Campus Conversations

Brian Wilson Author

02/03/2017 Added

153 Plays

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Campus Conversations 2017

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[00:00:00.935]And especially for those of us who are pushing
[00:00:03.027]out into newer modalities such as fully online,
[00:00:08.071]blended and everything else that's in between.
[00:00:12.692]So the idea of bringing psychology to teaching challenges
[00:00:16.584]is not a new one by any means.
[00:00:18.211]I know you have some scholars here at Nebraska
[00:00:21.907]who are doing that very thing,
[00:00:23.729]but even so, I think that given all the calls to make
[00:00:25.826]what we do more evidence based,
[00:00:29.939]to fit it in to frameworks of learning science,
[00:00:32.558]still so much can get lost in translation
[00:00:35.433]and I even feel that as a relative expert in this field.
[00:00:39.294]It means that every year there are hundreds
[00:00:41.279]if not more findings that pile up like snowdrifts
[00:00:47.345]in journals and it's very hard to know
[00:00:51.282]which are the most relevant and which can we really bring
[00:00:55.449]to bear on those challenges and questions
[00:00:57.767]that we have as teachers heavily invested in technology now.
[00:01:01.979]So that's one of the real focuses
[00:01:05.081]that I try to bring to this,
[00:01:06.726]pulling out the most practical
[00:01:09.621]and the biggest guiding principles that we can use
[00:01:13.203]in doing things like planning our courses
[00:01:15.810]and planning our learning activities.
[00:01:17.933]So, I'm going to you as a theorist
[00:01:20.559]but also as a very, very practical person
[00:01:23.075]by nature and also because I do work
[00:01:26.362]with so many faculty teams in my own work
[00:01:28.446]in coursery design and first year
[00:01:30.547]learning initiative and so forth.
[00:01:32.273]So that's what I have planned for you today.
[00:01:35.914]We're actually going to frame this with some very practical,
[00:01:38.319]down to Earth planning questions,
[00:01:43.269]the questions I think are really helpful to have in mind
[00:01:46.398]as we go forward with new courses
[00:01:49.126]which I know we've already got our courses
[00:01:52.222]under way this semester, but there's always room to change
[00:01:54.682]and to bring in new activities
[00:01:56.940]and going forward in conversation with our colleagues
[00:01:59.242]about what we're going to do.
[00:02:01.198]So we're going to start with some planning questions
[00:02:02.911]and then I want to pull out the three pieces
[00:02:07.139]of the cognitive psychology framework
[00:02:10.998]that I do think are the most important for teachers
[00:02:14.218]in all modalities to know about
[00:02:16.171]but also we're going to talk about how those suggest
[00:02:20.250]and help us configure specific strategies
[00:02:24.291]and ways using technology and then
[00:02:26.616]we'll return to those planning questions
[00:02:30.677]at the end of our time here today.
[00:02:32.063]All right?
[00:02:34.710]So the questions,
[00:02:37.754]I say these are very down to Earth, I really mean that.
[00:02:39.820]The first one is, of course, what we want students
[00:02:41.509]to know at the end of our course or learning experience
[00:02:43.879]but more importantly perhaps,
[00:02:47.616]what we want students to be able to do.
[00:02:50.633]So especially as we get up in to those graduate courses,
[00:02:54.555]those pre-professional courses.
[00:02:56.791]It's not all about we want them to have some kind
[00:02:59.563]of familiarity with these pieces of knowledge,
[00:03:02.513]we want them to be able to carry them out.
[00:03:05.652]We want to be able to apply them effectively
[00:03:08.459]in specific contexts.
[00:03:10.674]So having that at the top of mind when we go
[00:03:13.279]in to planning our learning experience is important.
[00:03:16.042]So what do we really want students to be able to do
[00:03:19.496]with what it is that we're presenting?
[00:03:23.354]But here's another really important perspective
[00:03:25.446]I think can help shape planning and that is
[00:03:28.441]how do we want students to be spending their time
[00:03:31.586]and that is not often a perspective that I believe we have
[00:03:34.844]when we're sitting and figuring out which chapters belong
[00:03:37.437]in this and what am I going to write
[00:03:39.011]into my syllabus for policies.
[00:03:40.977]How do I want students to spend their time
[00:03:43.427]and especially when we are looking at fully online courses,
[00:03:44.766]that's most of what you have to work with, right?
[00:03:50.343]You don't have that kind
[00:03:52.319]of familiar fallback of the Facetime,
[00:03:54.356]you're going to have on this regular schedule.
[00:03:56.896]You've got students out there, doing something,
[00:03:59.915]engaging with the information and the activities
[00:04:02.706]you've provided and asked for them
[00:04:04.593]so what we're asking we really need to think
[00:04:07.614]about how they're spending that time
[00:04:08.841]and what the return on that time is going to be.
[00:04:10.125]And if you believe as I do,
[00:04:11.793]and many I think most engaged teachers do
[00:04:14.534]that student effort and productive effort spent
[00:04:17.259]is the basis for all success,
[00:04:20.575]then you can see why this is a really important thing
[00:04:22.591]to be thinking about as we choose what we're going to do.
[00:04:24.112]Everybody's favorite topic, assessment.
[00:04:27.837]But yes, learning has to be measured along with but,
[00:04:33.757]as we'll see, there are some ways to make this measurement
[00:04:35.269]of learning do double and triple duty to advance us
[00:04:40.825]towards some of the most important learning goals
[00:04:44.191]these students can have.
[00:04:45.773]So how are you going to measure student learning
[00:04:46.874]and how is that going to contribute to the learning itself?
[00:04:52.799]And then students learning from and with each other.
[00:04:56.129]So we all know especially in online modalities,
[00:04:58.460]there are new ways for students to exchange ideas,
[00:05:02.522]form relationships.
[00:05:06.415]It shouldn't be a static
[00:05:07.519]here's the information in front of you.
[00:05:08.994]These are people communicating with other people.
[00:05:10.529]So that's the other thing we need to think about
[00:05:12.438]in our minds as we picture that student
[00:05:16.196]who is on the other end of the online course
[00:05:17.863]or who has taken or lended a hybrid course home with them,
[00:05:21.137]what are they learning from each other?
[00:05:24.051]Okay, so practical questions moving in to them.
[00:05:28.841]This is map on to what I think cognitive psychology
[00:05:32.521]can bring to teaching and learning.
[00:05:35.982]So three aspects that I think really any teacher
[00:05:39.550]needs to have a great grasp of and especially
[00:05:43.427]for online and technology aided learning are these.
[00:05:46.049]So first off, processes and mechanisms having
[00:05:54.034]to do with attention.
[00:05:55.427]And here's where I think that I have a slightly different
[00:05:56.871]perspective than a lot of the other frameworks
[00:05:58.440]that are out there, books you can pick up
[00:06:01.634]that are about the psychology of learning
[00:06:04.766]or cognitive science of learning starting with attention.
[00:06:08.364]So as a cognitive psychologist I have this perspective
[00:06:12.510]that whenever something interesting is going on in the mind,
[00:06:16.667]learning is happening or problem solving is occurring
[00:06:19.301]or change is occurring, that attention kind of
[00:06:22.798]gets there first on the scene,
[00:06:24.702]so this is a really, really vital aspect of cognition
[00:06:28.343]and it sort of powers everything else
[00:06:31.068]that happens down the line.
[00:06:32.845]So I think it makes sense for us as teachers
[00:06:37.881]to use this as a starting point as well.
[00:06:40.608]Where is student attention going
[00:06:41.933]and how are you going to capture that
[00:06:44.668]and especially as we'll see in a second
[00:06:46.854]when we talk about memory,
[00:06:48.158]it's hard to separate out attention
[00:06:50.225]from what students are going to remember
[00:06:51.743]and speaking of memory,
[00:06:53.351]that's the bread and butter issue
[00:06:56.818]for a cognitive psychologist.
