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Publications (334)
The benefits of retrieval practice (practice testing) are pervasive across various materials, learning conditions, and criterial tasks, and consequently researchers and educators have enthusiastically recommended retrieval practice for educational applications. Less research has been devoted to examining the effect of combining retrieval practice w...
For researchers seeking to improve education, a common goal is to identify teaching practices that have causal benefits in classroom settings. To test whether an instructional practice exerts a causal influence on an outcome measure, the most straightforward and compelling method is to conduct an experiment. While experimentation is common in labor...
For researchers seeking to improve education, a common goal is to identify teaching practices that have causal benefits in classroom settings. To test whether an instructional practice exerts a causal influence on an outcome measure, the most straightforward and compelling method is to conduct an experiment. While experimentation is common in labor...
Previous studies have found that students' concept-building approaches, identified a priori with a cognitive psychology laboratory task, are associated with student exam performances in chemistry classes. Abstraction learners (those who extract the principles underlying related examples) performed better than exemplar learners (those who focus on m...
In many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, it is necessary to learn numerous jargon terms—that is, discipline-specific vocabulary words that are rarely used anywhere else (or are used in a very particular way by a scientific or technical discipline). Are there effective ways to help students learn jargon in the midst...
General Audience Summary
College students often are required to learn material characterized by arbitrary associations; for example, foreign language vocabulary, biology taxonomies, and various terminology. This material is challenging because students cannot utilize typical strategies that allow them to achieve a deep understanding. In two experim...
Background
Research suggests growth mindset interventions can support student achievement, particularly among students at risk of academic struggle, but it remains underspecified which at-risk populations will benefit from such interventions.
Objectives
This study aimed to experimentally evaluate whether highly (vs. moderately or minimally) nontra...
In this article, we highlight an underappreciated individual difference: structure building. Structure building is integral to many everyday activities and involves creating coherent mental representations of conversations, texts, pictorial stories, and other events. People vary in this ability in a way not generally captured by other better known...
The testing effect refers to the benefits to retention that result from structuring learning activities in the form of a test. As educators consider implementing test-enhanced learning paradigms in real classroom environments, we think it is critical to consider how an array of factors affecting test-enhanced learning in laboratory studies bear on...
Teaching natural-science categories is highly challenging because the objects in such categories are composed of numerous complex dimensions that need to be perceived, evaluated, and integrated. Furthermore, the boundaries separating such categories are often fuzzy. A technique that has been proposed and investigated for enhancing the teaching of n...
Knowing when and how to most effectively use writing as a learning tool requires understanding the cognitive processes driving learning. Writing is a generative activity that often requires students to elaborate upon and organise information. Here we examine what happens when a standard short writing task is (or is not) combined with a known mnemon...
The use of effective study strategies is important for academic achievement, yet research indicates that students often use relatively ineffective learning strategies. Though potent strategies to promote durable learning exist, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical work on how to train students to self-regulate use of these strategies succes...
General Audience Summary
Quizzing (testing) can enhance students’ later exam performance by directly strengthening one’s memory for the information, and is often referred to as retrieval practice. Quizzing can also benefit students’ understanding of what they do and do not know, especially when they are given feedback regarding which answers are co...
Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform intended actions in the future. PM failures are especially problematic for older adults, both in terms of frequency of occurrence and severity of consequences. As such, we tackle the challenge of developing a cognitive training program for PM specifically geared towards older adults. Departing...
The testing effect is one of the strongest learning techniques documented to date. Although the effects of testing on high-level learning are promising, fewer studies on this have been done. In this classroom application of the testing effect, we aimed to 1) determine whether a testing effect exists on high-level testing; 2) determine whether highe...
We previously reported that students' concept-building approaches, identified a priori using a cognitive psychology laboratory task, extend to learning complex science, technology, engineering, and mathematics topics. This prior study examined student performance in both general and organic chemistry at a select research institution, after accounti...
