Testing students on information that they do not know might seem like a fruitless endeavor. After all, why give anyone a test that they are guaranteed to fail because they have not yet learned the material? Remarkably, a growing body of research indicates that such testing--formally known as "prequestioning" or…

Metacognition and self-regulated learning (SLR) have been advocated by many and have significant support being seen as a potentially effective and low cost way of impacting learning. Fundamentally, the underlying supposition is that metacognition and SRL are important to learning, and thus raise attainment, and various studies have established…

Although error avoidance during learning appears to be the rule in American classrooms, laboratory studies suggest that it may be a counterproductive strategy, at least for neurologically typical students. Experimental investigations indicate that errorful learning followed by corrective feedback is beneficial to learning. Interestingly, the…

This paper presents a novel examination of the impact of students' feedback choices and performance on their feedback memory. An empirical study was designed to collect the choices to seek critical feedback from a hundred and six Grade 8 middle-school students via Posterlet, a digital assessment game in which students design posters. Upon…

We can now get purposefully directed in the way we assess our learners in light of the emergence of evidence from the field of neuroscience. Why higher-order learning or abstract concepts need to be the focus in assessment is elaborated using the knowledge of semantic and episodic memories. With most of our learning identified to be implicit, why…

How can students' forgetting be reduced? The spacing effect--a promising strategy from the field of cognitive psychology--might hold some of the answers. Research has demonstrated that information is remembered two to three times better if study sessions are spaced in time rather than massed together. The testing effect is another research-based…

Black, Wilson, and Yao have identified a very real tension felt by teachers today that has been created by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the United States and the National Curriculum Assessment in the United Kingdom. In many schools, formative assessment has either taken a backseat to summative assessment use, or many of the formative assessment…

The aim of this study was to determine whether the addition of interactivity to a computer-based learning package enhances the learning process. A sample of 33 (22 male and 11 female) undergraduates on a Business and Management degree used a multimedia system to learn about the operation of a bicycle pump. The system consisted of a labelled…

The relative contributions of test anxiety and exam-taking skills to information-processing deficits were investigated in a dual-task paradigm comparing high and low test-anxious students with either good or poor exam-taking skills. Sixty-four undergraduate students (21 males, 43 females) were selected based upon pre-test scores on the Test…

This article takes a critical look at methods used to identify learning disability (such as use of ability/achievement discrepancy formulas and medical/neurobiological diagnosis) and presents an alternative method that adds assessment of the psychological processes of memory and learning to current practices of assessing intelligence and…

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) published a new learning style instrument in 1986--the NASSP Learning Style Profile (LSP). The LSP yields independent scores on 24 discrete elements of learning style. Its purpose is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy to use instrument for diagnosing cognitive styles,…

One potential approach to the authentic assessment of what students know and can do in science is concept mapping. A concept map is a graph consisting of nodes representing concepts and labeled lines denoting the relation between a pair of nodes (concepts). The external concept map constructed by the student is interpreted as representing…

This book adds to the growing body of knowledge and research suggesting that educators need to move beyond simplistic, narrow approaches to teaching and learning. In Part I, "Accessing the Brain's Potential," current educational practices are examined in light of critical findings of brain researchers. In Part II, "Facts and…

This book is intended to help professionals differentiate among processing disorders in children in kindergarten through high school so that intervention efforts can become focused and more effective. It explains how to differentiate among processing disorders, discusses the major processing models, explains assessment procedures, and outlines…