Learning Is Just the First Step to Understanding

As a college professor for many decades, I am always amazed at how so many students pass exams while having so little understanding. If I taught math, it would probably be different, because the task in math is to solve problems, which you can't do if you don't understand how to construct and solve appropriate equations. But for most other subjects, it is amazing how much students can learn with so little understanding.

This problem also exists in the real world outside of academia. Opinions masquerade as fact. “Facts” are often asserted without evidence-based reasoning. Facts are presented out of a context that would otherwise promote understanding.

In school matters, teachers don’t seem to emphasize the importance of evidence and reasoning. Educational knowledge and skills standards used by all the states focus on conclusions, with little regard for how such conclusions are justified. Conclusions are presented to be memorized. Testing rarely focuses on the reasoning that constructed the conclusions.

In the k-12 teaching of history, for example, students may not learn the right lessons about our government. Numerous polls uniformly have revealed that the typical high school graduate has very little understanding about U.S. history. School history textbooks are roundly criticized for inaccuracy, bias, and omissions, especially omissions of context. I have verified this in conversations with my grandchildren. The young people I talk to know nothing about explanations for the form of our government in the Federalist Papers or the reasons for many of the events that happened in U.S. history. Students have little appreciation for how creative the ideas in the Constitution were at the time and how they have had at least some impact everywhere in the world. They may have very little understanding about why WWII was so important.

In the teaching of biology, evolution is presented as a theory widely accepted by scientists, but with much less emphasis on why they believe it. It seems like too much trouble to explore the scientific observations over the centuries that lead to an inescapable conclusion that life forms do evolve. Why they evolve was the hallmark of Darwin’s work, but somehow this tends to get lost in the conclusion that they evolve or assertions that the theory should not be believed.

In the teaching of neuroscience, with which I am most familiar, students memorize what neurons are, how they generate electricity, and communicate with each other, with much less attention to what this all means in a larger sense of mental health and meaningful living. For example, students may conclude that humanity resides in a late-term fetus without knowing why such a claim can be made on neuroscience grounds. Students may memorize which parts of the brain light up in a brain scan under different conditions without the slightest idea of how misleading and uninformative such information may actually be.

In science in particular, the “why” and “how” are often more important than the “what.” I remember as a graduate student that my major professor rejected my research findings until I could find an explanation for the results. It is not enough just to know.

The larger point, of the need to understand the factoids you are learning, applies in all aspects in life: school, workplace training, and relationships with people of different backgrounds. In everything we read or hear, we should get in the habit of asking ourselves certain questions:

·       Do I understand what this means?

·       What are the limitations of this information? Where could be wrong or incomplete?

·       How much can I learn from it, not just of it?

·       What are the implications of this information?

·       To what good purpose can I put this information?

Understanding is much more demanding and valuable than just knowing. I might add as the "Memory Medic" that this perspective on learning makes it easier to remember what you learn. The best way to remember factoids is the thinking required to understand them.



"Memory Medic" has four books on improving learning and memory:

• For parents and teachers: The Learning Skills Cycle.
• For students: Better Grades, Less Effort
• For everyone's routine living: Memory Power 101
• For seniors: Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine

For details and reviews, see Memory Medic's web site: WRKlemm.com

The Case for Informal Language in Teaching and Learning

Far too many students find schoolwork to be boring. There are multiple reasons, but a main one is that academic instruction is typically framed in plain-vanilla, academic language and style. In the teaching of science, this is the dominant style of teaching. Knowledge is packaged like Wikipedia posts.  Informal and picturesque language is typically verboten. Science instruction dumps information on students with the implicit statement, “Here, you must learn this.” Science teachers tend to talk at students; they do not converse with students. Academic language does not sparkle; it dulls the finish of ideas.

The high priests of education promote formalism because it seems more impressive and more authoritative. Students, however, live in their own world of distinctively informal language, and teenagers are notoriously resistant to authority. They certainly do not find it appealing to read or listen to instruction expressed in rigid academic style.

Most teachers teach the way they were taught. They were taught what and how to teach by academics, who inevitably communicate in academic style, because that is the way they too were taught. You would readily understand that if you have read as many education doctorate theses as I have.

Every-day language includes informal and picturesque literary devices that make communication more entertaining and engaging. The most common device is the use of metaphors. While a traditional view of the purpose of metaphors is to decorate and embellish language aesthetically, and therefore superfluous to instructivist  modes of teaching, it is clear that metaphors serve useful functions in aiding motivation, understanding, reasoning, creative imagining,  and persuasion. Good metaphors make instructional content vivid and relatable to what students already know. As with all forms of instruction, the metaphors should resonate with the existing culture and experience of the learners.