Surveys indicate that at all educational levels students often use relatively ineffective study strategies. One potential remedy is to include learning-strategy training into students’ educational experiences. A major challenge, however, is that it has proven difficult to design training protocols that support students’ self-regulation and transfer...
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) can serve as a summative assessment of students’ conceptual knowledge at the end of introductory physics, but previous work has suggested that the knowledge measured by this instrument is not a unitary construct. In this article, we consider the idea that FCI performance may reflect a number of student attributes i...
Mastery of jargon terms is an important part of student learning in biology and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains. In two experiments, we investigated whether prelecture quizzes enhance memory for jargon terms, and whether that enhanced familiarity can facilitate learning of related concepts that are encountered during...
Background:
Most science categories are hierarchically organized, with various high-level divisions comprising numerous subtypes. If we suppose that one's goal is to teach students to classify at the high level, past research has provided mixed evidence about whether an effective strategy is to require simultaneous classification learning of the s...
The present experiment examined individual and age differences in the dynamics of category learning strategies. Participants learned categories determined by a disjunctive rule with relational features through a feedback training procedure. During training, participants responded to strategy probes following each block to provide online assessment...
Non-focal prospective memory (PM) is sensitive to age-related decline; an additional impairment in focal PM is characteristic of mild stage Alzheimer’s disease. This research explored whether, by mid-adulthood, the distinct demands of focal and non-focal PM expose differences in carriers of an APOE ε4 allele, a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s d...
The introductory psychology course is offered by nearly all undergraduate psychology programs. Given its prominence in curricula, there have been calls to develop reliable and valid assessments of introductory psychology knowledge to inform and evaluate instruction. The current research, guided by the American Psychological Association’s five conte...
Category learning is a core component of course curricula in science education. For instance, geology courses teach categorization of rock types. Using the educationally authentic rock categories, the current project examined whether category learning at a broad-level (BL; igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks) could be enhanced by learning c...
In prospective memory (PM) research, a common finding is that people are slower to perform an ongoing task with concurrent PM demands than to perform the same task alone. This slowing, referred to as costs, has been seen as reflecting the processes underlying successful PM. Historically, costs have been interpreted as evidence that attentional capa...
Mastery of jargon terms is an important part of student learning in biology and other STEM domains. In two experiments we investigated whether pre-lecture quizzes enhance memory for jargon terms, and whether that enhanced familiarity can facilitate learning of related concepts that are encountered during subsequent lectures and readings. Undergradu...
Low-stakes testing, or quizzing, is a formative assessment tool often used to structure course work. After students complete a quiz, instructors commonly encourage them to use those quizzes again to retest themselves near exam time (i.e., delayed re-quizzing). In this study, we examine student use of online, ungraded practice quizzes that are reope...
In prospective memory (PM) research, a common finding is that PM accuracy is greater using focal, rather than nonfocal, cues. Under the multiprocess framework, the high PM performance for focal cues (cues that facilitate noticing of the target), often in the absence of task interference, reflects people's ability to rely on spontaneous retrieval pr...
The keyword mnemonic and retrieval practice are two cognitive techniques that have each been identified to enhance foreign language vocabulary learning. However, little is known about the use of these techniques in combination. Previous demonstrations of retrieval-practice effects in foreign language vocabulary learning have tended to use several r...
Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember an intention in the future, is essential to children’s everyday lives. We explored age differences (6- to 7- vs. 10- to 11-year-olds) in PM depending on the nature of the task and the children’s motivation. Children performed event-based PM tasks (in which the cue was presented during the ongoing act...
Because of their complex structures, many natural-science categories are difficult to learn. Yet achieving accuracy in classification is crucial to scientific inference and reasoning. Thus, an emerging theme in cognitive-psychology and cognitive-science research has been to investigate better ways to instruct about categories. This article briefly...
