notetaking

One of the points I mention in my book on notetaking is that the very act of taking notes helps us remember — it’s not simply about providing yourself with a record. There are a number of reasons for this, but a recent study bears on one of them. The researchers were interested in whether physically writing by hand has a different effect than typing on a keyboard.

In a fascinating experiment, adults were asked to learn to write in an unknown alphabet, with around twenty letters. One group was taught to write by hand, while another group used a keyboard. Participants were tested on their fluency and recall after three and six weeks. Those who had learned the letters by handwriting were significantly better on all tests. Moreover, Broca's area, a brain region involved in language, was active when this group were recognizing the letters, but not among those who had learned by typing on a keyboard.

The findings point to the importance of sensorimotor processes in processes we have typically regarded as primarily intellectual.

I recently reported on another finding concerning handwriting — that the memory-blocking effect of exam anxiety could be overcome by the simple strategy of writing out your anxieties just before the exam. It’s also interesting in this context to remember the research into the benefits of gesturing for reducing the load on your working memory, with consequent assistance for memory, learning and comprehension. The writing effect on exam anxiety is also thought to be related to reducing the load on working memory.

In the case of this latest study, it seems likely that the benefits have more to do with the increased focus on the shape of the letters that occurs when writing by hand, and with the intimate connection between reading and writing.

But the message of these different studies is the same: that we ignore the physical at our peril; that cognition is “embodied cognition”, rooted in our bodies in ways we are only beginning to understand.

This post is the second part in a four-part series on how education delivery is changing, and the set of literacies required in today’s world. Part 1 looked at the changing world of textbooks. This post looks at the oral equivalent of textbooks: direct instruction or lecturing.

There’s been some recent agitation in education circles about an article by Paul E. Peterson claiming that direct instruction is more effective than the ‘hands-on’ instruction that's so popular nowadays. His claim is based on a recent study that found that increased time on lecture-style teaching versus problem-solving activities improved student test scores results (for math and science, for 8^th grade students). Above-average students appeared to benefit more than below-average, although the difference was not statistically significant.

On the other hand, a college study found that a large first-year physics class taught in a traditional lecture style by an experienced and highly rated professor performed more poorly on several measures than another class taught only by engaging in small-group problem-solving tasks. Attendance improved by 20% in the experimental class, and engagement (measured by observers and "clicker" responses) nearly doubled. Though the experimental class didn’t cover as much material as the traditional class, dramatically more students showed up for the unit test, and they scored significantly better (average score of 74% vs 41%).

It must be noted, however, that this experiment only ran for a week (3 hours instruction).

But the researchers of the middle-grade study did not conclude that lecturing was superior, or that their results applied to college students. Their very reasonable conclusion was that “Newer teaching methods might be beneficial for student achievement if implemented in the proper way, but our findings imply that simply inducing teachers to shift time in class from lecture-style presentations to problem solving without ensuring effective implementation is unlikely to raise overall student achievement in math and science. On the contrary, our results indicate that there might even be an adverse impact on student learning.”

The whole issue reminds me of the phonics debate. I don’t know what it is about education that gets people so polarized, when it seems so obvious that there are no simple answers. What makes an effective strategy is not simply the strategy itself, but how it is carried out, who is using it, and when they are using it.

In this case, the quality and timing of these ‘problem-solving activities’ is perhaps central. The rule of thumb that twice as much time should be allocated to problem-solving activities as to direct instruction is perhaps being applied with too little understanding about the role and usefulness of specific activities.

But it’s obvious that there are going to be strong developmental differences. The ‘best’ means of teaching 18-year-olds is not going to suit 5-year-olds, and vice versa. So we can’t conclude anything about middle school by looking at college studies, or college by looking at middle school studies.

So, bearing in mind that a discussion of college lecturing has little to do with direct instruction in schools, let’s look a little further into college lectures, given that this is the predominant method of instruction at this level.

First of all, we must ask what students are doing during lectures. Given many teachers’ distress at their students’ activity on phones and laptops during class, it’s worth noting the findings of two recent studies that spied on college students in class rather than relying on self-reporting.

The first study involved 45 students who allowed monitoring software to be installed. Distinguishing between “productive” applications (Microsoft Office and course-related websites) from “distractive” ones (e-mail, instant messaging, and non-course-related websites), the researchers found that non-course-related software was active about 42% of the time. However only one type of these distractive applications was significantly correlated with poorer academic performance: instant messaging. This despite the fact that IM windows had the shortest average duration. (It’s also worth noting that instant-messaging use was massively under-estimated by students (by 40% vs, for example, 7% for email use)).

It seems likely that this has to do with switching costs. For those who read my recent blog post on working memory, you might recall that switching focus from one item to another has high costs. Moreover, it seems that the more frequently (and thus briefly) you switch focus, the higher the cost.

The other study used human observers rather than spyware, with obvious drawbacks. But the finding I found interesting was the dramatic jump between first-year and second- and third-year law students: more than half of the latter who came to class with laptops used them for non-class purposes more than half the time, compared to 4% of first-year students. While the teacher took this as a signal to ban laptops in his upper-year courses, perhaps he should have rather taken it as evidence that his students had become more discerning about what was relevant. We need to know how this laptop use mapped against performance before drawing conclusions.

But not all teachers are reflexively against distractive technology. The banning of cellphones from classrooms, and general distress about social media, is starting to be offset by teachers setting up “backchannels” in their classes. These digital channels are said to encourage shy and overwhelmed students to ask questions and make comments during class.

Of course, most teachers are still anti, and a lot of that may be driven by a fear of losing control of the class, or being unable to keep up with the extra stream of information (particularly in the face of the students’ facility in multitasking).

And maybe some teachers are so antagonistic toward distractive technology because they feel it’s insulting. It implies they’re boring.

Well, unfortunately, many students do find a lot of their lectures boring. A 2009 study of student boredom suggested that almost 60% of students find at least half their lectures boring, of which half found most or all of their lectures boring.

But I don’t think the answer to this is to remove their toys. Do you think they’ll listen if they don’t have anything else to do? The study found bored students daydream (75% of students), doodle (66%), chat to friends (50%), send texts (45%), and pass notes to friends (38%).

It’s not that teachers have to entertain them! Granted it’s easier to hold students’ attention if you’re doing explosive chemistry experiments, but students really aren’t so shallow that you have to provide spectacles. They are there (at college level at least) because they want to learn. But you do have to present the information in a way that facilitates learning.

One of the main contributors to student boredom is apparently the (bad) use of PowerPoint.

But even practical sessions, supposedly more engaging than lectures, appear to bore students. Lab work and computer sessions achieved the highest boredom ratings in the study.

Because boredom is not as simple a concept as it might appear. Humans are designed for learning. This is our strength. Other animals may be fast, may be strong, may have sharp claws or teeth, or venom. Humans are smart, and curious, and we know that knowledge is power. Humans like to learn. So what goes wrong during the education process?

Well, one of the problems is that there’s a cognitive “sweet spot”. If you make something too difficult, most people will be put off. If you make something too easy, they won’t bother. The sweet spot of learning is that point where the amount of cognitive effort is not too little and not too great — of course you have to find that point, and a complicating factor is that this varies with individuals.

One area where creators have had a lot of success in finding that sweet spot (because they try very hard) is video games.

How can we harness the power that video games seem to have? A book called "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" points out that creating Wikipedia has so far taken about 100 million hours of work, while people spend twice that many hours playing World of Warcraft in a single week.

Some of the features of good games that researchers believe are important are: instant feedback, small rewards for small progress, occasional unexpected rewards, continual encouragement from the computer and other players, and a final sense of triumph. Most of this is no news to educationalists, but there’s a quote I really love: “One of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has ‘failed’ into the sense that they ‘haven’t succeeded yet.” (Tom Chatfield, British journalist and author)

That quote is a guide to how to find that sweet spot.

Providing motivation, of course, as we all know, is crucial. Where’s the relevance? Traditionally, it may have been enough to simply tell students that they needed to know something, and they’d believe you. But it’s not just that students have become cynical and less respectful (!) — the fact is, they have good reason to question whether traditional content and traditional strategies have any relevance to what they need to know.

