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Handwriting Improves Learning, Right?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Here’s a good rule for research: if you believe something, look for research that contradicts your belief.

So, if you think that retrieval practice helps students learn, see if you can find research showing the opposite.

If you disapprove of cold-calling, see if any studies support its use.

If you think that hand-written notes help students more than notes taken on a laptop, try to find research that disagrees with you.

In this last case, you might even find me. Most teachers I know believe that handwritten notes are superior, and they cite a well-known study to support that belief.

I’ve argued for years that this research assumes students can’t learn how to do new things – a very odd belief for a teacher to have. If you believe a students can learn how to do new things, well, this study actually suggests that laptop notes will help more than handwritten notes.

However, the “good rule” described above applies to me too. If I believe that we don’t know whether handwriting or keyboarding is better for learning, I should look for evidence that contradicts my belief.

For that reason, I pounced on a recent science news headline. The gist: recent research by Robert Wiley and Brenda Rapp shows that students who wrote by hand learned more than those who used laptops.

So, does their research finally contradict my belief?

Learning Arabic Letters

Wiley and Rapp had college-age adults learn Arabic letters.

12 of them learned by pressing the right key on a keyboard.

12 learned by looking at the letters closely and confirming they were the same.

And, 12 learned by writing the letters.

Did these distinct learning strategies make a difference several days later?

YES THEY DID.

The hand-writers learned a lot more, and learned a lot faster.

In fact – here’s a cool part – their learning transferred to new, related skills.

These participants practiced with letters. When Wiley and Rapp tested them on WORDS, the hand-writers did better than the other two groups – even though they hadn’t practiced with words.

So: sure enough, handwriting helped students learn more.

Boundary Conditions

Given the strength and clarity of these findings, you might think that I’m going to change my mind.

Reader, I am not. Here’s why:

This research shows that writing by hand helps people learn how to write by hand. It also helps people learn to do things immediately related to writing by hand – like, say, saying and writing words.

We should notice the narrow boundaries around that conclusion.

People who write by hand learn how to write by hand.

That research finding, however, does NOT demonstrate that writing by hand helps people learn things unrelated to handwriting itself.

For instance: do handwritten notes help people learn more about history or psychology or anatomy than laptop notes? This research does not answer that question, because that question falls outside the boundaries of the research.

In a similar way: practicing scales on the piano surely helps play piano scales better than – say – watching someone else do so.

But: does practicing piano scales make me better at other tasks requiring manual dexterity? Knitting? Keyboarding? Sculpting?

To answer those questions, we have to research those questions. We can’t extrapolate from piano scales to knitting and sculpting. (Well: we can, but we really shouldn’t.)

So, What’s The Answer?

Is handwriting really a better way to learn than keyboarding?

Honestly, I just don’t think we know. (In fact, Wiley and Rapp don’t claim that handwriting helps anywhere other than learning and reading letters and words.)

In fact, I suspect we need to explore MANY other variables:

the content being learned,

the teacher’s strategy for presenting it,

the student’s preference,

the student’s age –

perhaps even the relative complexity of writing vs. keyboarding. (I’m not an expert in this topic, but I understand that some languages require very intricate steps for accurate keyboarding.)

We can say – thanks to Wiley and Rapp – that handwriting helps learn how to write by hand. But until we explore those other precise questions precisely, we shouldn’t offer strong answers as if they have research support.

 

The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practice to Engage and Empower all Learners by Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb

Imagine how schools might be different if educators focused on the process rather than product of students’ thinking and tried to support students’ disposition to think. Ron Ritchhart, Senior Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Harvard Project Zero, and Mark Church, consultant with Harvard Project Zero, argue for this shift in The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practice to Engage and Empower all Learners. This book offers innovative teaching practices, each illustrated with real world examples, for supporting students’ deep learning and cultivating habits of mind for productive engagement with other people, ideas, and actions.

Ritchhart and Church make a compelling case that teaching with a focus on making thinking visible can transform students’ learning experience by giving them more agency and thus greater feelings of engagement, deepening their understanding (measured in both standard and non-standard ways), enhancing formative assessment, and ultimately supporting their intellectual character so that they will be lifelong learners, prepared for all they will encounter beyond school.

