I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it.  I’ll describe why in a bit, but for now I’ll just change it to “does your mind do more or less the same thing when you listening to an audio book and when you read print?”

The short answer is “mostly.”

For difficult-to-understand texts, prosody can be a real aid to understanding. Shakespearean plays provide ready examples. When Juliet says “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” it’s common for students to think that “wherefore” means “where,” and Juliet (who in fact doesn't know Romeo is nearby at that moment) is wondering where Romeo is. "Wherefore" actually means “why” and she's wondering why he's called Romeo, and why names, which are arbitrary, could matter at all. An actress can communicate the intended meaning of “Wherefore art thou Romeo” through prosody, although the movie clip below doesn't offer a terrific example. 

​So listening to an audio book may have more information that will make comprehension a little easier. Prosody might clarify the meaning of ambiguous words or help you to assign syntactic roles to words.  

But most of the time it doesn’t, because most of what you listen to is not that complicated. For most books, for most purposes, listening and reading are more or less the same thing.  

So listening to an audiobook is not “cheating,” but let me tell you why I objected to phrasing the question that way. “Cheating” implies an unfair advantage, as though you are receiving a benefit while skirting some work. Why talk about reading as though it were work?

Listening to an audio book might be considered cheating if the act of decoding were the point; audio books allow you to seem to have decoded without doing so. But if appreciating the language and the story is the point, it’s not.  ​Comparing audio books to cheating is like meeting a friend at Disneyland and saying “you took a bus here? I drove myself, you big cheater.” The point is getting to and enjoying the destination. The point is not how you traveled. 

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students who are the first in their families to attend college are at heightened risk to leave school without a degree. It's not a matter of students coming to school inadequately prepared--something else is at work (e.g., Steele, 1997). It's not merely disheartening for these students, there can be potentially grave financial repercussions for dropping out. 

Most colleges and universities have programs meant to help students with the process of transitioning, and they often focus on practical skills like choosing classes and study strategies on the assumption that navigating academic life is a significant part of the problem.

In the last few years researchers have focused on a quite different approach: offering students a "lay theory" of the college experience. A lay theory is a set of beliefs that are used to interpret one's experiences. In the case of college, two beliefs have been flagged as especially important: that the transition to college inevitably involves setbacks, and that these setbacks are temporary.

College always includes disappointments, both academic and social. A student fails a test, or a callous professor tells them that their writing is beyond hope. (My freshman year of college an English professor wrote this as the entire comment on my exam essay: "No. D" Students get lonely, and have trouble making friends.  For students who grew up in families where it was always assumed that they would attend college, such disappointments are dispiriting, but not threatening. The student may even wonder if he or she belongs in college, but that doubt likely doesn't last. For a student who did not grow up in an environment where it was taken for granted that they would graduate college that doubt may persist. They may think that they are not smart enough to succeed, that they are "not college material," or that their cultural background is not compatible with college. 

Researchers have sought ways to instill a lay theory of college that would change that interpretation, focusing on two ideas: setbacks in college are common  (and therefore should not be taken as a sign that you don't belong) and setbacks are temporary (so things will get better). 

Researchers have had some success with this intervention in smaller experiments (Stephens et al, 2014; Walton & Cohen, 2011. Now a new study (Yeager et al, 2016) suggests that a simple, inexpensive intervention works at scale. 

Before they matriculated at college, students participated in an activity taking just 30 minutes, administered over the Internet. They were told that it was to help them think about the transition to college, and that they would have the chance to share their experiences, perhaps helping future students. 

There were three experimental conditions. The social belonging condition provided information showing that feeling out of place is common in the transition to college, but most students do make friends and succeed academically. The growth mindset condition provided information showing that intelligence is malleable, and that student can succeed with effort, coupled with effective strategies. The third condition combined both strategies. In each case, students were asked to write an essay about how the information they read might apply to them, as a way of cementing the information in memory, and to help them imagine making it applicable to their own experience.

One experiment targeted the entering class of a large public university. As shown in the table below, the intervention improved retention. All three of the intervention conditions were equally effective. 

Another experiment administered the intervention at a selective private university. The figure shows that disadvantaged students receiving the intervention earned higher GPAs in their first year of college 

Consistent with the theory, advantaged students don't benefit from the intervention; they already believe that they can succeed at college, and that they belong there, so their lay theory of college is likely already similar to the one described in the intervention.

Two things are noteworthy about this experiment. First, the reduction in the achievement gap is quite sizable, on the order of 30-40%. Second, this intervention was remarkably brief, and remarkably inexpensive. Obviously this work needs to be replicated and the interventions fine-tuned. (The growth mindset intervention didn't really work in Experiment 1.) But if this finding holds up, it must be counted as a huge success for social scientists, and for David Yeager and Greg Walton in particular. 

There's plenty of research on homework and the very brief version of the findings is probably well known to readers of this blog: homework has a modest effect on the academic achievement of older students, and no effect on younger students (Cooper et al, 2006).

In a way, this outcome seems odd. Practice is such an important part of certain types of skill, and much of homework is assigned for the purpose of practice. Why doesn't it help, or help more?

One explanation is that the homework assigned is not of very good quality, which could mean a lot of different things and absent more specificity sounds like a homework excuse. Another, better explanation is that practice doesn't do much unless there is rapid feedback, and that's usually absent at home. 

A third explanation is quite different, suggesting that the problem may lie in measurement. Most studies of homework efficacy have used student self-report of how much time they spend on homework. Maybe those reports are inaccurate. 

A new study indicates that this third explanation merits closer consideration. 

The researchers (Rawson, Stahovich & Mayer, in press) examined homework performance among three classes of undergraduate engineering students taking their first statics course. The homework assigned was typical for this sort of course; the atypical feature was that students were asked to complete their homework with Smartpens. These function like regular ink pens, but when coupled with special paper, they record time-stamped pen strokes.

The researchers were able to gather objective measures of time spent on homework, as well as other performance metrics.

A few of these measures proved interesting. For example, students who completed a lot of homework within 24 hours of the due date tended to earn lower course grades.

But the really interesting finding was a significant correlation of course grade and time spent on homework as measured by the Smartpen (r = .44) in the face of NO correlation between course grade and time spent on homework as reported by the students (r = -.16).

The relationship between homework and course grades is not the news. This is a college course and no matter what the format, it's only going to meet a few hours each week, and students will be expected to do a great deal of work on their own.

The news is that students were poor at reporting their time spent on homework; 88% reported more than the Smartpen showed they had actually spent. The correlation of actual time and reported time ranged from r = .16 to r = .35 for the three cohorts. 

In other words, with such a noisy measure of time spent on homework, there was little hope of observing a reliable relationship of homework with a course outcome. This finding ought to call into question much of the prior research on homework. 

Please don't take this blog posting as an enthusiastic endorsement of homework. For one thing, this literature seems pretty narrow in focusing solely on academic performance outcomes, given that many teachers and parents have other goals for homework such as increased self-directedness. For another thing, even if it were shown the certain types of homework led to certain types of improvement in academic outcomes, that doesn't mean every school and classroom ought to assign homework. That decision should be made in the context of broader goals.

But if teachers are going to assign homework, researchers should investigate its efficacy. This study should make us rethink how we interpret existing research in this area.