What Learning Science Says About How to Teach (Part 4/7)
This is the fourth story in a series of posts about how learning science insights can improve course design. The other stories are linked within and included at the end of this post.
Teachers build up their toolboxes of teaching strategies, learning from courses, professional development, each other, and observations of what works in their classes. Teaching strategies — or a general approach to teaching — should also be informed by learning science.
Here, we talk about principles of using multiple media in your teaching; questioning and students creating their own explanations; wait time; different ways to view active learning; and making predictions.
Multimedia Principle
The multimedia principle is not about using videos in class.
Instead, the multimedia principle [1] sheds light on how our brains work best when we receive information via a variety of media sources simultaneously. For example, a teacher talking while the student reads text on a powerpoint slide and looks at an image added for emphasis.
That’s a lot for any brain to process.
The multimedia principle is linked to cognitive load and simply recommends: people learn better when words and graphics are combined than when they learn from words alone.
There are some caveats.
First, this has mostly been proven with how-to types of content. For example, when students need to learn how an engine works, they do better when they hear a narration while watching an animation than when they read a description alone.
Second, this works best when students only receive one type of text input: either they read a description and view an image or their hear a description and view an image. It’s difficult for people to process two types of text, for example when they read long text on a slide, look at an image, and hear someone explaining the process.
Third, there are important principles for designing those graphics so that they reduce extraneous cognitive load and encourage productive thinking.
For example, in order to reduce extraneous load, research shows you should:
- remove unnecessary information (such as video interviews or maps that don’t relate to the purpose of the task),
- highlight important information (such as by using headings, indicating ‘first’, ‘second’ etc, or using arrows to demonstrate movement),
- make sure printed descriptions are close to the section of the graphic they explain,
- avoid using captions if you’re already narrating information, and
- make sure the narrated information matches the graphic.
Likewise, in order to encourage productive thinking, research shows you should use a conversational style with personal pronouns and use a human voice instead of a machine voice.
Why does this matter? Many programs that create narrated graphics allow you to choose a computer-generated narration (the easy option) or to narrate it yourself (more difficult). Choose to narrate it yourself.
Other research suggests that if you have a picture of a human on the screen (for example, your face while you present information), that person should move in human-like ways. Further research shows that just having a fixed image of a person on the screen is not always helpful. In half of the studies it was actually distracting to learners.
What’s exciting about these principles is that they work both in the lab and in the classroom. In one example, a medical school restructured their lectures according to the multimedia principle [2] and found that students who received the redesigned course content significantly outperformed their peers who received the traditional learning materials.
Tying It Together
Many of us use presentation software — in our teaching, when teaching colleagues, or as assignments for our students. The Multimedia Principle suggests some very specific ways we can improve our presentations and instruction, especially when teaching processes.
Next time you’re teaching your students presentation skills, teach some of these principles. And next time you’re putting together teaching materials, try some! Let me know in the comments if you observed a difference in student learning.
Questioning
My three-year-old asks a lot of questions. Why? How? When? What? All day long, we’re fielding questions and trying to frame responses that are accurate and understandable.
At some point in students’ schooling or development, they stop asking quite so many questions.
But questions have a very important learning purpose.
We learn when we reflect on the questions others ask us. We learn when we come up with questions to ask others. And we learn when we come up with and reflect on our own questions.
One of the important ways questions help us learn is through something called the self-explanation effect [4].
When we explain something to ourselves, we become aware of what we understand and where we have gaps in our knowledge. This then allows us to find out the missing information to create a better explanation.
When we create explanations we also make links between pieces of information, coming up with our own ideas and comparing them to what we already knew. This allows us to update our understanding of the world and improve our understanding.
Teacher Questions
As teachers, we can make our questions more powerful by asking students to generate their own explanations.
In one study, 8th graders were asked to self-explain after each sentence of a text: they understood more about the text and understood the material better [5]. In another study, college students were prompted a couple of times during their reading with questions like “What new information does this paragraph add?” They performed better than the other students who had just read or studied the material [6].
Try this: When assigning readings, prompt students to self-explain periodically as they read.
Try this: When students are working with diagrams in their readings, textbooks, or other instructional materials, ask them to create their own self-explanations. This is especially helpful if they’re learning material that uses multiple visuals. The explanation prompts might ask students to explain the differences between the two processes.
Try this: Give students correct and incorrect examples of work and ask them to explain why the examples are correct or not. Having students work with both exemplars of good and examples that include mistakes encourages them to identify misconceptions, identify limits of their own understanding and correct their own mental models [7].
