Commercial artists routinely use images like this to draw our attention to their advertisements. But it also has implications for trainers and instructional designers as well. The fact that the second image is harder to read means that people have to take longer and work harder to comprehend the words. And you know what? An abundance of evidence shows that when people work harder and take longer studying material, they end up remembering it better.
Learning styles—the notion that each student has a particular mode by which he or she learns best, whether it’s visual, auditory or some other sense—is enormously popular. It’s also been thoroughly debunked.
In his new book, “How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens,” author Benedict Carey informs us that “most of our instincts about learning are misplaced, incomplete, or flat wrong” and “rooted more in superstition than in science.”
A considerable amount of research into learning has focused on human memory. A number of theories about how memory and recall function has been published, but one that stands out is a model derived from the work of Canadian psychologist John Robert Anderson. Adaptive Control of Thought – Rational – abbreviated to ACT-R (previously known as ACT*) – is a cognitive theory of learning that is concerned with the way memory is structured. The so called cognitive architecture of ACT-R is made up of three main components.
I just finished one of the best books I’ve read on the science of learning. Daniel Willingham is a Harvard educated cognitive scientist who writes books and articles about how to learn and teach better.
The title of his book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, is a tad unfortunate, I think, because the book isn’t really about bored students. Instead, the book is divided into principles of learning.
Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning.
How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such gut knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?
The Picture Superiority Effect says concepts are much more likely to be remembered if they are presented as pictures rather than as words. In fact, research has discovered that visuals are recalled six times better than words alone. But what kind of visual support works best? Is there a superior picture approach that maximizes the Picture Superiority Effect?
Confirming what neurocomputational theorists have long suspected, researchers at the Dignity Health Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. and University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that the human brain locks down episodic memories in the hippocampus, committing each recollection to a distinct, distributed fraction of individual cells.
In this article, I will share some scientifically proven brain facts that you'll want to take into consideration before creating your next eLearning course. Keeping these interesting brain facts on hand may allow you to develop eLearning courses that offer the most value and benefit to the learner, given that you'll have a more comprehensive understanding of the inner works of the brain.