The study behaviours of students can be assessed from several perspectives, such as what study strategies are used, the total number of hours of study, and the distribution of studying over time. Here, we present the results of a survey study that considered each of these perspectives by asking students to report the what, how much, and when of their study behaviours over the course of a semester. As important, to better understand students' use of study strategies, we also had students report at the beginning of the semester how they intended to study and their beliefs about the effectiveness of a variety of common strategies. Our results indicate that during the semester, students rely on relatively ineffective strategies and mass their studying the day or two before an exam. However, students intended to begin studying earlier and to use a mix of effective and ineffective study habits. Despite their use of some ineffective strategies, they did have a relatively accurate assessment of which strategies were less versus more effective. Taken together, our results suggest that students have some excellent intentions but may falter because massing study the evening before an exam limits their use of more effective study strategies.

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In this paper, we systematically reviewed twenty-one factors that have been shown to either vary with or influence performance on working memory (WM) tasks. Specifically, we review previous work on the influence of intelligence, gender, age, personality, mental illnesses/medical conditions, dieting, craving, stress/anxiety, emotion/motivation, stereotype threat, temperature, mindfulness training, practice, bilingualism, musical training, altitude/hypoxia, sleep, exercise, diet, psychoactive substances, and brain stimulation on WM performance. In addition to a review of the literature, we suggest several frameworks for classifying these factors, identify shared mechanisms between several variables, and suggest areas requiring further investigation. This review critically examines the breadth of research investigating WM while synthesizing the results across related subfields in psychology.

Unique distractions are present in nonclassroom environments, and many students attempt to multitask while learning online. This study examines the effect of six distractions (folding laundry, playing a computer video game, texting on a cell phone, engaging in conversation, watching a low-arousal video, and watching a high-arousal video) on learning and subsequent recall as assessed by a posttest. Compared to a baseline no-distraction condition, all six of the distractions significantly impaired posttest performance, from a baseline average of 87% correct to a distraction average of 62% correct, t(202) ϭ 15.30, p Ͻ .001, Cohen's d ϭ 1.30. In addition to objective measurements of learning, students self-reported their own assessments of learning during the distractions. Judgments of learning were poor for the high-arousal video. We discuss these findings both theoretically and for their practical application to learning in online environments.