Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner
We started our blog 3 years ago we’re determined to keep going!
We’d like to thank you for your ongoing support and invite you to grab a beer, a cocktail, a cordeal, or whatever, listen to some summery music (two options to choose from below) and relax with TWO top 3s!
First, in the category “Such a shame you missed it!” our 3 favorites and second, our 3 best-ever-read blogs!
Such a shame you missed it!
For 125 years, we have been studying how we, people, learn and how our memory works. That resulted in many so-called ‘learning strategies’. A few remain, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, and many have died a quiet or sudden death. There are also a number of poor yet very stubborn learning strategies that are promoted and used everywhere, although research has long proved them to be ineffective. In this blog we discuss the top 5 of effective learning strategies and the ‘flop 5’ (ineffective learning strategies). A strong example of why we’re writing these blogs: to encourage people to use the evidence out there to design better learning experiences!
This blog is one of our favorites 
because using objective learning data to measure learning effectiveness is critical. The trigger to write this blog was a statement that Bart Rienties, saying that research shows that learning design has a strong impact on learner behaviour, satisfaction, and performance. Now, what is critical is that learning analytics are used to provide (more) evidence for those relations (learning design based on learning sciences and learner behaviours and performance) as well as insight in the learners’ learning processes to enable learning design specialists to improve the design based on learning analytics. This blog explains why current learning analytics research doesn’t always do so. The best part? Rienties picked up on it and continued his great research!
This blog explores ‘grit’, which is defined as ‘passion and perseverance’ needed to achieve long term goals. And although grit might be important, it’s not always well understood or applied and hence, we investigated the research around it. This topic is still very relevant, not only in the light of grit itself but in the light of all other buzzwords that swarm around (growth mindset, resilience, mindfulness, and so the list goes on).
Best ever!
This is our (well, actually Paul’s) all time NUMBER 1. Paul crowdsourced a question to colleagues in the educational psychology community, namely: What article or articles do you feel are seminal articles in our field that every (young) researcher should be aware of?
He ended up with a cleaned-up, alphabetical list of articles that the community deems critical for the profession, each with an abstract or short annotation and where possible, a link to the document itself. Paul calls it an educated beginning 😊.
BTW: He’s working on a book with his top 25 along with Carl Hedrick and this should go to the printer before next summer
This one we only posted last month this new arrival made it to our all-time number 2! It’s probably because we all agree that feedback is one of the most, if not the most important tools for supporting learning. This blog discusses all the ins and outs of effective feedback as well as feedback that’s detrimental for learning.
Paul recently discussed this blog in a podcast as well. You can find it here:
iTunes: https://apple.co/2yFJL5K
Android: http://bit.ly/2JpUXYh
This blog discusses the hype around 21st century skills by unraveling what they are, what’s so “21st century” about them, why education and business people shout from the rooftops that we need them, and to what extent we do…
3-Star learning experiences 