Thinking and Learning

Principle 1: Students’ beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning

Students who believe that intelligence and ability can be enhanced tend to perform better on a variety of tasks and in problem-solving situations.

Sample tips for teachers

Teachers can foster student beliefs that their intelligence and ability can be developed through effort and by applying different strategies:

• Positive messages about people with disabilities (or other demographic groups to which students belong) and self-affirming activities, may help counteract students’ negative self-perceptions due to stereotypes about factors such as their race or disability status, and may in turn increase academic performance.
• Make sure the content of praise is tied to effort or successful strategies and not ability.
• Unsolicited offers of help by a teacher, especially when other students do not receive help, and sympathetic affect from a teacher following student failure can be interpreted by students as indirect and subtle cues about low ability.

Principle 2: What students already know affects their learning

Students come to classrooms with preconceived knowledge based on their everyday experiences, social interactions, intuitions, and what they have been taught in other settings and in the past. Accordingly, learning consists of either adding to existing knowledge or transforming or revising knowledge.

Sample tips for teachers

Teachers can be instrumental in achieving both growth and change in a targeted manner:

• Provide accessible instructional materials (e.g., audio books, assistive technology to support reading like screen readers) for students with disabilities that impact language and reading print.
• When considering why students were unsuccessful, teachers should encourage students to reflect on what worked and how to advocate for accommodations and tools they need to succeed (e.g., text to speech or tactile drawings). The reflection should focus on how to change their learning environment rather than negative attributes about the student.
• To identify misconceptions held by the student, teachers can engage their students in activities that tap into their curiosity and increase their interest in the topic by asking questions, defining, summarizing, synthesizing, applying concepts, and participating in hands-on activities.

Principle 3: Students’ cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development

Student reasoning is not limited by an age or a grade level. Students are capable of higher-level thinking and behavior when (a) there is some competency for knowledge in the domain, (b) they already have some familiarity or expertise with a knowledge domain, (c) they interact with more capable others or challenging materials, and (d) in contexts with which they are familiar through experience.

Sample tips for teachers

In designing instruction, teachers can facilitate the advancement of student reasoning in the following ways:

• Encourage students’ reasoning in familiar areas—that is, in domains and contexts in which students already have substantial knowledge.
• Use groupings whereby students are placed in mixed-ability groups to allow for interaction with higher-level thinkers in learning and problem solving.
• Teachers can gain information from family members that might aid in understanding students’ out-of-the classroom functioning and learning.

Principle 4: Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated

Learning occurs in context. Contexts can consist of subject matter domains (e.g., science), specific tasks/problems (e.g., a textbook problem to solve), social interactions (e.g., caretaking routines between a parent and child), and situational/physical settings (e.g., home, classrooms, museums, labs). Hence, for learning to be more effective or powerful, it needs to generalize to new contexts and situations.

Sample tips for teachers

Teachers can support students’ transfer of knowledge and skills across contexts—from highly similar to highly dissimilar. This is best done by the following:

• Consult with the individualized education program (IEP) team, parents, and caregivers for appropriate goal setting, breakdown of learning steps, and strategies over time that work before introducing new methodologies and concepts.
• Build on strengths that students bring to a learning situation, thereby making connections between students’ current knowledge and skills and the teachers’ learning goals.
• Acknowledge that each student with some disabilities might need sensory input and support to be successful in learning about multiple contexts.

Principle 5: Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice

Practice is key to the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory in at least five ways. Evidence demonstrates (a) increased likelihood that learning will be long-term and retrievable, (b) enhanced student ability to apply elements of basic knowledge automatically and without reflection, (c) skills that become automatic free up students’ cognitive resources for learning more challenging tasks, (d) increased transfer of practiced skills to new and more complex problems, and (e) gains often bring about motivation for more learning.

Sample tips for teachers

Effective methods of implementing practice in the classroom include:

• Enhance the value of testing, or any kind of practice exercise, by conducting them at spaced intervals and giving them frequently.
• Design tasks with students’ existing knowledge in mind.
• Ensure student learning is reinforced during extended school breaks.
• Provide family members with concrete examples and activities to set test-taking expectations and to practice at home.

Principle 6: Clear, explanatory, and timely feedback to students is important for learning

Learning can be increased when students receive regular, specific, explanatory, and timely feedback on their work. Feedback is most effective for students with disabilities when it describes the gap between their current performance and the goal for their desired performance, and provides cues for how to close that gap.

Sample tips for teachers

• Feedback can be accompanied by relevant learning goals that tell students what they are (or are not) understanding and the strength of their performance. It is ultimately important that students with disabilities participate in and learn to set personal goals for their learning.
• It is useful to provide students with disabilities with guided practice in strategies that they can use to improve their work and reach their goals.
• Feedback is even more effective when it describes what students can do in the future when they achieve those goals.
• When students are learning a new task or struggling with an existing one, frequent praise following small degrees of improvement is very important, and when progress is evident, encouragement to persist can matter a great deal.

Principle 7: Students’ self-regulation assists learning, and self-regulatory skills can be taught

Self-regulatory (or executive function) skills, including attention, organization, self-control, planning, and memory strategies, enable students to learn efficiently and effectively. This principle is particularly important for teachers of special education students because many the diagnostic criteria for common disabilities include self-regulatory skills (e.g., inattention and impulse control are criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)). These skills allow students to arrive prepared, follow instructions, attend to the teacher, and ignore distractions.

Sample tips for teachers

The classroom environment itself can also be organized to enhance self-regulation.

• Break down tasks into smaller “chunks” and clearly spell out the criteria for successful task performance.
• Help students identify and evaluate short- and long-term goals for performance or consequences to their decisions.
• Use cues to alert students that important information will follow, especially when introducing a new concept.
• Gain additional strategies from family members of what works in the home environment that might be used within the school setting.

Principle 8: Student creativity can be fostered

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that creativity is a stable trait (you either have it or you don’t), creative thinking can be enhanced and nurtured in all students, making it an important outcome of the learning process for students and educators. Moreover, creative approaches to teaching can inspire enthusiasm and joy in the learning process by increasing student engagement and modeling real-world applications of knowledge across domains.

Sample tips for teachers

A variety of strategies are available for teachers to establish classroom environments that are conducive to creative thinking in students, including:

• Encourage openness to diverse perspectives during discussions, reinforcing that perspectives from all students are clearly valued and welcomed in the classroom.
• Orchestrate special classroom activities where rules are allowed to be broken or students can generate their own rules. Such activities might give students opportunities to experience creativity and teach them how to cope with novel and unexpected challenges.
• Be aware that highly creative students are often seen as disruptive; however, student enthusiasm can be channeled into solving real-world problems or taking leadership roles on certain tasks.
• Model creativity. Teachers are powerful models, and as such, they should share with students their own creativity—including the use of multiple strategies to solve problems across various aspects of their lives.

For further explanation and additional tips for teachers, download the full report .