Category: spaced practice

420. Teaching from the Same Side

Posted in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, engagement, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, scholarship of teaching and learning, spaced practice, teaching, Uncategorized
November 19, 2025

Antagonistic relationships with students are not uncommon—there is a history of faculty distrust of students. In this episode Michelle Miller joins us to discuss a same-side approach where faculty and students work together in support of student learning.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Ed and is the co-editor with James Lang of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at Oklahoma University Press.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Antagonistic relationships with students are not uncommon—there is a history of faculty distrust of students. In this episode we discuss a same-side approach where faculty and students work together in support of student learning.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Students’ Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to a variety of publications including The Chronicle of Higher Ed and is the co-editor with James Lang of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series at Oklahoma University Press. Welcome back. Michelle.

Michelle: Hi, thanks. It’s great to be here. Thanks for the chance to speak with you today.

John: It’s great to talk to you. It’s been too long. Today’s teas are:… Michelle, are you drinking tea?

Michelle: I am not. I had all great intentions, and one thing led to another, and our time was upon us, and so I will be drinking a nice, tall glass of water

Rebecca: Again, the foundation of tea. I have Lady Grey today, John.

John: And I have ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice. So we invited you here today to discuss a workshop that you’ve been offering recently on teaching from the same side. What do you mean by teaching from the same side.

Michelle: So I want to just say right off the top here, it’s not like a formal framework or a theory or something like that, it’s really one resonant phrase that kept coming to the top of my mind to bring together a number of themes and ideas and even philosophies that I’m seeing converging out there in the world of higher education, pedagogy and course design. And so when I look at all the roots, I think of things like Pedagogy of Kindness, Cate Denial’s wonderful book and framework. I think about the idea of relentless welcome that was talked about in Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book, even some themes that come up from ungrading and alternative grading, all of which are feeding into this idea of: “Are there strategies? Are there practices that are essentially more adversarial than they need to be in our relationships with students and what might we try instead, and what can be some of the outcomes?” So those are some of the things that pulled together and have started again to come to the forefront of my mind as I’ve talked about this with faculty. So, teaching from the same side, itself, just the phrase, it’s also something that I wrote about in a newsletter issue from a couple of years back, and it keeps coming back to my mind, and I think it continues to resonate with readers of that newsletter. I think I got a lot more traction with readers that I have with some other ideas or themes or discussions that I’ve put out there in the past. That’s what got me thinking a little bit more about some fundamental realignments that can take place in our ideas about why students are taking our classes, our ability to meld those goals and find common ground with the goals that we have for them, and to even interrogate and question some practices that we may take for granted, even things like how we frame policies in our syllabus, what those policies even are, and how we think about drawing students into the concepts and material that we want to share with them as excited, engaged teachers ourselves.

John: It makes so much sense that we should share the same goals as our students, that we want our students to learn, and they want to learn. Yet a lot of faculty come into teaching with this adversarial approach. And Cate Denial talked about that in her book at the beginning, how she was encouraged to not trust students so much. And I remember getting a very similar induction into academia from colleagues. Why is an adversarial teaching approach or teaching relationship so common?

Michelle: Well, I really like how you talked about your formative experiences as a college instructor. And I think even for those of us like myself, where it’s: “ah, that was decades ago. How could that still be affecting me today?” But that’s what formative experiences do. They set us on a track, and they put us in a mindset that may be with us for a lot longer than we realize. So I think it’s really productive to think back, and I encourage faculty to do that as well. When I do get to talk to folks about this and work with them, I say, “Well, what were some of your early experiences, both as a student and as a budding, upcoming instructor?” And yes, like so many of us, I was told explicitly and implicitly at every turn, “Well, you got to keep an eye on those students. Your job is to choose the goals and the content and make the demands on the students.” We are the experts in the room. It makes sense that we would be leaders in that way. But then that turns into the sense of and you can absolutely expect that students don’t want that. I’ve heard different variations on: students just want the easy points, they want to check a box, they want to get a credential, go on to have a job and not intellectually engage. And so, hear that over and over and over, and you’re encouraged, and maybe it’s even valorized in certain cultures, certain departments, certain institutions, that the more you can push that onto students, the better instructor you are. And so I think many of us are questioning that, but we may not have some better ideas or anything concrete to replace it with, or we’re concerned what would happen if I changed this policy or took a different approach? And I’ll say that I also had an experience I’m just realizing now I’ve been thinking back to this experience. It was actually the very first time I ever taught a course as the instructor of record, and it was fraught with all kinds of stresses, as you might imagine [LAUGHTER], and there were definitely times when I felt that what I wanted was mismatched with what students wanted, and that we were on different sides, but it was long enough ago that I’m comfortable even sharing the particular conflict that happened. So I had a teaching assistant in this class, and the way it played out, the teaching assistant was about my same age, which was already kind of fraught enough, so I’m trying to navigate this relationship with him, and he is quite naturally trying to step up and be helpful and tell me what to do and what he thought I was frankly doing wrong in the course. And we had had a lot of student feedback coming in over and over that students, they weren’t happy with the course, but there was one thing in particular that they kind of wanted, and I looked, it was like, “Well, that’s an easy fix.” It just had to do with how many points and how fine grained of feedback they were getting on this one recurring assignment. I was like, “Well, we could do that if we change this midstream and it works better for everybody. Why not?” And my teaching assistant and I had a confrontation in my office. I mean, I remember it quite well. It w as the sort of where you’re both standing up on other sides of the desk and raising your voices at each other. And he said, flat out: “If you do this, regardless of what the change is, if you let those students know that they can ask you for something and that you’ll give in…” his words… “then you’ve lost it. The students are going to be in charge from here on out, and that’s going to be it for this semester. That is what will happen if you do this.” And I don’t see a good reason not to do it, and I’m going to try it, and we tried it. And what do you know? Students were happier and satisfied. We quit getting those same emails every single week, and it was fine. If anything, the level of respect and willingness to put forth productive effort improved. It didn’t go away. So I had the benefit of having that, but it’s something that I still had to tuck away and return to all these many years later and occasionally still do to remind myself that sometimes it’s a matter of just trying it. So even if we’re kind of dissatisfied with an older, adversarial philosophy, there are ways to experiment and find better approaches that meet our needs and our goals and our aspirations as the experts in the room, but also meet students’ needs a lot better.

Rebecca: We see a lot of examples where this us versus them relationship comes up. We see it on campuses, between faculty and administration, between students and faculty in a lot of different contexts. What’s the value of trying something different and not having this us versus them mindset.

Michelle: Well, the other really indelible experience and tipping point that I had around this does it have to be us versus them thought process was during remote emergency instruction. So during the pandemic itself, where that case, I think, like for so many of us, it wasn’t even a matter of like, well, maybe I could take something good and make it even better, that we could accrue benefits. I think we were in survival mode. I know I was. I had a handle on the technology. I think I was probably pretty well positioned, but I still had this experience, as many of us did in spring of 2020, going, “Oh, everything that I planned out and I was going to do and all the boxes I was going to check, because that’s what I always do, we can’t do that anymore.” And I just felt the ground fall out from underneath of me. I’m kind of going, Well, how do I choose? [LAUGHTER] And if we can only do some of these things and not a lot of the others, how can I make the right decisions, and part of it is realizing…[LAUGHTER] giving yourself a little bit of grace, and saying, “Well, you do the best you can, and not all the decisions are going to be right.” But I kept returning to that guiding beacon of, “why did students take this class in the first place?” None of us anticipated how it was going to play out when we all signed on for this. But what were the most important takeaways that they needed and wanted to get? And I just was like, “look, whatever the activity or learning objective was, if it aligns better with that, what brought them to the course in the first place? That’s what we’ll do, and other things are going to take the back burner or go away.” So I think that was one real benefit of when we know we need to revise something and not everything can happen, it can be a prioritization tool. But, what I sense is drawing in some of my fellow faculty to this is the idea of that better and more welcoming atmosphere and the possibility of taking more of our contact and conversations with students out of the realm of like the negotiation over points. “If you do this, I will give you that.” I don’t think any of us are really in teaching and getting inspired by conversations like that. sometimes they have to happen, but to have fewer of those and more of “I am struggling with the material. I’m worried about how this is turning out. I don’t know what to do next,” and me being able to step in and say, “Ah, I can help you,” because we are fundamentally on the same side. And even up to yesterday, when a student was asking me something kind of involved about a test grade, and could we do this? I had to take a breath, step back and say, “Okay, what moves her closer to the common goal of her learning about and getting excited about psychology, which is what we’re doing in intro to psych, and what would move her further away from that?” And yeah, more of a same-side solution, without getting too far into the weeds of what it was, I think we hit on something, and I saw a little bit of a light come up for her as well. Now, I think non-adversarial teaching approaches of different kinds are starting to make it into scholarship and teaching and learning and other sorts of literature. But here too, I want to be upfront and say, Hey, I don’t think that we can point to 20 research studies and five meta-analyses showing, well, if you tweak this one thing about your mindset or philosophy, that students are going to attain X, Y and Z. I hope it happens. But right now, I’m in that, to me, exciting and sometimes intimidating state of like, I think there’s something to this, but we just have to keep working working with it.

Rebecca: Minimally, maybe you’ll just be happier. [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: …minimally happier as an instructor. Yes, that’s not about just saying anything goes or let’s always be buddy buddy, and I never want to have that conversation about your grades. It’s not that so much. I think it’s a matter of balance and realizing how even subtly telegraphing or communicating to students like, yeah, no, I said it was all about the learning, I mean that and the points, all that will shake out [LAUGHTER] in the end, and I’m actually willing to act accordingly and keep on that talking point. That really does start to make them step back and say, like, “Oh, actually, this is different, and I think I like it.”

John: Earlier you mentioned that so many of the discussions among faculty are with perceptions of declining student engagement, less student motivation, and students seeing education primarily as a means to a degree and checking off that box so they can move on to the next stage. And there are some surveys that indicate that students today see less connection between what they’re learning and their future lives and careers. Might the same-side approach help support an environment where it’s easier, perhaps, to motivate students,

Michelle: Right, so student motivation. And here too, it’s sometimes, even to this day, still like a little uncomfortable to me as a cognitive psychologist and one who comes from that tradition and sort of side of our psychology. But, as I frequently share about Minds Online. I realized just in the course of writing that first book, which is very cognitively oriented, we talk about memory, we talk about transfer of thinking skills and all this stuff. But I was like, “Oh, wait, if we don’t also talk about why students are doing all this great evidence-based [LAUGHTER] coursework in the first place, then why are we here?” So yeah, just acknowledging that, and reminding myself pretty much every day as an instructor that yes, I do have to think about this. So there is that perception. And I’m not, first of all going to necessarily just totally turn away from somebody else’s authentic experience and say, “This is what my students are telling me, but I respectfully also submit that when I really started reflecting on it, my experience, even recently with students, has not fit that mold of like, “Well, Professor, can’t you just not take up my time, give me my points and let me go on my merry way to a job.” I have students expressing a very diverse range of goals. Some have not formulated goals. They’re not trying to tick a box to get a job. They don’t know what the job is yet. They’re not even sure what credential they want to get. So I think in the right environment, if you know what to look for, and you’re primed to look for it, that you will see that students they do want to learn. Now do they always act in accordance with high intellectual ideals that we start the semester with? No, and I would submit that none of us do. It’s just not how human beings work. But there is a core and a well of authentic intrinsic engagement. But actions need to follow those ideals. So we talk about motivation. I do keep coming back to and frequently sharing with my fellow faculty two old good solid aspects of motivation theory that just seem to work time and again. And one of them is actually getting a lot of new air time as well, and sort of a revival of interest. So I can share those with you, and I’ll hit the real high spots of these. First of all, self-determination theory, our old friend… and all of the motivation theories, by the way too… they also really bring home an important point, which is not to think about motivation in terms of “you’re a motivated person,” or “you aren’t.” Motivation theory just really looks at the conditions of the environment and the setting, which is great news for us teachers, because students don’t have to walk in, just motivated people. They can respond to the cues and the incentives we give them. So self-determination theory is we’re more motivated when we have autonomy and choice in what we do, we have some sense of mastery, or that we’re getting better at what we’re learning, and there’s relatedness or social components, so somebody else out there cares [LAUGHTER] that I’m getting better at whatever this thing is. And I’ve just seen informally, but it’s a very strong impression that I have over the last few years of like scholarship of teaching and learning and learning and learning sciences research, lots of folks are discovering or rediscovering these principles and say, “Well, what happens if we actually bake these into, say, an online class? What happens to student achievement, especially around the autonomy and choice part?” And that’s one that too, that used to be really tough to do. I tried building all kinds of choices and saying, “Well, maybe students can be graded more on tests or weight their assignments more heavily.” I tried that many years ago, and it was so hard to do and track, and now, with better technology tools, we can say, “Why didn’t you pick this? This is your strength and you want to pursue it. Do that, or here’s a fork in the road, pick A or B.” So those things can really elicit just some basic, more motivated behavior. So there’s that, and then there’s always intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Lots of us say, like, you don’t have to just rely on intrinsic motivation and hope that it will be there. There’s ways to kind of promote that, and it doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of all grade or other kinds of incentives. So I’ve been playing around with different ways to spark that intrinsic motivation, some sneaky ones that psychologists know about, and also some ones that I think lots of us hit on through our teaching experience, things like introducing surprise or asking students to predict, rather than always just telling them what the outcome is, so that can help build that over time.

Rebecca: Were there some sneaky ones you were going to share?

Michelle: Well, see how I did that. [LAUGHTER]

John: Is there a secret handshake or something needed for these?

Michelle: Oh, it is. It is, it walks a fine line between psychology and perhaps a little bit of manipulation, but people can decide if this is in their comfort zone or not. It has a terrible name, which is the “hypocrisy effect,” but has wonderful outcomes. So essentially, it’s a way to try to induce attitude change by getting people to act in accordance to what we’ve said or done before. So we all kind of naturally like to be consistent. If we say it, we tend to start to believe it over time. So there’s ways of doing this, essentially getting students to endorse or identify for themselves the value of either course features or things they’re learning about. Like I have a colleague here at NAU who, years back, was teaching a first-year seminar and it’s a pop culture topic. I won’t get too deep into what it was, but you might look at that and say, “Oh, sure, it’s inherently interesting.” Then again, students may look at it and say, “Well, maybe I should spend more time actually studying in this required chemistry class” or something. And maybe their families are even saying, like, “Why are you taking that?” So, right from the beginning, what he did is he asked students to write a letter home. I don’t know whether they sent it or not, but this is a classic technique to tap into this. So that was the assignment: write to your family and tell them why you’re taking a class in this thing that, on the face of it, might seem a little frivolous, and talk about the skills you’re going to acquire and how that’s going to help you in everything you’re going to do to make the most of your college education from here on out. So, that could be a way to spark authentic buy-in to: “Yeah, this is why I am actually going to put effort into this class,” or in my case, I hit on this with an assignment that does double duty, trying to get more investment in using class time and staking more of the grade on that without doing very traditional participation grading. So they do a reflection on what they’ve been learning over the last two weeks. And one of the prompts that’s in there does ask them like, “What’s your favorite learning?” and yeah, I’m leaning on them pretty heavily.[LAUGHTER] It’s a little heavy handed to say, “Tell me what you like.” But what does that do? You come up with something. I mean, students do have the option. If they’re like, “this is not doing it for me,” [LAUGHTER] I won’t take that personally, but most do find something. And it’s a good fit for intro to psych, because you do something totally different every week. There’s something for everybody [LAUGHTER] in this course. And so they’re the ones saying, “Well, here’s why learning about Pavlovian conditioning can really help you in your life. Here’s something I didn’t know about our sensory systems that was really insightful.” So instead of me always telling them, they’re telling me, and it should spark more engagement over time.

Rebecca: Good. I want you to get off the hook without the sneaky… [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Yes, knowing me as you do.

John: In our past discussions and much of your work, you usually focus on the cognitive side of learning, as you’ve mentioned, things like attention, memory, critical thinking. How might teaching from the same side support all of that?

Michelle: Well, I think that that’s just such an exciting perspective on this as well, and that’s something that I’ve really been challenging myself on lately too. Say, are these two separate things? So building in things like more retrieval practice, that active, effortful recall that we know is so much better than just the standard playbook of like, okay, you make a PowerPoint deck and explain it to me, and then I’ll take it home and reread it, which we know does not work really well from the knowledge perspective. Distributed spaced studying is sometimes harder to do as schedules get busy, and transfer and practice, this is hard stuff to actually get in there and keep practicing the skills, including with really messy, challenging problems. All that stuff is evidence-based. You know it works. I know it works. Our students, on the other hand, just they see the effort, or even some other facets of this that dissuade them from it. So the way I’ve been thinking of it lately is like, okay, so we finally have these evidence-based practices going mainstream. Like, really over the last 10 years, it’s this incredible success story with more people, podcast listeners, there’s all this great interest. So that’s wonderful, but maybe the next level is to put more into getting students to internalize those on their own. Because, after all, I mean, these are techniques that even if they’re not built into a class, if I know about them, I can probably bring them in as a student, or even if I’m not in a formal class, I’m in professional learning situation years after I’ve graduated, what better skill to have available to me than knowing how to break something down and say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to use some of these same principles.” And there’s some suggestions from the research literature that when students do have those good experiences and see it in action, that they actually do internalize it, even without anybody standing over them and saying, let’s do this. So I’m challenging myself to say, “Well, can I change my mindset from evidence-based practices, cognitive learning principles…?” These are not things just to do two students, say, “All right, I’ve applied this to you because I know it will help,” but also to say, “Hey, this is why it is the way it is, and isn’t it exciting? Let me bring you in.” And that might seem simple, and some of it does come down to transparency, this concept that many of your listeners may be familiar with, where we just quickly say, “Okay, here’s the assignment, but also here’s why it’s here, why it’s set up the way it is, and how it’s supposed to help you.” There is some research showing that that’s beneficial. Students will sit back and go, “Oh, okay, now I get it, and I’m more invested, and I’m on your side now as well to say I’m going to do this hard project and do it the way that you suggested.” So yeah. There is that. But I think also what I’ve facing up to myself is it’s not always just like, “Well, let me just explain to you a better way to do it, and then why won’t the students do it?“ And perhaps coming away is like, “Oh, they’re lazy. They don’t want to try something new, or they just aren’t listening to me.” Well, think of it in terms of risk. Students, by the time they’ve gotten to our classrooms, they are, of course, not blank slates, especially when it comes to their study techniques. If you talk to students for any length of time, you know that they’ve developed what they believe oftentimes are successful study approaches. And it’s a risk. So it’s really a risk-benefit calculation that our students may be engaging in to say, “Well, not only are you telling me to do this thing that’s hard, to close my book and quiz myself, but that’s going to take away from or replace something that’s worked before. Just because you’re telling me to do this, you want me to put my grades on the line [LAUGHTER] and throw out the thing that got me to here.” So when you see it in that way, you realize that there’s perhaps some different tactics and approaches. And here, some really esteemed cognitive psychologists have picked this up as really a challenge. So Mark McDaniel and his longtime collaborator, Gil Einstein, they’re known for a ton of different applied research findings and discoveries all over. And they stepped back and said, “Oh, wait a minute. This is an example of a dynamic that has been with us for some time in all branches of applied psychology, which is just knowing doesn’t transform behavior. Maybe folks out there are all eating their eight servings of vegetables and 30 minutes of exercise, doing everything we know we’re supposed to do, we don’t do it.” And there’s lots of reasons why, but Einstein and McDaniel said it’s still my sense is a work in progress, but they’ve put together a pretty detailed step-by-step program. They call it KBCP. So knowledge, belief, commitment, planning, I think, is what it stands for. But basically, you can get the sense here that it’s about not just “do your retrieval practice,” but also, “let me tell you about it, sure, inform you. But I’m not going to stop there. Let’s also do some demonstrations. Let’s try it with and without, and we can all see it in action.” So building that really authentic buy-in, and then encouraging students to get out there and try it in higher stake settings. So okay, what do you plan to do for that big exam you have in that other class? And let’s lay out a plan for that, and then come back and reflect and say, Well, did it work the way that I predicted it would [LAUGHTER] as the expert? And now, what do you want to do? So again, it’s something that I think is emerging, and their program is pretty detailed. So I don’t know that everybody’s going to go through that step by step, but the spirit of it is very much with me as a cognitively oriented instructor and researcher to say, “Okay, but how do you really reach people so that they are willing and excited to take it forward” and realizing that students, under the right circumstances, may do that, and that’s a much greater gift to them than just what you’re doing by designing a single class.

Rebecca: One of the key things of that model seems to be the idea, or from my experience, is that ability to achieve something and achieve that success and see it working, so that you then might be motivated to try it again. Thinking about any parent who has a kid that doesn’t like to practice stuff, but if they have some success in seeing that the practice helps them achieve something that they want to achieve, then they’re more likely to do it again.[LAUGHTER]

Michelle: It’s a competence piece. Now you’re putting it that way. Now I’m kind of seeing that connection. It’s the competence piece of SDT, and, yeah, as inspiration to stick with it and do the hard things. And when we’re on the same side, we have our techniques as parents who are also in the motivation business, but I have to feel like we are in a better position to do that when we can help celebrate and say, remember, we are in the same side. And here’s where it was difficult, but here’s where, yeah, you tried it and it worked, and let’s celebrate that win together from the same side.

Rebecca: You’ve mentioned a wide variety of cognitive practices. Can we think about what that looks like in practice?

Michelle: Yeah, and here’s where we can tap a little bit more into my other love within the field of psycholinguistics, but some of this is just basic communication principles as well. So as a piecing together and pulling from lots of different areas, how do we communicate that we are on the same side and establish that atmosphere of, frankly, trust and a non-adversarial approach to these things. Some of the things that have struck me as just, first of all, a lot of this work, a lot of the folks that I would consider to be my models, and the folks I’m looking up to here, they’ve talked about the syllabus as a starting point. So there’s lots and lots and lots of work out there. Sometimes, like, as the work builds up, it’s hard to synthesize, but a few threads that I’ve been pulling out. So anybody who has not read Kevin Gannon’s classic, I think, “How to Create a Syllabus” guide, it came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years back. It was really, I think, one of the first clear, unambiguous, like “we need to do this and not that” in our syllabi, including calling into question, in a good way, a lot of the things that we have taken for granted, and I know I just copy pasted [LAUGHTER] semester after semester, including things like using all caps. It might come from a good intention of like, “this is important, I want you to see it.” But as Gannon so accurately points out, this is how we scream at each other online. And why do that? [LAUGHTER] and it’s just saying is there some other way to highlight what’s important? Or even, I had a faculty member say to me recently, she’s like, “Yeah, for all the complaining about, oh, students don’t read it, students don’t get it. Well, think about the policies we deal with. When do we look at them? …was when we need them.” So yes, absolutely, students should read the thing from top to bottom. This faculty member, she even sends out, pieces out, like relevant parts of it as reminders or announcements at the right times of the semester. So there’s other ways to emphasize besides just the all caps and Gannon also talks about is like, is there some way that your syllabus is kind of getting across that, not only here’s the things I don’t want you to do, but there’s no reasons for it other than I say so and it gets across this idea that “and I expect you to do all these bad things.” So playing around with ways of dialing that down. So syllabus warmth is another major concept, some interesting findings about how sensitive students are to that. And then lastly, I ran across, just in the last two years, a great article came out, maybe we put in the show notes. It was focused on STEM syllabi. And here they just took a very open approach, and they surveyed a variety of syllabi to say which of these seems more supportive and inviting and warm to students? And they have a great list that they laid out, including things like just phrasing things as we: we will, we are going to engage in these difficult topics, and here’s how we are going to do it, instead of students must… [LAUGHTER] which is what used to be in all of my syllabi, talking about challenge in positive ways. And here’s the resources that we want. And again, sometimes, yeah, it’s a good thing to have, like, “well, here’s the tutoring center.” But to say, “hey, successful students go to the tutoring center, and I promise you, [LAUGHTER] they will be supportive,” …some other way to do that and encouraging, very explicitly, that we do want students to come talk to us. So yeah, it’s like, well, I said what my office hours were, and now I’m sitting here, and why won’t students come talk to me? [LAUGHTER] And now I have several other alternative ways to schedule appointments, and I do give a little rah rah, but I also back up that verbiage with “and here’s even more access to me and all the ways to do it and in the circumstances under which you should do it.” So that’s one big starting point, is the syllabus. We can definitely get into a few others. But if you start there, I think a lot of other things will fall into line.

John: And we should mention we have a few past podcasts that address some of that. We’ll include some of the links in the show notes related to effective practices in creating that same side environment in the class using the syllabus.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think I’m hearing you say is that to be on the same side doesn’t mean we don’t hold boundaries, it’s just how we communicate those boundaries.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. And to pick up on that, run with that a little bit, that is now a really important part of my practice as well. While I’m going through the syllabus and cleaning it up and fixing it up, as far as tone, I’m also questioning the policies, so things like I’ve written about being pretty critical, and I don’t do anymore, the 10% per day deduction for deadlines. I handle deadlines very differently now, which is not to say I don’t have any or it’s anything goes, but I think it’s more the process of questioning it, of saying, “Well, which deadlines in this course are actually fixed, and have I explained that to students or mentioned it in any way to differentiate those where there is a firm deadline, like you really do have to get your discussion post in by Sunday night,” because, Haven’t we all been in an online discussion and somebody answers you three weeks later and we don’t actually have a conversation? Didn’t take forever, but that’s just a little bit of saying, “Yeah, it’s not just because I say so.” So yes, as we get into the substance of it, that is where we do have to think pretty deeply about what appropriate boundaries are. And just for the record, too, it doesn’t mean being buddy buddy, and we’re all friends with students at all times. I’m pretty formal in my interactions with students. That’s appropriate for my style and my persona. But I would challenge listeners, go back over a syllabus, as you’re planning for next semester, identify at least one thing to say, “Is there some way that this could be less harsh?” Perhaps even, as I mentioned, I have my little heuristics for saying, “Well, do I say yes or no?” Does it take the student closer to the learning goal or away from the learning goal? If it’s an assignment that’s intended to develop their skills, so it’s a formative assignment somewhere in the middle of the semester and it’s late, I mean, if the goal of that is to engage them in the learning and that’s why I worked so hard building in the first place. Well, if they’re five minutes past the deadline, don’t I still want them to do it, maybe I still want them to do it a week after the deadline. So with that learning and the shared goals and those shared ideals as the reorientation point, that’s what we can go through and do. So yes, it doesn’t mean throwing out grades, necessarily, unless you want to bring in ungrading for other reasons. It doesn’t mean that now we’re all completely informal, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any hard and fast boundaries in the course. But I’ve thought those through and not simply just transferred them over, because that’s what we always do, and if we don’t, students will take advantage of us.

John: One other thing that we’ve talked to you about in the past is the importance of learning students’ names. Could you just talk about that a little bit, and we’ll include a link to your book as well as the earlier podcast on the topic.

Michelle: Yeah. So I mean, I guess if we trace the whole evolution of how to get on the same side or begin that in our instruction. It starts with me thinking about my past and what do I believe is true about students, and then looking in at the overall policies and the objectives of the course, then getting into the communications, and then I’m in the classroom with them, and if it is a face-to-face class, one of the very best, often surprising to students, and effective ways to make a personalized classroom atmosphere is to know and use students’ names. And so that’s also something folks who’ve followed my writing or things I speak about know, that’s something that I’ve really been on a mission to do in my own practice, and to help others know how to do it as well. Now, that said, it’s very, very difficult. That’s one of the themes of the book. If folks see it right off the top, it’s like, and if you’re one of the many people who sidle up to me in various settings and go, “Oh my gosh, I have to tell you something. I’m not good at learning names,” like, okay, most of us are pretty bad at it. It takes effort, and that can be an effort that we model. I mean, even as I circulate around in my classroom, if it’s a big class, we’ve got little table tents with names, which is a great starting point, but I want to eventually know the names, [LAUGHTER] so I go around to the little groups during small group discussions, “Okay, turn your table tent over. I’m going to practice.” And they see me making mistakes. They see me putting effort into it, and see me struggling a little bit, which maybe also establishes a little bit of common ground there as well. But if we put in that effort, I guarantee you that not every student, not every time, but over time, you will see a definite trend towards students saying, “You know what? I think I will listen to what she’s saying about the value of this course. I will follow her advice when she says, ‘study it this way, not that way,’ even though my way is harder, I’m going to stick with it when times are tough. And yeah, I’ll do what she says and try to focus on the ultimate goal of learning and attaining what this class is all about, and not just about taking off points and making sure that I can just put in less effort.” So I think that that is definitely of a piece with the rest. And I hope that folks, whether it’s through the advice in my book, or a lot of other good advice out there, or their own techniques, will keep working to get a little bit better every single semester.

Rebecca: I think we have lots of opportunities now to think about how to work more from the same side, but we always end by asking: “What’s next?”

Michelle: What’s next? Well, I’m going to keep working with this idea and seeing how I can bring it into the classroom and keep an eye out for the great research that’s out there, and continue to share that in the newsletter that I put out to faculty and instructional designers and others who care about learning. I will be speaking about this or offering me an opportunity to be part of a workshop… upcoming POD conference. So for those for whom POD is part of their professional life, they might want to check that out. And I will be going into a new role that I’m excited to take on at my institution. It’s a co-directorship position where we’re going to be looking at AI in the curriculum and bringing some of the developments and robust debate in that side of instruction right now, it’s part of, I think, all of our lives, bringing that into my professional life at NAU as well.

John: Well, that’s an area where there’s so many interesting challenges and such a rapid pace of change. That should be an exciting thing to be working on.

Michelle: Yep, all the more reason to get on the same side, don’t you think?

Rebecca: Definitely, and you won’t be bored, that’s for sure. [LAUGHTER] Lots of motivation to get involved in that work.

John: And I wish I could make it to the POD thing, but I’m going to be at the OLC Conference, which, unfortunately, is at the same time this year.

Michelle: That’s how it shakes out some years. We make our choices the best we can.

Rebecca: Well, thanks again for joining us, and hopefully we’ll get to talk to you again soon. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Michelle. Again, it’s always great talking to you, and I also hope we get to talk very soon.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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407. Covering or Teaching

Posted in active learning, attention, classroom community, cognitive science, engagement, evidence-based teaching, feedback, higher education, instructional communication, interleaved practice, learning, motivation, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
August 20, 2025

New faculty often begin their teaching careers by emulating the teaching methods that they have observed, but these practices are often not consistent with evidence on how students learn. In this episode, Chris Hakala joins us to discuss the role that educational developers can play in shifting faculty focus from presenting to teaching.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: New faculty often begin their teaching careers by emulating the teaching methods that they have observed, but these practices are often not consistent with evidence on how students learn. In this episode, we discuss the role that educational developers can play in shifting faculty focus from presenting to teaching.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Chris Hakala. Chris is a professor of psychology and is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Springfield College. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on the science of learning, assessing learning, large-class instruction, and on teaching centers. His most recent work, co-authored with Leslie D. Cramblet Alvarez is Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center, released in late December 2024. Welcome Chris.

Chris: Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here and have this conversation with the two of you. So I appreciate it.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: … Chris, are you drinking tea?

Chris: So this is an interesting thing. I’m routinely a coffee drinker. However, my wife and I every morning get up in the morning and we share time together. We actually have a station in our bedroom where we make coffee and tea. And so in honor of my wife and the tea, I’m drinking her tea, which is a Zen green tea, which I will sometimes drink as well. So yes, I’m having Zen green tea this afternoon.

Rebecca: Excellent. Thanks for ditching the coffee for us.

Chris: Happy to do so, happy to do so. I’ve had enough of it already today.

John: And I am drinking a spring cherry green tea, even though it’s late summer here in Oswego.

Rebecca: It does feel more like a spring day today, though, after being so hot for so many days. I have a weird mix of random black teas because I was cleaning out my tea cupboard, [LAUGHTER] so it’s an eclectic mix.

Chris: Whatever gets you through the day, right?

John: I imagine no cherry teas, though.

Rebecca: No, they are black teas without any weird flavors, John.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the relationship between pedagogical practice and what research tells us about how students learn. First, though, could you tell us a little bit about your path to becoming an educational developer.

Chris: Sure, it’s an interesting path that actually we talk about a little bit in the book, but one of the things that is fascinating to me about this field of educational development is it’s not a field people often go directly into out of college. And so I went to college in Vermont, at a small school in Vermont, went to grad school, and in grad school, I earned a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of New Hampshire. And I know we’re going to talk about this a little bit more later, but I just want to point out that during that time, we had a course in a seminar in practicum and teaching of psychology, and that course was taught by a faculty member named Victor Banassi, who was doing teaching center work at that time. So it was the first time I began to hear about educational development. It was back in the mid 90s, and so I thought it was kind of interesting, but I went on, I became a faculty member, I received tenure, and then as I was working through my career, I began to notice that many schools had teaching centers. Many schools had the opportunity for faculty to talk to other faculty about what they’re doing and to share ideas. And so I approached our Provost and asked him if we could start a teaching center. And he said, “No, there’s not enough money.” And so I approached him again, and he said, “No, we don’t have enough money.” And finally, I was able to steal an idea from Todd Zakrajsek, who is a name you are probably aware, and Todd recommended me just buying coffee mugs that said Center on it. So I did. I bought coffee mugs that said Center for Teaching and Learning, and I had them branded, and then I handed them out and gave one to the President, and the President said, “Do we have a teaching center?” And the Provost said, “Well, I guess so.” And so they gave me a little bit of money, and so I had this very small teaching center. I would do a little bit for faculty orientation, I’d run some workshops, and it became really interesting for me to see how sharing ideas with faculty about teaching and hearing what they’re saying and what they’re doing and what they’re experiencing with their students was a really wonderful way to engage with my colleagues, to go across disciplines and to really sort of work to improve our students’ learning. So I left there and became a full-time center director in 2014, and I’ve have been doing that ever since. It’s been an interesting process, because as we were speaking off-mic, in 2020 our world changed dramatically, and teaching centers became very important. And it was a really interesting time to see all that work ramp up. And I think now we’re in a different sort of era of teaching centers, as people began to realize the value of educational development when they needed us. Yeah, so it’s been an interesting journey.

Rebecca: I see some sales of teaching center mugs going up [LAUGHTER] with the sneaky strategies for starting teaching centers, moving forward. [LAUGHTER]

Chris: That’s all Todd. It’s all Todd.

Rebecca: He’s always good for a good idea.

Chris: He is good for a good idea.

Rebecca: Most faculty begin their teaching careers without the kind of training that you mentioned that you had as part of your graduate program in evidence-based teaching practices and kind of rely on what they experienced with their own instructors. What are some of the disconnects between learning science and pedagogical practices?

Chris: So it’s a great question. It was really interesting. I’m gonna go back to go back to my experience and sort of talk through that, because I think it’s a great question. I went into my first experience teaching in 1992… by the way, I still have a video of it. I had spectacular hair. It was wavy and flowy… and I went in with this idea that I was now the disseminator of knowledge. I was going to share what I knew with these students, and I did what I had experienced the faculty that I admired do. I lectured. I had an overhead projector, I wrote on the board, and my students were doing the tasks I was asking them to do. They were studying. They were doing well on quizzes and all of that. But what became really apparent to me over time was student learning is not as simple as they just remember things, because there’s more value in students taking what we teach them and expanding that out to other concepts. And so I began to think about it in lots of different ways, and my teaching now looks very different. One of the things that becomes problematic, though, is, as you brought up, Rebecca, many faculty end up in a teaching experience without having any kind of guidance or support. They have very little in the way of reflective teaching, and they think their job is to just share what they know with their students. I hear “covering content” so much from faculty with this idea that they have to make sure they say everything. And I think that helping faculty understand that the magic words coming out of your mouth doesn’t mean a student learns it is a really important thing. And one of the distinctions I draw up with my faculty all the time is this distinction between presenting and teaching. And so I think a lot of faculty are good at presenting, but they haven’t really thought through teaching. And so a lot of times I spend time working with our faculty to talk to them about who they are and what they bring to the table as an instructor, who their students are and how they can begin to find what is going to leverage what we know about student learning in the classroom in the context of who they are and who their students are. So for example, I tend to be pretty expressive in class. I tend to move around a lot. I tend to do lots of interactive things, but that’s also part of who I am. You don’t have to be that to be successful. You can be lots of ways in the classroom, but it’s a matter of understanding that the processes I’m engaged in are to help students focus attention, to help engage them, to draw them in with different anecdotes and stories, to try to tie those things together, and then have them reflect it back to me so we can work through that. People have different approaches, but you have to sort of to be aware of that and know that the student learning is essential. The key to student learning is that they do the work. It’s not that you’re doing all of the work. They’re doing the work. And so you have to help faculty sort of navigate that. And it is fortunate for me. I’m at a small college where teaching is really emphasized and faculty care about it, that I get to work with wonderful people and help them understand some of the things that we know about human learning, and help them sort of integrate that into their classes.

