Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice

The primary goal of this research, which is funded by the James S. McDonnell foundation, is to promote learning and memory performance within educational contexts through the investigation of principles in cognitive psychology. Studies address issues of transfer-appropriate and material-appropriate processing between encoding and retrieval. Applying tests in order to enhance learning and determining the desirable amount and timing of feedback regarding an individual's memory performance are methods that are currently under investigation.

The overlying theme of "desirable difficulties," first introduced by Robert Bjork (1994), is also explored through manipulations in the spacing of learning events and the study schedule produced by interleaving various to-be-learned items, such as English-Swahili translated word pairs or prose materials. Interleaving occurs when a to-be-learned target item is initially presented and followed by different to-be-learned items prior to the target's subsequent presentations. An interleaving schedule used during the presentation of a painting matched with the name of the artist has been shown to lead to better performance on later recognition tests when compared with a massing presentation schedule in which each painting and artist name was presented back-to-back, with one presentation immediately followed by the next presentation of a different painting by the same artist (Kornell & Bjork, 2008).

Studies have also looked at the effectiveness of similar choices used in multiple choice tests for future test performance as well as the act of generating items when they are presented with missing letters. Additional research is targeted towards understanding the role of an individual preparing to teach on that individual's subsequent learning and test performance.

This line of work is also directed toward understanding the mechanisms behind metacognitive awareness of learning. Most people are inaccurate in measuring their own knowledge, through judgments of learning, because they mistakenly rely on the immediate access to knowledge in order to determine the long-term memory retention and the transfer of such knowledge to different contexts. The goal of these studies is to determine the type of instructions and study conditions that will foster accurate judgments of learning, which can lead to better predictions of future performance and optimal self-initiated study practices.

Goal-Directed Forgetting in Human Memory

The main questions of this area of research pertain to what happens to irrelevant and distracting items that compete during the memory retrieval of target information. These studies investigate the conditions under which inhibitory processes may suppress unwanted and out-dated items in memory in order to adaptively keep memory up-to-date and resolve competition during retrieval. Investigations designed to better understand the dynamics of retrieval-induced forgetting have revealed that intentionally remembered items are more susceptible to suppression and later forgetting, as revealed in a delayed cued recall test, when they compete with the retrieval of semantically related items when compared with intentionally forgotten items (Storm, Bjork & Bjork, 2007). Storm, Bjork and Bjork (2008) have recently found that those items which fall prey to retrieval-induced forgetting benefit significantly more from relearning as evidenced in final cued-recall performance when compared with items that do not suffer from retrieval-induced forgetting. These inhibitory processes appear to be beneficial to the present retrieval demands in allowing memory access to specific, relevant information without exhibiting detrimental effects for later recall of the unnecessary and irrelevant information.