Join Us This Summer in Boston for a Hands-on Workshop

From July 26 - 29, 2027, Learning & the Brain is offering a Summer Institute on the campus of Boston University.

Why do students sometimes struggle to pay attention—even when they want to learn? Why does an explanation that seems perfectly clear to the teacher leave some students confused? And why do students forget material they appeared to understand just a few days earlier?

Research in cognitive psychology offers valuable insights into these familiar classroom challenges. But making sense of that research—and deciding how to use it—requires more than a list of teaching strategies.

In this week-long, interactive institute, we'll explore three essential dimensions of learning: attention, working memory, and long-term knowledge. Along the way, we'll examine the role of schemas in helping students understand new ideas and connect them to what they already know.

Throughout the week, we'll consider both what researchers have discovered and what their findings might mean for teaching. We'll also practice evaluating research claims with an appropriately skeptical eye: learning to distinguish well-established findings from intriguing possibilities and educational hype.

Our Three Main Areas of Exploration

• Attention: Getting and Keeping Students' Focus. What does it really mean to pay attention? Why do students sometimes struggle to focus, and what can teachers do about it? We'll explore the science of attention—including alertness, orienting, and executive attention—and consider its implications for classroom learning.
• Working Memory: Understanding the Limits of Mental Effort. Why can a seemingly straightforward task overwhelm some students? How can explanations, instructions, and assignments unintentionally make learning harder? We'll investigate the limits of working memory and consider ways to manage cognitive demands without sacrificing intellectual challenge.
• Long-Term Memory and Schemas: Building Knowledge That Lasts. How do students connect new information to what they already know? What makes some knowledge easier to understand, retrieve, and use? We'll explore schemas, encoding, retrieval practice, and consolidation—and consider how these processes can inform lesson design.

Throughout the institute, participants will connect these ideas to their own teaching contexts, from elementary school through college. Discussions, demonstrations, collaborative activities, and opportunities for lesson analysis will help us bridge the gap between research findings and classroom decisions.

Join us this summer and reimagine how learning happens! This institute is hands-on and is limited to 50 participants.