2021 – Page 2 – Education & Teacher Conferences Skip to main content
Let’s Get Practical: Signaling a Growth Mindset
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Most teachers know about Mindset Theory: the idea that students’ beliefs about intelligence shape their success in learning.

Specifically:

If I think that intelligence (whatever that is) can’t change, I learn less.

If I think that intelligence can change, I learn more.

Once widely believed and championed, this theory now faces real doubts — especially following two meta-analyses by Sisk and Burgoyne showing that mindset strategies produce (on average) negligibly small effects.

Alas, Mindset debates often fall into two extreme camps:

“Tell students about growth mindsets — they’ll learn more!” or,

“Mindset research is nonsense; skip the whole thing.”

Ugh.

Perhaps we can do better?

Doing Better

Dan Willingham (I believe) has argued that contrary findings about growth mindset don’t exactly “disprove” Mindset Theory. Instead, they remind us that getting mindset strategies right takes precision and care.

We shouldn’t blithely think: “I’ll just do some mindset stuff now.”

Instead, we should think: “I need to ensure my mindset strategy aligns with research, and with my students, quite precisely.”

For instance: I’m skeptical that simply telling students about mindset — the most common strategy I hear about — has much enduring effect.

Instead, I think we need to have quiet and consistent classroom policies and procedures that re-enforce Growth Mindset messages.

Obviously, if we tell our students that intelligence CAN change and act as if we believe it CAN’T, our actions reveal what really matters to us.

One Recent Example

One research group from Washington State wondered if the syllabus of a college course might be enough to communicate a professor’s mindset.

They created two mindset versions of a Calculus syllabus.

The Fixed Mindset Syllabus, for instance, said:

“If you have not mastered these concepts, you should consider dropping the course.”

“I do not take attendance in class [because] I do not penalize students with strong math abilities.”

It also had one heavily-weighted final exam.

The Growth Mindset Syllabus, by contrast, said:

“I you have not mastered these concepts, you should see me or a teaching assistant and we will provide resources.”

“All students will learn something new and attending class is the best way to learn.”

This syllabus had many exams, equally weighted.

Sure enough: both men and women assumed a) that the professor who wrote the FM syllabus indeed had a fixed mindset, and b) that this professor probably assumed that women are “naturally worse at math” than men.

And, women (but not men) who read the FM syllabus did worse on a subsequent math test than those who read the GM syllabus.

Beyond the Syllabus

These perceptions, it turns out, influenced learning beyond the syllabus.

This research team had students rate their professors’ mindsets.

In 46 courses across the university, students — both male and female — rated their STEM professors’ mindsets similarly. That is: some professors rated strongly at the fixed mindset end of the scale — and the students’ gender didn’t matter in that rating.

And, both male and female students assumed that fixed-mindset professors believed that “women struggle to do well in advanced math.”

Sure enough: men had higher average grades in classes taught by FM professors. Women had higher average grades in classes taught by GM professors.

In other words: those syllabus policies — combined with other classroom factors — influence students’ learning.

It might be hard to identify exactly what causes this effect, but mindset certainly seems to be an important part of the equation.

What Should K-12 Teachers Do?

Few pre-college teachers have a syllabus with the gravitas of a college syllabus.

We do, however, have about policies and procedures. We talk about policies and procedures with our students. This study (and many others) encourages us to rethink those policies with their mindset implications in view.

For instance: does our rewrite policy suggest we think that students can get smarter? (I say to my students: “If you say to me you want to work harder and learn more, why would I say no to that? OF COURSE you can revise the essay!”)

Do we have different policies for “smart students” than “other-than-smart students”?

Do we — heaven help us — have a program for students we call “Gifted”?

In brief: we should not think of mindset as a topic we discuss once in a special program.

Instead, we should consider — bit by bit, day by day — what signals we send to our students. If the language we use, the policies we communicate, the procedures we follow all demonstrate “I think you can get smarter,” our students just might believe us.

If we think they can, they will.

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion by Wendy Suzuki
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion takes a refreshing look at an emotional state, anxiety, that is often seen as a problem to be avoided and kept at bay; but here, Wendy Suzuki asks us to honor this aspect of our lives, understand it, and even embrace it. She asks that we interpret feelings of anxiety as useful indicators of the way we are framing contexts. We can use that information to adjust our perspectives so that anxiety can be a potential source of positive personal energy.

