marcia a. barnes, ph.d. professor of special education, ut ... · • students think that cramming...
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Cognitive Science Matters to Middle School: Applications to Instruction and Learning Marcia A. Barnes, Ph.D. Professor of Special Education, UT-Austin
What is Cognitive Science?
• Interdisciplinary field of study – linguistics, cognitive & developmental psychology, education, neuroscience, computer science –AI, anthropology, philosophy
• How does the human mind work? • How do people think, act, and learn?
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Why do we need it for teaching & learning?
• Research-based evidence for a set of powerful learning principles or techniques
• When applied, these techniques optimize learning
• Several principles have direct application for instruction and learning for middle school students
If we know what works why don’t we use it more often?
1. Sorting out what is likely to yield the biggest bang for the buck from a vast literature that spans several disciplines with technical language in journal articles is not an easy task
2. Techniques are not consistently and frequently covered in all teacher preparation programs
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Textbooks that Cover Teaching and Learning Strategies
• Main textbooks used in courses: • Inadequately cover techniques • Do not cover the most effective techniques
or do not provide ratings of effectiveness – Where should I put my effort?
• Do not provide enough guidance on implementation – How can I use this in my teaching?
(Dunlovsky et al. 2013)
If we know what works why don’t we use it more often?
3. Techniques not known by teachers are not transmitted to students – Consequences- some popular learning
techniques students use are ineffective 4. Focus may be more on WHAT students need
to learn and less on HOW to promote student learning across content areas and over time
5. Principle of Desirable Difficulties (R. Bjork)
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Desirable Difficulties – Short term pain for long term gain
• Using techniques slows down learning • Use may not result in immediately
discernable changes in learning, but produces longer lasting benefits for comprehension and retention
• Can students be convinced to use techniques that have long term pay-offs without evidence of immediate benefit?
Outline of Presentation on Techniques from Cognitive Science
• Review of 2 techniques with the highest levels of evidence for what works
• Review of 3 techniques with moderate levels of evidence for what works
• Cognitive science principles to pay attention to in multi-media learning environments
• Discussion of techniques that do not work • Small group activities and quizzes infused
throughout the seminar
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Highest Levels of Evidence For:
Technique Descrip.on Distributed Prac6ce
Frequent well-‐spaced opportuni6es to relearn and retrieve previously taught materials; studying distributed over 6me vs. cramming
Tes6ng Effect or Prac6ce Tes6ng
Frequent quizzes on learned materials –teacher delivered and student prac6ce tes6ng
Why are these techniques rated as highly effective with high usability?
• Techniques are rela6vely easy for teachers to use and teach to students (class 6me efficient)
• Don’t require that a lot of materials be found or made up and don’t require technology
• Useful for all ages • Help learning and comprehension across a large range of content areas and materials
• Good evidence they increase student achievement
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Basic Demonstration of Distributed Practice Benefits: Keppel (1964) �
Bahrick (1979): Learning translations of Spanish words: Desirable Difficulties in Action�
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Distributed Practice– What do these and newer findings tell us?
• Note that there was a complete flip in the findings – where learning looked worse after 6 sessions for the distributed practice group with widely spaced sessions, but a final test after a month showed the best learning for this group and the worst for the massed practice group – illustrates the principle of desirable difficulties
• Distributed practice with appropriate spacing yields long term retention benefits even though initial learning looks better after cramming
Distributed Practice – Why does it work?
1. Massed practice leads to deficient processing vs. effortful processing for distributed practice – students don’t have to work hard to retrieve what they just
learned – false sense of what they know and will remember because of
“easy” processing (faulty metacognition)
2. Reminding – the more times you retrieve, hear, see something the better you will remember it
3. Distributed learning takes advantage of a better-consolidated neural memory trace -hippocampal consolidation takes time
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Distributed Practice – Why don’t students use it?
• Students think that cramming works even though distributing studying (even when total studying time is the same in both cases) works better over educationally relevant periods of time
• Learning feels “tougher” with distributed practice
• There is a false sense of security with cramming
Distributed Practice – What can you do to help them use it?
• Bad habits that seem helpful are hard to break • Use an analogy that makes sense to them -
– Can they cram for a basketball game? A dance or singing recital or a school play? Their driver’s road test? No, they distribute practice for these
– Success and progress in computer games are all about distributed practice
– Skill learning in math, science, ELA, social studies is no different
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Distributed Practice – What can you do to help them use it?
