Distance education in its contemporary forms invariably presents administrative, technical, and legal problems usually not encountered in traditional classroom settings.

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.

The ideas of "going away" to college and of living on campus are valorized in the academic literature (and upper middle-class culture) as important for separating from parents, developing independence, and broadening social networks. It is important for students to move away to grow up.

There is little consideration of what is lost by not selecting locally. Apart from losing high-quality people who are unwilling to leave their communities, we see three losses: (a) a sense of social responsibility and depth of commitment to parts of the local community; (b) a sense of respect for and understanding of the community's resources and cultural assets that could be tapped into (see Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005, on "funds of knowledge"); and (c) a connection to the community that facilitates working with it

Whether in their linguistic capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Ogbu 1978), and/or in their cultural, social, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1988), academics must distance themselves from other groups. That is part of their distinction as academics, as professionals.

Given an academy that does not reward community service (Blackburn & Lawrence, 1995), the advice to new professors, especially to women and those of color, is to not get drawn into such activity (Johnsrud & Des Jarlais, 1994; Tierney & Bensimon, 1996) for it distracts from time that could be spent doing research and developing professional networks. The advice is more about how to "make it" than how to remake it.

Three kinds of goals of multimedia instruction design are to minimize extraneous cognitive processing during learning (i.e., cognitive processing that does not serve the instructional goal), to manage essential processing during learning (i.e., cognitive processing needed to mentally represent the essential material), and to foster generative processing during learning (i.e., cognitive processing aimed at making sense of the material)

Three major principles for a cognitive theory of multimedia learning are that learners have separate information processing channels for verbal and visual material (i.e., dual channel principle), that learners can engage in only a small amount of processing in each channel at any one time (i.e., limited capacity principle), and that meaningful learning depends on the learner’s cognitive processing during learning (i.e., active processing principle)

The science of multimedia learning is concerned with developing a research-based theory of how people learn from words and pictures.

The science of multimedia instruction is concerned with developing design principles for multimedia instruction that are consistent with research evidence and grounded in cognitive theory.

the elaboration principle is that people learn better when they outline, summarize, or otherwise elaborate on the presented material

The questioning principle is that people learn better when they must ask and answer deep questions during learning

The guided discovery principle is that people learn better when they are allowed to solve problems while receiving appropriate guidance

The worked-example principle is that people learn better when they are shown a step-by-step example of how to solve a problem, with commentary

The self-explanation principle is that people learn better when they are prompted to explain lesson elements during learning

The testing principle is that people learn better when they take a practice test on the material have studied

The anchoring principle is that people learn better when material is presented in the context of a familiar situation,

Research on concrete advance organizers provides encouraging evidence that students learn more deeply from a text lesson when it is preceded with a familiar concrete model or analogy (Mayer, 2008).

The concretizing principle is that people learn better when unfamiliar material is presented in a way that relates it with the learner’s familiar knowledge, such as using concrete examples and analogies.

some other candidates for fostering generative processing—also relevant to non-multimedia environments (Mayer, 2011)—are the concretizing principle, the anchoring principle, the testing principle, the self-explanation principle, the worked-out example principle, the guided discovery principle, the questioning principle, and the elaboration principle

The rationale is that an instructor using a human voice is more readily accepted as a social partner (Nass & Brave, 2005), thereby fostering deeper cognitive processing during learning.

lecture on learning principles

The rationale is that people try harder to make sense of the presented material (i.e., engage in the cognitive processes of organizing and integrating) when they feel they are in a social partnership with the instructor.

three principles for fostering generative processing—multimedia, personalization, and voice

The modality principle is that people learn better from a multimedia lesson when words are spoken rather than printed

Concerning boundary conditions, preliminary evidence suggests that the effects of pretraining may be strongest for low knowledge learners (Clarke et al., 2005; Pollock et al., 2002).

For example, Mayer and Chandler (2001) found that compared to viewing a continuous 2.5 min narrated animation on lightning formation, students performed better on a transfer test after viewing a narrated animation on lightning formation that paused after each of 16 segments until the learner clicked a “Continue” button. Similarly, compared to viewing continuous narrated animation on how an electric motor works, students performed better on a transfer test in two experiments if they could see the presentation broken into five segments, each started by the learner’s mouse click (Mayer et al., 2003). Overall, across three experiments conducted in our lab, the median effect size across these three experiments was d  =  0.98, favoring the segmented group over the continuous group.

three principles for managing essential processing—segmenting, pretraining, and modality principles

students who received a narrated animation (or narrated slideshow) performed better on a transfer posttest than students who received the identical presentation with on-screen text added as captions. The median effect size was d  =  0.72.