Try this: In your regular classroom questioning, intersperse questions that require all students to create their own explanation. They might write down their responses, draw a diagram, or share their explanations with a peer.
Peer Questions
Too often, we forget about the power of peers.
Research on peer feedback shows that the vast majority, 80%, of feedback students get in class comes from their peers [8]. This feedback comes as responses to their questions, as reactions to their comments, as suggestions on how to improve their work.
Peers give each other feedback during designated peer feedback sessions, during small group activities, when they sit at shared desks.
And they give each other feedback outside of class. They may use a social media channel to communicate about your class. Or they chat together during breaks or on the way home from school.
Unfortunately, a lot of this feedback is inaccurate [8].
Helping students ask better questions can help them get better feedback.
One researcher created a detailed flowchart (p. 141 of the pdf) of peer questioning strategies and found that peer questions and peer feedback improved significantly [9].
Try this: Teach students to ask questions at various levels, according to the flowchart, to see how their questions and responses improve.
Try this: Teach students to ask questions that require an explanation instead of mere confirmation.
Try this: Coach students to prompt each other to elaborate or clarify their ideas instead of just accepting student responses. This can be an important way for less confident or more introverted students to participate and think deeply about a subject.
Self-Questioning
One of the most important skills students learn in school is not academic. Metacognitive skills — the ability to think about your own thinking — are a powerful predictor of future success [10].
By teaching students to ask themselves questions, we teach them these essential metacognitive skills.
Metacognition involves monitoring your learning and focus, addressing gaps, clarifying questions, making connections, identifying where you need more challenge, knowing when to review a topic.
Reflection activities help students practice metacognitive skills.
Modeling helps students improve metacognitive skills.
Feedback helps students improve metacognitive skills.
Try this: Explicitly teach students about various metacognitive skills. Weaker students often don’t know these mental strategies, since they’re largely invisible. Make them visible and prominent in your classroom.
Try this: Include a reflective prompt or metacognitive question on your assignments to encourage these skills. As an English teacher, I would ask my students to write a paragraph or two explaining the choices they made in their creative work, making them more aware of their own thinking and creative process.
Try this: Build in regular reflection activities throughout your teaching. Use thinking routines, like those created by Harvard’s Visible Thinking program. Or have your students come up with their own reflective prompts.
Try this: When you give students feedback on their participation in class, comment specifically on the types of questions they ask each other. How do their questions promote thinking in their peers?
Try this: A couple times a year, when students are doing group work, assign one student to be the observer. Have that student write down all of the questions the students ask each other and then engage in an activity to help them understand their question types, the types of thinking their questions elicit, how helpful their questions are for student learning.
Try this: If you assign readings as homework, ask students to submit their own questions, instead of answers to teacher- or publisher-created questions. They can then answer their own questions or trade them with a peer for a review activity.
Try this: When teaching students note-taking skills, encourage students to include a self-questioning step in their revision. When they take notes, leave space (for example, a wide margin). Then when they review their notes, use that margin space to write down questions. They may ask questions about the material, they may write questions about how the material is related to other information, they may ask questions to prompt themselves to remember. Voilà: they have just created their own retrieval practice guide.
Tying It Together
Questions are powerful.
We can use teachers’ questions, peers’ questions, and students’ own questions to prompt reflection, metacognition, explanations and conceptual connections. In short, all of our questions have the potential to improve student learning.
The question is: do they?
Wait Time
Thinking deeply takes time. Updating our mental models based on new information takes time. Making connections and understanding the relationships between information takes time.
We know this, and yet we still have a hard time providing enough thinking time.
Wait time is one of the first things I learned about in my education classes. It’s something I remind myself about regularly. It’s something I consciously develop teaching strategies for. And it’s something I still need to work on.
Cognitive load theory provides a rationale for waiting while students process.
Our understanding of working memory indicates that we should provide uninterrupted time for students to process while holding information in fragile working memory.
Creativity research suggests that the best ideas ferment and require time to come up with [11].
Try this: Ask students to write down or draw their thoughts before calling on one or two to share their ideas. This has the added benefit of drawing out more introverted students [12].
Try this: Ask open-ended questions that have several responses. Instead of acknowledging the first one or two as correct responses and moving on, encourage deeper thinking by asking students to reflect on those responses or by challenging them to come up with additional ideas.
Try this: Create an expectation in your class that you won’t call on anyone until at least x-number of students’ hands are in the air. The number of hands should be reasonable based on the size of your class. Make this a routine so you don’t interfere with students’ thinking by explaining that you’re waiting for more hands to go up.
