More than a decade ago, I reviewed the The Science of Learning, a slim report published by the then-new advocacy group Deans for Impact. At the time, it felt like an intervention, nearly an epiphany. Teacher preparation had long been dominated by progressive education theory and pedagogy, and many of the report’s core claims—that memorization matters, prior knowledge shapes learning, practice improves retention, and “skills” like critical thinking depend on what you know—were far from universally accepted. A newly released second edition arrives under very different circumstances.
What’s striking is not how much the report has changed, but how little. It’s nearly doubled in length, but its organizing questions—How do students learn and retain new information? What motivates them to learn? What are some common misconceptions?—remain largely intact. Core insights about knowledge, memory, motivation, transfer, and learning endure. The report has been expanded, updated, and refined, but it hasn’t been fundamentally rewritten.
That’s precisely the point. The durability of its original framing suggests that the field has (or ought to have) learned something important over the last decade: The science of learning is not another fad or passing enthusiasm destined to be replaced by the next education trend. The central insights remain as relevant and enduring today as they were when Deans for Impact first published the report in 2015.
In some respects, its greatest achievement may be that it no longer feels especially controversial. Ten years ago, many educators derided “rote memorization” as a relic of an earlier era, to be replaced by student-directed projects and discovery learning. Knowledge was often subordinated to skills. “Critical thinking” was frequently discussed as though it were a transferable skill that could be taught independently of content. On the contrary, one of the central findings of cognitive science is that students cannot think critically about what they do not know—and that deep understanding rests on a foundation of effortlessly retrieved knowledge that’s stored in memory. Broadly speaking, though, cognitive science remained a boutique concern for nearly a decade, occupying a relatively small corner of the education conversation.
Today, concepts such as cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, prior knowledge, and worked examples are widely discussed among educators. The science-of-reading movement has brought many of the report’s core assumptions into the mainstream, and knowledge-rich curricula continue to gain traction. Explicit instruction is no longer something educators feel compelled to whisper about or embarrassed to champion.
No single organization deserves credit for these shifts. But at least some credit should go to Deans for Impact, which played an important role as an early translator of cognitive science research, helping bring key findings to teacher preparation programs.
The second edition reflects the organization’s maturation. It places greater emphasis on common misconceptions about learning and spends more time addressing implementation pitfalls. If the original report was a concise introduction to what cognitive science tells us about learning, the new edition reads more like a field guide informed by a decade of watching educators attempt to put those ideas into practice. That evolution reflects a larger shift in the field itself. When the first edition appeared, the challenge was changing minds. Today, the challenge is changing institutions.
That remains uphill work. If you prefer to see the glass half full, the National Council on Teacher Quality has just reported that the share of elementary teacher preparation programs aligned with scientifically-based reading instruction has doubled since 2023. More than half such programs now earn top marks for preparing future teachers to teach reading using methods grounded in research. That’s no small accomplishment.
Half-empty? That means nearly half of teacher preparation programs still fall short, with one-in-five earning a failing grade from NCTQ. That’s a lot of bad training still finding its way into American elementary classrooms. Many programs continue to devote insufficient attention to foundational content knowledge in subjects like science, social studies, and mathematics. They spend more time on pedagogy than on the content teachers are expected to teach.
The challenge facing education is not a lack of evidence. In many cases, we know more than ever about how students learn. The challenge is translating that knowledge into the routines, systems, and structures that shape teachers’ daily work.
The second edition of The Science of Learning inadvertently highlights this reality. It repeatedly emphasizes principles that few serious observers would dispute: students learn by connecting new information to prior knowledge; memory is essential to understanding; practice strengthens learning; and expertise develops gradually through sustained effort.
The more daunting question is why institutions often resist acting on those insights. Fordham’s recent survey of teachers found something both surprising and sobering: Teachers who relied most heavily on their pre-service preparation for their knowledge of the science of reading demonstrated weaker knowledge of it than peers who credited professional development, classroom experience, or curriculum-based learning. The science is gaining ground, but many aspiring teachers still appear to learn its lessons despite their teacher-prep programs, not because of them.
Suffice to say that Deans for Impact’s project remains unfinished. The first edition of The Science of Learning arrived when the challenge was persuading educator-preparation programs to take learning science seriously. The second arrives when the challenge is ensuring that these ideas are embedded deeply enough in enough institutions that they become the norm rather than the exception.