• Give explicit instruction to help students map out study blocks distributed over time – show them how to work backwards from test dates – help them develop a STUDY PLANNER
• Have them study in shorter blocks of time, but more frequently – e.g., two short study blocks per week for past and recent material – try it out in class to monitor for first time
• Have them combine distributed practice with practice tests - the testing effect (next topic)
Distributed Practice – How can you use it in the classroom?
• Return to most important material repeatedly across days/weeks/months
• Repeating important points helps students with distributed learning, and cues these concepts are important and need to be remembered
• Put key information from previous weeks or units on your weekly or daily quiz – repeat most important material across quizzes
• Use cumulative exams, but cue students as to what content they need to learn/relearn
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Basic Demonstration of Testing Effects: Roediger & Karpicke, 2006�
Quiz: Identify and explain an example of Desirable Difficulties using this graph.
Practice Testing – Why does it work?
• Requires retrieval of prior learning from long term memory (distributed practice opportunity)
• Along with retrieving information specific to answering the question comes related information in memory - may be why technique helps inference making and application of old learning to new problem solving
• May lead learners to better mentally organize information in memory
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Testing Effect– What do the findings tell us?
• Effects are found for multiple choice, short & long answer formats, and for learning facts and making inferences
• Findings are positive even for open book tests • Transfer between formats – performance on
multiple choice transfers to performance on other types of criterion tests such as free recall
• However, results best when practice tests require answer generation (free recall, essay) vs. recognition (multiple choice, short answer)
Testing Effect–Robust learning across domains and time
• Effects found for learning: – science, history, math, spelling, vocabulary – from texts of different genres – from video lectures – maps and other object and spatial location
information • Effects are durable across educationally
meaningful intervals – days to months, years • Best effects when feedback used
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Why is feedback so important?
• Prevents the wrong information from creeping into students’ long term memory – Multiple choice and short answer questions are
often answered inappropriately from general knowledge and if not corrected become part of the student’s knowledge base
• Allows student to revise memory and update understanding
• Important in all subjects, especially for math
The Testing Effect – How can you help students to implement it?
• Teach students how to use key info flash card technique – during note taking write down a ques6on on a key term or piece of informa6on with the answer on the other side and use cards in self-‐tes6ng
• Have students do prac6ce tests and quizzes in their textbooks or provide prac6ce test as part of homework
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The Testing Effect – How can you implement it in your classroom?
• Give daily or weekly no-stakes or low-stakes quizzes at the beginning or end of class and provide immediate feedback – can call it review
• Choose most important ideas for practice tests • Have overlap between questions on quizzes and
higher stakes tests/exams so students take them seriously
• Students remember more if they know that their final exam is cumulative and includes previously learned/tested information
Quiz on Distributed Practice and Testing Effect �
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Moderate Levels of Evidence For:
Technique Descrip.on Interleaved Prac6ce
Mixture of problems or materials within same session
Self Explana6on Self explana6ons of steps in a problem – thinking aloud about how something is being understood
Elabora6ve Interroga6on
Explaining why something is true or false; “Why” ques6ons
Interleaved Practice vs. Cover and Drop
• Most science and math textbooks cover a topic then move on to another topic (e.g., add and subtract decimals, then multiply decimals, then…)
• Practice is often specific to that topic • Interleaving can mean both interleaving of the
teaching of different (but related) concepts and procedures as well as the mixing of problem sets for practice on worksheets or tests
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���Taught how to solve for volume of one shape with practice then another shape etc. vs. taught how to solve all four shapes and practiced with a different shape on each trial (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007) �
Interleaved Practice
• Performance looks better during problem solving immediately after learning and practice on same problem sets, but opposite effects on delayed test – Quick learning è quick forgetting – Slower learning è better retention
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Interleaved Practice: Why does it work?
• It’s a type of distributed practice – not over time, but with respect to content
• Interleaved practice may require deeper thinking about what type of problem is being solved – requires more engagement in identifying problem types and thinking through steps to solve them
• Massed practice may lead to more robotic problem solving
Interleaved Practice – Implementation in the Classroom
• Interleave problems on tests with those from previous units/weeks and those from more current lessons – Expect students to struggle at first, but
longer-term learning will be better • Use the same principle for worksheets • Encourage students to do the same when
studying and when they do their own practice testing
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Elaborative Interrogation – What is it?
• Why question prompts: – Why does it make sense that… – Why is this true? Why is this false? – Why is this true of X, but not of Y?
• Most useful prompt is one that drives the learner to produce similarities AND differences between concepts
Elaborative Interrogation – Why does it work?
