JABET

I think I can now shed a little light on part of a quote from this previous post (from a Time Magazine article):

…students remember just 20% of the content of class lectures a week later…

It seems that research has revealed that multitasking makes you dumb. Once you have read the quotes below, you might wonder, as I do, why educational institutions, especially Universities, expect you to simultaneously: listen to the lecturer, comprehend what they are saying, compile it into an abbreviated form, and write that in your notes. If that isn’t multitasking, I don’t know what is.

The quote comes by way of SDRNews, inspired by the following summary from Slashdot of an article in The Atlantic:

…in which Walter Kirn talks about the scientific results that support his claim and his own experiences with multitasking: that it destroys our ability to focus.

“Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on… studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.”

Interestingly, a couple of years earlier, Digg also mentioned coverage in ArsTechnica of a Time Magazine cover story:

…entitled “Too Wired For Their Own Good?”, condemns the youth of the nation as gadget-obsessed, perennially multitasking, social failures who can’t really get into anything important or even relax. The article brings up example upon example of dysfunctional teenagers and their equally disjointed families.

It is good to see scientific evidence can now substantiate and explain this. Who knows – given that the research was released two years after the Time article, it may have even been in response to it.

After going through the archives of podcasts at EdTechTalk, I recently listened to Women Of Web 2.0, Episode 7. 56 minutes in, they have an interesting discussion about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation related to the concept of Locus of Control.

As this is related to two of my previous posts (here and here) I though it was worthy of mention. Being a podcast, it is hard to give you a simple reference to the discussion point, so I decided to transcribe it below. The other difficulty related to it being from a podcast, is that I can’t be sure exactly who the speaker is, beyond the female members of Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Vicki Davis , Sharon Peters and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. Despite their inherent challenges in these situations, I still love podcasts. So the quote is:

I heard a gentleman talking the other day, and one of the things he said I thought were so interesting – he was talking about ‘Locus of Control’… What he was talking about was intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Research has shown that students that are intrinsically motivated and really feel that they learn best by what comes from inside of them, that their learning depends on their own initiative about ‘do I get enough sleep’, ‘have I eaten enough’, ‘have I prepared enough for this’, ‘wow, this is interesting, I am going to make it happen’. They [intrinsically motivated] are the most successful at school. But the majority of males that were tested in school were extrinsically motivated, and they beleived that learning somehow occurred from the outside – from whatever the teacher imposed upon them. They were going to be told what to learn and how to learn it, e.g. if the teacher liked them they did better. There wasn’t a whole lot that really came from the inside.

People that are intrinsically motivated, when you start to teach them, and intervene into something (e.g. there is a real wonderment going on and they are exploring and discovering). All of a sudden someone, a teacher comes in from the outside and says ‘ok, we are going to do it structured, we are going to do this, look on page 47, lets reflect on that, what do you guys think’ that the enthusiasm and the wonderment and the excitement just drops from that person who is intrinsically motivated.

And so immediately I questioned, I wonder if all those boys, who are not going to do so well in school because they are extrinsically motivated could be trained to do things the way we [the speaker] do in the average [constructivist] classroom [aka, to be intrinsically motivated].

Quite interesting. From what I can tell, Locus of Control (according to Wikipedia) is more about whether you perceive that you have control over your performance due to skill, of if you beleive it is due to luck. This is closely related to a previous post. The Wikipedia article does not mention intrinsic or extrinsic motivation (in so many words). Although it looks like a relevant Google search does highlight some connections.

It is interesting to relate it to gender differences – I wonder if the stereotypical ‘males are more competitive’ view is connected to this, in that competition may be viewed by them as extrinsic motivation.

Also interesting to see another example of how intrinsic motivation can be decreased by teacher intervention. In retrospect, the ‘imposing structure’ intervention described here is probably a broader category, of which the ‘offering a reward’ intervention of my previous post is simply an example of.

My previous post (on a child’s outlook influencing their intelligence) made me recall a segment in a BBC documentary (I think it was either Human Body or Child of our Time, both hosted by Robert Winston) about how using rewards too much can actually demotivate a child.

