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…
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…
Can Students Change Their Study Habits?
Before I give a more detailed description of the study I want to caution that this is still a working paper. This means that it has not gone through the peer review process. The peer-review process is in place to assure that research that is published is high quality. As the name suggests, this process…
How Should Students Take Notes?
References (1) Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25, 1159-1168. (2) Bui, D. C., Myerson, J., & Hale, S. (2013). Note-taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105, 299-309. (3) Fiorella,…
Retrieval Practice and Bloom’s Taxonomy
By Cindy Nebel As researchers attempting to bridge psychological science and education, we come across several challenges. Each of us has expertise in the area of retrieval practice, where many of the classic studies take place in the laboratory with simple materials. Researchers have therefore attempted to answer several questions to address the extent to…
