Understanding how people learn and apply their knowledge to novel situations has been a focus of cognitive science since the early 1900s. To capture this phenomenon, many theories of knowledge transfer have emerged, and most “suggest that the likelihood of transfer is dependent upon the likelihood of encountering a relevant bit of information or skill […]
Applied Cognition
In preparing to write this blog post about the relationship between strategic learning and creativity, I informally polled my research assistants about their views of creative pursuits. I prompted them to name the first creative hobby/profession that came to mind. Now, you might suspect that they named pursuits like art, graphic design, and writing—and you […]
With the start of a new term underway, many students and educators are likely in the process of creating goals for a successful term and developing plans toward achieving those goals. Students’ goals might include earning a certain grade in their course or mastering the course material. To achieve these goals, students may create a […]
Imagine you are preparing for a geology exam that will test your ability to identify different types of rocks. You have a lot of examples to study, but you are not sure how to organize them. Should you study one category at a time, studying several examples of obsidian and then several examples of peridotite? […]
What makes students and instructors choose, sustain their learning with, and learn meaningfully from instructional videos? I recently became the homeowner of a mid-80s colonial revival and have taken on several projects to bring it out of the 80s and into a more contemporary style. Levelling out a sunken dining room is much more challenging […]
Here’s a burning question: What strategies can actually improve classroom learning? One promising strategy—pretesting—may be the answer for both instructors and students. Certainly, the notion of “evidence-based teaching” is becoming entrenched in the education lexicon, as instructors search for answers. Institutions are spending lots of money, resources, labour, and time to develop websites, offer workshops, […]
Imagine you have a 4-year-old about to participate in the marshmallow test, a measure of their ability to delay gratification. In front of them is a treat, and they have the option to take the immediate, smaller reward (e.g., one marshmallow) or receive a delayed, larger reward (e.g., two marshmallows) by waiting until an experimenter […]
My young daughter plays computer games that allow her to learn a skill while playing and competing with other players. It’s probably a gift and a curse of the COVID-19 pandemic all at once — children getting more than enough screen time per day, but gaining a skill that they might otherwise not attain while […]
If you’re an educator, you’ve probably wondered how many of your students are paying attention as you deliver course content in class. Although most research on mind wandering has been conducted in the laboratory, understanding when and why students mind wander during class can have important implications for how we teach and design our learning […]
In cases where humans are tasked with jobs that have a lot of variability in workload, the aid of an automated system at the right times would undoubtedly come in handy. In this interview, Andrew Heathcote (pictured below) describes a recent paper by him and his co-authors published in the Psychonomic Society journal Cognitive Research: Principles […]