Memory in the classroom

Doctoral candidate Martin Van Boekel studies how learners adjust beliefs with new information

Living in London, Martin Van Boekel taught first-generation immigrants, many of Somali and Bangladeshi descent. He observed that many of them believed that they were good at math and poor at English when, in reality, their English was just as strong as their peers’.

Van Boekel was intrigued. He returned to his homeland of Canada to complete a master’s degree studying the influence of stereotypes in classroom learning and how emotions can influence academic motivation. But after his master’s, he wanted more. And he really wanted to work with teachers in training. Unsure of his choice, Van Boekel visited Minnesota to attend the Department of Educational Psychology’s annual graduate research day.

“I was blown away by the quality of the work that the students were doing and how they challenged one another,” he says.

Hindsight bias

Now a doctoral candidate in educational psychology, Van Boekel’s independent research revolves around how people reason in the face of contradictory information by looking at memory effects such as hindsight bias. That’s the tendency for people to believe, after learning the correct information, that they knew the right answer all along.

Early theories of hindsight bias proposed that, when asked to recall our original judgment, the new, correct data replaces the old in our memory. But this isn’t consistent with research literature on memory. In his own research, Van Boekel gives participants the opportunity to recall both their original answer and the correct answer. He has found that kids do a good job at reproducing their original answer when they also get to prove that they now know the correct one, too. This shows that people have access to both their original answers and the correct answers, which may mean that engaging in hindsight bias isn’t as bad as traditionally believed.

Van Boekel is exploring the idea that hindsight bias—along with other memory issues that traditionally have been viewed as problematic—might even be adaptive. He also wants to reframe these memory effects that have been considered a problem and see how they can be put to use in education.

Working with associate professor Keisha Varma and his adviser, Sashank Varma, Van Boekel is studying what happens when people have to reason with information that is different than they expected. Some choose to embrace the new data, while others want to hold on to both the new and old information. During his first year in Minnesota, he and the Varmas ran across an interesting case of students who “cheated” on a measure of working memory. They analyzed the data and found that the cheating kids did not perform differently on a measure of scientific reasoning. However, the cognitive factors related to scientific reasoning were different across the two groups.

The team of researchers decided to design an impossibly hard quiz for the same group of students and “accidentally forget” the answers at the bottom of the paper. The students were told to take the quiz and ignore the apparent answers, which were actually not correct. Using this measure and a coin-flip prediction task, they identified two groups of children: strict reasoners who quickly dismiss hypotheses that have been disconfirmed, and permissive reasoners, who are willing to retain hypotheses in the face of disconfirming evidence for further evaluation.

“That’s where my interest lies, in understanding how or if people adjust their beliefs in the face of contradictory information,” Van Boekel explains.

Opportunities to collaborate

Now in his third year, Van Boekel continues to be inspired by the collaborative nature of his department that drew him to Minnesota. He enjoys working with the many strong students in his program and professors who are willing to bring him into their studies. Van Boekel jumped right into research projects in cognition psychology and social psychology and often has several going on at a time.

For example, he is working as a research assistant with associate professor Panayiota Kendeou on a reading comprehension study that looks at how people’s misconceptions can be refuted by carefully structured narratives, a powerful means of communication. They are investigating how the structure of a text can help people revise their misconceptions.

Van Boekel is also involved in the Minnesota Youth Development Research Group, led by professor Michael Rodriguez. The group, known as MyDrG, is a team of graduate students and educational psychology alumni who analyze youth development data to understand the complexities and nuances of students.

Meanwhile, his co-adviser, Geoff Maruyama, has spurred Van Boekel’s interest in action research. His goal is to eventually balance his laboratory and classroom-based experiments with field-based research, driven by students, where they can collaboratively study aspects of their lives that they have identified as positive and negative forces in their communities.

Van Boekel considers himself fortunate that his work as a research assistant lines up with his independent research on hindsight bias and, ultimately, on what he hopes to do as a professor one day.

“I’ll continue to work on reasoning and decision making, but I also want to work with teachers in training,” he says. “Education is where my heart is, first and foremost. That’s why I’m here.”

Read more about the psychological foundations of education track in the Department of Educational Psychology.

Story by Ali Lacey | June 2014