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When Evidence Conflicts with Teachers’ Experience
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Here’s an interesting question: do students — on average — benefit when they repeat a grade?

As you contemplate that question, you might notice the kind of evidence that you thought about.

Perhaps you thought: “I studied this question in graduate school. The research showed that answer is X.”

Perhaps you thought: “I knew a student who repeated a grade. Her experience showed that the answer is X.”

In other words: our teaching beliefs might rest on research, or on personal experience. Almost certainly, they draw on a complex blend of both research and experience.

So, here’s today’s question: what happens when I see research that directly contradicts my experience?

If I, for instance, think that cold calling is a bad idea, and research shows it’s a good idea, I might…

… change my beliefs and conclude it’s a good idea, or

… preserve my beliefs and insist it’s a bad idea. In this case, I might…

… generalize my doubts and conclude education research generally doesn’t have much merit. I might even…

… generalize those doubts even further and conclude that research in other fields (like medicine) can’t help me reach a wise decision.

If my very local doubts about cold-calling research spread beyond this narrow question, such a conflict could create ever-widening ripples of doubt.

Today’s Research

A research team in Germany, led by Eva Thomm, looked at this question, with a particular focus on teachers-in-training. These pre-service teachers, presumably, haven’t studied much research on learning, and so most of their beliefs come from personal experience.

What happens when research contradicts those beliefs?

Thomm ran an online study with 150+ teachers-in-training across Germany. (Some were undergraduates; others graduate students.)

Thomm’s team asked teachers to rate their beliefs on the effectiveness of having students repeat a year. The teachers then read research that contradicted (or, in half the cases, confirmed) those beliefs. What happened next?

Thomm’s results show an interesting mix of bad and good news:

Alas: teachers who read contradictory evidence tended to say that they doubted its accuracy.

Worse still: they started to rely less on scientific sources (research) and more on other sources (opinions of colleagues and students).

The Good News

First: teachers’ doubts did not generalize outside education. That is: however vexed they were to find research contradicting prior beliefs about repeating a year, they did not conclude that medical research couldn’t be trusted.

Secondteachers’ doubts did not generalize within education. That is: they might have doubted findings about repeating a year, but they didn’t necessarily reject research into cold calling.

Third: despite their expressed doubts, teachers did begin to change their minds. They simultaneously expressed skepticism about the research AND let it influence their thinking.

Simply put, this research could have discovered truly bleak belief trajectories. (“If you tell me that cold calling is bad, I’ll stop believing research about vitamin D!”) Thomm’s research did not see that pattern at work.

Caveats, Caveats

Dan Willingham says: “one study is just one study, folks.” Thomm’s research gives us interesting data, but it does not answer this question completely, once and for all. (No one study does. Research can’t do that.)

Two points jump out at me.

First, Thomm’s team worked with teachers in Germany. I don’t know if German society values research differently than other societies do. (Certainly US society has a conspicuously vexed relationship with research-based advice.) So, this research might not hold true in other countries or social belief systems.

Second, her participants initially “reported a positive view on the potency of research and indicated a higher appreciation of scientific than of non-scientific sources.” That is, she started with people who trusted in science and research. Among people who start more skeptical — perhaps in a society that’s more skeptical — these optimistic patterns might not repeat.

And a final note.

You might reasonably want to know: what’s the answer to the question? Does repeating a year help students?

The most honest answer is: I’m not an expert on that topic, and don’t really know.

The most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen, over at the Education Endowment Foundation, says: NO:

“Evidence suggests that, in the majority of cases, repeating a year is harmful to a student’s chances of academic success.” (And, they note, it costs A LOT.)

If you’ve got substantial contradictory evidence that can inform this question, I hope you’ll send it my way.

“Soft” vs. “Hard” Skills: Which Create a Stronger Foundation?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

As teachers, should we focus on our students’ understanding of course content, or on our students’ development of foundational academic skills?

Do they benefit more from learning history (or chemistry or spelling or flute), or from developing the self-discipline (grit, focus, executive skills) to get the work — any work — done?

