PHASE I by Margaret W. Matlin
Introduction
Annotated Bibliography
General Frameworks
Annotated Bibliographies and Resources About
College Teaching
Nature of Memory
Very Long-Term Memory
Memory Improvement
General Information
Depth of Processing/Elaborative Rehearsal
Self-Reference Effect
Practice
Organizational Strategies
Imagery Strategies
Metamemory
General
Students' Judgments of Learning (JOLs)
Students' Perceptions of Examination
Preparation
Text Comprehension
Strategies
Metacomprehension
Writing
Improving Writing Quality
Reducing Procrastination for Paper Completion
Miscellaneous Topics
Attention
Understanding the Subject Matter
Multimedia Classes
Critical Thinking
Testing
Note: This annotated review of the research literature relating principles and findings from cognitive psychology to college-level instruction will appear in the special edition of New Directions in Teaching and Learning on Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond. It will be edited by Diane F. Halpern and Milton Hakel. Publication date should be late in 2002.
Cognitive Psychology and College-Level Pedagogy:
Two Siblings Who Rarely Communicate
Margaret W. Matlin
SUNY Geneseo
Cognitive psychology and college-level pedagogy are two closely related topics. Cognitive psychology is a lively discipline, dedicated to human processes such as memory, knowledge, comprehension, and writing. Many cognitive psychologists emphasize "everyday cognition," the kind of processes we employ during our normal daily lives. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that approximately 12,510,000 undergraduate students are enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities ("The Nation: Students," 2000). In other words, more than 12 million students are currently using their everyday cognition in undergraduate classrooms, as part of their normal daily lives.
The topic of college-level pedagogy is also a lively discipline. After all, more than 1,800,000 full-time faculty members are employed in U.S. colleges and universities ("The Nation: Faculty and Staff," 2000). These individuals are presumably interested in effective teaching. Several dozen books can inform these faculty members about the philosophy of teaching, potential teaching problems, and specific suggestions for teaching improvement. Many academic disciplines even have their own journals, devoted to teaching within their subject area. In psychology, for instance, we have Teaching of Psychology, which began publication in December 1972. We might therefore expect that faculty members could easily locate a large number of resources that describe empirical research about enhancing students' memory, knowledge, comprehension, and writing.
The problem, however, is that these two siblings--cognitive psychology and college-level pedagogy--are barely on speaking terms. I searched through recent issues of Applied Cognitive Psychology, a journal whose title suggests that it would feature the application of cognitive psychology in the college classroom. In the issues of this journal from 1996 through 2000, I found only 8 articles directly related undergraduate learning. In contrast, the number of articles related to eyewitness testimony--for the same period of 1996 through 2000--was 64. The contrast is especially bewildering when we consider the annual number of college students versus the annual number of people who provide eyewitness testimony--a number much smaller than 12.5 million!
Let's turn our attention to a more theoretical journal in cognitive psychology, Memory & Cognition. This journal published only 6 articles related to classroom learning during the same 1996 through 2000 time period. In summary, cognitive psychologists may be fascinated by eyewitness testimony, as well as many theoretical issues. However, they are mysteriously hesitant about examining pedagogical issues. They seldom explore topics that show us how college professors could enhance their students' memory, knowledge, comprehension, and writing.
When we consider the empirical research on college-level pedagogy, the situation is discouraging for a different reason. Our discipline's most relevant journal, Teaching of Psychology, focuses specifically on improving the way we design and teach our psychology courses. I performed an analysis of articles that appeared in this journal from 1996 through 2000, focusing only on articles at least two pages long. I excluded reviews of the literature, as well as descriptions of psychology programs, textbook characteristics, and teaching-award recipients. In particular, I recorded the dependent variable that the authors of each article had selected to assess a teaching technique. During this 5-year period, 63 articles assessed students' affective evaluation of a teaching technique. Most often, authors had asked students to rate the extent to which the technique was fun, enjoyable, or interesting.
An additional 68 articles in Teaching of Psychology assessed students' cognitive evaluations of a teaching technique. Authors of these articles had typically asked students to rate the extent to which the teaching technique had provided greater understanding, helpful organization, or useful information. Other common dependent variables focused on improved writing, problem solving, or critical thinking. Students' ratings may provide face validity that a new demonstration or teaching technique is effective. However, the research on metacognition demonstrates that students' ratings of their comprehension are only weakly correlated with their performance on an objective test of their comprehension (Maki, 1998). Students may believe that a teaching technique is entertaining, or they may judge that the technique helped them master some psychological concepts. Unfortunately, though, the technique may have no influence on their actual cognitive performance.