Metaphors help students verbalize abstract concepts that would otherwise be too complicated for the learner’s current state of competency.  Metaphors teach what it means to be fully literate. Good metaphors stir positive emotions, and such emotions powerfully motivate students. Critical and creative thinking often depend on analogical reasoning. It is not particularly useful to quibble over the technical difference between analogies and metaphors. We can legitimately think of all metaphors as analogies.

Metaphors help students leap across the chasm of ignorance from what they know to what they do not yet know. Metaphors can help students feel more at home with new ideas, especially abstract ones that seem strange and alien to them. A special advantage of metaphors is that they provoke reflection while at the same time making memorization easier. Metaphors help students see relationships of concepts, while at the same time stretching their thinking to discern where metaphors break down. In line with constructivist pedagogy, metaphors acquire special power when teachers ask students to construct their own metaphors for new learning material. Constructing metaphors is a creative process; requiring it of students teaches them how to be more creative.

All of the properties of metaphors just described have obvious importance for making teaching more effective. Some teachers may resist the use of metaphors, because they assume that children do not have the mental capacity to appreciate and understand them. While it is perhaps true that understanding metaphors requires intellectual development, that alone is reason enough to use metaphors to help children develop their intellectual capacity. Besides, children are naturally attracted to metaphors, as evidenced by their strong interest in stories, fables, fairy tales, and the like. What greater evidence of this point can there be than the common observation that children who don’t like to read will spend hours devouring Harry Potter books?

We associate the use of metaphors with great literature. But metaphors are clearly useful in science. The beneficial effect of using metaphors to teach science is well established. Metaphors can be central to scientific discovery. The most famous examples of how metaphors stimulate discovery are found in such examples as the continual use of metaphors by Kepler in his various astronomical discoveries. Then there is Harvey’s comparing the heart to a pump; Huygens’ discovery of the wave-like nature of light; Einstein’s understanding of relativity in terms of riding on a beam of light; Kekule’s discovery of the benzene ring; and Darwin’s ideas of phylogenetic trees (which he more appropriately thought of as bushes). Today, we think in such terms as ribosomes as protein factories; mitochrondria as the cell’s powerhouse; the eye as a camera; the immune system as bodily defense; the genetic code as editable; the brain as a computer; the brain’s limbic system as reptilian brain; nerve impulses as trains of impulses; short-term memory as working memory; thought as movie-frame streams of consciousness; and so on.

In his book on using metaphors in teaching, Rick Wormeli explains to teachers that metaphors can help them walk in their student’s shoes. He gives advice on how to develop new metaphors related to instructional content and to teaching students how their understanding benefits from recognizing the literal limits of metaphors. He has found that metaphors greatly assist in generating those magic eureka moments when students say, “Oh, I get it now!”

A group in Spain uses metaphors in the teaching of English as a second language. They teach metaphoric awareness in a business course as a useful device to raise awareness of key concepts, models and issues and to improve their reading and translating skills. They introduce students to a series of specific metaphor examples as they relate to the conduct of business. They teach that metaphors have a “source” and a “target,” with a direction of the connection between them. They base learning exercises on questions in a variety of formats.

Another teaching approach with metaphors is used in life-enhancement coaching. One coach claims that his clients not only help clients grasp the meaning of his advice, but also help them shift perspectives, gain insight, and solve problems. His clients often use metaphorical language to describe their issues and problems, but need help in probing the usefulness of their own metaphors. For example, he begins by asking clients what they think their metaphor means. Then he shows them how to probe and develop it with the objective of helping them move forward to a new way of thinking about dealing with their issue or problem. This coach studiously tries to avoid misuse of metaphors, such as using metaphors that are mixed, clichéd, ambiguous, unfamiliar, over-extended, or near-literal.

A case study on the use of metaphors in formal teaching examined the impact of observing classes and interviewing both teacher and students. Teachers used metaphors based on common sense and the culture and language of the students. All parties valued the use of metaphor.

Another case study revealed that creating visual metaphors had a unique potential for improving recall of information. This finding surprised the authors. They should not have been surprised. Scholars of mnemonics have long known that creating visual image metaphors is the most powerful way to memorize.

One group of schoolteachers teaches about microbes by constructing a Sherlock Holmes detective scenario. Another group of teachers has even constructed a web-site library of lesson plans based on metaphors and similes. Educational games are often metaphors.

