How Students Learn: Strategies for Teaching from the Psychology of Learning

I'm going to shoot for three things Bransford has written this great book it's an online book the references in the back and it's how people learn I'm going to take that information show you exactly how some of this applies in teaching learning situation but it's just basically three things and if you can do those three things huge impact in the classes number one are preconceptions people have preconceptions about how things work and his actual principle is if these preconceptions are not engaged they may whale fall it's grasp of them they may fail way it may well fail to grasp and implement the new knowledge what happens essentially is you just go back to the way things always have been so if you believe something to be true and an instructor tells you something else and you don't really engage those preconceived ideas oftentimes you learn the new stuff dump it for the test have it out there and then go right back to the way things were before so we have to be careful to pull that information out and to work with a little bit and so that's the first part I want to go through is how do we play around with and pull that information out now there's in this whole concept of learning there's there's lots of ways of looking at this one I just wanted to put out there very quickly this concept of the stage theory of learning and the reason I wanted to do that to show you how the brain actually processes information and kind of what's going on this is an extremely simplified model it came out in the 70s there's some people who say that it's not all that accurate I don't totally agree with that I think there are framework works pretty well but it's very simplified and I'm tell you why it doesn't include lots of things after that but let's just go into this very very quickly there's all kinds of stuff going around you at any given moment now again trying to tie all the stuff back in the classroom your human mind is an amazing thing it processes all kinds of information when you walked into this building in fact when you got up and came here today if you think about all of the stuff that's your brain processed in that period of time the cars you passed on the road stopping for lights pedestrians walking across cane as people walking by you what they were wearing what they were saying if they were talking conversations you had very quickly this morning what food you ate this morning all of this stuff that's going on at this moment in this room there's the ceiling tiles the walls the floors the place you're sitting the people around you just a buzz of stuff and basically what we have to do as humans is figure out what do we need that's important and after we figure out what's important that will start down the process but if it's not important if it's not something we process it doesn't matter how many times you see it it doesn't go in anywhere so real quick when I thought about the other day is craziest thing talking to somebody about something all of you have seen over and over and over again but never really processed it for most of you and for one of those that I can come up with is your your speedometer on your car you've looked at your speedometer on your car depends on how long you've had your car maybe thousands of times in a given trip across town you glance at it all the time to see what your speed is okay so you've seen it you've seen it over and over and over again the top number on that odometer or the speedometer okay think about that for just a minute how many of you know what your top number is I mean just okay now ask okay how many of your probability with it no no no here's what I'm after how many of you just know it you say I know what that number is raising again real quickly all right so that's use and then how many of you don't know it raise your hand real quickly okay that's really cool now most of you by far don't know what that number is and yet you've looked at it over and over and over again so the point is in this part right here the external stimulus it never really hit yours it did hit the sensory memory part we'll get that second it came in and you have glanced at it but you never did anything with it after that now odds are when you get into your car today you'll look at it and say holy mackerel that's a big number on my car I Drive a Honda Accord it's 160 now my car has never to my knowledge gone 160 miles an hour I don't know and I don't think it can if any of you would like to test it um now that's a really bad idea all the way around forget it but anyway um yes quick oh okay that's true no that's a really good one in fact yeah go ahead now mine's not cuz I actually it someone was had gotten to a fight with me about three days ago about that they said that's kilometres said no the kilometres are in blue they're underneath these are white letters that are on top and the other thing I need to tell you from this morning I mention is I got terrible a DD so every once in a while I'm just saying hey let's take a minute and go do this other thing you've just mentioned the concept of thinking of something else if you want to send me an email I can tell you how to do this quickly tell every I friend of mine did this and I only saw it done one time it was so cool for the first day of class to get across to the students that there everyone's processing things differently so take out a piece of paper and here's it and don't do it we're not going to do it in here but just tell me here's the thing you can't ask me any questions if you don't know just do it the best you can ready okay so take out a piece of paper fold it long along the long way fold it in half please I'm sorry everyone had to have their eyes closed the entire time everyone's eyes were closed she said fold it the long way in half now fold it in half again okay some people fold it like that some people fall like this then after he did the second one he says okay now rip off one the upper right-hand corner so then you know you ripped off the right-hand corner it's okay now rip off the lower left-hand corner okay put on solar ham now unfold it one time and fold it the other direction for one time fold another direction and he had like a series of just unfolded fold it ripped the corner off and then he said okay everybody open up your eyes and pull up the paper and people open up their eyes pull up the paper like this in a room of 40 people there was 40 different looks the papers had different parts ripped off and it had been folded differently and it was a quick one in terms of how you process things and how it goes through and it was a really quick demonstration for the whole group but it turned that whole idea what goes in so here's what have all this information around us sensory memory the things that we attend to for just a second those get into this very very short memory and if you don't do something with them it's forgotten often times two to five seconds it's gone somebody asked you a quick question which way are the restrooms they're around the corner boom it's pretty much gone at that moment is just forgotten if you do process it it goes into what's called a working memory now the reason I mentioned this is and I'll show you in a few seconds how this can happen is if students are kind of half listening to you and half paying attention in class but not processing the material it's gone very quickly most of what you say in class most