Background: Visual representations are pervasive in electrical engineering instruction in various instructional settings. Further, electrical engineering instruction often requires students to extend simple visual representations to learn about more complex visualization in subsequent instruction. Yet, students often struggle to understand…

Physical education in colleges plays an increasingly important role in cultivating high-quality innovative talent. The main factors that affect college students' approaches to learning physics remain unknown. This study examined the relationships among college engineering students' epistemic views of physics, conceptions of learning physics, and…

Background: Undergraduates' collective epistemic agency is critical for their productive collaborative inquiry and knowledge building (KB). However, fostering undergraduates' collective epistemic agency is challenging. Studies have demonstrated the potential of computer-supported collaborative inquiry approaches, such as KB--the focus of this…

Introduction: The learning approach of undergraduate medical students can be influenced by motivations toward learning medicine as well as perceived outcomes such as their specialty preference in the future. In this study, we analyze the relationships between learning approach, motivation to study medicine, and factors related to their specialty…

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) incorporate pedagogical agents (PAs) to scaffold learners' self-regulated learning (SRL) via prompts and feedback to promote learners' monitoring and regulation of their cognitive, affective, metacognitive and motivational processes to achieve their (sub)goals. This study examines PAs' effectiveness in…

We investigated the benefits of two ways to use flashcards to perform retrieval practice: alone versus with a partner. In three experiments, undergraduate students learned word-definition pairs using flashcards alone (Individual condition) or with another student (Paired condition). Participants then made global judgments of learning (gJOLs;…

The ability to properly evaluate one's own academic progress has long been considered a predictor of academic success. However, its distinctive role in the context of computational mathematics remains underexplored. Grounded in social cognitive theory, this study investigates the critical role of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies in…

This study explores the relationship between seating quadrants and student performance, including the role of classroom type in the quadrant effect. Data collected from 131 classes taught at 17 colleges of Northwest A&F University in China were analyzed using the ordinary least squares method. The results revealed that where a student sat in a…

We investigated whether finger pointing is an effective cognitive-load self-management strategy to mitigate the split-attention effect during learning. This effect holds that learning from split-attention examples consisting of spatially separated, but mutually referring text and picture, is less effective than learning from equivalent spatially…

Experiencing failure is an important part of the learning process, but undergraduate students often hold a negative perception of failure that may contribute to fear of failure and risk avoidance. We investigated the influence of instructor feedback, discussions of failure in the classroom, and course-level and institutional structures on…

The development of student metacognition has the potential to provide some of the greatest learning gains in science education, even outstripping the contribution of general intelligence. While models for metacognition are in broad agreement about their nature, they vary widely in essential elements and the relationships between them, especially…

Being an effective learner is an important pillar supporting success in higher education and beyond. This research aimed to uncover the extent to which undergraduate students use a set of commonly researched learning strategies, as well as to understand how learning strategy usage relates to key self-regulation factors proposed in influential…

Multitasking activities among students using various technological devices is common during lectures, and many studies have demonstrated their deleterious effects on various learning outcomes. In contrast, fewer studies have examined ways to reduce multitasking and stimulate engagement in learning. The present study provides an educational…

Research has shown significant relationships between students' epistemological beliefs and their approaches to learning. This study aimed to investigate the relationships between the scientific epistemological beliefs, science learning approaches, and the scientific inquiry skills of undergraduate students who took science courses by expanding the…

In most mathematics textbooks, each lesson is followed by a set of homework problems in one of two ways -- blocked practice and mixed practice. Additionally, most mathematics textbooks rely on a common learning strategy called overlearning, that is, mastering a skill and continuing to practice this same skill. This study investigated the effects…