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Creators/Authors contains: "McDaniel, Mark"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2026
  2. Abundant laboratory and classroom research demonstrate the superior effectiveness of effortful learning strategies based on cognitive science over re-reading, highlighting, and other strategies more widely used by college students. However, persuadingstudents to adopt and adhere to effective strategies is difficult. This article outlines a novel, peer-to-peer intervention rooted in the Knowledge, Belief, Commitment, and Planning theoretical framework (McDaniel & Einstein, 2020) that emphasizes the need for students to believe in, commit to, and plan to use effective strategies rather than simply “know” them. Opportunities for faculty and learning center personnel to incorporate elements of the intervention into existing programming and adapt them to local institutional needs are described. 
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  3. Retrieval practice (i.e., recalling information from memory) and elaboration (i.e., generating meaningful explanations and examples) promote learning, but students underutilize these strategies when studying. We developed a strategy-training intervention addressing prominent barriers to students’ strategy use: lack of knowledge, lack of motivation, and poor management of study time. Undergraduates in an Introductory Biology course were randomly assigned to receive the strategy-training intervention or to a healthy life habits control group. No significant differences were found between the two groups on measures of learning behavior or achievement collected across the semester, emphasizing the challenge of changing students’ learning habits. Future research should investigate strategy training with lower performing students integrated into a course. 
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