visible learning and the science of how we learn...

1 Brendan Flynn Reading Notes

VISIBLE LEARNING AND THE SCIENCE OF HOW WE LEARN

John Hattie and Gregory Yates

Flynn’s Notes 2.4.2015

Introduction

Page XI

Teachers to seek feedback to create a dialogue:

A) To encourage teachers to set appropriate challengers based on a clear

understanding of where the student is currently and where they next

need to accomplish

B) To have high expectations that all students can learn

C) To welcome error as opportunities to learn

D) To be passionate about and to promote the language of learning

These focus on the learner – the learner being both the student and the

teacher

Teachers need to be critical planners, using learning intentions and success

criteria, aiming for surface and deep outcomes and ensuring they

communicate these notions of success to the students.

XII

VL argues that the more teachers understand the prior status of the student,

and the more they are aware of the nature of success (and share that with the

student) the greater probability of learning happening

Xiii

It helps when students want to learn, want to be challenged and want to attain

the success criteria from the series of lessons, and have an intention to

implement the power of thinking.


PART 1: LEARNING WITHIN CLASSROOMS

Chapter 1: why don’t students like learning at school? The Willingham thesis.

3 Study = average student neither loves school nor hates school.

Student apathy is often cited by teachers as a main cause of their stress,

burnout and lack of job satisfaction.

Teachers need feedback from students and needs to affirm that their

journey has been worth the effort.

5 Study = suggests that humans do not naturally like school is because it

takes a great deal of effort to learn things. That thinking takes energy.

Learning is tied to a person’s SELF EFFICACY – their confidence in

themselves to know that they can learn

The dominate motive is often to concern energy when the outcome is

uncertain.

Avoiding failure is a strong motive

6 Availability refers to the minds ability to have appropriate information on

hand and sufficient cognitive resources to deal with the problem at hand.

The harder it is to recall information the less useful it becomes.

We will seek out and pay attention to things that we already know in the

hopes of increasing our knowledge of it

7 We are more engaged when we have access to a knowledge gap and the

tools to close it.

We avoid thinking and try to find solutions by using memory

8 Study – Willingham study main points:

a) Your mind is not naturally well suited to thinking

b) Activity involving the brain is slow effortful and has uncertain outcomes

c) Deliberate or conscious thinking does not guide most people’s behaviour

d) Our brains rely on memory

e) Our interest is usually restricted to things that we have some prior

knowledge of

f) We are unlikely to engage in activities unless we can see the benefit of

expending energy and gaining success.


Chapter 2: Is knowledge an obstacle to teaching?

12 Experts tend to ignore more basic information because they assume that

novice learners may not need it when they would find it valuable.

Experts find it very hard to gauge how much knowledge a novice has.

15 Curriculum knowledge enables you to identify individual learning

problems, provide corrective instruction and set achievable goals.

Chapter 3: The teacher student relationship

16 Empathy gap when someone cannot put themselves in someone else’s

shoes

17 Study = teachers who report lower job satisfaction are usually the ones

who also provide lower levels of emotional support to their students.

20 Teachers who spent additional time each day with students who

demonstrated negative behaviours – reported more positive attitudes

towards those students.

21 A major reason for developing closeness and reducing conflict is to build

the trust needed for most learning.

Learning for many students is a risky business – it requires confidence

that we can learn, it requires openness to new experiences and thinking,

and it requires understanding that we might be wrong, we may make

errors and we will need feedback.

Chapter 4: Your personality as a teacher: can your students trust you

26 All students rate their teachers based on how the teacher makes them

feel they are being treated

Students value being treated with fairness, dignity and individual respect

Young adolescents need to understand that the world is just – and

teachers play a key part in that.

27 Students develop a moral compass that they measure teachers against:

these compasses are developed well before preschool.

28 Students respond to teachers more who – have positive open gestures,

move around the room, frequently smile, direct eye contact and using

friendly and encouraging vocal tones especially when talking 1:1


Study = 7 year olds test scores increased when it was sat in positive

environments

29 Seeking help is a cognitive strategy to develop resilience

30 Mastery and ego can exist in each person. Mastery students wanting to

learn and ego wanting to prove their learning.