Overall, there is strong and consistent evidence for the coherence principle based on well-controlled laboratory studies

in a replication involving a text lesson on lightning formation, Lehman, Schraw, McCrudden, and Hartley (2007) found that adding interesting but extraneous sentences about lightning throughout a lesson resulted in significantly less learning (d  =  0.88) based on deep processing measures such as a holistic understanding score for student essays

The median effect size was d  =  1.66, which is large effect

six principles for reducing extraneous processing—coherence, signaling, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity, redundancy, and expectation principles

In the generative underuse situation (shown in the bottom of Fig. 31.4), extraneous load has been eliminated and essential load has been managed so the learner has cognitive capacity to engage in generative processing but chooses not to do so. In this case, an important instructional goal is to foster generative processing by designing instruction in ways that encourage the learner to engage in deeper processing (e.g., organizing and integrating) during learning.

When an instructional scenario creates excessive extraneous cognitive processing, an important instructional goal is to design the lessons in ways that reduce extraneous processing.

Drawing on Sweller’s (1999, 2005; Brunken, Plass, & Moreno, 2010) cognitive load theory and Mayer’s (2009; Mayer & Moreno, 2003) cognitive theory of multimedia learning, Table 31.1 lists three kinds of demands on the learner’s cognitive processing capacity during learning.

Dual channels—people have separate channels for processing verbal and pictorial material (Paivio, 1986, 2001) Limited capacity—people can process only a few pieces of information in each channel at any one time (Baddeley, 1986, 1999; Sweller, 1999) Active processing—meaningful learning occurs when people engage in appropriate cognitive processing during learning, including attending to the relevant information, mentally organizing it into coherent structures, and integrating it with other structures and with knowledge activated from long term memory (Mayer, 2009; Mayer & Wittrock, 2006; Wittrock, 1989)

The science of learning is the scientific study of how people learn, that is, how the learner’s experience causes a change in the learner’s knowledge (Mayer, 2008, 2011)

Historical Overview of Multimedia Instruction

Levin, Anglin, and Carney (1987) reported a large effect size when the illustrations were designed to promote deep cognitive processing (with effect sizes greater than d  =  0.50) but not when they served mainly to decorate the page (with effect sizes below d  =  0.00).

people can learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone—a finding that has been called the multimedia principle

Multimedia instruction is instruction that includes words (e.g., printed or spoken text) and pictures (i.e., static graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, charts, maps, and photos, or dynamic graphics such as animation and video).

Researchers doing such work should focus on developmental and contextual influences on the sources of information individuals of different ages use, the processes by which they form their ASCs and STVs, and the nature of the specific hierarchies of ASCs and STVs being activated for any specific achievement-related choice. Interviews and other methodologies to examine process rather than relations of constructs to outcomes should be used. These include the use of more implicit and projective measures, the use of more time intense ESM and diary methods, the use of more physiological measures, and the more use of intense observation.

about information used and processes involved in the development of children’s STVs

utility value as the aspect of task value

We also suggest that individuals’ relative weighting of the various components of STV and the impact of situational demands and characteristics on them will increase with increasing social and cognitive maturity.

change over time in children’s ASCs and STVs

(1) Effort cost – the perception of how much effort would need to be exerted to complete a task and whether it is worth doing so; (2) Opportunity cost- the extent to which doing one task takes away from one’s ability or time to do other valued tasks; and (3) Emotional cost -the emotional or psychological costs of pursuing the task, particularly anticipated anxiety and the emotional and social costs of failure

3.2.3. Attainment STV

perceptions of task difficulty

Fourth, we shift to the left side of the model focused more on the world in which individuals mature, their own relatively more stable characteristics, and their own history of experiences that we hypothesize lay the social and experiential background for the ontogeny of within- and between-person differences in the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of rest of the model.

Research has demonstrated that the time required for trainees to process training materials typically increases with advancing age (Kubeck et al., 1996).

some learners will benefit from error management instructions even in highly structured training

resource allocation theory, which states that performance on tasks is dependent on the attentional resources available, the degree of self‐regulation during task engagement, and task complexity (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989),

the higher older participants were in cognitive ability the better their performance with the error management instructions

low structure + error management instructions condition was superior overall

This suggests that the error management instructional manipulation was effective but mainly in the low structure condition, when people could actually make errors during practice.

