"To better understand the authors' messages and to prepare our students for the challenges ahead, we at the local level must assume responsibility for learning how to use these `classroom lessons' in our own schools."
-- Brian Bottge, Educational Leadership

A timely complement to John Bruer's Schools for Thought, Classroom Lessons documents eight projects that apply cognitive research to improve classroom practice. The chapter authors are all principal investigators in an influential research initiative on cognitive science and education. Classroom Lessons describes their collaborations with classroom teachers aimed at improving teaching and learning for students in grades K-12. The eight projects cover writing, mathematics, history, social science, and physics. Together they illustrate that principles emerging from cognitive science form the basis of a science of instruction that can be applied across the curriculum.

The book is divided into three sections:

1. applications of cognitive research to teaching specific content areas;
2. applications for learning across the curriculum; and
3. applications that challenge traditional concepts of classroom-based learning environments.

Chapters consider explicit models of knowledge with corresponding instruction designed to enable learners to build on that knowledge, acquisition of specified knowledge, and what knowledge is useful in contemporary curricula.