LX Research

k-12

Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model

Students’ beliefs and goals can powerfully influence their learning success. Those who believe intelligence is a fixed entity (entity theorists) tend to emphasize ‘performance goals,’ leaving them vulnerable to negative feedback and likely to disengage from challenging learning opportunities. In contrast, students who believe intelligence is malleable (incremental theorists) tend to emphasize ‘learning goals’ and rebound better from occasional failures. These results suggest that beliefs can influence learning success through top–down biasing of attention and conceptual processing toward goal-congruent information.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide

In Studies 1 and 2, 7th-grade students received critical feedback from their teacher that, in the treatment condition, was designed to assuage mistrust byemphasizing the teacher’s high standards and belief that the student was capable of meeting thosestandards—a strategy known aswise feedback. Wise feedback increased students’ likelihood of submit-ting a revision of an essay (Study 1) and improved the quality of their final drafts (Study 2).

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014, Vol. 143, No. 2, 804–824

A gender matching effect in learning with pedagogical agents in an immersive virtual reality science simulation

The teacher is just as important in a virtual learning environment as in a normal classroom, but a new study shows that boys and girls differ greatly in terms of how they learn best: Boys learn best when their virtual teacher comes in the form of a drone, while girls get more knowledge from VR-teaching when they are taught by a young, female researcher-type named Marie.

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 2018

Depth-of-Knowledge Levels for Four Content Areas

Depth of Knowledge or DoK is another type of framework used to identify the level of rigor for an assessment. In 1997, Dr. Norman Webb developed the DoK to categorize activities according to the level of complexity in thinking. The creation of the DoK stemmed from the alignment of standards to assessments. Standardized assessments measured how students think about a content and the procedures learned but did not measure how deeply students must understand and be aware of a learning so they can explain answers and provide solutions, as well as transfer what was learned in real world contexts.

The Effects of Interleaved Practice

Children practiced four kinds of mathematics problems in an order that was interleaved or blocked, and the degree of spacing was fixed. Interleaving of practice impaired practice session performance yet doubled scores on a test given one day later. An analysis of the errors suggested that interleaving boosted test scores by improving participants' ability to pair each problem with the appropriate procedure.

Applied Cognitive Psychology 24(6):837 - 848 · September 2010

Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process.

Educational Psychologist, 41:2, 75-86

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