Student Cognition and Metacognition in the Classroom

How do students’ study habits affect their exam performance?

(Introductory biology and Introductory psychology at Washington University in St. Louis: Current researchers: Washington University in St. Louis includes Elise Walck-Shannon (biology) and Shaina Rowell (psychology))

How students study for exams affect their performance on exams and in the class in general. However, we often depend on students to study effectively without explicit instruction. There is a considerable evidence from psychology research that shows students learn more if they use certain study strategies. Using the “desirable difficulties” framework (Bjork, 1994), strategies can be separated into strategies that feel more difficult during study but lead to better long-term learning (i.e., “active”) and strategies that feel easier during study but lead to worse long-term learning (i.e., “passive”). In Introductory Biology and Introductory Psychology, we are examining students’ self-reported study habits and the effect these habits have on exam performance, after controlling for potential confounds, such as academic preparation, self-reported class absences, and self-reported total study time.

This is the first step in a project implementing an exam wrapper, which an exercise where students reflect on their study habits and make plans for how to change them. We are implementing randomized control studies of the effectiveness of exam wrappers to change student study habits and improve student exam performance in a large introductory biology course and a large introductory psychology course.

The effect of students’ concept-building approaches on their exam performance and problem-solving behaviors

(General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry: Current researchers: Washington University in St. Louis includes Mark McDaniel and Mike Cahill (psychology and CIRCLE))

We showed that students’ concept-building approaches, identified a priori using a cognitive psychology laboratory task, extend to learning complex STEM topics. Our prior studies examined student performance in both general and organic chemistry, after accounting for preparation. We found that abstraction learners (defined cognitively as learning the theory underlying related examples) performed higher on course exams than exemplar learners (defined cognitively as learning by memorizing examples). We are extending our project, via think-aloud interviews, to probe the effect these concept-building approaches have on problem-solving behaviors (specifically on average-exam-performing students).