In schools, we want students to learn many topics: math, and history, and reading, and health, and robotics…
And, especially at the beginning of the year, we’d like them to make friends along the way.
Can we help?
One research team tried a reasonable approach. They wondered if students might form new friendships when they sit next to classmates they don’t yet know well.
In these schools, students sat at “freestanding forward-facing 2-person desks.” (It sounds to me like Little House on the Prairie, but in rural Hungary.) Researchers assigned students to these paired desks randomly.
And, they tracked the friendships that formed.
So: what happened? Did students befriend their deskmates?
The Prediction & the Speculation
Unsurprisingly, we tend — on average — to form friendships with people who are like us. In schools, that means:
boys typically befriend boys, while girls befriend girls;
academic achievers connect with other achievers;
members of racial and ethnic groups often form friendships within those groups. (In this study, researchers kept track of Roma and non-Roma Hungarian identities.)
Researchers predicted that this pattern (called “homophily) would continue.
And they speculated that the new seating plans might shake things up a bit. That is: perhaps more friendships would form outside of those usual patterns.
The Results
So, what happened with these new seating plans?
First: Randomly seating students next to each other did modestly increase the likelihood of mutual friendships forming: from 15% to 22%.
Second: These new friendships did mostly fit the expected patterns. As homophily suggests, friendships largely formed within gender, achievement, and ethnic groups.
Third: Random seating DID foster new friendships across those divides as well — although to a smaller degree. That is: some girls did form mutual friendships with boys, and so forth.
In brief: researchers wondered if random seating patterns might expand friendship circles — and they do!
The Big Picture
We should, of course, remember that this study is just one study. We’ll need more research to be increasingly certain of these conclusions.
And, honestly, this seating plan didn’t make a huge difference.
At the same time: teachers know that every little bit counts. If we can help students form new friendships — and help them form friendships that might not otherwise have started — that’s a powerful way to start a new school year.
You will, of course, adapt this idea to your own teaching context. As you contemplate your routine at the beginning of a new year, this strategy might be a useful way to open new friendship vistas.
We’ve seen enough research on retrieval practice to know: it rocks.
When students simply review material (review their notes; reread the chapter), that mental work doesn’t help them learn.
However, when they try to remember (quiz themselves, use flashcards), this kind of mental work does result in greater learning.
In Agarwal and Bain’s elegant phrasing: don’t ask students to put information back into their brains. Instead, ask them to pull information out of their brains.
Like all teaching guidance, however, the suggestion “use retrieval practice!” requires nuanced exploration.
What are the best methods for doing so?
Are some retrieval practice strategies more effective?
Are some frankly harmful?
Any on-point research would be welcomed.
On-Point Research
Here’s a simple and practical question. If we use pop quizzes as a form of retrieval practice, should we grade them?
In other words: do graded pop quizzes result in more or less learning, compared to their ungraded cousins?
This study, it turns out, can be run fairly easily.
Dr. Maya Khanna taught three sections of an Intro to Psychology course. The first section had no pop quizzes. In the second section, Khanna gave six graded pop quizzes. In the third, six ungraded pop quizzes.
Students also filled out a questionnaire about their experience taking those quizzes.
What did Khanna learn? Did the quizzes help? Did grading them matter?
The Envelope Please
The big headline: the ungraded quizzes helped students on the final exam.
Roughly: students who took the ungraded pop quizzes averaged a B- on the final exam.
Students in the other two groups averaged in the mid-to-high C range. (The precise comparisons require lots of stats speak.)
An important note: students in the “ungraded” group scored higher even though the final exam did not repeat the questions from those pop quizzes. (The same material was covered on the exam, but the questions themselves were different.)
Of course, we also wonder about our students’ stress. Did these quizzes raise anxiety levels?
According to the questionnaires, nope.
Khanna’s students responded to this statement: “The inclusion of quizzes in this course made me feel anxious.”
A 1 meant “strongly disagree.”
A 9 meant “strongly agree.”
In other words, a LOWER rating suggests that the quizzes didn’t increase stress.
