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The Testing Effect is dead! Long live the Testing Effect!

2015-05-20T10:50:21+01:00May 20th, 2015|Featured, psychology|

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Feynman Yesterday we were told that the much vaunted testing effect (which I've written about here) has been effectively shown to be useless in improving the learning of 'complex' material. Tamara van Gog and John Sweller's provocatively titled paper, Not New, but Nearly Forgotten: the Testing Effect Decreases or even Disappears as the Complexity of Learning Materials Increases explored the 'boundary conditions' of the effect. The abstract of the paper says, [One] potential boundary condition concerns the complexity of learning materials, [...]

A review of 2014

2014-12-31T22:26:35+00:00December 28th, 2014|Featured|

I wrote 125 posts in 2014 bringing the running total to 336 posts. Here are the ten most popular this year: Why do so many teachers leave teaching? (February 2013) The Cult of Outstanding™: the problem with ‘outstanding’ lessons (January 2014) Work scrutiny – What’s the point of marking books? (January 2013) Marking is an act of love (October 2013) Where lesson observations go wrong  (July 2013) What is good behaviour? (January 2012) Slow Writing: how slowing down can improve your writing (May 2012) Why AfL might be wrong, and what to do about it (March 2014) Building challenge: differentiation that’s quick and works (January 2013) What I learned from my visit to [...]

Are we fetishising marking?

2014-11-14T08:10:13+00:00November 14th, 2014|learning|

When you make something a fetish, ashes and dusts will laugh at you, because they know even the most valuable fetishes will turn into dusts and ashes! Mehmet Murat ildan Last night I innocently posted the following tweet:   This sparked something of a debate. A number of people got in touch to tell me this was 'bonkers' and a 'complete waste of money'. Other responses ranged from cautious interest to overwhelming support. But by far the biggest objection was the assertion that marking is an essential aspect of planning: if teachers don't know how pupils are performing then future teaching will [...]

Why do we overestimate the importance of differences?

2014-11-05T17:48:31+00:00November 5th, 2014|learning|

"For a difference to be a difference, it must make a difference." William James We're all different. Obviously. Just like snowflakes, human beings are all special, unique and entirely individual. But like snowflakes, maybe those differences aren't as important as we might sometimes like to think. When it snows the difference between individual flakes is irrelevant. For all we have our very own permutations of DNA, the fact our physiognomies are broadly similar means we behave in broadly similar ways. Of course we have an infinite variety of differences in ability, but the way we learn is surprisingly similar. You doubt me? Well, you're not [...]

The problem with SatNavs, or how feedback can impede learning

2020-05-07T18:16:23+01:00July 6th, 2014|learning|

I'm not an especially good driver, but I'm a truly terrible navigator. This used to mean that I would get lost. A lot. When I first moved to Bristol in 2001 I bought an A-Z of the city and when driving somewhere new I would have to stop the car periodically and try to align the map to the streets around me. Needless to say, I found this pretty stressful. Luckily, I'm a lot better at recognising landmarks than I am at reading maps. Slowly, through a process of trial and error, I started to learn how to find my way around. I've got [...]

Now we are three

2014-07-04T09:07:19+01:00July 3rd, 2014|Featured|

In a pleasingly synchronous turn of events this post marking the end of the third year of writing The Learning Spy is also the 300th post I've published on the site. That's about a blog every 4 days. I knew I'd written a lot, but this smacks of some sort of worrying compulsion. This last year has been by far the busiest yet with over 600,000 views but I'm sure that has more to do with the explosion of high quality education blogging that's taken place in the past year or so than it has to do with anything special about me. And [...]

What I got up to at the Wellington Festival of Education Part 1

2014-09-21T22:12:27+01:00June 22nd, 2014|learning|

Sadly, I missed most of the Friday. I spent the morning speaking at a maths conference (I know, right?) on correcting the mistakes made in the name of ‘numeracy across the curriculum’. If you’re interested, I argued that whilst numeracy has a pretty superficial connection with much that goes on in other subjects, mathematical thinking would be a far more powerful way to explicitly teach pupils to filter how they viewed the curriculum. I may blog on this at some point in the future. Then, channeling the spirit of the John Cleese film Clockwise I had to race across to Wellington [...]

A request: Have you experienced any craziness in your school?

2014-05-25T22:41:32+01:00May 24th, 2014|myths|

If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most. Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller) So. I've started work on my next book, provisionally (and provocatively) entitled, Why Everything You've Been Told About Teaching Is Wrong. Contrary to expectations I want to make is fair-minded and as lacking in ideological slant as I'm able. To achieve this I need your help. The chapter I'm currently writing is on cognitive bias, and I'd really like to use some examples of the sorts of blinkered thinking which we can be drawn into in schools. Obviously I've got lots [...]

This is who I am

2014-05-18T20:27:42+01:00May 18th, 2014|Featured|

This post was written at the behest of Rory Gallagher (@EddieKayshun) who assured me that some people might find it interesting to know a little more about my background. He has persuaded all sorts of fascinating teachers to share their stories on his marvellous Who I Am, What I Do site. I recommend you check it out. My experience of school was troubled. It took me a long time to get over it. Apparently, my mother took me out of school for several months at the age of seven in order to teach me to read. My primary school had written [...]

Intuition vs evidence: the power of prediction

2015-01-26T12:37:57+00:00May 8th, 2014|myths|

I wrote earlier in the week about why, despite it's limitations, research is better than a hunch. Since then, I've been reading Daniel Willingham's article on Real Clear Education; he says that it's not that people are stupid but that science is hard. He refers to the nobel prize winning physicist Carl Weiman whose interest in science education came from many years of working closely with physics undergraduates and observing that "their success in physics courses was such a poor predictor of a student’s ultimate success as a physicist." Or in other words, performance was not a useful indication of learning. Weiman argues that rigorous eduction [...]

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