For Students

New StudyToday I’m reviewing a study that recently came out looking at how students choose to use spacing in their own study and how it relates to their performance (1). Importantly, the researchers recognized a limitation in the way students were being asked about their study habits in previous research on spacing. Here are common…

One of the factors that can affect how we feel about completing a task is how much choice we had in the matter. A recent study by Wahlers et al. (2025) examined how autonomy (the degree of choice) influences the experience of mental effort while completing a reading comprehension task (2). In the first experiment,…

Writing PhaseRead the questionsWhen the exam starts, carefully read the questions. Think about what the focus of the question is and if there are any terms you need to define or distinguish between first. Pay attention to the depth of the question. Some questions are shallower and ask for definitions, but others will require you…

by Althea Need KaminskeCover Image by Robin Higgins from PixabayAs of last October, the CDC estimates that approximately 1 in 16 adults in the United States have been diagnosed with ADHD (1). Despite the high prevalence of ADHD in adults, there are few resources for adult learners with ADHD. Many resources online are designed for…

So, how do you build dependable habits?Don’t get me wrong, sometimes life just gets in the way, a deadline creeps up or training gets extended last minute. But, having some sort of structure helps you respond instead of react. When habits are in place, you have a mental anchor, a reliable starting point, even in…

Cover photo by Gerd Altmann from PixabayBy Megan SumerackiIn my last blog, I wrote about cognitive networks and implicit bias. The gist of the post was that our systems allow us to categorize and generalize, flexibly and automatically, and that this generally helps us. For example, we have some general rules about what a chair…

Cover image by u_9p7tw4noz0 from PixabayBy Althea Need KaminskeNote: The following describes Health Professions Education within the U.S.As a learning scientist interested in how learning works, health professions education is an exciting and dynamic environment to explore best practices in the application of the principles and strategies that we study in cognitive psychology. Recently, Cindy…

As mentioned, the authors used a mixed-method approach. One the one hand, they asked students during the pre- and post-assessment to indicate how many minutes they had spent using successive relearning or other learning strategies, when they had started studying for the exam, their confidence in recalling specific content from the course, etc. On the…

Images above by WOKANDAPIX, Yinan Chen, Taken, kieurope, M S, and GSLCMedia, from PixabayWe are able to categorize, and to generalize. Every time you see a chair that you have never seen before, you don’t have to learn that it is a chair and can be used for sitting. This is because you have learned some general rules…

The question then is whether imitation is the best approach to learning pronunciation or whether an alternative approach is equally or more effective. Kang et al. (1) investigated exactly this research question. They looked at comprehension and production (i.e., pronunciation) of foreign language words and pitched an imitation approach against a retrieval practice approach. In…