Interleaving Improves Learning for All Learners
References:(1) Taylor, K., & Rohrer, D. (2010). The effect of interleaving practice. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24, 837-848. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1598(2) Rohrer, D., Dedrick, R. F., & Burgess, K. (2014). The benefit of interleaved mathematics practice is not limited to superficially similar kinds of problems. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21, 1323-1330. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0588-3(3) Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A.…
When Restudying Trumps Retrieval
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…
Pitting Learning Styles Against Dual Coding
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…
Mary Whiton Calkins
by Althea Need KaminskeIn the past month I’ve been thinking a lot about history. I was tasked with writing a brief overview of cognitive psychology for a book I’m writing with Megan, and someone wrote into the Learning Scientists interested in the history of learning and asking for some places to start. I was not…
Using Memes as a Teaching Tool
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,…
Confident and Wrong: Can Students Learn from Their Mistakes?
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…
Learning Math from Errors
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…
Sources of Cognitive Load
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…
How To Convince Students To Use Effective Study Strategies?
As mentioned, the authors used a mixed-method approach. One the one hand, they asked students during the pre- and post-assessment to indicate how many minutes they had spent using successive relearning or other learning strategies, when they had started studying for the exam, their confidence in recalling specific content from the course, etc. On the…
Are Your Classroom Decorations Reducing Learning?
MethodsEach participant in the study was asked to come to a classroom in the computer science building on campus for a study in partnership with the Career Center about interest in STEM majors. The classroom contained either the stereotypical or non-stereotypical items and participants were told to ignore those items because the room was being…
