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A Virtual Talk by Louis Deslauriers (9/24/25, 7-8:30am CDT*)
How close can we get to the learning gains of expert one‑to‑one coaching in university courses? One-to-one coaching — combining deliberate practice, instant feedback, and affective support — is widely recognized as the gold standard for learning. Drawing on our Science 2011 study, I will illustrate what high‑learning‑density active learning (many decisions and feedback cycles per unit time) looks like and why it is so effective. I will then discuss findings from our PNAS 2019 paper, on the illusion of learning: when instruction is more effortful and thus, perceived as disfluent, students often feel they learn less even as their performance improves—an instance of fluency bias that favors polished lectures over productive struggle and can negatively distort student course evaluations.
I will also share new results from two‑stage exams—now common in North America—where students complete an individual exam and immediately retake it in groups for partial credit (e.g., 20%). In a randomized comparison of post-exam feedback conditions, students who received group exam feedback scored ~10% higher on later isomorphic questions than those who received instructor feedback, even though students in the group-exam condition spent much of the time debating errors (roughly 40% of the time)—showing the cognitive value of explicit error engagement, a hallmark of deliberate practice that is rarely taught in higher education. Finally, I will examine the role of AI in education, highlighting both promising applications that enhance engagement and the critical limitations that prevent current systems from approximating true tutors, given their limited capacity to capture the nuances of student thinking.
* This event is hosted by a group of folks at the University of Bergen (Norway), and 7am CDT is their afternoon. :-)
For those of you who were unable to attend and don't have time to watch the 84-minute recording, I'm going to record a summary of my notes (i.e., his talk and my observations) soon. --Nancy
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