Incentivising has shown to improve participation in clinical trials. However, ethical concerns suggest that incentives may be coercive, obscure trial risks and encourage individuals to enrol in clinical trials for the wrong reasons. The aim of our study was to develop and pilot a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to explore and identify preferences…

Cumulative assessment refers to interspersed testing in which each assessment covers all previous content and the mean assessments' grade weighs in for the final exam grade. The effect of cumulative assessment on motivation and performance might differ between summative (i.e. assessment grades weigh in for the final exam grade) and formative (i.e.…

In 2 experiments we investigated the efficacy of self-paced study in multitrial learning. In Experiment 1, native speakers of English studied lists of Dutch-English word pairs under 1 of 4 imposed fixed presentation rate conditions (24 × 1 s, 12 × 2 s, 6 × 4 s, or 3 × 8 s) and a self-paced study condition. Total study time per list was equated for…

Collaborative problem-solving is often not a sequential process; instead, it can involve tasking switching or dual tasking (i.e., multitasking) activities in that the collaborators need to shift their attention between the targeted problems and the conversations they carry on with their collaborators. It is not known to what extent the…

Time is experienced as passing more quickly the more changes happen in a situation. The present research tested the idea that time perception depends on the level of construal of the situation. Building on previous research showing that concrete rather than abstract mental construal causes people to perceive more variations in a given situation,…

Two experiments are reported examining how value and relatedness interact to influence metacognitive monitoring and control processes. Participants studied unrelated and related word pairs, each accompanied by point values denoting how important the items were to remember. These values were presented either before or after each pair in a…

The last two decades have witnessed the gradual implementation of integrated science curriculum at the junior secondary level in China. However, in most provinces of China, the implementation is not as successful as expected. Challenges were reported, yet without fine-grained investigation, with respect to science teachers' instruction on…

While multitasking is not a new concept, it has received increasing attention in recent years with the development of new media and technologies. Recent trends appear to suggest that multitasking is on the rise among the younger generation. The purpose of the study is to determine if students obtain more or less information in multitasking…

College completion and college success often lag behind college attendance. One theory as to why students do not succeed in college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student…

"Multitasking" has developed a certain mantra in our culture, and according to this widely held axiom, people in general and students in particular, can and do function productively and learn efficiently doing several things at once. There also seems to be an unshakable conviction that young students excel in a multitasking environment.…

Everyone has probably experienced chronostasis, an illusion of time that can cause a clock's second hand to appear to stand still during an eye movement. Though the illusion was initially thought to reflect a mechanism for preserving perceptual continuity during eye movements, an alternative hypothesis has been advanced that overestimation of time…

When participants allocated time across 2 tasks (in which they generated as many words as possible from a fixed set of letters), they made frequent switches. This allowed them to allocate more time to the more productive task (i.e., the set of letters from which more words could be generated) even though times between the last word and the switch…

By nose poking a lighted key, rats obtained food pellets on either a variable- interval schedule of reinforcement or a schedule that required an average of four additional responses after the end of the variable-interval component (a tandem variable-interval variable-ratio 4 schedule). With both schedule types, the mean variable interval was…

Is Skim reading effective? How do readers allocate their attention selectively? The authors report 3 experiments that use expository texts and allow readers only enough time to read half of each document. Experiment 1 found that, relative to reading half the text, skimming improved memory for important ideas from a text but did not improve memory…

Theories of self-regulated study assume that learners monitor item difficulty when making decisions about which items to select for study. To complement such theories, the authors propose an agenda-based regulation (ABR) model in which learners' study decisions are guided by an agenda that learners develop to prioritize items for study, given…