Student Development and Learning · 27 min read
How Students Learn
This chapter covers Objective 0002: understanding learning processes and how to help students become active, self-directed learners. You will review the major learning theories (behaviorism, social cognitive theory, information processing, and constructivism), the work of key theorists, memory and study strategies, metacognition and self-regulation, frameworks for higher-order thinking, and the home, school, grouping, and expectation factors that influence how much students learn.
The Big Picture: Four Families of Learning Theory
Learning theories answer the question "What happens when someone learns?" in different ways. Each family has strengths, and skilled teachers draw on all of them.
Four Families of Learning Theory
| Theory family | What learning is | Key names |
|---|---|---|
| Behaviorism | A change in observable behavior shaped by consequences | Skinner, Pavlov, Thorndike |
| Social cognitive | Learning by observing others, influenced by beliefs about oneself | Bandura |
| Cognitive / information processing | Taking in, organizing, storing, and retrieving information | Atkinson and Shiffrin, Miller, Sweller, Paivio |
| Constructivism | Building understanding by connecting new experience to existing knowledge | Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner |
Exam Tip: Many questions describe a classroom practice and ask which theory or principle it illustrates. Look for the key mechanism: consequences point to behaviorism, watching a model points to social cognitive theory, memory and attention point to information processing, and building meaning through activity or social interaction points to constructivism.
Behaviorism and Operant Conditioning
Behaviorism focuses on observable behavior and how environmental events shape it. Ivan Pavlov studied classical conditioning (learning associations between stimuli, such as a student who feels anxious when entering a room where an embarrassing event happened). For classroom practice, the most important behaviorist is B. F. Skinner and his theory of operant conditioning: behavior is strengthened or weakened by its consequences.
Reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement always increases a behavior; punishment always decreases it. Positive means something is added; negative means something is taken away.
Operant Conditioning Consequences
| Consequence | What happens | Effect on behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Positive reinforcement | Add something pleasant | Behavior increases |
| Negative reinforcement | Remove something unpleasant | Behavior increases |
| Positive punishment (presentation) | Add something unpleasant | Behavior decreases |
| Negative punishment (removal) | Remove something pleasant | Behavior decreases |
Common Trap: Negative reinforcement is not punishment. It increases a behavior by removing something unpleasant. Example: a seventh-grade teacher tells the class that anyone who finishes the review accurately will not have to do the homework worksheet. Removing the worksheet (unpleasant) increases careful work. This is one of the most frequently missed concepts on teacher exams.
Schedules of reinforcement. Continuous reinforcement (reinforcing every correct response) is best for establishing a new behavior. Intermittent schedules are best for maintaining a behavior:
Shaping. Shaping means reinforcing successive approximations of a target behavior. A teacher working with a sixth grader who rarely writes more than one sentence might first praise three sentences, then a paragraph, then a paragraph with a topic sentence and details.
Extinction. When reinforcement for a behavior stops, the behavior eventually decreases. Often it first gets worse, called an extinction burst, before it fades. A teacher who begins ignoring a student's call-outs (if attention was the reinforcer) should expect a short increase before improvement.
The Premack principle. The Premack principle, sometimes called "Grandma's rule," uses a more preferred activity to reinforce a less preferred one: "First finish your vocabulary practice, then you may choose your independent reading book." The preferred activity follows the less preferred one.
Classroom Example: A fourth-grade teacher wants students to transition more quickly after recess. She praises specific tables that are seated and ready within one minute and, at unpredictable times, adds a marble to a class jar that earns a group reward. The specific praise is positive reinforcement, and the unpredictable marbles create a variable schedule that keeps students consistently quick.
Exam Tip: Behaviorist strategies are effective for routines, specific skills, and behavior management, but overuse of tangible rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation for tasks students already enjoy (the overjustification effect, covered in Chapter 2.4). The test favors specific, contingent praise and natural reinforcers over heavy reliance on prizes.