[00:06:58.678]It's where we've done most of our high profile research
[00:07:00.496]and yeah, it's obviously very central
[00:07:02.706]to teaching and learning which is not to say
[00:07:06.079]that memory for information,
[00:07:08.979]memorization, is the most important thing about learning
[00:07:12.694]or even one of the most important things,
[00:07:15.446]so of course, again, any engaged teacher,
[00:07:18.300]anybody who is serious about this knows
[00:07:20.616]that there's a lot more to learning than memory.
[00:07:22.153]That said, I think more of us in the field
[00:07:24.060]are starting to say it's okay to expect students
[00:07:26.590]to have a base of content knowledge to work off of
[00:07:33.538]and we are learning more about how
[00:07:37.903]that compliments things like higher thought processes
[00:07:40.790]rather than detracting from it or competing with it.
[00:07:43.221]That said, remember that students only have a limited amount
[00:07:48.321]of time and effort that they can put in to learning
[00:07:51.359]so it's a good thing that we know a lot of ways
[00:07:55.181]to make more memory happen in less time, all right.
[00:07:58.064]So the memory piece is right there, central in the middle.
[00:08:02.290]And then yeah, the thought processes.
[00:08:04.866]If you ask engaged teachers what they really most want
[00:08:07.706]out of the work they're doing it's this, right?
[00:08:14.541]So if somebody comes to me and says,
[00:08:19.198]"What do you really want your Introduction to Psychology
[00:08:21.191]"students or your teaching practicum students
[00:08:22.475]"or your graduate students to have
[00:08:23.597]"at the end of your course?"
[00:08:24.990]I want them to be able to think more like me
[00:08:27.555]as an expert in the field.
[00:08:29.278]I want them to be able to solve problems.
[00:08:31.236]I want them to have the habits of mine
[00:08:33.109]that go along with that.
[00:08:35.388]That's what I want, however,
[00:08:37.468]it's very, very easy to let content knowledge
[00:08:42.003]override and dominate this.
[00:08:44.648]So I think we do kind of intuitively on a gut level know
[00:08:48.382]that just knowing a lot of content about an area
[00:08:51.828]doesn't allow you to think like
[00:08:53.730]an expert in that area, right?
[00:08:55.757]And yet, it's very easy to fall into the trap
[00:08:58.601]of teaching that's true.
[00:09:02.399]So thinking skills and the research in thinking converges
[00:09:04.737]on the rather unsettling ideas and finding
[00:09:09.756]that teaching thinking is a lot more difficult
[00:09:12.196]and takes a lot more time, practice and repetition
[00:09:15.869]than we realize.
[00:09:17.593]So it's hard.
[00:09:20.584]We need to make space for it.
[00:09:22.013]Okay, so attention, memory, thinking.
[00:09:23.113]These are the three things that I think can most advance us
[00:09:27.220]towards making great choices in planning our teaching
[00:09:32.210]and choosing our technology.
[00:09:35.155]So,
[00:09:36.475]highlights, key findings, thought-provoking questions
[00:09:39.277]from each of these areas.
[00:09:42.710]Starting first with that question of attention,
[00:09:44.735]so how do we capture student focus, use it effectively,
[00:09:46.794]what is attention all about and what gets in the way?
[00:09:52.704]Now a funny thing about the study of attention in my field
[00:09:55.997]is that we don't have, I don't feel,
[00:09:59.338]really good working, solid definitions of what attention is.
[00:10:02.625]There's not just one attention spot in the brain,
[00:10:05.234]Attention researchers don't usually talk about
[00:10:08.830]in terms of minutes like here's your attention span,
[00:10:11.725]it's five minutes, 10 minutes.
[00:10:14.117]That's not really a thing with attention researchers
[00:10:15.374]but we have a really good grasp of what attention is for
[00:10:17.541]and what it does.
[00:10:19.869]So when we talk about somebody's attention
[00:10:24.726]or a student's attention,
[00:10:28.948]that's all about prioritizing, right?
[00:10:32.985]So we have a limited amount of cognitive capacity
[00:10:35.713]and from on a millisecond to millisecond basis
[00:10:38.200]we are directing and redirecting that
[00:10:40.958]to reflect the priorities we're trying to address, right,
[00:10:44.062]so we might divide it, we might direct it all in one place.
[00:10:47.040]It's about that prioritizing and allocation of resources.
[00:10:52.110]Attention is highly intertwined with memory.
[00:10:58.704]So for example, if you're familiar
[00:11:00.063]with the concept of working memory,
[00:11:01.987]how many pieces of information you can hold
[00:11:06.411]in immediate consciousness at a time.
[00:11:08.229]Current conceptions of that,
[00:11:10.091]some people believe that this is essentially the same
[00:11:12.411]as how many things you can pay attention to at once.
[00:11:15.322]So we're realizing that those are intertwined.
[00:11:18.350]There's also kind of an old school of thought
[00:11:22.082]that I still think is quite valid which holds that
[00:11:23.482]if we're encoding or putting new information into memory,
[00:11:28.608]we're learning some new connection, some new information,
[00:11:31.275]that that requires focused attention,
[00:11:36.098]that essentially for all intents and purposes
[00:11:40.235]learning by osmosis, learning in the background,
[00:11:44.490]learning you didn't realize happened,
[00:11:45.974]that almost never occurs, so attention is required
[00:11:48.587]in order to get new information into mind and in to memory.
[00:11:56.415]So what gets in the way of this?
[00:12:02.142]A couple of things.
[00:12:03.350]So in teaching there's been a very influential idea
[00:12:04.927]called cognitive load.
[00:12:06.218]How many people are familiar with that
[00:12:08.253]or have heard of that before?
[00:12:09.548]Okay, great.
[00:12:12.660]So this is not a new thing for this group, right.
[00:12:15.181]And you know, there's a whole rather complex theory
[00:12:16.472]around cognitive load but,
[00:12:18.753]in a sense, part of it can be summarized
[00:12:22.516]by saying that there's multiple things going on
[00:12:24.790]in any learning task, right?
[00:12:27.028]There's so called germain demands
[00:12:30.888]or germain load of the learning task.
[00:12:33.304]That's how much attention cognitive capacity
[00:12:35.261]has taken up just by learning about classical conditioning
[00:12:39.485]say or how to work out a calculus problem
[00:12:42.447]but then there's tacked on to that some other demands
[00:12:46.612]in that drain off that limited capacity
[00:12:49.190]so for example,
[00:12:50.968]I'm trying to work this problem out
[00:12:53.939]but the instructions for my homework are over here
[00:12:56.518]and I have to keep switching back and forth
[00:12:58.209]and how does this discussion tool work
[00:13:01.116]in this element anyway?
[00:13:02.361]Those two things come out of the same common
[00:13:07.493]pool of resources and one competes with the other
[00:13:09.219]and sometimes with better design,
[00:13:11.712]we can address that so called extraneous cognitive load.
[00:13:14.026]So too much going on at once,
[00:13:16.646]too much that's not extrinsically tied up with the learning.
[00:13:19.761]Here's a matter though that I think can be
[00:13:22.488]very thought provoking for us as teachers
[00:13:24.681]and that is the concept of automaticity.
[00:13:28.360]So when we learn certain thing,
[00:13:30.538]we're carrying out a task,
[00:13:32.705]there are certain pieces of it we can over learn
[00:13:35.313]to where we no longer take as much
[00:13:38.325]out of our pool of resources, right?
[00:13:42.208]So a great classic example is where we learn to drive.
[00:13:45.380]All right, so when everybody learns to drive,
[00:13:49.590]listening to the radio, figuring out where we are,
[00:13:51.560]even carrying on a conversation.
[00:13:53.191]It's all too much because we haven't automated
[00:13:55.225]a lot of the processes involved in driving
[00:13:58.228]which is of course not to say
[00:14:00.635]that driving can be done on autopilot.
[00:14:04.566]It can't, there's novel aspects of the driving task
[00:14:07.060]that come at us all the time,
[00:14:08.367]but pieces get automated and that frees up
[00:14:09.949]other resources to do other things.