John: And we have lots of faculty who are very interested in improving their teaching, and we also are a teaching focused institution, but there are some faculty who are a little reluctant to change their practices, or consider changing their practices. What are some strategies that you’ve used to help reach out to those faculty who may not see the benefits of changing the way in which they’re teaching.

Chris: Yeah, the recalcitrant faculty problem. It’s a big one. I have had a mixed success. When I arrived on campus, I was fortunate to have someone here who handed me a list of people. On one side was “these people will come to everything you offer. Don’t worry about it. You could roll out a boring thing, they’ll show up.” “These people would come if it’s interesting.” “These people will never darken your door.” And so I went right after the people who would never darken my door and went and had a conversation with them about their teaching. Now, this doesn’t scale up to a big institution because there’s too many people, but in a small institution, it was really effective for me to go talk to faculty, find out what it was they were doing in the classroom, ask them if they were happy with it, and start to look at things in their classes they might want to work on. Now, again, you scale it up to a big institution, you start with departments and ask the department, “what would you like support with?” But one of the things that’s been really helpful for me as a center director is showing faculty things that they can implement, that they can see the impact on, and it’s been simple things. One of the things that our faculty in our health science really like is that I taught them about retrieval practice. They had not really thought about retrieval practice, and so now they’re using tools, including some AI, to build out many little quizzes the students can take on their own that seem to be benefiting the students’ ability to do well on these very high-stakes exams. So it’s a matter of finding the niche where the faculty member’s issue and your expertise can come together. I also strongly, strongly encourage faculty to watch each other teach, which is a really interesting thing. I have an open-door policy. Faculty can show up in my class anytime. It doesn’t matter when, they don’t have to tell me, they can just come. And I have 5 to 10 faculty a semester show up in my class and they just are there, and we talk, and then I go to lots of other faculty members’ classes, and we have an open-door week where we open up classes for faculty to go to each other’s classes. I think that’s really helpful for people to see lots of different ways of doing things. I have a line that my associate director always gets annoyed with when I say, but I believe this. I have faculty who say to me, “Chris, I’ve heard that if you’re funny, students really like it.” And I say “that’s true, but only if you’re really funny. If you’re not funny, it’s terrible.” And I’ve seen faculty try to be funny and they’re not and it fails. So one of the big messages is, “lean into who you are.” It’s okay if you’re a bit of a dork. I love statistics. My students, I get them on board eventually, but I come in with the enthusiasm of someone who loves statistics. So it’s a challenge, and we’re humans. So John, you know, humans don’t always respond well, when you say, “we can help you do something better.” So there’s a lot of nuance to it. I will say teaching centers should never be where bad teachers are sent. I push back against it.

John: We do too.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that’s interesting about teaching centers, and what you said about faculty not having support, is that actually a lot of institutions have teaching centers, so there is the availability of support, but getting said support is not built into requirements or time is not necessarily allocated by the institution to participate in teaching center things. It’s voluntary. It feels extra sometimes. So you talked about your list and individually reaching out to folks. But what are some other strategies to get over this hurdle of helping folks realize that this is a good investment of their time.

Chris: We have some events that are campus wide, and we use these events as a way to try to promote options of how you can interact with the center. So to just give you a couple of examples. Our President is incredibly supportive of the center, so twice a year, we host an evening event at the president’s house, it has wine, that goes over well, and we bring in speakers, and we try to get speakers who will hit a variety of different areas of interest for faculty. And we often will get faculty at those events that don’t come to anything else, but then may come to other events, as they’ve seen the value in those events. So that’s been a good one. Diversity of programming has been really helpful, and I’m super proud of this. We run a summer conference. It’s a week after commencement, all faculty are off contract, and we will get roughly 40 to 50% of the full-time faculty showing up at our Summer Conference off-contract because we structure it in such a way that faculty are talking to each other. We’ve been very fortunate having some really, really amazing outside speakers, and then we give faculty the opportunity to do some chatting with their colleagues, get to see people that they don’t normally see, and that’s been another way. Part of it is having a big footprint on campus, Rebecca, and being involved in lots of things. I go to department meetings once a year. My associate director goes to department meetings. But I will say this, our office also has this footprint, because we not only oversee educational development, we oversee all of instructional design, we oversee all online course builds. We also oversee all student research. We also oversee the IRB. We also oversee sponsored research with our staff of two. So it’s hard to have something on campus that doesn’t involve reaching out to one of us once in a while, and that’s been really helpful. But it is, it’s challenging, because those resources are there and they’re often not used as much as they could be.

Rebecca: I think it’s important to ask how you went from a mug to overseeing that many things.

Chris: I switched schools, that helped, and then… I said this to John… this is 33 years of me being in higher ed, and you learn a lot when you’re just around in higher ed. And I’ve been tenured full professor for a long time, and I still teach, and that actually buys me credibility among the faculty, but I also manage budgets, that buys me credibility among the administrators. So that’s all been really helpful. It’s a needle you have to thread sometimes, and teaching centers are interesting because if you look at it, I mentioned before how we were able to show the utility of teaching centers. But as budgets get tighter and things begin to change across the landscape of higher ed, you’re starting to see teaching centers get shrunk and cut again. I know of at least two teaching centers at major institutions that were simply cut and all the people were fired because of budgetary crises. And I’m actually down four staff members right now, which I may or may not get back. So it is a very difficult time financially, and you work for a state system, so you know what that’s like. You look at the state budget. We were private. Stuff just happens in a private institution. It just happens. It’s not easy.

John: One of the things we found has been helpful to reaching out to more faculty is getting faculty who were in that wave of people who were interested in attending more workshops, having them do things and then present on it to other faculty, because the more faculty hear from their peers about how things have worked and made their classes more enjoyable, the more likely they are to show up and to try these things as well. There’s still some areas, though, that it’s difficult to reach and we keep trying.

Chris: Yeah, John, it’s a great concept you’re talking about, and that’s the Summer Conference. I do nothing at the summer conference but serve food. I simply show up and all my colleagues talk to each other. And that’s really the joy of it, because they see other people, and we have a SOTL fellowship program, and so they’ll present their scholarship of teaching and learning work, and the opportunity to do that is often gonna draw people in. It really is a grassroots thing. And one of the interesting things that Leslie and I saw when we were working on this book is that there’s no one way to run a center. It’s deeply contextualized into the context of the institution and the structure and culture of the institution. And some places have had a long culture and a long history. I was the first full time director at my place here, and by the way. I didn’t say this before, but we’re Springfield, Massachusetts. I know there’s Springfields in every state, and I feel like I’m contractually obliged to say, if you know anything about Springfield College in Massachusetts, we are the home of basketball. Kansas wants to claim it, but we are where basketball was invented, so I just have to say that. My president will be proud if she hears this.

Rebecca: These are important details.

Chris: These are important details.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about how teaching centers can continue to help faculty align their practices so that we’re really teaching students how to learn and building that into the work that we’re doing, and help faculty see value in spending some time or allocating time in their classes to that kind of work.

Chris: Sure, the change in teaching practices over the last 30, 40, years has been pretty remarkable, and a lot of it has to do with the changing demographics of students entering college and the changing demographics of people teaching them. And what we’ve learned as we’ve looked at the science of learning is that human learning hasn’t shifted as much, but there are other outside variables. And I like to talk about, with faculty as we discuss these things, the notion that a student is going to walk into your class, any given student with a number of variables that are impacting what they’re doing in the classroom. Some of them you have some control over. Many of them you don’t. One of the things that you can help them with is a simple concept, such as attention. And I always start with attention, because it’s the one that faculty can begin to sort of wrap their head around. And I say you can help by using the classroom space in a way that is not going to cause them to have other distracting variables pull them away. And then I get the same comment, “well, students’ attention spans have changed.” And my response always is, “Nope, hasn’t. Hasn’t changed at all. What has changed is how many things they can be distracted by.” So you have some control over that. What are you going to do about that? And so it’s a way in, and then I can talk to them about… and because I’m a practitioner who does this research too… I can talk about data. Now, by the way, the data always get the bench scientists. They love that, because I’m talking about we have results that show this. Here’s the data, here’s the results, here’s the interpretation of the results. And things like I mentioned, retrieval practice, things like interleaving, or worked problems, the data are pretty strong that these kinds of procedures are effective. Now what is really, for me, the joy is working with a faculty member to see how that particular process works within their class, with their content, with what they’re trying to do, and try to really personalize it to their approach. One of the ones that my faculty seem to really like is this notion of interteaching. It’s a way to help students sort of structure their reading and so students get questions before they read, and they answer the questions, but they come in with two copies. One copy goes to you, one they sit and they discuss with a partner, and they look at where they answered the questions the same way, they answered them differently. They talk about it, and then everyone comes back together and talks about it. It seems like they’re going to not say much to each other, but they actually get pretty competitive about who said what on these things. But the real joy is not that they get it right or wrong, but it’s rather that they’ve thought through these things and now they’re engaging with the concepts in a different context. And I always talk to faculty about the key is to get the students to not just hear it, but to do something with it, to engage with it. And so how you structure that is the most important piece in terms of that they’re doing it, but how you do it is going to vary. So I think that that’s where I get some buy in. But I will say, Rebecca, it causes people to have to change their classes and they don’t like it, because you have your slides and you have your presentation, and you know what you’re going to do, and this opens up the probability, and I say, probability, not possibility, that class is going to be derailed sometimes. That’s okay. I love to tell faculty I teach two sections of intro sometimes back to back, one at eight and one at nine. I might be two chapters apart in those two classes because they’re going at different rates, and I’m okay with that.

John: So you encourage faculty to build in some forms of retrieval practice and interleaved practice, spaced practice and so forth. But sometimes students react poorly when you build that into your courses. Do you have any strategies you share with faculty in terms of getting buy-in from students? Because students, in general, in a number of studies, prefer to be lectured at, but we do know they learn more when they use evidence-based strategies. How can we get students to buy into that?

Chris: I’m going to tell a story while I talk about this. Part of it is being incredibly transparent about why students should be doing these kinds of things. And I think that’s pretty obvious, but I’m gonna tell you a story. I did this study at a different institution, and we never published it. We had two sections of neuroscience, and they both had 60 students. So we had 120 students total. And for the students, for exam one, the students were told in class A, we’re going to teach you how to concept map for studying. So we taught them how to concept map. Class B, study however you want. For exam two, we flipped it and we flipped it all the way through, and what the students found was when they concept mapped, they tended to do better than the other class, and then on their next exam, they did better when they concept mapped then when they didn’t concept map and we showed them the data. We showed them students tend to do better. For the final exam, we told the students, “Pick whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. You study however you want. We’re done with the study. Just study however you want.” They took the exams, and then we just asked them, “What approach did you take?” And the idea was, many of these students would adopt concept mapping, because it worked. Well, much to our chagrin, the number was so low that it was actually zero. None of them concept mapped. They all said, “I know it looked like it worked there, but my way is better.” So you’re absolutely right, John, it’s really difficult sometimes to convince people of these things. The approach I tell faculty to do is to introduce these things slowly into your classes, to build up and get small gains. So I’m a firm believer in formative assessment at various times throughout the semester, including my intro psych class, we do an assessment every class. It’s simple. It takes a minute or two, but it’s a way for me to gauge where they are. And I share the results with the students, and I talk to them about why the results might look the way they look, and I talk to my fellow colleagues about how to try to incorporate that in terms of how they’re doing it. The students, they do not like when you do retrieval practice in class, yet, if you give them the opportunity to build a Quizlet outside of class, they’re all over it, which is really retrieval practice. And so it’s a matter of trying to have that conversation. And it’s one of those things about human behavior, and you’re an economist, you know this. It’s so frustrating. People don’t do things that are good for them sometimes, and it’s frustrating, but you just keep working at it in a variety of ways. I know we’ve had success by hosting student faculty conversations, where the students and the faculty will talk to each other about what is going on in class, and it helps the students understand why the faculty members do things. It helps the faculty understand why students do things. But at the end of the day, it’s incredibly challenging, and I think it’s one of the things that makes this work. We’re going to be around for a while, because we really need to continue to work. And I will say one more thing, it also doesn’t help that faculty are incredibly resistant. And they’re resistant because you try something, the students don’t like it, you back off of it because the students don’t like it, even though it might take two or three iterations for them to like it. So there’s a lot of challenges there.

John: And we’re also coming up against students who’ve had 12 to 13 years of practice before entering college without using those techniques with high stakes exams and so forth. So there’s a lot to overcome there.

Chris: Yeah, and the high-stakes exam thing, we have a large group of physical therapists, physicians assistants, and OTs (occupational therapists), and they all have this national exam they have to sit for. And so they just want the stuff. They just want to know stuff. And I always try to tell them, you could know a lot, but you have a patient in front of you, and this is the example I give. I say, “If a patient comes to you and says, ‘My arm hurts when I bend it up’ and you say, ‘Okay, here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna do this.’ And then the patient comes back says, ‘I did that and it doesn’t help.’ You can’t look at the patient and say, ‘Well, boy, that’s terrible.’” You have to have another approach. You have to have something else to try. And I try to help them sort of work through that. Again, we’re fortunate here. I do go in and talk to almost all the grad students when they go from undergrad to grad, to talk about the application of knowledge. I also talk to all the undergraduates when they show up on campus to talk about some of these things too, with the idea that if we repeatedly talk to students about it and try to help show them, we may get more buy-in. There’s no panacea to this.

Rebecca: I think what you’ve both highlighted is that there’s resistance on both sides. There’s resistance from students and resistance from faculty, because change requires effort, and establishing new habits takes time and effort. But I like the idea of the dialoguing so that you’re working on change from both directions.

Chris: Yeah, and it’s interesting, I always ask faculty, especially like, if they give an assignment and say, “Why did you give that assignment?” And I’ll sometimes hear, “Well, it was time.” Well, that’s not a good enough answer. If you can’t relate that back to what you’re trying to get students to learn, then the students don’t know why they’re doing it, and they’re just doing it, which is the big issue with AI right now, is faculty are like, “Why are students AI-ing my assignments?” They see zero value. You work towards things that you value. You create value in education, students are more likely to work. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s more likely they’re going to do the work.

John: Earlier you suggested that one strategy you encourage is transparency, so that students understand why you’re asking them to do these things. Might that help in getting students to break the habits they’re developing of using AI for so many assignments now.

Chris: Yeah, I feel pretty strongly about this. I’ve done quite a bit of work in the AI field, working with AAC&U as well as with the American Psychological Association. And I think that the transparency with AI, we just have to do it at this point. What we need to do is lean into teaching AI literacy, teaching students about what AI can do, the limits of AI, showing them some of the limits of AI, and allowing them to see this as a tool, not as learning, but as a tool to help them learn more effectively. John, you were teaching at the time. I remember in 1995 we got essentially a graphic browser called Mosaic, and I could actually see the internet versus just typing things into gopher. And I thought my life has just gotten better. It’s just gotten better, and I was able to do things I couldn’t do before. Well, AI has done the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times n ow, when I’m generating a data set for statistics, I give it the parameters, and it just generates the data for me and it comes out the way I want it to. I used to calculate those numbers, and it was terribly difficult to do. Now it just does it, and that takes the time from that for me to give students feedback or do other things. Well, the students, just like with the calculator, can use it in a way, and I’m not saying it’s a calculator. It’s much different than that. I’m not saying that, but it’s a tool that we can use, if we can figure out how to leverage it. But transparency is key. We are talking right now about creating a guidance document through the center that’s going to be shared with faculty and students about how the center and how academic affairs views AI and the value of it, as well as some of the pitfalls and concerns and some of the caveats that need to be around it. Because I think, even if you hate it, and we have faculty who truly hate it, they truly hate it, it’s not going anywhere, and the students have access to it on their phones. It’s there, so we have to figure out what to do with it.

Rebecca: One of the things I want to underscore about what you just said is that you’re going to develop a guide for faculty and students and that you’re going to share it to both parties. And I think that’s a practice that institutions could just do more generally, so that both sets of individuals are getting the same information, because especially around AI like literacy is necessary for all members of the campus community, not just students.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. We have a task force right now we’re running with my associate director, which involves five staff members and five faculty, and we’re going to cycle in some students so that we can sort of figure out what we need to be talking to people about. Our staff, many of them are afraid to use it because they’re afraid that it’s going to work them out of a job. But we say “No, this is gonna make your lives better if you use this.” So we’re trying to work through some of that. But the transparency is really key. I would argue that for everything, Rebecca. I’m a firm believer in being incredibly transparent with my students about all sorts of things that I think help move the learning process along, and that’s been really valuable for me as an educator and with my colleagues as a faculty member, as an educational developer.

John: And one of the things we’ve been advocating is that faculty have these conversations at the start of the semester with their students about what uses of AI are appropriate to see if they can get some degree of buy in. Do you think that might be helpful in convincing students that they should use it in ways that support their learning, rather than ways that serve as shortcuts to their learning?

Chris: Yeah, my associate director, Matt Citron, developed a system for one of our majors because the faculty really wanted it. And it’s not a new system, people are using it, but they just have a system built into Brightspace where an assignment will have either red or green or yellow light saying: red, don’t use AI; yellow, use it with caution; green, do what you want with it. But even before they see that, there’s a whole conversation about what “use it with caution” or “go crazy with it” means, how you’re going to involve that, and what you’re going to do with it, and how you’re going to report what you got out of it to the instructor, so they know exactly where this is coming from and how it looks. Again, It’s a transparency. But, you know, I’ll say this, I am continuously amazed when faculty are trying to sneak things in and trick students, because learning is not about being tricked, man, it’s about being able to do things more effectively. And I even do this, and faculty don’t love this. But when I give multiple choice… I’d really moved away from it…but a few years back, when I gave multiple choice, I told students, look, if you don’t like my answers, give me your own. If I like it, I’ll give you points for it. Or if you think my answers aren’t good enough, and you could write it better, fine. Write it underneath the multiple choice, I’ll read it. I mean, students don’t often do it, but every once in a while they do. It’s not like I have the magic knowledge, that’s the thing. I just know more about this than you do. I’ve learned more, I can think about it differently than you can, but let’s talk about it. And I have conversations with students after exams. I have conversations with students about their papers. I’ve taken to shooting video feedback to all my students on assignments and their responsibility is to give me video feedback, telling me how they understood my feedback and what they intended to do with it. So it becomes this virtual conversation. I talked to my faculty about that. Teaching and learning is an innately humane relational process, and the more we can continue to build that in, the better off our students and our faculty are going to be. But Rebecca, it’s work. It’s work.

Rebecca: It is work.

Chris: It is. I have two classes. I have 67 students this upcoming semester, as well as running a teaching center. It’s a lot of work. I grew up as a first kid to go to college, first one to graduate. I feel pretty lucky to do this job. I’ve worked other jobs, man, I built fences. This is way better than building fences. This is way better than building fences.

Rebecca: Sounds like we’re trying to take them down, actually.

Chris: Yeah.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’re seeing with budget crises across higher ed is sometimes increases in class sizes, and you just talked about how deeply humane and relational [LAUGHTER] teaching and learning is. Do you have some strategies for student engagement and some of that relation building in those larger classes.

Chris: Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s interesting because at Springfield, and I’m not sure about the size of Oswego, but for us, a big class is like 60 students. Faculty freak out when they hit 60. And the fact is, I think that relational piece is going to look different depending on the size of your class and how you’re able to navigate that. I think part of it is understanding a variety of ways to give feedback. So I tell faculty, in particular with large classes that I would encourage them to do small assignments and give feedback to percentages of students every class to ensure that every student gets written feedback across time, but they don’t have to get all the same written feedback every time. You would never not read a student’s work, but you would give more substantive written feedback to a percentage of your students, but work in ways to develop those kinds of touch points. It’s not always easy. Sometimes it involves using the LMS, sometimes it involves getting there early, but being aware that your students, if they identify you as a human, they’re much more likely to be kind to you. So it’s really a matter of trying to figure out a way to allow yourself to be perceived as a human in students’ eyes. That’s idiosyncratic to the instructor. My students know a lot about my life. Part of it was I was a single dad for six years. I taught with my kid in a Snuggie. There was no way for my students to not be aware of what I was doing. I had a child strapped to my chest. She fell asleep. I told my students, come closer. She’s sleeping. I can’t wake her up. So I’ve always been pretty transparent with my students about lots of things. It makes me human, and I think part of it is allowing the students to see that you’re human too at whatever level you’re comfortable, whatever level people are comfortable, some people are more private. I get that, but I think you have to allow that humanity to kind of show through. I’ll say one more thing about that. If nothing else, you went and got a degree in this discipline. Show your passion for your discipline. Let your passion for your discipline come through however it does for you. I can’t talk about some psych topics without being jazzed. I’m a psycholinguist by training. I can’t talk about language without being super excited about language. It’s fun. I was just in Europe. I was looking at things written 1000 years ago. My camera is filled with pictures of stone tablets. My wife’s like, “What is this?” I said, trust me, “That’s linear B, man, that’s good stuff, right there.”

John: One of the issues that we do hear a lot of concerns from, especially since the pandemic, although it seems to be a little bit less last year than in the previous years, is students seem a little bit less engaged with some of their classwork, that students are more likely just to blow off some assignments and not complete them. And also, many faculty complain about having lower attendance in their classes. You mentioned using polling as a strategy. Are there other strategies that faculty can use to help increase that connection, or to get students a bit more engaged so they don’t disappear on us.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, the mental health crisis has really had its fingers in lots of this, and students’ anxiety has led them to be less willing to chat in class, less willing to engage in class, and with the devices they get to class, and they used to talk to each other, they sort of look at their phones, and so that’s an issue. I am pretty transparent about what I expect my students to do, and I talk to faculty about stating your expectations clearly and being open to knowing that students are going to sometimes struggle with this. I’ve got a couple of simple little tips. So for example, I give this tip to faculty. Have students answer questions and just write them down on a note card without their name, and then they take their note card and they stand up and they walk around the room, they hand it to someone, they take theirs, and then they take that note that note card and hand it to someone else, and then they take that, and then they just pass them around. And then I can call on any student, and all they’re doing is reading the note card, and so that helps them sort of see that it’s okay. I’ll tell you another secret… my students, whenever they find out about this… they get really mad, but I do this. I collect note cards at the beginning of the semester with all my students’ names on it, and I tell them, sometimes I’m going to randomly call on them to see if they know an answer. And they’re always softball, simple, very easy questions. So I’ll shuffle the cards and call someone. I will almost always call a name that is not on the card. I’ll call the name of the student who I know hasn’t said much, but knows what’s going on. So they have a chance to do something in class, be successful, and shine, and then they’re more likely to talk. And students don’t know what name I draw off the card. It doesn’t matter to me. It could be blank cards for all they know, but it’s a way to get the students… and again, as a psychologist, I look for ways to sort of shape that behavior up. Also, I tell faculty: “Get the class early, greet students when they come in, just talk to them.” I don’t know if this happens at Oswego, but this is a Springfield College thing. Our students thank us. At the end of every class, I get fist bumps as my students are walking by after every class. And I’m not unique. Lots of our students do that, and part of it is a culture that has built up over campus, over time, this is before my time. This is sort of who our students are. And so you work with that culture, okay, if the students are gonna do that, then I know they’re polite. Okay, good. Then I can work with that. Your students might be different. You know what they are. You try to work with that. It’s like I say to people all the time when faculty say, “Well, what can I do to be a better teacher?” I can’t pull a book off the shelf and say, “Here, do this.” I have to know who you are, who your students are, and all of that. And so it’s why the field is so much fun. I get to know lots of faculty, and I get to work with lots of faculty.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve been talking a little bit about, are some budget cuts in higher ed and teaching centers being on the chopping block? What are some of the things that you’re concerned about in this space?

Chris: So you don’t want to open that door too much. I really appreciate this in part, because I think there is a sense with teaching centers right now that if we let them go, we’re going to be okay. And I think faculty need the resource, even if it’s a perceived resource. My wife and I talk about it all the time. Perceived help is often as useful as the help you get, and so us existing is really important, and I worry that teaching centers are going to start to shrink, and it’s going to make faculty struggle in their teaching. So I hope that we continue to talk about these things and I appreciate having the opportunity to talk about it.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Chris: So what’s next for me? I have an idea for another writing project. I want to look at intentional teaching. I want to talk about barriers that make it difficult for faculty to be as effective as they can be in the classroom, starting with things like lack of pedagogical understanding and going through variables such as student variables, classroom size, physical space, etc. Because I think we need to take a harder look at what we are doing, knowing the stakes are higher than ever at being able to be effective at what we do. We need to be incredibly intentional about creating really strong learning environments for our students to succeed. And I think our livelihood depends on it. Listen, I teach at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast, and have either you ever been to Springfield, Massachusetts?

Rebecca: Yeah.

Chris: So from my office, if there were no trees, I could see two other colleges less than a mile away from me. So there’s lots of schools and fewer students. We just need to be really good at what we do. So I’m thinking about that. The other thing is, I am excited to be building out some additional resources for our faculty that I think are going to support them with short burst sort of faculty development that we’re building with our media team, which has been really fun. So we’ve got lots of stuff coming. We’re excited to get the year started and to do these things and to share them out. I’ve lots of ideas.

John: Well, thank you for talking to us. We very much appreciate the conversation and look forward to future conversations.

Chris: Yeah, thank you both so much, and I appreciate having this conversation. I know that you folks talk to lots of people. I went through, and I just have you know I run every day. You’ve gotten me through many runs, because your times is just about right, so I really appreciate that, and you’ve talked to some people that I have deep affection for. So I really appreciate being part of this, and thank you for all the work that you’re doing for teaching and learning. I think it’s super important for people to hear from these other people, so thanks.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you. We’re looking forward to sharing out this episode with our audience, and we’re grateful for all the people that we’ve gotten to have on the show, you included.

John: And that’s why we keep doing it. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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358. Essentials of the New Science of Learning

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation, first-year classes, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, metacognition, neuromyths, pedagogy, reflective practice, retrieval practice, spaced practice, stereotype threat, teaching
September 11, 2024

Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to discuss a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Most freshman students enter college with little knowledge of evidence-based strategies for successfully navigating the college experience. In this episode, we explore a variety of approaches that students can use to more efficiently achieve their learning goals.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. His most recent book is Essentials of the New Science of Learning. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Todd, what do you got today?

Todd: Oh, today I have a white ginger pear.

Rebecca: Nice.

John: Very nice. And I am drinking something similar, a ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I’ve got Cardamon Cinnamon.

John: Nice.

John: We were just talking to you a few months ago about your last most recent book, but we’ve invited you here today to discuss your newest most recent book of the year. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of The Essentials of the New Science of Learning: The Power of Learning in Harmony with Your Brain.

Todd: When I worked on The New Science of Learning: Learning in Harmony with Your Brain, that book, its third edition has gotten up to be about 265 pages, and the book was actually written for students. It is still for students, but when it started, the whole concept of this book is it would be used as kind of an ancillary text in a class. And a friend of mine out in California used it in a community college in a developmental math class, and they found, actually, when they used the book in the class, that the attrition rate went down. And for developmental math, that’s a very important concept. In fact, the students who did pass for the next semester, the students who had learned about the science of learning, that attrition rate was even further down. So it’s helped out a lot. The problem is, once it gets up to 265 pages, you can’t use it as kind of an ancillary book. You know, “Read this chapter, it’ll take you 10 minutes.” The New Science of Learning is built more to be like a primary book for a first-year seminar course. So this book, being The Essentials, allowed me to come back and add some new things about AI and a few other things. Is kind of a streamlined version of that that can be used in a class, so that you could say to your students, for instance, “Hey, on Wednesday, make sure you read the chapter on sleep,” and then you talk about the content. When Wednesday comes along, you spend five minutes talking about sleep, what did you learn? And then you move on with the content. And that’s how you can infuse it in the class.

Rebecca: Why isn’t this material taught to students earlier in their education process.

Todd: Aaaah… this is a question that we’ve talked about before with other kinds of science of learning things. It’s frustrating. I take the breath because it’s frustrating. It’s funny, across country, if you ask students two questions: “do you like to learn?” and “do you like school?” you tend to find that the students will say yes to both those questions until they hit right about third grade. In third grade, we start picking up some of the testing and really focusing more on content, and at that point, we start telling students, you need to learn these things, but we don’t tell them how. There just is this assumption that because people are learners, that they can learn it. But learning out of a book is very artificial in terms of how we evolved. So the concept is students should be taught that, and I really believe they should be taught that starting in about third grade. And could you imagine a student that comes into college that has spent eight or nine years learning how to learn along with the content that they have? I think it would be amazing, but typically not done, so it should really be done as soon as they get to college and as quickly as possible. And it doesn’t matter who I talk to. I have talked to students from all kinds of disciplines. I’ve talked to students in medical schools, nursing programs, a lot of the health professions, they do a ton of content really fast. I’ve talked to students in philosophy and history and psychology, and almost invariably, people will come up afterwards and say, “Why doesn’t anybody teach us this stuff?” And so the students see value in it too. We get focused on content, and we don’t tend to do it.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, Todd, that you’re saying that there’s a wide range of people that are hungry for this information because before we were recording, I was doing graduate student orientation. I was talking to a couple of MBA students who had been out in the field, into their career 10 years, coming back to school, and I had embedded some of this kind of information in their online orientation. They said, “Oh yeah, I watched this TED talk that you had included [LAUGHTER] about the science of learning, and it was really great. It was so interesting.” And I had included that study from Michelle Miller.

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: And he had read it, and it was fascinating. He’s like, “I was so surprised that I didn’t know some of this stuff.” So we’re talking about it at lunch today, and they were all talking about, “Yeah, that was really interesting. I’m so glad you included that.” But it just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter who our learners are. They’re really hungry for this information, and it’s really valuable to them.

Todd: Yeah, I will say quickly, in terms of the book that a lot of this is drawn from, which is The New Science of Learning, the full version of it that I have at the end is, if you find this valuable, or if you’d like to just ask other questions, I put my email address in there and just send me an email. And I got an email like, three weeks ago from a student who’s going into a health professions field, and he’s going in as a post grad. I mean, he’s going in as a master’s student, and they’re all required to read that book coming into the class, so it’s at any level. In fact, faculty find a lot of the stuff new and interesting to them, so we should teach it to everybody. Somebody should write a book about it.

Rebecca: Huh.

John: And fortunately, you have.

Todd: Hey, [LAUGHTER] me and a couple other people have too.[LAUGHTER]

John: So you mostly focus on effective learning strategies and how students can use the time more efficiently in learning. You also provide a lot of other advice to students about challenges that might arise for different students or students in different categories. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other advice you provide in addition to those directly related to learning?

Todd: Yeah, there’s a lot of other things that I think are really important. There’s a chapter on how we learn and a chapter on how we remember things, which learning and memory are separate, and those talk about the structures and the way we do that, but there’s so many other things that come into play, and a lot of things from social psychology. Everybody talks about cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology, but if a person understands exactly how to learn. If you’re really, really frustrated at the time you’re trying to learn, it doesn’t matter the actual cognitive structures, because the social part of it just wipes that out. And so things like microaggressions, how we perceive other people and how we interact with other people, has a huge impact on learning. Stereotype threat, whenever we get in a situation, if we’ve got a person who is a minority within a class. So it could be a male in a nursing program with mostly women. It could be in some discipline that has mostly men with a woman. It could be a student from an underrepresented group. When there’s an individual there that doesn’t typically come into the play, they’re under this pressure all the time that if they do poorly, then it reflects on “Well, maybe men can’t do nursing,” and so there’s extra pressure on them, and they tend to struggle with that. And things like imposter syndrome, almost everybody I’ve talked to at some point or another says that I don’t feel like I really belong, or I don’t feel like I know as much as other people think I know. And so those types of things, along with goal setting and dealing with or helping people who are working. I mean, what happens when you’re trying to work? Huge proportion of our students now work part time, but there’s a large portion also that work full time in addition to being full-time students. So a lot of those things can be drawn into this whole concept, and all those things are in the book.

Rebecca: One of the topics that you discuss is managing cognitive load. Can you talk about some of the recommendations you make related to this?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is one of the foundational things. And if you’re a listener and do not understand what cognitive load is, one of the best things you can do is get up to speed on that a little bit. A place to start, I always say, is Wikipedia. And if there was a motto that I would throw in there, it would be Wikipedia, great place to start, and a hideous place to finish. And I just want to point that out there, because there’s some stuff you can get pretty quickly. But here’s the thing with cognitive load, is it basically boils down to there’s only so much information your brain can process at any given time. And if you try to do too much, then it pretty much shuts down enough in one area so that it can process a different area. Be a little bit like if you’re putting together an IKEA bookshelf for the very first time, and your significant other comes into the room and says, “Hey, where do you want to have lunch?” And you may very well say, “Not right now,” and your brain’s just full with all of these parts and how things are supposed to fit together. Once you put 10, 15 IKEA bookcases together, you could carry on a conversation with somebody else while you’re doing it. And that’s an all cognitive load issue. The first time you do something, it is taxing, and it takes extra energy for your brain to sort out all the pieces. But the more you do something, the easier it becomes. And this is why, as an expert, you have to be careful. Because as an expert, I might say to my students, read this article, this 10-page article, and I might read that 10-page article very, very quickly, because I’ve read this kind of stuff over and over and over again, but the novice is going to take way more time because it’s their first time doing it. So we can talk to students about the fact that this is going to be hard when you start, and then as you do it, more and more, it’ll be easier, and that’s a cognitive load issue. As you actually work on things as combinations, as things come together, you build what are called schemas, and those are like scripts that all come together, and as you activate a whole schema, then that’s just there. If I go golfing, I don’t have to think about every little piece of that. Or if I’m driving, I don’t have to think about how hard I turn the wheel and turning on a turn signal and everything else. I have a schema for being in a car and the types of things you do. So as we practice and go through these things, that’s the cognitive load issue. There’s going to be heavy cognitive load, which we have to be cognizant of, and then, as we do it, it becomes easier. And then there’s another piece to this. Is if there’s things in your environment that don’t help you to learn, but they take up cognitive energy, so a conversation by people on the other side of the room, pretty much everybody in here listening this has probably, at some point been reading something, and people are talking, and you either say, “Excuse me, could you quit talking?” Or you pack up and go someplace else. If you’re reading a hard article, that will happen. If you’re reading something like a novel, people can be all over the room talking, and you don’t care. That’s a cognitive load issue. Hard article, high cognitive load, an easy thing, lower cognitive load. This is one I will jump in there and say, too, this is an area that AI has me very concerned. Because as you start anything, you start at the foundational level, and it’s challenging, but as you work with it over and over again, it becomes less and less challenging, then you can move up to more complex things. If AI is doing the simple foundational stuff for us, then we don’t develop that base that allows us to kind of automatically process something, so that we can move to a higher, more complicated thing and then practice that and go to a higher, more complicated thing. If AI is doing a chunk of it, we don’t ever develop the base of it. And so I’m concerned with respect to cognitive load development and how AI might come into play with that, but that’s the two-minute version of a topic that we spend two or three class periods on [LAUGHTER] in a course in psychology.

John: One of the many other topics you address in this book is metacognition. Why is developing metacognition so important? And what are some strategies that students can use to increase their metacognition?

Todd: Yeah, cognitive load is huge. Metacognition is right in there next to it. And metacognition basically boils down to knowing how much you know, knowing how much you’re thinking about something. It’s the process of thinking about the process, and we often don’t do that. It’s actually kind of fascinating when you chat with people, is they’ll engage in a behavior and not think anything about what they’re doing. So we fall into patterns. And so I’ve had students for years that will come in and say, “You know, Dr Z, I’ve read the chapter like four times and I’m still struggling.” And I’ll say, “Well, why did you read it four times?” It’s like, “Well, I need to to learn it.” “Isn’t there any other way you could learn it?” And as I’m asking these questions, I’m trying to bring up a metacognitive concept of let’s reflect on your learning process. If you’re struggling with the material when you read it, it may very well be that two, or three, four more times… In fact, research has shown that you’re probably not going to learn anymore, because if you’re not paying attention to your cognitive functioning, you may very well be reading while you’re daydreaming about something else. And the reason I mention that is that that is not being aware of your processing of information. So again, something that all of us have done, you finish reading a chapter of a book, or you finish reading an article, and just as you get to the end of it, it’s like, “Oh, my word,the entire time I was thinking about bacon or lunch of some kind.” And if that’s the case, you’ve just wasted that time. So for metacognition, it’s kind of thinking about how you’re studying, evaluating it, to what extent are you successful When you sit down and study for an hour, and if you quiz yourself, do you know more or don’t you? So practicing with that, thinking about while you’re studying, what’s going well and what’s not going well. If you’re frustrated in your surroundings and you’re having trouble processing, then you can make changes. If you don’t think about it, you can’t and then also thinking back. So after I take a test or after I study, I can think what went well and what didn’t go well. And that’s all kind of metacognitive things that, because of the way we live, we just don’t tend to do them. And so you know people who will repeat the same pattern over and over and over again, and we use phrases like, “You’ve done this four times, it’s always failed. What were you thinking?” And when we say “What were you thinking?” we’re actually asking a person, to what extent are you engaging in metacognition. But quite frankly, the “What were you thinking?” it’s such an automatic statement that it really doesn’t pertain to thinking.

