Timothy Nokes-Malach

• PhD Cognitive Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at University of Pittsburgh

The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their class on a screening survey. Participants were asked to share general reflections on challenges and su...

We apply a motivational perspective to understand the implications of physicians’ longitudinal assessment. We review the literature on situated expectancy-value theory, achievement goals, mindsets, anxiety, and stereotype threat in relation to testing and assessment. This review suggests several motivational benefits of testing as well as some pote...

Is self-assessment enough to keep physicians' cognitive skills-such as diagnosis, treatment, basic biological knowledge, and communicative skills-current? We review the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of self-assessment in the context of maintaining medical expertise. Cognitive science supports the importance of accurately self-assessing one's o...

Although tests and assessments-such as those used to maintain a physician's Board certification-are often viewed merely as tools for decision-making about one's performance level, strong evidence now indicates that the experience of being tested is a powerful learning experience in its own right: The act of retrieving targeted information from memo...

Over the course of training, physicians develop significant knowledge and expertise. We review dual-process theory, the dominant theory in explaining medical decision making: physicians use both heuristics from accumulated experience (System 1) and logical deduction (System 2). We then discuss how the accumulation of System 1 clinical experience ca...

Until recently, physicians in the USA who were board-certified in a specialty needed to take a summative test every 6-10 years. However, the 24 Member Boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties are in the process of switching toward much more frequent assessments, which we refer to as longitudinal assessment. The goal of longitudinal asses...

Physics is a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics discipline in which women are severely underrepresented. Prior work has identified motivation-based explanations for low participation and retention rates of women in physics. Among various motivational factors, intelligence mindsets (i.e., having fixed or growth mindsets) have been rar...

One standard pedagogical approach in physical science courses first asks students to make predictions about physical phenomena that commonly elicit non-normative expectations, and then has students make observations that provide counterevidence to spark conceptual change. This paper presents five experiments investigating conditions where observati...

We propose that causal networks representing canonical scientific models can be a useful analytic tool for specifying how student knowledge resources are aligned with canonical science as well as the ways that they need to be recoordinated in learning science. Using causal networks to analyze student-generated science explanations, we highlight thr...

Several strands of prior work have evaluated students’ study strategies and learning activities. In this work, we focus on integrating two of those strands. One has focused on student self-reports of their study practices from a cognitive psychology perspective. The other has focused on classifying student learning activities from a learning scienc...

Self-efficacy is an aspect of students’ motivation that has been shown to play a critical role in students’ engagement, participation, and retention in academic careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Since women are underrepresented in STEM domains such as physics, we studied female and male students’ self-efficacy and...

There is a significant underrepresentation of women in many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors and careers. Prior research has shown that self-efficacy can be a critical factor in student learning, and that there is a tendency for women to have lower self-efficacy than men in STEM disciplines. This study investigates ge...

Gender differences in students’ physics identity in introductory physics courses can influence students’ interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and their career decisions. Exploring the components that influence these identities is critical to developing a better understanding of the underrepresentation of women in physics co...

Achievement goals are the reasons for pursuing competence-related tasks. Much prior work has shown that they can affect student motivation, learning, and performance outcomes. They are typically measured in classroom settings vis-à-vis self-report surveys about students’ goals or the perceived goal structure of the class. Less work has measured how...

Students’ intentions to persevere and their career choices in science, technology, engineering, and math fields can be impacted by their physics identities. Women are severely underrepresented at all levels in physics and engineering. Physics in particular has stereotypes about being a discipline for brilliant men. Therefore, it is particularly dif...

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019

A gulf exists between prior work testing metacognitive instructional interventions and teacher practices that may support metacognition in the classroom. To help bridge this gulf, we designed an observational protocol to capture whether and how teachers provide metacognitive support in their talk and examined whether these supports were related to...

We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent vs. incoherent) on learning and transfer. Working in dyads or individually, participants classified examples from either an abstract coherent category, the features of which are not fixed but relate in a meaningful way, or an incoherent category, the f...

Models of achievement goals suggest that different tasks and contexts influence the goals students adopt at a given time. However, many studies of achievement goals rely on measures assessed at the class level, analyze results with a variable-centered approach, and employ self-report questionnaires, which may reduce understanding of the contextual...

People often use spatial metaphors (e.g., think “laterally,” “outside the box”) to describe exploration of the problem space during creative problem solving. In this paper, we probe the potential cognitive underpinnings of these spatial metaphors. Drawing on theories of situative cognition, semantic foraging theory, and environmental psychology, we...

We compared types of transfer facilitated by instructions to engage in analogical comparison or self-explanation. Participants received learning materials and worked examples with prompts supporting analogical comparison, self-explanation, or instructional explanation study. Learners also self-reported their use of analogical comparison and self-ex...

