Evidence for Locate #

Every substantive claim on the Locate page is checked against current research. Here is each claim, how well today’s evidence supports it, and the sources. The full, de-duplicated source list lives on the references page.

Supported · strong evidence — Before they begin studying, skilled learners engage in a forethought phase — sizing up the task, setting goals, and planning what and how to learn — and this up-front strategic planning is one of the features that distinguishes effective self-regulated learners from less effective ones.

Zimmerman’s three-phase model places task analysis (goal setting, strategic planning) and motivational beliefs in the forethought phase and identifies proactive planning as a hallmark of self-regulated learners; this is the standard framework in educational psychology.

Sources: Zimmerman (2002), Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview, Theory Into Practice — https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 · full reference ›

Supported · strong evidence — Deciding what and how to learn up front matters because learning techniques and approaches differ markedly in effectiveness, so the choices a learner makes about method and material have a large effect on how much they ultimately learn.

Dunlosky et al.’s review graded ten common learning techniques and found wide variation in utility (e.g. practice testing and distributed practice high; rereading and highlighting low), establishing that method choice strongly affects learning outcomes.

Supported · strong evidence — Learners are often poor judges of their own study choices in the moment — material that feels familiar or fluent can feel well learned when it is not — so deliberate, often counter-intuitive choices about how to study are needed rather than relying on what feels productive.

It is well established that subjective fluency from rereading/familiarity inflates judgements of learning relative to actual retention; Dunlosky et al. and the metacognition literature (e.g. Koriat & Bjork) document this illusion of competence.

Sources: Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham (2013), Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest — https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266 · Koriat & Bjork (2005), Illusions of Competence in Monitoring One’s Knowledge During Study, Journal of Experimental Psychology: LMC — https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.31.2.187 · full reference ›

Supported · strong evidence — Large language model (AI) assistants can generate fluent, confident text that is factually wrong, including fabricated citations and references that do not exist, so their output should be verified rather than trusted as a source.

The tendency of large language models to ‘hallucinate’ plausible but false or unsupported content is well documented in the NLP literature, including fabricated references; this is a recognised limitation that warrants source verification.

Sources: Ji et al. (2023), Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation, ACM Computing Surveys — https://doi.org/10.1145/3571730 · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Encountering information embedded in stories, biography or emotionally engaging material tends to make it more memorable than the same information presented as neutral facts.

Emotional arousal generally enhances memory encoding and consolidation for the gist of emotionally salient material; the effect is robust though it can narrow memory toward central details and is modulated by arousal and timing.

Sources: Tyng, Amin, Saad & Malik (2017), The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory, Frontiers in Psychology — https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454 · full reference ›

Supported · moderate evidence — Verifying a claim against independent sources, and preferring sources that show their reasoning and evidence, are sound practices for judging the reliability of information found online.

Research on online reasoning shows that cross-checking a source against other sources (lateral reading) is the strategy expert fact-checkers use and outperforms reading a single source closely; it supports the cross-check and source-scrutiny advice, though the studies focus on credibility evaluation rather than learning outcomes.

Sources: Wineburg & McGrew (2019), Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information, Teachers College Record — https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811912101102 · full reference ›