How to Learn How People Learn

[Wowbagger]

Anyone, in this here Forum, got any recommendations for books describing, in some scientifically studied detail, HOW the average, general human being learns things, while debunking some bad assumptions about education techniques that have failed over the years?

I saw once, a long time ago, a reference to such a book, on this very forum, (possibly going back to its JREF days). Searching for it is going to take a while, I suspect, because it wasn't even in a thread on that subject. If I recall, it was mentioned offhand in another type of discussion which I cannot recall too many details of.

Even if no one comes up with that specific book, any others along those lines would be fine.

One book I found tangently useful to this topic is "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)", by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, which covers cognitive dissonance. If you want someone to learn that their ideas are bad ones, it is better to find a way to rethink their ideas for their own reasons, rather than confronting their most cherished beliefs directly. Otherwise they'll only reaffirm those beliefs.

Anything more directly related to the science of education, however, would be most appreciated.

 

[Minoosh]

Anything more directly related to the science of education, however, would be most appreciated.

Good question, big topic.

About 15 years ago I was looking for quantitative research about best practices for teaching adolescents English as a second language - something that tracked kids taught with different methods. For example, having an immersion-only group, a drill-only group, a combination and a control group. I didn't find much. I have since tried it with other topics.

Instead a lot of education "research" is theorists citing what other theorists have said. (They also sometimes cite themselves). John Dewey spent 2 weeks in the Soviet Union and came away with the idea that the Soviet system was superior. School wasn't even in session at the time. Piaget is often criticized for his assumptions and lack of replicability. The prose devolves into babble pretty quickly, often taking 50 pages to state the blindingly obvious, e.g., "different people learn in different ways." It's almost unreadable.

Malcolm Gladwell is far from scientific but he does base his writing on actual research that could provide a starting point.

It is such a huge topic that maybe it could be broken down somewhat? Operant conditioning is a big part of learning. For example kids who are not fluent with the multiplication tables are going to struggle. Meanwhile my 93-year-old mom, who has dementia, can immediately answer "what is 7 x 8?" Now consider a multiple-step problem where high school students are literally plugging single-digit arithmetic into a calculator. Learning "by rote" is criticized, but it has its place.

There's a guy named Zig Engelmann who horrifies a lot of teachers by having a scripted approach with a lot of chanting. But he does have quantitative research. Here's a start:

The Pet Goat approach

 

[angrysoba]

Yeah, it is a big topic and I don’t know of any Brief History of Time-style treatment.

As mentioned above there are many theories with competing claims, from some of the big theories of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructionism.

It might be a good idea to start with those and look at some of the main theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, etc...

I think it might also be useful to distinguish between declarative knowledge, which means what you know in the abstract and procedural knowledge which is related to skill learning.

There are some modern ideas about the importance of attention, motivation and self-efficacy which are usually considered to be important.

You will probably learn something about Blooms Taxonomy, which I should know but don’t.

And as you say, there are likely to be lots of pseudoscientific dead ends. My understanding is that learning styles (or at least tailoring classes for specific learning styles) is not supported by evidence. Also unsupported, at least in the way it is often used, is the idea of multiple intelligences. You will certainly hear teachers talking about these ideas as if they were real things though.

Maybe one thing we know is that lecture styles are poor delivery methods of education. Hands on, practical education seems to be more useful especially if it is skill-related.

I’m sure there is more but I cannot think of them right now.

 

[Roboramma]

If you want to try to search through the forums for the post you were talking about, this is just a guess, but it sounds like something Anton might have brought up. As I recall he was an education researcher, or something like that.

Okay this is weird, I just did a search to see if I could find anything and he's not coming up at all. Am I misspelling his user name? Am I having some weird fake memory? He was a pretty prolific poster, but of course it's years back. You were around when he was though so I'm sure you'd remember him. Am I making this up?*

That aside, I'm reading Superforcasters right now which you might find at least tangentially related to the topic you're interested in.

Sorry, that's all I've got right now.

*ETA And this is weird, when I do the search and start typing his name, I get to Anto and "Anton" comes up as a suggested user name to search for, but when I search it says no results were found...

 

[Wowbagger]

I brought it up, in part, because I think skeptics, in general, should study this type of thing a lot more. We're very good at separating the facts from the bunk, but we have an abysmal track record for convincing others to accept those facts and reject the bunk.

I think skeptics, in general, should learn HOW people learn.


...And, I am also gearing up to do a short presentation on the subject. It would be nice to get a few book recommendations to go along with it.

 

[angrysoba]

I brought it up, in part, because I think skeptics, in general, should study this type of thing a lot more. We're very good at separating the facts from the bunk, but we have an abysmal track record for convincing others to accept those facts and reject the bunk.

