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 […]
How do you turn on the television? How do you go faster on a swing? What colors of paint can you mix to make the color you want? These questions seem obvious to us as adults, but at some point in our lives, we had to figure out the answers. To do so, we needed […]
Memories, oh memories, they can be so powerful, and detailed, and… ours. Only that, sometimes, they may not actually be ours. As we all can remember important things in our lives, and the subjective experience of remembering often tells us that our memories are coming from within, it’s easy to assume, and to feel, that […]
Jules Verne, considered a Father of Science Fiction, pioneered the idea of space travel, along with air and water travel, long before the advent of rocket ships and space shuttles, airplanes, and submarines. Ray Bradbury wrote about electronic devices considered prototypes for Bluetooth and Airpods in Farenheit 451. Neuromancer by William Gibson brings to life […]
How well do you remember detailed visual information, such as the precise color or shape of an object you saw several hours ago? Although intuition might suggest that our memory for fine details is quite poor, research finds that visual long-term memory has a massive capacity for visual details of objects and scenes. For instance, after […]
There are absolutely no swear words in Toy Story 3. This is something that probably should go without saying, if you’re even vaguely familiar with the Disney/Pixar approach to family entertainment. And yet, as I paused in my scrolling through a popular short video app, this was exactly the thought that skipped through my mind […]