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Handout Evidence from Neuroscience for Education.pdf

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Massed versus Distributed Learning and examples for benefits

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How does the mind work- and especially how does it learn? Teachers make assumptions all day long about how students best comprehend, remember, and create. These assumptions- and the teaching decisions that result- are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such gut knowledge often serves us well. But is there anything sturdier to rely on?

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology that seek to understand the mind. In this new American Educator column, we will consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application. This issue' s question: How to allocate students' practice time as they learn new material.

By Daniel T. Willingham

How much practice do students need to learn a given body of knowledge or group of facts? What strategies for learning different kinds of material work best? What's the most efficient way to allocate practice time? Cognitive science offers insights that can help answer these questions and thus help teachers shape their instruction in especially effective ways. In this article, we will consider one aspect of this broad topic for which the findings are especially consistent: how the "massing" or "distributing" of students' practice time influences students' long-term retention of factual knowledge. This is an important issue for an obvious reason: Knowing important factual information should be a residual effect of good schooling. In addition, in many cases, students' more advanced learning depends on their retention of previously learned material.

Let's begin. Suppose a student is going to spend one hour learning a group of multiplication facts. How should that hour be allocated? Should the teacher schedule a single, one-hour session? Ten minutes each day for six days? Ten minutes each week for six weeks? The straightforward answer that we can draw from research evidence is that distributing study time over several sessions generally leads to better memory of the information than conducting a single study session. This phenomenon is called the spacing effect.

The spacing effect was noted by Hermann Ebbinghaus, the psychologist usually credited with the first scientific study of memory in 1885. In a super-human feat of patience and endurance, Ebbinghaus tested his ability to learn hundreds of lists of meaningless syllables (e.g. "lum") under different conditions. Ebbinghaus noted that if he studied a 12-syllable list 68 times, he could remember the list perfectly the next day if he allowed himself a "refresher" of seven repetitions before the test. However, if he distributed his study over three days, (and again allowed seven repetitions as a refresher before the test) he needed to study the list just 38 times- meaning he could cut study time nearly in half, with the same result, by distributing the practice.

The spacing effect has held up remarkably well over the better than one hundred years that researchers have examined it. Here's another example published about 80 years after Ebbinghaus's work: Geoffrey Keppel had college students learn pairs of nonsense syllables and adjectives (e.g., lum-happy). They were to learn the list so that when they saw the syllable, they could provide the matching adjective. All subjects studied the list eight times, but for half of the subjects, all eight trials occurred on the same day (massed practice) and the other subjects studied the list two times on each of four successive days (distributed practice). Keppel tested their memory of the list either 24 hours after the final study session, or a week later. The results are shown in the chart on the left. The upshot is that the massed practice group does fairly well if they are tested the next day, but they show a considerable drop-off if they are tested a week later. The distributed practice group, on the other hand, shows very little forgetting, even after the delay.

Massed practice is obviously very similar to what is commonly and derisively called "cramming." These results make it look as though cramming might allow you to remember things for a test the next day, but not for the long haul.

These are interesting studies, but for teachers they should raise as many questions as they answer. Before looking at some of the questions, it's important to pause and emphasize what the spacing effect is not.

The spacing effect does not address the issue of "review." Reviewing refers to presenting again, material that the student once knew but which has been subject to the ravages of forgetting. Review is designed to strengthen a fragile memory.

The spacing effect does not address the usefulness of spending additional time on a topic. It refers only to the distribution of time one has already allocated to study some material.

Let's consider several questions raised by the research.

Does this spacing effect apply to school-age children as well as college students? Does it apply to the sorts of materials students learn and not just nonsense words like "lum"?
It seems to. Kristine Bloom and Thomas Shuell (1981) taught 20 new vocabulary words to high school students enrolled in a French course. Students either studied the words for one 30-minute session (massed) or for a 10-minute session on each of three consecutive days. The groups were indistinguishable on a test administered immediately after practice, with each group remembering about 16 of the 20 words. A retest administered four days later, however, showed that the distributed practice group still remembered the words (15 words correct), whereas the massed practice group forgot much more (11 words correct).

Another study was conducted by Cornelius Rea and Vito Modigliani (1985) with third-grade students. In this experiment, one group was taught spelling words and math facts in a distributed condition and another in a massed condition. A test immediately following the training showed superior performance for the distributed group (70 percent correct) compared to the massed group (53 percent correct). These results seem to show that the spacing effect applies to school-age children and to at least some types of materials that are typically taught in school.

So spacing practice time improves the likelihood that a student will remember new facts. Does spacing work for other types of material?
John Donovan and David Radosevich (1999) conducted a meta-analysis of spacing-effect studies performed on adults. A meta-analysis is a statistical technique that reveals trends across many studies. Donovan and Radosevich noted that spacing has the biggest effect for learning simple motor skills (such as typing), but is also present when subjects learn new facts, as in the studies above. Only a few experiments have investigated highly complex skills (e.g., running an air traffic control simulator), but in those studies, the spacing effect has disappeared altogether. Thus, this meta-analysis supports the idea that the spacing effect applies to some (but probably not all) of the sorts of things that children learn in school. Unfortunately, there is little laboratory data to suggest at what point along the continuum, from learning facts to learning complex material, the spacing effect loses its potency.

