For Teachers

5) Goodbye growth mindset, Hello efficacy and attribution theory by Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner @P_A_KirschnerThis blog post was written before this latest revival of the growth mindset controversy, but provides an accessible description of why many interventions might fail in the ways that they simplistically apply mindset research. Instead, a clear and easily applied…

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…

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…

How to reflect When asked to reflect on an experience, what questions do you ask yourself? In the book, Make it Stick [6], neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold comments:I’d go home that night thinking about what happened and what could I do, for example, to improve the way a suturing went. How can I take a bigger bite with…

For today’s VLOG post, Cindy interviewed Jessica Jackson, Director of Professional Learning for the Learner Variability Project @DigitalPromise. In this video, Jessica talks about the concept of learner variability and walks through all the fun tools available through the Learner Variability Project, and in particular the Learning Variability Navigator. The Navigator is an evidence-based guide…

The ResultsA regression analysis showed that prior knowledge predicted final test performance for new items, but only in the domain that they had prior knowledge for. People who came into the experiment with a stronger background in cooking learned more “new” facts about cooking, but not football. Similarly, people with a stronger background in football…

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…

A brief explanation of the cognitive and neuroscience We have an excellent neuroscientific understanding (1) of how long-term memories are stored and made more robust by retrieval practice. Explicit memory represents the memories and knowledge that we can consciously retrieve.  The subset of explicit memory, known as semantic memory, is the long-term memory of facts and…

By Megan SumerackiFor over a century cognitive psychologists have been studying spaced practice and retrieval practice, resulting in a great deal of evidence that these two strategies work very well to improve student learning. However, no single experiment or paper is going to be able to answer, in full, the question “how does this strategy…

By Althea Need KaminskeAs we prepare for the start of another academic school year, now is an excellent time to think about how to include inclusive teaching practices in your course. There is no one right way to use inclusive teaching practices in your course. Instead, inclusive teaching involves a deeper understanding of the interaction…