A relatively small number of articles in Teaching of Psychology provided a more objective assessment of cognitive performance. In 24 articles, authors reported scores on tests of memory, understanding, writing skill, and critical thinking. Most of these articles compared the performance of students who had been taught with the innovative technique, versus the performance of students in a control group. Only a handful of articles featured random assignment to groups. Obviously, a well-controlled experiment would provide logistical problems for administration within the classroom. An experiment would also generate ethical problems, because some students would be taught with a potentially more effective technique. Still, it is remarkable that so few of the pedagogical articles in Teaching of Psychology use the rigorous research methodology that would satisfy cognitive psychologists.
In summary, cognitive psychologists and professors interested in pedagogy share a common concern about enhancing human learning. However, these siblings have not yet communicated extensively about this common concern. In the pages that follow, I provide an annotated bibliography listing several dozen resources that have explored how we can use principles of cognitive psychology to enhance college-level pedagogy. This bibliography begins with some resources that provide a general framework, as well as a list of other annotated bibliographies. The next three topics are the nature of memory, memory improvement, and metamemory. Then, we'll focus on understanding, considering both text comprehension and metacomprehension. After that, we'll turn to the topic of writing. (Incidentally, both cognitive psychologists and teaching professors are strangely silent on the issue of writing papers, though most of us assign papers in our courses.) Finally, we'll consider a variety of miscellaneous topics, focusing on other cognitive skills that could be relevant for college-level pedagogy. I am hopeful that this annotated bibliography--and the volume as a whole--will encourage cognitive psychologists and teaching professors to converse more extensively with each other. Ideally, they would also begin to conduct the kind of research that could enhance both of these important perspectives.
References cited in the Introduction (back to top)
Maki, R. H. (1998). Test predictions over text material. In D. J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 117-144). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
The nation: Faculty and staff. (2000, September 1). Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac, 47, 34-40.
The nation: Students. (2000, September 1). Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac, 47, 24-32.
Annotated Bibliography
General Frameworks
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. This book provides an excellent overview of current perspectives on human learning. Instead of emphasizing rote learning--in which students remember and repeat information--contemporary cognitive psychology emphasizes that educators should help students develop the learning strategies needed to acquire usable knowledge.
Kirschner, D., & Whitson, J. A. (Eds.). (1997). Situated cognition: Social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. The situated cognition approach argues that learning occurs--not in a vacuum--but in a natural context, which is both social and cultural. Readers may wish to begin with Bereiter's chapter, which addresses the problem that material learned in one situation is often not transfered to another situation.
Langer, J., & Moldoveanu, M. (Eds.) . (2000). Mindfulness theory and social issues [Special issue]. Journal of Social Issues, 56 (1). Ellen Langer's concept of mindfulness stresses the importance of drawing novel distinctions, noticing new features, and achieving enhanced awareness about a cognitive task. This special issue examines how mindfulness influences tasks such as problem solving, remembering, and speaking.
Annotated Bibliographies and Resources About College Teaching (back to top)
(Note: These also include suggestions for individual courses)
Wise, P. S., & Fulkerson, F. E. (1996). Annotated bibliography on the teaching of psychology: 1995. Teaching of Psychology, 23, 257-264.
Johnson, D. E., & Schroder, S. I. (1997). Annotated bibliography on the teaching of psychology: 1996. Teaching of Psychology, 24, 287-293.
Johnson, D. E., & Schroder, S. I. (1998). Annotated bibliography on the teaching of psychology: 1997. Teaching of Psychology, 25, 307-314.
Johnson, D. E., & Schroder, S. I. (1999). Annotated bibliography on the teaching of psychology: 1998. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 305-313.
Johnson, D. E., & Schroder, S. L. (2000). Annotated Bibliography on the teaching of psychology: 1999. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 296-303.
Ware, M. E., & Johnson, D. E. (2000). Handbook of demonstrations and activities in the teaching of psychology (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. This three-volume resource includes demonstrations and activities, gathered from the journal Teaching of Psychology, and arranged by academic courses. For example, Volume 2 includes physiological psychology, perception, learning, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology.
