Why We Learn

It seems to me that education’s ultimate goal is transfer. Ironically, efficient instruction, a primary aim of instructional design, could prevent one from reaching this goal. Instructional designs represent the way in which its creator/designer views, perceives, and/or understands the content of study. Efficient instruction prescribes a narrow (single) path from what the learner knows to what the learner should know. Varying instructional techniques or utilizing complex (dynamic) methods of task selection, while increasing efficiency, is not likely to improve transfer. The path from which the (dynamically-selected) task originates is still narrow and pre-defined by the design.

Tangentially related information, and recollection of experiences (even mistakes), are useful when recalling information. Misperceptions, once corrected, can serve as points of activation (as episodic or autobiographical memories). These experiences and “ways of organizing” are likely beneficial in transfer situations, but they’re idiosyncratic. The teacher or designer’s idiosyncrasies, integrated into an instructional design, are not as likely to be assimilated into a learners schemata because the learner is not their “owner”. How do we construct experiences that facilitate the generation of these idiosyncrasies?

Research on feedback suggests that learners pay great attention when their misconceptions are challenged, and even greater attention when they find their internal “calibration”, or their ability to assess their expertise within a domain, to be inaccurate. These situations are more likely to occur when learners are not led stepwise from point A to point B. That is to say that instructional experiences that result in, but then alleviate cognitive dissonance (see Piaget’s disequilibrium) might be more likely to produce diverse and wide-ranging schema.

Much of the work on instructional efficiency has been completed within the field of research related to cognitive load. Cognitive load theory (CLT) prescribes the presentation of learning tasks matching complexity to learner expertise, so as to ensure that working memory capacity is not overloaded during instruction. More advanced studies vary task complexity based on (a.) performance, (b.) mental effort, or (c.) mental efficiency (calculated using the first two values). Randomly presenting problem states, assuming immediate feedback (corrective or explanatory in nature) is provided, may facilitate the construction more complex schema, consequently increasing performance in transfer situations.

Benjamin S. Bloom has two works from which to draw when interpreting the results of a new study by Carnegie Mellon. The key finding, related to the efficiency of this design, is summarized in the following quotation.

By combining the open-learning software with two weekly 50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.

Essentially, the inclusion of this intelligent tutoring system allows the professor to discuss more nuanced and/or complex aspects of the content, and do so in one less class period. Bloom might infer that the observed improvements were due to an increase in the amount of time spent analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating, i.e., at the higher levels of “his” taxonomy, while in class. Alternatively, he could point to his work on tutoring, and its corresponding “2 Sigma Problem”, which suggests that one can expect to observe a difference of +2 standard deviations when students work with a teacher in a one-to-one setting.

I’m inclined to agree with both of these hypothetical conclusions. I’m also reminded of Ewan McIntosh’s recent response to Will Richardson’s post commenting on an image of a lecture hall filled with (mostly Apple) computers. McIntosh’s critique, in he differentiates between curriculum and pedagogy, noting that teachers can control pedagogy but not curriculum, culminates with the following assertion.

The reason the picture presents a dubious message is that neither curriculum nor pedagogy have changed an iota in this learning space: it’s about the same layout – with as many apples on laps – as a Victorian classroom would have appeared.

I wonder how instructional design fits, as Carnegie Mellon’s design offloads the mundane, didactic portions of instruction to technological entities, thus freeing up space and time for the instructor/professor to do the sorts of things that are much harder for computers, even “intelligent” systems, to replicate. This is a good start, but can we go further?

The program’s efforts to maximize the contributions of technology are impressive. They’ve applied adaptive algorithms similar to those that are used in the GRE, which monitor and subsequently respond to students understanding. This is one of the first times this technology has been used outside of the assessment arena. (The article refers to its use as “novel”.) What needs to be considered, however, is a design that manufactures or generates time for face-to-face. That is to say that although the tutoring aspect of Bloom’s research is (partially) present in the form of the intelligent tutoring system, the potential of human tutoring is greater.

This is not the first time that I’ve considered using technology to offload the sort of lower level tasks of instruction. My presentation, entitled “A Shift in Focus: Designing for Face-to-Face” can be found here. Comments/critiques are welcome.

Recently I came upon a Twitter post from Darren Draper, the context of which was the writing of Ivan Illich, a radical academic prominent in the early 1970’s. I’ve since ordered one of his books from Amazon. It arrives Tuesday.

The general idea behind what Illich wrote, as I understand it from reading the initial blog posting from Christopher Sessums and two papers^{1, 2} I found using EBSCO is that schools are problematic in that they reinforce economic disparity while being inherently problematic in the way in which curricula is standardized and teachers act as both mentor and evaluator. I must admit that I find what little I know about his philosophy appealing. There is a general principle in martial arts that I think provides a useful analogy for how I interpret what Illich is saying. That is the ability to use an opponent’s energy against them; to redirect, if you will, that energy back towards the individual from whom it originated. I’ve never understood why more of this philosophy isn’t used more in public schooling. It seems that educators spend the majority of their time learning and then employing strategies meant to overcome the implicit resistance of students to learning the majority of the material that they are required, via legislation, to be able to regurgitate on standardized assessments.

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There is a distinct quality of the presenters at BLC, in that there is a progressive bent to most of what they do. It’s refreshing, but also slightly depressing as it seems that in order to make the points that they’ve been making, principally the idea of creating school environments and pedagogy focused on the cultivating of global building learning communities, they’ve had to put aside the problematic nature of legal and societal issues facing the administrators and school board members who would be charged with initiating, or at a minimum endorsing any requisite policy changes.

Two of the sessions I visited today were presented by Mark Prensky, the first entitled “The Death of the Classroom and the Rebirth of Learning in the 21^st Century: How Technology Changes the Meaning of Teaching”, and the second “The True 21^st Century Literacy is Programming: What We Should Be Teaching Our Kids and How To Do It”. They were both excellent, but some of what he says would be considered controversial by the masses. He questions the need for teaching written language, especially cursive. Why are we teaching long division when we have machines that can do these types of operations for us? Why aren’t we focusing on skills such as programming and the sharing of culture that he suggests are required.

Central to Mark’s argument, I think, are two contentions. First, the predicted exponential growth in the use and capacity of technology, which has just begun, renders the traditional classroom and pedagogy obsolete. And secondly, if we resist this reality and continue to teach the content that we’ve always taught using methodologies that we’ve always used, that we are essentially teaching backwards. That is to say that we are preparing our young people for the possibility of some sort of event that cripples the technological infrastructure that exists and is continuously expanded. Further, and most profound, is the question of what an adoption of this backward approach would say about us and our confidence in our own society.