Education Bookcast

Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about: Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence; Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field; apparent resistance to scientific findings from some people in the field of education; understanding expertise as a key to knowing how to improve education; the power of economic thinking in understanding motivation and behaviour; the failure of behaviourism, and the incorrect conclusions some people have drawn from it; and how school seems to be good for society, but the mechanisms of how this happens aren't completely clear, and I remain neutral on this point as I gather further evidence. Enjoy the episode. ### SUPPORT You can support the podc

This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon). Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic i

Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how they relate to learning. The Handbook starts off with five chapters on "The Self and Its Impact". I have previously covered a number of self-related concepts on the podcast, such as self-esteem, stereotype threat, self-affirmation theory, and self-compassion, but my conclusion was that raising self-esteem does nothing to help people academically or to improve their character, and in fact could lead to narcissism, which is now at epidemic levels following the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980's. H

In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme. A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different components, but we discuss this diagram in the interview so I have shared it here. OVERVIEW. What is cognitive architecture? What is ACT-R? Why should we care? EVIDENCE. What evidence is there for ACT-R? How much evidence is there? What sort of human activities can it model? Can it model non-goal-driven behaviours such as daydreaming, for instance? Has ACT-R been tested with people of different ages (children vs. adults vs. the elderly)? Has it been tested with people of different cultures? SCOPE & ELEMENTS. ACT-R versio

I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced. I particularly focus on one theory known as ACT-R, though I have also been reading about other architectures such as Soar, LIDA, EPIC, and CLARION. I will be able to go into more detail about some of these in later episodes of the podcast. For the moment, the biggest takeaway is what a cognitive architecture is and how impressive the achievements of the field have been so far. Cognitive architectures aim to describe human thinking and learning through analysing the mind into parts, and clearly specifying the role of each part and its inte

One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I thought might be relevant. So this one's for you, Tom. The chapter starts with an overview of the definition of what expert writing is as a task, followed by a description of the characteristics of expert writers, and finally goes on to describe something of the learning process of becoming a writer. Writing is a difficult skill to characterise because it comes in so many different forms, genres, and domains of expertise, but commonalities among expert writers are still possible to elucidate. While this article is more of a stud

In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain. Enjoy the episode.

I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory, popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann 17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey 79. What learning is 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham 114. Philosophy of Science - the good bits 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences SUPPORT To support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, visit www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast! Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate practical takeaway. Website: https://thepedagoguecast.com.au/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc I've shared the first episode of Season 1 in this recording so you can get a sense of what the podcast is like. To listen to further episodes, visit the Pedagogue-Cast itself. I'm excited! Enjoy the episode.

In this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley Becker, Douglas Carnine, and Russel Gersten (1988) No Simple Answer: Critique of the "Follow Through" Evaluation by Ernest House, Gene Glass, Leslie McLean and Decker Walker (1978) Follow Through Revisited: Reflections on the Site Variability Issue by Russel Gersten (1984) The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Jean Stockard, Timothy Wood, Cristy Coughlin and Caitlin Rasplica Khoury (2018) RELATED EPISODES 76. Comprehensive School Reform SUPPORT To support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic. First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI for short, should be distinguished from lowercase "direct instruction". The latter refers to explicit teaching in general, whereas the former, as a proper noun, refers to a specific implementation and philosophy as designed by Siegfried Engelmann and colleagues, starting in the early 1960s. Direct Instruction is also considered to be a type of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR), and indeed, in my episode covering a meta-analysis of CSR I pointed out that DI was one of the three most effective CSR models. Direct Instruction came to fame in the early 1970s as a result of Project Follow Through, which was the largest educational study ever funded by the United States government. DI was one of the 13 models used in the pr

[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.] I was initially a huge supporter and admirer of Carol Dweck's work on fixed vs. growth mindset. The very first episode of the podcast was about her book, and I mentioned it many times afterwards, talking about how amazing it was. Then a couple of years ago I lost confidence. Angry about being misled by advocates of constructivist, project-based, or discovery learning, and pessimistic about psychology as a whole with my recent discovery of the degree to which studies would have completely different results depending on cultural sample, I heard that Dweck's work was having trouble replicating. In episode 100, I spoke about my concerns with mindset, which was particularly bitter since I'd once been such a strong advocate of it. It just seemed like the

I stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different mental models that the children had: rectangular, disc-shaped, spherical, flattened sphere, hollow sphere, and the bizarre "dual Earth" model. There are important theoretical and pedagogical implications of an enquiry like this. Cognitive scientists argue about the right way to think about novices' preconceptions - do they have small, fragmented pieces of knowledge with no consistency on further probing; or self-consistent "alternative theories" that can generate answers to novel questions, albeit wrong answers? The answer to that theoretical question leads to different implications about teaching - are we aiming to provide knowledge where there is very little, and consolidate the little bits of correct thinking into

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This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me). The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many internal contradictions. They propose a new perspective on transfer called Preparation for Future Learning (PFL), as opposed to the generally accepted standard which they label Sequestered Problem Solving (SPS). In short, when you ask people to solve an unfamiliar problem and grade them on whether they get the right answer (SPS), they universally do badly; but when you ask them how they would approach solving the problem, including what questions they would ask (PFL), then you get a completely different perspective - not onl

I wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced. Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my initial, flawed understanding. Cognitive load theory - a case where I was so enamoured with the power of the model that I had started to equate the it with truth (or confuse the "map" with the "territory"), but a well-put listener comment made me realise that there are phenomena that the theory cannot account for. Motivation - a case where perspectives offered from other cultures and other disciplines undermined my initial confidence in the findings of psychologists. I also discuss the idea put forward by Ference Marton in discussing the following questions: Is learning by yourself better than learning by being taught? Does homework enhance learning? Is problem-based learning better than lectures for big classes? Is indi

A listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is! Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about discernment of important features of a situation (what he calls "critical aspects") being a (the?) key element of learning, and therefore the importance of the nature and quantity of variation in instruction. He explains his ideas in theory at length, after which he provides a number of examples of experiments that provide evidence for his interpretation. This is one of those cases of a simple and apparently obvious idea being particularly fruitful when thoughtfully applied. Of course we can't learn something if we can't notice it, and of course it's difficult to notice something if it's always the same - hence the classic "fish in water" problem. But this retrospectively obvious principle can be used to make learning more e

"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences between the hemispheres in different activities, but they were having trouble understanding the big picture of why there was asymmetry at this fundamental level of brain structure. Iain McGillchrist used to be an academic of English literature at the University of Oxford, but after becoming frustrated with what he saw as the over-analysis of poetry so as to make it lose its implicit meaning, decided to change career entirely and pursue medicine. Since that time, he has taken ten years to research and write this book about brain lateralisation and its importance to life, culture, and our moment in history. For me personally, reading this book made me realise that my most commonly used approach to thinking about the mind

Dr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about where he got the idea, the damage that Veblenian entrepreneurship can do to the economy, urban myths about entrepreneurship, potential flaws of popular mottos such as those promoted in The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, and the role of entrepreneurship education. Enjoy the episode.

Entrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are not the only reasons that people become entrepreneurs. Some do so to fulfil a kind of fantasy, or simply to look good. And there is an entire educational sub-industry offering to help them to indulge this fantasy, for a price. In Towards an "Un"trepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur, authors Hartmann, Spicer, and Krabbe try to explain a strange trend in recent years: while entrepreneurial activity has gone up, success rates for entrepreneurial ventures have gone down. After considering several possible explanations, they ultimately conclude that a major reason for "excess entry" into what one might call "high-class" entrepreneurship (e.g. founding a tech start-up) is due to