Here’s a lovely example of the importance of motivation and relevance. In India Bollywood musicals are madly popular. For nine years, these movies have had karaoke-style subtitles. The first state to broadcast the subtitles was Gujarat. Because viewers were so keen to sing along, they paid attention to these captions, often copying them out to learn. As a consequence, literacy has improved. Newspaper reading in one Gujarat village has gone up by more than 50% in the last decade; women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, have become more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school. Viewers in India have shown reading improvement after watching just eight hours of subtitled programming over six months.

This has apparently worked in more literate nations as well. Finland (and we all know how well it scores in education rankings) attributes much of its educational success to captions. For several decades now, Finland has chosen to subtitle its foreign language television programs (in Finnish) instead of dubbing over them. And Finnish high school students read better than students from European countries that dub their TV programs, and are more proficient at English.

But songs, it seems, are better for this than dialog.

Of course this strategy is only useful at a certain stage — when learners have basic skills, but are having trouble moving beyond.

This is the point, isn’t it? Different situations (a term encompassing the learners, their prior knowledge, and their goals, as well as the content and its context) require different strategies. For example, I recently read a discussion on Education Week prompted by a teacher being forced by his/her institution to use PowerPoint in a class for ESL students to improve their English speaking skills.

Powerpoint slides can be very effective, but far too many aren’t. Similarly, lab sessions can be true learning experiences, or simply “paint-by-numbers” events for which the result is known. Lectures can be a complete waste of time, or true learning experiences.

Consider marathon oral readings of famous texts. A recent article on Inside Higher Ed said that such “events help convey messages, engage students, and foster community on their campuses in ways that reading alone cannot do”. And there was a nice quote from a student: "Until you hear another student read it in his or her own voice, you don't really understand the vast possibilities for interpretation."

What’s the difference between this and a lecture? Well, in one sense none. Both depend on delivery and presentation. I’ve been to some very engaging and inspirational lectures, and some readings can be flat and uninspiring. But the critical difference is that one is literature (a story) and the other is expositional. To make instructional text engaging, you have to work a lot harder. And this is true regardless of the mode of delivery — lectures and textbooks are the oral and written variants of linear exposition.

Is it fair to dismiss a strategy just because some people perform it badly? Is it smart to require a strategy because in some circumstances it is better than another?

We need a better understanding of the situations in which different strategies are effective, and the different variables that govern when they are effective. And we need more flexibility in delivery.

Which brings us to computer learning, which I’ll discuss in the next post.

[Update: Please note that some links have been removed as the articles on other sites are no longer available]

As we all know, we are living in a time of great changes in education and (in its broadest sense) information technology. In order to swim in these new seas, we and our children need to master new forms of literacy. In this and the next three posts, I want to explore some of the concepts, applications, and experiments that bear on this.

Apparently a Danish university is going to allow students access to the internet during exams. As you can imagine, this step arouses a certain amount of excitement from observers on both sides of the argument. But really it comes down, as always, to goals. What are students supposed to be demonstrating? Their knowledge of facts? Their understanding of principles? Their capacity to draw inferences, make connections, apply them to real-world problems?

I’m not second-guessing the answers here. It seems obvious to me that different topics and situations will have different answers. There shouldn’t be a single answer. But it’s a reminder that testing, like learning, needs to be flexible. And education could do with a lot more clear articulation of its goals.

For example, I came across an intriguing new web app called Topicmarks, that enables you to upload a text and receive an automated précis in return. On the one hand, this appalls me. How will students learn how to gather the information they need from a text if they use such tools? How can a summary constructed automatically possibly elicit the specific information you’re interested in? (Updated: this no longer appears to exist, but you can see an example at the end of this post, where I’ve appended the summary produced of a Scientific American article.)

Even if we assume it actually does a good job, it is worrying. And yet … There is too much information in the world for anyone to keep up with — even in their own discipline. There’s a reason for the spate in recent years of articles and books on how the invention of printing brought about a technological revolution — a need for new tools, such as indices, the idea of using the alphabet to order them, meaningful titles and headings, tables of contents. Because the flood of information, as we all know, requires new tools. This one (which will assuredly get better, as translation software apparently has) may have its place. Before we get all excited about the terrible consequences of automated summaries, and internet-access during exams, we should think about the world as it is today, and not the world for which the education system was designed.