These multiple examples and studies provide strong evidence that the use of informal language and metaphors motivates learners, and improves their engagement, understanding, memory, and creative abilities.

To learn more about Dr. Klemm's ideas and activities, check his web site at http://thankyoubrain.com.

Sources:               

_____ (n.d.)   Lesson Planet. https://www.lessonplanet.com/search?keywords=simile+metaphor&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8dOpkbzD4AIVih-tBh15jg0FEAAYASAAEgJI6vD_BwE. Accessed Feb. 17, 2019.

_____(n.d.). Metaphors and analogies. Teacher Vision. https://www.teachervision.com/metaphors-analogies. Accessed Feb. 17, 2-19.

_____(n.d.) Using metaphors to teachj. Faculty training. Academy of  Art University. http://faculty.academyart.edu/faculty/teaching-topics/tips/using-metaphors-to-teach.html.

Elston, Eleanor (  Teaching using metaphors: the Sherlock Holmes Way. https://www.picnet.ca/wp-content/uploads/Eleanor-Elston_Teaching-Using-Metaphors.pdf. Accessed Feb. 17, 2019

Gentner, U., et al. (1997) . Analogy and creativity in the works of Johannes Kepler . In T . B . Ward, S . M . Smith, & J . Vaid (Eds .), Creative thought : An investigation of conceptual structures and processes (pp . 403-459). Washington, DC : American Psychological Association. http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/newpdfpapers/GentnerBrem97.pdf

Harrison, A. G., and Coll, R. K. (2008). Using analogies in middle and secondary science classrooms: the FAR guide-an interesting way to teach with analogies. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Corwin Press.

Kanthan, Rani and Mills, Sheryl (2006).  Using metaphors, analogies and similes as aids in teaching pathology to medical studsents. Medical Science Educator. 16 (1), http://www.iamse.org/mse-article/using-metaphors-analogies-and-similes-as-aids-in-teaching-pathology-to-medical-students/

Mouraz, Ana, Pereira, Ana Vale, and Monteiro, Raquel. (20  The use of metaphors in the processes of teaching and learning in higher education. Int. Online J. Educational Science. https://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/sites/default/files/IOJES_1041.pdf/ Accessed Feb. 17, 2019.

Pramling, N. (2011). Possibilities as limitations: A study of the scientific uptake and moulding of G. A. Miller’s Metaphor of Chunk. Theory & Psychology, 21(3), 277–297.Accessed Feb. 17, 2019.

Sacristá, Marisol Velasco (n.d.). Metaphor and ESP: metaphor as a useful device for teaching L2 business English learners. IBÉRICA 10 [2005]: 115-131. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/26911948.pdf. Accessed Feb. 17, 2019.

Wormeli, Rick (2009). Metaphors and Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject. (2009). Stenouse Publishers.

Van Aswegen, Anneke (2017). Best way to use metaphorical thinking when coaching.  May 29. Promote Coach. https://promotecoach.com/best-way-use-metaphorical-thinking/

Decision-making 101

Teenagers are notorious for poor decision-making. Of course that is inevitable, given that their brains are still developing, and they have had relatively little life experience to show them how to predict what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, what doesn’t work may have more emotional appeal, and most of us at any age are more susceptible to our emotions than cold, hard logic.

Seniors also are prone to poor decision-making if senility has set it. Unscrupulous people take advantage of such seniors because a brain that is deteriorating has a hard time making wise decisions.

In between teenage and senility is when the brain is at its peak for good decision making. Wisdom comes with age, up to a point. Some Eastern cultures venerate their old people as generally being especially wise. After all, it you live long enough, and are still mentally healthy, you ought to make good decisions because you have a lifetime of experience to teach you what future choices are likely to work and which are not.

Much of that knowledge comes from learning from one’s mistakes. On the other hand, some people, regardless of age, can’t seem to learn from their mistakes. Most of the time the problem is not stupidity but a flawed habitual process by which one is motivated to make wise decisions and evaluate options. Best of all is learning from somebody else’s mistakes, so you don’t have to make them yourself.

Learning from your mistakes can be negative, if you fret about it. Learning what you can do to avoid repeating a mistake is one thing, but dwelling on it erodes one’s confidence and sense of self worth. I can never forget the good advice I read from, of all people, T. Boone Pickens. He was quoted in an interview as saying that he was able to re-make his fortune on multiple occasions because he didn’t dwell on losing the fortunes. He credited that attitude to his college basketball coach who told the team after each defeat, “Learn from your mistakes, but don’t dwell on them. Learn from what you did right and do more of that.”

