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!

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!

Into the wild: Checking learning environments against learning science

As I've written in this blog on numerous occasions, there is a ton of learning science already out there (e.g., the synthesis available in E-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer, or the very nice exposition by Daniel Willingham in Why Don't Students Like School, among many other sources). Unfortunately, much of it is only accidentally incorporated into real learning environments at scale.

What we should be doing as we evaluate new offerings or new work we're proposing to do or fund, is to compare what we're looking at against principles and features that learning science has established can make a difference.

We here at Kaplan have built a checklist for this purpose, and we thought it would be fun to release the checklist and the training course for it into the wild.

Competencies and assessment: what's learning science got to do with it?

At a recent meeting sponsored by iNacol to think deeply about competency and assessment, we talked about what impact the last few decades of learning science should have on doing the best job planning and using competencies for learning.

The good news is the learning science lines up with the idea of personalizing instruction, and the pace of instruction, for individual learners: they're likely to be more motivated, and more successful, if they can work and master at different rates, doing different things, to get to the same competencies.

However, not every way you could conceive of making learning personalized is likely to match how learning and expertise actually work.

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?

Crossing the street - can start-ups and researchers connect?

Just coming back from both the main annual American Education Research Association (AERA) meeting in Vancouver and from the Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale Arizona (EIS).  Curiously, the two meetings were scheduled to overlap, which reflects, perhaps, how little the world of learning research (as exemplified in AERA) and education technology investment (as exemplified in EIS) overlap.  Yet there’s much to gain from both these worlds – and perhaps even more to gain by a conscious juxtaposition.