In a previous article in "FORUM," Ofsted's criteria for 'outstanding grades' were described as 'outstanding nonsense'. In the first part of this short two-part article, a similarly sceptical view is taken in regard to one important practice in the current Ofsted framework -- interviewing children to see how much they remember of the…

Context: Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of sport-related deaths in young athletes. Athletic training students must understand cardiovascular anatomy and physiology in addition to pathophysiology to appropriately care for patients with cardiovascular conditions. Objective: Describe a teaching technique to actively engage students in…

This article aims to present learning strategies that can be applied to OpenWHO online courses to primarily increase learning retention and nudge behavior change where applicable. This paper draws on existing research on learning strategies and takes an innovative approach to recommend how these strategies could be applied to learning design to…

Slamecka and McElree (1983) and Rivera-Lares et al. (2022), like others before them, factorially manipulated the number of learning trials and the retention interval. The results revealed two unsurprising main effects: (a) the more study trials, the higher the initial degree of learning, and (b) the longer the retention interval, the more items…

This article presents a comprehensive exploration of ipsative and sociomaterial assessment methodologies, dissecting their theoretical frameworks, practical implementations, and the resultant effects on educational paradigms. The purpose of this article is to introduce a combined ipsative-sociomaterial assessment framework for science education at…

The existing literature on study time allocation has primarily focused on how people regulate their study time allocation across different items and conditions. However, these studies rarely investigated how self-regulated study time allocation affects later retention. In this review, the effectiveness of self-regulated study time allocation on…

The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 demonstrated to many educators that writing or, at least, the type of writing often asked of students had been automated. While this rightfully raised a host of practical concerns, mostly around cheating, it should also raise questions about what kind of intellectual life the liberal arts will open once…

This article describes the results of a game ("Zombie Federalism") created for a lower-level political science elective, State and Local Politics. This game was created to improve both retention of course material and enthusiasm in a historically underperforming course. In the game, students play the roles of officials in different…

The authors of this article examine the potential for increased student learning and retention through more frequent assignments. They conduct a field experiment that investigates whether student knowledge retention can be improved by increasing the frequency of homework assignments, motivating students to have more exposure to the material, and…

Students learn large amounts of information, but not all of it is remembered after courses end -- meaning that valuable class time is often spent reviewing background material. Crucially, laboratory research suggests different strategies will be effective when reactivating previously learned information (i.e. "marginal knowledge"), as…

Since pre-internship medical students appeared inefficient in acquiring fundamental knowledge in large classes, a hybrid instructional method of problem-and-lecture-based learning (PLBL) was designed to leverage the complementary strengths of PBL in reasoning under minimal guidance and LBL in immediate knowledge retention. We improved PBL (IPBL)…

This article uses data from site visits to four Hasidic elementary schools in Brooklyn to examine how specific learning, review, and testing activities used in these schools might be applied in other Jewish education classrooms to build knowledge depth and automaticity. The literature on learning and cognition in secular subjects has identified…

Socrative is an online platform that allows a teacher to put questions to students through an app on their smart phone or tablet. In existence since 2011, its use is now quite common in university teaching. But is Socrative any good? This article reviews the literature on the device and discusses my research on the use of the app, the first…

Many doubt the effectiveness of Jesus' teaching that was intended to be preserved in his disciples' memory. The Gospels were written long after the Resurrection, and humans are prone to forgetfulness. These reasons alone suffice to arouse suspicion about the reliability of the disciples' memory and the record of Jesus' teaching in modern…

Purpose: Researchers in the cognitive sciences have identified several key training strategies that support good encoding and retention of target information. These strategies are retrieval-based practice, also known as learning through testing, and spaced practice. The recent resurgence of research on retrieval-based and spaced practice has been…