| Summary: | The need to identify methods to support self-regulated learning has raised the interest of
researchers in recent years. Cognitive prompts are considered very promising instructional
tools for developing self-regulatory abilities. The present study aims to investigate the
usefulness of several types of cognitive prompts in activating learning strategies for
studying an educationally relevant content by psychology students. Two empirical
investigations were conducted in a realistic learning environment to test an instructional
strategy which integrates cognitive prompts. The first experiment tested the effectiveness of
prompts to stimulate deep and shallow processing, measuring immediate learning effects.
The second experiment focused on long-term effects of the strategy. The findings indicate
that prompts activating deep learning strategies resulted in a slightly improvement in
students' performance, but this enhancing effect diminished over time. Cognitive prompts
encouraging a deep learning approach can support the comprehension of complex content
in a psychology course. Future research is suggested to identify conditions that facilitate
long-lasting learning effects. Cognitive prompts may be an effective method for teaching
psychology to support students’ efforts to understand a complex content. For enhancing the
long-term impact of the method, teachers should explore other learning strategies.
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