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 […]

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 […]

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 […]