Social Cognitive Theory: Bandura
Albert Bandura showed that people learn a great deal by observing others, not only by experiencing consequences directly. His famous Bobo doll studies found that children who watched an adult act aggressively toward a doll were more likely to imitate the aggression.
Observational learning. Bandura identified four processes needed for observational learning:
Modeling. Teachers model constantly, both on purpose (think-alouds, demonstrations) and by accident (how they handle frustration or mistakes). Students are more likely to imitate models who are competent, similar to themselves, and who are reinforced. Peer models are especially powerful in the middle grades.
Vicarious reinforcement and punishment. Seeing a classmate rewarded for a behavior makes observers more likely to do it; seeing a classmate punished makes them less likely.
Self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person's belief in his or her ability to succeed at a specific task. It is not the same as general self-esteem. A student may have high self-esteem but low self-efficacy for algebra. Self-efficacy strongly predicts effort, persistence, and choice of challenges. Bandura described four sources, which you will study more in Chapter 2.4: mastery experiences (the strongest source), vicarious experiences (seeing similar others succeed), verbal persuasion, and physiological and emotional states.
Reciprocal determinism. Bandura argued that personal factors (beliefs, knowledge, feelings), behavior, and the environment all influence one another. A student's low confidence leads to avoiding practice, which leads to poor results and a teacher's lowered expectations, which further lowers confidence. A teacher can intervene at any point in the cycle.
Classroom Example: An eighth-grade algebra teacher shows a short video of last year's students, who look and sound like her current class, explaining how they solved a hard problem after initially getting it wrong. Seeing similar peers succeed after struggling builds vicarious self-efficacy, and their strategies serve as models.
Memory Aid: Bandura's four processes spell "ARRM": Attention, Retention, Reproduction, Motivation. Picture a model reaching out an arm for students to follow.
Information Processing: How Memory Works
Information processing theory, built on the multistore model proposed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin, describes memory as a series of stores that information passes through.
The Information Processing Model of Memory
| Store | Capacity | Duration | Classroom implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensory memory (sensory register) | Very large | Less than a second to a few seconds | Only what receives attention moves on |
| Working (short-term) memory | Small: a few chunks | About 15-30 seconds without rehearsal | Limit new information at once; chunk it |
| Long-term memory | Essentially unlimited | Potentially permanent | Organize and connect knowledge so it can be retrieved |
Attention. Attention is the gateway to learning. Sensory memory takes in a flood of information, but only what students attend to enters working memory. Teachers capture attention with novelty, questions, clear signals, and relevance, and they protect it by reducing distractions.
Working memory. George Miller famously described short-term memory capacity as "the magical number seven, plus or minus two" items. Later research suggests the true limit for new, unrelated information is closer to about four chunks. Either way, working memory is small and easily overloaded. Alan Baddeley's model describes working memory as having a central executive that directs attention, a phonological loop for sounds and words, and a visuospatial sketchpad for images and spatial information.
Encoding. Encoding is the process of moving information into long-term memory in a form that can be retrieved. Strategies that strengthen encoding include:
Schema. A schema is an organized network of knowledge about a topic. Students with rich schemas learn new related information faster because they have more "hooks" to attach it to. Activating prior knowledge at the start of a lesson helps students bring the relevant schema into working memory.
Long-term memory types. Declarative (explicit) knowledge includes facts and events. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something, like solving an equation or shooting a free throw. Conditional knowledge is knowing when and why to use a strategy, an important part of metacognition.
Exam Tip: When a question asks which strategy will most help students remember new content over time, elaboration and meaningful organization usually beat rote repetition. When a question asks why students cannot follow a long set of oral directions, the concept is working memory capacity.
Cognitive Load Theory
John Sweller's cognitive load theory applies the limits of working memory to instructional design. It describes three types of load:
Good instruction reduces extraneous load, manages intrinsic load by breaking complex tasks into steps and building on prior knowledge, and directs effort toward germane processing. Worked examples are one of the best-supported strategies for novices: studying a fully solved problem lets beginners focus on the steps without the load of searching for a solution. As students gain expertise, worked examples should fade into independent problem solving.
Classroom Example: A sixth-grade science teacher notices students struggle with a labeled diagram of the water cycle that has the explanations in a paragraph at the bottom of the page. She redesigns it so each short explanation sits right next to the matching arrow. Students no longer have to search back and forth, which reduces extraneous load, and their quiz scores improve.
Evidence-Based Learning Strategies
Several strategies from cognitive science have strong research support and appear on teacher tests.
Constructivism: Piaget and Learning
Constructivism holds that learners actively build understanding rather than passively receiving it. Piaget's theory explains how this building happens through three processes:
Teachers can deliberately create productive disequilibrium with discrepant events: a demonstration whose result surprises students, such as a heavy steel ship that floats or two objects of different masses that hit the ground at the same time.
Classroom Example: A seventh-grade science teacher asks students to predict whether a large candle or a small candle will burn longer under a jar of the same size. Most predict the large one. When both go out at nearly the same time, students are puzzled and eager to figure out why. The surprise creates disequilibrium that drives investigation of oxygen and combustion.
Social Constructivism: Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and Gradual Release
Vygotsky's social constructivism emphasizes that knowledge is built first between people and then within the individual. Learning happens through dialogue, collaboration, and guided participation. The zone of proximal development and scaffolding, introduced in Chapter 1.1, are central to everyday teaching.
Gradual release of responsibility. The gradual release model, described by P. David Pearson and Margaret Gallagher, applies scaffolding to lesson design. Responsibility shifts from the teacher to the student in stages, often summarized as "I do, we do, you do," sometimes with a collaborative "you do together" step:
Classroom Example: A fifth-grade ELA teacher introduces summarizing. She first summarizes a short article aloud, explaining how she decides what is important (I do). Next, the class summarizes a second article together while she records ideas and asks guiding questions (we do). Then partners summarize a third article using a checklist (you do together). Finally, each student writes an independent summary (you do alone).
Bruner and Ausubel
Jerome Bruner. Bruner, a cognitive psychologist influenced by both Piaget and Vygotsky, contributed several ideas:
David Ausubel. Ausubel emphasized meaningful reception learning: students learn best when new information is clearly organized and connected to what they already know, as opposed to rote memorization of isolated facts. His key tool is the advance organizer, a brief introduction presented before new material that gives students a framework for organizing it. An expository organizer describes the new content at a general level (an overview chart of the three branches of government before studying each one). A comparative organizer links the new topic to something familiar (comparing the circulatory system to a city's delivery system).
Exam Tip: Advance organizers come first, before instruction, and present the big structure. Graphic organizers can be used at any time. If the stem says "before the lesson begins, the teacher presents an overview that relates the new topic to a familiar one," the answer is an advance organizer (Ausubel).
Transfer of Learning
Transfer is the ability to apply learning in new situations. It is the ultimate goal of schooling, and it does not happen automatically.
Near transfer: applying learning to a situation very similar to the one in which it was learned (solving a new problem of the same type).
Far transfer: applying learning to a very different context (using proportional reasoning from math class to adjust a recipe or interpret a map scale).
Positive transfer helps learning in the new situation; negative transfer interferes (a student who learned "multiplication makes bigger" struggles when multiplying by fractions less than one).
Teachers promote transfer by teaching for understanding rather than memorization, using varied examples and contexts, explicitly pointing out connections across subjects, asking students to explain when a strategy applies, and providing practice in authentic situations. Students with intellectual disabilities and some other learning needs often require explicit instruction and practice in multiple settings to generalize skills.
Classroom Example: After teaching percent in a sixth-grade math class, the teacher has students calculate the tip at a restaurant, the discount on clothing, and the percent of their school's students who ride the bus. She then asks, "What's the same about all three problems?" Varied contexts and an explicit discussion of the shared structure promote transfer.
Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning
Metacognition, introduced in Chapter 1.1, includes knowledge about oneself as a learner, knowledge about tasks and strategies, and the regulation of one's own thinking through planning, monitoring, and evaluating.