The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
Laboratory evidence of a positive effect of sleep on declarative memory consolidation suggests that naps can be used to boost school learning in a scalable, low-cost manner. The few direct investigations of this hypothesis have so far upheld it, but departed from the naturalistic setting by testing non-curricular contents presented by experimenters...
Robust evidence shows that Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) improves the academic success of first-year college students in introductory Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. Less clear is the extent to which this positive PLTL effect varies across different subgroups of the population. The current study aims to deepen our...
Relatively little research has focused on how prospective memory (PM) operates outside of the laboratory, partially due to the methodological problems presented by naturalistic memory research in general and by the unique challenges of PM in particular. Experience sampling methods (ESM) offer a fruitful avenue for this type of research, as recent w...
General Audience Summary
Students often use flashcards to study; however, the available classroom evidence suggests that college students’ use of flashcards may not necessarily improve their exam performances. One explanation is that students typically use flashcards that focus primarily on facts and definitions. Consistent with this possibility, a...
Little research has examined the fruitfulness of flashcards for improving learning outcomes of authentic classroom material. In Experiment 1, across different content areas flashcards did not significantly increase performance on a final test relative to the free-study condition. Experiment 2 investigated whether providing conceptual flashcards wou...
Under the guidance of a formal exemplar model of categorization, we conduct comparisons of natural-science classification learning across four conditions in which the nature of the training examples is manipulated. The specific domain of inquiry is rock classification in the geologic sciences; the goal is to use the model to search for optimal trai...
The capability to remember and execute intentions in the future – termed prospective memory (PM) – may be of special significance for older adults to enable successful completion of important activities of daily living. Despite the importance of this cognitive function, mixed findings have been obtained regarding age-related decline in PM, and, cur...
For nearly 50 years, psychologists have studied prospective memory, or the ability to execute delayed intentions. Yet, there remains a gap in understanding as to whether initial encoding of the intention must be elaborative and strategic, or whether some components of successful encoding can occur in a perfunctory, transient manner. In eight studie...
General Audience Summary
Extensive prior research suggests that quizzing experience in which students actively retrieve answers to questions bolsters their memory for the quizzed content more than restudying or simply reviewing the quizzed material. In the current experiments, we explored the utility of online quizzing with feedback for improving p...
A highly controlled laboratory experiment was conducted that suggested computer-based image training of rock classifications can provide a useful supplement to physical rock training. Two groups of participants learned to classify samples of 12 major types of rocks during a training phase. One group was trained using computer images of the rock sam...
Researchers’ and educators’ enthusiasm in applying cognitive principles to enhance educational practices has become more evident. Several published reviews have suggested that some potent strategies can help students learn more efficaciously. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, students do not report frequent reliance on these empirically supported...
Learning naturalistic categories, which tend to have fuzzy boundaries and vary on many dimensions, can often be harder than learning well defined categories. One method for facilitating the category learning of naturalistic stimuli may be to provide explicit feature descriptions that highlight the characteristic features of each category. Although...
Women and minorities remain underrepresented in chemistry bachelor’s degree attainment in the United States, despite efforts to improve their early chemistry achievement through supplemental academic programs and active-learning approaches. We propose an additional strategy for addressing these disparities: course-based, social-psychological interv...
In prospective memory (PM) research, costs (slowed responding to the ongoing task when a PM task is present relative to when it is not) have typically been interpreted as implicating an attentionally demanding monitoring process. To inform this interpretation, Heathcote, Loft, and Remington (2015), using an accumulator model, found that PM-related...
The field of psychological science has seen major advances in the development of formal models of perceptual classification learning; however, little work has tested such models in real-world natural-category domains. In our current project, we aim to fill that gap by testing the ability of a formal exemplar model of classification to predict learn...
Student attitudes, defined as the extent to which one holds expertlike beliefs about and approaches to physics, are a major research topic in physics education research. An implicit but rarely tested assumption underlying much of this research is that student attitudes play a significant part in student learning and performance. The current study d...
