Making Learning Stick with S.U.C.C.E.S.S.

Interesting post at the wonderful Eide Neurolearning Blog regarding learning, creativity and memory:

Made to Stick Learning

Urban legends, conspiracy theories, Internet memes, and popular advertising campaigns all have something in common: they know how to make information ‘stick’ – now if we can just apply some of these tools to education, we might really have something. The brothers Heath in Made to Stick have come to an interesting conclusion about creativity – not only is it not highly unpredictable or idiosyncratic, in fact it’s just the opposite – it’s systematic and that means it can be taught.

In an interesting Israeli study assessing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, researchers found that instruction in certain successful creative approaches improved the creativity and positive attitude ratings 50% higher than non-instructed controls.  In a similar vein, the Heaths began analyzing extra-sticky ideas and stories and found that they often shared the following qualities:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete Imagery
Credible
Emotion-Provoking
Stories

The pattern makes sense if you think about how the brain is wired to remember (novelty / surprise, imagery, association, emotions, stories) and in regards to simplicity, the brain’s limitations regarding working memory. The Heath’s have a nice Teachers Guide (see below), but the emphasis is on helping students to realize how using the SUCCES  approach can focus and target their communication, but we could also envision a different Teachers Guide providing suggestions and examples for how to help teachers focus their own communication.

Imagine if lessons plans incorporated simplicity, novelty, imagery, and compelling personal stories on a daily basis! Michael Sandel’s great Justice course (bottom video below) shares SUCCES elements and that might be a reason for its extraordinary popularity.

Made to Stick Teachers Guide pdf

Boys, Learning, Gaming & the Culture of Public Education

Great TED talk on how the culture of public schools clash with the learning style and cultural interests of many boys and inhibit their reading and writing performance. Not “anti-girl” or “pro-boy” but a “pro-learning” presentation.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Testing Well and Poorly

NCLB legislation has imposed “high stakes” testing with draconian consequences on public school districts under a system of continuously escalating benchmarks that are, in theory, likely to cause 100 % of all schools and districts to be rated as failing by 2014. Award winning schools, troubled schools, city schools, suburban and rural schools, schools in large states and those in small ones, schools that send students to the Ivy League after graduation and those where graduation rates are terrible. All of them.

The absurdity, wasted time and expense of NCLB testing has caused a wide political consensus, including very conservative advocates of rigorous testing in education, such as Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, E.D. Hirsch, Charles Murray and the American Enterprise Institute, to call on Congress to reform NCLB when it is due for reauthorization. Hopefully, this will be the case.

But not all testing is bad. Valid and reliable tests, used constructively and in the right proportion to other educational activities, can yield important data to improve student learning.

Tests are assessments of student the state of student knowledge and level of skills. They come basically in two forms, whether they are created by teachers, states or testing companies.

1. Summative:  Testing of student learning – i.e. final exam, SAT etc.

2. Formative: Testing for student learning – i.e. practice tests, AIMSweb.

Summative tests should be used very sparingly, as yardsticks or final measurements as they do not contribute to student learning. Formative testing, research shows us, should be a regular teaching-learning practice as they help reinforce learning, identify areas of student weakness and strength and give data for changing instructional practices.

From the Eide Neurolearning Blog, citing an educational study published in the prestigious journal Science:

Hot Seat Learning – Why Testing is Not All Bad

 

Testing at its best is:

- Test and Re-Test – retesting improves retention, not one-time only testing. So if re-testing rarely occurs in the classroom (i.e. quiz then test on same material), students should practice quizzing themselves, do practice problems, and correct their work in order to learn from their mistakes.
- Quiz Me: Retrieve, Don’t Just Elaborate Elaborative study may be necessary for students with memory difficulties (mnemonics, acronyms, etc.), but in a pinch – having to retrieve information will be a better strategy for committing information to long term memory
- Effort + Retrieval are Good If students had to struggle a bit before comprehending a sentence, they were more likely to remember it later (even though they would not recognize the struggle being any benefit)
- Repeated Re-testing and Avoiding the ‘Mastery Illusion’ When Karpicke studied effect studying, repeated re-testing was a effective strategy, but many students succumbed to the ‘mastery illusion’ putting away materials (i.e. they thought they ‘knew’) before they had really filed information into long-term memory

Tests should be our tools and not our masters.

