More Thoughts on Drilling, a.k.a. Practice

Since we know the purpose of drilling is to make certain processes automatic, how should we practice?

Research shows something we all know - steady, daily practice is better than cramming. Additionally, you do not have to practice as much at one time when you are practicing regularly. If a test of spelling words, vocabulary, math facts, countries and capitals, or you name it is at the end of the week, it is better to drill or practice a little of the material each night than to wait until the night before the test. The effectiveness of steady practice over cramming applies to any discipline, whether it be academic, athletic, or musical.

However, if we want to ensure that our students do not forget previously learned material, I don't think we should always leave it up to them to drill or practice it on their own. Not all of them will. For a number of reasons, we should lead them in practice at school. Classroom choral responses are more fun than drilling at home. Weak or insecure students can gain confidence as they practice in groups. Also, the teacher can assess a student's competency away from a graded assessment and exhort him to greater effort. Finally, it gives the teacher more control of the learning. By leading the practice and ensuring the student's participation, the teacher is making the student learn.

Math classes may want to begin start with class wide recitation or drill of previously learned math facts and formulas and Latin classes could begin with the declining of nouns and conjugating of verbs. I imagine every class could think of some course knowledge that needs to be automatic if there is going to be any new learning.

If you are not doing this in your classes, try it. I drilled exercises with the band for many, many years. It never mattered how good they were - it only made them better.

Is Drilling Worth It? Chapter 5 of "Why Students Don't Like School"

Many "educrats" decry what they sarcastically describe as the "drill and kill" method of fact learning. They argue that drilling kills the sense of wonder and discovery of "real" learning. But we all know we need to be able to recall facts or perform certain mental or physical acts without thinking. A musician cannot play fluently without drilling scales and finger techniques, nor can an athlete develop reflexive skills without drilling certain physical movements.

Drilling is nothing more than focused, repetitive practice. Its purpose is to help students gain confidence and improve their skills. I will admit that drilling for its own sake is boring and can kill off motivation. If you practice scales and finger techniques, but never play a tune, eventually you would say "to heck with this!" If an athlete drilled for hours everyday, but never played a game, his reaction would be the same.

Nevertheless, drilling makes the difficult easy. Consistent, correct practice eventually leads to the freedom to be creative in ways that would otherwise have been impossible.

In order to be meaningful, drilling has to lead to something greater than itself. Scales lead to playing tunes, batting practice leads to standing at the diamond waiting for the pitch. In education, fact drilling should lead to application, analysis, and and other higher ordered thinking.

Drilling or practice doesn't have to be boring. Nor does everything require drill. According to Willingham, teachers need to implement drilling in a way "that students find maximally useful and interesting."

"Odd as it may seem, that sort of practice (drilling) is essential to schooling. It yields three important benefits: it reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer.

More later.

Shallow Knowledge

We have all been in classrooms where we ask a question about the previous day's lesson and get an answer that's an exact duplicate of what we said or wrote on the board. You wonder if the student really understood what he's saying. The student has just demonstrated rote learning, but not true understanding. In fact, rote learning means there is no understanding.

Willingham calls limited understanding "shallow knowledge." Shallow knowledge is information tied to an analogy or example that cannot be used to create further analogies or examples. He uses the example of "Carpe Diem." You can tell a student it means, "Seize the day," figuring the student understands that concept. However the student can know the translation without knowing it's true meaning. In fact, it's possible the student, if the saying hadn't been written down, might have interpreted "Carpe Diem" to mean "Cease the Day!" We have all seen examples of student test responses that hilariously demonstrate this kind of misunderstanding. The students' knowledge is truly "shallow."

"Deep knowledge," on the other hand, is knowledge that can be applied to many different contexts. This is the aim of good teaching. Unfortunately deep knowledge does not always come easily. Many students only look at the surface structure of problems when trying to apply knowledge.

For example, if a student can calculate the this problem:

Jayne is reseeding her lawn. The lawn is 20 feet wide and 100 feet long. She knows that lawn seed costs $10.00 per bag, and that each bag will will 1,000 square feet.

How much money does Jayne need to seed her whole lawn?"

but not this problem:

Jon is varnishing his tabletop, which is 72 inches wide long and 26 inches wide. The varnish he needs costs $8.00 per can, and each can will cover 2,300 square inches.

How much money does he need to buy the varnish?

it is because he can't see past the superficial difference between the problems. If he can't see that both problems have the same deep structure, he can't see they require the same steps for their solution.

So how do we lead our students to deep knowledge and understanding?

1. Ask students to compare different examples. You can guide students to discover deep similarities, while skimming over superficial differences.
2. Ask questions that require students to demonstrate deep understanding. This goes far beyond quizzing them about factual knowledge. For example, a student may be able to follow the arithmetical procedure of "borrowing", but may not be able to explain why it works. Lacking the deeper understanding of place value and regrouping may cause the student to have trouble later on as math becomes more complex.
3. Set appropriate benchmarks (Bloom's Taxonomy) for your student's level of understanding. Let the students know of your expectations for deep understanding.

More Willingham - Why Is It So Hard For Students To Understand Abstract Ideas?

In chapter four of Why Don't Students Like School, Dr. Willingham discusses the difficulties students have comprehending abstract ideas and applying them in unfamiliar situations. He says the teachers need to expose their students to many different examples of an abstraction to help them understand it - the mind prefers the concrete to the abstract.

He gives an example of a student who can calculate the area of a table top, but is stumped when it comes to calculating the area of a soccer field. The student needs to solve area calculation problems for tabletops, soccer fields, envelopes, doors, and so on.

