One of the major principles of learning is that a learner needs to make an active response to the source of learning. This idea runs through all theories of learning irrespective of whether or not we use terms such as ‘behaviourist’, ‘cognitivist’, or ‘constructionist’. Within the world of psychology, there is no such thing as passive learning, unless this term implies learning to do nothing, in a manner akin to learned helplessness. When we are learning from listening or watching, our minds are highly active. All such effects are mediated through our active working memories. For instance, when the mind is focused, observational learning can produce powerful effects. People will often learn more effectively from watching a model perform than from doing and performing that same action in the flesh. Although we note the learners need to be active, this does not mean being active in the physical sense of having to respond overtly.
The teacher’s role, agreed upon by all parties and all theories of learning, is to invite and induce students to engage actively with learning sources. A great deal of information flows through teachers’ talk. But when a teacher exposes
students to high levels of their talk, the students’ basis for knowing what is relevant or not can be undermined. Besides straight overload, this phenomenon is akin to the redundancy effect as identified by cognitive load researchers. Studies into the characteristics of effective teachers have found that they will explain material extremely well, but in brief periods of time, for instance in 5- to 7-minute bursts, whereas a novice teacher would have taken longer. In short, instructors who assume that students will learn simply by listening for long periods of time are buying into ideas inconsistent with what we know of normal human capacities, as described by information processing theories.
The available studies into paying attention and vigilance indicate that mental focus drops off after 10 minutes. Although there will be large individual differences, a sensible working hypothesis is that students at the high-school level may listen intensively for perhaps up to 10 minutes. After that, overload factors come into play, as do other aspects such as ego depletion and simple boredom.
In fact, there are two major theories about mind wandering in the neuro science literature. One theory reflects the notion of ego depletion and a failure in self-regulation (see Chapter 26). That is, one’s ability to focus intensively (or to try hard) literally runs out through biological exhaustion, indexed by glucose levels available to the brain. Hence, it is necessary to conserve one’s energies ready for the next trial coming up in the future. In this theory, mind wandering is an adaptive strategy for conservation of one’s resources.
The second theory is called cascading inattention. This reflects the role of overload in preventing the mind from following the story being told. In other words, excessive input is threatening to one’s clear mental organisation and gives arise to confusion. The mind is striving for simplicity, but the input implies complexity. In practice, both these theories, depletion and confusion, suggest the same: that student attention deteriorates over the course of a lesson. One study with university students found that by half way through lectures, 55 per cent of students will report ‘yes’ when asked if they are mind wandering at the time.
Another study found that good students are able to regulate their attention by literally ‘tuning in’ and ‘tuning out’ throughout entire lectures.
The commonsense finding, that attention is a limited resource, is com -pounded by other research suggesting students (at all levels) are frequently exposed to instructional explanations they are unable to comprehend. What has been communicated to a group can be well out of sync with individual students’
capacity to understand and memorise complex information relayed. Within any one class, differences in students’ prior knowledge will account for large differences in their understandings of the same content. To attain high levels of understanding and mastery, instructional explanations need to be adapted to individuals’ knowledge prerequisites. But this goal is unlikely to be achieved for all at the level of whole group instruction.
It has been repeatedly shown, through both classroom and laboratory studies, that students who arrive at high school with misconceptions about phenomena will not alter their misconceptions as a result of directive instruction or simply
Learning within classrooms
listening to ‘correct’ explanations. Such students are often unaccustomed to having their views of the world challenged. Such misconceptions can be altered through sensitive challenge, careful expository teaching, active discussion, and individualised tutorial guidance. But the necessary conditions for this intensive and interactive form of teaching to occur are rarely possible under general classroom conditions.
IN PERSPECTIVE: Encouraging the student voice
Attempts have been made to alter classroom procedures to encourage quality student talk and active teacher listening. For example, consider the Paideia model of teaching, which considers that there should be three major parts to learning:
didactic instruction, Socratic questioning, and coached product – and each should consume about one third of classroom time. Didactic teaching is not talking but active teaching of ideas and relationships between ideas, and coached product puts an emphasis on the coached more than the product. But the Socratic questioning is the key – it entails asking students open questions (usually about higher order ideas) and then listening to them answering and asking each other relevant questions.
Creating opportunities for quality student talk requires deliberate actions, learning how to ask open questions (that do not then require teacher further involvement for some time) and a subtle shift in the teacher’s role away from the traditional model.
Karen Murphy and colleagues have reviewed a large body of studies on quality talk and found many approaches that promote vocabulary and understanding of the fundamental ideas of lessons, and particularly that promote higher order thinking such as comprehension, reasoning, critical thinking, and argumentation. They found reducing teacher talk and increasing student talk was not enough. That is, merely putting students into groups and encouraging them to talk was not enough. Student talk is a means not an end. Deliberate strategies are needed to structure student talk (such as Paideia and other methods outlined by Murphy) that leads to greater comprehension and learning. In surveying the literature, it was evident that particularly strong effects associated with encouraging such student talk were found in the case of below average students.
