Over 100 years of research shows that retrieval practice is highly effective for enhancing student learning. When managing their own study behaviors, however, students tend to avoid using retrieval practice as a way of learning. Understanding and improving students’ study decisions is important given the increasingly autonomous nature of educational experiences that require students to initiate and

Cognitive load theory has been in development since the 1980s. Much of the impetus for that development has come from firstly, replication failures using randomised controlled trials and secondly, from the incorporation of other theories into cognitive load theory. Both have led to theory expansion. The immediate cause of the so-called “replication crisis” in psychology and other disciplines is a failure

Adopting an evolutionary approach to substantiate major characteristics of human cognitive architecture has been one of the major recent developments in cognitive load theory. According to this approach, human cognitive architecture is a natural information processing system which can be described by five general principles. This paper attempts to (1) identify the scope of applicability of these principles

Translating ideas into acceptable sentence is an essential writing production process. Limited sentence construction skills can hinder young writers from expressing ideas as intended or creating sentences that are comprehensible to their audiences. This may also limit other writing production processes, as young writers must devote considerable attention to this skill until it becomes more facile.

To date, there have been four responses (Dumas & Edelsbrunner, Educational Psychology Review, 35, 48, 2023; Grosz, Educational Psychology Review, 35, 57, 2023; Mayer, Educational Psychology Review, 35, 64, 2023; Zitzmann et al., Educational Psychology Review, 35, 65, 2023) to the Brady et al. (Educational Psychology Review, 35, 36–37, 2023) observational study showing that the field of educational

This article reviews the embodied theoretical basis for the meaningful learning of abstract vocabulary and reviews selected educational programs that are theoretically based and have both success and promise for abstract vocabulary development. Abstract vocabulary is a mainstay of academic vocabulary, but its nature and educational development are not well understood. From the perspective of embodied

Approaches to Learning (AtL) is an umbrella construct describing children’s attitudes, habits, and learning styles as they engage in learning. First introduced by the National Education Goals Panel to indicate a child’s readiness to learn in school, AtL includes openness to new tasks, initiative, task persistence, and imagination. Over the years, this construct has been studied in various ways, leading

The benefits of retrieval practice (practice testing) are pervasive across various materials, learning conditions, and criterial tasks, and consequently researchers and educators have enthusiastically recommended retrieval practice for educational applications. Less research has been devoted to examining the effect of combining retrieval practice with other evidence-based learning strategies; this

This commentary critiques Brady et al.’s (2023) paper, “How scientific is educational psychology research? The increasing trend of squeezing causality and recommendations from non-intervention studies” and analyzes six research methods for assessing whether an instructional intervention affects learning outcomes.

Undergraduate student misuse of mobile technology (e.g., smartphones, laptops, tablets) for non-class purposes (e.g., texting, scrolling social media, playing games) has become ubiquitous in college classrooms across the globe. In addition, research has suggested that these digital distractions can negatively impact learning and performance. The prevalence and negative consequences of student digital

Recommendations for practice have become increasingly common in educational psychology articles in recent decades, according to a review by Brady et al. (2023). At the same time, the proportion of experimental studies has decreased. This led Brady et al. to warn against under-supported recommendations for practice. Researchers who read their article might get the impression that evidence from experimental

In this commentary, we outline a five-phase process by which recommendations for educational practice can be distilled from correlational data using structural equation modeling (SEM). First, meta-theoretical beliefs associated with latent variables—that mental attributes cause behavior and can therefore be measured indirectly by observing multiple indicators of that behavior—must be adopted and made

The goals of this article are three-pronged. The first is to consider the perspectives and insights collectively offered by the four contributions to this special issue dealing with higher-order, critical, and critical-analytic thinking. The second is to build on the content of those contributions and on the literature from philosophy and educational psychology to establish meaningful distinctions

The information flood—ever present in today’s society—requires students, teachers, and the general public to think at a higher level, critically and analytically. However, higher order, critical, and critical analytic thinking lack practical and precise definitions, and therefore, researchers and practitioners have adopted disparate characterizations of these constructs. This special issue presents

The field of educational psychology has been moving away from intervention and experimental methods and toward observational and correlational methods (Hsieh et al., Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(4), 523–529, 2005; Reinhart et al., Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(1), 241–247, 2013; Robinson et al., American Educational Research Journal, 44(2), 400–413, 2007). Additionally, there has