It would help if we knew how the brain made decisions, so we could train it to operate better. “Decision neuroscience” is an emerging field of study aimed at how learning how brains make decisions and how to optimize the process. Neuroscientists seemed to have honed in on two theories, both of which deal with how the brain handles the processing of alternate options to arrive at a decision.

One theory is that each option is processed in its own competing pool of neurons. As processing evolves, the activity in each pool builds up and down as each pool competes for dominance. At some point, activity builds up in one of the pools to reach a threshold, in winner-take-all fashion, to allow the activity in that pool to dominate and issue the appropriate decision commands to the parts of the brain needed for execution. As one possible example, two or more pools of neurons separately receive input that reflects the representation of different options. Each pool sends an output to another set of neurons that feed back either excitatory or inhibitory influences, thus providing a way for competition among pools to select the pool that eventually dominates because it has built up more impulse activity than the others.

The other theory is based on guided gating wherein input to pools of decision-making neurons is gated to regulate how much excitatory influence can accumulate in each given pool. [i] The specific routing paths involve inhibitory neurons that shut down certain routes, thus preferentially routing input to a preferred accumulating circuit. The route is biased by estimated salience of each option, current emotional state, memories of past learning, and the expected reward value for the outcome of each option.

These decision-making possibilities involve what is called “integrate and fire.” That is, input to all relevant pools of neurons accumulates and leads to various levels of firing in each pool. The pool firing the most is most likely to dominate the output, that is, the decision.

However circuits make decisions, there is considerable evidence that nerve impulse representations for each given choice option simultaneously code for expected outcome and reward value. These value estimates update on the fly.[ii] Networks containing these representations compete to arrive at a decision.

Any choice among alternative options is affected by how much information for each option the brain has to work on. When the brain is consciously trying to make a decision, this often means how much relevant information the brain can hold in working memory. Working memory is notoriously low-capacity, so the key becomes remembering the sub-sets of information that are the most relevant to each option. Humans think with what is in their working memory. Experiments have shown that older people are more likely to hold the most useful information in working memory, and therefore they can think more effectively. The National Institute of Aging began funding decision-making research in 2010 at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. Results of their research are showing that older people often make better decisions than younger people.

As one example, older people are more likely to make rational cost-benefit analyses. Older people are more likely to recognize when they have made a bad investment and walk away rather than throwing more good money after bad.

A key factor seems to be that older people are more selective about what they remember. For example, one study from the Stanford Center compared the ability of young and old people to remember a list of words. Not surprisingly, younger people remembered more words, but when words were assigned a number value, with some words being more valuable than others, older people were better at remembering high-value words and ignoring low-value words. It seems that older people selectively remember what is important, which should make it easier to make better decisions.

Decision-making skills are important of learning achievement in school. Students need to know how to focus in general, and focus on what is most relevant in particular. They are not learning that skill, and their multi-tasking culture is teaching them many bad habits.

Those of us who care deeply about educational development of youngsters need to push our schools to address the thinking and learning skills of students. "Teaching to the test" detracts from time spent in teaching what matters most. Today's culture of multi-tasking is making matters worse. Children don't learn how to attend selectively and intensely to the most relevant information, because they are distracted by superficial attention to everything. Despite their daily use of Apple computers and smart phones, only one college student out of 85 could draw the Apple logo correctly.[iii]

Memory training is generally absent from teacher training programs. Despite my locally well-publicized experience in memory training, no one in the College of Education at my university has ever asked me to share my knowledge with their faculty or with pre-service teachers. The paradox is that teachers are trained to help students remember curricular answers for high-stakes tests. What could be more important than learning how to decide what to remember and how to remember it? And we wonder why student performance is so poor?

"Memory Medic" is author of Memory Power 101 (Skyhorse) and Better Grades, Less Effort (Benecton).

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[i]Purcell, B. A.; Heitz, R. P.; Cohen, J. Y.; Schall, et al. (2010). Neurally constrained modeling of perceptual decision making. Psychological Review, 117(4), 1113-1143.

[ii] McCoy, A. N., and Platt, M. L. (2005). Expectations and outcomes: decision-making in the primate brain. J. Comp. Physiol A 191, 201-211.

