While there has been considerable interest in cognitive science in education, limited numbers of educators are using this information to inform teaching and learning. That’s according to Weinstein et al. (2018), who identify six effective cognitive learning strategies: spaced or distributed practice, interleaving, retrieval practice,
Over the past few years, there has been a lot of discussion about student persistence in online education and how to improve it (Lakhal et al., 2021). While exit interviews show that the most common reasons that students leave are ones they cannot directly control,
“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams wrote over 250 years ago. He was right in more ways than one—for our field of history and probably for yours too.
Despite all the manufactured uproar over the teaching of “divisive concepts” like critical race theory (Waxman 2021),
Memory is a bread-and-butter topic in my academic field of cognitive psychology—something that we’ve been systematically researching for over a half century now and where important discoveries continue to happen. As many of my disciplinary colleagues have pointed out, memory theory is also an incredibly
Multiple-choice questions get a bad rap, and it is easy to see why. Most do not assess higher-order thinking—you either know the answer or you don’t. And if you do know the correct choice, it does not reveal depth of knowledge. So how can we
In the very first article I ever wrote for The Teaching Professor, I quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory
With all the unrest and violence that has rocked our country over the past few years, this fall you might be giving added attention to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in your courses. Maybe peers or administrators have encouraged you to think about
Interleaving is the process of alternating between concepts during learning by periodically returning to earlier ones. Studies have shown that interleaving content promotes retention (Richland et al., 2005; Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer et al., 2015). Rohrer suggests that this is because interleaving helps students distinguish between
As the number of neurodivergent students continues to rise nationwide, the student population filling our classrooms reflects this increase. As college professors we often find ourselves unprepared for the challenges of teaching these students. We might even confuse a student’s disruptive or uncooperative behavior for
Connectedness and relationships are important for students’ learning experiences. But online instructors may be tempted to think it is too challenging to fully engage all of their students. How can instructors whet their students’ appetites and keep them coming back for more? In this article,
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