[00:14:11.700]What if we start thinking about
[00:14:16.615]this in context of our teaching?
[00:14:18.382]So what tasks, skills, processes
[00:14:21.157]can students over learn to where they don't
[00:14:24.583]pull as much out of those resources?
[00:14:29.924]So I want to throw this out to the group actually
[00:14:33.783]to think about for just a second,
[00:14:38.758]not at a big table discussion,
[00:14:41.219]but let's gather maybe a couple of examples
[00:14:42.469]of things in your discipline that you think students
[00:14:45.158]can and should have over learned, had down pat,
[00:14:47.919]to where they don't take up
[00:14:50.595]a whole lot of resources anymore.
[00:14:53.156]What do you think?
[00:15:00.128]Okay, effective note taking, right?
[00:15:02.774]If you're skilled, you can take the notes
[00:15:06.027]and still be processing the information at a low level.
[00:15:07.411]Lower level students can't, right?
[00:15:09.864]Okay, that's a good one.
[00:15:15.676]Skills we ask of the students.
[00:15:17.920]We want them to learn the math
[00:15:20.891]so that they're familiar enough they can think
[00:15:24.586]about what the math means.
[00:15:26.323]Enough to know what the math means.
[00:15:29.720]Really profound application.
[00:15:31.158]We have maybe one more?
[00:15:34.301]Accessing files.
[00:15:35.839]We're in computer science
[00:15:36.991]and there's a surprising number of students
[00:15:42.418]who really don't know how to use the computer
[00:15:44.777]or even got on the internet.
[00:15:45.749](chuckling)
[00:15:47.265]Okay, this is an engineering question.
[00:15:49.765]Exactly.
[00:15:51.809]And there's this philosophy that, well,
[00:15:56.790]everything is on Google, you can look everything up,
[00:15:58.263]why memorize anything.
[00:16:00.069]Well because when you get to where you need to function
[00:16:04.097]as a professional or a pre-professional
[00:16:05.374]or be thinking about higher level aspects
[00:16:07.713]of what you've been doing, that's not going to work.
[00:16:09.752]So I know for my work with an electrical engineer,
[00:16:13.435]used to work at NEU, Elizabeth Brower,
[00:16:16.273]brilliant teacher!
[00:16:17.353]We would just go around and around
[00:16:19.759]about what was getting in the way of her students' success
[00:16:22.027]in circuit analysis and she would say,
[00:16:24.737]"Well there are these principles like Ohms Law,"
[00:16:27.033]which I have to admit I still don't understand but,
[00:16:29.560]Ohms Law, you're going to need it over and over.
[00:16:31.491]You need to have it.
[00:16:33.429]Yes, you can go look it up.
[00:16:35.331]If you have to look that up every time,
[00:16:37.088]you are not going to last as an electrical engineer.
[00:16:39.338]So when we haven't automated certain processes,
[00:16:44.168]that's going to make us play out differently
[00:16:47.519]because of the demands of attention.
[00:16:52.915]And lastly there's this thing of, perhaps tactfully called,
[00:16:55.038]dysfunctional multitasking which you could probably guess
[00:16:56.059]what I mean by that.
[00:16:57.142]It can itself be driven by mistaken beliefs
[00:16:59.979]about attention, right?
[00:17:01.847]Even if we understand that learning doesn't take place
[00:17:04.335]by osmosis and attention is really needed for it,
[00:17:07.159]our students may not
[00:17:09.969]and so they make choices to have that video running
[00:17:14.984]and at the same time I'm on my online course
[00:17:17.006]and doing the discussion and I'm texting
[00:17:19.270]three of my friends at the same time.
[00:17:21.101]When that happens, attention is overloaded
[00:17:23.620]and learning is going to fall through.
[00:17:25.568]We may not even realize it until it's too late.
[00:17:27.986]So thinking about some applications.
[00:17:32.947]So one of the most sure fire ways to keep pulling
[00:17:35.429]attention back to the task at hand is having to respond.
[00:17:40.472]Right so we learn this when we teach face-to-face.
[00:17:44.130]We learn to call on students
[00:17:47.135]and even in large classes now,
[00:17:50.301]this is one of the big functions that something
[00:17:52.831]like a student response system can accomplish
[00:17:55.648]and this is what students, for example,
[00:17:57.901]have told us in our surveys at NAU
[00:17:59.780]and big classes that use clickers
[00:18:01.282]because I didn't always love the clicker
[00:18:02.873]but at least it kept bringing my attention back
[00:18:06.918]to what I was doing.
[00:18:10.205]But fully online, I think we need to think of that as well.
[00:18:12.673]So those very, very text heavy designs are often criticized
[00:18:15.744]as if it's the text that's the problem
[00:18:18.712]and I don't think that's necessarily true.
[00:18:21.799]It's that students are having to read and read and read
[00:18:26.390]without having to put something back in,
[00:18:28.277]say here's what I thought about this,
[00:18:30.522]here's what I gathered from it,
[00:18:31.873]here's what I understood from it.
[00:18:35.309]So doing things like building in lots
[00:18:37.785]and lots of stop out and weigh in questions
[00:18:40.029]even if we're just going to spot grade those
[00:18:42.899]or have some other way to make it
[00:18:44.618]not an overwhelming grading task.
[00:18:46.391]The point is in having students respond
[00:18:48.018]and having students do it.
[00:18:48.971]Human mind is not set up to simply monitor
[00:18:52.232]and take in lots and lots of information
[00:18:55.830]without having to do something with it, right?
[00:18:58.831]When that happens the mind is almost guaranteed to wander.
[00:19:03.632]Automating those lower level processes.
[00:19:06.088]So thinking about what kind of learning activities
[00:19:08.369]can we set up where some students or maybe even the students
[00:19:12.012]who just need them to make sure that they've got Ohms Law
[00:19:16.837]down pat, that they've got the math
[00:19:18.956]that they need for this class,
[00:19:21.348]not just yeah, we're sort of there
[00:19:23.342]but I can do it without having to think about it too much.
[00:19:27.689]In the case of Elizabeth Brower's class,
[00:19:31.224]one of the things that we did is we used the affordances
[00:19:34.147]of learning management system and online homework
[00:19:36.734]to actually take speed into account
[00:19:39.517]with some of the homework.
[00:19:41.481]I know a lot of times with homework we're saying,
[00:19:43.075]"Hey spend more time on it,"
[00:19:44.701]but this was a case where we said,
[00:19:49.347]"You know what, this was reinforcing something
[00:19:51.130]"like Ohms Law every problem is going to ask you to use that
[00:19:53.132]"so the final grade you get takes into account not just
[00:19:55.244]"your best attempt, like your best score,
[00:19:58.759]"but how quickly you did it."
[00:20:01.695]So there are some cases we may even want to do that,
[00:20:05.546]incentivize speed.
[00:20:10.545]And opening those dialogs with students
[00:20:12.990]about the dysfunctional multitasking and the beliefs
[00:20:16.786]they have about attention memory.
[00:20:18.955]And there's been a lot of kind of discussion
[00:20:22.429]and debate about this in higher education community.
[00:20:26.095]A lot of it comes down to,
[00:20:28.720]oh should we ban laptops in classes?
[00:20:31.040]Should we let students use their phone?
[00:20:33.079]We have the people who say, "Oh, let them get involved
[00:20:35.076]"with the devices" and other people saying,
[00:20:36.688]"No, they have to write everything out on paper.
[00:20:38.835]"Nothing else will do."
[00:20:41.021]and this is kind of hilarious if you teach fully online.
[00:20:44.705]Are you going to go home with them?
[00:20:46.862]No.
[00:20:48.108]You need to teach them to be better stewards
[00:20:50.196]of their own attention, all right,
[00:20:52.693]so they can make the choices.
[00:20:55.515]So and especially if a few of them still kind
[00:20:59.002]of cling to this idea of well,
[00:21:00.516]we're digital natives, we're used to having lots
[00:21:02.919]of streams of information all at once and say,
[00:21:04.715]"No, that doesn't excuse you from fundamental limitations
[00:21:08.257]"of how much the mind can take in
[00:21:10.406]"and the fact that we do not learn by osmosis."
