Self-Regulated Learning and Personality
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…
When Revising, Read Out Loud
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…
Prior Knowledge and Retrieval Practice
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…
Prior Knowledge and Learning New Information: The Rich Get Richer
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…
Spacing Retrieval is More Important than Extra Retrieval
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…
Spaced Retrieval Practice Benefits Long-Term Learning and Transfer
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…
School Meals and Academic Achievement
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…
Help Students Believe in Themselves: Self-efficacy Boosts Exam Scores
by Cindy NebelThe six strategies for effective learning are, indeed, effective, but only to the degree that students actually use them. And in order to change behavior, we have to consider motivation. Now, motivation is an entire area of psychology and not one that we pretend to be experts in. There are many different motivational…
The Way Learners Think About Intelligence Affects Their Own Study Choices
The authors explained that when the participants were told intelligence can be improved, they may have thought that restudying the words they had not learned very well would lead to the most growth. When the participants were told intelligence is fixed, the words they thought they had not learned very well may have been reminded…
Informal Science Education and Interest Development
The survey revealed that students’ self-reported level of competence in science skills increased steadily through the study, with competence significantly higher at the midpoint survey than baseline and significantly higher at post survey than midpoint. A similar pattern emerged for students’ engagement with science outside of the program, however the only significant difference was from…
