How we can empower people to become motivated and effectively self-regulated learners? Learners must have the right mindset—they must be motivated and interpret the experience of difficulty in productive ways—but they also have to know effective strategies for learning. Rather than ‘making learning easy’, what research from cognitive psychology demonstrates is that the effective learning strategies that make learning stick are often the ones that introduce difficulties (e.g., interleaving, retrieval practice, pre-testing). Dr. Yan is presently focused on examining the mechanisms underlying these ‘desirably difficult’ strategies and the motivational mindsets that encourage learners to not just study harder, but to study smarter.
The current focus is on understanding the barriers and facilitators to effective studying, using a combination of qualitative focus groups and quantitative survey and experimental methods. The end goal is to develop interventions and teacher practices that will help improve students' use of effective learning strategies. Multiple other studies, however, including experiments examining the efficacy of different conditions of learning, are ongoing.
People you can contact include:
Veronica Yan (veronicayan@austin.utexas.edu)
Alexis Richmond (arichmond@utexas.edu)
Stephanie Johnstone (snjohnstone@utexas.edu)
Preference given to sophomore students.
At least a one year commitment.
Undergraduate research assistants invited to join the lab will have the opportunity to participate in all aspects of the research process, from research design, to data collection, and data presentation. Commitment is expected to be ~6 hours/week, to include participation in journal club and presenting in research meetings.