Self-regulated learning. Self-regulated learners set goals, choose strategies, monitor progress, and adjust. Barry Zimmerman described a cyclical model with three phases:
Zimmerman's Self-Regulated Learning Cycle
| Phase | What students do | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Forethought | Analyze the task, set goals, plan strategies, consider motivation | "I'll outline before drafting and finish by Thursday." |
| Performance (volitional control) | Use strategies, self-monitor, manage attention and time | Checking the outline; using a timer to stay focused |
| Self-reflection | Evaluate results, make attributions, adjust for next time | "Outlining helped; next time I'll start sooner." |
Teachers build self-regulation by modeling planning aloud, giving checklists and rubrics students can use to self-assess, asking students to predict their performance and compare it with actual results, and building reflection into routines (exit tickets that ask "What strategy helped you today?").
Study strategies. Middle schoolers need explicit instruction in how to study. Useful strategies include:
Note-taking systems such as two-column (Cornell-style) notes, with key terms or questions on one side and details on the other, plus a summary.
Summarizing: identifying main ideas, deleting trivial details, and putting ideas in one's own words.
Self-questioning: turning headings into questions before reading and answering them afterward.
Using graphic organizers to see relationships.
Self-testing with flashcards or practice problems.
Organization and time management. Executive function is still developing, so many students need help with planners, binder or folder systems, digital calendars, breaking large tasks into steps, and estimating how long work will take. These skills should be taught and practiced, not assumed.
Student ownership. Ownership grows when students set goals, track their own data, have meaningful choices, reflect on their progress, and participate in conferences about their learning. Students who own their learning are more motivated and more likely to persist.
Classroom Example: An eighth-grade science teacher gives students a graph on which they plot their own quiz scores across a unit. Before each quiz they predict their score and name the strategy they used to prepare. After each quiz they compare the prediction to the result and decide whether to keep or change the strategy. Students learn to connect strategies to outcomes, a core metacognitive skill.
Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles, and Growth Mindset
Gardner's multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner proposed that intelligence is not a single general ability but several relatively independent ones. His list includes eight intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. (He has also discussed a possible existential intelligence.) The practical lesson for teachers is to offer varied ways for students to engage with and show their learning, and to recognize strengths beyond reading and math.
Learning styles. The idea that each student has a fixed learning style (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic) and learns best when instruction matches it is popular but not supported by research. Studies have not found that matching instruction to a student's preferred style improves learning. What does help all students is presenting content in multiple ways, such as combining words and visuals (dual coding), and choosing the format that fits the content (a map for geography, a demonstration for a lab skill).
Common Trap: Gardner's theory is about different kinds of ability, not about matching instruction to a preferred sensory channel. An answer that says "identify each student's learning style and teach only in that style" is a trap. Varied, multimodal instruction for everyone is the defensible choice.
Dweck's growth mindset. Carol Dweck distinguished a fixed mindset (believing intelligence is a fixed trait) from a growth mindset (believing abilities can be developed through effort, good strategies, and help from others). Students with a growth mindset are more likely to embrace challenges, persist after setbacks, and view mistakes as information. Teachers foster a growth mindset by praising process (effort, strategies, improvement) rather than person ("You're so smart"), normalizing mistakes, and teaching how the brain strengthens with practice. Effort alone is not the message; students need effective strategies and support, too.
Classroom Example: When a seventh grader says, "I'm just not a math person," the teacher responds, "You're not a math person yet. Let's look at which strategy you tried and find one that might work better." She then shows the student a worked example and asks him to try a similar problem. The response teaches a growth mindset paired with a concrete strategy.
Thinking Frameworks: Bloom's Revised Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge
Teachers use thinking frameworks to plan objectives, questions, and tasks that require more than recall.
Bloom's revised taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom's original taxonomy of the cognitive domain was revised by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, who changed the categories to verbs and placed creating at the top. The six levels, from lower-order to higher-order, are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.
