This week’s article summary is “An Alphabet of Research on Teaching and
Learning” which is a summary of the book The
ABCs of How We Learn.
The book’s
authors use each letter of the alphabet to highlight an effective method of
learning. (As you’ll see, they stretched a bit on the letters X and Y.)
The list is a
reminder about how we all best learn and store content in our long-term
memories: techniques such as frequent practice, imaginative play, and hands-on
learning.
The article also
reminds us how important prior knowledge and ample sleep are in the learning
process.
As I read through
the list, I was gratified Trinity employs all of these effective pedagogies in
a variety of combinations. Not only do we make school fun for kids, we also
never forget that our ultimate goal is student learning!
Joe
Below are 26 principles of pedagogy matched with a letter of the
alphabet from the book The ABCs of How We
Learn. Each is accompanied by an overview of the research, how the item
works, how to use it in the classroom, what it’s good for, its risks, examples
of good and bad use, and a short summary.
Analogy: By
identifying the underlying similarity between things that have surface
differences (for example, blood vessels and highways), analogies help people
learn principles and apply them in new situations. “Analogies help students
sort out the wheat of deep structure from the chaff of surface features,” say
the authors. “Analogies can help students make a positive transfer.”
Belonging: Feeling
that they belong to a learning community makes students try harder and
decreases distracting thoughts of inadequacy and alienation. “Learning is
social,” say Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. “Belonging is the perception of being
accepted, valued, and included. Belonging can help learning by increasing
effort and decreasing negative distancing thoughts.” Teachers who explicitly
create an atmosphere of respect and community boost learning and close racial
and economic achievement gaps.
Contrasting
cases:
Noticing the difference between two or more examples that seem the same at
first glance – for example, a spider and an insect. “Contrasting cases help
people notice subtle but important details that they might otherwise overlook,”
say the authors.
Deliberate
practice:
Applying focused and effortful practice to develop specific skills and concepts
(for example, playing the guitar or solving physics problems) beyond one’s
current abilities. “Deliberate practice automatizes skills and concepts so they
become faster, more accurate, more variable, and less effortful to execute,”
say Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. “This allows people to see new patterns and
frees cognitive resources so people can attempt more complex tasks.”
Elaboration: Explicitly
connecting new information to prior knowledge, which increases the chances of
remembering it later. “Human memory is vast,” say the authors. “Remembering
depends on finding the right memory at the right time. Elaboration makes
connections among memories when learning, so it is easier to find a path to the
stored information later.”
Feedback: This allows
people to sense a discrepancy between what they did and what they should have
done, which allows them to adjust future actions. “People would have a hard
time learning something new if they never knew whether they were on the right
track,” say the authors. “Feedback, particularly constructive negative
feedback, guides people toward what they can do to improve and learn.”
Generation: Retrieving
a specific memory (like where you parked your car in a multi-story garage)
given partial cues or hints improves future retrieval. Retrieval – testing
yourself – increases the strength of the memory, making it easier to retrieve
later on. Spreading out retrieval practice over several days enhances the
effect.
Hands-on: Recruiting
the body’s intelligence makes it possible to understand abstract concepts. “The
perceptual-motor system contains tremendous intelligence,” say the authors.
“This intelligence provides meaning for simple symbols and words… Hands-on
learning recruits the perceptual-motor system to coordinate its meaning with
symbolic representations.” Two risks: hands-on activities can become procedures
for finding answers rather than a source of sense-making; and students may
become too dependent on them.
Imaginative
play:
This involves creating a story that is different from the reality in front of
us, letting one thing stand for another – for example, a child pretends a fork
(a mother) is scolding a spoon (a child) for not eating her peas. There isn’t a
lot of research evidence on the efficacy of play, but the authors say it “can
serve as a great vehicle for delivering activities known to support maturation
and learning.”
Just-in-time
telling:
Students are immersed in a simulation of a problem and are then given an
explanation. “The simulation provides students with rich experiences,” say the
authors, “and the debriefing provides an explanation or framework for
organizing those experiences. Without the experience, the explanation would be
too abstract. Without the explanation, the experiences would just be a
collection of memories. Together, they produce usable knowledge.”
