Teachers vs Tech - Daisy Christodoulou Flashcards
Thomas Edison 1913 prediction?
Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years. Thomas Edison, quoted by Smith, F. J., 1913
Most high profile tech failure? Where, when and company involved?
Tablets in Los Angeles In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced a deal with Apple and Pearson (a leading educational publisher) to equip every student in the district with iPads that carried a Pearson curriculum.
The LAUSD is the second-largest school district in the US, educating over 700,000 students, and the contract would ultimately have cost $1.3 billion. Barely a year later, the deal collapsed. The iPads’ security software was easy to delete, the pre-installed curriculum was unfinished and riddled with errors, and teachers had been given little training in how to use the tablets and curriculum.
Perhaps the most chastening aspect of this failure was the stature of the organizations involved. As Wired magazine reported: If one of the country’s largest school districts, one of the world’s largest tech companies, and one of the most established brands in education can’t make it work, can anyone?
What does 2012 OECD data show about US and UK?
In 2012, the OECD carried out a new assessment designed to measure adult skills, and also to compare different generations across time. In Korea, adults in the 55–65 age range performed poorly, but those aged 16–24 did much better.25 But in England and the United States, ‘improvements between younger and older generations are barely apparent’.
It is this - not the Flynn effect - which is generational.
What is the Flynn effect and what’s happened to it?
Throughout the 20th Century, scores on IQ tests increased steadily, a phenomenon known as the ‘Flynn effect’ after the scientist who discovered it.27 In recent years, there have been signs that the Flynn effect has stalled or even gone into reverse.28
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field which draws on research from different areas, including …
… psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and computer science.
When / where / who … concept of AI?
a conference on artificial intelligence that was held in 1956 at Dartmouth University. The organizer, John McCarthy, coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), and the conference is seen as the foundation of AI as a field of academic study.4 Attending the conference was Herbert Simon, who would win the Nobel Prize later in his career. Together with two colleagues, he presented the Logic Theorist, often called the first artificial intelligence program.5 It was able to find proofs for many fundamental mathematical theorems
The insight from the science of learning that perhaps has the most practical relevance for teachers is…
… the distinction between working and long-term memory.
Why is this true?
Differences in prior knowledge is one of the most significant differences between learners, and in many ways can be more significant than differences in general intelligence or working memory capacity.
Because the prior knowledge is mental models for understanding.
Knowledge (like vocabulary) unlocks the ability to process or reveal meaning.
Summarise in four words:
Project-based learning, hands-on activities and authentic tasks aim to present students with the types of unstructured activities they will encounter in the real world. We can sum up all of these approaches as …
Minimally guided, discovery learning
A 2006 paper from the cognitive scientists Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark reviewed the evidence for minimally guided teaching and found that for novices, guided instruction is more effective because …
… it reduces the load on working memory.
The teacher decides the l…… i…….. and s…… c…….., makes them t………. to the students,d……….. them by m…….., e………. if they understand what they have been told by c…… for understanding, and r.-t….. -telling them what they have told by tying it all together with closure. Hattie, J. 2009, p.206
(Direct instruction)
The teacher decides the learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to the students, demonstrates them by modelling, evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding, and re-telling them what they have told by tying it all together with closure. Hattie, J. 2009, p.206
In J…. H…….’s 2008 educational meta-analysis, V……. L……., direct instruction was one of the most effective approaches.
In John Hattie’s 2008 educational meta-analysis, Visible Learning, direct instruction was one of the most effective approaches.
+ PISA 2015 science approaches
What did the PISA 2015 study on science find with regard to ‘constructivist approaches’ (where pupils ‘construct’ their own meanings)?
Activities related to experiments and laboratory work show the strongest negative relationship with science performance. While this correlational evidence should be interpreted with caution – for instance, teachers may be using handson activities to make science more attractive to disengaged students – it does suggest that some of the arguments against using hands-on activities in science class should not be completely disregarded. OECD, 2016, p.71
What is the ‘knowing / doing gap’?
… the frustrating phenomenon where we know a rule, but fail to apply it reliably, like when students know that they should use a capital letter for proper nouns and at the start of sentence, but don’t do so.
Give an example of a ‘biologically secondary’ skill? Unlike?
Reading and writing are similar to speaking and listening, but they are not natural: they are inventions of late civilization.28–29
Unlike speaking.
What is the limitation on our working memory?
Summarise chapter 1: the science of learning.
Our working memories are limited to about 4–7 new items of information. Long-term memory is vast: it’s made of elaborate and well-organised knowledge structures that provide us with a way of making sense of the everyday information we encounter. We need knowledge in our long-term memory to get around the limitations of working memory. Direct instruction is an effective way to gain this knowledge. so There is a science of learning that can be applied to education. Our working memories are limited to about 4–7 new items of information. Long-term memory is vast: it’s made of elaborate and well-organised knowledge structures that provide us with a way of making sense of the everyday information
What is Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for personalised learning?
