Bror's Blog

An AERA summer drink: Mix cold cognition with warm motivation, and create a stir

The 2013 AERA meeting was a huge (13000 plus attendees), complicated (2400+ sessions), long (five full days in San Francisco for 2013) education research conference, with some unusual sessions. Yet, if you dig a little, you can find real gems, including research from David Feldon, Briana Timmerman, and colleagues, showing a simple intervention change based on cognitive task analysis can lift both learning and retention in an early science course in college. 

The full story is even more interesting!

“Practice-based” teacher education is really learning-based education

An interesting article in EdWeek last month about new methods for teacher preparation caught my eye.  It described an approach focused on giving teachers a specific repertoire of competencies through structured training and practice before they’re let loose on classrooms.  What’s reassuring (and maybe puzzling this didn’t happen earlier) is how close this new approach to training teachers is to what research says works best for learning.

Two sessions will explore: Why so little learning science?

In the next few weeks there will be two different sessions (full disclosure: I’m a panelist on both) talking about how education can benefit from more learning science, one at the ASU GSV meeting in Scottsdale Arizona, and the other at the huge education research conference, AERA.  The audiences are the right ones to also give insight into why that hasn’t happened yet.

Big Data: A big part of the education innovation mix – not all of it

Big data is big news.  Some might think the arrival of very large education-related data sets spells the end of our education troubles – that by analyzing this data, all necessary new information to accelerate learning will be revealed. 

Not quite!

On-line learning vs. in-class learning – three falls out of five?

A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times got me thinking about strengths and weaknesses offered by on-line learning. The writer, Mark Edmundson from the University of Virginia who teaches Shakespeare there, lauds the wonder of the intimate, free-flowing, improvisational-yet-responsive nature of in-class experiences, and contrasts this with what he posits is the cookie-cooker, video-based, hardly-better-than-a-textbook online course that he asserts represents the genre.

 Hmmm. . .

“Students online” vs “student's learning”?

A recent letter in the Wall Street Journal from an over-burdened college professor, Larry Bensky, lamented the push he was feeling towards teaching more students (90 instead of 60) in his summer school online course. He was particularly worried about the quality of instruction he could provide with a 30% increase in student load. Are university students – and professors – doomed to increasingly mediocre learning experiences as technology advances and costs to deliver instruction are forced downwards?

Performance by education trio: Gates, Khan, Saxberg

I had the good fortune to be invited to attend the Microsoft CEO Summit in Seattle last week.  This is a yearly gathering of 100 or so of the world's most prominent CEOs (covering 30 countries and 11 million employees this year) to talk together, with Bill Gates, and with the Microsoft brain trust, about key themes in the world and how they are all engaging with those themes.  

Part of the attraction of the summit, which has run for 16 years, is that no press, no social media, almost no information comes out from the meeting - it's a very relaxed, informal set of informed panels and engaged discussions between the CEOs and a few visiting experts. The topics, and the presenters, are a pretty wide-ranging group, from Daniel Kahneman and Tom Friedman talking about the structure of minds and implications for our future, to workshops on branding, social media, Brazil, growth, and (of course) technology, to wide-ranging discussions with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jamie Dimon about business decision-making, strategies, innovation, and more.  

This year they released the video of one session in education, where Walter Isaacson interviews Bill Gates, Salman Khan, and myself for about 45 minutes on how education is beginning to innovate, especially now with a variety of players using technology to offer more and more learning opportunities that are starting out free to users.

We talk about learning, employment, cognitive science, evidence-based instructional desigh, technology, the role of for-profit in a world of free materials, and more.  See what you think!  

Teething troubles for tech-based test grading?

A recent study by Shermis et al looking at how a number of automated essay scoring (AES) systems fare compared with human raters has generated a bit of press about advances in automated test scoring and the implications.  Not all that press is favorable – what should we all be doing, then?

Where should “learning engineers” draw their principles from?

Many folks are seeking inspiration for their approaches to learning (new and old) from results that are emerging about how the brain works. Inspiration can come from anywhere, of course – but when you're building “real stuff” that's supposed to work in the world at scale (“learning engineering” we might say), the best sources for evidence-based principles to guide design success are likely to come from cognitive science, not (yet) lower level research from neuroscience and brain science.

 

Should we all be paced like U-Pace?

At the recent Educause Learning Initiative meeting in Austin Texas, I came across some very interesting recent randomized control trial results from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  They’re testing a combination of mastery learning plus “amplified assistance” (data-driven suggestions for faculty about who to intervene with and how) in an introductory Psychology course, and, with thousands of students (!!) having run through controlled trials, they’re showing significant improvements in pass rates and long term retention.

It’s great to see this kind of work taking place: a learning institution at scale, using their scale to test out instructional approaches that fit in with learning science in careful ways.  And getting good results, creating a runway for more work and impact.