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Is it worth trying to memorise facts?

We can only think about what we know and, no mater how intelligent we might be, we cannot think about something about which we are ignorant. But how well do we need to know things? Is there any point to memorising facts? I had an interesting discussion with some primary maths teachers recently about the benefits of memorising certain basic maths facts. While pretty much everyone agreed that if children had memorised number bonds to ten and times tables then they would have an advantage when performing calculations, there was a difference of opinion on what was reasonable to expect. Some teachers suggested that [...]

2017-02-08T17:17:40+00:00February 8th, 2017|learning|

War and Peace in education

After a long flight, I've finally finished rereading War and Peace and, if you were in any doubt, it is a masterpiece. I found so much I'd either entirely forgotten or hadn't understood from my first reading over 20 years ago. What particularly struck me was the final chapter from the Second Epilogue. Throughout the book, Tolstoy has been advancing his theory of history as being far more than the will and actions of 'great men'. We are, he rather thinks, all slaves to circumstance and our attempts at writing history are mere post hoc rationalisations of what happened. In this final [...]

2017-02-02T20:34:19+00:00February 2nd, 2017|Featured|

Knowing the names of things

Many people have written many thousands of words about the difference between knowledge and understanding, but I think Richard Feynman nails it here: You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. This is sometimes used to belittle the idea that knowing what things are called is useful. Of course I agree that [...]

2017-11-27T17:52:07+00:00January 30th, 2017|Featured|

Is growth mindset bollocks?

Like everyone else, when I first came across Carol Dweck's theory of growth mindsets I was pretty psyched. There was something so satisfyingly truthy about the way the labels 'fixed' and 'growth' mindset could explain why children failed or succeeded at school. I wanted to believe that something as simple as telling children their brains are 'like a muscle' and showing them a cartoon about synapses forming could make them cleverer. And if praising effort instead of praising intelligence really did make all this happen, then why the hell wouldn't we? And best of all, the whole edifice was established on rock-solid, credible research and [...]

2017-01-28T13:42:55+00:00January 25th, 2017|psychology|

Reading for betterment

About 20 years ago, I read Tolstoy's uber-novel, War and Peace. The perfect set of conditions all came together: I'd just been sent a copy of the book by a friend who was keen that I read it, I was in my third year of an English literature degree and fairly convinced of the benefits of reading improving books, and I was ill and was living in a world where home internet access wasn't really a thing - at least not for students - and so I had little to distract me. I devoured it in about 2 weeks. Although long [...]

2024-06-16T12:30:51+01:00January 24th, 2017|reading|

Humans can’t multitask

One of the highlights of my day at researchED Amsterdam was hearing Paul Kirschner speak about edu-myths. He began his presentation by forbidding the use of laptops or mobile phones, explaining  that taking notes electronically leads to poorer recall than handwritten notes. The benefits of handwritten over typed notes include better immediate recall as well as improved retention after 2 weeks. In addition, students who take handwritten notes are more like to remember facts but also to have better future understanding of the topic. Fascinatingly, it doesn't even matter whether you ever look at these notes - the simple act of making them appears [...]

2025-03-11T20:16:43+00:00January 23rd, 2017|psychology|

The power of 'best bets'

The other day I read Greg Ashman's post Why Education is like smoking which talked about the way teachers often generalise from anecdotes in the same way that when smokers are confronted with statistics about the health risks of smoking they might say things like, "Well, my nan smoked 400 cigarettes a day! She may have had bright yellow fingers but she lived to the ripe old age of 130!" Or whatever. Teachers do this sort of thing all the time. We say things like, "Well, the research may say x, but I find y works so much better for me!" Maybe it [...]

2017-01-15T17:40:00+00:00January 15th, 2017|research|

Problems with the ‘zone of proximal development’

It's hard to have a discussion about learning without someone sooner or later chipping in with the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) to support their position. This might, in part, be because Vygotsky is one of the very few theorists covered in many teachers' training, but it's also because it feels intuitively right. Briefly, most people use ZPD to suggest that there is a 'Goldilocks Effect' where the level of challenge for a child is 'just right. If work is too easy, it's argued, then no learning will take place, and if it's too hard, then it [...]

2017-01-13T14:18:53+00:00January 13th, 2017|Featured|

Should students be overlearning?

In my last post I outlined my concerns with the idea of 'thinking hard' being a good proxy for learning. Briefly, thinking hard about a problem appears to be an inefficient way to alter long-term memory structures. This means that it's perfectly possible to struggle with a difficult exercise, successfully complete it, and still not have learned how to repeat the process independently. The problem is that 'thinking hard' exhausts limited working memory reserves. In fact - as Daisy Christodoulou states in Making Good Progress? - the evidence on 'overlearning' seems to suggest that repeating a task to the point where almost no thought [...]

2017-01-12T21:28:45+00:00January 12th, 2017|Featured|

Further problems with the ‘thinking hard’ proxy for learning

Because learning is invisible, we can only hope to measure whether students are making progress by observing proxies. Most people now seem to agree that certain activities which routinely take place in lessons are, in the words of Robert Coe, 'poor proxies for learning'. Rob has suggested that a better proxy might be 'thinking hard'. This seemed sensible and, like many others, I've embraced the idea, but the harder I think about this the less sure I am. In this post I began considering of the limitations of think hard as a good proxy for learning but was still wedded to the [...]

2017-01-11T19:26:25+00:00January 11th, 2017|learning|

Why feedback fails

Feedback is one of the few things in education that pretty much every agrees is important and worthwhile. The need for feedback is obvious: if you were expected to learn how to reverse park a car whilst wearing a blindfold you would be very unlikely to learn how to go about this without causing damage either to your car, or to the environment. In order to learn you would need to see where you were going and what happened when you turned the wheel. We get this sort of trial and error feedback all time; we act and then observe the effects of [...]

2017-05-28T13:40:02+01:00January 10th, 2017|assessment|

Post-truth and the best way to teach

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. St. Augustine We've always had a tendency to defer to what is most said most magnificently and shun that which is badly uttered but now it's a thing. To much fanfare, 'post-truth' has entered the lexicon and now we have a made-to-measure term for the emotively uttered truism that turns out not to be er... true. Deliberate falsehoods would be much easier to combat because, as Hannah Arendt put it, "The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of [...]

2017-01-03T10:25:55+00:00January 3rd, 2017|learning|
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