The Paved Mind

This is fun. Ed was reading the paper yesterday when he realized Animals in Translation had been mentioned on the editorial page: The Paved Mind by Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, May 22, 2009.

Klinkenborg is talking about perception but he could just as easily be talking about mastery & automaticity.

Speaking of mastery, the Spring 2009 Direct Instruction News has an article by Engelmann on "Mastery & Rate of Learning." I'll get passages posted shortly.


automaticity theory

more from palisadesk re: learning speed & precision teaching

At some point the student's learning rate will stop accelerating. There are various steps to take when this happens, but if the student consistently meets a wall at that point, despite the recommended steps, s/he has probably reached the ceiling in that area of learning. The ceilings might be different in different cognitive domains.

I take a flexible approach and figure the student's ceiling is likely within 2 standard deviations. Getting student performance (even IQ) up one standard deviation is not all that uncommon, and getting improvements of two standard deviations is less frequent but a regular occurrence. I suspect this is easier with younger students than older ones, but I do not have data on that. The SD range is what I keep in mind myself. Thus, I would not be trying to get a student with a diagnosed developmental delay and an assessed IQ of 55 into a college-prep program (4 SD).I would try to get this student functioning in the low average range. The data would tell me when a student had reached the ceiling on performance improvement in something specific.

[snip]

There is plenty of data on what effective teaching looks like -- observations that can be gathered and assessed in a scientific way. The late Dr. Michael Pressley has written extensively on this; I recommend his Motivating Primary Grade Students for a well-written look at this question. He wrote more technical articles in journals; this one is an astute analysis of what makes early grade teachers effective, with examples and non-examples, and (for teachers) some workable suggestions that one can start to use right away.

[snip]

I do not profess to understand the mind of the education administrator. I do know that good results are always attributed to what the school is doing (even though the results may be the outcome of actions by parents and tutors) while bad results are usually attributed to characteristics of students and families. It seems to be the way it is.

[snip]

Learning centers such as the ones I cited serve a widely varied clientele, so I would be wary of overgeneralizing . What I know from my own research is that they set goals, develop detailed plans to meet those goals, and are successful with a wide variety of learners of different ages. It's probably a safe statement to posit that MOST people could learn much more and faster than they currently do, given the appropriate application of learning science and technology. Much is known now about cognitive processes and how learning occurs and how to work around various obstacles, but very little of this knowledge has trickled down to the grass roots -- schools in particular.

[snip]

General principles of teaching effectiveness seem to apply across the board. For instance, effective teaching is highly interactive. Teacher and students(s) are interacting at a high rate -- teachers may model, give examples, pose questions, clarify distinctions, scaffold tasks, provide feedback, etc. while students may listen, ask questions, demonstrate, practice, compare/contrast, respond orally, by actions or written output, etc. The key thing is lots of interaction -- ON TASK interaction, not chit-chat; learning is active, not passive. Think of an orchestra conductor, or an athletics coach --the relationship of those people with their team/orchestra is highly interactive. Lots of back and forth. Engagement is high (another important component).

Pressley developed something like a checklist of behaviors of effective teachers . What these behaviors would look like and the specifics of application would vary of course (the type of interactive teaching that is effective in first grade would not be appropriate for seventh grade), but the general case would be the same. Pacing -- another important characteristic of effective teachers -- also varies by population. You speak faster and can move things along quicker in a group in middle school than in K. But appropriate pacing as a characteristic of effective teaching remains constant.

[snip]

"Slow learners" are often (in educational jargon) those students who are deemed rather low in academic ability but not low enough to be considered intellectually disabled. They are very low average, and they take longer to reach the same levels of achievement as same-age peers (their physical development is sometimes slower as well). Then there can be students whose academic ability is average or even high but who are slow processors -- they may have difficulty with word finding, working memory, lexical access, various types of memory, co-ordination, motor skills. Typically these students need more repetitions to mastery and more distributed practice over time to become automatic on fundamental skills which they may *grasp* easily (conceptually) but not be able to apply reliably. The evidence is that some of these difficulties are neurologically determined, but again, we are working with a range -- so the individual can improve his or her own performance level and while s/he may never be "fast," s/he can meet average expectations. I think this is worth striving for, as it gives the individual many more choices in life and much more sense of competence.


If a child is truly slow, then it seems to me that there could be a variety of reasons and solutions that should be customized for the child

I agree, but realistically this is seldom done in school and in many cases I've seen, it is not realistic to expect it to be entirely done in school. We can only customize so far for individuals -- which is why homogeneous instructional grouping is so important in key areas.

I'm really an amateur in these matters myself, but I recommend people interested in the issues go to the excellent site maintained by an amazing self-educated parent activist: PT Wiki
Some of the items in the bar along the right -- "Why frequency matters," "Why celeration matters" etc. are a good place to start.

