Abstract

This essay showcases cognitive psychology and neuroscience research as the “one thing” that guides my work. This research shows how to learn on one’s own, paves the way for student success, and fosters inclusive teaching. These principles have implications for concrete classroom and online instructional practices that are easy for both faculty and students to implement. Because students have to attend to and process their learning experiences, faculty must motivate them to do so. Psychology offers us some useful, albeit limited, tools, and more research on ways we can help students set goals can reduce the limits.

Keywords: cognitive psychology, neuroscience, social justice, student success

The research on the cognitive psychology and neuroscience of learning is the one thing that guides all my work. Not that I was educated in these disciplines, because I wasn’t. But I continue to be amazed by the fact that we all have a mind, although few of us know how it works. More to the point, if our students don’t know what processes govern their learning, how can they possibly figure out how to learn on their own?

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience identify processes that all human minds have in common. Because of their universality, these processes constitute principles of learning. They may already have prominent places on the radar of most educational developers and instructional designers, but my experience visiting many varied campuses indicates that faculty outside of psychology and neuroscience are much less familiar with them.

Perhaps these principles have been underappreciated as tools to advance social justice. Because they apply across all human minds and cultures, their implications for teaching can help faculty maximize learning and success for everyone. They don’t privilege some students over others; they don’t discriminate, diminish, or divide. Rather, they can facilitate the creation of cross cultural learning spaces and foster inclusive teaching. This is at the core of what we educational developers do. While academic institutions and the research they produce may have their cultural biases, scientific scholarship is still the most valid and reliable means available of revealing how we learn.

Principles of Learning

While I will not attempt to cover all of the learning principles that research has identified, I will summarize eight key concepts and then derive their implications for teaching. According to the research, learning and memory universally benefit when:

  1. Students review or practice new material more than once with time between those occasions versus the practice of reviewing material, even many times, all at once (Brown, Roediger III, & McDaniel, 2014; Butler, Marsh, Slavinsky, & Baraniuk, 2014; Rohrer & Pashler, 2010). This literature calls this practice schedule spaced or distributive. A closely related principle favors interleaved practice over blocked, which means that learners benefit from reviewing earlier material as they are learning new material (Butler et al., 2014; Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013; Rohrer & Pashler, 2010).

  2. Students are tested or test themselves on new material verses only rereading it, even many times. Called the testing effect, these benefits accrue from providing spaced practice, retrieval practice, feedback, and desirable difficulty (see #4 below) (Brown et al., 2014; Dunlosky et al., 2013; McDaniel, Howard, & Einstein, 2009; Roediger III & Butler, 2010; Roediger III & Karpicke, 2006; Rohrer & Pashler, 2010). Relatedly, after repeated testing, learners can remember new material longer when they expect to take a cumulative final exam on it, in which case they will keep it more accessible in memory (Szupnar, McDermott, & Roediger, 2007).

  3. Students receive new material in connection with uncomplicated stories and example cases (Graesser, Olde, & Klettke, 2002), especially when those examples span different conditions, content, and contexts (Hakel & Halpern, 2005).

  4. Students have to overcome desirable difficulties to learn new material, which means they have to work harder in ways that create more than one retrieval path (Bjork, 1994, 2013; McDaniel & Butler, 2010).

  5. The instruction minimizes cognitive load, meaning that it places low demands on working memory, which has very limited capacity (Mayer, 2009, 2014; Mayer & Moreno, 2003; Pass & Kester, 2006). Low cognitive load permits efficient cognitive processing and is not to be confused with desirable difficulties, which generate multiple retrieval paths.

  6. Students self consciously plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning in order to maximize it. Called self regulated learning, this involves observing one’s cognitive learning strategies (metacognition), emotional reactions to the material, and physical responses to one’s learning environment, and then adjusting one’s learning strategies to achieve greater effectivenss (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Hattie, 2009; McGuire, 2015; Nilson, 2013; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Zimmerman, 2001, 2002; Zimmerman, Moylan, Hudesman, White, & Flugman, 2011; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001).

  7. The instruction incorporates visuals to complement text. We know that the human mind processes, stores, and retrieves graphics with less effort than it does text. In fact, graphics move seamlessly into long term memory and help retrieve the text later on. Because they do not require the relatively elaborate cognitive transformations that written words do, they carry a lower cognitive load. As a result, visuals make it easier for learners to think about the material and see relationships within it (e.g., comparisons, contrasts, causality, inferences) (Tulving, 1967, 1985; Vekiri, 2002; Zull, 2011).

