Section 2 Why Not? What Works? People Learn Best Through Multiple Modes by Elizabeth Moje -p.16

• people learn best when they make knowledge with others
• John Dewey argued that experience was a key ingredient in learning
• Paolo Freire used the metaphor of banking to critique lecture/test
• school knowledge was a currency, limited value, students did not actively construct it for themselves, limited value in the actual world where the knowledge had to be put to use
• discussions
• simulations
• investigations
• writing to learn
• research reports-difficult to carry out with 15 year olds
• ironically Dewey gave long lectures that weren't super engaging
• sometimes resort to lecture when students don't understand the reading of the text
• brainstorm phenomena 
• people learn best when they can experience many different ways of making meaning and when they grapple with ideas and with texts

Why Teachers Lecture

NOT

• to be in control
• to feel powerful
• to "plow through content"

Reasons

• teachers think students learn through lectures
• lectures are economical?
• lectures are efficient?
• lectures are effective?
• a service
• preparing students with knowledge that they need 
• students lack necessary knowledge or skills
• think it will help students 
• students want them to lecture-"high achievers"
• some students are part of a pedagogy of "telling"
• students are many
• time is short

Example

• non-English speaker teacher gave grammar instructions
•  felt pressure to teach students skills as quickly ASAP
• if they do poorly on test, it could impact their long term future 

Telling Information vs Constructing Understanding Tradeoffs

• 2 immigration laws are central to the point of a problem based social-science unit  
• quicker to explain historical circumstances behind the laws
• thought students would develop a better understanding by taking them apart and studying the statistics behind them
• reasons to buck trends must be strong and clear 

Questions Can Be Lecture

• initiation response evaluation (I-R-E)
• initiation response feedback (I-R-F)
• students are meant to absorb or reproduce what the teacher presents

 Pedagogy of telling

• stand-and-deliver peragogy

• learning is a bank deposit, information is deposited in the vault of the student's brains

Schema

• conceptually organized mental stuctures
• mental structures become more powerful as new connections are built and reinforced through experience
• learning happens when people use language and other tools to participate in the social and cultural contexts of their everyday lives
• child uses a stick to lift a rock, realizes the rock is a useful tool, lever for heavy lifting
• may not use the word lever or recognize the scientific concepts of force or gravity or work
• spontaneous concept, learning by doing
• scientific concept, formalized learning experiences, learning the language

What students need

• a wider range of skills than being effective at receiving new information
• the ability to communicate effectively and to collaborate across different backgrounds and experiences to solve the complex problems of today's world
• to be able to navigate, assess, and respond to the onslaught of new information, ideas, and perspectives
• more serious and difficult to achieve than a "college ready" and "career ready" mantra
• to be critical readers/writers/thinkers
• to become productive and generative citizens, teachers, school leaders, policy makers

Lecture ineffective

• not the most useful for taking in, retaining, retrieving, using, or constructing new ideas

 Best Way

• projects driven by questions or problems
• whole and small group discussions
• participation in real-world activities that make use of targeted learning skills, 
• the reading and writing of multiple texts
• scaffolded interactions with challenging problems
• judiciously applied just-in-time lectures (the best are usually interactive)
• discussion may be poor, more time to reach goal of teaching a few facts
• participation in purposefully framed and meaningful learning activities

  How People Learn

• student preconceptions and prior knowledge are engaged, expanded, and refined
• students have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application
• Students take control of their learning by defining their own learning goals and monitoring their progress toward achieving those goals (a metacognitive approach)
• Even young children bring knowledge to new learning situations, and over time they use that knowledge to develop strategies for learning and remembering. When the knowledge students have already constructed from past experience is acknowledged and used as a point of reflection and analysis, students either assimilate or accommodate the new ideas (Piaget 1977)
• Knowledge of and skill with learning strategies develops through practice "in the skilled and valued activities of the society in which [students] live" That is, students need to engage in tasks that they can readily see as meaningful or that they can come to understand as relevant and meaningful because they are relevant and meaningful to society
• Interaction both with peers (Piaget 1977) and with "knowledgeable others" (Vygotsky) is important to both development and learning. Such information can serve as a scaffold--a temporary support--for students as they connect new ideas to ideas they have already learned. Research that supports the power of interaction as a tool for learning suggests that lectures can build on and expand prior knowledge but cannot on their own offer the practice and interaction necessary to develop deep and long-lasting knowledge, strategies, and practices for using knowledge
• Practice needs to be organized and scaffolded (Ericcson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer 1993); in particular, feedback is necessary for what is learned to be transferred to another learning situation. A stand-and-deliver approach along cannot provide the level of application, practice, and feedback necessary for learning to transfer
• Too often motivation is seen as a quality a learner either has or does not have. But the motivation to learn is also related to the value and usefulness of the concepts being studied (Eccles et al. 1983; Wigfield, Eccles, and Rodriguez 1998) 
• Students need to see the usefulness of what they are learning to be able to use the information to impact others
• Without the opportunity to solve the problems or apply the concepts, however, students are unlikely to engage cognitively or effectively. 
• Research has indicated that transfer across contexts is especially difficult when a subject is taught only in a single context rather than in multiple contexts. Lecturers are generally limited to the context in which they occur, which tends to be a context abstracted from the real world of the problem under study, thus making lectures difficult to situate in multiple contexts, except through the telling of multiple examples to convey how the concept is shaped by particular contexts
• The National Research Council (NRC)'s central recommendation for translating what we know about how people learn into school-based teaching practices is to create learning environments that are simultaneously learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered (Bransford 2000; Bransford and Donovan 2005). How People Learn (Bransford 2000) posits problem- or inquiry-bnased approaches that start with learners, build knowledge in meaningful frameworks, continually assess and develop students' learning, and develop learning communities

Immigration Project

• US immigration laws
• individual's journals
• media texts
• social media
• various data sets of statistics
• Without the legitimate problem/question frame, the tasks are simply school activities
• How Students Learn offers additional examples of these approaches, provided by classroom teachers of language arts, science, social science, and mathematics, in which students collaboratively learn concepts and develop the literacy, process, and metacognitive skills to apply these concepts independently
• Although the specifics vary, shared features include (a) forming driving questions anchored in real-world, community-based problems; (c) collaborating with students, teachers, and others in the community; and (d) using technological tools
• To this list of features of inquiry-based approaches, I add the practice of using texts and other literary and communication tools . A key aspect of knowledge is the ability to read, write, synthesize, and critique ideas offered in print
• Subject-area teachers need to provide their students scaffolded opportunities to "do the discipline" and, in the process, learn the literacy practices most commonly associated with the subject area and how these practices apply to other disciplines and to their everyday interactions at home, in the community, and with their peers. 
• similar problem-based approaches can be developed in other subject areas
• Most studies favor interactive and problem-based approaches to learning

 Improve Test Scores

• lectures and topics were linked to laboratory investigations through literacy strategies such as mapping content, writing focus questions, charting comparisons, drawing scientific processes, and identifying word-part meanings of biology vocabulary
• scores on a forty-question multiple choice pre- and posttest improved significantly for students who were taught these literacy strategies, suggesting that if teachers implement content-area literacy strategies in their subject area, students are better able to link what they have learned from a lecture to the problem-based, investigative work done in labs
• hands on, problem based learning helps students gain these necessary critical thinking skills
• differences between the traditional and blended instruction were not statistically significant
• active learning interventions: solving problems in groups, completing worksheets or tutorials during solving problems in groups, using personal response systems-the average examination scores improved by 6%
• students in lecture settings were 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in active learning classrooms
• The students in active learning sections outperformed those in lecture series on all types of examinations, but scored even higher on "concept inventories," which the researchers describe as being designed to "diagnose known misconceptions." 
• The active learning students performed better on both content and process skills valued in STEM disciplines 
• Now more than ever, college-ready students may need to be able to learn by solving problems in collaborative teams

Research on Lecture Conducted in Middle and High School Settings 

• Ward and Lee evaluated the effectiveness of problem-based learning compared with traditional, lecture-based instruction, focusing on seventy-nine high school students in grades 9 through 12 who were taking one of four food and nutrition classes taught by the same teacher
• The teacher employed problem-based learning in 2 of the 4 classes (42 students) and lecture-based instruction in the remaining 2 classes (37 students)
• the authors found no significant difference in test scores
• However, students in the problem-based learning group demonstrated, by the questions they asked and the critical thinking skills they exhibited, a greater understanding of the connection between the "content, the work world and their personal lives.:
• Because they were more or less investigators of the topics covered, students in the problem-based learning group may have felt a greater sense of identity with and inclusion in the nutrition community 
• Day and Wong studied 2 Hong Kong secondary science classes of approximately 40 students each
• The classes covered the same topics, human reproduction and density 
• The researchers administered 3 tests. 
• There were no significant differences in the students' test scores between the pretest and immediate posttest on human reproduction, but students in the problem-based learning group outperformed students in the tests on density 
• Day and Wong noted that the students were less motivated to learn about density than reproduction; that the problem-based learning group scored better on this topic suggests that framing and investigating the problem made this topic more interesting and engaging, yielding better results
• The problem-based learning group also demonstrated a greater improvement in "comprehension and application of knowledge" over an extended period 
• What makes these results especially compelling is the Hong Kong learning context: Hong Kong has a long history of traditional, lecture based teaching in the classroom, and their schools rarely use problem-based learning
• Thus, the study clearly supports the hypothesis that problem-based instruction is as effective as lecture-based instruction in helping students meet test objectives and suggests that problem-based learning may help students retain information over long periods 
• Finally, a long-term curriculum intervention project undertaken in several U.S. cities suggests that middle school students who received problem-based science instruction benefitted over peers who did not
• Schwerdt and Wupperman claimed the lecture approach was superior in secondary schools. Flaws: data was not collected to compare lecture to other types of teaching, data from self reporting teachers, failed to account for cultural differences that might make various approaches more or less difficult to implement
• Most important is the critique that the study measured learning solely in terms of standardized test outcomes. It can therefore be argued that lecture-based approaches are the best tool for ensuring high achievement as measured by tests, but not, perhaps the kind of learning that will last a lifetime
• Nevertheless, the majority of studies I reviewed demonstrate strong positive results on both standard and nonstandard measures for students who were taught with interactive, problem-based approaches
• This suggests that problem-based approaches may be even more effective when evaluated on the basis of assessments that account for the kind of learning one expects to occur from inquiry: how to think and reason critically, how to read for varied interpretations, and how to write evidence-based arguments

