Introductory biology courses are widely criticized for overemphasizing details and rote memorization of facts. Data to support such claims, however, are surprisingly scarce. We sought to determine whether this claim was evidence-based. To do so we quantified the cognitive level of learning targeted by faculty in introductory-level biology courses.…

The authors conducted 3 experiments addressing the issue of how observations and multiple sources of prior knowledge are put together in category learning. In Experiments 1 and 2, learning was faster for critical features, which were predictable on the basis of prior knowledge, than for filler features, and this advantage increased as more…