of what I say today will be gone within two to five seconds and it's just gone the whole clue is can you pick up the important stuff and so part of how people learn and how we process information is you need to help them to figure out out of all of this stuff what should get processed more and that could be done many different ways students have terrible time for instance taking notes you ever notice that one they're not good note takers I again I try to help my students whenever they struggle with stuff so I tell my students on the first day of class especially the first level students the intro students there are four things I want you to watch for and if you see them take notes number one is if I repeat something write it down if I repeat it write it down number two if I spell it for you 1w undt good idea to write it down if I repeat it if I spell it if I actually put it on the notes if I write it down on a board or if I have a list of five items up here write those down if I've written them down for you write them down by the way I don't I do give I'm sorry I do give my PowerPoint slides ahead of time it has very little information on them I want them to have the framework I don't want them to have all the notes because then they don't really have to pay attention in class but if I come with seven items if you don't have them write them down the last one is if there's a dramatic pause then you write it down because I'm giving you time to write so if I repeat it I spell it I write or if I pause write it down and I do that because I want to help them for processing there's other things I can do I myself doing it workshops all the time I can sometimes make some gestures oh this is so cool now that's a total trying to get a person to go from sensory memory into working memory catching the attention having people do demonstrations turn to your neighbors anything you can do to draw their attention to something will help get that into this working memory and potentially long-term memory David Letterman I've learned many of my little tricks in class from him if you watch him if you have it before watch him for how he draws your attention he'll do things like listen to this listen to this it's one of his favorite phrases listen to this he's doing a monologue why in the middle of a mile long would you say listen to this hopefully you listen to the whole thing well because in the middle of a monologue it's easy to turn and talk to the person next to you or to start trading some tests or doing something when you hear the phrase listen to this it draws your attention this is really important here's something you'd really like something you can do to draw their attention so whatever you can do to draw the attention otherwise it can just be lost in a blur of activity here even in this working memory here and some people call it short-term memory working memory it has some different names that all mean different things there's arguments that it lasts like 20 30 seconds there's other arguments that it can last a couple of days I've got a couple of things to show you I differentiate that which can be remembered for 24 hours and I put that mostly into a general category like this and then beyond the 24 hours after about 24 hours you learn you lose forget almost everything that you've seen which is good if you think about it you don't need to keep track of all that stuff when you stop and go to order something for lunch and you look up at the board and you're staring at the board you I don't know what to eat today all right you know I'm on a diet I'll have the bacon ranch club sandwich if you pick out the thing it's my diet oh I haven't lost any weight but I'm on a diet okay so I picked that up an hour later but certainly the next day there is no reason for me to remember everything I've looked up on that board I may have been able to keep track of it for even a couple of minutes maybe 20 minutes but then it should go away so it kind of goes if you repeat something over and over again it can stay in there a little longer but rote memory won't get it in the long-term memory either I'll show you that in a second too but if we do that code it we can get into long-term memory long-term memory lasts an indefinite amount of time we don't even know what the limit is on this one because there are people who are very very elderly individuals who can't reliably remember things from their childhood that means memories can be there 50 60 70 years other memories are not in there there's a question of whether you can retrieve them so what we're going to talk about today and I tried to do this all in about 10 minutes so again spending something I'd spend weeks on class do it about 10 minutes is we want to get stuff into long-term memory and then get it so that it can come back out because if you can't get it out of long-term memory it is of no real value to you kind of like a library out here if you take away a older person here if you take away the card catalogs if we take away the organizational system shake the library a little bit so the books get mixed up a bit it doesn't matter that they're here if you can't get to them so being able to pull the material out really good evidence that the best way of getting stuff I learned term memory is to practice pulling out a long term memory so we'll hit some of that too so in your class need to get the information to the students in a way that they can understand it then help them to focus on it enough that they can then process it once they process it they get it into their long-term memory once it's in their long-term memory have them practice it getting it back out if you can do that life is easy now there's some problems this is Dee Fink and Dee Fink wrote this book on creating significant learning experiences and I bring it up for a quick reason it's a good book as a 2003 book it's a good book because he's saying if you all of these things come into play and there's I think there's more to quite frankly but at least all of these things come into play and they're different components of actually significant learning of learning foundational knowledge that software you learn something is just one piece of it and I guess what I want to just point out quickly is that we have to be careful that we don't forget the rest of the stuff so for instance learning how to learn is an important component of learning is learning how to learn factor some great old psychic experiments and I did some of these when I was in graduate school too if you have a motivated person first of all they have to be motivated but if they're motivated and then you want to pay them for their responses so for half of you're all motivated to learn something you want to learn this stuff for half of you I say I will give you ten dollars for every right answer and for you folks you don't know about the ten dollars I'd say just do the best you can there's no significant difference between the two groups there is a significant difference if I teach you guys how to learn here's a way to process the material that can actually help you to retrieve it and for you guys just work really hard at it and what we find is that knowing how to learn really helps so there's just that little chunk in there that that learning how to learn so teaching your students how to learn is something that's really important although you know I've done it myself I fell into many years of walk into the classroom just assuming they made it