Nature of Memory
Very Long-Term Memory
Bahrick, H. P., & Hall, L. K. (1991). Lifetime maintenance of high school mathematics content. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 120, 20-33. People who had taken at least one college-level mathematics course showed nearly perfect retention of knowledge about high school algebra and geometry, decades after the coursework. Those who had not taken a college-level math course showed a linear decline across time in retention of this knowledge.
Conway, M. A., Cohen, G., & Stanhope, N. (1991). On the very long-term retention of knowledge acquired through formal education: Twelve years of cognitive psychology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 120, 395-409. Students who had taken a college course in cognitive psychology were tested 10 years later; they were able to recall only about 25% of the names of researchers and specific technical concepts, but about 70% of general information and cognitive research methods.
Naveh-Benjamin, M., Lavi, H., McKeachie, W. J., & Lin, Y. (1997). Individual differences in students' retention of knowledge and conceptual structures learned in university and high school courses: The case of test anxiety. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11, 507-526. At the end of a course, students who were high in test anxiety performed worse than students who were low in test anxiety. However, those differences disappeared when the students were tested 3 to 7 years later.
Rubin, D. C., Rahhal, T. A., & Poon, L. W. (1998). Things learned in early adulthood are remembered best. Memory & Cognition, 26, 3-19. When asked to produce autobiographical memories, older adults are more likely to recall memories from the period when they were 10 to 30 years of age.
VanderStoep, S. W., Fagerlin, A., & Feenstra, J. S. (2000). What do students remember from introductory psychology? Teaching of Psychology, 27, 89-92. During the last week of the semester, students in introductory psychology classes were asked to recall what they remembered from the course; they were most likely to remember vivid in-class demonstrations and dramatic videos. The accuracy of free recall was correlated with grade in the course.
General Information
Soler, M. J., & Ruiz, J. C. (2000). The spontaneous use of memory aids at different educational levels. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10, 41-51. Students answered a questionnaire about memory aids; college students--like 8th and 11th graders--were likely to report that they used general memory strategies such as short-term repetition, rather than mnemonics such as creating bizarre images.
Gruneberg, M. M., & Herrmann, D. J. (1997). Your memory for life: Develop and improve lifetime memory skills. London: Blandford. This book is a broad overview of memory aids, emphasizing that memory is affected by numerous factors. It also discusses specific topics such as prospective memory, memory for faces, and memory in the workplace.
Herrmann, D. J., & Gruneberg, M. M. (1999). How to cure your memory failures. London: Blandford. This book includes anecdotes of real-life memory failures, and it explains why these failures may have occurred. The book also examines memory-improvement techniques.
Depth of Processing/Elaborative Rehearsal
Cabe, P. A., Walker, M. H., & Williams, M. (1999). Newspaper advice column letters as teaching cases for developmental psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 128-131. Students in a developmental psychology course reported that they learned the course material more effectively if they had used a developmental perspective to analyze a series of personal advice columns.
Connor-Greene, P. A. (2000). Making connections: Evaluating the effectiveness of journal writing in enhancing student learning. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 44-46. Students in a course on personality theory wrote journal entries that applied theoretical concepts to personal friends, political figures, and characters from television; their test scores were significantly higher than the scores of similar students who had not written journal entries.
Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684. This is the classic article outlining the levels of processing (or depth of processing) approach. According to this approach, people remember material more accurately if they use deep, meaningful processing, rather than superficial processing.
Davis, M., & Hult, R. E. (1997). Effects of writing summaries as a generative learning activity during note taking. Teaching of Psychology, 24, 47-49. Students took notes on a lecture in introductory psychology, which included periodic 4-minute pauses; on a test 12 days later, those who had summarized the notes during the pauses received higher scores than those who had only reviewed the notes.
Kreiner, D. S. (1997). Guided notes and interactive methods for teaching with videotapes. Teaching of Psychology, 24, 183-185. While students watched a videotape, they either took no notes (control group) or took notes according to three kinds of instructions. Performance on a subsequent memory test showed that the notetaking conditions did not influence recall of specific factual information. However, on more sophisticated questions, which required inferences, students recalled more information when they had been required to answer key questions while watching the video or when they had been required to answer questions orally during brief pauses in watching the videotape.
