Many science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) majors fail to complete their degrees, and those who leave report they lack learning skills required for STEM coursework. In 2 studies, we ...examined the effects on students' exam performances when they were assigned to complete a brief digital learning skills training program we embedded into their course site on the university learning management system for their large lecture science and math courses. Study 1 examined whether delivering brief trainings that teach learning skills to students directly within their STEM course site during the first weeks of class would encourage undergraduate science learners to adopt effective learning behaviors and improve their achievement on exams. Additional analyses examined benefits to a group underrepresented in the STEM workforce: first-generation college students. Students who spent time completing training made greater use of resources supporting planning, monitoring, and cognitive strategy use and outperformed students in the control group on initial and final exams. Study 2 examined whether the same, domain-general learning skill training could produce effects when placed in a college algebra course. Random assignment to treatment and control was conducted early in the second course unit. Those in the skill training condition outperformed a control group who solved additional algebra problems on the next 2 unit exams. Across studies, effects of training were similar for first-generation and continuing generation students. However, the effects obtained often improved the exam scores of first-generation students from below to above the minimum score which requires course reenrollment and delays STEM degree completion.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Findings from two studies indicated that students who received a brief, digital Science of Learning to Learn skill training performed better in their university science and math exams than students who spent equivalent time studying science content or solving additional math problems. Digital skill training modules taught students learning strategies that are known to help improve academic performance and methods to plan, organize, monitor, and stick with their study efforts. Study findings advance theories of self-regulated learning and provide evidence that digital learning skill training may be an efficient approach to supporting students-and particularly those who are the first in their families to attend college-who are underprepared for rigorous university coursework.
Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate ...reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1), knowledge of fraction equivalence (both experiments), and strategy use (Experiment 2) influenced adults' fraction reasoning. Adults were only biased by fraction components when reasoning about fractions as holistic magnitudes was difficult: when estimating under a time constraint, when estimating fractions with large components, or when comparing fractions close in decimal distance. However, adults' knowledge of fraction equivalence moderated the effects of whole number components on their fraction estimation performance: when modeled at low levels of equivalence knowledge, adults were biased by fraction components when estimating. Adults with more knowledge of fraction equivalence were able to reason about fractions as holistic magnitudes through adaptive strategy choices.
How people respond to health threats can influence their own health and, when people are facing communal risks, even their community’s health. We propose that people commonly respond to health ...threats by managing their emotions with cognitive strategies such as reappraisal, which can reduce fear and protect mental health. However, because fear can also motivate health behaviors, reducing fear may also jeopardize health behaviors. In two diverse U.S. samples (N = 1,241) tracked across 3 months, sequential and cross-lagged panel mediation models indicated that reappraisal predicted lower fear about an ongoing health threat (COVID-19) and, in turn, better mental health but fewer recommended physical health behaviors. This trade-off was not inevitable, however: The use of reappraisal to increase socially oriented positive emotions predicted better mental health without jeopardizing physical health behaviors. Examining the costs and benefits of how people cope with health threats is essential for promoting better health outcomes for individuals and communities.
Data from protocol studies of nine experienced industrial designers, performing the same task, were analysed to develop an expertise model of the product design process. The protocol data and the ...expertise model were used to identify four different cognitive strategies employed by the designers: problem driven, solution driven, information driven, and knowledge driven design strategies. These strategies were then related to task outcomes such as solution quality and creativity, and to process aspects such as iterative activity. The different strategies appear not to be related to overall solution quality in any straightforward manner. Designers using a solution driven strategy tended to have lower overall solution quality scores but higher creativity scores. Designers using a problem driven design strategy tended to produce the best results in terms of the balance of both overall solution quality and creativity.
Raven's advanced progressive matrices (APM) comprise two types of representational codes, namely visuo-spatial and verbal-analytical, that are used to solve APM puzzles. Studies using analytical, ...behavioral, and imaging methods have supported the multidimensional perspectives of APM puzzles. The visuo-spatial code is expected to recruit operations more responsive to the visual perception tasks. In contrast, the verbal-analytical code is expected to use operations more responsive to the logical reasoning task and may entail different cognitive strategies. Acknowledging different representational codes used in APM puzzle-solving is critical for a better understanding of APM's performance and their relationship with other tasks, especially creative reasoning. We used the eye-tracking method to investigate the role of two representational codes, visuo-spatial and verbal-analytical, in strategies involved in solving APM puzzles and in generating an APM-like puzzle by using a creative-reasoning task (CRT). Participants took longer time to complete the verbal-analytical than visuo-spatial puzzles. In addition, visuo-analytical than visual-spatial puzzles showed higher progressive and regressive saccade counts, suggesting the use of more response elimination than constructive matching strategies employed while solving verbal-analytical than visuo-spatial puzzles. We observed higher CRT scores when it followed verbal-analytical (
Mdn
= 84) than visuo-spatial (
Mdn
= 73) APM puzzles, suggesting puzzle-solving specific strategies affect puzzle-creating task performance. The advantage of verbal-analytical over visuo-spatial puzzle-solving has been discussed in light of shared cognitive processing between APM puzzle-solving and APM-like puzzle-creating task performance.
This study aimed to determine the effect of using metacognitive- cognitive strategies based on the brain-based training approach on the creativity of sixth-grade elementary male students. This ...quasi-experimental study had a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The statistical population of this study was all sixth-grade male students of Isfahan (Iran) in 2021. Sixty students were selected by multi-stage cluster random sampling method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Torrance Creativity Questionnaire (1979) was used to assess creativity. In the experimental group, the package of cognitive-metacognitive strategies based on the brain-centered training approach (Baratali et al., 2013) was performed in 20 sessions of 100 minutes. Results revealed a significant difference between the two groups in terms of mean scores of creativity and components of fluidity, expansion, and flexibility. According to the findings, using cognitive-metacognitive strategies based on the brain-centered training approach has increased creativity and components of fluidity, expansion, and flexibility. However, it did not significantly increase the initiative component of creativity in the experimental group. In general, the research supports the application of cognitive-metacognitive strategies based on the brain training approach to improve the creativity of elementary students.
Structuring is a parental response to young children’s behavior that may foster children’s attempts to use cognitive skills to engage in self‐regulation. Using a rural, economically strained sample, ...parental structuring in response to 127 eighteen‐month‐olds’ negative emotion was observed during a home visit. Children’s distraction, a useful cognitive strategy when waiting for a reward, was assessed during a laboratory wait task at 18, 24, 36, and 48 months. More frequent parental structuring at child age 18 months predicted more developmental growth in children’s use of distraction between 18 and 48 months, in contrast with parental directives. Consistent with Kopp’s (1989) framework, parental structuring may capitalize on children’s cognitive development to play a unique role in fostering children’s self‐regulation of negative emotion.
Exposure to natural environments and the adoption of specific cognitive strategies are each claimed to have a direct influence on executive mental functioning. Here we manipulate both factors to help ...determine whether they draw on common cognitive resources. Three experiments investigated links between environmental effects (nature vs. urban video tours) and strategic effects (active vs. passive instructional approaches to the task). Each experiment used a pretest-posttest design and assessed executive mental functioning using a backward digit span task and Raven's progressive matrices. Experiment 1 manipulated participants' cognitive strategy through explicit instructions in order to establish a link between cognitive strategy and executive mental functioning. Experiment 2 used a pair of 10-min video tours (urban, nature) to examine the relationship between environmental exposure and executive mental function on the same tasks, replicating previous findings with the backward digit span task and extended them to a new task (i.e., Raven's progressive matrices). In Experiment 3, these two manipulations were combined to explore the relations between them. The results showed that the nature video tour attenuated the influence of task instructions relative to the urban video tour. An interaction between environmental video exposure and cognitive strategy was found, in that effects of cognitive strategy on executive function were smaller in the nature video condition than in the urban video condition. This suggests that brief exposure to nature had a direct positive influence on executive mental functioning.
This research examined how motivation (perceived control, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation), cognitive learning strategies (deep and surface strategies), and intelligence jointly ...predict long-term growth in students' mathematics achievement over 5 years. Using longitudinal data from six annual waves (Grades 5 through 10; M
age
= 11.7 years at baseline; N = 3,530), latent growth curve modeling was employed to analyze growth in achievement. Results showed that the initial level of achievement was strongly related to intelligence, with motivation and cognitive strategies explaining additional variance. In contrast, intelligence had no relation with the growth of achievement over years, whereas motivation and learning strategies were predictors of growth. These findings highlight the importance of motivation and learning strategies in facilitating adolescents' development of mathematical competencies.
We analyze how people form evaluative judgments about categories based on their experiences with category members. Prior research suggests that such evaluative judgments depend on some experience ...average but is unclear about the specific kind of average. We hypothesized that evaluations of categories could be driven either by the simple average of experiences with the category or by the member average (the average of the evaluations of the category members, where the evaluation of a category member is the average of experiences with this particular member). Understanding whether evaluations of categories are driven by the simple average or the member average is important in settings where people obtain unbalanced numbers of observations about category members such as when people form opinions about a social group and predominantly interact with just a few members of this group. Across nine studies (N = 1,966), we consistently found that evaluative judgments about categories were better explained by the simple average than by the member average. We call the underlying cognitive strategy the simple averaging heuristic. Collected evidence indicates that participants relied on simple averaging even in settings where normative principles required avoiding the use of this cognitive strategy, leading to systematic mistakes. Our findings contribute to several areas of social cognition such as research on redundancy biases, information aggregation, social sampling, and norm perceptions.
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