Bloom's Revised Taxonomy with Middle Grades Examples
| Level | Students... | Example task |
|---|---|---|
| Remember | Recall facts and terms | List the three branches of government |
| Understand | Explain ideas in their own words | Summarize the causes of the water cycle |
| Apply | Use knowledge in a new situation | Use the area formula to find carpet needed for a room |
| Analyze | Break apart, compare, find relationships | Compare two authors' views on the same event |
| Evaluate | Judge using criteria | Decide which experimental design is more valid and defend it |
| Create | Produce something new | Design a solution to reduce cafeteria waste |
Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK). Norman Webb's framework describes the complexity of thinking a task requires, not its difficulty. DOK has four levels: Level 1, recall and reproduction; Level 2, skills and concepts; Level 3, strategic thinking and reasoning; Level 4, extended thinking, usually over an extended period with multiple sources or investigations.
Exam Tip: Bloom's categories are often tied to the verb, but Webb's DOK focuses on the complexity of the thinking the task demands. "Explain" can be DOK 2 or DOK 3 depending on whether students explain a simple relationship or justify a reasoned argument with evidence. A long, difficult computation is still DOK 1 if it only requires following a known procedure.
Higher-order thinking. Higher-order thinking includes analysis, evaluation, creation, problem solving, critical thinking, and creative thinking. All students, including those who struggle and English learners, need opportunities for higher-order thinking with appropriate support. Limiting struggling students to drill and recall is a common and harmful mistake.
Making Content Accessible and Using Technology
Learning theory applies to every student, but teachers must make content accessible to students who face particular barriers. Chapter 1.3 covers exceptionalities and language development in depth; the key learning-process points are these:
English learners need comprehensible input: visuals, gestures, demonstrations, graphic organizers, building on prior knowledge, and explicit teaching of academic vocabulary, while keeping the thinking demands high.
Students with disabilities may need content chunked into smaller steps, explicit modeling, extra practice, multiple representations, assistive technology, and planned practice to generalize skills.
Gifted students need faster pacing, greater depth and complexity, and fewer repetitions of mastered content.
Technology for learning. Technology supports learning when it serves a clear purpose: interactive simulations that let students manipulate variables, collaborative documents for shared writing, adaptive practice programs that adjust difficulty, text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools, digital graphic organizers, and video for modeling. Technology does not improve learning simply by being present. The test favors answers in which technology is chosen because it advances the learning goal, increases access, or provides useful feedback.
Teacher and Student Roles
Different learning goals call for different roles. In direct instruction, the teacher is an expert explainer and model, and students listen, practice, and respond. In inquiry or project-based learning, the teacher acts as facilitator, coach, and questioner, and students investigate, collaborate, and construct explanations. In both cases the teacher remains responsible for clear goals, monitoring, and feedback. Effective teachers shift roles depending on the goal and the students' readiness: modeling a new procedure directly, then stepping back to coach as students apply it.
Exam Tip: "Facilitator" is not always the best answer. For a brand-new procedural skill, explicit modeling and guided practice are usually most effective. For developing conceptual understanding or problem-solving, a facilitator role with structured inquiry often fits better.
Home, School, and Community Factors
Learning is shaped by conditions outside the classroom. The test expects you to recognize these factors and respond with understanding rather than blame.
Poverty: students from low-income families may face food insecurity, unstable housing, limited access to books and technology, crowded study space, and family stress. Poverty is not a measure of a family's care or a student's ability; it is a set of conditions that schools can help offset.
Mobility: students who change schools often may miss content, lose relationships with teachers and peers, and need help filling gaps. Military families, migrant families, and families facing housing instability are especially mobile.
Trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): ACEs include abuse, neglect, and household challenges such as violence, substance abuse, mental illness, incarceration of a family member, or parental separation. Chronic stress affects attention, memory, emotional regulation, and trust. Trauma-informed teaching emphasizes safety, predictable routines, strong relationships, choice, and teaching regulation skills, rather than relying on punitive responses to behavior that may be stress-driven.