  8. Students receive new material multiple times through multiple modalities involving multiple senses—that is, in ways that use different parts of their brain (Clark & Mayer, 2011; Doyle & Zakrajsek, 2013; Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Charalampos, 2006; Shams & Seitz, 2008).

The Teaching Implications of the Principles of Learning

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience principles are in themselves academic and abstract, so they require translation into concrete class activities and assignments. Faculty need to know what they can “do on Monday” to apply them. I have the utmost respect for the time limitations that instructors face, whether adjunct, tenured, or in quest of tenure, and I realize that many of them perceive teaching improvement strategies as competing for time with the course content. They feel justifiably obliged to represent their disciplinary material accurately and as comprehensively as possible. Therefore, not only must I try to bring them the most effective teaching strategies available, I must also make those strategies easy to implement and help faculty see how they can complement the content. What makes the teaching implications of the principles so appealing is that they don’t demand restructuring the entire course. They don’t require much prep, grading, or class time. Nor do they burden students with extra work. Yet, they are powerful. And they show students how their minds operate and how they can achieve greater success.

To Integrate Spaced and Interleaved Practice

Faculty can modify their existing class activities, exercises, assignments, and test review aids to integrate some prior material with the new. When the homework involves solving problems, for example, instructors can intersperse those from previous lessons among the new problem sets. This way, students also get practice classifying problems and deciding on the appropriate algorithm. These are abilities that midterm and final exams demand and that blocked practice doesn’t teach.

To Generate the Testing Effect

Frequent low stakes quizzes, higher stakes tests, and practice tests all afford students the opportunity to revisit the material, find out what they have and haven’t learned, and gain retrieval practice (Roediger III & Butler, 2010). Faculty can also set up free recall activities for students to self test. For instance, they can give students a few minutes after a mini lecture to write down all they can recall and work with their neighbor to fill in any blanks (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). They can also teach the reading method Read Recall Review where students complete a reading (or video or podcast), recite aloud or write down all the important material they can remember, and then go back through the reading to find what they forgot or recalled incorrectly in order to recall this content. Considerable research documents that this technique surpasses multiple rereadings and matches note taking (which takes more time) in terms of short term and longer term recall (McDaniel et al., 2009; Roediger III & Karpicke, 2006). The findings about the memory benefits of comprehensive final exams obviously support administering such exams.

To Provide Instructive Stories and Examples

Stories have a long history as the primary means by which people passed down their belief structure and culture from one generation to the next. Many millennia ago, listeners found them engaging, illustrative, relatable, and memorable, and today’s listeners and readers still do. Examples, anecdotes, cases, and problem based learning problems are simply short to long stories that make abstract ideas concrete, applicable, and human. For instructional purposes, the most powerful set of stories and examples illustrate how broadly and robustly a concept or principle can be applied in the real world—that is, the extent to which it is generalizable. Therefore, stories and examples should represent as many different contexts, conditions, settings, and levels of abstraction as appropriate.

To Incorporate Desirable Difficulties

First, let us distinguish desirable difficulties from the undesirable ones that increase cognitive load. The former makes students explore the material more deeply, more slowly, or more deliberately, while excess cognitive load interferes with and burdens their learning. Desirable difficulties push students to generate multiple retrieval paths through different parts of the brain, while the undesirable difficulties ask one part of students’ brains to perform competing tasks. Persellin and Daniels (2014) lists examples of desirable difficulty that faculty can incorporate into their class activities and assignments:

  • Have students recast text material into a graphic format such as a concept map or flowchart.

  • Vary the conditions and locations of students’ practice opportunities (e.g., sometimes in class, sometimes online).

  • Give students activities and assignments in which they transfer new knowledge to new situations.

  • Have students handwrite (versus type) notes on the lectures, readings, podcasts, or videos. This requires them to isolate the most important points (versus just take dictation) and pay close attention to the organization of the material.

  • Hold students to high standards for example, refuse to accept or grade work that shows little effort or fails to satisfy the assignment.

  • Assign especially creative, inventive, or challenging tasks to small groups.

