Learning Scientists Posts

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

By Carolina Kuepper-TetzelWhile there is clear evidence for the benefits of using retrieval practice as a learning strategy (1), we also know that students may not necessarily chose to use retrieval practice when studying on their own (2). A very recent experiment (3) investigated study choices in university students who were tasked with learning English-Swahili…

Here is an example she gives in the newsletter: baby sleep location. The first best is that babies sleep alone in a crib, on their back with no loose blankets or toys, in their parents’ room, for at least the first six months of life. This is what the AAP recommends and is considered the…

Sometimes their recall was tested, and they were asked to produce the word. For example, “Tell me about the truck. The truck is very___” or “Tell me about the table. The table is very___” and they needed to finish the sentence. Sometimes they were tested with multiple-choice; they were shown four pictures and were asked…

With the constant advances in the medicine, medical training is continual and unabating. To start with, after spending typically four years earning a bachelor’s degree, medical professionals then typically spend four years in medical school, three to seven years in residency, and possibly a few years in fellowship. Then, relatively less formal education continues as…

 Experiment 1 ResultsStudents in the delayed feedback condition performed better on the exams than students in the “immediate” feedback condition. The difference was about 8%, or the difference between earning a B and an A. However, students’ perceptions did not match the exam results. The students that received the delayed feedback really didn’t like it.…