Are natural learning environments really the best way learn? Thread on Herbert Simon and why effective instructional design needs to be artificial. 🧵 In 'Sciences of the Artificial', Herbert Simon described an ant's complex, winding path across a beach.

The complexity isn't in the ant; it's in the environment (pebbles, dunes). Simon argued humans are the same: our complex behavior largely reflects the complexity of the environment we are navigating.

Simon’s claim is brutal and clarifying: Human behaviour looks complex largely because environments are complex. Change the environment and behaviour changes automatically. Leave it untouched and no amount of exhortation will help.

Working on instructional invariants today and the idea that evaluability is far more important than feedback. In fact, feedback is not an invariant at all.🧵 An instructional invariant is a non-negotiable design condition that must hold for learning to occur reliably.

If violated, it causes learning to fail. Even if everything else appears to be working.

Instructional invariants are constraints on learning environments that prevent predictable failure modes.

They are not a theory of learning. They are a diagnostic tool for design.

Reading 'A Pattern Language' by Christopher Alexander and it’s just blowing my mind. His ideas have so much to offer instructional design 🧵 A “pattern” isn’t a recipe. It’s a constraint that, if violated, makes the design fail no matter how pretty the surface is. A room can be any style, but violate “Light on Two Sides” and it will feel gloomy anyway.

Not everything is worth retrieving. Retrieval practice is powerful, but only when it targets the right knowledge. 🧵 As a general rule, knowledge that's central to the discipline should be retrieved.
Threshold concepts:
- Opportunity cost in economics
- Evolution by natural selection in biology
- The concept of a limit in calculus
- Irony in literature.
Hinge points:
A moment in instruction where everything that follows depends on students having grasped what came before. It's the juncture where the lesson either consolidates or collapses. If students haven't understood the concept at this point, proceeding is futile.

Vygotsky's 'Zone of Proximal Development' is perhaps the most misunderstood idea in education. It was never a teaching method but a metaphor for how teaching can pull thinking upward, from the everyday to the scientific. ⬇️ 🧵 There are, broadly speaking, two Vygotskys.
The Anglo-American Vygotsky is social, collaborative, constructivist. Born in Mind in Society (1978), he became the patron saint of progressive education and appears alongside Bruner, Piaget, Rogoff, and Wertsch in teacher education courses.

Really interesting new paper on using 'contrasting erroneous example' as a means of preventing common misconceptions.
The worked example effect shows that novices benefit from step-by-step clarity, while this paper suggests that once some foundations are in place, contrasting erroneous examples can push learning further by clarifying boundaries. Again I'm reminded of Theory of Instruction here and the idea that we learn what something is by contrasting it with what it isn't.

Not all wrong answers are equal. I used to think students just needed the right information to fix misconceptions but then I read the work of Michelene Chi🧵⬇️ Chi’s research revealed that misconceptions are not just small knowledge deficits; they are often coherent yet incorrect frameworks of understanding.

Put simply, a student’s wrong answer can stem from a well-formed but fundamentally flawed theory about how something works, rather than from a simple factual mistake.

What is the effect of giving children smartphones before the age of 13? It's bad. Strongly associated with poorer mental health and wellbeing. BUT the evidence is largely correlational. What does this mean? 🧵⬇️ A new global study of over 100,000 young adults found that receiving a smartphone before age 13 is associated with significantly poorer mental health outcomes in early adulthood, particularly increased suicidal thoughts and diminished emotional regulation, with effects primarily mediated through early social media access.

"Learning facts is going to fade into the background." 🤦‍♂️
Quick thread on why this is a terrible take🧵⬇️

https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1947810003169292371

For whatever reason, the idea of knowing stuff has become unfashionable. We’ve absorbed the idea that facts are “mere” details, that skills and dispositions matter more, and that technology makes memory unnecessary.

Expertise isn't about having more working memory, it's about needing less of it. Experts automate many components in long-term memory and can recognise meaningful patterns instantly, bypassing the need to process individual elements. ⬇️ 🧵 For example, the multiplication tables aren't memorised for their own sake, but because automated arithmetic facts free working memory for algebraic reasoning.

New study: A single 10-minute retrieval practice activity significantly improved final exam performance compared to a review session. But there's a lot more to this study 🧵⬇️ The intervention was 10 minutes of students taking an unexpected, closed-notes practice test consisting of:
- 10 multiple-choice questions created by the instructor
- Questions focused on key concepts likely to appear on the final exam
- Each question had four answer choices
- Questions assessed recall or comprehension of foundational concepts

Students were told it was ungraded and framed as preparation for the final exam. Immediately after the 10-minute test, the instructor provided corrective feedback, explaining why each answer was correct or incorrect.