Students who took the graded quizzes averaged an answer of 4.20.
Students who took the ungraded quizzes averaged an answer of 2.96.
So, neither group felt much stress as a result of the quizzes. And, the students in the ungraded group felt even less.
In the Classroom
I myself use this technique as one of a great many retrieval practice strategies.
My students’ homework sometimes includes retrieval practice exercises.
I often begin class with some lively cold-calling to promote retrieval practice.
Occasionally — last Thursday, in fact — I begin class by saying: “Take out a blank piece of paper. This is NOT a quiz. It will NOT be graded. We’re using a different kind of retrieval practice to start us off today.”
As is always true, I’m combining this research with my own experience and classroom circumstances.
Khanna gave her quizzes at the end of class; I do mine at the beginning.
Because I’ve taught high school for centuries, I’m confident my students feel comfortable doing this kind of written work. If you teach younger grades, or in a different school context, your own experience might suggest a different approach.
To promote interleaving, I include questions from many topics (Define “bildungsroman.” Write a sentence with a participle. Give an example of Janie exercising agency in last night’s reading.) You might focus on one topic to build your students’ confidence.
Whichever approach you take, Khanna’s research suggests that retrieval practice quizzes don’t increase stress and don’t require grades.
A surprising research finding to start your week: parachutes don’t reduce injury or death.
How do we know?
Researchers asked participants to jump from planes (or helicopters), and then measured their injuries once they got to the ground. (To be thorough, they checked a week later as well.)
Those who wore parachutes and those who did not suffered — on average — the same level of injury.
Being thorough researchers, Robert Yeh and his team report all sorts of variables: the participants’ average acrophobia, their family history of using parachutes, and so forth.
They also kept track of other variables. The average height from which participants jumped: 0.6 meters. (That’s a smidge under 2 feet.) The average velocity of the plane (or helicopter): 0.0 kilometers/hour.
Yes: participants jumped from stationary planes. On the ground. Parked.
Researchers include a helpful photo to illustrate their study:
Representative study participant jumping from aircraft with an empty backpack. This individual did not incur death or major injury upon impact with the ground
Why Teachers Care
As far as I know, teachers don’t jump out of planes more than other professions. (If you’re jumping from a plane that is more than 0.6 meters off the ground, please do wear a parachute.)
We do, however, rely on research more than many.
Yeh’s study highlights an essential point: before we accept researchers’ advice, we need to know exactly what they did in their research.
Too often, we just look at headlines and apply what we learn. We should — lest we jump without parachutes — keep reading.
Does EXERCISE helps students learn?
It probably depends on when they do the exercise. (If the exercise happens during the lesson, it might disrupt learning, not enhance it.)
Does METACOGNITION help students learn?
It probably depends on exactly which metacognitive activity they undertook.
Do PARACHUTES protect us when we jump from planes?
It probably depends on how high the plane is and how fast it’s going when we jump.
In brief: yes, we should listen respectfully to researchers’ classroom guidance. AND, we should ask precise questions about that research before we use it in our classrooms.
Teachers have long gotten guidance that we should make our learning objectives explicit to our students.
The formula goes something like this: “By the end of the lesson, you will be able to [know and do these several things].”
I’ve long been skeptical about this guidance — in part because such formulas feel forced and unnatural to me. I’m an actor, but I just don’t think I can deliver those lines convincingly.
The last time I asked for research support behind this advice, a friend pointed me to research touting its benefits. Alas, that research relied on student reports of their learning. Sadly, in the past, such reports haven’t been a reliable guide to actual learning.
For that reason, I was delighted to find a new study on the topic.
I was especially happy to see this research come from Dr. Faria Sana, whose work on laptop multitasking has (rightly) gotten so much love. (Whenever I talk with teachers about attention, I share this study.)
Strangely, I like research that challenges my beliefs. I’m especially likely to learn something useful and new when I explore it. So: am I a convert?
In her first experiment, she had students read five short passages about mirror neurons.
Group 1 read no learning objectives.
Group 2 read three learning objectives at the beginning of each passage.
And, Group 3 read all fifteen learning objectives at the beginning of the first passage.
The results?
Both groups that read the learning objectives scored better than the group that didn’t. (Group 2, with the learning objectives spread out, learned a bit more than Group 3, with the objectives all bunched together — but the differences weren’t large enough to reach statistical significance.)
So: compared to doing nothing, starting with learning objectives increased learning of these five paragraphs.
But: what about compared to doing a plausible something else? Starting with learning objectives might be better than starting cold. Are they better than other options?
How about activating prior knowledge? Should we try some retrieval practice? How about a few minutes of mindful breathing?
Sana’s team investigated that question. In particular — in their second experiment — they combined learning objectives with research into pretesting.
As I’ve written before, Dr. Lindsay Richland‘s splendid study shows that “pretesting” — asking students questions about an upcoming reading passage, even though they don’t know the answers yet — yields great results. (Such a helpfully counter-intuitive suggestion!)
So, Team Sana wanted to know: what happens if we present learning objectives as questions rather than as statements? Instead of reading
“In the first passage, you will learn about where the mirror neurons are located.”
Students had to answer this question:
“Where are the mirror neurons located?” (Note: the students hadn’t read the passage yet, so it’s unlikely they would know. Only 38% of these questions were answered correctly.)
Are learning objectives more effective as statements or as pretests?
The Envelope Please
Pretests. By a lot.
On the final test — with application questions, not simple recall questions — students who read learning-objectives-as-statements got 53% correct.
Students who answered learning-objectives-as-pretest-questions got 67% correct. (For the stats minded, Cohen’s d was 0.84! That’s HUGE!)
So: traditional learning objectives might be better than nothing, but they’re not nearly as helpful as learning-objectives-as-pretests.
This finding prompts me to speculate. (Alert: I’m shifting from research-based conclusions to research-&-experience-informed musings.)
First: Agarwal and Bain describe retrieval practice this way: “Don’t ask students to put information into their brains (by, say, rereading). Instead, ask students to pull information out of their brains (by trying to remember).”
As I see it, traditional learning objectives feel like review: “put this information into your brain.”
Learning-objectives-as-pretests feel like retrieval practice: “try to take information back out of your brain.” We suspect students won’t be successful in these retrieval attempts, because they haven’t learned the material yet. But, they’re actively trying to recall, not trying to encode.
Second: even more speculatively, I suspect many kinds of active thinking will be more effective than a cold start (as learning objectives were in Study 1 above). And, I suspect that many kinds of active thinking will be more effective that a recital of learning objectives (as pretests were in Study 2).
In other words: am I a convert to listing learning objectives (as traditionally recommended)? No.
I simply don’t think Sana’s research encourages us to follow that strategy.
Instead, I think it encourages us to begin classes with some mental questing. Pretests help in Sana’s studies. I suspect other kinds of retrieval practice would help. Maybe asking students to solve a relevant problem or puzzle would help.
Whichever approach we use, I suspect that inviting students to think will have a greater benefit than teachers’ telling them what they’ll be thinking about.
Three Final Points
I should note three ways that this research might NOT support my conclusions.
First: this research was done with college students. Will objectives-as-pretests work with 3rd graders? I don’t know.
Second: this research paradigm included a very high ratio of objectives to material. Students read, in effect, one learning objective for every 75 words in a reading passage. Translated into a regular class, that’s a HUGE number of learning objectives.
Third: does this research about reading passages translate to classroom discussions and activities? I don’t know.
Here’s what I do know. In these three studies, Sana’s students remembered more when they started reading with unanswered questions in mind. That insight offers teachers a inspiring prompt for thinking about our daily classroom work.
With the school year starting in just a couple of weeks, Learn Like a Pro: Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything by Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe is an excellent resource to help students start the school year with strong study habits. Using a fun, accessible tone and helpful graphics this book instructs readers about how to manage procrastination, exert self-discipline, stay motivated, study actively, think deeply, memorize new content, take better notes, read more efficiently, and ace the next test. Oakley is a professor of engineering at Oakland University and known for her widely popular massive open online course. Schewe is the founder and CEO of an EdTech start up, Educas.
Part of effective learning and studying involves developing persistence and motivation to stick with one’s studies. One tool Oakley and Schewe recommend to beat procrastination is the Pomodoro technique, which involves remove all distractions, setting a timer for 25 minutes during which one works intently on a single task, then rewarding oneself with a 5 minute relaxing break (i.e., not a break that involves one’s smart phone). Meditation, yoga, and taking time to relax can also help build attention and focus. Removing temptations can make it easier to stick with a goal. Setting specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time limited short- and long-term goals can help increase motivation. Working with others (e.g., in a study group) and finding value in one’s work can also increase motivation. Metacognitive awareness about one’s progress are also helpful. Finally, a healthy lifestyle, which involves physical exercise, high quality and sufficient sleep, and a balanced diet, is key for effective learning.
Oakley and Schewe review good study habits. Active studying (e.g., by using flashcards, explaining concepts and their relations to one another, and brainstorming possible test questions) rather than passive studying (e.g., re-reading notes) is likely to yield results. Studying in frequent, small chunks and reviewing, previewing, and mixing content during those chunks of study time is helpful. Sometimes studying involves memorizing ideas so that a student has mental power available to solve advanced problems with simpler ideas already clearly in mind. Using acronyms, metaphors and other memory tricks can help make ideas stick. Working through practice problems is a great way to check for understanding while studying.
Being a good test taker involves some different skills than being a good student or studier. Oakley and Schewe suggest reading through test instructions and questions carefully, checking the time while taking the test, starting the test by previewing the hardest questions so one can passively think about them while answering other questions, and reviewing answers at the end.
Oakley and Schewe conclude the book with a checklist of ways to become an effective learner. To learn more about these and other helpful study suggestions you may be interested in Learn Like a Pro, as well as other works by Oakley, including Learning How to Learn.
Oakley, B. & Schewe, O. (2021). Learn Like a Pro: Science-based Tools to Become Better at Anything. St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
When Daniel Willingham wrote Why Don’t Students Like School, he accomplished a mini-miracle: he made abstract psychology research…
…easy to understand, and
… obviously helpful to classroom teachers.
Its invaluable pages include emphatically practical teaching advice: “memory is the residue of thought,” novices and experts think differently. (Little wonder its third edition was just published.)
In his third chapter, Willingham included one important strategy for helping students understand and remember: use stories.
We understand and remember stories for many reasons:
They follow a familiar cause/effect structure.
They focus on people and conflicts.
We (most of us) grew up hearing stories.
Stories evoke emotions.
Expository writing — essays, textbooks — has its own advantages, but they probably can’t compete with the advantages of narrative.
Today’s News
Willingham first published Why Don’t Students Like School in 2009. What have we learned about narratives vs. exposition since then?
After all, research conclusions change over time. Does this advice still hold?
Earlier this year, Raymond Mar and colleagues published a meta-analysis of research on this topic. They wanted to know:
Does narrative presentation of information improve memory, compared to expository texts?
Does it improve comprehension?
Are there boundary conditions?
They identified 37 studies (with 78 data sets and more than 33,000 participants!) that matched their criteria.
So, what did they find?
The Envelope Please…
Sure enough, narratives help students understand. And they help students remember. And — this news is surprising to me — those benefits don’t have quirky exceptions. (Most research findings do: e.g., “This technique works in these circumstances but not those.”)
For the stats minded, they calculated a Hedges’s g of 0.55. In my experience, that’s a surprisingly big effect for measurements across such a big field. (Hedges’s g is a version of Cohen’s d — it’s more appropriate for meta-analyses.)
One of my favorite examples of this strategy wasn’t (I believe) included in this study. McNamara and Scott asked students to remember a list of words. They coached one group to turn those words into a story.
Given the words “foot, cow, shirt, hut,” students created sentences like “my foot was stepped on by a cow that wore a shirt and lived in a hut.”
McNamara and Scott coached the other students to remember their words by “thinking out loud.”
Sure enough, the group that composed storiesremembered a lot more words.
Getting the Story Just Right
Although Mar’s meta-analysis did not find boundary conditions, I do want to add a note of caution. This advice — like so much of cognitive science — can be easily misconstrued.
The idea makes sense, but its classroom application can be tricky.
Imagine that, as a science teacher, I want my students to understand Boyle’s Law. I’m tempted to tell my students that P1V1=P2V2, to define the various terms, and to run some sample problems.
If I hear the advice that stories improve comprehension, I’m probably tempted to tell some interesting stories about Boyle’s life. For instance, he made a list a wish list of 24 inventions (a machine that could fly, drugs that could “exalt the imagination”). Way back in the 1600s! So cool!!
That story is interesting and memorable, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the pressure or volume of gas.
I shouldn’t shouldn’t, in other words, tell stories about the general subject; we’ve got lots of research about the dangers of “seductive details.”
I should instead tell stories tailored specifically to the meaning and importance of the topic.
Why does the relationship between volume and pressure matter?
Who else was trying to find out?
What changed as a result of Boyle’s discovery?
If I can fashion those questions into a story, now I’ve got all the characteristics of a memorable narrative: cause and effect, personal conflict, familiarity, and emotion.
And, all those benefits attach to the content I want my students to learn.
In Brief
Do narratives help students understand and remember?
Teachers like research-informed guidance because it offers a measure of certainty.
“Why do you run your classes that way?”
“Because RESEARCH SAYS SO!”
Alas, we occasionally find that research encourages AND DISCOURAGES the same strategy simultaneously.
What to do when expert advice differs?
In fact, I got this question on Thursday during a Learning and the Brain Summer Institute. Here’s the setup.
“Difficult” Can be Good
Regular readers know that desirable difficulties help students learn. As explained by Bob Bjork and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork — and researched by countless scholars — some degree of cognitive challenge enhances long-term memory formation.
In brief: “easy learning doesn’t stick.”
And so: why do spacing and interleaving help students learn? Because they ramp up desirable difficulty.
Why is retrieval practice better than simple review? Because (among other reasons) review isn’t difficult enough. Retrieval practice, done correctly, adds just the right amount of challenge.
And so, if you attend Learning and the Brain conferences (like this one on “Teaching Thinking Brains”), or if you read any of the great books about long-term memory formation, you’ll hear a lot about desirable difficulty.
Memory at Work
Cognitive scientists who don’t focus on long-term memory might instead focus on a distinct mental capacity: working memory.
Working memory allows us to gather information — facts, procedures, etc. — into a mental holding space, and then to reorganize and combine them into new patterns and ideas.
In other words: it’s absolutely vital for thinking and learning. If students are learning academic information, they are using their working memory.
Alas, all this good news comes with some bad news: we don’t have much working memory. And, our students probably have less than we do. (For evidence, try this mental exercise: try alphabetizing the workdays of the week. No problem alphabetizing 5 words? Now try alphabetizing the twelve months of the year. OUCH.)
For this reason, effective teachers pay scrupulous attention to working memory load. Every time we go beyond working memory constraints, we make learning MUCH HARDER.
In fact, I think working memory is so important that I wrote a lengthy series of blog posts on the topic. I’m kind of obsessed. (Heck: I even wrote a book on the topic, called Learning Begins.)
Trouble in CogSci Paradise
Because both topics — desirable difficulties and working memory — provide teachers with important and powerful insights, I devoted much of last week’s workshop to them. Almost every day, in fact, we talked about both.
On Thursday, one participant asked this wise and provocative question:
Wait a minute. You’ve told us that desirable difficulties help learning. And you’ve told us that working memory overload hinders learning.
But: isn’t desirable difficulty a potential working memory overload? Don’t those two pieces of advice conflict with each other? Won’t “spacing” and “interleaving” vex working memory?
Yes, reader, they certainly might.
So, what’s a research-focused teacher to do? Team Desirable Difficulty tells us to space and interleave practice. Team Working Memory tells us to beware overload. How can we make sense of this conflicting advice?
This (entirely reasonable) question has two answers: one specific, one general.
A Specific Answer
When we consider the tension between “working memory” and “desirable difficulty,” we can focus for a moment on the adjective “desirable.”
In almost every case, working memory overload is UNdesirable.
So, if our teaching strategy — spacing, interleaving, retrieval practice, metacognition — results in overload, we shouldn’t do it: it’s not desirably difficult. We should, instead, back off on the difficulty until students can manage that cognitive load.
How do we get that balance just right?
We use our teacherly experience and insight. If I create a homework assignment with lots of interleaved practice AND ALL MY STUDENTS DO TERRIBLY, then interleaving wasn’t desirably difficult. (Or, perhaps, I taught the concepts ineffectively.)
In this case, I know the next night’s assignment should be working-memory-friendlier.
No research can tell us exactly what the best balance will be. Our expertise as teachers will guide us.
The General Answer
Researchers and teachers have different goals, and follow different practices. In brief: researchers isolate variables; teachers combine variables.
We think about stress and about working memory and about alertness and about technology and about spacing and…
That list goes on almost infinitely.
For that reason, I chant my mantra: when adopting cognitive science approaches to teaching, “don’t just do this thing; instead, think this way.”
That is: don’t just DO “spacing and interleaving” because research tells us they’re good ideas. Instead, we have to THINK about the ideas that guide spacing and interleaving, and be sure they make sense at this particular moment.
Should we have students meditate at the beginning of each class? It depends on our students, our school, our schedule, our culture, our curriculum, our goals, and … too many other variables to list here.
Should we ban laptops from classrooms? Ditto.
Should high schools start later? Ditto.
Should 3rd graders learn by doing projects? Ditto.
One isolated piece of research advice can’t effectively guide teaching and school-keeping decisions. We have to combine the variables, and think about them in our specific context.
Simply put: we can’t just “do what the research says.” It’s not possible; different research pools almost certainly conflict.
Instead, we’re doing something more challenge, more interesting, and more fun.
I first published this blog post back in January. I’ve been seeing more and more discussion of this question on social media, so I thought it might be helpful to offer this perspective once again.
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.
Good news: we’ve got SO MUCH research about learning that can guide and inform our teaching!
Bad news: we’ve got SO MUCH research about learning that…well, it can honestly overwhelm us.
I mean: should we focus on retrieval practice or stress or working memory limitations or handshakes at the door? How do we put all these research findings together?
Many scholars have created thoughtful systems to assemble those pieces into a conceptual whole. (For example: here, and here, and here, and here.)
Recently, I’ve come across a system called 4C/ID — a catchy acronym for “four component instructional design.” (It might also be R2D2’s distant cousin.)
First proposed by van Merriënboer, and more recently detailed by van Merriënboer and Kirschner, 4C/ID initially strikes me as compelling for two reasons.
Reason #1: Meta-analysis
Here at Learning and the Brain, we always look at research to inform our decisions. Often we look at one study — or a handful of studies — for interesting findings and patterns.
Scholars often take another approach, called “meta-analysis.” When undertaking a meta-analysis, researchers gather ALL the studies that fit certain criteria, and aggregate their findings. For this reason, some folks think of meta-analytic conclusions as very meaningful. *
A recent meta-analysis looked at studies of 4C/ID, and found … well … found that it REALLY HELPS. In stats language, it found a Cohen’s d of 0.79.
For any one intervention, that’s a remarkably high number. For a curriculum and instruction planning system, that’s HUGE. I can’t think of any other instructional design program with such a substantial effect.
In fact, it was this meta-analysis, and that Cohen’s d, that prompted me to investigate 4C/ID.
Reason #2: Experience
Any substantial instructional planning concept resists easy summary. So, I’m still making my way through the descriptions and diagrams and examples.
As I do so, I think: well, it all just makes a lot of sense.
As you can see from this graphic, the details get complex quickly. But (I think) the headlines are:
A graphical view on the four components: (a) learning tasks, (b) supportive information, (c) procedural information, and (d) part-task practice. Author: Jeroen J. G. van Merriënboer
… ensure students know relevant procedures fluently before beginning instruction
… organize problems from simple to complex, aiming to finish with “real-life” tasks
… create varied practice
… insist on repetition
And many others. (Some summaries encapsulate 4C/ID in 10 steps.)
None of that guidance sounds shocking or novel. But, if van Merriënboer and Kirschner have put it together into a coherent program — one that works across grades and disciplines and even cultures — that could be a mighty enhancement to our practice.
In fact, as I review the curriculum planning I’m doing for the upcoming school year, I think: “I’m trying to do something like this, but without an explicit structure to guide me.”
In brief: I’m intrigued.
The Water’s Warm
Have you had experience with 4C/ID? Has it proved effective, easy to implement, and clear? The opposite?
I hope you’ll let me know in the comments.
* Others, however, remain deeply skeptical of meta-analysis. The short version of the argument: “garbage in, garbage out.” In this well-known post, for instance, Robert Slavin has his say about meta-analysis.
Even before the increase in mental health challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were living in an era of heightened anxiety. People experience feelings of worry, nervousness, or unease related to their futures or to life circumstances shrouded in uncertainty. In Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycle of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind, Judson Brewer, professor in Brown University’s School of Public Health and Medical School, shows that anxiety is a type of habit, and that the science of habit formation and addiction can help address anxiety. By some estimates, just shy of one-third of U.S. adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some time in their life. This book is helpful for the many people who struggle with anxiety and for individuals who help support people suffering from anxiety.
Anxiety originates from a brain and mind mechanism intended to support survival—i.e., fear is at the root of anxiety, and fear can be key to keeping us out of life-threatening danger. Anxiety is socially contagious and often exaggerated by judgement about our anxiety from ourselves or others. It cannot be avoided with willpower, reason, distraction, substitution, or environmental changes alone. Instead, Brewer suggests that we become aware of our anxiety habit loop and understand the ways in which we reward and reinforce those habits. Identifying a habit loop involves defining a trigger, subsequent behavior, and reward. He suggests practices for breaking bad habits and forming new ones and urges patience in the process of change. Mindfulness, or purposefully and non-judgmentally attending to the present moment, and curiosity, are key parts of unwinding the anxiety habit and curbing perseverative thinking. Brewer argues that mindfulness and curiosity work in part because they do not require changing the thoughts or emotions we have, but instead involve changing our relationship to those thoughts and emotions. For example, when we fall back on a bad habit, rather than chastising ourselves or saying what we “should” do, we can frame the misstep as a learning opportunity. Brewer urges actively saying “hmm” more often. He suggests that between our comfort zone and our danger zone is a growth zone in which we have the potential to help create a new version of ourselves.
Brewer recommends several specific practices for addressing anxiety and forming new mental and behavioral habits. He developed the acronym RAIN to describe one especially helpful practice which involves: 1) recognizing and relaxing into what one is feeling; 2) accepting and allowing those thoughts and feelings; 3) investigating them with curiosity and kindness; and 4) noting what happens in each moment. Paying attention to the present moment, including through breathing exercises, can be very effective. Loving Kindness meditation, which involves wishing yourself and others well, can help us accept ourselves and others as we are, and allowing the feeling of kindness to run through our bodies can provide a sense of calm. Paying close attention to the adverse behavior in a habit one is trying to break and to the good feelings in the new habit one is trying to form can help bring about habit change. Brewer also encourages having faith that you can learn a new skill or habit, practicing those new habits as needed, and focusing on making change in small, manageable chunks of time.
Brewer has examined all these practices through extensive laboratory-based research, as well as through a smart phone app he has developed to change habits. While many people are motivated to address anxiety-related issues because anxiety itself is unpleasant, Brewer offers additional incentive in the form of the wisdom that worrying does not prevent possible future troubles from occurring, but it does rob us of peace in the present moment. To learn more about addressing anxiety and engage with additional resources that Brewer has developed, visit DrJud.com.
Brewer, J. (2021). Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycle of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind. New York: Avery, Penguin Random House LLC
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