To Lower Cognitive Load

Both cognitive psychologists and instructional designers have devised actionable guidelines for reducing cognitive load (Clark & Mayer, 2011; Mayer, 2009, 2014; Mayer & Moreno, 2003; Pass & Kester, 2006).

  • To accommodate the limits of working memory, faculty can “chunk” new material for students and provide exercises that teach students to chunk it on their own. Chunking involves reducing the number of pieces of new information by collapsing them into categories or logical groups. Instructive exercises for students include classifying subconcepts under more general concepts, as in a concept map.

  • Faculty can divide a complex lesson into short segments. This strategy, called the segmentation principle, translates into giving mini lectures; assigning generously subheaded readings; and limiting videos, podcasts, and animations to 3 10 minutes

  • Faculty can scaffold new material by incrementally adding knowledge and skills onto what students have previously mastered or approximated. In practical terms, this means modeling a procedural or reasoning process, supplying models of acceptable and unacceptable work, giving hints and feedback on early practice, showing worked and then partially worked examples of problem solutions, and starting new material with graphic organizers showing the relationships among topics or concepts (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006).

  • When given a choice between text and audio narration to explicate a graphic, faculty can facilitate learning more by relying on the latter as opposed to the former and by avoiding the simultaneous presentation of the text and the audio. In other words, they should have students either read the text or listen to the audio that accompanies a graphic, but not both. This recommendation is called the redundancy principle. However, accessibility guidelines require that both forms be available.

  • Faculty can focus their presentations on the main points and avoid extraneous material, whether in text, graphics, or audio narration. As this coherence principle advises, simple, clean, lean presentations make learning easier for students; nonessential elaboration gets in the way.

To Cultivate Self Regulated Learning

Self regulated learning is marked by focused self awareness, a willingness to adopt better learning strategies, and a sense of responsibility for one’s learning. Faculty can promote these traits in their students by leading activities and making assignments in which students self regulate. Among the dozens of options are these (Nilson, 2013):

  • Have students write a reflection on the nature of the course subject matter at the beginning of the course and again at the end, so they can acknowledge and evaluate their learning.

  • Have them write essays on the course material at the beginning of the course and then correct and rewrite those essays at the end, possibly as the final exam; again, students can acknowledge and evaluate their learning.

  • For the same purpose, administer a knowledge survey (a survey of students’ perceived ability to answer questions and perform tasks) on the course material at the beginning and the end of the course.

  • Assign short, reflective writings on the readings, videos, mini lectures, and the like. The prompts might ask students to identify the most useful, valuable, surprising, or important thing(s) they learned; the central concepts or principles; their emotional reactions to the material; how it confirmed or conflicted with their prior beliefs, knowledge, or values; how it compared to their prior learning; and what was unclear or the desired learning focus.

  • Have students write about the process they went through to complete a major assignment, such as the steps they took, the strategies they chose, the reasoning they followed, the problems they ran into, the solutions they developed, and the goals they achieved.

  • Have them write about what skills and understandings they gained or improved from doing a major assignment, what outcomes they achieved, or what they would do differently if they did the assignment again.

  • Have them write advice to future students of the course on doing a major assignment: what approach to take, how to avoid problems, and how to learn the most from it.

  • After a simulation or role play, have students describe and evaluate their goals, decisions, strategies, and responses to the actions of other players.

  • For every problem students do not complete correctly on homework or quizzes, give them the chance to earn back some lost points by writing an error analysis (where they went wrong) and re solving the problem or a similar one.

  • After giving back a graded test, have students write an evaluation of their preparation strategies, an analysis of the types of error they made, and a plan for preparing for the next test.

While students should submit these assignments, faculty need grade them only pass/fail, with some nominal number of points for passing. To pass, students must complete the assignment (e.g., answer all the questions) and meet some minimum length requirement. When depth and detail are desired, grading with a rubric may be best.

To Add Visuals

The most cognitively digestible and memorable material relies on both text and graphics, rather than text alone. Termed the multimedia principle (Clark & Mayer, 2011; Mayer & Moreno, 2003), it urges faculty to display graphics—that is, pictures, diagrams, flowcharts, animations, videos, concept maps, and mind maps—to elucidate principles, theories, knowledge schemata, phenomena, processes, procedures, cycles, examples, and causal and conceptual relationships. A related guideline, the contiguity principle, recommends that the accompanying text, such as labels, descriptions, and explanations, appear on or in close proximity to the graphic (Clark & Mayer, 2011). After seeing a few models, students should be able to compose their own visuals.

