These ideas have a long history.
Not a technology 'fad', but from 2015 I've been trying to get funding for some ideas around this (I'm sure others also have done so for years), incorporating principles for multimedia learning (e.g. see sciencedirect.com/science/articl…)
Oh even 2014 for a Wellcome Trust Science Learning+ call. After that Leverhulme, EU, Nuffield. Sure, it could have been the case that the proposal wasn't as well written as others, but I'm still annoyed that the ideas seemingly didn't even get a look in.
Remember, this was six years ago, so maybe there is more movement now, but then it wasn't. The Wellcome call was about different themes, including engagement in STEM and equity.... see informalscience.org/projects/fundi… - also check the projects that were funded.
I *personally* thought (sore 'loser' I know) that the winning ideas were very much 'more of the same'. Museums. Science events. Basically the venues where many of the more disdavntaged socio-economic groups never go to any way. So....
(disclaimer...I know tweeting about original ideas risks people run with it, but after 6 years of bidding, and now seeing the ide pop up in other places any way, bit fed up any way. If you like the idea and want to do something, wouldn't mind looking into it again.)
...in the first version of the project (not funded twice) we had:
- A theme park in the UK (specifically a rollercoaster ride)
- A theme park in the US
- Augmented reality (AR supplier on-board) to teach 'forces'
- A mobile platform for delivering content (scalable other parks)
The reason to include a theme park was that they have a distinctly different audience that visits. Roller coaster rides obviously involve many forces. The mobile platform would allow any content to be accessible anywhere (using buddypress). The AR would add a multimedia layer.
Honestly, so many years back it was one of the coolest ideas I had and every time I write about it, it still is. I repeat that we HAD THEME PARKS that worked with us. WE HAD ROLLERCOASTERS.
Note this was not a school project (although later funding attempts tried that as well).
But focus was on informal learning. So the stuff museums do, but then -as mentioned- tapping into other audiences.
Variations of proposal, with different emphases, have passed several other funders...to no avail. And every time I speak about it, people say THAT SOUNDS COOL (and useful). Yeah, it does, it wasn't even a lot of money we asked tbh. Many people liked to contribute cos it was COOL.
Of course, now we see more of these initiatives. I'm not trying to downplay their work. Just venting about years of getting an idea into action. Sure, we could still do some of the work, but as we all know, a little bit of funding is a useful 'go for it!' incentive... #rantover
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I have never had an issue with procedural knowledge. I am fed up, though, with the misleading analogies with early phonics. Procedural and conceptual knowledge go hand-in-hand at all ages.
Now some folk will say that that will still be the case if you 'push back' content to later education phases, there is a risk that every phase will say 'the next one will have to do it'. This is why we always must keep both procedural and conceptual knowledge firmly in focus.
TBH I was also surprised by the 'pleasure' link. Glad to see it, but recently I've not seen it mentioned much in what I would call 'science of learning' views. They tend to one-sidedly highlight the achievement-to-motivation direction, when it's bidirectional.
I never read Nuthall's The Hidden Lives of Learners before today, after so many mentions of it over the years. I must say that personally I was a bit underwhelmed. I'm sure his career is impressive...and maybe I should have mainly seen it is a convincing narrative...
But if the book argued to be evidence-based I thought the claims were quite hard to check, and the book itself rather low on research detail. Let's just say I expected more.
Just put in a few direct article and page references for key claims; how hard is that? Now I have to do quite some work to find claims like 'three times confronted with knowledge' and the '80% from others 80% wrong '. Maybe someone can give the exact studies?
We've known it because unfortunately this is not really a 'new study' (maybe a few small changes) but yet another re-analysis of PISA 2012. All countries were already included by Caro et al. (2015) researchgate.net/publication/28… - also PISA 2015 sliced and diced to death.
So, we are talking about the same source and there's much to say about the scales (the casual way in which the paper equates scales reminds me of papers that declare inquiry, PBL, student-orientation all the same, when they're not).
It might be the case that it appeared in this quite unremarkable journal because it basically already had been done. One thing I would check is the within-country variance.
There have been quite a few people who did not seem up-to-date with decades of literature around online and blendec learning, but feel expert because of online learning during the pandemic.
And it’s not that it isn’t worthwhile to keep on studying the determinants of effective learning, it’s just that my sense is that there is a lot of reinventing the wheel. Take some of the OU stuff from ages ago with quizzes and more open answers….
…multiple choice quizzing with a bit of spacing imo then is rather underwhelming. Sure, sometimes things just take a ‘crisis’ (the pandemic in this case) to make a step change, but can Injust ask to read up on the history of online learning?
When on edutwitter some people don't want to talk about terminology, it isn't always because they have a good eye for 'obfuscation' and 'relevance', but because they need a 'persuasive definition' for their semantic sophistry.
Take the recent inquiry/explicit convos. For inquiry you need to be able to bunch all criticism together, so you can use it all interchangeably, and paint a field that uniformly fails.
With explicit instruction, direct instruction, Direct Instruction, Explicit Direct Instruction, despite wildly different with different evidence bases (many positive), you can then just talk about it as a coherent, clear, field...
Reading the Ofsted maths review a bit more. I really think the categorisation of knowledge is very limited with declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge. The latter is not used a lot afaik but is metacognitive and strategic in nature (but metacognition not mentioned).
With Rittle-Johnson et al’s (and others) work on procedural and conceptual knowledge, I especially find the omission or rephrasing of ‘conceptual’ notable. The word ‘conceptual’ appears in sevral places….
… in relation to ‘fluency’.
… in the table under ‘declarative’ as ‘relationships between facts’ (conceptual understanding)
… ‘develop further understanding through applying procedures’
… in a table under ‘procedural’
…