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Monthly Archives: January 2021

“Students Switch Their Screens Every 19 Seconds.” Sort Of…
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 26, 2021

“Students Switch Their Screens Every 19 Seconds.” Sort Of…

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I recently read an arresting claim: when students have web browsers open, they switch their screens — on average — every 19 seconds.

Such data boggle the mind with horror.

As teachers, we want our students to devote sustained thought to complex topics. Nineteen seconds just isn’t going to cut it.

As an English teacher, I think nineteen minutes won’t reveal the full joys of a Shakespearean sonnet. In nineteen seconds, my students won’t have time to find the main verb. The Horror.

Although it took a moment’s sleuthing to track down this claim (see Coda below), this statement does in fact have research support. Back in 2014, Leo Yeykelis and his intrepid team undertook quite a complex study — including screen monitoring and measures of skin conductance! — to arrive at this conclusion.

Clearly, it’s time to panic.

Don’t Panic Just Yet

Whenever we hear shocking “research based” conclusions  — ESPECIALLY conclusions that confirm our prior beliefs — we should look hard at that underlying research.

We need to know exactly what the researchers did before we jump to big conclusions about their work.

If you click the link above, you can read Yeykelis’s study. When I did, two points jumped out at me very quickly:

First: this study draws its conclusions based on research into 10 college undergraduates. TEN.

Now, researchers have very good reasons to run studies with only ten people in them. Research is pricey and time consuming, so it makes sense to do a small-ish study before ramping up to study hundreds or thousands of people.

In other words, they didn’t do anything wrong.

However, for the same reason you wouldn’t take a medicine that had been tested on only ten people, you shouldn’t make dramatic changes to your classroom based on that research.

Second: because this study has so few participants, we want to know what other studies have found on this topic.

Regular readers know: my go-to sites to answer that question are Scite.ai and ConnectedPapers.com.

When I plugged Yeykelis’s study into those search engines, I found some support — but not lots-n-lots. In other words: this field simply hasn’t been studied very much.

For instance: the ConnectPapers grid doesn’t highlight any related research after 2017. (That finding doesn’t mean that no research has been done after that date, but that it hasn’t reached prominence yet.)

Don’t Panic; Do Respond

For all these reasons, I don’t think we should get too focused on “19 seconds.”

At the same time, the other studies highlighted by Scite.ai and ConnectedPapers.com do point consistently in the same direction: screen switching really is a thing.

A bad thing.

We don’t know exactly how prevalent the problem is, but it’s not isolated; it’s not trivial.

For that reason, I think we should consider our own teacherly responsibilities here.

ESPECIALLY during online classes, we can remind students to turn off other technologies. “Remember our class rules: please turn your cell phones off. And, close all the other tabs in your browser except this one, and your homework.”

We can explicitly teach students to purge tech from their study areas and habits. “When you start your work, have your book open, your pencil on your paper, and your computer off.”

We can include those reminders in homework assignments. “This paragraph is due Wednesday before class. Remember: have your web browser closed before you start writing.”

We can look in the mirror. How often do we switch screens? What prompts us to do so? For instance, as I write, I’ve got 7 browser tabs open. I am — REALLY — using them all to write this post. Based on this experience, what realistic guidance can I give my students about multi-screening?

Of course, you’ll translate such suggestions to fit your own teaching circumstances. In every case, we’re making reasonable and measured changes.

The precise number “19” doesn’t really matter. The big picture — learning requires sustained attention, so we should foster it — really does.

Coda

I wrote last week, improbably, about the benefits of Twitter. Yes, it can be mean-spirited and dreadful, but it can also provide helpful insight and useful resources.

The day after I wrote that blog post, my own Twitter experience highlighted that lesson.

I first read about the “19 Seconds” research in Doug Lemov’s excellent new book Teaching in the Online Classroom. (Lemov’s Twitter handle: @Doug_Lemov).

Curious, I tweeted at him asking for the citation.

Before Lemov could answer, another scholar — Christian Bokhove (@cbokhove) — BOTH provided me with Yeykelis’s 2014 study AND linked to a follow-up study with even more dire results.

And then — because Twitter can be great — Lemov himself followed up to be sure I’d gotten the research I needed.

I don’t mean to downplay its flaws. But I’ve found Twitter mighty useful in learning about teaching, and about research; and in finding a kind of community.

It’s ironic but: I’m encouraging you to OPEN another web browser and check out Twitter.

EduTwitter Can Be Great. No, Really…
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 19, 2021

EduTwitter Can Be Great. No, Really…

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Twitter has a terrible reputation, and EduTwitter isn’t an exception.

The misinformation.

The name-calling.

The “team” rivalries: all heat and little light.

Did I mention the misinformation?

You might wonder: why bother? Honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. I myself was hesitant to sign up.