through high school they got into a pretty good school they must know how to learn be real careful with that caring creating that human dimension component if students know whether you know whether you believe whether you care for them or not because perception is just as important as reality it makes a big difference I've actually had students who have skipped other classes so that they could study extra for my class which is pretty cool I've had them skip my class before to write papers for other classes because they didn't want to disappoint the other instructor I mean it's there's a huge component there about caring in the classroom and it is a big thing this this whole human dimension we're all humans and because we have all kinds of stuff that comes into it there's lots of stuff going on there um I throw the affective component into there I mean if something tragic happened in a family and the student sitting in the classroom they're not going to be processing anything i class of 200 one time I had a student come in I just happened to notice him he came in and he looked really lethargic and he sat down class was just about ready to start I ran up and I happened to know his name I had a two hundred I try to learn about thirty to forty names at least and I happen to know his and I went up in as John what's going on you look a little disheveled he said well my dad went in for a checkup they found out he has a tumor in his brain and they're like going to operate on him tomorrow morning just found this out I said for crying out loud go home he said well my mom's going to come over or not the mom but somebody's gonna come over and pick me up I don't have a car and he says I have nothing I can do for the next like 4 hours and he says you know all things being equal I'd just soon be here this is a student in a math lecture that thought that's we'd rather be because he felt you know it felt more regular to him but there is no way and I told him I said you're not gonna process anything today that's okay hanging out as long as you want and leave whenever you feel you need to and he was there about half the time and he left but all kinds of things going on by the way have to be really careful student called me a few years ago and said I'm can I take a makeup exam this is the night before the test about 6 o'clock before the test and I said well so what's going on so what my cat just died and I don't really think I can take the test tomorrow now I have to admit some of you are cat lovers you get it just like that I've never I'm barely a cat licker and it is true cats will gravitate toward the person in the room that likes them the least I can't tell if they want to win you over or if they just want to irritate the crap out of you whichever I think they're cats they want to irritate you but um so I caught something in her voice and I said could you tell me real quickly um you know is this are you okay and I worded it like that she said yeah I am be okay I said well obviously you've had this cat for a long time and she I mean she's a first-year college student said we've had it my whole life cats will live to be that long she went to college she took her cat with her her whole life she's had this cat and it just died it was a member of the family so do you have anyone you can call and I tried to lighten the mood a little bit because I do a lot of humor and I said do you ever may you can call she said well my mom's out doing such-and-such my dad isn't really a cat person I could call my sister we talked about everything but she's no help at all she irritates me I said okay well if you need to chat with me you can maybe you want to go to the Counseling Center I said but certainly you can take a makeup on the test if your sister passes away however you take it on time she says that's a deal sir so her sister it obviously irritated her a lot but a lot of stuff is going on in the classroom so the point is again I like to bring these up because as you walk into the classroom if you keep track of the fact that they're individuals there's really you fall into an out-group bias kind of thing we say oh you know what students are like I do a workshop on millennial students there's a millennial students yeah they drive me nuts you know what you've just done is taken the entire group of students drop them in a category of millennial students and treated them all as if they're the same so in the classroom you have to be really careful about this then there's little issues of integration how do we integrate the material how do we apply it one of my favorite ones is hearing people say whoo I thought my students really understood the material then they took a test and they bombed it the whole class bombed it now say so tell me about the test what was on the test say well you know there's some basic information and some application kinds of things I can usually have to tease that one out but if their application questions knowing material doesn't mean that you can apply it they're different domains so what people will do is they'll make statements like I thought my students knew it but they can't apply any of it say well yeah that can happen when you say you thought they knew it they probably do they may very well know it if you want to know if they know it test them for knowledge if you want to know if they can apply it test them for application but don't teach knowledge and then test application big problem so just be careful with that so for example I do in my stats class all the time first day of stats class I say listen you may not believe this but people who collect numbers they collect data are very important for all of us can you think right now and jot down on a piece of paper everything you can think of in the next minute about how people who collect numbers impact your life on a daily basis and for my interview you folks could probably make a long list for my students they stare at me for the longest time and they look down well you know there's the census takers a couple others where what are some other ones what some good guys got a couple good taxes taxes would be good Hospital data sports oh that's great sports stuff all right here's hmm banking is good okay then what I do is I tell them you know what I find intriguing the human brain and how we interact with the world Gustav Fechner wrote some stuff back in 1860 about how we take representations of our mind and quantify them for instance how bright these lights should be if they're too bright it would be blinding but if they're too dim it wouldn't help us how tall should that terribly air be how tall should the desk be how wide should the chair be how wide should that door be how how fast should the elevator door open and how fast should they close where should the sensors be okay somebody sticks their arm in there hmm books how big should a book actually be because if it's too big you can't carry it around if it's too small you can't see it ah people who collect data do a lot of stuff don't they then I pause for a minute say now write down anything you can think of that as a data collector may have had an impact on your life and all of a sudden they'll write like 90 miles an hour all I've done is give them an example so that's that part of just giving application examples so that's what we're after now I do I do the same thing I thought before I got to be careful the time because we don't have a whole lot here I want to do the first part is kind of