Try this: Create a routine where students know that you always wait at least 15 seconds — or 30 seconds — or more — before calling on anyone. If you find your students don’t need that much time, consider altering your questions to encourage more deep thinking.
Try this: Encourage students who process faster to come up with more than one reasonable or justifiable response. Have them share both, along with an explanation of which one they prefer and why.
Try this: When assigning a creative project, provide students with time to make a comprehensive start on it at the beginning of the process and then again, later. How much later of course depends on the time you have available. This should help them come up with more creative ideas.
Tying It Together
Wait time. It’s so important, so easy to provide, and so frequently forgotten. I am a prime culprit.
Join me in building in more wait time so that your students think more deeply and learn better.
Active Learning
You probably thought I’d start this whole story about teaching practice with a discussion about active learning.
Discussions about how to teach often quickly reveal a belief that active learning is superior to everything else. Lots of teaching books and workshops provide a wealth of active learning strategies to help teachers in their classes.
There is research that shows that active learning is better for learning. But, like most of learning science, there are important caveats.
First, let’s talk about what active learning even is. Then we’ll talk about those pesky caveats. Then we can give some specific suggestions.
Most teachers consider active learning to mean learning activities and classroom structures that involve students in the learning process. They might refer to group work, projects, hands-on activities, field trips or computer simulations as examples of active learning.
Learning scientists have a harder time defining active learning.
Turns out, all learning is active. When we learn, our brains are doing something.
So instead, learning scientists often turn to definitions of active learning in contrast to other types of learning.
ICAP Framework
One deceptively simple framework is called ICAP [13]. This structure looks at passive, active, constructive and interactive types of learning; most teachers consider the final three of those categories active learning.
The researchers define passive learning as when students are receiving information and not overtly doing anything with it. This might be listening to a lecture or reading a text.
Active learning in this framework is when students manipulate information, physically. Here they might be underlining information, copying a solution, taking notes verbatim, or mixing chemicals.
Constructive learning is when students create something that wasn’t already there. This might be creating self-explanations, making inferences, drawing a diagram to explain a text, taking notes, or comparing items.
Interactive learning, which the researchers posit is the best for learning, refers specifically to when two or more students are creating new knowledge and building their new knowledge from each others’ insights.
It’s important to note that merely interacting — having a group conversation, editing each others’ work, comparing answers — isn’t good enough.
For the best learning to happen, students must be engaged in a task that allows them to construct new understandings and have the opportunity to build an even better understanding by using a peer’s insights and ideas.
The final product should be better than what either one could have produced alone.
ICAP Learning Hierarchy
Evaluations of the ICAP framework suggest a hierarchy in terms of how good the learning is. Active learning is better than passive learning. Constructive learning is better than active learning. Interactive learning is better than constructive learning.
But it’s not always the case that interactive learning is best. In order for students to be able to co-construct impressive new knowledge, they need strong background knowledge. And the other levels of learning are often better ways to build this foundation.
This framework does provide a nice way of evaluating learning activities. The researchers analyzed the verbs used in a variety of tasks and found that, with a couple of exceptions, the verbs were a very good proxy for level of learning. Tasks that required students to select, match, or identify were largely lower level tasks. Those that asked students to compare and contrast, build, draw, model, explain, make an inference, or reflect were largely more cognitively engaging.
There are many other ways of viewing active learning.
First Five Principles
Another learning scientist [3] outlines five principles for learning:
(a) Learning is promoted when learners are engaged in solving real-world problems. (b) Learning is promoted when existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge. (c) Learning is promoted when new knowledge is demonstrated to the learner. (d) Learning is promoted when new knowledge is applied by the learner. (e) Learning is promoted when new knowledge is integrated into the learner’s world.
We read those principles and clearly see active engagement in learning: learners engaged in problem-solving, learners activating their prior knowledge, learners applying their knowledge; learners integrating information into their worldview.
Look at those verbs!
Here, too, there are caveats.
Let’s take real-world problems. Students should be shown what kinds of problems they’ll be able to solve with their new knowledge. Students should be engaged in all aspects of the problem, not just following instructions to solve it. Students should solve progressively more challenging and explicitly linked problems.
Or take prior knowledge. Students should be explicitly encouraged to think about how their prior knowledge supports their new learning. Teachers should make sure students have prior knowledge — and provide it if it’s lacking. It’s not just enough to recall prior knowlegde — students should also think about how that prior knowledge is structured in their minds so that they can build on that foundation.
