ABSTRACT
Learning has a central role in education, as the whole of this book makes clear, in one way or another. In England and Wales the National Curriculum now defines the content of what is taught, and the teaching of literacy and of numeracy in particular are somewhat prescribed, but most of the process of how teaching happens is still largely left up to the individual teacher. Even with this, however, there are signs of increasing direction, with the implementation of the Green Paper proposals (DfEE, 1998f) which introduce evaluation for performance-related pay and professional development. Psychological research about what goes on during learning has established a number of different findings which have important practical implications for teaching, and some of the key aspects of these will be described in this chapter.