lecturing and I have some active stuff for us to do learning styles I want to be very careful with learning styles here and I'm not going to ask you what your learning styles are here's the deal a few years ago psychology came up with this concept of they would take a team of roughly four people and have them investigate something that's a really big issue but really investigate it well and these are like four of the biggest names in psychology right now doing research bob bork is doing tons really good stuff pastors doing some I mean they're publishing all over the place the question essentially was learning styles right now two or three years ago you could have come to a workshop or you would I could have helped you with how I design my class to help with learning styles read this um turns out that there's only about three or four studies that have ever been done collecting any data on learning styles and that concept of meshing teaching to a students learning style we all know how great that is there's no data on it except for those couple of studies in the studies they found out there was no impact it doesn't help to teach to someone's learning style mostly because it appears that people don't actually have learning styles what it appears is that they have learning preferences learning preferences come from a lifetime of experiences but a sty would mean I learn this way but not this way so if a student tells you they're an auditory learner it means they really need to learn auditorally but they can't really learn visually Kin aesthetically in the other areas or that they somehow do way better when it's presented this way then when it's presented the other way in a controlled way and then they have to be better at this than someone who's a kinesthetic learner who's have an auditory material and when you really test this out it doesn't work anymore here's what's really neat about this one is it does work if it makes sense so for example if you're teaching someone to play the clarinet you could show them photographs of the clarinet let them listen to symphonies of clarinets you could let them study books about clarinets they could learn the music learn all the fingerings they could do all of that stuff and never touch a clarinet then you hand them the clarinet and say okay the concerts tomorrow go play of obviously they couldn't do it you have to be a kinesthetic learner when it's a kinesthetic activity riding a bike requires you to ride the bike however if you're learning how to write a report and there's blocks where you lay out where's the topic sentence go and then where does the major issue goes and where's the conclusion and I'm moving things around and I'm saying this is fabulous because I'm a kinesthetic learner and I move it all around that actually doesn't help me learn it any better than other ways of teaching the other thing is we have to be careful we've left some out this is a nasal learner struggling with an odourless textbook this report indicates by the way I believe if you read this sometime that 70% of students would rather smell a term paper than write one and here's my favorite my child is not super Weber said there's simply no way for him to thrive in a school that only caters to traditional students who absorbed concepts by hearing reading seeing discussing drawing building or acting out that's no way my 15 year old Chloe couldn't sustain her interest in academics and as a result she would goof off with her friends and get in trouble now I realize all those d's enough did not represent a failure on my daughter's part but rather her schools fail to provide an appropriate nasal based curriculum that's the issue that we get into is it if we and this is one I get really concerned about learning styles makes tons of sense and now I'm bring this up in this whole workshop here because it's preconceived ideas getting those out looking at those playing around with them a little bit but we have to be careful in terms of what we're doing and teaching students it makes a lot of sense to say I tend to do better with visual material I'm a visual learner but that's a little bit like somebody saying you know I tend to get sad at times I'm manic-depressive and we would be really nervous about people who self diagnosed that way or look at this spot I have on my skin I think I have a melanoma and I better get checked out or this is probably indicative of some liver problem that I have we get nervous about people self diagnosing medical stuff self diagnosing psychological stuff but we're fine with students rolling in and saying I'm a visual learner my response now is good for you so are the rest of your classmates we're all visual learners I mean when you look around you learn that way so a picture of graph is very very important the tricky spot is be careful that we're not letting our students disengage the learning process because you're not teaching in a way in which they can learn that's the danger if the students say I can't really learn from that person because I'm a visual learner and they don't do any graphs there disengaging from the whole thing so that's the danger we have to be careful of so which is something to watch out for now real quickly the other part I want to do on this one is the concept of how we process information Mueller and directed a great little study and here's how the study work you solve anagrams in solving these anagrams and this is going to be the thing on the bottom of page three that's got the dotted line across it here's how the study rolls first of all we break you into three groups for group number one everybody gets these anagrams I should slow down and tell you this so you take these and mix them up and come up with new words so mug would become gum see like that night becomes thing very good we don't anybody to get hurt well just these are the answers so we give the anagrams when you're done doing the exams we tell you either good for you for you you must be sparked or good for you you must have worked really hard so you get the feedback they either just a well done general feedback worked hard or you're smart those are the three conditions then we come back with another list this list is hard for everybody so everybody does really really terrible on this one these are just a couple of examples here I like teaching is cheating that's pretty cool then after you do this one we basically say ouch ouch and ouch you know it's just it was really rough we don't all we want to know now is we want you to experience failure and then what we're really after is coming back for a third one after you've been successful and I said here's your feedback then you failed now how hard do you work the next time now we're looking at some self-efficacy issues and some other stuff how hard do you work on getting these there are three groups again the group that was the good for you just the plain old good for you group they look like this now what I'd like you to do is take that graph of yours and just draw a line in where you think the effort based feedback group would be and where you think that the work hard group would be so just draw a line in here somewhere for effort and a line in here somewhere for smart that's it sorry smart and effort all right for sake of timing let's just keep moving here then so did they look pretty similar yeah come up with differences than different ways of these here's the one I like to do and I do this with my classes all the time give some