More caveats for demonstration. The demonstration should match the task students will need to do. For example, if students will be solving problems, worked examples help; if students will be following a process, a demonstration of the procedure helps. Teachers should draw students’ attention to the most important aspects of the demonstration and use multiple examples. And demonstrations that use more than one medium are more effective than those in a single-medium.
When having students apply their knowledge, keep in mind: the way they apply their knowledge in practice should be similar to how they’ll ultimately need to apply their knowledge. Don’t make them match definitions if they’ll need to describe the process down the line. Make sure you provide feedback and coaching so students know they’re applying their knowledge accurately.
And finally, integration. Public demonstrations of skills are highly impactful. Students should reflect on and defend their skills. Students be encouraged to creatively come up with their own ways to personalize their skills.
Just as definitions of active learning have many caveats, active learning strategies do, too. Read enough education literature examining specific strategies and you’ll find that the same strategy in one study is very effective, in another study is ineffective, still another study shows no effects, and everything in between.
Model of Learning
In an effort to better understand this phenomenon, some researchers [14, 15] created a model of learning. Their argument is that there are different levels of learning: surface, deep and transfer. And that at each level of learning there are different types of learning: acquiring and consolidating.
So, according to this model, a strategy isn’t effective in a vacuum: it is effective only in certain learning contexts.
Project-based learning, for example, is typically not effective when students are acquiring surface learning. But it can be very powerful when students are transferring their learning.
Similarly, activating accurate prior knowledge is essential when students are acquiring surface learning but may not be as important for teachers to facilitate when students are in deep learning phases.
Explicitly teaching vocabulary is effective in surface learning, while concept mapping (using that vocabulary!) is important in deep learning.
Learning science makes clear that all active learning is not equally good for learning. And, counter-intuitively, sometimes the exact same strategy used by the exact same teacher is not equally good for learning.
Tying It Together
We’ve all heard that active learning is better learning. But actually the science suggests it’s not quite that black and white.
Just because students are working together doesn’t mean they are actively learning. A close analysis of the verbs you use in your assignment will get you closer to seeing whether the activity encourages effective learning.
Convincing research also suggests that it’s not just a matter of what students are doing, but it’s also a matter of how well that activity aligns with the learning process. Here, again, we circle back to objectives, content, and assessment.
The Take-Away
This reinforces that we must be crystal clear about our objectives. We need to know what our students already know. We need to know what content we want them to learn and how deeply we want them to know it. And then we can choose appropriate teaching strategies. Not before.
We also know that our strategies should include questioning — questions we ask the students, questions the students ask each other, and questions the students ask themselves. And we need to provide ample time for them to think of responses.
And we have clear guidelines for creating learning materials that facilitate learning, by including narration and graphics but ruthlessly making sure they support the learning goal.
Related Posts
How Insights from Learning Science Can Transform Your Teaching (Part 1/7)
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)
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
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- Issa, N., Mayer, R. E., Schuller, M., Wang, E., Shapiro, M. B., & DaRosa, D. A. (2013). Teaching for understanding in medical classrooms using multimedia design principles. Medical education, 47(4), 388–396.
- Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational technology research and development, 50(3), 43–59.
- Chiu, J. L. & Chi, M. T. H. (2014). Supporting self-explanation in the classroom. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Overson & C. M. Hakala (Eds), Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum (pp. 59–70). Retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology website: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php
- Chi, M. T., De Leeuw, N., Chiu, M. H., & LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive science, 18(3), 439–477.
- Griffin, T. D., Wiley, J., & Thiede, K. W. (2008). Individual differences, rereading, and self-explanation: Concurrent processing and cue validity as constraints on metacomprehension accuracy. Memory & Cognition, 36(1), 93–103.
- Durkin, K., & Rittle-Johnson, B. (2012). The effectiveness of using incorrect examples to support learning about decimal magnitude. Learning and Instruction, 22(3), 206–214.
- Nuthall, G. (2007). The hidden lives of learners. Wellington: Nzcer Press.
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- National Research Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school: Expanded edition. National Academies Press.
- Grant, A. (2017). Originals: How non-conformists move the world. Penguin.
- Cain, S. (2013). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Broadway Books.
- Chi, M. T., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational Psychologist, 49(4), 219–243.
- Hattie, J. A., & Donoghue, G. M. (2016). Learning strategies: A synthesis and conceptual model. npj Science of Learning, 1, 16013.
- Frey, N., Fisher, D., & Hattie, J. (2017). Surface, Deep, and Transfer? Considering the Role of Content Literacy Instructional Strategies. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 60(5), 567–575. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.576
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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.
