When a metaphorical game succeeds, it succeeds because it creates structurally similar cognitive demands—not because it is fun, novel, or symbolic.

In other words, the brain doesn’t care about your metaphor. It cares about what it has to think about during the activity.

From a cognitive architecture viewpoint, activities are not designed to “create engagement,” “break up the session,” or “get people talking.” Those may be side benefits, but they are never the goal. The purpose of an activity is to create conditions where the learner must activate, retrieve, apply, or integrate the target schema.

When aligned to cognitive architecture, interactive activities can beautifully satisfy SDT’s psychological needs: Autonomy: choosing strategies, making decisions Competence: clear and informational feedback, achievable challenge Relatedness: coordinating, negotiating, helping But motivation is a multiplier, not a substitute

Despite their increasing use, there's limited evidence that AI-generated avatars significantly improve learning outcomes.

A study by Sung and Mayer (2012) suggests that any graphic in a learning experience will fall into one of these three categories: Instructive images: These visuals directly support learning and facilitate essential cognitive processing of core concepts. For example, a diagram illustrating Porter’s Five Forces can help students better understand this business strategy framework. Decorative images: These graphics enhance aesthetics but don’t influence learning. For example, an image of a business handshake can be visually appealing but won’t support or obstruct students’ understanding of negotiation strategies. Distracting images: Sung and Mayer call this category “seductive” images. While these visuals may relate to the topic, they impede learning because they require extraneous cognitive processing. As an example, consider a complex organizational chart of a full corporation in a lesson on team leadership. The image connects broadly to the lesson but also highlights a lot of irrelevant details, distracting students from the key concepts.

Logically if we think about feedback as correcting errors, then it makes sense that we would want pretty immediate feedback. But if we think about feedback as another presentation of the information, then a space ought to improve learning.

“Personal and Professional Support” is now the largest theme by far, stealing most of its new ground from “Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting.”

First, we prompt seven state-of-the-art generative text-to-image models (DALL-E 3, Midjourney v6, Firefly 2, Imagen 2, Imagine, Realistic Vision, and Stable Diffusion XL Turbo) to create 10,320 synthetic marketing images, using 2,400 real-world, human-made images as input. 254,400 human evaluations of these images show that AI-generated marketing imagery can surpass human-made images in quality, realism, and aesthetics. Second, we give identical creative briefings to commissioned human freelancers and the AI models, showing that the best synthetic images also excel in ad creativity, ad attitudes, and prompt following.

The polite version yielded better learning outcomes, and the effect was amplified in learners who expressed a preference for indirect feedback, who had less computer experience, and who lacked engineering backgrounds. These results confirm the hypothesis that learners tend to respond to pedagogical agents as social actors, and suggest that research should focus less on the media in which agents are realized, and place more emphasis on the agent's social intelligence.

Neuroscience techniques can only reliably answer “how” people behave or process information, but they should never answer “why” people behave the way they do.

Scenarios can be implemented in actual simulations (where the world is actively modeled, and the consequences are calculated), or in branching scenarios where the relationships are hard-coded in the consequences attached to a decision.

scenarios give us contextualized practice, which research shows leads to better retention and transfer. With the right choices, the scenario is engaging and provides meaningful practice, which leads to acquiring new abilities.

<div data-breakout="normal"><p class="-Zro6 -ZADH IjV6v AnCKd _57WYp" id="viewer-avnma"><span class="d0767"><span style="font-weight:700"><span>DAN: What makes learning through a simulation experience unique and meaningful?</span></span></span></p></div><div type="paragraph" data-hook="rcv-block26"></div><div data-breakout="normal"><p class="-Zro6 -ZADH IjV6v AnCKd _57WYp" id="viewer-d53db"><span class="d0767"><span style="font-weight:700"><span>CLARK</span></span><span>: As above, research says that contextualized practice (with feedback) is the best way to develop new abilities. They need to have a ’story’ setting: a context, then something happens that precipitates the need for a decision, and then the decision has consequences. That’s just a better-written multiple-choice question (please!), but if we drive the outcomes from a branching or simulation basis, this can lead to new decisions (they travel in packs!)</span></span></p></div>

Stories may be easier to remember and comprehend than essays because stories resemble our everyday experiences (Bruner, <a href="#CR10" rid="CR10" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">1986</a>; Graesser et al., <a href="#CR39" rid="CR39" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">1991</a>). People experience life in the real world as temporally ordered causal events, organized around personal goals, with the encountering and overcoming of obstacles to these goals resulting in emotional experiences; this parallels the structure of stories (Graesser, McNamara, &amp; Louwerse, <a href="#CR37" rid="CR37" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">2003</a>; Graesser, Singer, &amp; Trabasso, <a href="#CR38" rid="CR38" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">1994</a>).

