Transforming online pedagogy

I am, as usual, behind on my posts, so here is one from an event I attended way back in May...

UNCG's University Teaching and Learning Commons sponsored and hosted the Transforming Online Pedagogy and Practices Symposium, or TOPPS, this past May 7th through 11th. This wonderful event ran the entire week, although I was only able to attend Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm very happy I did so, too, because UTLC brought in Dr. Michelle Miller, a cognitive psychologist who specializes in memory and attention, as the keynote speaker. Her presentation, which revolved around the theme "Leveraging Psychology to Create Compelling Learning Experiences," was spread across two morning sessions.

The first session focused on memory and attention. Dr. Miller began by asking us to recall movie lines. It turns out that people are surprisingly good at recalling, verbatim, extended pieces of dialog from our favorite movies. Wouldn't it be nice if students could retain information like this in our classes? What is it about movie lines that encourages long-term retention? As we went around the room, folks identified several factors that explains this, including the fact that the lines appear as part of a dramatic scene in which we were (at the time of viewing) deeply engaged. In other words, we were fully attentive, and attention, as Dr. Miller pointed out, drives memory. The problem, though, is that many things can interrupt the link between attention and memory: excessive cognitive load (there is simply too much strain being put on attention), poor mastery of low-level processes (they have not yet been automatized and, thus, take up some attention), and "dysfunctional multi-tasking" (the myth that attention can be effectively split among several tasks).

So, how do we capture students' attention in order to exploit the link between attention and memory? Dr. Miller had several suggestions:

• Ask for responses, and do it often. Asking someone to retrieve information immediately focuses their attention on the task at hand. Student Response Systems in face-to-face courses and interweaving questions into online text can keep students involved and attentive.
• Work to automate lower-level tasks so that they require less attention. Assignments that require and reward repeated practice and even speed help students achieve mastery of tasks that teachers, as experts, take for granted. We thus need to ask ourselves: what skills can we reasonably automate in our courses? 
• Address attention myths. Most students (and most people, for that matter), for example, are under the impression that they can multi-task without negatively affecting their attention on any one task (reading and watching YouTube, anyone??). Another common misconception is that certain people are exempt from the attentional limitations of the human mind (well, most people can't multi-task, but I can...). Dr. Miller developed an online module called Attention Matters! that demonstrates to users how limited attention really is. She and her colleagues have shown that the module does help students realize how difficult it is to learn something without fully attending to it. Memory is, after all, not a fixed thing. It is constantly constructed and reconstructed.   

Ultimately, it is important to realize that memory is an adaptation; we are, in fact, evolved to remember things! However, our brains must use relevancy to decide how to parse out the limited amount of attention it has at its disposal. Items are also more likely to be recalled when learned within a context that creates cues.

Dr. Miller also stressed the visual nature of most learning--while people may prefer particular modes of content delivery (audio, verbal, etc.), the idea of "learning styles," as I found out, has been largely debunked. Okay, so what does the field of applied memory tell us? In other words, how do we make our material memorable? Well...

• Harness the "testing effect." Reading quizzes, repeatable quizzing, self-quizzing: forcing one to recall information helps build memory.
• Space it out. Break information into smaller temporal chunks and include exercises that involve information retrieval between chunks of information. When material involves categorization or problem types, interleaving can be particularly effective.
• Push powerful processing. Ask students to synthesize information and relate material to themselves. Visual diagrams, especially those that have audio and an interactive interface, can be especially powerful.

Dr. Miller demonstrated these principles with a simple request: draw a penny. Try it yourself. Suffice it to say, I was not able to recreate a U.S. penny on my pad of paper (I was able to produce a circle with a face and some of the correct words, though). Why? Do I need to know what a penny looks like? Nope. This knowledge is not relevant, so I've no reason to continuously look at a penny and remember what it looks like. So, I have never quizzed myself about it. There is also no context here--why does a penny look the way that it does? I've never been forced to synthesize the information about a penny. All that historical and political information would provide critical context.