“You’ll have technology that understands how you learn best and where you need to focus. You’ll advance quickly in subjects that interest you most, and get as much help as you need in your most challenging areas. You’ll explore topics that aren’t even offered in schools today. Your teachers will also have better tools and data to help you achieve your goals. “
Who coined the phrase ‘personalised learning’ and when?
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom, his 1984 research paper challenged academics to replicate the effectiveness of one-to-one or small-group tutoring to a much bigger scale to enhance student learning.
In his initial findings, Bloom claimed that students who received “personalised instruction” outperformed 98 percent of those who did not.
‘When we are learning, what matters most is not our p……
or best l……. s…., but the best l……. s…. for the c…….’
‘When we are learning, what matters most is not our preferred or best learning style, but the best learning style for the content.’
Two biggest problems with learning styles theory?
- Limits the type of concepts some students are encouraged to learn by focusing on preferences.
- Encourages educators to stereotype and may limit achievement entrench inequality.
Paradoxical effect / problem with ‘self-pacing’?
to make good decisions about our own competence in a particular area, we need to a…… p…… a degree of c……… in that area. If we don’t have this b……. of c………, we often don’t realize our w……..
D……-K…..
to make good decisions about our own competence in a particular area, we need to already possess a degree of competence in that area. If we don’t have this baseline of competence, we often don’t realize our weaknesses.
Dunning-Kruger
What does ‘overlearning’ build?
Fluency and automaticity
How can students feel when required to take control of their learning?
Overwhelmed by additional mental load
Dunning and Kruger conclude that the way to improve judgement of your competence in an area is to i…… y…. c……….
Dunning and Kruger conclude that the way to improve judgement of your competence in an area is to improve your competence.
What is the method of ‘personalised education’ that generally shows small positive gains due to its similarity to tutoring? And what does it do?
Adaptive learning tools collect specific information about individual students’ behaviors by tracking how they answer questions. The tool then responds to each student by changing the learning experience to better suit that person’s needs, based on their unique and specific behaviors and answers. Edsurge, 2016
An alternative often suggested to learning facts / information?
Learning to be a ‘critical thinker’ … problem solve and evaluate information you encounter.
What are the three reasons why it is wrong to say now we have Google, we no longer need to memorise facts?
- We need facts in long-term memory because we use them to think, and without them our working memories would quickly get overwhelmed.
- Even when we are using reliable online sources, we need facts in long-term memory to be able to look something up and make sense of what we find.
- When we do encounter unreliable online sources, relying on generic evaluation skills will not help us to identify them.
L…-t… m….. is now viewed as the c……, d…….. s……… of h….. c……… Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our l…-t… m……
Kirschner P. A., et al., 2006
Long-term memory is now viewed as the central, dominant structure of human cognition. Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our long-term memory.
Kirschner P. A., et al., 2006
What was the memory experiment that proves that we think by using our long-term memories? (1970s - not ADG)
S…. & C….
CHUNKING THEORY 1970s
Show chess board.
Grandmasters reproduce 25 pieces after just a few seconds exposure.
Once randomised, just 3/4 (as everyone else).
Simon & Chase
(Reason and recall ‘bound up’)
I believed him when he said he had a lake house, until he said it’s only forty feet from the water at high tide. Willingham, D. T., 2009, p.24
This brain scan is fuzzy. Probably, the patient was wearing makeup. Amplify, Center for Early Reading, 2018, p.13
To make sense, a reader must KNOW lakes don’t have tides, make-up has trace metal elements.
Looking up things is a …?
… high-level cognitive task.
The more you already know, the more useful a reference source becomes.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus The hoax website contains detailed and often amusing descriptions of an entirely fictitious creature.
What do we learn about Google from this?
It isn’t enough to apply ‘reliability criteria’ like authorship … you need basic (adult) information (like octopuses don’t live in trees).
‘Critical thinking’ ineffective here, actual science effective.
Which ‘research’ site might lead to ‘misconception reinforcement’ (and what is that)?
YouTube. Increasingly sensationalist videos (learn more about why Earth is flat).
Guided (teacher) vs unguided learning.
What is R….. M….’s Multimedia Principle?
presenting text and images together can enhance learning.
Richard Mayer proved with bicycle pump experiment
… he has another 29 principles
What does the split attention effect show?
The split-attention effect shows that (if textual materials must be presented in written form) closely integrating text and images leads to better learning than providing the text and image separately.
(Block of text and image vs closely integrated image and annotations)
What is the ‘redundancy effect’?
Part of..?
Giving students irrelevant information whilst they are learning something will clog up their working memory.
This means students may remember the wrong stuff, not the parts of the information you actually want them to
… don’t talk over your slides.
Cognitive load theory.
What can we learn about creativity from Johannes Gutenberg?
Johannes Gutenberg developed his printing press using his skills as a goldsmith and his knowledge of how wine presses worked. He succeeded not by ‘conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead [by] borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem.’49
Summarise chapter 3: why can’t we just look it up?
We need knowledge in long-term memory to make sense of the world.
We need knowledge in long-term memory to use search engines effectively and identify misinformation.
We’ll still need knowedge in the future!
We need technology to help build memory, not to replace it.
