As a cognitive psychologist, I think it’s important for students to understand how their attention works. But, unlike aspects principles of cognition that are easy to demonstrate, attention can be somewhat elusive. Perception can be demonstrated...
All in For Researchers
GUEST POST: How to Help Students Overcome Misconceptions
As teachers, you and I want all of our students to come away from our classes learning accurate information. Unfortunately, misconceptions exist in every area of study, and teachers should not ignore them. Studies have consistently shown that if you do not ...
On the Potential Limitations of Spacing and Retrieval Practice in the Classroom (and the Need for More Applied Research)
We have been writing a lot about the top two learning strategies that cognitive psychology has brought out: Spacing and retrieval practice. Both learning strategies have accumulated a vast amount of scientific evidence, making us confident to recommend these strategies to teachers and students. However, it is important to keep in mind...
GUEST POST: My Journey from Mayhem to Morphology
I became a high school speech pathologist after earning a Master’s degree in Speech and Language Pathology. When I was in school, Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs) didn't learn a whole lot about orthography. We learned many things...
Weekly Digest #68: Desirable Difficulties
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...
The Key to Interleaving: Jumble It Up!
Interleaving can be a confusing topic and is often confused with spaced practice. In laboratory studies, we can disentangle the effects of interleaving and spacing to show that they are both helpful on their own to produce learning (1). However, in classroom ...