Tag: methodology

In an ideal world, teachers and researchers collaborate to bring out the best in each other.

So, I might invite Pooja Agarwal to study retrieval practice in my 10th grade English classroom.

My students and I benefit because we learn more about this great study technique.

Dr. Agarwal’s research benefits because she sees how the theory of the technique functions in the real messy world of schools.

What’s not to like?

Theory, Meet Reality

Of course, our world rarely lives up to that ideal. Teacher/researcher collaboration creates all sorts of challenges.

We speak very different languages.

We operate within very different time frames.

At times, we highlight very different values.

All these differences can make communication, progress, and success difficult to achieve.

Today’s Example

Over at the Blog on Learning Development, Meeri Kim has recently written about a collaboration between neuroscientists and Head Start teachers. More precisely, she interviewed two of the scientists in the program.

The result: a refreshingly frank description of the benefits and stresses of this collaboration.

For instance: the curriculum that the scientists created improved social skills and selective attention, while reducing problem behaviors. What teacher wouldn’t like those results?

As researcher Lauren Vega O’Neil noted:

A lot of the activities were packaged as fun games. The teachers loved having these ready-made activities that would help them long-term in the classroom.

And yet, this collaboration included confusions and stresses as well.

I worked mostly with teachers in classrooms during the study, and many of them jumped on board right away. But there was some pushback, particularly since some teachers saw this as yet another curriculum that they were being asked to implement. […] So they just saw our training program as something else that was being asked of them.

Suggestions?

Researcher Eric Pakulak has some surprisingly direct advice for colleagues who want to do classroom research:

Unfortunately, it seems to be all too common that researchers come in and don’t listen as much as they should to educators, thinking that it should be all about neuroscience, and only using education to implement what they know, as opposed to something more bi-directional.

Instead, we need to work together and really understand the ways that the experience of teachers and administrators can inform our work.

I agree with this advice wholeheartedly.

And, I likewise think that teachers can do more to understand the pressures on researchers.

For instance: research works by isolating variables.

Classroom researchers might have very particular scheduling needs. They can be certain that retrieval practice produces a benefit only if nothing else in the class was different. So, they might have to insist we schedule quizzes at a very specific point in the class — even if that schedule is highly inconvenient for us.

The more that teachers understand these research requirements, the more effectively we can create classroom research paradigms that both help our individual students learn and help researchers discover enduring truths about learning.

We’ve explored the relationship of correlation and causation before on the blog.

In particular, this commentary on DeBoer’s blog notes that — while correlation doesn’t prove causation — it might be a useful first step in discovering causation.

DeBoer argues for a difficult middle ground. He wants us to know (say it with me) that “correlation doesn’t prove causation.” AND he wants us to be reasonably skeptical, not thoughtlessly reactive.

On some occasions, we really ought to pay attention to correlation.

More Fun

I recently stumbled across a livelier way to explore this debate: a website called Spurious Correlations.

If you’d like to explore the correlation between — say — the number of letters in the winning word of the Scripps National Spelling Bee and — hmmm — the number of people killed by venomous spiders: this is definitely website for you.

Just so you know, the correlation of the divorce rate in Maine with per-capita consumption of margarine is higher than 99%.

The good folks over at TedEd have produced another helpful brain video — this one exploring different brain-scanning techniques.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B10pc0Kizsc

This video does a particularly good job exploring both the strengths and the weaknesses of each technology.

Location, Location…oh, and Timing

In particular, EEG is very good at measuring timing precisely. Sadly, it can’t pinpoint location very accurately.

On the other hand, fMRI can zoom in on location within a few millimeters. However, its timing measurements are only rough-n-ready: within a few seconds or so.

Surprisingly, the video doesn’t discuss magnetoencephalography (MEG) — which does with magnetic waves what EEG does with electrical waves.

For fun: this video shows the MEG image when the brain reads the single word “dog.”

Over at his blog Filling the Pail, Greg Ashman likes challenging popular ideas. In a recent post, he takes issue with meta-analysis as a way of analyzing educational research.

In the first place, Ashman argues — in effect —  “garbage in, garbage out.” Combining badly-designed studies with well-designed studies still gives some weight to the badly-designed ones.

Of course, Ashman has some thoughtful suggestions as well.

Why Does It Matter?

Why should we care about such an obscure and complicated statistical technique?

Meta-analysis matters because we pay so much attention to it.

For instance: just a month ago, a pair of meta-analyses about Mindset Theory set off another round of anxiety. Edu-twitter lit right up with thoughtful scholars wondering if we should stop focusing so much on the right kind of praise.

Or: I frequently rebut claims about working memory training by citing this well-known meta-analysis by Melby-Lervag and Hulme.

If we’re going to rely so much on this technique, we should be clear-minded about its strengths and its weaknesses.