For Teachers

by Cindy NebelWe’re all wrong from time to time. We misremember something or we were taught something factually inaccurate to begin with. It happens. As an educator, I have certainly had students that come to my class with some inaccurate beliefs (see neuromyths). When students find out that they’re wrong about something, how often does…

Importantly, students engaged with the same problems in each of the two conditions. What differed was whether they practiced solving all of the problems, or practiced solving some problems and engaged with error correction and explanation for the others. The researchers measured students’ learning through post-tests administered immediately after the two learning conditions were completed and…

Finally, while intrinsic and extraneous load describe sources of load, germane load describes the relative allocation of resources. When the majority of your working memory is dealing with intrinsic load, and relatively little is occupied by extraneous load, then this task has high germane load. However, if a task has a lot of extraneous load…

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…

In an article in the 2012 journal Association for Psychological Science titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation,” authors Baird et. al looked at the link between solving problems in creative ways and providing an opportunity for those solutions to occur. Let’s look at what the study examined then what it could mean…

MethodsEach participant in the study was asked to come to a classroom in the computer science building on campus for a study in partnership with the Career Center about interest in STEM majors. The classroom contained either the stereotypical or non-stereotypical items and participants were told to ignore those items because the room was being…

One of the simplest methods to bring dual coding to the onboarding learning environment is by introducing computer-based learning modules with robust imagery accompanying language (2). For organizations, this would seem to be an obvious implementation where laptops are issued. Further, personal mobile devices are basically ubiquitous and there are a number of low cost,…

We have a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Our newest book, Ace That Test: A Student’s Guide To Better Learning is coming out this summer—July 19 to be exact. You can preorder through Amazon now! Starting June 28, you can preorder through the Routledge link on our website. You can read Chapter 1 for free here!We are SUPER…

After the lecture, students studied the display they were given (outline, text, etc.) for 15 minutes. They were told that there would be three tests:A test on facts. Question example: What is the size of the Brahmaputra basin?A test to check relationships based on categories. Question example: Which rivers merge with other rivers?A test to…

By Carolina Kuepper-TetzelWhile there is clear evidence for the benefits of using retrieval practice as a learning strategy (1), we also know that students may not necessarily chose to use retrieval practice when studying on their own (2). A very recent experiment (3) investigated study choices in university students who were tasked with learning English-Swahili…