All tagged working memory
In this week’s post, Cindy and I (Althea) talk about our work with medical student learners. We have both worked for medical schools for a little over a year now and we’ve learned some things! We discuss common challenges for learning in medical school, efficient learning strategies, learning in the context of attentional disorders and anxiety, and what it means to prepare future healers.
Even among the top effective, evidence-based study strategies that we write about, spaced practice is one of the best. Spaced practice is all about when you engage in practice. It is better to spread practice out over time, rather than massing (cramming). This is true whether you are reviewing …
Cognitive Load Theory is an influential theory from educational psychology that describes how various factors affect our ability to use our working memory resources. We’ve done a digest about cognitive load theory here and talked about it here and here, but haven’t provided an overview of the theory so I want to give an overview here.
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… However, a recent study with German medical students found that test anxiety did not predict exam performance when prior knowledge was controlled for, claiming strong evidence against the interference hypothesis (3).
For a lot of students, final exams create a sense of dread and a lot of anxiety. As if they weren’t worried enough, that worry can actually cause worse performance on exams (1). One of the mechanisms for the lower performance may have to do with working memory.
Metacognition is a superpower that helps elite students separate themselves from their peers. I have written about this topic several times including how learners can employ metacognition when reading academic materials in order to deeply engage with the content. It’s a practice I employed …
