Garvin Brod

DIPF - Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education · Education and Development

The so-called “five-to-seven year shift” describes the remarkable improvements observed in children’s cognitive abilities during this time period, particularly in their ability to exert control over their attention and behavior – i.e., executive functioning (EF). As this shift coincides with school entry, the extent to which it is driven by brain m...

Using both behavioral and eye-tracking methodology, we tested whether and how asking students to generate predictions is an efficient technique to improve learning. In particular, we designed two tasks to test whether the surprise induced by outcomes that violate expectations enhances learning. Data from the first task revealed that asking particip...

We tested 6–7-year-olds, 18–22-year-olds, and 67–74-year-olds on an associative memory task that consisted of knowledge-congruent and knowledge-incongruent object–scene pairs that were highly familiar to all age groups. We compared the three age groups on their memory congruency effect (i.e., better memory for knowledge-congruent associations) and...

This study investigated whether prompting children to generate predictions about an outcome facilitates activation of prior knowledge and improves belief revision. 51 children aged 9–12 were tested on two experimental tasks in which generating a prediction was compared to closely-matched control conditions, as well as on a test of executive functio...

Demonstrating the differential effectiveness of instructional approaches for learners is difficult because learners differ on multiple dimensions. The present study tests a person-centered approach to investigating differential effectiveness, in this case of reading instruction. In N = 517 German third-grade students, latent profile analysis identi...

The ability to apply effective learning techniques is critical for lifelong learning. However, young students in particular often struggle to apply effective strategies for lasting learning, such as distributing practice over multiple sessions. To help lower secondary schoolstudents develop more consistent study routines, we used a smartphone app t...

Mobile devices like smartphones and smartwatches are ubiquitous both inside and outside the classroom, but their potential for personalized education has yet to be realized. The data collected by mobile devices can be used to provide the right type and amount of support to a student at the right time. In the present work, we argue that adaptive mob...

Background Learning Progress Assessments (LPA) have been developed to help teachers individualize their curriculum. The use of LPA is facilitated by an increasing number of computerized LPA tools. However, little is known about student factors that influence the effectiveness of computerized LPA. Objectives In this study, we explored whether a com...

Educational applications (apps) offer opportunities for designing learning activities children enjoy and benefit from. We redesigned a typical mobile learning activity to make it more enjoyable and useful for children. Relying on the technology acceptance model, we investigated whether and how implementing this activity in an app can increase child...

Advancing learners’ agency is a key educational goal. The advent of personalized EdTech, which automatically tailor learning environments to individual learners, gives renewed relevance to the topic. EdTech researchers and practitioners are confronted with the same basic question: What is the right amount of agency to give to learners during their...

Working memory (WM) precision, or the fidelity with which items can be remembered, is an important aspect of WM capacity that increases over childhood. Why individuals are more or less precise from moment to moment and why WM becomes more stable with age are not yet fully understood. Here, we examined the role of attentional allocation in visual WM...

Working memory (WM) precision, or the fidelity with which items can be remembered, is an important aspect of WM capacity which increases over childhood. Why individuals are more or less precise from moment to moment, and why WM becomes more stable with age, are not yet fully understood. Here, we examined the role of attentional allocation in visual...

Bayesian models allow us to investigate children’s belief revision alongside physiological states, such as “surprise”. Recent work finds that pupil dilation (or the “pupillary surprise response”) following expectancy violations is predictive of belief revision. How can probabilistic models inform the interpretations of “surprise”? Shannon Informati...

Planning is an important but difficult self-regulation strategy. The successful implementation of a plan requires that the plan is retrievable in everyday life when it is needed. Children in particular are unlikely to use effective strategies to internalize plans in a way that makes them easy to remember. Therefore, we designed PROMPT, a planning a...

Mobile technologies offer new opportunities for encouraging self-regulated learning (SRL) in children. In this pre-registered study, we tested what kind of mobile intervention helps children maintain a regular study routine for vocabulary learning. Study behavior was measured objectively and with high ecological validity using logfiles of a vocabul...

Mobile technologies offer new opportunities for encouraging self-regulated learning (SRL) in children. In this pre-registered study, we tested what kind of mobile intervention helps children maintain a regular study routine for vocabulary learning. Study behavior was measured objectively and with high ecological validity using logfiles of a vocabul...