some data or some expectation or some you know the set up for some finding and then have them compare this is the whole part that brans was talking about getting preconceived ideas out here's the problem if you just give the results here's the study here's the results here's the structure and here's the findings whatever most people tend to say yeah it's about what I would talk almost everybody assumes that whatever pops up there's about what they would have figured they also look around the room and figure we all know this stuff and I'll tell you from teaching intro psych the number of times that people say you know this is all common sense and when it's all common sense you know it doesn't make sense that we spent a lot of time just tell us what you want to learn and we'll learn it then I started playing with a little game where I would I would hand out something to say here's a here's a description of your personality I have a little test you take you turn in the test the next day I give you a little personality description then I ask you on a scale of one to ten how well does this fit you you tend to be outgoing at time although at other times you're more reserved you feel very intelligent but there are times when you also feel a little bit out of place you don't know if you really fit in well but you've got some really good friends but you're curious about how well some of your friends would come to your aid if you really needed them you all know where I'm going with this everybody had exactly the same feedback on a scale of 1 to 10 they all give it like sevens eights and nines have you heard that the horoscopes change signs now we found this new calendar or whatever happened I got to read more about this my daughter just told me the other day she's distraught because she's she's not the same sign that she used to be I came here she went from Libra does Virgo or something but in her head it makes more sense but she'd always believed it was right now it so if there was ever a time when people should be dissuaded from believing in these astrological signs it's to find out you've been living for 40 years under the wrong sign and their immediate responses this makes so much more sense so we have to be careful with these things so by comparing these with others what happens is not only do you not look up there and say yeah that's about what I would have done but you also can go to the neighbor and say whoa why did you do that so it did it started some great conversations real quickly so here's what I ended up being effort goes there people who did poorly after the first one who were told you must have worked hard and then you failed will work significantly harder the next time the people who are told you must be smart the second time represents the fact that they can't do it and they actually work less hard I saw one that was dead-on like that and the issue here is if I don't possess this thing why should I put energy into it if you could do me a favor as my colleagues we're all teaching colleagues here please start calling people when they start calling on them or calling them out I guess when they say oh I don't do math we can't just laugh and say yeah I'm not good at it either essentially I don't do math means I don't possess the entity that would allow me to be successful in mathematics and if that's true then you could set it aside but if it's not true maybe you haven't put the energy in necessary to do well which would be the effort part the effort part means it's incremental I work and work and work and get better at it this means I got it or I don't we in the States in the United States tend to teach our kids effort based not effort I'm sorry kind of smartness based stuff is you're bright or you're not bright other cultures tend to do it another way yes in variation in terms of oh the variability within group variability yeah these are the means I have to go back and look but it's a real clear differentiation significant but I don't know what the variability is I have to go back to look or you can pull it I mean this is me learned Dweck so yeah but it's it's interesting and this has been demonstrated in other areas over and over and over again the concept of an entity based curricula or entity based idea or an incremental based and here's what makes it really rough for some of you in this room you do pick up things faster than others for a host of reasons it may be that starting out very very young you are reinforced for lots of mathematical things you're done and now you tend to pick up math very quickly those can happen drawing you may have drawn a lot as a child and now you draw pretty well but it's really rare and I know that they put them in the news all the time it's really rare to have somebody who picks up a pen and pencil for the first time and starts to draw seriously and draws a masterpiece doesn't really happen mathematics people don't all of a sudden just spew out great mathematical concepts so it comes from lots of effort and lots of work however some people do for a host of reasons pull together things better than others I have one daughter who's got an amazing just picked she picks up pitch so well dad I don't know that she I don't know that she's ever been trained in that area she just does that well however she picks up the pitch very quickly she sings in the choir the choir teacher keeps saying oh you're a natural here and natural and I kept saying stop doing that don't tell her she's a natural tell her she's working really hard she's got some good basic foundations but working hard at it because the way I finally got her to stop by the way the choir teacher I said that's great Mary's not going to be coming to class anymore and she said why not I said well she doesn't have time to waste it on your class this was such a great conversation teaches but but what I said well you're not teaching or anything I'd really rather have her focus in areas where she's learning so but she's learning so much in here I said no I have talked to you many times I keep telling you she's working hard at your class you keep telling her that she's a natural if she's a natural she doesn't have to work at it why would she come to class I think we're just going to go get a recording deal she paused she said well she's not ready for that I said will she be if she works hard at it she says all right you win she won a game but this concept she kept throwing out there so we have to be really careful how we do this and so but the demonstration I showed you in turning to your neighbors that's the preconceived ideas getting that information out and that's the incremental stuff there and you can go online actually in Carol Dweck explains the whole thing yes now we got one generation I think we flush them then we'll be okay again um no I you got to do that one side I have takes you know one of my favorite old jokes is the real reason that psychologists have kids is you don't have to deal with IRB committees no the really the nice thing we have is the way the human brain just kind of works and kind of like that horoscope thing where it's like oh good now I can you know this really works well for my life now is that they can still be taught but we are raising a generation that we're telling a couple of things to number one is that you're a winner no matter what and I got to tell you just as a quick side note and see some people immediately freeze when I say this but I also say please watch context