Despite all these flaws — none of which is exaggerated, by the way — I do find lots of benefits. This experience recently got my attention.

The Setup

On my personal Twitter account, I posted a link to research that had me puzzled. According to a small study, the motor cortex does not “remap” to represent prosthetic limbs.

Given all the research we have into neuroplasticity, I was genuinely shocked by that finding.

In fact, I’m currently reading Barbara Tversky’s book Mind in Motion, which talks about brains remapping in response to TOOL USE.

If brains remap because of tools, but not because of prosthetics — which are, from one perspective, tools that have been attached to the body — well: that’s a very strange.

But, people on Twitter know things I don’t. I thought: maybe someone knows more about this research pool than I…

Rising Action

Soon after I posted that link, my Twitter friend Rob McEntarffer (@rmcenta) retweeted it, sharing my curiosity. (By the way: “Twitter friends” are really a thing. I know LOTS of people — too many to name here — whom I have come to respect and like entirely by “meeting” them on Twitter. I would NOT have predicted that.)

One of his Twitter followers — someone I have never met and don’t know — retweeted Rob’s retweet, with a question to her professor.

So, we’re now at 3 or 4 degrees of separation. What happens next?

The Payoff

Turns out: this professor — whom I also don’t know — has lots of expertise in this research field. He briskly explained why the study couldn’t draw strong conclusions. (If I understand him correctly, its measurement methodology doesn’t allow it to make those claims.)

In other words: within a few hours, I went from…

being ASTONISHED because a research finding dramatically contradicted my (fairly basic) understanding of neural remapping,

to…

having a SUCCINCT AND CLEAR EXPLANATION why that research shouldn’t concern me,

and…

feeling RELIEVED that my understanding of neuroplasticity wasn’t so wrongheaded.

And, what made those changes possible — or, at least, a whole lot easier? Twitter.

Caveats

To be clear, Twitter really does include (and produce) foul, cruel nonsense. If you look for that, you’ll find it. (Tom Lehrer says: “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends [at least in part] on what you put into it.”)

At the same time, I routinely come across generous teachers & researchers. They freely share perspectives and resources and contacts and information.

If you can stand the background noise, you might give it a look.

One place to start: @LearningAndTheB. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

How Can We Help Students Study Better?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 12, 2021

How Can We Help Students Study Better?

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This story might sound familiar:

You attend a Learning and the Brain conference (like, say, our upcoming conference about Teaching During a Pandemic) and come away with FANTASTIC ideas.

You go back to your classrooms — in person, online, asynchronous — and tell your students all about the amazing research you saw. (Perhaps you discuss the importance of retrieval practice, which helps much more than old-fashioned review.)

Your students sound thrilled!

And yet, the very next day they ignore your retrieval practice suggestion, and go right back to rereading their notes. Ugh.

SO FRUSTRATING!

What can we do to help our students study correctly — which is to say: how can we help them learn more, and more effectively?

In a recent article, Mark McDaniel and Gilles Einstein offer a 4-step framework to help change students’ study behavior.

Called KBCP — which stands for “Knowledge, Belief, Commitment, and Planning” — this framework could make a real difference for long-term learning.

The Short Version

In brief:

Knowledge: we should tell students about the study strategy or technique that research has shown to be effective: say, spacing, or generative learning strategies.

Belief: students then undertake an exercise that demonstrates the benefits of this strategy.

Commitment: students get onboard with the idea. They don’t just know and believe; they buy in.

Planning: next, they make a specific and measurable plan to enact their commitment.

As McDaniel and Einstein’s article shows, each of these steps has good research behind it. Their contribution to this field: they bring them all together in a coherent system.

McDaniel and Einstein emphasize that teachers shouldn’t rely on just one or two of these steps. They all work together to help students learn more:

Our central premise is that all four components must and can be explicitly targeted in a training program to maximize self-guided transfer of effective learning strategies.

The problem with the story that began this blog post, in other words, is that it targets only the first of these four steps. To help our students learn, we need to do more and better.

One Example

This article makes for such compelling reading because the authors both explain the research behind each step and offer specific classroom examples to show what they mean.

For instance: the “belief” step encourages teachers to design an exercise that helps students really believe that the technique will work. What would such an exercise look like?

If, for instance, we want to encourage students to “generate explanations” as a memory strategy, what exercise would persuade them that it works?

M&E describe a strategy they’ve often used.

First: have students learn several simple sentences. For instance: “The brave man ran into the house.”

Second: for half of those sentences, encourage students to (silently) generate an explanation: perhaps, “to rescue the kitten from the fire.”

Third: when we test students on those sentences later, they will (almost certainly) remember the second group better than the first. That is: they’ll have reason to believe the strategy works because they experienced it themselves.