Rebecca: Feel like a next interesting leap might be to talk about the myth of learning styles, which is something that people often cycle through and say often as well, like, “I’m a visual learner, and this isn’t in a visual style, so I can’t possibly learn it.” And this is something that you address in your book as well.

Todd: Yeah, I think foundationally, first of all, for anybody listening, I’m pretty sure you probably know about learning styles, but if you don’t, there’s a whole concept out there by Neil Fleming came up with this in terms of the learning styles index. And essentially, you take 13,14 quiz questions and you answer these questions, and based on how you answer them, you’re categorized as typically, either a visual learner, an auditory learner, or a kinesthetic learner. A couple of foundational things. Number one, anytime there’s some kind of a test that you can take on Facebook or online or in a quiz book or someplace or even somebody reading 13 items to you, and that’s supposed to tell you how you function as a human being. We’re way more complex than that. Psychologists will ask hundreds of questions to come up with a response that says based on the hundreds of questions that we have, all these validated questions, we believe you will tend to do this. Now, think about that for a second. That’s after a whole battery of tests. They’re saying we think you tend to do this, which has got a lot of hedging in it, which is different than 13 items, “Oh, you’re a visual learner.” So keep in mind that it doesn’t work that way. Number two is that there’s nobody who scores like every item is all on visual or every item is on kinesthetic. If you tend to answer, let’s just say 40% of your answers are on visual learning, and 30% are on auditory learning and 30% are on kinesthetic learning, you’d get categorized as a visual learner because that had the highest percentage. But really it’s a 40-30-30. Why wouldn’t you be categorized as all three? But boxes are easier to deal with, so the learning styles has lots of concepts behind it. Research will also indicate or show you pretty quickly if you read through this stuff, it’s just not how learning works. I would just love to say this, because I don’t want to just say learning styles isn’t good. Here’s the concept Is basically the best way to learn is to practice with the material in a way in which you want to retrieve it. If you want to actually dance, the best way to learn is kinesthetically, by dancing. You might get some auditory or visual information of here’s what the pose looks like, but by and large, you’re going to want to dance. If you’re going to want to be able to recognize certain kind of prints from Monet versus Manet or somebody else in painting, then probably the best thing to do is look at a lot of paintings. Visual would make sense there. Semantic learning, if you want to remember something, you’re probably going to want to read it or hear about it, and so you want to practice it in the way you’re going to retrieve it. The reason people love this concept of learning styles is people love to take quizzes that put them into boxes. I don’t get this, but people take quizzes all the time. Here’s 10 ways to determine what kind of a spouse you are, or five things you can do to figure out what kind of parent you are. We love to do those. And the problem is that learning styles comes along and people think that’s how I learn. And based on what you said at the beginning, Rebecca, when a student says, “You don’t use many images and I’m a visual learner, therefore I can’t learn from you,” they won’t learn from you. But they won’t learn from you because they’re a visual learner, they won’t learn from you because in their head they’re thinking, I can’t learn from you. And when your brain is processing, “I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this. I can’t learn this.” there is so much cognitive load dealing with the fact you can’t learn it there’s no room for learning. So if you think of yourself as a visual learner, I would say, just think about it in terms of you like to use visual things to help you to learn, but there’s a lot of other ways that you can learn as well.

John: Going back to an earlier location in your book, one of the things you talk about as a suggestion for students is that they avoid dichotomous thinking, and you also add in a discussion in the essentials book of generative AI. So this is kind of a mashup of those two concepts. But will the use of generative AI be helpful or harmful for student learning?

Todd: Yes, [LAUGHTER] yeah, the dichotomous thinking, I will say, just to address that very quickly, is that whole concept is that it’s the weakest kind of thinking. It’s basically you put somebody in a box and you don’t have to deal with them anymore, because this is them. That person’s a very aggressive individual. Everything gets interpreted as aggressive because that’s who they are. We don’t stop and think about on a given day, maybe a lot of bad things have happened; on a different day, maybe good things happen. So maybe they tend to be more aggressive, but they’re not just yes/no, you are/you’re not. So AI… people have asked multiple times, is this terrible or is this good? I tell you, everything has nuances. So the bad side, I do think AI is going to be really tricky for us, because humans, in fact, all organisms, will take the easiest route we can. In many respects, we should. If we are going to work and it’s five miles away and there’s a car in the driveway, taking the car makes a lot of sense. So I should take the easy way. However, there’s going to be times when I’m going to want to be physiologically in good shape. I might need to run. I might want to walk up a flight of stairs. I might just want to live for a while, in which case I should work on helping my heart to be better. And the human body is fantastic, and the more you push something, the more it will develop. And so I love to ask students, for instance, I’ll say, “Anybody in here run or jog?” And a whole bunch of hands will go up, and I’ll say, “Why? You got cars. You should just take a car.” And somebody will say, “Well, yeah, but I want to be healthier.” I’ll say, “Perfect. Let’s talk AI for a minute.” For AI, if we let the AI do all the things for us, then we don’t develop those things. And so if I’m taking a poetry class and I just keep having AI write the poems, write the poems, write the poems. It can do it. I can edit them, but I’m not going to learn how to write and how to express myself. And so the issue we’re going to have is, if we don’t learn how to do those things, especially at the beginning level, kind of the cognitive load thing, we’re not going to be able to do them when it’s more complicated. So I think we have to be very careful of that. And for faculty, I think we have to be very careful about focusing on things like academic misconduct. Yes, there are students who will use AI to cheat, but students didn’t start cheating because AI came along. Based on the culture in your classroom, the rapport you have with your students will make a huge difference in the extent to which students will engage in academically honest behaviors. So anyway, those types of things, we’ll watch out for. The good side, there are so many things that this is going to be able to use for good. For instance, we know from study after study after study that the more you practice at something, the better you become. And we have said, I have said for years too, the best way to learn anything is to teach it to somebody else, if you don’t have a family member or a roommate, that you can teach it to, then teach it to a dog, teach it to a sofa, just teach it. And the concept there is, the more you explain something, the better you get at it. AI is beautiful for this, because it can work with you. Actually, I tried something recently I thought was so much fun. I told AI, and the scenario in my head was, I’m a student in a psychology class, and I just learned the routes of persuasion by Cialdini, and now I have to remember how this persuasion all works. Well, one of the best ways to do that is to practice with it. And so I fired up ChatGPT and the prompt I gave it was, “Hey, how about if we do a role play? I’m going to be a car salesman, and you’re going to be in the market to buy a car. You do have enough money, you could buy today, but you want to be a little cautious, because you want to get input from your family, and you want to make sure you get a good value and get the kind of car you want. So overall, if I really can sell you, you’ll buy, but otherwise you’re going to wait. What do you think?” And then ChatGPT typed out, “This sounds like fun. Can you show me some vans?” And so then I said, “This is a van,” and I started to sell it. Now, the reason I’m mentioning this is that I could use all my different persuasion techniques that I learned, and ChatGPT kept asking me questions back. So I’d say this van has something about scarcity. Here’s a good one for scarcity. It’s one of the principles to persuade people. I said, “Whis is the last van on the lot. And so ChatGPT said, “Oh, that’s unfortunate, because I’m really interested in the van. Is there a possibility of getting another one if this one sells before I actually sign the paper?” And now what ChatGPT has just done is to see if they could reduce that concept of basically a quantity issue of scarcity. If this is the only van, a human would basically say, “Oh no, it’s the only van. I better get it before somebody else does,” so with ChaGPT, it says, “Can you get another one from a different lot?” And if I said, “Yep”, then the scarcity goes down a little bit. So then I have to think, “Oh, how can I bring scarcity back in a different way? It’s on sale, but the sale is going to end at the end of this week, so we’re going to have to make a decision fast… that scarcity in a sense of we don’t have much time. And so the point is that I role played with ChatGPT for about 20 minutes on these principles of persuasion. We’ll be able to do that. We’ll be able to do simulations. We’ll be able to do repetition. I can say to ChatGPT, and I’ve done this one. “Give me 10 multiple choice questions about metacognition for a student in a second-year college course, and the course is on the basics of cognition.” The better prompts you lay out there, the better it will do. It asked me multiple choice questions. And the last one I’ll mention for this, because there’s so many different ways you could do it, I actually gave it a definition of metacognition. I wrote out kind of what it is, and then I just put it in ChatGPT, and I said, if I answered a question of “What is metacognition?” with this response, and I was a senior in a cognitive psych course, because it’s different from being a first-year student, but it’s going to give you feedback: “If I’m a senior in a cognitive psych course, what grade would I get?” And I purposely made it bad, and it said you would get an “F” on this. And then I said, “Why?” And it explained a couple reasons why. And then I rewrote it, one of the best responses I could possibly dream up. And then ChatGPT said, “this is a good solid A minus.” And I said, “Why is this an A minus?” And it pointed out that I hadn’t done very much on the reflective component. And I thought, “hmm, alright, I did miss that piece.” And so when I can practice quiz questions like that, I can have it ask me multiple choice questions. And much like Khan Academy, when Sal Khan came up with Khan Academy, he said, one of the things that students love about this is you can go and watch the same video four or five times, and it doesn’t get frustrated with you. ChatGPT, you can struggle with learning a concept, it’s never going to get frustrated with you because you’re struggling. Whereas a human might say, in their head, it’s like, “Oh my word. You should have gotten this by now.” So I know that was a very long answer. It’s a huge, huge issue in education right now, but we can’t be focused on the academic misconduct side of it. We really need to be focusing on how can we use it to instill deeper learning?

Rebecca: That’s a nice transition to one of the other topics that you have in your book, which is maybe something that faculty might be interested in knowing is in your book, [LAUGHTER] which is that you advise students to spend two hours outside of class for every hour they spent in class, which is definitely an expectation, I think, that many faculty have, but it’s not always conveyed to students. I know I mention it to students, [LAUGHTER] but can you talk a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, so I put it in there, and it was funny because it was a section I put in the book, and one of the reviewers looked at it and said, “Why did you put this in here? And then it was funny because the editor was reading the book and said, “I love the fact that you put the breakdown in there about how much you should study and how much time you should commit, because people don’t normally know this stuff.” And so I put it in there because I think people struggle with this, and for students to understand, if it’s a course that requires extra work and things, if it’s a three-credit hour course, you’re expected to do two hours outside for every hour inside. This is the way the system was built up. So a three-credit hour class is going to take you about nine hours a week. The three hours in class, then the two-to-one ratio will give you six hours outside of class. This is why, if you take 12 to 13 credit hours, or 13 to 14 credit hours, it’s considered full time, because 13 credit hours would put you up around 39 hours total, when you put all the hours together, and that’s a full-time deal. And by the way, just so I don’t forget this, or I put it off to the side, if it’s an activity course, something you wouldn’t do anything outside, that’s why a one-credit hour class might meet for three hours, like a jogging class or something, racquetball class, because there’s not outside work. The two-to-one ratio kind of thing, all of that’s done in class. So that kind of gives you a sense of how much you should be studying. Here’s the tricky spot, nobody does it. I shouldn’t say nobody, very few people do it. The reason is that a lot of students can get by with studying less than two hours outside for every hour inside class. And when students will say they don’t need to, or faculty will say they don’t do it, and people focus on the fact that, “Well, you know, students don’t really have to spend that much time.” I love to respond with, oh, so they all are getting 100% on their quizzes and tests and perfect papers, right? And to that, we say, “Well, not really.” System’s set up that you expect a lot of B’s and C’s and D’s. Well, what if you spent two hours outside for every hour inside? It would be a very different thing. But the problem again, is, “Whew, if students are not spending the two hours outside for every hour inside, and then you are, then it seemed like you’re taking more time, and you feel like, why am I spending all this time when they’re not?” And so we look to other people, and unfortunately, we don’t do that. But I can tell you, for students, if you do actually sit down and study for two hours outside of class, for every hour inside class, and do it before the class period. When you walk in, you already know material there. You understand the foundation of it. And if the instructor is doing a good job, they’re pushing you and showing you connections and everything, you can process that because you have the material. If you walk into class after skimming a Chapter, you don’t have the foundational material to make the classroom more effective for a learning situation.

John: I was really happy to see that advice there, because I tell students the same thing, and they always seem really, really surprised. Or in an online class if you tell them they should expect to spend nine hours there, there’s often an even larger surprise, because they think it’ll take as much time as what they spend in high school, which is often zero outside of class and with an online class, zero doesn’t work very well, especially. So I’m glad you included that. But one of the other things you include in your book in terms of advice to students is you talk about various fallacies, and one of those is a sunk cost fallacy, which is something that we talk about quite a bit in economics, especially behavioral economists. So could you talk a little bit about this fallacy and how it might affect students?

Todd: Yeah, sunk cost is something that I always covered in psychology, because I love the concept, psychological concept. It’s really important a sunk cost basically just simply means, how much energy or resources have you put into a course of action. That’s basically it. How much have you sunk into this thing? The problem is for humans, is we overestimate the value of that. If you’ve worked on a paper for six hours and it turns out you’re heading in the wrong direction, best thing you can do is pitch the paper and just start over. But people say, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve put six hours in on this. I must be able to salvage something of it.” And I watched a woman on television years ago, and I think it was Ukrainian eggs. It was when they hollow out the eggs, you get the insides out, and you cut half of it away, so you’re dealing with, like a little half of a shell. And they do these beautiful, intricate things inside the shell. And she pointed out, she said, “If you ever drop one of those, the best thing you can do is stomp on it,” because if you drop it and it cracks, you try to fix it, and you spend so much time trying to fix it, because the sunk cost is, “I’ve already put hours into this,” then you waste a lot of time trying to fix it, your better bet is just to throw it away and start over.” And that’s why she said stomp on it, so you’re not tempted to do that. So in your work, we’ll do this all the time. We try things, and we get all this investment… we might be in a class that’s just we’re flunking the class, and this is always hard, and you always want to always talk to an advisor if any students are listening, or tell your students always talk to an advisor before you ever drop a class, because it can have ramifications, especially if it drops you down to part-time status. But if you are going to flunk class, the best thing you can do is just stop working in that class. Take the F if you’re past the drop period, and just focus your energy somewhere else. And students will often say, “but yeah, but I’ve already put so much time in this.” And when I was teaching intro psychology, this is a particular one is students would come in with like, 50% average and come into the final, and I’d say, it doesn’t matter, you’d need a 98% to get a passing grade. You’re going to get an F. And the students say, “Well, yeah, but I put so much energy this I’m going to try” and I’ll say “If you’ve averaged 50, you’re not going to score above an A plus. It’s just not going to work. Take your time and study for your other classes and then come back and take this class next semester.” So we do this a lot. We have people who will stay in relationships because they’ve been in relationships for a while. So it’s like, I’m gonna hang in there when, you know, maybe it’s the end of the relationship. We’ll have people that put so much money into a car they’re gonna keep driving it. It might come to a point you just need to get rid of the car. So sometimes we’ll chase a course of action because we put so much money into it. The one thing I do want to point out, though, that’s important, is that sometimes sunk cost is very helpful. So if we’re in a job, for instance, that we’ve been in for five years, and we run into a really rough spot, we might say, “Well, I’ve been working pretty hard. I’m working my way up in this. I’ve got a lot invested. I’m going to stick this out.” A relationship’s another good example. Relationships do have rough times. And if you have been dating someone or married to somebody for a period of time, then it’s like, “I’m going to get through this because I have so much invested.” So a sunk cost can help you if down the road, it’s a good thing to stay in, but you’d be tempted to leave. College is a good example. I mean, junior year, a lot of people would quit, but it’s like, “I’ve already got three years in, I’m going to finish.” But at other times, we’ve got so much in, and it’s time to cut it loose. And this is the part where I love to tell people, when I was an undergraduate, I was a criminal justice major at first, and then I switched over and double majored with psychology, and then I ended up with a psych major and a criminal justice minor and a sociology minor, and I am one class short of having a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. And every time I tell that, there are people in the group that says “You should just take that class,” and I’d say, “Why?” And they say, “Well, because you’re one class short, you’ve got all that invested.” And to that, I get to say, “At my age, I’m getting close to retirement age. I’m never going to work as a police officer. I don’t even think those credits would count. But even so, what I did is I got to a point where I thought, is it worth it for me to spend a semester to finish this when I don’t believe it’s anything I will ever do. I worked with a police department for a short period of time. At the end, decided I just didn’t want to go that route. There’s no reason to finish that.” But even listening today, if I tell you, in an entire bachelor’s degree, I just need one more three-credit hour class, the inclinations to say, “Well, you should take it.” That’s a sunk cost.

Rebecca: As I’ve been listening to you talk today and thinking about the things in your book, and I was also thinking about a lot of the things that some of our faculty panelists said at our graduate orientation, I was very happy that a lot of those things aligned. That’s always good. And one of the things that came up actually at orientation was the recommendation from one of our panelists to really think about some wellness things like sleep and exercise. And that’s something that came up and eating well, which is something that is in your book. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits of having adequate sleep and engaging in exercise that you talk about in your book?

Todd: Yeah, it’s funny, because when I’m talking to students, especially, if there’s quite a bit of material, there’s invariably somebody will say: “So if there’s just one thing I should really work on, we’ve talked about the testing effect, practicing over and over and quizzing yourself. We’ve talked about things like interleaving, where you mix materials together, or spaced learning, where you space it out. And for memories, is to practice over and over types of things, and to say, “Which one should I really focus on?” I said “sleep.” The best thing you can do to be better at learning is to make sure you have a good chunk of sleep. Not only as a restful person, do you process information faster, but while you’re sleeping, you actually consolidate memories. You could study all day long, all through the night. Take a quiz, and you’ve all done this at some point, do okay on the quiz, because that’s right during the learning period, come back a week later, or final exam, for sure, and it’s like none of it’s there. Well, it’s because after you learned it, you never slept, which allows your brain to consolidate it. We actually now know that different stages of sleep will consolidate certain semantic like meaningful things. A different stage of sleep will solidify and consolidate repetition, like movement, so the kinesthetic things. So the physiology of what your brain does is really important. By the way. I was just reading something the other day too. I can’t cite it here, because I didn’t know I’d be talking about it, but it talked about the correlation between low levels of sleep and later cognitive decline, because while you sleep, the brain kind of flushes out all of the toxins, so to speak, and all the stuff it doesn’t need. It consolidates the stuff that’s important. It gets rid of the rest. And if you don’t sleep, a lot of that becomes muddled across time. And so sleep, physiologically, is just an amazing thing for you. And so that’s a really, really important thing. Exercise is another one. Regular aerobic exercise is just good for the learning process. I had a student that told me one time… it was funny, we were chatting about this… and said he does the best learning during basketball season when they’re exercising all the time. Coach makes them sleep an adequate amount, because it impacts your play, of course, and if it impacts your play. It probably impacts your learning too, right? So the concept there is that he said he always did better during basketball season because he was sleeping better and exercising better. Eating is the same thing. We know that simple sugars are not as good as complex carbohydrates. There’s actually ways that we can process this in terms of memory, and it doesn’t take very much liquid at all. If you get dehydrated, a little bit of dehydration, you have cognitive decline. In fact, it’s funny, because if you talk to somebody who is a health professional and you say, late in the day, “Man, I’m just confused and really having trouble processing things,” one of the first things that will ask you is, “How much did you drink today?” So it does have an impact on that. So, adequate hydration, not too much, but the right amount there, good nutrition, sleeping and exercise, those are four ways right there that you can actually impact your learning of material in classes… oh, and your health. I’d like to point out too that it’s one of those things that’s got the best side effect there is: it’s really good for learning and it’s also good for living.

Rebecca: One of the key tips that came up from our students and our faculty was to actually schedule some of those to make sure you’re doing those things.

Todd: Oh, totally. Yeah, eating too, I have to admit for myself, especially when it’s hot out. I didn’t understand this when I was younger, but I can eat breakfast and work outside in the yard, come in, drink a little bit, go back out, sit down and read a book and do some stuff, and realize at eight o’clock at night’s like, “Oh my word. I didn’t eat today,” and so I’m suddenly hungry, but then it’s late, so you’re eating at eight, nine o’clock, which is not ideal. But if you schedule it while you’re busy, and stick to it. If you’ve got it scheduled, you’re gonna eat at one o’clock or noon, and the bell rings summarize where you’re at, go eat, and then come back and then pick it up from there. Because if you think “I’ll just finish this section and then I’ll eat,” there’s been lots of study through the years that says that’s not as good as stopping, noting where you are and then coming back for most people.

John: And one of the things you talk about in your book is scheduling. And you also suggest there that you include a little bit of slack, because things don’t always take the amount of time that you anticipate. Could you talk just a little bit about that?

Todd: Yeah, I kind of laugh about this one, because, yeah, people are hideous at estimates. Almost everybody is. But I will tell you, folks with ADHD are particularly bad at it. And part of the issue you run into with ADHD is it’s not just that you’re distracted, is that you’re thinking to yourself, I will do this task, it will take like, 40 minutes, and then I’ll go do this other task. When I got tested for ADHD, after three questions, like, we’re good, we know exactly where we’re at. Anybody who knows me says you don’t need any kind of test. We’ve known that for years. I wish somebody had told me 10 years ago. But the reason I mentioned this is that I’m working really hard at some metacognitive kind of process of estimating how long it’s going to take me to do something. I set off the block of time. When the timer goes off, then I think about: “What did I do? What worked well? What didn’t work well?” That process takes seconds to do, by the way, it’s like, okay, “did it work or didn’t work?” And then if it does work, I think about what I did to kind of set that up. And if it doesn’t, I think about that. But I will tell you that I will often start out with a to do list of 10 items, and I’m sure that I’ll be done by noon, and so by 6pm I’ve gotten through three of them, and I still have seven to go. So I put those seven on my to do list for the next day, and then, because I am a super genius… I always use that phrase whenever I follow it with something that’s not super geniusy… but I’ll take those seven items and I’ll just put them on the to do list with another 10 items, and then I got 17 items that I’m going to do tomorrow, because that’s going to be easy to get through them. I’ll just do them really fast, and then I get through like five things. As you practice at that, you can actually practice at estimating how long things will take you, put it into a schedule. I did this was an intro psych class. It was one of the most impactful things I’ve done. Is the teacher had us keep track of one week in one-hour blocks. Like, if you sleep for eight hours, you block off and say, I slept. But then if you read, you put a block in for reading, and while you’re awake during the day, he had us doing metacognitive exercises too. You estimate how much do you think you’ll get done? How well did you do? And then you just put a grade in the block. So if it’s going to be I’m going to read the to read this chapter in this two hours, and I get through half of the chapter in the two hours. And I’ve done this other stuff, I get like, a D. And what I found was that I’m very effective in the morning, from about 6 am until about 10 am I can cram through… oh, it’s just so good. And then I find out that from about 2 to 4 pm I’m just awful. I have enough extrovertness in me that if I’m talking to somebody, it’s fine, but if I sit down to read something or work at something, it doesn’t work. So I schedule these things in. So I’m kind of coming back to the schedule, but I schedule these things in, but also try to make estimates of how long things will take. I will finish with this, tell your students, or ask your students, I guess, at the beginning of the semester to keep track of, as they read the first couple pages in every book, jot down, after five pages, how long did it take you, and figure out the average amount of time it takes you per page. Because students don’t understand this, and they’re not good at estimating their time. And I’ve had students before who are going to tell me, for the final exam, they’re going to reread all the chapters. And I say, how long is that going to take you? And they’ll say, “I don’t know.” And I’ll say, “The exam’s tomorrow. What do you think it’s going to be?” And students will tell me that they thought they could read a chapter in an hour, or the whole book in like six hours. And then they find out that their average is eight minutes a page, and say, “Alright, well, at eight minutes a page, you’re not going to read a chapter of 35 to 40 pages in an hour.” But the point is, it may be that you have a novel in English class that you average one minute a page. You might have a physics book where you average 20 minutes per page, and you might have a philosophy book where you average five minutes a page. If you know that, you can make some estimates. And so talk to your students about making those estimates. But rolling that all together, kind of figuring out estimates on how long things are going to take, and keep working at it, and then using metacognitive strategies to think about when it’s going well and not going well. And I’m still working at how to do this.

John: And that issue of cascading to do lists, one of the things I found is that there’s a lot of to do apps that you can put on your smartphone, and when the list gets too long, just start another one.

Rebecca: That’s what I do. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Well, there’s a great strategy that I really do like. You list the really important things as A’s and then B’s and then C’s. And the one strategy I read one time was great. It says, Put all your things on the list, put down your A’s, your B’s, and your C’s, and then delete all your C’s. [LAUGHTER] And so it’s that same kind of a thing as at the end of the day, they’re not going to get done, just pitch them. But yeah, we put too many things on the list. I’m trying right now. Actually, I’ve reframed it in my head, and I’m desperately trying to put down the amount of stuff that I think that I can get done by noon, and I still block off eight until 6pm but I put my to do list thinking this can get done at noon. If I get done at noon, you know what? I’m only gonna work a half a day. And when I’m better at it, I’ll probably put more items on the list. But for right now, yesterday, I still was working till 8 pm on my stuff that should have been done by noon. An another little tip I’ll give you… I’m getting better at some of these… I always make up my to do list now just before I go to bed, when I’m as tired as I can be during the day, because if you make a to do list in the morning when you’re feeling really full of energy, then you’re very optimistic. If you do it when you’re exhausted, it’s a little closer. [LAUGHTER]

John: I believe that behavioral economists refer to this phenomenon of underestimating the amount of time required for a task as the planning fallacy, and I believe that I’ve heard that the people who are most productive underestimate the amount of time required by more than other people tend to, otherwise they’d never undertake many of the tasks that they engage in. There was a Freakonomics episode on it that I just listened to recently.

Rebecca: In my design class, I have students keep time sheets for their projects and things, and that helps them become more aware of how long it takes them to do different parts of projects, so that if they were to take on freelance work or whatever, they have more of an idea of how long it actually takes them to do things, so that they could more adequately charge for work if they were to do that.

Todd: Rebecca, that’s a really, really important skill to teach them, because you could make up your mind you want to have a design company or a landscaping company, whatever it is, and if you’re hideous at estimating time, you’ll be out of business very quickly. When you explain to somebody, “Yeah, I’ll cut your loan on every week, and I’ll only charge you $20 because I think it’s going to take 10 minutes,” and then it turns out it takes two hours. You can’t stay in business like that. So I think that’s a great skill. See, we started out with the why don’t we teach these cognitive things early? This is one of those that you are doing, which is great. Teach them how to think about time.

Rebecca: Well, we could talk about really important things we could teach students all day long, but we do need to pay attention to our time, which we are not always good at doing. [LAUGHTER] So we always wrap up by asking: “what’s next?”

Todd: Probably just the last items on my to do list is next, [LAUGHTER] but right after that, I’m working on a couple things. So one of them is a book on lecturing and active learning. The research does not say that the active learning is more effective than lecturing. The research is very clear that says, when you combine the two, lecturing with active learning, it’s more effective than lecturing alone. So I’m working on a book that’s balancing the two. And then the other one is, I’ve really become pretty passionate lately about people that are not built for the way the educational system’s built. I love to use the phrase that education is kind of built for fast-talking, risk-taking extroverts. I’ve got that in the book, and actually in a couple of the book. And the idea is in class when the teacher says, “Could somebody tell me…” there’s hands going up before you actually get to the end of this question even from some people, individuals who think really fast, who are okay if they’re wrong, they’re taking a shot at it, and they’re extroverted in that they like to really have the energy to be around people. If you’re not one of those individuals, you’re actually at a disadvantage all the way through the educational system whenever something’s run like that. And so the other thing I’m working on right now is, how do we help the individuals who are shy, who are on the autism spectrum, who maybe have depressive episodes, individuals with food insecurity, housing insecurity, all these types of individuals who walk into a classroom and when they do really well, it’s because they’re doing so much more work. I should be careful. I don’t want to discount the people who are working hard in the classroom, but there’s individuals who are working way harder than other individuals, and there’s got to be a way to balance that a little bit. That’s what I’m working on now too.

Rebecca: Sound like really important, interesting projects.

John: And will those both be ready this year, or [LAUGHTER] will it take a little bit longer for those?

Todd: Probably Tuesday, I think… maybe Thursday. It’s interesting. I will say that I really love writing. It’s obvious, I’ve got several books out now. But I work with an editor. I have my own editor that I’ve hired now, and the reason I did that is because I’m not an editor. And what I used to do on books is I would write something and I would spend more time trying to edit it and get it to sound right than I was actually writing. And so the reason that I’m kind of cranking books out right now is I write it, I send it off to my editor, my editor reads it, comes back to me and says,” I like what you did here, but you might want to change that.” And then I just zip into the next thing. So it takes me about four months to write a book now. And so I would suspect that we will see one of those heading off… well, it won’t be too long.

Rebecca: Must be there on the early part of that list, that stuff before noon.

Todd: When I mentioned that keeping track of the day, it’s a really, really important thing. It’s because, yup, that’s exactly what it is. My writing time tends to be between 7am and 10am and then all my committee meetings are in the afternoons.

Rebecca: Prioritize.

Todd: Yeah, it’s like recording this show. Huh, look at this, 3:46 pm… Ha! Right, between two and four.

Rebecca: I did notice that. I was making that note,

Todd: Uh huh, I knew you were. Boy, we should do this sometime at 10 am You wouldn’t believe how fired up I am the.

Rebecca: Alright, but that’s when I prioritize my writing and doing stuff too.

John: We always enjoy talking to you, and we’re very much looking forward to talking to you about those next books as those approach,

Todd: I always love coming to this program. I get to sip my tea, which is always good, and chat with two of my favorite pod people.

Rebecca: Thanks for joining us, Todd.

Todd: Thanks for inviting me.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC].

289. The Cognition-Motivation Connection

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, emotion, engagement, evidence-based practices, experiential learning, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, motivation, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
May 17, 2023

Emotions can have both positive and negative impacts on learning. In this episode, Michelle Miller joins us to explore the relationships that exist between emotions and learning.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University.  She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Michelle is also a co-editor, with James Lang, of the superb West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning.

Show Notes

  • Miller, Michelle (2023). “Revisiting the cognition-motivation connection: What the latest research says about engaging students in the work of learning.”  March 3.
  • Miller, Michelle (2022). “Ungrading Light: 4 Simple Ways to Ease the Spotlight off Points.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. August 2.
  • Remind
  • Transparency in Teaching and Learning (TILT)
  • Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. A. (2022). Inclusive teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the college classroom. West Virginia University Press.
  • Ariely, D., & Wertenbroch, K. (2002). Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment. Psychological Science, 13(3), 219–224.
  • Abel, M., & Bäuml, K. H. T. (2020). Would you like to learn more? Retrieval practice plus feedback can increase motivation to keep on studying. Cognition, 201, 104316.
  • McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2020). Training learning strategies to promote self-regulation and transfer: The knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning framework. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(6), 1363-1381.
  • Miller, Michelle (2019). Attention Matters. Tea for Teaching Podcast. Episode 86. June 19.
  • Michelle Miller’s R3 Newsletter
  • Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s Once More, With Feeling substack
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
  • Cavanagh, S. R. (2023). Mind over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.

Transcript

John: Emotions can have both positive and negative impacts on learning. In this episode, we explore the relationships that exist between emotions and learning.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Michelle is also a co-editor, with James Lang, of the superb West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Oh, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here today.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Michelle, do you have some tea?

Michelle: Well, not exactly. I’ve started hydrating with fruity water today. So, I’ve got my water jug and I’m working on it.

John: And I have just a little bit of a peppermint-spearmint tea blend here. And the reason is just a little bit as this is our third podcast of the day today. So I didn’t have a chance in between them to go back to my office and get some new tea or some new hot water. So I do have a little bit to get us started here.

Rebecca: A tiny bit left from my pot of blue sapphire tea.

John: …which is much more colorful.

Rebecca: It is, but not in my cup, only in the pot.

John: We’ve invited you here to discuss your March 3 blog post, addressing the relationship between cognition and emotion. In general, how is cognition influenced by emotion,

Michelle: I’ve been interested in this connection for a while and watching the evolution from within my field of cognitive psychology and kind of moving away from the approach that I came up with when I was just starting out as a graduate student, which is I recall was this kind of oil and water conception of cognition and emotion that here on the one side, we’ve got thought processes, we’ve got memory, and so on. And on the other side [LAUGHTER], we’ve got the emotions and so on. And we’re just going to really work from in our subfield to try to get our arms around just these cognitive processes, and don’t worry about the rest of it. And now, I think that most cognitive psychology theorists in the field would say that, yeah, our cognitive processes are definitely shaped by and infused by what’s going on kind of over in the emotional processing systems of our mind and in our brain. And if I had to describe, just from my own perspective, what I see is a change over time and an evolution in our field, we’ve kind of gone from really talking about parts of the mind in this very compartmentalized modular way, where different parts do different things pretty much independently. And now you see more discussion of how these different parts have interplay with each other, how they give what I would think of as a sort of a soft input to other subsystems, or even set some constraints on what those other systems are doing without totally determining them. So I think we are moving into this more nuanced view of how those two things work together. So that, yeah, our emotions affect what we believe, they also serve as a way to almost elevate or suppress different aspects of what we’re processing so we might remember things in a particular way, or think about them in a particular way. And it’s neat to me too, as somebody in the field, because I look and I see clinical psychologists, the people in the area of psychology who work on how do we help people in therapy and help people with different disorders and challenges. They’ve known this for quite some time, but they’ve looked at it sort of in reverse. So if you’ve ever heard the school of thought known as cognitive therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the core tenets of that approach is that the emotional side of how we function, our emotions, are affected by our cognition. So what we feel, even our mood states and so on, that’s fundamentally driven by things like what we believe. And so they’ve come up with these really exciting and powerful techniques for addressing beliefs that people have and thereby affecting their emotions. So we can take a cue from that and have this more nuanced view of the interplay. So back to cognitive psychology. I also come at this really philosophically as what we would call a functionalist, [LAUGHTER] that’s sort of a lens through which I see how we address questions in psychology. So when we say, “Well, why does the mind work in this particular way? Why does it have this component or why does it do this in this way?” I would look at and say, “Well, how does that help us survive? What’s the function for helping us really survive and thrive in our world?” And when we look at things like emotions, our emotions are there for very functional reasons. I believe our emotions exist in order to kind of move us towards things that help us in our survival and move us away from things that are going to be a threat to our survival. And also they serve in this way to kind of alert us to what’s relevant. So it’s almost like a relevance mechanism. So if something provokes an emotional response in us, that may be an old shortcut that our mind has to say, “Yes, this is something that’s important. This is something that maybe you want to remember and that you want to pay attention to.” So I see emotions as kind of a feel for relevance, and that’s something I’m sure we’ll get into in our conversation about teaching and learning. later. And all of this is a practical issue too. I tell the story sometimes about Minds Online, and writing that book, where I got to about midway through the book and literally had this crisis, I remembered it happening like in the middle of the night, there’s something huge that’s missing right around this point in the book. And that book, for those who have taken a look at it, it takes a very cognitive view of how we select and use technologies. But I came to this realization, we can’t really talk about how to maximize the effectiveness of those approaches, unless we also talk about why students are going to do them in the first place, and how we can get them motivated to do them. So, in that book, I ended up covering some very basic elementary foundational concepts in motivation and motivation theory with that idea of what are just the essentials that every teacher needs to know and how might that also get involved in how do we choose certain technologies? How do we set things up in a particular way, for example, in an online course to keep students moving and that keep them putting in that productive effort. And so that’s been around in the back of my mind for quite some time. But now I’m reading all these new articles and this wave of interesting new research that is finding yet more connections between those two sides of the mind. And so how to get students to engage in strategies that work from a cognitive perspective and how to direct that feel for relevance. And early on in my career, as I mentioned in that blog post, I look back and it seems so harsh now, like, well, how do we get students to be accountable. And now I’ve kind of shifted that along with many others towards really looking more at the support side of this and bringing in things like empathy for our students, I don’t think I’ve ever been one of those super punitive “look to your left, look to your right” kinds of teachers, nor have I ever really advised that to their faculty. But I’m realizing that in this really critical case that I’m looking at this relationship in new ways, and I’m excited to share that.

