CBE), asse...