Understanding is Remembering in Disguise

The easiest way to understand something new is to relate it to prior knowledge.

Analogies are great for this. Concrete examples are helpful as well. A teacher can try to explain iambic pentameter until she is blue in the face, but the explanation may be useless until the students actually hear the rhythm in the verse.

"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

And burnt the topless towers of Illium?"

Come to think of it, that might even not be enough! If the concrete example is not familiar, it may not have the intended effect. (To successfully explain iambic pentameter you might have to begin with a discussion of simple meter using a familiar example like, "Jack and Jill went up the hill...")

Examples must be familiar to be effective. Familiar examples bring old ideas into working memory, so we can "make comparisons we had not made before or think about features we had previously ignored."

But does retrieving and applying old information to an abstraction lead to deep understanding? Does this guarantee that new knowledge and understanding will transfer to the outside world? No.

The next section will concern the issue of shallow knowledge and lack of transfer.

Brain Rules

Jane Doerries gave me a copy of the book, Brain Rules. The author, Dr. John J. Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at University of Washington School of Medicine.

He has developed 12 rules about the brain, which he calls "... principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school." In order, the rules are:

1. Exercise boosts brain power.
2. The human brain evolved, too.
3. Every brain is wired differently.
4. We don't pay attention to boring things.
5. Repeat to remember.
6. Remember to repeat.
7. Sleep well, think well.
8. Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
9. Stimulate more of the senses.
10. Vision trumps all other senses.
11. Male and female brains are different.
12. We are powerful and natural explorers.

If you want to learn more, go here to see a series of video clips covering each rule. I think you will find the clips entertaining.

Why boys need their own activities

The great thing about the internet is that it can be very easy to find comments from those who can express my own sentiments with words much superior to my own.

Such a writer is Anthony Esolen, English professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, who also writes for Touchstone Magazine. In an article at the Catholic Education Resource Center, he writes about the benefits of single sex programs for adolescent boys. He laments the fact that so many of these types of programs have disappeared over the years in the name of "equal access."

He writes, "That some things needn't have been the sole preserve of boys never meant that nothing at all need have been. What do we call it when people who merely want something take it away from or spoil it for those who need it?"

For the entire article go here.

Using Mnemonics

When we last left Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School?, we were talking about the power of stories to help students remember content. But what if there isn't a story? Perhaps you could tell students a story about the discovery of the elements of the periodic table, but that won't help them learn the table and all the information it contains.

When content really doesn't have a story, we should teach the students to use mnemonics to help them remember content, such as lists, definitions, odd spellings (Wednesday), and the like.

Mnemonics work because they give us cues. They also impose some sort of order on the material we're trying to learn. Below are various mnemonic strategies.

From Chapter 3:

Peg Word

• How it works: "Memorize a series of peg words by using a rhyme - for example, one is a bun, two is a shoe, three is a tree, and so on. Then memorize new material by associating it via visual imagery with the pegs.
• Example: "To learn the list radio, shell, nurse you might imagine a radio sandwiched in a bun, a shoe on a beach with a conch in it, and a tree growing nurses' hats like fruit.

Method of Loci

• How is works: "Memorize a series of locations on a familiar walk - for example, the back porch of your house, a dying pear tree, your gravel driveway, and so on. Then visualize new material at each "station" of the walk.
• Example: "To learn the list radio, shell, nurse you might visualize a radio hanging on its cord on the banister by the back porch, someone grinding shells to use as fertilizer to revitalize the dying tree, and a nurse shoveling fresh gravel onto your driveway."

Link Method

• How is works: "Visualize each of the items connected to one another in some way."
• Example: "To learn the list radio, shell, nurse you might imagine a nurse listening intently to a radio while wearing large conch shells on her feet instead of shoes."

Acronym Method

• How it works: "Create an acronym for the to-be -remembered words, then remember the acronym."
• Example: "To learn the list radio, shell, nurse you might memorize the word RAiSin using the capitalized letters as cues for the first letter of each word you are to remember."

First Letter Method

• How it works: "Similar to the acronym method, this method has you think of a phrase, the first letter of which corresponds to the first letter of the to-be-remembered material."
• Example: "To learn the list radio, shell, nurse you could memorize the phrase "Roses smell nasty," then use the first letter of each word as a cue for the words on the list."

Songs

• How it works: "Think of a familiar tune to which you can sing the words."
• Example: To learn the list radio, shell, nurse you could sing the words to the tune of "Happy Birthday to You."

You might have noticed that the sayings used in the examples do not have to make sense. In fact, the crazier they are, they greater the chances are they will be remembered.

Also it's not enough to tell the students about these methods, you'll will need to model their use for your students and encourage them to develop and share their own mnemonic strategies.

Do you have any other mnemonics you have found helpful for your students?

Someone else who thinks "21st Century Skills" were used during the 20th century

From Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police:

I for one have heard quite enough about the 21st century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in third grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on.Let me suggest that it is time to be done with this unnecessary conflict about 21st century skills. Let us agree that we need all those forenamed skills, plus lots others, in addition to a deep understanding of history, literature, the arts, geography, civics, the sciences, and foreign languages.

