Make it Stick

I just read Make it Stick, about research-based results in how people learn and the implications for education. I loved it; it is filled with simple, straightforward ideas that will be useful in the classroom. For example, it is better to do many low-stakes quizzes than a few high-stakes exams. For another, it isn't useful for students to re-read the textbook, and it is useful for the lectures and the textbook to be misaligned. For another, students' perception of their learning is often wrong and misguided. For another, it is useful to interleave topics and not just do “massed practice”. It points out that it is very adaptive for learners to believe that their brains are plastic and their abilities are not innately limited. Luckily this also appears to be true. All of these things will come into my next pre-health (or other big) class. And I will explicitly explain to the students why.

My quibbles with the book are few. One is that they slag off unschooling, and then immediately follow with a long profile of a Bruce Hendry, who is a perfect example of the power of unschooling (he is entirely self-taught through self-directed projects of great importance to himself!). I also found the writing repetitive and a bit slow. But the book is filled with good ideas. Also, it is not just informative, it is responsible: The authors clearly differentiate between research findings and speculations or over-generalizations of them. This is a great contribution to the literature on teaching and learning.

scientific teaching?

I am on a committee at NYU (related to NYU's Morse Academic Program) in which we were given copies of this article on scientific teaching (PDF) by Handelsman et al. The article has many sentences that include the word should, which is a little annoying, but the worst thing about it is that it advocates, repeatedly, basing our teaching methods on scientifically demonstrable successes, measured with metrics. I don't object to being scientifically accountable, and I, for one, use the research-supported techniques of active learning, participatory classroom activities, and peer instruction. However, the article goes on about metrics without giving a single clear example. Why? Because they don't want to undermine their point by bringing up controversial testing strategies. However, we can't be metric-driven if we don't have metrics! So let's all just stop talking about the philosophy of being scientific and find some metrics that we can agree on. I, for one, haven't found anything I like. After all, the goal of physics education is not to create students who perform better on isolated, decontextualized exams like the Force Concept Inventory!

diagnosis

I posted about diagnosis on my research blog and that made me realize that I should post here too. Almost all of science is diagnosis: You must diagnose your code, you must diagnose disagreements between theory and observation, you must diagnose inconsistencies in results. And yet diagnosis is so far outside any formal curriculum, no-one knows what you would even think about teaching there! It is taught to doctors and automobile mechanics, but not astronomers, who need it just as much, or perhaps even more.

Seymour Papert makes this point very clearly—and much more generally—in his book Mindstorms. One of his main arguments that computers must play an important role in education, or in thinking about thinking, is that programming a computer forces us to confront bugs. These require diagnosis (and also lead to interesting insights, a consequence he discusses extensively).

is our children learning?

Teaching style / technique came up at the MPIA mess hall lunch table last week. I said that I use the highly interactive style. Some at the table opined that it probably only helps the best students and is bad for the worst. I differed, but realized that I have essentially no objective evidence. There are certainly studies on the subject, many of which do limited forms of controlled experiments, and they tend to support my view. But it is truly impossible to do a proper differential experiment.

You can't teach two classes at identical quality in two different styles to two identical sets of incoming students. It gets worse the more you think about it. For just one example of the biases: Even if you get two teachers to agree, the one that agrees to do the newer style will tend to be younger; that is, very different when it comes to interacting with the students. And for another: There is no agreed-upon evaluation of student knowledge or aptitude, before or after, and the ones that exist (FCI, for example) favor certain kinds of knowledge.

This relates to a bigger issue I sometimes expound upon from my soap box: When it comes to human or important things, like teaching, hiring, promotion, and supervision, scientists tend to become non-scientists, and throw repeatable empiricism out the window. They are convinced that what they are doing is right despite being able to muster no piece of objective evidence (indeed, evidence is often concealed behind confidentiality or human subjects rules).

For all these reasons, I am a big fan of those who are trying to actually make measurements of the effectiveness of various educational strategies. More power to them, and I will continue to take their advice.