Our school career culminates in a set of exam results, but if students want to do well, attending lessons is not enough: the implicit expectation is that all students will reinforce learning independently outside of the classroom. Really effective learners employ effective independent study techniques, but when, how and where do they learn to do…

Performance improvements during early human motor skill learning are suggested to be driven by short periods of rest during practice, at the scale of seconds. To reveal the unknown mechanisms behind these "micro-offline" gains, we leveraged the sampling power offered by online crowdsourcing (cumulative N over all experiments = 951).…

In this new edition of the highly regarded "Why Don't Students Like School?" cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham turns his research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning into workable teaching techniques. This book will help you improve your teaching practice by explaining how you and your students think and learn. It…

The purpose of this publication is to provide basic information to teachers about how to help students become independent learners. Its recommendations are based on the conceptual framework known as "self-regulated learning," or SRL. Self-regulated learners have flexible knowledge and skills that enable them to manage their cognition,…

Performance on verbal and mathematical tasks is enhanced when participants shift from using algorithms to retrieving information directly from memory (Siegler, 1988a). However, it is unknown whether a shift to retrieval is involved in dynamic spatial skill acquisition. For example, do athletes mentally extrapolate the trajectory of the ball, or do…

Learning complex skills is driven by reinforcement, which facilitates both online within-session gains and retention of the acquired skills. Yet, in ecologically relevant situations, skills are often acquired when mapping between actions and rewarding outcomes is unknown to the learning agent, resulting in reinforcement schedules of a stochastic…

The fading of instructional scripts can be regarded as necessary for allowing learners to take over control of their cognitive activities during the acquisition of skills such as argumentation. There is, however, the danger that learners might relapse into novice strategies after script prompts are faded. One possible solution could be monitoring…

By studying forgetfulness in humans and monkeys, scientists are learning about the anatomy of normal memory. Results of amnesia studies, indicating that memory collapse occurs in a selective fashion depending on the cause, may help resolve a fundamental dispute among learning theorists. (JN)

This article provides an overview of how people learn and strategies that can be taught to individuals to improve their levels of academic achievement. Several examples from recent case studies illustrate cognitive controls and profiles as well as the procedures and materials employed in augmentation and transfer training. (MT)

This article has three goals: to set forth some general claims about the course of skill acquisition; to discuss a series of counter intuitive predictions derived from the ACT theory; and to review the state of empirical evidence relevant to these predictions. (LMO)

In the dance studio, the mirror can play a large role in the dancer's learning process. Research on learning and memory shows that reducing the amount of feedback during training enhances long-term motor skill retention and that more externally focused attention may aid performance. Research testing the effectiveness of training with a mirror as a…

Traditional and performance-oriented approaches to procedural training were compared, and the deficiencies were identified. A cognitive interpretation of procedural learning was advanced, and training implications were considered. Representative armor procedures were analyzed to derive the underlying memory structures required for recall. Findings…

Study habits and memorization strategies were found to differ in fourth grade good readers and poor readers. The good readers also achieved higher recall. With training in efficient mnemonic strategies, however, the poor readers performed as well as the good readers. (GDC)