Thorne, B. M. (1999). Using irony in teaching the history of psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 222-224. This article suggests that students can learn the history of psychology more effectively if the professor provides examples of irony (for example, Descartes's theory of mind-body dualism, illustrated by the fact that--after his death--Descartes' head was stored separately from his body for 150 years).
Watson, D. L., Hagihara, D. K., & Tenney, A. L. (1999). Skill-building exercises and generalizing psychological concepts to daily life. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 193-195. Introductory psychology students who had performed skill-building exercises (for example, providing real-life examples of the concept "learning through modeling") scored higher than control-group students on a subsequent test of applying psychology concepts to daily life.
Hartlep, K. L., & Forsyth, G. A. (2000). The effect of self-reference on learning and retention. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 269-271. Students in a child-development course studied a chapter in their textbook, using one of three study techniques; recall was tested two weeks later. Those in the control group (instructed to use their customary study method) received lower scores than those who used a SQ4R method (study, question, read, reflect, recite, and review) or those who used a self-reference method (read and reflect); the scores of the latter two groups did not differ from each other.
Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A.., & Kirker, W. S. (1997). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 677-688. This is the classic reference on the self-reference effect, which demonstrated that people recalled more words if they related these words to themselves, rather than in terms of the word's visual or auditory characteristics.
Symons, C., & Johnson, B. T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 371-394. This meta-analysis of 129 studies demonstrated that people recall more material when they use the self-reference technique, rather than either semantic processing or shallow-processing techniques such as processing in terms of visual characteristics.
Practice
Cull, W. L. (2000). Untangling the benefits of multiple study opportunities and repeated testing for cued recall. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 215-235. This article replicates the spacing effect, which refers to improved memory when an item is repeated after several intervening items, rather than immediately. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that memory is improved with several different schedules of repeated testing throughout the learning period.
Dempster, F. N. (1996). Distributing and managing the conditions of encoding and practice. In E. L. Bjork & R. A. Bjork (Eds.), Memory (pp. 318-344). San Diego: Academic Press. This chapter provides a general review of research on the spacing effect.
Donovan, J. J., & Radosevich, D. J. (1999). A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don't. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 795-805. A meta-analysis of 63 studies shows that spaced practice is more effective than massed practice (effect size = 0.46). However, the advantages of spaced practice are moderated by the length of the interval between trials and by the nature of the task.
Russo, R., Parkin, A. J., Taylor, S. R., & Wilks, J. (1998). Revising current two-process accounts of spacing effects in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 161-172. This review article on the spacing effect reports that divided attention eliminates the spacing effect in recognition, but not in free recall.
Bower, G. H., & Clark, M. C. (1969). Narrative stories as mediators for serial learning. Psychonomic Science, 14, 181-182. This classic study demonstrates the effectiveness of narratives, or stories that the participants created to link a series of words together. Participants who used the narrative technique recalled more than six times as many words as those in the control group, who had spent the same amount of time learning the words.
Bower, G. H., Clark, M. C., Lesgold, A. M., & Winzenz, D. (1969). Hierarchical retrieval schemes in recall of categorized word lists. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 323-343. This classic study demonstrates the effectiveness of the hierarchy technique for organizing lists of items; participants recalled more than three times as many words when they were organized into hierarchies, rather than presented in random order.
Imagery Strategies
Carney, R. N., & Levin, J. R. (1998). Coming to terms with the keyword method in introductory psychology: A "neuromnemonic" example. Teaching of Psychology, 25, 132-134. Students learned keywords in order to facilitate recall of brain structures (for example, "Pituitary glands"-->keyword "pit"-->a child down in a pit would need to grow until he's big enough to climb out). Students recalled more definitions and also scored higher on a test assessing the ability to apply their knowledge of the terms.
Gruneberg, M. M. (1998). A commentary on criticism of the keyword method of learning foreign languages. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12, 529-532. Thomas and Wang, in a series of studies, failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the keyword method. Gruneberg argues that those researchers ignored many situations in which the keyword method is a useful mnemonic device.
Michas, I. C., & Berry, D. C. (2000). Learning a procedural task: Effectiveness of multimedia presentations. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 555-575. Undergraduate students learned about a first-aid bandaging task, using text alone or in combination with line drawings, video, or stills from the video. Performance on the bandaging task and on a recall test was enhanced when the text was supplemented by visual information, especially when the visual supplement provided action information.
