Radical New Theory on Learning

An Australian University study has come up with an interesting and important new set of claims about how people best retain information. It contends that teaching techniques that require reading along to the same spoken context is detrimental to learning. Here's some of the longer article by Anna Patty of the Sydney Morning Herald:

Pioneered at the University of NSW, the research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

It also questions the wisdom of centuries-old habits, such as reading along with Bible passages, at the same time they are being read aloud in church. More of the passages would be understood and retained, the researchers suggest, if heard or read separately.

The findings show there are limits on the brain's capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory.

John Sweller, from the university's faculty of education, developed the "cognitive load theory".

"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

The findings that challenge common teaching methods suggest that instead of asking students to solve problems on their own, teachers helped students more if they presented already solved problems.

"Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it," Professor Sweller said.

The working memory was only effective in juggling two or three tasks at the same time, retaining them for a few seconds. When too many mental tasks were taken on some things were forgotten.

The Biorhythms of Learning

The New York Times just concluded a three-part series on the difficulties of teaching Jr. High School students And something that jumps out at the reader is that Jr High School is the wrong place to try to drill facts. In watching the compelling videos and listening to the teachers describe their experiences it becomes obvious that subject matter is less important than psychology and sociology.

And you cannot help but feel that there is a biorhythm that introverts during the Jr High school years.

For Teachers, Middle School Is Test of Wills by Elissa Gootman is a worthwhile read.

The most recent results of math and reading tests given to students in all 50 states showed that between 1999 and 2004, elementary school students made solid gains in reading and math, while middle school students made smaller gains in math and stagnated in reading.

Yet many middle school teachers land there by happenstance. “More people end up in middle schools because that’s where the openings are,” said Carmen Fariña, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City school system who is now helping 35 middle school principals reshape their schools. “It’s not necessarily a choice.”

JoAnn Rintel Abreu, 40, an English and social studies teacher at Seth Low, graduated with a masters’ degree in English literature, the “bare minimum” teaching requirements and glorious visions of turning high school students on to Shakespeare and Chaucer. She was offered a middle school job first.

Now, after 16 years at Seth Low, Mrs. Abreu takes great satisfaction in trying to figure out how to reach adolescents. The rewards come with breakthrough moments, like when a sullen eighth grader who rarely does his homework handed in a bitterly descriptive, beautifully written memoir about his father’s new girlfriend, “the witch.”

“Middle school is like Scotch,” she reflected in the teachers’ lounge one afternoon. “At first you try to get it down. Then you get used to it. Then it’s all you order.”

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Learning Multipliers

Here's an excellent set of ideas and suggestions for becoming a more effective student and learner.

From Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better by Online Education Database.

For Teachers, Tutors, and Parents

56. Be engaging. Lectures are one-sided and often counter-productive. Information merely heard or witnessed (from a chalkboard for instance) is often forgotten. Teaching is not simply talking. Talking isn't enough. Ask students questions, present scenarios, engage them.

57. Use information pyramids. Learning happens in layers. Build base knowledge upon which you can add advanced concepts.

58. Use video games. Video games get a bad rap because of certain violent games. But video games in general can often be an effective aid to learning.

59. Role play. Younger people often learn better by being part of a learning experience. For example, history is easier to absorb through reenactments.

60. Apply the 80/20 rule. This rule is often interpreted in different ways. In this case, the 80/20 rule means that some concepts, say about 20% of a curriculum, require more effort and time, say about 80%, than others. So be prepared to expand on complex topics.

61. Tell stories. Venus Flytrap, a character from the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, once taught a student gang member about atoms, electrons, and protons by saying that an atom was one big neighborhood, and the protons and neutrons had their own smaller neighborhoods and never mixed. Just like rival gangs. The story worked, and understanding sparked in the students eyes.

62. Go beyond the public school curriculum. The public school system is woefully lacking in teaching advanced learning and brainstorming methods. It's not that the methods cannot be taught; they just aren't. To learn more, you have to pay a premium in additional time and effort, and sometimes money for commercially available learning tools. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but what is taught in schools needs to be expanded. This article's author has proven that a nine-year old can learn (some) university level math, if the learning is approached correctly.

63. Use applied learning. If a high school student were having trouble in math, say with fractions, one example of applied learning might be photography, lenses, f-stops, etc. Another example is cooking and measurement of ingredients. Tailor the applied learning to the interest of the student.

For Students and Self-Studiers

64. Be engaged. Surprise. Sometimes students are bored because they know more than is being taught, maybe even more than a teacher. (Hopefully teachers will assess what each student already knows.) Students should discuss with a teacher if they feel that the material being covered is not challenging. Also consider asking for additional materials.

