Creating a problem context means to explicitly tie the learning environment to a problem to be solved (ie to see how wide you need to build these building supports, you need to understand the physics affecting the building you're designing). The benefits of imposing a problem context onto a learning environment are three-fold.
- Cognitive psychology research demonstrates that people are intrinsically fascinated by and motivated to solve problems.
- Heightened cognitive engagement and attention facilitated by a problem context has been shown to improve retention ability
- Establishing an immediately relevant context to learning environments improves the ability of students to transfer information to novel problem contexts

University of Chicago

Cook and Klipfel's review of the educational psychology literature identifies 5 main principles of efficient teaching to the ends identified earlier in the paper. These 5 principles are points that educators should aim to employ as often as possible with their students in order to most efficiently enable them to retain and transfer information. Although Cook and Klipfel acknowledge that students are different from one another and have different preferences, their interpretation of the educational psychology literature is that students ultimately have more in common than they don't; ergo, these principles should work well to help most students.

The first three principles pertain to improving student retention of new knowledge while the last two principles pertain to improving student transfer of new knowledge.

5 Foundational Principles for Educators

1 Create a Problem Context

The quotation marks are my own addition. This principle taps into a few main concepts in cognitive psychology. Each of these concepts have many papers attributed to each of them individually, but I've decided to give a very short summary of each in order to justify the authors' conclusions.

- Cognitive Load Theory: there is an upper bound to how many pieces of information one can keep in mind to the end of problem solving.
- Information Overload: when people are presented with too much relevant information, they struggle to use any analytical tools and will often instead turn to analytical "coping mechanisms" such as tuning out.
- Working Memory Theory of Learning: in order for information to be learned (and retained) information needs to first be processed by one's working memory before it can be processed by their long-term memory. Therefore, if there is too much information for working memory to hold all at once, there is no chance that it will be saved in long term memory.

Students learn more when educators teach "less" and focus on teaching fewer things. Cook and Klipfel advise educators to write down a list of possible outcomes for students after receiving a given lesson, (ie Students learn A. Students learn B. Students are prepared to learn about C) and choose the top 2 or 3 that they will focus on. Other outcomes can be used to direct discussion, but the educator would ideally focus the entire lesson on just a few outcomes at maximum.

2 Do "Less"

The cognitive science literature agrees that stories are "psychologically privileged". We have a better long-term memory relating to stories than any other kind of information. Therefore, narrativizing teaching methods maximize potential for information retention and transfer. Cook and Klipfel focus on two such methods.

- Narrative Modeling: educators can explain how one would work through a problem/circumstance if they were in a given context (ie being assigned an assignment that your students have just received). This often looks like "I thought about if I were in your position and had to write this paper and how I would x, y, z."
- Storytelling: material is perceived as more interesting if presented as a story, with historical figures/scientists presented as characters.

The authors are confident that educators should, in all disciplines, communicate course material to their students in the form of stories. However, there is something notable about how stories ought to be told; they have to be interesting. If a teacher tells a boring story, it will be jettisoned from their audience's memory as if they hadn't tried this technique at all.

3 Build a Narrative

For something to be truly learned (in pedagogical terms), it must not only be assimilated but then applied to new contexts and situations. The classroom is the optimal environment for students to practice and repeat information they've been taught. This is for two main reasons that teachers can and must deliver on:

- Students can feel only slightly more challenged than what they are already capable of
- Students can receive immediate and constructive feedback

"Active learning exercises", where students are asked to use knowledge they have just acquired in new contexts, are the most important measure of mastery in a pedagogical setting. When active learning exercises are designed to engage with the deep structure of the content they are engaging with, students are most likely to not only remember but apply what they learn in classroom settings.

5 Active Learning is Practice of Deep Structure

In educational psychology, a distinction is made between "shallow" and "deep" knowledge. Shallow knowledge pertains only to its original context, while deep knowledge can be applied in new contexts and is considered more valuable for learning. For example, knowing how to use a single kind of database is shallow knowledge, whereas understanding how databases function in general is deep knowledge. Deep knowledge overlaps significantly with identifying structure over content, and is often interchangeable with structural knowledge or deep structural knowledge in learning science literature. A foundational principle for educators is to focus on deep structure by teaching students the underlying reasons why concepts are true, which facilitates the successful transfer of knowledge to new contexts.

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