Rebecca: So there’s been a lot of discussion about student motivation and engagement…, a crisis in it. [LAUGHTER] A lot of faculty have reported students being less engaged or less motivated. How can we, as faculty, address some of the challenges that people are experiencing at this moment?

Michelle: And it is such a pressing question, and that’s another thing that’s just really been registering as I’ve had my antenna up about what are people talking about right now? What are they bringing into conferences, and so on? And first off, as a little bit of a skeptic, I have to say, “Well, I think that we still need some more information to nail down exactly what the extent and the nature of the engagement crisis is.” And I think all three of us are attuned to what I guess you can call the fallacy of “students these days.” [LAUGHTER] So as so many people have observed, it’s so tempting to have that filter on of like, “Well, back when I was a student, I was always intrinsically engaged in my classes, I didn’t miss assignments, and so on and there’s a downward trend.” So there’s something about that. I put on my skeptic filter when I see that. But that said, we do have these experiences. And I don’t think regardless, even if we look back and say, “Well, maybe this wasn’t really part of a bigger trend as we thought.” Even if that were to happen, are we gonna look back and say, “Well, we shouldn’t have worried so much about engaging our students, we can almost always stand to engage them more.” So with that big caveat, I think that we should also be really reflecting on and separating out, as much as it’s really possible to do so, disengagement from other related things like prioritizing. I don’t have the capacity to cover all that I need to as a student, and perhaps also as a family member, a parent, a worker, and so on. So here’s how I’m going to go at it, or even just straight up overwhelm, and I think we can look at that from our own perspective, too, and say, “Well, right.” I think we’ve also seen quite a few faculty professional development directors and others who work with other faculty to say, “Oh my gosh, I put up a half a dozen workshops, and I’m having trouble filling them. So we too, as a lot of our demands have converged over the last couple of years, and as we’ve coped with those stresses, we too. It’s not that we’re disengaged from what we’re doing, but we’re having to make some different choices out of necessity. We have the economic costs of college and that whole dynamic that’s going on as well. I’m no expert in that. But I think we all know that students today are working more jobs, succeeding at every single course and getting through as quickly as possible is an economic necessity and so on. So the stakes are very, very high for students, and students are dealing with that. And so that’s one also very important thing to think about when we’re looking at this. So with that, though, have students been more disengaged? I mean, my experience immediately coming back to in-person teaching, I found myself that students were really excited. At the risk of sounding very strange here, it was like a box of excited puppies: Oh my goodness, we’re all here in the classroom together. And I felt the same way in some ways too. But really directing that in some, again, productive ways is what we have to do as the leaders of our classes. Now to practical tips for what can we do. If there’s a disengagement, students are elsewhere, they’re not doing the work, or they’re all excited but they don’t know how to manage that. But here’s a couple things that I think are very practical. So I’m a big advocate these days for flexibility and approachability in what we do. So I wrote a piece last year titled, “Ungrading Light…” I think that was the catchphrase in the title… which talks about “Okay, without sort of throwing out grades and say, ‘Well, students have the wrong motivation when it’s all about the grades.’” If we’re still going to have grades, what are some positive ways to keep students really focused on the learning and engaged with the learning and not just like, checkpoint, checkpoint, how do I get through this? And I do think that even some basic changes to policy can help here. So things like I really have gotten very flexible on deadlines. The caution here that this is going to look very different for people with different course sizes, section sizes, different disciplines, what the learning objectives really are in your course. So I don’t want to imply that everybody just can do this in the same way. And as I also mentioned in the piece, things like very flexible deadline policies can present a professional risk for people who do not have the security of, for example, tenure, and people who are historically minoritized, and are going to elicit different kinds of reactions from students to play out on things like end-of-semester evaluations. So for example, faculty of color. So with those big cautions in mind, now, here’s been my experience is I communicate with students… I say, “I want to be approachable,” I want to really show them and not just tell them that if you come to me and say, “I was pulling double shifts all weekend, and I need to do this paper draft, and I know that, but I need another two days,” that I’m not going to come down on them in a harder, personal way. And if they do that, just not all the time, I will say, “Yeah,” and then my catchphrase right now is, “Take the time, you need to do your best work.” And that turns out actually to be really good for my motivation, too, because I would really rather read what they put together [LAUGHTER] with a little bit of more time, that’s all about I want to do something I can be proud of in this course, and actually walk away with great knowledge. It’s more geared towards that and less geared towards “Oh my gosh, didn’t come in until 11:58 when it’s due at midnight, and I sort of just checked that box again. So that is something as well and other ways to be approachable, that can also elicit more engagement. How do we know students are engaged? Well, when they reach out to us. And so, here again, different individuals have to decide their appropriate comfort level and parameters. But I have a syllabus statement that says here are all the different ways to get in touch with me. If you’ve got a long question, and we need to talk, I’ve got a scheduling program, you click a button, and boom, now you have access to my calendar, and you can get on my calendar the same way my colleagues can. And that’s good. If you have a really quick question like, “Oh my gosh, there’s one thing I need to do in order to finish this assignment and actually be successful, then you can text me or send me a message in a program such as Remind, which can kind of buffer so we’re not trading phone numbers. But, that immediacy, it has not really resulted in this giant pile up of lots of inappropriate communications, which is what I was always warned about when I was coming up as a teacher. But instead, students get the question answered and then they can kind of stay engaged with the flow of what they’re doing. So just basic ideas, but ones that I think can help move us back towards a more engaged setting where students are excited to be there and so am I. If I could add one other thing here, too, we can also take a page out of the transparency philosophy. So if you’re familiar with Transparency in Teaching and Learning, the TILT framework, it’s so powerful. And it’s all about giving more explicit directions to students, as well. What you may read as disengagement or not caring, might be “I don’t know where to start and now, I really am feeling either alienated, overwhelmed, or something in between.” And I think that’s another we can all relate to is, we’re a lot more likely to take the first step down the path and keep going if that first step is lit up, or maybe if the whole path is lit up. So taking that little bit of extra time to say “And here’s where to start and if you get stuck, here’s what to do.” That can also help.

John: I’ve been observing the same sort of issue that many people have reported of students not completing work. I’ve seen students being much more excited to be back in the classroom, and they tend to be fairly engaged in classroom activity. But what I’ve been seeing and what a lot of faculty have been saying is that students aren’t doing the work outside of class at the same rates that they used to do. And one of the concerns in terms of making your classes more flexible, in some cases, you can do that really well and I do allow that with many of the assignments. But in classes where the material builds from week to week, if students start getting behind early in the semester, they’re going to be struggling a lot more later. So I have different policies depending on whether they’re producing something, some type of educational project… a podcast or something similar… as they do in some of my classes, then they can have more time. And I give them as much time as they need to do that with multiple iterations. But with other things like reading the materials online, where there’s some embedded questions, and so forth, there, I do insist that they get it done by a certain time, because then when they come into class and they’re asked clicker questions, some of which they’re graded on, they’re not going to be successful in that if they haven’t done the basic reading. And that’s where I’m seeing a lack of engagement, outside of class. I’ve had many fewer students complete the readings before class, or even weeks after they were due, they’re still not completing some of those readings. And that’s the concern that I’m having. And I have to say that I’ve also observed some of this with faculty too, that attendance at professional development workshops have been a lot lower this year than in the last couple of years. And some of it may be because of burnout after the pandemic. And I should note that on my campus, we’re also transitioning to a new learning management system. And a lot of people have been struggling with that, which takes up a lot of their time, reducing the amount of time they have to learn other new things while they’re struggling to learn the new system. But this issue of engagement does seem to be impacting the amount of learning that I’m seeing, at least in my large intro classes, I’m not seeing it so much in my upper-level classes. But I’m wondering if some of this may be because we have students who’ve spent a year or two with remote learning in schools that often had very few resources to do that, well and students may have just gotten out of practice with doing a lot of work, because in many school systems, students were just passed on to the next grade level without necessarily learning very much in many classes.

Michelle: Yeah, I’ve seen this dynamic, actually even at my upper levels as well became rather glaring the first time that we went back to an in person symposium, it was the kind of capstone experience in this class was to bring some research to the symposium. It’s a wonderful experience, but it dawned on me partway through the semester to step back and just say, “Okay, how many of you have never done a presentation like this before?” And yeah, previously, most of the class would have had some experience either in an in-person research lab that they were in, or in a methods class or something like that. It was one of those head slapping moments, at least for me, feeling, “Of course, of course they don’t know.” And I try to come at it like, “Well, this is the time to do what I probably should have always done for what was previously a small group of students. But it’s still an important group of students who are sitting in the back going, ‘Oh, my gosh, I feel lost. I don’t want to even raise my hand. I don’t know what she’s talking about with the poster or participation or even things like what to wear.’” And so I did, I went back and dusted off and created a few stopgap materials. I found some things out on the web that actually demonstrated a poster presentation that was in progress and what to do and not to do. So it can be an opportunity to do more of that transparency and kind of scaffolding and bringing everybody up. But yeah, it can be shocking to stand back and say, “Okay, who has not actually done this thing that I kind of always assumed would be the case by this level,” regardless of what that is.

Rebecca: I’ve experienced this, even with graduate students, this lack of knowledge of certain kinds of academic experiences, in part because they were learning online or not doing things in person, and now they’re in in-person classes and having any in-person experiences. So I had the same experience, Michelle, but with graduate students, and needing to really build in some transparency there that maybe didn’t need to be there before because in their undergraduate experience, they were very likely to have had a similar experience.

John: And as you said, Michelle, giving students more structure and more support is something that we probably should be doing anyway. We just finished a reading group on Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan’s book on inclusive teaching. And that’s the message at the heart of that book: that giving students support will help all students at least some and will especially help those students who come from backgrounds that provide less preparation for success in college. So to the extent to which we as faculty all learn that lesson, that giving students more support is useful, it’ll be a better environment.

Michelle: I agree and what seems implicit in that., how you’ve put that too is, instead of like, “Oh my gosh, another thing I have to cram into the semester” …for our motivation and our engagement is to say, this is part of one of the most noble pursuits that we can have as educators, to give it that meaningful frame. So yes, a hearty I agree with that book, in particular, and their framework. And for me, that helps me kind of say, like, “Okay, yeah, this is not just an extra add on, this is what we’re here for.” And if I’m trimming back a few extra articles, or chapters, and I have done that, to some extent, in favor of being able to go more deep and into content, and be more supportive in these positive ways, I think that’s a win.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I’ve noticed or experienced recently with students is high engagement in class, high engagement in the subject matter, but we’ve had really interesting conversations about procrastination or not doing things outside of class, largely due to a lack of confidence, or striving for perfection that doesn’t exist. And there’s a lot of that emotion around that. And so a lot of my students have talked about that, or shared that with me, which I’m grateful that they’ve shared that with me. But that’s what’s preventing them from getting started.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I think folks who follow the research on procrastination out there, it’s not as much in my specialty area, but I do think it’s fascinating. And it’s another one of these touch points between what we believe, what we feel, what we’re motivated to do, and then in turn, what we remember and what we learn. So I think that for people who are interested in this whole topic of procrastination, why does it happen? What are some really good ways to talk about it, and address it, there’s new stuff coming out. And it’s a good thing to talk about with students as well, I think years back, it was almost a taboo subject. But now from what I hear you saying, you just bring it up with students, and we can all talk about it not as like, “Oh, that’s some terrible thing that other people, bad students, are doing. This is all of us, right? [LAUGHTER] We live in a world of abundance, but also abundant distractions, and so many things competing for our time. So I like this idea of opening up that line of communication, saying, “What do we all do to tackle this when it occurs?”

John: Dan Ariely had a paper a number of years ago, where he did an experiment in class, I think it was an economics class, actually, where students wrote papers. And he and some co authors had two sections of the class, where in one section, students had three papers with fixed due dates spread evenly through the semester. And in the other section, students were able to pick their own due dates. And there was a penalty in either case of one percentage point a day for each day the work was submitted late. And what was found in that study is that the students did best who either had fixed due dates, they had higher quality papers, and higher quality work, and so forth, they wrote more, and the quality of the work was much better when they had fixed due dates, or when they chose evenly spaced due dates. From an economist’s perspective, the rational thing to do would be to put all three due dates on the last day of class, because then you could still plan to do it evenly throughout the semester, but you would have no cost of doing that. So if something came up, you could postpone it. But what happened is the people who put all their due dates at the end of the semester ended up procrastinating, turning in work later, the papers were shorter, they were lower quality, and in general, they didn’t do quite as well. So that’s one study, I often will cite to students when we talk about due dates and deadlines, and so forth. But it’s an interesting study. And I haven’t seen anything else in economics journals, at least, related to that, but I’m sure there’s more that I haven’t seen in the literature.

Michelle: Fascinating stuff from across the disciplines.

John: One of the things you talk about in your blog post is that the strategies that students use for learning are not the strategies that evidence tells us are most effective. Students tend to use strategies that provide some short-term benefit, and seem to be easier, rather than the strategies that require them to struggle a little bit more with the content. One of the things you talk about are some ways that we could encourage students to adopt strategies that may not feel quite as good in the short run, but result in more learning. How can we motivate students to use evidence-based learning strategies?

Rebecca: …motivate them to struggle? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Right, but that is really what we’re talking about here. And I do want to go into this… big qualification here… I don’t think that students are just out there wanting to get the best grade and for the least effort necessarily, that’s just not a narrative about students that I buy into. So, I don’t think students are trying to do low-effort strategies. But, just like the rest of us, we don’t have a very good or accurate view always, a very empirical view, of what actually pays off in terms of learning. It’s pretty rare that we sit down and actually kind of do the math and say, “Well, I did this, I systematically changed the approach in this way, and here’s the outcome.” So we don’t come at it that way. So no wonder that over time, we end up with kind of a distorted view of what actually does work. So that’s a big piece of it. And it is true at the same time that these strategies we’re talking about… well, let’s take one, for example, of blocked study. Now this is a term that I also want to unpack a little bit too, it’s not super intuitive. So this has to do with the principle of interleaving, which I always say it doesn’t always apply in all studying, but to cases where you’re learning how to apply different problem solving strategies and you have to choose from several when you’re having to categorize and learn to discriminate among categories. So that is a subset of what students are sometimes learning. And the thing is, we have this great powerful line of research that shows that actually mixing it up in an unpredictable way, the different problem types or category types, means it’s going to be a lot more memorable when you actually work through those practice problems or practice sets. And if that’s the case, the unpredictability of like, well, something’s gonna pop up categorizing different painting styles, I have no idea [LAUGHTER] if it’s going to be a Renoir or a Monet, what could be next? It’s that unpredictability. So people sometimes confuse it with just like mixing up topics or having variety, but it really refers to the systematic principle. Now, when students are offered the opportunity to structure their own study, what do you know, they tend to go with blocked study, and again, it’s not because there’s some dispositional factor, they don’t want to do their homework or something like that. Really when you look at it intuitively, it’s like an illusion, block study feels so effective. I’m going to work through all of this one painter or all of this one way of solving a statistics problem. And then I’ll go into the next and our textbooks are organized that way, too. So students have seen that, and so that’s what they fall back on. And there’s some recent work that I’ve talked about in that blog post and in a few other places, that has really studied in a very granular fashion… it’s presented students with different alternatives, like here’s a blocked study schedule. Here’s an interleaved one. We don’t use the technical terms, we show them both options, and say, “Okay, let’s pretend you have a math test coming up. Which one of these do you want to do? And why?” And yeah, students, they gravitate towards the blocked one. And they say, I perceive that this is going to be easier, first of all, and that’s fine. We want to use the most efficient strategy. So they say, this is gonna look easy and also, it feels more effective. Because I feel like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.” But as we all know, sometimes that’s a false sense of security. So that’s the example as it lays out in that one case, and I think that that is a larger kind of big dynamic, that we do have to be aware of what looks easy, what feels easy, what looks effective, what feels effective. Sometimes, your brain is kind of playing tricks on you. And that becomes very serious when it is the case that things like interleaved study are more effortful, but they’re going to pay off more for the time invested. Retrieval practice, which I and a lot of other folks in the space talk about so much, that’s another that it’s gonna require a different level of effort and engagement to close my book and say, “Alright, instead of rereading this chapter, what did I actually get out of it, or maybe I can seek out a quiz.” And to me, I also think it’s not just the effort involved, and research, by the way, it’s also showing students also to look at this and go, “that looks difficult.” It also kind of emotionally, I mean, I was feeling okay about this chapter, and now, I can’t really kid myself any more. So to the extent that students might be kind of saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” …like, we might all do this, this will kind of bust that unjustified optimism, and that doesn’t always feel great in the short term. So if that’s the case, I mean, we can set up these wonderful learning activities, and if students aren’t going to do them, then they’re not doing them or us any good or any benefit. So, that’s the case as well. And so if they have a sense of the value, and a lot of these strategies that maybe we can touch on, do have to do with exposing and revealing and convincing about the value, and finding ways to draw students into exactly those techniques. So just because these are difficult, I do want to make sure everybody doesn’t get this terrible impression of like, “Ah, studying is going to be this miserable slog, no pain, no gain,” …it’s more subtle than that. And they really do work, you really are gonna get so much more out of the time that you put in and for students who really are stretched really thin as we’ve touched on. That’s an important powerful message.

Rebecca: You mentioned a number of specific examples in your post, do oyu want to dive into some of those and share something like the snowball effect or self-determination theory, or some of your other really awesome examples?

Michelle: Oh, thank you, I appreciate that. And, after all, the big philosophy and approach matters, but let’s get down to the actual techniques. So I’ve referenced something called the “snowball effect,” and this is just my informal term, but really, the more you know, the more that you want to know. And the more that you know, because of the way memory works, the more you know about a particular domain or subject area, the easier it is to acquire new facts. And like I always throw out the example of folks we know who are just really committed to some hobby or area of interest, the sports fanatics and so on, they can run into a fact one time and boom, they’ve got it, they’ve maybe got it for life, and they don’t have to study [LAUGHTER] or do anything like that. And so there is that snowball, or rich get richer effect, just because of some factors about how memory is set up and how it works. From a very practical angle, like I ran into this really intriguing study. And it’s not one where we’ve got piles of research yet, but this really got me thinking. So they did a study where they had students through retrieval practice, learn some basic facts about an area that they picked. And they were able to systematically track that when students did learn this foundational information more solidly, then when they had the option, “Oh, would you like to know more about this subject?” …students were more likely to say yes. And that’s totally voluntary. And that’s the sort of thing that makes our hearts go pitter pat, as teachers we want students leaving and going, “Oh, my gosh, now I really want to read that next reading that Dr. Kane assigned, for example.” And like when you were talking about, students are coming into class, and we’re trying to get them into the next level of conceptual stuff and exciting things they can do, if they don’t have the facts, it’s gonna be really, really tough, so it also really points up the importance of doing that. And it also, I think, addresses one of these big myths about memory. And this is one that I’ve talked about in some of my recent workshops, and so on, and I mentioned in my last book, this big myth that if we do focus on having students concentrate on remembering foundational information, we’re going to turn them off of learning: “Oh, it’s going to be this sort of these nightmare of drills.” And, “sure, they’ll know it for the test, but they’ll walk out and they’ll never want to be engaged with the subject again. So it’s a big loss, [LAUGHTER] right?” And this is really calling that into question, saying that sometimes knowing some of these cool initial facts can start to set you down that path and then maybe someday, you will be that expert who can hear a fact one time in this area and we’ve got it. Why? Because we already know so much about it. So again, that whole Interplay there. There’s also the role of choice and autonomy. And this is one that I think a lot of really intuitive, committed, teachers really hit on early, even if they never really have some of the more formal terminology for it. So when there’s choice, not only are students more invested in what they’re doing, there’s possibly a role of curiosity here. So I talk about, in this blog post, this sham lottery study, it was one of these, where if you look at it on the face of it, you’re like, “What are they doing?” But as a psychologist, I’m like, “Ah, that’s really clever.” So basically, they had research participants going through this little pretend lottery of like, “Okay, you’re selecting out of this bucket of red balls, and so on. And what do you think it’s going to come up?” And the one twist that they put in there, is sometimes people chose which of these two little buckets, there are these little random drawings, that they were going to focus on? And then it’s like, okay, well, we can either just move on with the study, or you can see how it came out? Well, they want to know how it came out when they chose… even this incredibly arbitrary [LAUGHTER] low-stakes situation. So I think that’s also another kind of natural, emotional process, motivational process, that we can tie into… setting up curiosities or questions, but also having students say, “Well, which of these two projects do you want to do?” These days I offer options whenever I can. Would you like to write a term paper? The sort of formal paper? Or would you like to put together a slideshow that you can narrate and share? Big learning objectives are probably similar, but students can pick and I always present in practical terms, I say, “Well, if you are going to graduate school next year, and you need a writing sample for your portfolio, this is a great opportunity to do that orr if you’d like to stretch your skills with oral presentations, maybe because of the last few years, you haven’t gotten to do that as much, then you can choose this,” …but simply by having them make a choice, the research would predict that they are going to be more invested, and they’re going to be involved in these more effective things. So that’s one and oh, I’m really excited to see what’s coming out in this whole sub area of “Okay, we’ve done all the research we know that things like retrieval practice and interleaved study, all this engaged stuff. We know it works. We put it on a tip sheet, we gave it to students, nothing happened.” Uh oh.[LAUGHTER] Now what? So not just the like, “Okay, what should students be doing?” But “how do we get them to do those very things?” And, boy, if there was ever a time when we realize, yeah, my ability to just sort of exhort you and make you do things because I say so is limited, this is the time. Because I don’t get to go home with students [LAUGHTER] and say like, “Alright, that whole thing about quiz yourself. And so now you really have to do it.” So there’s this relatively new framework that’s come out too from some cognitive psychologists that I really admire, Mark McDaniels and his team. The knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning approach, KBCP. So this pulls in from some other research on intentional behavior change that’s also been perking along just all on its own for years and years. We know so much about how people set a course and decide to change their behaviors. And study skills are, after all, kind of an entrenched pattern of behavior for many students by the time they get to us. How do we go in and change it? And yeah, it’s absolutely not through my least favorite technique, which is put together a list of random tips and hope for the best. So they say, alright, knowledge is the first step. So just telling students like, “Hey, there’s all this research that shows that if you close the book and quiz yourself, you’re going to get more out of this. If you do the reading quiz that I set up for you, and do it as many times as you possibly can, that’s going to help you retain the foundational information.” I’ve told them, I’ve shared it with them, or something like interleaved study, if you’ve got different problem types, mix them up. But it doesn’t stop there. That’s only the first step. So the next step is belief. And that means changing beliefs, which means persuasion. So we kind of dust off a whole bunch of other things out of the psychologist’s toolkit. How do you persuade people? Well, you show, don’t tell. So this team proposes doing things like “Well, let’s run a head-to-head comparison, like a Pepsi Challenge, in class. Sure, your brain tells you that you learned a ton just from reviewing, but did you? Let’s try it.” And this takes some time. I mean, this is not easy. But this is one of the things they propose: commitment. So now that I’ve persuaded you that this is the way to study, now, what’s your next step? So getting your students to say, “Yeah, I actually authentically believe this. And I see how it’s going to help me and I’m going to try it.” And then of course planning. So instead of just like, “I will do this,” right? Those of us who are veterans of New Year’s resolutions of yor [LAUGHTER] know that that is not the way to go. So yeah, saying “Okay, but here’s what I’m going to actually do. So I’ve got a test coming up, I’m going to maybe set up a study schedule, instead of just cramming it all in the last minute, which is [LAUGHTER] a really good empirically grounded strategy. I’m going to find these practice quizzes, or maybe I’ll get together with a study group and do that. So here’s my plan.” And then if possible, circling back and say, “Well, did it work.?” And hey, if we’re right, then students will actually try it, they’ll say, “Wow, in less time, I knocked the top out of this test that I was really worried about.” And that is going to feed that virtuous cycle of going right back to those effective strategies. So KPCB, I love it too, because I’ve been doing something similar in the Attention Matters Project that I think I’ve talked about on some previous episodes as well, which is all about having students themselves come in and see how their attention is limited, learn about the effects of things like distraction on their learning. But we don’t stop there. We give them a few rudimentary tools as well, we say, “Okay, what is going to be your plan if things are dragging in class and your mom is texting you? That’s tough. How are you going to get through [LAUGHTER] that without then checking out of your class? What are you going to do if your neighbors are watching who knows what on their laptop or they’re texting and it’s bothering you? What is going to be your plan?” So getting students to really think ahead to those things, commit to doing them in a way that works for them, and puts that newfound knowledge into practice. So those are some of the things that I’m really experimenting with and excited about right now.

Rebecca: So in that approach, it seems really necessary to help set up a structure for students and then circle back and have a reflective piece so that maybe they will do that on their own next time.

Michelle: And there’s some exciting suggestions from research here, too. I mean, I know it’s easy sometimes as faculty, especially at the end of a long year, like this one, to say, “Ah, well, did it actually stick with them?” But there’s a couple of different projects out there that have kind of converging on this idea that once students really do see something like retrieval practice, active studying, and so on, and once they really experienced that, as part of the structure of one course, they absolutely will run with it. So they will go into the next class, whether in your discipline or not, and say, “Well, from now on, I’m actually going to have a study plan that’s set up in this particular way and I’m going to do this.” So I personally find that very, very encouraging that “Yeah, it takes some work to do this stuff, but the payoff, even if you personally don’t see it right in front of your eyes, the payoff is likely there.”

John: And so the more faculty you start doing these things too, the more likely it is that students will adopt new approaches. So spreading this more widely is helpful.

Michelle: Yes, yes, a hearty I agree to that statement. And I can test on my own campus, I’ve seen more faculty bringing in more structure, things like online reading quizzes, I have noticed that, so I guess that’s a counterpoint to the “Wow, my lived experience is telling me that there’s these issues in engagement. Maybe so, but my lived experience is also telling me that students are coming to me more ready to be proactive about their study, they need a little less persuasion to do things like reading quizzes, because they at least they’ve seen them before. So yeah, I think it absolutely can work that way you’re describing.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Michelle: Wow, well, these days, I’m working a lot on my substack newsletter, it’s called the R3 Newsletter. And I think this is the mechanism by which we connected on some of these new topics. So I love that it’s already starting these great dialogues. And if you haven’t seen substack at all, it’s a bit of a blogging platform. And my substack is free, some subtasks are paid, but mine is definitely free. And so, for example, if you’re interested in this topic, I would definitely tell your listeners to check out Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s substack, as well, it’s called “Once More, with Feeling” and I also want to affirm that she is and her work are really at the forefront of this whole topic of motivation and emotion and particular in learning so a great other substack to follow it and buy her book, Spark of Learning is also just an absolute modern classic in this. So I decided to get in the fray since I saw these wonderful thinkers around me also doing this. And this has been a really good platform, and a way to structure for myself something that I felt needed a refresh, which was my reading of the literature that’s coming out. So what I do is twice a month, approximately, I’ve been putting out discussions of research that I’m reading. My little heuristic is anything that was published in approximately the last year, really privileging the new stuff. And I’ve historically just seen that then when I really get into the nitty gritty of the research and what it says and what it doesn’t and parsing that for folks, especially those who may be outside of social sciences, that’s where I get the most affirmation from folks and people saying, “Yeah, this was really helpful.” So I decided to run with that. And so that’s a big project ight now. I’ve been really happy with the reception and just working on that. I’ve been writing and thinking more about this topic of motivation and cognition. So as we mentioned at the top of our conversation, it’s one that goes back to kind of my initial ponderings, thrashing around as a beginning graduate student of like, “How does this all work?” Coming back to that, and really finding new ways that I can share that with my fellow faculty. So getting the word out there. I have a few new projects that I’m working on that tie back to that attention issue. So that’s another perpetual area of interest for me. So I have a few new writing and research projects that are going on with that and kind of in the development phase. And this summer, I am going to be catching up on a stack of books, just an epic number of these great books and works that are coming out. Seems like every week, there’s a new thing that goes on that list. So I look forward to a few weeks or more to really concentrate on that.

John: And we should note this is the second podcast that has come out of things we’ve seen posted on your substack blog.

Michelle: Oh, wonderful.

John: One other thing. Sarah Rose Cavanaugh has a new book coming out that we were fortunate enough to get a draft copy of and it should be out this summer: Mind over Monsters, if you’d like to see more about this topic.

Michelle: Oh, absolutely. Alright. It’s on the stack now.

Rebecca: That pile keeps growing.

Michelle: Yes, it does.

Rebecca: Better add on another week. [LAUGHTER]

John: We could all use an extra week or summer.

Rebecca: Right? Yeah.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, Michelle.

Michelle: Oh, my pleasure, you as well.

Rebecca: Thanks, Michelle.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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282. Moving the Needle

Posted in cognitive science, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, instructional communication, learning, reflective practice, retrieval practice, self-regulated learning, spaced practice, STEM
March 29, 2023

The study techniques that most college students adopt do not align with what research tells us about how we learn. In this episode, Sheela Vermu and Adrienne Williams join us to discuss what happens when an instructor in a community college biology class attempts to encourage students to adopt evidence-based study methods. Sheela is a biologist at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove. Illinois. Adrienne is a biologist at the University of California, Irvine.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The study techniques that most college students adopt do not align with what research tells us about how we learn. In this episode, we discuss what happened when an instructor in a community college biology class attempts to encourage students to adopt evidence-based study methods.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guests today are Sheela Vermu and Adrienne Williams. Sheela is a biologist at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove. Illinois. Adrienne is a biologist at the University of California, Irvine. They are co-authors of a study entitled “Moving the Needle: Evidence of an Effective Study Strategy Intervention in a Community College Biology Course.” Welcome, Sheela and Adrienne.

Sheela: Thank you.

Adrienne: Thank you.

John: Today’s teas are:… Are you either of you drinking tea?

Sheela: Yes, I am.

Adrienne: We heard that was a thing.

John: And what type of tea?

Sheela: I’m actually drinking my favorite tea. It’s called A Sama tea. It’s a calm relaxed, lavender, rose, chamomile and cardamom.

Rebecca: You just describing it just took my blood pressure down. It sounds very relaxing. [LAUGHTER]

Sheela: I was doing it for myself. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Well, you helped me too. [LAUGHTER]

Adrienne: I can’t compete with that. But I have a classic Trader Joe’s pomegranate white tea.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: I think, John, today was my closest call of not having tea. Because when I got home to record about an hour ago, we had no water at my house. The water was off, but it’s on now. And I have a Scottish afternoon tea.

John: And I have a black raspberry green tea, which I haven’t had for a while but it’s nice.

Rebecca: Yeah, that is one that you haven’t had in a while.

John: I had it last time when I was in quarantine at home, [LAUGHTER] which is where I am now with COVID.

Rebecca: It’s like you’ve established quarantine routines. [LAUGHTER]

John: Unfortunately, yes, this is my second time. We’ve invited you here today to discuss the study that you both worked on. One of the things that you noted in the study itself is that there’s relatively few studies of student study strategies at the community college level. Even though community colleges provide an introductory college experience to over half of all the students that graduate with a bachelor’s degree in STEM fields. Could you give us a brief overview of your study?

Sheela: Thank you, John, for asking that question. Because it sort of made me think about what really brought about my interest in studying this topic. It stemmed from me becoming a community college Bio Insights Fellow, and Insights is a network of community college instructors who are actually interested in investigating teaching and learning in their classroom. So when I became a fellow in that network, one of the goals was for us to think about what are some teaching practices that could inform the scholarship of teaching and learning in a community college setting. And I teach microbiology and anatomy and physiology at Waubonsee Community College. And while I was starting to teach, I realized that students really struggled to study effectively. And community colleges occupy a very important position in higher ed, especially in STEM because they provide low cost training and education for workforce training, preparation for transfer, and also recently an opportunity to reskill for many of our underemployed and our underserved students and population. So keeping that in mind and our classroom structure, we noticed that in the biology education field, papers or authorships for community college faculty, in a CC context was very few, only 1- 3% of all the biology education research articles had a community college context question or a community college. So this network sort of enriched me to think about what do I need to ask a question in the classroom that would encourage my students to use better study strategies? So in some ways, I wanted to ask this question, but it was the Insights that helped me think about this from the scholarship of teaching purposes. So the brief overview of what we see as the basic study of this paper, is we were really wanting to ask this question, what kind of study strategies students are using in a community college context right now in a biology classroom that I teach, that was one… and can an intervention of some kind from an instructor really intentionally encourage students to reflect upon their current study strategies and guide them in some ways to change their strategies to ones that have been shown through research to have high impact. So it was to just gauge the field, but also to see if we can gently intentionally guide that providing guiding practices. And that’s sort of the big picture of what we did. But we administered a pre- and a post- survey. The pre- and post- survey was taken from a previously published work. The survey actually asked questions about the study habits and the study strategies that students actually used. The intervention was administered. And one of the things that is really important is I was able to get approval from our college institutional effectiveness team, and those are the ones that serve as the institutional review board and they look at the studies research paper and also helped assist with gathering institutional data, because institutional data was very meaningful to our study. And Adrienne helped arrange the statistical power. That is what made a big difference in the study. And she also helped me wrap it up and write it up and get it published in the CBE Life Science Education journal.

Rebecca: So a lot of students enter college and plan to acquire a STEM degree but often change their mind or change their plans. Which students are disproportionately likely to give up on their planned STEM degree.

Adrienne: In general, regardless of institutions, students have a difficult time with a STEM degree. They tend to give lower grades and that can be very discouraging for students, even if they’ve done well in high school… when they get to college, and they start to not get A’s can be very discouraging. So there is a history for all undergraduates, when they enter even a four-year or a two-year program that they start to leave STEM. They find it less rewarding than they had thought, I would say community colleges have additional hurdles to overcome, because they are an open access system. And so they get students with a wide variety of past experiences. Some are people who’ve just come out of high school and are used to studying and are pretty on top of things… they remember their math, they’re accustomed to memorizing things. And then there are students that are adult learners, or perhaps have families, been in the military, perhaps they get a GED and have worked for awhile. And so there’s a lot of habits to relearn. That can cause problems, particularly in STEM where the grading is just historically rather harsh.

Sheela: I would agree with what you said about historically STEM attrition is pretty problematic. But the problem is also more exaggerated in marginalized and minoritized students who come from backgrounds that could have been a first generation, some kinds of a financial issues, students who probably did not have a whole lot of high school curriculum that prepared them well for a STEM field. And there’s been recent work in 2016, that talked about how the National Academies needed to look at improving underrepresented minority students persistence in STEM, not just entry into STEM, but for them to be able to stay in the pipeline, and successfully move on and build a career trajectory for themselves.

John: We saw similar results in an earlier podcast interview with Peter Arcidiacono from Duke. He was a co-author of a study that looked at the determinants of students’ continuation in STEM fields and found something very similar: that, holding other factors constant, females and students from historically minoritized groups were much more likely to change out of the STEM fields than students who were white males, even when they were doing relatively better in these classes, then the students who chose to remain in the discipline,

Adrienne: STEM classes, particularly, are not welcoming to many students, because the exams are difficult. Now, there’s just the culture that we’ve developed, not necessarily for good reasons but it does cause many students who are doing fine, who are scoring above the mean in the class, to feel like they’re not succeeding, because they’re only getting 70-80%. And that’s just kind of an unfortunate reality that we’re working to change. But in the meantime, we would like students to be as successful as possible on their exams.

Sheela: And recently, there’s been some studies that talk about some concrete steps to diversify the scientific workforce. And that came out last year in Science, and that talked about how students in the STEM field sometimes do get discouraged, and often feel really compartmentalized by the climate and some of the teaching methods and assessment, exactly what Adrienne was talking about in the STEM classroom. And there’s been an exodus of students, specifically from the underrepresented minority communities.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the study techniques that students were using before your intervention as part of your study?

Sheela: Yeah, so when I walked into the classroom, what I noticed were that students were typically cramming the night before the exam, or perhaps two days before the exam, and they would use one study session to just get all the notes that they could for that particular unit. The other thing that I noticed students doing were, they would be using a lot of flashcards, they would walk into the classroom with a whole bag of flashcards and sometimes it would all drop and they would have color-coded flashcards, different colored highlighters. And as the classes were going on, as I would see them studying, I would see them using most of these methods which was underlining key words in the textbook or terms or in the PowerPoint and in In some ways, creating some flashcards, and massing all of this study as they thought it was in one particular session, and then just go to the exams. And I saw them a little bit frustrated thinking that they had put in so many hours into it, and not having the results that they would have expected out of those exams.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about what study techniques you recommended to students and how you convey that information to students?

