Tag: cognitive psychology

ABCs of How We Learn… U is for Undoing
Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… U is for Undoing

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

“A bullet is dropped at the exact same time that one is shot horizontally from a gun. The bullets start from the same height. Which lands first?”

We know how this question goes when posed to students. Aside from the fact that we’ve primed them to answer one of the bullets, knowing full well the answer is “neither” we are leaning into student misconceptions, or rather an incomplete conception.

Students know, and are correct, that the shot bullet is initially travelling faster than the dropped one. Students also know, and are correct, that the shot bullet is always moving with a faster speed than the dropped one. Students also know, and are correct, that faster objects will travel the same distance in a shorter time than a slower moving object. All of these notions are true, and because students know these to be true, they will typically answer that the shot one lands first.

Well… except for those students who think about it a little more. See, those students reason that because the shot bullet is travelling faster and because it was shot horizontally, it is going to travel more distance, so perhaps the dropped one lands first due to its shorter distance.

Then there’s the one kid who of course has to say “air resistance!” in some way because fast things experience air resistance. Also not wrong.

Every bit of this reasoning is true until you get to the conclusion.

The issue here has to do with the fact that the reasoning and concept are incomplete. Students are not taking into account that the vertical properties of the two bullets are all identical, and since gravity, a vertical force, is responsible for accelerating the bullets towards the ground with the same vertical acceleration, they will land at the same time.

In a course where students are already coming in with preconcieved notions about who can do physics, the last thing we should be doing is blatantly demonstrating everything wrong with their thinking. Instead, we should leverage and aknowledge the good, while also giving them the tools to make a complete judgement.

Physics students come to us with a lot of incomplete conceptions, they want the ball to roll out in a curved path…

They want the force on the bug to be more than the force on the bus

They want acceleration at the peak of a projectile’s flight to be equal to zero, an object that flies out the window is moving backwards, waves should push matter, and more resistors to always mean more resistance.

Physics misconceptions are frustration for student and teacher alike because they are very much grounded in elements of truth and lived experience, but they are always incomplete.

Making these notions complete and providing many opportunities to encounter the complete notion is imperative to unlearning the previous notion. In order to do this we must:

  1. Increase student precision of thought; so they can reconize the difference between arguing with evidence vs intuition.
  2. Provide students with an alternative conception. This is where our representations such as force diagrams, motion maps etc. come in.
  3. TIME – students need time and exposure for the new conceptions to take hold.

This is a critical component built into the Investigative Science Learning Environment framework, and it is immensely effective at completing these conceptions. What I particularly like about ISLE is that when we are providing the alternative conception, especially for the first time, we are not leaving it up to students to just make the representation. Instead, that representation is carefully drawn through observational evidence.

Coming back to the original question of the two bullets, let’s discuss how the ISLE cycle approaches this particular conception.

In my class, I use the “three views of a ball” in pivot interactives for their observational experiement.

First, I ask students to construct the motion map for each of the three views. Even here students will sometimes rely on their incomplete conceptions over their observations. I will gently remind students to construct the maps based on the evidence in the video. (This is why we use an experiment!) How is the distance changing (or not) as the ball travels accross the screen? Be sure to represent it appropriately!

After students have done this, we discuss how the side-view actually works (Just in Time Telling!). It’s a composite of the top and front views. That is, the top (horizontal motion) is totally constant. This makes sense because there are no horizontal forces (I do projectiles after forces). The front view looks like an object experiencing gravity.

When students get the question with the classic ball drop demo (now a testing experiment rather than a demonstration) instead of just asking the question about landing, I ask them to first carefully construct the motion map for each ball based on what we’ve just learned and discussed then make their prediction. They should then be able to explain the reasoning for their prediction based on their motion maps.

Students all come to the agreement they should land at the same time.

In this manner of approaching the misconception, we have equipped students with tools to support their thinking, and forced them to slow down that thinking so they can achieve success at reaching a final answer.

From here, students need additional opportunities to represent and reason, so I will use problems like the ones from TIPERS

Teachers that have learned about ISLE for the first time often feel overwhelmed by the idea of “changing everything” but in truth, it’s really more about shifting the overarching perspective and intention, and then you can continue to do a lot of the same activities you’ve done before! Consider any of the other misconceptions presented here, or that you can think of. What might be a way to develop an observational and testing experiement to support the undoing of their misconceptions?

Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… T is for Teaching

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

In the previous post on self-explanation I mentioned how one of the strategies I provide to students is to create their version of “teacher notes” to reference and use.

When we engaged in our “How to Score Better on the Test” workshop (aka, how to learn) students were presented with the following question:

Which case would you work harder?

A) Study the material to get an A on the test
B) Learn the material so you can teach it to the class?

As you would expect, students overwhelmingly chose “B”

A 2013 study furthermore found that when students do, in fact, teach the information they learn more than if they only prepare to teach the content.

The idea of teaching content to another person to enhance one’s own learning is the reason why the jigsaw approach works so effectively in the classroom.