How large is the spacing effect's impact on learning?
The reality of the spacing effect is strongly supported by a good deal of data. But is its actual impact on learning large enough to justify altering our teaching plans to accommodate it? The effect could be real in statistical terms, but insignificantly small in practical terms. So just how big is it? Because different studies use different measures, it can be very difficult to compare the relative effectiveness of strategies; this, of course, is the old apples and oranges problem. To overcome this problem, statisticians use "effect size" measures-one of which is denoted d --that are independent of the particular measurement scale employed in a study.

According to Donovan and Radosevich's meta-analysis of spacing studies, the effect size for the spacing effect is d = .42. This means that the average person getting distributed training remembers better than about 67 percent of the people getting massed training. This effect size is nothing to sneeze at-in education research, effect sizes as low as d = .25 are considered practically significant, while effect sizes above d = 1 are rare.

To put this effect size in perspective, consider another effect size. People who have had a heart attack are often encouraged to take an aspirin each day to help prevent future heart attacks. The effect size associated with this treatment is a puny d = .03. Why, then, is it such a well-known treatment? Partly because the stakes are so high (we're trying to prevent heart attacks) and partly because there aren't many effective alternative treatments.

By all these measures, it seems that a strategy with a d = .42 effect is worth taking very seriously.

Does the spacing effect produce long-term effects or just short term effects?
The tests that we've described used rather short time-frames. Even the "distributed" delays were often minutes or hours, and the test was administered at most, a week (and often much less) after study. In education, we hope that students will remember material for years-both because the knowledge itself is valuable and because we must build on that initial knowledge in order to reach advanced knowledge. Suppose distributing practice helps memory for a month or so, but has no effect in the long run? If that were true, it certainly wouldn't be worth worrying about.

This question has not been investigated too often because of the practical difficulties of conducting studies that last a number of years. The few studies that have been done, however, suggest that distributed practice is very important in forming memories that last for years.

Harry Bahrick and Elizabeth Phelps (1987) examined the retention of 50 Spanish vocabulary words after an eight-year delay. Subjects were divided into three groups. Each practiced for seven or eight sessions, separated by a few minutes, a day, or 30 days. In each session, subjects practiced until they could produce the list perfectly one time.

Notice that in this experiment, the researchers didn't match the total amount of practice across groups. Rather, they matched the level of subjects' performance; at the end of each session, each subject could produce the list without error. Eight years later, people in the no-delay group could recall 6 percent of the words, people in the one-day delay group could remember 8 percent, and those in the 30-day group averaged 15 percent. Everyone also took a multiple choice test, and again, the spacing effect was observed. The no-delay group scored 71 percent, the one-day group scored 80 percent, and the 30-day group scored 83 percent.

This experiment, although impressive, was a bit different than those that came before it. Subjects were trained to a criterion (one perfect repetition of the list), which means that subjects in the longer delay condition studied a bit more than those in the shorter delays; they had forgotten the list during the delay, so they needed more practice to get to the criterion of one perfect recitation of the list. But, clearly, the payoff for this small cost was dramatic.

Nonetheless, this difference in total practice time raises an important issue: Perhaps the improved memory eight years later was not caused by the distributed nature of the practice, but by the slight increase in the number of practice trials.

In a follow-up experiment, Bahrick and his colleagues varied both the spacing of practice and the amount of practice. Practice sessions were spaced 14, 28, or 56 days apart, and totaled 13 or 26 sessions. They tested subjects' memory one, two, three, and five years after training. Once again, it took a bit longer to reach the criterion within each session when practice sessions were spaced farther apart, but again, this small investment paid dividends years later. It didn't matter whether testing occurred at one, two, three, or five years after practice-the 56-day group always remembered the most, the 28-day group was next, and the 14-day group remembered the least. Further, the effect was quite large. If words were practiced every 14 days, you needed twice as much practice to reach the same level of performance as when words were practiced every 56 days!

To summarize what we know from the laboratory: There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that spacing study time leads to better memory of the material; the effect applies to at least some of the types of learning students do-fact learning; and it seems to hold for school-age children. Most of that work used "distributed" timeframes that were not all that distributed-a matter of minutes or perhaps a day. But the small number of experiments that have used longer delays between practice sessions, and very long delays (years) before testing for retention, indicates that the spacing effect holds-and perhaps is even more robust after these long delays.

What Could This Look Like in the Classroom?

How can this research on the spacing effect be applied in the classroom? Here are a few ways to think about applications:

1) Identify key facts and ideas for distributed study: Think about the key sets of facts and ideas that you most want your students to remember twenty years from now-and next year. In an American history class, that set of ideas might include the key principles that the Founders intended to capture in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In elementary science, one such idea could be how electricity works. In first-grade math it could be addition and subtraction facts. Once you've identified this core content, you can use the next five strategies to engage students in studying this material on a number of occasions over several weeks or even months.

