Items to Share: 29 March 2015

Education Focus

• Why formative assessment should be an enduring priority for every teacher [Dylan Wiliam] 

• Make it stick a book which uncovers scientific support for some of what we do!  My own review is here.

• Donald Clark Plan B: The fake 'Wellness' cult in education and the workplace 'In all of these cases an unwelcome, and I suspect, unintended consequence, of all of this happiness, mindfulness and wellness effort, is a condescending attitude towards the rest of us who ‘don’t get it’ or ‘don’t live up to these standards’. There is a smugness about the whole affair, a stink of righteousness. It’s the modern equivalent of a meme-inspired cult, a touch of the Temper[a]nce movement and smattering of Scientology.' And Ecclestone K and Hayes D (2008) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education is worth reading in a similar vein.

• Skills rhetoric doesn’t make the cut | 157 Group 'Saving adult education is more than about protecting what there is – it is about shaping what it can be in the future.' More on the coming decimation of adult education. (The 157 group lobbies on behalf of Further Education.)

• #TLAB15: A flash of light | Those that can…'The theme of the day was ‘all in the mind’, and, powerfully, it brought together teachers with experts from other fields to share their research in a clear and accessible format which gave so many ideas and insights into how we – teachers and students – and the cultural, environmental and relational factors which influence this. Below, I have highlighted some of my key ‘take-home’ moments for the day...'

• 1 Corinthians 13 for teachers | Bishop's Blog

• What is the point of praise? | Sandagogy '[T]he Year 13 students who were part of my focus group were adamant that they did not want or need praise from their teachers! They were also very clear that they did not find praise helpful and implied that praise is not always used for valid purposes by teachers, for example you were more likely to receive praise if you had a poor mark. Yet from my own informal classroom observations I have witnessed the positive effect that written praise has had on students and the responding increase in motivation and self-esteem.

• Left Brain – Right Brain: This idea must die | teflgeek 'Blakemore states that the idea of left and right brain separation arose out of studies done in the sixties and seventies on people who had had surgery to divide their brains. Snip. In that scenario, the left and right hemispheres can no longer physically communicate with each other and some brain functions are inevitably degraded as a result. [ ] For everybody else though? No matter how analytical or creative we are being – we use both sides of our brains. All the time.'

• Donald Clark Plan B: 7 reasons: Why we need to kill boring ‘learning objectives’! 'At the end of this course you will….” zzzzzzzzz……. How to kill learning before it has even started. Imagine if every movie started with a list of objectives; “in this film you will watch the process of a ship sail from Southampton, witness the catastrophic effect of icebergs on shipping, witness death at sea but understand that romance will be provided to keep you engaged”. Imagine Abraham Lincoln listing his objectives before delivering the Gettysburg Address. Imagine each episode of Breaking Bad starting with its objectives. It makes NO sense.'

• The Research That Never Was | Sam Shepherd [Sam would like to do some research to test an intervention:] 'The intervention, and those who know me will now groan, is the setting of SMART targets for learning. I know, I’m like a stubborn dog with a particularly juicy slipper on this, but do bear with me. You see, that research would never happen. Smart targets are an integral part of the individual learning plan, and as such, are pretty much unassailable. After all, they tick every ideological and performance management box: achievement of the target runs the argument, supplies evidence of individual student learning. Criticism of the target is seen as criticism of the concept that the learning of the individual is crucial.'

• Yeah, but what about the visual learners? | barrynsmith79's Blog 'Spelling tests in MFL – I think they went out of fashion didn’t they? Most of you reading this probably can’t recall a time when they were ever in fashion. To be fair, it was a bit draconian expecting kids to get the spelling right and take pride in their work. You know, actually checking what they’d written. Yeah, spelling tests, they’re boring, they are'

• Umberto Eco's How To Write a Thesis: A Witty, Irreverent and Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English | Open Culture 'I wish, [...] that as a onetime (longtime) grad student, I had had access to the English translation, just published this month, of Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, a guide to the production of scholarly work worth the name by the highly celebrated Italian novelist and intellectual. Written originally in Italian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of fiction as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, How to Write [a] Thesis is appropriately described by MIT Press as reading: “like a novel”: “opinionated… frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious.”

Other Business

• Video portrait of a guy who quit finance to become dog walker - Boing Boing

• Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that dramatically cuts the calories - The Washington Post

• Bryan Appleyard » Blog Archive » Hell Is Not Other People Review of 'The Village Effect: Why Face to Face Contact Matters' by Susan Pinker. 'Total assets amounting to trillions of dollars depend on you not believing a word of this book. What The Village Effect shows, in a nutshell, is that “we’re lonelier and unhappier than we were in the decades before the internet age”. Life online goes against human nature, providing only a thin, fake version of real contact, real life. We should — we must — turn away from the seductions of Silicon Valley. [ ] Susan Pinker [...] is a developmental psychologist turned author and journalist. This book, being research heavy and stylistically light and readable, draws on both aspects of her career. But, though pleasantly mild-mannered in tone, it is an urgent polemic directed at the virtualisation of our lives.'

