Learner Variables¶

Canonical learner characteristics claims report findings about — one page per variable, so the same concept does not fragment across differently-worded tags.

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In Review¶

Jump to: A · B · C · D · E · G · H · I · L · M · N · O · P · R · S · T · V · W

A¶

Academic and Critical Literacy - A learner's command of the ways of reading, writing and reasoning used in academic disciplines and real-world domains, including questioning a text's purpose and bias.
Academic Anxiety - Anxiety tied to learning and assessment in a subject, such as mathematics anxiety, test anxiety and foreign-language anxiety.
Academic Self-Concept - A learner's perception of their own ability in an academic domain, such as how good they think they are at mathematics or at reading.
Access - Whether a learner can perceive and operate the material at all — device, bandwidth, sensory and motor.
Achievement Emotions - Emotions tied to learning activities and their outcomes, such as enjoyment, boredom, frustration, pride, shame and hope.
Achievement Goal Orientation - The purposes a learner pursues in achievement settings: to master the material (mastery goals) or to demonstrate competence relative to others (performance goals), each in an approach or avoidance form.
Adverse Experiences - Events that can cause trauma, such as abuse, neglect, witnessing violence or instability at home, and the chronic stress they leave behind.
Affect Regulation - What a learner does with frustration, anxiety and failure while the work is still in front of them.
Age and Developmental Stage - A learner's age, grade level or stage of development, from early childhood to adulthood, as it bears on what instruction suits them.
Algebraic Thinking - A learner's ability to generalise, represent, justify and reason about mathematical structures and relationships, from patterns in arithmetic to equations and functions.
Alphabet Knowledge and Print Awareness - A young learner's knowledge of letter names, shapes and sounds, and their understanding that print carries meaning and works in particular ways on the page.
Arithmetic Fact Retrieval - A learner's ability to recall basic number combinations, such as single-digit sums and products, quickly and accurately from memory.
Attention - How long a learner can sustain focus on one thing, and how easily something else takes it away.
Auditory Processing - How the brain makes sense of the sounds that reach it through hearing: locating, distinguishing and interpreting sounds, especially speech.
Autism Spectrum Disorder - Autism, a lifelong developmental difference in social communication and in patterns of behaviour, interests and sensory processing, recorded in research by clinical diagnosis or school category; it varies widely between people and is distinct from intellectual ability.

B¶

Belonging - Whether a learner expects to be treated as a full participant in this setting, and how much of their attention that question consumes.

C¶

Civic Mindedness - A learner's sense of themselves as a contributor to their community: attending to others' needs, understanding how civic systems work and affect people, and acting with others toward shared goals.
Collaboration - A learner's ability to work effectively and respectfully with others toward a shared goal: expressing and listening to ideas, compromising and sharing responsibility for the work.
Communication Skills - A learner's ability to express thoughts, ideas and feelings and to understand others, through speech, sign, writing, gesture, drawing or technology, including talking about subject matter such as mathematics.
Creativity - A learner's ability to generate novel and useful ideas, usually measured as divergent thinking: the fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration of ideas produced for an open-ended problem.
Critical Thinking - A learner's ability and disposition to evaluate information and arguments, weigh evidence and perspectives, and reason to a judgement or decision.

D¶

Decoding - A learner's ability to turn written words into spoken words and meanings, by applying letter-sound knowledge to unfamiliar words and by recognising familiar words at sight.
Digital Literacy - Whether a learner can operate the interface the instruction is delivered through, independently of whether they can reach it.
Domain Context - The sector, role or setting a scenario has to be placed in before a learner recognises it as their own.

E¶

Emotional Intelligence - A learner's ability to perceive, understand, use and manage emotions in themselves and others.
English-Learner Status - Whether a learner is still acquiring the language of instruction (an English learner, multilingual learner or second-language learner), as classified by a school system or measured by proficiency tests.
Epistemic Beliefs - A learner's beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing: whether knowledge is certain or tentative, simple or complex, handed down by authority or built from evidence.
Executive Function - The set of control processes, inhibition, working-memory updating and cognitive flexibility, that let a learner direct attention and behaviour toward a goal.

G¶

Gender - A learner's gender as recorded in research data, used to describe differences in participation, attitudes and outcomes and to test whether an instructional effect differs between groups.
General Cognitive Ability - A learner's general reasoning and problem-solving capacity, measured by intelligence or general ability tests, as it bears on learning and on how instruction works.
Geometric Reasoning - A learner's ability to define, analyse and argue about shapes and spatial relationships, up to writing formal geometric proofs.

H¶

Home Learning Environment - The learning opportunities, materials, practices and attitudes a learner's home, family and community provide outside formal instruction.

I¶

Identity - A learner's developing sense of who they are, including the social identities, such as race, ethnicity, gender, culture, language and disability, that shape how they meet the world.
Inferencing - A reader's ability to fill in what a text leaves unsaid by connecting it with background knowledge, experience and other parts of the text.
Interest - A learner's engagement with and liking for a topic, whether a lasting personal interest or interest sparked in the moment by the situation.