2) Design homework assignments that distribute practice: In developing homework assignments, strongly consider including material that was taught in previous weeks and even months. For example, at the end of a given unit, consider assigning homework that includes questions related to the previous several units (and even units going back to the beginning of the year).

3) Discourage cramming for tests: Carefully consider how to elicit student practice of test material several times before it appears on the test (for example, it might appear in a homework assignment; be elicited as part of a class discussion; and get quizzed in a quick class "bee"). When test time arrives, students have already distributed their learning a bit; the test becomes one more in a series of practice opportunities. In addition, make it a routine to include a number of items from previous units on each test-particularly material that many students did not do well on the first time around. This way students will know that they need to keep working on material that they find challenging-and that they won't be able to get away with just cramming on the current material.

4) Take advantage of "down time" for practice: Especially in elementary school, when children are lining up for recess or lunch or during other transitions, run down the line asking each student a question related to material that has been introduced and practiced in previous lessons.

5) Break big ideas down into small pieces that can be easily practiced: After introducing a topic and covering enough content for students to understand the key ideas, break those key ideas and their associated facts or skills into small pieces that can be practiced in a variety of ways like class discussions, short quizzes, homework assignments, and class games.

6) Let students in on the secret: By all means, explain to your students that an important part of learning is remembering-and that they're more likely to remember material if they revisit it a number of times. In fact, students may find that they can spend less total time studying for tests if they distribute their time over several sessions.

Daniel T. Willingham is associate professor of cognitive psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia and author of Cognition: The Thinking Animal. His research focuses on the role of consciousness in learning. Visit his Web site at www.danielwillingham.com. Special thanks to Alice Gill, Rosalind LaRocque, and Diane Airhart of the AFT's Educational Research and Dissemination Program for their ideas in developing the classroom applications.
Readers can pose specific questions to:
Cognitive Scientist c/o American Educator
555 New Jersey Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20001
or e-mail to: amered@aft.org
References

Bahrick, Harry P; Phelphs, Elizabeth. Retention of Spanish vocabulary over 8 years. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition. Vol 13(2) Apr 1987, 344-349

Bloom, Kristine C; Shuell, Thomas J. Effects of massed and distributed practice on the learning and retention of second-language vocabulary. Journal of Educational Research. Vol 74(4) Mar-Apr 1981, 245-248.

Donovan, John J; Radosevich, David J. A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don't. Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol 84(5) Oct 1999, 795-805

Ebbinghaus, H. Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology. New York: Dover, 1964 (Originally published, 1885).

Rea, Cornelius P; Modigliani, Vito. The effect of expanded versus massed practice on the retention of multiplication facts and spelling lists. Human Learning: Journal of Practical Research & Applications. Vol 4(1) Jan-Mar 1985, 11-18.

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How does the mind work-and especially how does it learn? Teachers make assumptions all day long about how students best comprehend, remember, and create. These assumptions-and the teaching decisions that result-are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct.

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We've all heard the adage: practice makes perfect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning pianist might rehearse scales before chords. A young tennis player practices the forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this "blocking," and because it is commonsensical and easy to schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other settings.

However another strategy promises improved results. Enter "interleaving," a largely unheard-of technique that is capturing the attention of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Whereas blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next (for example, "skill A" before "skill B" and so on, forming the pattern "AAABBBCCC"), in interleaving one mixes, or interleaves, practice on several related skills together (forming for example the pattern "ABCABCABC"). For instance, a pianist alternates practice between scales, chords, and arpeggios, while a tennis player alternates practice between forehands, backhands, and volleys.

Over the past four decades, a small but growing body of research has found that interleaving often outperforms blocking for a variety of subjects, including sports and category learning. Yet there have been almost no studies of the technique in uncontrived, real world settings-until recently. New research in schools finds that interleaving produces dramatic and long-lasting benefits for an essential skill: math. Not only does this finding have the potential to transform how math is taught, it may also change how people learn more generally.

The first signs of interleaving's promise appeared in the domain of motor skills. One early study, published in 1986, involved training students to learn three types of badminton serves.Compared with blocking, interleaving produced better recall of each serve type and better ability to handle new situations, such as serving from the opposite side of the court.Similar results were later reported for baseball, basketball, and other sports. In 2003, one of the first studies to examine interleaving outside of sports found that using it to train medical students produced more accurate electrocardiogram diagnoses than blocking. In 2008, another widely-cited study found a similar benefit for teaching college students to recognize the painting styles of landscape artists. Even critical thinking skills benefit: in a 2011 study, students trained with the technique made more accurate assessments of complex legal scenarios.

