Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
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Prediction-based and repetition-based learning are two learning strategies, differing most profoundly in their depth of processing. In repetition-based learning, students repeat information shortly...Show morePrediction-based and repetition-based learning are two learning strategies, differing most profoundly in their depth of processing. In repetition-based learning, students repeat information shortly after learning it, while in prediction-based learning, students make a prediction before learning the information. This study aims to compare the effectiveness of the two learning strategies for memory recall, as well as consider the influence of age, the magnitude of the prediction errors, and the involved brain areas. It seeks to enhance the educational debate on these learning strategies by uncovering the strategies' mechanisms and guiding educators on their effective use. To accomplish this, 28 young adolescents and 46 young adults were scanned in an MRI scanner while learning numerical facts using both strategies: predicting and repeating. The study explored the influence of strategy, age group, and prediction error on memory recall. Furthermore, it investigated strategy-specific and age-specific differences in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), striatum, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). While it was expected that prediction-based learning would result in better learning for both age groups as it requires deeper processing, results showed that adults had improved memory for repetition compared to prediction, whereas adolescents did not show a significant difference between the two learning strategies. Within prediction-based learning, adults showed increased memory for small and large prediction errors, while adolescents only did for large prediction errors. Lastly, among the investigated brain areas, the ACC, which is involved in error detection, showed the most prominent role in prediction-based learning.Show less
Research master thesis | Psychology (research) (MSc)
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Prediction-based learning is an effective teaching method for building factual knowledge, i.e., semantic learning. Its effectiveness likely depends on its potential to elicit surprise in learners....Show morePrediction-based learning is an effective teaching method for building factual knowledge, i.e., semantic learning. Its effectiveness likely depends on its potential to elicit surprise in learners. Only a few studies tested this hypothesis using a prediction-based learning framework comparable to semantic learning in the classroom. Most of these studies used physiological measures of surprise. However, the link between prediction-based semantic learning and learners' metacognitive surprise remains to be investigated. Using mixed models, we tested and explored to what degree participants' (N = 41; Mage = 21.9 years, SD = 1.5, 73% female) metacognitive surprise about the learning material (numerical trivia facts) explained how well participants learned (continuous metric) and recalled (binary metric) this material during a numerical-fact learning task designed to resemble classroomlike prediction-based learning. In line with our hypothesis, preregistered analyses showed that the more surprising participants found a fact, the more they learned from it. Extending previous work, we found that this link remained when controlling for a) between-fact differences in learning potential and b) facts already known to the participants and when c) participants failed to recall a fact correctly. Further extending previous work, our exploratory analyses suggested that learning also improved when participants perceived the facts as nonsurprising. So, the link between metacognitive surprise and learning may be u-shaped rather than linear. Altogether, these findings hint that learners'surprise about the learning material is one of the factors explaining to what degree learners learn from their prediction mistakes to update their factual knowledge. We forgo conclusions about the link between metacognitive surprise and recall accuracy since the confirmatory and exploratory results were ambiguous and negligibly small.Show less
