The Counterintuitive Science of Learning (Veronica Yan)
- Opening Key Note: February 18; 9:00am to 9:50am
Students’ time and attention is ever more limited. As instructors, we therefore need to design our courses that maximizes the time our students put in. Rooted in cognitive processes that underlie human learning, Dr. Yan’s talk will cover “desirably difficult” strategies that can be implemented into course structures and instruction. These strategies engage learners more effortfully and elaborately in the learning process but require appropriate structuring and motivational messaging by the instructor.
Presenter:
Veronica X. Yan
The University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Veronica X. Yan (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) an associate professor of educational psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research bridges cognitive, social, and educational psychology fields to empower people to be effectively self-regulated learners—to want to not just study harder, but to study smarter. Dr. Yan’s cognitive research explores the cognitive mechanisms that support long-term learning, the strategies that foster these mechanisms (and their boundary conditions). This research reveals that many of the strategies that promote long-lasting learning are counterintuitive and increase the experience of difficulty (e.g., pretesting, interleaving, spacing, retrieval practice). Hence, drawing on metacognitive and social psychology, her work also explores the motivational important for helping learners lean into desirable difficulties in learning.
She has received the Rising Star Award from the Association of Psychological Science, and the J Don Read Early Career Research Award from the Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Yan also conducts professional development workshops for teachers of all education levels, and has spoken on podcasts and written blog posts to share the science of learning with the broader community. Her own educational background has spanned three continents: She studied at an international school in Hong Kong, completed her undergraduate studies in England, (experimental psychology, University of Cambridge), hopped over to California for graduate school (cognitive psychology, UCLA) and postdoctoral training (social psychology, University of Southern California) before landing in Austin, Texas.
Her own educational background has spanned three continents: She studied at an international school in Hong Kong, completed her undergraduate studies in England, (experimental psychology, University of Cambridge), hopped over to California for graduate school (cognitive psychology, UCLA) and postdoctoral training (social psychology, University of Southern California) before landing in Austin, Texas.
Teaching with Instructional Video (Richard Mayer)
- Closing Keynote: February 19 12:30pm to 1:30pm
This talk will present 14 evidence-based principles for how to design effective instructional videos. These instructional design principles for teaching with instructional video are grounded in learning theory and based on more than 200 experiments carried out by the keynote speaker and colleagues. The work represents an example of the progress made in applying the science of learning to education. The session will include an understanding of how meaningful learning works and evidence-based principles for designing effective instructional videos.
Presenter:
Richard E. Mayer
University of California, Santa Barbara
Richard E. Mayer is Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests involve applying the science of learning to education. His current research is at the intersection of cognition, instruction, and technology, with a special focus on multimedia learning, game-based learning, learning in virtual reality, and learning with animated pedagogical agents. He served as President of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and Vice President of the American Educational Research Association for Division C (Learning and Instruction). He has received the E. L. Thorndike Award for career achievement in educational psychology, the Scribner Award for outstanding research in learning and instruction, the Jonassen Award for excellence in research in the field of instructional design and technology, the James McKeen Cattell Award for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution of Applications of Psychology to Education and Training Award, and the Citizen Psychologist Citation for four decades of service as a local school board member. He has been recognized in Contemporary Educational Psychology as the most productive educational psychologist in the world, by Clarivate’s Web of Science as among the top .1% of the world’s scientists in terms of citations, and by research.com as among the top 50 research psychologists in the world. He serves on the editorial boards of 12 journals mainly in educational psychology. He is the author or co-author of more than 600 publications including 35 books, such as Multimedia Learning: Third Edition, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Fifth Edition (with R. Clark), Learning as a Generative Activity (with L. Fiorella), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning: Third Edition (co-edited with L. Fiorella), Applying the Science of Learning, and Learning and Instruction: Second Edition.