This suggests that metacognitive skill and confidence in knowledge decline with age

The cognitive abilities that are implicated in learning—such as general reasoning ability, working memory capacity, and processing speed—peak in late adolescence/early adulthood (i.e., the college years, where most research efforts are focused) and decline with age (Cattell, 1987).

self‐regulatory processes, cognitive ability, and the effect of structure and instruction in active learning

We did not include the low structure + no instruction condition tested by

given that older learners tend to have greater negative emotional reactions to errors in computer training than younger learners

Results indicated that trainees in the EMT condition outperformed those in the error‐avoidant and error‐training conditions

Self‐regulatory processes help sustain focused attention on performance through self‐monitoring and self‐reactions during task execution

Resource allocation theory posits that individuals possess limited cognitive resources that can be directed to meet the attentional demands of one or more tasks. When learning a complex task, performance is determined by individual differences in attentional resources, the attentional requirements of the task, and the self‐regulatory processes used to allocate attention across tasks (Kanfer, Ackerman, Murtha, Dugdale, & Nelson, 1994)

Over half of working adults in the United States will be over the age of 40 by the year 2012

Active learning approaches are more beneficial than passive strategies (such as classroom/lecture approaches and didactic step‐by‐step approaches) for adaptive transfer (Bell & Kozlowski, 2008; Keith & Frese, 2008).

Research has demonstrated the efficacy of active learning approaches that encourage exploration and emphasize the learner's responsibility in their own development

Changes in self‐regulatory skills such as the ability to monitor and manage one's performance are also likely to occur with age,

abilities that are implicated in learning, such as working memory, typically decline over the lifespan, whereas levels of experience‐based knowledge typically increase or remain stable

research shows that older adults typically take longer and learn less in training than younger adults

The aging of the global labor force necessitates a focus on how to train and retrain workers over the age of 40

We find that multiple instructional methods facilitate learningamong this group; however, self paced training makes the largest positive impact on trainingperformance among older learners

Training that occurred insmaller groups or training that enabled learners to progress at their own pace was associatedwith higher levels of observed training performance relative to training occurred in largegroups or training that was paced

the lecture method may prove useful under certain conditions: (1) if the older learnerperceives the content as relevant, (2) the content builds on their current knowledge base,and (3) the information is presented in a logical sequence (Knowles, 1990; Tough, 1979).

Research has shown that attentional deficits re-sult in inadequate registration of instructional materials

The decrement is slight for simple tasks but increases monotoni-cally as task complexity increases

cognitive response times slow with age

These projections indicate that a great many people will work past

Because of the variability in learning contexts, there is a need for methods to determine whether a technology is well suited to the ecological learning niche in which it may be used.

An immedi-ate goal of such research should be to identify promising interventions and determine their potential efficacy and generalizability. Researchers examining the determinants of learning and development through the life span should look beyond prior achievement and also examine ability, attitude, motivation, and self-regulatory processes for all learners

Results from such studies could elucidate whether self-regulation is a skill that is fundamental to academic and life success, whether the develop-ment of self-regulation can be sustained over time, and at what developmen-tal time period(s) practitioners might most effectively target self-regulation interventions.

“to learn” is an active verb naming a dynamic process through which humans continuously adapt, through conscious and unconscious physiological and cognitive responses, to the unique circumstances and experiences they encounter.

People continue to learn and grow through-out the life span, and their choices, motivation, and capacity for self-regulation, as well as their circumstances, influence how much and how well they learn and transfer their learn-ing to new situations.

Both reasoning and knowledge increase up to early adulthood, when their paths begin to diverge: abilities to quickly generate, transform, and manipulate factual information begin to decline, while knowledge levels remain stable or increase

Most research in this area has focused on K-12 students.

most workers can expect to have multiple jobs and even several careers, pursued at many organizations, over the course of their working life.

research does indicate that older adults can learn in training environments if that environment is designed to meet the individual needs of learners (Callahan et al., 2003; Charness and Schumann, 1992)

This increased autonomy highlights the importance of inter-est, motivation, and the capacity to monitor and regulate their own progress

the focus is on recognizing and rewarding talent, rather than raising the performance of those who are struggling

some abilities (e.g., binding pieces of information together in memory, the ability to provide specific memories, metamemory during retrieval) show relative decline with aging while others (collaborative memory, emotional and motivated memory, acquisition and maintenance of existing knowledge base) show relative preservation with aging

research points to the value of training for older learners that enhances the learner’s self-efficacy, accommodates age-related differences in cognitive capacities and emotional reactions to feedback, uses content that builds on the trainee’s existing knowledge and skills, and has immediate relevance to the trainee.