It seemed that by promising a reward while assigning a task, the child would focus on how to acheive the reward with the least possible effort, shifting focus away from intrinsic motivation and simply enjoying the task at hand. They illustrated this effect in a classroom, and it only took one or two occurrences to to demotivate the children, and created flow-on problems for quite a while afterwards like boredom, lack of focus and loss of self-sufficiency. This negative effect could be avoided by not promising the reward ahead of time and only providing a reward on a regular basis. With student motivation seeming to be the largest problem facing many teachers and schools today, I wonder if this phenomenon is at least partially to blame. It is very easy to fall into this trap and once started, it can be a slippery slope, as teachers try to counter demotivated students with the promised reward technique again. Even telling students they can leave class or stop work early once they have finished xyz, (or inversely, hold them in after the bell has rung to finish a task) can start them down the slippery slope.

Its facinating and somewhat terrifying how easy it can be to influence a person’s frame of mind. Which brings us back to the previous post – how are the children’s “theories” of intelligence being influenced in the classroom? Related studies have shown that praising a child for acheiving a particular task can be a problem, as (in a similar way to the promised reward technique) it conditions the child to expect (or even attempt to ‘engineer’) praise. This becomes a problem if a task is not done well – if praise is withheld, then the child will feel like they are not able to accomplish that task and be less inclined to try in the future. This fosters ‘helpless’ orientation of learners. However, it is also possible to foster ‘mastery-oriented’ learning using praise. The key is to not praise the task itself, but rather to praise the characteristics used to complete the task. For example, when a child has created a painting, instead of saying “what a beautiful painting”, you could praise their creativity etc.

Recognising the correct characteristics to praise can take some getting used to, however there is help available. The Virtues Project has identified a list of virtues, categorised them and selected a shortlist of the most important ones to bear in mind. They also provide advice and training of how to identify virtues in people’s actions and acknlowledge them. They provide courses for teachers, who in turn teach the students, who interestingly teach their parent as they are intrinsically motivated to be praised on their virtues. They also offer a lot of other advice with many different applications from Violence Prevention to Leadership Development. I actually know someone who is finishing their masters thesis on applying the virtues project in primary schools. The results have shown a significant improvement in sociability and time on task for pretty much all students (less for students that already rated well) in the space of only a few weeks.

So it is good to know that the ease of influencing someone can be both a good and a bad thing.

SlashDotReview mentioned an item on SlashDot (which has a vibrant conversation on the topic) quoting Hugh Pickens, who summarises an article in Scientific American on the secret to raising smart kids. Dang - talk about quoting your sources!

Anyway, Hugh Pickens writes:

Scientific American has an interesting article on the secret to raising smart kids that says that more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings. In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. One theory of what separates the two general classes of learners, helpless versus mastery-oriented, is that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount. Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. Mastery-oriented children think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating offering opportunities to learn.

The original article Scientific American article is available here.

Its great to see the NECC Conference releasing stuff to the wider world that cannot make it to the conference. In NECC Live 2006 (only 2007 content is currently available), the item called “One Laptop Per Child: Hope or Hype?” had a number of interesting comments that I have transcribed below.

The three pannelists were:

• Ian Jukes – Travels a lot (consulting), working on 4 books.
• Barry Vercoe – Media Lab – Developer of OLPC, Music and Audio specialist.
• David Thomburg – Thomburg Center, State Dept Advisories, Travels (Brazil, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand), Getting into OS and Linux, New book “When the Best is Free – an educators perspective on Open Source”.

