Hot answers tagged educational-psychology
11
It seems like somebody's done a lot of literature pooling already:
Is Rationality Teachable?
Among influences mentioned are statistics, logic training, and debiasing.
There's also a book that summarized findings:
Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons From Cognitive Science
Tim van Gelder
College Teaching
Vol. 53, Iss. 1, 2005
ABSTRACT: This ...
8
There are a few videos and some links here on gamification in education.
Sarah Smith- Robbins has an article on gamification in education.
http://www.gamifyingeducation.org/ is a website devoted to the topic; the site has a listing of research papers here.
7
I found the actual report on the PBS NewsHour. The program which teaches children empathy using infants is known as Roots of Empathy. It's Wikipedia article states:
The Roots of Empathy program effectiveness has been evaluated nine different times by independent reviewers. Overall, the results were positive. The results showed that students who ...
7
A recent senior thesis by Schoen (2012) addressed this exact question. Students watched a filmed lecture and were randomly assigned to take notes with either by typing or handwriting. After the lecture, students were given a few distractor tasks, and then given a retention test. Other students were assigned to take notes from a textbook, instead of a ...
7
There is a classic paper by Halpern (1998) on the topic. From the abstract:
Numerous studies have shown that critical thinking, defined as the deliberate use of skills and strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome, can be learned in ways that promote transfer to novel contexts. A 4-part empirically based model is proposed to guide ...
7
A popular lit review [1] discusses some game concepts that have been empirically tested to support the idea of gamification. In some cases, these may be very hard to quantify. For instance, the article cites fantasy as one gaming characteristic that engages gamers. Other characteristics, such as having clear, well defined rules/goals seem easier to ...
7
An excellent question! A 2011 paper in Science by Karpicke and Blunt in the Cognition and Learning Lab at Purdue University gets at this issue. They offer that:
"Concept mapping is considered an active learning task, and it serves
as an elaborative study activity when students construct concept maps
in the presence of the materials they are learning. ...
6
Concept mapping is a way of reviewing the material, depending on the study it may be significantly better than other forms of review, though not all studies I read found that superiority. The most popular theory for its claimed superiority is that it also organizes the information better for recall; most of the papers that found concept mapping better than ...
6
The research literature on stress in general and burnout in particular would be relevant. The stress literature is massive and there are studies that have a particular focus on students.
For example Jacobs and Dodd did a study on college student burnout:
Measures of social support (Multidimen- sional Scale of Perceived
Social Support), personality ...
6
Learning Styles
There is a large literature on learning styles particularly in educational psychology. See for example, the wikipedia page on learning styles.
You will soon discover that there are many different taxonomies of learning styles. Thus, there are certainly more than three "theorised" learning styles.
However, more importantly, there have been ...
5
There are two theoretical constructions that may be of use to you:
Scaffolding
"...what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow" -Vygotsky
You are right to graduate the level of difficulty of problems the students encounter. Intuitively, a student has before her a level of task which, although ...
5
Suppose a person learns a subject in college and waits for 10 years before learning it again. An exam is given one week after the person relearns the subject. So in this case, the ISI (inter-study interval) is very long compared to the RI (retention interval). The person will definitely forget some of the material after the 10 years. So how long they would ...
4
General literature on training and educational program evaluation
In general, you would want to read up about program evaluation in general, and educational program evaluation, and training evaluation in particular.
With regards to the educational context I found this article online.
With regards to training evaluation, you could check out Kraiger et al ...
4
Pashler et al
It is worth reading the critical review of learning styles by Pashler et al. To quote some of the summary:
Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children
and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer
information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence
arguing that people ...
4
Yes, brain power is eroded via a lack of practice. This occurs through the processes called synaptic pruning and brain plasticity.
I will leave you with a very basic answer as I am unsure of your level of understanding of cognitive processes. First, you must understand neurons. Then, you can begin to understand synaptic pruning and brain plasticity. ...
3
Not using your brain might well be deleterious, but it's impossible not to use your brain unless you're in a coma or something. There are some cool studies on plasticity (see Shayna's answer above) in amputees, where the parts of the brain that control the amputated limb go unused but are taken up by other functions instead.
However, "perpetual brain ...
3
Tom Boardman's suggestion in the question comments about the Law of the Instrument ("if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail") seems to capture an important aspect of this, especially with respect to illustrating that it's not necessarily done out of malice.
The simplest theoretical explanation would cast this in terms of top-down ...
3
Harvill mentions an estimate by Lord (1959). Lord (1959) presents some data for the standard error of measurement for some moderately difficult cognitive measures. While there are many caveats (e.g., the estimate of the standard error is most accurate for scores around 50% and the estimates are based on tests that are neither particularly easy or ...
3
Relationship between study time and performance
Plant et al (2004) review the literature of studies that have correlated average time spent studying and variables such as GPA. They report a couple of correlational studies in the literature that found small positive correlations (e.g., $r=.18, r=.23$). They make two main points: (a) academic performance is ...
3
I think it's important to keep in mind the different effects that one might achieve using mind mapping, with regard to the way mind maps are being evaluated in the literature mentioned so far. While retrieval ability is easy to measure and certainly a useful metric that approximates one important aspect of learning in an academic setting, retrieval isn't ...
3
Assessing Adolescent And Adult Intelligence (Kaufman & Lichtenberger, 2005) goes through quite a bit of the research on this. Or you can use the correlation of 0.7 that they report, which is based on an aggregation of more recent studies of adult intelligent test scores and academic achievement. I don't see where they break down country, but they do ...
2
You've actually stated 2 questions in one. The second one is answered by Jeromy, the burnout or burnout-like states are the consequence of any overworking. I would also add the health problems, but those are not particularly on topic.
When it comes to the reasons, the learning can become the addiction, as most of the things you do. It can become obsession. ...
2
Bacon and Bean (2006) discuss the issue of the reliability and validity of GPA.
They report the results of two studies that looked at the reliability of GPA in samples of business students at the same university.
Average intercourse grade correlations were typically between $\bar{r} =.18$ and $\bar{r} =.38$.
Estimates of reliability for GPA ranged from .67 ...
2
I personally like Michelene Chi's taxonomy of instructional methods, which is related to your question although it's not specifically about learning styles. Chi distinguishes passive, active, constructive, and interactive learning activities. Passive means you're just receiving info from the instructor (or textbook, or whatever). Active means you're doing ...
2
To me the most natural solution is to just use item response theory (IRT). IRT has been around for a few decades, so it is well established, implemented in a variety of software packages and provides a sensible, extensible framework for this type of problem.
Essentially, one assumes an underlying latent construct of interest, values of which should drive ...
2
This is not intended an answer. I have a couple observations and I want actual formatting.
You say:
So, I've broken down larger problems into smaller problems. I've arranged these problems in the increasing level of difficulty. For the patterns to be remembered properly, I've increased no. of simple problems.
and then:
I'm ensuring that students ...
1
There is a difference between being wrong and knowing you're wrong.
I like to think of this with the analogy of Wiley the Coyote from looney toons. He would usually try to catch the runner, and run off the cliff, but keep running for a while, and only fall when he realizes that he ran off a cliff.
The point in which your student is doing the assignments ...
1
In short, I'd say the minimum requirement is to understand which behaviours you are influencing and why.
Before you consider which game techniques to use, consider the 'story' of the product/service.
Each story includes:
Actor/s. Who are your targets?
These actors are motivated by something. This is what your game should leverage.
There is a goal. What ...
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