L¶

Learning Disabilities and Developmental Differences - Identified learning, developmental and intellectual disabilities (dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities, autism, intellectual disability), and the special educational needs that follow from them.
Learning-Style Preferences - A learner's stated preference for receiving information in one form (such as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic), and the claim that matching instruction to it improves learning.
Long-Term Memory - The memory system that stores knowledge, skills and experiences over hours to decades so they can be retrieved and used later.

M¶

Mathematical Flexibility - A learner's ability to hold and move between several representations of numbers and several strategies, choosing the one that suits the problem.
Measurement - A learner's understanding of measuring: picking out an attribute such as length, area or time and quantifying it by comparison with a unit of the same kind.
Metacognition - A learner's awareness of their own thinking and their ability to monitor and steer it: planning an approach, checking understanding and changing strategy when something is not working.
Mindset - A learner's belief about whether ability or intelligence is fixed or can grow with effort and good strategies (implicit theories of intelligence).
Morphological Awareness - A learner's awareness of the meaningful parts of words (roots, prefixes and suffixes) and ability to use them to read, understand, spell and build longer words.
Motivation - Whether a learner is willing to spend effort here, and what makes the spending feel worth it.

N¶

Need for Cognition - A learner's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful thinking, such as complex problem solving and abstract reasoning.
Number Sense - A learner's understanding of numerical magnitudes and the relations among numbers, shown in tasks such as comparing two quantities or placing a number on a number line.

O¶

Operations and Place Value - A learner's procedural and conceptual understanding of arithmetic operations and of the base-ten place-value system that written numbers rely on.
Oral Language - A learner's spoken language skills, including vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension and the ability to tell an organised story.

P¶

Personality Traits - A learner's characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, usually described by the Big Five: conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism.
Phonological Awareness - A learner's ability to notice and work with the sounds of spoken language (rhymes, syllables and individual phonemes) and to process those sounds quickly when reading and spelling.
Physical Well-Being - A learner's physical health and fitness, including nutrition, regular exercise and adequate sleep, as it bears on cognition, mood and learning.
Prior Knowledge - A learner's existing domain knowledge in the subject area before instruction begins.
Problem Solving - A learner's ability to work through unfamiliar challenges by setting goals and bringing knowledge, resources and creative thinking to bear on a solution.
Processing Speed - The rate at which a learner takes in information, makes sense of it and produces an appropriate response.
Proportional Reasoning - A learner's understanding of ratios and the relationships between them, as expressed in fractions, percentages and rates.

R¶

Race and Ethnicity - A learner's racial or ethnic group as recorded in research and administrative data, used to describe gaps in opportunity and outcomes and to test whether an instructional effect differs across groups.
Reading and Language - What a learner can read fluently, and whether the language of instruction is the one they think in.
Reading Fluency - A learner's ability to read connected text accurately, at a good pace and smoothly, silently or aloud, so that attention is free for comprehension.

S¶

Safety - Being, and feeling, physically and psychologically secure at home, at school or work, and in the neighbourhood and wider community.
Self-Efficacy - A learner's belief in their own ability to carry out the actions needed to succeed at a particular task or in a particular subject.
Self-Regulation - Whether a learner can plan, monitor and adjust their own work without the structure being supplied.
Sensory Integration - The brain's ability to take in, organise and combine information from several senses and turn it into fitting physical and emotional responses.
Sleep - How much, how regularly and how well a learner sleeps, the period in which the body and brain rest, recover and consolidate memories.
Social Awareness and Relationship Skills - A learner's ability to understand others' perspectives and feelings and to build and keep positive relationships with peers, teachers and colleagues.
Social Supports - The network of people, such as family, friends, teachers and community, that a learner has and believes they could turn to for help.
Socioeconomic Status - A learner's family income, wealth, parental education and occupation, and the resources and constraints that come with them.
Spatial Ability - The ability to generate, retain, retrieve and transform visual and spatial images, such as mentally rotating an object or relating shapes to one another.
Statistical Reasoning - A learner's ability to reason about data and uncertainty: posing questions, collecting and organising data, and describing and drawing inferences from it.
Stereotype Threat - The risk that a learner performs below their actual capability when a negative stereotype about a group they belong to is made salient in an evaluative setting.
Syntax - A learner's grasp of how sentences are built: how word order, sentence structure and punctuation carry meaning, in reading, speech and writing.

T¶

Time and Continuity - How much uninterrupted time a learner actually gets, and whether progress survives the gap until the next session.

V¶

Visual Processing - The cognitive work of making sense of what the eyes take in: recognising, ordering and interpreting visual information such as letters, numbers, shapes and diagrams.
Vocabulary - The words a learner knows and can use, receptively and expressively, including the academic and subject-specific words that school texts depend on.

W¶

Working Memory - How much a learner can hold and manipulate at once before the material itself becomes the obstacle.
Writing Skills - A learner's ability to write, from the foundational skills of handwriting, spelling and conventions to composing texts in a genre and arguing from evidence.