By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel There is an ongoing debate on whether students should take notes on their laptops (typed) or by putting pen to paper (handwritten). We have blogged about this topic in the past and presented papers that found a negative effect of typing notes, no difference between typed versus handwritten notes, or that the benefit of one note-taking medium over another depended on other factors (e.g., whether students had the opportunity to review their notes). Various meta-analyses papers – a meta-analysis looks at the combined effect of a finding by bundling previous studies on t ..read more

cover image by Skitterphoto on Pexels The idea of authentic assessments has been around for over 30 years now. In 1990, Grant Wiggins coined the term ‘authentic assessment’ (1) and in recent years this assessment approach has received a considerable boost. The pandemic as well as the rise of AI in education have required educators to explore more innovative ways to assess knowledge and skills in their students. Specifically, there is a call for assessments for learning – the idea that students need to apply their knowledge and skills to complete an assessment which, in turn, leads to increases ..read more

cover image by WOKANDAPIX on Pixabay We were recently made aware of a gap in resources on our blog such that we do not have any information about assessing learning strategies. Thank you to Dr. Shana Southard-Dobbs for pointing us in this direction! Below we have included a list of many different learning strategy questionnaires for your consideration. We have tried to include information about the amount of research that has been conducted on each questionnaire and the costs associated with its use, so that you can make an informed decision about how to best assess learning strategy use in yo ..read more

By Althea Need Kaminske Cover image by Mizuno K from Pexels Recently, Cindy talked about how the Yerkes-Dodson Law (or performance-arousal) is less of a law and more of a nice story about how stress influences performance. The performance-arousal curve is a handy explanation for a lot of different patterns and, on the surface, it seems to tell an interesting story about how stress affects our performance. Further complicating the story, the label of Yerkes-Dodson Law itself is incorrect. The performance arousal curve was developed independently of the results of the Yerkes-Dodson experiments ..read more

By Megan Sumeracki Cover image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay About 8 years ago (seriously, I can’t believe we’ve been doing this for so long…), we published a pair of blog posts on understanding both near and far transfer (Part 1; Part 2). Transfer is one of my favorite topics, in part because it is arguably the whole point of most formal education. The purpose of learning something in school is to be able to at the very least produce it outside of school, and ideally use it or apply it outside of school in some other context. This is true in many, many grades, subject areas, and programs. Ho ..read more

By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel Imagine you are enrolled in a life sciences course and learning about stochastic molecular motion in biological systems (i.e., how molecules move in random ways within cells and other parts of living things). You are given the option to study the topic using either a) expository instruction which focuses on explaining the topic, b) a narrative instruction where the explanation of the topic is embedded into a story-like narrative that offers additional background information (e.g., about the lives of the researchers who discovered the phenomenon), or c) a narrative bl ..read more

By Lindsay Tierney Image by Dany Chilon from Pixabay Dr. Lindsay Tierney is a fifteen year veteran of student success in higher education, holding such roles as educator, academic coach, and student affairs leadership administrator. Her areas of professional interest and expertise include the success of students with high-incidence disabilities, such as ADHD and Anxiety, as well as the role of self-determination with regard to academic success. Dr. Tierney resides in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and their three children. Metacognition is generally regarded as being the awareness or con ..read more

Cover image by Prawny from Pixabay By Megan Sumeracki The great thing about effective learning strategies is that they tend to work well for a lot of different people, as long as they are modified in appropriate ways when needed. One individual difference between people that often comes up in learning research is developmental age or stage. Our bodies and minds do change across the lifespan, and so there are some differences in cognitive processes between developmental stages across the lifespan. We need “individual differences” research in cognitive psychology for many reasons, but one of tho ..read more

By Althea Need Kaminske Cover Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay If you, like me, follow author, vlogger, and Indianapolis resident, John Green, you’ve heard a lot about tuberculosis (and about the many charms of my home town). Last month he released a Crash Course lecture about tuberculosis that is interesting, well-structured, and I highly recommend watching it. As I watched it, it struck me that it bears only a loose resemblance to the video lectures that I am able to produce as an instructor. Crash Course has a history of making high-quality educational videos that I am incredibly jealou ..read more

By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel We have looked at the benefits of combining text and visuals for memory and learning – see dual coding – in many previous posts. A new series of experiments has investigated the effects of drawing specifically and whether drawing improves memory for the to-be-learned material compared to other strategies (1). The research is so new that it is currently only available as a preprint and in the process of being submitted for publication. The upside of this is that the paper is already available publicly and that you can provide the authors with feedback on it. The resea ..read more