There are many tools that teachers can use to make thinking visible, and part of teachers’ and students’ task is to develop skill in understanding which thinking tools are appropriate for a given context. The authors focus on 18 routines for making thinking visible.  They explain the purpose of the routine, the contexts in which it is appropriate to use the routine, steps to implementation and possible variations, and how to assess students’ use of the thinking routine. They also offer compelling and informative examples of the use of the routine in diverse classroom settings. Routines are aimed at increasing questioning, noticing, empathic listening, perspective taking, observing, documenting, and planning. Some routines seek to support students in reasoning with evidence, synthesizing, reflecting, identifying core concepts, considering possibilities, exchanging ideas, receiving feedback, and appreciating truth and beauty.

It is possible to make thinking visible across all academic subjects and domains. Advancing students’ thinking skills in a domain can help students master curricular content more efficiently.

Especially with the examples and instructions provided in this book it can be easy to implement these thinking routines, but doing so well can remain a challenge. Teachers benefit from developing an understanding of when and where deep thinking is needed, noticing it as it emerges, cultivating students’ thinking when they are doing it, and reflecting on how to embed more deep thinking opportunities into the learning experiences of students. Teachers who are skilled at supporting thinking set long-term learning goals for students, listen and respond to students, remain flexible, set high expectations, and believe in the transformative power of teaching thinking skills. Focusing too much on a short-term daily agenda or scheduling class time too densely can be counterproductive. Given the difficulty associated with teaching to make thinking visible and the fact that teachers’ own growth and development as educators takes time and experience, it is important for educators to support one another in the process of making thinking visible. Ritchhart and Church suggest ways to facilitate teachers in supporting one another in developing this skill.

The Power of Making Thinking Visible is an extremely practical, usable guide for educators to support students in honing sharp minds. To learn more about supporting the process of thinking, see Creating Cultures of Thinking, also by Ron Ritcchart.

Ritchhart, R., & Church, M. (2020). The power of making thinking visible: practices to engage and empower all learners. John Wiley & Sons.

Why Don’t My High-School Students Just Follow My Advice?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

I’ve been teaching for several centuries now. You’d think my students would believe me when I tell them how to make their sentences better. Or how to interpret literary passages. Or how to succeed in life.

Why don’t they?

Recent research suggests one potential answer: because my advice isn’t very good.

Here’s the story…

London Calling

A research team in London, led by PhD student Madeleine Moses-Payne, looked at research into adolescent metacognition: their ability to assess the correctness of their own judgments.

And, they looked at teens’ willingness to accept advice — good and bad — from adults.

In this case, the metacognition and “advice” were about a kind of space-themed video game. The participants had to determine — as quickly as possible — if there were more of species X or species Y on a planet.

The species were simply blobs in different colors. So, the participants made a snap judgment: are there more blue or more yellow blobs on the screen? (You can see some images from the study here.)

After the participants made their guess, they then rated their own confidence in their judgment; that’s the metacognition part.

And occasionally they got guidance from a “space advisor,” saying either “there are more blue blobs” or “more yellow blobs.” Most of the time (70%) the advisor was correct; 30% it was wrong.

What did researchers learn by putting all these variables together?

This Depends on That

Moses-Payne’s methodology included 3 age groups: children (8-9 years old), early adolescents (12-13), and late adolescents (16-17).

She wanted to know if data patterns changed with time. Here’s what she found:

First: adolescents (both early and late) were better at metacognition. That is, their confidence in their judgment aligned more precisely with the quality of their guesses, compared to the children.

Second: adolescents rejected more adult advice than children did.

And, here’s the kicker:

Third: adolescents rejected more bad advice.

That is: children lacked metacognitive certainty in the correctness of their judgements. Therefore, they let adult advice — even bad advice — sway their decision making.

However, adolescents had more accurate metacognitive confidence in their judgment. Therefore, they accepted good advice when they weren’t certain, but rejected bad advice when they were certain.

In Moses-Payne’s pithy summary:

adolescents, in contrast to children, take on others’ advice less often, but only when the advice is misleading.

So: why do my students resist my advice? Maybe they resist it when I’m wrong

Not So Fast

So far, this research design makes a lot of sense, and leads to a helpful — and usefully provocative — conclusion.

At the same time, I think we should notice the important limitations of its conclusions.

In this research, the “advice” was either a correct or an incorrect answer about perceiving the relative number of colored blobs on a screen.

It was not, say, advice about career choice, or about the best strategy to use when solving a math problem, or about when to listen to your mother. (ALWAYS listen to your mother.)