It's kind of a seeing is believing thing. When you see kids (or adults) make HUGE, sudden, dramatic leaps forward in their learning that change their lives, you can't help saying to yourself, Holy cow! WHAT was THAT? and trying to learn more to make it happen again.

If you haven't seen it you may not think it's possible and you certainly won't see what the fuss is about.

I have fun introducing as many of my colleagues as possible to that HOLY COW!! moment. They never look back.


Catherine speaking: the issue of slow processing has been intriguing to me ever since John Ratey told me a story about a patient whose husband left her because he thought she was timid and unadventurous. What she was, John said, was a slow perceptual processor. So, if she happened to be standing on top of a tall building, she'd hang far back from the edge because she feared she'd walk over the edge before her brain got the message she'd reached it. She applied the same principles to her driving, and a good thing, too.


and from Steve H:

Is effective teaching the same for true slow learners and for average kids? (I suppose you could say that effective means effective.) I wouldn't think so. My nephew was considered to be a slow learner, but my sister worked to provide him with better skills for approaching new material. She had the same issue when she was young. Now that he is grown up (with a degree in computer science), he is anything but a slow learner.

palisadesk on increasing a student's rate of learning

There is data that you can improve individual children's rate of learning in specific areas. The general rule of thumb is that the rate of improvement will be about x2 : i.e., if a certain concept or discrimination required 100 trials to master, the next similar learning task will take 50 trials, then 25, etc up to an individual's ceiling. This is nicknamed the "learning curve," although on a semilog graph it will be a straight line. Individuals do have ceilings -- in this as in most things. Learning rate, like IQ, is a range rather than a point, and something that is modifiable by environmental variables.

Several early studies (1960's-1970's) were with severely handicapped children who needed THOUSANDS of repetitions to learn something. Their learning rate improved, under experimental conditions, to a much more normal (but still slow) rate. Thus, you will never turn a tortoise into a cheetah, but the tortoise might end up similar to an average dachshund. I have the cites on some of those articles but they are very recherché items in Sp. Ed. journals and not easy to look up. I'll see whether Catherine can run them down for me. Engelmann was a partner in some of them.

With more "normal" learners, there is lots of data in the PT [precision teaching] literature about improvement in learning rate. The Great Falls project (a school implementation of rate-building instruction in North Dakota in the 70's or 80's) collected quite a lot of data on this. The students' abilities generalized to many areas of the curriculum and the project was finally pulled, in part because too many kids ended up being classified as "gifted." One of the project managers was Ray Beck, who subsequently (and perhaps still) went to work for Sopris West. You could consult him for data on the project -- I know it has been published, but I don't know where.

PT practioners and their clinics also have a great deal of data on individuals and their rate of learning improvements. You could consult Elizabeth Haughton, the Center for Advanced Learning (CAL) in Las Vegas (can't remember the name of the person in charge), Dr. Kent Johnson at Morningside, Dr. Joe Layng who implemented many rate-building procedures both with stroke victims and with low-SES college students in his years in Chicago, Dr. Carl Binder and others for specifics of publications, data, etc. There's plenty out there, but you have to try hard to find it since it is in opposition to mainstream thinking.

Since my concern is with teaching students, not with convincing naysayers (I ignore them), I have made use of the lessons from these people to successfully get "hopeless" cases -- not only "dumb" kids but kids who learn at a slow rate -- functioning at higher levels so that they can compete in the mainstream successfully. Very few end up at the top of the heap (only one so far), but numerous others end up in the average range and that's what excites me, since they were initially regarded as too dyslexic, too stupid, too slow, too disadvantaged, too whatever, to succeed. At least once or twice a year I hear from one who has finished university, started a business, is successful in some field of study or application that I would never have thought of when he/she was a student (designing solar -powered homes in one case, marine biology in another, co-ordinating seniors' services for a community agency in a third). The point is that these students' can learn effectively (with DI, among other things) and their rate of learning can be maximized so that they are empowered to achieve meaningful goals.

In a perfect DI environment, you do periodically regroup students based on rate, but rate-building per se is not something DI people typically focus on, and its largest application has been with people in Special Ed populations (autism, developmental disabilities, LD). For people currently doing cutting edge work in the field, google Michael Fabrizio, Alison Moors, Richard McManus, Kent Johnson (I can probably think of others).

It's hard work, but it can be done. Will it be done routinely in the school system? Not in our lifetime I suspect.

Can a school that slows learning to a crawl via heterogeneous grouping, required collaboration, discovery, problem-solving, whole-to-part teaching and all the rest of it reduce a student's rate of learning?