Developmental activities that do not provide the learner with a sense of growth and accomplishment are unlikely to be sustained as people age (Carstensen et al., 1999)

as people age and develop expertise in domains associated with their work and other aspects

Because it is a limited resource, it is possible to use up attentional reserves

Capacity models acknowledge individual differences in attentional resources and the ability to allocate these resources between multiple tasks. In addition, and according to the capacity model, some individuals have greater attentional resources than others to begin with (Kane & Engle, 2002).

distraction in its various forms impairs learning and subsequent recall of information

The top of the figure represents posttest scores in the no-distraction condition, and thus the bars reflect the amount of impairment from a student’s normal level of performance. Conversation had the largest negative effect, impairing performance by 30% from baseline, followed by high-arousal video, video game, and texting/social media. Unexpectedly, folding laundry impaired posttest performance by over 20%, which is equivalent to two full letter grades. Least impairing was the low-arousal video, yet this condition still lowered scores by 15%, or one and a half letter grades. These results indicate that the presence of distraction during learning can lower subsequent test scores by multiple letter grades.

Older students tended to do better than younger students in the distraction conditions (r[109] = .21, p = .003). However, there was no significant relationship between age and performance on the baseline posttest (r[109] = .08, p = .24), indicating that age may play specifically a role in the level of impairment caused by distraction during learning

One notable exception to the agreement between objective and subjective measures of learning was the high-arousal video, which was an exciting sword-fighting scene. Although students did not feel distracted by the high-arousal video, their performance was very poor. This indicates that students are unaware of how certain TV programs can capture attention and induce deficits in learning

A few articles construed engagement through its opposite, by operationalizing and measuring disengagement, primarily through off-task behaviors, disruptions, or inactivity (Donovan et al., 2010, Hayden et al., 2011, Rowe et al., 2011). Yet some research has argued that disengagement or disaffection is not merely the bipolar opposite of engagement, but its own unipolar construct (Skinner, Kindermann, & Furrer, 2009).

We defi ne student engagement as a meta-construct that includes behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement

Any transcript is already an abstraction for a particular purpose, and oneof the challenges of any transcription procedure is determining what levelof detail should be included in the representation of both talk and actions.The level of detail is usually determined by the purposes of the analysis orthe theoretical assumptions underlying it. In this case, for instance, not ev-ery action is described.

Inspired by Bakhtin’s (1979) concept of polyphony and a microgeneticapproach to the development of activity (Rowe & Wertsch, 2002; Vygotsky,1978), and to capture the relationships among actions and talk carried outby multiple agents as they develop over the course of an activity, I have usedthe musical score as the model for constructing the transcripts

We can see texts as shaped by two sets of causal powers and bythe tension between them: on the one hand, social structures and socialpractices; and on the other hand, the agency of people involved in theevents of which they are a part

When text is not critically analyzed, oppressive discursive practices, such as marginalization and oppression, are taken as accepted norms

Discourse (the words and language we use) shapes our role and engagement with power within a social structure. CDA emphasizes when looking at discourse three levels of analysis: the text, the discursive practice, and the sociocultural practice. The text is a record of a communicated event that reproduces social power. Discursive practices are ways of being in the world that signify accepted social roles and identities. Finally, the sociocultural comprises the distinct context [Page 370]where discourse occurs.

As we wrote at the beginning of this article, the purpose of this special issue was to explore the possibilities of using concept as method in educational and social science inquiry. In short, we asked authors to begin inquiry with a concept instead of a preexisting methodology with a predetermined process in which the researcher identifies a problem, conducts a literature review, designs a study using existing research designs (e.g., in qualitative research—case study, ethnography, grounded theory), collects data, analyzes data, and writes it up. The researcher using a concept would not necessarily use conventional methods of “data collection” (e.g., interviewing, observation, survey) or methods of “data analysis” (e.g., grounded theory analysis, thematic analysis, coding, statistical analysis). Instead, the concept would orient her thinking and her practices, which might or might not include conventional practices.

