Markus Wolfgang Hermann Spitzer

Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg | MLU · Institut für Psychologie

In increasing numbers of classrooms worldwide, students use digital learning software. However, we know little about the trajectories of usage and the performance within such digital learning software over the academic year. This study analyzed real-world longitudinal data from a mathematics learning software used in classrooms in Germany and the N...

In increasing numbers of classrooms worldwide, students use digital learning software. However, we know little about the trajectories of usage and the performance within such digital learning software over the academic year. This study analyzed real-world longitudinal data from a mathematics learning software used in classrooms in Germany and the N...

To expand their knowledge and satisfy their intellectual curiosity, people need to engage in self-directed information seeking. However, curiosity research often relies on experimental tasks that explicitly prompt information seeking instead of capturing participants’ self-initiated exploratory behaviors. The present study aimed to combine aspects...

Research on fostering learning about percentages within intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) is limited. Additionally, there is a lack of data‐driven approaches for improving the design of ITS to facilitate learning about percentages. To address these gaps, we first investigated whether students' understanding of basic mathematical skills (eg, arith...

The development and distribution of digital learning software, such as intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), have evolved into a billion-dollar industry, impacting a vast number of students worldwide. While ITSs have significant potential to effectively transform learning and support teachers, the extent to which ITSs rely on teacher support to main...

Background: Students who learn with adaptive intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are often provided with additional learning materials to close their knowledge gaps when the system recognizes difficulties in a topic. Students may be nudged with notification badges to close their knowledge gaps. Aim: This study evaluated the effectiveness of impleme...

Online experiments are increasingly gaining traction in the behavioral sciences. Despite this, behavioral researchers have largely continued to use keyboards as the primary input devices for such online studies, overlooking the ubiquity of touchscreens in everyday use. This paper presents an open-source touchscreen extension for jsPsych, a JavaScri...

Background: COVID-19-related school closures globally disrupted students' education, leading to declines in academic performance. However, some studies also reported performance increases within intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Yet, the latter evidence stems exclusively from so-called “Western” countries (e.g., Germany). Hence, whether these fi...

The anchoring effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein individuals heavily rely on a previously presented anchor when making decisions. This anchor, often a numerical cue presented at the beginning, influences the perception and evaluation of subsequent information by serving as a reference point. The extent to which this effect plays a role in...

Open-book examinations have become a true alternative to closed-book examinations. However, mixed evidence exists on whether students’ examination outcomes differ between the two examination formats and little is known about whether the two examination formats affect all students equally, or whether lower-performing students are affected differentl...

The adoption of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) worldwide has led to a considerable accumulation of process data as students interact with different learning topics within these systems. Typically, these learning topics are structured within ITSs (e.g., the fraction topic includes subtopics such as a fraction number line subtopic). However, the...

Curiosity has been described as a desire to learn new information, and previous studies have demonstrated that curiosity drives peoples’ decision to invest resources (e.g., time or tokens) to find out answers. It is commonly assumed that curiosity should also prompt people to invest more effort until they attain unknown answers. However, experiment...

Humans are remarkably flexible in adapting their behavior to current demands. It has been suggested that the decision which of multiple tasks to perform is based on a variety of factors pertaining to the rewards associated with each task as well as task performance (e.g., error rates associated with each task and/or error commission on the previous...

Rational numbers pose a significant challenge in mathematics education. A recent suggestion was to facilitate learning by designing a curriculum that introduces the different formats of rational numbers (i.e., fractions, decimals, and percentages), starting with the easiest. However, conclusive evidence on the respective difficulty of the different...

Curiosity appears to be the driving force for humans to find new information, but despite its general relevance, only a few studies investigated the underlying mechanisms of curiosity. Kang et al. (Psychol Sci 20(8):963–973, 2009) and Dubey and Griffiths (Psychol Rev 127(3):455–476, 2020) reported a relation between curiosity and confidence such th...

A growing number of studies seek to evaluate the impact of school closures during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While most studies reported severe learning losses in students, some studies found positive effects of school closures on academic performance. However, it is still unclear which factors contribute to the differential effects observed in...

Background: In 2020, school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic forced students all over the world to promptly alter their learning routines from in-person to distance learning. However, so far, only a limited number of studies from a few countries investigated whether school closures affected students' performance within intelligent tutoring sy...

In several countries, students learn basic mathematical skills first, followed by fractions before learning percentages. Previous longitudinal studies observed that basic mathematical skills (e.g., arithmetic) are significant predictors of understanding fractions, which is critical for later academic success. However, it is still unclear whether th...

