Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

When I think about the times I definitely knew what I was talking about, versus the times I kinda, sorta, might have, maybe did… well…. Let’s just say that wisdom doesn’t always come with age, but hindsight certainly does. We may cringe when we remember the moments we were overconfident, out of our depth, etcetera, and so forth—when we lacked the critical capacity known as intellectual humility. It’s a quality that can save us a lot of shame, for sure, if we’re the type of people capable of feeling that emotion.

It was soon after my son enrolled in a local junior college that I realized something was wrong. Success, which seemed to come so easy to him in high school, was suddenly out of reach. In fact, he was failing every course! I quickly learned that in high school he did not have to exert any effort and was taught to simply memorize material.

Sadly, this high school experience resulted in a new high school graduate who had no concept of time management, study skills, or critical thinking (McGuire, 2015). He had no idea how to take responsibility for his own learning, and despite my pleas that he needed to “study differently” in college, he had no idea what this meant or how to go about this task.

It’s long been known that drawing something helps a person remember it. A new study shows that drawing is superior to activities such as reading or writing because it forces the person to process information in multiple ways: visually, kinesthetically, and semantically. Across a series of experiments, researchers found drawing information to be a powerful way to boost memory, increasing recall by nearly double.

It can be a struggle to best help students understand what they are learning or for students to articulate their learning in meaningful ways. This was especially difficult for me starting out in on my teaching journey. Based on how I had been taught to be an educator the best ways to know if students are learning was to give them a test. If they failed, it was their fault and they needed to do better next time. It took me a long time to learn that in the process of learning the teacher and the student need to be partners.

“Student Voice” is something that many schools are focusing on and for a good reason.  If we, as educators, understand that we serve our students and not the other way around, getting their thought and feedback for not only problems but solutions in moving our schools forward, is crucial.

From my experience though, I have seen a lot of money, time, and effort, in getting thoughts and feedback from students, listening to their voice, and then often, no action based on what they have shared.  Dean Shareski wrote a challenging post on this and shared the following thoughts on “Student Voice”:

Sometimes the details former students recall from class is nothing short of amazing. A few years ago I had a student named Abby in my history class

As a professor of cognitive psychology, I teach about memory, especially about when and why our memories often fail us. Students are excited to apply this material to their everyday lives.

Empowered with some basic information about how the mind and brain work during learning, teachers can plan to use some new strategies for supporting high student achievement.

Through the years we have facilitated the use of brain-based strategies that help foster growth mindsets through the internalization of learning successes, individual choice, positive self-talk, and teacher modeling. Teachers tell us that using these teacher-friendly tools can jumpstart the learning process early in the year.

Guy Claxton is professor of education at Bristol University, and author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (1997). Among other concepts, he is interested in how people learn.

And so are we, so that’s awfully convenient.

Over at teachingexpertise, they recently overviewed Claxton’s work, including four “new Rs”:

“Resilience: ‘being ready, willing and able to lock on to learning’. Being able to stick with difficulty and cope with feelings such as fear and frustration.
Resourcefulness: ‘being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways’. Having a variety of learning strategies and knowing when to use them.
Reflection: ‘being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning’. Getting to know our own strengths and weaknesses.
Relationships: ‘being ready, willing and able to learn alone and with others’.”

Science is constantly changing, and although we’ve come a long way since the days when it was widely believed that older people couldn’t learn new things, a number of learning myths have stood the test of time despite having no grounding in scientific research.

A study finds that even short breaks help you solidify new learning.
In a way, learning really only happens during your breaks.
For the most effective learning sessions, build-in short rest periods.
It's been believed for some time that resting, ideally sleeping, after learning something new helps you lock in your newly acquired knowledge.

In positive psychology, ‘flow’ is a term used to describe the optimal state of consciousness. It’s in this state that we become so energised and absorbed by what we’re doing that all distractions fade into the background and the hours seem to fly by.

Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions.

I broke a rowing machine yesterday at the gym. I don't know my own strength. Ironically, that's the very reason I attend the gym regularly. I want to know my own strength. I want to know what my limits are, and then try to exceed them. Apart from breaking the rowing machine, my fitness regime is going swimmingly (without the swimming, obvs). I have learnt a lot. I know about cross trainers, treadmills and weights. I thought a Dip Assist was someone telling me where to stick my Doritos*, until I discovered the weights area. And it was while I was working out at the gym this morning that this thought came to me: To know your own strengths, it's often wise to compete against yourself rather than anyone else.

Learnhigher is a network for promoting and facilitating the development and dissemination of high quality, peer-reviewed resources for learning development in the higher education sector. We aim to support the development of such resources as well as conduct and disseminate research into the use and effectiveness of learning development strategies and materials.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlights the dynamic process of learning throughout the life span.

This presentation highlights the findings of that report, quoted directly from the report.

https://www.downes.ca/post/68693

Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget—highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick.

What exactly is flow? Imagine for a moment that you are running a race. Your attention is focused on the movements of your body, the power of your muscles, the force of your lungs, and the feel of the street beneath your feet. You are living in the moment, utterly absorbed in the present activity. Time seems to fall away. You are tired, but you barely notice.

According to positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, what you are experiencing in that moment is known as flow, a state of complete immersion in an activity.

Strategies that target students’ metacognition—the ability to think about thinking—can close a gap that some students experience between how prepared they feel for a test and how prepared they actually are. In a new study, students in an introductory college statistics class who took a short online survey before each exam asking them to think about how they would prepare for it earned higher grades in the course than their peers—a third of a letter grade higher, on average. This low-cost intervention helped students gain insight into their study strategies, boosting their metacognitive skills and giving them tools to be more independent learners.