It feels a bit odd to say this as an academic, but I am largely very glad to not be a student anymore. I do not miss sitting in crowded lecture halls, or taking exams, or studying for long hours into the night before said exams. I especially don’t miss feeling like I wasted so […]
Applied Cognition
At this point, we’ve probably all spent more time than we want to think about on Zoom calls. Whether that’s meeting with students or collaborators when we’re spread across countries (or the planet), or committee meetings, or even social events, if you’re reading this, you’re probably more familiar than you want to be with a […]
The bard, William Shakespeare, was a lover of symbolic imagery and flowers and often used flowers to convey meaning between characters and to the audience. Take Romeo & Juliet, for example. Shakespeare uses the imagery of roses (such as represented below) to represent Juliet’s passionate love for Romeo and to emphasize that their love is […]
As a cognitive psychologist who leads a higher educational institution, I contemplate the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on equity and justice every day. This technological era highlights the importance of bridging our knowledge of human cognition and behaviors with the design and execution of codes through machine learning. By understanding cognitive processes such as […]
Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so why do our recommendations for “strategic learning” ignore context? When we think about investigating learning – what it is and what processes are involved – we might think about it in ways similar to how Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) proposed in their model of human memory: Maybe you […]
The communication of scientific findings to the broader public is a noble, but often fraught goal. Scientific progress comes in fits and spurts, with meanings rarely understandable in the moment they occur. As a result of this uncertainty, it is often difficult to know how to place a single study or even a series of […]
The Learning Scientists is a community project that has grown organically out of a common passion to share the science of learning with the broader community. We are currently a group of four cognitive psychological scientists who came together after noticing an important problem in our field. As psychologists, we know quite a lot about […]
Picture this time of the year: exam weeks. Students are spending day and night in the library, going through their summaries over and over again, highlighting the most important parts of their notes in various colors, re-watching lectures, and just trying to cram as much as possible before the exam. With little time for good […]
It’s crunch time. Two weeks left in the semester, and Sasha is running on coffee, with limited sleep and even less available time. To make matters worse, she has extra-credit assignments coming up in two of her courses, and she came to the unfortunate conclusion that the assignments will take about the same amount of […]
Most of us, at one time or another, have had the experience of sitting through a lecture in which we felt totally overwhelmed. This is going too fast! What was that term she used? What am I even supposed to be getting out of this? It’s pretty likely that you left that lecture with some […]