Distance learning has been defined as “planned learning that normally occurs in a different place from teaching and as a result requires special tech-niques of course design, special instructional techniques, special methods of communication by electronic and other technology, as well as special organi-zational and administrative arrangements” (Moore and Kearsley, 1996, p. 2).

Embodied cognition is the idea that cognition is shaped by every aspect of an organism’s experience, including the bodily system and ways the body interacts with its environment (see Yannier et al., 2016).

Key Affordances of Learning Technologies

An affordance has been defined as a feature or property of an object that makes possible a particular way of relating to the object for the person who

Researchers in the field use the term affordances to refer to oppor-tunities that a technology makes possible related to learning and instruction (Collins et al., 2000)

Purposefully teaching the language and practices specific to particular disciplines, such as science, his-tory, and mathematics, is critical to helping students develop deep understanding in these subjects

Effective instruction depends on understand-ing the complex interplay among learners’ prior knowledge, experiences, motivations, interests, and language and cognitive skills; educators’ own experiences and cultural influences; and the cultural, social, cognitive, and emotional characteristics of the learning environment.

“a model of student cognition and learning in the domain, a set of beliefs about the kinds of observations that will provide evidence of students’ competencies, and an interpretation process for making sense of the evidence” (National Research Council, 2001, p. 44)

Effec-tive formative assessment articulates the learning targets, provides feedback to teachers and students about where they are in relation to those targets, and prompts adjustments to instruction by teachers, as well as changes to learn-ing processes and revision of work products by students (Andrade, 2016).

teachers can guide learners in developing sound academic habits by offering rewards, that effective feedback targets the specific stage a learner has reached and offers guidance the learner can immediately apply, and that helping learners establish connections with knowledge they already have assists them in learning new material. We noted that when learners are guided in constructing conceptual models for themselves, such models are par-ticularly useful in helping them understand and organize what they are learning

These accounts of disciplinary learning are informed by insights from the learning sciences that becoming more proficient in a domain is not simply a matter of acquiring knowledge. Rather, learning in a content area involves a process of engaging in disciplinary practices that require learners to use knowledge in the context of discipline-specific activities and tasks

Stereotype threat is believed to undermine performance by lowering executive functioning and heightening anxiety and worry about what others will think if the individual fails, which robs the person of working memory resources.

Steele has noted that stereotype threat is most likely in areas of performance in which individuals are particularly motivated

This integration often means tak-ing on the particular knowledge, goals, and practices valued by that group (Nasir, 2002

Social dimensions of identity are linked to social roles or characteristics that make one recogniz-able as a member of a group, such as being a woman or a Christian (Tajfel and Turner, 1979).

priming learners to adopt a multicultural mindset may support more-divergent think-ing about multiple possible goals related to achievement, family, identity, and

performance goals tend to support better im-mediate retrieval of information, while mastery goals tend to support better long-term retention

learners who strongly endorse mas-tery goals tend to enjoy novel and challenging tasks (Pintrich, 2000; Shim et al., 2008; Witkow and Fuligni, 2007; Wolters, 2004), demonstrate a greater willingness to expend effort, and engage higher-order cognitive skills during learning (Ames, 1992; Dweck and Leggett, 1988; Kahraman and Sungur, 2011; Middleton and Midgley, 1997). Mastery students are also persistent—even in the face of failure—and frequently use failure as an opportunity to seek feedback and improve subsequent performance

in some circumstances external rewards such as praise or prizes can help to encourage engagement and persistence, and they may not harm intrinsic motivation over the long term, provided that the extrinsic reward does not undermine the individual’s sense of autonomy and control over her behavior

Self-determination theory posits that behavior is strongly influenced by three universal, innate, psychological needs—autonomy (the urge to control one’s own life), competence (the urge to experience mastery), and psycho-logical relatedness (the urge to interact with, be connected to, and care for others).

five characteristics of informational texts were associated with both interest and better recall: (1) the information was important, new, and valued; (2) the information was unexpected; (3) the text supported readers in making connections with prior knowledge or experience; (4) the text contained imagery and descriptive language; and (5) the author attempted to relate information to readers’ background knowledge using, for example, comparisons and analogies (Wade et al., 1999)

some studies have suggested that task valuation seems to be the strongest predictor of behaviors associated with motivation, such as choosing topics and making decisions about partici-pation in training

