Pedagogy: Theory, Planning and the Assessment Vocabulary
The theoretical spine
You need four families of theory at recall level. Behaviourism (stimulus–response, reinforcement, programmed instruction). Cognitivism (information processing, meaningful learning, schema). Constructivism (Piaget's stages of cognitive development with their approximate ages; Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and scaffolding). Humanistic and social approaches (Maslow's hierarchy, cooperative learning).
Planning and delivery
Know a usable lesson-plan skeleton - objectives, previous knowledge, introduction, development, recap, evaluation, assignment - and the 5E model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate). Understand how to write a behavioural objective: observable verb, condition, criterion. Bloom's revised taxonomy runs Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create; questions asking for the highest or lowest level are common.
Assessment and management
Distinguish formative (during learning, diagnostic, feedback, no grade necessarily) from summative (after learning, judgement, certification). Know the difference between a method and an aid: a method is a planned procedure (lecture, demonstration, project); an aid is a resource (chart, model, projector).
Traps
The most frequent conflations are: formative vs summative, ZPD vs scaffolding, teaching method vs teaching aid, and evaluation vs measurement. Piaget's stage ages are also frequently shifted by one stage in the distractors.
Worked example
A teacher ends a lesson with five ungraded questions, finds that half the class confused two terms, and re-teaches the next day. Is this formative or summative? Formative - the result is used to change teaching while learning is still in progress, and it is not used for certification.
Rule of thumb: ask who uses the result and what for. If the teacher uses it to adjust instruction, it is formative; if it ranks or certifies the learner, it is summative.