Students tend to avoid effective but effortful study strategies. One potential explanation could be that high-effort experiences may not give students an immediate feeling of learning, which may affect their perceptions of the strategy's effectiveness and their willingness to use it. In two experiments, we investigated the role of mental effort in…

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are popular in vocabulary software because they can be scored automatically and are compatible with many input devices (e.g., touchscreens). Answering MCQs is beneficial for learning, especially when learners retrieve knowledge from memory to evaluate plausible answer alternatives. However, such retrieval may not…

Co-thought gestures are understudied as compared to co-speech gestures yet, may provide insight into cognitive functions of gestures that are independent of speech processes. A recent study with adults showed that co-thought gesticulation occurred spontaneously during mental preparation of problem solving. Moreover, co-thought gesturing (either…

Recent findings show that after studying a text, teaching the learned content on video to a fictitious peer student improves learning more than restudying the content. This benefit may be in part due to increased arousal associated with the teaching activity. The present experiment investigated whether teaching on video is also effective for…

The testing effect is a finding from cognitive psychology with relevance for education. It shows that after an initial study period, taking a practice test improves long-term retention compared to not taking a test and--more interestingly--compared to restudying the learning material. Boundary conditions of the effect that have received attention…

Subjective cognitive load (CL) rating scales are widely used in educational research. However, there are still some open questions regarding the point of time at which such scales should be applied. Whereas some studies apply rating scales directly after each step or task and use an average of these ratings, others assess CL only once after the…

Recent literature on learning with instructional manipulatives seems to call for a moderate view on the effects of perceptual and interactive richness of instructional manipulatives on learning. This "moderate view" holds that manipulatives' perceptual and interactive richness may compromise learning in two ways: (1) by imposing a…

The present study tests whether presenting video modeling examples from the learner's (first-person) perspective promotes learning of an assembly task, compared to presenting video examples from a third-person perspective. Across 2 experiments conducted in different labs, university students viewed a video showing how to assemble an 8-component…

Segmentation of animations, that is presenting them in pieces rather than as a continuous stream of information, has been shown to have a beneficial effect on cognitive load and learning for novices. Two different explanations of this segmentation effect have been proposed. Firstly, pauses are usually inserted between the segments, which may give…

Learning by observing and imitating others has long been recognized as constituting a powerful learning strategy for humans. Recent findings from neuroscience research, more specifically on the mirror neuron system, begin to provide insight into the neural bases of learning by observation and imitation. These findings are discussed here, along…

A large body of research has shown that for novice learners, instruction that relies more heavily on worked examples than on problem solving, is more effective for learning as shown by higher test performance. Moreover, this beneficial effect is often obtained with less acquisition time and lower cognitive load during acquisition and test phase.…

Due to the complexity of the legal domain, reasoning about law cases is a very complex skill. For novices in law school, legal reasoning is even more complex because they have not yet acquired the conceptual knowledge needed for distilling the relevant information from cases, determining applicable rules, and searching for rules and exceptions in…

This study explored the effects of prior knowledge (high vs. low; HPK and LPK) and concept-map structure (hierarchical vs. network; HS and NS) on disorientation, cognitive load, and learning from non-linear documents on "the infection process of a retrograde virus (HIV)". Participants in the study were 24 adults. Overall subjective ratings of…