but I looked at my daughter one time and I said how's it feel to be a loser and that will make most people cringe if I'm not careful to think that I would look at my kid and say how does it feel to be a loser I think that's important once in a while and the one time I did it I just couldn't tell you quickly here she wanted she signed up for a race at school she's in third grade she signed up for it every day after school I'd say come on let's go run let's go practice running let's go practice the start let's practice coming out of the blocks let's practice practice no I'm busy I don't want to do it don't do it day of the race came on the day of the race she came in last place she was as far as I could tell the only kid who did absolutely nothing to prepare for this and maybe the others didn't do much but she had no she had no natural proclivities in Syria so she finished the race and I said honey I love you but I'm just curious how does it feel like right now to be a loser she said I hate it I said do you hate it enough to work hard at being a not loser she said yes I said do to be okay if you if we sign up for this race next year and we come back and kick those butts of those other kids she's yeah Danny I want to do that I felt good about that moment then the trophies were given out you guys know how this gig goes first place second place third place 4th place there's eight kids fifth place sixth place tries really hard and you know most motivated or most interested or something like a most most willing to show up was the trophy she came back from the trophy thing just beaming from ear to ear says hey I got a trophy I said well that's two congratulations I said I actually have never won a trophy in my life she's well I got one now can we put on the fireplace I said yeah now when do you want to get practicing for next year so what are you talking about look I got a trophy her whole mentality changed too she was a winner which meant she didn't have to work at it so I bring that up because we have changed that mentality so that is changing but that's one that we have the other one we do have is this whole concept of it's you have it or you don't and yes I mean the answer is you certainly can still change that you have to demonstrate what hard work can do basically get them to do the work and see the outcomes but it's really tricky to do that when it when other people are telling them you're naturals and we're talking about mathematics earlier in like a class where students have a really hard time with math getting them to believe they can do it is the first huge hurdle that you have so and it does so good that's good yeah just anyways it's getting them to actually doing it is really really important okay here's another one I want to just try here real quick I I do this exercise every day every semester on the first day of class so I want to try it real fast here everybody get a penny here don't look at anybody else's when they're doing this all by yourself if the task is a simple one just pick out the real US penny don't I phone it don't google it don't pull a penny out just just look at this and take it and just pick a penny if you decide you do want to do this in your class let me know now I'll actually PD I'll send you the PDF of the penny good again working alone all by yourselves now either circle the letter under the penny or write the letter somewhere you got to commit to one coin so now I'm going to ask you real quickly to raise your hand on which coin please don't look around the room and think oh I wonder if anybody else picked this coin that's just sad just be proud and pick your coin okay now I want to show you real quickly something of the way the brain works here all right ready on your mark get set how many is any A's custom a is good B's B's C's C's DS very good E's excellent s very good jeez excellent H's eyes that's eyes good J's very good K's ELLs yells good em stends the ends or O's all right not bad that's eight different coins it's about 30 people here who just picked eight different coins of something you've looked at thousands of times don't look at a penny yet hurry put that away no don't look at it you can do it put it down okay next thing real fast and we're going to try to do this I don't have a whole lot of time but I want to try this next step in about groups of about four or five see if you'd come to a consensus on which coin you would pick in some small groups anybody in here find out that their colleagues we're not as smart as they are usually you get into groups and you're thinking how in the world can you be picking J so we got it but you keep that to yourself okay here we go um let's see how many how many groups come up with all around tumor could a groups holy mackerel well we can that's a lot faster then so all except for you guys where did you come up with all I try you look at the penny that's true god that's pretty good now here's what's really important and this is a really big thing a is the right answer I noticed the one person in your group that was so quick to come to consensus left see he keep convinced they all picked eyes anyway okay so here's what's really important though how many of you seriously how many of you had I liked the very first time on your own just raise your hands quickly I'm sorry eh okay sorry Hey so I ended up with like one two three four five there's like six people seven people in the room who had a and yet after literally three or four minutes of talking you all the rest of you said okay by whatever measure you came to an agreement that a was the answer you know when I talk to my students about the value of him of doing group work and really talking to the colleagues this makes a great demonstration for that it was a couple of minutes and a lot of learning that happens and so the point there is that that can be very very valuable it's also a great icebreaker that ties in with the course material there's other stuff there's also some research out there which indicates and I think you could probably confirm it for yourselves icebreakers don't tend to be a real a favorite activity when they have nothing to do with the material that you're actually breaking into and so to have people do something that's not related at all is is one that you have to be careful of there's so many icebreakers out there that can tie into the material break the ice while you're breaking the material down a little bit too there's a great statement out there I've heard it over and over again people say I don't spend a lot of times with details in my class I want to do critical thinking the problem is if you don't teach them some details they have nothing to critically think about and what you have to be really careful with and the penny one kind of demonstrates that too is if if they don't have some knowledge there to kind of build from I mean that whole scaffolding thing everything else how do you build on stuff so you have to get them the knowledge the other statement that I have a really hard time with is people forget about how do you discount your own knowledge when you give that advice so the question of the point here is for instance classical conditioning I can do this quiz I can do this fairly easily I teach classical conditioning over and over and over again I have many many years now when I teach it I could say don't worry about what an unconditioned stimulus conditioned stimulus unconditioned response and conditioned respect don't worry