An infographic entitled "How to remember (almost) anything" very nicely summarized the morning's session (see more details here):

• Quiz, don't reread. Actively recall information rather than passively rereading it.
• Visualize it. Associating information with sensations is memorable, and vision is a strong sensory cue for most people.
• Structure it. Break information into parts and put related pieces into meaningful order or structure.
• Give it meaning. Brains remember things that mean something to their owners. Before trying to remember something, make sure you understand it.
• Relate it to yourself. Personal relevance makes things stick and allows you to draw on what is already known.
• Create a cue. Find parts that are difficult to recall and link that piece of information to something that's more vivid.    

The second session revolved around thinking, motivation, and self-regulated learning. Having students "think" is, of course, what we as instructors want, but it is a skill that needs to be cultivated. What is more, we have to define what we mean by "thinking." This can be difficult, since it can manifest in a wide variety of ways, from problem solving and formal reasoning to critical thinking and analogical reasoning. Thinking can be difficult to develop, too, because it is often crowded out by content. The question, as Dr. Miller presented it, is: how do we balance thinking skills and content knowledge so that the complement each other?

This is what the literature tells us about thinking skills:

• Thinking skills are context specific, so they do not transfer as well as we think they do. Better transfer of skills can be attained through repeated practice across--and this is key--varying examples. This taps into the deeper structure of a problem, which is something that novices have real difficulty with because, for them, everything matters. In other words, students are unable to distinguish between the unimportant details and the more meaningful framework of a problem. (Raise your hand if you've ever said "Don't worry about the details here. Pay more attention to the general principles." Well, there you go.)
• Critical thinking is difficult to define and, thus, particularly tough to address. The barriers are myriad, and include a resistance to independent thinking and the fact that just because you can thinking critically doesn't mean that you will. Why? Well, it's hard! You have to be motivated to do hard things, so the problem requiring critical thinking must matter (back to relevance).     

Dr. Miller offered the following suggestions for producing thinkers:

• When designing a specific activity or an entire course, think first about the specific skills you, as the instructor, want to cultivate. Align the course and its activities to those skills, which counters the tendency to focus exclusively on content.
• Ensure that activities encourage transferability by creating lots of examples with different surface details.
• Use scenarios like case studies, problem-based learning, role-playing, and faux "clients" to work with.

We were then asked to consider our own educational experience in college. What classes were we both interested in and motivated for? What about not interested but still highly motivated? Or perhaps interested but not motivated? There are typically four types of students:

The interest/motivation dynamic requires different approaches for different learners, and there are several approaches to the problem of motivation.

• Classic incentive approaches. These incentives can come from the learner (intrinsic) or from the instructor/course/environment (extrinsic)
• Self-determination theory. This approach revolves around the ideas of competence ("I'm good at this, so I can do it," or "I'm no good at this, so I just can't succeed"), relatedness (we're all in this together), and agency (there is some choice on the part of the learner).
• Academic self-efficacy. This is the "You think you can do it, so you do it" approach. Imagine you offer someone $50,000 to prepare a presentation, in a single evening, on a topic that is completely alien to them. Most of us would say that this is quite simply not possible. No incentive, not even $50,000, can change one's motivation if they don't think the goal is possible.
• Mindset. This is based on the now well-known work of Carol Dweck, who distinguishes between a "growth" mindset (intelligence is mutable, so one can become smarter through hard work) and a "fixed" mindset (intelligence is fixed and unchanging, so no amount of work will make one successful).

One interesting suggestion that Dr. Miller made was to borrow from game design. There is, in fact, an entire movement within pedagogy to "gamify" assignments and classes. Games are highly motivating, so I think there is something to be said about this approach. What is it about games that makes them so motivating that they are actually addictive? Well, for one thing, people often get "in the groove" while playing games (this is referred to more formally as flow in the psychology literature), which involves effortless control of one's creative abilities. Games also involve failure, which is also a key aspect of learning. With games, though, the stakes are lower because one can quickly restart, learn from mistakes, and use multiple attempts. Games also have a sense of mission and a narrative, which creates user investment in the outcome. Perhaps our assignments can be designed with these tenets in mind. In particular, assignments and courses should tell learners why they are completing tasks and involve frequent low-stakes assignments (this provides lots of feedback, makes it easier to accept, and learn from, failure, and permits the slow advance toward a larger goal).

The UTLC also provided several sessions for online course design and implementation, including difficult-to-implement tasks like group work. Overall, this was a wonderful symposium.