Why the science of learning matters for maths and science teachers

WORDS: Ocean Road Editorial Staff PHOTOGRAPHY pexels-jeshoots-com-147458-714698_1

Ask a class of Year 5s who’s “not a maths person” and a surprising number of hands go up. Ability is rarely the reason. What usually happened is smaller than that: a few early ideas never quite landed, the gaps compounded, and before long the whole subject felt like guesswork. Teaching changes this. There’s now a solid body of evidence on what actually works in maths and science classrooms, and it tends to travel under one name: the science of learning.

What “the science of learning” actually means

Nobody sells the science of learning in a box. It’s the accumulated findings from cognitive science and psychology about how memory and attention operate, then applied in the classroom. One finding sits above the rest. Working memory is small, and it overloads fast. Pile too much on a student at once and they don’t learn more. They learn less, because there’s nowhere to put it.

So the methods that come out of this research are built around that limit. Break new material into small steps. Model each step yourself before students try it. Check that everyone’s followed before you move on, not just the few hands that shoot up. Come back to old material often enough that it stays put.

Explicit instruction, and why it works

Take explicit instruction, the clearest example of the lot. Rather than set a hard problem and hope students stumble onto the method, you teach the method directly, show worked examples, then hand over responsibility bit by bit as they get it. Every student is a novice when a topic is new, and for novices this approach beats discovery-style teaching in study after study. Why? Working memory again. A fully worked example lets a student see the whole path at once, instead of spending all their mental effort just to hold the problem in place.

It sounds obvious written down. In practice it runs against a lot of received wisdom about “letting kids explore,” which is why plenty of teachers were never trained in it.

The reading and maths versions of the same idea

That same evidence base shows up under two more specific names you’ll hear a lot. The science of reading is the research showing that most kids need explicit, structured phonics to decode words, rather than guessing from pictures and context. The science of maths is the equivalent for number: build fluency with number facts and clear procedures first, so working memory is free for the harder problem-solving later.

For a science or maths teacher, the maths version matters most. A student who still counts on fingers for times tables has no spare capacity for algebra. Get the basics automatic and you free the brain up for the interesting stuff. None of that is drilling for its own sake. The fluency is what buys room for everything harder that comes after.

The engagement problem starts earlier than you think

Careers with STEM publishes plenty on getting kids excited about maths, and that’s worth doing. But engagement and instruction aren’t two separate jobs. A student who spends every lesson lost won’t feel curious, however clever the real-world examples are. Competence comes first, and confidence usually turns up somewhere behind it. The teaching that makes students genuinely fluent does more for how they feel about the subject than any amount of enthusiasm bolted on top.

Where teachers can train in the science of learning

Most teachers weren’t taught any of this in their own degree. The research moved faster than initial teacher education did, so a lot of the upskilling now happens after you’re already in the classroom.

The science of learning draws on cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience and educational research to explain how students absorb new information and hold onto it, then turns that into concrete classroom methods. For teachers who want to build these methods into their own practice, ECU Online’s Graduate Certificate in Education includes a dedicated Science of Learning specialisation. Delivered by Edith Cowan University, which has trained teachers since it began as Claremont Teachers College in 1902, the four-unit part-time course covers explicit and direct instruction, the science of reading, the science of maths instruction, and an introduction to the science of learning itself, and is intended for people who already hold a teaching qualification.

Worth being clear on one point. The course is for upskilling existing teachers. You’ll need an initial teacher education qualification to get in. It runs fully online over about eight months, with several intakes a year if the timing’s tight, and the credits stack toward a Master of Education later, so it needn’t be where you stop.

You don’t have to scrap what already works in your room to use any of this. The job is smaller and more honest: hold your current habits against the evidence, then keep what stands up and change what doesn’t. For plenty of maths and science teachers, that’s what moves a class from scraping through to genuinely getting the work.