65. Teach yourself. Teachers cannot always change their curricula. If you're not being challenged, challenge yourself. Some countries still apply country-wide exams for all students. If your lecturer didn't cover a topic, you should learn it on your own. Don't wait for someone to teach you. Lectures are most effective when you've pre-introduced yourself to concepts.

66. Collaborate. If studying by yourself isn't working, maybe a study group will help.

67. Do unto others: teach something. The best way to learn something better is to teach it to someone else. It forces you to learn, if you are motivated enough to share your knowledge.

68. Write about it. An effective way to "teach" something is to create an FAQ or a wiki containing everything you know about a topic. Or blog about the topic. Doing so helps you to realize what you know and more importantly what you don't. You don't even have to spend money if you grab a freebie account with Typepad, Wordpress, or Blogger.

69. Learn by experience. Pretty obvious, right? It means put in the necessary time. An expert is often defined as someone who has put in 10,000 hours into some experience or endeavor. That's approximately 5 years of 40 hours per week, every week. Are you an expert without realizing it? If you're not, do you have the dedication to be an expert?

70. Quiz yourself. Testing what you've learned will reinforce the information. Flash cards are one of the best ways, and are not just for kids.

71. Learn the right things first. Learn the basics. Case in point: a frustrating way to learn a new language is to learn grammar and spelling and sentence constructs first. This is not the way a baby learns a language, and there's no reason why an adult or young adult has to start differently, despite "expert" opinion. Try for yourself and see the difference.

72. Plan your learning. If you have a long-term plan to learn something, then to quote Led Zeppelin, "There are two paths you can go by." You can take a haphazard approach to learning, or you can put in a bit of planning and find an optimum path. Plan your time and balance your learning and living.

Collaborative Teaching Catching On

Last week the Couant reported on a Bristol school that's improving it's teaching effectiveness by having teachers share and complement each other's efforts. Those of us in software engineering know that bad data can poison any well-intentioned set of statistics or number crunching activity and we know from the fraudulent Bush claims about schools how numbers can be used to obfuscate reality so I always read this stuff carefully.

The schools the Courant talks about seem to be getting it right! Not only are they getting it right but the world is moving in the direction of gestalt thinking activities. Education will soon become less about what any individual knows than what an individual can contribute to larger problem solving.

Check it out.

Teaching Strategy Yields Results - Student Data Analysis Paying Off In Bristol by LORETTA WALDMAN, Courant Staff Writer.

This year, 61 percent of the elementary students at O'Connell scored at or above the "proficient" level on the Connecticut Mastery Test, enough to make the school the first public school in the state to pull itself out of the "needs improvement" category. At Central, 72 percent of the sophomores taking the Connecticut Academic Performance Test scored in the proficient range in math - 3 percent more than the number required under NCLB.

"Obviously, we're very pleased," Wasta said. "It's an affirmation of the work we've been doing."

The technique, pioneered by districts in Norfolk, Va., Milwaukee and Indianapolis, took hold in Bristol about seven years ago. The interest grew out of work that administrators at the time were doing with Doug Reeves, the founder of a Colorado-based educational consulting firm specializing in student achievement and accountability.

For the last three years, teachers and administrators have been meeting regularly in an assortment of teams where they compare notes and calibrate instruction based on standardized test scores and other measures of how well students are learning.

If a trend stands out - for example, fourth-grade boys falling short of the goal in math - teachers try to come up with a common strategy and adjust instruction for that grade level. Administrative teams sift through data on the department, building or districtwide level to deal with broader problems.

That may sound simple, but getting educators to actually do it has been a challenge.

"Education is not a culture of collaboration. It's a culture of isolation. `Give me my kids, close the door and let me do my thing,'" Wasta said. "That's enough when you expect some of the kids to succeed. When you expect all the kids to succeed, it's not."

Veteran teachers, hardened by one educational fad after another, were the hardest to convince.

"Little by little, success by success, you don't see that so much anymore," Wasta said. "But it took three years to see those little islands of success."

Those little islands also caught the attention of state school officials, who studied Bristol's use of the technique before adopting it as a statewide model. Training is now being offered to all school districts in the state by the Department of Education.

Wasta and other Bristol school officials have either visited or been visited by district leaders from Southington, East Hartford, Vernon, Bloomfield, Region 10 and elsewhere. Bristol officials also have hosted two out-of-state delegations eager to learn how the approach works. Denise Carabetta, the district's director of teaching and learning, is at work on a book being published by an arm of Reeves' firm, expected to be released next year.

"Bristol has been wonderful in the way they have shared their lessons learned," said Nancy Stark, the manager of the school improvement unit of the state Department of Education. "Now we have many districts involved in this initiative."