[00:21:13.272]And so I wanted to share with you just one example
[00:21:18.209]of how we've tackled this at NAU
[00:21:20.871]and this is an approach that I think is flexible enough
[00:21:23.397]to tailor for just different institutions as well.
[00:21:25.326]So with this idea that students need to know more
[00:21:30.070]about attention works and how it's related to memory.
[00:21:33.669]We set up what kind of functions
[00:21:38.221]as an institution specific mook.
[00:21:39.859]It's a BB learn sort of mini course
[00:21:43.154]that's no credit and it's no cost and anybody at NAU
[00:21:46.031]can self-enroll at any time
[00:21:48.316]and I kind of run it and monitor it.
[00:21:50.481]So it's called Attention Matters
[00:21:53.457]and it isn't just kind of a website with here's information
[00:21:56.314]about you can't multitask and don't have
[00:21:58.786]your phone out in class.
[00:22:00.465]We sort of show them and tell them
[00:22:03.624]so we've pulled in some different online videos
[00:22:06.221]that show things, for example,
[00:22:07.561]like the change blindness effect.
[00:22:09.342]If you've never seen that one demonstrated
[00:22:10.758]it is very, very memorable in and of itself.
[00:22:14.751]There are self-assessments and discussions
[00:22:19.341]where students talk about their reactions
[00:22:22.243]to those activities and, importantly,
[00:22:24.585]at the end we ask them to kind of put together
[00:22:27.270]very briefly what their own plan is for managing attention,
[00:22:28.462]managing distractions in class, managing distractions
[00:22:30.834]while they're doing their homework.
[00:22:34.152]So we've really put this out there to try to draw them
[00:22:37.990]in to this dialog and in to this question
[00:22:41.747]so that they can be more involved in it
[00:22:43.413]and at this point we've had
[00:22:46.369]about 1,000 students go through this.
[00:22:47.674]Why did they do this?
[00:22:48.708]Well, because different faculty around the institution
[00:22:52.337]offered a little bit of extra credit
[00:22:54.971]at the beginning of the semester for doing it.
[00:22:56.835]So we have a lot of faculty who feel
[00:22:59.236]that this is an important issue.
[00:23:01.922]They're not cognitive psychologists themselves.
[00:23:02.872]They don't want to stand up and try to teach a class on it,
[00:23:05.071]but this resource is there for them
[00:23:07.467]and that combination of addressing faculty concerns,
[00:23:10.362]bringing a subject matter expert who is willing
[00:23:14.393]to kind of run the experience
[00:23:16.226]and having students go through this
[00:23:17.903]is we feel a positive step towards bringing this
[00:23:22.333]into dialog and into the curriculum at NAU.
[00:23:25.034]All right, moving on to some highlights about memory.
[00:23:30.700]So I think that as teachers what can be very helpful for us
[00:23:34.425]is to do what is to start thinking about memory differently.
[00:23:38.176]Similarly, to how memory experts have changed
[00:23:41.852]their thinking about it in recent years.
[00:23:44.234]So instead of thinking of memory as a place
[00:23:46.794]where we put stuff, a big bucket for information,
[00:23:49.434]we now think of memory more in terms of what it does for us.
[00:23:55.102]It's an adaptation that helps us accomplish our goals
[00:23:58.282]and when you think about it that way
[00:24:00.603]it becomes a lot more clear why we remember certain things
[00:24:03.809]and we forget others.
[00:24:05.354]It also helps us kind of remember that memory
[00:24:09.547]is very context dependent.
[00:24:12.349]Memories don't pop in to mind just because we want them to.
[00:24:14.422]They pop in to mind because they're cued by other things.
[00:24:16.705]So cues and context are very critical to what we remember.
[00:24:19.000]And we have known for a very, very long time in psychology
[00:24:23.211]that what you do with information is as important
[00:24:27.144]as anything else in determining whether your remember it,
[00:24:30.678]the so-called depth of processing effect
[00:24:32.742]and how many people have heard of this one before?
[00:24:34.021]The depth of processing effect, all right.
[00:24:35.523]So essentially if that you think about information
[00:24:39.466]in terms of its meaning, especially its meaning
[00:24:42.106]as it relates to you, it's a lot more likely to stick
[00:24:46.367]than information you think of in terms
[00:24:49.682]of its surface characteristics
[00:24:51.883]which if you go back to memory being an adaptation
[00:24:53.814]that helps us accomplish goals and survive,
[00:24:55.218]that makes a lot of sense.
[00:24:56.130]Right, we should hang on to things
[00:24:57.633]that we think of in relation to ourselves
[00:24:59.270]and forget other things.
[00:25:02.688]Some other good take home principles.
[00:25:06.367]There's also the quirk of the human cognitive system
[00:25:10.738]that vision is really highly salient
[00:25:14.179]and highly memorable for most people,
[00:25:16.623]so if you ever run across the book Moonwalking with Einstein
[00:25:19.297]for example and it's a great book.
[00:25:21.797]I hate that it was written by a journalist
[00:25:23.434]and not a psychologist, but it's well worth the read.
[00:25:26.156]He describes in that book competitive memory champions,
[00:25:31.508]this is what they're almost always doing to do things
[00:25:34.632]like memorize a deck of cards or a series of numbers.
[00:25:38.187]They're using a visualization technique.
[00:25:40.547]So that's worth kind of tucking away and saying
[00:25:42.838]vision is really worth more memory for most people,
[00:25:47.900]but at the same time it doesn't come down
[00:25:51.793]to so-called perceptual learning styles,
[00:25:53.621]so it's not a matter of oh,
[00:25:55.651]some students are visual learners
[00:25:57.576]so we have to match that style.
[00:25:59.266]That's an idea that has pretty thoroughly,
[00:26:04.554]at least within cognitive psychology,
[00:26:05.900]has really been critiqued and some people believe debunked.
[00:26:07.550]So don't worry about matching styles.
[00:26:09.513]Remember that vision, visualizable information,
[00:26:12.385]things you present visually are going to have a better road
[00:26:14.920]to memory than other things for most people.
[00:26:17.389]All right and lastly there's what I've come to call
[00:26:23.351]just the big three in applied memory research.
[00:26:26.660]So when we look at the large body of research
[00:26:29.425]that really tests what do people recall
[00:26:32.066]in realistic situations such as class material,
[00:26:36.550]here's the three that really float to the top.
[00:26:38.476]First of all is the testing effect which also
[00:26:41.559]sometimes goes by the term retrieval practice.
[00:26:44.960]Now another show of hands,
[00:26:46.401]how many people have heard of that?
[00:26:47.953]Testing effect?
[00:26:49.222]Okay, about a third.
[00:26:50.077]Okay so,
[00:26:52.748]the testing effect is really exciting for its implications
[00:26:54.603]for teaching, especially teaching with technology
[00:26:57.448]where it's possible to quiz people much more frequently
[00:27:00.928]and in lots of different ways than we ever could before.
[00:27:04.110]So the finding goes like this, the principle goes like this,
[00:27:09.193]that when you take a quiz or a test or a test-like activity
[00:27:14.784]with material, you actually work
[00:27:16.727]with it in that specific way,
[00:27:18.923]trying to respond to a quiz question,
[00:27:21.491]that has a better impact on your ability to recall it later
[00:27:24.421]than virtually anything else
[00:27:28.150]that you could do with that time period.
[00:27:29.754]It especially gives you a much bigger return
[00:27:34.710]than the favored student strategy of re-reading,
[00:27:37.791]so when students say that they're studying,
[00:27:41.311]we're sending them home and they're studying,
[00:27:42.860]that's sometimes what they're doing.
[00:27:44.527]They're re-reading, re-reading, re-reading.
[00:27:46.138]That gives you a wonderful sense of familiarity.