Sheela: So one of the key things that I did for myself was just to get familiarized with what were some high-impact study strategies, because this was not something that I was very familiar with. And one of the things I figured out was it was distributed spacing. And in the STEM fields, especially in the subjects that I teach, like microbiology, anatomy, and physiology, we wanted students to know one concept well, before they moved on to the second concept. So if they tried to do all of this studying the night before the exam, it’s very possible that they missed out one of the pieces in the Jenga, and the whole Jenga fell apart the day of the exam. So, something that I talked about was spacing, but also making sure that spacing is not just happening two days before, but it is distributed throughout the unit that we are actually covering. And the second high-impact practice that I asked students to think about was self testing. Self testing sometimes can be difficult for students to understand, especially at our community college setting, because the kinds of self testing that they’ve been exposed to in high school, is a teacher giving them a set of practice problems, or they having 50-60 questions in a test bank, and just going over those, and in some ways, just memorizing or flash carding and making it into a Quizlet. And they would think that is self testing. So I had to go back and walk them around and say that self testing would be to self test a concept. And to double check and see, do you really understand that concept by looking at a problem or a question, which is at the end of the chapter, before going on into the next particular concept? The other piece that is also very important that high impact practices that I talked about to the students was diagramming. And this was something that I wanted them to get away from, just trying to just reread chapters, condensing chapters, and summarizing chapters. I wanted them to get away from those kinds of practices and move on to something called diagramming.

John: So what did you find in terms of the use of self testing and spaced practice, as well as the drawing applications? Was there a significant change in the student use of these techniques over the course of the semester?

Sheela: So, in the beginning, there was some resistance from the students. Because this was something difficult for them to do, they had never heard of these kinds of strategies. And as we proceeded with the intervention, which was periodic, we found that students, over the period of the entire semester, improved their spacing, so they went from high levels of cramming to high levels of spacing. We also found that self testing, which was very low in the beginning, also improved at the end of the course. Students were not creating their own questions, but instead, they were using the questions that were at the end of the textbook that were desirable for comprehension. They were using questions that were problem-solving oriented, which were part of the assessment to test themselves and diagramming also improved by the time the semester finished.

Adrienne: Let me also say something that we noticed was students were willing to give up some strategies very easily. I do similar work at my large four-year R1 institution, and students also arrive in their first quarter at UC Irvine and they’re very fond of flashcards, and tend to also be fond of underlining and highlighting. And those are two study strategies that students see kind of quickly just don’t work. The exam questions that they get in college are just not associated with things that they did on flashcards and so they’re like, “Okay, boom,” and they drop them with very little resistance. Every year I check, every year, they come in high flashcards and they leave low flashcards. They’re like, “Nope, that didn’t work.” And they’re happy to drop that. Other study strategies like rereading their notes: they come in high rereading their notes, and we tell them, that won’t help. Yes, you have to understand the concepts, but stop rereading your notes, that is not an effective study strategy. And that one doesn’t move. They’re like, “Nope, still gotta reread my notes.” And so that’s been interesting for us. I talked to Sheela about that. I talked to students about that. And so some of these strategies are easier to move than others. And I think what’s going on… we’re going to foreshadow some metacognition here in students choosing what study strategies to use. They feel like when they start their study session, they have to decide what is it that I’m going to work on and so they reread their notes as a way to set themselves up with what needs to happen in the study strategy time they have coming up, but it just takes so long to reread all their notes that they know half their times gone by the time they finished doing the setup activity. And so they’re unable to do the more useful things of self testing, explaining to others, doing things from memory, painful things. It’s also just more encouraging and soothing to look at your notes and go “Yep, yep, I remember that. Yep. Okay, yep, I remember that.” And that feels like studying, even though not really.

John: That’s sometimes referred to as fluency illusion, that the notes are familiar, you see them, you remember the organization on the page, and it’s reassuring, even though it adds virtually nothing to your ability to either recall concepts or to transfer those concepts into different applications. But it’s hard for people to give that up, especially when they’ve been told to reread their notes and reread the materials over and over again, throughout all their prior educational experience.

Adrienne: Yeah. And it worked great for him in high school. So why would they believe us until they try it and find out that it doesn’t work? So some strategies are easy.

Rebecca: So much easier when your answers are in your notes, and not from learning?

Adrienne: Well, the ironic thing is, in my classes, I’m now all open note, open Google. And so they still think the notes will be the answer to all their problems. Now, it’s all application problems.and so you can’t find all that. So it’s hard, it’s difficult for students to change, even if they know like, one of the new things I’ve started to ask is, what do you think researchers say is more effective: spacing your studying or cramming? And all the students know that spacing is more effective. And then you ask, and what did you do for this test? And they’re like, “Well, I had to cram.” So a lot of it is not lack of understanding of what should happen, but just the difficulties associated with it, just like eating right and exercise, the difficulties with actually doing the difficult work.

Rebecca: I think often students mentioned that it’s difficult to plan their time, or to have the time to do the thing that they know is good for them.

Adrienne: Which is why we’re going to again, come back to metacognition, I think, that this talk about how we’re kind of moving forward out of just asking students, how are they studying, but thinking more broadly about metacognition.

John: Before we get to that, though, could faculty reduce the incentive to cram by using more low-stakes activities so that students don’t have that incentive to cram before a high-stakes exam and ignore studying the rest of the time.

Sheela: So John, in the courses that I am teaching, we have not just one high-stakes exam, we have many small unit exams. And these unit exams come every two to three weeks. But the material in STEM, as we speak, is so dense for the students that they have to move from lower order Bloom’s… just remembering terminology… all the way to concept analysis to an explanation very quickly, in a very brief period of time. And I think even having those low-stakes assignments is not enough for them. Because those assignments, they may not choose to use the high impact study strategies, they may get away by looking at a summary, or maybe looking at the notes in the low stakes. But when they come to these unit exams, even if it’s just two chapters, I found students in my college, in my classroom, really struggling, even if the low-stakes assignments were done at a 95% completion, which is what led me to think of this study and say, what is it that I can do as an instructor, I would love to change all the dynamics of higher ed, and move things seamlessly to make it a beautiful world for everyone. But I can only control what I can do in the classroom, which is the intervention. And I think a persuasive intervention through modular use over a period of time, which is consistent, and short and brief, is a possibility that faculty could use in order to shift students’ practices of study strategies. And for them to be cognitively aware that this is a good study strategy. I’m actually aware of it. And that’s the knowledge I have from the literature, which is what Adrienne was talking about. But then how do you implement it in the moment and modify just a little bit so that you can actually get good grades in that unit exam that’s coming? Because there are five of them, you just can’t afford to blow each one of them. You have to just get gooder and gooder if there is a word like that. [LAUGHTER]

John: You mentioned working to improve students’ metacognitive skills. Could you talk a little bit about how you built in metacognition into this approach.

Sheela: So when we did the intervention, my intervention was very simple. It was a PowerPoint presentation, and it was a PowerPoint presentation before and after each exam. And we have five big exams in that course. And we had an exam wrapper as well. So the PowerPoint presentation was not just this is what you need to do. It was things from the literature of high-impact study strategies, and also being aware of what is a low-impact study strategy. And the PowerPoint presentation was 15 minutes long, it had about 15 to 16 slides. But there were some examples of how to use those strategies and how not to use them. For example, if they were looking at muscle contraction, and if they were looking at how the skeletal muscles, students know that it’s a bicep, how does the bicep actually contract instead of just making 100 flashcards of every piece of that information, which is in that unit? How can we translate that into concept, and learn each concept and see how that moves into the next concept. For example, when we think about this, you think of a motor neuron that actually stimulates a skeletal muscle like a bicep, and there are multiple segments in this piece, the neuron has to send a signal, which is an action potential, so they need to know what’s an action potential. And they also need to know the structure of the neuron. So there are two big pieces there, then it sort of travels into a terminal, and it causes some channels to open, they need to know the kind of ions that actually travel through those channels, and what causes those ions to travel from A to B. And then through that influx of those ions, they need to know there is a release mechanism. And that release mechanism causes another set of ions to open postsynaptically in the muscle. And from there, they move on into understanding how it contracts the muscle tissue or cell. So there’s a sequential activity that goes on. And for students to be able to compartmentalize that and get good at understanding each concept before they move on to the next is something that my intervention was part of. And for them not to just make all of that into a highlighting flashcard, summarizing it into three sentences and say, the neuron travels and the bicep contracts. And in the middle, there is a gap. And that’s called a synapse. And that’s what they would do when they summarize. And that’s not effective, because the questions are not summary driven. The questions are application driven. What would you do when a drug blocks that particular channel? What would happen upstream? What would happen downstream? And now they’re like, “I never thought about this much detail.” So that was the intervention. But then there was also an exam wrapper. The exam wrapper, it was more of a reflective piece. I just thought it would give students an opportunity after every exam to self reflect and see what study strategies they used. How many hours did they spend studying? What would they like to change for the next exam? And I thought it was reflective, I gathered a lot of paper and I gathered a lot of data, it’s sort of gave a quiet moment for our students to reflect on exams. But talking with Adrienne and working on this for a little while, realized that the research on exam wrappers does not show… it’s not efficacious enough to change students on how they learn. So now I’m doing something a little bit different where I’m not just doing an exam wrapper and calling it as a check in point on Canvas for them to sort of reflect after the exam, but not just using exam as the main tool, which is what shifted us to think about the next steps, which is the metacognition, which Adrienne was talking about.

Rebecca: Adrienne, do you want to share some of the details about the metacognition side of it here?

Adrienne: Yeah, I do research on my students. And it’s just been fascinating how students seemed to choose to do strategies which didn’t seem helpful. And so in additional reading that we’ve done, Sheela and I have learned more about metacognition. And you can kind of break down metacognition, in knowing what good strategies are… like, do students know that spacing and retrieval practice and interleaving? And diagramming? Do they know that those are considered the good strategies? Second, do they have the metacognitive skills to use them at the right places, or even though they know spacing is good, they never actually set up time to do the studying days in advance. And then thirdly, metacognitive judgment, do they have a sense for yes, they now know this information, can they judge their learning? Is their appropriate judgment of learning that goes on? And so all of these are steps that we realized, all we knew was which strategy students chose. We didn’t know if they had the knowledge about which ones were good ones. And we didn’t know whether or not they recognize whether or not they were successful. And so we’ve expanded our questions to students: do you know which strategies are successful? …and pretty much they do. That doesn’t seem to be the missing link. It’s the scraping together, the organization time to actually apply them early enough that they can spend the time appropriately. And we’re also trying to determine can we help students? Give them regular feedback? The exam wrappers didn’t seem to work really well. There wasn’t a lot of evidence that they were really doing a lot of changing of student behavior. So, something I’m trying this quarter, particularly in my anatomy class, is to ask students: “If I said different study strategies were worth different amounts. I said, rereading your notes is only worth 0.2 points per hour and I said, explaining concepts to a neighbor or drawing diagrams by hand of the different systems and that’s worth 1.5 points per hour, will you change how you study in order to maximize your studying points? And so we’re in the middle of that right now to see is there anything that can motivate students to attempt to try new, difficult, painful, complicated things, other than the comforting things of rereading and rewatching videos? That’s a bigger metacog picture I’m working on, Sheela’s also doing that, kind of increasing our focus away from just single study strategies to this metacognitive view, do students have the metacognitive chops? And is there anything that we can do as instructors to help them with these applications? Because once you’ve told them that spacing is important, they’re like, ”Alright, spacing is important.” But that’s not solving the problem much. It’s an important initial first step, but are they actually going to figure out how can I schedule an hour a night on my anatomy, so that I have some chances to forget and relearning, and so that relearning really kind of nails down those mental pathways, and so it’s easier for them to do the work for application problems when they get to an exam? So we’re enjoying just trying different things as we move forward, to see can we expand our understanding of metacognition. help students understand? Can they tell us what they understand and don’t understand? And can they tell us what they really struggle with in the application so that we can help reward them for doing good studying? Happy to do that.

Rebecca: Have you tried sharing a study plan for the week just to see if they followed it to see if it worked?

Sheela: Yes. And I think that’s sort of the third part of metacognition, that Adrienne was just talking about. The knowledge is one, which is the strategies that they know, and whether they can actually apply those strategies when they are thinking or listening or reading difficult tasks. That’s very important, because you can apply these strategies when it’s in your comfort zone. It is the application of these high-impact strategies when you’re out of your comfort zone, and that is really important. And that’s where the planning comes in: having a calendar and making sure you plan it, and you’re putting in the hours. But what I found in my explanations with my students is that even though they planned the time, I had students who had devoted an X number of hours, they just didn’t know when they got to the muddiest point that they were even muddled. [LAUGHTER] And that is, to me, metacognitive judgment, right? You know, that you don’t know, and you know, that you need to do something that you don’t know, and students were like, they didn’t even know they were muddled. And so they didn’t go ahead and use the appropriate strategies, or change directions, or make some adjustments one week before the exam so that they can actually monitor their learning, which is where we are working on building the set of skills, and just making sure we ask our students and see if we can shift their practices to more of a judgment outside of just planning the time. Planning the time is very important, but it’s not just planning the time. What do you do with that time? And we couldn’t be with them all the time, to sort of shift it.

Adrienne: You’re probably familiar with the idea of high-structure courses, having many assessments. And I think that is really important. It’s a lot more work for the instructor to be building all of these assessments and managing them. But the more cases where you can help students get feedback on whether or not they’re learning successfully, the more likely they’re going to realize that the thing they thought would be fine is not actually working.

John: You talked a bit about ways in which we might be able to better improve student’s understanding of effective study strategies. But did you find any impacts of the techniques that were used during this experiment? Did it make a difference for some of the students?

Sheela: The drawing did. To me, the way I was thinking of drawing was, I was thinking of it as a visual representation of a science process. That’s how I was thinking of it. But the drawing was very meaningful to the students, because students before in my class, were sketching typically, or taking a diagram or a figure from a textbook. Because most science textbooks have beautiful colored large figures, they will just take that figure and translate it into a sketch and just draw some diagrams and draw some arrows and point to some facts. But drawing the process was very important. And not only drawing the process as a flowchart, but actually organizing the conceptual information and connecting the dots. So in some ways, the way I was using drawing representation was more like a concept mapping. But I also realized that students without a lot of encouragement on how to do these concept maps or how to do these representational drawings, were not getting a lot of feedback, because they were just drawing and maybe they’re drawing it beautifully. But they were not really using that drawing to really understand and self test themselves on some of the key concepts. So this semester, what I’m actually doing is asking for our students to show some of their drawings and upload it on Canvas. And I have two or three criteria before it’s accepted as a drawing. And one would be to make sure that they have some basic notes that they have talked about, some key concepts. And then they have also asked themselves a question, which would be like a feedback, like a retrieval question using that drawing. So they’re using the drawing as a practice. And they’re using the drawing as a self-retrieval practice to ask a question. And I’m hoping that it would have some change. But the literature in the drawing area is not very clear. And I would like to use it as an if and then statement, maybe, like, you know, if this happens to the sodium, and what happens to the action potential, or maybe like a causal effect kind of statement, or sometimes maybe even say, why and how, why does this happen? And how do you think you can make it better?

Adrienne: It really does take time and scaffolding for students to be effective at something like this. You can’t just assign them a drawing or tell students you should draw more when you study. But taking the time in class to assign something, give them appropriate scaffolding, give them feedback, show them what you were imagining it would look like, asking them a test question that should have been easy to answer if the diagram had been appropriately written. And just training students, we tend to do a lot of assumption that somebody before us did the training, and that’s just not appropriate in many cases. It is really helpful to make space during class time, either by flipping the class or by flipping 10 minutes of the class, moving that outside to pre-class work so that you have time in class to train students how to think carefully and study effectively so they can be more successful going forward.

Rebecca: I think one of the themes that I’m hearing both of you point to is helping students prioritize things, there might be a sequence to knowing or what might be most important versus kind of an extraneous detail that’s not as important until you have the big thing figured out. And a lot of times when you’re new to something, these are not obvious things. But when we model how to make a diagram and verbalize how we made a decision, or how we chose what might go in a diagram, it can be really helpful and enlightening to students because they’re seeing how that thought process might work. If they’ve not experienced it for themselves.

Adrienne: It’s not like students aren’t working hard. I think we tend to think that somehow students that are doing badly in the class are slacking, and that is often not the case, they’re working very hard. But if you’re spending hours making flashcards, that’s just not as useful a thing to spend time on

Rebecca: …for hours going down a rabbit hole that’s like not actually important… [LAUGHTER] which I sometimes have had conversations with my students like “You spent how long on that? Yeah, that’s not something to worry about. Maybe you should do this other thing instead. [LAUGHTER]”

Sheela: Yeah, and color coding. And our textbooks in the sciences have a lot of colors. And the textbooks also have a lot of highlights. So in some ways, I feel that some of these high-impact study strategies are not very, very clearly explained in our textbooks. So when they see the highlighted word in a textbook, or they see the color-coded diagrams, the students often believe that that’s the secret. In one of our exams recently, I asked them to bring that color-coded diagram and see if that helps them answer the questions. And they were surprised that they could only answer 50% of the questions on the exam with that color-coded diagram. The rest had to be some kind of retrieval practice, some kind of higher-order thinking which they had not spent the time doing, because there was spending more time drawing that thing out, like a sketch.

Rebecca: …and probably essentially just copying whatever they saw. [LAUGHTER]

Sheela: and just making it look prettier. That’s it.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Adrienne: The good strategies are painful, they’re difficult and painful, and expose everything you don’t know. And they feel like you don’t understand things if you’re doing the good work. And that’s a difficult thing to fight through. Nobody likes to feel like they don’t understand.

John: I think we all face that challenge with our students.

Adrienne: Um hmm.

John: They like strategies where they could sit and passively listen to someone explain concepts to them. But that doesn’t really seem to help them remember it, but it feels good. It feels like they’re understanding every step of it. But when you’re trying something in active learning, and you’re getting feedback that tells you that “No, you don’t quite have that,” it’s certainly not as pleasant. And there’s no real way around that, other than perhaps reassuring students that that’s an important part of learning. I’ve been trying to explain that to students for years without complete success, because they much prefer to listen to a lecture or to read a book and assume that they know things until the professor tricks them with these questions that clearly are not a fair measure of their learning, and it’s a difficult cycle to break.

Adrienne: True for all humans. We like to minimize the calories we use in everything.

Rebecca: Is this a line of research you’re hoping to continue on?

Sheela: Yes, we are, as we speak, to fine tune what we learned from the study last year. By the time the study finishes and the time the paper comes out a whole long time has gone by. So that was a great time to sort of think about what are some areas and it was the exam wrappers that sort of prompted me to think about this metacognition, especially metacognitive judgment, because exam wrappers are self reported, they’re sort of reflective, and I found that students were reflecting the same thing, like I spent only 5%, doing X, it hasn’t changed from unit exam to the next unit exam. Then the question became, “Why is it that they were not able to monitor their studying, or make those adjustments as they moved forward?” So maybe for an exam on tissues, they spent 10 hours studying a certain way, but probably when they come to the nervous system, they probably need to modify that or adjust it, but students were not able to do that, based on the difficulty of the task. They were just steamrolling it. They were just doing the same thing over and over again, they said, Oh, “You told me to study X number of blocks, and you told me to study 12 hours and I’m just going to do those 12.” And that’s prompted us to think about the next steps. And we are asking this question in a community college classroom and see what kind of metacognitive skills students have. And we are dividing those skills into three parts, which is knowledge of the skill, are you aware of it, can you actually apply it, judgment would be can you apply it and monitor and change it when needed based on what’s happening in the moment, and then sort of plan and have a control on your self-regulated strategies? I think this is an uphill task, because the data that you get could be a little messy, just like most education research, but I think we’ll just have to continue and plod through it just like how we did the other one, before we get some kind of a baseline that suggests that whatever we are doing, whatever intervention we are planning to have in the classroom, has an effect. So I think of myself as a practitioner, Adrienne is also a practitioner, but she’s also a researcher. So for me, if it doesn’t make sense in the classroom, I’m very happy that it did make awesome sense in the world of research, but I would like it to really make sense in the classroom because I want to see our students benefit, move forward and have great STEM careers, however it may be.

Adrienne: I’m also doing projects. I’m continuing to work with Sheela on adding some metacognitive aspects to her class. A couple of things that I am trying to work on is an implementation strategy where I try to have students, each week, think back on the week that they’ve just completed, and how did they study on that week and so just regularly get feedback and to overtly tell them each week: these are high-impact strategies, these are low-impact, which ones did you use and what do you plan to do next? And a lot of hitting over the head, perhaps. But it takes a lot to change this for them. And secondly, I’m particularly interested in students who are studying with friends. I saw an interesting effect in my intro bio class a year ago, where students who really valued studying with friends were doing worse in the class. And so I’m attempting to figure out what’s going on there, because that was kind of non-intuitive to me. And I think it has something to do with some students really value studying with friends, because it’s an opportunity to have their friends explain the material to them. So what I’ve been asking students this past year was what do you do when you study with friends, they’re like, figure out what they’re actually spending their time doing. And some students are spending a lot of times explaining and others are spending time getting explained to and there’s different relationships in how they do in the course. That is pretty clear, though students that are in study groups in order to learn the material, that’s an indication they’ve got other struggles going on. They need help. So things like that, I’m still figuring out the best way to ask students and to figure out where the pain points are so that I, as an instructor, can say, “Alright, if you find that you like study groups because you really need somebody to help explain things to you, that is a sign that we need to help you understand the material more effectively, and get you extra help.” So both research and being a good practitioner as Sheela says.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we don’t always recognize when we’re introducing students to strategies that are really new to them is that they’re learning that in addition to the course content at the same time, so there’s an extra layer of things that need to be learned and we need to do spaced practice and things on that, too. [LAUGHTER] Start building some habits and remember that that’s a thing that they’re also learning and remind them that that’s also a thing that they’re learning and that accounts for some time. It takes time to adopt a new set of practices. It takes time to plan [LAUGHTER] or whatever.

Adrienne: And I like to give students a small amount of points are doing it, because it’s part of the work of learning and I want to reward that, and frankly, they need the points.

Sheela: sAnd some study trategies are also discipline based. So it’s very difficult for our students, especially when they’re freshmen and sophomore, and they are in three or four different types of classes. Some are STEM-based, some are non-STEM-based, maybe their non-STEM faculties guiding them to read and create some kind of a graph or some kind of a writing narrative. And here in our STEM class, I’m saying, don’t just spend your time reading and rereading, while the other faculty is sort of giving them a different point of view.

Adrienne: They have a lot of bosses.

Sheela: Yes. And that can be very difficult for them, because they’re like, “What do I do? My other teachers telling me this, and this teacher is telling me this, and I don’t know, and I’ll just do what I know to do, which is flashcarding,”

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Sheela: To me, what I would like to do is continue this kind of education research, which is classroom based, that also has an efficacy for student improvement. These three are very important to me. But I also have an overall goal because of the CC Bio Insights network that started me to think about biology education research, is to make sure that these kinds of questions that are community college centric, asking questions that are based from a community college classroom, are also being part of the education research and part of the biology education journals published so that people can actually see what’s going on in these classrooms, and perhaps build some credibility to the work that’s done in this area. So that would be sort of my big picture, giving back to the overall community of community college and how it affects higher ed.

Adrienne: That’s great, Sheela. Yeah, what’s next is always iterations on improving my teaching, new projects for research. But I thought working with Sheela on a project like this was super helpful, both for my career, because it benefits me to publish… that’s a really important part of my job… and I have a community of people with statistical skills and experience publishing, that if I can bring that to a partnership with a community college faculty person who has access to community college students, that’s a important connection that the community college students can benefit from the research finds for them, the faculty member in the community college isn’t overwhelmed attempting to learn a whole bunch of additional publishing skills that they don’t need for their career advancement, but they still want the message to get out that I can carry some of that burden in a way that benefits me. So it’s a win-win for me, for Sheela

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. And we look forward to hearing what else you learn.

Adrienne: Thank you so much for having us.

John: And this is really important work that you’re doing because we lose so many students from the STEM fields, and the students we’re losing are the students who could gain the most if they were to be successful in the STEM fields because the rate of return to a degree in the STEM fields is so much higher than it is everywhere else and we face some serious shortages in these areas. So it’s an area in which the research could be really beneficial to a lot of people.

Adrienne:: We’ll do what we can.

Sheela: Yes, keep marching along and carry more with us.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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257. PsycLearn

Posted in adaptive learning, assessment, backward design, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, equity, first-generation students, higher education, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
October 5, 2022

Adaptive learning platforms provide each student with a customized learning path based on the student’s individual learning needs. In this episode, Anna Yocom, Linda Goldberg, and Alan Strathman join us to discuss how the American Psychological Association has developed adaptive learning packages for core psychology courses.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Adaptive learning platforms provide each student with a customized learning path based on the student’s individual learning needs. In this episode, we examine how one professional association has developed adaptive learning packages for core courses in their discipline.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are all involved with a psych learning project, which we’ll be talking about throughout the podcast. Let’s have each guest introduce themselves.

Anna: Hi, I am Anna Yocom. I am a senior lecturer at The Ohio State University in psychology and I am also a Content Manager for PsycLearn.

Linda: And I’m Linda Goldberg. And my role with the PsycLearn project is that of product evangelist.

Alan: Hi, this is Alan Strathman. I’m a content manager for PsycLearn and was a professor of psychology for a long time at the University of Missouri.

John: Welcome, everyone. We’re really happy to talk to you about PsycLearn. I first heard about this when I was working on a project at SUNY dealing with adaptive learning solutions. And we had seen some write ups of PsycLearn so we want to find out a little bit more.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Alan, are you drinking tea?

Alan: I’m drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Oh, a coffee drinker.

Alan: Sorry.

Rebecca: I see how it is. [LAUGHTER]

Alan: I had tea this morning this morning.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s good. That’s good.

Rebecca:: How about you, Linda?

Linda: I’m having an iced tea this afternoon. It’s hot and muggy outside, so something citrusy and decaf.

Rebecca: …and perfectly refreshing. [LAUGHTER]

Linda: That’s right. And sweetened.

Rebecca: Awesome. Anna?

Anna: I had tea earlier, but I have switched to water.

John: And I’m drinking spring cherry green tea.

Rebecca: Nice. I have some Scottish breakfast. Still in my pot today.

John: We’ve invited all of you here today to discuss the PsycLearn adaptive learning platform developed by the American Psychological Association. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this project?

Linda: Okay, I’m going to start with that. And there are a couple of overlapping facets to the origin story, so to speak. One is really a desire to expand APA’s publishing program. APA has a very rich publishing program, which includes publishing of over 90 academic journals, a very robust books publishing program, where many of those books are aimed at clinical practice, as well as books that might support the professional researcher, books that might support self help, and so on. And we found that there was an opening for us to make a contribution to undergraduate academic instruction and contribute to that portion of the path toward the profession. We also were recognizing as we contemplated this new project that there was a tremendous amount of disruption in the higher educational publishing landscape, a lot of cost pushback, a lot of desire among publishers to leverage technology. And we thought that perhaps not simply for delivery of content, but to improve the learning experience and to improve efficacy that we saw there might be some opportunity there.

Alan: Yeah, also, let me jump in. I think the developers also saw this as an opportunity to work toward some of the goals that APA has for the field of psychology, including, for example, utilizing psychology to make an impact on social issues.

Linda: And the field of cognitive psychology is one that tells us a lot about how we learn. So we felt like we could draw from our very own field in development of our final product,

John: Which courses have been developed for this platform.

Linda: So we started with a course for research methods and psychology and added a PsycLearn statistics for the behavioral sciences to that. These two courses are typically required for all majors in the discipline. And they also represent the most challenging content for many students. So we thought that seemed like a good place to start.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how this material was developed?

Alan: Sure, we use a backwards design process where we start by identifying what we want students to learn in each module and a module is similar to what would be a chapter in a regular textbook. These outcomes that we have in mind become Learning Objectives, and they really guide the content development. Learning Objectives are developed through collaboration, a conversation, maybe a hashing out between the subject matter experts and the content managers, and are influenced by a variety of factors, including how well the learning objectives address APAs guidelines for undergraduate education. And then there is a rigorous review process where other experts in the field provide feedback and often suggest additional learning objectives

John: Was there much of a challenge getting agreement on learning objectives. I know in many disciplines, there’s a lot of discussion of what should be in the core material in the discipline? Has psychology been able to overcome that a bit by agreeing on these standards?

Alan: Well, I think it is a challenge in every case, because everybody has a sense of what they think should be taught and what is essential for students to learn. Like I said, I think it’s hashing out. It’s sometimes a little bit of trial and error, where we identify a learning objective, and then start writing about it. And then at some point, we may decide that’s not the right objective to have. But I think in the end, the subject matter experts and the content managers do a really good job of coming to some consensus on what we want to teach.

John: Was the content in the courses, the actual readings and other materials, developed by the people who created the package?

Alan: Absolutely. We are a digital first product, with original content developed by experts in various sub disciplines in psychology. And this really gives us a big advantage I think over print textbooks. So starting from scratch, in an entirely digital environment, we can develop a seamless presentation, where we start with learning objectives, we present content, we design activities and interactive exercises, and then have assessments. And we can be sure that all those things are aligned with learning objectives. And we don’t have to try and retrofit learning objectives into existing content. And then just hope that assessments that we have address the new learning objectives. So I think being able to work in a digital environment allows us to have this really seamless presentation where we start with learning objectives and we go all the way through assessment, and all those things match.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted a little bit about maintaining the content, given that it’s in a digital platform. But can you talk a little bit more about how you maintain that or what that review processes is or how that gets updated on a regular basis?

Alan: Well, that’s a good question. One issue for us is that we’re still so new, that we haven’t had semesters and semesters of feedback from students that we can use to make revisions. But what is really exciting is that whenever we decide that we want to make a change, we can do it in real time. Think about a print textbook, whenever they decide that they want something to be different, they might wait three to five years for the opportunity to make those changes. With us, since it’s digital first, we decide something needs to be changed or updated or revised and we can make those changes in a really timely fashion. And I think it really helps to keep our content current.

John: And if you find that students are not achieving the learning objectives, you have the ability, at least, to make some changes, either redefining the objectives if perhaps the objectives didn’t work too well. Or if the learning materials weren’t quite aligning with that. How often is that type of change done?

Alan: Well, so far, we’re still into the development process, that we’re making those changes just all the time. As the products get older and more mature, I think we’ll need to do that less. But again, we’ll still have the opportunity to do it as often as we’d like to.

Rebecca: John mentioned at the beginning of the episode about his interest in this project related to adaptive learning. Can you talk a little bit about the adaptive learning component of this project and the platform that you use.

Anna: The platform that we use is CogBooks, it is a platform, I think, is really unique compared to other textbooks, because it allows students to engage in their learning, and really direct their own learning pathway. And that’s based on their understanding of the content. So instead of going through a whole chapter, and then maybe quizzing yourself or testing yourself, after each content page, they get some formative questions and they get to make their own assessment. They get to say, “Okay, did I understand that? Was I not too sure? How did I do on those questions?” And then they can choose whether they want to get that support material or not, which we think of as like, “Would you follow up and ask your instructor a question.” That’s how we think of this support material. So if a student is very confident with the material, they’re essentially going to get a different path than a student who might need help in a couple of different areas or a student who might need help in a lot of areas. There’s just more examples or more practice. So it can look a little bit different for each student, which is pretty cool.

John: Linda mentioned earlier that psychologists have done a lot of research and cognitive scientists have done a lot of research on how people learn, how have some of those principles of how we learn been built into this platform?

Alan: Well, Linda is certainly right. There is a lot of research on learning science. And because we are psychologists, we’re familiar with the research, and use that knowledge to help students learn throughout the product. I think the centerpiece of our efforts to use learning science is the inclusion of metacognition, that is helping students evaluate their own learning, helping them identify what they know and what they don’t know. And when they identify what they don’t know, then they could spend a little more time learning that particular topic. Often students get to the exam, and they haven’t really done a good job of testing themselves, identifying what they know, and what they don’t know. And the first time they realize they don’t know something is when they get to the exam. And that’s obviously not the right time to get there. And so we’re able to identify ways that we can help them evaluate their own learning. We help them in this process by incorporating those learning strategies that we know are supported by research. We present concrete examples throughout. We have frequent activities and assessments. Students get practice retrieving content from memory. And these opportunities are spaced just as the research suggests they should be. They have interactive exercises. They get practice in the elaboration, or explaining content to themselves in their own words. And really the process of taking material and from the jargon in which it’s presented to explaining things in their own words, is a really useful process for students to engage in. And we could have a whole podcast just on principles of learning science that PsycLearn incorporates.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what the student experience is like for students that are using the platform? So Anna, you hinted a little bit at this with some of the adaptive learning components. But what does it look like from: I entered this space from the beginning, and now I’m interacting with this over time.

Anna: So students really, I think, approach PsycLearn differently than a printed textbook, again, not only just the fact that they would go through a printed textbook, and then maybe ask themselves some questions, probably skip over a lot of reading, because maybe it’s not very engaging or easy to get distracted with print textbooks as well. But one of the really interesting things is that they’re engaged with the content pages within them. So they’re not just engaged outside of content, like “Oh, refer to this video,” or “you can reference this activity” or “try some completely different platform to help with your reading….” but within the content pages, they get activities in which they’re asked to reflect on the course material. How does this connect to things you already know? So they get to respond to those things within the content pages. They get practice formative questions, formative meaning that it’s not just did I get this right? Yes or no. But they get feedback. So they would find out what a suggested answer was to a short answer question. They can compare that to their own. With a multiple choice question, they get follow up on why that is the correct answer, not just “Well, if I’ve missed this a couple of times, and they get multiple chances to respond, but they get some explanation about why that was the correct answer.” And so we have video questions, we have matching exercises, we have short answer, we have multiple choice questions, different drag and drop. So we’ve tried to just vary the kinds of interactions that students would have, the ways that they can practice answering questions. And this variety really helps maintain interest throughout. So they get to engage it in lots of different ways. It’s not just a rote memorization, but they’re actually applying the material as they go through each module.

John: So you mentioned formative questions. Are there are some assessment tools built in to evaluate students’ learning for grading purposes, for example?

Anna: There are. Yeah, so there are summative questions. And we try to have them associated with those learning objectives that Alan had talked about earlier. And so after maybe one, two, or a small group of those learning objectives are covered, there is a short sample, maybe 5…10 multiple choice questions where students have a few attempts, and we want them to get to about an 80% accuracy. And one of the nice things is if they don’t on their first attempt, they can actually go access those support pages then. So maybe they skipped over them earlier. And they thought, “Okay, I got this, it’s fine. I understood this page.” And then they get to these questions later on, these mastering the content and they’re like, “Well, wait a minute, I was missing some of this.” So they get another chance to go back to those support questions, and try it again. So then hopefully, they can get those right after three attempts. We don’t want them to be punitive. We want them to get engaged with the material and get to that mastery.

Rebecca: So now that you’ve talked a little bit about the student experience, can you talk a little bit about how this supports instructors? What kind of feedback is provided to instructors and maybe how instructors are using this in their teaching.

Anna: One of the things I really like, we all know, anytime that we can even maybe think back to our own experiences in classrooms, it’s a struggle getting students to read. But a lot of these classes, I mean, really all of our classes, if we’re assigning some sort of book, some reading material, we want them to read it. So how do we get them to engage? Well, that’s where the accountability comes in. So we’re giving them this tool, and then their instructor can see, “Okay, they’ve made it through this material, they engage with this.” So the instructor could choose to then reiterate that material in class, or they could choose to maybe take an active learning approach in class. And okay, now that you’ve had this background, everybody made it through, we’re going to apply it. And maybe not everybody got to 100% on every question, but maybe we got to about over 90% completion, which is what I would typically see in my classes. So you would have students who, even after a few attempts, would sometimes miss some of those mastering questions, but generally, it was pretty high. And so I could see that before I went into class. Okay, so students, as a whole, on average have got this. So I can take it a step further, where I can go back to those questions that were really challenging. So you get to track progress through each module, you can also dive a little deeper with individual students. So a student comes to you and says, “I’m really struggling,” the instructor can go in there, they can look at their pathway. Were they accessing the support material? Did they take those quizzes a few times? Where were they spending their time? Or if the instructor wanted them to cover it on let’s say, Tuesday night, were they doing it all Tuesday at 9pm? Right? Like you could actually see all of that. So you can kind of work with them like, “Well, I see you started this that night, let’s think about how we could maybe back that up. Like maybe we should pace this out at least a few days ahead of time, which is a really nice way to work with students.” And it also syncs with the LMS, the learning management system, so it really takes that burden off of instructors as well. So it’s talking to the platform that we get there. So we get this easy back and forth, which is really nice. So we can nudge students along with that, I would often encourage students to visit those support pages if they were struggling, like, “Look, I know this is really challenging,” or, “Hey, there’s more practice, if you just want a little bit more practice, you can go to some of those support pages to get that.” And the other nice thing is students can actually email right from there, which I think is pretty unique. So if a student emails me, I could see okay, they were having problems in statistics with variability and standard deviation. And it will take me as the instructor right to that page. And so then I can see that and I can say, “Oh, well, why don’t you try these examples here,” which was really nice. Instead of just a student saying, “I don’t know, I don’t get this,” they can let you know exactly where they’re struggling. So it provides a lot of options for instructors.