about those you can look those up let's just think about the essence of credit of classical conditioning I'm using this as an example because it should be able should work well to confuse most of you if we did that if I said just look those up let's just talk critically about classical conditioning so for instance if you go into your grandmother's house and it smells like baked goods and every time you go there you have fun and and you relax and no matter how stressful life is it just feels good later in life you could go into a house that's for sale and walk in and smell baked goods and suddenly you're not stressed anymore see and that's because and all of a sudden I'm getting that because of the classical conditioning stuff but you'd sit back say okay but I don't understand what's going on here the real truth of it is is that most of us are born with very few things that we do automatically but there are some things which is an unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus I'm sorry an unconditioned stimulus in the unconditioned response the unconditioned stimulus is something that triggers a response on you like a loud noise could cause you to jump on conditioned stimulus loud noise jumping as the conditioned stimulus now when you pair an unconditioned stimulus with a conditioned stimulus the conditioned stimulus was previously neutral will become to elicit a response upon multiple pairings so that you can actually get a conditioned response which will become close to an unconditioned response although not exactly the same think of that Grandma example got it yeah okay great dr. Z you're a genius and I don't know nothing I mean that's the type of thing you're all of us on doing so when you say to the students don't worry about this you can look at stuff up be careful because if it's a foundational piece of knowledge you have you might not realize how important it is so figure out what do you really have to know in the class teach that the deep foundational knowledge and then they can build later but I get real nervous when people say when I hear them say oh don't worry about that you can just look that up also the retrieving retrieving information is very important now as students are learning and going to things and I'm sorry I got like eight minutes left here so we'll finish up this last piece here we have to be careful because it's easy to think that you understand something and you're getting it when you're actually not so something like this which is on the sheet last learning fling globe and Priven were in the bird light rep range loopy cables gleaming burly grep suddenly did he start so moved in to fling about trust ribbon Glade so triangle def they chive that did he struts all his trestle is tuning in your grap okay here's what's neat and your students can do this you looking at your sheets will just do this as a group let's do a little quiz don't answer real fast just mate wait a second but wait I deserve a twinge so when did fling gold Obon Priven truck well this answer is a group here when did fling gold Obon Priven trepan when was it last Ernie very very good what kind of cables did fling gold Obon Priven trepan ready wait a minute okay what kind of cables were they gloopy very good what did the did East wrestle due to fling gold Doubs tress now wait a second what did the did he struts will do okay ready okay as a group what he do moved right boof suddenly well we take I would fill in the bank I'd take boost or boost into number four what was Priven x' reaction at that point at that point ribbon did what great very good now what's basically happening here is you're answering the questions and everything is going fine and then we get to question five what do you imagine happen next let's see the dentist restless tuning in your graph now what all right if it were me taking the quiz I'd say I'm going to go on to the next question I'll come back based on the incidence in the story why do you think fling gold Obon Priven went to the bird link are they likely to return why or why not hmm now here's where it becomes really tricky if if I gave you 10 points apiece for your quiz and you had memorized that you would have gotten one through four just nailed those points there and then suppose I didn't use a grading rubric bad on my part but I don't like them so I'm not going to use them see I'm just tongue-in-cheek I would always use them if I gave you a couple points for five and three points for six because you wrote a lot of stuff you'd get 40 plus 2 plus 3 is 45 45 out of 60 45 out of 60s is 75 percent on my class 75 percent would get you a C and of course that would prompt some of you to come to my office one of my favorites hey dr. Z I got a C on my test and like I don't get C's I hear that one the things I would love some time to have a conversations about the things you can't say to students because this one would be you do now you can't do that instead what we have to do is we have to say I used to say well you know classes up until this point we're probably lower level classes and you could you know you probably did well because you power through them and this is a really tricky class so a C represents a good foundation knowledge you just have to work harder you see that's wrong if you've memorized stuff you don't really get so now what I'm talking about and this is under that framework of developing competence a person has to have a deep understanding now what I ask my students when they come in for this is I say first of all I ask them how long they studied how do they study how are things going in life I ask couple those questions and I say so what do you think about the material and it's my favorite thing to do now the number of students will say what do you mean I'll say what do you think about it say well I don't know what you mean what do I think about it and we play that game for just a little time and that's usually the ones who don't get it and then they'll say well I'll tell you the truth I don't really understand it say well you must be working really hard in this class then say well I am I've read the chapter like four times I make up flashcards say yeah you can tell you're working really hard because if you don't understand it you're getting a C you're really doing well on that portion of the tests what you're not doing well on are these things where you have to understand the material so I don't need to understand this material to answer blooms low-level kinds of questions so just making sure you you see if they're getting it or not it's a really really important thing to do and that's it just just getting down to the foundation of really understanding the material oftentimes this this can come out in homework problems by the way great studies out there a person teaching calculus said he used to give this students five problems all the time he switched now he gives them four problems and on the fifth one he says tell me what you think about this in a math course tell me what you think about these when I do variability it's kind of like I might mess with the range I might mess with the sample size to calculate a variability and what I'm trying to get the students to kind of understand is that if if you have a smaller sample size or has a bigger sample size the numbers are really spread out versus not spread out I wanted to get that what my students used to do is they they plow through the formula after they did one or two they'd say oh I know how to