Moving from what we know, to what we know works: How one primary school uses cognitive science in teaching and learning

Dan Willingham’s (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School? is the first thing that all staff who work at Willingham (name is a coincidence) Primary School are asked to read. It gives a great introduction to cognitive psychology and raises the question: ‘Why have we always done X this way?’ The answer, on far too many occasions, is: ‘Because we have’. When I completed my psychology degree in 2001, Atkinson and Shiffren’s (1968) multi-store model of memory was already well tested; theories of short-term memory and its limited capacity had been around for 50 years or so (Miller, 1956) and had been developed with theories of working memory (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974). There was growing evidence in the work of Bandura (1961) and others that self-regulation could be influenced by social situations and interactions. Work by the likes of Tulving (1972) and Cohen and Squire (1980) on long-term memory had already built a decent picture about the nature of long-term episodic, proc