Foreign language studies however suggest that the effectiveness of interleaving comes with an important caveat. When native English speakers used the technique to learn an entirely unfamiliar language, such as to generate English-to-Swahili translations, the results were better, the same, or worse than after blocking. These mixed results imply that learners should have some familiarity with subject materials before interleaving begins (or, the materials should be quickly or easily understood). Otherwise, as appears to be the case for foreign languages, interleaving can sometimes be more confusing than helpful.

Given interleaving's promise, it is surprising then that few studies have investigated its utility in everyday applications. However, a new study by cognitive psychologist Doug Rohrer and colleagues at the University of South Florida, recently published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, takes a step towards addressing that gap. Rohrer and his team are the first to implement interleaving in actual classrooms. The location: middle schools in Tampa, Florida. The target skills: algebra and geometry.

The three-month study involved teaching 7th graders slope and graph problems. Weekly lessons, given by teachers, were largely unchanged from standard practice. Weekly homework worksheets, however, featured an interleaved or blocked design. When interleaved, both old and new problems of different types were mixed together. Of the nine participating classes, five used interleaving for slope problems and blocking for graph problems; the reverse occurred in the remaining four. Five days after the last lesson, each class held a review session for all students. A surprise final test occurred one day or one month later. The result? When the test was one day later, scores were 25 percent better for problems trained with interleaving; at one month later, the interleaving advantage grew to 76 percent.

These results are important for a host of reasons. First, they show that interleaving works in real-world, extended use. It is highly effective with an almost ubiquitous subject, math. The interleaving effect is long-term-lasting on the order of months-and the advantage over blocking actually increases with the passage of time (in other words, there's less forgetting). The benefit even persists when blocked materials receive additional review. Overall, the interleaving effect can be strong, stable, and long-lasting.

Clearly interleaving does wonders for 7th grade math. Moreover, when combined with prior work showing similar benefits of the technique across a spectrum of topics ( algebra, exponents, proportions, prisms, and volumes) and with students at different grade levels (elementary through college), interleaving may turn out to be among the most effective math learning techniques.

Researchers are now working to understand why interleaving yields such impressive results. One prominent explanation is that it improves the brain's ability to tell apart, or discriminate, between concepts. With blocking, once you know what solution to use, or movement to execute, the hard part is over. With interleaving, each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote responses don't work. Instead, your brain must continuously focus on searching for different solutions. That process can improve your ability to learn critical features of skills and concepts, which then better enables you to select and execute the correct response.

A second explanation is that interleaving strengthens memory associations. With blocking, a single strategy, temporarily held in short-term memory, is sufficient. That's not the case with interleaving-the correct solution changes from one practice attempt to the next. As a result, your brain is continually engaged at retrieving different responses and bringing them into short-term memory. Repeating that process can reinforce neural connections between different tasks and correct responses, which enhances learning.

Both of these accounts imply that increased effort during training, either to discriminate correct responses or to strengthen them, is needed when interleaving is used. This corresponds to a potential drawback of the technique, namely that the learning process often feels more gradual and difficult at the outset. However, that added effort can generate better, longer-lasting results.

In modern society there is tremendous interest in ways to enhance learning and memory: brain training, learning apps, and so on. Interleaving has the benefit of scientific evidence in favor of its use across a range of circumstances. It also has the practical advantage of requiring no extra training, extra time, or special equipment to work. Only more careful planning is required, and possibly some extra effort at the outset.

Despite these relative advantages, interleaving remains mostly unknown and unused. Consider the example of grade school math. Out of all the math textbooks used in the U.S. today, all but one type-the Saxon series-uses blocked practice. One can only speculate on what would happen if interleaving were widely used in classrooms and in textbooks. The differences in academic achievement could be substantial.

As interleaving research progresses, we stand to learn much more about the technique: other areas where it works, or doesn't, and what other limitations it might have. Yet that doesn't preclude us from putting it to the test right now. For instance, are you studying statistics? Learning to play an instrument? Taking up a new sport? In all of these areas, you are faced with a series of skills or concepts to learn. The typical response would be to practice each of these, one at a time, over and over. Another option would be to mix it up. As it turns out, your brain may prefer doing exactly that.

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The Interleaving Effect: Mixing It Up Boosts Learning

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We've all heard the adage: practice makes perfect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time.

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5 ID Tips to Enhance Metacognition in E-Learning

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5 ID Tips to Enhance Metacognition in E-Learning

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- range of skills and subjects
- model metacognition
- give choice/control
- review/identify/evaluate
- differentiate know/need to know

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Metacognition involves not just having knowledge and being able to cognitively process information, but being able to control these mental processes. This typically involves modification, monitoring, and organization of the information in order to apply it in real world settings. Metacognition also focuses on analyzing a challenge or task to determine which problem solving approach would be the most effective.

One of the most significant advantages of using metacognition in eLearning is that it encourages learners to become more independent and empowered. They must identify their strengths and weaknesses, and fine tune their study, organization, problem-solving, and communication skills. In this article, I'll delve into the categories of metacognition, its best practices, and I'll share 5 tips that will help you use metacognition in eLearning.

