Effortless Learning Research Articles

Effortless learning: leveraging summarization and tabulation for automated note making

Effortless learning: leveraging summarization and tabulation for automated note making

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY'S EFFECT ON TEACHING AND LEARNING

Digital technology has had a big impact on how teaching and learning are done in different areas of education. It has been demonstrated that incorporating educational technology into teaching and learning procedures improves their efficacy (Qurat-ul-Ain et al., 2019). According to Qurat-ul-Ain et al. (2019), it is essential for raising productivity, efficacy, and pedagogical advancements that are beneficial to education. Interactive learning experiences are made possible by educational technology, which offers new ideas and uses beyond simple digital resource storage and transfer (Tuma et al., 2021). Furthermore, by providing a variety of learning opportunities and encouraging co-creative thinking abilities, digital technologies have been shown to support collaborative creativity in language instruction (Sastre et al., 2022). Even while technology offers many advantages, there are still issues with how to integrate it into the classroom. According to several studies, it's critical that teacher educators act as role models and encourage educators to use technology (Matthew et al., 2002). Furthermore, emphasis has been placed on the role that educational leaders play in helping students acquire digital citizenship and technology use (Baydar, 2022). In order to maintain teaching and learning as the primary focus in the face of technological improvements, schools must establish technology leadership. (In Davies, 2010). Moreover, the integration of technology in education has been linked to favorable consequences, including expedited and effortless learning and the promotion of inclusive, sustainable education (Uygur et al., 2020). Divergent viewpoints exist about the efficaciousness of technology in education. While some contend that technology can augment learning, others maintain that specific domains of knowledge, such as physical education, cannot be satisfactorily imparted through technological means (Aprilo et al., 2023). All things considered, incorporating technology into education necessitates a thorough comprehension of both its possible advantages and disadvantages, highlighting the necessity of ongoing professional development and assistance for teachers (Karakaş & Hidiroğlu, 2022).

The Interplay Between Students’ Learning-Related Beliefs, Reading Comprehension Strategies and Academic Success

The present study explored the combined effects of students’ learning-related beliefs as well as use of reading comprehension strategies on academic success—academic outcomes and exhaustion. In total, 1165 eighth grade students’ beliefs, use of reading comprehension strategies and reading comprehension were assessed at the beginning of the school year. Half a year later 296 students from the sample reported their academic exhaustion and grades from the previous semester. Students’ learning-related beliefs and use of deep reading comprehension strategies were associated with their academic outcomes and exhaustion. More specifically, believing in quick and effortless learning was associated with the use of a smaller variety of deep reading comprehension strategies and lower academic outcomes. Additionally, students’ motivational beliefs about effective learning were mainly indirectly through strategy use linked to their academic outcomes, while having direct effects on academic exhaustion. These results refer to the importance of addressing learning-related beliefs in addition to strategy instruction.

Second language vocabulary learning in the digital era: Ten reasons it should be on the go!

Word learning is a key component in second language learning and one that L2 learners often find laborious. With the advent of mobile technology in recent years, research on mobile-assisted vocabulary learning has uncovered the immense potential mobile devices (namely smartphones and tablets) have for providing L2 learners with opportunities for effortless learning of L2 lexis. To this end, we pinpoint ten reasons why L2 learners should abandon traditional pen-and-paper-based methods of word learning and shift instead to a digital mobile word learning environment that fully utilizes the virtues of mobile learning. The role of mobile applications (apps) dedicated to word learning is hence stressed as such apps represent the core basis of mobile-assisted vocabulary learning. For EFL learners to entertain a more manageable and less time-consuming word learning experience, we emphasize the role of EFL teachers in calling their learners’ attention to the ten reasons we underscore in this article to help encourage those who are still into conventional word learning and have not yet explored learning words via mobile gadgets to make the digital shift at once.

How odor cues help to optimize learning during sleep in a real life-setting

Effortless learning during sleep is everybody’s dream. Several studies found that presenting odor cues during learning and selectively during slow wave sleep increases learning success. The current study extends previous research in three aspects to test for optimization and practical applicability of this cueing effect: We (1) performed a field study of vocabulary-learning in a regular school setting, (2) stimulated with odor cues during the whole night without sleep monitoring, and (3) applied the odor additionally as retrieval cue in a subsequent test. We found an odor cueing effect with comparable effect sizes (d between 0.6 and 1.2) as studies with sleep monitoring and selective cueing. Further, we observed some (non-significant) indication for a further performance benefit with additional cueing during the recall test. Our results replicate previous findings and provide important extensions: First, the odor effect also works outside the lab. Second, continuous cueing at night produces similar effect sizes as a study with selective cueing in specific sleep stages. Whether odor cueing during memory recall further increases memory performance hast to be shown in future studies. Overall, our results extend the knowledge on odor cueing effects and provide a realistic practical perspective on it.

Different Schools to Different People: The Future of Universal, Uniform and Quality Education. Review of the book: Lyubzhin A. The Twilight of Universal Education. School for All and for Nobody

Education practices inherited from the Soviet school are fading away and will hardly be inspired with new life. Society has changed, and so have the education goals, which rarely become the subject of rational discussion nowadays. As a response to these new conditions, it would be good to see diversification of the education system, so that everyone could get what they want, whether it be effortless learning or real education obtained through hard work. Today, unfortunately, education remains uniform and the window of opportunities is not growing larger.

Neuropathologic Associations of Learning and Memory in Primary Progressive Aphasia.

