Learning Scientists Posts

As a memory researcher I was obviously interested in what reading strategies would leverage encoding to improve reading comprehension. My main area of expertise is in human learning and memory which does occasionally brush up with research on reading comprehension, but they tend to be separate fields. So I was excited to see some very…

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.…

How much did the babies learn? The babies who watched the video, either alone or with a parent, did not learn any more new words than those in the control condition without any intervention, despite watching the video 20 times over the course of a month. This means that the video did not teach the…

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,…

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., &…

“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…