All in Learning Scientists Posts
There is a wide range in quality of educational videos that learners navigate. A range in quality of content, production, and relevance. Whether you’re a student watching lecture videos for class, watching videos as a supplement to your regular coursework, or a life-long learner who simply wants to learn more about the world (and tuberculosis), I want to talk about two strategies that can help you learn more from videos.
We have looked at the benefits of combining text and visuals for memory and learning – see dual coding – in many previous posts. A new series of experiments has investigated the effects of drawing specifically and whether drawing improves memory for the to-be-learned material compared to other strategies…
I’ve learned so much about the tools, language, and strategies that medical students use and how those ideas can be adapted using effective strategies. I discuss the lessons I’ve learned about the limitations of research and efficient (not just effective) learning.
In my last blog, I covered a paper I published (1) about questions in class, covert retrieval, and cold calling. The conclusion from this paper, and the blog post covering it, is that inserting questions into a lecture, and encouraging students to covertly retrieve through cold calling, ought to improve learning from a lesson. If time does not permit writing out the answers (one form of overt retrieval), or doing so would disrupt the flow of a discussion, then students should still benefit from bringing the information to mind if they are encouraged to do so fully through cold calling. However, it is often quite difficult to …
While we talk about the benefits of retrieval practice a lot here at the Learning Scientists, we usually talk about the benefits of retrieval practice for already learned information. However, retrieval practice has also been shown to be beneficial for learning new information.
The Yerkes-Dodson law is used frequently in performance settings. It has been applied to everything from work productivity to sports performance and the impact of anxiety on learning. But how did this research finding become a “law”? And how well has this been replicated?