But allow me also to propose a new entity that will advance a different set of skills and understandings that are just as important as what are now called 21st century skills. I propose a Partnership for 19th Century Skills. This partnership will advocate for such skills, values, and understandings as:

The love of learning

The pursuit of knowledge

The ability to think for oneself (individualism)

The ability to work alone (initiative)

The ability to stand alone against the crowd (courage)

The ability to work persistently at a difficult task until it is finished (industriousness) (self-discipline)

The ability to think through the consequences of one’s actions on others (respect for others)

The ability to consider the consequences of one’s actions on one’s well-being (self-respect)

The recognition of higher ends than self-interest (honor)

The ability to comport oneself appropriately in all situations (dignity)

The recognition that civilized society requires certain kinds of behavior by individuals and groups (good manners) (civility)

The ability to believe in principles larger than one’s own self-interest (idealism)

The willingness to ask questions when puzzled (curiosity)

The readiness to dream about other worlds, other ways of doing things (imagination)

The ability to believe that one can improve one’s life and the lives of others (optimism)

The ability to speak well and write grammatically, using standard English (communication)

I invite readers to submit other 19th century skills that we should cultivate assiduously among the rising generation, on the belief that doing so will lead to happier lives and a better world.

Diane Ravitch

The Power of Stories

People remember stories. In fact, psychologists claim they are even stored differently in the brain – they are “psychologically privileged.”

Setting up lessons as stories can be very useful for helping students pay attention and think about meaning.

Think of the elements of a story. First there’s causality. Students have to think about the causal relationship between events in the story. Then there’s conflict. Every good story has conflict. Conflict usually involves complication. After all, conflicts without complications are not that interesting. And finally, there must be character. What are the characters of the story like? What are their personal qualities?

According to Willingham, “…using a story structure brings several important advantages” when communicating with others.

“First, stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events do not happen randomly in stories. There must be a causal connection, so if the cause is not immediately apparent, the audience will think carefully about the previous action to try to connect it to present events.”

“Second, stories are interesting.” Researchers have determined that stories are more interesting than other formats, even when the material presented is the same. Why is this? Stories demand inferences that act as slightly difficult problems that people like to solve. (See chapter one.) However, people consider stories with too much detail to be less interesting, because too much detail does let the listener make inferences.

“Third, stories are easy to remember.” This is for two of the reasons mentioned above. Stories demand we make inferences, so we are doing a little bit of problem solving. Also, stories have a causal structure which helps us remember the plot.

What Good Teachers Have in Common

If you want students to think about meaning and remember content, Willingham does not recommend making the content relevant to a student’s interests. After all, we can attend conferences and lectures about topics we find interesting, but we can also be bored to tears by the lecturer.

Don’t forget, when organizing your lessons to help your students remember content, you also have to pay attention to the different aspects of its meaning, a subject I mentioned in the previous post.

For example, discussing cell phone minutes to illustrate an example for a math class (after all, what could be more relevant to a teenager than cell phone minutes?) might cause the student to think about the minutes he/she currently has and not the math.

Many consider teaching style to be a major factor in helping students remember content. Quite often, a teacher who is funny, a good storyteller, or a showman can make boring material interesting. But this is only part of what makes teachers effective.

As you know we have class evaluations. Concerning these Willingham states, “A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?”

The evaluations show that “the emotional bond between student and teacher – for better or worse- accounts for whether students learn.” I think we all know this to be the case. No student will work for a teacher he doesn’t like or thinks doesn’t like him.

So “Effective teachers…are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in such a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.”

This is what good teachers have in common.

Remembering Information

The last post ended with this question: “What else is needed (to help us remember information) besides attention?”

Here Willingham examines some reasonable guesses.

The first is “…we remember things that bring about some emotional reaction.” We usually remember events that had emotional content, like birthdays, weddings and the like.

But this does not mean that memory depends on emotion, otherwise we wouldn’t remember much from school (assuming we do).

Perhaps “it’s more accurate to say, things that create an emotional reaction will be better remembered, but emotion is not necessary for learning.”

Next guess: “Repetition is another obvious candidate for what makes learning work.”

However, repetition does not guarantee learning.

When I used to watch the 7th grade boys during chapel I would constantly tell them to open their prayer books so they could sing one of the canticles like the Benedictus es Domine – “Blessed art thou, O Lord God of our fathers…”

Invariably they would tell me they don’t need the prayer book. They would argue that they have the canticle memorized, because they had sung it so many times over so many years. I would say, “That’s fine. Would you be willing to write out the entire canticle for an all or nothing test grade – an A or an F?” They would then open their prayer books. Years of repetition did not guarantee they knew the canticle exactly. So repetition by itself does not guarantee learning.

After giving other examples, Willingham says, “Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember... Therefore, a teacher’s goal should almost always be to get students to think about meaning.”

You notice he doesn’t say the goal is to keep students entertained or on task. If we want our students to learn, we must get the students to think about meaning.

Also, we have to be specific about which aspect of meaning we want the students to remember. “There can be different aspects of meaning for the same material.” For example, take the word piano.

Willingham writes, “In one of my all-time favorite experiments, the researchers led subjects to think of one or another characteristic of words by placing them in sentences – for example, “The moving men lugged the piano up the flight of stairs” or “The professional played the piano with a lush, rich sound.”

The subjects read one of the two sentences and were only to remember the word in bold type. They would later have a memory test about the word.

“The results showed that the subjects’ memories were really good if the hint matched the way they had thought of the piano, but poor if it didn’t.” For those subjects who read the moving man sentence, the cue “something that makes music” didn’t help them remember the word piano.

Therefore “…teachers must design lessons that will ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material.” He goes on to give an example of a teacher giving his sixth grade nephew an assignment to draw a plot diagram of a book he had finished reading. The point of the assignment was to show that novels have structure.

The teacher thought incorporating art into the project would be useful (engaging), so she encouraged the students to draw pictures representing the plot elements.

“That meant that my nephew thought very little about the relation between plot elements and a great deal about how to draw a good castle.” Thus the lesson failed to achieve its objective with at least one student.

