[1] Born in West Lafayette, IN and raised in Lexington, KY, McDaniel attained his undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Psychology in 1974.
He completed his graduate study at University of Colorado, Boulder, receiving his MA in 1978 with a dissertation titled “Memory for the Meaning and Surface Structure of Sentences as a Function of Processing Difficulty” and his PhD in 1980 with a dissertation titled "Bottom-up and top-down acquisition of expertise on river crossing problems: A study of knowledge acquisition".
[4] McDaniel, along with his colleague Gil Einstein, are credited with developing one of the earliest, and since then the most frequently used, laboratory measure of prospective memory.
[9] The nature of age-related changes in prospective memory continues to be debated by the field, but research findings are consistent in showing that monitoring declines with aging[10] and spontaneous retrieval appears to remain relatively intact in older adults.
[18] Additionally, McDaniel co-authored the book, Make it Stick, with Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III which synthesizes cognitive principles discussed above to help learners of all ages to improve their learning.