Education Glossary

How Learning Works

Working memory — the small amount of information you can consciously hold and manipulate at once. Overloading it stops learning entirely.

Long-term memory — durable storage. Learning is, operationally, a change here.

Cognitive load — the demand a task places on working memory. Intrinsic load is the material's inherent difficulty; extraneous load is everything else (bad instructions, cluttered slides) and is worth eliminating.

Encoding — getting information into memory. Retrieval — getting it back out.

Retrieval practice (active recall) — deliberately recalling material from memory rather than reviewing it. The most effective single study technique in the literature.

Spaced repetition — spreading study over time rather than massing it. Same total hours, substantially better retention.

Interleaving — mixing problem types within a session instead of blocking them by topic. Feels harder, works better.

Desirable difficulty — a difficulty that slows learning in the moment and improves retention. Explains why the most effective techniques feel the worst.

Elaboration — connecting new material to existing knowledge by explaining, questioning, and generating examples.

Dual coding — pairing verbal and visual information, which uses two partly separate processing channels.

Transfer — applying knowledge in a new context. The actual goal of most teaching, and the hardest thing to produce.

Fluency illusion — mistaking familiarity for knowledge. The reason rereading feels effective and isn't.

Forgetting curve — the decay of memory over time without reinforcement.

Metacognition — thinking about your own thinking; knowing what you do and don't understand. Weak metacognition is why students study the wrong things.

Teaching

Scaffolding — temporary support that's removed as competence grows.

Zone of proximal development — the band between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with help. Where instruction is most productive.

Differentiation — adapting teaching to different readiness levels within one class.

Personalized learning — tailoring pace, path, or content to individual learners.

Direct instruction — explicit, teacher-led, structured teaching. Strong evidence for novices and for procedural knowledge.

Inquiry-based learning — learners investigate questions rather than receiving conclusions. Works well once foundational knowledge exists; poorly before it.

Project-based learning — extended work producing an artifact. Strong for integration and motivation; needs careful structuring to avoid activity without learning.

Flipped classroom — content delivered before class, class time spent on practice and discussion.

Blended learning — combining in-person and online instruction.

Gamification — applying game elements (points, levels, streaks) to non-game tasks. Effective for effort and consistency; less so for depth.

Active learning — any approach requiring learners to do something with the material rather than receive it.

Assessment

Formative assessment — low-stakes checking during learning, used to adjust teaching. Its purpose is information, not grading.

Summative assessment — measuring learning at the end of a unit or course.

Diagnostic assessment — checking prior knowledge before teaching begins.

Exit ticket — a very short end-of-lesson check on the day's material.

Rubric — an explicit description of what each level of performance looks like.

Feedback — information about the gap between current and desired performance. Effective feedback is specific, actionable, and arrives while the work can still change.

Testing effect — the finding that being tested improves retention. Assessment is a learning tool, not only a measuring one.

Curriculum and Structure

Curriculum — what is taught. Pedagogy — how it's taught.

Syllabus / specification — the document listing what a course covers and how it's assessed.

Learning objective — a specific statement of what a learner should be able to do afterwards.

Bloom's taxonomy — a hierarchy of cognitive demand from remembering through to creating. Useful for checking that tasks aren't all at the bottom.

Spiral curriculum — revisiting topics repeatedly at increasing depth.

Prerequisite knowledge — what must already be in place for new material to be learnable.

Learners and Environment

Learning styles — the popular idea that individuals learn better through a preferred sensory channel. Preferences are real; the claim that matching instruction to them improves outcomes has repeatedly failed testing.

Growth mindset — believing ability develops through effort. Effect sizes are more modest than the popular version suggests, but the framing is a reasonable one.

Self-regulated learning — a learner planning, monitoring, and adjusting their own study. Strongly predictive of outcomes and rarely taught explicitly.

Intrinsic / extrinsic motivation — driven by interest in the task itself / by external reward or consequence.

Executive function — the set of skills governing planning, attention, working memory, and impulse control.

Inclusive education — designing teaching so all learners can participate, rather than retrofitting adjustments.

Whole-child education — attending to social, emotional, and physical development alongside academic outcomes.

Technology

EdTech — the category of technology built for teaching and learning.

LMS (learning management system) — the platform hosting materials, assignments, and grades.

Adaptive learning — software adjusting difficulty or path based on performance.

Digital literacy — the ability to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information using digital tools. Distinct from being comfortable with devices.

Screen time — a blunt measure. What's on the screen and what it replaces matters more than the total.

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