Improving College Student Outcomes with Course Policies that Support Autonomy
Cover image by Ulrich from PixabayBy Megan SumerackiIn today’s post, I want to share a cool, relatively new paper by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer from Science Advances (1). The paper is titled, Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education. The methodology is neat, the results are interesting, and while this…
Digest #177: Podcast Episodes for Parents and Educators
I have been following Brown University Professor and Economist Emily Oster for a number of years, basically ever since I started my journey of becoming a parent. Now, I listen to her podcast and read her newsletters (and the newsletters from the endocrinologist on her team, called “Hot Flash”) to hear from Emily and experts…
GUEST POST: Can Gamified Technology Be Used to Enhance Students’ Intrinsic Motivation?
Dr Jamie Murray is an expert in the field of human episodic memory and uses his knowledge to enhance learning in educational settings. Jamie obtained his Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Stirling within the Psychological Imaging Laboratory and subsequently completed two postdoctoral positions focused on understanding how memory precision changes as we…
To Prompt or Not To Prompt: Effects of Prompt-Questions and Educational Videos on Learning
By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel Educational videos are often used in the classroom setting to support instruction of content. On the positive side, these videos can help scaffolding a topic which can lead to better understanding of it. They can also increase situational interest in students because they are fun which may spark further engagement with the…
GUEST POST: Reflections on a “Spaced Practice Challenge” with Community College Students
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.…
Effective Learning Strategies depend on Prior Knowledge
*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…
Digest #176: For When You’re Feeling the Pressure!
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 Hard
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…
How Do You Use Our Book “Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide to Learning...
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.…
Guest Post: Retrieval Practice: How to Encourage Long-Term Retention
While utilizing retrieval practice on its own will enhance student learning, research has shown that there are three considerations that teachers must think about in order to amplify the impact that retrieval practice has on long-term retention: spacing, interleaving, and feedback. SpacingSpacing is described as distributing practice over time and research has shown that this strategy…