In this article, we address the measurement of individualized instruction in the context of regular classroom instruction. Our study assessed instructional practices geared towards individualization in German third grade reading lessons by combining self-report data from 621 students, from their teachers (n = 57), and live observations. We then inv...

Bayesian models allow us to investigate children’s belief revision alongside physiological states like “surprise”. Recent work finds that pupil dilation (or the “pupillary surprise response”) following expectancy-violations may be predictive of belief revision. How can probabilistic models inform interpretations of “surprise”? Shannon Information c...

Do test-anxious students perform worse in exam situations than their knowledge would otherwise allow? We analyzed data from 309 medical students who prepared for a high-stakes exam using a digital learning platform. Using log files from the learning platform, we assessed students' level of knowledge throughout the exam-preparation phase and their a...

Predictive coding models suggest that the brain constantly makes predictions about what will happen next based on past experiences. Learning is triggered by surprising events, i.e., a prediction error. Does it benefit learning when these predictions are made deliberately, so that an individual explicitly commits to an outcome before experiencing it...

Humans accumulate knowledge throughout their entire lives. In what ways does this accumulation of knowledge influence learning of new information? Are there age‐related differences in the way prior knowledge is leveraged for remembering new information? We review studies that have investigated these questions, focusing on those that have used the m...

Self-regulated learning can be conceptualized as the pursuit of learning goals by means of self-initiated control processes. Models of self-regulated learning postulate that goal-directed processes unfold within individuals from motivational states through volitional-control processes to goal achievement. Thus far, this hypothesis has mostly been t...

Asking students to generate a prediction before presenting the correct answer is a popular instructional strategy. This study tested whether a person's degree of confidence in a prediction is related to their curiosity and surprise regarding the answer. For a series of questions about numerical facts, participants (N = 29) generated predictions and...

Despite sometimes noisy evidence (e.g., perceptual processing errors), young children are capable of predicting and evaluating events based on complex causal representations. Children rapidly revise their beliefs and learn scientific concepts -sometimes without prior knowledge of an underlying causal system. What might we need in our computational...

Generative learning strategies are intended to improve students’ learning by prompting them to actively make sense of the material to be learned. But are they effective for all students? This review provides an overview of six popular generative learning strategies: concept mapping, explaining, predicting, questioning, testing, and drawing. Its mai...

Most psychological interventions have to be administered repeatedly to be effective, but what is the optimal frequency? The answer will depend on how quickly the effects build up and wear off between intervention prompts. We investigated these temporal dynamics in a popular self-regulation intervention: implementation intentions. We combined a nove...

Personalized education—the systematic adaptation of instruction to individual learners—has been a long-striven goal. We review research on personalized education that has been conducted in the laboratory, in the classroom, and in digital learning environments. Across all learning environments, we find that personalization is most successful when re...

Misconceptions about scientific concepts often prevail even if learners are confronted with conflicting evidence. This study tested the facilitative role of surprise in children’s revision of misconceptions regarding water displacement in a sample of German children (N = 94, aged 6–9 years, 46% female). Surprise was measured via the pupil dilation...

From age 5 to 7, there are remarkable improvements in children’s cognitive abilities (“5–7 shift”). In many countries, including Germany, formal schooling begins in this age range. It is, thus, unclear to what extent exposure to formal schooling contributes to the “5–7 shift.” In this longitudinal study, we investigated if schooling acts as a catal...

Active learning holds great promise for improving education, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Instead of receiving information passively, students take agency and actively construct their own understanding. Although the promises of active learning are wide-ranging, research on its merits has predominantly fo...

This article attempts to delineate the procedural and mechanistic characteristics of predicting as a learning strategy. While asking students to generate a prediction before presenting the correct answer has long been a popular learning strategy, the exact mechanisms by which it improves learning are only beginning to be unraveled. Moreover, predic...

The present study tested how students emotionally react to and deal with goal failure. We (1) examined students’ achievement emotions after they failed to achieve their learning goal and (2) tested whether students’ achievement emotions after goal failure predicted goal revision. We tested medical students (N = 344) who used a digital learning plat...

