The present study examined the effects of a classroom intervention on students' metacognitive monitoring of retrieval practice performance feedback and metacognitive control of future study decisions. A true experimental design was used to randomly assign 103 undergraduate students from an education course to trained (n = 49) and control (n = 54)…

College students are often urged to "find their passion," but if students believe that passions or interests are fixed, they may not develop interest in fields beyond the academic identity with which they enter college. Can a brief intervention that portrays interests as developable, not fixed, boost interest, and even grades, in…

Students who drop out of their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors commonly report that they lack skills critical to STEM learning and career pursuits. Many training programs exist to develop students' learning skills and they typically achieve small to medium effects on behaviors and performance. However, these programs…

Three experiments examined note-taking strategies and their relation to recall. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed either to take organized lecture notes or to try and transcribe the lecture, and they either took their notes by hand or typed them into a computer. Those instructed to transcribe the lecture using a computer showed the…

Examines the extent to which low- and high-WMC (working memory capacity) readers adjust cognitive processes to fit the reading purpose. When reading to study, low-WMC readers emphasized less demanding processes over more demanding processes to a greater extent than high-WMC readers and recalled less. When reading for entertainment, patterns of…

The hypothesis that reorganizing written material while taking notes would aid free recall was evaluated in two experiments with high school juniors. Results are discussed in terms of the encoding variability hypothesis which predicts that reorganizing material aids recall. (RC)

In 2 experiments, college students read a historical passage on aspects of human intelligence. Students were randomly assigned to 2 different instructional conditions to process the passage, mnemonic and free study. Mnemonic participants remembered more names and contributions than did free-study participants. Findings illustrate that mnemonic…

The findings of this study indicate that study skills and learning strategies may be more fundamental determinants of academic success than are abilities. (EH)

Students scoring high on the Test Anxiety Scale had lower grades and poorer study habits than their low-scoring counterparts. Amount and quality of study by high anxiety students were positively related to grades; missing classes and delaying exams were inversely related. (Author/CP)

The results support the hypothesis that the oral review of prose material has a positive influence on retention as measured by cued-recall questions. (RC)

Introductory physics students were taught the skill of acquiring the abilities to apply quantitative relations in problem solving, from a text description of those relations. This enhanced the students' capacities for acquiring this ability from a subsequently presented text description of new relations. (BW)

Results supported the conclusion that encoding cues will facilitate prose learning when they result in encoded information required by output which would not otherwise be encoded. (Authors)

In two experiments, instruction in a hierarchical summarization study strategy focusing on the organization of ideas in a text was compared with the procedure of answering questions after reading. Fifth-grade student comprehension and memory were enhanced but were found to be affected by mastery of the strategy. (Author/CM)

Two experiments investigated whether instructions to students about how and what to learn can facilitate learning as effectively as adjunct postquestions. Adjunct-question, instruction, and adjunct-question plus instruction groups performed significantly better than the control group in recall of verbatim factual information and in responding to…