Students' academic performance improves when they use active study methods and discussion of study strategy efficacy can impact students' choice. Faculty often employ mid-semester wrappers to encourage student reflection on their study habits, so we explored whether exposure to research about learning embedded within post-exam wrappers was…

When students are left to choose their own approaches to studying, they frequently engage in ineffective learning strategies, such as rereading textbooks or cramming. Given this natural tendency amongst students, there has been significant interest in how to increase the use of more effective methods of studying. Efforts to-date have typically…

Much of the learning that college students engage in today occurs in unsupervised settings, making effective self-regulated learning techniques of particular importance. We examined the impact of task difficulty and supervision on whether participants would follow written instructions to use repeated testing over restudying. In Study 1, we found…

College success requires development of self-regulated learning skills. This study describes a self-regulated learning strategy intervention in a large general education Introductory Psychology course, focusing on the second exam. Students' reflection responses across five time periods were compared with exam performance. Increased self-regulated…

Planning for and evaluating study behaviors are key regulatory skills that present considerable challenge for college learners. This study examined the utility of a targeted intervention tool intended to promote college learners' study time calibration. Through implementation of a weekly, reflective activity, we examined improvement in learners'…

This study aimed to learn if a guided metacognitive exercise helped students analyze their past behavior in their preparation for assessments to influence their future practices and performance on assessments. Specifically, this study used a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design which followed two groups of student participants…

There is widespread agreement that student teachers need to construct an integrated knowledge base across multiple domains. This study examined the contributions of intraindividual factors of self-regulated learning to explaining student teachers' (a) integration of knowledge across topics and domains (i.e., integrative learning) and (b)…

When transitioning to higher education, students need to develop the skills to become self-regulated learners capable of setting their own learning goals and planning and monitoring their learning. Self-regulated learning and academic performance have been shown to positively correlate with effective time management and study skills. There are…

Background: Undergraduates may not use the most effective learning strategies, particularly those considered "desirable difficulties" such as spacing, elaboration, and testing ("SET"). Objective: This study examined knowledge-based, metacognitive, and behavioral outcomes from interventions designed to teach undergraduates about…

Knowledge monitoring is an important metacognitive process, which can help students improve study habits and thereby increase academic performance. Which is more useful in predicting test performance: knowing what you know, or knowing what you do not know? Two distinct constructs of knowledge monitoring calibration, sensitivity and specificity,…

A concern in engineering education is students adopting a 'recognise and reproduce' approach to problem solving. In this study, an assignment was conceived and analysed through Legitimation Code Theory -- which allows for visualisation of students' thinking, and to illuminate how students construct knowledge in open-ended problem solving. The…

Reasoning skills have been clearly related to achievement in introductory undergraduate biology, a course with a high failure rate that may contribute to dropout of undergraduate STEM majors. Existing measures are focused on the experimental method, such as generating hypotheses, choosing a research method, how to control variables other than…

Improving students' performance in Calculus is a challenge for many colleges and universities. One way of improving students' performance as well as their metacognition and study skills is to provide opportunities for them to receive support outside of the lecture. A modified version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ)…

Background: There is a critical need for evidence-based metacognition instruction models with an ease of implementation. Three issues involved in advancing the implementation and assessment of metacognitive interventions are: (i) the lack of an operational framework for the development of metacognition; (ii) metacognition instruction models that…

In fall 2014 we started the development of a series of short YouTube videos to help our introductory physics students better comprehend concepts they tend to find challenging. Our work is inspired by the PhD thesis of Derek Muller (author of the Veritasium channel) showing that lecture-based videos tend to be not only ineffective, but actually…