For Teachers

If you use edtech in your classroom, you’ve probably seen at least one of the tools you use recently advertise their brand new “AI feature.” At Podsie, the core of what we’re building has always been research-driven, so as the AI hype rages on, we’ve been asking ourselves, “How can we leverage the recent advances in…

by Cindy Nebel(Cover image from Pixabay by squarefrog.)We have so many blogs about retrieval practice. In fact, it is the most common tag we use on our blog. If you’re new to this conversation, you can find some summary information about the benefits of retrieval practice here and some additional resources here. In short, there…

By Althea Need Kaminske(cover image by MabelAmber on Pixabay)Time management can be a challenge for learners at all levels. Generally, the farther along you are in your educational journey, the less your time is managed for you. You are given more independence and autonomy to set your own priorities and manage your own time -…

By Megan SumerackiWhen creating content and materials for the Learning Scientists website, we try to include many different types of forms (NOT because of Learning Styles, but because of preferences, and diversity in the type of media an individual can consume!). To that end, I’ve created blog versions of some bite-size research podcast episodes in…

By Carolina Kuepper-TetzelI’m sure you have done this before or seen it in presentations: That funny meme on a slide to make it more engaging. My first thought would go to seductive details and how adding irrelevant, but funny details can hinder learning. We have blogged and talked about this before (here and here). However,…

Valuable Content: This is the ‘what’ of the microlesson – the actual topic. Instructors should ask themselves – what is it I want to teach my learners with a particular microlesson? Content should be relevant and useful, and it should be a part of something that will connect to learners’ existing knowledge. Content is a…

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…

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…