On cuts

 Ouch! (Tips via Jim Crawley; thanks!)

Government cuts could ‘decimate’ adult education by 2020, AoC warns (FE week)

Association of Colleges warns of the end of adult education and training provision by 2020
The Skills Funding Agency’s response to the Skills Funding Letter 2015 to 2016 which has now been published.

National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education:

• Funding cuts will hit people and businesses  24 March: David Hughes responds to the analysis from the Association of Colleges on the future prospects for adult education. Read more

• Adult vocational education consultation must tackle skills crisis 24 March: NIACE believes that the consultation on the challenges affecting adult vocational education over the next ten years is in a uniq[u]e position to tackle the adult skills crisis.

On assessment drift and engineering education

There is an interesting new campaigning blog on the block, called Fixing Engineering Education. A post today points to an article on the Guardian blog, about the training of engineers at university, and to a blog exchange on LinkedIn arising from it, with particular reference to chemical engineering. (Disclosure, my father and my brother were both chemical engineers.)

I was impressed by the quality of comment in the exchange, and by the near-unanimity amongst practitioners that the education on offer is just not fit for purpose. The Chief Executive of the Institute of Chemical Engineers rather defensively dismissed some of the Guardian article as “complete rubbish”, and tried to assert that the industry-education links are developing, but the consensus among the other contributors persuasively contradicts that.

I'm not equipped to comment on the specific case of engineering, but I'm not surprised by the argument. It accords with what I have observed many times over 20 years of observing teaching and talking to “second career” vocational teachers working in further and higher education. The blog author attributes the drift away from practice and into academic preoccupations in universities in part to the lack of practical background of most engineering academics, and to their need to claim their status as proper academics. That may be so, but there is a substantial tradition of critical educational thought which suggests that the drift is inexorable. It goes back to Howard Becker's classic "A School is a Lousy Place to Learn Anything in" (1972) in conjunction with ideas about situated learning and communities of practice.

From the educational end, the issues are most clearly reflected in the process of assessment: I discussed how it works in this post a couple of years ago. I guessed that there might be no more than 15% overlap between what the area of practice actually requires, and what the course ends up assessing and graduating. If this blog and the comments on LinkedIn are to be believed, the case of engineering education illustrates it beautifully, except that it suggests there is no overlap at all left.

Once you commodify education and start demanding £36,000 from graduates (the M.Eng is a four-year course), that won't wash any more. Perhaps the call for a revival of graduate-level apprenticeships may finally be heeded?

Items to Share: 22 March 2015

Education Focus

• What might be a good proxy for learning? | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'As I’ve mentioned before (at tedious length) learning is invisible. Or at least, other people’s is. It happens inside our minds and, as such, we tend to believe either that everyone else behaves pretty much as we do, or that certain visible signifiers that we associate with learning must, in fact be learning. The proxies Coe has identified do not preclude learning – at some level we are probably always learning something – just these conditions may be present without students learning anything a teacher intends them to learn.' (via The Echo Chamber, also the proximate source of several other links)

• Causation and Correlation in Education - HuntingEnglish 'When presented with evidence we should question the correlation and causation. When setting up evaluations of our own we need to be mindful of this too. Setting up a new time-consuming intervention, that costs teacher time and students’ curriculum time, must be evaluated better if we really want to go some way to having robust evidence. We all have a long way to go. [ ] Now, I’m off to straighten my bedsheets and to hide the margarine.'

• Marina Warner · Learning My Lesson · LRB 19 March 2015 'The correspondence [I received after my resignation from the University of Essex] reveals a deeper and more bitter scene in higher education than I had ever imagined. I had been naive, culpably unobservant as I went about my activities at Essex. Students, lecturers, professors from one institution after another were howling in sympathy and rage; not one of them dissented or tried to justify the situation. I had thought that Essex was a monstrous manifestation, but it turns out that its rulers’ ideas are ‘the new normal’, as the Chinese government calls its present economic plan. Cries also reached me from other countries, where the new methods have been taken even further: from New Zealand and Australia, above all; from Europe, especially the Netherlands, and from certain institutions in the US.

• Donald Clark Plan B: Finland to scrap subject teaching 'Teaching by topic, or phenomenon teaching, is not an new idea but no state has adopted it nationwide. In Helsinki this has already happened for 16 year olds. A ‘topic’, such as the European Union would be used to bring in knowledge and skills around history, geography, maths through the interpretation of stats, writing skills, politics and languages. A real business problem, such as running a café, would be an opportunity to bring in maths, nutrition, as well as languages for foreign customers and soft-skill, such as communications. [ ] Structurally, there will be a lot less chalk and talk, less sitting in rows, less ‘hands up questioning and much more project and group work. It involves a complete rething and redesign of the delivery methods.'

• Fixing Engineering Education: Engineering Educators: You're Doing it Wrong! '[T]hose greatly influential in the content and delivery of engineering degrees do not understand what engineers do, or how they do it. Many of them have never practiced the discipline, and often think of real engineers as their social and intellectual inferiors. [ ] Many think that the "purer" subjects in which they have first degrees are more intellectually demanding than real engineering. Perhaps they think that teaching abstract theory irrespective of its relevance to engineering practice is "an education", but teaching practically relevant material is the vastly inferior "training", fit only for technicians.'

• Getting Them to Stop Talking | Vitae Managing student participation in class discussions.

• Using research in education: Coming soon: Guest academic bloggers share their research Listing of a range of coming guest posts.

• Top Tips For Education Academics Who Want Media Coverage (or REF impact) | Laura McInerney

• Bloom's Revised Taxonomy Action Verbs infographic - e-Learning Infographics 'Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom, and David Krathwohl revisited the cognitive domain in the mid-nineties and made some changes. This new taxonomy reflects a more active form of thinking and is perhaps more accurate. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy improved the usability of it by using action words. The Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy Action Verbs infographic includes some action words that are useful in writing learning objectives.' Yes, but even the blurb shows how this ain't indisputable truth—it's just another heuristic.

• Minimal Guidance | Filling the pail Good discussion of the debate around direct instruction versus minimally guided learning, with sources.

• Why do so many teachers find cognitive psychology so attractive? | Psych(ed)

• Stripping the Ideology from Differentiation | Stepping Back a Little 'In my opinion, there are fundamental flaws with the idea that the more we seek to personalise schooling then the better we educate our children. Nevertheless, this idea seems to exert a stranglehold on the otherwise important concept of differentiation, and push it beyond being a learning enhancer into being a stressful pressure on teachers of dubious educational benefit.' Useful counter to the conventional wisdom.

Other Business

• "The first crack in the wall of significance testing" | Big Think 'Significance testing is one of the most important, yet most widely misunderstood definitions in science. [...] Yale clinical neurologist Steven Novella sums up the problem well: "the p-value was never meant to be the sole measure of whether or not a particular hypothesis is true. Rather it was meant only as a measure of whether or not the data should be taken seriously". Novella's account refers to an absolutely beautiful guitar-hero-meets-space-invaders-meets-tetris-meets-roulette statistical demonstration of the problem by Geoff Cumming, dubbed "The dance of the p-values". If it is not the most inspired stats less[on] you've ever had, then I'll eat my hat!

• The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became the Standard For Typesetters Everywhere | Open Culture

• Nigeness: What would Captain Mainwaring say? 'This morning I stepped into my local branch of Barclays bank to get some cash, and I am still aghast at what I found there. This branch has three indoor 'hole in the wall' machines, each with a different function, as was hitherto apparent at a glance. Now, however, the notice above each machine carries not an indication of what it does but a name. The machines are now 'Sally', 'Jake' and 'Mike'.  

• Beware the perils of groupthink, yet meetings can still be useful

• APA Style Blog: How to Cite an Illustrated Book

• Older Really Can Mean Wiser - NYTimes.com / BPS Research Digest: Different mental abilities peak at different times of life, from 18 to 70   '"At any given age, you’re getting better at some things, you’re getting worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things," Hartshorne told MIT News. "There’s probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them."  

On make-work

A few weeks ago, I was having coffee with former colleagues when the latest edict from management came up. Like most higher education (HE) courses in the UK, theirs is modularised (or unitised). In this particular model, each module is worth 15 credits, which means that it is meant to require 150 “guided learning hours” to complete*.

The course leader had just been told that she needed not only to account for what the students do in the taught contact hours of each module (about 24 hours) but also in the remaining 126 “guided learning” hours. The course itself is a two-year part-time one, undertaken by mature, (mostly) employed adult students who are already qualified in their original discipline, and who are now training to teach that subject in post-compulsory education.

The form—which I have not actually seen—apparently requires a breakdown of, for example, reading set for study outside of class, with the time required to be spent on each set task.

The management have clearly finally taken leave of their senses. Over the eight modules of the course, over two years, the students will receive about 192 hours of direct teaching, plus tutorials**. As a 120-credit course, the total guided learning hours are notionally 1200. So the students are expected to put in roughly 1000 hours of study on their own. That works out, again roughly, at 17 hours a week during the academic year—or 2 working days as well as their half-day attendance. Half a working week. On top of—in the majority of cases—a full-time job

And they do that, and more. Just not quite as the management would like to think.

They do it because their main work is teaching, and so they are gaining practice all the time, they are testing out ideas from the course, they are thinking about*** their practice and relating it to the course. And we know that is what they do because that is what they write about and provide evidence of in their assessments.

But that is not enough for management. Unless what they are doing is, in the management view, under the control of the course, they are not learning.

This is an extension of the ideology of “scientific management” propagated by a charlatan named Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early years of the last century. “Taylorism” as it has come to be known, is characterised by to-down micro-management and de-skilling of the labour force, and is a) discredited, and b) popular in education. (This article is partisan, and US-based but makes the case clearly in that context. This one locates its popularity in the crises of late capitalism.)

I asked my colleagues how they handled the latest demands. I already knew the answer, of course, because it reflected what I had myself done for years. “We just make it up.” they replied.

At that point management forfeits all credibility. It becomes a self-serving defensive activity which is all about managing accountability, and has long forgotten what the substantive task is. It spawns documentation which is an end in itself although interestingly there seems to be no attempt made to account for and evaluate the time (and hence money) spent in designing and preparing said documentation.

As happens every so often, I was reminded of Graham Gibbs’ magisterial keynote at a conference in Liverpool in 2010, including:

“He explored the quality guidance and criteria laid down by many bodies for evaluating the excellence (or otherwise) of courses--and showed that some of the avowedly best institutions might meet none of them. He showed that in some cases staff engaged in "industrial deviance", violating university policies where they actively inhibited the provision of formative feedback to students. The result was the students appreciated this bending of the rules as evidence of the staff interest, and succeeded. But this department seemed to be bucking a trend in the research--because when the investigators visited the staff were reluctant to confess to such "illegal" good practice!

“He discussed the impact of organisational culture on the development of excellent practice; out of four kinds of such culture found in universities--collegial, corporate, bureaucratic and entrepreneurial, it was the first and the last which actually promoted excellence. The corporate and bureaucratic models were dead hands. So why has government and the quality movement (he did not mention the QAA, or Ofsted, by name) persevered in plugging precisely the least effective models?

---

* Note that this calculation is different across the pond, where a) a module will probably be called a “course”, and b) its credit value will be determined by the taught contact hours per week—hence a 2- or 3-credit course.

** “about 192 hours” because some modules are organised differently.

*** a.k.a. “reflecting”, of course.

Items to Share: 15 March 2015

Education Focus

• How's the Education and Training Foundation doing? Don't worry if you've never heard of it—the latest FE quango... 

• Becoming a happier teacher 'I’ve just finished reading behaviour and public policy expert Paul Dolan’s marvellous Happiness by Design. Originally it shone out invitingly from the shelves of Waterstones, but I didn’t take the bait until Mark Healy recently recommended it in this blogpost. I have often thought that we teachers are very adept at making ourselves needlessly unhappy – at work and in life generally – and this book has helped me to conceptualise this and find some potential solutions. For me, at least.'

• And if I told you I don't believe in lesson plans? 'Lesson plans – they’re a bit of a nonsense. Don’t you think? In fact, I’ll go further. Lesson plans hold kids back and encourage teachers to focus on all the wrong things. [...] So does that mean I just roll up and freewheel my way through lessons? Not really. But it does mean I work according to a set of principles that allow me to teach, largely, on autopilot. Teach on autopilot? That sounds strangely complacent! Not really. I keep to my key principles. My lessons are uncluttered. I have the flexibility to tweak lessons on the hoof.'

• Teachers, not Nobel laureates, are the experts in how to teach science | Science | The Guardian '[Sir Paul] Nurse [President of the Royal Society] writes “Finding things out for yourself is at the very heart of science”. As a science teacher, it is statements like this that lead me worry that Nurse, and others like him in the “science community”, have at best a superficial, and at worst a grossly inaccurate, idea about science education. [...] Students very rarely “find things out” for themselves in their school science lessons. Practical work is not some magical process whereby scientific knowledge is painlessly implanted into the minds of young people as they stir spatulas of sugar into hot water, or hang weights from a spring. [...] It sometimes seems that everyone who’s ever set foot in a school reckons they are an expert in how I ought to do my job. But I’d expect better from scientists who are supposed to rely on evidence and data.'

• Why ‘Everybody got it?’ is functionally rhetorical - Teach Like a Champion '[T]he way we often ask these questions—with a wait time of a fraction of a second; a willingness to accept silent assent without testing; a look of relief, even, when we get silent assent because we really just want the green light to move on—intimates very clearly that we’re not expecting a response. Students know not to speak up. If they do, our response can also send the message that they weren’t really supposed to answer.'

• The revolution that’s changing the way your child is taught | Ian Leslie | Education | The Guardian 'The best teachers do not necessarily understand how teaching works, because their own technique is invisible to them; sports psychologists call this “expert-induced amnesia”. When the Los Angeles Times asked some of the teachers who topped their list what made them so effective, one replied that great teachers simply love their students and love their job: “You can’t bottle that, and you can’t teach it.” [...] Doug Lemov is on a mission to prove that talented teacher wrong.

• Introducing… The Echo Chamber Uncut | Scenes From The Battleground  'I have set up a new website, Echo Chamber Uncut. This is a companion site to The Echo Chamber where my team of volunteers and I have been blogging links to the best blogposts we could find. [...] The Uncut site is different in that [...] it is intended to reblog everything from the UK education blogosphere regardless of whether I think it is good or not. This is likely to be substantially more than 100 posts every day, so this is not really a convenient site to follow to read every post.

• Sam Gerstenzang - Knowledge units 'There are two models of online education: 1 Preparatory knowledge, in the form of course-based video-delivered teachings: Coursera, Udacity, Thinkful, etc. 2 On demand knowledge: Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Genius, etc. Of the two, the latter has been much more widely spread and far more influential.'

• Part 3 – Books that Made me Think About my Teaching | cijane02 Reviews of Pinker (1998) How the Mind Works; Willingham (2009) Why Don't Students Like School?, and Priestley and Biesta (eds.) (2013) Reinventing the Curriculum.

• Fact Check: are free schools raising education standards? Nicky Morgan (Education Secretary) claims they are; the evidence is just not there.

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): Hans Rosling clarifies world demographics 'The best hours of my academic life were spent behind or beside the podium in front of an classroom full of students, so I'm supersensitive to the nuances of lecturing. This guy has all the skills. He is recognized as a wizard at portraying otherwise-dry statistics in comprehensible visual forms (see his superb TED talk on the developing world). In addition his stage presence is captivating, and his use of English (as a second language) is excellent. [ ] [T]ake my word for it, if you are interested in the world beyond your doorstep, this video is worth 15 minutes of your time. Or at least the first five, and then see if you can stop.'

• Ms. Potts Presents the Present Perfect | aplinglink On different approaches to ESOL

Other Business

• Chuck Jones' 9 Rules For Drawing Road Runner Cartoons, or How to Create a Minimalist Masterpiece | Open Culture Art cannot exist without limits: the limitations of particular media, the limitations of the artist’s vision, the limitations of space and time. We always work within limits, and often those creators who are most deliberate about setting limitations for themselves produce some of the most profound and unusual works. One could name minimalists like Samuel Beckett, or Lars Van Trier, or Erik Satie. Or Chuck Jones, American animator of such classic Warner Brother’s characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and, of course, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

• Dalek Relaxation Tape (via Tyler Cowen)

• E. O. Wilson wants to know why you’re not protesting in the streets | Grist 'We are entering a new world, but we’re entering it as Paleolithic brains. Here’s my formula for Earth’s civilization: We are a Star Wars civilization. We have Stone Age emotions. We have medieval institutions — most notably, the churches. And we have god-like technology. And this god-like technology is dragging us forward in ways that are totally unpredictable.' 

• 15 pairs of words that seem etymologically related but aren't 'A crayfish is not a fish, an outrage is not a rage, and there's no bomb in bombast. Words suggest one thing, but their histories tell us another.' 

Items to Share: 8 March 2015

Education Focus

• Is there a ‘cargo cult’ approach to school improvement? | Evidence into practice 'Perhaps one of the most damaging consequences of a high-stakes/low-validity accountability system is that we continually fail to learn very much about what makes a school effective. Instead, it encourages a ‘cargo cult’ approach to school improvement: Gimmicks and pet projects from ‘outstanding’ schools or teachers – which may have nothing to do with improved outcomes for students – are copied across schools as ‘best practice’. Teachers and school leaders engage in time-consuming activities – which may have nothing to do with improved outcomes for students – in the hope that Ofsted lands them a good judgement.'

• On the subject of Anonymity. | cherrylkd Thoughts about "Harry Webb", anonymous author of the Webs of Substance blog, having deleted his blog and its archives, and what that might mean. It's certainly a pity, because I have regularly linked to the blog from these Items to Share posts.

• Spaced learning – too good to be true? | eddiekayshun '[E]ver since the dawn of human culture people must have attempted to find ways to retain information, and to be frustrated by the fallibility of our memories. Ebbinghaus’ major contribution was not to notice that we forget, or how quickly, nor to simply point out that by revising information we can retain it in our memory; his chief discovery was that there is an ideal timetable for the revision of information, and that if we space out these revision sessions, we have more chance of keeping things in our memory.'

• Starting an MA in TESOL and Applied Linguistics | aplinglink  'My experience working with students on MA Applied Linguistics courses tells me that the biggest problems students face are: too much information; choosing appropriate topics; getting the hang of academic writing. Let’s briefly look at these 3 points.' Good advice which goes way beyond linguistics and TESOL.

• Explicit vs Implicit in Education | Carl Gombrich '[I]t seems to me that our age of ‘accountability’, ‘metrics’ and the like can demand of us an approach which kills when it should nurture and inspire. Too much ‘signposting’ and explicit requirements do not educate our students in such a way as to allow them to grow, create and learn what is of value.

• What neuromyths do you believe in? | Big Think (Video) debunking neuromyths in teaching.

• The Benefits of No-Tech Note Taking - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'The researchers found that students who used laptops were inclined to try to take notes verbatim—even when they were told not to. The longhand note takers took selective, organized notes because they couldn’t write fast enough to get everything down. As a result, they processed lectures more deeply, which allowed them to retain more information and even understand it better.

• New study examines the effect of taking learning styles into account. Guess what… | From experience to meaning... [theeconomyofmeaning.com] Say no more...

• Computational Competence Doesn't Guarantee Conceptual Understanding in Math[s] - Daniel Willingham 'Commenters on the teaching of mathematics sometimes express impatience with the idea that attention ought to be paid to conceptual understanding in math education. I get it: it sounds fuzzy and potentially wrong-headed, as though we’re ready to overlook inaccurate calculation so long as the student seems to understand the concepts—and student understanding sounds likely to be ascertained via our mere guess. [ ] Impatience with the idea that conceptual aspects of math ought to be explicitly taught is often coupled with an assurance that, if you teach students to calculate accurately, the conceptual understanding will come. A new experiment provides evidence that this belief is not justified. People can be adept with calculation, yet have poor conceptual understanding.

