Motivation This article explores how the brain processes feedback during learning, offering insights that complement more common educational theories about learning from feedback from cognitive, behaviorist, sociocultural, and constructivist approaches. Feedback-Based Learning in Education and Neuroscience Whether for academic achievement, professional development, or lifelong learning, learning…
In the learning sciences, or any research endeavor, the research methods used are of paramount importance. Research methods and design are critical to the quality and validity of the knowledge produced. We need to use methods that represent the complete learning environment, or we risk making incorrect explanations for our findings, and that represent it [ ]
Motivation Is More Than Just Willpower When students struggle to stay engaged or persist through challenges, it’s easy to assume they lack interest or willpower (thanks to the Fundamental Attribution Error bias). But motivation is far more complex. In the learning sciences, motivation is understood as a dynamic and context-sensitive process shaped by many factors—including [ ]
Learning Environments as Engines of Learning In the learning sciences, the learning environment is not just a place—it’s part of the learning process itself. Learning environments include not only learners, but also the tools they use, the people they interact with (such as peers, instructors, and mentors), and the broader social and cultural context, including [ ]
Cognition in Context Cognition—the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding—is central in learning. But it’s not the whole story. The learning sciences emerged in part as a response to the limitations of fields like cognitive science, which often focused narrowly on internal mental processes while overlooking the broader learning environment. Early learning scientists [ ]
The learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies how people learn and how to design effective learning environments. Drawing from cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, etc., it seeks to understand the processes of learning in real-world contexts and to apply that understanding to improve education. My goal for this blog series is [ ]
In a previous post, I mentioned that I started researching wellness a few months into the pandemic when I noticed my physical and mental health declining. A large factor in this decline was sharing walls with a guy who d play loud music during the day and late into most nights. Because of the moratorium on [ ]
Our response to stress evolved over hundreds of thousands of years during which stressors were much more dangerous. We were regularly threatened by starvation, illness, ostracization, or attacks from animals or neighboring tribes, so our bodies responded to stress automatically and strongly. Unfortunately, our bodies respond to modern stressors with the same automaticity and intensity [ ]
Motivation Activating prior knowledge is a powerful instructional tool, but students do not always have relevant prior knowledge to activate. This paper tests a method for developing prior knowledge that prepares students to learn from lectures and explanations. On a more theoretical level, it examines when during instruction it is better to support students exploration [ ]
Motivation To explain how semantic waves (based on the semantics dimension of Legitimation Code Theory) can help students to build upon prior knowledge, particularly everyday, practical knowledge, to develop new knowledge, particularly technical, disciplinary knowledge. **I used ChatGPT to help write this summary. The text in italics is from ChatGPT with light editing. A description [ ]