There has been quite a lot of research into the relationship between students’ expectations and academic performance. It’s fairly well-established that students tend to have inflated expectations of their performance, but the effect of this has been disputed. Does over-confidence discourage students from preparing for exams, or do high expectations motivate students to study harder? A largish study has investigated this question.
A natural experiment involving 5,740 participants in a MOOC ( massive open online course) has found that when students were asked to assess each other's work, and the examples were exceptional, a large proportion of students dropped the course.
In the MOOC, as is not uncommon practice, course participants were asked to write an essay and then to grade a random sample of their peers' essays. Those randomly assigned to evaluate exemplary peer essays were dramatically more likely to quit the course than those assigned to read more typical essays.
There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the importance of mindset in learning, with those who have a “growth mindset” (ie believe that intelligence can be developed) being more academically successful than those who believe that intelligence is a fixed attribute. A new study shows that a 45-minute online intervention can help struggling high school students.
One of the crucial aspects to learning efficiently is being able to accurately assess your own learning process. Research has shown that in general people are not very accurate at judging how well they have learned complex materials. A review of recent research into how to improve judgment accuracy has concluded that rereading or summarizing text can help, as well as techniques that focus people’s attention on just the most important details of a text, such as trying to recall the key ideas from memory.
Dunlosky, J. & Lipko, A.R. 2007. Metacomprehension: A Brief History and How to Improve Its Accuracy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16 (4), 228–232.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/afps-rpt082307.php
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823142827.htm
Three classroom experiments have found that students who meditated before a psychology lecture scored better on a quiz that followed than students who did not meditate. Mood, relaxation, and class interest were not affected by the meditation training.
The noteworthy thing is that the meditation was very very basic — six minutes of written meditation exercises.
The effect was stronger in classes where more freshmen students were enrolled, suggesting that the greatest benefit is to those students who have most difficulty in concentrating (who are more likely to drop out).
Working memory capacity and level of math anxiety were assessed in 73 undergraduate students, and their level of salivary cortisol was measured both before and after they took a stressful math test.
Whether IQ tests really measure intelligence has long been debated. A new study provides evidence that motivation is also a factor.
Meta-analysis of 46 studies where monetary incentives were used in IQ testing has revealed a large effect of reward on IQ score. The average effect was equivalent to nearly 10 IQ points, with the size of the effect depending on the size of the reward. Rewards greater than $10 produced increases roughly equivalent to 20 IQ points. The effects of incentives were greater for individuals with lower baseline IQ scores.
It’s well-established that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, so it’s been generally believed that people primarily use the simple rule, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), to work out whether they’re likely to remember something (as discussed in the previous news report). However, new findings indicate that the situation is a little more complicated.
Research has shown that people are generally poor at predicting how likely they are to remember something. A recent study tested the theory that the reason we’re so often inaccurate is that we make predictions about memory based on how we feel while we're encountering the information to be learned, and that can lead us astray.
A study involving 120 toddlers, tested at 14, 24, and 36 months, has assessed language skills (spoken vocabulary and talkativeness) and the development of self-regulation. Self-regulation is an important skill that predicts later academic and social success. Previous research has found that language skills (and vocabulary in particular) help children regulate their emotions and behavior. Boys have also been shown to lag behind girls in both language and self-regulation.