College of Education
Department of Educational psychology
CSTL brownbag announcement
Promoting Understanding and Application of Effective Study Techniques through Engaging Educational Technologies
H. Chad Lane
Associate Professor of Educational Psychology & Informatics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tuesday, February 9
12:30 – 2:00
210A Education Building
We are pursuing the development and study of a proposed new genre of engaging educational technologies that seek to help learners better understand processes involved in learning and how to use that knowledge to improve their own study practices. The novelty of the envisioned tools lies in the use of playful (digital) contexts for conveying and learning about basic evidence-based principles of learning, with integrated tools to visualize performance. Our proposed research is translational in that we seek to incorporate findings from basic psychological research into educational contexts, and also interdisciplinary since it combines ideas from psychology, entertainment, and behavioral science to address the challenge of helping people become better learners. Underlying our approach is over a century of psychological science research on human cognition, memory, and learning. Principles stemming from this expansive body of work have straightforward implications for education, but those gains have yet to be fully realized. In fact, in an almost outright rejection of scientific findings, the world continues to be saturated with misplaced advice for learners that is based on intuition and opinion rather than evidence. In this project, we approach the problem of promoting evidence-based learning techniques by using educational games to illustrate fundamental principles of learning, and building tools to promote understanding and application of those principles in academic contexts.
For questions about this brownbag, please contact Professor Liz Stine-Morrow at eals@illinois.edu
