7 High-Impact Learning Strategies You Must Teach Your Students

Strategy 1: Integrating with Prior Knowledge

Students’ minds are not blank slates. Rather, they contain students’ existing understanding of the world around them. Research shows that students encode information better when they connect it to their existing understandings.

So, the first of the seven learning strategies is integrating with prior knowledge.

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It is also important to note that some of your students’ existing understandings may be accurate and some may be faulty or incomplete.

You need to teach students to ask themselves what they think they know about the topic at hand – before they begin to engage with it.

Then, while they engage with it teach your students to ask themselves, how has what I learned:

• Confirmed what I already knew?
• Added to my existing understanding?
• Challenged and changed what I thought I knew?

Researchers often refer to the learning strategy integrating with prior knowledge as elaboration. Sometimes it is referred to as schema activation. And, there are some specific forms of the strategy. For example, summarising what you have already read before reading on.

Learning Strategy 2: Outlining

Outlining involves recording to be learned information in an organised way. Typically, students do this using some form of hierarchy. Such a structure helps students to separate main ideas from their supporting details.

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Students can take notes using the principles of outlining. They do this by using headings, subheadings and a nested bulleting system.

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You can also create outlines using graphical techniques such as mind maps.

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Strategy 3: Transforming

Transforming is the third of our seven learning strategies. As with outlining, transforming involves students in organising information. But when transforming information, students rearrange it in ways that highlight different interrelationships.

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These interrelationships can include comparisons, sequences, hierarchies, patterns, trends and cause-effect.

You can transform information in written form using words such as, but, and, next, because, and so. However, transformations usually involve some form of visual structure. For example:

• Tables
• Venn Diagrams
• Graphs
• Steps
• Timelines
• Concept maps
• + More

Example of Using Tables to Transform Information

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Example of Using Concept Maps to Transform Information

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Learning Strategy 4: Rehearsal & Practice

Students need to move information from their short-term, working memories, to their long-term memories. This includes information about things (declarative knowledge) and information about procedures (procedural knowledge).

To do this, they should make use of rehearsal and practice. And they form the fourth of our seven learning strategies.

Rehearsal can involve flashcards, mnemonics, chunking, going over past notes, memorising lines for a play, and rereading material.

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Practice involves retrieving previously learned information and applying it to the question/task at hand. Retrieval practice works best when students:

• Don’t refer to prompts, notes or textbooks – except when marking
• Space their practice sessions out over time

One recent meta-analysis found that retrieval practice had an effect size of 0.55 larger than rehearsal.

Strategy 5: Problem-Solving

Teaching your students problem-solving skills has a high impact on their results. So, problem-solving makes it in this list of seven potent learning strategies.

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This starts with teaching your students the general problem-solving process. There are several different versions of this process, but they are all based on Polya’s 4 steps.

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Then, there are specific strategies that you can use within this process. For example, in mathematics, students could use a combination of these strategies:

• Paraphrase the question
• Eliminate extraneous information
• Create an orderly list
• Apply a formula or procedure
• Find a pattern
• Reason & Logic
• Draw a picture
• Work backwards

Learning Strategy 6: Help-Seeking

This one needs little explanation. Students do better when they seek out help from other people, including:

• Their teacher/s
• Peers
• Other knowledgeable adults

Yet, despite being easy to understand, many students do not do it. Teaching them the importance of seeking help leads to more help-seeking and better results.

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Strategy 7: Asking for Feedback

You should always find opportunities to give your students feedback. Giving feedback is both an evidence-based and a high-impact teaching strategy.

But, feedback as a learning strategy has a different twist. It is about your students asking for feedback before receiving it. Research shows that students achieve 42 percentile points better when they regularly ask for feedback.

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Furthermore, the mindset of students seeking feedback matters too. Students who believe that their performance is the result of their own actions or inactions are more likely to use feedback constructively.