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

Educators can most helpfully use their classroom time with students to addressing a problem context within an engaging narrative. This narrative and problem context should be designed such that each exercise engages as few new concepts at a time. Students should be tasked with actively applying new structural concepts in order to be better prepared to apply their knowledge in new contexts. When possible, students should receive immediate and constructive feedback.

Conclusions of Learning Science for Practical Application

This article is split into several discrete sections:

- Identifying the goals of educators through the case study of information literacy educators
- 5 foundational principles to guide educators grounded in research and cognitive theory
- The authors' conclusions

University of Chicago

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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