[00:27:48.269]You feel like you're making all this progress
[00:27:49.993]but the research shows that no,
[00:27:52.983]that's probably not giving you what you could
[00:27:55.668]by just shutting the book
[00:27:58.569]and taking a quiz on the information.
[00:28:01.861]Okay and so this is not just one or two findings
[00:28:03.185]that made it in to a journal.
[00:28:04.239]This is stacks and stacks and stacks of findings
[00:28:05.848]done across lots of different conditions,
[00:28:08.172]lots of different ways of going about
[00:28:10.201]giving tests and so on,
[00:28:11.757]so the testing effect retrieval practice is a big one.
[00:28:14.015]There's also the spacing effect
[00:28:17.205]sometimes called distributive practice
[00:28:19.772]which holds that study time gives you better return
[00:28:23.762]in terms of memory the more finely
[00:28:27.749]you split up your study sessions.
[00:28:29.811]So if I have two hours to study for a quiz,
[00:28:32.153]I'm going to get more out of it if I split that up
[00:28:35.572]in to two one-hour sessions or four half-hour sessions
[00:28:38.787]or even more fine grade than that
[00:28:42.030]and this is in many ways good news for students
[00:28:46.307]who are juggling coursework.
[00:28:48.872]They don't have the time even if they were inclined
[00:28:51.160]to go to the library for eight straight hours
[00:28:53.379]for a cram session, they couldn't do it.
[00:28:54.989]There's kids, there's jobs, there's other classes.
[00:28:57.051]And this says while the 15 minutes
[00:29:00.429]that you spend at soccer practice
[00:29:03.479]or waiting for the bus could pay off
[00:29:05.463]as much as half an hour more that you spend
[00:29:07.131]studying some other way,
[00:29:10.321]so the spacing effect.
[00:29:12.020]And lastly interleaving.
[00:29:13.687]Now interleaving is more of a newcomer to the scene.
[00:29:17.269]It's much less well established but there's some exciting
[00:29:19.078]newer work that's been coming out on this.
[00:29:21.360]Now interleaving only applies to a couple of specific types
[00:29:25.601]of learning tasks or subjects.
[00:29:29.433]It applies specifically when we're having
[00:29:33.747]to tell categories apart or we're having to distinguish
[00:29:36.674]and use different problems and different solutions,
[00:29:40.562]different ways of solving problems.
[00:29:41.799]So for example in the STATS class,
[00:29:44.109]am I going to use a kai square, a t-test
[00:29:45.812]or a nova for given problems?
[00:29:47.610]When there's that sense of kind of alternation,
[00:29:49.745]this principle applies and I'll tell you about it
[00:29:51.707]in a second but real quick,
[00:29:53.197]does anybody teaching or have an example of
[00:29:56.039]that kind of learning task where students have to learn
[00:29:59.981]to categorize something they're seeing or encountering,
[00:30:02.861]you have to tell this kind from that kind?
[00:30:06.501]Anybody have that experience in their teaching currently?
[00:30:08.938]Yes!
[00:30:10.158]I would posit that all the property law
[00:30:12.752]and tax law is that.
[00:30:15.193]Is this a lease, is it a lean, is it a property interest.
[00:30:19.826]I describe it as the Hogwarts' sorting hat.
[00:30:24.297]Depending on which way you land,
[00:30:27.240]then you know where you go,
[00:30:28.569]but you got to land on the right spot first
[00:30:30.762]otherwise everything is messed up.
[00:30:34.060]Great example, okay.
[00:30:35.312]All right, well, I'm going to show you
[00:30:36.689]this is easier to show you than tell you about it.
[00:30:38.830]With a very different example but I think you're spot on
[00:30:43.160]so let's say that students are in an art history class
[00:30:48.710]and they're studying impressionism and we've got to tell
[00:30:51.002]our Van Goghs from our Manets from our Monets, right?
[00:30:53.869]So there a couple of ways I can go about this as a student.
[00:30:58.458]I can try going through and really get my Van Goghs down
[00:31:02.827]then move on to all my Manets and all my Monets.
[00:31:07.542]I can do that or
[00:31:08.823]I could study by shuffling them, okay,
[00:31:13.202]kind of alternating them all at once.
[00:31:17.280]Now I would posit that most students
[00:31:20.866]are going to go with the former strategy
[00:31:22.599]and it feels more organized to do it that way.
[00:31:25.427]You feel like you have a better grasp of the problem
[00:31:28.115]and I bet a lot of your students are like,
[00:31:30.359]"I'm going to study the property law first.
[00:31:31.988]"I'm going to study all of my leases."
[00:31:33.621]Total silo, right.
[00:31:36.174]So the interleaving effect that finds that in most cases
[00:31:39.980]you do better with this.
[00:31:41.749]Students hate it but this is going
[00:31:43.361]to give you a better return, all right?
[00:31:46.129]So testing, spacing, interleaving,
[00:31:48.588]that's what's out there in the literature.
[00:31:51.062]How do we bring this into teaching with technology?
[00:31:55.583]First of all, I feel like we're really missing out
[00:32:00.174]if we don't harness this testing effect
[00:32:01.950]and it's important to tell students about it, right?
[00:32:03.914]So they can know as well,
[00:32:06.913]but even so, we can't leave it just on to them
[00:32:09.799]to make sure they go home and use this incredibly powerful
[00:32:12.145]time saving tool.
[00:32:14.061]So things like importing the whole test bank
[00:32:18.215]as we did in one of our psychology courses.
[00:32:20.832]Out of the text book, the whole thing,
[00:32:23.130]and having reading quizzes that are repeatable.
[00:32:25.949]We tell students you just keep your highest grade.
[00:32:30.234]So even if you've done perfectly on this reading quiz,
[00:32:32.361]you should do it again.
[00:32:33.796]Who would ever do that?
[00:32:34.704]Well, because the quiz helps you learn.
[00:32:39.431]Okay, so building in those frequent, small stakes, quizzes.
[00:32:43.791]Tools and resources that feature quizzing,
[00:32:46.688]things like quizlet.
[00:32:48.465]There's an app whose entire reason d'etre is to make
[00:32:50.648]quizzing and even student generated quizzes easier to do.
[00:32:54.608]You can put it and it's mobile friendly
[00:32:56.640]so that the student can be at the bus stop
[00:32:59.490]taking the quiz to get that foundational material
[00:33:02.660]that they need to come in and do higher thinking
[00:33:05.352]when they're actually in my class or actually coming
[00:33:07.526]back to my online discussion.
[00:33:09.669]We may have to market it to students, right?
[00:33:11.792]They come in thinking of tests as the way that I know
[00:33:14.582]that you learn instead of part of the learning itself,
[00:33:17.050]but they can really come around once you pull
[00:33:18.518]back the curtain and say this saves you time
[00:33:20.024]and this is why we do it.
[00:33:25.150]Similarly with the spacing or distributive practice effect.
[00:33:29.033]I mean online teaching gives us so much control
[00:33:33.594]over when students have to engage in these activities,
[00:33:36.330]so when we have a choice of breaking it down
[00:33:39.121]and staggering it or massing it all together,
[00:33:42.857]I think it's pretty clear which way we should go.
[00:33:45.438]Right and interleaving as well,
[00:33:48.887]so if I am making a practice activity or a practice exercise
[00:33:53.499]that students have to go through,
[00:33:55.080]I can be in control of this
[00:33:56.951]and then when students push back and say,
[00:34:00.147]"Can't we just do this one at a time?"
[00:34:02.246]You can tell them about the interleaving effect.
[00:34:05.436]Another kind of powerful processing,
[00:34:07.461]remembering that depth of processing is so important,
[00:34:10.485]we can push that in the kinds of discussion topics
[00:34:14.670]that we open up, asking students to explicitly tell me
[00:34:18.490]how did this relate to you,
[00:34:20.587]how are these two things similar,
[00:34:23.529]that's the kind of processing that is memorable
[00:34:25.723]and taking advantage of online teaching
[00:34:28.720]to really incorporate rich media.