I’ve found a recent study that explores this question. It stands out for the rigor of its methodology, and the tough-mindedness of its conclusions.

Here’s the setup:

Daunting Problems; Clever Solutions

Researchers struggle to answer these questions because student choice can complicate the data.

When college students choose courses and professors, when they opt out of one section and opt into another, we can’t tell if the professor’s quality or the students’ preferences led to particular research results.

How to solve this problem? We find a school where students get no choices.

They must take the same courses.

They can’t change sections.

Students start the year randomly distributed, and they stay randomly distributed.

Where shall we find such a school? Here’s a possibility: the United States Naval Academy. All students take the same courses. They can’t switch. They can’t drop. Sir, yes sir!

Even better: several USNA courses are sequential. We can ask this question: how does the student’s performance in the first semester affect his/her performance in the second semester?

Do some 1st semester teachers prepare their students especially well — or especially badly — for the 2nd semester?

We can even fold in extra data. The website Rate My Professors lets students grade professors on many qualities — including the difficulty of the course, and their overall rating. Perhaps those data can inform our understanding of teacher effectiveness.

Provocative Conclusions

A research team has followed this logic and recently published their conclusions.

In their findings:

Easygoing teachers — who don’t demand lots of work, who don’t communicate high standards, who routinely give lots of high grades — harm their students. 

How so? Their students — quite consistently — do badly on subsequent courses in the field.

In other words: if I have an easygoing teacher for Calculus I, I’m likely to do badly in Calculus II — compared to my identical twin brother who had a different teacher.

On the other hand, tough-minded teachers — who insist on deadlines, who require extra work, who remain stingy with high grades — benefit their students.

How so? These students — like my identical twin — do better in subsequent courses than I do.

This research team calls such executive function topics — getting work done, even if it’s dull; prioritizing; metacognition — “soft skills.” In their analysis, professors who are tough minded about these soft skills ultimately help their students learn more.

More Provocative Still

This logic certainly makes sense; we’re not shocked that students learn more when we insist that they work hard, focus, and set high standards.

Of course, professors who DON’T insist that their students work hard get lots of student compliments (on average). We teachers know that — all things being equal — students are happier when they get less work. Their RateMyProfessor scores average higher than those of their tough-minded peers.

In turn, colleges notice student popularity ratings. School leaders feel good when students praise particular teachers. They give them awards and promotions and citations. Why wouldn’t they? After all, those highly-praised professors give the college a good reputation.

In other words: according to this research team, colleges are tempted to honor and promote teachers who get high student ratings — even though those very professors harm their students’ long term learning, and thereby diminish the quality of the academic program.

That’s a scathing claim indeed.

Caveats

Like everything I write about here, this finding comes with caveats.

First: although these students were randomly assigned once they got to the Naval Academy, admission to that Academy is very challenging indeed. (Google tells me that 8.3% of their applicants get in.)

So, a tough-minded approach might benefit this extremely narrow part of the population — who, let’s be honest, signed up for a rigorous academic program, rigorously delivered.

However, that finding doesn’t necessarily mean that this approach works for younger students, or a broader swath of the population, or students who didn’t apply for such demanding treatment.

It might. But, this study by itself shouldn’t persuade us to change our work dramatically. (Unless we work in a similar academic setting.)

Second: this report’s authors define “soft” and “hard” in a very specific way (see their page 3).

Your school might use these terms quite differently, so their claims might not apply directly to your terminology.

Equally important, the strategies they use to distinguish between “tough-minded” and “easy-going” professors require lots of intricate parsing.

I myself don’t have the stats skills to interrogate their process; I can imagine a more expert reading asking sharp questions about their methods.

Conclusion

In many parts of life, short-term challenges lead to long-term benefits.

We might not like exercise, but it helps us as we get older.

We might like bacon and ice cream, but leeks and salmon keep us fitter.

This research report suggests that we help our students in the long run by maintaining tough-minded high standards right now.