John: And do instructors get aggregate statistics on what areas students are struggling in addition to data on individual students?

Anna: Absolutely. So you can see that on the dashboard. You can see if there were chunks of mastering questions, for example, or a specific question that students struggled with. So you could choose to review that and maybe even go over some of those in class or go over specific topics in more detail.

John: How are instructors combining this with other face-to-face learning activities, for example, in face-to-face classes. As I understand it, most people use this as a textbook replacement, except a much more powerful replacement to a textbook. What other things will people often do to provide more of a sense of community or a social component to the learning?

Anna: Yeah, so, I think a lot of instructors are using it, just as you said, as a textbook replacement. And that’s how I have used it for statistics in particular. So it was taking the place of my other textbook, which actually was a print textbook that was online. And so I don’t feel like there were any losses. But we were gaining the ability to say, “Okay, we’re all on the same page. I know that everybody’s at least had some exposure to this. So now let’s talk about it. I can see where you were struggling. So I know we’re going to need more examples here. I know we’re going to need more follow up here.” Or “why was this question challenging? Why was this hard?” So I think drawing on those parts are how we can maintain those social ties and the social interactions we want whether it’s online, whether it’s face to face, or in any capacity.

Linda: I’ll just go ahead and point out as well that part of the content package that we’re making available to instructors who adopt, PsycLearn course material is a set of student activities that sort of exist outside of the platform itself and are available for instructors to assign or to bring to the class. They’re typically designed again to align with specific learning objectives and to give the instructor options for an in- class activity or an additional assignment activity. And that’s accessible to the instructor when they’re using the dashboard.

Rebecca: Sounds like some really great support materials. Can you talk a little bit about how this platform has affected equity gaps that we might be seeing?

Alan: Sure, I think there are two ways that PsycLearn is addressing issues of equity. First, we are designing PsycLearn to be culturally inclusive, that is we work to make sure that through examples, images, photos, figures, every student can see themselves in the product. Plus, our goal is to include the research of diverse psychologists and psychologists of color. And then I think the second way that we strive to be equitable is to design for universal access. We want the product to be accessible to all students, and so we make great efforts to do so. We use typography that’s particularly accessible. We incorporate transcripts and closed captioning, we have text-based alternatives for non text elements. And our efforts are well beyond what the minimum guidelines would be, well beyond what typical expectations would be, and I want to say that this is because we value this process so highly. We are keenly interested in making an accessible, inclusive product, and I think we’re really working hard to do that.

John: Have there been any studies of the overall efficacy of this program compared to alternatives?

Linda: Well, we have conducted some impact surveys, surveys of student users to gauge their impressions of the impact of PsycLearn on certain important aspects of their experience. Through surveying students, we looked at the impact on their knowledge gains, on their confidence in their ability to use that knowledge, and on motivation to complete assigned activities. And on the questions that we asked, to sort of tease out each of these thematic areas, we did receive very positive response. Now, these are, albeit, impressions of students. That’s sort of the first line of study available to us. And we feel pretty motivated ourselves by what we’re learning, by what we’re hearing from students. These surveys did also include some open text entry questions. And very interestingly, some of the criticisms that we heard were often this is a lot of time, this is a lot of work. But by the same token, we’ll hear in the very same response, but it’s very worth my time, and it really helps. And I feel confident when I go into the class, and I already know what my instructor is going to talk about, I feel more relaxed, I feel more able to pay attention. That kind of response has been very rewarding to receive from these student surveys.

John: With some other platforms, there have been studies that have looked at the impact on equity gaps, and they relate very much to what you just said, that basically, students come into our classes with very different backgrounds. Some come in with a very rich and strong background from prior courses, others come in with a somewhat weaker background. But to make it through an adaptive learning platform, the students who come in with less background can acquire mastery, but it takes a bit more time and effort. And the students who come in with a stronger background can race through a little bit more quickly. But much of the research does suggest that those equity gaps tend to be reduced. But it is at the cost of additional effort by those students who come in with a little bit less prior knowledge or prior experience with some of the material. And so I think that’s one of those real strengths of adaptive learning platforms compared to other formats like textbooks and lectures and so forth, where everyone is expected to move at the same pace. But as Chuck Dziuban, on a previous podcast has said, in a traditional course, everyone spends the same amount of time with the material, but they learn different amounts, when they’re working with adaptive learning platforms, they have to spend different amounts of time, but they all can achieve the same learning outcomes, they can all reach the same outcomes. But it may take more time to do so.

Linda: That’s certainly our hope, and some of what motivates the work that we’re doing. I feel like having respect for the time that our students need to spend is top of mind. We need to make sure that what we’re asking them to do is a good use of their time. And therefore this mode of delivery and the kind of content that we make available through the multiple activities and so on that Anna was describing. We’re giving our students opportunities to do that self testing that reiterative process and not simply trying to digest a narrative.

Anna: I always think back to a student I actually had in class a number of years ago, and this student went through the same class multiple times. And it was a class that was needed to get to other upper-level classes and was very frustrated, of course. And then we came to find out that this student in the multiple times of taking the class, the book was listed as required, but with either a digital or print textbook, you really don’t have any way to monitor that. You don’t know if the student’s using the book even if they have it. But this student had never got the book, just never occurred to them that, okay, this could be a really valuable tool. And so that’s really a benefit. I see. Like you were talking about equity, let’s give them this tool. But let’s make it something that’s valuable, that can really help them and if they need that added support, they’ll get it. But kind of level the playing field a little bit.

Rebecca: How do you see this platform evolving over time.

Linda: So we are able to work fairly closely with our platform partner, CogBooks. We’re able to contribute to their roadmap planning to some degree. We’ve collected feedback through a variety of channels, also, not only the student surveys that I’ve mentioned, but we also, in the past year, conducted a qualitative study that included student interviews and observations of students who were assigned to use PsycLearn. And this exercise gave us really valuable insight into how and where students focus their time and attention. And so for instance, through that process, we were able to get some real good insight into how they approach the summary of each module. And as a result, we’ll be able to give some greater attention, we’ve got some plans to enrich and make more accessible, the content that we placed there, because we were able to learn that they highly value that for later test preparation. So that’s just an example. We’re hoping to be able to continue to do those observational and interview studies.

Rebecca: So I’m really curious for each of you to answer this question. But what makes you really excited about PsycLearn?

Anna: I’m happy to go first, because I am a very energetic instructor. I will be at the front of the room, and I bring a lot of energy. And what makes me excited about PsycLearn is just the ability of students to be active consumers of their learning. I would love for them to take away something that is memorable, that feels unique. And so PsycLearn frees me up as an instructor, that I don’t have to go through every bit of background information in the way I use it in class, I can assume they’ve had things. Let’s spend time on things that are interesting. Let’s dive deeper into things. Let’s do more exercises for things that are challenging. And so the students get to think about and apply new ways of learning and engaging the material from the very first moment that they encounter the content.

Alan: Yeah, for me, it’s really about the inclusion of metacognition, I think it’s really helpful to have students be able to evaluate their own learning. I think this makes them do better on exams, and I think it makes them more successful in their entire college career. It’s also an important part of my own teaching. I have a lot of activities in class where students can answer and identify how well they know what they’re supposed to know. And what I often find is that students study, but they don’t know how much to study, they don’t know: “Do I know it as well as I need to know it.” And this product gives them a lot of feedback, really helps them understand if they understand the material as well as they need to. And PsycLearn really can do that in ways that regular textbooks cannot.

Linda: I would say that my excitement really comes from the big picture, the opportunity for us to deliver on these experiences that Anna and Alan are describing. But we’re going to be able to do that across the foundational courses in the curriculum. And so that larger picture future horizon is pretty exciting.

John: Well, you’ve already addressed some of this, at least in terms of PsycLearn, but we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Linda: Well, we have sort of talked a little bit about future and what’s next and our opportunity to be iterative. The digital platform allows us to be continually rethinking what is the best activity to offer to reinforce or bolster certain concepts. And so that’s certainly something that is ongoing. We can take feedback from students on how well they feel various content is supporting them. We’ll be looking at what we can do to encourage a greater level and engagement with that support material, so that students aren’t feeling like, “Oh, that’s extra, I don’t really need to go there.” Indeed, it’s extra. But it’s really vital, especially for students who might sort of marginally understand. And so the opportunity for us to deliver a reframe of a concept can make all the difference at that tipping point.

Anna: Yeah, and I think what Linda had said about using the support material is really important to us. So we’re really interested in applying these learning science principles that Alan had talked about to say, “Okay, what is the best way to get students to engage with this.” We want them to see that cool stuff we’re putting on those pages, if they feel like they could benefit of it. So we want to reach the students that need that support. So I think just diving in a little deeper and figuring out the best ways to reach them, to get them to say, “Okay, yeah, I could use a little practice.” Or “I could use another example,” snd really assess that learning of their own. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge we have constantly, especially when students are new at something, they tend to think, “Oh, yeah, I got this. I know it all.” And so getting better at that metacognition, I think, is really exciting to us.

Alan: Yeah, and I think for us, it has a lot to do with making a better and better product. I think about what it was like the first time I taught a course. And I equate that to the first iteration of a PsycLearn product. And then I think about what was it like the fifth time I taught that course or the 10th time I taught it, and how richer and deeper it was. And I think the same thing will happen with PsycLearn. We’re going to keep on creating a product that gets richer, more inclusive, and more likely to help students succeed.

John: I was really excited to hear about PsycLearn, and everything you’ve talked about makes me even more excited about the opportunity for this and I hope that other disciplines will start working on similar materials for their basic courses, because the benefits from this have been well established in terms of improving student learning and reducing some of the equity gaps. Thank you.

Linda: Thank you.

Alan: Thank you.

Anna: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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222. Interleaved Practice

Posted in evidence-based practices, higher education, interleaved practice, learning, pedagogy, spaced practice, teaching
January 12, 2022

Students engaging in blocked practice focus their efforts on a particular topic and then move on to the next topic in sequence, resulting in a perception of content mastery. Interleaved practice provides an alternative approach in which students engage in learning activities that require them to determine which concepts are relevant in a given application. In this episode, Josh Samani and Steven Pan join us to discuss their study comparing the effects of blocked and interleaved practice on student learning.

Josh is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also an instructional consultant for the Center of Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences and Director of the UCLA-APS Physics Bridge Program. Steven is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at National University of Singapore whose research focuses on evidence-based teaching approaches.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Students engaging in blocked practice focus their efforts on a particular topic and then move on to the next topic in sequence, resulting in a perception of content mastery. Interleaved practice provides an alternative approach in which students engage in learning activities that require them to determine which concepts are relevant in a given application. In this episode, we discuss a study comparing the effects of blocked and interleaved practice on student learning.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners..

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John: Our guests today are Josh Samani and Steven Pan. Josh is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also an instructional consultant for the Center of Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences and Director of the UCLA-APS Physics Bridge Program. Steven is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at National University of Singapore whose research focuses on evidence-based teaching approaches. Welcome, Josh and Steven.

Josh: Thank you.

Steven: Thank you.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Josh, are you drinking tea?

Josh: I’m drinking the purest kind of tea which is no tea at all. Water.

Rebecca: It’s important to tea to have water, so this is good. This is good. How about you, Steven?

Steven: I’m having some very nice chamomile tea in honor of the podcast.

Rebecca: Awesome, even though it’s midnight.

Steven: Yeah. well, non caffeinated

John: …and I’m drinking Irish Breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: I have a classic English breakfast today as well.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss your research project on interleaved practice in physics classes that was published in Nature Science of Learning in November 2021. Before we discuss that study, though, could you describe to our listeners what interleaved practice is and how it differs from blocked practice?

Steven: Interleaved practice is a way of arranging learning activities in which you switch between different topics or skills as you try to learn them. So for example, say in the domain of mathematics, you’re learning to solve volume problems, graphing problems, factoring problems. With interleaving, in a single session, you would switch back and forth between those different skills. So maybe you will attempt a volume problem, then switch to a graphing problem, then a factoring problem. You’re constantly switching back and forth, mixing it up, or interleaving, between those different skills or topics. Now in contrast, a more common practice is known as blocking or blocked practice. And that’s where you focus on one skill or topic at a time, sort of exclusively. So for instance, in an initial session, you’ll focus only on, say, volume problems. And then it’s not until the next session, you will only focus on graphing problems. And then the next session after that maybe only factoring problems. So blocking and interleaving are in a way sort of diametrically opposed. In one case, you’re constantly switching back and forth. In the other case, you’re focusing on one at a time. And currently blocking is much more common in everyday practice in classrooms, it seems to be better organized, more intuitive to people, whereas blocking, firstly, most people don’t know about it. But if they hear about it, they may think “Oh, that seems disorganized, haphazard. Why would I even want to do that?” And so interleaving and blocking… very different ways to schedule your learning.

Josh: And I think also, from the point of view of gaining mastery, there’s this intuition that if you want to master something, you kind of need to block your practice on each sub skill, and hammer away at that for a long time until you master that sub skill then move on. We think this is maybe another reason why, in general, people intuitively are drawn to blocking as an initial study strategy.

Steven: Right. And just this idea of practice makes perfect, it kind of sometimes seems to imply that you should focus and target a particular skill or topic and just become really good at it by practicing it over and over. And that’s the essence of blocking.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the prior lab experiments, and what they suggest about interleaved versus blocked practice before we jump into your current study.

Steven: So, the first studies of interleaving were conducted in the domain of motor skills, and this is work dating back to the 1980s. And the chief finding is that… and it was surprising at the time, and still seems somewhat counterintuitive today… that if you interleave as you’re practicing a set of motor skills in a given domain, that results in better overall proficiency than blocking. For instance, in the domain of badminton, learning to serve different types of badminton serves, the finding has been that if you interleave as you practice, and you practice one type of serve, then you switch to another… then another… then another… that results in better serving ability than practicing only one kind of serve at a time before switching to the next. And that finding that interleaving benefits motor skills has been shown in a variety of motor skill domains, including baseball, basketball, and so on. So the earliest work was in motor skills. Moving on to the early 2000s, there was a move into non-motor skill tasks. And this is primarily involving perceptual category learning, where you’re shown, essentially, pictures that exemplify different categories, for instance, bird families, different artists, painting styles, and the finding there has been that if you interleave as you’re viewing these examples, you view one example from a given category, then you view another example from yet another category, you keep switching… that results in better ability to recognize those categories than if you block where you’re just seeing one category over and over at a time, and that finding has been especially the case for categories that are sort of confusable, similar to one another. And it seems that interleaving is a great way to learn to tell them apart. And now, even more recently, there’s been a move to really highly educationally relevant tasks. For instance, I myself have published a couple of studies investigating interleaving with learning grammar rules in a foreign language. And it seems that interleaving is a great way to learn different sets of grammatical rules. Perhaps the most sort of impressive set of recent studies has been worked by some researchers at University of South Florida, in which they interleave math homework in seventh grade classrooms. So early, I mentioned learning to calculate volumes and graphing and so on. That’s literally the kinds of problems that they interleaved in homework in seventh grade classrooms and that results in greatly improved learning over the traditional blocked approach. And so, overall, the literature on interleaving is small but growing, but there have been a variety of promising results across very different domains. But, really, the literature has just scratched the surface and it’s not yet clear whether the benefits of interleaving are universally applicable. But again, it’s showing considerable promise.

John: Your specific study took this out of the laboratory and into the classroom. Could you describe the experiment that you did?

Josh: Yeah. So in the winter quarter of 2020 at UCLA, I was teaching two sections of Physics 5C, which is a large-enrollment Physics for Life Sciences course. This is the course that pre-meds take mainly, but also some other students from the life sciences. And each course had an enrollment of about 180 students. So these were pretty large classes, so we can get some good statistics for our study. And the topics are things like electricity, magnetism, quantum mechanics, all of these things are taught at somewhat of an introductory level. These are not like physics major, really in-depth courses, but nonetheless quite challenging. And most students in this series find these topics quite challenging. And what we did was, we gave the students three homework assignments per week that were spaced out basically as evenly as we could, given the course schedule, and in one section of the course… so there were these two 180-person sections. In one section of the course,for the first month, all of their homework practice on all of these assignments were blocked practice. Whereas in the other section of the course, all the homework assignments were interleaved practice. So what that meant in our study design is that on a given homework assignment, students in the blocked practice condition, for every given topic, they would receive three problems that were what we call isomorphic problems. So isomorphic problems are problems where the surface features are quite different, but the deeper underlying structure is quite similar. In the blocked group, students saw these isomorphic problems all blocked together. Whereas in the interleaved group, students saw these different isomorphic problems for a given topic arranged so that they spanned multiple homework sessions. So instead of seeing all those problems in a single homework session all in succession, they saw them in three different homework sessions that were distributed across a week. At the end of this month, all students were given a surprise test to see if their learning had been retained and if they could transfer their learning to somewhat more challenging problems, in some cases for some of the problems on the test, and then basically, we measure the difference in performance between the blocked group and the interleaved group on this assessment. And then for the second month of the class, we did exactly the same thing with the new topics, but the section that was previously interleaved was now blocked, and vice versa. The idea being that, this way, every student in these two sections received both of the conditions. And we could make sure that regardless of which students are getting what type of problem set, we see the same result. So basically, like an internal replication almost. So that’s basically the design of the study.

Rebecca: So the intervention was the homework. Were the things that you were doing during class time blocked practice, or were those also interleaved practice?

Josh: Yeah, that’s a great question. So actually, maybe I should also clarify that the only thing that was different about these courses was the homework. Everything else was identical to the extent possible. I was teaching the course, so the lectures were back to back and I attempted to make the lectures as identical as possible. And lectures were somewhat traditional in the sense that there was a lot of me talking about generalized concept and abstract principles, but also doing some worked examples, and a bit of audience interaction. Students also had lab sections that they attended each week. They had discussion sections where they worked on problems. But all of those things are exactly the same. The only thing that was different, literally, was the arrangement of the problems. And in particular, the entire group of problems, the blocked group and interleaved got were exactly the same. So it was literally just the ordering of problems and their distribution and nothing else.

John: So why did you use surprise tests rather than embedded assessment?

Josh: Yeah. So in an authentic educational context like this, where you’re trying to measure the effect of some intervention, it’s pretty well known to anyone who’s taught a class in any context whatsoever that students tend to cram they’re studying. And the problem with that is that you could imagine,we do this intervention in the homeworks and we change the ordering, and students do all this stuff that’s different. And all of a sudden, if they know a test is coming, they can study 10 or 20 hours. And we have no idea what they’re doing during that studying, maybe everyone will interleave their practice during that studying. And it’s really quite a large amount of studying. So maybe it’ll just wash out any effects that we would have seen otherwise. So we use surprise tests, basically, to eliminate the contamination of cramming, which we know is ubiquitous. This way, we can measure, with much more precision, the effect of the thing that we did, as opposed to it being contaminated by cramming. And, by the way, it’s also pretty well known in the science of learning literature that cramming does actually work. So when students cram for 20 hours, we expect them all to do pretty well, as opposed to when they don’t, we can kind of see what the homework actually did for them.

Steven: …with the caveat that cramming is effective, but short lived in terms of its benefits. And just to add on to what Josh said, we thought of the surprise test as sort of the purest measure of the effects of our intervention. It was uncontaminated by the cramming and other various things that students may have done in the run up to the announced high-stakes exams.

John: That was something I’ve really liked about this, because it’s a methodology that I think perhaps could be used a bit more in measurements of teaching interventions. I haven’t seen it used very often in the past.

Steven: It’s not as frequently used as perhaps it should be, but there are some studies in which surprise exams are implemented just for the very reason that we did, sort of to have an uncontaminated assessment of whatever was being done in that particular study. One thing I also would add, that I think Josh mentioned… that students were genuinely shocked when they came into the lecture hall and rather than a review session, as we had suggested they were going to experience, he started handing out the surprise exam forms

John: It’s a form of retrieval practice, which is a form of review.

Josh: Oh, yeah, I think, in fact, I’ve actually used that as a form of review in the past, interestingly enough, even before we did this. Another thing I want to add is that using high-stakes, for example, midterm exams to measure the effectiveness of these sorts of things, is also problematic in the sense that, presumably in education, what we’re trying to measure is long-term retention, to a large extent, and students cram on these tests. And so given what Steven said, since cramming is effective only in the short term, what we’re really measuring is just what students know in a very short period of time. And I think it’s more broadly important to move away from that protocol. We should be measuring things at larger time intervals in general.

John: So, what did you find? How large were the effects?

STEVEN So in both stages, first of all, students who had received interleaved practice did significantly better. So, both from the perspective of it being a statistically significant finding, but also in the size of the effect. In stage one, the effect size was 0.4, which for those who maybe haven’t used such measures before, that would be considered like a medium-effect size, a moderate size of an effect. But in an authentic educational context, like in the wild where we’re doing this experiment, it actually might be considered a kind of a large one, because in general effect sizes, not in the lab, for studies that are done in a setting like a classroom, effects tend to be somewhat smaller, because it’s like all the different things that are going on. But in stage two, the effect size was 0.9, which means this is a very large effect, especially by the standard of educational interventions in classrooms. And just for those who, like I said before, effect size is not something their familiar with, in stage one, tthe average performance for blocked students in stage one was 0.43, which means that they answered 43% of the rubric items correctly, whereas in the interleaved class, it was 0.54, so they answered 54% correctly. And in stage two, the blocked students answered 27% of the rubric items correctly and 47% in the interleaved group. So it was a larger difference.

Rebecca: I’m curious about the second stage in that, if they’ve already been surprised one time, were they then primed to get a surprise a second time and maybe motivated more effort and time on homeworks?

Josh: So interestingly, one thing we did in the study, which is part of the published data, is we asked students to report how much study time they devoted before the surprise test. We also asked them to report how surprised they were that there was a surprise test during the review session. And interestingly enough, the surprisal remained very high the second time, and the amount of studying students did before the surprise test beyond the homework was still quite low. So at least from the self-reported measure, we can be pretty confident that things were pretty similar in both of the stages in that respect.

Steven: Perhaps though, if we did this a third time, maybe that would no longer be the case, but it worked both times.

John: Some of our listeners might be wondering how you counted the surprise test? How did you include this in the computation of their grade.

Josh: So in the end, actually, this had no effect on the computation of their grade. When the surprise test was administered, I did offer 1% extra credit to students based on their performance, but it didn’t actually affect the core grading rubric. So we wanted to make sure that if there were, in fact, big differences in performance, it wouldn’t adversely affect anyone in the long term in terms of their grade.

Rebecca: After having this intervention twice in the classes, sid you talk with students about this practice and its impact on them?

Josh: You mean students in those particular classes?

Rebecca: Yeah, after the fact.

Josh: I actually have not. That’s an interesting question. Actually, I haven’t even really seen very many of them to be honest. I teach so many students that it’s very rare for me to interact with anyone from previous classes, because everyone’s so busy. There were one or two instances of this, and they were very surprised and interested, actually, to see the results, but nothing particularly large scale.

Steven: One thing we did do, though, was for the homework assignments, have students rate after they completed those assignments, how well they thought they had learned and so on. And in those ratings, they didn’t seem to show any evidence that one particular homework type, namely interleaving, would actually be better than the other type.

John: Why might interleaved practice have this sort of positive effect on longer-term recall.

STEVEN So there are a variety of viable sort of explanations for the benefits we observed here. And I like to sort of categorize them… actually, Josh and I like to categorize them… sort of into two main categories, first, being interleaving, sort of engaging long-term memory processes, and that enhancing learning, and then the second being interleaving actually promoting specific kinds of learning that are unique, that you don’t get when you engage in blocking. So, with the first, it’s based on the idea that, with interleaving, when you encounter a given problem type, you don’t revisit it again until some time has passed, there has been some spacing or distributed practice. And in the learning sciences literature, distributed practice (or revisiting information after a delay) is actually a very potent enhancer of long-term memory. So again, with interleaving, you see one problem type, and you’re practicing other problem types, you don’t return to that original problem type until sometime later. And so, because of that spacing, the next time you encounter something, the students are going to have to recall from long-term memory, what they remember about that particular problem type in order to solve it, and so that long-term memory that’s constantly being engaged by interleaving, may be enhancing learning. So that’s sort of the first explanation. And the second set of explanations really involves interleaving because you’re switching back and forth between these problem types. This may afford you the opportunity to sort of compare and contrast one problem type with the next. And that can yield a host of possible benefits. You may become better, for example, at going beyond surface features, but actually recognizing what really distinguishes one problem type from the next. So on the surprise exam, you actually can tell this problem type from the next. You can also perhaps get better practice at choosing the right strategy to solve a given problem versus another. And also, our surprise tests had some problems in which students had to combine strategies from multiple problem types in order to come up with a solution. And so it’s possible that with interleaving, because students were switching between problem types, that might have given them the opportunity to think about what relates one problem type to the next, and that could have enabled them to be better able to combine strategies to solve these surprise test problems. None of those kinds of learning are possible with blocking, because you’re focused on one problem type at a time, there’s no switching, no ability to compare and contrast, and so none of those learning opportunities occur. So those are all possible explanations for how interleaving is enhancing learning in this particular study. And it’s also possible that multiple mechanisms are at play here, resulting in this powerful benefit.

John: In some of the lab experiments involving interleaved practice, generally, when students were exposed to interleaved practice, they felt they were not learning as much. When they were exposed to blocked practice, they thought they were learning more, yet the longer-term testing results in most of those experiments suggests that the opposite was true. Why is it that we so often see this sort of metacognitive illusion, where students perceive things that are beneficial as being less helpful, while the types of strategies they most typically use as being more useful?

Josh:: Maybe I can first of all say one thing just about what we actually measured in terms of judgments of learning very specifically, I think Steven did touch on this a bit earlier, but it might be interesting for the listeners to hear that we’ve actually measured two things. So we measured perceived difficulty of the homework. So right after students worked on an assignment, they rated the perceived difficulty, and we also measured judgments of how much they learned during that homework assignment, on that particular set of concepts. And in those two cases, interestingly, students tend to view blocking as being easier, which maybe actually is pretty intuitive because when you kind of are doing the same thing over and over again, you get this fluidity with it and you get into the state where you kind of know what you’re doing and you don’t have to think too hard about it. And I think that probably is what contributes to some degree to what you’re saying… why students don’t maybe respond so well to interleaving. Because you don’t get that fluid feeling of, “Okay, I’m kind of rolling, I’m doing these problems, and I know how to do them all.” So they perceive them as being easier. And they also felt like they learned more… possibly also, because they’re conflating this sense that they’re really fluid with how much they’re actually learning, which it turns out may not actually be the case, and probably isn’t the case. And in fact, that’s what we found here, is that. in both stages, this is what we found in terms of the perceptions. But in both stages, students did better on the surprise test. But also, interestingly enough, students in the blocked group did do better on their homework in general than students in the interleaved group. So it was easier for them. So in some sense, they were accurate about how hard the homework was for them. But they were inaccurate about what that meant in terms of their learning. And maybe I’ll let Steven go beyond what I said about why this may happen. But that’s one idea.

Steven: Yeah, I agree with that interpretation, I would add that one of the sources of metacognitive illusions relating to effective learning strategies involves students, learners, sort of conflating performance with learning. So how well you were actually doing in the moment with how much you’re actually learning sort of underneath everything. And, with blocking, and a variety of learning techniques that are actually less effective of the long term, they can give you high levels of performance as you’re using them, sometimes because they make the learning task much easier. And in our case, with blocking, because your practicing the same type of problem over and over, perhaps after the first problem, you no longer really have to work all that hard, you just repeat the same procedure… performance level is high. So students may infer that oh, well, I’m doing really well, I must be learning quite effectively. But actually, the underlying learning is quite low, whereas with interleaving, the performance level is not as high because they’re switching, it’s more difficult, they may then infer that, “Oh, my performance is low, I’m not doing so well, I’m not necessarily learning as well.” But actually, that struggle is very beneficial for learning over the long term. But this sort of inability to differentiate between learning versus performance, because performance is not always a direct indicator of the underlying learning, may be the source of this sort of disparity.

Rebecca: I love that you’re bringing this up, Steven, because I think a lot of times students or even folks that are new and in a professional position too, that are just starting out as an emerging whatever, whatever field they’re in, feel like they need to perform. And there’s this pressure or grades are often assigned based on performance, rather than the idea that learning and growing requires some struggle. And we don’t always think about that or encourage that.

STEVEN Oh, absolutely, yes.

Josh: Yeah, I think this has some implications for student mindset in general. We talk very often these days about growth mindset, and students having growth mindset being beneficial. I think students internalizing these sorts of results, although it’s very hard to get students to do that, may go some way in convincing them or helping them generate a mindset for themselves of growth, as opposed to a fixed mindset. So, understanding that things that actually are effective for learning oftentimes feel very difficult and lead to lower performance.

Steven: And I would just add on that, some of the more difficult but more effective in the long term learning techniques, they result in more mistakes and more errors. And certainly with interleaving, we saw a greater rate of problems being solved incorrectly than in the blocked condition, so students were making more mistakes. But the act of making those mistakes was not necessarily detrimental for learning in the long term.

Rebecca: Now, we can just get our assessments and things like this to match with that idea…

Josh: Yeah,

Rebecca: …we’d be all set. [LAUGHTER]

Steven: That would solve all our problems.

John: A lot of it, I think, is just the difficulty of convincing students of these issues, that there is benefit from making mistakes, and there’s some substantial learning gains from that. And it’s something I’ve been trying to do in my classes for a long time, without as much success as I’d like. Students like to feel good about their learning, and they like to be successful immediately. But that’s not consistent with long-term recall, or transfer ability.

Josh: Before I forget, along these lines, in terms of student perception, and judgments of learning, there’s kind of a couple of funny anecdotes along the following lines. So, when I was giving the surprise tests, students are shocked. And you can kind of hear this audible thing in the room with like, “Oh my god, we’re doing the surprise test…” and increasing anxiety and all these things. And something that I noticed, and you have to be, of course, very careful about these sorts of anecdotes, but I think it’s possibly indicative of something deeper. What I noticed was, in the blocked conditions, when they were taking the surprise test, there actually were a number of students who immediately decided to give up and turn in their tests. And basically unsolicited said to me, “I haven’t done any studying, how could I possibly answer any of these questions?” And so there’s this interesting thing where students somehow perceive the practice that they were doing as being completely useless. There were a few students in the blocked condition, in particular, who felt this way. And they only felt that after having crammed for an exam, would they be prepared. So there’s this kind of interesting, just also cultural, sort of perception around practice where somehow this spaced practice that they were doing this entire time, was not really doing anything for them and they had to cram to do well on the test. So I think it just speaks again to these kind of conceptions student have about learning, and oftentimes these illusions about learning that are really detrimental.

Rebecca: Yeah, I was just reflecting on what you were saying, Josh, and that I’ve definitely had the same experience with students. I teach web design. So I teach something very different. But we might work on a new project or a new assignment, and so we’re revisiting stuff from the past over and over again, because to start a new project, you have to know the things that we did before. And students will say, “Oh, I can’t do this. We haven’t done this in a while.” So just remembering many of these same instances [LAUGHTER] reflect the same idea. A lot of our textbooks and even adaptive learning platforms are primarily set up to encourage blocked practice, and many of our courses too, and what are some ways that faculty can build interleaved practice into our course design? …maybe beyond there’s the homeworks, as you mentioned, but are there other ways that we can start thinking about it in our practice?

Josh: Yeah, so firstly, one thing that any instructor can do that might promote kind of like an organic form of interleaved practice is to make sure their course is cumulative to a large extent. So if you tell students from the outset that you’re going to have a one midterm on so and so material that’s right before the midterm and this other midterm on so and so material, they’re basically going to focus on that material. And they’re not necessarily going to mix what they learned in that section with what they learned in sections for other tests. So if your course and your exams are cumulative, meaning that you are, for example, testing on a variety of topics, as opposed to just a single topic at a time, it’s a natural incentive for students to interleave their practice, because they need to do that for the exam. And in those cases, it’s probably a good idea to encourage students and say, “Well, you know, the structure of the test is going to be that it’s going to have mixed problems. And so it makes sense for you to mix your practice…” and you don’t even necessarily need to explain what interleaving is for someone to kind of feel like, it’s probably a good idea for me to mix my practice if the test is going to be mixed. Also, I know you said beyond the homework, but it actually can be logistically challenging to do interleaving If you haven’t thought about the sort of schedule you would need to use. I think the schedule we have in our paper actually is a good model for this because we had to think for some time about how you could actually do this effectively in a real classroom. And the main constraint to think about is that, with interleaving, if you’re mixing topics, you can only mix topics together you’ve already had before in the course, like something that students have learned something about. And so you just need to think sort of intentionally about: well, given the schedule of my class, and given the topics that we’ve covered, how spread out can I make the topics over the time that the students have to do the practice. So I’d recommend if people are looking for a concrete version of this, to see how you could arrange the schedule to make this happen. We have a diagram in our paper where you can see how they’ve been shuffled together, and it might be kind of helpful.

Steven: Yeah. And to add on to what Josh said, a lot of the work with interleaving is in the setup, sort of designing the interleave schedule. And probably one of the reasons why blocking is so popular is it’s frankly, much easier, you just: this week, I’m going to focus on this topic and once it’s done, I’m just going to move on. You don’t have to think about it again. With interleaving, the instructor beforehand, probably should sit down and think about: Okay, how am I going to make things cumulative? And then in the service of that, how am I going to perhaps arrange various learning activities where I’m going to require students to revisit other material? I’m going to perhaps mix things, randomize things in a way that is less predictable, less nicely, discreetly organized as a blocked schedule would be. And doing that would be a way to set up interleaving in advance and then just follow that schedule. I think it’s probably very difficult, possibly impossible, literally, to have interleaving sort of introduced midway through. You should plan it in advance and then execute it, and then all the difficult work is done up front.

Josh: And you mentioned also adaptive learning technologies. And at UCLA, for example, we use online homework systems that do automatic grading of assignments and problem banks and things like that. One really easy thing you could do if you use such a tool is just to try to shuffle the problems together from different topics. So we use something called Mastering Physics and on that platform, you can pick and choose the problems very easily, and you don’t want to think too hard about it. You could just make sure that you have problems from different sections mixed in as opposed to when you give a given homework only problems from this one section in the book.

Steven: Also explaining to students from the outset, sending out the expectation that interleaving of the materials will happen and it’s by design, because you could even say potentially that the exam isn’t necessarily going to be nicely organized, where you’re going to be told this problem is on Chapter one, this next problem is gonna be on Chapter Two, it’s probably going to be mixed together, so why not practice in a way that is similar to the actual exam. And moreover, in real life, everyday circumstance, usually, the next situation you encounter is not necessarily predictable and a repeat of what you just saw. Things are often interleaved in the real world. So in a way, engaging in interleaving is kind of a better proxy for what you actually have to do when you apply skills.

Josh: But I would say one last thing, just in terms of implementation, as with many of these sorts of things, you have to know ahead of time that there might be some student resistance. Because the homework is going to feel a little bit more difficult, you have to be prepared that some students are going to say, “Well, this is totally different than what I’m used to” …and maybe feel like it’s just the wrong way to do things. And so you just have to be prepared as an instructor, as an educator. We know this as educators, that we encounter resistance, but it’s a good thing to know ahead of time.