I think skeptics, in general, should learn HOW people learn.


...And, I am also gearing up to do a short presentation on the subject. It would be nice to get a few book recommendations to go along with it.

I think that might be a slightly different issue.

However, there are a couple of useful terms here such as the backfire effect and reframing.

 

[Minoosh]

I have a good girlfriend (well, 73, that's a girl!) who has probably gotten annoyed with me for a variety of challenges I've put to her:

Who's "they" (as in "they say")?
Why do you think that?
What makes you believe that?

We ski together sometimes and she'll ask questions like, "When is it supposed to stop snowing?" (according to whom? I want to ask).

She'll preface her beliefs with, "It seems to me that ______."

She used to always say, "I shouldn't feel this tired" and my response was, "How tired should you feel?"

When I come home from vacations my companions have told me, "It was an intellectual challenge." Less than a ringing endorsement IMO.

"Don't be a dick" is probably good advice.

In my experience people like talking about themselves, and will play along to some extent, and my temptation is to feed them the conclusion. I think it's probably more effective to ask the questions but skip the lecture. Or go, "Hmmm."

 

[Brainster]

Here's an interesting article debunking the notion that people are either auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners. It's Business Outsider so I wouldn't necessarily trust the source, but she does provide links to actual studies that might be useful.

As a tutor, I frequently have students telling me that they are visual learners, that they have to see it on the whiteboard to understand it.

 

[Minoosh]

Here's an interesting article debunking the notion that people are either auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners. It's Business Outsider so I wouldn't necessarily trust the source, but she does provide links to actual studies that might be useful.

As a tutor, I frequently have students telling me that they are visual learners, that they have to see it on the whiteboard to understand it.

Interesting article. I like to see things on a whiteboard too. In "Tools for Teaching" Fred Jones recommends putting a perfect example on the board, then leaving it there while kids work individually. He's talking about your typical classroom with 30 students. Give yourself huge boulevards to stride and work the room. If a kid is a "helpless hand-raiser," point at the board. Don't put your head down and try to do individual tutoring; you will lose the class. (I love being the extra body in the room that can tutor, but it's a luxury).

But his focus is teacher survival, not optimizing learning. There are all sorts of fads that come and go; "cooperative learning" is useful, kids "get in their groups." But for some students that's just a smokescreen; what they want to do is surf the Net and hang out with each other. Fantasies exist of the perfect math-learning software that will deliver a fruitful and flawless result.

I'd rather do math that way - it's a duel between me and the problem, and a motivated student could learn it from a robot - the teacher is more of a facilitator, a framing device (which is how I approached community college math). But trying it with 30 high school kids at a time, you'll get some slackers for sure.

More along the lines of Wowbagger's presentation - and I at first wrote "Wowburger," I have to see the name in writing several times before I internalize it - might be this Tomorrow Show interview with John Lennon. At the 24-26 minute mark there is an exchange where Lennon says (at minute 25), "You can't ************ the kids ... it's no good me saying dope is bad, don't do it ... you cannot tell people anything, they have to find out for themselves."

One more anecdote that is not what Wowbagger is looking for: I subbed in an art class that met off campus. For that day we could not use the usual room. There were no supplies of any kind! I started to nag some students who were video recording each other, then realized that they were actually making art. I didn't have to worry about an administrator walking in so I gave them search terms and had them look up pictures on their phones. If they did Google Image they got a look at art styles being satirized as well as the actual work - they needed to learn how to check for authenticity. In many cases phones are a distraction but if we really harnessed that potential - wowza!

ETA: In the style of Picasso, by Gary Larson

 

[Minoosh]

It's Business Outsider so I wouldn't necessarily trust the source, but she does provide links to actual studies that might be useful.

As a tutor, I frequently have students telling me that they are visual learners, that they have to see it on the whiteboard to understand it.

I have more to say about this so ... it's fascinating to see theories being debunked ... but all of them may have some useful bits; it's just that people get so fixated on the theories and swear by them with little evidence.

In learning languages that have a phonetic alphabet, I have to see a word in writing. Otherwise I can't get my head around the syllables. Learning song lyrics can really help you retain vocabulary; the rhythm of the tune somehow sparks the memory. People do process things differently, but I think that just means a teacher or tutor ought to be using a variety of techniques - not that the student is locked into some kind of "learning style."

Songs are powerful for many people. "(Para bailar la bamba se necesita una poca de gracia" - I will probably always know what you call a Spanish sailor. There were some really interesting parts of Structured English Immersion training that my state required teachers to get. Some of it was based on reliable studies. There was some evidence that acting out a verb helped you retain the meaning. But a lot of it was Speak Very Clearly, Make Gestures and Use Common Sense. Does holding, smelling and tasting a manzana make you remember "manzana"? I'm not sure but it's a nice way to give a vocabulary lesson.