If our aim is to make the students “think about meaning”, I believe it puts lesson design into a whole new light. How does the lesson cause the student to think about the meaning of what we’re trying to teach, and not just think about doing another worksheet or exercise.

How would we change our presentations if we wanted the students to think and not just do?

Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

Go here to watch a presentation based on chapter 2 of Dan Willingham’s, Why Students Don’t Like School.

Why Students Don’t Like School Chapter 3

Why Do Students Remember Everything They See On Television and Forget Everything I Say?

Questions: “What makes something stick in memory, and what is likely to slip away.”…“How does the memory system know what you’ll need to remember later?”

Short Answer: “Your memory system lays its bets this way: If you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.”

For students this means: “Whatever students think about is what they will remember...The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: Memory is the residue of thought.”

“To teach well, you should pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.”

The Importance of Memory

Have you ever presented a lesson you thought was clear, well organized and engaging only to find out the next day that all the students remembered was a joke you told or a comment you made about your family? They acted surprised when you reminded them that the objective of yesterday’s lesson was to teach them that one plus one equals two. Why did the students remember your off-hand remarks, rather than the information you wanted them to remember?

It will take a while to get to the answer. Willingham first discusses why we fail to remember things. He refers back to the diagram of the mind:



The environment always has a lot of extraneous information we filter in order to focus – we are usually unaware of it because we are not paying attention to it.

So for information to move from the environment into the long-term memory, it must come into the working memory, where we keep things “in mind.” This is a fancy way of saying, “If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it.”

A case in point: Most teachers do not remember what we did or talked about at seminar because they were thinking about something else (classroom decorations, class rosters, thinking about how boring the presentation is, or whatever!).

So that’s one reason we don’t remember things.

Sometimes we don’t remember things because the process for bringing information from our long-term memories into our working memories has failed. (Why this happens will be discussed in chapter four.)

Another reason is that information may no longer reside in our long-term memories. Thus the term “fading memories.”

But what about the times we do pay attention, but can’t seem to get the information from our working memories into our long-term memories? Sometimes we struggle with information not sticking.

Then on the other hand, we may be able to retrieve from our long-term memories information from long ago we never intended to learn.

“We all know that students won’t learn if they are not paying attention. What’s more mysterious is why, when they are paying attention, they sometimes learn and sometimes don’t. What else is needed besides attention?”

Stay tuned for the answer.

Why Students Don’t Like School Chapter 3 Why Do Students Remember Everything They See On Television and Forget Everything I Say?

Implications For the Classroom - Chapter 2 of Why Students Don’t Like School

1. How to Evaluate Which Knowledge to Instill

The $64,000 question is - Which knowledge should students be taught? After all, if we are trying to make sure the students have the background knowledge they need for academic success, we have to determine which information or knowledge to teach so they can store it in long-term memory.

But Willingham says this is the wrong question. The right question is, “What knowledge yields the greatest cognitive benefit?”

For reading, the students need to have enough background knowledge to allow them to understand what they are going to read. Students need to know the vocabulary of whatever they are reading and they need to know the information the author assumes they know. So as knowledge increases, so will the breadth of material our student can read along with a deeper comprehension of it.

For core subjects like math and science and history or whatever else you would like to include, students need to learn the concepts that come up again and again - what Willingham calls, “the unifying ideas of each discipline.” I think this is another way of saying we need to identify the essential knowledge and skills our students need as they go from grade to grade. Scope and Sequence anyone?

2. Be Sure That the Knowledge Base is Mostly in Place When You Require Critical Thinking

I think this is self-explanatory.

3. Shallow Knowledge is Better Than No Knowledge At All

We cannot have deep knowledge about everything, so a little knowledge about things is better than none at all. Although, I still think a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to critical thinking!

4. Knowledge Must Be Meaningful

From Willingham, “Teachers should not take the importance of knowledge to mean that they should create lists of facts – whether shallow or detailed – for students to learn. Sure, some benefit might accrue, but it would be small. Knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another, and that is not true of list learning. Also, as any teacher knows, such drilling would do far more harm by making students miserable and by encouraging the belief that school is a place of boredom and drudgery, not excitement and discovery.

Most teachers know that learning lists of unconnected facts is pretty hard to do” (Does this bring vocabulary lists to mind? See here for a different approach to learning vocabulary.)

“But what is a better way to ensure that students acquire factual knowledge now that we’ve concluded it’s so important? In other words, why do some things stick in our memory whereas other things slip away?”

That’s to be answered in the next chapter.

Still More from Chapter 2 of Why Students Don’t Like School

Background Knowledge is Necessary for Cognitive Skills

Most logical thinking is memory retrieval. When confronted with a problem, we think back to how we solved a similar problem, and apply that background knowledge to the new problem.

This is why it’s important to practice solving math problems. The repetition helps us store the problem solving procedures in our long-term memory.

Background knowledge is also important for science. How else could you determine whether or not your experiment had unexpected outcomes if you did not already know what to expect?

Factual Knowledge Improves Your Memory

Let’s say a group is reading a story or an essay. Those with greater background knowledge about the topic will remember more of what they read than those for whom much of the information was new.

Why is this? The reader with background knowledge knows more about the topic and consequently does not have to pay attention to as much detail as the person without the background knowledge. The person with the background knowledge has less new information to absorb. It’s hard to keep too much new knowledge in working memory.

“…Having factual knowledge in long-term memory makes it easier to acquire still more factual knowledge.” The more you have, the more you retain. Now we’re back to the Matthew Effect I posted about here.

Willingham sums up this part of chapter 2:

“…the cognitive processes that are most esteemed – logical thinking, problem solving and the like – are intertwined with knowledge. It is certainly true that facts without the skills to use them are of little value. It is equally true that one cannot employ thinking skills effectively without factual knowledge.”