General Audience Summary
Instructors sometimes note that though students do well answering exam questions that are similar to examples (or problems) presented in class, a sizeable proportion of students flounder on exam questions that require applying instructed concepts to a new context (or problem). Yet, other students perform satisfactorily on t...
A central focus of prospective memory research has been to understand how people self-generate the retrieval of intentions and how they remember to execute these intentions at appropriate times. In this chapter we review two theories that have stimulated much research toward explaining the cognitive underpinnings of prospective remembering, and the...
Experiments were conducted in which novice participants learned to classify pictures of rocks into real-world, scientifically defined categories. The experiments manipulated the distribution of training instances during an initial study phase, and then tested for correct classification and generalization performance during a transfer phase. The sim...
One primary goal of many science courses is for students to learn creative problem-solving skills; that is, integrating concepts, explaining concepts in a problem context, and using concepts to solve problems. However, what science instructors see is that many students, even those having excellent SAT/ACT and Advanced Placement scores, struggle in...
Writing is often used as a tool for learning. However, empirical support for the benefits of writing-to-learn is mixed, likely because the literature conflates diverse activities (e.g., summaries, term papers) under the single umbrella of writing-to-learn. Following recent trends in the writing-to-learn literature, the authors focus on the underlyi...
Background:
Prospective memory (PM) is essential for productive and independent living and necessary for compliance with prescribed health behaviors. Parkinson disease (PD) can cause PM deficits that are associated with activity limitations and reduced quality of life. Forming implementation intentions (IIs) is an encoding strategy that may improv...
The existing literature indicates that interactive-engagement (IE) based general physics classes improve conceptual learning relative to more traditional lecture-oriented classrooms. Very little research, however, has examined quantitative problem-solving outcomes from IE based relative to traditional lecture-based physics classes. The present stud...
The general view in psychological science is that natural categories obey a coherent, family-resemblance principle. In this investigation, we documented an example of an important exception to this principle: Results of a multidimensional-scaling study of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks (Experiment 1) suggested that the structure of the...
Prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform intended actions in the future. PM failures are especially problematic for older adults, both in terms of frequency of occurrence and severity of consequences. As such, we tackle the challenge of developing a cognitive training program for PM specifically geared toward older adults. Departing...
Time-based prospective memory tasks (TBPM) are those that are to be performed at a specific future time. Contrary to typical laboratory TBPM tasks (e.g., hit the Z key every 5 min), many real-world TBPM tasks require more complex time-management processes. For instance, to attend an appointment on time, one must estimate the duration of the drive t...
Knowing what skills underlie college success can allow students, teachers, and universities to identify and to help at-risk students. One skill that may underlie success across a variety of subject areas is structure building, the ability to create mental representations of narratives (Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, ). We tested if individual differ...
Objectives:
To test the utility of a memory-encoding strategy for improving prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to execute future goals (e.g., remembering to take medications), which plays an important role in independent living in healthy older adults and those with very mild Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Design:
Participants were rand...
A robust finding within laboratory research is that structuring information as a test confers benefit on long-term retention-referred to as the testing effect. Although well characterized in laboratory environments, the testing effect has been explored infrequently within ecologically valid contexts. We conducted a series of 3 experiments within a...
Structure building describes the process by which people mentally organize information while reading to comprehend and later recall text. We investigated how individual differences in structure building ability affect students' learning of complex, educational texts. College students studied a complex text with a mechanical theme, engaged in retrie...
Despite the fundamental role of category learning in cognition, few studies have examined how this ability differs between younger and older adults. The present experiment examined possible age differences in category learning strategies and their effects on learning. Participants were trained on a category determined by a disjunctive rule applied...
Prospective memory refers to the ability to remember to perform delayed intentions such as remembering to take medication. Prospective memory is dissociable from other forms of memory by its future focus, the need for planning, and a reliance on self-initiated retrieval. Current theoretical approaches examine whether prospective memory is supported...
