Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When persons intentionally act to learn, they use a mental model of studying to choose among their repertoire of study acts on the basis of beliefs about the effectiveness of these acts. One important educational objective is to develop that mental model to be more in agreement with our scientific knowledge about studying. In this experiment, subjects were asked to recommend study actions for fictitious students described in computerpresented scenarios. Feedback for one group was designed to reflect our scientific knowledge about learning, and for the other it was randomly determined. Student's repertoire of study acts expanded in both groups, and the acts selected in the scientific-feedback group became more congruent with scientific knowledge about studying.