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 […]
Learning and Memory
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 […]
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? […]