Rebecca: I think one of the key things when we’re introducing techniques that feel like a struggle, where we might fail is that there’s room to fail and not have long-term consequences in terms of grades and things and to think about making sure that we’re setting these things up in a way that promotes learning and promotes engagement with the method rather than just resisting it or just being really upset about how it might negatively impact a grade. Because also when we have emotions running high that are negative, like that’s not going to help our learning either. [LAUGHTER]

Steven: Right and making, I think, some of these activities low stakes, and not being highly detrimental to one’s grade if one bombs an assignments that’s interleaved, probably would be very palatable to students, but would lower that anxiety,

John: One of the things I’ve been doing for about a decade or so now is using progressively cumulative exams in my large class where I have weekly quizzes that a growing share of them are drawn randomly from earlier portions of the course and student resistance to that is pretty high, I do talk to them about the benefits of interleaved practice. But when they’re trying to work through the exam, and they’re trying to remember things from a month or so before, they don’t find that quite as pleasant. But reminding them that the more effort they put into this, the more they’re going to remember in the future, and that the goal of the class isn’t to get them the highest grades on their exams, it’s to give them a preparation in the discipline that’s going to let them be more successful when they take upper-level classes that build on this foundation. That’s what I tell them, and some students do accept that. But I wouldn’t say it’s a universal acceptance of this.

Rebecca: It’s so hard, John.

Josh: Yeah, who would have thought that the purpose of education is for you to remember things a month in the future?

Steven: It’s always a conundrum that perhaps the most effective instructors are not necessarily the most popular instructors. [LAUGHTER]

John: What does the evidence suggest about interleaving, across disciplines and across different types of concepts? Does it seem to work as well in all disciplines?

Steven: There seems to be a promotion of interleaved practice, particularly, I think, in the popular media that latched on to this technique and think, oh, wow, it’s really amazing and counterintuitive and cool. I’m going to recommend it broadly. And I think one of the concerns with that is then you have suggestions to interleave just anything under the sun and in any way. And although the effect of interleaving in controlled studies, in many cases, has been very, very promising, that isn’t necessarily a license to just interleave anything. And in particular, one of the sort of potential moderating factors is maybe the degree to which the materials that you’re interleaving are confusable, or similar with one another. And that may be really critical. So you can’t just interleave my say physics homework with history homework, and things like that. But the problem is then, when some people read these articles online, that say interleave, they don’t get that nuance. I think that’s a bit of a concern. And further, beyond that, there does seem to be different benefits, depending on the type of material. So, about two years ago, some researchers in Germany conducted a meta analysis. And for those listeners who may not be familiar, that’s sort of a statistical analysis of multiple studies in a given literature. And they did this meta analysis on interleaving studies, a good portion of them. And they found that the interleaving benefits were especially strong for perceptual categories like bird families and things like that, learning to recognize pictures. And whereas for text-based materials, like expository texts and short kind of non-visual materials, there was no substantial interleaving benefits. So I think that sort of raises a cautionary note that we don’t know the extent to which interleaving enhances learning across the wide space of possible things that you could use it for. And actually, that was one of the motivations for our current study, because we were thinking, would it actually work in the domain of physics? That hadn’t been investigated before. And actually, very few studies have been conducted in undergraduate classrooms. And so there was lots of unanswered questions that had not actually been empirically tested that we examined in this particular case. And again, yet other circumstances warrant further investigation before interleaving, I think, could be confidently used.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?

Josh: For us, in the sense of research on interleaving, what’s next is getting at this question of generalizability. How broadly across different types of learning, different contexts, do our results generalize. And we think of tackling this in a couple of ways. The first is, you could tackle this from a theoretical and mechanistic standpoint, meaning if you could understand why interleaving works, and be pretty confident about the factors that lead to why it works, then you can look at it in a given scenario and ask yourself, “Well, do those factors exist in this scenario, and therefore, can we be confident that it’s going to generalize to this scenario?” …so, sort of mechanistic theoretical line to understand its generalizability. And the other option is just to scale. So you could, for example, scale our experiment to something that goes across many disciplines simultaneously. We think both of those are really important and promising directions for future research. So, for us, we think, in the broader scope of interleaving research, that’s kind of a nice thing to investigate next. But also, I just want to say that in terms of just interleaving versus blocking, an interesting questions about interleaving versus blocking, there’s still a question that is largely unanswered, what about some sort of a hybrid schedule? Sometimes we think to ourselves, and I think we actually personally have this intuition, that some degree of blocking at the beginning of a very novice learner’s learning might actually be very beneficial. So, for example, imagine you’re learning to play piano, and your instructor teaches you three different scales, and you’ve never played the scales before, and then asks you to play the scales interleaved. So, play this one scale, then play the next scale, play the next scale. You may just be so non-fluid with playing these scales that perhaps your practice won’t actually be very beneficial, even if it’s interleaved. Maybe you need to play one of the scales two or three times over and then start the interleaving. The same may be true for mathematics learning or for problem solving in physics. So there’s still very much open questions about things like that, like, what exactly is an optimal schedule, and under what conditions do these optimal schedules need to be applied.

Steven: And to add on that, sort of the robustness of the interleaving effect across extended durations, perhaps longer than the four weeks that we sort of implemented interleaving assignments, and then had the surprise exam and different, maybe more advanced, materials, rather than an introductory course, maybe a more advanced level course where the students are already coming in with more pre existing knowledge that’s relevant, and so on. There are lots of possibilities to explore as to the extent to which this sort of interleaving effect generalizes to a variety of different educational circumstances.

Josh: I think talking about scale and understanding how this works across disciplines. I also want to say as sort of a tangential note that I’m a physicist by training, Steven is a cognitive psychologist. We connected in a little bit of a sort of random way at UCLA. But it’s been an incredible thing, having an interdisciplinary collaboration. And I think in our view, such collaborations are just really powerful and useful in the science of learning, in particular, that is becoming this very multidisciplinary field. So on a broader note, I hope what’s next for the science of learning is more of this sort of collaboration across disciplines.

Steven: Yes, and both of us brought unique perspectives and skill sets to this particular project. And it ended up working just marvelously. And hopefully there’ll be more of that in the future.

John: Well, thank you. We really enjoyed reading your study, and I think it’s a really nice contribution to the science of learning.

Josh: Thank you for having us.

Steven: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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187. Talking Tech

Posted in attention, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, edtech, engagement, evidence-based practices, feedback, higher education, learning, mobile, motivation, multitasking, pedagogy, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching
May 12, 2021

Student use of mobile technology can enrich student learning experiences, but can also interfere with the focused attention that is essential for learning. In this episode, Michelle Miller examine how we can talk to students about technology in ways that will help them become more efficient in their learning and professional lives.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research. Her research interests include memory, attention and student success in the early college career.

Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells us about Teaching and Learning in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University series on teaching and learning.

Shownotes

Transcript

John: Student use of mobile technology can enrich student learning experiences, but can also interfere with the focused attention that is essential for learning. In this episode, we examine how we can talk to students about technology in ways that will help them become more efficient in their learning and professional lives.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research. Her research interests include memory, attention, and student success in the early college career. Michelle is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells us about Teaching and Learning in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University series on teaching and learning. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi, it’s great to be here.

Rebecca: So good to have you back. Today’s teas are…. Michelle, are you drinking any tea?

Michelle: Well, I’m still on coffee. We have a three hour time difference this time of the year. And so I figure I’m entitled.

Rebecca: How about you, John?

John: I am drinking ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: And I have golden monkey today.

John: …for a change.

Rebecca: It’s expensive. I only drink it on special occasions. I was like, we’re gonna get to talk to Michelle, today. I’m gonna make fancy tea.

Michelle: Well, coffee is the fanciest tea of all.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk a little bit about how to talk to students about technology and why perhaps you might consider talking to students about technology. You teach a course on mind, brain and technology, and you’ve also created the Attention Matters projects that we’ve discussed on an earlier podcast. Could you tell us a little bit about the mind, brain and technology class that you teach?

Michelle: Right. So this has been such an incredible privilege I’ve had, on and off. for several years. Now, back a long time ago, when I first applied for and was competing for the President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellowship honor and award here at Northern Arizona University, one of the things that we got to do as part of our application packet was to envision a dream course. And this was, gosh, around a decade ago that I did this. So the landscape of the research and technology itself was very different. But this is the course that I came up with to say if I could teach one thing, brand new, build it from the ground up, this is what I would do: something that would connect psychology, especially empirical research-oriented psychology, the role of emerging technologies in our lives and the incursions they’ve made into all of our lives, and blend that with some real practical advice and things that would be engaging to college students today at a variety of levels. And so it went in my packet. I was so fortunate to win the award and be chosen for it. And then I came knocking on the doors, and I said, but remember, there was this dream course, I actually was very literal minded. So I said, “Well, I get to teach this now, right?” And my department said “Well, oh, okay, yes, we can work that out.” And it originally was taught as a senior capstone, and it’s been taught in that form, again. Another time it had an incarnation as a freshman seminar, a first-year seminar, and right now I’m teaching it as a fairly large general elective upper division elective, primarily serving our psychology majors and our minors. And so this is a course that I’ve been able to dip in and out of throughout the years. And I actually quote one of the first cohort of students, I got some really choice quotes that I included in my last book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. And this semester, I actually have students reading some early drafts of the book I’m writing right now. And so it’s really been interwoven throughout my professional evolution over the last 10 years.

Rebecca: It’s pretty cool that you got to ultimately teach the class and it’s been going on for so long.

Michelle: Indeed, it is, indeed it is.

John: What do your students think about the role of technology in social media, in their lives, as well as in educational environment?

Michelle: Well, right from the get go, when I got to first design this class, and actually be sitting with a cohort of students every week, and bringing up a new topic, we divided it up into: there’s technologies for learning; there’s the effects of technology on aspects of thinking, like cognition, and so on; there’s several weeks on social media, which we’re right in the middle of right now. So there’s lots of different kind of articulation points where different students can come in with opinions. And so it does really cover that really broad area. So right from the beginning, I was so struck by the thoughtful and sometimes unexpected things that students would say… unexpected meaning kind of counter to what are some real stereotypes about… first of all, that all college students are a traditional age in this kind of lifestyle where you live in a dorm and party on the weekends. And I think most of us know that today’s college students do not fit that mold, and they’re not all that age. But, even students who are in this younger age bracket, to have them really say… like one of the early exercises we do in the course, I asked them to sort themselves on a continuum. We did it on a whiteboard this time via video conference, but in a physical classroom, they’d actually stand on different ends of this… place yourself physically on this continuum: Do you love technology, you want it everywhere, can’t imagine life without it… you hate it, you want to go low tech. And students are really spread across that spectrum. And so many of them have thought… they’ve said, “You know, I noticed I feel a certain way after I’m on Instagram for a certain amount of time,” or “I’ve tried electronic textbooks and I personally prefer paper.” …that’s actually consistent with some of the surveys that have been done with college students as well. So they are varied, they’re rich, and they are very counter to the stereotype that younger people just want technology everywhere in their lives.

Rebecca: What is one of the biggest misconceptions about technology that your students bring up in class that you address?

Michelle: Well, there’s a complex of sort of some interrelated ones that dial into my specialty area, which is cognitive psychology. So naturally, I noticed those really prominently myself. And so those ideas that using technology is going to reduce attention span, it’s reducing even your ability to think. And then there’s a sort of a related set of issues around what has been in the past a very controversial and headline dominating issue, which is the issue of taking notes by hand versus on a laptop computer in class. And that research, in particular, not to go through all of it, but, while the original study that sparked that debate was well designed, the interpretation of it has been just stretched until it screams. That study doesn’t talk about the distraction issue, there’s a lot of things that aren’t addressed in it. But students have come away, they’ve heard this kind of very superficial version of that, by which laptops are bad, and they also have kind of picked up a folk belief that if you handwrite something, it sort of drives it into your memory automatically. And it does not work that way. In fact, if you read the original study, one of the things that they say is that in as much as laptop note taking can be less memorable, whatever you’re taking notes on, It’s because you’re less likely to paraphrase, synthesize, and compress down what you’re hearing. And yet we have other people, they’ve heard these people in the culture say, “Oh, well, if you want to remember something, sit down and copy it, get out that pen and paper,” and that’s not really an effective study strategy. So they’re a little surprised and they say, “Oh, wait a minute, there’s some nuance to that study, and maybe some others that didn’t replicate it.” That study wasn’t talking about distraction on a laptop, it was just strictly speaking about this one aspect of how memory encoding works. Attention span… I probably talked about it on an earlier podcast… This is not a concept that attention scientists usually use. And so right off the bat, that’s a little suspect. And there’s not really good solid evidence that fundamentally, attention is changing. So they’ve absorbed some of those things. And so they’re really delighted to really dig more into those. So I might assign them an editorial or something that ran in a popular magazine or a blog. And then we look at the original research they’re talking about, and we pick up on the discrepancies. It’s not that Mueller and Oppenheimer was badly designed, it’s just they were looking at some effects that don’t always hold up with replication. And that speaks to this idea that the effect size is maybe not that large. Not that, again, anything was wrong with their data, it’s just you have this now you see it, now you don’t quality with some of these effects. And that kind of tells you that maybe this isn’t the hugely overriding consideration. And subsequent studies too have talked about this storage function of notes. It’s neat to think that you remember as a function of note taking without having to go back and study. But in reality, that’s what we do with notes, we go back and we study them. And so here’s this big elephant in the room like, well, are they taking good notes? And if they’re not taking good notes that capture key points, that they are going to want to go back and study actively, then picking up a little bit here or there because it was more memorable during note taking is not as big an issue. So that’s a big like, “Okay, what have you heard? Let’s look at the original research.”

Rebecca: Having the opportunity to talk about these things with students is exciting. And I’m sure the students are really into it, because it connects to their direct lives. And diving into the research makes a lot of sense in the context in which you’re teaching your course within psychology. So it seems like a natural fit there. How might other academic fields adopt some of the ability to talk about these things in their own classes where maybe cognitive science is not or psychology is not, the fundamental underpinning of what they’re doing?

Michelle: That’s, I think, something that I think is really exciting and why I am so excited to be able to share with your Tea for Teaching audience is I’ve really come to believe that that maybe there is something that is more versatile here beyond just the psychology frame and just a senior capstone in psychology. And I think that this is where faculty creativity can come in. I think the fundamental things that I think are so promising… Well, first of all, this is just a topic that is really under discussed, and it’s under discussed in a serious way. It’s not like students have not ever heard anybody critique technology. They’ve heard that. They’ve heard, “Oh, it messes with their sleep that it messes with their social relationships.” They’ve heard a lot of this, but it’s kind of swept under the rug in a way or even treated as “what serious person would ever think about these sorts of things?” So, that said, this is something that, and it’s something that students are doing all the time, even pre-pandemic. Most students do use technology of one form or another and are on one or more social media platforms. And so this is in and out of their lives all day long. So I can only think that there are critical frames and key concepts within a variety of disciplines that could map onto this, even if a faculty member doesn’t have the opportunity, or the interest, to say develop a whole course. Well, perhaps this could be a vehicle for discussing, for example, experimental design. How do you set up a study to really get at things like “What are the impacts of heavy cellphone use?” You do have certain individuals who self select to use technology in a particular way. And that’s something that you see crop up again and again in the research literature. Or if we’re talking about our own personal relationships, classes that have a focus on health can perhaps use one of these sub areas as a springboard for discussion. And so this is just really what I found, is that students who might otherwise be very quiet or, when things are framed in a purely very divorced from reality academic way, they may hang back, but who doesn’t get hooked into a discussion of some of the impacts of technology on our life. So I think it can be a vehicle for those things. And I think that it might be a little bit of a stretch in, say, a physical sciences class where we’re really discussing empirical context. But even there, it can be folded into discussions of effective studying very well, as long as we don’t just have that, again, very superficial tech’s bad, just get rid of it all and do everything on note cards. There’s a lot more to it than that.

John: Students are going to be interacting with technology, not only in their classes, but in their future careers. So having them think about those issues can be a really useful thing to learn, no matter what discipline they’re studying,

Rebecca: It seems like a good hook. It’s something that everyone can relate to, in some context. I was doing an exercise in my own class not too long ago about storytelling, and how brands present stories around what they’re presenting to people. And I use Spotify and Pandora as the examples. I’ve never seen a class so excited, [LAUGHTER] because it was talking about this technology platform that they can connect to. So I can imagine, when you bring up social media or other things that they feel really connected to, it immediately is a hook to talk about anything more complex.

Michelle: Absolutely. And that’s precisely the kind of dynamic that I’ve seen. And if I could throw out a kind of a discipline-specific example, there’s a concept that I really started weaving in more of over the last few iterations of the class. And this is a concept from psychological sciences research and quantitative analysis that really can be very slippery. But it’s a big, big part of contemporary ways that we analyze data. And it’s a concept of mediators and moderators. And so it’s jargony… and essentially mediators, when you have a correlation between two things, and you want to know, does A cause B? Or is there something else in the middle does A cause B causes C, and we have these great techniques for untangling those relationships. And moderators, on the other hand, is the relationship or is the correlation stronger in the presence of a particular variable or for, say, a particular group of people than others? And so yeah, you read that in a textbook and you go, “oh….” and yet, it’s one of the things that we really… I mean, experimental design, and how we can interpret our data is just radically more sophisticated when we can just not say, “Well, these two things happen together, but for whom is this relationship stronger,” and so on? So there are a lot of studies on the effects of technology that have one or more of these involved. And yeah, it just clicks for students when they see it play out in this relatable domain. So, for example, we have a study that I incorporate really early in the course. It’s got a word in the title, “Technoference” in relationships. So it’s a study of your perception that your partner in an intimate relationship uses their phone…. and when you’re talking to them… [LAUGHTER I think, will have a little bit of recognition if we’re in a relationship. That’s part of contemporary relationships, right? And they look at overall well being and how that relates to being in a relationship where your partner’s on the phone all the time. Now, it’s not a perfect study. And that’s part of what we look at. It was only among women who were in opposite sex relationships, and there’s a lot of self report and all that stuff. But you can say that “Okay, now they have a mediator. It’s not that the phone itself is degrading your life’s wellbeing but here’s this chain of causality of when your partner’s using your phone all the time when you’re talking, then you’re not as happy in your relationship. There’s conflict and then your overall wellbeing in your life goes down.” And then, in that context, you go, “Oh, Okay, I get it. Here’s what a mediator is.” And then we can talk about moderators, we can say, “Well, what about individuals who are in same sex relationships? What about men? What about couples who have been together for 25 years versus those who just got together six months ago?” Oh, okay. Now we understand moderators. So yeah, similar to you, Rebecca, I’m just saying, once you bring in some of these things, is not just dropping in sort of pop culture, it’s really taking a substantive look at these things. But yeah, then you springboard into concepts that are otherwise just really abstract.

Rebecca: Do you have some examples of things about learning related to technology that we might be able to slip into any discipline’s classes? …some of the stuff about attention, or good study strategies, or anything that’s maybe mediated through technology, but would relate to anybody.

Michelle: Definitely, the relationship between attention and memory and learning. Now, like I always say, when I’m talking about these topics, memory is not the only important aspect of learning. Learning is not all about memorization. But we now know that when you remember more, we have a broader knowledge base in an area, you’re better able to think critically and think in some sophisticated ways in that area. So that’s all good stuff. So that’s one piece of it. And in order to acquire any new memories, pretty much, for practical purposes, you have to be paying attention. And this is what devices and technologies have been so well engineered at this point to take away from us. So yeah, when you talk about a life skill, you’re going to need this for the rest of your life, no matter what you do. We have to think about, alright, how do we kind of shepherd and be stewards of our own attention. And I think, from a teaching perspective, too, it’s not that we have to constantly entertain students to grab their attention back from whatever it’s wandering off on, or similar that we just have to stand up there and be like, “Well, you have to pay attention… unbroken for an hour and 15 minutes… and all violations will be punished.” There’s different paths between those, but just to share with students that “Yeah, using phones is probably not changing the way our attentional systems work.” They work the way they have for many, many millennia. However, there’s a lot more competition for that now. So having them think about what are their strategies going to be. For some students, they come up with very creative cold turkey types of situations or types of strategies. I had one student say that I put my phone in a dropbox outside at night when I’m studying, and if I want to use it I have to go out there, which may not seem like a big deal, but in Flagstaff, it could easily be three degrees Fahrenheit and ice falling out of the sky, it’s cold out here. So we have students who say, “Well, you know what, I’m gonna be a little bit more subtle. I’m going to use one browser for my classwork and one browser for fun and social media.” And it’s just a little subtle cue that kind of tells you, “okay, we’re in work mode, or we’re not in work mode.” It’s not as much prescribing the answers as getting students themselves involved in saying, “Well, here’s how I’m going to manage this.” So those are some of the things that we would share. And when it comes to learning strategies at work, I’m always going to be evangelizing retrieval practice in one form or another. Lots of ways that that can look… everything from a Kahoot! quiz to sitting and talking with your roommate to try to bat back and forth what you remembered. Lots of different things you can do but, it shows too, there’s a link between you have to put in some active effort for your brain to pick up on that information and store it away in memory if it’s going to. So yeah, there’s sort of a complex of interrelated principles and take homes, there.

Rebecca: The one thing that I was immediately thinking about when you said about phones being really good at taking away your attention. I immediately thought as a designer, what a great example of how to get someone’s attention? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: Yeah.

Rebecca: …not only to think about how to manage attention and think about what you’re paying attention to, but how do designers actually manipulate that? [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: See… perfect. There’s a cross-disciplinary connection.

John: The importance of attention is a topic that I think all students recognize is a problem. But I don’t think they fully understand quite how much of a problem it can be. Or at least my perception is there’s still a lot of misperceptions about the ability of students to multitask effectively. And I know that’s something that you address a bit in your classes.

Michelle: I do. And a related project that we’ve discussed on some other podcasts is the Attention matters project and I’m happy to report that project is still just perking along like crazy. We still have lots of faculty who are involved with it. So to kind of give a little background on it. Attention Matters was a concept that came out of a great conversation I had with my very smart and dedicated colleague, John Doherty, who’s an instructional designer and a librarian here at Northern Arizona University. And I had been going around and trying to teach a little, almost guest lecture, roadshow for interested faculty to spread these ideas to students of how to study effectively and how to have a plan for not getting distracted in the middle of class and stuff like that. And we talked about it. And we put together an online module that can serve so many more students. This semester, I have several really smart research assistants, undergraduate research assistants, who are in this module, moderating it and helping it run. And for those who know what MOOCs are (massive open online courses), it’s a little bit like that, except it’s specific to our institution. And so, in this, it’s a way of reaching out to students, they oftentimes will earn a little bit of extra credit in their classes for faculty who really want to spread these ideas to their students. They work through these modules that do touch on some of these key ideas about… as far as multitasking, we tend to be very overconfident. You can’t learn by osmosis, you do need that directed attention. Instead of highlighting and passively hoping things soak in, get in there and do retrieval practice. There’s also a little piece of Attention Matters, by the way, that talks about driving safety, which was not really something we set out to do. But I feel like it’s, again, a relatable everyday example that people can say, “Oh, my gosh, I was in a bike accident by a distracted driver,” or “I’m very careful about this.” And students are very adamant, and have strong views that do funnel back to that idea of: if you let it, devices and distraction of all kind can really take over and create some serious consequences. So, that’s yet another way that we’ve been working to bring these ideas to students throughout the years. And yet another thing that’s given us a fascinating window into what students are already doing to cope with these things, and some of their unexpected attitudes and ideas about them.

Rebecca: The thing that a lot of folks are doing is they’re teaching remotely or trying to jazz things up in synchronous online classes is trying to play with the idea of gamification in their classes, which certainly comes from technology, and often from video games and then some experience around that. Can you talk a little bit about how faculty might use gamification in their classes? Or also how that works on students?

Michelle: Yeah, games and gamification has been such a topic for so long in how can we use technology for education? I know it’s funny, when I was doing research for Minds online, I actually went to a Musee Mecanique in San Francisco, as a sort of a background research. It’s this amazing Museum, that’s just whatever the technologies of the time were, and it goes back like 100 years, all these different games, physical games you can play there.

Rebecca: It’s a cool Museum,

Michelle: Oh, you’ve been there.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Michelle: Oh, my gosh.

John: I was too.

Michelle: People have used photography in games and gamification. They’ve used all these different ways of using tech to play. So this is not a modern concept. And so we’ve seen lots of attempts throughout the years to also harness it for learning… some more successful than others. It’s such a deep theme in those connections between mind-brain-learning technology. And so students, here too, they get pretty excited about it. And that’s a good thing for faculty who are looking to use games and gamification. Now it’s another where I think drilling a little bit below the surface is really beneficial. It’s pretty clear to me, from the research and literature so far, that what makes games effective, and what makes them so compelling, you know, elicits the time, effort and attention that you need for learning, it’s not the superficial stuff about the experiences, not the music, and it’s not just calling it a game. It’s not necessarily tacking points onto something, although points and scorekeeping is usually a part of most compelling games, for sure. But there’s deeper things about getting really rapid feedback, there’s the opportunity for friendly competition. And that’s something that I’ve really seen this year, because I’ve also been using quite a few quizzes and polls and things like that in my courses, too, that are remote, is that you don’t have to attach a grade to the game to get some students really into the idea of competition, while other students, there, it’s more anxiety provoking, or it’s just too much because they’re already in so many high-stakes competitive exams, where they can play for fun. And so those are some of the aspects that are important when people are thinking about selecting a game, setting up a game, bringing gamification in some way. It doesn’t have to all be cheesy, let’s make everything look like a video game. But really, that idea too, that mistakes are part of it. While we’re playing a Kahoot and you get an answer wrong, whatever, we’re doing something else in five seconds, and it’s not a big issue like a test question is. So there’s definitely that. And I would say, too, that students here as well, they can be a great source for insight. So talk to your students. Say “What aspects of this game are more appealing? less appealing?” and so on. And games and game culture too, this is something that I really get a sense that they’ve never had a serious, let alone academic, conversation about the role of gaming in their lives. Yet for many students, that’s an important part of their identity. It’s what they do to relax. It’s what they do to socialize now, quite frequently, especially with distancing happening. So, as weird as it might sound, let’s take games seriously. Let’s take games seriously as an important aspect of students’ lives. Let’s take it seriously as a road to learning. And let’s just keep exploring that because the more research that gets done, the more effective and beneficial features we find associated with games.

John: And the most popular games are those that students can work through. And no matter what their prior knowledge with that type of game, as you said, provides them feedback. And that feedback is targeted so that they can use that to improve and the level of the games are set so that it’s neither so challenging that they give up and get discouraged, but not so easy that they don’t have the sense of challenge. And that seems like a really good way of perhaps thinking about how we should design our classes in general, whether we include explicit gamification aspects or not, creating an environment that encourages students to actively want to engage with the material, and where they can see progress and see how they’re advancing. That is, in general, something that I think is a really important thing for us to contemplate at least in course design.

Michelle: Agree 100%, agree 100%. And that’s exactly what makes games compelling. What is about social media that makes people return to it again, and again, and again, hundreds of times in a day? And what features can we extract and adapt in the service of learning?

Rebecca: One of the things we talked about with Ken Bain last week was an example about the arts and how that might change someone’s thinking… an experience with a piece of artwork. So, I used that kind of example, to inspire a little activity with my students this morning. And I asked them, “Can you talk about a piece of artwork that has influenced your thinking?” And I gave them some categories. And I’m teaching an interaction motion design class, but I included visual art, but games were one of my categories. And some of the students put some really interesting examples about how certain games have gotten them to really contemplate interesting ethical questions, relationship questions, really interesting stuff. And they wrote really thoughtful responses. I had them basically write the name of the game and just a sentence about how it impacted their thinking. But there were some really thoughtful responses. And it was really almost surprising to me how deep some of those quick summaries of their experiences had been with games.

Michelle: Yeah, that’s perfect. And without the conversation, you wouldn’t have that window.

John: For many years, we’ve all heard lots of arguments from faculty about whether technology should be or should not be used in classes. The pandemic, to a large extent, has shut those down completely. And that’s been, for many of us, quite a bit of a relief not to have to deal with those arguments all the time. However, as we begin to move back into a more traditional onsite teaching environment where more instruction is taking place in regular classrooms again, what are some of the things that people may have learned about interacting with technology effectively during the pandemic, that may perhaps lead to improvements in how we teach our classes regularly?

Michelle: That is such a meaty question, and I think it’s one we’re going to see so much just rapid development of reactions. it ties into the whole question right now of what does instruction look like post-pandemic or whatever the next stage of the pandemic is? But yeah, what a good time to think about this. And you know, I can look at it too through the lens of faculty experience, I was kind of fortunate to have had my Zoom baptism completely by accident earlier in spring of 2020. Because I had set up this idea of having a lot of guest speakers in one class, and I got a huge response, which is wonderful, but I needed to bring them in. And I had always kind of said, “Well, if I’m going to Zoom, I’m going to kind of sidestep that. I’m going to let somebody else drive.” And I had to get over that really fast. And so I do think that it illustrates the value of some targeted, not totally strategically planned, practice with technology tools. And that’s just the kind of bedrock cognitive processes that, when you have something like being able to just run Zoom, or Collaborate or something like that, or have an online poll, your ability to do that while monitoring a classroom or answering questions, you got to have the practice in first, and our students are the same way. So we can think about, alright, whatever we’re going to have students interacting with or using or if it’s us that are using something, having that practice upfront and expecting that, once we’re on the other side of the learning curve, it looks very, very different. So that is one big part of it. On a much more conceptual or abstract level. I think that, this whole year, we’ve really needed to look at the students and their goals and why they’re there in the class in the first place, wnd why are they taking the course. That’s something I’ve written about in some of the shorter articles I’ve put out this year. I think the pandemic teaching was distinctive for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that you just can’t keep persisting with “Okay, I’m the learning cop here and I’m going to make sure everybody does things because I’m watching you.” At the end of the day. I found if my students… I hope they’re not, but yeah, they are in Zoom, they could be doing other things… they may be minimally attentive, and that is not good for their learning. And I do a lot of things to have a lot of different shifts in gears to bring in gamification. I’ve done a lot of things to do that. But ultimately, if the student wants to check out, they can check out to an extent. And I’m not saying I’m okay with that, but I think that we are going to be meeting students much more in the middle, instead of having a more adversarial relationship to their learning, I’m here to enforce what you have to know. I mean, we have to collaborate to have something like remote teaching the way we’re doing it, to have that work at all, there has to be more of a collaborative approach to it. So I know that that’s a very top-level conceptual type of answer. But I think that in a lot of things, we’re going to be saying, “Well, you know, what, if this is something that helps some students, and if I’ve talked to students about why they’re here, and they’re purpose driven, ‘I am here to actually learn and take something from this class because I need it for the next class.’” Well, that’s a great basis to springboard off of, instead of “how do I write the policy in my syllabus that will prevent any kind of behavior I see as undesirable.” And you know, so many people were already moving away from that, which I think is incredibly fortunate given what we’ve been through in the last year. But this may be, if not a tipping point, something else that pushes us more in that direction of saying, “Well, what are the policies there to do?” Yes, students have to pay attention to learn. And that is very, very clear during remote pandemic teaching, as well as everywhere else. But let’s maybe take some different approaches and have a different philosophy of how we get there.

Rebecca: One of the things that I also hear you hinting at Michelle is that during the pandemic, we’ve all had a lot to manage, we’ve had a lot of cognitive load. And so we have to prioritize, and we have to decide what’s going to win our attention. And so students have the same problem all the time, just like we have the same problem all the time, we’re just more aware of it now. They have multiple classes to balance, they might have family concerns, they might have jobs, and at some point, they’re making choices about what they’re going to attend to, and what they can’t attend to. And I think sometimes we always hope and wish that they’re attending to whatever we’re putting out in front of them. But that might not be the best choice for them at a given moment, based on the other things that are going on in our lives. And we just often don’t think of our students in that kind of holistic point of view.

Michelle: Oh, absolutely. That’s such an eloquent example of this way of thinking, and the things that we have learned and the shift in mindset that we may be on the cusp of. And that’s another thing that really underlies the approach to talking to students about technology that I’ve really come to adopt, which is the same-side instead of opposite-sides stance. Like you said, we do struggle with some common things. I’m caricaturing a little bit, but I think we’re playing off of an older mindset where it’s us, we’re were older, we’re in this position of authority, and here’s how we like to do things. And here’s this young generation, and they think, very alien to us, and they want to do something else, and we’re going to make them come over to our side… saying, look, we all get distracted. In class, I’m frequently saying, “Well, yeah, here’s something unpleasant that happened to me on social media,” even if I don’t tell them all the details. [LAUGHTER] The point is, yeah, I get misunderstandings and hurt feelings on social media, too. I end up in the social comparison that tends to be so toxic on places like Instagram. I get really, really distracted and sidetracked because I’m using the same computer for 20 different things all at once. And so let’s work together to see how we can address those challenges. And yeah, so I think that what you’re describing is, I think, a very healthy way forward.

John: Now that faculty have had a chance to get more insight into students lives, perhaps now faculty will be more understanding of those things in the future, because the classroom environment is somewhat separated from all that it was much easier to ignore those things and maybe faculty will be more likely to treat students as human beings, perhaps in the future.

Rebecca: Are you implying that the classroom is real life?

John: Well, maybe it may more closely resemble that as we move back into more traditional classroom settings.

Michelle: Yes, and I’m all for that.

John: We always end with the question, and it’s particularly relevant now, “What’s next?”

Michelle: As you mentioned at the top of our interview together, I am in the very final stages of completing the Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology book. So I’m really excited to having that book be coming out in the not too distant future. And I’m really throwing myself into a brand new professional role, which is as the Co-editor of the Teaching and Learning Series with West Virginia University Press. Now, this series has just drawn so many dynamic thinkers with so many practical and also evidence-based ideas that we can all use in teaching and learning and so it was a tremendous honor to be invited to take that role on and I’ll be working with the other editor of the series who founded the series and launched it all, Dr. James Lang, who has just been tremendously influential in the area of bringing evidence-based effective pedagogical strategies to so many people in higher education. He’s been this tremendous leader in that area. His writing is also amazing. So what an honor to get to work with him and with West Virginia University Press. Stepping into that role has taken up a lot and it’s been wonderful already. So that is, for the most part, what’s next for me.

John: And I think we could say the same about your writing based on your earlier book, as well as recent comments that Jim Lang made on Twitter about how much he enjoyed the clarity of your writing and your exposition in this new book and how much he’s looking forward to that being released.

Michelle: Oh, thank you, that’s so nice to say and being able to teach students and to talk to students for so many years about these issues was the inspiration that gave me ideas to work with. So, it all comes around.

Rebecca: Well, thanks, as always for joining us, Michelle, and sharing some of your insights and some of the work that you’ve been doing.

Michelle: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Michelle. And we’re looking forward to talking to you about this book as it gets closer to coming out.

Michelle: Absolutely.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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144. Pedagogies of Care: Evidence Based Practices

Posted in active learning, attention, backward design, edtech, engagement, evidence-based practices, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, professional development, retrieval practice, spaced practice, teaching, universal design
July 15, 2020

This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, Dr. Michelle Miller joins us to discuss how the use of evidence-based teaching practices can be an effective way of demonstrating that you care about your students and their success.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research interests include memory, attention, and student success in the early college career. Michelle is the author of Mind’s Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells Us about Teaching, Learning, and Thriving in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang. The tentative release date is 2021. She is also a contributor to the Pedagogies of Care project created by authors in this series.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: This week we continue a series of interviews with participants in the Pedagogies of Care project. In this episode, we discuss how the use of evidence-based teaching practices can be an effective way of demonstrating that you care about your students and their success.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Dr. Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Miller’s academic background is in cognitive psychology research interests include memory, attention, and student success in the early college career. Michelle is the author of Mind’s Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, and has written about evidence-based pedagogy in scholarly as well as general interest publications. She’s currently working on her newest book, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: What the Science of Memory Tells Us about Teaching, Learning, and Thriving in a Wired World, scheduled as part of the West Virginia University Press series on teaching and learning, edited by Jim Lang. The tentative release date is 2021. She is also a contributor to the Pedagogies of Care project created by authors in this series. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Hi. It’s great to be here.

Rebecca: Great to have you back. Today’s teas are:

Michelle: I am drinking fresh mint and hot water, which I think is my favorite summer tea of all when the mint is thriving all around here at the house.

Rebecca: Sounds nice and refreshing. How about you, John?

John: I’m drinking Tea Forte black currant tea.

Rebecca: And I’m drinking Scottish Afternoon. I haven’t quite run out of that yet.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project and your forthcoming book. Could you start by talking about your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project?