do those now I'm moving on and that's the tricky spot I'm moving on because I got it down enough and that's when you say okay look at the four problems what was I going for here was I really trying to teach you and seeing if they can get that it really makes a big difference so by the way I do realize I made one other tiny mistake on that coin one got excited to get to this other one here started talking about that on this coin one I also forgot to tell you I'd like to do this in the first day of class because you know why this was difficult why'd you have a trip of picking out the right coin it's the same thing as the fling held open ribbon kind of thing is in processing information right there's too many choices they don't look it often but if I had a handful of change and I threw it out in the room and I said this is all us coins how many pennies you could glance over and say three you would know immediately what do you need to know that something is a penny color and size if it's this big in copper color that's all you need so what happens kind of like the fling Gold Oban Priven if you've got if you've read it a little bit you think you got it you move on you say I've got it good enough color and size I do this on the first day of class and say you know what if I did this in a coin collecting conference people could pick off those coins easily here you know it's copper in this big that's enough in this class copper in this big not good enough on the test you have to know details and so what happens here is experts you know the details you're going to become experts you have to pay attention to details and I tell people that because once you have enough information copper in this big your brains should move on think about that in terms of how to get to a certain store if I tell you how to get to Walmart from here and I give you the big landmarks that's all you need that's all you want if I start telling you how many trees there are how many side streets a lot of details you say that's details I don't need those details so it's the receiver who decides that's enough details so what you have to do is explain to the students you need to know details in here so once you do that and it's 124 so we're like out of just about a time I'm going to explain one last study pretty much done this study is one of my new favorites car pick and wrote agur this is a whole series of stuff called desirable difficulties there's undesirable difficulties in learning there's also desirable things sometimes making it harder actually increases learning this one is done this way it's a study where you have four test periods our study periods you read through material and you got five minutes to read through a passage of material then a few minutes later you read to it again then again and then again so you've read through the passage four times and then you take a quiz over the material that's this one sorry and I messed up here it's um oops if I go ahead it's going to show you what the day this is like 83% this runs down to I believe 40% I'll show you the graph on the next one but I forgot to include those apologize runs about forty to eighty eighty percent after four trials this group they go through three study trials then they take a quiz over the material do not get feedback on the quiz then they take a quick test over the material the same as these people so they've only studied three times and they scored a little less I think that's seventy eight this group actually studies the material only one time then takes a quiz no feedback takes a quiz no feedback and takes a quiz and then they take the five minute later test they tend to score the worst of the three here's what's really cool about this come back a week later the group that did all studies has lost most of what they learned I think that's a two to one factor it goes from like eighty three percent down to forty percent the group that took one practice test and then took the quiz five minutes later and now is taking a week later it's gone on that far and the most amazing thing was the one that did almost all tests had almost no decrement at all huge differences here at least these two are huge differences now what's happening here is they're practicing at retrieval the argument is if you want people to learn things they have to practice pulling them back out we know about the physiology of this two is called long-term potentiation when you start to fire neuronal pathways they fire more easily who is the first president United States BAM the pathway has fired so many times for you it just fires so the point here is get them to practice it retrieving the reason you want to do this is it students can study study study study study study study study and still not be able to produce it for an exam and I'll have students will come by and say I read the chapter like four times I'll say what did you quiz like a roommate do you guys quiz back and forth did you make up flashcards and go through them did you do some way of pulling that out well no I just kept reading it well your reading is it not going to pull it back out and those are the actual numbers the study study study went from eighty three to forty three the study test test test went from 71 to 61 I'm sorry was down to 43 was the percent forgetting eighty three to forty this when 71 to 61 I mean just huge differences well if you can get them to read it four times that's good but the big thing is getting them to just test pull the material back out and that was just about all except for the last piece which doesn't really wear a whole lot here is just metacognition and all I want to say on metacognition because we're out of time here is getting students to think about their learning this can be done in lots and lots of different ways and so all I'm gonna tell you is your homework assignment and you can call Jed because he's got this book on his shelf I'm sure of it is Angelo and cross classroom assessment techniques he's nodding because I knew he had one Oh excellent oh they are part of it okay part of its on the website that's even better classroom assessment techniques cats cats and classroom assessment techniques classroom assessment techniques is what you're after or check with Jed and he'll tell you here's the deal these are quick things you do during class that gets the students to reproduce or to produce answers or to stuff so it could be like a one set in summary in one sentence right what we learned today if they can't do it right then they're not going to magically know it later when they turn that in you only have to read one sentence per student so that was pretty cool if they practice that after you read a chunk of the material right out in a sense or to what you just read there's things in the class called a one-minute paper right for one minute there's list three things whatever it is but teach your students that as they're learning material to practice pulling it out remember the old sq4r sq3r method it was like the study was it sq study question read recite reflect the whole concept based on what step two was to question yourself so just metacognition means thinking about your thinking and we have to teach this to students or they won't get it

Channel: USC Center for Teaching Excellence

Views: 56,091

Keywords: How Students Learn, Learning and Cognition, Human Learning, Learning Concepts

Id: jX9xttiUcMQ

Length: 57min 27sec (3447 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2012