Ian Jukes – We need to transform learning, not just use the new technology in an old way.
David Thomburg – You need both the technology and the staff development to make the most of it.
David Thomburg – The technology can play a very important role if we can get the educators to realise it is learning about learning, not learning about stuff. (There is still a need for some learning about stuff, but not the dominant need).
David Thomburg – I think 1 to 1 is a myth, I don’t think 1 to 1 is a goal. I think 1 to 1 is a waystation on the way toward somwthing else. I think technology needs to be ubiquitous. I don’t operate 1 to 1, I operate 5 (technologies) to 1 (person). The critical issue is that those become useful to the extent that they interoperate. (a lot more work to make devices talk to eachother effortlesslessly).
Ian Jukes – In Singapore … they are truely 1 to 1 there, but you have to ask yourself “what has changed?”. I had a conversation with their Minister of Education two weeks ago where he said “top academic kids in the entire world that couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag if their life depended on it. We are a nation with no natural resources – not even fresh water. We can’t just have people that regurgitate the old, we have to have people that create the new”. And so if you put the technology in there by itself, I say “So what?”. The real issue here is about how you use that technology.
Barry Vercoe – Singapore … are running scared, just as they are in Taiwan, about the industry that has supported their economy for the last 20 years – the economic miracle of those places. …they can’t just stamp out copies any more, they are being undercut by Mainland China. The people in Singapore and Taiwan have to learn to create, have to learn how to invent, have to move higher up in the food chain in order to come up with products, new ways of thinking. So it has to do with how you think about technology, how you use technology to invent and create the economic community.
Ian Jukes – With ‘No Child Left Behind’ (no Superintendent left standing) we end up graduating highly educated, useless people – people who have really good school skills, really good test writing skills, but they arn’t ready for the world out there. … these kids leave the system that has held them up for 16 years and fall flat on their face.
Ian Jukes – So the real issues arn’t hardware issues, the real issues are headware issues. … about how we take the technology and leverage it. This isn’t about teaching powerpoint, it is about teaching kids to be better communicators. This isn’t about teaching Microsoft Word, it is about teaching kids to be better writers. Learning about the technology is nothing but an incidental (but essential) byproduct of that process. The real issue is education is about thinking – the technology is just the vehicle that will allow us to go there.
David Thomburg – (believes US is loosing its creativity. e.g. Motorola Razr Cellphones is designed in Brazil, not because it is cheap (it cost Motorolla a fortune), but because of the creativity of the Brazilian software engineers and their interdiciplinary perspective).
David Thomburg – This (lack of US creativity) is being exaserbated by the NCLB perception that we need to teach to task, that it is about a body of regurgitatable knowledge, as Ian says “the binge and purge model – information bulimia”.
David Thomburg – When did joy leave education? At conference it used to be so much fun … teachers were giving other teachers software they had wrote themselves … now it is all shrinkwrapped, you have al the booth barbies with bodies by Nautilus, brains by Matel. Come on, lets have some fun.
David Thomburg – You take Linux on a little box, you put in some creative stuff, you put that in the hand of some kids and teachers, you sit down in a corner and the next thing you know its Tuesday because your having so much fun with it. Anything that brings that joy back is going to be good for this country (USA).
David Thomburg – When we get all of the children who can celebrate knowledge, celebrate culture – not as a melting pot or soup that is homogenised but like a salad bowl where you get the delight of different flavours … it is not a perspective that supports the concept of (armed) conflict. When you truly understand other people in the world and that this is a planet, how can you fight?
Barry Vercoe – Its the people that have creativity and a natural desire to express themselves, are going to burst there way through whatever technological barriers are there, these are the people that innovate. Innovation occurs when there is a clash of cultures, a clash of ways of thinking, a clash of ways of doing things – the interaction of those people (is where the innovation happens).
Ian Jukes – We live in a media culture that builds things up in order to tear things down. My greatest fear is that the media jumps to a conclusion (like after a team looses one game) that all is lost (before we build enough momentum to reach Gladwells tipping point).
