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.