Metacognitive Knowledge vs. Metacognitive Regulation

Based upon the research of Flavell (1979, 1987) and Schraw& Dennison (1994), metacognition involves 2 distinct elements: knowledge and regulation.

Metacognitive Knowledge is the information that learners actually know about themselves, as well as the various problem-solving approaches that can be used, and what is required to complete a particular learning activity. Flavell also states that metacognitive knowledge involves three key variables:

Self-awareness.
Learners' capacity to recognize and acknowledge their own strengths and weaknesses during the learning process.

Task analysis.
What learners already know or can learn about the task at-hand, as well as what they will need to successfully complete the task. For instance, they may understand that a complex problem will require more time and critical thinking skills.

Selection of strategy.
The strategies and problem-solving approaches that learners already have at their disposal to complete the task. For example, they might read through the research material before answering a set of questions or engage in an online before completing the same process in real-world settings.

Boost the Metacognitive Knowledge of your Adult Learners with the Most Engaging Branching Scenarios!

Discover, choose and compare the top eLearning Authoring Tools with Branching Scenarios Functionality!

Metacognitive Regulation refers to how well learners are able to modify their mental processes in order to take control of their learning experience. For instance, they might fine tune their post-evaluation process, plan more effectively, or re-evaluate their learning goals to prepare for the next learning activity.

Best Practices To Enhance Metacognitive Skills

According to Fogarty (1994), in order to enhance their metacognitive skills learners must participate in the three different phases of metacognition, which are:

1. Creating a study plan.
Learners should create a study plan before beginning any learning task.

2. Monitoring their comprehension.
Learners must be able to monitor their understanding and comprehension throughout the task, making adjustments as needed.

3. Evaluating.
After the task has been completed learners should evaluate their learning processes and determine how they can improve.

5 Instructional Design Tips To Enhance Metacognition in eLearning

1. Integrate a wide range of skills and subjects.
In the real world learners will need to be able to apply their metacognitive abilities in a wide range of situations and settings. As such, you will want to integrate a wide range of skills and subjects into your eLearning course design, so that your learners can fine tune their metacognitive talents by completing diverse learning tasks.

2. Model the metacognitive process.
Leading by example is one of the most effective ways to encourage metacognition in your learners. Create a tutorial or presentation that showcases the metacognitive process. State the problem or question in the beginning of the presentation; then guide them through the steps you would use to solve it. Be as detailed as possible and include every they could make along the way, as mistakes can serve as invaluable teaching tools as well.

3. Give them control.
Allow students to take control of their own eLearning experience by giving them freedom of choice. Give them the ability to choose what projects to complete, when, as well as which topics they would like to explore. By doing this, you generate authentic interest, rather than forcing them to master a particular subject. They are also more likely to use their critical thinking, analysis, and creative thinking skills to solve the problem if they were the ones who chose to tackle the problem themselves.

4. Review, identify, and evaluate.
At the end of every eLearning activity, encourage your students to review, identify, and evaluate the process. Ask them to review the eLearning activity, itself, including their personal opinions about it. Then ask them to identify the strategies they utilized and why they chose these strategies, before evaluating their overall performance and assessing their strengths and weaknesses throughout the task.

5. Encourage learners to differentiate what they know from what they need to know.
The main goal of any eLearning experience is to fill the learning gap, whatever or however large that gap might be. Before each eLearning activity encourage your learners to determine what they currently know and what they need to learn by the end of the task. This might be developing specific skills or acquiring new information. Once they have completed the task, have them evaluate their original statements in order to determine if they have achieved their individual goals. You can also ask them to modify or add to their statements throughout the eLearning activity if necessary.

Metacognition gives your learners the ability to self-regulate and self-reflect, whether they have the skills and information they need to tackle challenges in and out of the virtual classroom. You can utilize these tips and best practices to develop metacognition in eLearning and benefit your online learners by facilitating their learning process and helping them to achieve better results.

Using metacognition in eLearning can empower your audience, but they must also first have the motivation and drive to become active participants. The article Intrinsic Motivation In Online Training features 6 top tips to help you bring intrinsic motivation into your online learning environment.

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5 Instructional Design Tips To Enhance Metacognition In eLearning

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Metacognition involves not just having knowledge and being able to cognitively process information, but being able to control these mental processes. This typically involves modification, monitoring, and organization of the information in order to apply it in real world settings. Metacognition also focuses on analyzing a challenge or task to determine which problem solving approach would be the most effective.

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Pre-assessment
Muddiest Point
Post-assessment
Reflections

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In simple terms, metacognition is thinking about one's thinking. In an educational context, it is students' awareness and understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses as learners and their ability to adapt accordingly to be more successful learners. Metacognition involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning. Novices tend to think more like experts when they recognize their strengths and weaknesses as learners. Self-monitoring and self-regulation, important metacognitive processes, lead to better goal-setting, planning, implementation of plans, monitoring of progress toward goals and, generally, better adaptation of learning strategies. Metacognitive practices increase students' ability to determine how to expand their knowledge and transfer that knowledge to new contexts. Recent studies show that these practices can be taught and learned. Students should understand that their ability to be self-regulated learners can improve with practice. Metacongnition is applicable to a single class session, a homework assignment, an exam, or an entire course.

