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The recent pandemic has emphasized the need for developing more effective pedagogical practices in online education. While activities that require more deep connection of concepts can enhance overall learning versus mere rote rehearsal, are conceptual activities also viable options for inclusion in online coursework, given the asynchronous and flexible nature of online learning? To answer this question, students in 2 online courses either completed concept-mapping exercises, or control exercises (i.e., definitions of concepts). Results indicate that while initially concept-mapping is no better than memorization, as experience with mapping increases, a growth in learning emerges later in the course. Students also rate the educational utility and enjoyablity of conceptual activities similarly to control exercises, suggesting that students do not perceive these conceptual activities more negatively. As such, concept-mapping does have a utility for online learning, but there is a necessary a warm-up period before benefits are realized.

Text skimming is a common reading behavior that occurs when readers scan text at a faster than normal rate to attempt to form understanding when not able to read at normal speed. Research has suggested that reading time varies across a skimmed text, guided by attention and comprehension goals. However, do individual differences in the ability to manage attention affect skimming? Are those better at managing attention (i.e., high working memory) also better at managing text skimming? Two experiments were conducted where participants who varied in WMC were asked to skim an unfamiliar expository text, both on a computer, and while being eyetracked. In both experiments, while participants did spend more time reading earlier portions of the text, this did interact with WMC. Those higher in WMC balanced their reading efforts more equally across the entire text, suggesting that text skimming behavior is sensitive to differences in WMC.

The creation of false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm has been shown to be sensitive to many factors such as task instructions, participant mood, or even presentation modality. However, do other simple perceptual differences also impact performance on the DRM and the creation of false memories? This study explores the potential impact of changes in perceptual disfluency on DRM performance. To test for a potential influence of disfluency on false memory creation, participants viewed lists under either perceptually disfluent conditions or not. Results indicated that disfluency did significantly impact performance in the DRM paradigm; more disfluent presentations significantly increased the recall and recognition of unpresented information, although they did not impact recall or recognition of presented information. Thus, although disfluency did impact performance, disfluency did not produce a positive benefit related to overall task performance. This finding instead suggests that more disfluent presentations can increase the likelihood that false memories are created, and provide little positive performance benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While the prevalence and use of mobile devices to gather important information is increasing rapidly, a critical question is whether information gathering and reasoning with these devices produces acceptable levels of performance, especially relative to more traditional desktop environments? Across two studies, participants were evaluated on their ability to not only remember information conveyed on small devices, but also reason with said information in complex ways. Results indicated that, when compared to a full-size display, there is a reasoning deficit when using a small device. However, changing the small device to landscape orientation effectively eliminated this performance decrement. Further, this orientation manipulation appears to most support individuals who are lower in working memory capacity, as these individuals have been shown previously to struggle with learning from scrolling interfaces. This suggests that consideration of learner differences, through adaptive design, can promote optimal use of small technologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]