While emphasizing that anxiety falls along a spectrum, she does not minimize the clinical conditions of anxiety that are debilitating to the lives of many. Her descriptions are helpful heuristics to assist us in understanding what aspects of our anxiety may benefit from professional help. But, her approaches throughout the book may be applied anywhere along the spectrum from these severe situations to everyday anxieties. The framing of our events that lead to anxiety is flexible and can be tweaked offering us a reprieve from the perpetual anticipation of what could go wrong and even pave the way toward a more actualized self.

As educators our focus is too often on getting through a long list of endless tasks: grading, preparing, going to meetings, attending to parents, and of course still mindfully attending to students. But all these tasks bring with them some degree of uncertainty and anxiety: Will I get it done? What will they think? Do I know how to run a zoom call? Am I doing my job effectively? But we still push through, dismissing these emotions in favor of checking off another task as done. We imagine that getting tasks done will make us feel better, but things are never really ‘done.’

Suzuki recognizes that while we all experience anxiety, we seldom take the time to engage the emotion and give it the respect it deserves. Ignoring anxiety does not make it go away; it compounds until we fight, flee, or freeze – are we attending to these adaptive responses that tell us something is wrong? Even a persistent low level of anxiety has deleterious effects on our body and mind. If we do not respect anxiety, we virtually guarantee that we will not be performing at our best which can further drive rumination and further deleterious anxiety. This book is a guide on a journey to building a healthier relationship with our anxiety and incorporating our knowledge into our lives for our benefit.

Through her engaging and scientifically accurate descriptions of the physiological processes, she helps us see anxiety as a biological system that has evolved for our protection but is flexibly under our influence. Bringing together an array of up-to-date research, she integrates the neuropsychology of both top-down and bottom-up processes into a set of practices that allow us to take advantage of the neuroplasticity of the system: relaxing the body, calming the mind, redirecting and reappraising, monitoring responses, and learning to tolerate the uncomfortable.

Authentic personal and third-person narratives illustrate the lessons in this book in an accessible and engaging way. You will see yourself in the various scenarios having made similar choices increasing your understanding of your past and future actions, but also giving you insight into the actions of others, helping improve our lives and the lives of our students. The narratives clearly illustrate how, when harnessed, anxiety may help you achieve your goals if you listen and engage this emotion appropriately.

The final portion of the book gives us some valuable assessment tools to help us gain a more mindful awareness of our mental state. Reading this book gently brings anxieties into view, affording us the opportunity during its reading to work with our anxiety. These assessment tools take us full circle back to the contents of the book and the menu of strategies we can draw from to address our evolving processing of anxiety.

Over the last few years, but not isolated to them, anxiety has been on the rise: the pandemic, elections, tense race relations, changing political landscapes, and further global catastrophes. This barrage is complemented by our unfortunate practice of ‘doom scrolling’ generating a feedback loop that seems like an endless drive toward harmful anxiety. What will the world throw at me next, and will I be able to cope? Students, parents, and teachers are doing their best to work through this moment, but we have been ill-equipped. When reading this book, fill it with sticky notes and bookmarks encouraging a return to strategies for checking, evaluating, and adapting your relationship with anxiety. Suzuki offers a useful tool to help us all on the road to recovery and prepare our minds and bodies for challenges yet unknown.

How Do Experts Think?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

It means, more or less, we see what we’re trained to see.

If I bring a problem to a plumber, she’ll think about it like a plumbing problem. An economist, like an economics problem. A general, a military problem.

What does research tell us about this insight? And, does that research give us guidance about teaching and learning?

The Geoscientists and the Balloon

A research team led by Dr. Micah Goldwater wanted to explore this topic.

So, they asked a few hundred people these questions:

“A balloon floating is like _________ because _________.”

“Catching a cold is like _________ because _________.”

Those who answered the question fell into four distinct groups:

Expert geoscientists — who had an MA or PhD in geoscience

Intermediate geoscientists — who were studying geoscience

Expert vision scientists –who had an MA or PhD in vision science

Non-expert adults — who had not studied science in college

Goldwater’s team wanted to know: how often would people offer causal analogies? “A balloon floating is like hot water rising in a cold sea because they result from the same underlying causal principle.”

Deeper still, they wanted to know how often people offer those causal analogies spontaneously, and how often they need to be prompted to do so. (The research details get tricky here, so I’m simplifying a bit.)

Archimedes Catches a Cold

Sure enough, expert geoscientists spontaneously offered causal analogies for the balloon question — because they have a relevant geoscientific rule, called “Archimedes’ principle.”

