Month: May 2017

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Cognition at Marquette, Spring 2017: A Postmortem of the Blog Project

The Spring 2017 semester is complete (by a couple of weeks, but I’ve been busy relaxing…) at Marquette University. I had the opportunity to adjunct there, teaching two classes, while looking for a tenure-track position. In Cognition, specifically, I enacted a blog project based on one at the Learning Scientists. It wasn’t the first blog project I’ve done, but quite different in approach and content. Im this post, I wanted to share my thoughts on the project as a trial run, some observations I made with grading, and try to figure out what I am going to do with this project moving forward. I’m open to suggestions and comments–just let me know in a comment below or on Twitter!

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Making Better Decisions in College

By Yuchen Yang and Taylor Walker

Every college student will be challenged with making decisions at some point during their college career. The decisions made by college students impact their relationships, family, career trajectories, jobs, education, sex, health, money, living situation, diet, friends, beliefs, and drinking.

However, compared to upperclassmen, college freshmen are likely to experience a hard time making these types of decisions because their lack of knowledge about new environments like college.

Some common questions asked by college freshmen are:

“Should I go out for drinks tonight or should I stay in to study for my exam on Monday?”

“Should I take this course because it seems easy or should I take a different course that challenges me?”

“Should I choose my major based on salary or should I choose a major that interests me?”

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Rethink Your Reasoning

By Annie Clark and Drew Kinsella

In college, incoming freshman can often get swept up in the overwhelming amounts of school work they suddenly have to balance. With the increased workload, learning effective and productive studying habits is essential for success. Although many people know the typical studying tips (spacing out studying sessions, not cramming, and using a variety of techniques to help memorize new facts), one area that does not receive a lot of attention is the actual cognitive processes that occur when new information is presented. An essential mistake that many people make while reasoning with new information, is belief bias. Though not often thought about directly when dealing with study techniques, it is important to  be aware of the types of errors you can make when trying to learn information to help avoid them.  

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Make It About YOU: Learning with the Self-Reference Effect

By Marissa Wurster & Daniel Ilagan

You know how you’re mom told you while you were growing up to stop being selfish and stop making things all about you? Well we’re here to tell you to forget that! In terms of improving memory and encoding items, relating things back to yourself can actually be really helpful! Students spend hours every single day trying to comprehend new material, but often times they waste that time because they fail to relate the material to themselves. Evaluating incoming information relative to the contents of one’s self schema can lead to enhanced elaboration and organization of the newly learned material (1).

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Why You Can’t Trust Your Brain or Anyone Around You

By Robert Dragani and Hannah Kaczala

No college student is a stranger to the stress of exams. But sometimes we get lucky, and after hours of cramming, you might find a question on an exam that you know you studied; you specifically remember it from the study session. You confidently answer and feel accomplished in your study skills. A few weeks later, when your professor finally hands back your graded exam, you are flabbergasted that the question you thought you nailed was marked incorrect. You crack open your textbook, because you’re sure you had it right. The book takes your teacher’s side and you wonder where in your learning you got mixed up. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you might have fallen victim to what psychologists call the Misinformation Effect.  

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Please Give Me Your Divided Attention: Multitasking While Studying

By Aileen Tierney and Erin McQuitty

Picture this: You’re trying to study for your first college exam, but your phone keeps buzzing. You try to answer texts and check your notifications while also reading your textbook in between. You think you have a handle on your studies because of this multitasking, but when it’s time to take your test, you realize you don’t remember anything you read about before. Why?!

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Low-Load vs. High-Load: How Distractions Really Affect Your Studying Habits

By Olivia Arnold and Ashley Gottardo

The transition to college can be a rough period for most students, ripe with a new school, new friends,  and a new sense of independence. Through all of these new experiences one realizes many areas of their life change in ways they didn’t expect- namely in their approach to studying. This is more of a forced change, and in order to succeed you will likely have to actively make it on your own. Lucky for you, we’re here to explain what areas may benefit the most from change, help you cope with your changing study habits, and give you tips for how to succeed in college.

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Using Visual Imagery to Improve Memory for College Exams

By Ve’Jhon Johnson and MaryJane Lukas

Your freshman year of college is such an exciting time in your life where you have an opportunity for a fresh start socially, individually and academically. You will be living on your own for the first time in a different environment with complete control over your own life. Just like you will have to adapt to this new environment, you will have to adapt to other parts of college, the academics. So exciting!

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Generating a Better Memory

By Heather Triplett and Patrick Haas

Studying can be something that is hard for students as they begin college. In high school you might have been able to pay attention in class and still get A’s without worrying about studying, or you might have just had to read the text and known everything that was going to be on the test. Yet, as we get older teachers and professors ask more difficult questions and expect you to know more information when it comes to test time. For each class in college your professor will ask you to purchase an expensive textbook, and read a certain chapter from the book to be prepared for class. These topics are no Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows people, these topics are dry definitions with no stories in them. So what can you do to make it easier to retain the information rather than just simply reading your textbook?

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How to Ace Your First College Exams With Dual-Coding

By Rachel Bagha and Theresa Santos

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? We’re not sure – but (mental) pictures can help you pass exams!

College exams are a lot different than the ones you took in high school. This means the methods you use to study for these exams should be different, too. Chances are, in high school, you took a lot of tests that didn’t really require a whole lot of studying. College tests more material over a shorter period of time, which throws off many incoming college freshman who think they can use the same tactics to study for exams than they did in high school. Many students get a wake-up call when they get their first college exam back and don’t do as hot as they thought. Lucky for you, a lot of research has been done on ways to study effectively, so that you can retain information and later apply this information in the future on an exam. You don’t have to wait until you bomb your first exam to start studying effectively. You can start right away – with some of the the dual-coding methods listed below!

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