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Strategize to Improve Student Learning and Success

The strategies and techniques listed below are intended to help learning in a multitude of ways. Consider how implementing these strategies can help adjust your instruction for different levels of learners and promote self-regulation for your students.

A body of research supports that we encode contextual information as we learn. Context-dependent memory, in general, refers to the idea that we recall information better when we try to retrieve it (i.e., use it) in the same state that we encoded it. For students, picturing what classroom or space they were in when trying to remember information from a particular course helps (e.g., a student pictures sitting in McBryde 100 for biology). In an online environment, those environmental contextual cues disappear. "The classroom," in this case a student's dorm room, apartment, or family home, becomes the space for each class. With the additional environmental cues gone, instructors may need to help students activate prior knowledge.

Attention is an important element in the encoding process. However, paying attention in an online environment requires much more effort than it does in a physical classroom. Why is that? In a physical classroom, there are multiple environmental cues that help you refocus your attention if it is waning. For example, a shift in volume or tone from the instructor,  other students start participating in an activity, moving from lecture to a video demonstration are all changes in environmental stimuli that regain attention. In an online environment, students do not experience as much of these shifts. Furthermore, whatever is on their screen is competing for attention with what is happening in the physical environment around them (e.g., roomates walking by, pets wanting to be petted). Our students experienced less than optimal environments when it comes to attention, so it is likely that they may have missed some information or didn't encode as deeply as they needed to. These factors affect learning and later retrieval.

Stress and lack of transition time between courses also affected our students' learning. Stress impacts long-term encoding, so again our students are going to need to work harder to remember some information. The lack of transition time between courses (think of this time as a walk from McBryde to the New Classroom Building when transitioning from one class to the next) also took away valuable time needed to process and decompress from one class to the next. Many students reported being overwhelmed with work loads or not having the time management and work management strategies to handle a full courseload of online courses, which require more self-regulation skills. Some really struggled, and they probably did not learn the information as well as they would have under normal circumstances where their learning environments are more structured.