Since the beginning of the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs), these and other online learning environments have been considered as potential partial solutions to some persistent problems in higher education. These learning environments, while they have great educational value, have not been as effective as they could be, because…

We examined the associations between 5-year-old children's private speech, behavioural self-regulation, and cognitive abilities. Behavioural self-regulation was assessed using parental and preschool teacher questionnaires. Cognitive abilities (i.e., language, inhibition, planning and fluency, and memory) were assessed with neurocognitive tests,…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

Conventional wisdom is that some topics in introductory psychology are more difficult for students than others. Such wisdom seems reasonable given mismatches between students' and instructors' expectations and variations in both instructor expertise and student motivation across topical areas. Five instructors pooled students' exam performance…