Visible Learning

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Visible Learning

• Judy Robertson
• 8/3/10

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About me

• Teach 1st, 3rd, 4th MSc students on a range of
  modules from Interactive Systems to Advanced
  Interaction Design
• Started teaching in 2003
• Have taught at Edinburgh, GCU and HW
• Have been researching technology enhanced
  learning since 1997
• Admin role is recruitment
• I try to roll together teaching, research, admin
  where possible
• This includes publishing papers about teaching
• See also www.judyrobertson.typepad.com under
  teaching and technology in teaching tags

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Heres what were aiming for
Happy
Proud
Confident
Achieving to top of her ability level
Independent learner
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Teaching principles for first year experience
(with Sandy)

1. Students should construct their own knowledge by
   designing and evaluating artefacts which have
   personal meaning to them.
2. Interactivity is at the heart of every class
   plan.
3. Module and class plans are carefully designed to
   be flexible and are subject to change
4. Encourage learner autonomy

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Teaching principles for first year experience
(with Sandy)

1. Feedback is informal and frequent
2. Feedback works both ways
3. Students learn from each other
4. Build a learning community
5. Use educational technology when appropriate to
   learning goals

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Innovation why bother?

• It encourages reflective practice
• Keeps you alert and on your toes
• You keep a look out for what works and what
  doesnt
• You (ought to) look for contrary evidence
• Youre keen to discover consequences and side
  effects
• If youre a new lecturer, every class you run may
  be like this!

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• Is teaching an art or a science?

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Teaching at HW

• Mostly treated as a practice based art (and
  sometimes as a chore)
• Formal training courses like PgCap cover some
  theory (but not necessarily evidence based)
• CPD happens by casual conversations in the coffee
  room
• or hurried and heated debates in BoS
• Some formal seminars and annual conference, but
  again these tend to be experience based
• Sporadic email exchanges

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Lets hear it for science based teaching!
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People have been researching this stuff for a
while

• Hatties work is a synthesis of
• 800 meta-analyses
• 52637 studies
• 236 million learners
• Why ignore this evidence?
• Dont we always tell our students not to
  re-invent the wheel?

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Effect sizes magnitude of learning outcome

• d 1.0 is one std dev increase in outcome
• OR
• Increasing learners' achievement by 2-3 years
• OR
• Improving rate of learning by 50

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What effect size are we aiming for?

• Aiming for at least d 0.4
• A least half of teachers can and do achieve this
  in their normal practice

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What works in education?

• Acceleration .88
• Reciprocal teaching .74
• Feedback .73
• Teacher-student relationships .72
• Meta-cognitive strategies .69
• Prior achievement .67

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What is visible learning?

• Teachers seeing learning through the eyes of
  their students and students seeing teaching as
  the key to their on going learning" p22

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Visible learning

• "biggest effects on student learning occur when
  teachers become learners of their own teaching,
  and when students become their own teachers" p 22

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Challenge

• If you want to improve achievement, set
  challenging goals for your learners
• (Rather than do your best goals)
• This is particularly important because students
  achievement is strongly correlated to their own
  perception of abilities. i.e. if students think
  they cant do something, they wont be able to.
• The performance of the students who have the
  most challenging goals are over 250 higher than
  the performance of students with the easiest
  goals Hattie (2009) 164

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Feedback (groan)

• If you have high challenge, you also need high
  feedback to match it
• Feedback isnt just from teacher -gt learner. Its
  also from learner-gt teacher
• We need to hear from all the learners rather than
  just the few who bother to answer questions
• We need to know regularly how effective our
  teaching is
• Learning needs to be visible for teachers and
  learners this is what feedback does
• Luckily, in computer science you get some help
  from the software itself!

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Effective feedback

• Aim is to help students fills the gap between
  what they understand now and what they need to
  understand
• Help students
• Come to a different view point
• Confirm to students whether they are correct or
  incorrect
• Indicate that more information is needed
• Suggest further/ alternative directions for
  student to pursue
• Point out alternative strategies
• Feedback at self or personal level, or just
  praise is rarely effective
• Students need to be able to interpret and act on
  feedback do they have the opportunity?
• See photocopy

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Example Metacognition

• First year learning logs for Interactive Systems
• (with Nicole and Roger)
• Students do the following
• Planning
• Monitoring
• Evaluating product and learning process
• Identify weaknesses in their skills

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Example reciprocal teaching

• First year IS students teaching them to read!
• (With Elaine Farrow)
• Scaffolded group reading process which teaches
  comprehension strategies
• Clarify
• Summarise
• Question
• Predict
• (See http//judyrobertson.typepad.com/judy_roberts
  on/2010/02/reciprocal-reading-with-first-years.htm
  l)

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Questioning our assumptions

• Often we make decisions about
• what is best to teach next without knowing what
  these students already know
• How to keep the students engaged and busy (but
  not necessarily learning)
• What activities provoke the most interest (rather
  than what leads to students putting in effort)
• How to structure material to make it easy to
  learn (rather than structuring it to help
  students learn through challenge)

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Whats the point of school?
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Whats the point of school?

• How many of these things apply to your students?
• Curious like new and puzzling things
• Courageous not afraid of uncertainty and
  complexity
• Good at exploration and investigation
• Willing to experiment and try stuff out
• Imaginative
• But also able to reason in a disciplined way
• Sociable can learn with others
• Reflective think about the purpose of learning
  and think of new strategies for doing it better

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How many of these things are true in MACS?

• Lecturers ask genuine, meaty questions (which
  they dont know the answer to) and give students
  time to think about it
• What do the displays of work tell you about what
  is valued in learning?
• Product or process of learning?
• Are mistakes valued?
• Do students do activities or sit and listen?
• Do students know why they are doing an exercise?
• Are the lecturers ever in role of learner?
• Does the lecturer acknowledge that he or she
  doesnt know everything?

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Summary

• Innovation is worth doing to keep you alert and
  learning about your teaching
• Answers are to be found in the research
  literature - we dont need to have endless
  debates over solved problems
• Dont listen to people like me woffling on
  insist on high quality evidence for innovation
• (And ask the university learning and teaching
  committee for it next time they come up with some
  barking scheme)

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Questions? Debates? Heckles?

• Judy.Robertson_at_hw.ac.uk