Except for information it repeatedly recalls, the human mind stores knowledge in an organized structure. By furnishing such a structure visually, a graphic syllabus or an outcomes map can help students remember the “big picture” of a course or subfield for years to come (Nilson, 2007). Without such a visual aid, it could take students years to devise a structure on their own, if they even made the effort, and we do not have that kind of time with them.

To Build in Multimodal Repetition

To learn new material, students need to read, hear, talk, write, see, draw, think, act, and feel it into their minds, using as many parts of their brain as possible. Faculty can incorporate opportunities for them to work with new material in at least two or three modalities involving multiple senses. While this may seem challenging and time consuming, many active learning classrooms already do it with ease. Students may first read or listen to the material and then spend time in class or online discussing it, writing about it, make a graphic of it, watching a video or animation of it, role playing it, or playing a simulating of it

However we choose to meet it, our challenge is to put students in situations where it’s difficult for them not to learn. But they still have to attend to, focus on, and think about the learning experience we put them in. In other words, active learning is ultimately an inside job. If it takes place in the minds of students, then our ability to motivate, to inspire students to self motivate, assumes special importance. How do we induce learners to choose to attend to, focus on, and think about a learning experience?

Motivation First

Cognitive psychology offers less effective approaches to motivation than it does to learning. It furnishes a host of well researched factors that motivate some learners some of the time (Keller, 2010): all the things that attract human attention, such as novelty, change, movement, color, intensity, contrast, and human faces; personal relevance; personal choice; goal setting and goal expectancy; and self determination, to include a sense of autonomy, competence, and social connection. Borrowing from another area of psychology, we can also use principles of behaviorism to set up incentives, rewards, and sanctions, such as a grading system.

However, for learning, we must not only attract our students’ attention but also sustain it, which is where the other motivators come in. One stands above the rest as the prime source of motivation: having a goal. Without a goal to one’s learning, goal expectancy, relevance, choice, self determination, and grades beg the question. Goal expectancy is moot; relevance and choice have no referent; self determination has no purpose; and grades lack significance. Many of our younger students enter college only because they think they are supposed to or believe it will get them a higher salary someday. But they have no job in mind or any other goal related to college. What material then can be relevant? Why would one choice of assignment appeal more than another? What do grades matter?

Such students need a goal—quickly. While we cannot rewrite their personal history, we can help them acquire direction with goal setting exercises. At the beginning of a course, we can assign the essay “How I Earned an A in This Course” or ask them to free write what they hope to gain from this course, where they see themselves in five years, or—after reflecting on their greatest strengths—how they could use these assets in the workplace. These ideas may not otherwise cross some students’ minds. While we know from one study that the essay “How I Earned…” has achieved good results (Zander & Zander, 2000), we need research on the motivational effectiveness of other goal setting exercises. After students have a good reason for being in a course, the principles of learning can work their evidence based magic on them.

The Stakes

As educational developers, we can ill afford to ignore the cognitive psychology and neuroscience research on learning, and we need to ensure that our faculty understand the major findings and their implications for teaching. Because so many faculty rightfully expect evidence to support our recommendations, this research should appeal to them. It follows the scientific method, which makes the findings valid and reliable across students, subject matter, learning platforms, and institutional contexts.

Most importantly—and another feature that faculty dearly value—this research guides instructors in helping students maximize their chances of achieving academic success. In particular, it promotes equity and social justice for first generation and disadvantaged students, who tend to come to college with the least knowledge about how they learn. By elucidating learning principles of universal application, the findings of cognitive psychology and neuroscience help even the playing field. They reduce unnecessary learner effort and discouragement and create opportunities for all students to realize their full potential. Given the goals of our profession, we need to pay attention to and keep up with this literature. Our students’ academic success is at stake, and our work is all about them. A number of books and articles provide more detailed summaries of selected learning principles that cognitive psychology and neuroscience offer (e.g., Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010; Benassi, Overson, & Hakala, 2014; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Doyle & Zakrajsek, 2013; Moulton, 2014; Persellin & Daniels, 2014; Zakrajsek & Bailey, 2018; Zull, 2011).

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