All in Digests
Some of the most prominent learning theories in the history of psychology stem from a behaviorist approach. Behaviorist theory is focused on ways to change observable behaviors. While we are trained as cognitive psychologists (and not behaviorists), ...
The concept of desirable difficulties describes the idea that students need tasks that challenge them to the right degree in order to learn best. Some have criticized this theory for being circular (1). That is, when a learning task is easy and later performance is low...
Dual coding, or combining visuals with words, is one of the 6 strategies for effective learning. The idea is that by combining a visual representation of an idea with a verbal representation of an idea, we will be able to learn the idea better. (Of course, this can be ...
About a month ago, Tim van der Zee wrote a guest post on “Guidelines for designing educational videos” for our blog. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are in vogue, although genuinely good MOOCs are often hard to find. I (Carolina) have recently started several MOOCs to explore the variety of approaches to...
In a March blog post, Megan walked through the evidence against pure discovery learning, noting that direct instruction is needed for novices in particular and that, once a baseline of knowledge is established, inquiry-based approaches can be ...
“... even the most detailed syllabus cannot save an instructor from being deluged with the same questions from students over and over. This is because, of course, even the most detailed information is useless to a person who does not take the time to ...
