Structured oral examinations (SOEs) result in higher test scores than traditional written assessments, but there lacks reproducible quantitative evidence supporting knowledge acquisition and retention. A modified SOE--called the One2One--whereby students present prepared answers to an instructor was evaluated for effectiveness in large classes…

Educational systems can benefit from Virtual Reality's (VR) ability to support experiential learning. In particular, VR based games, especially role-playing serious games (RPGs), can promote learning through the simulation of various educational scenarios. This study proposes an immersive VR-RPG to educate players about the behavior of honeybees.…

The current study investigated the relations between gamified refutations of COVID-19 misconceptions and individuals' emotional reactions and knowledge retention within a large-scale public health education campaign. Refutations have a substantial body of evidence supporting their use to correct misconceptions, yet reduced efficacy has been…

Background: Much work has focused on "inattention" in the classroom, examining how episodes of task-unrelated thought (i.e., mind wandering) and engagement with various forms of media (e.g., media multitasking, smartphone use) influence retention of lecture material. However, considerably less work has examined factors that may…

The production effect is a well-established finding: If some words within a list are read aloud, that is, produced, they are better remembered than their silently read neighbors. The effect has been extensively studied with long-term memory tasks. Recently, using immediate serial recall and short-term order reconstruction, Saint-Aubin et al.…

Sleep right after studying new material is more conducive to memory than a period of wakefulness. Another way to counteract forgetting is to practice retrieval: taking a test strengthens memory more effectively than restudying the material. The current work aims at investigating the interaction between sleep and testing by asking if testing adds…

Sustainability challenges are complex and call for the effective development of knowledge, skills, and abilities in current and new leaders. New offerings in higher education provide sustainability training to complement studies in geography, engineering, science, and other disciplines, in many cases including innovative experiential learning…

There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

Increasingly, students engage in multitasking during lecture by shifting their attention between class material and irrelevant information from texts and webpages. It is well established that this divided attention impairs memory and learning. Less is known about how to correct the problem. This study used an educational intervention in the form…

Learning objectives (LOs) are statements that typically precede a study session and describe the knowledge students should obtain by the end of the session. Despite their widespread use, limited research has investigated the effect of LOs on learning. In three laboratory experiments, we examined the extent to which LOs improve retention of…

Much evidence suggests that long-term retention can be maximized by practicing the recall of information and spreading out one's learning over time. Nevertheless, previous surveys have shown that undergraduates often ignore the benefits of such strategies and engage in less efficient techniques such as repetitive reading and massed studying. To…

Multistage collaborative exams are implemented to enhance learning and retention of course material. However, the effects of multistage collaborative exams on retention of course content are varied. These discrepancies may be due to a number of factors. To date, studies examining collaborative exams and content retention have used questions that…

The self-teaching hypothesis posits that enduring orthographic and phonological representations are produced when children independently recode print into speech. However, very little research has examined how children self-teach when initial decoding attempts are weak or ineffective. In this within-participant design, 25 students in Grade 2…

Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively. Yet, the nature of the code(s) underlying sequence memory is still relatively unknown. Across 4 experiments that…

Recent findings have provided strong evidence that retrieval-based learning is an effective strategy for enhancing knowledge retention and long-term meaningful learning, but it is not a preferred learning strategy for the majority of students. The present research analyzes the application of learning gamification principles in online, open-book,…