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Understanding the impact of attendance and participation on academic achievement

Our paper on the impact of attendance and participation on academic achievement is now available online! Here is a pre-formatted version of the paper.

In this study, we provide evidence demonstrating that it is not enough for students to be physically present in class to do well in a course – students’ engagement in class, not attendance, is predictive of their achievement in the course.

Thanks to all my co-authors – Sharry Shakory, Arman Azad, Celia Popovic and Lillian Park – for a great collaboration!

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Cognition and Education

I just received my copy of “The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education” – looking forward to reading it cover to cover! I’m honoured to be a contributor, among many scholars I look up to.

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Our ‘Statistics for SoTL’ course is now accredited by the EDC!

I had the privilege of working with Dr. Natasha May (Educational Developer at the Teaching Commons, York University) to co-create and co-facilitate a course for graduate students on providing statistical support for SoTL researchers.

Our course is now accredited by the Educational Developers Caucus (EDC), which is a huge win! Many thanks to Natasha for being such a fantastic partner throughout this whole process!

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The spacing effect stands up to big data

Our new paper, “The spacing effect stands up to big data”, is now accessible here. We analyzed longitudinal data from 10,514 individuals, collected in the context of naturally occurring workplace training. Our results revealed a significant interaction between spacing interval and retention interval: the optimal amount of spacing between repeated retrieval events increased as the retention interval increased. These findings are in line with the results of laboratory studies, demonstrating the relevance and transferability of laboratory-based research to real-world contexts.

A big thank you to my co-authors for their contributions to the study, as well as Carol Leaman and the entire Axonify team for such a great, ongoing collaboration.

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Using lego in the classroom: making implicit ideas explicit

This morning I gave a guest lecture for my colleague from Engineering at York University, Jeff Harris, focused on cognitive learning strategies discussed by Weinstein, Madan, & Sumeracki (2018) – a reading that students were assigned to read before class. In class, I challenged students to build lego representations of these strategies. The purpose of this creative lego activity was to deepen students’ understanding of these strategies by making their implicit ideas about them explicit. Here’s a sample of what they came up with!

  • Interleaving
  • Retrieval Practice
  • Elaboration
  • Distributed (Spaced) Practice
  • Concrete Examples

The activity sparked interesting discussions, and helped students identify what aspects of the assigned reading material they needed to review and/or clarify. It is definitely a teaching exercise that I will use again in the future.

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STLHE 2018 cracker barrel session on supporting SoTL researchers

We had a great turnout yesterday, and very insightful discussions on how to support SoTL researchers, at our cracker barrel session: “Insights into how to best support scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) researchers //Aperçu de la façon de mieux soutenir les chercheurs du SoTL.” If you couldn’t make it to our session, attached is our handout.

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Associative Agnosia Video

I teach a third year course at York University that surveys different aspects of cognition, including, for example, perception, attention, memory, decision making, and language. Teaching the course often brings me outside my research area, and I really enjoy covering the different topics and discussing them with students. Last week we covered perception. While preparing for my lecture I found this great YouTube video of a patient with associative agnosia.

Patients with associative agnosia can copy drawings and match objects, but they cannot identify objects through vision – the video demonstrates this very well. Patients with visual agnosias, in general, are impaired in their ability to interpret visual information. Importantly, however, for these patients vision is not a problem, it is really a matter of interpreting visual information. If you know of any other good videos for teaching cognition, please let me know!