Week 1 Lecture - educational psychology

Question 1

Fowler and Barker, using 8000 words from scientific magazines used active vs passive vs read only studied the effects of highlighting using a MCQ after a week of viewing material. What did they find?

Answer 1

Highlighting overall did not work.

Highlighting however did prove people’s memory for bits that were highlighted (active > passive). However is reduced memory for other information and reduced overall test performance.
Found it depended on quality of highlighting.
Only beneficial if you already have knowledge on subject.
More highlighting resulted in worst test performance.

Question 2

Is re-reading information beneficial?

Answer 2

Simply put - sort of. Having gaps between sessions shows you’re much more likely to remember effectively (distributed practise).

Question 3

When utilising distributed practise (re-reminding yourself of material over a certain amount of time), what intervals should you use?

Answer 3

10%-20% of retention interval. Eg, if you want to remember for a year. Should be approx 2 months between study sessions.

Distributed practise promotes consolidation. Reminder of context from previous study. Increases the chance of retrieving direct information or if you can’t it increases the chances that you’ll trigger a cue of something related to the direct material.

Question 4

What is practise testing?

Is it effective?

Answer 4

Study, and then testing yourself.
Has to be done in a closed book format (promote memory retrieval).

Practise testing is extremely effective. Even if retrieval is unsuccessful (if correct answer is studied immediately). Also helps with info not tested. Transfer of learning (Butler, 2010) - apply studied info from one domain to the other (bats to aircraft).

Question 5

Karpicke and Blunt were testing what?

Answer 5

Practise testing vs. concept mapping (links between connecting ideas).

Practise testing produced much better results.

Question 6

How does practise testing work? What’re the mechanisms?

Answer 6

When you’re doing a practise test, you’re generating your own cues and engage in elaborating processing which act as effective memory cues at test. It improves quality of cues retrieved.
(Carpenter; Pyc and Rawson).

Question 7

Why are learning techniques not taught?

Answer 7

Is emphasises content which some teachers will agree is only surface level learning.
Not up to date in textbooks.
Increased self-regulation expected from students.