Psychology researchers have long attempted to identify educational practices that improve student learning. However, experimental research on these practices is often conducted in laboratory contexts or in a single course, which threatens the external validity of the results. In this article, we establish an experimental paradigm for evaluating the benefits of recommended practices across a variety of authentic educational contexts—a model we call ManyClasses . The core feature is that researchers examine the same research question and measure the same experimental effect across many classes spanning a range of topics, institutions, teacher implementations, and student populations. We report the first ManyClasses study, in which we examined how the timing of feedback on class assignments, either immediate or delayed by a few days, affected subsequent performance on class assessments. Across 38 classes, the overall estimate for the effect of feedback timing was 0.002 (95% highest density interval = [−0.05, 0.05]), which indicates that there was no effect of immediate feedback compared with delayed feedback on student learning that generalizes across classes. Furthermore, there were no credibly nonzero effects for 40 preregistered moderators related to class-level and student-level characteristics. Yet our results provide hints that in certain kinds of classes, which were undersampled in the current study, there may be modest advantages for delayed feedback. More broadly, these findings provide insights regarding the feasibility of conducting within-class randomized experiments across a range of naturally occurring learning environments.

The current study investigated whether collaborative quizzing impacted quiz performance, overall grades, exam grades, pass/fail rates, and attendance in upper-level psychology courses. Students enrolled in two sections of upper-level psychology courses completed collaborative quizzes, whereas students enrolled in two noncollaborative sections completed quizzes individually. Students enrolled in the collaborative classes maintained quiz performance from beginning to end of the semester, whereas students enrolled in the noncollaborative classes demonstrated a general decline in quiz grades. There was also a slight increase in overall course grades for students enrolled in collaborative compared to noncollaborative classes; however, there was no difference in exam grades, pass/fail rates, and attendance between the collaborative and noncollaborative classes. Collaborative quizzes may encourage a deeper understanding of course material and/or encourage students to come prepared for the group quiz activities.

AimsSpeed reading is advertised as a way to increase reading speed without any loss in comprehension. However, research on speed reading has indicated that comprehension suffers as reading speed increases. We were specifically interested in how processes of inference generation were affected by speed reading.MethodsWe examined how reading speed influenced inference generation in typical readers, trained speed readers and participants trained to skim read passages. Passages either strongly or weakly promoted a bridging or predictive inference. After reading, participants performed a lexical decision task on either a nonword, neutral or inference‐related word.ResultsTypical readers responded to strong and weak inference words faster than neutral words. There were no statistical differences in reaction time between inference‐related and neutral words for speed and skim readers.ConclusionsThese findings provide no substantive evidence that the appropriate inferences are generated when reading at rapid speeds. Thus, speed reading may be detrimental to normal integrative comprehension processes.

The current experiments systematically examined semantic content integration as a mechanism for explaining source inattention and forgetting when reading-to-remember multiple texts. For all 3 experiments, degree of semantic overlap was manipulated amongst messages provided by various information sources. In Experiment 1, readers’ source recognition was significantly poorer when the sources presented semantically-congruent compared to semantically-distinct messages. Experiment 2 replicated the findings, despite half of the participants receiving a pre-reading warning. Experiment 3 extended the examination to include longer argument-based texts; readers additionally wrote a comprehensive essay on the topic. The results indicated longer reading times and better recall memory for the claims and evidence statements from semantically-congruent compared to semantically-distinct texts, while still reproducing the poorer source recognition effects of Experiments 1 and 2. We discuss implications for contemporary accounts of multiple text comprehension as well as directions for future research.

We examined how writing cover letters to the instructor influenced final papers in research methods courses. After receiving instructor feedback on drafts of each section of an American Psychological Association style research paper throughout the semester, students in two classes wrote cover letters to the instructor explaining how the instructor feedback was incorporated into their final paper. Students in the two control classes received the same type of feedback throughout the semester but were not required to write cover letters. Students enrolled in the cover letter classes showed more improvement in the quality of their papers than the students in the control classes. Using cover letters to articulate how feedback is being incorporated may help students more efficiently organize and respond to instructor feedback. Future researchers might investigate whether students’ reflective ability is a significant moderator in effective feedback utilization.

The present research investigated whether real-world application exercises promoted students’ abilities to spontaneously transfer statistical knowledge and to recognize the use of statistics in real-world contexts. Over the course of a semester of psychological statistics, two classes completed multiple application exercises designed to mimic real-world contexts; three control classes did not complete the exercises. At the end of the semester, all classes completed questions to assess transfer of statistical knowledge and answered a question that addressed how statistics apply to their everyday lives. Results indicated that students who previously participated in the application exercise activities displayed a greater usage of statistical knowledge when answering far-transfer questions and mentioned real-world applications of statistics more often compared to control students. We discuss the implications of transfer-promoting interventions in equipping students with statistical knowledge that they can flexibly apply in more real-world situations.

In the present experiments, we explored the relationship between individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity and susceptibility to false recognitions and their accompanying subjective experiences. Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) associative lists were used to elicit false memories, and remember/know judgments were used to measure the recollective experiences accompanying recognition decisions. We found that WM capacity was related to false recognitions of nonpresented critical lures and to the proportion of remember responses given to critical lures, such that higher WM capacity was associated with lower false-recognition rates and with lower proportions of remember responses. Importantly, these WM differences were only found when participants were forewarned about the nature of the DRM task prior to encoding (Exp. 1). When the forewarning was absent, WM capacity was not related to false recognitions or to the proportion of remember responses given to critical lures (Exp. 2). These results support the controlled-attention view of WM and suggest that subjective experiences of falsely recognized lures fluctuate as a function of WM capacity.

Researchers have manipulated text comprehension by creating texts that require a title to be understood, but the source of the comprehension deficit has not been fully examined. We created comprehension quizzes for these texts that measure the surface form, textbase, and situation model. In three experiments, participants read passages with or without a title and then answered quiz questions. Results showed that the absence of a title influenced the accuracy rate of answering situation model questions more than answering surface form or textbase questions. This suggests that the situation model is the primary source of difficulty for these texts. These passages and quizzes can be used in future research that requires controlled manipulation and measurement of situation level comprehension.