Students sharing problems in a jigsaw activity

In my physics courses this has looked like a number of activities, but most frequently looks like this:

  1. Students have a selection of homework problems they were required to solve in class or the previous night. All students were expected to complete all problems. This works best with 3 problems.
  2. Students are divided into visibly random groups of 2-3 students and are assigned one of the problems. The team discusses the problem, comes to consensus and provides their final solution on their board.
  3. Teams with the same problem come together to discuss their approaches to the problem. The team needs to come to a final consensus. Both teams must have the agreed upon solution on their respective boards.
  4. Teams then move into new groups where one team for each problem. Each team is presents the solution to the problem to the rest of the group.

Why this works:

  1. Students are individually responsible for making an attempt at the homework. I’m not a huge fan of doing this with problems they’ve never seen before unless I’m selecting a very, very specific skill.
  2. Students are able to discuss the problem in a non-threatening setting.
  3. Students get to confirm the answer, which increases confidence in the work BUT..
  4. Students are still accountable in small groups to do the teaching. That means that the group can’t rely one the one “really smart kid” out of the group of 6.

I think another great example of leveraging the idea of teaching as a non-threatening classroom activity is Kelly OShea’s Mistake Game.

Playing the “mistake game” at a Chicago Section AAPT meeting in 2017

The premise is simple: solve the problem, but leave one intentional mistake in the work…something a student would do. The group then presents the problem and its the class’s responsibility to help the presenters “find” their “mistake” by asking questions.

Why This Works

From the cognitive science lens, students are still required to solve a problem with the goal of presenting/teaching it to the class. Additionally, they have been specifically asked to build in a challenge (because often in teaching students will throw us for a loop!) and work that logic through to its completion. In order to do this, students need to be able to meaningfully connect ideas through elaboration, which, in turn, increases their retention and neural connections.

What’s great about this method is that the mistake is inevetable: it was part of the assignment! But this does something else so important for developing STEM identities: if the group made a valid mistake, no one needs to know which mistake was “intentional” and which was an unintentional mistake actually made by the team.

What this is NOT

I was talking about writing this post with my 10-year-old son and he groaned that he does this in math all the time and it’s not helpful. In order to use teaching and be effective it’s critical that students have time ti actually prepare what they are teaching. Too often teachers will group the “smart” and the “struggling” student together, expecting the smart student to “teach” the struggling one. And too often this leads to nothing but frustration. Both students know their respective “role” in the pairing, and the “smart” student is expected to effectively communicate without any prior preparation. Recognizing that students are not the teacher-expert in the room, it’s our responsibility to craft experiences where that preparation can happen and we can facilitate effective communication of the process while students are preparing their problems.

ABCs of How We Learn: Knowledge … To Whom Does it Belong?
Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn: Knowledge … To Whom Does it Belong?

Marianna Ruggerio5 Comments

One of the most cringe comments I hear from students working in class is “she said that…” When I hear this instead of “what we need to do next is…” or “I know that the answer is … because… ” I personally feel that I have not yet done my job for students. Why? Because students are not yet taking ownership of their knowledge, the answer still rests in my hands, not theirs.

We could argue that the goal of education is to impart knowledge to students, but knowing that our students are not going to remember all things, what knowledge do we truly want them exiting our classrooms with, and to whom does that knowledge belong?

Knowledge is the bedrock for all learning. The more a student knows, they more connections they can make, the deeper they can go with that material. We’ve already discussed that when students can tie new knowledge to previous knowledge, whether its through analogy, elaboration, generation or a hands on experience, the pathway for memory becomes stronger. In the brain, the physical neural pathway is what has literally grown and strengthened.

If we are going to implement strategies in our classrooms to enhance learning, and we are going to do that from a lens of evidence-based practices, then we need to understand the foundational underpinnings of the brain and how knowledge, skills and creativity are built and work together.

Knowledge and the Science of Learning Conversation

The science of learning has its set of cognitive principals upon which learning instruction can be built. Deans for Impact has a nice document that outlines most of them. Below are a few of them:

  1. New ideas are connected to old ones, but students working memory is limited. Therefore so too must be our presentation so as not to overload them.
  2. There exists a core set of facts in any area of study. Once these are memorized, a person can tackle more challenging problems as their working memory is now freed up. (this is the foundation for phonics in Science of Reading and memorization of math facts for fluency)
  3. Learning transfer is difficult as it requires knowledge of deep structure, which is often not apparent to the novice. (This is argument for contrasting cases)

I want to say first, that all of these core ideas are valid and have the research to support them.

Next, I need to say that unfortunately, due to either a lack of nuance or the inevitable polarization of our current society’s expression of social media, there exist some pretty strong feelings that pit science of learning against constructivist teaching as entirely incomparable.