McDaniel and Einstein include such examples for each of their four steps.

And Beyond

This article gets my attention for another reason as well. The authors write:

There are many potentially effective ways to actualize the key components of the KBCP framework, and we offer the following as one possible example of a training program.

Frequent readers recognize my mantra here: “don’t just do this thing; instead, think this way.”

In other words, McDaniel and Einstein don’t offer readers a to-do list — a set of instructions to follow. Instead, they provide ideas for teachers to consider, and then to adapt to our own specific teaching context.

KBCP will look different in a 2nd grade classroom than a high-school classroom; different in a gym class than a tuba lesson; different in a Brazilian cultural context than a Finnish one.

Research can offer us broad guidance on the directions to go; it can’t tell us exactly what to do with our own students.

The KBCP framework creates another intriguing possibility.

I recently saw an article saying — basically — that “teaching study skills doesn’t work.”

Its provocative abstract begins:

This paper argues that the widespread approach to enhancing student learning through separate study skills courses is ineffective, and that the term ‘study skills’ itself has misleading implications, which are counterproductive to learning.

The main argument is that learning how to study effectively at university cannot be separated from subject content and the process of learning.

Having seen McDaniel and Einstein’s article, I wonder: perhaps these courses don’t work not because they can’t work, but because they’re currently being taught incorrectly.

Perhaps if study skills classes followed this KBCP framework, they would in fact accomplish their mission.

M&E acknowledge that their framework hasn’t been tested together as a coherent strategy. To me at least, it sounds more promising than other approaches I’ve heard.

Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive by Stephen Kosslyn
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
January 11, 2021

Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive by Stephen Kosslyn

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The COVID-19 global pandemic has spurred a massive and rapid increase in online education. Although it is possible to design effective learning experiences in online classrooms, often online education fails to take advantage of the strengths of recent technologies and of the science of learning to meet students’ educational needs. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a former cognitive psychology professor at Harvard University who has worked in education technology start-ups and currently serves as the president of both Foundry College and of Active Learning Sciences, seeks to empower educators to provider better online education. His new book, Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive, first defines active learning and reviews the psychology of how people learn and remember. Kosslyn then reviews five principles that contribute to successful learning—deep processing, chunking, building associations, dual coding and deliberate practice—and discusses ways to combine these principles and motivate students to help them learn. The book ends with clear and helpful examples of specific active learning activities that can be effectively conducted online in middle school through graduate school classes and describes how to implement these for different subject areas and groups of students. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic is better controlled, online learning will continue to be a major part of education; Kosslyn’s dual expertise in the science of learning and online education make him well equipped to guide educators towards practices that will help their students.

Learning, according to Kosslyn, is the process of acquiring and encoding new skills and information in memory. Ideally learned material can be transferred and applied in novel ways. Active learning, or using information in service of achieving a learning outcome, is typically more effective than lectures for helping students to retain and apply information, even if it does not feel to students like they are learning during active learning exercises. Although lectures allow students to passively participate and cannot be tailored to students’ interests and background knowledge, in small doses they can be an effective teaching instrument because they highlight and organize key ideas for students, model expert thinking, and can be used to reach many students at once. Kosslyn advocates for the “learning sandwich,” which features a brief lecture-based explanation of an idea, followed by an active learning exercise, and then a class-wide debrief on the learning exercise.

To support students’ learning it is helpful to understand a few key aspects of how human learning and memory work. One key principle is that the more mental effort one exerts on understanding or manipulating a piece of information the more likely that piece of information is to be retained. Similarly, linking new information or ideas to existing knowledge aids learning. Pushing students just slightly beyond their current skills and knowledge can create a fertile environment for them to engage in this sort of deep processing and association building. Another key principle is that it is easier to learn content that has been organized into a few small units. Educators might organize lectures into three or four distinct chunks and pause between chunks or build in active exercises between chunks to aid learning. Presenting information in both verbal and visual forms aids learning. Educators often rely on verbal information deliver (e.g., through lectures and texts); maps, charts, graphs, and diagrams can be used to engage with information visually. Specific, timely, and actionable feedback, coupled with a learner’s motivation to improve, can help learners make significant gains. Kosslyn suggests several classic memory tricks that draw on and integrate these principles of how people learn. For example, he describes the method of loci in which one draws on known visual images to learn lists or sequences.

For students to learn they need to be motivated to participate in the learning experience. Kosslyn reviews basics of theories of motivation. An intrinsic desire or inherent interest in learning stems from an individual’s basic desire to feel competent, autonomous, and socially connected to other people. Extrinsic motivation involves offering incentives or threatening consequences. Kosslyn offers examples of ways to capitalize on these sources of motivation. He concludes with several examples of exercises and activities that can be incorporated into online classes, whether those classes are synchronous or asynchronous, and explains how to set up the relevant technology for these activities. Active learning exercises can include analyzing and evaluating various materials, engaging in perspective taking via debates, role playing and storytelling, solving problems, finding information, making predictions, and explaining ideas.

