Recent work in reinforcement learning has demonstrated a choice preference for an option that has a lower probability of reward (A) when paired with an alternative option that has a higher probability of reward (C), if A has been experienced more frequently than C (the frequency effect). This finding is critical as it is inconsistent with…

The educational system today often relies on incentives in order to motivate students. However, it might also encourage students to engage in deceptive behaviour (e.g. malingering) in order to reach certain benefits. Hereby, we investigated whether students would intentionally fabricate symptoms (i.e. malinger) when confronted with a…

The exploration/exploitation trade-off (EE trade-off) describes how, when faced with several competing alternatives, decision-makers must often choose between a known good alternative (exploitation) and one or more unknown but potentially more rewarding alternatives (exploration). Prevailing theory on how humans perform the EE trade-off states…

Cognitive control describes the ability to use internal goals to strategically guide how we process and respond to our environment. Changes in the environment lead to adaptation in control strategies. This type of control learning can be observed in performance adjustments in response to varying proportions of easy to hard trials over blocks of…

Despite the increased interest in gamification approaches, there is a lack of comparative studies that shed light on the applicability of these approaches in educational contexts. In this explorative study, with an experimental design, university learners (N = 98) studied a complex process (i.e., how to brew beer) in a 2-hour-long computerized…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been shown to be a very powerful technique in recent years on a wide range of applications. Much of the prior DRL work took the "online" learning approach. However, given the challenges of building accurate simulations for modeling student learning, we investigated applying DRL to induce a…

Learning to choose adaptively when faced with uncertain and variable outcomes is a central challenge for decision makers. This study examines repeated choice in dynamic probability learning tasks in which outcome probabilities changed either as a function of the choices participants made or independently of those choices. This presence/absence of…

College instructors often provide homework so that their students can review class material; however some students do not take advantage of these review opportunities. This study compared the effects of a certain reward and a lottery reward on the quiz submission rates and accuracy of 112 college students. In Baseline, quizzes were for practice…

The research reported here was focussed on accessing the perceptions of pre-service teachers regarding the critical factors which support highly effective learning in schools in the United Kingdom. Their perceptions were arranged into a taxonomy so that they can be used as a starting point for their reflections on the observations they make of…

In online learning environments where automatic assessment is used, students often resort to harmful study practices such as procrastination and trial-and-error. In this paper, we study two teaching interventions that were designed to address these issues in a university-level computer science course. In the first intervention, we used achievement…

This study examines the best ways to motivate college admissions counselors. A review of literature revealed multiple perspectives on intrinsic and extrinsic as well as tangible and intangible rewards. Primary research was designed to examine the impact of tangible rewards and verbal reinforcements with a convenience sample of nine college…

A growing body of literature has been examined and discussed the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on student learning at the college level. Intrinsically motivated individuals have been able to develop high regards for learning various types of course information without the inclusion of external rewards or reinforcements. In…

Objective: Behavioral economic theory suggests that a reduction in substance use is most likely when there is an increase in rewarding substance-free activities. The goal of this randomized controlled clinical trial was to evaluate the incremental efficacy of a novel behavioral economic supplement (Substance-Free Activity Session [SFAS]) to a…

Education students at a large research university participated in internships during their final semesters as part of their respective programs of study as a capstone experience. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect data on the perceptions of interns' readiness and knowledge of evidence-based practices to manage classroom…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine if instructors' use of mini audio presentations (MAPs) in online discussions serves as an effective facilitation method, particularly when the content contains specific facilitation markers including reinforcement, recognition, and reward (three Rs). Instructors posted MAPs as audio file attachments…