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The role of motivation on academic performance

A study shows how easily you can affect motivation, producing a significant effect on college test scores, while a large German study finds that motivational and strategy factors, but not intelligence, affects growth in math achievement at high school.

I’ve spoken before about the effects of motivation on test performance.

Effects of diagram orientation on comprehension

The most popular format of the most common type of diagram in biology textbooks is more difficult to understand than formats that use different orientations.

A study into how well students understand specific diagrams reminds us that, while pictures may be worth 1000 words, even small details can make a significant difference to how informative they are.

Review makes clear no gender differences in math ability

Analysis of hundreds of studies has found no difference between male and female in terms of their math skills.

A meta-analysis of 242 articles assessing the math skills of 1,286,350 people found no difference between the two sexes.

Short online ‘pep talks’ can boost students

A large study shows how a 45-minute online intervention can improve struggling high school students' attitude to schoolwork, and thus their academic performance.

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.

Repeating aloud to another person boosts recall
  • The simple act of repeating something to another person helps you remember it, more than if you just repeated it to yourself.

A Canadian study involving French-speaking university students has found that repeating aloud, especially to another person, improves memory for words.

Support for the use of song in learning a foreign language
  • Children taught foreign language vocabulary in the form of a song learned to pronounce the words better than those who learned the words using an oral poem.
  • Recall was also significantly better, and particularly so after six months.

A small study that compared teaching Spanish-speaking children English vocabulary using a song or a spoken poem has found definite and long-term advantages to the song form.

Tell a friend what you learned
  • A single instance of retrieval, right after learning, is enough to significantly improve your memory, and stop the usual steep forgetting curve for non-core information.

A study involving 60 undergraduate students confirms the value of even a single instance of retrieval practice in an everyday setting, and also confirms the value of cues for peripheral details, which are forgotten more readily.

Seeing exemplary peer work can undermine student performance
  • Two experiments show that exposing students to exceptional examples of work by their peers is discouraging for many.

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.

Drawing best encoding strategy
  • Even quick and not particularly skilled sketches make simple information significantly more likely to be remembered, probably because drawing incorporates several factors that are known to improve memorability.

In a series of experiments involving college students, drawing pictures was found to be the best strategy for remembering lists of words.

Finger tracing helps children doing geometry problems
  • Finger tracing key elements in worked problems seems to help some students better understand and apply mathematical concepts.

I've reported before on studies showing how gesturing can help children with mathematics and problem-solving. A new Australian study involving children aged 9-13 has found that finger-tracing has a similar effect.

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