If IQ decreases in mediocre-to-bad schools, does learning speed decrease as well?


on not teaching to mastery
how to build a fast learner (one-trial learning in rats)

how to build a fast learner, part 2

jackpot

We may be able to learn new things very quickly, and incorporate them into memories, if representations of related information have already been stabilized in the brain.

source:
Rapid Consolidation (pdf file)
Larry R. Squire
Science
April 6, 2007
Vol. 316 no. 5821, pp. 57-58

I've only glanced at the first page of Squire's commentary on the Tse, et al study, but my guess it that the condition under which rats failed at one-trial learning may resemble spiraling and constructivist curricula.

I'll see.


how to build a fast learner
how to build a fast learner, part 2

how to build a fast learner

I'm supposed to be writing a chapter of Temple's & my new book, so this will be quick. (I'll revise later.)

Some of you may remember last fall's posts about mastery learning and speed and mastery and IQ.

The jist of those posts is that while higher IQ means faster recall of new material, higher IQ doesn't give you a significant advantage in speed of relearning material that's been taught to mastery the first go-round.

Engelmann describes the same phenomenon, except Engelmann takes it a step further.

Engelmann observes that at some point slower learners get faster at learning new material, too:

[A]fter students have mastered a battery of skills and knowledge, the difference in rate of ascent for appropriately placed students is far less because all students tend to have enough skill to master the new material at around the same rate.

source:
Student-Program Alignment and Teaching to Mastery (pdf file)
Siegfried Engelmann

In other words, at some point in a student's process of learning a subject, he gets faster.

Lots faster, it seems.

I'm certain this is true, because I've experienced it all my life.

And because I saw it last spring with Christopher.

Getting C. through the Phase 4 math course in 6th grade was a battle unto death, as faithful readers will recall.

Ed and I went back and forth on whether to bag the whole thing,^* never quite reaching a conclusion for reasons having to do with stubbornness as much as anything else, no doubt.

Then suddenly, last spring, C. picked up the pace. Way picked up the pace. He'd come home from school having learned and remembered whatever it was they'd covered in math that day.

There wasn't any change beyond that. He wasn't understanding math better, or liking math better, or displaying greater motivation to learn math. (understatement)

The only difference was: he was faster. All of a sudden.



how do you build a faster learner?

So the question is: what has to happen to get a student to the tipping point?

I had been thinking that it must have to do with the learner (I can barely stand to type that word but I'm afraid I must) acquiring a schema of the field (or domain) he's learning.

Looks like I was right --

Schemas and Memory Consolidation
Dorothy Tse,1* Rosamund F. Langston,1* Masaki Kakeyama,2 Ingrid Bethus,1 Patrick A. Spooner,1 Emma R. Wood,1 Menno P. Witter,3 Richard G. M. Morris1

Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memory in the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process. We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occur extremely quickly if an associative "schema" into which new information is incorporated has previously been created. In experiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task for rats, the memory of flavor-place associations became persistent over time as a putative neocortical schema gradually developed. New traces, trained for only one trial, then became assimilated and rapidly hippocampal-independent. Schemas also played a causal role in the creation of lasting associative memory representations during one-trial learning. [emphasis mine] The concept of neocortical schemas may unite psychological accounts of knowledge structures with neurobiological theories of systems memory consolidation.

source:
Science
April 6, 2007
Volume 316, no. 5821, pp. 76 - 82

One-trial learning is about as fast as it gets.

Here's the way Science News describes it (subscription required):

People call on a rich background [ed.: background knowledge!] of relevant experiences to organize and remember new material. Rats do the same, and with surprising speed, say Dorothy Tse of the University of Edinburgh and her coworkers.

Prior studies, which have focused on task learning unrelated to preexisting knowledge, indicate that a brain region called the hippocampus incorporates new facts and events into memory. The hippocampus gradually yields to another structure, the neocortex, as new memories become stronger. This process typically takes at least 1 month in rodents and a few years in people.

Tse's team trained groups of rats to associate six flavors, including banana and bacon, with six designated spots within a laboratory-test area.... The animals learned all six flavor-place associations in 1 month.

....[T]he animals had also developed a framework of knowledge about relations between places and flavors that enabled them to learn new pairings remarkably quickly. The rats remembered novel flavor-place associations after just one trial and retained this information for at least 2 weeks, the scientists report in the April 6 Science.

The rats' formation of a knowledge framework spurred the neocortex to integrate new information into memory in record time, the scientists propose. Surgical removal of the hippocampus 48 hours after the rats had rapidly learned new flavor-place associations left those memories intact, a sign that the neocortex had already taken charge of the material.

source:
Rats take fast route to remembering
Science News
April 14, 2007 Vol 171, No. 15, p. 237
Bruce Bower

in a nutshell (t/k)


Note: the experimenters did not use a spiral curriculum.

These rats were taught to mastery.

Shouldn't we be asking whether schools have a moral imperative to teach students to mastery?


^* Do the fastest learners get faster, too? They must, wouldn't you think?
how to build a fast learner
how to build a fast learner, part 2


^* for newbies: "bag the whole thing," meaning move him out of accelerated math and into the regular track