An audience question – “How can we get the same scale of conversation moving (as around the OLPC) about what real rich learning looks like like when it is facilitated by teachers?”
Ian Jukes – Neil Postman said “Children enter school as a question mark and exit as a period. Primary kids like school, high schoolers like lunch. Primary teachers teach children, secondary teachers teach subjects”. I beleive the tipping point is about grade 3, where learning goes from this incredible multimedia experience to being increasingly drudgery.
Ian Jukes – What is the opposite of pro? con? What is the opposite of progress? congress? Many of these people that are making decisions that affect the lives of these kids – their senior year was grade seven, their toughest two years was grade one … and they haven’t been in a classroom for 30 years.
Ian Jukes – We have these incredible tools, but as yogi bearer says “Its deja vu all over again”. What has changed? … My fear is that we are going to take this magnificent tool (OLPC) and instead of letting the children shape the tool, the tool is going to shape the childern and basically it is going to be the same old same old all over again.
Ian Jukes – I think we do a great job in American schools today (2006) of preparing kids for 1950, and I may be being optomistic there.
Barry Vercoe – Our philosophy at the media lab is “tools to think with”.
David Thomburg – This also evokes some fear, some negative fear I have read (about OLPC) is that “oh my god – if this happens, education is going to change. We can’t let that happen”. They will hide this in other ways by saying “the machine is underpowered” etc (but based in this fear).
Barry Vercoe – The $100 laptop is already forcing people to think differently … The Intel $400 knockoff … it looks just like the (MIT) machine, but it costs $400. You have to admit the software systems are just bloated, they are very slow … so the small hardware is going to force the Linux people to come down (to match it).
David Thomburg – … they want something that is reliable, that works, you turn it on and it is there. You are not going to get that with anything that runs software that comes out of Redmond Washington.
David Thomburg – Dell is now releasing a $450 computer … but they are not going to preload it with the kind of software that MIT is doing because they are going to say “out maket doesn’t want that”. You see, focus groups are almost the worst things to have because what people will say what they want is what they already have. If you keep going where you are going you will keep getting what you’ve got. Its time for something new.
David Thomburg – The positive opportunity is that in November 2007, NCLB going to be rewritten. …MIT’s project has made enough noise that I think there will be a seat at the table to talk about what education might look like here. If this country starts to see what other countries are doing and take it seriously, they will realise “we have tennis shoe marks up out back”.
Lindy Mekeuwan (audience) – In working with professional development … I’ve moved my crosshairs of the teacher and have moved it onto the university staff. Anyone who can only run Powerpoint, Word and the Library software can’t possibly prepare a teacher for the kind of world that this machine is going to open up. … I think what you need areound the OLPC is the salvation army of education – the people who will work with the people as the devices arrive and bring the ideas to them. What I have found working with teachers is that they are wonderful, creative, teriffic people – all you have got to do is give them a little bit of time and some great resources and they will do astounding things with them. It is just they are not prepared for that by their faculty or in their graduate programs or the professional development that they are offered – it very targeted to maintaing the status quo. … The concept of a lecture about constructivism is our issue.
Barry Vercoe – The problem in Australia is that Brenda Nelson who was the Minister of Education last year is noe the Minister of Defense. These people are making some of the decisions. … the problem is that the decision making is not put into the hands of the people that have the real experience.
David Thomburg – One of the best instructional TV series is JunkYard Wars (you have to build a machine to fit a challenge with any junk you can find). During the process they go around and interview the teams about the decision making process and their materials testing etc. What you get to see is the most delightful thinking and problem solving. (and you learn the lessons you need in a practical way you will never forget). There is also “Make” Magazine dedicated to this topic. I think that we would be better off if textbooks were more like make magazine and schools were held in junkyards, because that is where people could really build stuff and do stuff. We are human beings, but we are also human doings.