• Excellence is not the only point of education [theconversation.com] 'David Cameron has reminded us once again that our children and young people should aspire towards excellence. According to the prime minister, schools should be doing more to ensure that children have the opportunity to model themselves on top entrepreneurs and learn how to make a profit. This sort of discourse simply reinforces what we’ve known for some time: corporate mentality has hijacked education. The raison d'être of students, teachers, schools, universities, and academics is to sell education and knowledge, while managing their image in the competitive educational marketplace.'

• Make them believe in you - News - TES Very good article on teacher credibility, with sources

• Pedagogical Kryptonite - The Hawthorne Effect and Confirmation Bias | Glen Gilchrist 'Like the colour yellow for the Green Lantern, Bruce Banner's incredible rage, Tony Stark's alcoholism and Venom's pathological fear of fire, teachers all have their equivalent of Superman's kryptonite - that one thing that zaps all their reserves of power, enthusiasm and resilience.'

• Why you should never assume anything about people with autism [theconversation.com] 'Without doubt being autistic in a world populated in the main by people who are not can cause huge issues for the individual and their family. But this is not the same as suggesting that the problems are caused by being autistic. The very fact that there are plenty of autistic individuals who are hugely successful demonstrates that being autistic does not preclude anything at all.'

Other Business

• Rock Star Psychologist Steven Pinker Explains Why #TheDress Looked White, Not Blue [forbes.com] 'The puzzle has nothing to do with what philosophers call the inverted-spectrum paradox (Is my red the same as your red?), which pertains to cases in which people agree—at least overtly—about the color they are seeing. Nor does it have anything to do with rods and cones. The viewing conditions for the image are all well into the brightness range of the cones. The rods aren’t seeing the image at all. And the two different percepts don’t seem to depend on the color settings of their monitor. According to the internet reports, two people can look at the same screen and still see the colors differently. What it has to do with is lightness constancy and color constancy.

• Health Check: why do some people feel the cold more than others? [theconversation.com] 'Most of us who are healthy but claim to feel excessively cold, however, have only ourselves to blame. [W]e have habituated ourselves to feeling comfortably warm. In the developed world we rarely expose ourselves to cold, letting expensive clothing protect us from outdoor cold and letting power companies warm our living and working spaces. Allowing power companies to do the work that our metabolism used to do when we experienced cold may actually contribute to obesity. We’d probably all be much better off if we spent more time being cold.

• Ronald Blythe watches as February tries to detach itself from winter

On Hattie's revised Top Ten

As I mentioned in “Items to Share” a couple of weeks ago, John Hattie has informally reported on the latest developments in his long-standing quest to discover “what works best” in education through meta-analyses of the research in the field. This has resulted in something of a shake-up of the top ten effect-sizes.

I've been through the previous listing from Hattie (2009: 297) and inserted the new items in rank order according to effect size (new ones in red, and without a former rank). This is not an exact science, first because the report is of an interview with Hattie which originally appeared in a Swedish magazine, and it is not always clear whether—as in the case of the former no. 1—there has simply been a slight re-labelling of the category (which is very likely given that the database has grown by about half since Visible Learning was written); or whether a completely new candidate has made an entrance, which seems to be the case with “Change Programs for conceptual understanding”.

I comment on some thoughts arising from the listing below: I'll leave “Collective Self-efficacy” to the last.

Former Rank	Domain	Influence	d. (Effect-size)
		Collective self-efficacy	1.57
1	Student	Self-report grades (Self-assessment of ratings / student expectations 1.4)	1.44
2	Student	Piagetian programs	1.28
		Change Programs for conceptual understanding	1:15
3		Feedback on intervention	1.07
	Teaching	Providing formative evaluation (Formative assessment 0.98)	0.90
		Teacher credibility	0.90
4	Teacher	Micro teaching (a.k.a Video analysis of tuition)	0.88
5	School	Acceleration	0.88
		Classroom discussion	0.82
6	School	Classroom behavioral	0.80
7	Teaching	Comprehensive interventions for students with Special Educational Needs	0.77
8	Teacher	Teacher clarity	0.75
9	Teaching	Reciprocal teaching	0.74
10	Teaching	Feedback	0.73

The former no. 1 Self-Report Grades remains near the top. As this post from docendo discimus points out, it is not really clear what it means, and indeed why Hattie does not make more of it if the effect-size is so big. Like the self-efficacy point later, is it actually an "influence" or "intervention"? Is it not at least as likely that the ability to point accurately to one's likely level of achievement is simply an artefact of successful learning processes, a kind of meta-learning after the event rather than a condition of routine learning. Given the world-wide scope of the meta-analyses it is also at least possible that culture enters the equation quite a lot—here is my take on it from a while back (unfortunately the Chronicle article no longer seems to be available.)

