All in Learning Scientists Posts
studying can be complicated! Improving students’ knowledge and understanding of effective strategies would certainly be helpful - we’ve spent the last year writing a book hoping to do just that! - but it is only one component of effective studying and learning. When students are tasked with making choices about their learning a number of cognitive, motivational, behavioral, and contextual factors come into play. The suite of skills learners use to handle those factors is referred to as self-regulated learning (1).
Very frequently, I give writers (my students) the advice that they should read their work out loud while revising. I give this advice because it helps me to catch errors in writing, but I did not have evidence to back up my advice… until now.
One of the challenges to studying the effects of prior knowledge on learning is that it is difficult to control in an experiment … This highlights one of the trade-offs that happen when we conduct research on complex topics. Prior knowledge takes a long time to develop, and our development of that knowledge is based on many factors. This makes it difficult to manipulate! … I was therefore really interested to see a recent study that attempted to do just that - manipulate prior knowledge in order to examine its effects on learning.
Every student comes into class with some type of prior knowledge which influences how well they will learn material. The more prior-knowledge they have, the more they will be able to learn. A recent paper by Witherby and Carpenter (2021) neatly summarized this effect in a set of experiments.
A few weeks ago, Megan wrote about the benefits of spaced retrieval practice on long-term learning and transfer of course material. The researchers have again shown the benefits of spaced retrieval practice, but this set up was a little different
For over a century cognitive psychologists have been studying spaced practice and retrieval practice, resulting in a great deal of evidence that these two strategies work very well to improve student learning. However, no single experiment or paper is going to be able to answer, in full, the question “how does …
