The 32nd Vernon-Wall Lecture presented at the Annual Meeting of the Education Section of the British Psychological Society Kent’s Park Conference Centre, Milton Keynes in November 2012. 

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Consider the following two lessons about the Tudors. They are, we might suppose, being delivered to two equivalent groups of 14-year-olds in the same school, perhaps even on the same day. In Lesson One, the students start by copying into their exercise books, as quickly and neatly as they can, a swathe of notes projected onto the whiteboard. When they have done that, they are set to read silently a few pages of their history textbook, and the lesson ends with a multiple choice questionnaire designed to assess their factual comprehension of the material they have just read...

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