… and from forests to ecologies…�

Courtney Hilton

PhD Candidate & Postgraduate Fellow

Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation;

School of Education and Social Work;

School of Psychology

Outline for talk

• Point to some problems in higher-education
• Articulate how ‘student partnerships’ approach might help
• Discuss a way we can implement some of these ideas

Let’s start with understanding a learner…

“trying to understand perception by studying only neurons is like trying to understand bird-flight by studying only feathers.” David Marr (1982)

Let’s start with understanding a learner…

“trying to understand learning by studying only neurons is like trying to understand bird-flight by studying only feathers.” David Marr/me

Move to understanding learners

"It's through participation in communities that deep learning occurs. People don't learn to become physicists by memorizing formulas; rather it's the implicit practices that matter most. Indeed, knowing only the explicit, mouthing the formulas, is exactly what gives an outsider away. Insiders know more. By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get to know not just the "standard" answers, but the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics, and why they matter"

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Learning in the Digital Age - John Seely Brown

“trying to understand learning by studying only individuals is like trying to understand forests by studying only trees.” David Marr/me

...humans are a social animal, and education is a socially situated activity

Some problems in higher ed

The standard lecture is boring and ineffective*

*(ok… lectures can be great, and serve a purpose, however, they shouldn’t be the primary form of learning)

The standard lecture is boring and ineffective*

• “The college lecture is the educational equivalent of bloodletting” - Carl Wieman
• “The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention, rather than to provide ready-made knowledge.” - Seymour Papert
• “Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.” - Noam Chomsky

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The core process of learning is knowledge construction

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Lectures are a medium for explanation (not knowledge construction)

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Assessment is disconnected from learning

Assessment is disconnected from learning

• The latin root for ‘assessment’ is ‘assidere’, which means to sit beside/with—this is more humanising!
• What students create during assessment is too often something nobody (except maybe the assessor) will ever engage with.
• There is not enough ‘formative assessment’
• One of the biggest effect-sizes in learning is the ‘testing effect’
• Summative assessment structure incentivises ‘cramming’ (see spacing effect)

Students feel isolated

Students feel isolated

• A 2013 survey of American college students found:
• 57% of women and 40% of men reported experiencing episodes of “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year,
• 33% of women and 27% of men reported a period in the last year of feeling so depressed it was difficult to function
• The 2013 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) data shows:
• more than one quarter (26 per cent) of the 16-24 age group experience a mental health disorder in a 12-month period – the highest incidence of any age group.
• Anxiety disorders are the most common, followed by substance use disorders and then affective disorders.”

We’re not enculturating learners into leadership

We’re not enculturating learners into leadership

The university learning experience is often very structured, supported, linear…

Life and work in the real world rarely ever is like this!

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Maybe student partnerships can help...

Students as co-educators and co-assessors

• “teaching is a natural cognitive ability” (Strauss, Calero, Sigman, 2014)
• “When one teaches, two learn” - Robert Heinlein
• “To teach, is to learn twice” - Joseph Joubert

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• Involving students (with appropriate support) in teaching each other can help:
• motivation and engagement
• metacognitive habits
• sense of belonging in discipline
• Involving students (also with appropriate support) in assessing each other can help:
• Scale up formative assessment
• Ensure assessment items more relatable to students
• Similar metacognitive learning benefits to teaching
• We can also treat contributions to this learning community as graded assignments
• More socially meaningful and more intrinsically motivating than most assignments

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So what do we want? (a brief summary so far)

• Meaningful assessment – Evidence-Centered Assessment design
• Socially meaningful learning – building learning communities (student partnerships)
• Cognitively informed learning designs – activities that support knowledge construction

How do we design for and support this at scale?

We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so our approach is relational

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Visualising knowledge

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Testing knowledge

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Explaining knowledge

(a learning ecology composed of students, technologies, learning activities, experts…)

Testing knowledge

• Why we need to test to learn
• “If you hear yourself saying “I think I understand this”, that means you don't” - Richard Feynman
• Illusion of explanatory depth - “Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.” (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002)
• Testing before learning (Kornell, Hayes, Bjork, 2009)

Knowledge testing is the basis of knowledge construction.

• In order to construct something new, you need to know what is already there.
• Testing (spaced over time) also then helps consolidate what you construct.

Testing knowledge

• How we can implement testing?

Explaining knowledge

Why we need explanations

• Explanations are a guide to how we can connect new knowledge with what we already know, and a guide to how we should ultimately structure our knowledge.
• It is just a guide: we still have to do the work

• Deep understanding is more than just memorizing facts. Explanations should help us ‘connect the dots’ and to consolidate knowledge into a larger ‘narrative’

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Explanations are a schematic that can guide the knowledge construction process

Explaining knowledge

• Implementing explanations:
• Lectures
• Peer tutoring (Roscoe & Chi, 2007)
• Self-explanation (Lombrozo, 2016)
• Students co-constructing an e-textbook/wiki

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Collecting student questions, misconceptions…

Co-creation of new explanations addressing questions…

Visualising knowledge (analytics)

• Why visualise knowledge
• It is a roadmap for both the educator and the learner that articulates:
• What should be learned
• When
• How far are you so far
• Can be used by the learner to:
• Plan studying and learning activities
• Direct their attention to what specifically they should be working on.
• Can be used by teachers to:
• Decide when to provide feedback or support
• Calibrate their own teaching and learning designs

Visualising knowledge

• Implementation:
• It’s on the curriculum (bad)
• We want to develop a dashboard that would support evidence-centered assessment design and also provide analytics to learners and teachers

Testing & explaining knowledge

• Idealised model of learning:
• Get a MCQ wrong in PeerWise
• Use this to identify gap in your knowledge
• Hyperlink from MCQ takes you to Wiki, where you:
• Can view explanations to help clarify your understanding
• Explain why you got something wrong, ask for help, etc

Explanation is directly tethered to testing, encouraging students to reflect on their misunderstandings and address them

Visualising & (Testing & explaining knowledge)

Building on this cycle of 1. Testing 2. Identifying misunderstanding 3. Seeking explanation to fix misunderstanding, visualisations of knowledge then:

• Guides learners toward answering relevant questions
• Guides learners towards writing relevant questions
• It not only guides the individual learner, but can be a blueprint for the learning community to determine what questions and explanations still need to be created

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Visualising knowledge

(learning dashboard)

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Testing knowledge

(PeerWise)

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Explaining knowledge

(Wiki/e-textbook)

Supporting meaningful knowledge construction at individual and community levels

Guiding what content is created

Guiding learner to answer relevant and timely questions

Thank you for your attention!