I find it quite difficult to explain this but I’ll keep on trying. It’s about the condtant change in how ‘knowledge’ is meant, as in certain specific knowledge is good for knowing thst dpecifuc knowledge, versus general claims about knowledge.
The tweet was about transfer of course but quite often those commenting on transfer combine it with the domain-specificity of knowledge. Take chess. De Groot, Herbert, Simon... or Leslie and Recht’s baseball study....take-away: knowledge matters...
...but of course not any old knowledge matters. The original point is that it matters for assessment on that knowledge. Therefore, imo it is a shift of the use of knowledge, when people say “ergo, I’m a proponent of knowledge curricula” in the sense that ‘they work’.
The shift is one from very specific knowledge to ‘knowledge in general’. The same applies to genericisms like ‘loads of knowledge’. A curriculum contains specific knowledge; angeneral argument for their effectiveness needs evidence.
And the irony would be that if this evidence would exist on standardised assessments, then that specific combination of knowledge together in curriculum could actually be a sign of some transfer (‘these curricula work’ broadly). But the research is mixed.
Especially for the CKLA program (which Hirsch devised) some sites improved, others didn’t. Hirsch himself AFAIK is not a fan of trials like that: the length is too short and standardised assessments don’t capture specific knowledge. So you need knowledge tests.
Tests that measure the knowledge that has been taught.
But now back to transfer....why does this not hold for chess as well? Or music. Or any topic? Of course it does hold for that.
The point being that if you keep the yardstick the same for all studies involving knowledge...*general* claims about knowledge (curricula) have similar challenges as transfer challenges. If no transfer occurs...could argue too ‘not long enough’, ‘not measured the right thing’.
Those are not suddenly ‘cop-outs’. They are just as valid as Hirsch’s comments towards ‘knowledge curricula’. If you talk about *specific* knowledge then it will benefit proficiency of *that* knowledge. But some over time perhaps benefits more generally (transfer).
To quote a event podcast “Transfer is difficult, far transfer is difficult, but there is no question it occurs and that it is possible.”
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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’
…
Ok, some thoughts on E.D.Hirsch’s latest book. To be honest, I’ve seen/heard 4 or 5 interviews with him so some of that might be mixed in.
Let me begin by saying that it’s quite clear that a desire for social justice really drives Hirsch. I seems passionate in both audio and writing. Several people, including himself, gave called this (last) book his most pronounced.
I can see that but I do think because of that some facts suffer. This is why I thought it wasn’t as good as ‘Why knowledge matters’ (I wrote bokhove.net/2017/02/17/hir… about that book).