Controversy regarding the nature and frequency of knowledge transfer has received significant attention for more than a century, and this debate has sparked advances in our theoretical understanding of transfer as well as educational practices designed to promote it. We review the classical cognitive approach to studying transfer and highlight seve...

Although collaboration is often considered a beneficial learning strategy, research examining the claim suggests a much more complex picture. Critically, the question is not whether collaboration is beneficial to learning, but instead how and when collaboration improves outcomes. In this paper, we first discuss the mechanisms hypothesized to suppor...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) theorists propose that learners' motivations and cognitive and metacognitive processes interact dynamically during learning, yet researchers typically measure motivational constructs as stable factors. In this study, self-efficacy was assessed frequently to observe its variability during learning and how learners' effi...

Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognitive skills results in changes to student metacognition, motivation, learning, and future learning in the classroom. We examined whether a 6-hr intervention designed to teach the declarative and procedural components of planning, monitoring, and evaluati...

This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science lessons or a contro...

Achievement goals have been examined extensively in relationship to self-reported learning behaviors and achievement, yet very little work has observed the behaviors through which achievement goals might influence learning and performance. We collected fine-grained behavioral data to assess students' activities throughout the semester in a college...

Achievement goals are a powerful construct for understanding students' classroom experiences and performance, yet most work examining achievement goals relies on self-report measures gathered through questionnaires. The current work aims to assess achievement goals using a task choice embedded within a typical classroom activity. Results show the b...

Robust knowledge serves as a common instructional target in academic settings. Past research identifying characteristics of experts’ knowledge across many domains can help clarify the features of robust knowledge as well as ways of assessing it. We review the expertise literature and identify three key features of robust knowledge (deep, connected,...

Research on expertise suggests that a critical aspect of expert understanding is knowledge of the relations between domain principles and problem features. We investigated two instructional pathways hypothesized to facilitate students’ learning of these relations when studying worked examples. The first path is through self-explaining how worked ex...

We propose a novel theoretical framework for knowledge transfer that consists of constructing a representation of context, generating a solution, and evaluating whether the solution makes sense given that context. Sense-making and satisficing processes determine when the transfer cycle begins and ends, and the classical mechanisms of transfer (iden...

A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We hy...

Over the past 20 years, there has been much research on how people learn from case comparisons. This work has implemented comparison activities in a variety of different ways across a wide range of laboratory and classroom contexts. In an effort to assess the overall effectiveness of case comparisons across this diversity of implementation and cont...

Models of self-regulated learning (SRL) describe the complex and dynamic interplay of learners’ cognitions, motivations, and behaviors when engaged in a learning activity. Recently, researchers have begun to use fine-grained behavioral data such as think aloud protocols and log-file data from educational software to test hypotheses regarding the co...

Previous studies suggest that social relations can increase one’s motivation to learn in school. However, other evidence showed that having more friends may also distract from one’s academic involvement. To understand the mechanisms behind this apparent contradiction, this study identified and tested the effects of a potentially important positive...

Metacognition, or knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena such as monitoring and regulation, has been positively associated with academic performance and motivation (Flavell, 1979; Hacker et. al, 2000; Swanson, 1992; Wolters, 1998). It develops naturally into adulthood but there are large individual differences in its use and development,...

The study of knowledge transfer rarely draws upon motivational constructs in empirical work. We investigated how students' achievement goals interact with different forms of instruction to promote transfer, defined as preparation for future learning (Bransford & Schwartz, 19998. Bransford , J. D. and Schwartz , D. L. 1999 . Rethinking transfer: A s...

Research in classrooms has shown mixed evidence for benefits of collaborative learning compared with learning individually. Moreover, laboratory research has shown that individuals working in dyads or groups often perform worse than individuals working alone — a robust finding called the collaborative inhibition effect. Despite these findings, we h...

Why do some groups succeed where others fail? We hypothesise that collaborative success is achieved when the relationship between the dyad's prior expertise and the complexity of the task creates a situation that affords constructive and interactive processes between group members. We call this state the zone of proximal facilitation in which the d...

Prior research on conceptual change has identified multiple kinds of misconceptions at different levels of representational complexity including false beliefs, flawed mental models, and incorrect ontological categories. We hypothesized that conceptual change of a mental model requires change in the system of relations between the features of the pr...

Knowledge transfer is critical to successfully solving novel problems and performing new tasks. Several theories have been proposed to account for how, when, and why transfer occurs. These include both classical cognitive theories such as identical rules, analogy, and schemas, as well as more recent views such as situated transfer and preparation f...

Cognitive science principles should have implications for the design of effective learning environments. The self-explanation principle was chosen for the current work because it has developed significantly over the last 20 years. Early formulations hypothesized that self-explanation facilitated inference generation to supply missing information ab...