Wang, A. Y., & Thomas, M. H. (1999). In defence of keyword experiments: A reply to Gruneberg's commentary. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 13, 283-287. This article summarizes Wang and Thomas's evidence for doubting the usefulness of the keyword method as a mnemonic device.
General
Benjamin, A. S., Bjork, R. A., & Schwartz, B. L. (1998). The mismeasure of memory: When retrieval fluency is misleading as a metamnemonic index. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127, 55-68. This paper explores situations in which retrieval fluency (the ease of accessing information from long-term memory) is a misleading predictor of later memory performance.
Ghodsian, D., Bjork, R. A., & Benjamin, A. S. (1997). Evaluating training during training: Obstacles and opportunities. In M. A. Qui–ones & A. Ehrenstein (Eds.), Training for a rapidly changing workplace: Applications of psychological research (pp. 63-88). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. This chapter provides applications of the research on retrieval fluency (see above reference); trainee's performance during training is often a misleading predictor of later performance. In particular, factors that enhance performance during a training period may actually lead to a decrease in later performance on the job.
Hacker, D. J., Dunlosky, J., & Graesser, A. C. (Eds.). (1998). Metacognition in educational theory and practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. This book provides an excellent in-depth summary of metacognitive topics related to education. Especially helpful chapters include Maki's discussion of students' predictions about their understanding of textbook material, Pressley and his colleagues' summary of college students' studying and time management, and Winne and Hadwin's examination of self-regulation during studying.
Kelemen, W. L., Frost, P. J., & Weaver, C. A., III. (2000). Individual differences in metacognition: Evidence against a general metacognitive ability. Memory & Cognition, 28, 92-107. College students showed consistent patterns in their memory accuracy and their memory confidence, across a variety of tasks during two separate sessions. However, they showed little consistency across tasks in their metacognitive accuracy (their ability to predict their future memory performance).
Metcalfe, J., & Shimamura, A. P. (Eds.). (1994). Metacognition: Knowing about knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. This book is a superb resource, with chapters on topics such as memory monitoring, feeling of knowing, and other applications of metacognition.
Nelson, T. O. (1996). Consciousness and metacognition. (1996). Consciousness and metacognition. American Psychologist, 51, 102-116. Here is a short, useful review of relevant concepts such as feeling of knowing, metacognitive monitoring, and judgments of learning.
Students' Judgments of Learning (JOLs) (back to top)
Balch, W. R. (1998). Practice versus review exams and final exam performance. Teaching of Psychology, 25, 181-185. Introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to two groups, a control group and an experimental group who took a practice exam (thereby providing information about students' mastery of the material). One week later, both groups took a test on the same material, but with different questions; students in the experimental group performed better. The effect was uniform across low, medium, and high ability levels.
Kelemen, W. L., & Weaver, C. A., III. (1997). Enhanced metamemory at delays: Why do judgments of learning improve over time? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 1394-1409. Previous research has demonstrated that students provide more accurate JOLs (estimates about whether they have learned a set of items) if they supply these judgments after a 5-minute delay, rather than immediately after studying the items; this paper explores several alternative explanations for the phenomenon.
Koriat, A. (1997). Monitoring one's own knowledge during study: A cue-utilization approach to judgments of learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 349-370. This paper explores the nature of JOLs and proposes three types of JOL cues: intrinsic, extrinsic, and mnemonic.
Students' Perceptions of Examination Preparation
Nelson, T. O., & Leonesio, R. J. (1988). Allocation of self-paced study time and the "labor-in-vain effect." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14, 676-686. Students allocated somewhat more study time to list items that they believed would be difficult; the correlations between study time and perceived item difficulty were about 30%. This study suggests that students should allocate their study time differently, placing even more emphasis on material they have not yet mastered.
Pressley, M., Yokoi, L., Van Etten, S., & Freebern, G. (1997). Some of the reasons why preparing for exams is so hard: What can be done to make it easier? Educational Psychology Review, 9, 1-38. This article reviews the recent research on factors--such as textbook characteristics and students' study habits--that hinder students' effective preparation for course examinations.
Van Etten, S., Freebern, G., & Pressley, M. (1997). College students' beliefs about exam preparation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 22, 192-212. This article examines college students' beliefs about how to study for examinations, focusing both on students' motivation and their choice of strategies.
