Learning

Alison King’s article in JSTOR on “Comparison of Self-Questioning, Summarizing, and Notetaking-Review as Strategies for Learning from Lectures.”

Underprepared college students in three conditions viewed a lecture, took notes, and then engaged in their respective study strategies. Those trained in questioning generated (and answered) their own questions based on the lecture, those trained in summarizing wrote original summaries of the lecture, and those in an untrained control group simply reviewed their lecture notes. At immediate testing summarizers recalled more of the lecture content than did self-questioners, who in turn outperformed notetaking-reviewers. On a retention test of lecture content one week later, the self-questioners performed somewhat better than the summarizers and significantly better than the notetaking-reviewers. Self-questioners’ and summarizers’ lecture notes contained more ideas from the lecture than did those of the notetaking-review students. Use of these generative study strategies appears to enhance learning from lectures by improving encoding both during the lecture and following the lectures; and for long-term retention of lecture material, self-questioning may be a more effective study strategy than summarizing.

So, perhaps, I could suggest that students do both summarizing and self-questioning. Or perhaps suggest when students are cramming to use summarization but when they are actually studying, to do self-questioning.

Siobhan Curious is asking what learning looks like at her blog. She teaches college English and I enjoy her blog and recommend it to my readers.

This particular article also has an interesting set of assignments for reading personal narratives. That’s not something I can teach at my college right now, but perhaps you can.

What does learning look like?

My developmental students are remembering what their headings should look like, that papers should be double spaced, that font size should be twelve. They are remembering they need a title, remembering not to use right justification, remembering to not just repeat the question but to answer it. To me that looks like it is learning.

But what if it’s not? My sophomore students had an out-of-class essay to write. In that essay all the problems mentioned above (and some others my developmental students have never practiced) showed up. My sophomores, who have had two freshman comp classes and have taken other college courses, didn’t learn how to write a paper for English.

So, I’m going to ask the question from a very different angle. What does learning look like? When is what it looks like really learning?

The Dallas Morning News has an article on the successful charters. While these are K-12 and not college, I would not doubt that some of this applies equally accurately to colleges and universities.

Common traits of successful charter schools include:

More classroom time. Houston-based KIPP schools, which include KIPP TRUTH Academy in Dallas, run from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, with four hours on some Saturdays and three extra weeks in the summer.

Rigorous classes. North Hills School, part of Irving-based Uplift Education, and Westlake Academy, run by the town of Westlake, offer the International Baccalaureate program from elementary through high school. It’s one of the most demanding courses of study a student can undertake.

Extra commitment from families. KIPP, Yes Prep and Uplift schools are among college-prep charters that ask parents and students to sign pledges. For instance, students promise to finish all homework on time. Parents agree to attend all parent-teacher conferences. And while charter schools cannot legally expel students if, say, their parents skip a school meeting, those pledges make a school’s expectations clear.

Extra demands of teachers. Teachers in charter schools often work longer days. Many college-prep charters encourage students who need homework help to call teachers on their cellphones. Charter schools also have more leeway to fire teachers.

Private donations. Unlike traditional public schools, Texas charter schools receive no state money for buildings. But big donors like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and the Communities Foundation of Texas have given millions of dollars to help promising charter systems build schools and cover other expenses.

School culture. “The culture of the school is the most important factor that teachers, principals and students talk about,” said Robin Lake, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. “The curriculum or teaching style might vary, but the mission is the same. It’s about norms and expectations.

Clear and concrete missions. Devora Davis, research manager at Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, said effective charter schools have goals that can be measured, like sending every student to college.

Slapping a catchy slogan on school letterhead doesn’t count.

I was intrigued by the title How to Speed Up Your Learning Rate, by Scott H. Young.

One of the skills I have found incredibly useful in my own life is the ability to learn new things rapidly with excellent comprehension. I hear a lot of talk about how learning abilities and styles are predetermined and our learning rate is fixed. I think this is garbage. Certainly our genetic predispositions and childhood environments give us certain biases towards learning, but if there is anything I have found to be true is that our learning rate can be improved markedly through the use of simple methods to help process that information more quickly.

Okay, he caught my attention. What else is there?

His answer? Stories.

Stories, metaphors and analogies are a powerful way to facilitate your own rapid learning. By creating connections to something your brain already understands you can utilize its incredible power. If you are presented material in a way you can’t quite understand or remember, try using a story to help the material sink in. Use stories and metaphors and you can speed up your own learning rate.