"Most school districts are doing it in one form or another," said Michael Frechette, the superintendent of schools in Middletown, where disappointing results on last year's mastery test triggered a wave of data-mining and soul searching. "If kids aren't learning, then we need to change what we're doing. And if we don't change what we're doing, we'll continue to get the same results."

"It's not a script, it's an approach," Rabinowitz said. "An approach that advises you how to look at data, but it doesn't say all of you have to do it this way and get these results. Where Bristol has excelled is tailoring it to their own particular needs, but the beauty is that it can be done in urban, suburban or rural districts."

I would love to see this adopted at the elementary schools for math and reading where such an approach would be most effective in those areas (pre-fourth grade).

Refreshing Educational Insight on Teaching Algebra

In today's Courant and article talks about an educational philosophy that the NCLB cancer is trying to stomp out. It's entitled; Johnny's Lessons - How A Tough Kid Found Key To Mystery Of Math: Multiplication - February 19, 2006 by Karin Klein.

Read the whole thing, it will bring tears to your eyes. Ms. Klein was asked to tutor a boy who was failing Algebra. She recalls that experience in responding to the LA Times recent series quoted earlier in this blog. Educational commentary is rarely better stated than in this piece.

"Today's failing high school students, though plagued by more poverty and upheaval than Johnny or I ever knew, bring the same scanty skills to algebra class, according to the Times' series. They never quite grasped multiplication tables, but still they moved on to more complicated math.

Who can focus on the step-by-step logic of peeling back an equation until "x" is bared when it involves arithmetic that comes slow and slippery, always giving a different answer to the same calculation?

Yet in all these decades, the same school structure that failed Johnny goes on, dragging kids through the grades even if they don't master the material from the year before. This especially makes no sense for math, which is almost entirely sequential.

Leaving children back isn't a solution; it simply makes them feel stupid. They learn, like Johnny, to look at the floor. The floor can't embarrass them.

What I learned from Johnny - aside from the fact that greasers could be sweet-natured and very, very smart - is that schools are structured to help administrators feel organized, not to help children learn.

Young children's skills are all over the map, yet we corral them into second grade, third grade and so forth, where everyone moves at one pace in all subjects. Better to group them according to their skills in each subject, without the "grade" labels, and let them move on to the next skill when they have mastered the one they were on. If they're not getting it, give them extra tutoring, but don't push them forward until they're ready. This way, there is no failure - only progress.

It requires a sea change in thinking, but it's not impossible or even all that hard. Back before standardized tests put classes in lockstep, some progressive schools already were using team teaching to do this in math as well as reading and writing."

A mathematical fable

In an article called, More Training Is Seen as Key to Improving Math Levels by Diana Jean Schemo in the New York Times, Bush's proposal to -cough- help math and science education is to get volunteers to do the teaching.

...he called for 30,000 mathematicians and scientists to pitch in as adjunct teachers, to teach a course at their local public schools.

That's where my story starts. My sons play basketball and we taxi them around quite a bit and every once in a while I get to the gym and some players are hanging out late at the gym with the coaches.

So one day I arrive a little early and Ron Pires, the Varsity basketball coach says to the squad, "Okay, listen up! We're going to shoot free throws [and he gives them certain parameters to follow] AND! - I WANT THE GROUP AS A WHOLE TO MAKE AT LEAST 85% OF YOUR SHOTS."

From the distance of the sidelines, an almost perceptable breeze seemed to push back the hair on the players heads - kind of like that rock and roll speaker advertisement of a kid listening to music in a wind tunnel. Ron repeated, "85% gentlemen."

At every basket, a group formed and began the exercise - for those who aren't basketball fans, 85% is a mighty fine shooting percentage and this was a test.

Once the shooting exercise was over, everyone gathered around Coach Pires who began asking for results.

"How many made four out of four?" Say five players raised their hands. "Five times four is how many baskets?" "Twenty" was answered by a chorus of players.

"Alright, how many made 3 out of four?" Now three players raise their hands. "So how many shots is that?" And so it went. Coach Pelletier rushed to get a calculator.

But what I witnessed from the sideline looked very much like a Norman Rockwell painting. Here in the middle of a gym were the biggest students in the school rubbing their chins, raising their eyes to imagine a calculation on a non-existent whiteboard, scatching their heads like Stan Laurel pondering an impossible dilemna. It looked like a lot of thinking and had I captured it on film it would be the yearbook photo.

And in the same fashion that they win basketball games, they helped each other track and recalculate the necessary arithmetic - IOW, with teamwork. The image is still stuck in my memory because everything you ever needed to know about teaching math was right there.

Which brings me back around to a number of things.

A.) Feed these students math in non-threatening, appropriate doses and they learn. You don't need tests to see the gears working when the learning is obvious.