Implications for the classroom in the next post.

more from Chapter 2 of Why Students Don’t Like School

Knowledge is Necessary to Reading Comprehension

Willingham writes, “Background knowledge helps you understand what someone is talking about or writing.”

Background information provides vocabulary. Vocabulary is important not only for understanding idea A, but also the connection between ideas A and B. But, quite often, vocabulary is not enough to help comprehension.

“Reading comprehension depends on combining the ideas in a passage, not just comprehending each idea on its own. And writing contains gaps - lots of gaps – from which the writer omits information that is necessary to understand the logical flow of ideas. Writers assume that the reader has the knowledge to fill in the gaps.”

For example:
“I’m not trying out my new barbeque when the boss comes to dinner!” Mark yelled.

Without going into too much detail to convey his meaning, the writer assumes the reader knows that Mark doesn’t know how hot the new grill gets, nor does he know whether or not it has extra hot areas that might burn the food if it’s not watched adequately. The writer also assumes the reader knows that Mark wants to make a good impression and not serve an over or under cooked meal to his boss.

Sufficient background knowledge is key to understanding Mark’s reticence. Because of their differing background knowledge, Mark’s child might not understand, while mom certainly will. I cold easily see the child saying, “But why not Dad?”

As an aside, how much of our conversations with children assume a certain level of background knowledge on their part? How frustrated do we adults get when we have to “fill in the gaps” with information we thought the children knew?

Next Willingham introduces the concept of “chunking”. He defines it as “the phenomenon of tying together separate pieces of information from the environment.” The more information you can “chunk”, the more space you have for storing information in your working memory. This means you can hold a concept or procedure i.e., lots of information, in your working memory without it taking up lots of space. However, chunking works “…only when you have applicable factual knowledge in long-term memory.”

For example look at the following list:
XCN
NPH
DFB
ICI
ANC
AAX

Now cover it and see how many of the three letter groups you can remember.

Look at this list:
X
CNN
PHD
FBI
CIA
NCAA
X

I bet you can remember the letters from this list better than the previous one. Why? Because the the three letter groupings made up acronyms stored in your long-term memory. You were able to “chunk” the letters and bring them into your working memory. By the way, both lists were the same, only the spacing was different.

This was a working memory task. If you remember, working memory has a limited capacity. Since you were able to chunk more of the information from the second list than the first one, you were able to store more information (from your environment i.e., the list) in your working memory than you were be able to without the benefit of chunking.

Chunking is essential to reading comprehension. The more background information you have stored in the long-term memory, the greater the ability you will have to chunk different bits of knowledge, and the more information you can chunk, the more you can store in your working memory.

Although cooking i not reading, you can see the chunking principle at work on cooking reality shows. There’s always some type of challenge at the beginning of each episode. The aspiring chefs/contestants are given a few meager ingredients and told to come up with a dish in thirty minutes that will impress the judges. There’s no time to dream up or look up recipes.

I have always been impressed that these chefs could create a variety of respectable dishes with so few ingredients and so little time.

I usually attribute their success to their experience as chefs or cooks. But what is experience, if not the ability to draw on accumulated knowledge stored in the long-term memory over many years, chunk it, and then bring much of it into the working memory?

If you had to rely only on the environment (the different food ingredients) and concoct something, chances are very high that you would fail to create anything appetizing. Okay, now I’m getting hungry. Let’s get back to reading.

Look at the following example:
“Ashburn hit the ground ball to Wirtz, the shortstop, who threw it to Dark, the second baseman. Dark stepped on the bag, forcing out Cremin, who was running from first, and threw it to Anderson, the first baseman. Ashburn failed to beat the throw.”

If you can’t “chunk” this information, you have to work hard to envision the scene as you read it. It’s a slow process, because there’s a lot to keep track of. Who’s whom, who’s got the ball, and who’s running where. But, if you know baseball well, you chunk the information, access your long-term memory, and know you’ve just read about a double play.

“Thus, background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in working memory, which makes it easier to relate to ideas, and therefore to comprehend.”

Finally, “background knowledge also clarifies details that would otherwise be ambiguous and confusing.”

Another example:
“The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange items into different groups. Of course one group may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to a lack of facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do few things at once than too many.”

If you had to describe this paragraph later, it might be hard and confusing, because the details are so vague. However, if you were told the title of the paragraph is “Washing Clothes”, you would have little trouble remembering it.

So we have four ways in which background knowledge is important to reading comprehension:

1. It provides vocabulary.
2. It allows you to bridge the logical gaps that writers leave.
3. It allows chunking, which increases room in working memory and thereby make it easier to tie ideas together.
4. It guides the interpretation of ambiguous sentences.

More to come!

Chapter 2 of Why Students Don’t Like School

In this chapter Willingham discusses the need for fact learning to facilitate the development of cognitive skills, i.e. reasoning, problem solving, analysis and synthesis.

His main point is: “Factual knowledge must precede skill.”

Here is his simple figure of the mind (see post from June 1).



Thinking is “combining information in new ways.” The information comes either from the facts you’ve memorized (long–term memory), or from the Internet or other reference materials (the environment).

Critical thinking advocates argue that because, thanks to the Internet, we have so much access to information, memorization is not as important as it use to be. After all, I can look up just about I need to know on Google. Willingham continues, describing the argument as follows:

“Perhaps instead of learning facts, it’s better to practice critical thinking to have students work on evaluating all the information available on the Internet rather than trying to commit some small part of it to memory.”

He says this argument is false.

“…Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most – critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving – are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory. (Emphasis mine.)

Information from the environment is not internalized and understood by an individual to the degree it is when it is stored and retrieved from long-term memory.

Critical thinking skills cannot exist in isolation as a discipline all their own. It’s easy to assume that when you learn a new thinking skill it can be applied to every situation. But the ability to think critically about one topic does not guarantee the ability to think critically about another. Critical thinking depends on having knowledge about the subject to be thought about.

For example, thinking critically about W.W. II does not give a person the ability to think critically about a game of chess, a bagpipe band, or educational theory. A person cannot think critically about which they know nothing or very little. (So that’s the problem with our politicians!) To talk about critical thinking without linking it to factual knowledge is leaving out a critical component of the learning process.

Why Students Don’t Like School Book Discussion from Dangerously Irrelevant Blog

I joined an online discussion about Why Don’t Students Like School. Below is the initial post of the moderator Scott McLeod. As usual I’m interested in any thoughts you might have, especially about the last part of the post. I’ll post more from chapter two soon.

McLeod writes:

"I’m kicking off the conversation with a post about each of our first two chapters. Remember that you can post as well as comment (just log in and enter the Dashboard; instructions how are here). Please do so. Otherwise you’re all just responding to me. That’s not a book club!

Willingham says that people are naturally curious, but curiosity is fragile. (p. 7) He also says that the pleasure is in the solving of the problem (p. 8) and that working on problems of the right level of difficulty is rewarding, but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant. (p. 10) His recommendations, which are based on a large body of cognitive psychology research, are that teachers make sure that there are problems to be solved and make those problems interesting to students (pp. 15–16).

Worksheets … and end-of-chapter questions … and doing 50 practice problems despite having the concept down after 5 … and sitting passively for long periods of time while teachers or other students talk … and (insert other common classroom activities here) … aren’t these all in direct violation of these basic cognitive principles that Willingham outlines here in Chapter 1? And, if so, why are these so prevalent in our classrooms and what do we do about it?"

The Matthew Effect

I ended my last post from Why Students Don’t LIke School expressing my frustration that one of our students, who is doing quite poorly in math, could get to our upper school and not know how to do fractions. How could this happen? Why wasn’t something done to address this deficiency well before high school?

While this example concerns math, I believe it points to a bigger problem we have with our weaker students. I am not convinced we are doing enough to help them succeed.

The wide range of capabilities we see in our classrooms could be an example of the Matthew Effect. This term comes from St. Matthew 25: 29 where Jesus says, "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath"

What this means for us is that the students with strong foundations build upon them rapidly and those without the strong foundations have less to build upon and begin to lag further and further behind their classmates. Thus a wide range of capabilities develops within a group of students while they go through school, and this gap grows and grows and grows to the point we have students in classes who just cannot do the work.

As Daniel Willingham notes in the first chapter of Why Students Don’t Like School, students who lack sufficient background knowledge cannot solve problems, experience frustration, and then stop trying.

I have had more than one conversation with parents who tell me this school is great for bright kids, but for those for whom learning doesn’t come easily, the school really doesn’t do too much to help them.

How can we lessen the Matthew Effect? The answer is not to dumb down curriculum. Rather we should track the knowledge and skills students should learn in each class and determine whether or not the students are deficient in any of them.

“Well”, you ask, “Isn’t that what we do with tests?” Yes it is, but - and I think this is a critical question - what do we then do with the students who do not demonstrate proficiency in the material over which they were tested?

I’m afraid all too often the students get their grades and everyone moves on. As a result students move on to new material without adequate knowledge of the previous material, and they fall behind their peers.

What if we make the students who do not perform well on a test retake it every afternoon after school until they can score at least a high C? They would still keep the original grade. What if we made the retake of the test supercede after school activities? Perhaps those who refuse to study will learn eventually that it's easier to study and get it right the first time.

No Wonder Virtue is So Difficult

"Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all; forgiving means to pardon that which is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all -- and to hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all."

G. K. Chesterton

Why Students Don’t Like School - “ (The last of the) “Implications for the Classroom” from chapter one

4. Reconsider when to puzzle students

“Every fact or demonstration that would puzzle students before they have the right background knowledge has the potential to be an experience that will puzzle students momentarily, and then led to the pleasure of problem solving.

For example, if you conduct the hard boiled egg in the bottle experiment (go here if you are unfamiliar with it), and your students don’t have any background knowledge that explains how the egg gets sucked into the bottle, it comes across as a is a very cool magic trick. However, if they already know about air pressure and vacuums, then perhaps the pleasure they gain from watching the relevant scientific principles in action will lead to the further seeking of pleasure through solving similar problems. According to Willingham the students will want to do more. They will stay engaged.

5. Accept and act on variation in student preparation

This idea is controversial. Willingham argues that students will not come to class equally prepared to excel, due to different preparations and different levels of support at home.

He continues, “If that’s true, and if what I have said in this chapter is true, it is self defeating to give all of your students the same work. The less capable students will find it too difficult and will struggle against their brain’s bias to mentally walk away from schoolwork. To the extent you can, it’s smart, I think, to assign work to individuals or groups of students that is appropriate to their current level of competence.”

Willingham argues that if teachers don’t do this, the work they give to the less capable students will not help them catch up, and, in fact, will make them fall further behind. I think most schools try to solve this problem through class sectioning or, as in the case of AP classes, by setting prerequisites.

But some classes will still have students with a wide range of capabilities, presenting real challenges for the students and the teacher. How do you keep the top students interested and devote enough time to help the weaker students? Because the top students are most engaged in the lesson, they usually get most of the teacher’s attention. Plus a certain amount of information and material must be covered by the end of the year, putting pressure on the teacher to keep the lessons moving at a certain pace, which in turn puts pressure on the students to keep pace.

