Diagrams can help students learn, especially when students connect verbal information (like words in the text of a lesson) with the diagrams (1). But getting students to make these connections can be tricky because you can’t look at a diagram and the text at the same time!
Dual coding, or combining visuals with words, is one of the 6 strategies for effective learning. The idea is that by combining a visual representation of an idea with a verbal representation of an idea, we will be able to learn the idea better. (Of course, this can be ...
We recently received this question at a workshop we ran for K-12 teacher and leaders. After hearing the research on spaced practice and retrieval, one might wonder: What do these strategies do to students’ abilities to make inferences, apply what they know, and think creatively?
You’ve got a big project due at the end of the term. You’ve got a cumulative exam in two weeks. You’ve got an oral presentation in three days. You know you should space your study/work sessions (because you’ve been reading posts such as this one on this blog)...
About a month ago, Tim van der Zee wrote a guest post on “Guidelines for designing educational videos” for our blog. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are in vogue, although genuinely good MOOCs are often hard to find. I (Carolina) have recently started several MOOCs to explore the variety of approaches to...
When we practice retrieval, or bring information to mind from our memories, we typically improve our memory for the information. Retrieval practice can be implemented in a lot of different ways, and we’ve talked about a number of them, for example short-answer ...