Strategies
Bereiter, C., & Bird, M. (1985). Use of thinking aloud in identification and teaching of reading comprehension strategies. Cognition and Instruction, 2, 131-156. This article identifies reading comprehension strategies used by adult readers (for example, paraphrasing in simpler terms, summarizing when the material is unclear, and noting when material is incongruent).
Klusewitz, M. A., & Lorch, R. F., Jr. Effects of headings and familiarity with a text on strategies for searching a text. Memory & Cognition, 28, 667-676. When students were unfamiliar with a text, they searched for information using a page-by-page search; if they had previously read the text, they used more selective search strategies, such as skipping pages that were unlikely to include the information. Factors Affecting Text Comprehension
Fischer, M. H. (2000). Do irrelevant depth cures affect the comprehension of bar graphs? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 151-162. Students took longer to understand bar graphs that were presented as 3-dimensional bars, within a 3-dimensional frame, in comparison to bar graphs presented as 2-dimensional bars and/or 2-dimensional frames.
Keeley, S. M., Ali, R., & Gebing, T. (1998). Beyond the sponge model: Encouraging students' questioning skills in abnormal psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 25, 270-274. Students in an abnormal psychology course were required to generate questions related to their textbook reading; students received grades and feedback on these questions. Questions from the end of the semester were significantly more sophisticated than questions from the beginning of the semester, as judged by professors who were uninformed about which questions came from each time period.
Millis, K. K., Simon, S., & TenBroek, N. S. (1998). Resource allocation during the rereading of scientific texts. Memory & Cognition, 26, 232-246. Undergraduate psychology students read passages from popular science magazines. When they reread the passage immediately after the first reading, they spent more effort on integrating the material and drawing inferences, compared to the first reading.
Slotte, V., & Lonka, K. (1999). Review and process effects of spontaneous note-taking on text comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 24, 1-20. Students who took high-quality notes (for example, summaries, rather than verbatim phrases) while reading a philosophy text scored higher on a subsequent essay-style examination.
Maki, R. H. (1998). Test predictions over text material. In D. J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 117-144). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Reviews research about metacomprehension (students' ability to predict how well they will perform on a test based on material they have read). Maki remarks that little research has been conducted on training students to become more accurate in predicting their performance.
Pressley, M., & Ghatala, E. S. (1988). Delusions about performance on multiple-choice comprehension tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 454-464. Students read passages similar to those on the reading comprehension section of the Scholastic Assessment Test, and they answered multiple-choice questions on those passages. Then they rated how certain they were that they had answered the questions correctly ("just guessing" = 20%; "absolutely certain" = 100%). On the items they had actually answered correctly, the average certainty rating was 73%, which was not substantially higher than the average certainty rating of 64% for items that they had actually answered incorrectly. In other words, students' estimates of their comprehension accuracy is not highly correlated with their actual comprehension accuracy.
Rawson, K. A., Dunlosky, J., & Thiede, K. W. (2000). The rereading effect: Metacomprehension accuracy improves across reading trials. Memory & Cognition, 28, 1004-1010. Research suggests that students' metacomprehension is not especially accurate; they are not skilled at predicting how well they will perform on a test based on material they have read. However, when students reread the same passage, their prediction of test scores are much more accurate.
Writing
Dorow, L. G., & Boyle, M. E. (1998). Instructor feedback for college writing assignments in introductory classes. Journal of Behavioral Education, 8, 115-129. Students made fewer writing errors if the instructors had provided detailed feedback on previous assignments, rather than simply providing an overall grade.
Hemenover, S. H., Caster, J. B., & Mizumoto, A. (1999). Combining the use of progressive writing techniques and popular movies in introductory psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 196-198. Introductory psychology students reported that they wrote higher-quality papers if they had used the progressive writing technique (for example, writing one section at a time, receiving feedback, and revising that section), rather than the traditional approach.
Levy, C. M., & Ransdell, S. (1995). Is writing as difficult as it seems? Memory & Cognition, 23, 767-779. High-quality writing samples were more likely to be generated by students who had spent above-average time in revising their writing sample. The study also demonstrated that students overestimated how much time they had devoted to revising their samples.