Most of the time, in fact, we don’t use the word “advice” to describe information that’s factually correct or incorrect. “Advice” is usually an experienced-based opinion, not the correct answer to a question.

And so: this research does provide a helpful look at adolescent development.

Teens improve their metacognitive awareness of their own right/wrong answers.

They can use that information to guide decision making effectively.

It does NOT, however, give us a comprehensive new framework for thinking about advising teens (“Don’t worry if they reject your advice — it must have been wrong if they did!”).

I suspect adults will still give teens advice. And, they’ll accept some and reject some. And we’ll still be puzzled when they do.

And — if we’re high school teachers — we’ll still think they’re awesome anyway.

Let’s Get Practical: What Works Best in the Classroom?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

At times, this blog explores big-picture hypotheticals — the “what if” questions that can inspire researchers and teachers.

And, at times, we just want practical information. Teachers are busy folks. We simply want to know: what works? What really helps my students learn?

That question, in fact, implies a wise skepticism. If research shows a teaching strategy works well, we shouldn’t just stop with a study or two.

Instead, we should keep researching and asking more questions.

Does this strategy work with …

… older students as well as younger students?

… history classes as well as music classes as well as sports practice?

… Montessori classrooms, military academies, and public school classrooms?

this cultural cultural context as well as that cultural context?

And so forth.

In other words, we want to know: what have you got for me lately?

Today’s News

Long-time readers know of my admiration for Dr. Pooja Agarwal.

Her research into retrieval practice has helped clarify and deepen our understanding of this teaching strategy.

Her book, written with classroom teacher Patrice Bain, remains one of my favorites in the field.

And she’s deeply invested in understanding the complexity of translating research into the classroom.

That is: she doesn’t just see if a strategy works in the psychology lab (work that’s certainly important). Instead, she goes the next step to see if that strategy works with the messiness of classrooms and students and schedule changes and school muddle.

So: what has she done for us lately? I’m glad you asked.

Working with two other scholars, Agarwal asked all of those questions I listed above about retrieval practice.

That is: we think that retrieval practice works. But: does it work with different ages, and various subjects, in different countries?

Agarwal and Co. wanted to find out. They went though an exhaustive process to identify retrieval practice research in classrooms, and studied the results. They found:

First: yup, retrieval practice really does help. In 57% of the studies, the Cohen’s d value was 0.50 or greater. That’s an impressively large result for such a simple, low-cost strategy.

Second: yup, it works it in different fields. By far the most research is done in science and psychology (19 and 16 studies), but it works in every discipline where we look — including, say, history or spelling or CPR.

Third: yup, it works at all ages. Most research is done with college students (and, strangely, medical students), but works in K-12 as well.

Fourth: most retrieval practice research is done with multiple choice. (Yes: a well-designed multiple choice test can be retrieval practice. “Well-designed” = “students have to THINK about the distractors.”)

Fifth: we don’t have enough research to know what the optimal gap is between RP and final test.

Sixth: surprisingly, not enough classroom research focused on FEEDBACK. You’d think that would be an essential component…but Team Agarwal didn’t find enough research here to draw strong conclusions.

Seventh: Of the 50 studies, only 3 were from “non-Western” countries. So, this research gap really stands out.

In brief: if we want to know what really works, we have an increasingly clear answer: retrieval practice works. We had good evidence before; we’ve got better evidence now.

Examples Please

If you’re persuaded that retrieval practice is a good idea, you might want to be sure exactly what it is.

You can always use the “tags” menu on the right; we blog about retrieval practice quite frequently, so you’ve got lots of examples.

But, here’s a handy description (which I first heard in Agarwal and Bain’s book):

When students review, they put information back into their brains. So: “rereading the textbook” = “review,” because students try to redownload the book into their memory systems.

When students use retrieval practice, they take information out of their brains. So, “flashcards” = “retrieval practice,” because students have to remember what that word means.

So:

Reviewing class notes = review.

Outlining the chapter from memory = retrieval practice.

Short answer questions = retrieval practice.

Watching a lecture video = review.

When you strive for retrieval practice, the precise strategy is less important than the cognitive goal. We want student to try to remember before they get the correct answer. That desirable difficulty improves learning.

And, yes, retrieval practice works.

How Can We Help Students Study Better? [Repost]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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.