Factual Retention Research Articles

The provision of partial notes is not associated with improved student attention in lectures or subsequent understanding of the lecture material

To optimize learning in lectures, students need to maintain a sustained level of attention to the lecture material. Previous research has suggested, however, that student attention declines over the course of the lecture. One strategy suggested to improve sustained attention of students during the lecture is to encourage note-taking by students. The provision of partial notes, where parts of the lecture slide materials are removed, has been associated with improved academic outcomes of students. Few studies, however, have directly compared the effects of partial notes on student attention with the provision of complete notes or no notes at all. This study investigated the effects of the provision of these three types of lecture notes on note quality through the lecture, a proxy measure of sustained attention, and on subsequent short-term factual retention of the lecture material. In total, 41 students were randomly assigned to one of the three notes groups. They listened to a lecture while taking notes and then completed a multiple-choice quiz. Their notes were evaluated for note quality. No advantage of using partial notes was found on the measures of sustained attention or on the results of the multiple-choice quiz, contrary to previous findings. Student sustained attention did degrade over the course of the lecture; this degradation occurred for all note type groups. This study suggests that educators within the higher education system reconsider the use of partial notes in lectures.

Learning 21st-Century Skills Requires 21st-Century Teaching

Globalization, economic necessity, and low civic engagement compound the urgency for students to develop the skills and knowledge they need for success. The interconnectedness of our global economy, ecosystem, and political networks require that students learn to communicate, collaborate, and problem solve with people worldwide. Employers demand fewer people with basic skill sets and more people with complex thinking and communication skills (Levy & Murnane, 2005). Low levels of civic engagement highlight the recognition that rote learning about government is not a sufficient way for students to learn how and why to be engaged citizens (Levine, 2012). But the movement toward 21st-century skills--as any movement--must define its objective, to wit, the skills that comprise the movement. Based on several hundred interviews with business, non-profit, and education leaders, Tony Wagner (2008) proposes that students need seven survival skills including: * Critical thinking and problem solving; * Collaboration and leadership; * Agility and adaptability; * Initiative and entrepreneurialism; * Effective oral and written communication; * Accessing and analyzing information; and * Curiosity and imagination The Assessment and Teaching of 21st-century Skills consortium (AT21CS), organizes skills, knowledge, and attitudes into four categories: ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working, and living in the world (2012). Regardless of the skills included or the terms used to describe them, all 21st-century skills definitions are relevant to aspects of contemporary life in a complex world. Most focus on similar types of complex thinking, learning, and communication skills, and all are more demanding to teach and learn than rote skills. These abilities are also commonly referred to as higher-order thinking skills, deeper learning outcomes, and complex thinking and communication skills. Why students aren't learning them The outdated, transmission model of education, through which teachers transmit factual knowledge to students via lectures and textbooks, remains the dominant approach to compulsory education in much of the world (OECD, 2009). Through the transmission model, students can learn information, but typically don't have much practice applying the knowledge to new contexts, communicating it in complex ways, using it to solve problems, or using it as a platform to develop creativity. Therefore, transmission is not the most effective way to teach 21st-century skills. Students are not developing them because they are not being explicitly taught (Schleicher, 2012) and because they are more difficult to assess than factual retention (AT21CS, 2012). Nine lessons Despite the challenges, we can educate students differently. Learning scientists have taught us nine lessons relative to teaching 21st-century skills. All of the lessons are about how students learn 21st-century skills and how pedagogy can address their needs. Many of the lessons--especially transfer, metacognition, teamwork, technology, and creativity--are also 21st-century skills in themselves. #1. MAKE IT RELEVANT. To be effective, curriculum must be relevant to students' lives. To make curriculum relevant, teachers must begin with generative topics or topics that have an important place in the disciplinary or interdisciplinary study at hand and that resonate with learners and teachers (Perkins, 2010). The relevance of a specific topic is clearer to students when they understand how it fits within the big picture. In his book Making Learning Whole (2010), teaching and learning expert David Perkins uses baseball as an analogy to explain that players must know how hitting, catching, and running bases contribute to the game. Similarly, students need to understand how statistics fit into the bigger picture of mathematical thinking, and they must have a sense of the value of mathematical thinking in the first place. …

