For Students

For long-term exams, it can be beneficial to create a study schedule to help pace yourself and hold yourself accountable. This may look different for every student, but a good basic outline includes starting with content from the beginning of the year and studying recent information closer to the exam. Additionally, students can portion out…

Cover image by Sebastián García from PixabayIn this week’s post, Cindy and I (Althea) talk about our work with medical student learners. We have both worked for medical schools for a little over a year now and we’ve learned some things! We discuss common challenges for learning in medical school, efficient learning strategies, learning in…

References:(1) Kaminske, A. N. (2019). Can Students Change Their Study Habits? The Learning Scientists. https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2019/8/1-1?rq=change(2) Balch, W. R. (2001). Study tips: How helpful do introductory psychology students find them? Teaching of Psychology, 28(4), 272-274.(3) Oreopoulus, P., & Petronijevic, U. (2019). The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging and What We Can Learn From It.…

*Quick aside: Sometimes this study is used to argue that reading comprehension skills don’t matter. That’s not our interpretation. Rather, this study was set up very carefully to show the power of prior knowledge in particular.Part of this effect is due to chunking. For folks who know a lot about baseball, they likely can process…

2) Yerkes-Dodson: Lore, not Law by Cindy Nebel and Stress and Memory by Althea Need KaminskeThis pair of posts is one of my favorites. We were taught that Yerkes-Dodson Law was, well, a law. When stress is too low or too high, performance suffers. Then Cindy discovered, not necessarily so. Friends, we were all blown…

Thinking is effortful, but is it unpleasant? Here the evidence is somewhat mixed. On the one hand, we tend to require rewards to pursue more effortful thinking which suggests that the effort of thinking may not be rewarding in and of itself. On the other hand, research on the “need for cognition” suggests that there…

We offer many concrete examples throughout the book, e.g., when describing a strategy or highlighting the scientific background. After reading a chapter, students can start applying the strategies right away – either using one of the ‘how to’ suggestions, or by coming up with an implementation themselves based on what they learned about the strategy.…

Now, onto the written coverage of this paper, by Jennifer Brigati and colleagues (1)! Note: my written coverage overlaps with the video, but is not a perfect replication. There’s a little something extra in each, based on how I’ve been tossing these ideas around in my head over the last few weeks.The studyIn their 2020…

When students use self-consequenting, they identify and provide either extrinsic rewards for talk completion (“After I finish this paper I’ll go get ice cream”) or negative consequences that might occur after poor performance (“If I don’t finish this paper I can’t get ice cream”). These consequences can be long-term - students may remind themselves of…

References(1) Allen, M., LeFebvre, L., LeFebvre, L., & Bourhis, J. (2020). Is the Pencil Mightier than the Keyboard? A Meta-Analysis Comparing the Method of Notetaking Outcomes. Southern Communication Journal, 85(3), 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2020.1764613 (2) Voyer, D., Ronis, S. T., & Byers, N. (2022). The effect of notetaking method on academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis.…