Retrieval practice is an effective strategy to promote long-term retention and learning, but students do not always use it in the most effective ways. Applying various intervention design principles that leverage sociomotivational research, we created an intervention targeted not only at teaching students about the efficacy of retrieval practice,…

Educators often use stories, humor, surprise, images, or other ploys to catch students' interest. This form of interest, often called "situational interest" because of how it is triggered by contextual cues, can facilitate learning to some degree. Yet it also may carry risks. This article proposes one such potential risk: flawed…

Mind-wandering during reading is often associated with worse comprehension performance. Research suggests that metacognitive competences (i.e., the knowledge about as well as monitoring and regulation of one's own cognitive processes) are positively related to reading performance and may play a role in the prevalence of mind-wandering. However,…

Despite the recognized importance of addressing belief bias in critical thinking, little is known about the neural activity underlying belief-bias reasoning and its connection to critical thinking. The study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural responses during belief-bias reasoning and explored the extent to which these…

More and more, people are abandoning the active pursuit of news, assuming instead that important information will be pushed to them via their social media networks. This approach to news makes people susceptible to the vast amounts of misinformation online, yet research on the effects of this kind of engagement is mixed. More research is needed on…

This research introduces the "Mindfulness Mindset Scale," a concise and reliable tool designed to measure beliefs about the malleability of mindfulness skills. Study 1 (N = 285) revealed a single-factor structure through exploratory factor analysis, further validated in Study 2 (N = 286) using confirmatory factor analysis. Studies 3a (N…

Math anxiety has received increasing focus in recent years, yet the causes for developing math-anxiety remain unclear. Whereas previous research focused on physiological/environmental causes, we examine the link between math-anxiety, dispositional mindfulness, and self-centeredness (operationalized as self-prioritization and decentering). The…

Retrieval practice enhances the learning of educational materials, and prior work has shown that practicing retrieval can enhance learning as much as or more than creating concept maps. Few studies have combined retrieval practice with other learning activities, and no prior work has explored whether concept mapping and retrieval practice might…

Research on the multimedia effect in testing indicates that static representational pictures (RPs) and, potentially, dynamic RPs that further subdivide the picture into segments may support students' mental processing. This might be especially relevant for mathematical word problems that pose high mental demands in a multistage solution process.…

Our civilization recognizes that errors can be valuable learning opportunities, but for decades, they have widely been avoided or, at best, allowed to occur as serendipitous accidents. The present research tested whether greater learning success could paradoxically be achieved through making errors by intentional design, relative to traditional…

Successive relearning involves repeated retrieval practice of the same information (with feedback) over multiple, spaced sessions. We implemented successive relearning in an introductory psychology class to explore potential learning benefits. After each weekly lecture, students were sent links via e-mail to engage in three learning practice…

When learning new information, should students focus on studying 1 concept at a time or should they alternate studying between different concepts? Recent research shows that students should mix up or interleave the study of different concepts, particularly when the concepts are related or hard to discriminate (Carvalho & Goldstone, 2015). But…

It is unknown how multiple components of on-task regulation of learning affect task performance in school children. This research aimed to acquire insights into the interrelations between children's metacognitive monitoring, regulation of learning, and task performance. Three components of on-task regulation of learning were investigated:…

Metacognition is theorized to play a central role in children's mathematics learning. The primary goal of the current study was to provide experimental evidence in support of this role with elementary school students learning about mathematical equivalence. The final sample included 135 children (59 first graders and 76 second graders) who…

We propose a model delineating the role of control, value, and cognitive disequilibrium in elementary students' experience of emotions during mathematics problem solving. We tested this model across 2 studies. In Study 1, using an explanatory mixed-methods design, 136 students from Grades 3 to 6 worked on a complex mathematics problem appropriate…