Lower ability students tend to ask less questions as they get older

When students perceive teachers as supportive – they tend to ask more

questions and associate it with mastering goals, building abilities and

less competitive

Chapter 5: Time as a global indicator of classroom learning

36 Academic learning time (alt) when student is learning and responding

with a high successful level evident.

37 Picture 1 table 5.1 looking at classroom time use through four critical

concepts

38 Students can appear to be engaged with their classroom activities but

the actual ALT is not always at a high level

39 More time spent working with high success leads to increase

achievement.

41 When students do not spend enough time teaching a topic students are

unlikely to be able to relate topics learnt to other topics

Chapter 6: The recitation method and the nature of classroom learning

44 Interaction, Response, Evaluation (IRE) cycles – teacher asks question,

student responds, teacher evaluates response, teacher asks another

question.

45 Most students are often powerless as they bid to answer the question

that they had no hand in creating

46 After years of experiencing the recitation method of learning, it is very

difficult for students to shift to other styles of learning > group problem

solving.

The recitation method gives teachers the feeling of success that they are

able to move quickly through a topic or the curriculum.


47 Study = observational studies have found that as students’ progress

through school they learn how to become invisible > they come to

school to watch the teacher working.

48 Study = students minds tend to wander after 10 minutes

49 Student’s misconceptions once they reach high school are hard to

change but it can be done through sensitive challenge, careful

expository teaching, and active discussion and individualised tutorial

guidance.

*Paideia model of teaching > One part didactic teaching active teaching

of ideas and relationships between ideas, One part socratic – asking

students open questions and then listening to them answering asking

each other questions, one part coached product – where the coaching is

more important than the product.

Chapter 7: Teaching for automaticity in basic academic skill

53 It is very hard for students to understand the big picture when they are

stuck on processing and understand the immediate words before them.

55 Study = one of the major causes of reading failure lay in the fact many

children were stuck on mental processing at the level of word access >

the problem lays in word recognition.

56 Learning to read relies on spending time acquiring necessary skills,

seeing them performed in the social world and copying them.

If students are reading at a pace less than 60 wpm then it is near

impossible for them to understand what they are reading.

59 When a student does not automatically know something it makes

learning a heavy load.

Chapter 8: The role of feedback

64 There is often a communication breakdown between what teachers say

feedback is and what students say the feedback they want it.

Teachers often say the 10 C’s

Comments and more instructions in how to proceed

Clarification

Criticism


Confirmation

Content development

Constructive reflection

Correction (focus on pros and cons)

Cons and pros of the work

Commentary

Criterion relative standard

65 Students tend to be future focused. The feedback they want is how I get

better in the future.

They will continue to apply effort when their past efforts are treated

with respect.

Often what a teacher sees as helpful feedback the student feels is a

personal attack on their ego

Different students need feedback that is relevant to their skill level

66 Feedback is not the same as reward or reinforcement

Feedback refers to the process of securing information enabling change

through adjustment or calibration of efforts in order to bring a person

closer to a well-defined goal.

Feedback allows the individual to plot, plan adjust, rethink, and self-

regulate in realistic and balanced ways.

Assessment information becomes an important tool for teachers and

students when feedback is used effectively.

Assessment information is powerful when teachers and students have

clear understanding of what is being asked for in the criteria.

Don’t say ‘this is a B’ – show the students features a B grade piece of

work has or even better showing an A and a B and having a discussion of

the differences.

67 Show students early on what success will look like at the end of the

lesson. This can make a huge difference for student achievement.

Feedback is powerful if students know a) what success looks like b)

appreciate it is aimed at reducing the gap between where they are and


where they need to be and c) when it is focused on providing them with

information about where to next.

69 Learners need to expect that difficult tasks will be difficult.

Praising a student for natural ability in easier tasks can have a negative

effect on their willingness to try to access tools to cope and work to

understand a harder task.

The more teachers seek feedback from the student’s benefits their

future teaching.

70 8 Main points on Feedback by John Hattie and Mark Gan:

1. It is important to focus on how feedback is received and not just how it

is given

2. Feedback becomes powerful when it cues a learner’s attention onto the

task and effective task related strategies , but away from self-focus

3. Feedback becomes powerful when it renders criteria for success in

achieving learning goals transparent to the learner

4. Feedback needs to engage learners at, or just above, their current level

of functioning.

