Blurts

I am personally invested in learning from books because some of my professional time is investing in writing books. However, I think I have a logical position for advocating the learning benefits of a book in comparison to disconnected resources. I feel the need to describe this position in opposition to the notion of personal professional development that results from exposure to unconnected and brief online sources. Just to be clear – by book I do not require that the resource be the old style object with paper pages.

An important contribution made by the author of a book is a structure – a model of some sort – that organizes many ideas. A book generated by a small group of authors (not authors writing different chapters) requires many decisions about what goes where and this requires some guiding principles – translate this as a structure. One important insight from cognitive psychology is that the structure of our stored information adds learning and thinking advantages that extend beyond the quantity of stuff that has been stored. We do all form our own personal structures, but having something to use as a starting point provides a great advantage. There is a reason college professors use a textbook in introductory classes and primary source resources in graduate classes. Putting together your own structure will eventually be necessary, but generating the big picture when starting from scratch overwhelms most learners.

I started thinking about this perspective as I struggle to organize the various topics I have in my head but want to see appear on my computer screen. Alternate structures are typically possible, but for reasons of efficiency you have to commit to a particular way of communicating your ideas. For example, my writing about technology integration differentiates tactics for communicating from tactics for presenting. Ignore your own meanings for these terms for a moment and translate this as learning from interacting and learning from generating a product to inform an imagined audience. The first is a two-direction experience and the second is not. Both processes offer benefits in shaping the understanding of the learner who interacts or presents.

Given this distinction, how would you offer specific examples? Would you position Twitter within the section on communication? Would you position full-length blogs in the section on presentation? Practice is complex. One might suggest that a blog post offers an initial position and is the starting point for interaction by way of responses/comments. One might take this position, but, of course, there are actually very few responses to nearly all blog posts and this would be one of those hypothetical benefits that is seldom realized. My decision was that it is best to explain things in terms of what is most likely to happen.

Consider the structure I have just generated – I have identified major tactics that can be argued to generate important cognitive activities, I have identified tools specific to each tactic, and I have explained what behavior tends to look like in practice. This is a structure. You might generate a very different structure taking these elements in different directions, but that would also be interesting because our different structures could then be contrasted against actual descriptive data.

I am obviously a fan of writing and reading the long form.

This post does not describe a specific app, but provides a link to an 8 page pdf from Apple identifying criteria education experts associated with the company recommend when selecting apps. The reference includes embedded links to specific products and to Apple recommendations for different grade levels.

This article from USA offers data on state by state spending on education.

Household earnings appear to play a major role in determining statewide school spending. The states that spent the most per student also had some of the wealthiest households. Median household income in all of the 10 top spending states was higher than the U.S. median. Among the states spending the least, only Utah households earned more than the national median of $51,371 in 2012.

In addition, spending does relate to outcomes. This is a good example of correlational data with a relationship not necessarily implying causality (increase spending to improve achievement). It may be that more money causes higher achievement. but it is also possible money spend indicates the value placed on achievement. Other factors may also be involved.

High education spending often pays off, at least as measured by standardized tests. Based on a recent Education Week report, four of the top spending states were among the top five states in K-12 achievement.

Scientific American publishes article contending hand written notes resulted in better learning than notes taken on a laptop. I am an old note taking researcher and some suggestions for thinking about this study may be helpful.

The learning benefits of taking notes have traditionally been evaluated by differentiating the potential benefits of taking the notes and the potential benefits of reviewing notes. I sometimes describe this as investigating a potential generative benefit of taking notes and the benefits of external storage. It is important to recognize these two roles for notes. It is possible that a similar note-taking activity has a different impact on these two processes. For example, taking very complete notes in class may be detrimental to thinking about content as it is presented, but be very necessary a month later when attempting to study for an examination. My position would be that the storage benefit of notes is likely to be more important than the generative effect of taking notes. It is important to remember that learning does not have to occur during the initial exposure to information.

Technology can also be used in ways not identified in the research. For example, several programs and apps simultaneously record a lecture and allow note taking. This arrangements allows students to take fewer notes AND to access a complete account of a presentation should the notes taken not made sense at a later point. It is very possible that some students should take no notes during a presentation as long as a complete record can be provided at a later point. These would be students with poor processing skills and limited background who would experience working memory overload and should listen as carefully as possible rather than attempt to write down what would likely be an incomplete and confused account.

The key study, for me, in this research is the third study which incorporated a one-week delay and allowed for review (see Psychological Science, Apr. 2014 if interested in the study). I guess the conclusion you reach might be based on how you think the research generalizes to applied settings. Note, for example, that students were given 10 minutes to review and then took the examination. The amount of information covered is not stated in the article (at least in the account of the 3rd study), but 10 minutes of study effort seems very different from what we would expect students to invest before a traditional examination. I would guess the amount of content is limited. I also would suggest that activating recall is possibly very different from the thinking that could go on during a study session. I would predict future research will tease apart methodological issues possibly accounting for the findings. Who knows!

The “less is more” feature mentioned in the SA article always reminds me of some research on highlighting. It turns out that forced, limited highlighting can be better than free highlighting. If review is not allowed, the limited highlighting likely requires the learner to think about what is important and this deeper processing would have benefits.

Among other things, it is important to recognize that learning is an acquired skill and productive mechanisms should not be assumed. We seldom actually teach students to learn/study and study skill instruction is often not integrated into daily practice. Common sense often results in flawed behavior. There is certainly nothing that requires learners to take more notes because they use a laptop. I hope no one jumps to the conclusion that this is some type of “brain thing” and there is some inherent benefit in the motor skills of handwriting.

So when I write for future teachers I like to explain the type of environments they will be working in within a few years. Technology trends are rapid and a sixth grade classroom can be quite different than a college senior experienced some 8 or so years ago. Field experiences presents some insights, but the narrow range of experiences can lead to false conclusions.

So, I like to use good sources for descriptive statistics. Good data are hard to find. Companies selling goods to schools may have the best data but their commissioned studies are often not shared. I try to use the Department of Education.

I say these things tongue in cheek because I have searched for good data on school use of technology off and on for 15 years. However, I was optimistic when I checked today. It would seem the Dept. of Ed. had something new to offer. It turned out that the data were the same as I accessed two years ago and summarized surveys conducted in 2009. Perhaps the Department has forgotten to update their web site or maybe they have a different way of defining “current” than I.