Fields / Portal
Comprehension, Retrieval, and Limits
Educational psychology studies how people learn, remember, and stay motivated. Three results shape this site. Kintsch’s construction-integration model says a reader builds meaning from the text and then weaves it into what they already know. The testing effect says pulling an idea back out teaches more than reading it again. And working memory is bounded: a handful of chunks at a time. Spw began in a course on learning from text, and I ran cognitive assessment batteries for The Adult Learning Lab.
Principles
Construction-integration
Text becomes propositions, then a situation model joined to prior knowledge. Parsers do the first half for machines.
wiki: Walter KintschThe testing effect
Retrieval practice beats rereading for long-term memory, which is why the curriculum asks before it tells.
wiki: testing effectA bounded working memory
People hold a few chunks at once; good design spends them carefully. See performance for the machine version of a budget.
wiki: working memoryWhere I trained
The Adult Learning Lab at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois.
adult learning labParallel and Competing Theories
Older theories of learning from China and Ghana, arrived at in parallel, that the laboratory results keep confirming.
Learning and thinking
Analects 2.15: learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. Construction without integration, and the reverse.
wiki: AnalectsSankofa
An Akan principle from Ghana, often drawn as a bird reaching back: go back and fetch what was left behind. Retrieval, as a cultural practice.
wiki: Sankofa