Educational Psychology
97 flashcards by MentisLibrary
How learning actually works: cognitive load, working memory limits, retrieval practice, spacing, and motivation theory. Includes the famous claims that failed to replicate, from learning styles to ego depletion.
- What is educational psychology?
- The study of how people learn in instructional settings, covering cognition, motivation, development, and assessment.
- What is behaviorism as a learning theory?
- The view that learning is a change in observable behavior produced by environmental consequences, with no need to appeal to internal mental states.
- What is classical conditioning?
- Learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to trigger a response after being paired with a stimulus that already produces it.
- What is operant conditioning?
- Learning in which the consequences of a behavior change how often that behavior occurs.
- What is the difference between positive and negative reinforcement?
- Positive reinforcement adds something to increase a behavior; negative reinforcement removes something aversive to increase a behavior. Both increase behavior.
- What is shaping in operant conditioning?
- Reinforcing successive approximations of a target behavior until the full behavior appears.
- What is a schedule of reinforcement?
- The rule determining which instances of a behavior are reinforced, such as fixed ratio, variable ratio, fixed interval, or variable interval.
- What is social learning theory?
- The view that people learn by observing others and the consequences those others receive, without needing to perform the behavior themselves.
- What did the Bobo doll experiments show?
- Children who watched an adult behave aggressively toward an inflatable doll were more likely to imitate that aggression.
- What is self-efficacy?
- A person's belief in their capability to succeed at a specific task.
- What are the four sources of self-efficacy?
- Mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological or emotional states.
- What is constructivism in learning theory?
- The view that learners actively build understanding by connecting new information to existing knowledge rather than receiving it intact.
- What is social constructivism?
- The view that knowledge is built through social interaction and language before it is internalized by the individual.
- What is the zone of proximal development?
- The distance between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with support from a more capable partner.
- What is cognitivism in learning theory?
- The view that learning involves internal processes such as attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval, which can be studied scientifically.
- What is the information processing model of memory?
- A model treating memory as sensory register, short-term or working memory, and long-term memory, with attention and rehearsal moving information between them.
- What is working memory?
- The limited-capacity system that holds and manipulates information currently in use.
- Roughly how much can working memory hold?
- Very little: classic estimates were about seven items, later work suggests around four chunks for novel material.
- What is chunking in memory?
- Grouping items into larger meaningful units so more information fits within working memory limits.
- What is long-term memory?
- The effectively unlimited store of knowledge and skills that persists over time and must be retrieved into working memory to be used.
- What is cognitive load theory?
- The theory that instruction should be designed around the narrow limits of working memory, because overload prevents learning.
- What are the types of cognitive load?
- Intrinsic load from the material's inherent difficulty, extraneous load from how it is presented, and germane load, the effort devoted to building schemas.
- What is the split-attention effect?
- Learning suffers when related information is separated in space or time and must be mentally integrated.
- What is the redundancy effect?
- Presenting the same information in two forms at once, such as reading slide text aloud verbatim, harms learning.
- What is the modality effect?
- Learning improves when information is split across visual and auditory channels rather than loading one channel alone.
- What is a schema?
- An organized knowledge structure that lets a person treat many related elements as one unit.
- What is the testing effect, or retrieval practice?
- Retrieving information from memory strengthens later retention more than rereading the same material for the same amount of time.
- Why do students underrate retrieval practice?
- Rereading feels fluent and easy while retrieval feels effortful, so learners judge the less effective method as more effective.
- What is the spacing effect?
- Study sessions separated in time produce better long-term retention than the same total time massed together.
- Who first plotted the forgetting curve?
- Hermann Ebbinghaus, using nonsense syllables he learned and retested on himself.