B.) Students working in teams to supplement each other's efforts works well. A lot better than "every student for themselves" no matter what - we got tests to - ahem - administer!

C.) You don't need mathematicians and scientists to walk in from the street to teach math. And, we aren't even touching the subject of what would qualify these people to be in classrooms with mixes of students with mixes of needs. Math is taught and can be taught in doses in many school activities that already exist. Students need to be given a weighed credit for the math and english they exercise in other classes that counts toward graduation.

D.) Bush's "plan does not envision hiring new teachers. Rather, it proposes to retrain the math and science teachers on hand." That's very nice but if the teachers receiving more training are hopelessly poor teachers to begin with - unmotivated to learn new techniques, self-centric, experts in math and ignorant of learning - we're just throwing good money after bad. Schools need a plan to marginalize mediocrity and reward talent.


BTW; The team made exactly 85% of their shots that evening.

On Dropping Out

In a new four part series, the LA Times is investigating High School education. While much of the dialogue is provincial to LA, many of the roots stretch into problems in our own backyards.

At EO, Bruce, Lou, and the Board of Education are all wrestling with lowering dropouts and the potential for droputs. The price the school pays will likely be lower standardized test scores. In other words, by NCLB "accountability" standards we will likely be lowering our chances of looking good statistically.

Here's why it's worth it.

Back to Basics: Why Does High School Fail So Many?
Shockingly high dropout rates portend a bleak future for youths who fall by the wayside and for society. For many, the traditional U.S. education system is a dead end.
by Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writer.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a dropout to get a job that could eventually lift him into the middle class. Those days are pretty much over. In 1964, a typical high school dropout earned 64 cents for every dollar earned by someone with a diploma. By 2004, it was 37 cents and dropping.

At a conference last fall at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York, some top educational researchers released their findings about the consequences of dropping out.

The researchers calculated that dropouts will cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost income taxes and increased welfare and healthcare costs.

Dropouts will die, on average, nine years earlier than high school graduates.

Dropouts will commit far more crimes than high school graduates.

Economist Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley estimated that if high school graduation rates were just 1% higher, there would be 100,000 fewer crimes in the United States annually, including 400 fewer murders, and that the savings would be $1.4 billion a year.

In an economy that increasingly relies on educated workers, "those who are not properly educated are going to fall by the wayside," said Michael Rebell, director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College.

The perversity of NCLB is that in order to avoid being labeled and punished as a failing school there is a reverse incentive to discard the students most likely to bring down these scores. The article describes the dubious practices:

Statistics Versus Reality

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, in conjunction with UCLA, produced a controversial report last spring saying that official dropout statistics in California's largest school districts were shockingly out of sync with reality. The researchers found that only 48% of the L.A. Unified students who started ninth grade in 1999 graduated four years later. The district claims a graduation rate of 66%.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who wants to take over the school district, jumped on the study to assert that half of the students in L.A. Unified were dropping out.

School district officials said that was wrong, since the UCLA numbers included as dropouts students who had left to continue their education elsewhere. They put the dropout rate for 2003-04 at 33%.

One of the problems with trying to understand the dropout problem is that experts can't even agree on the definition of a dropout: Should it include, for instance, a student who quits school but continues in home study that is unlikely to lead to graduation?

The debate can be seen in microcosm at Birmingham High. UCLA calculated the graduation rate at Birmingham at 50%. L.A. Unified, using federal formulas, puts it at nearly 80%, with just 3.5% classified as dropouts.

furthermore...

Debate has long raged in education circles over who's to blame for students failing high school. Is it the school or the student? The educational system or the society? The parents or the culture?

Teachers, the adults with the closest view of this slow-motion disaster, tend to have the most nuanced view. Even the best of them often express frustration and disappointment in their inability to reach failing students.

Paula Sargent teaches senior English composition at Birmingham and takes pains to stimulate her students.

Students adore Sargent, a former professional singer who appeared on the front page of this newspaper in 1968, when her singing troupe was ambushed in Vietnam en route to a performance for U.S. troops; two musicians died, and Sargent suffered back and leg wounds that afflict her still.

"Best teacher in the world," one boy said as he shuffled into her class. "I love you, Ms. Sargent," another exclaimed.

But Sargent, a wisecracking combination of mother hen and free-spirited aunt, is discouraged.

"There's no love of learning," she said. "If that's not there from the get-go" — she scanned the students slouching at their desks, the ones who had come to class on time — "then we have what we have."

Teachers complain that students come to school with a sense of entitlement — "seat time" alone, they believe, should be enough for a passing grade. Teachers also say they believe that popular culture demeans education.

But teachers also are among the first to admit that, for many students, the traditional American high school is broken. They can't handle its academic rigor and they chafe at its restrictions.