[00:34:32.500]Things like animated diagrams that show a process unfolding
[00:34:35.602]or multimedia that students can interact with
[00:34:41.603]to really explore something
[00:34:43.470]and here's just a little bit,
[00:34:47.630]I'll editorialize just a little bit and say that I think
[00:34:50.950]we should lean on our publishers and our content providers
[00:34:53.118]to do this because these kinds of media are very expensive
[00:34:55.621]and hard to produce sometimes.
[00:34:57.544]I'm not saying we should build these in to the course
[00:35:00.253]necessarily from the ground up,
[00:35:02.103]but I think that this is something where faculty demand
[00:35:04.255]could push for more and better materials.
[00:35:07.611]All right, so moving on to our last piece here,
[00:35:11.986]the thinking piece, the piece that we want so much
[00:35:15.110]but is so hard to actually accomplish sometimes.
[00:35:19.730]So you know, thinking is an intentionally broad term
[00:35:22.863]to cognitive psychologists that include everything
[00:35:24.528]from the formal reasoning that you might see
[00:35:27.325]in a logic or a math class to the problem solving
[00:35:30.787]that you'd see in an engineering class
[00:35:32.787]even analogies and everybody's favorite critical thinking
[00:35:36.136]which means different things to different people
[00:35:38.556]but we also all of us really, really want.
[00:35:40.842]So that's fine.
[00:35:43.630]There's a lot to it but even across all
[00:35:51.636]these very diverse areas, some things that tend
[00:35:53.998]to be very true are as follows.
[00:35:55.000]So thinking skills are, unfortunately for us,
[00:35:56.757]a lot more context specific than we may realize.
[00:35:59.925]So while most of us are trying to build kind
[00:36:01.779]of general purpose thinking skills
[00:36:06.885]that students can use in this class, the next class
[00:36:10.819]and their whole life, that's a great goal.
[00:36:12.238]Human thinking tends to not work that way naturally.
[00:36:13.742]All right?
[00:36:16.408]We tend to think in an area.
[00:36:19.198]We tend to be able to reason in a certain content area
[00:36:24.698]and it's very hard for us to push that into the next thing
[00:36:26.378]and this issue of transfer is, after all,
[00:36:28.668]I mean that goes to the real heart of what we're trying
[00:36:31.478]to do as educators.
[00:36:33.418]If it doesn't transfer, then it's essentially not learning
[00:36:35.548]and time and again we tend to be surprised
[00:36:39.938]by how little transfers, sometimes not even
[00:36:42.268]to the next module let alone the next class
[00:36:45.138]or the student's life,
[00:36:47.648]so here too who can throw out an example or two,
[00:36:50.578]not to get too negative here,
[00:36:52.928]but who can throw out an example of a time
[00:36:57.824]when you were just really surprised
[00:36:59.018]at what students didn't transfer,
[00:37:00.168]saying, "wait, we learned this, guys."
[00:37:01.467]The expert, you can see that,
[00:37:04.268]but it just didn't make it to the next thing.
[00:37:07.496]It's like you were starting all over.
[00:37:09.008]Who can give us a good example?
[00:37:11.715]I gave back to back biweek classes
[00:37:14.236]and had some students in both of them
[00:37:16.585]and two weeks apart, different classes,
[00:37:19.165]they were just lost.
[00:37:21.840]Wow, okay.
[00:37:23.560]And students who were kind of functioning and doing okay
[00:37:26.115]in the former experience and it's even the same person.
[00:37:30.360]Okay and the same person is in front of you,
[00:37:33.557]it's the same stuff and sometimes it's a memory issue
[00:37:37.098]but it may also be a transfer issue.
[00:37:39.090]That's what your mind is trying to do is give you the skill
[00:37:42.036]that you needed in the place where you needed it,
[00:37:44.238]but that's what gets in the way of transfer.
[00:37:45.143]Do we have another example?
[00:37:46.607]So he taught literally two experience to the same group
[00:37:50.903]of students and it fel like they went backwards, right.
[00:37:54.737]So transfer is going to be a more difficult problem
[00:37:58.110]than we realize and I think just having that in mind
[00:38:00.750]can help us see it and set more space aside for it
[00:38:04.120]and be thinking about this in our class planning.
[00:38:07.340]There's no magic bullet as far as transfer,
[00:38:09.892]but here's some things that do help.
[00:38:14.098]So focusing on the underlying structure problems.
[00:38:19.302]So this is really what gets in the way of transfer, right,
[00:38:20.978]is we change up the surface characteristics of a problem.
[00:38:25.144]We the experts know that underneath it's the same
[00:38:27.755]kind of problem, but you change a little bit
[00:38:30.263]of the surface characteristics and it falls apart.
[00:38:33.000]Well, to get over that,
[00:38:35.356]students need to be in that situation over
[00:38:37.912]and over and over where it's the same underlying principles,
[00:38:41.013]you tweak the details, the surface details
[00:38:42.879]and they have to practice with it.
[00:38:45.944]So over time they can use that to start being able
[00:38:49.222]to drill down to those underlying principles
[00:38:52.565]and also in the feedback and guidance we give them
[00:38:55.027]in problem solving to say,
[00:38:57.935]"All right, let's work on separating out.
[00:38:59.352]"What are some of the surface details
[00:39:00.511]"of this problem that don't matter
[00:39:02.271]"and what are the underlying principles?"
[00:39:05.015]and making them consciously do that can also be helpful
[00:39:07.174]to get over the transfer issue.
[00:39:12.027]Now critical thinking, there's now growing up a whole
[00:39:16.502]literature just around the teaching of critical thinking
[00:39:19.787]and we are going to unpack all the principles around that
[00:39:22.437]because it really is, as we've gotten in to it,
[00:39:25.229]we've realized what a complex problem this is
[00:39:28.542]and I know it can be a real beginner's mistake
[00:39:32.322]to underestimate just how hard it will be
[00:39:33.839]to teach critical thinking in your class.
[00:39:36.221]I know when I was a beginning Psychology instructor,
[00:39:37.663]critical thinking very,
[00:39:39.551]very important to learn in psychology.
[00:39:40.892]Right, I want them to be able to tell causation
[00:39:44.720]from correlation and think about empirical ways
[00:39:46.756]of explaining human behavior, great.
[00:39:47.812]We had two whole days to do critical thinking
[00:39:51.757]and boy, I taught critical thinking and then I thought
[00:39:53.060]they could do it at the end of that.
[00:39:54.727]No.
[00:39:58.794]This is something that you have to be in the habit of
[00:40:01.908]and practicing over and over and even then
[00:40:05.322]it can easily fall through.
[00:40:07.899]Now one of the things that I think can help us
[00:40:09.399]is just to have a good working definition in our minds
[00:40:10.511]going forward of what does critical thinking mean
[00:40:11.458]for me in this class, in this discipline
[00:40:14.187]because it's really not dictated
[00:40:17.150]by a formal working definition and I think that's fine.
[00:40:21.302]Critical thinking naturally looks different
[00:40:24.846]in an engineering class and in a psychology class
[00:40:27.044]and in a law class, but,
[00:40:28.749]we have to be at least clear on what our definition is
[00:40:32.149]and what that means, what it looks like to us going forward.
[00:40:35.595]And we have to know that this is going to be, perhaps,
[00:40:37.992]the most difficult uphill battle we will face as teachers.
[00:40:41.601]We can have all kinds of good conversations, I'm sure,
[00:40:46.158]after this event on just with the barriers to
[00:40:48.568]what critical thinking are.
[00:40:50.917]It's effortful, it asks us to sometimes ignore beliefs
[00:40:52.705]that we already have and learning we think we already have.
[00:40:56.118]There's all sorts of things that get in the way
[00:41:00.981]and if you think about it, it's also a cuing issue
[00:41:05.240]so it's not just knowing how to tell causation
[00:41:08.148]from correlation for example,
[00:41:09.989]it's knowing when to do that.
