Learning as a Generative Activity

During the past twenty-five years, researchers have made impressive advances in pinpointing effective learning strategies (i.e., activities the learner engages in during learning that are intended to improve learning). In Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies That Promote Understanding, Logan Fiorella and Richard E. Mayer share eight evidence-based learning strategies that promote understanding: summarizing, mapping, drawing, imagining, self-testing, self-explaining, teaching, and enacting. Each chapter describes and exemplifies a learning strategy, examines the underlying cognitive theory, evaluates strategy effectiveness by analyzing the latest research, pinpoints boundary conditions, and explores practical implications and future directions. Each learning strategy targets generative learning, in which learners actively make sense out of the material so they can apply their learning to new situations. This concise, accessible introduction to learning strategies will benefit students, researchers, and practitioners in educational psychology, as well as general readers interested in the important twenty-first-century skill of regulating one's own learning.

Logan Fiorella is a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on identifying strategies that promote meaningful learning, particularly in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. He was awarded a Junior Scientist Fellowship from the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students as well as the Award for Outstanding Research Contribution in Psychology from UCSB.

Richard E. Mayer is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He served as president of the Division of Educational Psychology for the American Psychological Association (APA) and as vice president of the Learning and Instruction Division for the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He has received many awards, including APA's E. L. Thorndike Award for career achievement in educational psychology and AERA's Sylvia Scribner Award. He has authored more than 400 publications, including 25 books, such as Applying the Science of Learning; Multimedia Learning, 2nd edition; Learning and Instruction, 2nd edition; and e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, 3rd edition (with R. Clark).