For Teachers

References:(1)   Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological bulletin, 132(3), 354.(2)   Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering,…

The overall structure of a research paper will usually follow an hourglass shape. That means that a research paper will start broad by embedding the study into the overall context and state the general issue it addresses. As the Introduction progresses, the scope will become more and more specific. The Introduction ends on a very…

And the latter is exactly what they found. When they looked at the results of Experiment 2, learning style no longer mattered. Strategy mattered. The way they students studied mattered. When their study strategy (verbalizing landmarks or visually drawing them) matched the way they were assessed (either on their verbal recognition of landmarks or their…

The ExperimentsIn both Experiments 1 and 2, Hungarian undergraduate students learned randomly paired Hungarian-Swahili word pairs. Using word pairs allowed the researchers to present multiple discrete trials (40 pairs in total) and to be able to clearly determine students’ accuracy on each trial. This is particularly important with physiological data, like pupillometry. Randomly pairing the…

References:(1) Macdonald, K., Germine, L., Anderson, A., Christodoulou, J., & McGrath, L. M. (2017). Dispelling the myth: raining in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1314.(2) Lithander, M. P., Geraci, L., Karaca, M., & Rydberg, J. (2021). Correcting neuromyths: A comparison of different types of refutations.…

This is one of several principles listed under “Principles for Managing Essential Processing”. The segmenting principle suggests breaking down a complex presentation into manageable segments whose pace can be controlled by the learner. Mayer describes research where students were able to click an arrow key to progress through segments of a multimedia presentation (6). However,…

By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel and Chiara HorlinFor today’s digest I teamed up with Dr Chiara Horlin who is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Psychology at the University of Glasgow and an expert in neurodiversity and what role it plays in education. She has co-founded The Neurodiversity Network (see below) as a resource to support and represent…

References:(1)   Beier, M. E., & Ackerman, P. L. (2005). Age, ability, and the role of prior knowledge on the acquisition of new domain knowledge: Promising results in a real-world learning environment. Psychology and aging, 20(2), 341.(2)    Chi, M & Koeske, R. D. (1983). Network representation of child’s dinosaur knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 19(1), 29-39.(3)    Recht, D. R., &…

As adults, we are so used to this kind of thinking that we are hardly aware we are doing it, and even less aware that young people are still developing these important metacognitive skills. More importantly, as adults we can think about our thinking (like you just did). We have the gift of age (acquired…

“Before you begin, we wanted to tell you about a strategy that is extremely effective for learning: repeatedly self-testing. Research shows that people learn more from repeated testing than from repeated studying. This is illustrated in the Figure to the right which shows differences in final memory performance for Purdue students who repeatedly studied information…