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L2L Strategy - Metacognition | Arizona Site

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In simple terms, metacognition is thinking about one's thinking. In an educational context, it is students' awareness and understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses as learners and their ability to adapt accordingly to be more successful learners. Metacognition involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning.

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What Is ‘Transfer of Learning’ and How Does It Help Students?

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Online formative assessment in higher education: A review of the literature

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As online and blended learning has become common place educational strategy in higher education, educators need to reconceptualise fundamental issues …

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle D. Miller
Michelle D. Miller is Director of the First Year Learning Initiative and Professor of Psychological Sciences at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Harvard University Press, 2014). Dr. Miller teaches courses in cognitive psychology, behavioral science research methods, and college pedagogy. She also works with faculty at Northern Arizona University and other institutions to improve their teaching practices and course designs.

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Is the Educational Technology Revolution Losing Steam? What Academic Leaders Can Do to Keep Us Moving Forward

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Michelle D. Miller Michelle D. Miller is Director of the First Year Learning Initiative and Professor of Psychological Sciences at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Harvard University Press, 2014). Dr. Miller teaches courses in cognitive psychology, behavioral science research methods, and college pedagogy.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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I was wrapping up a presentation on memory and learning when a colleague asked, "How do we help students learn in courses where there's a lot of memorization?" He explained that he taught introductory-level human anatomy, and although the course wasn't all memorization, it did challenge students' capacity to retain dozens of new terms and concepts.

The question itself is tricky because most teaching professionals are heavily invested in the idea that learning isn't about being able to regurgitate facts on an exam. We also worry, and with good reason, that emphasizing rote learning steals time and effort away from the deeper thinking that we want students to do. But in my work I've come to realize that memorization deserves some airtime because it is one important route to building content knowledge and expertise. Furthermore, acquiring content knowledge doesn't have to detract from critical thinking, reasoning, or innovation-rather, it can complement all these. Cognitive scientists are making new discoveries all the time about the connections between memory and processes such as drawing inferences, making predictions, and other skills that make up the ability to think like an expert in a discipline.

So what techniques target this specific teaching and learning challenge? We're all familiar with mnemonics such as the first-letter technique-using a word such as RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) or a catchy phrase (Every Good Boy Does Fine) to remember a sequence of information. Mnemonics are one good tool, but what else can we offer?

Learning isn't about being able to regurgitate facts on an exam, but memorization deserves some airtime because it is one important route to building content knowledge and expertise

For starters, we should convey to students (and keep in mind ourselves) that memorization challenges nearly everyone because the mind simply isn't set up to take in reams of disjointed facts. Our memory systems evolved to be picky about what we remember, selecting the information that is most relevant to our goals and discarding the rest. Understanding this helps us and our students have realistic expectations about the level of effort needed to succeed.

It also helps to understand how we create memories for words, because many memorization tasks involve scientific terms, foreign language vocabulary, and the like. How we do this has been hotly debated among researchers, but one view is that we rely on a special piece of mental machinery called the phonological loop that holds speech sounds.

If you've ever muttered a phone number to yourself while you ran around looking for a pencil to write it down with, you've experienced the phonological loop in action. But recycling phone numbers isn't the phonological loop's main reason for existing. Rather, its real job kicks in when we run into a word we haven't heard before. When this happens, the phonological loop grabs onto the sequence of sounds and keeps it fresh while other memory systems set up representations of what the new word means. The catch is that phonological loop capacity varies fairly substantially from individual to individual. This means that words of three, four, or more syllables overwhelm some people's ability to learn new words on the fly.

With these two points in mind-that memory doesn't handle disjointed facts well and new vocabulary hinges on one sometimes-shaky mechanism within memory-here are some ways to help students manage memorization:

Emphasize context and purpose. Ask yourself why students are being asked to memorize these facts in the first place. If students can readily answer that question and if they can picture future situations in which they will use the information, they will be better primed to remember it.

Break down new vocabulary words, especially those that are more than two syllables long. Allow time to rehearse and remember the first couple of syllables before tacking on later ones. Also keep in mind that this process will be easier for some students than others due to wide variation in phonological loop capacity; you may want to design in a "mastery learning" or other individualized approach for vocabulary so that students can move through at their own pace.

Visualize information. For most people, imagery is highly memorable, perhaps because so much of the brain is devoted to visual processing. Memory champions, such as the ones populating the best seller Moonwalking with Einstein, use elaborate visualization strategies to achieve incredible feats of memorization. Similarly, strategies such as the keyword mnemonic work by linking word sounds to images (such as using an image of a cowboy on a horse to remember the Spanish word "caballo," which sounds a bit like "cowboy").