He gives examples in the blog post, including elements wearing clothes… Can I find a picture of that? Nope.

Eight theories are presented at The Atlantic Wire.

They range from professors assigning less work to students focusing on extracurricular activities.

Discover Magazine has an article on how sign language in Nicaragua is being used to show how language affects thought.

Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.
…
Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”

That makes it all the more important that students learn things when they are young.

It doesn’t mean we should quit trying to teach them when they are older though.

An interesting post at D-Ed Reckoning.

She creates a new model, or an amended model, of learning.

Anyway, the important take-away revealed by this model is that teacher effects, student effects, and curriculum/presentation effects are all interrelated and affect what the student learns, doesn’t learn, or imperfectly learns.

I thought this was an interesting model, but while I was still working on the post, she came out with a different/better one.

Induction is Not Constructivism came about because of misunderstandings of her earlier model.

The point I’m trying to get across in the model is that the observed stimulus ALWAYS gets transformed as it becomes knowledge. I could have used an alternate model and placed the sub-induction directly under the “direct memory” process and indicated that the “sub-inductive” process was subsumed in the “deductive” and “inductive” reasoning processes to get the same point across.

I have been told that it really does matter whether or not you tell a person they are smart, regardless of whether they have exhibited intelligence or not, and whether you tell a person they are hard working, creative, a good thinker, a problem solver, etc.

It turns out that if you tell a child they are smart, there is the potential that they will react badly to this.

Some students become lazy, figuring that their smarts will bail them out in a pinch. Others conclude that the people who praise their intelligence are simply wrong, and decide that it isn’t worth investing effort in homework. Still others might care intensely about school but withdraw from difficult tasks or tie themselves in knots of perfectionism.

I have seen this result myself in the college classroom and I, too, have reacted this way in my undergraduate days. It is probably part of the reason I did not go into medical microbiology instead of English.

It also turns out that students’ learned helplessness is not universal. Some students, despite the same stimulus that causes failure of previously successful work in others, go on and succeed rather than giving up.

I am sure many of us have seen this in real life. One of my best friends was raised in a very bad household. Most of her siblings wound up on drugs, in jail, and/or dead from related problems. She, however, finished college as a single mother and found a job where she could support her family and make a difference. She did not learn helplessness in her home environment, even though most of her siblings did.

Carol Dweck, according to The Chronicle, found that there was a test which showed whether or not students would fail because of learned helplessness.

The questionnaire, known as the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale, is designed to determine whether a person credits or blames his own behavior for his academic results, or whether he attributes those outcomes to external agents.

If the students credit or blame their own behavior, then they succeed. They succeed where others fail.

It’s not the teacher’s fault, the school’s fault, the government’s fault, the parent’s fault, the community’s fault. If the students acknowledge that their effort makes a difference, if they don’t accept victim status, then they do not fail. They succeed.

So, yes, agency matters.

Can we teach our students that? Can we change their mindset in a college classroom? How would we be able to do that?

Here’s a scenario where it would make a difference. I just read it yesterday. In a single remedial class, 50% of the students pass. But when the other 50% repeat the course, only 30% of those students pass. The next time, 20% pass… Are students in college really unable to write paragraphs? Or do they have a learned sense of helplessness.

Note, however, that the article on Carol Dweck goes on to say that sometimes the students with incremental theories of intelligence do not do well. It turns out that if you give hard things to a student for whom school is important, they do not do as well as a student would who doesn’t care about school. Because if the incremental student believes it is hard, they will create things that can be blamed for their low performance, such as distracting music played during the preparation time.

How do we get over that?

What can we do in our classrooms to make this work out well for our students?

One thought… We should begin the class with the easiest assignments. I sometimes save those for last, when everyone is tired. Perhaps I should move them to the beginning.

I had already decided (for other reasons) that I should implement a paragraph-first strategy early on. That is, the students write a single paragraph from their paper and I comment on it and then we keep going. Before they even have the whole paper written, I would have commented on over half their paragraphs. I think that might be a way around the “hard” belief that comes with English classes at the college level.

Agency matters. And we, as college professors, have the opportunity to use our own agency to help our students see that they can succeed.

I am pretty sure I never had to know all this stuff. Of course, I wasn’t a government major in college, maybe they had to. But check out an 8th grade social studies test.