This new paper is a great example of desirable difficulties in practice: Interleaving spelling tasks led to better performance on later spelling tests, even though it was harder during practice. 🧵⬇️ What is interleaving and how does it work? Essentially it's really about a kind of discrimination: when learners encounter different items back-to-back, they must pay attention to what distinguishes one from the next. This strengthens their ability to categorise and apply the right rule or strategy.

Interleaving stands in opposition to "blocked practice", which is when learners focus on one type of problem, skill, or concept at a time and repeating it over and over before moving on to the next.

Once again, matching teaching to learning styles has near-zero impact on student achievement. I've noticed a resurgence of the learning styles myth recently so this new study is timely. 🧵 ⬇️ 9 out of 10 teachers still believe in the myth despite being thoroughly debunked by cognitive science. We've known this for 10 years. This to me is the most sobering aspect of all this and again, shows the pressing need for teachers to get proper training on how learning happens.

Why The Forgetting Curve Is Not As Useful As You Think. Ebbinghaus' research was groundbreaking for the time but it's not really how learning happens in authentic learning situations ⬇️🧵 I see a lot of training where school leaders use Ebbinghaus as a vehicle to talk about retrieval practice. While the basic premise is important, I don't think it's particularly useful for teachers because it's not really how learning happens in authentic learning situations.

New paper asks why have the same major motivation theories (self-determination theory, expectancy-value theory, achievement goal theory, etc.) dominated educational psychology for decades with little change? ⬇️ 🧵 Dominant motivation theories are valuable but underspecified. The paper acknowledges that current theories have "provided tremendous advancements in the understanding of motivation" and led to successful interventions, but argues they don't adequately explain how motivation actually works at a mechanistic level.

What's the "sweet spot" for spacing out practice? for students scoring below 35% they likely need more instruction or support first, while students scoring above 75% probably won't gain much from spacing out their practice. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.100… Specific evidence for this claim: "In Barzagar Nazari and Ebersbach's (2019a) study, the advantage of distributed practice occurred only for students scoring 3–7 out of 9.5 points, that is, 32%–74% on the first practice set. In Ebersbach and Barzagar Nazari's (2020a, Exp. 2) study, the advantage of distributed practice on transfer performance occurred only for students scoring >3.5 out of 9 points, that is, >39% on the first practice set." (p.12)

Students learn faster when they see what something is and what it isn’t. One of the most important aspect of curriculum planning + instructional design is effectively using examples and non-examples. 🧵⬇️ Been re-reading Theory of Instruction through a lens of what we know about learning from the last 50 years and really realising the brilliance of it in terms of how it incorporates so much of how learning happens. It's not an easy read but for me the core concept in it is "faultless communication": the idea that teaching should be designed so precisely that misunderstanding is impossible.

How do we learn? Just read this new pre-print from the great Slava Kalyuga which provides a slightly updated model of how we acquire knowledge through the conduit of an "explicit intention to learn". 🧵⬇️ As you'd expect from Kalyuga, he argues that instructional strategies should incorporate CLT (cognitive load theory) to support biologically secondary learning (stuff kids learn in school), emphasizing worked examples, guided discovery, gradual reduction of scaffolds etc. but what's interesting is the idea that the "explicit intention to learn" is the driver behind humanity's cultural evolution and that intelligence is an emergent property of this.

New paper challenging Cognitive Load Theory. I've been hoping to read a good criticism of CLT for some time but unfortunately this is not it. THREAD ⬇️🧵 tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… The paper basically argues that CLT is an outdated framework, rooted in 1980s cognitive psychology, and needs to be replaced by a richer, more holistic view of the brain and learning. Fair enough, let's see what they have to say... (Although I don't think the argument that just because something is old, it is 'outdated'. Indeed, the authors offer Darwin's theory of evolution as analogous to challenges to existing orthodoxies.)

Difficulties are not always 'desirable'. New review gives new insights into how to apply this idea with retrieval practice and how to avoid lethal mutations. 🧵⬇️ Essentially this paper advocates for a subtle but important distinction: instead of designing tasks based on the content or a static judgement of the learner, we should design tasks of dynamic difficulty based on the learner's relative expertise and the complexity of the material.

Why does the brain matter for education? New edition of BJEP has four papers which are very interesting. Made some notes, here's a quick 🧵⬇️ “The particular way that the human cognitive system works and the way that humans learn is due to the way their brains work. The way their brains work is due to biology. And our biology works the way it does because of evolution." Ok fair enough, nice initial rebuttal to the 'brain-as-computer' fallacy...