Learning Scientists Posts

Thank you to our guest bloggers and podcast interviewees! We’ve learned so much from your different perspectives and experiences and we’re proud to be able to share that with our readers. As Learning Scientists we, of course, love to talk about learning, but we also love getting to learn ourselves! (Have something interesting to share…

Cover image by Kei from PixabayBy Megan SumerackiLast week, my blog post covered a paper by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer. Their paper is titled Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education (1). In their paper, they present two studies. The first study, covered in Part 1, was a randomized controlled…

Cover image by Ulrich from PixabayBy Megan SumerackiIn today’s post, I want to share a cool, relatively new paper by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer from Science Advances (1). The paper is titled, Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education. The methodology is neat, the results are interesting, and while this…

Cover image by Ulrich from PixabayBy Megan SumerackiIn today’s post, I want to share a cool, relatively new paper by Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer from Science Advances (1). The paper is titled, Choosing to Learn: The Importance of Student Autonomy in Higher Education. The methodology is neat, the results are interesting, and while this…

The summary of the articles they found paints a picture of who is implementing and studying these learning strategies. Not surprisingly, introductory psychology courses were the most common setting to find studies (there were 16 studies like this) on the use of retrieval practice and spacing. After that, the most common setting to find these…

By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel Educational videos are often used in the classroom setting to support instruction of content. On the positive side, these videos can help scaffolding a topic which can lead to better understanding of it. They can also increase situational interest in students because they are fun which may spark further engagement with the…

*Quick aside: Sometimes this study is used to argue that reading comprehension skills don’t matter. That’s not our interpretation. Rather, this study was set up very carefully to show the power of prior knowledge in particular.Part of this effect is due to chunking. For folks who know a lot about baseball, they likely can process…

Thinking is effortful, but is it unpleasant? Here the evidence is somewhat mixed. On the one hand, we tend to require rewards to pursue more effortful thinking which suggests that the effort of thinking may not be rewarding in and of itself. On the other hand, research on the “need for cognition” suggests that there…

We offer many concrete examples throughout the book, e.g., when describing a strategy or highlighting the scientific background. After reading a chapter, students can start applying the strategies right away – either using one of the ‘how to’ suggestions, or by coming up with an implementation themselves based on what they learned about the strategy.…

In a recently published article, the authors took exam wrappers one step further and sent students to our blog to learn more about retrieval practice and metacognition in particular and to see how that would impact students’ strategy choices (2).We know that left to their own devices students most often choose less than desirable strategies,…