Familiarity with the structure and content of a text is referred to as relevant “prior knowledge” (Dochy, Segers, &amp; Buehl, <a href="#CR28" rid="CR28" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">1999</a>), and stories might be more memorable and comprehensible thanks to readers having greater prior knowledge.

Readers are less likely to benefit from prior knowledge while reading an essay, relative to stories, and are therefore less likely to benefit from easy inferences. This combination could easily put expository texts at a disadvantage when it comes to memory and comprehension (Coté, Goldman, &amp; Saul, <a href="#CR18" rid="CR18" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">1998</a>; McNamara, <a href="#CR68" rid="CR68" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">2004</a>).

A final reason to believe that narratives may be more memorable than expository texts hinges on the ability of emotions to facilitate memory (Hamann, <a href="#CR42" rid="CR42" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">2001</a>). Affectively charged recollections have been dubbed “flash-bulb” memories, to communicate the idea that emotional events are deeply imprinted on the mind, like a flash aiding photography (Winograd &amp; Neisser, <a href="#CR107" rid="CR107" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">1992</a>). This emotional facilitation of memory appears to result from a prioritizing of emotional material when it comes to attention and perception (Brosch, Pourtois, &amp; Sander, <a href="#CR9" rid="CR9" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">2010</a>), with personal relevance playing a key role (Levine &amp; Edelstein, <a href="#CR58" rid="CR58" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">2009</a>). To the extent that stories are better able to evoke strong emotions than expository texts (cf. Mar, Oatley, Djikic, &amp; Mullin, <a href="#CR62" rid="CR62" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">2011</a>), we would expect stories to be better recalled than exposition.

Our primary research question was whether memory and comprehension differ for narrative versus expository texts. Our three-level random-effects meta-analysis of 150 effect-sizes found that, on average, memory and comprehension of narrative texts was superior to that for expository texts.

Our meta-analysis of 150 effect-sizes (from over 75 unique samples and more than 33,000 participants) found that people had an easier time comprehending and recalling narrative texts compared to expository ones. The average magnitude of this effect was more than a half a standard deviation, with a 95% CI ranging from just more than one-quarter to slightly more than three-quarters of a standard deviation. Moreover, this result appears to be robust, and not driven by any one particular effect-size or study. There was a great deal of variability in these effects, however, almost all of which represents true heterogeneity and not random sampling error. This variability originated primarily from differences between studies.

In closing, the totality of the evidence available finds that people have an easier time comprehending and recalling information presented in a story compared to that presented in an essay. This has potential implications for a number of disciplines, not least of which is the realm of education.

To that end, the advantage afforded to narratives over exposition in this domain should be considered whenever possible. We must emphasize, however, that these results should not be interpreted as a suggestion to force all information into a narrative form for pedagogical purposes, especially when such information is not typically presented in this way.

It is quite possible that mixed genres like narrative journalism, for example, could hold the key for leveraging the advantages of narrative–its ability to capture interest and communicate experience through imagination – to meet the goals of exposition to inform and educate (van Krieken &amp; Sanders, <a href="#CR102" rid="CR102" class=" bibr popnode" role="button" aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true">in press</a>).

Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays. Moreover, this result was robust, not influenced by the inclusion of a single effect-size or single study, and not moderated by various study characteristics. This finding has implications for any domain in which acquiring and retaining information is important.

Results revealed detrimental effects of talking heads on the recall of factual knowledge covered in the videos. Interestingly, participants rated their perceived learning as being higher for videos with talking head. Furthermore, participants assigned higher satisfaction scores to videos with talking heads and selected them more frequently when choosing between different formats.

<span>Higher levels of teacher presence have been positively associated with student satisfaction and student&nbsp;</span><em>perceptions</em><span>&nbsp;of learning.</span>

Findings suggest that combining talking heads and annotations in asynchronous video lectures yielded the longest watch time, and highest satisfaction, engagement, and attitude scores.

The 85% rule suggests growth will be maximized when we practice tasks we can succeed at roughly four-fifths of the time.

If you succeed in every attempt, you probably don’t have the difficulty high enough to improve. If you fail most of the time, you will likely make more progress if you start picking smaller, more manageable challenges.

Finally, version with dialogue-based choices (see screenshot above) was perceived as more personal and engaging, “lively” and helpful for making a selection (“made me feel like I was talking out loud in my head”).

The findings from this pilot questionnaire seem to indicate that providing framing in the options themselves has more effect on the learner than providing it in an introductory text.

Additionally, options written as dialogue were experienced as more personal and elicited higher emotional reactions of the learner towards the characters. This may be of use in courses about soft skills.