RSA Animate with Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Educational Paradigms

A great animated overview of how public education is changing/needs to change in the 21st century:

Teaching and Cultivating “High Conceptual Thinkers”

The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, has long been one of my favorite blogs – here’s an example of why:

Gifted Big Picture / High Conceptual Thinkers

High Conceptual Thinkers are often…

- Omnivorous Learners: The world may be their oyster. Because of their quest for the “interesting”, they may love the Internet, read entire encyclopedias, or incessantly question adults about the real world, and so learn a little bit about everything. They may not hit ceiling scores on the conceptual knowledge IQ subtests because their omnivorous approach to figuring out the world around them.

- New is the Thing: HCTs prefer novelty (this is how they develop new conceptual categories) and are tickled by unconventional viewpoints or discoveries.

- Big Picture, Not Little Details: HCTs don’t always transition well to the “precision years” of late elementary, middle school, or beyond.

- Boredom is Death: Although using the ‘b’ word is notoriously a “no-no” word when talking to teachers, these kids rebel against what they see as boredom. Boredom may really seem like death to young HCTs.

If young HCTs seem “driven by a motor”, it’s intellectual restlessness and it can be a blessing as well as a burden.Not surprisingly, these kids often find classroom learning unsatisfying. After all, much of early education is focused on mastering basic skills or established facts, this is not what these kids are about. They’d rather be finding new worlds to conquer.

Although these kids are challenging to teach and parent, they are also a delight, and Dan Pink and others have suggested that the Conceptual Age is upon us and this pattern of thinking should be what we should be encouraging.

“High conceptual thinkers” – those with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, who see meta-level patterns and excel at constructing paradigms, extrapolation, synthesis and consilience are probably not a large percentage of the population and, most likely, they include eccentrics and cranks as well as highly accomplished individuals like E.O. Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Freeman Dyson, Nikola Tesla, Richard Feynman and probably figures like Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Winston Churchill, Robert Hooke, Da Vinci and numerous others.There seems to be some congruency between HCTs and the category of people known as polymaths, which raises the question of whether HCT are born or can be encouraged to develop such a cognitive profile from education and life experience.

The Eides offered a list of techniques for teaching children recognized as HCTs, but to my mind, these would also benefit a fairly broad section of students:

Teaching Big Picture / High Conceptual Thinkers

- Sky’s the Limit: If an idea or a lesson would be interesting to a wonky tech-y post-college 20-something, then it’s fine for the HCT. If a story or thing could be written about in Wired, Fast Company, or Mental Floss, then you’re probably on the right track. Sky should be the limit. Even some generally excellent gifted programs we’ve seen may grossly underestimate an HCT’s ability to think about advanced concepts. Also because HCTs develop their ideas through pattern recognition, they may want to see many examples and permutations, and complex presentations in order to help organize their ideas into simpler concepts.

- Play with Ideas: Conceptual thinkers like and need to play with ideas. Play expands ideas, creating a new opening for associations. Play means not micromanaging learning experiences – allowing some dabbling, and taking away some of the “high stakes every time” routine (e.g. not everything should be graded).

- Argue with Ideas We think many educational curricula wait way to long before they allow young HCTs to consider different viewpoints, learn how to frame arguments or actually debate, but this is often what HCTs love. If they don’t get it at school, make sure they get it home…maybe at the dinner table? Half of the 400 eminent men and women profiled in the Goertzels’ Cradles of Eminence came from “opinionated” families: “It is these homes that produce most of the scientists, humanitarians, and reformers.”

Compare these recommendations with the advice offered by nanotechnologist Dr. Eric Drexler of Metamodern:

Studying to learn about everything

To intellectually ambitious students I recommend investing a lot of time in a mode of study that may feel wrong. An implicit lesson of classroom education is that successful study leads to good test scores, but this pattern of study is radically different. It cultivates understanding of a kind that won’t help pass tests – the classroom kind, that is.

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
2. Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
5. Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
6. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

Intellectual curiosity would seem to be the axis that would make these approaches work effectively, and possibly, that’s what these techniques stimulate.