5. Feedback should challenge the learner to invest effort in setting

challenging goals.

6. The learning environment must be open to errors and to

disconfirmation.

7. Peer feedback provides a valuable platform for elaborative discourse.

Given opportunities, students readily learn appropriate methods and

rules by which respectful peer feedback can be harnessed.

8. Feedback cues teachers to deficiencies with their instructional

management and can lead to efforts to improve teaching practices.

Chapter 9: Acquiring complex skills through social modelling and explicit

teaching

72 VL supports the notion that teachers are direct change agents in the

classroom and seeing teachers as facilitators or guides can limit

student’s abilities to achieve growth.

73 Students know when teachers are demonstrating a core skill – principle

of ostension


Just seeing good examples do not imbue a student with the required

skills – there needs to be active participation of understanding.

When using modelling teachers will deliberately show progressive steps

and ensure that observers have ample opportunity to assimilate

information gradually.

Study = effective lesson: initial review> formal presentation > guided

practice > feedback> independent practice > follow up review.

74 *The explicit teaching of skills will be of greater benefit to students than

generalised teaching (case study pg74 – 75 High school text analysis)

*Second case study looks at the explicit how to teaching evident in CTA –

Cognitive task analysis – and how it benefits students

Chapter 10: Just what does expertise look like?

Chapter 11: Just how does expertise develop?

93 Continually practicing a skill does not automatically make you better at

that skills.

96 Study = showing that people today less time to develop skills as in the

past due to the changes in instruction/training methods

Deliberate practice requires concentration, attention and structured

goal setting

Deliberate proactive is a prerequisite for skill development

97 Simply repeating a task each day does not help you get better unless you

are actively trying to do better

100 One aspect of development is that there needs to be periods of growth

and other periods of consolidation.

Chapter 12: Expertise in the domain of classroom teaching

104 Table 12.1: matching expertise factors with research findings. Examples

of how expert teachers may apply skills

105 Novice teachers often greatly overestimate the learning that takes place

in any one lesson.


106 Study = just because you may be an expert or skilled at teaching your

own class does not mean you can walk into another and give the quality

of teaching to a class that is not your own.

107 Expert teachers are:

- Flexible with curriculum content

- Abe to improvise

- Understand individual student success and failure

- Able to develop more appropriate developmental learning tasks

- Anticipate and plan for difficulties in student responses to new content

- Develop accurate hypothesis about student success and failure

- Able to bring passion to their work


PART 2: LEARNING FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 13: How Knowledge is acquired

113

Six principles of acquisition

1. Learning requires time, effort and motivation: the ingredients of

learning are a) time, b) goal orientation c) supportive feedback, d)

accumulated successful practice and e) frequent review. Things learnt

quickly are often the first to be forgotten.

2. Concentration spans are short: we have a concentration span of about

15 – 20 minutes before our mind wanders

3. Distributed practice is more effective than massed practice or

cramming: 15 – 30 minute blocks of learning are the most beneficial.

4. Prior knowledge effects are powerful: ascertain what learns already

know and teach from there.

5. Your mind responds well to multimedia input: all students learn better

when learning is auditory, visual and kinetic combined.

6. To learn your mind has to be active: When the mind actively does

something with the stimulus, it becomes memorable.

Six principles of memory retention

1. To recognise is easy; to recall is hard: a recall multiple choice test will

have lower scores than a recognition one. But more meaningful tests

should involve items that cannot be answered by simple, direct

recognition, but which involve deeper levels of processing.

2. Information given first and last is recalled more easily:

3. Over time there are different rates of forgetting: Rote learning results

in rapid forgetting. Rate of forgetting will depend on the type of original

learning.

4. Memory is a highly constructive process: Memory relies on making

sense of partial cues and imprecise information.

5. The principle of savings: what is forgotten can still help: the second

time learning something can be quicker. Such experience appears

unconscious.

6. You memory is subject to interference: learning one thing can often

inhibit the learning of another, or the remembering of another thing.