Most psychological interventions have to be administered repeatedly to be effective, but what is the optimal frequency? The answer will depend on how quickly the effects build up and wear off between intervention sessions. We investigated these temporal dynamics in a popular self-regulation intervention – implementation intentions. We combined a no...

Volitional control (i. e., efforts to maintain goal striving in the face of obstacles) is an integral part of self-regulated learning and an important factor for explaining individual differences in academic performance. However, differences between the various methods for assessing volitional control have rarely been investigated. Two common metho...

Small-group interventions allow for tailored instruction to students with learning difficulties, a crucial first step being the accurate identification of students needing a specific intervention. This study investigated how teachers decide whether their students need a remedial reading intervention. To this end, 64 teachers of 697 third-grade stud...

This study examined age-related differences in the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies (GLSs). Twenty-five children aged 9-11 and 25 university students aged 17-29 performed a facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before seeing the correct result. We found a significant Age × Learning St...

Curiosity stimulates learning. We tested whether curiosity itself can be stimulated—not by extrinsic rewards but by an intrinsic desire to know whether a prediction holds true. Participants performed a numerical-facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before rating their curiosity and seeing the correct a...

Volitional control (i. e., efforts to maintain goal striving in the face of obstacles) is an integral part of self-regulated learning and an important factor for explaining individual differences in academic performance. However, differences between the various methods for assessing volitional control have rarely been investigated. Two common metho...

Abstract We tested 6–7-year-olds, 18–22-year-olds, and 67–74-year-olds on an associative memory task that consisted of knowledge-congruent and knowledge-incongruent object–scene pairs that were highly familiar to all age groups. We compared the three age groups on their memory congruency effect (i.e., better memory for knowledge-congruent associati...

Humans possess the capacity to employ prior knowledge in the service of our ability to remember; thus, memory is oftentimes superior for information that is semantically congruent with our prior knowledge. This congruency benefit grows during development, but little is understood about neurodevelopmental differences that underlie this growth. Here,...

Recent neuroimaging research suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays an important role for successful memory formation that takes place in the context of activated prior knowledge. These findings led to the notion that the vmPFC integrates new information into existing knowledge structures. However, a considerable number of n...

Schemas represent stable properties of individuals’ experiences, and allow them to classify new events as being congruent or incongruent with existing knowledge. Research with adults indicates that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved in memory retrieval of schema-related information. However, developmental differences between children and adult...

Unlabelled: According to the schema-relatedness hypothesis, new experiences that make contact with existing schematic knowledge are more easily encoded and remembered than new experiences that do not. Here we investigate how real-life gains in schematic knowledge affect the neural correlates of episodic encoding, assessing medical students 3 month...

The encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of events and facts form the basis for acquiring new skills and knowledge. Prior knowledge can enhance those memory processes considerably and thus foster knowledge acquisition. But prior knowledge can also hinder knowledge acquisition, in particular when the to-be-learned information is inconsistent with...

New experiences are remembered in relation to one's existing world knowledge or schema. Recent research suggests that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) supports the retrieval of schema-congruent information. However, the neural mechanisms supporting memory for information violating a schema have remained elusive, presumably because incongruity is...

In two experiments participants tuned a drum machine to their preferred dance tempo. Measurements of height, shoulder width, leg length, and weight were taken for each participant, and their sex recorded. Using a multiple regression analysis, height and leg length combined was found to be the best predictors of preferred dance tempo in Experiment 1...

Across ontogenetic development, individuals gather manifold experiences during which they detect regularities in their environment and thereby accumulate knowledge. This knowledge is used to guide behavior, make predictions, and acquire further new knowledge. In this review, we discuss the influence of prior knowledge on memory from both the psycho...

The possible transfer of musical expertise to the acquisition of syntactical structures in first and second language has emerged recently as an intriguing topic in the research of cognitive processes. However, it is unlikely that the benefits of musical training extend equally to the acquisition of all syntactical structures. As cognitive transfer...

It has recently been suggested that regardless of the dimension at hand (i.e., numerosity, length, time), similar operational mechanisms are involved in the comparison process based on approximate magnitude representation. One piece of evidence for this hypothesis lies in the presence of similar behavioral effects for any comparison (i.e., the dist...