For Students

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…

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…

 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…

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…

 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.…

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…

Given the harmful effects of excessive smartphone use, researchers have investigated the effects of reducing smartphone use. A recent study by Brailovskaia and colleagues (2022) examined the effects of smartphone use reduction and abstinence on well-being (3). A total of 619 participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Abstinence, Reduction, or Control. The…

By Megan SumerackiThis week, March 21-27, 2022, is Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Siena Castellon founded Neurodiversity Celebration in 2018. In Siena’s words, the week was founded because “I wanted to change the way learning differences are perceived. As a teenager who is autistic and has ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia, my experience has been that people often…

References(1) Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., & Miller, D. T. (2005). Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(5), 725.(2) Merry, J. W., Elenchin, M. K., & Surma, R. N. (2021). Should students change their answers on multiple choice questions?. Advances in Physiology Education, 45(1), 182-190.(3) Couchman, J. J., Miller,…

Dr. James Culhane earned his B.A. in Chemistry from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. Following the completion of his doctoral degree, he accepted a faculty appointment in the Department of Pharmaceutical…