Take advantage of the "Big Three" applied memory principles-testing, spacing, and interleaving. Briefly, these refer to the facts that quizzes are a great way to study and that we do best when we spread out our study sessions and alternate between different topics. Tackling a big memory project such as human anatomy means we need every advantage we can get, and dozens of research studies have supported these three as producing the biggest memory payoff for the time invested.

Avoid the rereading trap. Students tend to fall into passively reviewing material, and in doing so they miss the key advantage of techniques such as testing: retrieval practice. Retrieval practice strengthens memory, but it works only when we actively challenge memory. Flash cards, a favorite student strategy, are fine as long as students use them to actively quiz themselves.

It's okay to expect students to learn the facts and terms needed to become experts in a discipline. With an understanding of memory and some strategies to share, we can make this side of learning productive and maybe even painless-but certainly at least less painful.
Michelle Miller is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Northern Arizona University.
Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 28.9 (2014): 3. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved.

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Helping Students Memorize: Tips from Cognitive Science

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Although there is more to learning than regurgitating facts on an exam, memorization is an important route to building content knowledge and expertise.

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Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can do | TED Talk

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There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique -- called the memory palace -- and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him.

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Sample Critical Thinking Questions (PBL)

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Sample Critical Thinking Questions (PBL)

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The PBL Clearinghouse is a collection of problems that assist educators in using problem-based learning. The problems are peer reviewed by PBL experts in the disciplinary content areas. Teaching notes and supplemental materials accompany each problem, providing insights and strategies that are innovative and classroom-tested. Find challenging problems for your class in the PBL Clearinghouse.

Featured Sample Problems

Biology

Chemistry/Biochemistry

Physics

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The PBL Clearinghouse is a collection of problems that assist educators in using problem-based learning. The problems are peer reviewed by PBL experts in the disciplinary content areas. Teaching notes and supplemental materials accompany each problem, providing insights and strategies that are innovative and classroom-tested. Find challenging problems for your class in the PBL Clearinghouse.

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topic: focus

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What college teachers should know about memory: applying memory theory in higher education

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What college teachers should know about memory: applying memory theory in higher education

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What College Teachers Should Know About Memory: A Perspective From Cognitive Psychology

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(2011). What College Teachers Should Know About Memory: A Perspective From Cognitive Psychology. College Teaching: Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 117-122.

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Learning Sciences is the bridge between research and learning environments. MBE is the bridge between research and pedagogy with MBE being at the intersection of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Education.

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The Reticular Activating System is the first step as it gains the attention. The implication for this is that, you as the teacher, can control the focus of the student in the classroom, and what information goes through the RAS by how effective your teaching is.

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Neuroplasticity and Deep Learning for Adults

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The ability to effect change is essential for individuals, families and their enterprises to thrive. We all know that change is difficult - but why is it so difficult? To answer that question, we need to understand more about the science of neuroplasticity and how the human brain works.

We are standing at an inflection point as families of wealth and their advisors strive to harness scientific advances that measurably foster agility and performance while promoting and protecting health and well-being, both today and in the future. The ability to effect change - and neuroplasticity, more specifically - is essential for individuals, families and their enterprises to thrive. Despite the profusion of available advice about improving and enhancing our lives and businesses, meaningful change remains extraordinarily challenging. There is still an insatiable demand for yet more information and assistance.

"The world of business is evolving at an exponential rate, new multi-billion dollar industries emerging rapidly and old, established industries becoming obsolete. In this fast-changing environment, operating with agility and a purpose-driven, innovative mindset is key to the sustained success of modern enterprises."

- Francois Botha (Founder, &Simple)

Podcasts are a relatively recent and popular iteration of information sharing. from spring 2021 indicates there are over two million different podcasts with more than 48 million outstanding podcast episodes. That's a lot of information - and yet we still want more.

The continued yearning and desire for personal and professional assistance suggests that despite the proliferation of advice and information, our needs are fundamentally not being met. Contemporary neuroscience not only explains why change is so difficult but now offers us a remarkable array of specific, actionable tools to effect meaningful and enduring change.

The science of change

Based on an understanding of neuroscience and human behaviour, we know that information and advice alone are not effective at producing satisfying behavioural or emotional change. In fact, our neurobiological makeup does not support the straightforward utilization of information as the basis for change.

We are all experiencing a kind of paradox - we have "information overload" with an "application breakdown". There is a disconnect between the advice tendered, its successful application and its conversion into meaningful change.

Change manifests itself in many forms: alteration of our emotional, cognitive and/or physical states to improve mood, resilience and our relationships; enhancing our professional lives, performance, health and spiritual well-being. We yearn to develop meaning and purpose, connection to nature, stewardship of our environment, and to create an enduring legacy. Indeed, these are all powerful epigenetic interventions that support the favourable expression of our genes.

We all know that change is difficult. But why is it so difficult? To answer that question, we need to understand more about how the human brain works.

