For Students

School can be stressful, and 2020 has been a particularly stressful year for many of us. So, for this week’s blog, I thought I would write about retrieval practice and stress. Fortunately, I get to share some good news! Prior research has shown that acute stress can hinder our ability to retrieve information. Acute stress is…

For today’s blog post, I interviewed Dr Rob Nash who together with Prof Naomi Winstone and Dr Kieran Balloo created the website Feedback emPower Tools. Feedback emPower Tools sets out to help learners engage and process feedback they receive. For learners it can be challenging to engage with feedback, perhaps because they either do not…

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…