This paper explores trainee educational psychology doctoral students' experiences of Objective Structured Professional Assessments (OSPAs), implemented at three UK universities and involving participation in a series of timed, simulated scenarios. Focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed, and subjected to thematic analysis. Themes linked with…

The substantial growth of online learning, and in particular, through massively open online courses (MOOCs), supports research into nontraditional learning contexts. Learners' confusion is one of the identified aspects which impact the overall learning process, and ultimately, course attrition. Confusion for a learner is an individual state of…

Purpose: The purpose of this two-part paper is to provide a summary of current research opportunities in organizational forgetting literature and a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approach: The summary of current research opportunities and future research agenda is drawn from the systematic literature review and synthesis reported in…

Collaborative learning (CL) can be a powerful method for sharing understanding between learners. To this end, strategic regulation of processes, such as cognition and affect (including metacognition, emotion and motivation) is key. Decades of research on self-regulated learning has advanced our understanding about the need for and complexity of…

Retrieval practice has been widely studied as an effective strategy for enhancing memory. In this review article, we discuss how its effects on learning complex problem-solving procedures are less straightforward, however, with repeated studying of worked examples sometimes more effective than problem-solving practice. This worked example benefit…

Research has shown a bi-directional association between the (perceived) amount of invested effort to learn or retrieve information (e.g., time, mental effort) and metacognitive monitoring judgments. The direction of this association likely depends on how learners allocate their effort. In self-paced learning, effort allocation is usually data…

Based on the classic distinction between semantic and episodic memory, people answer general-knowledge questions by querying their semantic memory. And yet, an appeal of trivia games is the variety of memory experiences they arouse--including the recollection of episodic details. We report the first in-depth exploration of the memory states that…

This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile…

Humans are sensitive to the properties of individual items, and exemplar models are useful for capturing this sensitivity. I am a proponent of an extension of exemplar-based architectures that I briefly describe. However, exemplar models are very shallow architectures in which it is necessary to stipulate a set of primitive elements that make up…

Given that the primary task of teaching is to teach the content of physical education, attention to how instructional tasks operationalize the curriculum and progress learning is essential knowledge for teachers. Task progression in physical education occurs when tasks are designed to successively and incrementally present physical education…

This paper addresses two examples of MOOCs aimed at developing mathematics teachers' professional learning. The programme, named "Math MOOC UniTO," was developed under the guidance of the three authors, in collaboration with some researcher-teachers from the University of Turin. This paper analyses the development of teachers' learning…

We present evidence that experience and cholinergic modulation in an early sensory network interact to improve certainty about olfactory stimuli. The data we present are in agreement with existing theoretical ideas about the functional role of acetylcholine but highlight the importance of early sensory networks in addition to cortical networks. We…

Fear can potently inhibit ongoing behavior, including reward-seeking, yet the neural circuits that underlie such suppression remain to be clarified. Prior studies have demonstrated that distinct subregions of the rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) differentially affect fear behavior, whereby fear expression is promoted by the more dorsal…

Teaching and learning have evolved over the years. While the use of lecture is still the dominant mode of teaching in educational institutions, there has been consensus that students need to be active in learning, for which traditional styles of teaching may not be well suited. This calls for an alternative instructional mode: cooperative learning…

The metaphors that students form and encounter have been shown to exert a powerful influence on how they think about mathematics. In this paper, we explore the linguistic metaphors about learning and doing mathematics that were prevalent in 11 advanced mathematics lectures. We present four metaphor clusters that were common in the corpus that we…