Author Archives: Andrew Watson

I’m straight-up asking for some guidance here.

Here’s the story…

“Psychologically Privileged”

For many years now, I’ve seen the claim that “narrative is psychologically privileged.”

That is: we humans understand and remember stories better than we remember other kinds of informational presentations — say, essays.

Because I’ve read this statement so many times, I didn’t really think about it — other than to accept it’s probably true.

Also — I will admit — I spent some time feeling a bit smug. As an English teacher, I get to hang out with narratives all the time. If this claim is true, my discipline has it made.

I recently came across a meta-analysis examining this claim of psychological privilege. Sure enough, it found that:

“Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays.” (Emphasis added)

Technically speaking, 33,000 is a very large number.

Given this much data, I thought, SURELY teachers should teach with stories more than with exposition.

And then, I started feeling a bit queasy…

Let’s Get Practical

If you read this blog often, you know that I’m always trying to understand how a specific research finding can actually be used in classrooms.

So: how EXACTLY might teachers use this advice?

The obvious answer: when we have a choice, we should use the narrative version of an explanation instead of an expository one.

But here’s the catch: realistically speaking, how often do we have a choice? How easily can we switch between these two modes?

For example: I know how to present The Grapes of Wrath as a narrative. (It IS a narrative.)

But if I want my students to know …

the definition of a sonnet, or

the difference between personification and hyperbole, or

the qualities of a well-written thesis paragraph,

… how can I present that information as a narrative?

Of course, I could give examples of all those things. (I always do.) But examples aren’t narratives.

Honestly, I was kinda stumped.

Let the Quest Begin

But wait!

An obvious solution tapped me on the shoulder. I have, right here on my computer screen, a meta-analysis about the superiority of narrative! I can simply review the studies it meta-analyzes, and find strategies to accomplish this task.

I reviewed the document, and identified all the studies showing the benefits of narrative published after 2000. (Yes, that’s an arbitrary cut off, but it seemed handy and plausible.)

Believe it or not, only ONE of the studies even attempts to answer this vital question.

That is: almost all of the studies show that students understand narrative passages better than exposition, and remember them better.

But only this one tries to present the same information both ways.

Specifically, students read short passages about the circulatory system.

Some students read a version as a story: a young man named Alex shrinks himself into a tiny person, gets pulled into a passer-by’s lungs, and travels through the circulatory system to escape.

Other students read more traditional textbook explanations of the circulatory system.

In other words: my quick survey found only one example of expository information (the bad stuff) being translated into narrative (the good stuff).

One example doesn’t give teachers lots to work with.

And, the situation gets worse — in two ways.

Double Trouble

First: students in this study don’t (exactly) understand and remember the narrative better that the traditional exposition.

Instead, the researchers find that that the student’s prior knowledge is the key variable. I quote directly from the abstract:

“Learning and recall did not differ as a function of text genre overall [that is: narrative vs. exposition], but did interact with prior knowledge.” (Emphasis added)

In other words: we’ve got only one example to go on — and the example didn’t work as promised!

Second: more subjectively, I found the “tiny-man-pulled-into-the-lungs-story” rather confusing.

You can the sample passages here: check out Appendix B at the end.

I get that the story is a bit more interesting…but I’m not at all sure that I would have learned more from reading it.

In fact, other research into the “seductive details” effect increases my worry.

What if my cool and memorable stories actually distract my students instead of helping them?

The Problem, and The Ask

So here’s my problem: I’d like to be able to tell teachers how to use this research.

I’d like to say: “because students learn better from stories than from exposition, you can/should convert exposition into stories in this way…”

And yet, realistically speaking, I can’t figure out how to make that advice work. How can teachers do so?

So here’s my ask: can anyone out there help me out?

Do you know of research that answers this question more directly and successfully?

Do you have ideas how exposition can realistically become narrative?

I’d really like to know.

BTW, x2

BTW #1: I am, with this post, inaugurating what might be a series of questions. Rather than trying to provide answers, I increasingly find myself in search of them.

So, depending on the responses I get to this “help me understand” format, I might try it again.

BTW #2: Because we were getting SO MUCH SPAM on this blog, we had to add filters to the comment function. If you DO have an answer to my question, but you’re not able to get past those filters, you can email me directly at [email protected].

I really hope to hear from you!

Mar, R. A., Li, J., Nguyen, A. T., & Ta, C. P. (2021). Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28, 732-749.

Wolfe, M. B., & Mienko, J. A. (2007). Learning and memory of factual content from narrative and expository text. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(3), 541-564.

The obvious answer to my question is: “what a silly question.”

After all, the two phrases sound almost synonymous, don’t they?

Being “productive” is often “desirable.”

We often respond to “difficulty” by “struggling.”

When I face a “desirable difficulty,” I’m likely to engage in “productive struggle” — no?

This obvious answer, however, doesn’t seem to hold true in the world of education.

In fact, as far as I can tell, champions of “desirable difficulty” often decry “productive struggle” — and vice versa.

Let me explain.

Group A; Group 1

Many debates in the field of education boil down to two rough camps or teams.

These teams disagree quite heatedly about MANY questions; as a result, finding neutral terminology to name them gets complicated. You might hear about:

Progressive vs. traditional, or

Teacher-centered vs. student centered, or

Direct instruction vs. constructivism, or

… well, the list goes on and on. (All of these terms contain inaccuracies, but they offer a place to start.)

Perhaps the least partisan differentiation works like this:

Champions of high-structure pedagogy believe that working memory limitations require careful teacherly guidance through complex paths of learning. This “team” — often misunderstood to be “traditional” — roughly favors a teacher-centered classroom, direct instruction, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and so forth.

Champions of low-structure pedagogy believe that students learn best as they build (that is, “construct”) their own mental models by discovery, trial, and error. This “team” — often mislabeled as “progressive” — typically favors a student-centered classroom, inquiry or discovery pedagogies, a skills-based curriculum, and so forth.

To be clear, every sentence in these two paragraphs invites LOTS of disagreement and debate. But they’ll serve as a useful starting place.

Now, proponents of both high- and low-structure pedagogy want students to THINK HARD. (No surprise there. As Dan Willingham has written, “memory is the residue of thought.”)

BUT — here’s the big reveal — each team has a different name for the right kind of hard thinking.

As best I can tell:

Team high-structure promotes “desirable difficulties,” like spacing, interleaving, retrieval practice, and generative learning strategies.

Team low-structure promotes “productive struggle,” as students wrestle to construct their own understanding through inquiry, discovery, and so forth.

These phrases — which seem like synonyms outside the high vs. low debate — serve as team jerseys for thinkers engaged in the debate.

So, high-structure champions don’t think much of “productive struggle” because that phrase signifies open-ended project pedagogies.

Low-structure champions don’t like “desirable difficulties” because they suggest an excessive level of teacherly control.

In this way, rough synonyms turn into markers of strong disagreement.

Renaming the Rose

This paradox — “synonyms signal strong disagreement” — in turn highlights an important part of this debate.

Champions of both high-structure and low-structure pedagogy want students to THINK HARD.

The key difference between them: what’s the right kind of hard thinking?

In other words: what principles should guide us as we decide when and how students think hard? And — implicitly — how do we measure the success of our pedagogy?

Rather than saying “that team is entirely wrong,” we can say:

“That team has a different set of principles behind achieving a goal that we share.

We certainly disagree about those principles, but because — again — we share the goal we have a good place to start a conversation about meeting it.”

Long-time readers probably recognize one of my core beliefs in those sentences.

I have long argued that cognitive science reseach can’t tell teachers what to do. Instead, that reseach can help teachers think about what to do.

If we shift the high-structure/low-structure debate from a to do list (“follow these pedagogical steps”) to a to-think list (“think about making students THINK HARD in these ways”), we just might get the best ideas from both approaches.

After all: as long as students do the right kind of hard thinking — no matter the label we use to describe it — learning will result. Surely that’s a goal we share.

Teachers who want to rely on cognitive science to improve our teaching have SO MANY good options to choose from:

The best ways to help students practice,

The best ways to help explain new material,

Even the best ways to help students feel connected to one another.

This good news, however, can quickly become bad news.

How can we keep track of all this guidance?

How can we balance and combine all these suggestions?

As I’ve written elsewhere, we’re lucky to have an increasing number of books that bring all these pieces together. (I wrote about Teaching and Learning Illustrated just a few weeks ago.)

Another EXCELLENT candidate in this field has been published for a US audience in recent months: Walkthru: 5-Step Guides to Build Great Teaching by Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli.

Many books in this field summarize and organize research into coherent topics and flow charts.

Sherrington and Caviglioli – long time educators, both – take a different approach. They start from the assumption that teachers want to do something practical with the research right now.

With that in mind, they sort dozens of ideas into “Walkthrus”: a series of five concrete steps that teachers can take to focus on and improve a particular part of their teaching practice.

You want to be better at cold calling?

You want a new way to think about seating charts?

Maybe you’d like to create routines that foster a sense of classroom belonging?

For each of these goals – and DOZENS of others — you can pick a Walkthru and get down to work.

Here’s the fuller story:

The Background

Sherrington and Caviglioli build their Walkthrus on conceptual work done by many other scholars in this field. And – helpfully – they highlight these conceptual frameworks in the first section of their book, entitled “Why?”

MANY – perhaps most – of these frameworks will be familiar to long-time readers.

You’ve already heard about Caviglioli’s own work on dual coding.

I interviewed Blake Harvard for this blog many years ago.

Peps Mccrea’s book on Motivation gets the focus it deserves.

All the greats appear in this first section: Dan Willingham, and Generative Learning, and Shimamura’s MARGE model, and Cognitive Load Theory, and …

In effect, these 30 pages briskly summarize the essential thinkers, models, and frameworks of recent decades.

You might think this “Why” section as a Hall of Fame for this field.

Getting Practical

This sort of brisk summary can be inspiring, but it can also be overwhelming. What should we teachers DO with SO MUCH information?

Fear not!

Sherrington and Caviglioli spend the next 200+ pages answering exactly that question.

As a teacher – or instructional leader – you might pick one of the book’s broader sections: say, “Questioning and Feedback,” or “Behavior and Relationships,” or “Mode B Teaching.”

Or, you might pick one of the individual Walkthrus.

To take one example – literally at random – you might decide to work on helping students read. Happily, one Walthru focuses on “Building a Culture of Reading.” Steps here include:

Read Across the Curriculum, and

Embrace Reading Aloud, and

Embed Reading in Homework Tasks.

You can work through these steps at your own pace in an iterative cycle, which Sherrington and Caviglioli call “ADAPT” (see page 290).

In other words: teachers don’t need to do everything all at once. And we don’t need to figure out how to structure the application process.

Instead, Walkthrus walks us through the translation from theory (the “Why” section) to practice (the “What” section).

This strategy means that an enormous amount of research-based advice is repackaged into brief and manageable steps.

Some Important Notes

First: The USA version of Walkthrus distills the greatest hits from a 3-volume version published in the UK. If you’re REALLY into Walkthrus, you might look for that larger set.

Second: Sherrington and Caviglioli – of course! – make decisions about what to include (and not). Not all teachers or leaders will agree with all these decisions.

However: you can easily find points of agreement and focus there. The book’s structure, in fact, encourages you to do so.

Third: I share a publisher (John Catt) with these authors; in fact, I wrote a “blurb” for the book. I don’t think these factors have influenced my review, but you should have those facts as you weigh my opinions.

TL;DR

You’re looking for a resource that sums up the most important ideas for applying cognitive science to the classroom?

You’d like it to be simultaneously comprehensive and manageable?

Walkthrus just might be the book for you.

Learning and the Brain exists so that we can talk about good teaching together.

Although such conversations can provide great benefits, they also run into problems.

We might disagree with each other’s beliefs.

Or, we might disagree about research methods.

Even when we do agree, we might struggle to communicate effectively about shared beliefs.

For example: jargon.

When specialists talk with each other about “theory of mind” or “p3” or “element interactivity,” the rest of us often think “what the heck does THAT mean?”

Effective communication stops when words don’t have recognizeable meanings.

Another, subtler problem also hampers communication:

Effective communication stops when we use the same word to mean different things.

Sometimes this problem happens between disciplines.

The word “transfer,” for instance, has different meanings in neuroscience, education, and psychology.

Other words get us all tangled up, even within the same discipline.

I’m looking at you, “chunking.”

Television for All

I believe I first heard the word “chunking” to describe this mental phenomenon:

Imagine I ask you to memorize this list of letters:

CN NAB CFO XHB OCB S

Or, I might ask you to memorize THIS list of letters:

CNN ABC FOX HBO CBS

From one perspective, those lists are identical. They are the same letters in the same order. I just moved the spacing around a bit.

But, when I moved those spaces, I “chunked” the letters.

That is: I organized those letters to align with your prior knowledge.

As teachers, we can reduce working memory load by “chunking”: that is, by aligning new ideas/information with ideas/information our students already have.

“Chunking” means “alignment with prior knowledge.”

Cool.

Or, wait a moment…

Curiouser and Curiouser

I’ve also heard “chunking” used in entirely different ways.

The second meaning: “break larger pieces down into smaller pieces.”

If I’ve got a list of ten instructions I want my students to follow, that list will almost certainly overwhelm their working memory. So, I could break that list down.

Three instructions.

Then three more.

An additional two, followed by the final two.

VOILA, I “chunked” the instructions.

Of course, this kind of chunking (breaking down into smaller bits) doesn’t mean the same thing as the first kind of chunking (aligning with prior knowledge).

Nor does it mean the same thing as the THIRD kind of chunking: forming a link with prior knowledge.

That is:

You could learn that “hamster” is another “mammal” that people keep as a “pet.”

You’ve formed a new “chunk”: mammals that are pets.

Or, you could learn that “Saratoga” is another surprising military victory, like “Agincourt” and “Thermopylae.”

You’ve formed a new “chunk”: unlikely military victories.

You see the problem here?

In Sum

So, as far as I can tell, “chunking” means either…

… aligining new information with prior knowledge, or

… breaking large information dumps into smaller pieces, or

… connecting new information with well-known information (which sounds like the first meaning, but isn’t exactly the same thing).

If I tell a colleague, “I think that part of the lesson would have benefitted from more chunking,” s/he doesn’t really know what I mean.

Even worse: s/he might THINK that s/he knows — but might understand chunking one way when I mean it another.

Ugh.

To be clear: I am IN FAVOR of all three strategies.

After all: all three ideas reduce working memory load. And, I’m a BIG FAN of reducing WM load.

However, when we use the word “chunking” to describe three different teaching strategies, we make our advice harder to understand.

That is: we increase the working memory demands of understanding strategies to reduce working memory demands. The paradox is both juicy and depressing.

So, I am enthusiastically in favor of all the strategies implied by the word “chunking,” but I think we should stop calling them “chunking.”

Instead, we should use more precise vocabulary to label our true meaning.