Building a testing-based training paradigm from cognitive psychology principles.

Abstract

BoulderCognitive psychology often produces findings that are relevant to educational instruction. However, many of these studies rely on artificial conditions, which often fail to transfer to realistic settings, resulting in a disconnection between cognitive psychology and education. This article begins to address this issue by taking established principles from cognitive psychology and applying them to teach participants real academic concepts. We report a training paradigm that applies established principles from cognitive psychology: retrieval practice, feedback, self-paced studying, cognitive antidote, and levels of processing. This paradigm was used to teach undergraduates basic concepts of research design that are typically taught in university science courses. Participants studied PowerPoint-style slides that were divided into three sections. At the end of each section, participants were presented quiz questions. After each quiz response, the participant was shown the correct answer. This study also tested different forms of responding to quiz questions (between subjects): (a) fill-in-the-blank, (b) multiple-choice, and (c) fill-in-the-blank followed by a multiple-choice version of the same question. Participants completed two posttests, one immediately after training and another 1 week later. Both posttests consisted of items that tested retention and conceptual understanding. A control condition (wherein participants received no training) was used to assess the effectiveness of the training paradigm. Participants who used this paradigm outperformed control participants on both posttests. However, no differences in performance were found among participants who used different forms of responding.

Facilitating transfer through incorrect examples and explanatory feedback

“…This point notwithstanding, there are likely ways to modify the present paradigm so as to better assess learning on the application questions. In the present set of experiments, we made application questions multiple choice, so as to decrease the chances of a floor effect, as previous work has shown that requiring subjects to specify the flaws in the design of non-true experiments can be fairly challenging and can lead to relatively low performance (Corral, Healy, et al, 2019). However, one drawback to our approach is that multiple-choice questions can artificially inflate performance because all subjects have a given probability of correctly responding to a question that they do not know the answer to.…”

“…Slide 1 covered independent and dependent variables; Slides 2 and 3 covered true experiments, non-experimental studies, correlations, and causal inference problems; Slide 4 covered confounds and experimental control; and Slide 5 covered random assignment. Figure 3 shows an example pretest question and a tutorial slide; the pretest questions and tutorial slides were taken from Corral, Healy, et al (2019).…”

Adapting implementation science for higher education research: the systematic study of implementing evidence-based practices in college classrooms

“…Implementation science. Implementation science is related to, but distinct from, higher education-relevant cognitive psychology (e.g., Dunlosky et al 2013 ), science of learning (e.g., Halpern and Hakel 2003 ), educational psychology (e.g., Bernacki et al 2019 ), SoTL (e.g., Corral et al 2019 ), discipline-based educational research in psychology (e.g., National Research Council 2002 ), and the learning sciences (e.g., Sawyer and Dunlosky 2019 ). Implementation science builds on effectiveness research in applied settings—an existing evidence base is essential for designing implementation research studies (Lane-Fall et al 2019 ).…”

Adapting Implementation Science for Higher Education Research: The Systematic Study of Implementing Evidence-based Practices in College Classrooms

“…Bernacki et al, 2019), scholarship of teaching and learning in psychology (e.g. Corral et al, 2019), discipline-based educational research in psychology (e.g. National Research Council, 2002), and learning sciences (e.g.…”