Transfer of knowledge from one context to another is crucial in education, but difficult for students to achieve. This review discusses how different factors such as learner abilities, taught material, and lesson characteristics affect transfer performance in biology and life sciences education and offers practical advice for teachers.

In this paper, we provide practical recommendations to help promote self-regulated strategies for the use of lecture capture for both students and instructors. For students, we suggest that the importance of attendance and effective note-taking should be reinforced, as well as specifying how lecture capture can best be used as a catch-up or revision aid. For instructors, we highlight the need to provide guidance for students on how to learn and to adopt a context-dependent approach to lecture capture based on pedagogical considerations, rather than all-or-nothing. Regarding the issue of the relationship between lecture capture and attendance, we suggest the focus should move to a more nuanced discussion of why students fail to attend lectures and how they are using lecture capture. Finally, we discuss other concerns commonly raised by instructors related to lecture capture. Our student guidance is available for dissemination in infographic form at https://osf.io/esd2q/files/.

Although feedback engagement is important for learning, students often do not engage with provided feedback to inform future assignments. One factor for low feedback uptake is the easy access to grades. Thus, systematically delaying the grade release in favor of providing feedback first— temporary mark withholding—may increase students’ engagement with feedback. We tested the hypothesis that temporary mark withholding would have positive effects on (a) future academic performance (Experiments 1 and 2) and (b) feedback engagement (Experiment 2) in authentic psychology university settings. For Experiment 1, 116 Year 2 students were randomly assigned to either a Grade-before-feedback or Feedback-before-grade condition for their report in semester 1 and performance was measured on a similar assessment in semester 2. In Experiment 2, a Year 3 student cohort ( t) was provided with feedback on their lab report before marks were released in semester 1 (mark withholding group, N = 97) and compared to the previous Year 3 cohort ( t-1) where individual feedback and grades were released simultaneously (historical control group, N = 90). Using this multi-methodological approach, we reveal positive effects of temporary mark withholding on future academic performance and students’ feedback engagement in authentic higher education settings. Practical implications are discussed.

Sleep right after studying new material is more conducive to memory than a period of wakefulness. Another way to counteract forgetting is to practice retrieval: taking a test strengthens memory more effectively than restudying the material. The current work aims at investigating the interaction between sleep and testing by asking if testing adds to, neutralizes, or decreases the effect of sleep on memory? We tested this in one pilot and one experiment by manipulating the timing of the practice test as well as whether practice was followed by sleep or wakefulness when learning foreign language vocabulary. Taking a delayed practice test significantly reduces forgetting for both the sleep and the wakefulness group. An immediate practice test, in contrast, had no such effect; here we find the standard beneficial sleep effect. However, the immediate practice test leads to higher recall in the final test in comparison to a delayed practice test, but only for the sleep group. Practical recommendations imply two things: first, if students study in the evening, they should test themselves immediately after learning. Second, if students study during the day the practice test should be delayed in order to reinforce memory and reduce forgetting of the material.

Many initiatives to improve reproducibility incentivise replication and encourage greater transparency without directly addressing the underlying skills needed for transparent and reproducible data preparation and analysis. In this paper, we argue that training in data processing and transformation should be embedded in field-specific research methods curricula. Promoting reproducibility and open science requires not only teaching relevant values and practices, but also providing the skills needed for reproducible data analysis. Improving students’ data skills will also enhance their employability within and beyond the academic context. To demonstrate the necessity of these skills, we walk through the analysis of realistic data from a classic paradigm in experimental psychology that is often used in teaching: the Stroop Interference Task. When starting from realistic raw data, nearly 80% of the data analytic effort for this task involves skills not commonly taught—namely, importing, manipulating, and transforming tabular data. Data processing and transformation is a large and inescapable part of data analysis, and so education should strive to make the work associated with it as efficient, transparent, and reproducible as possible. We conclude by considering the challenges of embedding computational data skills training in undergraduate programmes and offer some solutions.