Background: Online crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), have become popular alternatives to the ubiquitous student samples used in psychology research. r/SampleSize, an alternative pool on the website Reddit, allows for online participant recruitment without compulsory or immediate payment, making it potentially useful…

What leads people to contribute to public life, to strengthen social cohesion, and work to better society? We investigated how co-curricular aspects of college life relate to social cognitive processes foundational for civic virtues and contribute to their development. We examined one widespread type of co-curricular college experience--studying…

Prior research has demonstrated the importance of forecasting to creative problem-solving performance. Less is known about how case analysis and outcome valence impact forecasting performance. In this study, 266 participants were asked to assume the role of a Marketing Director of a clothing company and develop a marketing campaign for entering a…

Student success is an ongoing area of interest to educators and researchers alike. The current study seeks to expand the literature on what factors help or hinder students by examining the roles of Need for Cognition (NfC), academic motivation, and student study habits in academic success. The results indicated that NfC scores, Personal…

To achieve many outcomes promoted by student affairs educators, students need the internal capacity to author their knowledge, identities, and relationships. This study examined the link between students' entering self-authorship capacity and their experiences and outcomes in their first and fourth years. Findings from 214 participants indicate…

Need for cognition is the enjoyment of and motivation to think, solve problems, and actively use one's mind, characteristics that are vital to learning. Diversity has been associated with many learning outcomes, yet critics of diversity claim that viewpoint diversity--not racial diversity--is sufficient for learning; therefore, I explored the…

Funded by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts (CILA) at Wabash College, the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS) is a multi-institution, multi-year, longitudinal study designed to identify the academic and non-academic collegiate experiences that foster liberal learning. This article describes how the study was done and…

Learners typically allocate more resources to learning items that are higher in value than they do to items lower in value. For instance, when items vary in point value for learning, participants allocate more study time to the higher point items than they do to the lower point items. The current experiments extend this research to a context where…

In this study the authors analyze longitudinal student survey data from the 17-institution Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS) to determine the extent that the influence of overall exposure to clear and organized instruction on four-year growth in two measures of cognitive development is mediated by student use of deep approaches…

Using longitudinal data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, this study measured the impact of first-year seminars on college students' life-long learning orientations. The findings suggest that first-year seminars enhance students' life-long learning orientations and that the effect of first-year seminars is mediated through…

Research on noise shows that a variety of effects including stress, annoyance, and performance decrements exist for certain types of sounds. Noise interferes with cognitive ability by overloading the attentional system or simply distracting from efficient encoding or rehearsal, but very little research has extended those findings to recreation or…