Firstly, it’s right that I credit Adam Boxer and his amazing blog for a lot of the links below. I thoroughly recommend his blog and his Twitter feed.
This is an excellent introductory paper – Deans for Impact: The Science of Learning
The “skills versus knowledge” debate has been a hot one in recent decades. I’ll declare myself a “knowledge” fan for many reasons, not least because I believe (most?) skills to be very domain-specific. An excellent piece on that is by Daniel Willingham, as linked here.
Rosenshine’s “Principles of Instruction” is another must-read.
And here’s an important piece of work by Clark, Kirschner and Sweller called “Putting Students on the Path to Learning”. If you’ve every caught yourself wondering whether group-work is a good or bad thing, or the degree to which pupils should be left to discover stuff for themselves, it provides some excellent insight.
And another blog by Niki Kaiser contains this post which introduces a few key ideas including the cognitive load model.
I’ll add to that by saying there are loads of excellent books, only some of which I have read! My favourites, which I have read are:
- Make it Stick
- Why Students Don’t Like School
- Making Every Science Lesson Count
- What if Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?