GUEST POST: Who Really Benefits from Retrieval Practice
So, what does this mean? First of all, although the benefits of testing have been extensively reported, it appears that not all participants, at least among college students, do benefit directly from testing. In fact, for about 1/3 of our participants, retrieval practice made them worse. Does this mean we should stop incorporating testing as…
New Findings Inform the Laptop versus Longhand Note-Taking Debate
While there may be very good reasons to be cautious about laptop use in the classroom – e.g., laptops with internet access may invite multitasking which is detrimental to the learning of the student engaging in multi-tasking, but also has negative effects on students sitting in proximity of the multitasker (2) – their use to…
Hocus Focus
From a cognitive psychologist’s point of view, these results are particularly impressive because they demonstrate transfer. There are a number of training tools that are marketed as improving mental processes. While a number of these show improvement on the training task itself, very few show improvement on things outside of the task (4). In other…
GUEST POST: Testing in the Classroom: The Importance of Feedback
References: (1) Roediger, H. L., III, & Butler, A. C. (2011). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 20-27. (2) Epstein, M. L., Lazarus, A. D., Calvano, T. B., Matthews, K. A., Hendel, R. A., Epstein, B. B., et al. (2002). Immediate feedback assessment technique promotes learning and corrects…
How Should Students Take Notes?
References (1) Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25, 1159-1168. (2) Bui, D. C., Myerson, J., & Hale, S. (2013). Note-taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105, 299-309. (3) Fiorella,…
THANK YOU to our guest bloggers from 2017!
We're right in the middle of a season where a lot of us are giving thanks and reflecting on the year we have had. For some of us it is because of American or Canadian Thanksgiving, Japanese Labour Thanksgiving, or Turkish National Day of Thanks, or upcoming holidays such as Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa. For…
Interleaving: A Classroom Experiment
The learning phase took place over 9 weeks in the classroom. During this time, the students received their normal lessons and assignments. There were four different types of problems that were a part of the experiment, and the students’ assignments were constructed so that across the nine weeks they saw 12 different problems of each…
Research in Practice!
By Megan Sumeracki The Learning Agency has created videos of researchers and teachers working together to impliment the science of learning into the classroom. These videos are brand new today!! You can check out Learning Agency Videos here. As a researcher deeply interested in student learning, it is extremely exciting for me to see decades…
Understanding Sample Sizes and the Word “Significant”
One big issue related to sample size requires us to talk about what the word significance means in a scientific context. In “the real world,” significant means noteworthy, or worthy of attention. However, this is not what scientists typically mean when they say significant. Often, we are talking about statistical significance, and this is a…
Lessons from The Science of Learning in the Field
Over the past few months, I have had the pleasure of working on a Science of Learning grant through the Learning Agency, funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation (see here). Through this grant, professors and researchers with expertise in the science of learning have been paired with K-12 teachers across the country. Each team is…
