Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice. To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension. We attempted to provide thorough reviews for each technique, so this monograph is rather lengthy. However, we also wrote the monograph in a modular fashion, so it is easy to use. In particular, each review is divided into the following sections: General description of the technique and why it should work How general are the effects of this technique? 2a. Learning conditions 2b. Student characteristics 2c. Materials 2d. Criterion tasks Effects in representative educational contexts Issues for implementation Overall assessment The review for each technique can be read independently of the others, and particular variables of interest can be easily compared across techniques. To foreshadow our final recommendations, the techniques vary widely with respect to their generalizability and promise for improving student learning. Practice testing and distributed practice received high utility assessments because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown to boost students' performance across many criterion tasks and even in educational contexts. Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice received moderate utility assessments. The benefits of these techniques do generalize across some variables, yet despite their promise, they fell short of a high utility assessment because the evidence for their efficacy is limited. For instance, elaborative interrogation and self-explanation have not been adequately evaluated in educational contexts, and the benefits of interleaving have just begun to be systematically explored, so the ultimate effectiveness of these techniques is currently unknown. Nevertheless, the techniques that received moderate-utility ratings show enough promise for us to recommend their use in appropriate situations, which we describe in detail within the review of each technique. Five techniques received a low utility assessment: summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, and rereading. These techniques were rated as low utility for numerous reasons. Summarization and imagery use for text learning have been shown to help some students on some criterion tasks, yet the conditions under which these techniques produce benefits are limited, and much research is still needed to fully explore their overall effectiveness. The keyword mnemonic is difficult to implement in some contexts, and it appears to benefit students for a limited number of materials and for short retention intervals. Most students report rereading and highlighting, yet these techniques do not consistently boost students' performance, so other techniques should be used in their place (e.g., practice testing instead of rereading). Our hope is that this monograph will foster improvements in student learning, not only by showcasing which learning techniques are likely to have the most generalizable effects but also by encouraging researchers to continue investigating the most promising techniques. Accordingly, in our closing remarks, we discuss some issues for how these techniques could be implemented by teachers and students, and we highlight directions for future research.

https://www.wku.edu/senate/documents/improving_student_learning_dunlosky_2013.pdf

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology

Inductive learning—that is, learning a new concept or category by observing exemplars—happens constantly, for example, when a baby learns a new word or a doctor classifies x-rays. What influence does the spacing of exemplars have on induction? Compared with massing, spacing enhances long-term recall, but we expected spac- ing to hamper induction by making the commonalities that define a concept or category less apparent. We asked participants to study multiple paintings by different ar- tists, with a given artist's paintings presented consecutive- ly (massed) or interleaved with other artists' paintings (spaced). We then tested induction by asking participants to indicate which studied artist (Experiments 1a and 1b) or whether any studied artist (Experiment 2) painted each of a series of new paintings. Surprisingly, induction profited from spacing, even though massing apparently created a sense of fluent learning: Participants rated massing as more effective than spacing, even after their own test performance had demonstrated the opposite.

Learning Concepts and Categories Is Spacing the “Enemy of Induction”?

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate how students perceive the services they are offered at a German university and how satisfied they are with them.Design/methodology/approach – An evaluation study using a new tool to measure 15 dimensions of student satisfaction at an institutional level that covers most aspects of student life was used. It was decided to develop a new measurement tool as many existing surveys are poorly designed, lack standardization and give no evidence concerning reliability or validity. Questionnaires were handed out in eight lectures for the pilot study and 18 lectures for the main study. The response rate was 99 percent. A total of 374 students (pilot study) and 544 students (main study) filled in the newly developed questionnaires using Likert scales.Findings – The study gave a valuable insight into how students perceive the quality of the services offered at a university and how satisfied they are with these offerings. The results show that students' satisfaction with their ...

/pdf/examining-student-satisfaction-with-higher-education-2rdq1lsoy6.pdf

Examining student satisfaction with higher education services: using a new measurement tool

Flipped classrooms refer to the practice of assigning lectures outside of class and devoting class time to a variety of learning activities. In this review, we discuss the range of approaches to the flipped classroom and focus on activities frequently used in these settings. Amongst these, we examine both out-of-class activities (e.g., video lectures) and in-class activities (e.g., quizzes, student discussions). We argue that the value of these activities reflects the particular cognitive processes engaged by the activity regardless of whether the setting is the traditional (lecture-based) classroom or the flipped classroom. Future work should continue to examine the influence of individual activities on student learning and behaviors, particularly when objective measures of learning, such as quizzes and exams, are held constant.

Flipped Classrooms: A Review of Key Ideas and Recommendations for Practice.

Repeated study improves memory, but the underlying neural mechanisms of this improvement are not well understood. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and representational similarity analysis of brain activity, we found that, compared with forgotten items, subsequently remembered faces and words showed greater similarity in neural activation across multiple study in many brain regions, including (but not limited to) the regions whose mean activities were correlated with subsequent memory. This result addresses a longstanding debate in the study of memory by showing that successful episodic memory encoding occurs when the same neural representations are more precisely reactivated across study episodes, rather than when patterns of activation are more variable across time.

/pdf/greater-neural-pattern-similarity-across-repetitions-is-35mayjku9e.pdf

Greater Neural Pattern Similarity Across Repetitions Is Associated with Better Memory

Two studies investigate the relationship between student expectations and student satisfaction. Can students’ satisfaction with a course be accurately predicted by comparing their perceptions to their expectations (as suggested by the expectancy/disconfirmation paradigm)? The results of these studies suggest that the answer to this question is strongly affected by the method used to measure student expectations. When recalled expectations and current perceptions are measured together at the end of a term, the extent to which student expectations are fulfilled does appear to be a good predictor of satisfaction. When expectations are measured at the beginning of a term however, the extent to which they are fulfilled is not a strong predictor of course satisfaction. These results have implications for marketing educators both in terms of the role they can play in affecting their students’ expectations and in terms of the timing of independent course assessments they may choose to administer.

Measuring Student Expectations and Their Effects on Satisfaction: The Importance of Managing Student Expectations

Recall of print material benefits from spacing repetitions of that material, an effect often attributed to varied encodings induced by changes in contextual cues. We examined an alternative explanation: retrieving earlier presentations during later presentations strengthens memory traces, the more so the greater the difficulty of such retrieval. In four experiments we found that ( a ) study-phase retrieval contributes to the benefits of spacing and ( b ) inducing variation via changes in ad formatting and content can be counterproductive at long spacing intervals, apparently because such changes decrease the likelihood that earlier presentations will be retrieved during later presentations.

Examining the spacing effect in advertising : Encoding variability, retrieval processes, and their interaction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2022.106402

Adults with overweight or obesity use less efficient memory strategies compared to adults with healthy weight on a verbal list learning task modified with food words

Sara L. Appleton-Knapp

Papers

Measuring Student Expectations and Their Effects on Satisfaction: The Importance of Managing Student Expectations

Examining the spacing effect in advertising : Encoding variability, retrieval processes, and their interaction

Adults with overweight or obesity use less efficient memory strategies compared to adults with healthy weight on a verbal list learning task modified with food words