Department of Education) for a series of grants that have aided research by Roediger and McDaniel in school settings, in collaboration with Kathleen McDermott. The work we conducted in Illinois at Columbia Middle School and Columbia High School would not have been possible without this support. We thank our program offi cers at CASL, Elizabeth Albro, Carol O’Donnell, and Erin Higgins. In addition, we thank teachers, principals, and students at the Columbia Schools, in par tic u lar, Roger Chamberlain (principal at Columbia Middle School when we began our research there) and Patrice Bain, the fi rst teacher who pioneered implementation of our research in a classroom. Other teachers who permitted us to conduct experiments in their classrooms include Teresa Fehrenz, Andria Matzenbacher, Michelle Spivey, Ammie Koch, Kelly Landgraf, Carleigh Ottwell, Cindy McMullan, Missie Steve, Neal O’Donnell and Linda Malone. A great group of research assistants has helped with this research, including Kristy Du-prey, Lindsay Brockmeier, Barbie Huelser, Lisa Cressey, Marco Chacon, Anna Dinndorf, Laura D’Antonio, Jessye Brick, Alli-son Obenhaus, Meghan McDoniel, and Aaron Theby. Pooja Agarwal has been instrumental in this project every step of the way, leading the research on a day- to- day basis while she was a graduate student at Washington University and then
Ac know ledg ments ê 291
overseeing the project as a postdoctoral fellow. Many of the practical suggestions in the book came from our classroom experiments.
Dart NeuroScience of San Diego, California, supported our research on memory athletes through a generous grant.
Roediger served as principal investigator and was joined by David Balota, Kathleen McDermott, and Mary Pyc. We tested several memory athletes in this project, and we appreciate James Paterson for letting us use his story in the book.
We are especially grateful for the support of Tim Tully, Dart’s chief scientifi c offi cer, who fi rst approached us with the idea of identifying individuals with highly superior memory abilities.
Our granting agencies were generous in their support, but we provide the usual disclaimer that the opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, or Dart NeuroScience.
Roediger and McDaniel would like to thank the many students and postdoctoral fellows who worked with us and helped with the projects described in this book. Graduate students who worked with Roediger on relevant projects during this period are Pooja Agarwal, Andrew Butler, Andy DeSoto, Michael Goode, Jeff Karpicke, Adam Putnam, Megan Smith, Victor Sungkhasettee, and Franklin Zaromb. Postdoctoral fellows included Pooja Agarwal, Jason Finley, Bridgid Finn, Lisa Geraci, Keith Lyle, David McCabe, Mary Pyc, and Yana Weinstein. Research staff that worked on the project include Jane McConnell, Jean Ortmann- Sotomayor, Brittany Butler, and Julie Gray. Mark McDaniel would like to thank his students who worked on research pertinent to this book: Aimee
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Calendar, Cynthia Fadler, Dan Howard, Khuyen Nguyen, Mathew Robbins, and Kathy Wildman, and his research-assistant staff, Michael Cahill, Mary Derbish, Yiyi Liu, and Amanda Meyer. His postdoctoral fellows who worked on related projects were Jeri Little, Keith Lyle, Anaya Thomas, and Ruthann Thomas.
We are indebted to those individuals from many walks of life who shared their stories of learning and remembering to help us illustrate the important ideas in this book. We thank Ken Barber at Jiffy Lube International, Bonnie Blodgett, Mia Blundetto, Derwin Brown, Matt Brown, Patrick Castillo, Vince Dooley, Mike Ebersold, Nathaniel Fuller, Catherine Johnson, Sarah Flanagan, Bob Fletcher, Alex Ford, Steve Ford, David Garman, Jean Germain, Lucy Gerold, Bruce Hendry, Michael Hoffman, Peter Howard, Kiley Hunkler, Thelma Hunter, Erik Isaacman, Karen Kim, Young Nam Kim, Nancy Lageson, Douglas Larsen, Stephen Madigan, Kathy Maixner, Michael Matthews, Kathleen McDermott, Michael McMurchie and Rick Wynveen at Renewal by Andersen, Jeff Moseley, James Paterson and his students at Bellerbys College (Stephanie Ong, Victoria Gevorkova, and Michela Seong-Hyun Kim), Bill
Sands, Andy Sobel, Annette Thompson and Dave Nystrom at Farmers Insurance, Jon Wehrenberg, Mary Pat Wenderoth, and Michael Young. We thank Lorri Freifeld at Training magazine for introducing us to the leaders of exemplary corporate training programs.
Several people kindly read earlier drafts of the book or selected chapters. We thank Ellen Brown, Kathleen McDermott, Henry Moyers, Thomas Moyers, and Steve Nelson. As is customary in the sciences, fi ve of our peers from the scientifi c community were recruited by our publisher to review the book anonymously in manuscript: we thank the three who have subsequently identifi ed themselves– Bob Bjork, Dan Schacter,
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and Dan Willingham– and the two whose identities remain unknown to us.
Finally, we thank Elizabeth Knoll, our editor, and the professional staff at Harvard University Press for their insights, guidance, and devotion to the quality of this book.
Index
Accessible information,
affecting, 109– 110; varied
compared to available
practice in, 52– 53, 264– 265n6
information, 268n8
Analogical transfer, 278n14
Achievement: attributions on,
Analytical skills: and achievement
180– 182; in science courses,
in science courses, 233; in
class structure affecting,
Bloom’s taxonomy of learning,
232– 234, 283n7
228; and intelligence, 148, 150
Achievement gap in the sciences,
Andersen Windows and Doors,
on closing, 232– 234, 283n7
247– 250
Acquired skill, learning as, 2
Anxiety in test taking, 91– 92
Agarwal, Pooja, 34
Application of learning, in
Alzheimer’s disease, 164
Bloom’s taxonomy of
Ambiguity, hunger for narrative
learning, 228
in, 109– 112
Apprentice model in training, 127
Anagram solving: diffi culty
Aristotle, 28
and working memory in,
Artists, learning painting styles
91– 92, 270n17; distraction