Classroom Example: A sixth-grade teacher notices that a new student, who has attended four schools in two years, has gaps in fraction skills but strong reasoning. Rather than placing him in a remedial group for all of math, she gives a short diagnostic, teaches the specific missing skills in small-group sessions, and keeps him in grade-level problem solving with his class. She also pairs him with a classmate to help him learn routines.
Grouping Practices
How students are grouped affects what and how much they learn.
Common Grouping Approaches
| Approach | Description | Considerations |
|---|---|---|
| Whole class | All students together | Efficient for shared introductions; hard to meet varied needs |
| Heterogeneous groups | Mixed readiness levels | Good for cooperative learning; must ensure all participate |
| Homogeneous groups | Similar readiness levels | Useful for targeted skill instruction when temporary |
| Flexible grouping | Groups change based on current data and purpose | Recommended practice; avoids labeling |
| Rigid tracking | Long-term placement in fixed ability levels | Can limit opportunity, lower expectations, and widen gaps |
Research on ability grouping is mixed but points to a clear lesson: short-term, skill-specific grouping based on current assessment data can be effective, while rigid, long-term tracking tends to give lower-track students less challenging curriculum, lower expectations, and fewer chances to move up, often reinforcing differences related to income, race, and language. Flexible grouping combines the benefits of targeted instruction with the opportunity for all students to work with varied peers.
Exam Tip: When a stem asks how to group students for a particular purpose, match the grouping to the goal. Targeted reteaching of one skill suggests a temporary, needs-based group. Discussion of a rich problem or a cooperative project suggests heterogeneous groups. Answers that permanently assign students to "low" groups are rarely correct.
Teacher Expectations and Teacher-Student Interactions
Teacher expectations can influence student achievement. In the well-known Pygmalion study, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers that certain randomly chosen students were about to "bloom" intellectually. Some of those students, especially younger ones, later showed greater gains. Although later research found the effects are usually smaller than first reported, expectation effects are real.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: a teacher's expectation, even if initially inaccurate, changes how the teacher treats the student, and the student's performance comes to match the expectation.
Sustaining expectation effect: a teacher's expectation keeps a student's performance at its existing level because the teacher does not notice or build on improvement.
Teachers may unconsciously treat students they view as low achievers differently: calling on them less, giving less wait time, providing less specific feedback, accepting less, praising less for correct answers, and seating them farther away. Students notice these patterns. Equitable practices include distributing questions fairly (using randomizers or "no hands up" routines), giving all students adequate wait time, providing specific feedback and challenging work to everyone, and checking one's own patterns by reflecting or asking a colleague to observe.
Common Trap: Expectation effects are not limited to academics. Expectations based on a student's older sibling, family reputation, disability label, language, gender, or background can all bias teacher behavior. The test favors answers in which the teacher bases judgments on current evidence about the student.
Classroom Example: A ninth-grade teacher asks a colleague to observe whom she calls on during discussions. The data show she calls on students sitting near the front three times as often as those in the back corner, where several English learners sit. She begins using name sticks and rearranges seating so that every student gets frequent chances to respond.
Key Takeaways
Know the four families of learning theory and their mechanisms: consequences (Skinner), observation and self-efficacy (Bandura), memory and attention (information processing), and constructing meaning (Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner).
Negative reinforcement increases behavior by removing something unpleasant; variable ratio schedules are most resistant to extinction; the Premack principle uses a preferred activity to reinforce a less preferred one.
Working memory is limited, so reduce extraneous load, chunk information, and use worked examples; retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, elaboration, and dual coding build durable learning.
Scaffolding and gradual release (I do, we do, you do) move students from supported to independent performance; advance organizers (Ausubel) and the spiral curriculum (Bruner) build meaningful structure.
Flexible grouping, high expectations for every student, and awareness of home and community factors such as poverty, mobility, and trauma help all students learn.
Study coach
Ask about this chapter
Answers come only from “How Students Learn”. If the chapter doesn't cover it, the coach will say so.
Finished reading?
Lock it in with a quick Student Development and Learning quiz.