Through Hattie’s research constructivist teaching has an mean effect size of 0.92 which puts it on par with the jigsaw method and strategies to integrate prior learning. Constructivist teaching is designed with the learner at the center, involves active teaching methods and allows students to explore ideas, solutions and explanations and then take action. This is not to be confused with pure inquiry or discovery based learning. Another set of strategies which has come under great scrutiny are the methods developed in Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. The hard-lined science of learning folks argue that having students engage in activities without prior instruction or knowledge is problematic due to the conflict with the previous statements above. Simply put, students are novices, therefore they lack the background knowledge and skill set to engage in a doing or creating activity, and as novices students will not be able to engage in truly meaningful ways that will impact learning. Instead, they will flounder around with great cognitive overload, little success and too much room for mistakes and misconceptions.

I’d like to take a moment to address this in the context of the kind of learning we see in curricula such as modeling and the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE). First, students are not blank slates. They come to us with a wealth of experiences which have shaped the background knowledge they bring to us. None of our students walk into our room with the same background, but there exists a background nonetheless. Both the experiences and the background knowledge need to be acknowledged in order for us to to our job properly, which is why constructivist teaching is student-centered. Second, I’d like to think that in an ideal educational setting our students are able to move from passive receivers of knowledge to active doers and producers of knowledge. In order for this to happen, we must create the environment where experience is central to developing knowledge.

I took on a collaborative project/conversation with another peer at the beginning of the year in which we took the principals from the Dean’s for Impact document and began aligning the principals with strategies and practices from a physics classroom that is centered on active-learning, constructivist pedagogies. If you’re interested you can take a look here.

Knowledge as a Cycle of Experience, Reflection and Testing

David Kolb, psychologist and educational theorist defined the learning process as the following cycle:

This cycle makes sense for any learning we encounter, not just school-learning. Consider perhaps the kid who “doesn’t like school” Very often that student’s dislike for school can be traced to a concrete experience, whether it was a teacher, and administrator or other students. That experience made them notice and feel things about themselves and/or their environment and made them determine that school was not the place for them. Perhaps this meant they withdrew socially or academically. Maybe it means they transfer schools all together. Either way, some action follows which creates a new concrete experience.

As humans we are learning all the time, and that learning is very often starting from an experience rather than a textbook. (Or perhaps the textbook motivates us to seek an experience!) Shouldn’t it only make sense then, that our students’ learning also begins in a place of experience?

In a previous post, Just in Time Telling, I discussed the fact that when a carefully selected and targeted experience is provided to students and then follow up with Just in Time Telling, the learning gains are strongest for the student than with lecture alone, or discovery-based learning alone. (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998) When we then follow up the Just in Time Telling with a testing experiment, we are providing students into the action, doing and ownership part of knowledge. During this phase of the learning cycle student can make a claim, “if ____ then ______ because______” This testing experiment then creates a new concrete experience from which the cycle can begin anew.

What is a testing experiment you ask? A testing experiment can be any of your traditional labs in which you’e asked students to calculate g, find the theoretical period for the flying pig, find the location where the two cars collide and so forth. Rather than making it a “challenge” task, we can reframe these activities as an opportunity to test our current understanding of forces, circular motion or kinematics.

A testing experiment might also look like one of your traditional labs. For example, we have a lab in which students determine if the friction of the wheels of their lab car are negligible. In this case the hypothesis might look like “if the friction is not negligible, then when we attach a mass to the car and allow it to drop, we expect the change in gravitational potential energy to be different from the change in kinetic energy of the car”.

A Paradigm of Ownership and Action is a Paradigm of Equity and Liberation

There is another critical component here regarding this particular concept of learning and discussing ownership. There is something that inherently sits very wrong with me around some of the language in the science of learning that sounds like language and expectations which are ultimately choosing compliance over creation and collaboration, and maintaining the power differential between teacher and student. When we can move students from passive receivers of knowledge to active producers of knowledge we are also transforming the seat of power. In a world in which we continue to have discussions around social justice, equity and power structures it is a natural conclusion that knowledge and the ability to act on that knowledge is also empowerment. Creating a learning environment where students become doers, producers and drivers of their own learning is creating a learning environment where students can become agents of equity and justice within their circles of influence and their communities.

Why is this conversation important?

When students are subject to strict direct instruction, in which students are assumed to be inadaquate at creative thinking until some benchmark base of knowledge has been established, what we are effectively doing is creating a bunch of minds with fantastic routine expertise (solve these exact problems this exact way). This kind of expertise might easily demonstrate strong effect with high grades and high standardized test scores, but what it doesn’t support is adaptive expertise where students can take a set of skills and move those skills to something novel. As is true in most of life, somewhere in the middle there exists the ideal balance. Routine expertise is important for some aspects, but so is adaptive expertise. We need both. I suppose another essay entirely could be written on why this is even more important in the age of AI.

Here are some questions for your consideration:

  • When you consider your classroom environment currently, does your teaching lean more towards the passive passing of knowledge, the active producing of knowledge, or have you struck the balance?
  • When you consider your students and their expectations for your classroom does they lean more towards the passive passing of knowledge, the active producing of knowledge, or have they struck the balance?
  • If there is discrepancy between your environment and your student expectations, how do you resolve this tension?