[00:41:12.386]So even if a student can perfectly on my final exam
[00:41:14.961]distinguish correlation and causation
[00:41:19.109]and the problem I give them, if they're reading
[00:41:20.752]through their news feed the next day,
[00:41:23.169]they may not be in that same mode
[00:41:25.050]where they opt to apply that motive thinking.
[00:41:33.793]So applying the principles.
[00:41:43.488]So here again thinking back to what we want
[00:41:46.409]students to be able to do and making sure we've consciously
[00:41:53.152]countering our natural tendency to focus on content.
[00:41:59.185]All right, it's not all about what chapters,
[00:42:02.140]what policy, should we include this or that.
[00:42:06.215]What are the students needing to do
[00:42:08.118]and making sure that our learning activities
[00:42:09.457]that we have incorporated are really
[00:42:10.787]well aligned to those skills.
[00:42:12.078]So I can't tell you how many times I've sat
[00:42:12.944]with faculty groups and said, okay,
[00:42:13.996]what are some of the skills you want students to have
[00:42:14.924]that they're not getting.
[00:42:15.874]"Oh, critical reading!"
[00:42:16.786]Right, we really want them to be able to read critically.
[00:42:17.995]They can read but even if they do it,
[00:42:19.227]they don't extract any points.
[00:42:21.191]Okay, so what exercises do you have built in to the class
[00:42:23.604]that make them accountable to do critical reading
[00:42:27.568]and to maybe even do it with each other
[00:42:29.992]so they can all compare their work?
[00:42:31.579]"Oh, we don't have anything.
[00:42:33.600]"We assign the reading and they go home with it
[00:42:35.839]"and then they don't get it."
[00:42:36.948]So that's an example of aligning our learning activities
[00:42:40.875]to the skills we want and something like group annotation
[00:42:42.668]tools, even a Google doc can help us help students
[00:42:44.903]and make them accountable to make their thinking visible
[00:42:48.583]and let them work together on that skill.
[00:42:54.873]Using the affordances of technology to present
[00:42:59.426]as many problems as students are going to need
[00:43:01.854]to master those skills, all right.
[00:43:02.995]So creating those large banks of problems
[00:43:04.610]like we did with the Ohms Law homework
[00:43:06.917]where they would get what looked like a different problem
[00:43:10.973]every time but still reinforcing that underlying skill.
[00:43:13.992]It's obvious to see how we can do that on an engineering
[00:43:16.714]or a math class, but maybe we need to be doing that
[00:43:19.231]in other disciplines as well.
[00:43:21.591]Quizzing as well turns out to be kind of a two-for
[00:43:24.873]or three-for because there's some evidence
[00:43:28.112]that when students are frequently quizzed on information,
[00:43:29.768]they're better able to transfer it when they go to use it.
[00:43:33.795]So that's yet another plug for quizzing
[00:43:38.408]and retrieval practice.
[00:43:40.713]And then using scenarios,
[00:43:44.011]remembering that human thinking is so context-driven
[00:43:45.835]especially for teaching in an applied field
[00:43:49.997]where students need to be able to use this
[00:43:52.022]in a real environment,
[00:43:55.808]that's what they need to be simulating
[00:43:59.100]as much as possible in their learning.
[00:44:02.007]So things like case studies, roleplaying that takes place
[00:44:03.305]within the discussion board,
[00:44:04.465]students can really get in to these
[00:44:05.344]even if you don't have a lot of props or other realism.
[00:44:08.159]If you assign roles and tell students,
[00:44:10.157]"Here are your goals and you need to play this out."
[00:44:12.291]that can be a realistic experience.
[00:44:14.710]There are also discipline specific tools
[00:44:17.941]that can simulate important experiences or principles
[00:44:21.126]within a discipline.
[00:44:23.790]In mine for example, there's Sniffy the Rat.
[00:44:25.828]He's a little animated rat, he lives in a little box
[00:44:27.312]and you can train him with little virtual pellets
[00:44:29.718]and thousands and thousands of psychology students
[00:44:32.112]have now used Sniffy to learn about learning principles
[00:44:34.479]and training,
[00:44:36.984]so there may be a tool like that in your discipline
[00:44:40.185]that can get students involved in virtual application
[00:44:43.526]of these skills that you want them to have.
[00:44:47.754]And even when we use a very low-tech approach.
[00:44:52.216]I'll just tell you one great example that I've gleaned
[00:44:55.430]from a colleague of mine that works at SUNT Oswego.
[00:45:01.986]She teaches an advanced course in Design for The Web
[00:45:02.819]and there are a lot of things that she teaches
[00:45:05.665]in this class but one of the things
[00:45:08.281]that she wants students to be able to do
[00:45:09.860]is not just build a good website to meet a client's needs,
[00:45:12.880]they need to get feedback from the client and learn
[00:45:16.068]to navigate some of those client relationships
[00:45:18.356]so she has this virtual client component to the class
[00:45:22.874]which goes like this:
[00:45:26.937]so students, of course, when they're assigned
[00:45:29.562]to build a website, they get a little bit of background
[00:45:32.045]on the company it's for and is it a non-profit or profit,
[00:45:34.633]all that good stuff, but they also get a client
[00:45:36.077]that goes with it and that client doesn't just have
[00:45:36.989]a list of needs, they have a persona.
[00:45:38.367]So she created a backstory for each of these clients
[00:45:40.502]and this is a really cool piece of realism.
[00:45:44.808]Each of those clients has an email address
[00:45:47.283]that's specific to them and she roleplays this client
[00:45:50.559]with every student
[00:45:53.425]and so instead of sitting down and emailing my professor
[00:45:55.205]about my work I did, I e-mail my client,
[00:45:58.036]Sally Smith, and depending on Sally's persona,
[00:46:01.663]she may like it, she may not, she may like it
[00:46:04.090]but then give you some unclear directions.
[00:46:05.636]She says that this is so realistic
[00:46:08.638]that every now and again one of her students comes to her
[00:46:11.149]to complain about their client.
[00:46:13.133](laughter)
[00:46:14.017]"I can't believe she said that!"
[00:46:15.880]And she's like, "Remember, that's me?"
[00:46:17.879]So it's not high technology, it's not that complicated,
[00:46:19.601]but it's creative and it gets to the heart of simulating
[00:46:24.429]what she wants her students to be able to do
[00:46:29.264]with all this web design that she's teaching them
[00:46:32.627]so we can think about exercises like that.
[00:46:38.420]So
[00:46:39.998]I know from working with faculty groups
[00:46:41.826]that better than answers are questions,
[00:46:44.044]so here are some more questions that I want to leave you
[00:46:47.016]with today to talk with your colleagues, each other,
[00:46:49.670]and your instructional design team
[00:46:52.031]as we advance forward in these different modalities.
[00:46:55.824]What do we want them to be able to do?
[00:46:57.589]Well, let's think about thinking skills.
[00:46:59.752]Let's worry about transfer.
[00:47:02.125]Let's see if we can piece out certain parts
[00:47:03.921]to be sort of automatic and over learned
[00:47:06.190]to where they no longer are pulling
[00:47:09.657]that much out of students' resources.
[00:47:11.648]How do we want them to spend their time?
[00:47:13.277]How are they going to be focused during that time?
[00:47:15.821]How are you going to make sure that that time is spaced
[00:47:18.782]out so they get more return on what they're investing?
[00:47:21.446]How are you going to be sure that the time they spend
[00:47:27.867]really does tie in to the goals
[00:47:29.691]that they're trying to accomplish
[00:47:31.667]since that is such a driver of memory?
[00:47:33.397]Measuring student learning in ways that take advantage
[00:47:35.027]of the testing effect and retrieval practice, right,
[00:47:38.178]so that assessments themselves serve to deepen
[00:47:40.921]and advance learning since we know that they can.
[00:47:44.120]And lastly, getting students learning
[00:47:48.229]from and with each other in ways that reinforce
[00:47:50.472]these important things like thinking skills
[00:47:53.335]and particular discussions.
[00:47:55.021]We know that those are so powerful for building things
[00:47:56.682]like critical thinking and you can do so much more
[00:47:58.585]in an online discussion than you can in a face
[00:48:01.874]to face discussion.
