Research on Learning and Instruction: Implications for Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

Abstract

There is considerable rhetoric about the need for our educational system to promote deeper learning and the development of 21st-century skills. Missing from the discourse is recognition that much of what we know from research on learning and instruction has yet to affect the design and enactment of everyday schooling in the form of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. This article considers some of the key research-based principles on learning and knowing and their implications for the design of instruction and assessment. Among these principles are differences in naïve and expert forms of knowing and how the latter develops through a variety of instructional methods and materials. Another is the social nature of learning and the classroom instructional and assessment practices that support students taking control of and monitoring their own learning. Incorporating many of the findings from research on learning and instruction into the materials, structures, and practices of everyday schooling involves addressing systemic challenges of practice and policy. These include the development and implementation of curricular and instructional resources that incorporate proven, research-based features, the design of assessment systems that balance and align classroom assessment and system monitoring needs, and more effective approaches to teacher preparation and professional development. The knowledge base to support such changes exists but for research-based educational interventions to move beyond isolated promising examples and to flourish more widely, these larger systemic issues, many of them policy driven, will need to be addressed.