<p>Dweck emphasizes that mindset interventions should not be one-time events.</p> <p>Anything that happens just once — “a chart at the front of the room, a lecture where you define the two mindsets” — isn’t likely to work.</p> <p>Instead, we should focus on “the policies and practices in the classroom. <em>It is not about teaching the concept alone</em>, it is much more about implementing practices that focus on growth and learning.” [emphasis added] </p>

That is: when students <span style="color: #000000;"><b>didn’t&nbsp;</b></span>review a particular set of facts, they could still reason with them — as long as they <strong>had practiced</strong> doing that kind of reasoning.

Stories are effective tools for learning due to their ability to facilitate the following cognitive processes: i) concretizing, ii) assimilation, and iii) structurizing (Evans and Evans 1989).

A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a <i>crappy thing to do</i>. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and <a href="slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/01/talents-part-2-attitude-vs-altitude/">sports</a> is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike.

So basically, you take the most vulnerable people, set them tasks you know they’ll fail at, then lecture them about how they only failed because of insufficient effort.

<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">1. Class Size</span></strong></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My initial thought:</span> Decreasing Class Size from 25 to 15 could significantly improve student achievement.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The bold, loud claim I hear:</span>&nbsp; “Decreasing class sizes is a key to student success!”</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">What the research says:</span>&nbsp; Of the 138 factors of the meta-analyses done, this was ranked as number 106, and had a impact factor of 0.21, well below the hinge point of showing notable change.&nbsp; This is based on studies of more than 40000 classes, and nearly 950000 students worldwide. Perhaps not surprisingly, “quality teaching” has nearly double the impact on student achievement than this factor.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My new thought:</span><strong>&nbsp; </strong>Not the high-yield strategy that I believed.</p>

<p><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">6.&nbsp; Formative Evaluation of programs</span></strong></p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My initial thought</span>:&nbsp; Extremely important for teachers to adapt and change their methodologies in response to student learning. Using student data to guide instruction and reflection through collaboration with their peers is something that we have been<a href="http://thelearningnation.blogspot.com/2010/11/restructuring-not-remortgaging-to-make.html"> focussing on in our school through our change in structures</a>.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Loud, bold claim I hear:</span>&nbsp; “I know what works in my class!”</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">What the research says</span>:&nbsp; This ranks as #3 of 138, with an effect of 0.9 over nearly 4000 students and 38 studies.&nbsp; Teachers being purposeful to innovations in that they are looking to see “what works” and “why it works” as well as looking for reasons why students do not do well lead to improvement in instruction and student achievement.</p> <p><span style="text-decoration: underline;">My new thought</span>:&nbsp; This is the high-yield strategy that can really make a difference at our school, and through the Professional Learning Community Model of providing time for teachers to collaborate and reflect on teaching practices, we have seen a marked increase in the success of our students.</p>

Numerous contradictions of cognitive load theory’s predictions have been found, but with germane cognitive load, they can still be explained away.&nbsp; de Jong does not use this term (unfalsifiable) but instead states that germane cognitive load is a <em>post-hoc</em> explanation with no theoretical basis: “there seems to be no grounds for asserting that processes that lead to (correct) schema acquisition will impose a higher cognitive load than learning processes that do not lead to (correct) schemas” (2009).

2. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Poor external validity of lab-based studies</span>.&nbsp; Moreno doesn’t touch on something in the de Jong article – the fact that most cognitive load (and multimedia learning) studies are conducted in labs that “includes participants who have no specific interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short study time” (de Jong, 2009), often only a few minutes.&nbsp; Quite a number of findings from these studies have not held up as strongly when tested in classrooms or real-world scenarios, or have even reversed (<a href="http://www.txwes.edu/professionaldevelopment/materials/Multimedia%20Instructions.pdf">such as the modality effect</a>, but see <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2007.09.010">this refutation</a> and this <a href="http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&amp;cpsidt=5135499">other example of a reverse effect</a>).

For neuroscience to mean something to teachers, it must provide information beyond what is available without neuroscientific methods. It’s not enough to describe what’s happening in the brain, and pretend that you’ve learned something useful.

In general, if you are interested in describing effects at a given level of analysis, you are most likely to make progress by sticking to that level of analysis. If you’re interested in describing ways that students learn best, it makes sense to study classroom situations. To the extent that neuroscience will inform good teaching practice, it seems most likely that this influence will be funneled through the cognitive level of analysis: For example, neuroscience will help us better understand memory, and this improved understanding of memory might be used to improve classroom practice. It’s unlikely that leapfrogging the cognitive level analysis and going straight from the brain to the classroom will work out very often.