Our school career culminates in a set of exam results, but if students want to do well, attending lessons is not enough: the implicit expectation is that all students will reinforce learning independently outside of the classroom. Really effective learners employ effective independent study techniques, but when, how and where do they learn to do…

Knowledge and its acquisition are central to the field of curriculum studies, but the ways in which empirical studies of pedagogical approaches relate to theories of knowledge acquisition are under researched. This paper reports the outcomes of a rapid evidence assessment about the impacts of "experiential learning" (EL), regarded by…

Performance improvements during early human motor skill learning are suggested to be driven by short periods of rest during practice, at the scale of seconds. To reveal the unknown mechanisms behind these "micro-offline" gains, we leveraged the sampling power offered by online crowdsourcing (cumulative N over all experiments = 951).…

In this new edition of the highly regarded "Why Don't Students Like School?" cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham turns his research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning into workable teaching techniques. This book will help you improve your teaching practice by explaining how you and your students think and learn. It…

The purpose of this publication is to provide basic information to teachers about how to help students become independent learners. Its recommendations are based on the conceptual framework known as "self-regulated learning," or SRL. Self-regulated learners have flexible knowledge and skills that enable them to manage their cognition,…

Performance on verbal and mathematical tasks is enhanced when participants shift from using algorithms to retrieving information directly from memory (Siegler, 1988a). However, it is unknown whether a shift to retrieval is involved in dynamic spatial skill acquisition. For example, do athletes mentally extrapolate the trajectory of the ball, or do…

This article synthesizes foundational knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines regarding how humans develop in context. Major constructs that define human development are integrated into a developmental system framework, this includes--epigenetics, neural malleability and plasticity, integrated complex skill development and learning, human…

Learning complex skills is driven by reinforcement, which facilitates both online within-session gains and retention of the acquired skills. Yet, in ecologically relevant situations, skills are often acquired when mapping between actions and rewarding outcomes is unknown to the learning agent, resulting in reinforcement schedules of a stochastic…

The fading of instructional scripts can be regarded as necessary for allowing learners to take over control of their cognitive activities during the acquisition of skills such as argumentation. There is, however, the danger that learners might relapse into novice strategies after script prompts are faded. One possible solution could be monitoring…

The involvement of working memory capacity (WMC) in ruled-based cognitive skill acquisition is well-established, but the duration of its involvement and its role in learning strategy selection are less certain. Participants (N=610) learned four logic rules, their corresponding symbols, or logic gates, and the appropriate input-output combinations…

By studying forgetfulness in humans and monkeys, scientists are learning about the anatomy of normal memory. Results of amnesia studies, indicating that memory collapse occurs in a selective fashion depending on the cause, may help resolve a fundamental dispute among learning theorists. (JN)

This article provides an overview of how people learn and strategies that can be taught to individuals to improve their levels of academic achievement. Several examples from recent case studies illustrate cognitive controls and profiles as well as the procedures and materials employed in augmentation and transfer training. (MT)

This review explores the factors of cognitive processing, style, and metacognitive organization as they contribute to academic success. Specific discussions consider aspects of short- and long-term memory, including how these affect learning and academic performance, and the keys to attaining long-term memory capability by involving redundancy,…

The aim of the 2018 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive…