The Impact of an Attorney’s Speaking Fluency When Delivering an Opening Statement on Juror Decisions

A wealth of research has focused on factors that impact jurors’ decisions based on the information made available to them in court. However, in no prior research has the impact of how well an attorney delivers an opening statement been isolated to evaluate its direct impact on jurors’ decisions. To explore this issue, students were randomly assigned to read a fluent or disfluent version of an opening statement. The fluency of the attorney’s opening statement did not impact liability ratings or ratings of the likelihood of hiring the defendant. By contrast, the fluency of the attorney’s opening statement significantly influenced how likely participants reported that they would be to hire the attorney and for many of the traits referring to the attorney’s competency

Tauber & Witherby (2019) Do judgments of learning modify older adults actual learning? Psychology and Aging

In this work, we explored the direct impact of judgments of learning (JOLs) on older and younger adults' memory

Exam Preparation: The Effects of Access to Notes and/or Text During Test

Prior work has found that the type of test that learners expect to take can influence how they prepare (e.g., Agarwal et al., 2008; Daou, Buchanan, et al., 2016; Daou, Lohse, et al., 2016; Tauber, Thakkar, & Pleshek, 2022). Specifically, learners tend to spend more time studying for a closed-book exam than for an open-book exam (Agarwal & Roediger, 2011). There also appears to be a benefit of open-book testing compared to closed-book testing in the short-term, with learners performing better on open-book versus closed-book exams. However, in the long term (e.g., a 2-day delay), open- and closed-book tests are equally effective for learning (Agarwal & Roediger, 2011; Wenzel, Schweppe, & Rummer, 2021). With the more recent transitions to online (and often, unsupervised) learning, especially during COVID-19, learners might have access to their notes in addition to their books while taking an exam. To date, little work has examined how open- versus closed-note exams influence learners’ exam preparation and learning outcomes. The current study examines the extent to which tests with open- versus closed-access to notes influence how long learners choose to prepare for the exam and how they prepare. More specifically, we will investigate how open-book versus closed-book and open-note versus closed-note conditions influence how long students study and how many notes they take in preparation for the exam. We also aim to replicate prior findings on open-book versus closed-book exam preparation and learning outcomes (Agarwal et al., 2008; Agarwal et al., 2011). In the experiment, participants will read a short passage (~1000 words) in preparation for a test consisting of 7 short answer questions about the passage (materials from Butler, 2010). Participants will have as long as they want to prepare for the test and will have the option to take as many notes as desired on the passage by typing them into a box on the screen. Immediately after participants are finished studying, they will take a self-paced short answer test in one of the four formats: 1. Open-book, open-note: access to passage and notes on test 2. Open-book, closed-note: access to passage only at test 3. Closed-book, open-note: access to notes only at test 4. Closed-book, closed-note: no access to passage or notes at test Once finished with the test, participants will answer a few qualitative questions (e.g., which of the four testing formats do you typically prefer?) and complete the Test Anxiety Scale (Cassady & Johnson, 2002)

Effects of Retrieval Practice Instructions and Aging on SRL for Medication Side Effects

Experiment investigating the effects of a brief retrieval practice intervention on older and younger adults' memory for medication side effect