Bror's Blog

A river of learning awaits us: implications of competency-based learning

iNACOL has just released the summary from a two day conference held this spring about what it takes to move to competency based learning for K-12 learning in the US.  While challenging, the benefits of such a shift are dramatic – and the look of education could be fundamentally different.

You can find an executive summary and a full report at the iNACOL Web site written by Susan Patrick, the head of iNACOL, and Chris Sturgis.

A key is to get definitions right:  performance-based learning (same as competency-based learning) has these characteristics. From the report:

• Students advance upon mastery.
• Competencies include explicit, measurable, transferable learning objectives that empower students.
• Assessment is meaningful and a positive learning experience for students.
• Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.
• Learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include application and creation of knowledge along with the development of important skills and dispositions.

There will, of course, be quibbles with this - for example, why not explicitly tie learning outcomes to actual competencies needed to become, as Dana Goia once put it, “productive citizens for a free society.”

Instructional design not technology - Part II: It's not just the iPad!

My colleague Bharat Krishna also sent me a link to a recent interesting blog posting by Christopher Mims. Apparently, the government of South Korea is getting ready, at a cost of billions, to turf out textbooks in favor of digital media on a variety of handhelds, tablets, and laptops. A good idea? 

The advantages of having electronic access to textbooks are “obvious” to many – “Kids today just love this stuff – it’ll be great!” However, as the blog entry points out, when universities actually slow down long enough to study the issues, they find that it’s not so simple. 

For example, in the same blog posting, there are links out to a Chronicle of Higher Education article about a failed trial of academic use of the Kindle DX by multiple institutions.  If you hunt around, you can find Reed College’s reports both on the Kindle DX trial (2009), and on their more recent iPad trial (2011).  Both of these are models of careful usability explorations of the benefits and problems of display technologies within classroom learning environments. They show that some thought is needed before simply replacing textbooks with technology. (Neither study attempted to look at learning performance changes – not enough scale, most likely.) 

One bump at a time

We’re on my mother’s farm in Norway, an hour and a half northeast of Oslo.  It’s lasted centuries, but will it survive my youngest learning to drive? 

Choosing in July between a week or two in DC or on a farm in Norway is not so hard:

  
 The farmhouse in Norway 

As my mother describes it, the farm house started hundreds of years ago with three foundation spaces:  living, kitchen, bedroom.  Over the last 150 years, many changes and additions to the original layout:  an added kitchen, a second story, the porch in the front, etc.  The farm has had its share of bumps and misfortunes – a fire in the 70’s took out the largest barn and a good chunk of another building. Each time, the family rebuilt, adding components as their needs changed, decade by decade. 

Interesting, then, to juxtapose my youngest son on this slowly-changing landscape.  Tor is fifteen, growing like a weed, sleeping like a possum, changing every month – and learning to drive for the first time here on the farm.  

 
The mighty Tor 

He started just days ago with three foundation skills:  gas, brake, and steering.  Over the days, he’s been adding:  signaling, reversing, parking, etc. He, too, has had his bumps and misfortunes along the way – including an unfortunate mistaking of accelerator and brake while backing towards a barn. Startled by that bump and crunch, but on he goes, turning and braking, reversing and forwarding, adding new components as he practices, day by day. 

Instructional design not technology - Part I: It's not just the videos!

My colleague Bharat Krishna from Kaplan Test Prep recently sent me a link to a blog about the trial of the Khan Academy videos in classrooms.  What seems exciting to the school (and to Khan) is not the videos, but a new instructional design that personalizes instruction with teacher time freed up by the videos. The real innovation is to line up a new instructional design with learning science, enabled by technology, not the raw technology, nor even the specific videos.

Khan Academy has had wonderful visibility for the thousands of free teaching videos across a wide array of elementary through high school topics produced by the articulate and energizing Salman Khan, a reformed (by his own admission) hedge-fund analyst. These teaching videos are a mix, but happen to be better designed for learning than many typical “famous faculty” videos: 

• They use separate audio and visual tracks focused tightly (and engagingly) on the individual topics, not simple “talking heads”, a goodness according to learning research (see Clark and Mayer’s E-Learning and the Science of Instruction).
• However, they don’t take advantage of other research on instructional design generally (Clark and Mayer again), nor about what can help students learn individual topics (e.g., the 2008 National Math Advisory Panel summary of empirical work on difficulties in elementary math) – just Khan’s own judgment. 

This is your brain working harder - it learns more. How annoying!

A colleague of mine over in Kaplan Test Prep, Amjed Saffarini, pointed out an interesting piece in ScienceExpress last winter.  It shows how some of our thinking about practice and learning just ain’t so – yet also gives hope about powerful, yet simple, techniques for complex conceptual learning.

The authors, Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt, first compared elaborative study with retrieval practice for 80 students: 

• “Elaborative study” means open book reflecting on a topic – classic “good student,” “active” study techniques.  This study used concept mapping as the elaborative technique: students draw structures to interconnect related concepts from the text to cement the ideas and their relationships, not just remember words.  Cool.
• “Retrieval practice” is a lot less sexy – basically, students, after reading, attempt to summarize what they had read without access to the text, then get access to the text to read again, and do one more attempt at summarization.  Eww.  

The researchers ensured the same amount of time was given for each type of activity.  The researchers gave a final test (multiple types of items) one week after the final study session to see how much information was carried forward.