Learning is one of psychology's favourite topics. It is true that the world's top universities, like Oxford, the Sorbonne or Yale, and the secondary schools that feed into them, evolved largely without its help. Now, however, the field is justifiably more competitive and a broader spectrum of students needs to understand a more complex, shrinking and faster-changing world. Stagnant or provincial educational traditions are creaking under the pressure. Psychology, a relatively new discipline, may just be the ticket to help.
Psychology confirms that it is relatively easy to teach facts such as dates, sequences and definitions. Great swathes of such material constitute the backbone of traditional education. What is harder, but infinitely more rewarding, is to inculcate deep understanding, and the ability to think in a structured and disciplined way, like a historian, artist, mathematician or scientist, for example.
This is particularly important in today's world, where specific knowledge can be subject to revision, become quickly outdated or limited to one culture. A range of thinking skills, on the other hand, imparts confidence to cope with and manage change and diversity. A good example of how multi-disciplinary thinking is already happening at the highest levels is the work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won last year's Nobel Prize - in economic sciences.
It is these forms of active, useable modes of understanding that is the way forward for education, according to psychologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity and Being Adolescent. Some call it the difference between deep and surface learning.
A group of teachers tried to incorporate the principles involved in deep learning in a five-year project with a team of researchers at Harvard University. One result was the book, Teaching for Understanding. In it, teachers describe exactly how they went about teaching and testing the sort of thinking skills many psychologists now promote.
Taxonomy, to take one example, is still often taught virtually by rote and examined in what amounts to a memory test. History lessons often involve learning about clusters of events set in a series of stories, and students are tested by writing about units of historical cause and effect, frequently with an emphasis on sequence and accuracy. Deep learning, in contrast, encourages the active practice of 'take-home' thinking skills, or patterns characteristic of each subject domain, rather than the accumulation of inert knowledge.