The present study examines the existing published research about the effectiveness of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text. A meta-analysis was conducted of scientifically rigorous experiments comparing the learning outcomes (i.e., performance on memory and/or comprehension tests) of students…

Background: Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are told they will have to teach what they are learning to others. Although learning-by-teaching has been shown to be effective in some cases, few studies have established guidelines for how to optimize the benefits of learning-by-teaching as a generative learning…

Generative learning theory posits that learners engage more deeply and produce better learning outcomes when they engage in selecting, organizing, and integrating processes during learning. The present experiments examine whether the generative learning activity of generating explanations can be extended to online multimedia lessons and whether…

One approach to encourage productive study strategies is to incorporate preparatory quizzes (or pre-quizzes) in which students are required to submit answers to questions before the underlying material is covered in class. In the present study, students took an introductory mechanical engineering class that either included pre-quizzes (treatment…

Learning-by-teaching is a generative learning strategy in which students are asked to teach what they are learning to others (Fiorella & Mayer, 2015). In this study, college students watched a multimedia lesson on chemical synaptic transmission with instructions that afterward they would explain the materials by making a lecture video…

In 2 experiments, college students read a 4-paragraph text on how the human circulatory system works and were instructed to form a mental image of the events described in each paragraph from the perspective of their own body (first-person perspective group) or from the perspective of a fictitious person facing them (third-person perspective…

Asking students to imagine the spatial arrangement of the elements in a scientific text constitutes a learning strategy intended to foster deep processing of the instructional material. Two experiments investigated the effects of mental imagery prompts on learning from scientific text. Students read a computer-based text on the human respiratory…

Students learned about electrical circuits in an arcade-type game consisting of 10 levels. For example, in one level students saw two circuits consisting of various batteries and resistors connected in series or parallel, and had to indicate which one had a higher rate of moving current. On levels 1-9, all students received a correct tone and had…