See you there

A few years ago I was lucky enough to spend a few days on the Big Island of Hawaii. Fortunately, it was part of a holiday rather than a work-related visit, so when I decided to spend a lot of the time on trails in Volcanoes National Park, I had none of the residual guilt usually associated with skipping sessions at a meeting I was supposed to be attending. Actually that whole issue of “meetings psychology” is an interesting one. There are probably entire academic departments devoted to it somewhere. They probably hold annual meetings in nice places where timetabled sessions oscillate between two stable states: auditoriums filled to bursting with academics who are noticeably more paranoid than usual, convinced that everyone is watching them. And auditoriums which are completely empty. You can imagine the conversations in the white-water-rafting ticket queue: “Hello Fred, good to see you. Having a day off?” “No, no, not at all. Following our recent major grant; you know about that?—‘The effects of intermittent relaxation on factual retention and creativity in loosely hierarchical organisational structures’—I’m actually obliged to spend at least 2 days per meeting engaging in fieldwork—as now in fact. Anyway, I was going to speak to you at the session yesterday, but you weren’t there were you?” “Yes, yes, I was there. Actually I was sitting right behind you.” “Oh right. So what’s new?” “Well we’ve got a big new grant too. I’m really pleased about it because I didn’t think it would get through—‘The effects of observation on factual retention, creativity, and relaxational behaviour in principal investigators’.” “Oh right…right…” In my purely anecdotal experience, people vary enormously both in their susceptibility to extraneous temptations and in their tendency to feeling guilty about having succumbed. At one extreme, there are those who feel so guilty about sneaking out that they will sit through days or even entire weeks of meetings with gritted teeth, trying desperately to extract satisfaction from their puritanical sense of goodness, but generally giving the game away by a default state of grumpiness, lightened only by occasional bursts of good humour when news filters through that a torrential downpour has caused a white-water raft to overturn and, as night falls, its occupants are stranded at assorted locations several miles downstream. (Actually, this isn’t quite the extreme: the real extremes are those who sit through an entire week of a meeting and genuinely enjoy it. But these individuals are quite rare, and anyway, are probably beyond psychology). At the other extreme, are the people who you didn’t even know were at the meeting—basically because they weren’t. Of course, most of us fall somewhere in between and our behaviour on any given occasion is quite sensitive to factors such as meeting content, company, and location. In places like Belgrade, everyone’s at the meeting, usually huddled round the podium for safety in numbers and to avoid eye contact with the armed guard stationed at the exit to prevent them leaving. But in places like Hawaii, even small lecture theatres suddenly become airy expanses, sparsely populated by an elite audience. And that squeaking noise isn’t the projector malfunctioning, it’s the sound of teeth grinding.

Evidential and extralegal factors in juror decisions: Presentation mode, retention, and level of emotionality.

Examined whether video scene re-creations affect juror decisions by assessing factual retention, emotional state, liability assessments, and damage awards. 102 mock jurors reviewed case materials from a wrongful death suit in 1 of 3 formats: print (transcripts), videotaped testimony, or videotaped testimony plus video re-creation. Pre- to posttest differences in emotionality were assessed with the Profile of Mood States questionnaire. Retention levels were measured by multiple choice questionnaire. Jurors in the videotaped testimony conditions experienced greater emotional reactions than those who read transcripts. Mood changes were inversely related to liability assessments on the plaintiff but no differences in damage awards were noted. This suggests that perceptions of levels of defendant liability are influenced by emotions, but damage awards appear to be based more on factual evidence. Video scene re-creations may thus be more effective in inducing out-of-court settlements than in actually swaying jurors' decisions.

