GUEST POST: Learning Strategies for Academic Writing
As an undergraduate at Stonehill College, Jessica Costello researched student and faculty knowledge of effective study techniques and sought a way to integrate empirically-supported learning techniques with the needs of the students she encountered as a writing tutor. She is currently working on her master’s in clinical counseling psychology at Assumption College and conducting research…
GUEST POST: Learning Styles and Differentiated Instruction
References: (1) Kirschner, P. (2017). Stop propagating the learning styles myth. Computers and Education, 106, 166-171.(2) Macdonald, K., Germine, L., Anderson, A., Christodoulou, J., and McGrath, L. (2017). Dispelling the myth: Training in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. (3) Willingham, D., Hughes, E., and Dobolyi, D. (2015).…
Six Strategies for Effective Learning: A Summary for Teachers
By Megan Sumeracki If you read our blog often, you are familiar with the six strategies for effective learning. We have a number of resources already, but this guide provides a brief explanation of each strategy and compiles a set of links on the website all in one place. So, if you’re wanting a single…
Weekly Digest #140: There’s an App for That
These days we are all extremely busy! So, we’ll keep it brief. Check out these resources to help you manage your workflow and stay productive. Since we know you’re busy, we’ll keep the descriptions to a minimum today and let the descriptive titles speak do most of the talking!
Engagement and Interest
Another aspect of engagement seems to be interest and attention. If we focus on this aspect of engagement the definition is closer to ‘participating in activities that capture interest and attention in a subject matter’. In this view interest and attention are, in and of themselves, effective processes that promote understanding and learning, or they…
Making Tests (More) Fun Through Hints Increases Student Uptake Of Self-Testing
As you can see: Students picked the 4-letter option more often than any of the other options. Furthermore, students reported that the 4-letter option was “the most fun” with 71% agreement for that option compared to only 11% agreement for the 6-letter option. Interestingly, the 0-letter option received an agreement score of 0% (the 2-letter…
Mistakes or Opportunities? Learning from Errors
While errors can be beneficial for learning, true guesses are not terribly useful. As the confidence in an error increases, learning from the error also increases (called the hypercorrection effect). There is quite a bit of research to support the idea that participants have heightened attention or perhaps surprise when they believe an answer is…
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…
Retrieval Practice in the Classroom: Is Asking Questions Enough?
So, what does this mean for educators? It is not enough to ask questions during lecture because students are unlikely to engage in covert retrieval unless they are pushed to do so. Instead, try having students write down an answer and then possibly share that answer with a partner or the class, but they need…
Explain It To Me: The Beneficial Effects of Explaining for Memory
Outcomes of the Experiment Lachner and colleagues (1) created an experiment (Experiment 2) in which they tested these different hypotheses against each other. They had students study two related texts and asked them to either a) explain the main ideas to a fictitious person or b) write down everything they remember (written retrieval practice). In…
