One of my approaches to teaching (and to work in general) is to impose organization and structure for my students. It helps to decrease uncertainties, but it also makes tackling tasks more efficient and manageable…
All in For Students
"Blips" of Knowledge Reduce Accuracy and Increase Confidence
What do you do when you get a random new physiological symptom? The study I’m reviewing today looks specifically at how short pieces of information impact our confidence in our knowledge and our accuracy…
Retrieval Practice and Stress (repost)
I recently remembered this post about retrieval practice and stress. I was talking to one of my students about retrieval practice and stress, and went back to the blog to help me remember some aspects of the research. Upon seeing the …
Feedback emPower Tools: How to Make Your Feedback Go Further
For today’s blog post, I interviewed Dr Rob Nash who together with Prof Naomi Winstone and Dr Kieran Balloo created the website Feedback emPower Tools. Feedback emPower Tools sets out to help learners engage and process feedback they receive...
Are You Sure You're Spacing?
Today I’m reviewing a study that recently came out looking at how students choose to use spacing in their own study and how it relates to their performance…
Choice and Mental Effort
Thinking is hard. In general, we don’t like to put forth mental effort when we can avoid it. Further, when we do exert mental effort, we tend to not like it. And yet… there are times when we actually enjoy doing the hard work of thinking through something. There are times when we may even feel we’ve entered into a flow state, where difficult tasks feel relatively effortless (1). How we feel about completing a task appears to be about more than just effort.