How Insights from Learning Science Can Transform Your Teaching (Part 1/7)
The Learning Science of Learning Objectives
This story is the first in a series of stories about how learning science can improve course design. The other stories are linked within and at the end of this post.
Course design starts with a focus. What do you want the students to learn?
Some systems call this a learning objective. Others call it a statement of inquiry or essential questions. Although they’re phrased differently, they have the same purpose: specify the goal of learning.
Why is this important from a learning science background?
It allows you to identify and link to relevant background knowledge required for your course. It provides the structure you need to develop effective learning scaffolds. It provides students with a road map for their learning [1]. It provides the specificity you need in order to give effective feedback. It ensures that the active learning strategies you choose support learning (as opposed to just being something fun for the students to do) [2]. It allows you to differentiate and even personalize your instruction.
Start with a conceptual focus.
Students want to know why they are learning something and how it’s relevant. As humans, we seek meaning in all that we do; when you have a conceptual foundation [3] for your curriculum, you can easily link the content, skills, and activities to their relevance or meaning.
If you’ve ever had a student ask. “Why are we learning this?” you know the importance of having a conceptual focus.
This is linked to the psychology of meaning making: as humans, we try to make sense of the world around us by fitting new information in to our existing understandings of the world. By explicitly outlining what understandings our courses target, we allow students to easily link new learning to these ideas.
This frees up mental space for learning and encourages students to think big.
A conceptual focus also helps students visualize the course. The sitemap principle [1] posits that students learn better when they have a mental map, when they have a road map of their learning journey.
Your conceptual focus provides the key landmarks in students’ mental maps of your course.
What do I mean by a conceptual focus?
Well, in English class it could be an understanding that literature study answers the questions “Why do people write?”, “What choices do they make?” and “How do those choices impact meaning?” With this conceptual framework, students can see how the texts you study (and the way you approach them) and the writing they do (both creative and analytical) slots into the overarching study of English.
In a history class, you may frame all of your work as understanding how various factors (historical, economic, geographic, cultural, political, social) impact movements and ideas. Thus, the analysis, evaluation and interpretation of primary and secondary sources all help students work towards this broad goal.
You may introduce your science class as the process of discovering the systems that make up the natural world. You might then start each unit with an overview of the system being studied and help students see how the facts they are learning, along with the experiments they are carrying out or learning about all contribute to a more thorough understanding of the system.
Of course, the conceptual focus is just the starting point. Students now have a scaffold to hang their learning on. But you need to identify exactly what that learning will be.
Tying It Together
Big picture concepts are powerful drivers of learning. They give students a conceptual framework for new learning. They help students make connections between disciplines, content areas, and ideas. And they answer the age-old question: why are we learning this?
Breaking down learning goals
One of the hallmarks of experts is that they chunk their learning efficiently. The typical example is that when you’re first learning how to drive, backing up out of a driveway requires a huge amount of concentration as you try to steer in reverse, look out of all of your mirrors and process the information, and accelerate at the right rate. As an expert driver, however, you can probably do this while talking to your kids and fumbling for your coffee.
(Full disclosure: this is not a personal example, as I am definitely still a novice driver. As a city dweller I barely got my driver’s license at age 24 and have driven fewer than 5 times alone in a car, all of which were more than 10 years ago.)
This is good for experts’ problem solving ability, as they can look at a problem (or text or question) and quickly figure out how to answer or analyze it.
But it’s bad for teaching because it’s hard to un-chunk that knowledge and identify the specific steps a novice needs to take in order to approach the same task.
Therefore, the first lesson from the science of learning is that teachers, as experts, really need to work at task analysis.
The good news is that the types of tasks and skills we’re teaching don’t change drastically from year to year (writing a literary essay will still require the same components next year), so we can work on this throughout our careers.
The other good news is that the better we understand the tasks we’re asking our students to do, the better we can scaffold their learning and differentiate our instruction.
And the best good news is that having a clear understanding of what students need to be able to do ensures that we’ll help them get there.
Our assessments will be better explained and more aligned with our instruction. Our feedback will be more specific and useful to students. The learning activities we design will lead towards a thorough understanding of what students are doing — and why — to encourage deep conceptual learning.
