If you are a parent of a school-aged child, some version of this recent conversation with my daughter has probably happened to you:

Me: What did you learn in your chemistry class? (replace with whatever subject fits)

High Schooler: Nothing new…

It’s not uncommon for parents to feel uneasy when they see their children spending so much time at school, feeling bored and uninspired.

But let’s consider that view for a second. First, every teacher I know (and I know a lot of them) strives to create engaging and exciting lessons to deliver their curriculum. And while I’m not trying to say that a student’s opinions aren’t valid, teachers plan the best they can to meet their students’ needs.

Let’s take a moment to consider some cognitive science and its implications for education and schools.

As many of you know, I used to be a coach, working as a head basketball coach and an assistant football coach. One of the things I consistently told my players was taken from one of my previous coaches, and it had to do with the two things that every player can control: their attitude and their effort. Even the best motivational speech by a coach will not change a player’s attitude or effort if they don’t strive for their best. The same exists in all aspects of life. We can all control our attitude and our effort.

In education, many people see motivation as something someone does for them – generally, the teacher motivates a student. As a former science teacher, I loved to introduce my students to the spectral salts lab we did by using a Bunsen burner and different salts to change the color of the flame. The wow factor would get kids’ attention through situational interest. But it is not a permanent type of attention, which we might call personal interest. I realized that individual interest is not just a fleeting moment but a crucial factor in sustaining motivation. No matter how many times I changed the color of the flame if personal interest wasn’t there, that student would struggle to learn the scientific concepts.

Situational interest may initially draw a child into an activity. This interest develops when teachers introduce the wow factor. But it’s important to note that motivation, the driving force behind sustained learning, comes from personal interest, a deeper and more lasting form of engagement. This is where educational research comes in to help us understand and foster personal interest in students.

Personal interest is highly correlated to a sense of success. We become more motivated to do something as we become better. There are two main implications of this. First, while it is great for a teacher to focus on making something enjoyable, that does little to build motivation or personal interest. To build motivation, we must create chances for students to find success and feel like they are improving.

The other implication is that motivation is an intrinsic skill that can be developed through choosing the right attitude and exerting effort. As many of you know, I love to cycle. It’s a rare weekend day that I’m not out of my bike on some country backroad in central Indiana. It’s not unusual for me to spend several hours on a ride. However, that wasn’t always true. When I started cycling more seriously, my first rides were typically less than 10 miles and maybe only a little over half an hour. I added miles as I got stronger and felt successful at those distances. I’d feel more successful, so I’d challenge myself more. It felt challenging, but I was motivated by my interest in continually improving. Eventually, I got to a point where I was a strong enough cyclist to ride in the RAIN (Ride Across Indiana). This one-day ride starts in Terre Haute and goes to Richmond, a distance of 160 miles. The training and the ride were both incredibly challenging, but the motivation I had to accomplish something drove me to put forth the effort.

The same is true for learning. Students can use the skills they learn from school to work hard on a subject, which will improve their understanding and increase motivation. But just like training for a long ride, this takes sustained efforts that will feel difficult at times. We need to focus on the success we find as we learn and achieve more.

While people may have personal interests and preferences, they also have tremendous control over their motivation. For this reason, I don’t believe it’s ever appropriate to tell someone, “Oh, you just aren’t a math person.” (Or again, replace math with whatever subject fits best).

So, let’s talk about how educational research ties into all of this. One way that teachers support students’ study skills is through a process called “spaced practice.” Cognitive science supports this concept as a way of learning material. It says that if we want to learn something new, we should break it up over time and return to it regularly rather than trying to learn it all in one block. This is why many of the curriculum resources used in schools these days involve spiral review – this creates a spaced practice that supports brain science around learning.

The other huge effect on learning related to cognitive science is the idea of “retrieval practice.” This concept tells us that once we have learned something, a great way to embed that learning in our long-term memory is to retrieve it from our memory and do something with it.

What does that mean in the classroom? This means that we should constantly return to concepts already taught, which is especially valid in subjects where current learning builds on previous knowledge. Math is an excellent example of this, and it’s also important to think about our essential standards and how we might create spaced practice and retrieval practice of those topics. Thinking about foundational learning skills in the elementary classroom, this is why short mini-lessons on things like structured literacy that move quickly and cycle through multiple skills quickly help our students stay engaged in the learning.

What might this mean for families at home? Instead of spending hours working on something like memorizing letters and sounds or math facts, we might spend 5-10 minutes, possibly a few times a day, and repeatedly return to similar skills. Last year, when helping my daughter learn her Spanish vocabulary, we became huge fans of flashcards. We’d use them to review and create two stacks – the words she knew and the ones we still needed to learn. When we reviewed, we’d spend more time on the words she still needed to learn, but in every session, we’d return to the words she knew. This spaced retrieval practice helped solidify the words in her brain and became a study skill that she could eventually implement independently and with her friends at school. Before long, she no longer needed my support because she had the strategies to help herself learn.

By returning to a topic, we help embed the idea so that our students can use it fluently. In a topic such as learning times tables, we need our students to not just get to the point where they get most things right but to get to a point where they can’t get them wrong.

However, these cognitive learning skills in spaced and retrieval practice sometimes make students feel like they aren’t learning anything new. But that’s what’s supposed to happen! If classes were always teaching students new things, the learning would be highly ineffective, and students would remember very little and apply even less.

It’s important to remember that most of the skills we teach in schools are not concepts that come naturally. Most people will automatically learn to speak and understand the language they are around most, a skill the human brain has evolved to do. But we have not evolved to learn math, reading, or writing. These are skills that require hard work and practice. There is no way to avoid that.

So when students complain that they aren’t doing anything new, help them understand that doing things again and again is how we learn. Just like I never would have been able to ride 160 miles on my first day of cycling, our students are not masters of new learning after one day of practice. There is always room to make sure that what we do is exciting and engaging, but some of that engagement has to be brought by the student in the form of trying their best to learn the new thing.

Our job as a school is to kindle the fire for learning in our students. They have to create a lasting fire.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any connections to how spaced practice helped you learn or improve at something? Could you share with us in the comments below?