• Relates new information to old knowledge • Provides a way of organizing new learning into
pre-existing categories/knowledge structures, which makes new learning easier to retrieve
• Processing of similarities, but particularly differences makes memories more distinct and easier to retrieve
• Helps you figure out what misconceptions students have and helps students correct faulty thinking and misconceptions (use feedback)
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Elaborative Interrogation: Conditions for Use
• Can be used at whole class level or in small groups or with pairs of students
• Strong evidence for effectiveness in middle school (less so with younger children)
• Seems to work for high achieving students as well as for students who are struggling and who have learning difficulties
• Works across domains such as history, science, ELA
Elaborative Interrogation: Cautions for Use and Other Interesting Findings
• Works best when the learner generates the answer (the generation effect) – Research shows that if a teacher’s question is
not answered within 4.5 sec. s/he answers it for the students (try to avoid this)
• Lack of general knowledge makes technique difficult to use so make the exercise fit within the students’ zone of proximal development – where new learning occurs
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Elaborative Interrogation: Self Generated Examples
• Form groups of 2-‐3 and come up with an example you could use in your teaching
• The genera6on effect in ac6on! • Share with the group
Self Explanation – what is it?
• Students explain how they are processing information – like Thinking Aloud but with specific prompts
• Self-explaining can also be implemented by drawing diagrams for some types of problems
• Can use prompts such as What does this sentence mean? How does it relate to what I know? What new information does it provide? Is there anything I don’t understand?
• Can be modeled by a teacher
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Self Explanation– Why does it work?
• Relate new information to pre-existing knowledge so better remembered
• Generation effect, again -engaging in effortful, deep processing makes things memorable
• Meta-cognitive aspects of processing – when explaining something to yourself you are more likely to notice when something doesn’t make sense and use a repair strategy – SELF-MONITORING
• Increases time on task? Dosage explanation?
Self Explanation: Conditions of Use
• Works best while engaging in a task rather than retrospective explanations (self-monitoring?)
• Evidence for effectiveness across grades, and for students with lower ability and knowledge
• Has been used in science, math, for narrative and expository text
• Useful for correcting student misconceptions
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Self Explanation: Cautions for Use and Other Interesting Findings
• If explanations are provided, effect is not as great (generation effect again)
• Best effects if the technique is taught to students with teacher direct instruction and modeling
• Shows transfer effects to similar problems (near transfer), but also generalizes to new problems that look less similar (far transfer)
Self Explanation: Self-Generated Examples
• Form small groups and generate examples you could use in your teaching
• Bring back to group
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Multi-Media: Why can it be a powerful learning tool?
• New information is remembered and understood better when it is presented in more than one “code” - Dual Code Theory (Paivio) – Visual and auditory – Oral lesson and computer-delivered
content
Principles to look for when choosing multi-media materials
• Contiguity – concepts that belong together should be close together in space on the screen or in time
• Coherence – visual and auditory streams should match and map onto each other in space and time
• Because information can be simultaneously auditory, visual, motor, setting up the right learning environment means paying attention to not overloading the learner
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Techniques with Low or No Evidence:
Technique Descrip.on Highligh6ng Underlining
Idea that highligh6ng or underlining text iden6fies important points – may result in less integra6on between parts of text
Rereading Passive rereading of materials – idea that mere repe66on results in beber learning -‐ it’s more like the massed prac6ce situa6on
Learning Styles Idea that there are individual differences in the modali6es by which students learn best
What study techniques do students report using the most?
• Highlighting • Underlining • Rereading
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No evidence for learning styles
Integrative Review Quiz
• Generate a list of 3-4 common mechanisms across the 5 highly and moderately effective techniques and identify the techniques for which they are relevant
• Generate some common characteristics of ineffective techniques that make them ineffective
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Why did we cover only 5 techniques?
• Best to invest time and effort in techniques that will provide the highest yield and that are the easiest to implement across content areas
• There are more techniques and more technical information on the ones we covered in the articles listed under Further Reading
• I followed another principle from cognitive science – human working memory has limits:
– THE 5 + or – 2 rule
Further Reading
• http://home.umltta.org/home/theories/25p (from Dr. Art Graesser’s website) • http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practice_guides/20072004.pdf (IES practice
guide by Pashler et al.) • 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. (pdf can be downloaded for free)
• Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual review of psychology, 64, 417-444. (can be downloaded for free)
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. (downloadable PDF)
• http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/fall2013/dunlosky.cfm