My new favourite journal.

I have a new favourite journal, even though I've only ever read two articles from it.  I searched my old blog posts for a reference to the first one, but shockingly, it would appear I've never actually mentioned it here.

The journal in question is Psychological Science in the Public Interest, compiled by the Association for Psychological Science.  The APS describes the journal:

"a unique journal featuring comprehensive and compelling reviews of issues that are of direct relevance to the general public. These reviews are written by blue ribbon teams of specialists representing a range of viewpoints, and are intended to assess the current state-of-the-science with regard to the topic."

Note that term "reviews of issues".  All too commonly, journals are full of individual papers that are too technical for anyone outside of the field of study, and pushing the point of view of the authors/researchers involved.

Not so PSPI.  Here we have a journal dedicated to identifying important research and summarising the state of knowledge and quality of research across the subject, such that people outside the research field can base their practices on the evidence.  This calls to mind Ben Goldacre's submission to the UK government, Building Evidence into Education, as even teachers who attempt to follow new findings tend to be tricked into following ideologically-led movements through the difficulty in obtaining actual evidence.

Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence
The first article that brough PSPI to my attention was entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence (free to read as PDF), and it reviewed the evidence supporting the extremely popular notion of "learning styles" in education, concluding that

"at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number."

Note that the article never claims that learning styles don't exist, or that research into learning styles should cease, but that the current state of knowledge of learning styles offers no demonstrable benefit to the classroom teacher.  This kicked off a bit of controversy which is summarised briefly on Wikipedia: the reviewers chose the papers to include based on the rigour of their experimental design, which led them to omit many of the most cited papers on learning styles, which only goes to show that the most cited papers are not in any position to prove anything, having employed sub-standard experimental methodologies.

(I discovered the paper via a forum link to an article on Chronicle.com)

Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques
The second article, which I stumbled upon thanks to a friend linking to a Time magazine article on Facebook.  It's called Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Education Psychology, and it reviews the literature supporting 10 different study techniques, concluding that most of what students do to study isn't particularly effective.  It's also worth noting that a lot of what they advise against is precisely what I was told to do in "study skills" lessons at high school and university.  As has been observed by many people, what is taught in study skills classes and what successful students actually do are two very different things....

I'll hopefully give a more in-depth review of the article once term's over and I'm able to devote a bit more time to it, but I'd like to also note that they make the mistake of criticising cramming without the qualification that cramming, while not the best way to learn, is still the best way to pass an exam, and that our school system still rewards it as a practice (particularly when you know that you're not continuing with the subject next year).  In fact, one training course I took at work several years ago was just two days of cramming followed immediately by the exam.  When one of the delegates asked the trainer why the exam wasn't a week later, the trainer said (with a straight face!) that they'd tried that and more people failed.  He completely missed the point that this really was in no way a good reflection on his teaching methods.

Talent Schmalent

Those of you based in the UK might remember the Channel 4 series Faking It, where a member of the public would be intensively trained over the course of 4 weeks to try to be able to "fake it" as a professional in a sphere they had never been in, but that was loosely related to their day-to-day lives.  A burger-van operator turned cordon bleu chef, a punk singer made into a classical conductor.  OK, so their skills weren't always entirely generalisable -- the conductor would struggle to conduct anything other than the two pieces he'd practiced, for instance -- but it was still an amazing demonstration of what an average member of the public could achieve... albeit with a more expensive regime than an average member of the public could normally afford: 24 hour a day company from people within the field.

Six years after the program stopped filming, the format has been resurrected in a slightly altered form by another studio, as Hidden Talents.  Instead of finding interesting individuals and training them up, this series starts off with the potentially pseudo-scientific notion of taking hundreds of applicants and putting them through a series of exams to discover their "hidden talents" and then pick the best ones to show on the programme.

I came across this as one episode has been mentioned on a couple of language websites, what with it being based on a "hidden talent" for languages.  Now I'm not convinced that they stuck to the exam results, because the guy they finally chose had a particularly tellie-friendly back story -- he left high school without doing any A-levels and was living in a homeless shelter.  Now of course I'm not saying that he wasn't capable and that he didn't get high marks on the exam (he probably did) but I just find it hard to believe that they didn't play a little bit fast and loose with the figures to get the guy they wanted on screen.

Now I've seen a couple of language aptitude tests in the past, and I'm not particularly impressed.  As with all tests, they can only test your current level of knowledge and not really your ability to be taught.  The most thorough language tests will try to get you to deal with concepts like conjugation, declension and word order without explanation.  So it says you'll pick up the initial concept pretty quickly.  So what?  Does the saving of half-an-hour at the start of the course make that much difference in the long term?  Is the language test putting off people who would actually do just as well in the long run as those that pass?  It's impossible to say, because for the most part, the people that run these tests only have data for those that passed in the first place.  (If anyone knows of any blind study that's given any empirical evidence for language batteries, I'd be very interested, but I doubt any exist.)

This is OK if you're running the US Defense Language Institute, where the number of applicants vastly outstrips the number of places available as they can afford to turn lots of possibly good candidates away -- heck, they really have to turn lots of possibly good candidates away.

It's also OK if you're producing a programme like Hidden Talents, because you only need one.

