Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

While multiple-choice quizzes can be useful for gauging how well students understand a topic, they can interfere with learning if poorly designed, according to a review of recent research.

Andrew Butler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University, specializes in the malleability of memory—how memories can fade or be reinforced over time. In a recent article in Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, he explains that despite the popularity of multiple-choice quizzes, they’re often not aligned to the latest scientific findings about how students process and retain information.

If you’ve ever wished you could rid your brain of unnecessary information, you’re in luck—your brain already does it for you. A research group at Lund University in Sweden has found that the human brain not only contains learning mechanisms but also forgetting mechanisms that erase “unnecessary” learning. In the study, the researchers trained human... Read More