Conclusions and Implications of Research on Lecture Versus Other Teaching Approaches

• Interactive, problem-based methods that offer students a reason to learn and help them construct knowledge from investigations, materials, texts, and one another are at least equal to the learning that occurs in lecture dominated classrooms and in many cases offer a statistically significant advantage over lectures
• Nevertheless, when one considers the evidence about how people learn, together with the evidence, albeit limited, about classroom-based interactive approaches, then it seems clear that lecture-only approaches will not help middle and high school students learn most effectively. Moreover, if colleges and universities are attempting to move toward more problem-based approaches as a result of their research, then K-12 educators need to prepare their students for those approaches
• In sum, lectures are a useful way to teach as long as they are used as one tool in a larger kit of instructional practices. However, when lectures turn into daily stand-and-deliver practice, the effects are not positive.

Research on How People Learn Literacy in Secondary Schools

• 4 practices are especially useful in improving students' abilities to comprehend and compose texts in the content areas: (1) connecting to and developing knowledge students bring to the classroom
• (2) providing opportunities for scaffolded practices
• (3) motivating and engaging learners
• (4) supporting students in navigating the subject areas and their lives outside school 

• Patricia Alexander and her colleagues have conducted extensive research on learning from texts in specialized domains
• For Alexander, a critical dimension in making meaning from texts is bridging knowledge, which I refer to as necessary knowledge
• It is one thing to recognize that students bring knowledge to learning; it is another to use that knowledge in teaching
• Project CRISS--Creating Independence Through Student-Owned Stategies--provides professional development showing secondary and late elementary teachers how to help their students integrate new knowledge as they discuss, write about, organize, and analyze a text's structure and meaning
• Project CRISS has not been studied at the high school level
• An approach called Reading Apprenticeship offers subject-area embedded literacy teaching practices explicitly focusing on developing students' metacognitive awareness by "talking to the text" as they grapple with subject-area texts
• This talking to the text strategy is similar to questioning the author: students converse with themselves and with others about the sense they are making of text
• The focus is on making thinking while reading visible to everyone in the class, thus improving metacognition, which in turn improves outcomes

Providing Opportunities for Practice

• Many discussions of literacy strategies imply that practice is necessary if the strategies are to become regular routines in skilled subject matter reading and writing, but only a few state this explicitly
• One is reciprocal teaching, which also has strong research support
• In this strategy the teacher and students take turns leading a dialogue about a text 
• What Works Clearinghouse gives reciprocal teaching a high effectiveness rating

Engaging and Motivating

• Many literacy teaching strategies are described as engaging, largely because they set purposes for reading or writing about a text

Navigating Many and Varied Contexts

• The best teaching supports learners to transfer what they have learned from one context to another
• We asked students when, why, and how various representations (an equation versus a table versus a sentence) and discourse practices (a scientific explanation versus an explanation to one's mother) should be used or avoided
• Students were highly engaged in these conversations and made situation-appropriate shifts in their written work, such as writing an explanation of a scientific phenomenon differently when directed to write for other scientists and when directed to write for their mothers
• (1) engaging students in the practices of the discipline (e.g. framing a problem, investigating, analyzing data)
• (2) eliciting and acquiring the knowledge to carry out those practices using content literacy strategies as tools
• (3) examining the words, phrases, and discourses that enable disciplinary work
• (4) evaluating why, when, and how they are not 

How Contexts Shape What Teachers Can Do

• Teachers often do use a combination or variety of instructional strategies--not just lecture-but all of them have a telling or vessel-filling emphasis
• (1) lectures, on which students are expected to take notes
• (2) recitations, where a teacher asks a question, receives a student response, and then evaluates the response as right or wrong
• (3) student seat work, either high-order knowledge construction tasks or literal-level question-and-answer tasks
• Teachers choose these formats for many reasons: their own learning histories and teaching models, their beliefs about learning (epistemologies) and teaching (pedagogies), the time and resources available, what they believe they can accomplish given the available time resources and accountability requirements; and what they know about designing and managing instructional tasks
• Although teachers' knowledge and beliefs or values partially explain their reliance on a pedagogy of telling despite overwhelming evidence that it is ineffective, another challenge is that secondary school contexts generally do not support, and sometimes even prohibit, problem-based practices

Structural Features