Study guide questions
1 There are several terms used to refer to the recitation method, including IRE cycles, the CDR method, or even ‘traditional chalk and talk’. Why is this form of teaching still around after some 200 years of criticism and antagonism from reformers?
2 What are the justified criticisms levelled against the recitation method?
3 Roughly what percentage of class time seems to involve teacher talk? How much time seems devoted to student talk?
4 Can you list any specific advantages that the recitation affords the teacher?
5 One worthwhile research finding is that once students are working through worked examples, then additional teacher talk is virtually useless. Why would this be the case?
6 One issue to note is that our attention is limited. Just what is known about mind wandering?
7 How does the prior knowledge factor create difficulties for the effectiveness of the recitation method?
8 Can student misconceptions be addressed through lecturing or direct instruction?
9 What are some of the strategies used to try to get students to talk more and participate in higher-level activities?
Reference notes
■ Professor Nate Gage of Stanford University was a most respected researcher who helped to initiate the modern era of classroom-based research (Gage, 2009).
■ The continuity of the recitation method over time (Cuban, 1984).
■ Problems with teacher-directed lessons (Pressley & McCormick, 1995).
■ Tensions between these two models have been apparent over the past century (Cuban, 1982). For a fascinating commentary on failure of open education over past century see Chall, 2000.
■ Influential American book: A Place Called School: Prospects for the future (Goodlad, 1994). An English study suggesting teacher dominance and student low level of responding (F. Smith, Hardman, Wall, & Mroz, 2004).
■ Many studies have now shown that although students learn a great deal from analysing worked examples, adding teachers’ verbal explanations into this mix adds virtually nothing (Wittwer & Renkl, 2010). Verbally based instruction is virtually useless in communicating forms of procedural knowledge. These findings are consistent with the fact that people cannot explain to others just how they can catch a ball, or ride a bicycle. Overall, procedural knowledge is immune to verbal forms of instruction.
■ Students come to school to watch teachers working (Hattie, 2012).
■ Effective teachers use brief instructional bursts (Brophy, 1986).
■ Human vigilance studies indicate drops in attention after several minutes (Ariga & Lleras, 2011). Students may have up to 10 minutes before attention fades (K. Wilson & Korn, 2007). However Wilson and Korn note that the
Learning within classrooms
10-minutes notion is too simplistic. Wide variations are evident, and many students tune in and out in cycles.
■ Mind wandering as depletion in executive processing (McVay & Kane, 2010). Mind wandering as confusion (Schooler et al., 2011). For a valuable paper on mind-wandering research and implications for professional practice see Smallwood, Mrazek, & Schooler, 2011.
■ Students’ mind wandering during university lectures (Risko, Anderson, Sarwal, Engelhardt, & Kingstone, 2012). Capable university students show cycles of ‘tuning in and out’ during lectures (Bunce, Flens, & Neiles, 2010).
■ Instructional explanations (at all levels of group classroom teaching) frequently fail to give rise to substantial learning effects for many students (Wittwer &
Renkl, 2008, 2010).
■ Students’ misconceptions are not altered by simply listening to correct information through direct instruction (Aydeniz & Kotowski, 2012). For a classic reading on how the mind resists new information when it already has a view in place see Chinn & Brewer, 1993.
■ The Paideia method (Billings & Fitzgerald, 2002). Review on increasing student talk (Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009).
You volunteer for a laboratory experiment on word recognition and are asked to stare into a computer screen, blank except for a small red cross in the centre of the screen. You note a brief flash and are asked what you saw. You find yourself saying, ‘Is it carrot?’ You got it right. What is surprising is that the flash was of 20 milliseconds (ms), or one fiftieth of a second. This is so brief as to be called subliminal or below the normal visual threshold. To say carrot took your brain several seconds after the flash to come up with the word. Genuinely, you remain uncertain as to how that word surfaced in your head. Given any normal sense of the term, you did not see the word on the screen. To see that word with genuine visual clarity would require some 60 ms exposure, or something approaching a tenth of a second.
With such ultra-brief flashes, most often, no effects at all will surface. This is especially so if the word is unfamiliar. For example, suppose the word flashed had been cappotto (coat in Italian). Although you do not speak Italian, you can read the word cappotto easily, but it takes more time than 20 ms. If this word is unknown, you read it using phonemic analysis. This strategy needs a good half second (500 ms) exposure on the screen, followed by several seconds of quiet subvocal rehearsal to ensure you can verbalise it to an acceptable level.
In this experiment, correctly identifying the word carrot after a split second reflects automaticity. But reading cappotto requires conscious effort. Through phonemic analysis, some elements will spring to mind with ease, such as the phonemes that represent chunks, such as cap-, pot-, and to-. These elements are familiar. Of course you can read cappotto accurately, but the phonemic recoding strategy will impose load on your brain for several seconds. While working out how to pronounce the word using your active working memory, other aspects of your mental life had to be placed on hold.
C H A P T E R