Doing so might not make us popular. Our administrative leaders don’t always recognize our wisdom. But if our students learn more, their strong “soft-skills” foundation really does help them thrive.

I’m Not Excited, YOU’RE Excited (OK: I’m Excited)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

I’ve been going to Learning and the Brain conferences since 2008, so it takes a lot to for a roster of speakers to WOW me. But this week I’m officially WOWed. Next weekend’s conference looks remarkable.

In some cases, I’m happy to see family favorites return to the LatB microphone:

Dan Willingham wrote the book that launched a thousand MBE careers. If you haven’t read Why Don’t Students Like School?, do so. If you HAVE read it, good news: the second edition is coming out soon.

Barbara Oakley has created some of the most popular online courses EVAH. Her topic: “learning how to learn.” Every time I hear her, I’m reminded why so many people rely on her wisdom and experience.

John Almarode and Doug Fisher both manage to apply the learning sciences to their own daily work in inspiring and unexpected ways. They make you think that good teaching really is possible: a reminder we all need these days.

I could go on. And on.

New Voices

However excited I am to hear these speakers again, I might be even more verklempt at the new speakers — or, more precisely, speakers new to Learning and the Brain.

Paul Kirschner is a real giant in this field. He reminds us constantly to be sure that teaching ideas don’t just need to sound good; they need to benefit students. His article Why Minimal Guidance Instruction Does Not Work [link], written with John Sweller and Richard Clark, remains a frequency-cited manifesto for teaching methods that really help students learn.

Daisy Christodoulou has written several field-defining books, beginning with Seven Myths about Education. (I once described this book as having the highest mic-drop/page ratio I know of.) You can see our review of her latest book — Teachers vs. Tech: The Case for an Ed Tech Revolutionhere.

Kenneth Wesson brings a neuroscience perspective to fields that have traditionally been the focus of psychology: for instance, reading instruction, or, the importance of play for learning. I’m deeply curious to hear how his work on the brain can inform our understanding of the mind.

Dylan Wiliam (yes, that’s the correct spelling) helped launch the idea of assessment for learning, and he hasn’t stopped there. His reminder that — in the world of educational innovation —  “everything works somewhere, but nothing works everywhere” keeps us humble and grounded.

Again, I could list many more.

In short, if you haven’t signed up yet, I truly recommend you do so.

Teachers vs Tech?: The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution by Daisy Christodoulou
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb

The dramatically increased reliance on technology to support students’ learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light educators’ need to understand how technology can support learning and how educators can make thoughtful decisions around the use of technology in schools. Daisy Christodoulou, Director of Education at No More Marking, draws on principles of human cognition and evidence about effective teaching and learning practices to offer suggestions for how technology can help bring about necessary improvements in education. Her book, Teachers vs Tech?: The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution, will be of interest to teachers, school technology managers, and EdTech entrepreneurs.

Lack of understanding and misconceptions about how people learn interfere with building technologies that can improve education. One especially important feature of human cognition is that while we have the ability to store vast amounts of information in long-term memory, we can only hold and manipulate a few pieces of information at a time—i.e., we have limited working memory capacity. Too often in-person or technology-based educational tools and techniques are ineffective because they tax our working memory. There is increasing pushback against teaching students facts since students can “just google it.” Christodoulou argues, however, that without sufficient content knowledge students’ working memory capacity would be quickly overwhelmed, they would not be able to understand the things they look up online, and they would easily fall prey to false information. A common misconception about learning is that students have different “learning styles.” This learning myth assumes that, for example, some students learn better with visual information while others learn better with auditory information.

While it is the case that technology could substantially help improve education by personalizing learning, doing so with technology that teaches to different learning styles or lets students guide their own learning based on their interests and assessments of their competency is not effective. Rather, technology could effectively personalize learning by providing targeted feedback and assessments based on students’ objective performance. Good educational technology can break down complex skills into smaller parts, provide helpful examples, and help students practice those skills repeatedly.