The world for which the education system was designed was a simpler one, in terms of information. You gained information from people you knew, or from a book. Literacy was about being able to access the information in books.

But that’s no longer the case. Now we have the internet. We have hyperlinked texts and powerpoint slides, multimedia and social media. Literacy is no longer simply about reading words in a linear, unchanging text. Literacy is about being able to access information from all these new sources (and the ones that will be here tomorrow!).

Even our books are changing.

The simplest ‘modernized’ variant of the traditional textbook is the traditional textbook on a digital device. But e-readers are not well designed for textbook reading, which is quite different from novel reading.

A study involving 39 first-year graduate students in Computer Science & Engineering (7 women and 32 men; aged 21-53) who participated in a pilot study of the Kindle DX, found that, seven months into the study, less than 40% of the students were regularly doing their academic reading on the e-reader. Apart from the obvious – students wanted better support for taking notes, checking references and viewing figures – the really interesting thing was the insight it gave into how students use academic texts.

In particular, students constantly switch between reading techniques, such as skimming illustrations or references before reading the text. They also use physical cues to help them remember where certain information was, or even to remember the information itself (this is something classic and medieval scholars relied on heavily; I have spoken of this in the context of the art of memory). Both of these are problematic with the Kindle.

Consequently, in a survey of 655 college students, 75% said that, if the choice was entirely theirs, they would select a print textbook. (The article also lists some of the digital textbook providers, and some open-access educational resources, if you’re interested).

But e-readers are the future. (Don’t panic! This is not an either/or situation. There will still be a place for physical books — but that place is likely to become more selective.) The survey found a surge in the number of students who have a dedicated e-reader (39% vs 19% just five months earlier). Another, more general survey of over 1,500 end users in the US, the UK, Japan, India, Italy, and China, found that the amount of time spent reading digital texts now nearly equals time spent reading printed materials.

Nearly everyone (94%) who used tablets (such as iPads) either preferred reading digital texts (52%) or found them as readable as print (42%). In contrast, 47% of laptop users found digital text harder to read than print. While 40% of respondents had no experience of e-readers, this varied markedly by country. Surprisingly, the country with the highest use of e-readers was China. Rates in the US and the UK were comparable (57% and 56% had no experience of e-readers).

The age-group unhappiest about reading on screen were 40- to 54-year-olds. Falling into that age-group myself, I speculate that this has something to do with the way our eyesight is beginning to fail! We’re not at the point of needing large font (or at least of accepting that we need it), but we find increasing difficulty in comfortably reading in conditions that are less than optimal.

So, we have a mismatch between e-readers and the way textbooks are read. There’s also the issue of the ‘textbook model’. Many think it’s broken. Because of their cost, because some subjects move so fast (and publishing moves so slowly) that they’re out of date before they come out, even because of their weight. And then there’s the question of whether students actually learn from textbooks, and how relevant they are to student learning today.

This is reflected in various attempts to revolutionize the textbook, from providing interactive animations (see, for example, a new intro biology textbook) to the ‘learning space’ being developed (again in biology — is this just happenstance, or is biology leading the way in this?). Here information is organized into interconnected learning nodes that contain all of the baseline information a textbook would include, plus supplemental material and self-assessments. So there are videos, embedded quizzes, information flow between students and the teacher.

One aspect of this I find particularly interesting: both students and teachers can write new nodes. So for example, in a pilot of this biology program, 19 students wrote 130 new nodes in one semester — clearly demonstrating their engagement in the course, and hopefully their much greater learning.

Another attempt at providing more user-control is that of “flexbooks”. Flexbooks for K-12 classes enables teachers to easily select specific chapters from the content on the website, and put them together into a digital textbook in three formats (pdf, openreader, and html — this format is interactive, with animations and videos). You can also change the content itself.

Multimedia is of course all the rage. But, as I discuss in my book on effective note-taking, it’s not enough to simply provide illustrations or animations — it has to be done in the right way. Not only that, but the reader needs to know how to use them. Navigating a ‘learning space’ or multimedia environment is not the same as reading a book, and it’s not something our book-literacy skills directly transfer to.

