Principles of learning and their application to instruction
Henk G. Schmidt

The last 20 years have seen a remarkable increase in our understanding of how people learn. These ideas have matured now to an extent that they are directly applicable to the teaching and the learning in higher education. However, despite these new developments, teachers tend to prefer the lecture-book-examination “trias” over perhaps more effective methods. The workshop will outline and illustrate five principles of learning and their translation into instruction. These ideas center around concepts such as the role of prior knowledge, knowledge construction, elaboration, context specificity of learning, and organization of knowledge. All these ideas will be illustrated with examples.