Visible Learning

1. Visible Learning Judy Robertson 8/3/10

2. 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

3. Here’s what we’re aiming for Happy Proud Confident Achieving to top of her ability level Independent learner

6. Teaching principles for first year experience (with Sandy) • Students should construct their own knowledge by designing and evaluating artefacts which have personal meaning to them. • Interactivity is at the heart of every class plan. • Module and class plans are carefully designed to be flexible and are subject to change • Encourage learner autonomy

7. Teaching principles for first year experience (with Sandy) • Feedback is informal and frequent • Feedback works both ways • Students learn from each other • Build a learning community • Use educational technology when appropriateto learning goals

8. Innovation: why bother? • It encourages reflective practice: • Keeps you alert and on your toes • You keep a look out for what works and what doesn’t • You (ought to) look for contrary evidence • You’re keen to discover consequences and side effects • If you’re a new lecturer, every class you run may be like this!

9. Is teaching an art or a science?

10. 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

11. Let’s hear it for science based teaching!

13. People have been researching this stuff for a while • Hattie’s work is a synthesis of • 800 meta-analyses • 52637 studies • 236 million learners • Why ignore this evidence? • Don’t we always tell our students not to re-invent the wheel?

14. 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%

15. 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

16. What works in education? • Acceleration = .88 • Reciprocal teaching = .74 • Feedback = .73 • Teacher-student relationships = .72 • Meta-cognitive strategies = .69 • Prior achievement = .67

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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 can’t do something, they won’t 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

20. Feedback (groan) • If you have high challenge, you also need high feedback to match it • Feedback isn’t just from teacher -> learner. It’s also from learner-> 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!

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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_robertson/2010/02/reciprocal-reading-with-first-years.html)

24. 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)

25. What’s the point of school?

26. What’s 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

27. How many of these things are true in MACS? • Lecturers ask genuine, meaty questions (which they don’t 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 doesn’t know everything?

28. Summary • Innovation is worth doing to keep you alert and learning about your teaching • Answers are to be found in the research literature - we don’t need to have endless debates over solved problems • Don’t 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)

29. Questions? Debates? Heckles? • Judy.Robertson@hw.ac.uk