According to the majority of educational psychologists, educators have 2 primary measurable goals.

- For their students to master Information Retention; "the ability on the part of the learner to remember, recognize, and recall information presented to them."
- For their students to master Information Transfer; "the ability to take what one has learned in one situation and use it to solve problems in unrelated contexts."

Goals of Educators in terms of Cognitive Psychology

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

Cook and Klipfel's article first identifies information retention and transfer as educational goals, then presents five cognitive learning principles intended to support those goals. Classroom application follows from those principles.

University of Chicago

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Cook, D., & Klipfel, K. (2015). How Do Our Students Learn? An Outline of a Cognitive Psychological Model for Information Literacy Instruction. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 55(1), 34-41. Retrieved January 21, 2021, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/refuseserq.55.1.34

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