The efficacy of audiotapes in promoting psychological well-being in cancer patients: a randomised, controlled trial

Open or uncontrolled studies have suggested that providing cancer patients with audiotapes of their clinical interviews can improve information recall and reduce psychological distress. We tested these hypotheses in a 'clinician-blind', prospective, randomised controlled trial. A total of 117 patients newly referred to a medical oncology clinic who were to be given 'bad news' had their consultations audiotaped. Blind to the clinician, patients were randomly allocated to receive a copy of the tape to play at home or not (control group). At 6 months follow-up, tape group patients reported positive attitudes to the audiotape and were shown to recall significantly more information about their illness than did controls. Overall improvement in psychological distress at 1 and 6 months follow-up, as measured with the 30-item General Health Questionnaire and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale was no different in the two groups. However, a second-order interaction suggested that poor-prognosis patients were disadvantaged specifically by access to the audiotape, with less improvement in psychological distress at 6 months follow-up than non-tape controls. Patient access to audiotapes of clinical interviews promotes factual retention but does not reliably reduce psychological distress and may be actively unhelpful in some subgroups of patients.

Read Something Once, Why Read it Again?: Repetitive Reading and Recall

Seventy-two college students were instructed that they would be reading a text either once or twice. Then, half of each instruction group were allowed to read the text once, and half were required to read the text twice. All subjects were then tested for factual retention and for transfer. The instruction that a text could be read twice facilitated recall, even if the text was only read once. Reduced anxiety appears to be the simplest explanation for this. Reading a text twice increased factual retention, but on the transfer test, an interaction with ability was found. Only high ability students showed improvement with a second reading on the transfer test. Results are interpreted in terms of Mayer's processing strategies in that good readers benefit both qualitatively and quantitatively from repetition. Poor readers benefit only quantitatively from the opportunity to reread.

Use of Group Process in Teaching Communication and Life Skills for Law Enforcement Personnel

This article presents a training program in life-coping skills for law enforcement personnel using group procedures. Highlighted in the article is a follow-up evaluation of a 64-hour training program conducted five years ago in which 300 police officers were instructed in life skills. To examine the effectiveness of this program, 30 of the officers were randomly selected and retested. Their test scores on factual retention, self control, and dogmatism were compared with their earlier pretraining and post-training data. No significant changes were found, suggesting that the officers retained the factual information, level of dogmatism, and sense of internal control they learned in the program. In addition, their scores were compared with the scores of a control group of 30 officers who either did not receive the life-training skills or were hired after the training program. As expected, the scores of the officers who had undergone the training program demonstrated a significantly higher knowledge of life skills, a stronger sense of self-confidence, and a somewhat lower dogmatic attitude.

Delay of Feedback and Retention of Correct and Incorrect Responses

Sixty-seven fifth graders studied a text followed by an immediate test (T1) consisting of inference, factual retention, and guess questions, and either received feedback after thirty minutes, after a day, or no feedback. Retesting of half the T1 items was done after a day, the other half after a week. On retesting, subjects were asked to identify their T1 responses. The three types of T1 questions were similarly affected by feedback, while on the postfeedback tests the one-day delay of feedback gave somewhat better results than the thirty minutes of delay. Identification of T1 responses was generally high and was not found to interfere with learning from feedback. In discussing the results, the adequacy of the interference-perseveration hypothesis was questioned.

Juror Responses to Direct and Mediated Presentations of Expert Testimony1

One hundred twenty‐one King County (Washington) jurors viewed one of four videotaped versions of medical testimony relevant to the determination of a claim for damages against an employer in an industrial accident case. Two versions presented the claimant's physician (direct testimony), and two presented an attorney reading the physician's testimony verbatim (mediated testimony). Two professional actors (one female, one male) portrayed the physician in one version and the attorney in the other. Videotape presentations were introduced by written material and followed by a questionnaire in which Ss answered a number of legal, attitudinal, and factual questions. Responses to direct testimony differed from those to mediated testimony on several dimensions: number of items listed as significant to the determination of a cash award, estimates of sufficiency of material presented to determine an award, estimates of physician's competence, estimates of confidence in ratings of physician's competence, and number of correct items in a factual retention test. Significant correlations were found between scores on some of these dimensions and number of dollars awarded as compensation. Differences between the actors produced no significant effects, nor were there any significant interactions. It is concluded that, ceteris paribus, direct testimony is to be preferred to mediated testimony.