Previous research has shown that the Read-Recite-Review (3R) technique, a retrieval-based strategy, enhances free recall but not inference performance relative to a common note-taking strategy. We hypothesize that this may be because retrieval practice enhances memory processes without encouraging learners to build a coherent situation model, a typ...
In educational learning contexts, unlike typical contemporary laboratory paradigms, students have repeated opportunities to study and learn target material, thereby potentially allowing different sequences of testing and studying. We investigated learning and retention after several plausible sequences that were patterned on a classic memory paradi...
How does orthographic distinctiveness affect recall of structured (categorized) word lists? On one theory, enhanced item-specific information (e.g., more distinct encoding) in concert with robust relational information (e.g., categorical information) optimally supports free recall. This predicts that for categorically structured lists, orthographic...
According to the multiprocess framework (McDaniel and Einstein, 2000), the cognitive system can support prospective memory (PM) retrieval through two general pathways. One pathway depends on top–down attentional control processes that maintain activation of the intention and/or monitor the environment for the triggering or target cues that indicate...
In educational contexts, students may engage in various strategies to acquire to-be-learned information. For example, when learning how to solve math problems, students may focus on superficial attributes of the problems and memorize procedures for solving them, or they may abstract underlying rules or regularities to understand why certain procedu...
This study tested whether (1) very mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with impaired prospective memory (PM) for tasks that are supported by either spontaneous retrieval (focal PM) or strategic monitoring (non-focal PM) and (2) implementation intention (II) encoding could improve PM performance in very mild AD.
Thirty-eight healthy older ad...
The current study examined the effects of providing learning aids during a lecture on later test performance, and its relationship to structure-building ability. Before taking notes on an audio lecture, participants were either given a skeletal outline, an illustrative diagram, or no learning aid at all. After the lecture, participants were given a...
Recently, the testing effect has received a great deal of attention from researchers and educators who are intrigued by its potential to enhance student learning in the classroom. However, effective incorporation of testing (as a learning tool) merits a close examination of the conditions under which testing can enhance student learning in an authe...
Prospective memory (PM) tasks are those that must be performed in the future (e.g., attend an appointment). While these everyday tasks can be especially relevant for older adults (i.e., medication adherence), and have been associated with age-related decline, PM has been virtually overlooked in the cognitive training domain. This article describes...
Interactive-engagement (IE) techniques consistently enhance conceptual learning gains relative to traditional-lecture courses, but attitudinal gains typically emerge only in small, inquiry-based curricula. The current study evaluated whether a "scalable IE" curriculum—a curriculum used in a large course (̃130 students per section) and likely adopta...
List composition effects refer to the findings in which a given memory phenomenon shows discrepant patterns across different list designs (i.e., mixed or pure lists). These effects have typically been reported with verbal materials (e.g., word lists, paired associates, sentences); much less research has examined whether these effects generalize to...
Although individual differences in category-learning tasks have been explored, the observed differences have tended to represent different instantiations of general processes (e.g., learners rely upon different cues to develop a rule) and their consequent representations. Additionally, studies have focused largely on participants' categorizations o...
This study evaluated brief, in-class write-to-learn assignments as a tool for promoting learning and retention in large, introductory psychology courses. A within-subjects (student) design was used with assignment of concepts to write-to-learn and copy (control) conditions counterbalanced across sections for each instructor. Students performed bett...
Despite considerable evidence that testing benefits subsequent retrieval of information, it remains uncertain whether this effect extends to topically related information with authentic classroom materials. In the current study we first profile the way in which quizzing is used in the classroom through a survey of introductory psychology instructor...
We investigated the potential benefits of a novel cognitive-training protocol and an aerobic exercise intervention, both individually and in concert, on older adults’ performances in laboratory simulations of select real-world tasks. The cognitive training focused on a range of cognitive processes, including attentional coordination, prospective me...