Sitko, B. M. (1998). Knowing how to write: Metacognition and writing instruction. In D. J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky, & A. C. Graesser (Eds.), Metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 93-113). Mahwah, NJ; Erlbaum. This chapter discusses the research on writing strategies of experts and novices, as well as the influence of metacognitive instruction on students' abilities to plan, draft, and revise their written material.
Reducing Procrastination for Paper Completion
Taylor, S. E., Phan, L. B., Rivkin, I. D., & Armor, D. A. (1998). Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation, self-regulation, and coping. American Psychologist, 53, 429-439. Students often underestimate the amount of time required to complete a project, such as a paper for a psychology course. This study showed that students were more likely to complete a project on time if they spent 5 minutes every day trying to envision each step of the process of completing the paper.
Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal study of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The costs and benefits of dawdling. Psychological Science, 8, 454-458. Students who procrastinate were less likely than nonprocrastinators to experience stress and illness early in the academic term. However, the procrastinators were more likely than nonprocrastinators to experience these same problems late in the term.
Attention
Furnham, A., & Bradley, A. (1997). Music while you work: The differential distraction of background music on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11, 445-455. Introverts and extraverts were tested on a reading comprehension test, both in a condition in which popular music was played and in a silent condition. Introverts in the popular-music condition had lower scores than introverts in the silent condition, as well as lower scores than the extraverts in both conditions.
Kalyuga, S., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (1999). Managing split-attention and redundancy in multimedia instruction. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 13, 351-371. This article explores how multimedia instruction can impose a cognitive load by straining the capacity of working memory; it also suggests how cognitive load can be reduced by appropriate modifications of the visual display.
Understanding the Subject Matter
Friedrich, J. (1996). Assessing students' perceptions of psychology as a science: Validation of a self-report measure. Teaching of Psychology, 23, 6-13. This article reports on the development of a 19-item scale designed to assess students' awareness that psychology is a science; the author describes reliability and validity measures (for example, higher scores on this test at the end of a course than at the beginning).
Multimedia Classes
Erwin, T. D., & Rieppi, R. (1999). Comparing multimedia and traditional approaches in undergraduate psychology classes. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 58-61. Students in multimedia classes earned higher final examination scores than students in traditional classes. Also, students' learning preferences ("visual," "auditory," or "haptic") were not correlated with final examination scores--in either of the two conditions.
Smith, S. M., & Woody, P. C. (2000). Interactive effects of multimedia instruction and learning styles. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 220-223. Students in an introductory psychology course were taught using either the traditional lecture technique or with lectures supplemented by multimedia visual components. Students with the standard lecture approach initially scored lower on exams, but differences disappeared on later exams. In addition, "visual orientation" students were more likely than "verbal orientation" students to perform well with the multimedia approach,
Halpern, D. F. (1996). Thought and knowledge: Introduction to critical thinking (3rd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. This textbook relates critical thinking to the discipline of cognitive psychology, including topics such as memory, reasoning, decision making, and problem solving.
Lawson, T. J. (1999). Assessing psychological critical thinking as a learning outcome for psychology majors. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 207-209. Psychology students scored significantly higher than biology or chemistry students on a test assessing psychological critical thinking (for example, correlation and causation).
Stanovich, K. E. (1998). How to think straight about psychology (5th ed.). New York: HarperCollins. This brief textbook on critical thinking points out the most prominent errors, and the methods that can be used to reduce them.
VanderStoep, S. W. (1997). Taking a course in research methods improves reasoning about real-life events. Teaching of Psychology, 24, 122-123. Students completed a test of critical thinking that assessed the ability to detect flaws in everyday reasoning (e.g., selection bias). Students in a course on research methods showed greater improvement across the semester than did students in a course on developmental psychology.
Testing
Connor-Greene, P. A. (2000). Assessing and promoting student learning: Blurring the line between teaching and testing. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 84-88. Students in an upper-level course took a daily essay quiz at the beginning of each class section; 92% of students in this daily-quiz course reported that they kept up with the assigned reading, in contrast to 12% of comparable students in a class with a traditional arrangement of four scheduled tests during the semester.
Graham, R. B. (1999). Unannounced quizzes raise test scores selectively for mid-range students. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 271-273. Unannounced quizzes had no effect on the hour-long examination scores for A students, a moderate effect for B, D, and F students, and a strong effect for C students.
(back to top)
|