Piagetian Program[me]s: This is based on a meta-analysis from 1981, and if it is that powerful, it is again quite strange that it (a) does not feature more strongly in VL —it gets just a 13-line paragraph on page 43—and (b) does not appear to have attracted more recent corroboration; there is a 2008 reference cited but that is to a two-page note on "Cognitive load theory and education technology". Docendo discimus also discusses this item here. Depending on the ages of the pupils, of course, there may be something here about the importance of enabling children to make the developmental stage transitions as effectively as possible, but that does depend on the reliability of Piaget's developmental model, and the accuracy with which it can be assessed—not to speak of the differentiation probably required. (See here for an introduction to Piaget.)

Change programs for conceptual understanding: Now this sounds more interesting. It's a new category and I imagine Hattie will locate it in the “curricula” domain. In the previous ranking, curriculum did not appear until 15 (Vocabulary Programmes; d. 0.67). In his 2013 lecture (link in Further Reading) Hattie says:

A major argument in this discussion is that there should be more attention to the narrative of ‘learning’, as it is via developing ‘learning’ for all students that there will be subsequent effects on ‘achievement’. While there are many definitions of ‘learning’, the one that is the basis for this presentation is that learning is the process of developing sufficient surface knowledge to then move to deep or conceptual understanding. (My emphasis)

He goes on to endorse Biggs' SOLO taxonomy as a way of achieving this. This leads me to read “Change programs...” as an instruction, rather than as an endorsement of the packaged nostrums and course designs which purport to develop “thinking skills” and hence conceptual understanding. Indeed, it is interesting that in the quote above he starts with “developing sufficient surface knowledge to [...] move on”. Surface learning is commonly deprecated, but nevertheless provides the foundation for conceptual understanding. (See VL pp.28-9.)

I assume that formative assessment (0.98) is merely a re-wording of formative evaluation (.90). There are several variations on the theme of feedback, of course.

Teacher credibility is a new entrant to the chart. It's a hot topic for me; see blog posts here, here and here. I'm interested to see that the effect-size is as large as it is (0.90); in the brief note on the VL web-site, Hattie treats it as more of a hygiene factor (in Herzberg's sense) than a positive intervention:

According to Hattie teacher credibility is vital to learning, and students are very perceptive about knowing which teachers can make a difference. [...] In an interview Hattie puts it like that: “If a teacher is not perceived as credible, the students just turn off.”

(Do read the full interview linked from the quote.)

Video analysis is probably simply a better term than “micro-teaching”, which is jargon and not self-explanatory.

So in terms of new entrants, that brings us to Collective self-efficacy, entering directly at the top with an amazing effect-size of 1.57. But if micro-teaching is jargon, what on earth is this?

You can't really blame Hattie—he did not invent the term, and it has been around since 1977 (ref. below). It originates with Albert Bandura, the pioneer of social learning theory, who defined it as  “people's judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances” (1986: 391). It is more specific and task-focused than general motivation, and of course in this case it is collective; the beliefs concern the team or institution, possibly the class, rather than relating to just an individual.

If all that is a bit of a mouthful, it comes down to President Obama's (and Bob the Builder's) slogan: Yes, we can! (Bob got there first, in 1998.)

But as with Self-reported grades / Student expectations, the direction of causation is still not clear to me. It makes sense that a class with a “Yes, we can!” attitude is more likely to achieve than one without it. But surely the collective self-efficacy is the product of many other smaller effects or influences, such as students' trust in each other as well as the teacher, a sense of prior achievement, high expectations... the list goes on and on. Yes, we can! is a condition and an aspiration for learning rather than something which can be created ex nihilo and applied. It has to be nurtured with an through the class, and certainly cannot be imposed.

---

• For a recent short accessible account of Hattie's view of learning; here is his his keynote from the 2013 conference of the Australian Council for Educational Research Understanding Learning; lessons for learning, teaching and research.

• For a glossary of Hattie's terms: http://visible-learning.org/glossary/

• Bandura A. (1977) “Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change”, Psychol Rev. 1977 Mar; 84(2): 191-215.
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 
• For more on self-efficacy: http://www.positivepractices.com/Efficacy/SelfEfficacy.html 
• Interestingly, Hattie was involved in direct empirical research on self-efficacy and the development of a measurement instrument: Dimmock C and Hattie J (1996) “School Principals’ Self‐Efficacy and its Measurement in a Context of Restructuring” School Effectiveness and School Improvement: An International Journal of Research, Policy and Practice vol 7 no 1, pp 62-75

Items to Share; 1 March 2015

Education Focus

• Learning is invisible – my slides from #LEF15 | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'If we want students to truly understand anything more than the superficialities of our teaching then we need to stop trying to rush them through liminal space. The false certainty of easy answers – successful in-lesson performance – might actively be retarding learning. But we have a problem: we’re genetically predisposed to avoid uncertainty. In our primitive ancestors, if it looks like a duck or, more to the point, if it looks like a snake, we’re better off assuming it’s a snake rather than having an ontological debate. It’s easy to see how a preference for dithering might quickly have been selected out of the gene pool.'

