Digest #168: Introduction to ChatGPT
Everyone is talking about it, but we may not yet fully grasp what it is and what it means for education: ChatGPT. ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer” and is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot. This means that you can have a dialogue with an AI bot. It will provide you with answers to questions,…
Learning With Flashcards
How did they investigate these questions?They conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to study one of two text passages (biological anthropology versus geology) and then instructed participants to study in one of four conditions:1. Provided-Flashcards: Participants were given premade flashcards from the textbooks to study with. These flashcards were heavily detail-level…
GUEST POST: Smartphone Learning: When Students Should Use it, and When to Avoid it!
By Karla LassondeKarla Lassonde is a Cognitive Psychologist and has been teaching Psychology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, for 14 years. One of her research and teaching passions is student learning and attention. Some of this work focuses on how misconceptions in psychological science can be revised. She works on various outreach projects to promote…
Digest #166: Perfectionism in Education
By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel“Perfection is the opposite of done!” I came across this statement recently and it made me think about how perfectionism really affects one’s work and studying. Growing up, I always thought of perfectionism as a good thing, as something to aspire to. However, more recently I am questioning this thought. It adds unnecessary…
When Revising, Read Out Loud
Why disfluency?There has been some research looking into whether reading something disfluent, like sans forgetica font, could improve learning via desirable difficulties. That is, when learning is more effortful, it often results in better long-term retention. Most recently, a meta-analysis (2) showed that disfluent font doesn’t lead to much better learning, but the hypothesis still…
Spacing Retrieval is More Important than Extra Retrieval
Let me phrase those results a different way. Taking the same amount of time and energy that it took to write the normal quiz for a class and just distributing those questions across a couple different quizzes was more beneficial than writing and answering (and grading?) additional quiz questions. Educators: Quiz your students. Absolutely you…
Digest #164: Sustainability and Climate Change in Education
1. Education for sustainable development, UNESCO (@UNESCO)This is an excellent general resource that provides an overview of many aspects of the importance of sustainability in education. There are many stories from around the world with examples of climate change education. Resources on this website can be used as material in the classroom to engage students with…
GUEST POST: Can Digital Detox Improve your Learning Abilities?
What is a digital detox? The term was coined by founders of Digital Detox company that address the impact of tech dependency with camps, research, and educational programs (10). In Oxford Dictionaries definition, a digital detox is defined as a “period of time during which a person refrains from using their electronic devices, such as…
Reducing Math Anxiety with Expressive Writing
So what you can see here is that when working memory demands are low (easy problems), people respond pretty fast and don’t make a lot of errors, regardless of anxiety. But when they need to use more of their working memory on the hard problems (High WM demand), anxiety starts to get in the way.…
How do Learning Styles Affect Learning Predictions?
Students learned one list at a time. While the students were learning the lists, they were asked to make a judgment of learning (JOL). A JOL is just a prediction about how well they think they have learned the material. In this case, they were asked to rate the likelihood that they would remember the…