The dementia syndrome of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) can be caused by 1 of several neuropathologic entities, including forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) or Alzheimer disease (AD). Although episodic memory is initially spared in this syndrome, the subtle learning and memory features of PPA and their neuropathologic associations have not been characterized. To detect subtle memory differences on the basis of autopsy-confirmed neuropathologic diagnoses in PPA. Retrospective analysis was conducted at the Northwestern Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center in August 2015 using clinical and postmortem autopsy data that had been collected between August 1983 and June 2012. Thirteen patients who had the primary clinical diagnosis of PPA and an autopsy-confirmed diagnosis of either AD (PPA-AD) or a tau variant of FTLD (PPA-FTLD) and 6 patients who had the clinical diagnosis of amnestic dementia and autopsy-confirmed AD (AMN-AD) were included. Scores on the effortless learning, delayed retrieval, and retention conditions of the Three Words Three Shapes test, a specialized measure of verbal and nonverbal episodic memory. The PPA-FTLD (n = 6), PPA-AD (n = 7), and AMN-AD (n = 6) groups did not differ by demographic composition (all P > .05). The sample mean (SD) age was 64.1 (10.3) years at symptom onset and 67.9 (9.9) years at Three Words Three Shapes test administration. The PPA-FTLD group had normal (ie, near-ceiling) scores on all verbal and nonverbal test conditions. Both the PPA-AD and AMN-AD groups had deficits in verbal effortless learning (mean [SD] number of errors, 9.9 [4.6] and 14.2 [2.0], respectively) and verbal delayed retrieval (mean [SD] number of errors, 6.1 [5.9] and 12.0 [4.4], respectively). The AMN-AD group had additional deficits in nonverbal effortless learning (mean [SD] number of errors, 10.3 [4.0]) and verbal retention (mean [SD] number of errors, 8.33 [5.2]), which were not observed in the PPA-FTLD or PPA-AD groups (all P < .005). This study identified neuropathologic associations of learning and memory in autopsy-confirmed cases of PPA. Among patients with clinical PPA syndrome, AD neuropathology appeared to interfere with effortless learning and delayed retrieval of verbal information, whereas FTLD-tau pathology did not. The results provide directions for future research on the interactions between limbic and language networks.

Childhood Giftedness, Adolescent Agency

Although considerable research has addressed development from childhood giftedness to adult excellence, subjective perceptions of this development by gifted individuals themselves have remained largely unexplored. This multiple case study examined the ways in which young adults, who in the past had been identified as gifted, made sense of their giftedness based on cues obtained from their social environment and the impact of this sensemaking on their development. Some participants made sense of their giftedness in a way that prevented them from developing a sense of agency in their education: Their sensemaking was based on social control or, conversely, on effortless learning and easy victories they experienced in childhood. The participants who showed the highest level of achievement and motivation in early adulthood perceived themselves as “agents of their learning” and made sense of their extraordinary outcomes as resulting from effortful, proper, and self-directed practice. Our findings indicate that a sense of agency is critical to maintaining gifted-level achievement through adolescence. We have identified some of the social environment factors that can diminish or enhance that sense of agency in high-achieving children.

Leveraging social media for scalable object detection

In this manuscript we present a method that leverages social media for the effortless learning of object detectors. We are motivated by the fact that the increased training cost of methods demanding manual annotation, limits their ability to easily scale in different types of objects and domains. At the same time, the rapidly growing social media applications have made available a tremendous volume of tagged images, which could serve as a solution for this problem. However, the nature of annotations (i.e. global level) and the noise existing in the associated information (due to lack of structure, ambiguity, redundancy, and emotional tagging), prevents them from being readily compatible (i.e. accurate region level annotations) with the existing methods for training object detectors. We present a novel approach to overcome this deficiency using the collective knowledge aggregated in social sites to automatically determine a set of image regions that can be associated with a certain object. We study theoretically and experimentally when the prevailing trends (in terms of appearance frequency) in visual and tag information space converge into the same object, and how this convergence is influenced by the number of utilized images and the accuracy of the visual analysis algorithms. Evaluation results show that although the models trained using leveraged social media are inferior to the ones trained manually, there are cases where the user contributed content can be successfully used to facilitate scalable and effortless learning of object detectors.

An errorless learning approach to treating dysnomia

Few errorless learning approaches to dysnomia treatment are found in the aphasia literature; none are found when paired with effortful rather than effortless learning (Fillingham, Hodgson, Sage, & Lambon Ralph, 2003). Grounded in Hebbian plasticity (Hebb, 1961), errorless learning occurs with increases in synaptic strength. Therefore, if a stimulus elicits an errorless response, Hebbian learning will strengthen the tendency to activate the same pattern of response on subsequent occasions. Our interest was in developing and piloting a treatment method of errorless and effortful learning cast in an ecologically valid framework of interactive discourse.

Visual association test to detect early dementia of the Alzheimer type

Background: The visual association test (VAT) is a brief learning task based on imagery mnemonics. The test materials consist of six line drawings of pairs of interacting objects or animals—for...

Education and the mass media: Where they differ, where they converge

All of the major mass communication media had their origins outside education. Schools have always thought of them as competitors as regards their influence on society and ways of thinking, which explains the constant desire to make use of mass communication techniques in schools and the illusion about their ability to solve the major problems of education. Educational institutions and the mass media are essentially rivals. Throughout the world, teachers make virtually the same criticisms of them. The mass media are reproached with placing such emphasis on entertainment and spectacle that whatever information they may convey is drowned in a flood of empty words. Education and the media rest on two irreconcilable principles: on the one hand the spectacle, with its facility, superficiality, passivity and illusion of effortless learning, and on the other the training process, which implies effort, depth, the solidity of real learning and activity. Lastly, the most fundamental clash is between two orders of faculties: the school gives priority to reason