(1) whether a topic or task is useful for achieving learning or life goals, (2) the importance of a topic or task to the learner’s identity or sense of self, (3) whether a task is enjoyable or interesting, and (4) whether a task is worth pursuing (Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield and Eccles, 2000)

Another important aspect of self-attribution involves beliefs about whether one belongs in a particular learning situation

improve self-efficacy for learning

Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1977), which is incorporated into several models of motivation and learning, posits that the perceptions learners have about their competency or capabilities are critical to accomplishing a task or attaining other goals (Bandura, 1977).

motivational systems perspective, viewing motivation as a set of psychological mechanisms and processes, such as those related to setting goals, engagement in learning, and use of self-regulatory strategies

mindset: the set of assump-tions, values, and beliefs about oneself and the world that influence how one perceives, interprets, and acts upon one’s environment (Dweck, 1999).

less likely to seek challenges and persist than those who focus on learning itself.• Learners who focus on learning rather than performance or who have intrinsic motivation to learn tend to set goals for themselves and regard increasing their competence to be a goal. • Teachers can be effective in encouraging students to focus on learning instead of performance, helping them to develop a learning orientation.

People are motivated to develop competence and solve problems by rewards and punishments but often have intrinsic reasons for learning that may be more powerful. • Learners tend to persist in learning when they face a manageable chal-lenge (neither too easy nor too frustrating) and when they see the value and utility of what they are learning.• Children and adults who focus mainly on their own performance (such as on gaining recognition or avoiding negative judgments) are

Motivation is a condition that activates and sustains behavior toward a goal

Learners routinely generate their own novel understanding of the information they are accumulating and productively extend their knowledge by making logical connections between pieces of information

prior knowledge can also lead to bias by causing people to not attend to new information and to rely on existing schema to solve new problems.

The tendency to prefer simple, broad explanations over more complex ones may affect what people learn and the inferences they draw.

Students who prepared to teach others performed better on the assessment than students who simply read and studied the material.

prior knowledge moderated the effectiveness of self-explanation and that the more prior knowledge of chemistry the students reported having, the more self-explanation appeared to help them learn

Self-explanationis a strategy in which learners produce explanations of material or of their thought processes while they are reading, answering ques-tions, or solving problems.

elaborative interrogation does not come naturally to most children and adults; training people to use this skill—and particularly training in asking deep questions—has been shown to have a positive impact on comprehension, learning, and memory

Elaborative interrogation is a strategy in which learners are asked, or are prompted to ask themselves, questions that invite deep reasoning, such as why, how, what-if, and what-if not (as opposed to shallow questions such as who, what, when, and where) (Gholson et al., 2009).

The authors concluded that the drawing was more effective in this case because the learning involved spatial relations

compare their drawings to author-generated pictures (Van Meter et al., 2006). Similarly, providing learners with a list of relevant elements to be included in drawings and partial drawings helps learners create more complete drawings and bolsters learning (Schwamborn et al., 2010)

To summarize is to create a verbal description that distills the most important information from a set of materials. Similarly, when learners create drawings, they use graphic strategies to portray important concepts and relationships. In both activities, learners must take the material they are learning and transform it into a different representation

a fairly consistent trend in which the development of knowledge remains steady as reasoning capacity (the ability to quickly and accurately manipulate multiple distinct pieces of factual information to make inferences) drops off (Salthouse, 2010).

Reasoning ability is a major determinant of learning throughout life, and it is through reasoning, especially in contexts that allow people to pursue their interests, that people develop knowledge throughout their life span (Ackerman, 1996; Cattell, 1987)

Problem-based learning emphasizes that memories are not simply stored to allow future reminiscing, but are formed so that they can be used, reshaped, and flexibly adapted to serve broad reasoning needs. The goal of problem-based learning is to instill in learners flexible knowledge use, effective problem-solving skills, self-directed learning, collaboration, and intrinsic motivation. These goals are in line with several of the goals identified in other contexts as important for success in life and work (National Research Council, 2012b).

We have seen that building a knowledge base requires doing three things: accumulating information (in part by noticing what matters in a situation and is therefore worth attending to); tagging this information as relevant or not; and integrating it across separate episodes.

these declines are offset by increases in knowledge accumulated through the life span, which empowers new learning

An implication of this ability is that students need to learn to see the relevant information in the environment to help differentiate concepts, such as the differ-ence between a positive and a negative curvilinear slope

A central focus of HPL I was how experts structure their knowledge of a domain in ways that allow them to readily categorize new information and determine its relevance to what they already know. Be-cause novices lack these frameworks, they have more difficulty assimilating and later recalling new information they encounter.

