In the BNU Metacogntion & Learning lab, we explore two main topics: Science of Learning and Metacognition.
Specifically, we target to explore effective strategies to enhance learning efficiency and practical techniques to consolidate long-term retention. Although many effective tools have been robustly established, they have not been widely used in educational settings as they deserve to be, which may result from metacognitive unawareness of the merits of those strategies. For instance, hundreds of studies documented that testing is not just an assessment of learning but also an assessment for learning. Testing can more effectively consolidate long-term retention by comparison with passive restudying, a phenomenon termed the testing effect or test-enhanced learning. However, people tend to believe that restudying is more beneficial than testing. The lack of metacoginitive appreciation of test-enhanced learning leads learners reluctant to administer self-testing during self-regulated learning.
The other major goal of our lab, therefore, is to explore the mechanisms underlying how people monitor their learning/memory status and how to induce metacognitive appreciation of effective learning strategies, which have potential to promote application of those strategies in educational settings.
Science of Learning
Since the foundation of Experimental Psychology, a main subject mission has always been to explore effective strategies to promote learning outcomes. Following this subject mission, our lab endeavors to identify practical ways to enhance learning in educational settings, such as administering tests following encoding, managing study materials in an interleaved way, aloud speaking, drawing, concept-mapping, offloading, and so on.
Metacognition
Metacognition is characterized as “knowing of knowing” or “cognition about cognition”. It includes two components: monitoring and control. Similar to many other cognitive processes, metacognitive monitoring suffers from a variety of illusions and bias, which in turn leads to low efficiency in metacognitive control. Our metacognition research aims to investigate how people judge their learning/memory status, which factors affect such judgments, how to calibrate judgment illusions, and metacognitive interventions to enhance academic attainment.
