Related Early Career Framework strands

How Pupils Learn

2.1 Learning involves a lasting change in pupils’ capabilities or understanding.

2.2 Prior knowledge plays an important role in how pupils learn; committing some key facts to their long-term memory is likely to help pupils learn more complex ideas.

2.3 An important factor in learning is memory, which can be thought of as comprising two elements: working memory and long-term memory.

2.4 Working memory is where information that is being actively processed is held, but its capacity is limited and can be overloaded.

2.5 Long-term memory can be considered as a store of knowledge that changes as pupils learn by integrating new ideas with existing knowledge.

2a. Taking into account pupils’ prior knowledge when planning how much new information to introduce.

2c. Reducing distractions that take attention away from what is being taught (e.g. keeping the complexity of a task to a minimum, so that attention is focused on the content).

2e. Linking what pupils already know to what is being taught (e.g. explaining how new content builds on what is already known).

Subject and Curriculum

3a. Identifying essential concepts, knowledge, skills and principles of the subject and providing opportunity for all pupils to learn and master these critical components.

3b. Ensuring pupils’ thinking is focused on key ideas within the subject.

Classroom practice

4f. Starting expositions at the point of current pupil understanding.