It’s difficult to attend to every student’s needs in these situations. I have experienced this very thing in the band.

When it came time to prepare the band for the World Championships, I would often have to break the pipe section into two groups. No matter how good the strong players would be, the weak players would pull down the general playing level of the band. By creating a “premier” group out of the A band, I could focus on refining the better players while helping the weaker ones catch up. If I didn’t do this, I would find myself spending too much time with one group at the expense of the other. I would split my time between the two groups, often having my top piper work with one group while I was with the other. Also, I would often have my stronger players work with the weaker ones during a portion of band practice. I created sub sections within the A band for the purpose of bringing everyone up to my expected standards.

Would this not be possible in a classroom of students with differing capabilities?

For example, the typical class routine goes like this: the teacher presents new material, answers clarifying questions, and assigns the homework. It’s up to each student to study, do the homework and gain the mastery of the new material. Then the students take tests that determine their mastery of the new material. For those who do not perform well, i.e. demonstrate mastery, and if they ask how they can improve for the next test, they usually hear “work harder”, “do your homework”, “ask more questions in class” and/or “get a tutor.” But could we do more to help the struggling student before it gets to this point?

What if weaker students were paired with stronger ones during class? The stronger students could be a positive influence on the weaker student. The weaker student could learn from the note taking skills of the stronger one. If there was time in class, the two could work together on homework.

Teachers also could build common purpose within the class by presenting incentives for achieving a particular class-wide GPA each marking period. Is it possible to get a class thinking of grades from a group perspective rather than an individual one? Maybe encouraging academic competitions would help.

I am very interested in finding ways to help our struggling students. In this chapter Willingham has shown us the importance of background information and working memory to a student’s desire to learn. In many cases, telling a student to work harder might not be the right answer, especially if the student does not have the tools (background information and working memory) he needs.

Here are our dilemmas: How do we discern whether poor performance is due to insufficient background information and working memory or just plain lack of effort? And how can we track a student’s specific deficiencies that will allow us to know where they will need extra help from year to year.

It saddens me to hear an upper school student say she finally learned fractions while taking a remedial summer algebra I course. Someone should have caught and remediated this a long time ago.

Any thoughts?

Penmanship making a comeback in Iowa

Have a read here.

I love the class titled “Handwriting Without Tears.” Let’s start a class called “Homework without Tears.” Think of the money we could make!

BTW, do you think the class is about avoiding hand cramps?

Why Students Don’t Like School - More “Implications for the Classroom” from chapter one

From my previous post:

The question: “Why don’t students like school, or perhaps more realistically, why don’t more of them like it?”

For Willingham the answer lies in ensuring the student gets to experience the pleasure that comes from solving problems. Once they experience success, they will strive for more.

In practical classroom terms that means:

1. Make sure there are problems to be solved - cognitive work requires activities or thinking that pose moderate challenges.

We now continue with:

2. Respect students’ cognitive limits

Cognitive limitations refer to a student’s background knowledge and working memory. When presenting new material we have to take into account our students’ background knowledge and the capacity of their working memory (the amount of information a person can be conscious of and work with simultaneously.)

“…suppose you began a history lesson with a question: ‘You’ve all heard of the Boston Tea Party; why do you suppose the colonists dressed as Indians and dumped tea into Boston Harbor?’ Do your students have the necessary background knowledge in memory to consider this question? What do they know about the relationship of the colonies and the British crown in 1773? Do they know about the social and economic significance of tea? Could they generate alternative courses of action?” If not, “…the question you pose will quickly be seen as ‘boring’.” It will also show on their faces! :-)

Leave that question until your students gain the background knowledge that makes them ready to think about and answer it.

“Equally important is the limit on working memory. Remember, people can keep only so much information in mind at once…Overloads of working memory are caused by such things as multi-step instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and the application of just learned concepts to new material (unless the concept is quite simple).”

“The solution to working memory overloads is straightforward: slow the pace, and use memory aids such as writing on the blackboard that save students from keeping too much information in working memory.”

3. Clarify the problem to be solved

“How do you make the problem interesting?”

You usually hear the answer, “make the problem relevant to the students.” Sounds good, but this doesn’t always work. Chances are the classroom will be filled with students having varied interests.

Previously WIllingham wrote that in order to get students to want to solve a problem, they must perceive they can solve the problem.

He then asks rhetorically, “What is the question that will engage students and make them want to know the answer?” Wouldn’t we all like to know the answer to that question!

He points us in the direction of the answer: “When you plan a lesson, you start with the information you want students to know by its end. As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be and how you can frame the question so it will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students and so you will respect your students’ cognitive limitations.”

The last part of the chapter “Why don’t students like school” to come in the next post.

Why Students Don’t Like School - “Implications for the Classroom” from Chapter 1

The question: “Why don’t students like school, or perhaps more realistically, why don’t more of them like it?”

For Willingham the answer lies in ensuring the student gets to experience the pleasure that comes from solving problems. Once they experience success, they will strive for more.

In practical classroom terms that means:

1. Make sure there are problems to be solved - cognitive work requires activities or thinking that pose moderate challenges.

This is why scaffolding curriculum and expectations is so important. We don’t want to present our students with problems they are not capable of solving. Short term goals have to be achievable, otherwise long term goals remain in the realm of wishful thinking.

I think we do this fairly well with our curriculum. I believe in most courses, especially in math and Latin, the 1^st marking period is used for reviewing the previous year’s work. (Do we do this with grammar?) By doing so we make the students retrieve factual knowledge from their long-term memories, put it into their working memories, apply to familiar problems, and thus try instill confidence before moving into new material.