Michelle: Right towards the end of the spring semester for many of us, as you know, we in the teaching and learning community and professional development and scholarship of teaching and learning space, were in just vibrant discussion with one another, just talking each other through the experiences that we were having as part of the pivot to emergency remote instruction, which I think for most of us in higher education, that was a big part of what we did in March all the way through May of 2020. So we’d been talking about these and there’s this very vibrant group of authors that have come together under the West Virginia University Press’s project, as you mentioned, edited by Jim Lang. And so we had this group, which was already exchanging very rich sets of advice and ideas about where we were going and really talking about how to help. And so under the leadership of Tori Mondelli, who conceived of this whole project, and also Tom Tobin, who has also been a real leader as part of this group, we talked about how can we put together some resources that grow out of the work that we’re doing, that capitalize on some of the rich conversation and collaboration that’s already happening, and whatever format that takes, put that out there into the world, so that people can use that and there’s all different ways that it could be utilized. We’re not prescribing that but we really had envisioned something that was open, that was helpful, and that was really contextualized within this moment of real upheaval and crisis and new directions that many of us are involved in.

John: We’ve gotten some really good feedback. I shared that with the faculty at our campus just a few days ago and I got about a dozen responses within a couple of hours saying “These resources are really useful. Thanks for sharing.” We’ll include a link to that in the show notes. So, we went through this traumatic switch that was a bit of a struggle for everyone, students and faculty, what can we do now to better prepare for the fall?

Michelle: At the time that we’re recording this, we are, for me, about midway through the summer. So, it really is starting to get real, for many of us, what we are going to do in the fall. And we’re seeing more and more institutions who are firming up and starting to commit to real plans for what the format of instruction is going to be like, what enrollments are going to be like, and all those kind of locally specific pieces of information that are so important for determining what we’re going to be able to do. So, what can we do differently to better prepare for the fall semester? First of all, let’s honor that what the vast majority of faculty that I’ve talked to, what we accomplished in such a short space of time in spring, providing instructional continuity. This was amazing. I mean, we really enabled students who, in some cases, they were set to graduate, they were earning their degree in maybe a month or two, and we made it possible for them to get to that finish line through a tremendous amount of ingenuity and hard work on everybody’s part. So, let’s not sell ourselves short. That said, we are headed into a very different environment. And so what I’ve really suggested in some other things that I’ve written about and definitely in my Pedagogies of Care project is a focus on what does quality really look like? And for me, being a cognitive psychologist, social scientist, totally acknowledging that that’s my perspective… forr me that comes down to aligning with the best of what learning science has to offer. And the neat thing is that we are in an era right now when number one, we really have converged on a set of principles that are fairly non controversial, and if not always easy to implement, it’s fairly clear what we can be doing. And we have technologies, in some cases, that map onto them very well. They don’t do the work for us. But they can really help implement things and make things concrete that we’ve known in theory for a long time were very, very important. So, that’s one of the things that I think that we can focus on. So, there is that. I’ve also really emphasized the reevaluation that we won’t be able to simply do what we’ve always done. I think those of us who work in this space are always quite adamant that teaching, say online or teaching a hybrid course, is not a matter of just sort of capturing a lecture. If that were the case, this would be very, very straightforward. We should just lecture all summer, record it and post it, but that’s not what it’s really about. So, what I think that we can focus on as we do reevaluate, in our teaching, what are we trying to accomplish? We can step back and say, “Well, what do students want to get out of this?” And that I think can help us winnow down from all the things that we could potentially do. It will help us let go of some things that we will not be able to do. And help us find, if not an easy path forward, a more clear one that will allow us to serve our students and also take good care of ourselves during this time.

Rebecca: I think anything that helps us figure out what our priority can be, in terms of content or goals that we have for students, but then also methodologies that we’ll use and why, I think is key because I think we all need to scale back and be reasonable with ourselves because there is so much to accomplish if we want to do it perfectly. But we just don’t have that kind of time. You just said it was halfway through the summer and I almost had a panic attack.

Michelle: Right. Not that I’m counting but it is actually just about the midway through the summer. And you, know, when I started reflecting even more on this Pedagogies of Care concept, which is the kind of overarching ideal that we eventually rallied under as a group, it’s occurring to me that that applies to faculty as well. I mean, self care is a kind of a term that’s very cliched, and it gets kicked around, but I think that we also really do at this time need to be recognizing that, again, what we did, what we accomplished as faculty in the spring was tremendous, that it did require people working weeks and weeks and weeks, sometimes months without a break. And although summers are not really traditionally a break,or vacation for faculty in any conventional sense of the word, they are a time to recharge and for many of us were also taking care of research obligations and other things that went completely by the wayside for a while out of necessity. So we really do have to balance that too. What’s the degree of faculty burnout at this point? What’s the degree of faculty receptivity to brand new things. So, the things that we are looking at also need to be kind to ourselves. We need really good communication and collaboration more than ever before, I think, in university communities. I think that’s really also the thing that’s going to make this fall successful, is being able to recognize what faculty have been through and work with that. So yeah, I think that we should recognize this effort. And with that, I also think that evidence-based teaching, incorporating learning science and those principles… that ideally shouldn’t be yet another thing on the to-do list. I think that if that’s the way it’s coming across, then we’re going about it the wrong way. I mean, to me, frameworks are always a way to simplify. Again, we have this infinite landscape of things that we could do in any given class, all these different decisions to make and choices. We do have a framework for whether it’s learning principles or another framework… that should help and simplify. So I think it kind of fits in that big landscape of possibilities as well. That’s how I see it. It should help; it shouldn’t add to what’s becoming a pretty serious burden for faculty.

John: One of the things I’ve really liked in your discussion, as an economist, is you sounded at times, like an economist, when you were describing that, in terms of this is the most efficient way of helping students reach their goals… that if we use evidence-based methods of teaching, we can let students learn skills more efficiently without wasting as much time and getting closer to that point, making it a form of caring, I think, as you referred to it. That one way of demonstrating your care for students is by using techniques that are more efficient, that provide the largest return on students’ time… there’s the economics part coming in. So I really appreciated that. And I thought it was a really good argument that we tried to emphasize ourselves in our workshops.

Michelle: Oh, thank you. And you said it better than I possibly could have as a non-economist, but that’s exactly the core of that idea, that it is kind to students and perhaps it’s kind to faculty as well. We can pre-select some of these avenues and techniques that, if you’ve got an hour to study (and for many of our students, that hour of study might be fractured and jammed in among all kinds of caregiving tasks) that you’re going to get more from that. If, as a faculty member, you’ve got four hours that you can devote today to preparing for the fall… and as well, that’s going to be divided up among other tasks among your caregiving responsibilities… how can we cut to the chase for faculty so that they can make those choices? So I’m glad that that comes across.

Rebecca: I think it’s important when we are planning for the fall that we are getting down to those essential elements. Can you talk us through some of the steps that faculty might take to focus in on those essential items and the evidence-based practices so they can have a good framework moving forward, not just for the fall when they might be teaching remotely, and that’s what they’re not familiar with, but all the time?

Michelle: Coming down to essentials, and here too, I think, that that has really resonated with many faculty and also with instructional designers and others tasked with making all of this work. That’s what’s really resonated, like what are some of the essentials, and I’ll never claim to be able to I Identify the complete and exhaustive list of exactly what to do. But here’s what comes to my mind. I think that perhaps returning even to those learning objectives, which we may have put in a syllabus long ago, and they can be sometimes kind of abstract, but coming back to those and saying, alright, what does it really look like when students have achieved these? Are there any that need to be perhaps modified, or dropped altogether? So if we are going to have a semester of really focusing on essentials, this might be a good time to do that. Naturally, we will want to think about the content. And oftentimes we talk about in pedagogy and developing pedagogy, we talk about re-focusing away from just coverage of content, that’s something that a lot of us get behind. And it’s okay to be thinking about well what content is going to be in the course. But then really pivoting to look at what’s the engagement with that content? How are the students going to engage with the content and how are they going to engage with you? So that’s a piece of it, asking yourself that question. And I think then, starting to bring in those really concrete logistics. Now, again, typically those of us who talk about pedagogy a lot, we kind of discourage people from talking about very specific tools or technologies, until they’re really, really clear on some of those high-flown ideals of what they and their students want to get out of the course. But I think in this case, we probably want to hold off on th.t, we are going to have to say, “Well, are you going to be expected to teach online but synchronously? And if you want an example of that, the Zoom meetings, which we’re all pretty familiar with, at this point, where we’re in at the same time, but maybe you’re in a different place? So is that going to be a part of what you do with students? Because that is pretty new to many of us. And if so, there’s certain considerations you’re gonna have to have in mind say, ‘Well, how is that going to work?’” Especially, if you’re expected to also be teaching say, a face-to-face course at the same exact time, which I think is going to present challenges. And I think for many of us, it’s going to depend on your local institutional context, but I think you can’t go wrong right now with setting up a robust online component to your course. I think that with the level of uncertainty we have, or even with individual students… if they’re going to need to say quarantine or take care of an ill relative or something like that… having some asynchronous, so different time activities and materials online, is going to be essential. So I think taking those concerns and saying, “Alright, what is this physically going to look like?” I wouldn’t typically push that as much but I think that that’s important now. And I think in the preparation for this, too, another kind of bare essential point that I talk about in my resource for our project is media creation. So in some cases, people are going to want to create, say, a set of videos, or let’s say they’re demonstrating a process. Let’s say they’re teaching studio art. They might want to have some pretty involved videos or other kinds of demonstrations, or perhaps there’s not good written material out there that might replace a series of face-to-face lectures. Maybe they’re going to be wanting to write a fair amount of content or maybe record, even, podcast-style materials. That stuff eats up a lot of time. So I think really being real about what you absolutely need to do in that department and getting started now, that’s sort of the wisdom of experience that I would share with folks as well.

Rebecca: I think that’s really good advice, Michelle. As I’m thinking towards the fall, I made a list of “this is absolutely essential… if I don’t have this content made, we’re screwed if we’re online,” versus like, “this stuff does exist out there that I could use…if maybe isn’t my favorite.” And then there’s well established stuff that’s fine or whatever. Because it does take a lot of time to write, produce and plan some of that stuff… even if you’re using methods that aren’t burdensome, where you’re not worried about production quality and those kinds of details. It still takes time. You need quiet space. There’s a lot of constraints, especially if you’re like me and you have kids at home. [LAUGHTER] You got to find the quiet time to record the thing. [LAUGHTER] So I appreciate the balance there… really thinking logistically a little bit. Because if you have a finite amount of time, then you have to prioritize what can get done ahead of time.

Michelle: Right. And you know, it may not be the way to go. And I though I’d share with you an experience that I had, well, right in the thick of the great pivot, the transition to remote instruction. I was talking to a faculty member who does happen to teach studio art. They teach drawing and painting in a small-class atmosphere, a very intimate atmosphere that’s very hands on… and not somebody who works at my institution. I happen to know them. And she called me up partway through the great pivot week and was distraught. She was really on the verge of tears. And she was saying, “Well, this goes live next week, I need to somehow carry my course forward, my studio art course. And I just learned that my colleague, the guy down the hall, what he’s doing is he’s got these videos that come down from the ceiling, and then we have these close ups on drawing and these techniques and he’s doing all this. I can’t do this. I’m a single parent. I’m at home. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do.” And I said “Alright, it doesn’t have to look like that. Your colleague may be doing that. It doesn’t have to look like that.” And I said alright, what is working in your course? That’s another thing you can use to kind of cut to those essentials. So what is the strongest thing? What do your students need right now?” She said “Well, they’re absolutely overwhelmed and I think they need a lot of support.” And “Well, is there any kind of social peer-to-peer support?” And she said “Oh, well, we have since the beginning of the semester, I put them into these pods of three. And so they’ve been developing these social structures where they consult with each other every week. And so they have ways of communicating with each other in these pre-existing social groups. Do you think that could be useful? And I said “Yes, go with that.” So what your course is accomplishing really well right now is setting an atmosphere where students are talking to each other and I said, “Well, maybe you can kind of divide and conquer. You can hand off this project to where students are critiquing each other’s work in these groups. So, definitely kind of double down on that arrangement that you’ve already put into place. Your colleague down the hall, maybe multimedia is his thing and this is easy for him. But he may be struggling to say how do we get students to socially support each other form connections and feel connected to the class, even though it’s now in a remote format.” To me, that’s something to really capitalize on. So I took away a lot from that and I’ll be reflecting a lot on that as well. Your “solution” to the challenges we face is going to look different and it really should go with whatever is strongest for you. I think as academics, we kind of say, “Well, if it’s easy, that must be the wrong way to go about things.” But sometimes the path of least resistance maps well and aligns well onto what your strengths happened to be and what your students needs are.

John: Going back to that point, though, about creating media. If you create materials for an online format, you can always use that to support face-to-face if by some miracle things return to some sense of normalcy, it’s probably not going to, but that material will still be there and will be useful. So, a focus on that, I think, is really helpful. And that’s what we’ve been strongly advocating for our faculty as well.

Rebecca: Just as long as you don’t have specific deadlines… don’t put deadlines, dates or anything like that in them.

Michelle: Right? See, that’s just a practice that is so important to create reusable media. And it’s a seemingly small thing, but until you really get into this and get practice, you don’t realize how important that is… that yeah, if you are going to sink the time into that, make it reusable. And that’s an important point for reusability.

John: And going back there, I’d like to once again, we’ve done this many times, recommend Karen Costa’s book on 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Videos. It’s a really nice resource. And it does focus on keeping it simple. Don’t do the fancy transitions. Don’t do something where a half an hour video is going to take you 30 hours of production time. Keep it so that it’s easy for you so that you can keep doing it without imposing a burden that’s going to make you stop doing this.

Michelle: Absolutely. And I’m so glad for that recommendation. I went out and got the book myself. I think I’m on Tip Number 80 as of this morning, so I’m almost there and I’m finding these wonderful… everything from very specific guidelines to much more conceptual things about why you want video in a course to begin with. So yeah, I’m with you on that. It’s definitely worth a read and definitely this summer. But maybe also, to kind of put this into a different focus as well with the focus on creating media and doing so purposefully in a way that is sustainable, let’s not lose sight of the active learning component. So that’s something that I’ve really kind of watched with some concern and definitely some interest as this conversation evolves. So active learning at this point, I mean, people sometimes perceive it as a buzzword, but it is such a robust concept. And I think it’s easy, at a point where we are kind of saying, “Well, how can we make all this work in some different formats” to lose sight of that. And so we may be creating wonderful videos, instructional videos, or all kinds of things and just merrily perking along with that, but we do need to remember how are students interacting with it, which is why a beautiful film of somebody demonstrating a drawing technique might, in some context, not even be as valuable as somebody who’s having students talk to each other because of that engagement. So I think that too, this is going to be so critical as we see more schools pushing for things like recordings of lectures, or even synchronously bringing students in during a live session you’re having with other students, I think that we do need to remind people who are in charge of these things, that education is just never something you watch, it is something that you do. So it is really tempting to say, let’s record everything we can, that’ll be equivalent, but active learning is not a luxury that we can just put on hold for a while. It really isn’t. And so I’m hoping that we don’t see that happen. I think there’s a very similar story that’s going on with Universal Design for Learning. Another concept I know you’ve engaged with so much on this podcast and is so important. And I think you’re too, it’s easy to say, “Well, you know, given all this going on, maybe we won’t have multiple ways of engaging with these great media that we’re creating, or maybe we’re going to kind of shut down this avenue over here for a little while.” And I really hope that doesn’t happen. So that’s another aspect of this balance between the quality and ambitiousness of what we’re doing and the feasibility and protecting ourselves as we face another very challenging semester.

Rebecca: I think that’s a really good reminder about focusing on the learning as the essential element as opposed to the teaching. It’s really about setting up the framework and the possibilities for students to learn, and designing those activities and making sure that we’re spending the time on that, rather than all the time on just delivering something.

John: But having those videos can free up time so that if you do meet synchronously, you can engage in more active learning activities rather than just lecturing to students online, which is probably one of the worst ways of structuring synchronous meetings. And if you really want to do a little bit more work, you could use something like PlayPosit where you embed questions in the middle of a video that could be somewhat open ended and that you could even grade. If you happen to have an institutional license you can embed it directly in your LMS. So the videos themselves can be made, with a bit of work, a little more interactive, and they can serve as a replacement for lecture that allows for more active learning, I think.

Michelle: Absolutely, and I too. I’ve seen some wonderful examples in practice of that technology, and there’s a couple of different ways to do this. So there’s multiple tools that allow you to put a retrieval practice or comprehension questions somewhere in the midst of this online lecture, presentation or video and what better way to help ensure that students are attentive to them, to give yourself some opportunities on the other end to say what’s the actual level of comprehension that’s going on out there. And for students to really solidify and practice the material. That’s all bedrock learning science stuff, right? Retrieval, active practice, and so on. And it just takes a little bit of ingenuity to take that one extra step to say, alright, what’s the level of interactivity here. And that’s something that I hear too, from faculty, it’s quite reasonable. They have taught purely face-to-face and don’t have that level of first-hand experience with something like online teaching. It’s just like, “Well, how do I know what’s going on out there?” And, again, there’s not a technology that’s going to just magically replace the experience of looking at the sea of faces that we experience in a face-to-face class. But think about it. That’s one way to do it. Having something like an online gamified quiz, like Kahoot!, which is currently my favorite quizzing app that’s out there. I ran this just the other day quite successfully in a remote synchronous environment. So, there are two that could help give you that information right away about what concepts are they struggling with. And having other ways of reaching out to students, if not talking to them individually in something like a meeting, a phone call, or even a text chat, having some other ways to kind of figure out on the ground what’s the mood level of the course? How are we feeling about things and are there individual students who are struggling for one reason or another who we can reach out to?

John: One way in which I saw interactive videos being used was several years ago, I took a MOOC on behavioral economics that Dan Ariely had put together and he’d often discuss experiments, but he set up the experiment and describe what the experiment did. But then the video pauses, and you’re asked to predict what the outcome would be. And that type of prediction is a really useful evidence-based technique that you can even do with videos if you can embed the questions in the middle of them. And I thought that was really useful. And it’s something I’m going to be trying to do a bit this fall. But in terms of evidence-based learning, could you talk a little bit about some of the main principles that people should be using to design their fall classes? What should people be focusing on?

Michelle: So, when I talk about bringing down just a vast literature of learning science and I’m going to necessarily boil this down to what I think are my favorites and the most applicable… So, of course, retrieval practice,I think if there’s one success story that our field has had, I mean it goes back even over 20 years that we got the data, determined how this principle works and started flowing it out to practitioners in the field, it’s this one. So that is, of course, the principle that when we actively pull something out of memory, it increases our ability to remember it in the future. And of course, we’d naturally think of tests, exams, and assessments as the avenue for this, but there’s lots of other ways that it can take place. So I always love to direct people to the website retrievalpractice.org. I’m not affiliated with it, but I think they have a wonderful compendium of ideas for how to bring this into classrooms at all different levels, all different disciplines, and so on. So if you don’t have retrieval practice, quizzing, students actively talking about what they remember, great time to bring that in. So you can’t go wrong with retrieval practice. Then, of course, the principle of what’s the timing of your study. So, spaced study, and pretty much by any measure, when we spread out student engagement with material… again, whether it’s through quizzing or solving problems, you name it, you’re going to get more out of that… efficiency… when it is spread over time. And I think that this is one of the real unsung benefits of online and technology assisted learning, even among people who are saying, “Oh, I’m just using the basic learning management shell to organize some materials and students turn their stuff in online. I mean, let’s not sell that short for how powerful that is, for being able to stagger deadlines, change the timing of when we are getting students to be working on different aspects of the course and so on. So while we don’t necessarily always want to bombard students with deadline after deadline, we do have to be mindful and help them kind of organize multiple deadlines. This is something that we could definitely build in as a design principle. So just to be very blunt about it, we always discourage people from the two midterms and a final course design. That’s something that a lot of us have experienced. It could work of course, like that can be fine. But from a memory and learning standpoint, that’s really not ideal. We want students engaging quite frequently. And then the practice… so the practice of this skill. So that advice, bring that up again, about it’s not all about content coverage. It’s about practicing the application of the content knowledge that they’re getting. We can almost always stand to build in more of these, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a course where I’ve said, “You know, you really need to present more content to the students. Don’t have them solving problems so often…” I have never seen that in practice, I will just go on the record and say that. So, if we want students to be doing X,Y, and Z. And again, go back to the front page of your syllabus and remind yourself what you’re hoping they’d be able to do at the end of the course. We want them to do that, what are the opportunities for them to actually try, and try in small bites? In my contribution to the Pedagogies of Care project, I give a very brief example of this in my own courses. So one of the things you have to do… bread and butter skills as a psychologist… is you have to be able to look at a psychology research study and kind of break down the structure of it. So no matter what’s being studied, there’s probably… we call them independent variables and dependent variables. So, things that are being manipulated, things that are being measured, and students have to develop that as a thinking skill and it’s really not easy. So I will oftentimes have them in, say a research methods course, very frequently, as part of whatever we happen to be doing, I’ll say, “Okay, here’s a really short description of a study. Maybe it’s an abstract or just a description, you pull out from me, before we talk about anything else about this study, you tell me, what are the independent variables? What are the dependent variables?” So it’s something that traditionally we’d always put on an exam. But, we didn’t always have students repeatedly practicing. So knowing that students absolutely had to master this before they got out of my research methods course. That’s what I did. So practice, and that kind of segues back into that active learning principle, which…yeah, you cannot go wrong with students getting involved. Once again, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a course where I said “You, the professor, need to get out there front and center, don’t emphasize the students so much.” So, they need to be doing the thinking, the practicing, and quite frankly, the work. That’s where the benefits come from. So with those: the retrieval practice, spaced study, practice of higher-order thinking skills, and a real active learning orientation, I think that that’s something you can take to the bank as a faculty member. You could build on that, but if you start with those, you’re probably going down the right path.

John: And I remember reading this really good book that talked about how using computer mediated instruction or using the tools within the LMS allows you to provide students with lots of feedback and lots of retrieval practice without necessarily increasing the burden on you, as the instructor. I think that book was called Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah. I feel like I might know that author, I’m not sure.

Michelle: Yes. [LAUGHTER] And thank you very much. That’s what I was trying to go for. So, thank you. It is wonderful that people are finding many of those points really relevant right now. So, yes, thank you so much for pointing that out. I think it’s great. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I think one thing that I’ve been thinking about in terms of having more remote time then maybe in-person time is that I often provide a lot of structured activities around retrieval practice and spaced practice in my face-to-face class and if students are working more independently when they’re working remotely, I’m not there to [LAUGHTER] facilitate it synchronously, that structure needs to really be in place, maybe even more so than when you’re in face-to-face class, that they have that structure and that they know they should be doing those things on a regular basis. Of course, we should be reminding them to do these things on their own as well. But, I think focusing a little bit more on having that structure or those reminders in our courses, when they might be remote is actually really, really imperative,

Michelle: Right? And those are learning skills and abilities and principles that are going to serve our students well, no matter what they study or what they may do after they leave a course. And it’s kind of neat. There’s some indication from the research literature that particularly for students who come in who are not from advantaged backgrounds, that when they’re exposed to courses, which as you say, they remind them, “Okay, do this kind of practice. Here’s what you should be doing. Here’s why you should be doing that” …that benefit really does extend not just into that course, but into future ones because students can pick these things up on their own. So, if we do really want to be thinking about how can we set our students up for success no matter what the future holds, I think that’s a pretty high ideal that we can work towards. So yet another reason to incorporate these powerful practices and perhaps, yeah, to talk about how students can adopt them, no matter what.

John: For those faculty who are struggling to prepare their courses, what are some heuristics they could be using in terms of focusing their time where it would give the most benefit.

Michelle: This is something that has definitely been on my mind, both for my own preparation and to share with others. So heuristics, shortcuts, and helpful hints and approaches. So, I talked earlier about looking at what you consider to be your strongest points as an instructor and kind of the highlights of the course… the things that you know, are memorable, that advance learning that you feel really strong and competent with, with the caveat that, yeah, we do want to make sure that those do align with student learning. I think that that’s a great place to start. Say: “Okay, what’s the great parts of my course? Forget about what anybody else is doing. What do I really want to use?” And putting those front and center. If you have a short activity that’s working great, maybe that’s something that could be done every week, or somehow extend it. But the flip side of that is this, and this is another that I didn’t invent this… This is something you’ll see repeated time and again, in teaching advice, which is the pinchpoint heuristic, flipping it around and saying, “Oh my gosh, if there is one thing that students are struggling with conceptually, or it’s something that I know they should be doing, and they don’t do it to the level that they need to,” that you focus your efforts, kind of train your sights on that piece of it. Especially in the discipline. I teach, psychology. I mean, there’s so many fun things we could talk about with psychology, and it’s easy to kind of spend a whole lot of time and effort shooting the videos or setting up the learning activities online and making a quiz that’s about something that’s just cool to learn about. But that can’t squeeze out “Oh my gosh, everybody gets unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus wrong and they do it every single year, and I know it’s going to happen.” So I need to be pulling out those things. You know what, if I’m going to spend the hours on a video or an extra module or creating an interactive quiz with multimedia, spend the time on the places where students are struggling. People who work with UDL, also talk about, “Well, here’s where you want to be especially conscientious to ensure that you do have the multiple means of representation and expression is around these areas that are really, really tough for students.” So what’s working great, where’s the point where you just say, if I could wave a wand and make one thing happen, that’s what I would do. So really looking at those two tracks. So that’s one heuristic. I think, as well, I’ll share with you something that I’m working on for my own courses… big caveat, that this is my courses. I will probably not be teaching a very large set of classes just because of the vagaries of course assignments. So I know I have that a little bit easier. But, here’s what I’m going to do as a framework. I’m kind of thinking of splitting it up so each week, students have a set of kind of general categories that they have to meet, they have to do some type of work or meet some kind of expectations in that area. So, I might, for example, have a column that corresponds to engaging with classmates about the topics for the week, and then a set of options for that week. So maybe you came to a face-to-face class, maybe you participated in an online discussion. And maybe there’s even a third option that I haven’t thought about yet. So just to really simplify things, I say, “Okay, check off in that area, what’s another column or category that you have to participate in, you have to do some type of demonstrating mastery of material” or I’m not quite sure what I’ll call it yet, but that could correspond to taking a quiz or maybe playing a Kahoot! in class or playing a Kahoot! remotely online. And I’ll probably also have a column that constitutes working towards whatever the term project is, and I’ll give them a set of choices again of what that term project can be like. But I am a very big believer in if you’re going to have a big project that there’s lots and lots of formative steps to that. So I tend to take that to extremes. And every week or so, students are doing something to show that they are moving towards and making progress in that area. So it is still a little bit general around the edges. But, to me, that really helped me feel like I had a handle on how am I going to manage choices? How am I going to manage multiple formats, and manage uncertainty with that focus on the purpose? Why do we have this do this week? Well, because it falls into these different categories, all of which are important for your learning in this class. So, those are a couple of the shortcuts that I would share.

John: One of the other things you talked about in your contribution to the Pedagogies of Care is the importance of getting help when you need it or where you need it. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Michelle: So this whole idea of getting help, I mean, it’s very simple on the face of it. I’m a faculty member, I want to do this thing in my class. I don’t know how… I call somebody… magic happens. And in reality, in higher education, what I’ve seen over and over at different institutions is that that is not a direct path at all between support, assistance, and collaboration, and the faculty member and the time and place when they need that. And so I think that this is going to be an issue that, if it’s not on people’s minds now, in leadership and pedagogy circles, if it’s not on their minds, now, it will be in six months to a year, I think that this is going to be one of the differences between institutions that make it through this fall in good shape and those that really struggle is what are those processes? So for faculty members, I’m really encouraging them to say, “Alright, where are the points, in this process, where you could get some kind of assistance that either you invest some time and you get the capacity to do something very efficiently in the future, say, like a workshop on how to do sustainable videos, or how do you actually find somebody to share the load? …actually delegate some of the work? For faculty, they should be reflecting on that, but at that point, that’s where things are going to get complicated depending on what the systems are in place at their institutions. So first of all, I think that institutions don’t always, and faculty ourselves, we don’t always make that distinction. When I say I want help, do I mean, I want you to point me to a great website or a book I can read? Do you want me to spend half a week coming to a workshop series? Or are you going to get in there and say, “Okay, you have the content, I can build these quizzes, you have a script for what you want to do for a complex video, I can shoot that for you, caption it, and put it online.” So what kind of help are we talking about here? And then figuring out how do you approach your institution to do that? So I’ve just really been continually surprised as I do visit different institutions. I mean, almost universally there are these amazing instructional designers and other people who just devote their professional lives to teaching and learning. They’re up on all the new technology. They know what was the great new video editing software that just came out last week? You know, they’re the ones who have that. And oftentimes there’s a disconnect there. People don’t know how, they feel inhibited, or maybe they’ve been actively inhibited. Some institutions, they say, “Well, there’s a process, and we’re going to put a lot of strings on how we’re going to divvy up these resources.” Others actually discourage instructional design and similar staff from even talking to faculty. And there’s a little kind of social piece to it as well, I think, just because we haven’t yet fully incorporated this into what we do… that it’s almost like, well, who makes the first move? If I’m an instructional designer and I know, here’s these courses over here that I could be helpful with, you know, just email people out of the blue… and likewise, faculty, they say, well, should I call the support line for this more complex project that I need help with or not? So I think that institutions will hopefully be sorting that out, but presuming that there isn’t a giant revolution in how we have collaboration between instructional designers and faculty, being aware of that and at least having something very clear in your mind for what you’re asking for, the worst that can happen usually is that somebody says no, but to have any chance you at least have to know what specifically do you want.

Rebecca: I think knowing that’s really helpful too. Because if you start talking to faculty, for example, in other disciplines, they might have a similar goal or they need similar structure in place, you could actually work with those faculty to put the structure in place and share the structure, swap out the content or whatever too. Sometimes we don’t think about those kinds of collaboration.

Michelle: Right, and what you’re describing, that’s something that is kind of non-traditional and new. We come into this with a very strong tradition of “my class is my class” and a kind of an ethos as academics that you do things the hard way, and you do them by yourself. But maybe this can be an impetus for us to really be getting creative with swapping, even things like a syllabus. You say, “Well, you know, maybe the way that I’ve gone about this, you can actually springboard this even if it is, as you said, in a different discipline.” Maybe we’ll even see faculty putting together some more unconventional team teaching arrangements. Traditionally, we know a team teaching is we’ve we’re experts in the same subject. And we’re going to create this class that sort of articulates, or we’re going to pass it back and forth. But maybe I should be collaborating with somebody from another area of psychology. Do they have to be in my sub discipline to just come in and say, help me with discussion forums, if I’m not very good at that, and then I can come into their class and help them with synchronous video, if they need help with that. Maybe if we have to, we will do it that way. So if that comes out of all of this, I think that would be a great benefit. And I want to say I have been really hesitant and cautious about engaging in this narrative of the silver linings and “Oh, isn’t this a wonderful experience? We’ll learn all these new methodologies of teaching will come out of this and we’ll all love online teaching and be fluent with it.” I don’t think that that’s an appropriate message for faculty right now. I think we do need to recognize that this has been somewhere between disruptive and catastrophic for most of us career wise, and not imply that we should all just constantly be thrilled to be learning new things. There are so many new things that we could be learning right now. But fall is coming. And we only have so much time. So I do want to put that out there, and that’s something that I think is an important thread that needs to be, and I hope it will be, talked about more as the dialogue unfolds. But even without saying, “Hey, this is a great time to do new things,” we can recognize that there will be innovation that happens, and it’s already happened. We’ve seen it happen.

John: And while this may not be a silver lining, I know in our teaching center, we’ve seen a lot of faculty who I didn’t even know existed on our campus, because as Jessamyn Neuhaus has talked about, people have broken down some of those barriers where they think they have to do everything themselves, and they’re more willing to request help when they desperately need help in ways that they weren’t willing to do before.

Michelle: Absolutely. I think that Jessamyn Neuhaus has been such a clear and fresh voice on some of these development issues. She’s absolutely right. She talks about it in her own style, which is totally unique to her, but it really gets it across, that we’re Professor SmartyPants, and we are not used to collaborating, working together, or just saying, “I don’t know.” So I guess we can also say, even if we don’t formally work in a teaching and learning center, if there’s something that you know, that your colleague does not, and you can help with, get out there, volunteer it, and let’s all really do this in perhaps a new spirit, where it’s not all just about, “Well, here’s what I know and you don’t know it, and I’m gonna feel uncomfortable coming in,” let’s have a real reset in terms of really open sharing. It’s not about playing the game of who knows more, or who figured out the latest thing. It’s really about serving the students and doing so in a way that we can sustain what promises to be a pretty challenging semester.

Rebecca: These have all been really great tips and things to think about as we move towards the fall, as the fall moves towards us… maybe that’s a better way of thinking about it. [LAUGHTER]

Michelle: I think that’s a frighteningly accurate turn of phrase there. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I want to make sure that we get to talk a little bit about your new book, though, can you share a little sneak preview?

Michelle: Oh, sure. And this book, of course, well predates the era that we’re in. But it’s been something that I’ve wanted to write about for a very long time. And then when I was able to make the connection to James Lang and to his series, I think it was really meant to be. So, it is about memory and technology. So, much has been written in the popular press, and a little bit in the scholarly press as well, about cognitive processes and how those change or not in the presence of technology and with a frame for teachers, of course, so those of us who want to make up even just very specific policies, like should I allow note taking in class on laptops or not, to people who are really interested in this broader sense of teaching and learning in our contemporary era. So what I’ll be talking about in the book are issues such as well, first of all, what do we need to know about how memory works in the first place as a teacher or a person who is really into learning. So what do we now know about how memory works and how it can be improved? I also talk about why anybody should even care about memory, because that’s one of the angles of technology as well… this question of “Well, do you really need to know anything in the age of Google?” And there are people on both ends of that spectrum… probably no surprise that I come in somewhere in the middle of saying, on the one hand, it’s really important to be able to find information when you need it. And yes, we absolutely should be de-emphasizing memorization for its own sake. However, we also know from current research that memory in a subject area helps us think in that area. So there’ll be something for everybody in that section of the book as well. And then we will talk about what is the effect of having something like a smartphone, always at our fingertips? Does that create any kind of global change in memory? Does it change our memory for specific things that we might be doing or thinking about what we’re using that technology? And how, again, can we turn this to our advantage as lifelong learners ourselves and also for our students. Now, of course, you can’t talk about any of this without talking about attention itself. And so while it’s not a book about attention and distraction, per se, we’ll talk about “Alright, well, what’s the flip side of that?” And so how, basically, can we take all the advantages that technology has to offer for building memory and de-emphasize all the things that it does to offset and degrade our memories, and come out of this with the best of both worlds? I will get into a little bit at the end of the book as well into some of these bigger questions of how is memory itself changed when we live in a technological era when so much of our lives are recorded? And what does that say about things like generational differences, or what memory might look like decades from now? So I’m absolutely loving exploring all those themes, and I think they’ll be interesting for anybody who’s in the arena of teaching and learning but also with a lot of practical tips about again, how we can reap all the benefits that technology can offer for memory and for learning.

Rebecca: You’ll have a lot of disappointed listeners to know that that doesn’t come out until 2021. Right?

Michelle: Good things take time. And yes, we will see. It is a work in progress. And although we definitely have all the themes and all the ideas nailed down, it’s something I’m working on as we speak. So that’s part of why I’m so excited about the project. But yes, I got to finish it first.

Rebecca: We’re definitely excited for it to come. We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Michelle: I am, as many of your listeners probably are, when this comes out, absolutely in the thick of redesigning my own courses for fall. Without getting into too many of the specifics, my institution has kind of laid out a set of parameters that they want us to meet. And so I’ll be re-envisioning my courses and to practice what I preach. I’m going to try to flow that out as much as possible to my colleagues, both locally in my own department, my own college, at my institution, and also nationally. So I’m kind of looking at some different ways that I can continue to engage people in this and share out what I’m learning as we go along. And I’m also pretty excited to be preparing some even more in-depth materials for some institutions who are looking for help in exactly this type of thing, how to get faculty interested in this whole topic of flexible teaching, some specific techniques that are useful for what I’ll call flexible teaching, key resources, things to do and not to do, and so on. So I’m excited to be coming back at it on all cylinders in the fall, and looking forward to engaging students in all the different formats that we now have and seeing where it takes us. So that’s what’s next for me.

John: Well, thank you. This has been wonderful talking to you again. We’ve always enjoyed these conversations, and our listeners have very much appreciated them.

Michelle: Oh, thank you.

Rebecca: It’s always really helpful to know too, that you’re not alone. We’re all going through the same kinds of contemplations, and so thanks for sharing some of your own stories about developing and planning for the fall too.

Michelle: Thank you as well.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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