One thing we hear over and over again is that we should be teaching creativity in schools. We also often assume that certain people are just more creative than others. What is the evidence for this? A new paper examined fifty years of research. Thread ⬇️ 🧵

This paper asks a basic question: are some people simply born more creative, regardless of the subject or field and if so, what does this mean for education? this idea, known as the "domain-general hypothesis", suggests that a person with a high level of general creativity could excel in any creative task they pursue.
The article questions whether we should be testing for this general creative ability, if we should teach it and whether "general creativity" is even a thing. To test this, researchers studied how participants complete creative tasks in various domains like writing, visual arts, or problem-solving.
The general creative type or "domain-general hypothesis" would be supported if participants consistently demonstrated above-average creativity across all these domains. However, this review found several limitations:

Possibly the most difficult challenge teachers face in instructional design is the “transfer paradox” otherwise known as the deceptive trade-off between immediate performance vs. long-term transfer. A short 🧵⬇️ The “transfer paradox” refers to a counterintuitive situation in learning and instructional design: techniques that improve immediate performance often do not lead to effective transfer of skills or knowledge to new and different contexts. In other words, what helps students perform well during initial learning may not prepare them well for applying that knowledge in different situations or problems they haven’t encountered before.
ref. researchgate.net/publication/25…

Seeing a lot of schools mandating retrieval practice in every lesson but also seeing quite a few misconceptions. A quick thread: 10 ways to get retrieval practice wrong ⬇️ 🧵 1. Not providing enough challenge, especially initially: Giving quizzes, where the first retrieval is very soon after learning, can create the "illusion of competence" where students recall easily on that first attempt, but later performance suffers. The initial retrieval needs to be sufficiently challenging to be effective.

Easy retrieval often involves retrieving information based on superficial cues or associations, rather than engaging in deeper, more elaborative processing. This type of shallow processing can lead to memories that are fragile and easily forgotten.

When retrieval is effortless, the brain doesn't need to work as hard to retrieve the information. Evidence suggests that this lack of effortful retrieval can result in weaker encoding of the memory trace, making it less durable over time.

How effective are open-plan classrooms or '21st Century learning spaces'? Is a noisy classroom a 'thinking classroom'? A short thread on why they're a really bad idea 🧵 The idea of open plan classrooms became popular in the 1960s and emerged from a broader concept of 'open education' which included a set of assumptions derived from constructivist thought:

How might teachers and school leaders think about implementing the science of learning in practice?
Some thoughts from my talk at #rEDTO2024 Firstly it's important to say that we still have a large gap between evidence from experimental settings and classroom practice. @TWPerry1's review is a hugely important work and really sets out the limitations of the evidence we actually have.
Where we do have evidence of the science of learning in schools, the interventions are often not done by real teachers in real situations. This is a problem.
#rEDTO2024

What can we learn from experts on expertise? Some notes from this excellent book 🧵⬇️ 1. Experts Excel Mainly in Their Own Domains.

"There is little evidence that a person highly skilled in one domain can transfer the skill to another."

This point is possibly the central one in the book and one which most people struggle with. Being an excellent teacher in one subject doesn't mean you can teach any subject. In fact even within one subject area there is not a lot of transfer: an expert secondary school English teacher would be useless at teaching 5 year olds how to read.

Likewise, teaching students a set of generic skills is unlikely to lead to them becoming proficient in other areas. You can think deeply about something you know a lot about - generalised 'thinking skills' doesn't come into it.

"The obvious reason for the excellence of experts is that they have a good deal of domain knowledge. This is easily demonstrated; for example, in medical diagnosis, expert physicians have more differentiations of common diseases into disease variants (Johnson et al., 1981). Likewise, in examining taxi drivers’ knowledge of routes, Chase (1983) found that expert drivers can generate a far greater number of secondary routes (i.e., lesser known streets) than novice drivers."

Does cognitive science claim the brain is like a computer? A short thread ⬇️ 🧵

It's true that phrases such as 'central executive', 'process', 'encoding' and 'retrieval' are used in the field to define how we learn, however cognitive science also acknowledges the fact that we are human and that unlike computers, we have all the attendant biases and cognitive limitations that come with being human. Blake Richards argues that if we take the definition of computer from computer science then it's not a good metaphor because the differences are too vast to warrant comparison:

One of the key things to know from over 100 years of research on learning is the weird paradox that an important part of learning anything is actually forgetting it. A thread on how to harness this principle for effective learning ⬇️ 🧵 In 1914, Edward Thorndike outlined his law of effect (based on experiments with cats) which became the blueprint for the behaviourist idea that positive experiences are reinforced and negative ones are weakened.

But part of this broader theory was his 'theory of disuse' which establishes another fairly simple idea: the less you use something the more you forget it. The key idea is that unless you rehearse learned information and skills, it will fade or 'decay' as he put it, over time (use it or lose it).

Now on the surface this seems like something everybody knows, but like so much about learning, it's really not that simple at all.

One of the most important things educators need to know about learning is that human memory is not like a tape recorder or a computer. It has what Bjork and Bjork call “important peculiarities”, four of which are really important to know when planning teaching ⬇️🧵 (1) Memory has a "remarkable capacity for storing information coupled with a highly fallible retrieval process" (Bjork & Bjork, 2006)

In other words, while we can store a wealth of information, the mechanisms for recalling that information are imperfect and prone to error.

We often think we know something when we don't really know it at all.

This is the main reason why cognitive science has focused so much on the spacing effect and retrieval practice as they are powerful tools for helping students to remember stuff for the exam in June that they were taught in September.

Direct or explicit instruction seems to be widely misunderstood. It's often characterised as boring lectures with little interaction and not catering to the needs of all students. Nothing could be further from the truth. A short thread 🧵⬇️ Direct Instruction (DI) as a formal method was designed by Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley Becker in the 1960s for teaching core academic skills. This was a structured, systematic approach which emphasizes carefully sequenced materials delivered in a clear, unambiguous language with examples.

It's designed to leave little room for misinterpretation and to ensure that all students, regardless of background or ability, can learn effectively.

It's also anything but boring. Here is a video from the 1960s of Englemann teaching Maths. Notice how interactive and fast paced the teaching is:

A real shame to see some opposition to cognitive science in education as I believe it offers some incredibly powerful insights into learning and how to create the best conditions under which students can flourish. Here are some core misconceptions which I will try to address⬇️🧵 “Cognitive science is not science”
It’s not a pure science in the tradition of the natural sciences obviously but it’s very much an applied science. As Mayer points out, what makes it science is firstly that it’s based on “evidence rather than opinions, slogans, or quotations from experts”

A thread summarising my talk at #rED23 yesterday on the challenges of applying the science of learning in the classroom 🧵 As far back as the 1890s William James cautioned against thinking you can apply the principles of psychology straight into the classroom. However, without an understanding of how the brain learns, planning instruction is suboptimal. I think these two positions encapsulate the interstitial point in which we find ourselves.

How good is ChatGPT at writing English essays? As an English teacher of 15 years I've been playing about with it and I think we need to pay attention to this. ⬇️ 🧵 Two conclusions at this stage:
1. It's not at the stage yet where it can produce sophisticated A-level/undergraduate essays.
2. It has absolutely nailed how to write GCSE English essays.

THREAD: there is a growing body of evidence to show that mobile phone use is linked with lower academic achievement, a decrease in wellbeing and can often facilitate bullying in schools. Here's some of the available evidence. Firstly the amount of time children are spending in front of screens in general is alarming. To take one example, 20% of 14- to 17-year-olds in the US spend 7 hours a day in front of screens. (and that was 5 years ago) census.gov/programs-surve…