[00:48:05.911]And lastly, a question that gets well
[00:48:07.747]out of cognitive psychology but I hope starts
[00:48:11.012]some good conversations with your colleagues,
[00:48:13.547]how do we create the online communities
[00:48:15.012]and get students engaged in ways that help them
[00:48:19.761]get the benefit of all these other learning activities
[00:48:21.877]that we set up for them?
[00:48:23.210]All right, we're going to wrap it up right there
[00:48:25.857]and thank you so much.
[00:48:28.438](applause)
[00:48:37.996]All right, time for questions.
[00:48:54.054]I was wondering if you had an example
[00:48:57.354]perhaps out of the world of (muffled speech)
[00:49:00.843]that might be the best mapping of what you told us
[00:49:05.440]here today to our best practices.
[00:49:09.388]Do you have any (muffled speech)
[00:49:13.914]did the best job of incorporating what you've said today?
[00:49:17.440]All right, tell me a little bit more about MOPS.
[00:49:20.177]What do you mean by that?
[00:49:21.509](muffled speech)
[00:49:23.743]Right, okay.
[00:49:25.590]It's such a tough one because...
[00:49:29.566]I think the
[00:49:36.234]online, okay,
[00:49:37.438]so
[00:49:43.232]Carnegie Melon's project with their online courses,
[00:49:45.080]their adaptive courses, now at Stanford,
[00:49:47.552]Candace Tiel's project,
[00:49:55.362]I think that's been the most grounded in research.
[00:49:57.560]They've done the best job of making the things
[00:49:59.635]publicly available and in theory,
[00:50:01.177]it's driven by tweaking the materials
[00:50:03.751]based on how students do in them.
[00:50:05.619]I think that's by far the most evidence based
[00:50:09.787]book that's out there.
[00:50:12.313]That said,
[00:50:18.984]they don't always look as flashy as some other offerings.
[00:50:20.509]You can't always tell because they're built
[00:50:22.264]on these principles that you can't always see.
[00:50:24.544]You can't see why is it presenting this question,
[00:50:26.128]why are we doing this activity this time.
[00:50:27.966]They look like any other collection of materials
[00:50:32.392]and I think that they've done a good job trying
[00:50:34.471]to flow it out beyond math and science,
[00:50:37.114]so I think that's where something like adaptive courseware,
[00:50:43.120]that's the most obvious application and it's relatively easy
[00:50:49.840]to say here's the progression of this should lead
[00:50:51.880]to this should lead to this,
[00:50:54.937]it's relatively easy to assess.
[00:50:57.161]So they've tried to push it out into things
[00:50:59.705]like language learning, English and writing,
[00:51:02.733]but I think Tiel herself has said
[00:51:06.496]that's always going to be more of a challenge,
[00:51:09.562]so I think that those are some of the questions
[00:51:15.562]that I'd look at and saying what is out there
[00:51:17.029]that's really good?
[00:51:19.116]But I worry that we're kind of losing steam
[00:51:21.601]and pushing forward for even more and better offerings.
[00:51:25.915]Yeah, sure.
[00:51:26.963](muffled speech)
[00:51:32.069]50, okay.
[00:51:36.709](muffled speech)
[00:51:40.986]So yeah, a large and tell me is there,
[00:51:46.015]let's go and make sure the interaction
[00:51:47.156]that students are doing with the material
[00:51:48.531]and with each other right now.
[00:51:49.592]How would you characterize it?
[00:51:51.200](muffled speech)
[00:51:53.594]Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:55.145]Yeah.
[00:51:59.148]Yeah they do, especially if we give them a very
[00:52:04.348]open question like debate such and so.
[00:52:07.536]I think much as we would do in a face to face class,
[00:52:09.629]well the National Center for Academic Transformation
[00:52:11.559]has this great catch phrase called Small Within Large.
[00:52:14.341]So dividing the experience and the connections
[00:52:19.394]that students have so that they're themselves interacting
[00:52:23.208]with a smaller group of peers
[00:52:25.411]or perhaps a more targeted question.
[00:52:28.630]So that's one way to divide
[00:52:32.846]and conquer in a larger class like that because I agree,
[00:52:35.771]I moderate the Attention Matters boards
[00:52:38.563]where we just it's very, very simplistic and, yeah,
[00:52:41.447]you wake up and there's 150 new posts
[00:52:42.784]and it's kind of going all over the place.
[00:52:44.523]So maybe not all of the students have to interact
[00:52:50.037]with all of the other students and maybe they don't
[00:52:51.937]all have to interact with each other in the identical ways
[00:52:53.385]to do that
[00:52:55.698]and I'm also a fan of discussion boards
[00:52:59.835]that ask students to solve a very specific problem
[00:53:03.435]or that narrow it down more than we traditionally seem to do
[00:53:06.604]with the discussion and debate types of boards,
[00:53:08.485]so that's one way to do it and lastly I think
[00:53:14.230]putting in the time up front to make something
[00:53:17.059]like a bank of problems, a bank of questions
[00:53:20.356]that then runs either semi-automated
[00:53:23.286]or without a whole lot of intervention from you
[00:53:25.222]is a great, great investment because,
[00:53:27.750]just because it's large, we don't want students
[00:53:32.510]to miss out and have a superficial experience.
[00:53:35.909]They still need to be practicing, practicing
[00:53:37.730]and seeing if they can get mastery and so automatic that
[00:53:42.431]and making sure that they're really getting
[00:53:44.373]into what they need to be learning or applying
[00:53:45.356]and accountable to reaching standards,
[00:53:47.774]that's something else that I would look at
[00:53:55.121]in a class that is relatively large like that.
[00:53:56.886]Okay.
[00:54:02.432]Are there any questions?
[00:54:09.370](muffled speech)
[00:54:10.970]Walt Hamilton wants to know if there's a way
[00:54:15.875]we can access the attention course that you mentioned.
[00:54:18.794]Oh okay, good!
[00:54:21.302]So Attention Matters is very much kind of
[00:54:23.066]we call it pilot, beta and everything else,
[00:54:24.983]but I do share materials with people.
[00:54:29.941]I usually do it with just a dropbox link.
[00:54:31.440]I don't post it because I kind of like to know
[00:54:36.058]who had it and make sure that they know how to get
[00:54:38.521]back in touch with me if they need any help,
[00:54:39.988]but it's available as BB learn archive
[00:54:41.355]and also I've pieced the materials out,
[00:54:43.146]so you can take parts of it.
[00:54:44.781]You can take the assessments,
[00:54:47.026]you can take the ideas for discussion questions
[00:54:48.424]or the written materials that we have for students
[00:54:51.049]and you're absolutely welcome to do that
[00:54:52.939]so go ahead and e-mail me and I can give you a link to that.
[00:55:00.959]Let's thank Dr. Miller for coming.
[00:55:03.621](applause)
[00:55:10.696]And I want to thank everybody that's in the room
[00:55:13.855]for coming today and those that are on the webcast.
[00:55:15.479]There is some information on your table,
[00:55:19.267]the 2017 Spring Teaching and Learning Symposium
[00:55:21.961]that is March 3rd.
[00:55:24.111]The list of instructional designers that can help you
[00:55:29.558]as you think about course design
[00:55:31.755]and any format, face to face, blended, web,
[00:55:35.500]fully online, some online,
[00:55:39.829]whatever you want to do,
[00:55:42.079]the instruction designers can provide
[00:55:43.461]that assistance to you.
[00:55:45.901]Also the evaluation is on the table.
[00:55:48.112]If you fill that out, I'll appreciate it.
[00:55:50.193]We have been recording this,
[00:55:52.644]We will follow next week with a link to the recording
[00:55:56.106]and any other kinds of resources that we've identified
[00:56:01.022]for this particular
[00:56:06.637]talk topic.
[00:56:09.433]Thank you very much for coming.
[00:56:10.560]Have a good rest of the afternoon and a good weekend.
[00:56:12.869](applause)

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