Learning requires applying limited working memory and attentional resources to intrinsic, germane, and extraneous aspects of the learning task. To reduce the especially undesirable extraneous load aspects of learning environments, cognitive load theorists suggest that spatially integrated learning materials should be used instead of spatially separ...

Developing high-level problem-solving skill is critical to successfully perform a variety of tasks in both formal (e.g., school and work) and informal (e.g., home) settings. One way to understand how people acquire such skills is to examine research on expertise in problem solving. In this article, we provide an integrative review of the psychologi...

Our work lies at the intersection of motivation, affect, social interaction, and learning. We are interested in how dialectical interaction impacts conceptual learning vis-à-vis motivation and affect. In this research, we focus on situations in which two or more people with roughly equal status but alternative viewpoints either compete with one ano...

Whereas the cognitive processes and effects of collaborative learning have been intensively studied within the Learning Sciences, little attention has been paid to the way motivational and emotional factors may affect them. In this symposium, we present recent findings from three independent lines of research that focus on the way motivation and af...

The authors used a novel dual-component training procedure that combined a serial reaction time task and an artificial grammar learning task to investigate the role of instructional focus in incidental pattern learning. In Experiment 1, participants either memorized letter strings as a primary task and reacted to the stimuli locations as a secondar...

How does the type of learning material impact what is learned? The current research investigates the nature of students’ learning of math concepts when using manipulatives (Uttal, Scudder, & DeLoache, 1997). We examined how the type of manipulative (concrete, abstract, none) and problem-solving prompt (metacognitive or problem-focused) affect stude...

Self-explaining is a beneficial learning strategy for studying worked-out examples because it either supplies missing information through the generation of inferences or because it provides a mechanism for repairing flawed mental models. Although self-explanation is generated with the purpose of helping the individual, is it also helpful to produce...

A central goal of cognitive science is to develop a general theory of transfer to explain how people use and apply their prior knowledge to solve new problems. Previous work has identified multiple mechanisms of transfer including (but not limited to) analogy, knowledge compilation, and constraint violation. The central hypothesis investigated in t...

The effect of expertise on collaborative memory was examined by comparing expert pilots, novice pilots, and non-pilots. Participants were presented with aviation scenarios and asked to recall the scenarios alone or in collaboration with a fellow participant of the same expertise level. Performance in the collaborative condition was compared to nomi...

Cognitive science research focuses on how the mind works, including topics such as thinking, problem solving, learning and transfer. Much of this research remains unknown in science education circles, yet is relevant for the design of instructional strategies in the sciences. We outline some difficulties in learning science, along with a discussion...

Knowledge transfer is critical for solving novel problems and performing new tasks. Recent work has shown that invention activities can promote flexible learning, leading to better transfer after instruction (Schwartz & Martin, 2004). The current project examines the role of achievement goals in promoting transfer. Results indicate that engaging in...

Previous research in cognitive science has shown that analogical comparison and self- explanation are two powerful learning activities that can improve conceptual learning in laboratory settings. The current work examines whether these results generalize to students learning physics in a classroom setting. Students were randomly assigned to one of...

Research in cognitive science has shown that students typically have a difficult time acquiring deep conceptual understanding in domains like mathematics and physics and often rely on textbook examples to solve new problems. The use of prior examples facilitates learning, but the advantage is often limited to very similar problems. One reason stude...

Contemporary theories of learning postulate one or at most a small number of different learning mechanisms. However, people are capable of mastering a given task through qualitatively different learning paths such as learning by instruction and learning by doing. We hypothesize that the knowledge acquired through such alternative paths differs with...

Participants were trained on three knowledge types -- exemplars, tactics, and constraints -- and then thought aloud while solving a series of transfer problems. Results show that participants shift between mechanisms of analogy, knowledge compilation, and constraint violation depending on their prior knowledge and the characteristics of the transfe...

Three theories of knowledge transfer --analogy, knowledge compilation, and constraint violation --were tested across three transfer scenarios. Each theory was shown to predict human performance in distinct and identifiable ways on a variety of transfer tasks. Results support the hypothesis that there are multiple mechanisms of transfer and that a g...

Several theories of learning have been proposed to account for the acquisition of abstract, generative knowledge including schema theory, analogical learning and implicit learning. However, past research has not compared these three theories directly. In the present studies we instantiated each theory as a learning scenario (i.e., direct instructio...

Research on implicit learning has shown that the knowledge generated from memorizing patterned symbol sequences can be used to make familiarity judgements of novel sequences with similar structure. However, the degree to which these knowledge representations can be used for subsequent cognitive processing is not known. In this study, participants m...

Thesis (PH.D. in Psychology)--University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-130).