Library / Professional
Learning science
How learning actually works — memory, attention, transfer, motivation, and the evidence behind them. The foundation shelf.
Why this shelf
Every other shelf here assumes an answer to how people learn. This one makes that answer explicit, so the rest can be argued with.
Book
How People Learn — National Research Council, 2000
The consensus document the field still argues against, which is the mark of a good one. Prior knowledge, metacognition, and transfer set out before any of it was fashionable.
Book
The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences — R. Keith Sawyer, 2006
The reference I go to when I need to know what a whole subfield thinks, not what one author argues. Useful precisely because it is not a single voice.
Book
Why Don't Students Like School? — Daniel T. Willingham, 2009
Nine cognitive principles explained without condescension, each one tied to a classroom decision. The chapter on why thinking is slow and effortful changed how I sequence a task.
Best door inBook
Make It Stick — Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III & Mark A. McDaniel, 2014
The clearest case that the study habits which feel productive are usually the least effective. Retrieval, spacing, and interleaving, with the discomfort named honestly.
Book
The ABCs of How We Learn — Daniel L. Schwartz, Jessica M. Tsang & Kristen P. Blair, 2016
26 mechanisms, each with what it is good for and where it fails. The failure notes are the reason I keep it on the desk rather than the shelf.
Book
Understanding How We Learn — Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki & Oliver Caviglioli, 2018
A visual translation of the retrieval-practice literature that a teacher can act on in a week. Proof that a diagram can carry an evidence base.
- How Learning Happens
Book
How Learning Happens — Paul A. Kirschner & Carl Hendrick, 2020
28 seminal papers summarised and then argued with. It taught me to read the original rather than the citation of the citation.
Book
The Scientist in the Crib — Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff & Patricia K. Kuhl, 1999
A reminder that the most powerful learning any of us does happens before instruction exists. It keeps me humble about how much design is really contributing.
Rules
How this shelf is kept
- Nothing is here because it is famous. Several famous things are deliberately absent.
- Every entry carries one line in my own words on why it matters. No publisher blurbs.
- Every shelf names its best door in for a newcomer.
- Anything superseded is removed, not archived.
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