The Learning Scientists is a community project that has grown organically out of a common passion to share the science of learning with the broader community. We are currently a group of four cognitive psychological scientists who came together after noticing an important problem in our field. As psychologists, we know quite a lot about the basic mechanisms for human learning and the field has moved toward considerable applied research. However, so much of that work lives in journals with paywalls and academic jargon, creating barriers to access for those who might benefit from this applied work.
To address this issue, we host a website (www.learningscientists.org) with a variety of free content for educators, students, and parents. We have a weekly blog that includes brief summaries of research with applied value written by us, guest blogs by researchers and educators, and resource digests. The website also includes downloadable posters in several languages, slides, videos and more. We have a podcast with new episodes approximately once per month, and among us, we have written a number of books including: Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide, Five Teaching and Learning Myths Debunked, and most recently, Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning Better. When requested, we also provide talks and workshops. We have talked to a wide variety of audiences, including students and educators from primary school to higher education and medical education, the US State Department, museums, corporations, and more across the US, UK, and Australia.
We each hold positions in Higher Education and engage with the Learning Scientists as a side project and labor of love. One of our core values throughout our work is that we do not advertise and do not promote work that is not clearly evidence-based. We want to be trustworthy with the community of people we aim to serve, and we therefore carefully consider recommendations before we make them. Below, we highlight some of the things we’ve learned during the 8ish years that we have operated as the Learning Scientists.
Some things work better than others
Throughout our time as The Learning Scientists, some things have been more successful than we could have imagined, while others have been flops. Social media is where we got our start, and after our success on Twitter (X; current followers: 30,000+), we attempted a number of other platforms to try to share our message. Some have been reasonably successful (e.g., Facebook), while others failed miserably (e.g., Tumblr). If you want to interact with the broader community, you must be willing to go out there and find them in a way that works for you and for them. You also need to be adaptable to the shifting landscape of social media. As platforms gain or lose popularity, we will need to see what is easy for us to maintain, and what our community of educators, teachers, and students prefers.
Because of our commitment not to advertise, we made the decision to use Patreon to fund our podcast editing and to keep the website and newsletter afloat, and this has worked out well for us. On Patreon, we offer exclusive content for our supporters at various levels of support. This is also a delicate balance of choosing what level of interaction we can maintain, and what level of interaction our supporters feel is worth supporting. Patreon is another way in which we can build a community and interact with people who are interested in learning more about the science of learning. We’re able to operate without worrying about how we will continue to do so.
One of the lessons we learned early in our Learning Scientists journey is that burnout is real, and you have to find balance in your strategy. Early on, we had multiple posts per week, plus a research agenda with multiple grants, the podcast, talks and workshops, and all the content production. We were pouring ourselves into the project and that may be part of the reason that it took off. However, we eventually realized that this was unsustainable in the long term. We reduced the number of posts and content production and have been happily putting out content without burning out.
Talk with your audience, not to them
Early in our work, we were excited about disseminating science. We wrote pieces and gave talks where we told educators what we thought they should do based on the research and explained why. It was much more of a lecture and less of a conversation. One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned in our time in science communication is that communication is very different from dissemination. Research dissemination is unidirectional. An expert in an area reports on what is happening in that area. Science communication, on the other hand, should be bidirectional, a true conversation. In our work as The Learning Scientists, we’ve learned that listening is sometimes more important than talking. Without listening and having conversations with your audience your message can come off, at best, tone-deaf and, at worst, patronizing. Even if our goal was simply to disseminate what we know about learning, it wouldn’t have done much good if our audience rejected the message because it was delivered poorly.
Aside from simply not wanting to insult your audience, another important reason for bidirectional communication is that your message will be much stronger if you know the person you are talking to. We know from learning research that knowledge builds on knowledge. If we have a better understanding of the current knowledge of the audience, we are more likely to successfully communicate. Additionally, we want educators to be able to apply learning research in their classrooms in a way that is effective. And classrooms can be wild places—educators are simultaneously scaffolding knowledge, managing behavior, tending to social-emotional needs, and organizing a host of paperwork. Recommendations will also change based on the age and material that someone is trying to learn and whether that’s happening in a formal classroom or fieldwork. As The Learning Scientists, we try to understand the unique challenges of the educators we’re speaking with so that we can help them in a way that works for them.
During conversations with educators, we sometimes find that they are hesitant or even resistant to try our suggestions. They might have misconceptions or genuine and reasonable concerns about what will happen when they try a new strategy. Only by listening are we able to slow down and address these concerns. For example, some educators feel like they need to use every evidence-based strategy they have learned about to be an effective teacher. We hear comments like, “I’m not sure how to use dual coding in ___ lesson.” This gives us the opportunity to discuss that every strategy is not optimally useful in every situation, and they shouldn’t feel compelled to use it if it feels contrived. We don’t want to create checklists for educators, such that they have to check x number of boxes at any given moment to be effective. Rather, we want to work with educators to help build a toolbox and foster their use of the tools when it makes sense in their classrooms.
Find your people
We consider ourselves very fortunate to work in the group that we do. Considering that we live in different parts of the globe and have only been in physical space—all four of us together–a handful of times in all these years, we are particularly proud of our collaboration and mutual trust and respect. We are all working moms, cognitive psychologists, and professors. Often, life happens and pulls us away from our work unexpectedly. Between the four of us, someone is always willing to step in and help. We all work hard, meet deadlines, and respect our competing demands. It is precisely because of our communication, collaboration, and mutual trust and respect that we have been able to reach so many educators over the years and continue to promote the use of evidence-based practices throughout the educational community. We hope to continue this rewarding line of work in the future and are looking forward to exploring new ways of science communication in this ever-changing world.