And it’s not only a matter of textbooks. Textbooks have their own particular rules, but any expositional text has the potential to be recreated as a multimedia experience.

Here, for example, is a “video-book”: Learning From YouTube , is "large-scale online writing that depends upon video, text, design, and architecture for its meaning making." The author, Alexandra Juhasz, talks about how “common terms of scholarly writing and publishing must be reworked, modified, or scare-quoted to most effectively describe and traverse the "limits of scholarship" of the digital sphere.”

She talks about how scholars should ask which book medium is best suited for their study (rather than simply assuming it must be a traditional book). Reading and writing practices are changing on the internet — rather than deploring or embracing the new habits, we should ask ourselves which practices are most appropriate for the specific material.

She also talks about the need to educate readers in new ways of doing things. We don’t want to simply equate internet use with surfing, with hyperactive jumping and skimming. That has a place, but the internet is also home to material (like her video-book) that requires lengthy and deep study.

And of course there’s an obligation on the net to actually provide the deeper information (at least in the form of links) that in print books we can fob off with references and recommended reading lists.

Note this point: scholars should ask which book medium is best suited for their study. It applies to textbooks too. Books are not being transformed into something different; they are blossoming. There is still room for straight texts. Nor should it — it most certainly should not — be assumed that throwing a bunch of animated videos into the mix is enough to turn a book into an exciting new learning experience. As with books, some are going to be created that are effectively presented, and some are not.

I’ve said we should think of this as a blossoming of the book concept. But are these new, blossoming variants, still books? Where are we going to draw the lines? Video-books and learning spaces are more like courses than books. Indeed, the well-known textbook publisher Pearson has recently partnered with the lecture capture provider Panopto — another sign of the movement from traditional textbooks to cloud-based “educational ecosystems”.

Perhaps it’s premature to try and draw any lines. Let’s consider the oral equivalent of textbooks: lecturing, or as it’s known at K-12 level, direct instruction. My post tomorrow will look at that.

 

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Topicmarks summary (Scientific American article)

In humans, brain size correlates, albeit somewhat weakly, with intelligence, at least when researchers control for a person's sex (male brains are bigger) and age (older brains are smaller). Many modern studies have linked a larger brain, as measured by magnetic resonance imaging, to higher intellect, with total brain volume accounting for about 16 percent of the variance in IQ. But, as Einstein's brain illustrates, the size of some brain areas may matter for intelligence much more than that of others does. Studying the brains of 47 adults, Haier's team found an association between the amount of gray matter (tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe just behind it. In its survey of 146 children ages five to 18 with a range of IQs, the Cincinnati group discovered a strong connection between IQ and gray matter volume in the cingulate but not in any other brain structure the researchers examined.

In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307 children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of their cerebral cortex, the brain's exterior part. Over the years brain scientists have garnered evidence supporting the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information processing in the brain. Underlying such speed, some psychologists argue, is unusually efficient neural circuitry in the brains of gifted individuals. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that detects electrical brain activity at precise time points using an array of electrodes affixed to the scalp, to monitor the brains of 27 individuals while they took two reasoning tests, one of them given before test-related training and the other after it. The results suggest that gifted kids' brains use relatively little energy while idle and in this respect resemble more developmentally advanced human brains.

Some researchers speculate that greater energy efficiency in the brains of gifted individuals could arise from increased gray matter, which might provide more resources for data processing, lessening the strain on the brain. In a 2003 trial psychologist Jeremy Gray, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 48 individuals using functional MRI, which detects neural activity by tracking the flow of oxygenated blood in brain tissue, while the subjects completed hard tasks that taxed working memory. The researchers saw higher levels of activity in prefrontal and parietal brain regions in the participants who had received high scores on an intelligence test, as compared with low scorers. Lee and his co-workers measured brain activity in 18 gifted adolescents and 18 less intelligent young people while they performed difficult reasoning tasks. These tasks, once again, excited activity in areas of the frontal and parietal lobes, including the anterior cingulate, and this neural commotion was significantly more intense in the gifted individuals' brains.