Nothing works on its own: Why learning depends on how cognition, motivation, and metacognition get along

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Does testing yourself help you remember? Does an entertaining video help you learn? Does investing more effort into your learning mean you learn more? Educational psychology has studied questions like these for decades, and the most honest answer is almost always the same: Nothing works on its own.

In this lecture, Tino Endres argues that this annoying answer is exactly where learning research gets interesting. Learning is never driven by a single factor. Whether quizzing yourself pays off depends on how you learned in the first place. Whether an appealing video design keeps you focused or simply distracts you depends on how tempting the alternatives are. Knowing more can even make a task harder, depending on what the task asks of you. Drawing on experiments from his research on retrieval practice and constructive learning, on interest development, as well as on self-regulated learning, he will show how cognitive, motivational, and metacognitive processes shape one another when people learn.

Taking these interactions seriously changes how we design learning materials, how we study them, and how we support learners who, as is the case at a distance university, have to steer much of their learning by themselves.