Five aspect of handling information overload

1. From the learner’s perspective, learning is not always a pleasant

experience: overall learning will bring high levels of reward and

personal satisfaction. These emotions are linked to a) planning and goal

setting and b) achieving planned goals – not the learning itself. Learning

can be tough, stressful and loaded with emotion uncertainty. We often

underestimate the amount of time and practice it requires to learn

something.

2. Learning places great stress on mental resources: A learner is

vulnerable. A learner has to maintain composure in the face of often

unpredictable consequences.

3. For all learners, it is crucial to develop coping strategies: coping

strategies need to a) increase opportunities to learn and b) manage our

emotional responses. Failure to have coping mechanisms makes the

learner passive when they are challenged by a situation.

4. Sources of Overload:

a. Low levels of prior knowledge

b. Deficient use of mental strategies or inappropriate coping

strategies

c. Unrealistic expectations

d. Poor instruction or failure to engage with the learning material

e. Unfavourable learning conditions

f. Assessment apprehension

5. We are all subject to overload:

120 Multi-store theory: Students need to be using the information to take it

from Iconic memory > Short Term or working memory > Long term

memory.

Chapter 14: How knowledge is stored in the mind

126 There are 6 types of knowledge with Sensory recognition, strings, ideas,

schemata and mental models being declarative knowledge as they can

potential expressed through words and Procedural knowledge that is

expressed through action.

127 Table 14.1 type of knowledge in a chart with functions and examples


133 SOLO (structure of observed learning outcomes) taxonomy. Four levels:

one ideas, many ideas, relate the ideas, extend the ideas. The first to

being surface level and the last two being deeper.

Chapter 15: Does learning need to be conscious and what is the hidden role

played by gesture

138 Implicit learning takes place when the brain understands something and

is often unable to explain in words how it is they know it.

141 Adults who use their hands to explain things are often more successful

communicators

Study = students performed better on a second task when they were

asked to use gestures to explain their working in the first task.

142 Using gestures while you think reduces the cognitive load on your verbal

and memory systems

*Students will:

- Actively use information the teacher gave through gesture

- Can learn more from a lesson when a teacher explicitly uses hand

gestures as a teaching strategy with the lesson presentation

- Young children rate a teacher as more knowledgeable when they use

their arms to point at significant details to be observed.

*Chapter 16: The impact of cognitive load

146 Cognitive load theory (CLT) is important for teachers for two principle

reasons:

a) It directly addresses the problem of why learning is so inherently difficult

for human beings

b) It specifies how teachers and instruction designers can make it relatively

easier for students to learn and store new information.

147 Working memory becomes overloaded when dealing with novel or

unorganised information

148 Your mind can become overloaded with the number of interactive

information units needing to be processed simultaneously for you to

achieve understanding


Extraneous cognitive load creates stress for the individual > it relates to

the learning conditions and the instructional context. Removing as much

of these stressful elements assists students in their learning especially as

a task gets more complex.

150 *table 16.1 principles of learning described in the cognitive lad research

literature

151 Giving students problems to solve when the process of working out

problems has not been consolidated first is counter productive

Worked examples provide opportunities for students see how acquiring

knowledge can be useful to apply to situations.

Worked examples provide a form of modelling through demonstration

of successful procedures or products

152 Completion examples are where the first steps are shown, but the

students complete the sequence

Novices are unlikely to apply knowledge they have just acquired to

independent tasks.

Problem solving independently is not helpful, but those demands helped

when students needed to work in groups of two or three.

Chapter 17: Your memory and how it develops

162 Teacher do not spend much time teaching students how to remember

strategies to develop their answers to problems.

163 Students of High Mnemonic Teachers HMT over a two year period

scored higher on tests and achieved more learning than Low Mnemonic

Teachers.

Chapter 18: Mnemonics as sport, art and instructional tools

*It does not seem beneficial to teach Mnemonic skills explicitly but more

to help students to develop a process to access strategies to respond to

activities or situations effectively.

Chapter 19: Analysing your students’ style of learning

Teaching to a students’ “Learning style” lacks data evidence.