[iii] Blake, Adam B., Nazarian, Meenely, and Castel, Alan D. (2015). The Apple of the mind's eye: Everyday attention, metamemory, and reconstructive memory for the Apple logo. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2015; 1 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.1002798

What's New in Brain-based Learning

              BASED     

In an earlier post, I explained the new trend of “neuro-education.” Science is discovering many things about learning and memory that have not yet been incorporated into school programs. Schools are so focused on teaching kids what to know to pass government-mandated tests that they don’t seem to get around to teaching students how to develop their capacity to learn and remember.

On-line Universities.com has just posted a very nice item on how “neuroscience is changing the classroom.” The post explains nine neuro-education interventions:

1.      Cognitive Tutoring. There is a current system for algebra that employs computer-based AI to adjust to student needs as well as to track student progress and thought processes so teachers can better help them learn.

2.      High School Starts Later in the Day. Because adolescents don’t get enough sleep and are not fully functional in early morning, some schools are starting school later. I agree with this policy and go further to suggest an afternoon nap (recent memories are consolidated in a nap).

3.      Spaced Learning. Students learn more when episodes of learning are spaced out over time rather than pushed into one single episode. Many teachers already do that, but all of them should, because research has clearly established this is the best way to form lasting memory.

4.      Individualized Instruction. This is too labor intensive to be very practical, but digital tools are becoming available to help. In addition, teachers are being encouraged to expose students to novel experiences when presenting information to build entirely new neural connections or to connect new information to previous experiences students have had. A problem in the past, I think, is that teachers have surrendered to the notion that learners should always use their preferred mode (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). I think they should use all three to expand their capabilities.

5.      Less Down Time. The blog used another heading, but two ideas here are well established yet in great need for more implementation. One is to get students to read more.  Research has clearly established that people who read more challenging books often have a greater variety and number of neural connections. Yet, most adolescents notoriously avoid reading, and many teachers let them get away with it. The other sorely needed intervention is to have shorter summer breaks, year-round school, and more frequent short breaks.

6.      Better Identification and Remediation of Learning Disabilities. ADHD and dyslexia are the two big problems. Research is still revealing that we have not optimized remediation practices, but useful things are available that are not always put into practice.

7.      Fun Learning Environment. Positive reinforcement is the most powerful teaching tool there is. A fun environment, even including friendly games and competition, works. More teachers should try it, as long as they don’t get so wrapped up in the games that academic rigor is watered down.

8.      Team Learning. Students remember information better over the long term if they learn in groups. There are well-known formalisms for effective team learning. Doing this over the Internet can be especially useful. Not enough teachers know or use team learning in optimal ways.

9.      Neuro-education Findings. The idea is to spend less time on teaching content and more on strengthening and developing the brain itself. There is a whole lot already known that is not being implemented in schools. More application is inevitable.

I do what I can with my e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort, and with my new book, Power Memory 101, which the publisher is releasing this August.

NOW RECRUITING TEACHERS: I am developing a new teaching resource for middle-school science. The lessons are based on “brain-based” teaching or “neuro-education.” The idea is to teach students aspects of brain function that will help them perform better in school. I have now added some of this material to the brain section of our Organ Systems module of our middle-school website. In addition, I have invented a new system for teaching, learning, studying, and remembering all in the same visual and conceptual environment. That environment is created as a “one-card” virtual flash card that contains neuro-education material that would cover 1-3 typical class periods. The system is based on a PowerPoint file that contains a table. Icons representing key concepts are placed on the top left corner of a cell, with associated text information placed as bulleted text in the corresponding cell. Each object is then tagged for animated display upon mouse click anywhere off screen. Lectures, study, and self-testing occur in slide-show mode wherein the user navigates the single screen by mouse click from icon to associated text box to next icon, etc. The system would seem to have the following beneficial features: comprehensive, holistic access to all the information, compact, flexible/extensible, cohesively organized, easily and quickly studied, self-tested in flash-card style, embodied key memorization principles, and easily constructed and modified. I am recruiting teachers to test this presentation/study card in their class. I will limit participation to the first 50 middle-school teachers who sign up. Details are below: What I Pledge to You: 1. You get a free e-copy of the flash card and access to the instructional material. 2. My promise to maintain your anonymity, while retaining the right to pool survey data from all participating teachers and their students. 3. An e-copy explaining how to create and use the one-card flash-card invention. 4. Notice of when and where a report of the findings is published, and an electronic copy of the report. What You Need to Agee to Do: 1. Agree to teach at least one middle-school class period this Fall from the “flash card” and give a study copy to each student. 2. Fill out a simple website survey of your opinions. Have your students fill out a simple website survey of their opinions. 3. Get on the waiting list by sending me your name and e-mail address to wklemmATSIGNcvm.tamu.edu