• See also: Landmark: a million thank yous | David Didau: The Learning Spy 'All this reading and thinking has led me to challenge some of the axioms of modern education. If learning is invisible then maybe progress in lessons might also be a myth? And if that’s true, where does that leave assessment for learning? And possibly feedback, long considered the king of all education interventions, might be widely misunderstood and misapplied'

• Donald Clark Plan B: What can we learn from the Million dollar teacher? 'In terms of learning theory his method could be summed up as the use of a blended learning that includes lots of ‘elaboration’ to improve retention and recall. He is optimising his blend, matching optimal elaboration with the learning outcomes. For simple naming the learners stand and chant the structure using their bodies and arms as cues. For processes, they line up and move around. For chemical interactions, they start to interact with each other in groups.'

• BPS Research Digest: Some student-professor pairings lead to "unusually effective teaching" (and it's possible to predict which ones)

• Is John talking through his Hattie? | Dan Haesler 'Despite having been challenged as early as 2011 in the British Journal of Educational Studies, Hattie’s work has been seen as the guiding light in educational reform, but of late it has come under scrutiny, not least because of this blog post and it’s [sic.] subsequent follow up which asserts that half the statistics in Visible Learning are wrong. ' And Chatting with John Hattie – Pt. 2 | Dan Haesler

• Expert in a year | Living and teaching in Spain | The Echo Chamber 'An intriguing project that has been getting attention on the Internet recently looks at what is possible in just one year. Under the title “Expert in a year” a table tennis coach by the name of Ben Larcombe has taken a young protege, Sam Priestly, and set off on a twelve month project to try and place that player in the top 250 players in England. The composite video that records the project is compelling viewing. '

• Teachers show bias to pupils who share their personality 'The more similar the personalities of teachers and their pupils, the more likely the teachers are to grade them highly, according to new research from Germany. The findings again open up the debate around the subtle biases teachers have about their pupils and how important it is to try and minimise their impact on children’s progress through school.'

• Outcomes, Evidence and Assessment | Sam Shepherd  'Perhaps we need to turn our back on the input/output behaviourism of the learning outcome. Forget SMART and be a little more laid back. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit in with the prevailing educational wind in post 16 learning in the UK. But then, one of the challenges of teaching ESOL in an FE context that we are a bit of a misfit, lauded and celebrated when colleges want to brag about their diversity, but in terms of funding, time tabling and classroom practice, we are a bit of a pain. But then I wouldn’t have that any other way.'

• Pedagogical thoughts from the ski trip | Mr Shepstone's Blog '[W]e are often told that students need to be progressing onto more and more challenging work each lesson, or the students won’t be making progress. Yet here was a group who spent 2 days (12 hours!) doing things that they had done before. Surely that isn’t right? Well…by day 6 it absolutely was.'

• The Ladybird Peter and Jane – A Social History | The Dabbler 'Do the words ‘Peter and Jane’ take you back to a warm, fuzzy, nostalgic place in your memories? The rose-tinted hues of distant childhood? Or do they remind you of the horrors of primary school, of being tortured into reading by the terrible two (and Pat the dog). Apparently over 80 million of us have learnt to read with Ladybird’s Peter and Jane books . And some of the books are still in print; I still see them for sale in my local bookshop. Based on Head Teacher William Murray’s system of teaching reading, the Key Words scheme is founded on a recognition that just 12 words make up one quarter of all the English words we read and write and that 100 words make up a half of those we use in a normal day. Teach children these key words first, and they are well on the way to making some sense of most texts. So, step by step, page by page, these words are introduced and repeated (one might say hammered) to reinforce them as the length and difficulty of the texts increase'

• Can we teach intelligence? [theconversation.com] '[T]eaching and instruction in the 21st century should focus more on cognitive flexibility, on problem-solving and on those aspects of intelligence that are amenable to change. There are numerous ways to do this. These include teaching students strategies to increase self-monitoring and evaluation during problem-solving, or using teaching methods that facilitate deep rather than shallow understandings of the structure that underlies new problems.'

Other Business

• The happiness conspiracy: against optimism and the cult of positive thinking (Bryan Appleyard) Optimism is a pressure – it is stress-inducing and intelligence-lowering. Pessimism is a release: it is relaxing and mind-expanding. Read the Book of Ecclesiastes (“To every thing there is a season”) or Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (“The Bird of Time has but a little way/To fly . . .”) to see how beautiful and peaceful zero expectations can be. And remember, when John Lennon wrote “It can’t get much worse” he was, I am sure, being ironic. Of course it can, it always can.' 

• Why Do So Many Psychologists Write So Badly? | Neurobonkers.com

• Bayes' Theorem with Lego — Count Bayesie 'Bayes' Theorem is one of those mathematical ideas that is simultaneously simple and demanding. Its fundamental aim is to formalize how information about one event can give us understanding of another. Let's start with the formula and some lego, then see where it takes us.' 

• The 2015 Sony World Photography Awards - The Atlantic