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.

https://twitter.com/jon_severs/status/1836278981706010635

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.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/thebandb/status/1434840362716119041

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).

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….

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.

https://twitter.com/cbokhove/status/1426159690573037581?s=19

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….

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.

When people discuss CLT effects I seldom hear them mention that Sweller et al. (2019) themselves call some 'compound effects', which he imo rather vaguely calls them 'not a simple effect' but 'an effect that alters the characteristics of other cognitive load effects' (p. 276). Interestingly, compound effects 'frequently indicate the limits of other load effects.'. In other words, in some contexts effects that might be relevant, are not relevant any more because of such effects.

I've been working on a project that is a bit niche. It's not finished yet as I have to finish other stuff, but it tries to tap into the iconic status of the Countdown show. It is running since 1982 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown… A show typically has letter/word rounds (I'm less interested in those) and number rounds (yes!). EVen from when I was young - in the Netherlands we had a variant called 'cijfers and letters'- I have been intrigued by solution processes.

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.

https://twitter.com/cbokhove/status/1308847234197454848

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...

Let me cite some issues from this paper....

(I know some will keep on insisting that it 'at least is better than not having it all' but I would argue this really depends on what you're looking at. Often it's a trade-off with other things.)

https://twitter.com/cbokhove/status/1307606782295117824

Of course the paper is medicine oriented but given that some like to make that comparison any way... In social science there often are even more challenging limitations. But the 'randomisation' points here also apply....

There are loads of things that matter in good research. There is an assumption that if one of the ‘gold standards’ criteria isn’t met, it can’t be good research. I would rather say that it just has a limitation. It would not be good to think b/w here. What some also seem to forget is that all those criteria matter. So, it’s great you randomised participants but if your measurement is bad....it’s still bad. Or if your comparison groups are poorly chosen....still poor.

Disappointed with this article. It just repeats what’s already known but with some added ambiguous wording -> Cognitive-Load Theory: Methods to Manage Working Memory Load in the Learning of Complex Tasks journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… First the abstract. ‘Productive’ and ‘unproductive’ cognitive load seem the new faboured terms. Reminds me of ‘deliberate’ in ‘deliberate practice’. It’s tautological. Who would want ‘unproductive load’. When is it ‘unproductive’ any way?

Fair point about terminology. Some more examples: scales like those in PISA teacher-directed instruction, inquiry. Or here 50 frequently confused term pairs in psychology frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
-> Humpty Dumptyisms gregashman.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/hum… “In particular, the ‘methods’ sections of such papers are vital because they demonstrate exactly what was measured, rather than what the researchers chose these measures to mean.”

Interesting spread of salaries from Education at a Glance 2020. Also the school head ones.

I’m reading ‘Cynical Theories’. I haven’t kept up-to-date with all the available ideologies, and only read the introduction, but I find some of the ‘labels’ like liberalism and postmodernism quite contentious. But I’ll read on, might become clearer. “Liberalism is thus best thought of as a shared common ground, providing a framework for conflict resolution....”

“on our furthest left, not only advance their cause through revolutionary aims that openly reject liberalism as a form of oppression”

This blog has some ok points (teacher voice, of course, a good thing) but in some key areas it uses some ambiguous wording and links to exaggerate the situation -> Teachers on the Edge teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/tea… Let me first start with the recommendations. Point 2 re CPD is good, this has been the case in the Netherlands for some time. Point 3 seems right to me; it’s good to let frontline teachers have a say. However, wonder whether really means all teachers. Will come back to that.

In my experience, those dismissing clarity of terminology sometimes do this for opportunist reasons: they need the lack of clarity to set the terms of the discussion, for example with a biased use of words. Can often revognise them by their statements that the meaning of terms is ‘obvious’ without explaining what is meant. Some sort of ‘folk understanding’ of it or a very generic, ‘truthy’ statement like ‘all humans need order’.

I know I can’t expect everyone to studiously analyse every graph they encounter, but if you make a big claim, I think you should. The fact that not many seem to ask themselves what the provenance of Hirsch’s data for this graph is, is worrisome.
bokhove.net/2017/04/26/the… In the blog I use my basic knowledge of French (exam when I was 17) to decipher the source data: education.gouv.fr/les-performanc…

Interesting article, although I disagree with some of the observations -> Populism, Twitter and how to be a social media academic by @DrNomyn link.medium.com/AOUBLrSv68 @DrNomyn Firstly, I do very much like how the kerfuffle led to an immense Altmetric increase. This is a new social media reality; a reality that says any attention is good attention.

This is a pertinent tweet.
I have been very surprised the grade boundaries the last three years for maths have been so different, purportedly because of differing exam difficulty? Should be much more stable.

https://twitter.com/mikercameron/status/1295265015046508547

Last three years maths Gcse in a tweet. See how low the boundary is but also how it fluctuates.

https://twitter.com/cbokhove/status/1293149408134078465?s=19