However, expert vision scientists did not spontaneously give causal analogies, because their branch of science does not include a causally relevant analogy.

And neither group spontaneously proposed many causal analogies for “catching a cold,” because neither field builds on underlying relevant principles.

This finding — along with other parts of Goldwater’s research — suggests this conclusion: hammers typically see nails.

That is: experts spontaneously perceive, contemplate, and understand new information (“floating balloons”) through core principles of their field (“Archimedes’ principle”) — even though balloons don’t come up very often in geoscience.

Teaching Implications: Bad News, and Good

As I visit schools, I often hear teachers say “I want my students to think like historians” or “think like scientists” or “think like artists.” To accomplish this goal, some pedagogies encourage us to give students “expert tasks.”

Alas, Goldwater’s findings (and LOTS of other research) suggest that this bar might be MUCH too high. It takes years — decades? — to “think like a researcher” or “think like a coach.”

Even people with PhD’s in vision science don’t think causally about floating balloons unless explicitly prompted to do so.

As Dan Willingham writes in Why Don’t Students Like School?, “cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training” (127).

This message often feels like bad news.

All those authentic tasks we’ve been giving students might not have the results we had hoped for. It’s extraordinarily difficult for students to think like a mathematician, even when we give them expert math tasks.

However, I see glimmers of hope in this gloomy conclusion.

My students (I teach high school English) won’t think like literary critics. However, I think they can and do become “experts” in much smaller sub-sub-sub-fields of English. (Warning: I’m about to switch from summarizing research to speculating about a classroom anecdote.)

When Comedy is Tragic

For instance: I recently gave my students a fairly complex definition of “comedy and tragedy.” This section of the unit required LOTS of direct instruction and LOTS of retrieval practice. After all: I’m the expert, and they’re novices.

My students then read a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri called “A Temporary Matter.” I asked them to look for elements of comedy and tragedy in that story.

Not only did they find those elements, they SPONTANEOUSLY pointed out Lahiri’s daring: she uses traditionally comic symbols (food, music, celebration, childbirth) as indicators of tragedy (“death and banishment”).

And, since then, they’ve been pouncing on tragic/comic symbolism, and other potentially innovative uses thereof.

These students aren’t (yet) expert literary critics. But on this very narrow topic, they starting to be flexible and inventive — a sign of budding expertise.

As long as I have a suitably narrow definition, a focused kind of pre-expertise is indeed a reasonable and achievable goal.

In Sum

Like lots of research in the field of “novices and experts,” Goldwater’s study warns us that experts really do think differently from novices, and that true expertise takes years to develop.

However, that insight shouldn’t scare us away from well-defined tasks that build up very local subsections of developing expertise. Our students aren’t yet capital-E Experts. And, the right-sized educational goals can move them towards ultimate Expertise.

 

Teachers’ Gestures Can Help Students Learn
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Over the years, I’ve written about the importance of “embodied cognition.

In other words: we know with our brains, and we know with and through our bodies.

Scholars such as Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow and Dr. Sian Beilock have done splendid and helpful work in this field.

Their research suggests that students might learn more when they make the right kind of gesture.

Other scholars have shown that — in online lectures — the right kind of pointing helps too.

What about the teachers‘ gestures? Can we help students learn in the way we use our hands?

Dr. Celeste Pilegard wanted to find out

Steamboats, East and West

Pilegard invited college students to watch brief video lectures. The topic: the differences between Eastern and Western steamboats. (You think I’m joking. I’m not joking.)

These students watched one of four versions:

In the first version, the teacher’s gestures focused on the surface features of the steamboats themselves (how deep they sit in the water, for instance).

In the second version, the gestures focused on the structure of the lesson (“Now I’m talking about Eastern steamboats, and NOW I’m talking about Western steamboats.”).

Third version: gestures emphasized BOTH surface AND structural features.

Fourth version: a control group saw a video with neutral, content-free gestures.

Did those gestures make a difference for learning?

Pilegard, in fact, measured learning in two ways:

Did the students remember the facts?

Could the students apply those facts by drawing inferences?

So, what did she discover?

No, but Yes

Researchers typically make predictions about their findings.

In this case, Pilegard predicted that neither the surface gestures (about steamboats) nor the structural gestures (about the logic of the lesson) would help students remember facts.

But, she predicted that the structural gestures would help students draw inferences. (“If a steamboat operates on a shallow river, what does that tell you about the pressure of the steamboat’s engine?”) Surface gestures, she predicted, would not improve inferences.

Sure enough, Pilegard was 2 for 2.

Watching gestures didn’t help students remember facts any better. However, students who watched structural gestures (but not surface gestures) did better on inference questions. (Stats types: the Cohen’s d was 0.39; an impressive bonus for such a small intervention.)

When Pilegard repeated the experiment with a video on “innate vs. acquired immunity,” she got the same results.

Implications and Cautions

As teachers, we know that every little bit helps. When we use gestures to reinforce the underlying logical structure of our explanations, doing so might help students learn more.

As we plan, therefore, we should be consciously aware of our lesson’s logical structure, and think a bit about how gestures might reinforce that structure.

At the same time, regular readers know that all the usual cautions apply:

We should look at groups of studies, not just one study.

Pilegard’s research focused on college students. Will this strategy work with other students? We don’t know for sure.

These video lessons were quite short: under two minutes each. Will this strategy work over longer periods of time? We don’t know for sure.

In other words — this research offers a promising strategy. And, we need more research with students who resemble our own classrooms and lessons that last longer to have greater confidence.

I myself do plan to think about gestures for upcoming lessons. But I won’t ignore all the other teaching strategies (retrieval practice, cognitive load management, etc.). Here’s hoping that future research can point the way…


By the way:

Teachers often ask how they can get copies of research to study it for themselves.

Easy answer #1: Google Scholar.

If that doesn’t work, I recommend easy answer #2: email the researcher.

In this case, I emailed Dr. Pilegard asking for a copy of the study — and she emailed it to me 11 minutes later.

In honor of her doing so, I’m creating the Pilegard Award for Prompt Generosity in Sharing Research with People who Email You Out of the Blue.

No doubt it will be much coveted.

 

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.

“Rich” or “Bland”: Which Diagrams Helps Students Learn Deeply? [Reposted]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Here’s a practical question: should the diagrams we use with students be detailed, colorful, bright, and specific?

Or, should they be simple, black and white, somewhat abstract?

We might reasonably assume that DETAILS and COLORS attract students’ attention. If so, they could help students learn.

We might, instead, worry that DETAILS and COLORS focus students’ attention on surface features, not deep structures. If so, students might learn a specific idea, but not transfer their learning to a new context.

In other words: richly-decorated diagrams might offer short-term benefits (attention!), but result in long-term limitations (difficulties with transfer). If so, blandly-decorated diagrams might be the better pedagogical choice.

Today’s Research

Scholars in Wisconsin — led by David Menendez — have explored this question.

Specifically, they asked college students to watch a brief video about metamorphosis. (They explained that the video was meant for younger students, so that the cool college kids wouldn’t be insulted by the simplicity of the topic.)

For half the students, that video showed only the black-and-white diagram to the left; for the other half, the video showed the colors and dots.

Did the different diagrams shape the students’ learning? Did it shape their ability to transfer that learning?

Results, Please…

No, and yes. Well, mostly yes.

In other words: students who watched both videos learned about ladybug metamorphosis equally well.

But — and this is a BIG but — students who watched the video with the “rich” diagram did not transfer their learning to other species as well as students who saw the “bland” diagram.

In other words: the bright colors and specifics of the rich diagram seem to limit metamorphosis to this specific species right here. An abstract representation allowed for more successful transfer of these concepts to other species.

In sum: to encourage transfer, we should use “bland,” abstract diagrams.

By the way: Team Menendez tested this hypothesis with both in-person learners and online learners. They got (largely) the same result.

So: if you’re teaching face-to-face or remotely, this research can guide your thinking.

Some Caveats

First: as is often the case, this effect depended on the students’ prior knowledge. Students who knew a lot about metamorphosis weren’t as distracted by the “rich” details.

Second: like much psychology research, this study worked with college students. Will its core concepts work with younger students?

As it turns out, Team Menendez has others studies underway to answer that very question. Watch This Space!

Third: Like much psychology research, this study looked at STEM materials. Will it work in the humanities?

What, after all, is the detail-free version of a poem? How do you study a presidency without specifics and details?

When I asked Menendez that question, he referred me to a study about reader illustrations. I’ll be writing about this soon.

In Sum

Like seductive details, “rich” diagrams might seem like a good teaching idea to increase interest and attention.

Alas, that perceptual richness seems to help in the short term but interfere with transfer over time.

To promote transfer, teach with “bland” diagrams — and use a different strategy to grab the students’ interest.