There are also so-called "sleeping dictionaries" - another way to build vocabulary!

 

[TX50]

Have a look at "How we learn" by Benedict Carey. For a more rigorous approach I suppose you'd need cognitive science textbooks.

 

[Minoosh]

I'm trying to find a study (and there have been multiple studies) done by the World Bank or the IMF in Africa. Basically, it turns out the best tutor for a third-grader is a fourth-grader. As far as I know this has been replicated in other studies, but I'm having a hard time finding the right key words to search for.

It was quite quantifiable; children with slightly older tutors did better than children who were tutored by a licensed educator.

I think I first read about it in The Economist, and I have cited such studies before on this forum. Sorry I can't find it right now, but it was definitely Africa. The implications were important in countries with many young children and a shortage of trained teachers.

 

[Roboramma]

Wowbagger, have you looked at any of the work of Dan Kahan?

Here's a youtube lecture by him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5fBkivqa78

He goes into the psychology of science communication.

 

[Wowbagger]

I think that might be a slightly different issue.

Slightly different, yes. But, as a foundational skill for skeptics, I think knowledge of the general science of education is good to have. The more deeply we go, the stronger at this we all could be.

Here's an interesting article debunking the notion that people are either auditory, visual or kinesthetic learners. It's Business Outsider so I wouldn't necessarily trust the source, but she does provide links to actual studies that might be useful.

Useful, perhaps, but I would eventually like to see more than articles in magazines.

Have a look at "How we learn" by Benedict Carey. For a more rigorous approach I suppose you'd need cognitive science textbooks.

That looks like a good candidate!

(I was thinking this might possibly be the original book I was looking for, but its publish date is 2014, which I suspect makes it a tad too young. But, I could be wrong about that, too.)

Amazon is also recommending "Make It Stick" by Peter C. Brown, et al. That might also be a good candidate to include in a reading list.

Wowbagger, have you looked at any of the work of Dan Kahan?

Not yet, but I will, now. Thanks!

 

[Wowbagger]

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_514595b1b0ec788ec4.jpg[/qimg]

Oh man, I wuved "Wiener Dog Art"!

 

[novaphile]

A long time ago, a colleague told me about his wife's PhD in education...

She had told him that there were more than 50 "learning styles" that had been identified, and something like 6 "teaching styles" that were commonly practiced.

Hence, almost a guarantee that most students with struggle with the method being used to teach them.

I did best when given access to information (typically books) and left to my own devices.

 

[Minoosh]

A long time ago, a colleague told me about his wife's PhD in education...

She had told him that there were more than 50 "learning styles" that had been identified, and something like 6 "teaching styles" that were commonly practiced.

Hence, almost a guarantee that most students with struggle with the method being used to teach them.

Except that, IMO, that whole shtik sounds like made-up nonsense.

I did best when given access to information (typically books) and left to my own devices.

Same here, for acquiring information and perspective. I also like finding knowledgeable people and asking questions as they occur to me. But for procedural knowledge there is no substitute for doing it. I can explain how to drive a car, but it's not the same.

A girlfriend of mind likes to have someone show her how to do things on her iPhone. I'm just the opposite - I hate having things like that explained to me. Give me the phone and I'll figure it out. So there is something to different learning and teaching styles, but my hunch is that combining methods makes a lesson stick better than trying to address 50 (yikes!) different learning styles.

 

[Minoosh]

Another example, guided tours bore me to tears and I absorb very little ... but seeing, for example, a great artwork, I will begin to form my own questions, then more will come to me. That's not to say I never learn from such tours, but I tend to avoid them.

Except in Liverpool ... the Beatles tours were a lot of fun.

 

[TX50]

A long time ago, a colleague told me about his wife's PhD in education...

She had told him that there were more than 50 "learning styles" that had been identified, and something like 6 "teaching styles" that were commonly practiced.

A study in 2007 identified 71 different learning styles classification schemes.
Here's a linky: http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/people/academicStaff/edpahj/publications/mbe2007.pdf

 

[Minoosh]

A study in 2007 identified 71 different learning styles classification schemes.
Here's a linky: http://www.bris.ac.uk/education/people/academicStaff/edpahj/publications/mbe2007.pdf

I'm not finding anything in the linked article that says that. But it is a good indicator of what passes for research: 189 teachers filled out a questionnaire and 11 were interviewed "in-depth."

"In all but one of the areas listed (curriculum content), the majority of participants rated the role of the brain as important or very important"

I'm think I'm actually gnashing my teeth.