Cognitive Psychology in Education
By Katie Russell
Do you like to study by cramming the night before big exams? If you’re anything like me, I quickly learned this technique is an awful way to retain information. Studies show that taking intermittent breaks during your long study sessions helps to improve memory and attention drastically.
By Sydney Abdnour
We’ve all heard the saying “you get out what you put in.” This statement applies perfectly to schooling, specifically studying and test taking. In high school, it is easy to cram the night before a test and get a good grade. Unfortunately, that is not the case in college. Even if you consider yourself a “good test taker,” it is important to put more time into your studies than you did in high school. There are many techniques out there to enhance the learning and studying experience for students of all ages. One of the effective ways to help students (especially college students) study and retain information better is the Testing Effect, known more commonly as the Retrieval Practice Effect.
By Hikaru Sanouchi
Elaboration: The process of developing or presenting a theory, policy, or system in further detail. (from dictionary.com)
The word elaboration is from the late Latin word, elaborationem. Labor played an important role in the word elaboration, as we can physically see the word “labor” in this word. When we imagine the word labor, we would imagine labor work, which is physically hard work people do, for instance yard work, construction, and such. Currently, elaboration means to work out a problem in more detail and depth.
That is it for elaborating on the word elaboration. Here, I’m going talk about using elaboration in psychology. Elaboration is the process of incorporating new information with an old idea. According to Yang (1995), a goal of elaboration is to, “make learning more meaningful by forming a relationship between the new, unfamiliar material and the new the older, already learned information” (Yang. 1995. P,3). Creating a connection between your new knowledge and old knowledge to understand the information in more depth is the goal (1).
Continue reading “Only three steps and you’re master of elaboration!”
By Marissa Corder
Can music help you study more efficiently? Unfortunately, this question is not easy to answer, and research has yielded contradictory evidence. The effect of music on cognitive performance depends on a multitude of factors including tempos of songs, types of cognitive tasks being performed (such as reading comprehension or solving algebra problems), and prior listening experiences. The arousal and mood hypothesis proposes that music’s influence on cognitive performance is a result of physiological responses (1). This hypothesis was developed to explain the “Mozart effect” – the popular misconception that listening to Mozart makes you smarter; that is, after Mozart-listening sessions, participants scored higher on spatial abilities compared to silent conditions or listening to instructions on relaxation (2). Later research found supporting evidence for the arousal and mood hypothesis and thus, “busted” the erroneous conclusion of a causal relationship between music and intelligence.
Continue reading “Music While Studying: Does It Motivate Or Distract?”
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!
Continue reading “Cognition at Marquette, Spring 2017: A Postmortem of the Blog Project”
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?
By David Peoples and Madeline Voelker
Welcome to your first year of college. If you are like me, you are probably wondering how in the world you are going to remember everything you need to know for exams, quizzes, and assignments. Well, the first thing you should know is that remembering is actually a complicated process of re-accessing information that has been stored in your brain. (1) When your brain recalls information it is reconstructing the event by drawing various elements together from different parts of your brain to effectively re-experience the neural activity generated in response to the situation you experienced. (1) Thus, in a sense, your brain is neurally reliving the experience. (1) This probably sounds very technical and complicated. But that is where cued recall comes in to save the day. Cued recall is exactly what the name implies: recollection that is cued. But what does that mean? Put simply, a cue is something that both triggers and assists in the recollection of a memory. (1) But what constitutes a cue? And how can they help in college? Well, anything can be a cue, but we are focusing on those that are directly applicable to your college experience. Therefore, the cues we are focusing on are: taste, location, sound, and written. Continue reading “What a Cue Can Do For You”
By Malika Handa and Roselee Ledesma
Okay so you made it to college! You will be starting in the fall, but now you have AP tests, final exams, high school graduation, and perhaps a summer job that awaits since you are saving for your future (or should be…). Well, congratulations you are going to college! Yes, starting college is a very big deal! I was definitely encouraged to dream big, so naturally I had to plan big and for that I had to think big . . . big, big, big! What if we use small steps to achieve big plans? “Small” and practical steps can be more manageable for you.
When thinking about problem-solving it is important to recognize that there is a difference in the way experts and novices solve problems. Novices are people who are inexperienced in a field of study, just like college students who are starting to build their expertise. If you consider yourself a novice, this is for you!
Continue reading “‘Expert-ology’: A Novice’s Guide to Problem-Solving”
By Cara LaBelle and Niki Bending
Every college freshman struggles with adjusting study habits from high school to college. They go from studying for their finals the night before, and doing well, to studying for a regularly scheduled exam the night before, and failing. Sadly, there is no exact formula for how much or how long you need to study in order to do well. Through our study conducted on consolidation methods, we have discovered some tendencies and tips on how to study more effectively in order to get the desired grade.
Disclaimer: Only one exam was failed in the making of this blog post.
Continue reading “Studying Smarter, Not Harder: The Keys to Consolidation”
By Joseph Contezac and Darlene Valdez
If you go in any coffee shop or public place on a college campus other than the library, you will see students studying and chatting with their friends. But is chatting while you study preventing you from remembering key info on that test you are studying for? Though studying with a partner has been shown to actually help with remembering information, simply chatting about everyday things while you study is a distraction that is anything, but helpful to your academic success. Due to the amount of media we consume and how readily available it is, millennials have adopted “strategies” for multitasking. Millennials in general, are all about multitasking, especially when the amount of work you have is not equal to the amount of time you have to do it. Focusing more on chatting and studying, it is important to note the reasons why this might be affecting your ability to remember key material. It all comes down to the concepts of divided attention, and the distinction between on-topic and off-topic conversation.
Continue reading “Don’t Ignore the Voices: They Could Be Helpful *insert suspenseful music*”