LX Research

instructional strategy

Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model

Students’ beliefs and goals can powerfully influence their learning success. Those who believe intelligence is a fixed entity (entity theorists) tend to emphasize ‘performance goals,’ leaving them vulnerable to negative feedback and likely to disengage from challenging learning opportunities. In contrast, students who believe intelligence is malleable (incremental theorists) tend to emphasize ‘learning goals’ and rebound better from occasional failures. These results suggest that beliefs can influence learning success through top–down biasing of attention and conceptual processing toward goal-congruent information.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes’ Steadfast Factual Adherence

Evidence of factual backfire is far more tenuous than prior research suggests. By and large, citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their ideological commitments.

Political Behavior, Advance Online Publication

The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory

The identification of a number of moderators suggests that in certain situations, feedback interventions (FIs) can yield a large and positive effect on performance. Specifically, a feedback intervention provided for a familiar task, containing cues that support learning, attracting attention to feedback-standard discrepancies at the task level (velocity FI and goal setting), and is void of cues to the metatask level (e.g., cues that direct attention to the self) is likely to yield impressive gains in performance.

Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284

Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics

Undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

PNAS June 10, 2014

Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement

The optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter — students watched most of the way through these short videos. In fact, the average engagement time of any video maxes out at 6 minutes, regardless of its length. And engagement times decrease as videos lengthen.

EdX

Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide

In Studies 1 and 2, 7th-grade students received critical feedback from their teacher that, in the treatment condition, was designed to assuage mistrust byemphasizing the teacher’s high standards and belief that the student was capable of meeting thosestandards—a strategy known aswise feedback. Wise feedback increased students’ likelihood of submit-ting a revision of an essay (Study 1) and improved the quality of their final drafts (Study 2).

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014, Vol. 143, No. 2, 804–824

Development and use of the ARCS model of instructional design

ARCS Model of motivation contains a four category synthesis of variables that encompasses most of the areas of research on human motivation, and a motivational design process that is compatible with typical instructional design models. Following its development, the ARCS Model was field tested in two inservice teacher education programs. Based on the results of these field tests, the ARCS Model appears to provide useful assistance to designers and teachers, and warrants more controlled studies of its critical attributes and areas of effectiveness.

Journal of Instructional Development

A Qualitative Meta-Analysis of Computer Games as Learning Tools

The effects of computer-based games on learning are positive. When analyzing research results of the 65 out of the 89 studies that specifically examined the effectives of computer-based games on learning, researches found a significant positive impact for computer-based games as compared with conventional instruction 52% of the time.

Effective Electronic Gaming in Education (Vol. 1, pp. 1-32).

Andragogy: An Emerging Technology for Adult Learning

Andragogy refers to a theory of adult learning that details some of the ways in which adults learn differently than children. For example, adults tend to be more self-directed, internally motivated, and ready to learn. Teachers can draw on concepts of andragogy to increase the effectiveness of their adult education classes.

Education for Adults: Volume 1 Adult Learning and Education

Inducing effort with behavioural intervention

Monetary incentives are strong motivators, non-monetary psychological inducements are moderately effective, and results using behavioural factors are generally consistent with models of social and time preferences.

Vox EU

Success factors for serious games to enhance learning: a systematic review

Reveals five central serious game themes: backstory and production; realism; artificial intelligence and adaptivity; interaction; and feedback and debriefing, all of which require deliberate intertwining with pedagogical content to ensure successful learning.

Virtual Reality, 21(1), 31–58

Depth-of-Knowledge Levels for Four Content Areas

Depth of Knowledge or DoK is another type of framework used to identify the level of rigor for an assessment. In 1997, Dr. Norman Webb developed the DoK to categorize activities according to the level of complexity in thinking. The creation of the DoK stemmed from the alignment of standards to assessments. Standardized assessments measured how students think about a content and the procedures learned but did not measure how deeply students must understand and be aware of a learning so they can explain answers and provide solutions, as well as transfer what was learned in real world contexts.

Integrating educational knowledge: reactivation of prior knowledge during educational learning enhances memory integration

Reactivation of prior knowledge during new learning and congruency of prior knowledge with new learning are beneficial to memory formation.

npj Science of Learningvolume 3, Article number: 11 (2018)

Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process.

Educational Psychologist, 41:2, 75-86

The Effects of Overlearning and Distributed Practise on the Retention of Mathematics Knowledge

Long-term retention of mathematics knowledge was boosted by distributed practise and unaffected by overlearning.

Applied Cognitive Psychology Vol 20: 1209–1224 (2006)

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