The shift toward gist-based memory with age can lead older adults to be more likely than younger adults to remember the “big picture” or important implications (McGinnis et al., 2008). The shift toward pattern completion also may enable older adults to note connections among events and to integrate across experiences, abilities that often are considered part of the wisdom that is acquired with age

Binding and pattern completion are likely to be part of the explanation for why older adults are more likely than younger adults to retain the “gist” of an event but not its specific details.

Normal aging is accompanied by a gradual decline in episodic memory that begins as early as the twenties and accelerates precipi-tously after the age of 60 (Salthouse, 2009). This decline is associated with degradation in a key aspect of episodic memory: the ability to anchor or bind an event to one’s personal past and to a location (e.g., Fandakova et al., 2014; Wheeler et al., 1997).

An adult’s more mature neural structures and networks manage to retain many more of the features of the original experience.

Working-memory performance declines beginning in middle age (Bopp and Verhaeghen, 2005; Park et al., 2002; Verhaeghen and Salthouse, 1997)

he way a learner will retrieve particular knowledge and skills varies with the cues that trigger the reconstruction; the cues, in turn, are partly dependent on the emotional, social, and cognitive state of the learner at that moment.

When students shifted perspectives, they recalled new information that they had not recalled the first time. Only the retrieval conditions had changed. Students had encoded and stored the same story, but what they recalled depended on the cues to which they were attending.

if a person fails to remember a fact or skill at a particular time, that does not necessarily mean he does not possess the necessary knowledge

or long-term skill development and learning to occur, the distributed pattern of inputs contributing to the current experience (visual, motor, auditory, emotional, etc.) must be consolidated and integrated with stored memory representations from prior experiences.

Retrieval processes are triggered and guided by retrieval cues in the learner’s environ-ment (e.g., prompts, questions, or problems to be solved) or in the learner’s mind (other thoughts or ideas that have some relationship to the memory)

Retrieval refers to the processes involved in reconstructing memories of past experiences.

Over time and with sleep, an encoded memory may be consolidated, a process whereby the neural connections associated with it are strengthened and the memory, or representation of the experience, is stabilized, or stored

“intrinsic” executive control, or a person’s ability to direct herself, change course when needed, and strategize in the absence of explicit rules to follow

Interventions that target social and emotional learning may be beneficial in part because they improve executive function (Riggs et al., 2006)

Self-regulation refers to learning that is focused by means of metacog-nition, strategic action, and motivation to learn.

refers to cognitive and neural pro-cessing that involves the overall regulation of thinking and behavior and the higher-order processes that enable people to plan, sequence, initiate, and sustain their behavior toward some goal, incorporating feedback and making adjustments

Metacognition is the ability to monitor and regulate one’s own cognitive processes and to consciously regulate behavior, including affective behavior

The learner shapes that process through decisions and capacities to orchestrate his learning, but many aspects of learn-ing occur below the level of consciousness.

Ways to do this include providing just-in-time access to critical knowledge, worked-out examples, assistance with hypothesis generation, and advice as needed.

experts may not realize how much of their understanding stems from perceptual learning. As mentioned previously, once one has learned how to see something, it is hard to remember what it looked like when one was a novice. Experts may not realize that novices cannot see what they themselves see because it seems so self-apparent to their perception

it is doing the activity, not being explicitly instructed, that brings the gains

Implicitpattern learning, also called statistical learning, involves the learning of regular patterns in a particular environment without actively intending to do so.

Peer observation is a key source of information about descriptive norms: standards for conduct among socially related people, which are ac-

The researchers found that for modeling to be a successful learning method, learners must not only pay attention to the critical components of the modeled behavior but also ignore irrelevant features of the behavior or skill; they must also be able to remember and replicate what they have observed.

for observational learning has been called “no-trial learning” (Bandura, 1965) because it is even faster than the one-trial learning observed in animals that have a strong built-in tendency to form certain associations

predictable rewards actually reduce the durability of habits. That is, bad habits are often harder to extinguish when they are only intermittently rewarded, and the benefits of good habits may seem unclear when one takes the reward for granted.