However, it's a horrible message to be sending out -- that people have specific talents.  On the surface it seems like a positive message (when everything goes wrong, it's just that you haven't found your talent) but it's actually pretty corrosive.  How many people give up on languages and say "I haven't got the head for languages" or "I'm no good at languages"?  People genuinely believe that they are inherently incapable of learning languages, with no real evidence, and it gives them an excuse to give up.

If talents exist, we still have no way of genuinely identifying them.  Furthermore, these talent characteristics are miniscule compared to the potential for education.  A 16-year-old coming out of a 21st century school knows almost as much about the world about them as some of the top scholars of the ancient world, and that's all down to education.  As the old phrase has it, most of us are nothing more than "dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants".

Isaac Newton did not invent this phrase -- here's the original citation for the phrase (taken from Wikipedia)

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

Now, whenever I say there's no such thing as talent, someone always mentions sportsmen and physical pursuits.  I could claim it's a bad analogy, but actually, I don't think it is.

International competition sports can only be won by one individual (or team) out of the billions in the world, so yes, the most physically gifted generally win... if the training and equipment is equal.

But what if the training and equipment isn't equal?

I apologise for repeating myself, but I've used the example of marathons in a previous post.  The reason I'm repeating myself, though, is that it was in the comments section, so people may well have missed it.

The marathon: one of the great challenges of distance running.  And yet there are now people who run the length of six marathons in six days...in the Sahara desert!  And that's not to mention finishing times.  In the first modern Olympic Games (ooh, topical!) in 1896, the marathon was won by Spiridon Louis, in 2 hours 58 minutes and 50 seconds.  As I said previously, in the 2011 London marathon, 939 people beat his time.  The world record for the marathon currently stands at 2 hours 3 minutes and 38 seconds (Haile Gebrselassie).  How much of these improvements is down to better training regimes and better race-day nutrition?  How much is down to choice of footwear?

Overall, the lion's share of skill in any field appears to be teachable.  The talented will always be "best", but only by a whisker.

We can all be "good at" anything, as long as we don't expect to be the best.  After all, out of 7 billion people, it's pretty much impossible to be "best" at anything.

PS.  Sorry I haven't progressed with the study of novels.  I was with family at the weekend, and I never got my momentum back afterwards.  I'm travelling at the weekend as I'm starting a new job on Monday.  If the weather's bad where I am, I might make some progress in the evenings.  Otherwise, I'll be out exploring.

Learning styles, teaching strategies

Anyone who has talked to me in person about learning will be aware that I don't believe in "learning styles", the idea that people have their own personal optimal way of learning.

Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't treat people differently in a classroom, because there are individual differences.  All I'm saying is that these differences are differences in past experiences, not fundamental differences in their ways of thinking.  If a new subject relies on knowledge that the student lacks, these holes must be filled before the new subject can be learned.

If we look at physics, a student that is not strong mathematically is going to have a lot of bother, because physics is built on maths.  No physics teacher is going to accept that the student is a "non-mathematical learner" and teach physics in a non-mathematical way -- this would be nonsensical and impossible.

Discussing learning styles with language learners and teachers is interesting.  I have heard and read many many learners claiming that they need the written word because they are "visual learners".  Now most professional educators (people with degrees, not one-month teaching certificates) would decry that as a misinterpretation of what learning styles is all about, but I haven't had a solid explanation of how to apply learning style theory in a classroom.  As Einstein said, if you can't explain it clearly, you don't understand it well enough.  This leaves us with the idea that no-one understands learning styles, yet it is now part of the fabric of the modern teaching system.

So what is there instead?  I've always held that we should talk about learning strategies, that the learner should be encouraged to develop strategies appropriate to the problem at hand rather than believing he has a fixed "style" that the task must be distorted to fit.  This latter notion always struck me like trying to drive screws into wood with a hammer.  It takes more time and effort, and the end result may look OK from the outside, but underneath, the structure is weaker.

But I've re-evaluated and decided that while the end-goal is learning strategies, the only thing we can really focus on is teaching strategies.  The appropriate strategy can only be known by someone familiar with the desired end-state knowledge and the learner's initial knowledge.  The course given to the student must define the optimal strategy and walk the learner through it, because it is only be doing that we learn, so it follows that in employing a strategy, we learn it.  We then hope that the learner will recognise in future where to apply the strategy he has now learnt.

Anyway, so I was very glad when I was recently directed to the journal article Learning Styles: concepts and evidence.  The article is a very specific type of review of the published literature on learning styles: it looked at the methodology behind the experiments supporting (or otherwise) learning style theory, to see if they really proved anything.  The findings were pretty damning: the only experiments that held up to examination showed that learning styles had no discernable effect on the optimal strategy for teaching a subject.

The authors were very careful to say that this does not disprove learning style theory, but they stated quite clearly that their professional opinion was that the focus on learning styles in modern education is distracting attention and money from finding the optimal approach for the subject itself, and that there is no place for learning styles in modern education.

And they're quite right.  Even if language styles do exist, we still don't know what they really are or we certainly don't know how to account for them, so discussion of learning styles is the equivalent to the old clichéd philosophical debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.