Chapter 20: multitasking


189 Switching between tasks has been seen as to have a “switching cost”

and that cost is quite high. Stopping and having an unfinished activity

seems to have a higher impact on a students’ ability to perform well on

the following task.

191 Listening to music during study or learning also lacks data evidence – as

learners’ concentration and focus seem to shift as they begin to listen to

the music instead.

*Some people use music as a background feature but are not actively

listening to it. Having music on during novice learning as they will often

stop grappling with the task and focus on the music instead.

192 Studying requires clear mental focus – music is counter productive

Chapter 21: Your students are digital natives. Or are they?

198 The use of computers in student learning have an effect size of 0.37

Computer learning is more effective when:

a) They supplement traditional teaching rather than being seen as an

alternative

b) Teachers receive high levels of training with how to teach effectively

using them

c) They offer students opportunities to extend their learning practice

d) Students have control of their learning situation in aspects of pacing an

mastering new material

e) Children use computers more effectively in pairs

f) Computers have the ability to provide high level feedback to users

g) The students learn more when they are working in pairs

Chapter 22: Is the internet turning us into shallow thinkers?

It is all about how you use the internet

Chapter 23: How music impacts on learning

Music has no special impact on learning


PART THREE: KNOW THY SELF

Chapter 24: Confidence and its three hidden levels

215 *We want students to show confidence in answering before moving into

more complex or challenging questioning

The student must get it right, must know they are getting it right and

must be able to apply and extend their knowledge

216 Three areas of confidence: Global self-esteem, perceived competency

and self-efficacy

221 Boosting confidence through statements like “you can do it” are not as

helpful as saying “you can do it because these problems are the same as

the ones you did last week just a little bit harder”.

224 Grey box on 224 – helping your students to develop their academic

confidence

Chapter 25: Self-enhancement and the dumb-and-dumber effect

228 People who show outward signs of confidence are rated favourably by

other people

231 Our self-assessments seems to go off track easily and are not

representative of how other people see you or how you actually are. We

need accurate feedback to assess ourselves.

233 Students who are incompetent at a task but have no bases for

comparison still believe they are at or above average in their abilities.

238 Self-images need to be positive, but realistic

Chapter 26: Achieving self-control

243 It is harder for students to wait patiently when a reward it with sight and

they do not have clear focus on something else

245 Many people reach adulthood with impulse control strategies either

insecurely learned, relatively unpractised and unavailable when needer

or easily depleted

Students who have lower abilities of impulse delay by the age of 4

continue to have those delays through life


254 Distraction and Deflection techniques allow anyone to control their

thoughts.

Using if-then models also help

Developing clear plans of behaviour have been seen to have a

remarkable effect on performance.

Chapter 27: Neuroscience of the smile – a fundamental tool in teaching

263 Most people cannot detect a fake smile from a real one unless they are

keyed in to look for it. This is particularly true for young children.

Therefore smiling can become a key tool, useful in developing strong

and supportive relationships between a teacher and students – not to

say teachers always fake smiling when interacting with students.

264 The smile is correlated with comprehension and understanding.

It is not always clear why a teacher acts a certain way during lesson

delivery but research is suggesting that they are responding to low level

facial cues offered by students.

Chapter 28: the surprising advantages of being a social chameleon

Chapter 29: Invisible gorillas, inattentional blindness, and paying attention

Chapter 30: Thinking fast and thinking slow – Your debt to the inner robot

Chapter 31: IKEA, effort and valuing

306 The IKEA effect – whenever someone takes an active role in the

production of a positive outcome, then he or she is disposed toward

valuing that outcome more positively, even to the point of overly inflated

assessment, which the person believes is true, fair, and correct.

307 People expect to work hard when they are working towards a harder

goal.

Expending effort makes you more likely to value the product

310 It is important for teachers to give positive feedback as well as next step

feedback


311 *Students do not enjoy going to school when everything they do or

made, is not valued, is rendered meaningless, discarded or even

destroyed as soon as it was completed.

1. The effort we put into something does not just change the object. It

changes the way we evaluate that object.

2. Greater labour leads to greater love.

3. Ove revaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume

that others share our biased perspective

4. When we cannot complete something into which we have put great

effort, we do not feel so attached to it.

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