Learning Scientists Posts

It is that time of year again! We’re taking a break to spend time with family and recharge for next year. We hope that you are able to stay safe and take time to enjoy the end of 2022, and ring in a happy new year! Our next post will be a blog post on…

The self-efficacy intervention was designed to be comprehensive, targeting all the different ways in which self-efficacy is thought to be influenced:1)      Previous experiences: If you think about times that you have been successful in the past, you are more likely to believe you can be successful in the future. For the intervention, students were provided…

Thank you to our workshop and talk sponsors and attendees! Thank you for inviting us into your space and giving us the opportunity to share evidence-based practices with others. We appreciate your invitation, generosity as hosts, and the excellent conversations and questions from attendees. Thank YOU, our readers! Your interest in, and passion for, learning…

By Althea Need KaminskeI recently taught about effective learning strategies in one of my courses and, as I do every week, reserved a day for questions and clarifications. My students asked a version of a question that I get a lot about effective learning strategies: “If this is so effective, why isn’t it being taught…

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…

By Althea Need KaminskeA few weeks ago I wrote about the effects of prior knowledge on new learning. I reviewed research which found that students who had stronger prior knowledge of a topic were more likely to remember more new information on that topic (1). This suggested a “rich-get-richer” effect, where it is easier to…

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…

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 KaminskeNote: This post focuses specifically on education within U.S. school systems. When we give presentations and talk to people about effective learning strategies, one of the most common questions that we’re asked is: “If this is so effective, why isn’t it being taught in schools?”. This is a complicated question with a complicated…