Knowledge: Prior
knowledge enables people to make sense of new information and is essential to
learning. But knowledge can also blind people to new conditions that have
different patterns; for example, the vaults being set two inches lower in the
2000 Summer Olympics caused major problems for female gymnasts who had trained
on a different elevation. The trick is to combine extensive knowledge with the
ability to adapt.
Listening and
sharing:
Students may be disengaged and bored in class, trapped in their own thoughts,
and lacking the skills needed to work together. Once those skills have been
taught, say the authors, “students maintain joint attention, listen, share,
coordinate, and try to understand one another’s points of view. This can help
learners exchange information and develop a multifaceted understanding.”
Making: Producing
an artifact or performance, getting feedback, and setting new goals – for
example, writing a poem to perform at a local spoken-word festival. “Making has
motivations that naturally produce a learning cycle that expands one’s means of
production,” say the authors. “Motivations include the desire for feedback on
the realization of one’s ideas, and the creation of new challenges that
motivate makers to learn more skills and methods.”
Norms: These are
the informal rules that regulate social interactions – for example,
student-generated classroom rules or a protocol for mathematics debates. “Good
norms help coordinate learning interactions,” say the authors, “both at the
level of good behaviors and at the level of the way different disciplines
engage their topics.”
Observation: “Human
brains are wired to learn by observing others,” say the authors. Often
trial-and-error is slow and inefficient, a behavior is too complex to explain
verbally, and learners are not sure how to act or feel. Learning by observing
and imitating other people’s behaviors and affective responses is more
efficient, as is vicariously seeing the consequences of others’ behaviors.
Participation: This
“provides learners with access to the goals, consequences, methods, and
interpretations that render learning meaningful,” say the authors. An example:
a surfing instructor tows beginners out to sea and pushes the surfboard at the
right moment to catch a wave, so the novice can focus on balancing and
experiencing what it means to surf. Gradually the scaffolding is withdrawn.
Question-driven: Being asked
to answer a driving question increases curiosity, purpose, attention, and
well-connected memories and may develop problem-solving skills. For example, a
class might investigate how noise pollution affects the wildlife around their
school.
Reward: Rewards,
extrinsic and intrinsic, can motivate desired behaviors, and rewarding
successive approximations of proficiency can help students achieve the desired
level. But rewards can backfire if people already find something intrinsically
motivating or if the goal is creativity and exploration. Rewards can also
reduce intrinsic motivation by making people dependent on external
reinforcement.
Self-explanation: Silently
talking through expository material improves understanding by revealing gaps in
knowledge, and forces one to fill in missing information to make a coherent
explanation. The main learning problem this addresses is overconfidence.
Teaching: “Teaching is not just good for pupils,” say
the authors; “it is good for the teacher, too… Asking older students to tutor
younger students is an excellent example of learning by teaching. Tutors
improve their understanding nearly as much as tutees.”
Undoing: Identifying
misconceptions and faulty reasoning and replacing them with correct
information; for example, a child says 13 – 7 = 14, perhaps believing that she
can’t subtract 7 from 3 so she subtracts 3 from 7. The teacher needs to make
this misconception explicit and teach some basic arithmetic principles to keep
the misconception from becoming entrenched.
Visualization: Drawing
spatial representations – maps, diagrams, sketches, graphs, Venn diagrams,
matrices – helps organize complex information, make it understandable, and
embed it in memory. A classic example: in the early 1900s, Harry Beck created a
simplified map of the London subway system that sacrificed exact geographical
detail for a structure more relevant to a subway rider. This type of map is now
used in nearly every subway system around the world.
Worked
examples:
These are step-by-step models of how to complete a procedural task – for
example, doing a long-division problem. Worked examples build on observational
learning, allowing the learner to observe and imitate well-defined steps.
eXcitement: “Excitement increases psychological arousal,
which focuses attention and improves memory acquisition,” say the authors.
“However, too much excitement interferes with performance and learning. Arousal
and anxiety combine to cause choking under pressure.”
Yes I can:
Self-efficacy – believing one can succeed – makes people more willing to take
on a challenging activity, persist in the face of difficulty and failure, take
on more challenges, and accomplish more. This is what Carol Dweck calls a
growth mindset.
ZZZs: Research
has established that while we sleep, recent memories are consolidated into
long-term storage and integrated with prior knowledge. John Steinbeck once
wrote, “A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the
committee of sleep has worked on it.”