Background Mastering fractions seems among the most critical mathematical skills for students to acquire in school as fraction understanding significantly predicts later mathematic achievements, but also broader academic and vocational prospects. As such, identifying longitudinal predictors of fraction understanding (e.g., mastery of numbers and op...

Humans are remarkably flexible in adapting their behavior to current demands. It has been suggested that the decision which of multiple tasks to perform is based on a variety of factors pertaining to the costs and benefits associated with a task. However, further empirical investigation is needed to examine how cognitive costs associated with task...

Humans adjust their behavior after they have committed an error, but it is unclear whether and how error commissions influence voluntary task choices. In the present article, we review different accounts on effects of errors in the previous trial (transient error effects) and overall error probabilities (sustained error effects) on behavioral adapt...

One of the recent major advances in cognitive psychology research has been the option of web-based in addition to lab-based experimental research. This option fosters experimental research by increasing the pace and size of collecting data sets. Importantly, web-based research profits heavily from integrating tasks that are frequently applied in co...

Humans are usually engaged with a task but frequently face the decision to remain with their current task, or to switch to another task. Recent research suggested that this decision may be influenced by the cognitive processes involved in task performance preceding this decision—linking task performance and task selection. One critical performance...

Background: Mastering fractions seems among the most critical academic skill for students to acquire in school as fraction understanding significantly predicts later academic and vocational prospects. As such, identifying longitudinal predictors of fraction understanding (e.g., mastery of numbers and operations) is highly relevant. However, almost...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused schools to shut down around the world. Despite mounting empirical data, little is known about the use of online-learning environments and its impact on learning losses throughout the pandemic. Using a large dataset of over 24,000 students from classes 4-10 who computed over 560,000 problem sets, we examined the...

Curiosity appears to be the driving force for humans to find new information, but despite its general relevance, only few studies investigated the underlying mechanisms of curiosity. Kang et al. (2009) reported that curiosity follows an inverted U-shaped function of confidence, with highest curiosity on moderate confidence levels of knowing informa...

Background Due to the COVID-19 pandemic schools all over the world were closed and thereby students had to be instructed from distance. Consequently, the use of online learning environments for online distance learning increased massively. However, the perseverance of using online learning environments during and after school closures remains to be...

Humans adjust their behavior after they committed an error, but it is unclear whether and how error commissions influence voluntary task choices. In the present article, we review different accounts on effects of errors in the previous trial (transient error effects) and overall error probabilities (sustained error effects) on behavioral adaptation...

The shutdown of schools in response to the rapid spread of COVID-19 poses risks to the education of young children, including a widening education gap. In the present article, we investigate how school closures in 2020 influenced the performance of German students in a curriculum-based online learning software for mathematics. We analyzed data from...

One of the recent major advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience research has been the option of web-based in addition to lab-based experimental research. This option fosters experimental research by increasing the pace and size of collecting data sets. Importantly, web-based research profits heavily from integrating tasks that are frequen...

Decades of research produced inconsistent findings on whether study time can lead to achievement gains in mathematics. Data generated by more than six thousand students from three different countries who solved more than 1.1 million problem sets using a dedicated mathematics software are analyzed regarding the effect of study time on students' achi...

Previous studies on voluntary task switching using the self-organized task switching paradigm suggest that task performance and task selection in multitasking are related. When deciding between two tasks, the stimulus associated with a task repetition occurred with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) that continuously increased with the number of rep...

The shutdown of schools in response to the rapid spread of COVID-19 poses risks to the education of young children, including a widening education gap. In the present article, we investigate how school closures in 2020 influenced the performance of German students in a curriculum-based online learning software for mathematics. We analyzed data from...

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Während des letzten Jahrzehnts war die Replikationskrise eines der am meisten diskutierten Themen in der Psychologie. Doch wie konnte es überhaupt zu dieser Krise kommen, welche Studien sind von der Replikationskrise betroffen und welche Maßnahmen wurden bisher ergriffen, um dieser Krise zu begegnen? In dieser Übersicht werden eine...

Several studies reported that it is harder to switch from a difficult task to an easy task than vice versa. Previous studies explain this paradoxical effect in terms of differences in task strength, by letting participants switch between different types of tasks. However, these studies failed to isolate the effects of task strength from task identi...

In the context of hedonic (over-)eating the ventral tegmental area (VTA) as a core part of the dopaminergic reward system plays a central role in coding incentive salience of high-caloric food. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether transcranial magnetic theta-burst stimulation (TBS) over t...

A comparison between the effects of the same type of physical activity being executed and watched on television on inhibitory control, the ability to focus on the relevant stimuli and disregard distraction, does not exist so far. Trying to close this gap, we tested 24 students on their inhibition control with the Erickson flanker task before and af...