Christodoulou warns that a challenge with smart devices is that it is so easy to become distracted from educational work while using such devices. She suggests reducing device use, changing settings to reduce distractions, and potentially moving towards devices designed for a single learning purpose so that there are fewer possible distractions.

Christodoulou suggests that the path forward for EdTech should be to combine teacher expertise, for example in motivating students and evaluating complex ideas, with the ability of tech to do things like scale lectures, engage students in spaced, repetitive practice, and consistently applying rules to make grading fair. Further, teachers should receive training in using new technologies. Before adopting new EdTech, educators should investigate how the technology personalize the learning experience, how it builds long-term memory, how it support attention, and what evidence there is about its efficacy.

Christodoulou wisely concludes that change in education will only be possible when it is grounded in the realities of how people learn and the objectives that society and students have for school, and when it honors the expertise of teachers. Still, she argues that technologies that adapt to students’ performance and provide opportunities to practice challenging component skills provide an example of useful educational technology. In this moment when understanding the possibilities of EdTech is so important, Teachers vs Tech is a helpful read.

Christodoulou, D. (2020). Teachers vs Tech?: The case for an ed tech revolution. Oxford University Press-Children.

Does MOVEMENT Help LEARNING?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

In the exaggerated stereotype of an obsessively traditional classroom, students sit perfectly silent and perfectly still. They listen, and watch, and do nothing else.

Few classrooms truly function that way.

But, how far should we go in the other direction? Can teachers — and should teachers — encourage noise and movement to help students learn?

In recent years, the field of embodied cognition has explored the ways that we think with our bodies.

That is: movement itself might help students learn.

Of course, this general observation needs to be explored and understood in very specific ways. Otherwise, we might get carried away. (About a year ago, for instance, one teacher inspired a Twitter explosion by having his students read while pedaling exercycles. I’ve spent some time looking at research on this topic, and concluded … we just don’t know if this strategy will help or not.)

So, let’s get specific.

Moving Triangles

An Australian research team worked with 60 ten- and eleven-year olds learning about triangles. (These students studied in the intermediate math track; they attended a private high school, with higher-than-usual SES. These “boundary conditions” might matter.)

Students learned about isosceles triangles, and the relationships between side-lengths and angles, and so forth.

20 of the students studied in a “traditional way“: reading from the book.

20 studied by watching a teacher use software to manipulate angles and lengths of sides.

And, 20 studied by using that software themselves. That is: they moved their own hands.

Researchers wanted to know:

Did these groups differ when tested on similar (nearly identical) triangle problems?

Did they differ when tested on somewhat different problems?

And, did they rate their mental effort differently?

In other words: did seeing movement help students learn better? Did performing the movement themselves help?

The Envelope, Please

The software clearly helped. The actual movement sort-of helped.

Students who interacted with the software themselves, and those who watched the teachers do so, did better on all the triangle problems. (Compared — that is — to students who learned the traditional way.)

And, they said it took less mental effort to answer the questions.

HOWEVER:

Students who used the software themselves did no better than the students who watched the teachers use it. (Well: they did better on the nearly identical problems, but not the newer problems that we care more about.)

In other words: movement helped these students learn this material — but it didn’t really matter if they moved themselves, or if they watched someone else move.

The Bigger Picture

Honestly: research into embodied cognition could someday prove to make a big difference in schools.

Once we’ve done enough of these studies — it might be dozens, it might be hundreds — we’ll have a clearer picture explaining which movements help which students learn what material.

For the time being, we should watch this space. And — fingers crossed — within the next 5 years we’ll have an Embodied Cognition conference at Learning and the Brain.

Until then: be wise and cautious, and use your instincts. Yes, sometimes movement might help. But don’t get carried away by dramatic promises. We need more facts before we draw strong conclusions.


Bokosmaty, S., Mavilidi, M. F., & Paas, F. (2017). Making versus observing manipulations of geometric properties of triangles to learn geometry using dynamic geometry software. Computers & Education113, 313-326.