Online learning has really come of age in the last year. Educators can equip themselves to be able to teach effectively online with the advice in Active Learning Online.

Kosslyn, S. M. (2020). Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online courses Come Alive. Alinea Learning; Boston, MA.

Does Online Learning Work? Framing the Debate to Come…
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 05, 2021

Does Online Learning Work? Framing the Debate to Come…

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With news that several very effective vaccines will be increasingly available over the upcoming months, we teachers can now start thinking about “a return to normal”: that is — in person teaching as we (mostly) worked before February of 2020.

One question will inevitably be debated: did online learning work?

I suspect that the “debate” will go something like this. One voice will stake an emphatic opinion: ONLINE CLASSES WERE AN UNEXPECTED TRIUMPH! Some data will be offered up, perhaps accompanied by a few stories.

An equally emphatic voice will respond: ONLINE CLASSES FAILED STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND PARENTS! More data. More stories.

This heated exchange will reverberate, perhaps improved by all of Twitter’s nuance and common sense.

A Better Way?

Rather than launch and participate a BATTLE OF EXTREMES, I hope we can look for a more level-headed approach. As is so often the case when research meets teaching, a key question should be boundary conditions.

Whenever we look for a research  finding (e.g.: drawing helps students learn!), we should ask: under what precise conditions is this true?

Does drawing help older students and younger ones? In math and in phonics? Autistic students, dyslexic students, aphantasic students, and neurotypical students?

We’re always looking for boundaries, because every research finding has boundaries. As Dylan Wiliam (who will be speaking at our February Conference) famously says: “When it comes to educational interventions, everything works somewhere. Nothing works everywhere.”

If we ask about boundary conditions for the strengths and weaknesses of online learning, we can have a much more productive discussion.

Places to Start

Age: I suspect we’ll find that — on average — older students did better with online classes than younger ones. My friends who teach college/high school don’t love online teaching, but they don’t seem quite as overwhelmed/defeated by those who teach younger grades.

Additional Technology: Is it better to have a simple Zoom-like platform with occasional breakout sessions? Does it help to use additional, elaborate programs to supplement online learning?

Discipline: Perhaps online teaching worked better with one kind of class (science?) than another (physical education?).

Personality: Although most high school students I know emphatically prefer in-person classes, I do know two who greatly prefer the online version. Both really struggle negotiating adolescent social networks; they’ve been frankly grateful to escape from those pressures and frustrations.

Teachers’ personalities could matter as well. Some of us comfortably roll with the punches. Some of us feel set in our ways.

Administration: Did some school leaders find more effective ways to manage transitions and support teachers and students? The question “does online learning work” might get different answers depending on the managerial skill supervising the whole process. (In my work, I find teachers appreciated decisiveness and clear communication above all else. Even when they didn’t like the decision itself, they liked knowing that a decision had been made.)

SES: No doubt the socio-economic status (SES) of school districts made a big difference. It’s hard to run online classes in schools and communities that don’t have money for technology, or infrastructure to support its use.

Pedagogy: Do some styles of teaching work better online? Or — a slightly different version of this questions — do teachers and schools with experience “flipping the classroom” have greater success with an online model?

Teacher Experience: Perhaps well-seasoned teachers had more experience to draw on as they weathered the muddle? Or, perhaps younger teachers — comfortable with tech, not yet set in their ways — could handle all the transitions more freely?

Country/Culture: Do some countries or cultures manage this kind of unexpected social transition more effectively than others?

Two Final Points

First: We should, I think, expect complex and layered answers to our perfectly appropriate question.

In other words: online learning (a la Covid) probably worked well for these students studying this topic in this country using this technology. It was probably so-so for other students in other circumstances. No doubt it was quite terrible for still other students and disciplines and pedagogies.

Second: I myself have long been skeptical of the idea that “online learning is the future of education (and everything else)!”

And yet, I don’t think we can fairly judge the validity of that claim based on this last year’s experience.

After all: most teachers and school and students didn’t get well-designed and deliberately-chosen online education. They got what-can-we-throw-together-with-grit-and-hope online education.

Of course that didn’t work as well as our old ways (for most students). Nothing worked well: restaurants struggled to adjust. The travel industry struggled. Retail struggled.

Yes: I think that — for almost everybody learning almost everything — in-person learning is likely to be more effective. But I myself won’t judge the whole question based on this year’s schooling.

We all benefit from forgiveness for our lapses and muddles during Covid times.

Let’s learn what we reasonably can about online education, and use that experience to improve in-person and remote learning in the future.