Author: Stephen Kosslyn
This very brief guide provides a high-level introduction of some key effects in Cognitive psychology and how to construct active learning environments which apply these techniques (e.g. deep processing, dual coding, deliberate practice, etc). There’s also some very broad discussion of how to organize lessons and student activities.
I’m a fan of the author’s work—and particularly of Building the Intentional University—but my intuitions don’t seem to match his premise here. It’s good for teachers to be aware of these effects, but I’m skeptical that these are actually the key blockers for teachers who want to orchestrate active learning in their classes. My experiences working with teachers have suggested that most really have no exemplars for this style of class at all, other than awful, begrudging group work. They don’t know what discussion-oriented classes should look or feel like. In K-12, they’re often not comfortable enough in their own abilities in the subject to improvise sufficiently. And they’re often quite worried about the loss of control. More practically, I think they often just don’t know how to make this style of class go, moment-to-moment. The flowcharts in this book are helpful, but I think a much better treatment would look like a detailed, annotated play-by-play transcript of several classes demonstrating a variety of techniques. Case studies. A video-centric primer.
Q. What surprising experimental result illustrates the “deep processing” principle?
A. Subjects visualizing how the words in a word pair interact had twice as good recall as those trying to explicitly memorize the pair (without any Elaborative encoding). (Bower, 1972)
The ICAP hypothesis suggests a taxonomy of four modes of learning, in descending order of efficacy: {interactive}, {constructivist}, {active}, {passive}.
Q. If we take the ICAP hypothesis seriously, why not just always jump do interactive learning, assuming it’s available?
A. Novices may struggle with more challenging modes of learning; perhaps better to start them with a passive introductory phase and to work up to more challenging levels.
One key problem for “flipped classrooms”: too many students don’t actually do the reading before class (but n.b. that his cite for this is an informal white paper focusing on parent learners).
To follow up: