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What’s the Eberly Center reading and thinking about this month?

The Research and Scholarship Digest, published the first Monday of each month, consists of short summaries of recently peer-reviewed studies on teaching and learning topics. This digest offers a view into what we are reading and thinking about at the Eberly Center that:

• adds to our understanding of how students learn
• is potentially generalizable across teaching contexts in higher education
• provokes reflection on implications for our teaching and educational development practices.

We hope the readers of this digest will find it a useful resource for staying in-tune with the rapidly expanding education research literature.

Malain, E. D., & Hartwig, M. K. (2026). Self-reported spaced study: Associations with college students’ grades and self-regulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 32(3), 378–389. 

Recent research investigated why self-reported spaced study often fails to correlate with college grades, despite experimental evidence proving its effectiveness. The authors discovered that traditional survey items focus too heavily on the timing of study sessions or cramming, rather than whether students actually restudy the same concepts. By introducing a novel measure specifically targeting restudy, the researchers found a consistent positive link between this behavior and higher exam performance across two separate samples. This predictive relationship remained significant even when accounting for the total time spent studying. Additionally, the study revealed that students with higher levels of self-regulation and self-control are significantly more likely to engage in this effective form of restudy. Ultimately, the findings suggest that educators should emphasize revisiting specific material to help students truly benefit from the spacing effect.

Rice, M. M., Lones, L., Luong, L. M., Aranda, M. L., Farrar, K. M., & Tanner, K. D. (2026). Investigating undergraduate student perceptions of classroom inclusion—Emergence of the Student Perceptions of Instructor Practices—Inclusion/Exclusion (SPIP-I/E) Framework. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 25(3), ar30. 

This study investigated student perceptions of classroom inclusion across an entire biology department at a large, diverse, minority‑serving public university. A total of 1173 students submitted responses to a study, including 375 responses to the inclusion prompt and 183 responses to the exclusion prompt. The researchers asked three main questions: what instructors do that makes students feel included, what instructors do that makes students feel excluded, and whether these perceptions vary across demographic groups. Students reported practices and behaviors that fell into four distinct categories: Building/Dismantling the Instructor/Student Relationship, Making/Compromising Student-Centered Pedagogical Choices, Establishing Collaborative/Non-Collaborative Classroom Culture, and Portraying Science as Inclusive/Exclusive. Through qualitative analysis, the authors developed the Student Perceptions of Instructor Practices—Inclusion/Exclusion (SPIP‑I/E) Framework. Overall, findings suggest that instructor language and behavior—more than any specific teaching strategy—play a central role in shaping students’ sense of inclusion, and these patterns were consistent across demographic groups. 

Schweppe, J., Radloff, P., & Fenzl, A. (2026). Do prequestions support learning from text more than learning objectives?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 32(3), 355. 

Providing students with prequestions before learning is a well documented strategy for improving student learning. Previous research has attributed this effect primarily to the focusing of students’ attention, as well as to the benefits associated with actually attempting to answer the questions. In two preregistered experiments (total n=285), the authors investigated these attributions by testing whether students who received prequestions prior to reading a text would outperform students who were presented instead with learning objectives for the material that corresponded to the prequestions. Through joint analyses of the experiments using both frequentist and Bayesian modeling, the authors concluded that there is a significant advantage for prequestions over the learning objectives condition and the learning objectives condition did not differ from controls. The effects found were smaller than expected, however. These results suggest that it is not merely the focusing of students’ attention that is responsible for the prequestions effect, as students did not perform as well when only presented with learning objectives rather than given explicit instructions to attempt answering questions. The authors discuss practical implications related to prelearning activities and their implementation.