An aside: I’m not so sure we do as well with our expectations concerning the maturity of our students. We need to teach them proper behavior and personal responsibility from grade to grade, so that with instruction and encouragement that takes into account their ages and maturity levels, our students will develop the character traits necessary for success in their academics and personal relationships.

I believe it is possible to scaffold or map out expectations for good behavior and personal responsibility for each grade. I also believe it can be done is such a way that accounts for the natural development of the child, generally speaking of course, thereby avoiding the anxieties that result from placing inappropriate expectations on children before they are prepared for them. (Any volunteers?)

Maybe the model for this scaffolding should be similar for academic scaffolding. The new expectations that come with each new grade level should not appear until the 2^nd marking period, and then introduced only a little at a time.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts about this.

I’ll get back on track with more on Implications for the Classroom later…

Why Students Don’t Like School - “How Thinking Works” from Chapter 1

Here Willingham gives us a fairly simple model of the mind. One part he calls the environment. It’s full of things to see and hear, problems to be solved, and so on. Another component is called working memory. This is the same as consciousness. Working memory is that part of the mind where we are aware of what is around us. The other aspect of mind is long-term memory. This is where we store our vast factual knowledge of the world. This knowledge can be concrete. It can also be abstract. All of the information in our long-term memory resides outside of awareness. It is there for us to retrieve we need it.

"Thinking occurs when you combine information (from the environment and long-term memory) in new ways." We bring each of these aspects of mind into our working memory.”

An aside here: This is why background knowledge is so important to understanding so much of what we have to learn. Without it, it is very difficult to make sense of the information in our environment.

Back to the main point environment and long-term memory...

Willingham gives us the puzzle below.

If you haven't seen this problem before, you probably felt like you either couldn’t figure it out or had to guess the answer. That's because you didn't have any information in your long-term memory to guide you. However if you have had experience with this type of problem before, you were probably able to retrieve some information about it from your long-term memory.

Our long-term memory not only contains factual information, but also procedural information. For example if you were to solve the problem 18x7 in your mind, you would probably quickly run through a list of procedures without giving it any thought.

So thinking requires that we retrieve factual and procedural information from our long-term memory.

Here's another puzzle:

"In the inns of certain Himalayan villages is practiced a refined tea ceremony. The ceremony involves a host and exactly two guests, neither more nor less. When his guests have arrived and seated themselves at his table, the host performs three services for them. These services are listed in the order of the nobility the Himalayan's attribute to them: stoking the fire, fanning the flames, and pouring the tea. During the ceremony, any of those present may ask another, "Honored Sir, may I perform this onerous task for you?" However, a person may request of another only the least noble of the tasks which the other is performing. Furthermore, if a person is performing any tasks, then he may not request a task that is nobler than the least noble task he is already performing. Custom requires that by the time the tea ceremony is over, all the tasks will have been transferred from the host to the most senior of the guests. How can this be accomplished?"

Willingham tells us: “This puzzle is really the same as the peg and disc puzzle above. But in this case disc A is stoking the fire, disc B is fanning the flames, and disc C is pouring tea.”

“This version of the problem seems much harder because some parts of the problem that are laid out in the peg and disc problem must be juggled in your head in this new version. The rules of the problem occupy so much space in working memory that it's difficult to contemplate news that might lead to a solution.”

"In sum, successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and the amount of space in working memory. If any one of these factors is inadequate, thinking will likely fail."

The next section will deal with implications for the classroom.

More from Why Students Don’t lIke School - Chapter 1

In this next section titled, "People Are Naturally Curious, But Curiosity Is Fragile," Willingham states that even though our brains aren't set up for efficient thinking, we like mental activity, especially problem-solving. Solving problems brings pleasure. We get pleasure and a sense of an accomplishment when we think successfully. The pleasure comes in solving the problem.

Working on a problem with no sense of making progress is not pleasurable. Nor does simply being told the answer give us pleasure. If you were able to solve the candle problem, you probably gained more pleasure than those of us who had to be told the answer.

But what characterizes the mental activity that people enjoy? We are curious about some things and not others. It’s that way for us and it certainly is that way for our students. But Willingham does not believe that content drives interest. He gives the example of people watching a TV program or attending a lecture over content that doesn’t interest them, only to find, that as they watch or listen, they become engrossed in the topic. He also makes the point that it’s easy to get bored when you like the topic or you think you’re interested in it.

So Willingham asks this question, “… if content is not enough to keep your attention, when does curiosity have staying power? The answer may lie in the difficulty of the problem.”

If the problem is too easy there is no point in working on it. If you believe it is too difficult and think it is unlikely you will solve it, you will not try to solve it. If we are overwhelmed mentally, we checked out.

“To summarize, I’ve said that thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. Nevertheless, people like to think – or more properly, we like to think if we judge that the mental work will pay off with the pleasurable feeling we get when we saw the problem.”

“This analysis of the sorts of mental work that people seek out or avoid also provides one answer to why students don’t like school. Working on problems that are right level of difficulty is rewarding, but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant. Students can’t opt out of these problems the way adults often can. If the student routinely gets work that is a bit too difficult, it’s little wonder that he doesn’t care much for school. I wouldn’t want to work on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle for several hours each day.”

I wonder if this applies only to content? What about the expectations for the independence and maturity we have for our students as they move through the grade levels?

“So what’s the solution – give the students easier work? You could, but of course you’d have to be careful not to make it so easy that the students would be bored. And anyway wouldn’t it be better to boost the students ability a little bit? Instead of making work easier is it possible to make thinking easier?”