Achieving neuroplasticity in order to change

Neuroplasticity is the capacity of our nervous system to learn new things - to change. Achieving neuroplasticity is the first step to optimizing our brain to effect change.

Yet, neuroplasticity alone is never the goal. The goal is to access neuroplasticity and then direct it towards particular changes we want to achieve. With practice and reinforcement, the changes we learn become increasingly reflexive. As an example, at a certain point in our development, we no longer had to be conscious of every step we took, we simply "knew" how to walk. The same could be said for learning a new language or navigating a new computer program.

Neuroplasticity enables behaviour that is initially tentative and deliberate to become automatic and reflexive.

Learning as a child vs learning as an adult

The human brain develops over time. Young brains are neuroplasticity machines. In the first few years of life, more than one million new neural connections form every second. After this period of rapid proliferation, connections are reduced through a process called "pruning" which allows brain circuits to become more efficient. This dynamic process never stops and our brain becomes a roadmap informed by the experiences of our life.

By the adult brain has fully . In order for adults to effect change, we have to engage in a different set of processes to successfully effect change and, more specifically, to endure. Adults cannot change the mind simply by using the mind. Words alone have the lowest currency to alter the brain. We can only change the mind through experience, but we can prime the brain for change with specific interventions that are fully under our control.

To effect meaningful change as an adult we must undergo a series of very deliberate steps to alter our internal state in ways that then allow us to change our brains.

Deep learning

For adults, change requires deep learning . Deep learning has two essential components: deep attention and deep rest.

Deep Learning =

Deep Attention (Alertness + Focus) + Deep Rest (Sleep + Recovery)

Alertness: Alertness is the state of feeling awake and alive. It involves the release of a neurotransmitter called adrenaline (sometimes referred to as epinephrine). You may recognize this as the primary neurotransmitter involved in the stress response. Alertness is also a state of vigilance, being aware of potential danger. The release of this neurotransmitter will often trigger a feeling of distress, agitation or discomfort. The levels of adrenaline are lower for deep learning than they are in dangerous contexts, but the feelings, albeit less intense, are much the same.

Focus: Focus involves suppressing surrounding noise to hone in on a specific task. When done right, focus is like casting a spotlight, eliminating unnecessary external stimuli. The neurotransmitter chemical responsible for focus is acetylcholine. This "focus" molecule highlights the areas of your brain that are involved in learning, marking those areas for change.

Distress and dopamine: The simultaneous release of adrenaline and acetylcholine produces a state of feeling that tends to be unpleasant, agitating and uncomfortable. This distressed state can be offset by dopamine, another neurotransmitter that is often associated with pleasure.

Small amounts of dopamine can be self-administered by celebrating small wins and reframing distress as a positive step necessary for change. Dopamine cannot be consumed or injected. It is up to the individual to generate the release of dopamine into the brain.

Deep rest: Change, or neuroplasticity, doesn't occur during the "deep attention" phase of work outlined above. Change occurs during periods of "deep rest", primarily sleep and recovery.

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Neuroplasticity and Change: Tools for Peak Performance - Aspen Brain Institute

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The ability to effect change is essential for individuals, families and their enterprises to thrive. We all know that change is difficult - but why is it so difficult? To answer that question, we need to understand more about the science of neuroplasticity and how the human brain works.

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The four underlying principles to change your brain: neuroplasticity, brain agility, mindset mastery and simplicity
https://www.forbes.com/sites/taraswart/2018/03/27/the-4-underlying-principles-to-changing-your-brain/#45e0b0de5a71

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Guidelines for multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Coming soon! UDL Guidelines 3.0

The UDL Guidelines are a living, dynamic tool that is continuously developed based on new research and feedback from practitioners. In 2020, CAST launched our most recent effort to update the UDL Guidelines, with a specific focus on equity. There has been a strong call from the field-both practitioners and researchers alike-to more fully develop the Guidelines to address critical barriers rooted in biases and systems of oppression. The current update aims to respond to this call and to work toward fulfilling the promise of the Guidelines as a tool to guide the design of learning environments that more fully honor and value every learner.

Since our launch in 2020, we have been committed to a community-driven, inclusive, and transparent updating process. As part of this effort, we are:

Collaborating with an Advisory Board, a UDL Guidelines Collaborative, and a Young Adult Advisory Board to guide our work

Conducting focus groups with a diversity of participants to learn from their perspectives, lived experiences, and feedback

Reviewing the research on the UDL Guidelines research pages to understand the balance of different research fields, methodological approaches, epistemological approaches, and author positionalities

Conducting literature reviews of equity-oriented research that connect to and extend the Guidelines, such as disability studies and critical pedagogy studies

We are excited to share this next iteration of the UDL Guidelines in 2024. If you are interested in receiving our UDL Guidelines 3.0 newsletter to stay updated on our progress and to share your ideas and perspectives, please complete this brief form.

Review the Summary

Explore the Full Draft

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST.