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The Cold-Calling Debate: Potential Perils, Potential Successes

Andrew Watson

October 22, 2023

The Cold-Calling Debate: Potential Perils, Potential Successes

Some education debates focus on BIG questions:

high structure vs. low structure pedagogy?

technology: good or bad?

how much should teachers focus on emotions?

Other debatess focus on narrower topics. For instance: cold calling. (“Cold calling” means “calling on student who haven’t raised their hands.”)

Proponents generally see several benefits:

Cold calling helps broaden check-for-understanding strategies. That is: it lets teachers know that MANY students understand, not just those who raise their hands.

It increases accountability.

It adds classroom variety.

And so forth.

Opponents likewise raise several concerns. Primarily:

Cold-calling could stress students out — even the ones not being cold called. That is: even the possibility that I might be called on could addle me.

Also, cold calling signals a particular power dynamic — one that runs contrary to many school philosophies.

Because both sides focus on different measures of success or peril, this debate can be difficult to resolve.

The Story So Far

Back in 2020, a friend asked about the cold calling debate. I looked for research, and –honestly — didn’t find much. The result of that search was this blog post.

In brief, the only study I found (focusing on college sophmores) found more benefits and fewer perils.

Students who had been cold-called a) asked more questions later on, and b) felt less stress.

But, one study is just one study. And, if you don’t teach college sophomores, you might not want to rely on research with that age group.

Today’s News

Research might offer teachers useful guidance, but we shouldn’t accept all research without asking a few questions.

One way to ensure we’re getting GOOD research-based advice is to look for wide ranges of evidence: evidence from…

… primary school AND high school

… science class AND history class

… small AND large school

… Stockholm AND Johannesburg

And so forth.

Similarly, teachers should feel especially confident when reseachers use different methodologies to explore their questions.

For this reason, I was especially pleased to find a cold-calling study published just last year.

This study doesn’t go in for random distribution or control groups (staples of other research paradigms). Instead, it uses a technique called “multimodal interaction analysis.”

I haven’t run into this technique before, so I’m honestly a newbie here. But the headline is: researchers used videotapes to study 86 cold-calling interactions.

In their analysis, the break the interaction down into a second-by-second record — noting the spoken words, the hand gestures, the length of pauses, the direction of the teacher’s gaze. (In some ways, it reminds me of Nuthall’s The Hidden Lives of Learners.)

Heck, they even keep track of the teacher’s use of modal verbs. (No, I’m not entirely sure what modal verbs are in German.)

By tracking the interactions with such extraordinary precision, they’re able to look for nuances and patterns that go beyond simply: “the teacher did or didn’t cold call.”

Conclusions?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study’s broad conclusion sounds like this: details matter.

The researchers offer a detailed analysis of one cold call, showing how the teacher’s build up to the moment created just the right support, and just the right tone, for the student to succeed.

They likewise detailed another cold call where the teacher’s body language and borderline insulting framing (“do you dare to answer?”) seem to have alarmed a shy student in monosyllables.

By implication, this research suggests that both opponents and proponents are missing a key point.

We needn’t ask: “is cold calling good or bad?”

Instead, we should ask: “what precise actions — what words, what gestures, what habits — set the student up for a positive interaction? Which precise actions do the opposite?”

Once we get good answers, we can focus and practice! Let’s do more of the good stuff, and less of the harmful stuff.

TL;DR

“Is cold calling good or bad?” is probably the wrong question.

Recent research focusing on nuances of technique suggests that teachers can reduce the perils of cold calling to foster participation and enhance learning.

Morek, M., Heller, V., & Kinalzik, N. (2022). Engaging ‘silent’students in classroom discussions: a micro-analytic view on teachers’ embodied enactments of cold-calling practices. Language and Education, 1-19.

Getting the Details Just Right: Highlighting

Andrew Watson

September 03, 2023

Getting the Details Just Right: Highlighting

Because the school year starts right now, I’m using this month’s blog posts to give direct classroom guidance.

Last week, I wrote about a meta-analysis showing that — yup — retrieval practice is awesome.

Teachers should be aware of a few detail (e.g.: “brain dumps” are among the least effective kinds of retrieval practice).

But for the most part, asking students to retrieve stuff (facts, processes, etc.) helps them remember that stuff better — and to transfer their understanding to new situations.

This week, let’s talk about another strategy that teachers and students might use: highlighting.

We know that retrieval practice is awesome. Is highlighting equally awesome? More or less so? When and how should students highlight?

Start Here

For several years, the go-to answer to this question has come from this research summary, by John Dunlosky, Dan Willingham, and others.

Their rather bleak conclusion:

we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility. In most situations that have been examined and with most participants, highlighting does little to boost performance.

It may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively, or when texts are difficult, but it may actually hurt performance on higher level tasks that require inference making. (emphasis added)

They reached this conclusion 10 years ago. Do we know anything more today?

Who Times Two

Last year, Ponce, Mayer & Méndez published a meta-analysis looking at the potential benefits of highlighting.

They found two key variables not included in the earlier research summary.

First: the students’ age/grade.

Second: the person doing the highlighting.

That is: they found that …

If the INSTRUCTOR does the highlighting, doing so benefits college students AND K-12 students, but

If the STUDENT does the highlighting, doing so benefits college studets but NOT K-12 students.

These findings make rough-n-ready sense.

We teachers know what the important ideas are. For that reason, our highlighting help students (on average) focus on those important ideas — so they learn and understand more.

Students — especially younger students — probably don’t know what the important ideas are. For that reason, their own highlighting might not accentuate important ideas (on average), and so they don’t benefit from highlighting.

When I ask a student why he highlighted a passage, I sometimes get a version this answer: “Honestly, I realized I hadn’t highlighted anything in a few pages, so I thought I really needed to find something that sounded important.”

Little wonder, then, that my 10th graders don’t benefit from highlighting.

Classroom Specifics

Of course, this meta-analysis also arrived at other useful conclusions.

This first one came to me as something of a shock: although highlighting does benefit some students, reviewing the highlights doesn’t.

The researchers write:

“on average, reviewing highlighted text previously highlighted by learners did not improve learning significantly more than students who only read or studied the text.”

I infer from this finding that highlighting helps (if at all) because it prompts students to FOCUS ON and THINK ABOUT information the first time they read it.

It does not, however, help students when they return to the highlighted passage later.

That’s useful to know!

Another conclusion is less of a surprise: training helps.

That is: we can help students (yes, even K-12 students) highlight more effectively.

According to the meta-analysis, we can…

… show students examples of good and bad highlighting,

… help them distinguish between main ideas and secondary ones, and

… emphasize that too much highlighting reduces the benefit.

For example:

I myself don’t ask my English students to highlight much. But, I do ask them to note very specific parts of the text.

When we read Macbeth, I ask them to circle/highlight every time they see the words “do,” “done,” or “deed.” (Believe it or not, those words show an important pattern in the play.)

When we read Their Eyes Were Watching God, they highlight various symbols: hair, gates/fences, mules, trees.

I hope that these very modest highlights help students spot patterns they otherwise would have missed — without distracting them too much from other important parts of the story.

In other words: used judiciously and narrowly, highlighting can provide some benefit.

TL;DR

This recent meta-analysis gives us helpful specifics on how best to use highlighting.

Ideally, we teachers do the highlighting ourselves, especially in K-12 classrooms ; we teach students how to highlight (not too much!); we don’t encourage them to review their highlights.

In fact, as we saw in last week’s post, retrieval practice should replace “review the highlights” as a way to review and study.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public interest, 14(1), 4-58.

Ponce, H. R., Mayer, R. E., & Méndez, E. E. (2022). Effects of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text: a meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 34(2), 989-1024.

Getting the Details Just Right: Retrieval Practice

Andrew Watson

August 28, 2023

Getting the Details Just Right: Retrieval Practice

As we gear up for the start of a new school year, we’re probably hearing two words over and over: retrieval practice.

That is: students have two basic options when they go back over the facts, concepts, and procedures they’ve learned.

Option 1: they could review it; that is, reread a passage, or rewatch a video, or review their notes.

Option 2: they could retrieve it; that is, ask themselves what they remember about a passage, a video, or a page of notes.

Well, the research verdict is clear: lots of research shows that OPTION 2 is the winner. The more that students practice by retrieving, the better they remember and apply their learning in the long term.

This clear verdict, however, raises lots of questions.

How, exactly, should we use retrieval practice in classrooms.

Does it work in all disciplines and all grades?

Is its effectiveness different for boys and girls?

Does retrieval practice help students remember material that they didn’t practice?

Do multiple choice questions count as retrieval practice?

And so forth.

Given that we have, literally, HUNDREDS of studies looking at these questions, we teachers would like someone to sort through all these sub-questions and give us clear answers.

Happily, a research team recently produced just such a meta-analysis. They looked at 222 studies including more than 48,000 students, and asked nineteen specific questions.

These numbers are enormous.

Studies often get published with a few dozen participants – which is to say, a lot less than 48,000.

Researchers often ask 2 or 3 questions – or even 1. I don’t recall ever seeing a study or meta-analysis considering nineteen questions.

As a result, we’ve got a lot to learn from this meta-analysis, and can feel more confidence than usual in its conclusions.

The Big Picture

For obvious reasons, I won’t discuss all nineteen questions in detail. Instead, I’ll touch on the big-picture conclusions, highlight some important questions about practical classroom implementation, and point out a few surprises.

The high-level findings of this meta-analysis couldn’t be more reassuring.

YES: retrieval practice enhances long-term memory.

YES: in fact, it enhances memory of facts and concepts, and improves subsequent problem solving. (WOW.)

YES: it benefits students from kindergarten to college, and helps in all 18 (!!) disciplines that the researchers considered.

NO: the student’s gender doesn’t matter. (I was honestly a little surprised they studied this question, but since they’ve got an answer I’m reporting it here.)

I should note that these statistical results mostly fall in the “medium effect size” range: a hedges g of something like 0.50. Because I’m commenting on so many findings, I won’t comment on statistical values unless they’re especially high or low.

So the easy headline here is: retrieval practice rocks.

Making Retrieval Practice Work in the Classroom

Once teachers know that we should use retrieval practice, we’ve got some practical questions about putting it into practice.

Here again, this meta-analysis offers lots of helpful guidance.

Does it help for students to answer similar questions over multiple days?

Yes. (Honestly, not really surprising – but good to know.)

More specifically: “There is a positive relationship between the number of [retrieval practice] repetitions and the [ultimate learning outcome], indicating that the more occasions on which class content is quizzed, the larger the learning gains.”

Don’t just use retrieval practice; REPEAT retrieval practice.

Is feedback necessary?

Feedback significantly increases the benefit of retrieval practice – but the technique provides benefits even without feedback.

Does the mode matter?

Pen and paper, clicker quizzes, online platforms: all work equally well.

Me: I write “do now” questions on the board and my students write down their answers. If you want to use quizlet or mini-white boards, those strategies will work just as well.

Does retrieval practice help students learn un–tested material?

This question takes a bit of explaining.

Imagine I design a retrieval exercise about Their Eyes Were Watching God. If I ask my students to recall the name of Janie’s first husband (Logan Killocks), that question will help them remember his name later on.

But: will it help them remember the name of her second husband? Or, her third (sort-of) husband?

The answer is: direct retrieval practice questions help more, but this sort of indirect prompt has a small effect.

In brief, if I want my students to remember the names Jody Starks and Vergible Woods, I should ask them direct questions about those husbands.

Shiver Me Timbers

So far, these answers reassure me, but they don’t surprise me.

However, the meta-analysis did include a few unexpected findings.

Does the retrieval question format matter? That is: is “matching” better than “short answer” or “free recall” or “multiple choice”?

To my surprise, “matching” and “fill-in-the-blank” produce the greatest benefits, and “free recall” the least.

This finding suggests that the popular “brain dump” approach (“write down everything you remember about our class discussion yesterday!”) produces the fewest benefits.

I suspect that “brain dumps” don’t work as well because, contrary to the advice above, they don’t directly target the information we want students to remember.

Which is more effective: a high-stakes or a low-stakes format?

To my astonishment, both worked (roughly) equally well.

So, according to this meta-analysis, you can grade or not grade retrieval practice exercises. (I will come back to this point below.)

Should students collaborate or work independently on retrieval practice answers?

The studies included in the meta-analysis suggest no significant difference between these approaches. However, the researchers note that they don’t have all that many studies on the topic, so they’re not confident about this answer. (For a number of reasons, I would have predicted that individual work helps more.)

Beyond the Research

I want to conclude by offering an opinion that springs not from research but from experience.

For historical reasons, “retrieval practice” had a different name. Believe it or not, it was initially called “the testing effect.” (In fact, the authors of this meta-analysis use this term.)

While I understand why researchers use it, I think we can agree that “the testing effect” is a TERRIBLE name.

No student anywhere wants to volunteer for more testing. No teacher anywhere either.

And – crucially – the benefits have nothing to do with “testing.” We don’t need to grade them. Students don’t need to study. The retrieving itself IS the studying.

For that reason, I think teachers and schools should focus as much as possible on the “retrieval” part, and as little as possible on the “testing.”

No, HONESTLY, students don’t need to be tested/graded for this effect to work.

TL;DR

Retrieval practice — in almost any form — helps almost everybody learn, remember, and use almost anything.

As long as we don’t call it “testing,” schools should employ retrieval strategically and frequently.

Yang, C., Luo, L., Vadillo, M. A., Yu, R., & Shanks, D. R. (2021). Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 399.

Using “Worked Examples” in Mathematics Instruction: a New Meta-Analysis

Andrew Watson

August 21, 2023

Using “Worked Examples” in Mathematics Instruction: a New Meta-Analysis

Should teachers lets students figure out mathematical ideas and processes on their own?

Or, should we walk students through those ideas/processes step by step?

This debate rages hotly, from eX-Twitter to California teaching standards.

As best I understand them, the arguments goes like this:

If students figure out ideas and processes for themselves, they think hard about those mathematical ideas. (“Thinking hard” = more learning.)

And, they feel emotionally invested in their discoveries. (“Emotional investment” = more learning.)

Or,

If students attempt to figure out math ideas for themselves, they first have to contemplate what they already know. Second, they contemplate where they’re going. And third, they have to (basically) guess until they figure out how to get from start to finish.

Holding all those pieces — starting place, finish line, all the potential avenues in between — almost certainly overwhelms working memory. (“Overwhelmed working memeory” = less learning.)

Therefore, teachers should walk students directly through the mathematical ideas/process with step-by-step “worked” examples. This process reduces cognitive load and builds schema. (“Reduced cognitive load” + “building schema” = more learning.)

Depending on your philosophical starting place, both argument might sound plausible. Can we use research to answer the question?

Enter the Meta

One problem with “using research to answer the question”: individual studies have yielded different answers.

While it’s not true that “you can find research that says anything,” it IS true — in this specific case — that some studies point one way and some point another.

When research produces this kind of muddle, we can turn to a mathematical technique called “meta-analysis.” Folks wise in the ways of math take MANY different studies and analyze all their results together.

If scholars do this process well, then we get an idea not what ONE study says, but what LOTS AND LOTS of well-designed studies say (on average).

This process might also help us with some follow up questions: how much do specific circumstances matter?

For instance: do worked examples help younger students more than older? Do they help with — say — math but not English? And so forth.

Today’s news:

This recent meta-analysis looks at the benefits of “worked examples,” especially in math instruction.

It also asks about specific circumstances:

Do students benefit from generating “self-explanations” in addition to seeing worked examples?

Do they learn more when the worked examples include BOTH correct AND incorrect examples?

So: what did the meta-analysis find?

Yes, No, No

The meta-analysis arrives at conclusions that — I suspect — suprise almost everyone. (If memory serves, I first read about it from a blogger who champions “worked examples,” and was baffled by some of this meta-analysis’s findings.)

In the first place, the meta-analysis found that students benefit from worked examples.

If you do speak stats, you’ll want to know that the g-value was 0.48: basically 1/2 of a standard deviation.

If you don’t speak stats, you’ll want to know that the findings were “moderate”: not a home run, but at least a solid single. (Perhaps another runner advanced to third as well.)

While that statement requires LOTS of caveats (not all studies pointed the same direction), it’s a useful headline.

In the dry language of research, the authers write:

“The worked examples effect yields a medium effect on mathematics outcomes whether used for practice or initial skill acquisition. Correct examples are particularly beneficial for learning overall.”

So, what’s the surprise? Where are those “no’s” that I promised?

Well, in the second place, adding self-explanation to worked examples didn’t help (on average). In fact, doing so reduced learning.

For lots of reasons, you might have expected the opposite. (Certainly I did.)

But, once researchers did all their averaging, they found that “pairing examples with self-explanation prompts may not be a fruitful design modification.”

They hypothesize that — more often than not — students’ self explanations just weren’t very good, and might have included prior misconceptions.

The Third Place?

In the third place came — to me, at least — the biggest surprise: contrasting correct worked examples with incorrect worked examples didn’t benefit students.

That is: they learned information better when they saw the right method, but didn’t explore wrong ones.

I would have confidently predicted the opposite. (This finding, in fact, is the one that shocked the blogger who introduced me to the study.)

Given these findings and calculations, I think we can come to three useful conclusions: in most cases, math students will learn new ideas…

… when introduced via worked examples,

… without being asked to generate their own explanations first,

… without being shown incorrect examples alongside correct ones.

Always with the Caveats

So far, this blog post has moved from plausible reasons why worked examples help students learn (theory) to a meta-analysis showing that they mostly do help (research).

That journey always benefits from a recognition of the argument’s limitations.

First, most of the 43 studies included in the meta-analysis focused on middle- and high-school math: algebra and geometry.

For that reason, I don’t know that we can automatically extrapolate its findings to other — especially younger — grades; or to other, less abstract, topics.

Second, the findings about self-explanations include an obvious potential solution.

The researchers speculate that self-explanation doesn’t help because students’ prior knowledge is incorrect and misleading. So: students’ self-explantions activate schema that complicate — rather than simplify — their learning.

For example: they write about one (non-math) study where students were prompted to generate explanations about the causes of earthquakes.

Because the students’ prior knowledge was relatively low, they generated low-quality self-explanations. And, they learned less.

This logic suggests an obvious exception to the rule. If you believe your students have relatively high and accurate prior knowledge, then letting them generate self-explanations might in fact benefit students.

In my own work as an English teacher, I think of participles and gerunds.

As a grammar teacher, I devote LOTS of time to a discussion of participles; roughly speaking, a participle is “a verb used as an adjective.”

During these weeks, students will occasionally point out a gerund (roughly speaking, a “verb used as a noun”) and ask if it’s a participle. I say: “No, it’s something else, and we’ll get there later.”

When “later” finally comes, I put up sentences that include participles, and others that include similar gerunds.

I ask them to consider the differences on their own and in small groups; that is, I let them do some “self-explanation.”

Then I explain the concept precisely, including an English-class version of “worked examples.”

Because their prior knowledge is quite high — they already know participles well, and have already been wondering about those “something else” words that look like participles — they tend to have high quality explanations.

In my experience, students take gerunds on board relatively easily.

That is: when prior knowledge is high, self-explanation might (!) benefit worked examples.

TL;DR

A recent meta-analysis suggests that worked examples help students learn algebra and geometry (and perhaps other math topics as well).

It also finds that self-explanations probably don’t help, and that incorrect examples don’t help either.

More broadly, it suggests that meta-analysis can offer helpful and nuanced guidance when we face contradictory research about complex teaching questions.

Barbieri, C. A., Miller-Cotto, D., Clerjuste, S. N., & Chawla, K. (2023). A meta-analysis of the worked examples effect on mathematics performance. Educational Psychology Review, 35(1), 11.

“Teaching” Helps Students Learn: New Research

Andrew Watson

August 14, 2023

“Teaching” Helps Students Learn: New Research

Not even two months ago, I admitted my skepticism about a popular teaching technique.

While I accept that “students teaching students” SOUNDS like a great idea, I nonetheless worry about the practical application of this idea:

Understanding a new idea requires lots of mental resources. Explaining a new idea requires even more. All those cognitive demands might overwhelm a student’s WM.

Even if students have the mental resources to accomplish these tasks, how can we be sure that their peers are — in fact — LEARNING the new ideas they’re being taught? For instance: what if the student-teachers misunderstood the material they’re meant to teach?

Peers can intimidate. If teachers have “first day of school” anxiety dreams, imagine how students feel when they must take on the teacher’s job. (And: they don’t have our training and experience.)

So: while I think it’s possible that students benefit from teaching their peers, making this pedagogy successful will take LOTS of preparation, skill, and humility.

Today’s Update: Does the Audience Matter?

Happily, Prof. Dan Willingham recently highlighted a new study exploring this pedagogical question. Specifically, researchers wanted to know if it matters whom the students are teaching.

College students in China watched a two-minute video on synapses, specifically:

how signals are transmitted across neurons in the human nervous system and the role of action potentials, calcium ions, synaptic vesicles, neurotransmitters, sodium ions, and receptors.

After a few extra minutes of prepration, they then “taught” a lesson on this topic.

One third of the participants explained chemical synapses to 7 peers;

one third explained to 1 peer;

and the final third explained to a video camera.

Students in all three groups were instructed that the peers would have to take a test based on these explanations.

So, what effect did the audience have on the student doing the explaining?

Results and Conclusions

The researchers had hypothesized that the presence of peers would ramp up stress and reduce the benefits of this teaching methodology.

For that reason, they suspected that students would do better if they taught their lesson to the video camera instead of to live human beings.

Sure enough, students who taught to the camera did better on basically every measurement.

They offered more thorough explanations (Cohen’s d values here ranged from 0.95 – 1.23: unusually high numbers).

They remembered the information better an hour later.

They transferred their understanding to new questions more effectively.

They felt less stress, and lower cognitive load.

As the authors write: “minimizing the social presence of the audience [by have students teach to a camera] during teaching resulted in maximizing learning outcomes.”

Classroom Implications

At first look, this study seems to suggest that — sure enough! — students DO learn more when they teach.

Alas, I don’t think we can draw that conclusion.

First: this study didn’t measure that question. That is: it didn’t include a control condition where students used some other method to study information about synapses.

This study DOES suggest that teaching to a camera helps more than teaching to peers. But it DOESN’T suggest that teaching (to a camera, or to peers) helps more than something else.

Second: I’m not sure that the verb “teach” makes sense in this context.

The students explained synapses to a camera, and they believed that another student would watch the video and take a test on it.

I suppose we can call that “teaching.” But that’s a very niche-y version of it.

And, in my experience, it’s not AT ALL what teachers think of when they hear about this methodology. More often, students break up into groups to study small parts of a process, and then circulate and “teach” the other groups what they learned.

Third: how would this “teach the camera” plan work in the classroom?

The “explain to a camera” approach might work better than an “explain to peers” version. But I imagine at least two practical problems.

#1: logistically, how does it work? Do I have 25 students explaining to 25 separate cameras simultaneuosly? Do I have a separate place with cameras where students go to record?

#2: In this study, researchers told participants that other students would watch their videos and be tested on their understanding.

Presumably this statement made the teacher-students quite conscientious about their explanations. For that reason (probably), they thought harder and therefore remembered more.

That is: the camera method helped students learn largely because participants believed that others relied on their teaching.

If, however, I use this strategy in my class, that causal chain (conscientiousness –> thinking –> remembering) could easily break down.

Either I DO use those videos to help other students learn — in which case I have to review and critque them scrupulously;

Or I DON’T use those videos — in which case my students know they don’t really have to be so concientious. (Reduced conscientiousness –> reduced thinking –> reduced memory.)

These practical questions might sound mundane, even grouchy. But I’m not trying to be grouchy — I’m trying to help my students learn material!

TL;DR

A recent study suggests that college students benefit more from “teaching” if they teach to a camera than if they teach peers.

Although I’m inclined to believe these results — they certainly make a lot of sense — I still worry that a “students-teaching-students” pedagogy sounds better in theory than it might work in practice.

Wang, F., Cheng, M., & Mayer, R. E. (2023). Improving learning-by-teaching without audience interaction as a generative learning activity by minimizing the social presence of the audience. Journal of Educational Psychology.

Andrew Watson

May 28, 2023

Should Teachers Explain or Demonstrate?

If I were a chess teacher, I would want my newbies to understand …

… how a bishop moves,

… how castling works,

… what checkmate means.

To help them understand, I could…

… show them (“see how this piece moves; now see how that piece moves”)

… tell them (“checkmate is defined as…”).

Both strategies sound plausible. Both probably help, at least a little bit.

Is one better than the other?

Today’s Research

I recently came across a fascinating study that explores this question.

In this research, two strangers met over an online puzzle — sort of a maze with prizes at the end of various paths.

Sometimes, one stranger could EXPLAIN to the other the best strategy to get the most points. (“Get the pink triangles, then the hollow squares, then the green circles.”)

Other times, one stranger could SHOW the other the winning path. (“Watch me go this way, now this way, now this way.”)

Which method worked better, show or tell?

PLOT TWIST.

In this case, the answer depended on the complexity of the puzzle.

For simple puzzles, both methods worked equally well.

For complex puzzles, telling helped more than showing.

I would have been surprised if there were a straightforward answer to the question; I am, therefore, more inclined to believe this “it depends” answer.

Take Two

This result — explaining complexity > showing complexity — prompted the researchers to test a second hypothesis.

In this case, the research details get very tricky, so I won’t go into them. But the basic idea was:

Perhas both words and actions can explain concrete things, but

Perhas words do better than actions at explaining abstract things.

Sure enough, the second experiment supported that hypothesis.

As the researchers say in their first paragraph:

Our findings suggest that language communicates complex concepts by directly transmitting abstract rules. In contrast, demonstrations transmit examples, requiring the learner to infer the rules.

In brief, the more abstract and complex the concept, the more important the words.

Teaching Implications?

Before we rush to reform our teaching, we should notice several key points about this study:

It involved adults working with other adults, and strangers working with strangers.

The participants were not — as far as I know — teachers. That is: they have neither expertise nor training in helping others understand.

The task involved (sort of) solving mazes. I’m an English teacher; my teaching — and perhaps your teaching — doesn’t focus on maze-solving like mental activity.

In other words, because this research differs A LOT from typical classroom work, its findings might not apply precisely to classroom work.

Teaching Implications!!

That said, this study reminds me of an important lesson:

Practice. My. Words.

That is: when I’m explaining a concept to my students for the first time, I should script and rehearse my explanation carefully.

Now, because I’ve been teaching for a few centuries, I’m occasionally tempted to wing.

Yes, “indirect object” is a tricky concept … but I understand it well, and I’ve explained it frequently over the years, and I’m sure I’ll do just fine…

No, wait, stop it. This research reminds me: words really matter for helping students understand abstractions.

I need to get those words just right, and doing so will take time, thought, and concentraction. (Ollie Lovell emphasizes a similar idea when he writes about the importance of “bullet-proof definitions”; for instance, in this book.)

A second point jumps out at me as well.

This study contrasts showing and telling. Of course, most of the time we combine showing and telling.

As I’ve written before, Oliver Caviglioli’s Dual Coding offers a comprehensive, research-informed exploration of this complex blend.

When I think about dual coding, I typically focus on the “showing/drawing” half of the “dual.” This study, however, reminds me that the “telling” part is equally important — and, in the case of highly abstract concepts, might even be more important.

In brief, in my chess classroom:

I can simply show my students how bishops move: that’s easy.

But “checkmate” is complex. I should both show and tell — and get the telling just right.

Sumers, T. R., Ho, M. K., Hawkins, R. D., & Griffiths, T. L. (2023). Show or Tell? Exploring when (and why) teaching with language outperforms demonstration. Cognition, 232, 105326.

Book Review: Teaching Secondary Science, by Adam Boxer

Andrew Watson

May 21, 2023

Book Review: Teaching Secondary Science, by Adam Boxer

Let’s start by making this simple:

First: You should absolutely buy Adam Boxer’s Teaching Secondary Science: A Complete Guide. Sooner is better than later.

Second: You will probably not READ Boxer’s book so much as you will STUDY it. Have a pen handy; some sticky notes; your favorite memory app. Whatever system you use to keep track of big ideas and vital details — have it ready to work.

Now that I’ve been bossy, let me explain why.

Two Big Surprises

Surprise #1:

I myself don’t teach high-school science. (I taught 10th and 12th grade English, and worked at a summer camp for 8-14 year olds.)

So, the title (Teaching Secondary Science) might suggest that the book isn’t for me.

Well, Boxer’s book (and the precision of his thinking) will absolutely make me a better English teacher; I suspect his approach will benefit almost any teacher.

Here’s why…

Surprise #2:

Longtime readers know my mantra: “don’t just do this thing; instead, think this way.”

That is: cognitive science research cannot provide us with a script (“do this thing”). Instead, that research CAN give us ways to think about memory and attention and motivation and stress. When we “think this way” about those topics, we’ll have better ideas about our teaching.

Well, Boxer’s book comes as close as any to effectively defying this mantra.

His book includes a GREAT MANY “do this thing” kind of instructions.

Phrase your question this way, not that way.

Present topics in this order, not that order.

Calculate cognitive load with this formula, not that formula.

You might think, given my mantra, I’d resist the specificity of his advice.

And yet, over and over, I found myself agreeing with his logic, and believing that I’ll do better classroom work if I understand and follow several of his scripts.

To my astonishment, I’m highly tempted to “do things Boxer’s way.” Why? Because he’s already done so much thinking for me.

Case in Point

I recently discussed Boxer’s book with a group of friends. All of us had highlighted this specific advice:

When introducing a concept, start with examples, not definitions.

Why?

Because definitions are necessarily abstract, and abstraction increases working memory load.

Examples, in contrast, live comfortably in the familiar, concrete world. This very familiarity and concreteness reduce WM load, and thereby makes learning easier.

When my friends and I tried to apply this advice to our own teaching world, we immediately saw its usefulness.

The Spanish teacher said: don’t start with the abstract definition of the subjunctive; start with familiar examples in English.

The PD provider said: don’t start with abstract definitions of “declarative” and “procedural” memory; start with concrete classroom examples.

And so forth.

Two points merit notice here.

First: although Boxer writes about science instruction, his guidance applies widely across disciplines and age groups.

Second: although Boxer’s advice stems from (abstract) cognitive psychology, he frames it in (concrete) teaching suggestions.

That is: over and over, Boxer’s book practices what it preaches. His book does what he tells us teachers should do.

You perhaps have heard a conference speaker give passionate teaching advice (“never talk for more than ten minutes!”), only to defy this advice in his hour-long talk. Boxer carefully avoids such hypocricy.

The Big One

A few of my opinions in this interdisciplinary field approach heresy. Here’s one:

In my view, cognitive load theory helps experts talk with other experts about working memory load in the classroom.

Paradoxically, however, cognitive load theory almost certainly overwhelms the working memory of non-experts. It is, after all, complicated and jargony. (Quick: define “element interactivity” and “germane load.”)

For that reason, cognitive load theory probably isn’t useful as a framework for discussing working memory load with teachers. (Several people whom I admire are howling as they read these paragraphs.)

Boxer does not articulate this heretical claim directly. However, he enacts its conclusion quite directly.

That is: he translates the abstractions of cognitive load theory into a concrete formula — a proportionality formula using words anyone can understand.

Rather than reproduce the mathematical version of the formula here, I’ll summarize it this way:

Task complexity and abstraction increase working memory load.

The student’s background knowledge and the teacher’s support reduce working memory load.

Therefore, to optimize working memory load, we should look out for those four variables and manage them appropriately. (He’s got CHAPTERS on each of those topics.)

If you speak cognitive load theory, you see exactly how Boxer has translated its abstractions into this concrete formulation.

But — crucially — you don’t need to speak cognitive load theory to get its benefits.

Boxer, again, has taken his own advice. He has started with concrete examples rather than abstract definitions; he has thereby made it MUCH easier to learn from this book.

Always with the Limitations

Having raved for several hundred words, let me add a few quick notes of caution.

First: I don’t agree with absolutely everything Boxer writes. (I don’t agree with absolulety everything I write.) For instance: he emphatically champions mini white boards; I don’t think they’ll work in my context.

Second: Boxer’s examples draw on science teaching in high school in England. All three of those truths require some degree of translation as you apply his ideas to your work.

The English education system thrives of mysterious acronyms; you’ll just have to figure them out. When the SLT talks with the NQT about Supply, well, I can’t help you there.

Third: Full disclosure, I should point out that Boxer’s publisher is also my publisher — so I might have a conflict of interest in writing such an enthusiastic review. I certainly don’t think this connection has skewed my perspective, but you should have that information to make your own decisions.

These few points aside, I return to my initial hearty recommendation.

When you read and study Boxer’s Teaching Secondary Science, you’ll get specific and wise guidance for applying the abstractions of cognitive science to your classroom.

You’ll enjoy it, and your students will learn more.

Andrew Watson

April 30, 2023

Is Teaching Golf Like Teaching Algebra?

My work in this field starts with a simple logical argument:

A: Learning happens in the brain and the mind.

B: Therefore, teachers might benefit from knowing more about the brain and the mind.

C: Therefore, we should hang out with people who study brains (neuroscientists) and who study minds (psychologists). We can learn from them, and they can learn from us.

So far, so good.

That seemingly simple logic, however, gets complicated quickly.

First — as I argue frequently — we benefit MUCH MORE from studying psychology than neuroscience.

Second — again, a refrain here on the blog — we need always to remember context and nuance.

For example:

Teaching 1st graders might require different skills and techniques than teaching 8th graders, or college students.

Sometimes neurotypical students benefit from different teaching strategies than non-neurotypical students.

Cultural differences shape classroom expectations, and might thus require or forbid various teaching strategies.

In other words, my simple idea — “improve my teaching by learning brainy stuff!!” — quickly requires all sorts of subtleties.

In fact, I’ve just stumbled across a new one. Let me try to explain.

To The Classroom, and Beyond

As an English teacher, I live in a wordy world.

We study poems and write essays and read Zora Neale Hurston and revel in grammar. (Well, I revel. My students graciously put up with me.)

As the Prince of Denmark once said: “Words, words, words.”

To teach these English-y topics, I’ve got lots of strategies:

Retrieval practice: “What’s the difference between a direct object and a predicate nominative…Sylvia?”

Managing alertness: “Alistair and Yazmeen, please write your answers on the board.”

Working memory load reduction: “What’s our acronym for the 4 key verbs?”

Research suggests all this wordiness will help my students learn.

HOWEVER, not everything that students learn boils down to words.

Yes, SOME knowledge is “declarative“: I can say it out loud.

Yet OTHER knowledge is “procedural“: something I do, not something I can say.

Imagine, then, that I’m teaching someone how to play golf. As they practice, should I use those same teaching strategies? Will my players benefit from translating their physical activity into words?

For instance:

Retrieval practice: “Describe the best stance for a putt…Sylvia.”

Working memory load reduction: “What’s our acronym for the ideal golf swing?”

Will words, words, words help golfers?

Plot Twist

Just this last week I’ve started finding research raising intriguing doubts.

The research suggests:

Some kinds of knowledge aren’t really verbal: say, for example, a golf swing.

Asking students to put not-verbal knowledge into words as they learn actually gets in the way of learning.

In other words, if I ask a golfer to describe her swing while learning, I’m asking her to cram procedural knowledge into declarative form.

That translation — put “not words” into “words” — makes learning harder.

I’ve been using golf as an example because the studies I’ve found focus on golf skills.

In this study, novice golfers learned less when asked to describe their golf strokes.

In this study, expert golfers improved less under similar circumstances.

But off the top of my head, I can think of all sorts of school topics that might (MIGHT!!) fit this category:

Pottery and painting and dancing

Handwriting

Manipulating microscopes or pipettes or other science-y tools

Shop

If the golf research applies to these procedural skills, then many of my word-based teaching strategies need a substantial rethink.

Not So Fast

In this highly speculative post, I should rush to include several cautions:

First: I haven’t yet found any research applying this idea to the school subjects I’ve mentioned. I’m extrapolating — always a perilous thing to do. (Most of the research, in fact, focuses on facial recognition.)

Second: this line of reasoning might lure some folks into “learning-styles” flavored teaching theories. Beware that siren song!

Third: I might be overstating the changes that flow from this possible conclusion. For example, my pottery students should still do retrieval practice — but they should respond to questions by showing me rather than telling me the answers.

As you can tell, I’m still working out these ideas in my head. If you have insights — or research suggestions — I hope you’ll share them with me.

By the way: this research topic is called the “verbal overshadowing effect.” That is: when I translate procedural knowledge into declarative terms, the mistranslation into words (“verbal”) overshadows the actual content knowledge — which is at its root procedural.

Flegal, K. E., & Anderson, M. C. (2008). Overthinking skilled motor performance: Or why those who teach can’t do. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 927-932.

Chauvel, G., Maquestiaux, F., Ruthruff, E., Didierjean, A., & Hartley, A. A. (2013). Novice motor performance: Better not to verbalize. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 20, 177-183.

You Should Not (or Should) Let Your Students Take Pictures of Slides

Andrew Watson

April 09, 2023

You Should Not (or Should) Let Your Students Take Pictures of Slides

Back in October, I wrote a blog post about a surprise: it turns out that students REMEMBER STUFF BETTER when they take photos of lecture slides.

For several reasons — including common sense — I would have predicted the opposite. In fact, so did the researchers (led by Dr. Annie Ditta) who arrived at this conclusion.

But when Team Ditta ran their study and crunched their numbers, they found that slide photos improved students’ recall.

Having written that pro-photo blog post, I was genuinely alarmed to see a tweet from Prof. Dan Willingham — one of the greats in this field. He describes taking photos as “a terrible way to take notes.”

And Dr. Willingham should know. He’s just written a book focusing on study strategies — including note-taking.

What’s going on here? Have I given you terrible advice?

It turns out: Professor Willingham’s advice derives from this study, published in 2021 by Wong and Lim.

My blog post came from the Ditta study, published in 2022.

How do we explain — and choose between — studies that ask the same question and arrive at entirely different answers?

Untangling the Knot

Step 1: don’t panic.

It might seem that contradictory results explode the field of psychology. If THIS study shows “yes” and THAT study shows “no,” then the whole enterprise looks foolish and broken.

But here’s the thing:

Psychology is complicated.

Teaching and learning are complicated.

PEOPLE are complicated.

When psychology researchers study people who are teaching and learning, they’re studying FANTASTICALLY complicated topics.

For that reason, psychology researchers regularly produce contradictory results. That’s just how they roll.

And for that reason, no one study answers a question for good. To quote Dr. Willingham once again: “One study is just one study, folks.”

We should look not for one study to answer a question definitively, but for clusters of studies to point in a consistent direction.

If 10 studies show YES, and 2 studies show NO, and 2 more show CONFUSION — well then, “yes” strikes me as a plausible conclusion. (At least for now.)

Start Here

How can we know if most researchers have arrived at Wong’s 2021 conclusion (“photos = bad”) or at Ditta’s 2022 conclusion (“photos = good”)?

Step 2: Get curious.

Replace advocacy (“I know for sure that photos are good/bad!”) with curiosity (“I wonder what I’ll find? This should be fun…”)

For my curiosity projects, I rely on three websites: scite.ai, connectedpapers.com, and elicit.org. *

They all have different approaches and yield different kinds of results. And, they all help answer the question: “do we yet have a cluster of studies that mostly point to the same conclusion?”

So, what did I find when I asked those resources about the Wong (“photes = bad”) study?

When I looked on connectedpapers.com … it identified exactly ZERO other studies that asked questions about taking photos of lecture slides.

When I asked elicit.org a question on the topic … it came up with nothing.

Scite.ai did identify one other study responding to Wong. Sure enough, it’s the Ditta study: “photos = good.”

So, unless I’m missing something, we just don’t have much research on this topic. We can’t know where a “cluster of studies” might point because we don’t have anything remotely like a cluster.

Getting Specific

We’ve got at least one more research avenue to pursue:

Step 3: explore the boundaries.

Let’s imagine for a minute that Wong did her study with 3rd graders, and found that photos = bad; and (still imagining), Ditta did her study with college students, and found that photos = good.

In that case, we could reasonably imagine that they got different results because they studied participants in different grades.

Or (more imagining) maybe Wong studied photos of slides during a music class, and Ditta studied photos during an art history class.

Here again we could make a reasonable guess: slide photos will help in some disciplines (art!) but not others (music).

Researchers call these “boundary conditions”: as in, “this finding applies to people within these boundaries, but not outside them.”

Potential examples: a conclusion applies to …

… math class but not history class, or

… a Montessori school but not a military academy, or

… for dyslexic students, but not for neurotypical readers, or

… in Icelandic culture, but not Brazilian culture.

You get the idea.

When we look at Wong’s and Ditta’s studies, however, we find they’re very similar. Adults watch short-ish videos, and do (or don’t) take photos or notes.

The studies differ slightly — Wong looks at mind wandering as an important variable, for instance — but not enough to draw strong conclusions.

At this point, neither our online resources nor our exploration of boundary conditions gives us any reason to prefer one study to the other.

End at the Beginning

No matter how the journey goes up to this point, we always end with …

Step 4: Look to your experience, and your colleagues.

In other words: we teachers should be curious (step 2) and informed (step 3). And, we always ultimately rely on our own judgement.

In this case — in my view — we simply don’t have a good research consensus to push us strongly one way or another. So, relying on my experience, here’s the policy I would follow with my 10th grade English students:

You may take pictures of photos or complex diagrams — anything that would be hard to put into words.

However, if you can put the material into words, I’m going to ask you to do so.

Why?

Because the more time you spend processing the information, the likelier it is you will understand and remember it.

This policy would, of course, have nuances and exceptions. (E.g.: dysgraphic students shouldn’t have to write as much.)

I want to emphasize, however, that your policy needn’t resemble my policy.

If you teach different kinds of students, or teach in a photo-friendly discipline (art history!), or if your experience tells you something else…you should follow your own wisdom.

TL;DR

Should students take photos of slides as a way to remember the material?

At present, we have so little research on the topic that it really can’t answer that question — ESPECIALLY because the studies contradict one another.

Instead, we should rely on our research-informed judgement.

* As I’ve written elsewhere, I would not use ChatGPT for this kind of inquiry. In my first forays into that world, the website simply MADE UP citations. Ugh.

Ditta, A. S., Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2022). What happens to memory for lecture content when students take photos of the lecture slides?. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2021). Take notes, not photos: Mind-wandering mediates the impact of note-taking strategies on video-recorded lecture learning performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Think, Pair, Share: Does It Help? If Yes, Why?

Andrew Watson

March 26, 2023

Think, Pair, Share: Does It Help? If Yes, Why?

On some days, I find myself drawn to esoteric research studies.

A few months ago, for example, I wrote about the effect of earworms on sleep. (Yes, scholars really do research earworms.)

Today, I’ve found as straightforwardly practical a study as I’ve seen.

Teachers everywhere have been encouraged to have students “think, pair, and share.”

That is:

I ask my students a question: “what are the metaphors in this poem?”

We all pause for several seconds, so that students can think about their individual answers.

Students then pair up: “okay, everyone, chat with the person next to you about your answers.”

Finally, I ask students to share their thoughts: “who has spotted a metaphor they want to discuss?”

Voila: they thought, they paired up, they shared.

The Bigger Picture

In truth, LOTS of classroom strategies have such popular currency that we don’t really think to question them.

Is it a good idea to have students write answers on the board? (I’ve never thought to ask; after all, ALL teachers have students write on the board.)

Should I really do those handshake dances at the door? (My colleagues LOVE a good handshake dance.)

College professors everywhere are banning laptops, because handwritten notes are superior. (Aren’t they? Like, obviously?)

In other words, we don’t need to have a research basis for absolutely everything we do in the classroom.

At the same time, when a scholar does explore my classroom practice in a research-y way, I ought to be at least a little curious about the results. (If you clicked on those links above, you’ll notice that our teacherly instincts might be wrong…)

So, what happens when researchers turn to “Think, Pair, Share”?

Will our beloved habit get the research seal of approval? Or, do we need to rethink this standard practice…?

Worth Checking

Researchers in Erfurt, Germany — led by Lukas Mundelsee — undertook a straightforward study with 9th graders.

Researchers introduced students to a topic, and then asked questions.

In some cases, they just asked students to raise their hands (SHARE only).

In some cases, students THOUGHT individually, and then SHARED.

And, of course, they sometimes THOUGHT and PAIRED and SHARED.

Finally, the researchers measured other useful variables — for instance, how shy do students report themselves to be?

So, what do you think Team Mundelsee found?

Sure enough, “think, pair, share” led to more handraising than “share” alone.

And, in particular, this strategy helped students who reported higher levels of shyness.

In other words: researchers got the result that (I suspect) most of us predicted. And, the underlying explanation makes sense.

If I’m shy, I don’t want to get the answer wrong in public. But if I can pair up to discuss my answer first, then I’m less worried about my potential wrongness.

Beyond the Research

Since “sharing” is under discussion here, I’ll share my own approach to “think, pair, share.”

When it comes to the final step — “who wants to share with the group” — I myself cold call.

That is, I don’t ask for someone to volunteer; I call on a student at random.

Now, I should be clear:

First: Mundelsee’s research does NOT investigate this approach. He’s looking at voluntary sharing.

Second: “cold-calling” does generate some controversy. Some folks consider it stress-inducing, even (brace yourself) ‘carceral.’

Now, I don’t doubt that cold-calling can be done badly. (If pizza can be bad, anything can be bad.)

But I explain my thinking to my students at the beginning of the year, and they seem to get in the grove fairly easily.

In this case, I worry that students need a little incentive to think. After all, if the student knows s/he has a pair coming up, then s/he can simply use the other students’ idea as a share.

ESPECIALLY because students have time to test-drive their ideas when they pair, I think cold-calling should be low stakes enough for them to feel plenty comfortable sharing.

Of course, my classroom climate might not match yours; teachers always adapt and balance to get their teaching strategies just right.

TL;DR

Yes, “think, pair, share” helps students feel comfortable sharing.

And, yes, it does so by reducing anxiety.

Hat tip to Alex Quigley, who first pointed out this study to me.

Mundelsee, L., & Jurkowski, S. (2021). Think and pair before share: Effects of collaboration on students’ in-class participation. Learning and Individual Differences, 88, 102015.

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