Tying It Together
Experts think differently than novices. And it’s hard for experts to remember how novices think about topics once they’ve developed mastery.
As experts in our content and skills, we must be aware of how our thinking is different. Know that we chunk information that our students still need to grapple with step by step. Know that we see patterns and underlying similarities that our students do not.
And we need to take action. We need to break down those skills into their component parts. And then break them down again. And maybe even again. Until we get to where our students are.
Prior Knowledge
The second lesson from the science of learning is that learning goals help teachers identify what prior knowledge students need to build on [4, 5]. As teachers, we know about the importance of helping students access their prior knowledge (for example, through the famous K-W-L chart).
Learning science corroborates the importance of strategies like these.
Better prior knowledge makes learning easier, as it allows students to hang their new knowledge onto existing understandings. Prior knowledge also makes learning strategies more effective. It allows students to make richer connections between what they are learning and what they already know. And prior knowledge enables students to learn more efficiently, as they can chunk their prior knowledge to do increasingly complex analytical tasks.
What our teaching methods courses probably didn’t cover, however, are some of the pitfalls associated with activating prior knowledge.
The biggest pitfall is when students’ prior knowledge is inaccurate. A key study [6] found that when students who believed the earth was flat learned that it was actually round, they simply imagined it as a pancake instead of a sphere. As learners, we try really hard to reconcile new information with our existing knowledge. Of course, factual inaccuracies can be pretty quickly fixed.
The bigger issue is when students come to us with prior misconceptions about a topic.
These are typically quite difficult to correct through instruction [4]. For example, several studies have asked students to explain common phenomena about which people have misconceptions (why we have seasons, how airplanes fly, etc), provide them with instruction, and then test their understanding. People typically maintain their prior misconception despite the teaching.
Tying It Together
We know that it’s important to activate prior knowledge. What we don’t think about very often is how accurate that prior knowledge is.
By explicitly outlining our conceptual focus, by breaking down that conceptual focus into learning goals, by engaging in task analysis so we completely understand what our students will be required to do, we can identify the required prior knowledge students need in order to succeed in the class. More importantly, we can then actively build on that prior knowledge to improve learning.
The Take-Away
Why does this matter?
The big picture view of a course is powerful.
It allows teachers to prioritize topics. It allows teachers to design the most effective learning activities and instructional strategies. It gives teachers insight into the building blocks required for student learning. It allows teachers to stretch the highest achieving students and support those who are struggling. It enables teachers to give the most effective feedback. It allows teachers to design high-impact assessment.
It’s also a game-changer for students. It provides students with a map of their learning. It helps students make meaning; it helps them see how daily lessons are linked to the big picture. It helps address persistent misconceptions and provides a robust foundation for future learning.
In short: concepts matter.
Related Posts:
Three Insights From Learning Science to Structure Your Lessons Better (Part 2/7)
Three Powerful Lessons from Psychology To Change How You Plan Lesson Content (Part 3/7)
What Learning Science Says About How to Teach (Part 4/7)
How You Can Use a Top-Ten Instructional Strategy to Boost Learning (Part 5/7)
The Surprising Ways Thinking About Learning Can Impact Learning (Part 6/7)
Rethinking Testing: Better Ways to Use Assessment to Improve Learning (Part 7/7)
Teaching in a Pandemic: How Learning Science can Help (Part 8/7)
Prior Knowledge: Why It Matters and What We Can Do
References
- Mayer, R. E. (Ed.). (2005). The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning. Cambridge University Press.
- Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher education, 32(3), 347–364.
- Erickson, H. L. (2002). Concept-based curriculum and instruction: Teaching beyond the facts. Corwin Press.
- Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., Lovett, M. C., DiPietro, M., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching.
- Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational technology research and development, 50(3), 43–59.
- Vosniadou, S., & Brewer, W. F. (1987). Theories of knowledge restructuring in development. Review of educational research, 57(1), 51–67.
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Stephanie Hepner has taught middle and high school special education/learning support and English in New York, Brussels, and Stockholm. She currently works in education in Singapore. An international educator committed to equity in education, she is passionate about learning science as it promises to improve learning for all students.