I think I have stumbled across a parallel that is worthy of note between the idea of rhizomatics and the Discovery 1 school. The idea of rhizomatics is briefly mentioned in a seminar I blogged about, and detailed more in some of Dave Cormier’s blog entries, starting with this introduction. The Discovery 1 school is a local experimental primary school I blogged about.

In a sentence, rhizomatics “describes theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation”. And Discovery 1 School focuses on letting children discover the knowledge that they are personally interested in.

So it seems to me that Discovery 1 children are operating in a very rhizomatic way – they are taught from their very first day to seek out information in many and varied ways, and integrate this into their own knowledge. Of course they need some help in the early years, but parents are encouraged to come to school with the child and assist them. They are also taught the associated skills that support this: choosing educatonal goals, planning how to acheive these goals (so essentially creating their own lesson plans), managing their time,  recognising ‘blind spots’ in their knowledge and resolving them, and at the end of the topic, creating an output that will fairly represent the knowledge they have gained (their equivalent of assessment).

So what can we learn from this? The first thing that hits me is that rhizomatics does not have to be a digital process. Sure, it is made easier by using the internet, but it can equally work in a classroom of 10 year olds who enter and exit from knowledge via talking to people, observing or interviewing an expert, reading books, performing experiments or possibly using the internet.

In addition, at the end of the presentation, there was a discussion on how to apply rhizomatics in traditional teaching situations, especially with regard to curriculum and assessment. I beleive there is a lot to be learned from Discovery 1 School (who themselves have had to learn from the ground up over the last 5 years). Bear in mind I am not the expert on this (in fact, I can probably line up someone from Discovery 1 to attend an EdTechTalk – if someone is interested, let me know), but my second-hand knowledge would be as follows.

With regard to assessment, the student has to create one or more outputs by the end of the topic that will fairly represent the knowledge they have gained. These outputs can be in any form that does the job, so can be any or all of text, diagrams, photos, video, audio, multimedia, posters, paper mache or performance etc.

With regard to curriculum, the teacher (or parents) works with the child to ensure that all curriculum objectives are acheived within the topics of the student’s choice. Often, this is simply a suggestion that the student also looks at xyz as a part of their chosen topic (maybe if the topic is dinosaurs, the student is encouraged to calculate the fraction of various species’ life spans compared to a humans). Occassionally, when the student presents their learning goals to the teacher, the teacher may have to suggest that, for example, they have covered enough music topics recently and should think about something involving science, but generally this does not seem to be a problem as the students seem to naturally have diverse interests.

I am sure there is more that can be drawn from this comparison, but for now, real life becons.

I recently had the good fortune to visit the Discovery 1 school in my home town, Christchurch, New Zealand. It is an experimental primary level school, which leads into an experimental secondary school called Unlimited. It really was an inspirational tour, as they have changed so many of the tried and true tennants of public education, but always for the better.

From 5 years old, the children learn about what they are interested in so the focus is on them being taught to discover their own knowledge. In addittion, they are also taught the associated skills that support this: choosing educatonal goals, planning how to acheive these goals (so essentially creating their own lesson plans), managing their time,  recognising ‘blind spots’ in their knowledge and resolving them, and at the end of the topic, creating an output that will fairly represent the knowledge they have gained (their equivalent of assessment). The essentials are still taught in more structured sessions, but the majority of time is self directed. The result is that they may now know as many facts, but that they can readily get up to speed on any given topic with no external assistance. I think this is such a valuable technique in the modern world, when your facts can be out of date in six months. Another huge benefit is that students stay modivated, because they are constantly doing what they enjoy, to the extent that while a lunch break is available, most students just stop long enough to eat their food, then get with back to ‘work’, which is probably more like focused ‘play’ to them.

Many things have been changed in interesting ways, often directly opposite to traditional techniques. The school is in the central city, on the third floor, above the central bus station – fitness is done in the town square and they have converted a balcony into a playground. Parents are not only allowed, but encouraged to come to school with the children for extended periods, and help them – they receive training in how to help, and many eventually start helping other students too. There are no distinct classrooms – it is like an open plan school, with different clusters of children. No students have their own desks – they all work on share larger desks, computer tables, beanbags or the floor – wherever they feel comfortable.

The teachers certinly have some interesting stories to tell – they have had over 4000 visitors tour through the school in the last 5 years it has been open, but sadly, they say they have had more visitors from Taiwan than they have from New Zealand’s ministry of education. Having said that the MOE does fund the school like any other (they get no special privilidges) and is interested in leaning from the initiative.
You can find a little more information at www.discovery1.school.nz.