By Dr. Rob McEntarffer and Dr. Bethany Brunsman Rob McEntarffer taught English, psychology, and philosophy for 13 years at Lincoln Southeast high school in Lincoln, NE. While teaching, he became interested in educational measurement issues and got a Masters degree in educational measurement from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln in 2003. He started working as an Assessment/Evaluation specialist with Lincoln Public Schools in 2005, and works with the district on large scale and classroom assessment issues. Rob earned his PhD in Teaching, Learning, and Teacher education in 2013, focusing his ..read more

Dr. Toni Shub is the CEO of QoreInsights. She is leading the innovation and development of the Classroom Education Plan, a K-5 practice-embedded personalized professional development program with a decision intelligence platform for needs analysis and research-informed strategies. Toni earned her EdD in Leadership and Learning in Organizations from Vanderbilt University, and holds an MS in Occupational Therapy and a BA in Child Development: Child Mental Health. She has six patents and two peer-reviewed publications. As an Early Learning Consultant, she developed the Mead® Writing Fundamentals ..read more

By Megan Sumeracki Like with many effective learning strategies, what students think is helping them learn is not what actually helps them learn. In two experiments presented by Hillary Mullet and colleagues (2014, 1), University engineering students received relatively immediate feedback or delayed feedback on homework assignments. I talked about this paper in a bite-size research episode on our podcast; so, if you prefer to listen you can head to our podcast episode list and check out Episode 58. But, for those who prefer to read or want a different modality (with spaced repetition, albeit a ..read more

By Althea Need Kaminske Does test anxiety cause poorer performance on exams? Meta-analyses show that students with higher test anxiety tend to perform worse on exams (1). We also know that anxiety can affect cognitive processes through working memory capacity (2). Therefore, the general consensus is that test anxiety interferes with our working memory, which in turn leads to poorer exam performance. According to this interference hypothesis, anxiety interferes with our already limited working memory capacity, making it harder to focus and process information in anxiety-filled situations like e ..read more

By Karla Lassonde Karla Lassonde is a Cognitive Psychologist and has been teaching Psychology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, for 14 years. One of her research and teaching passions is student learning and attention. Some of this work focuses on how misconceptions in psychological science can be revised. She works on various outreach projects to promote a better understanding of psychological science. One is her student led blog called, Communicating Psychological Science. Another is a program for training students to be better learners called LEARN. She can be found on Twitter @karla ..read more

It is that time of year again! We’re taking a break to spend time with family and recharge for next year. We hope that you are able to stay safe and take time to enjoy the end of 2022, and ring in a happy new year! Our next post will be a blog post on January 19th, 2023 ..read more

By Layla Murray Layla Murray recently earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Goucher College, and received the 2022 Prize for Excellence in Psychology. She wrote this blog post for an academic assignment in the seminar for Cognition, Teaching, and Learning, taught by Dr. Jennifer McCabe. Layla’s research interests include cognition (memory, learning, decision-making), age-related cognitive decline, and socioeconomic disparities. In her free time, Layla enjoys knitting, reading, watching Real Housewives, and being with her cats. “I think it was Layla who mentioned this earlier…” my cl ..read more

by Cindy Nebel Any educator in today’s environment will tell you that all the cognitive strategies in the world are great, but we also need to focus on social-emotional learning (SEL). And today’s blog is about one facet of SEL that has plenty of research to support its necessity in learning: self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as our belief in our ability to successfully complete a given task (1). This means that we can have different levels of self-efficacy for different domains (e.g., math vs. literature) and even within domains (e.g., addition vs. division). As you can imagine, self-ef ..read more

Today is (American) Thanksgiving so we wanted to take the opportunity to thank our community! 2022 has been challenging and we are so grateful for the continued support, encouragement, and contributions of our community. Image from Pexels Thank you to our Patreon sponsors! Your support keeps our email subscription service and podcast production going. The Learning Scientists is an entirely volunteer effort and we appreciate the help in getting our message out to the people and communities we hope to serve. Our Patreon page with additional resources can be found here. Thank you to our guest bl ..read more

Recently, two new meta-analyses were published analyzing growth mindset interventions. Here are the impact statements from each meta-analysis: “This systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that, despite the popularity of growth mindset interventions in schools, positive results are rare and possibly spurious due to inadequately designed interventions, reporting flaws, and bias.” - Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2022 “Growth mindset interventions are increasing in popularity in education and are being applied to improving other areas of functioning as well; however, there is debate about how we ..read more