When myths about the lack of embodiment online get translated to conclusions about student science misconceptions

The Institute for effective evidence (IEE) http://www.york.ac.uk/iee

is an influential filter of educational research providing ‘rigorous evaluations of programmes and practices’. It is why it is disappointing that a recent report from them on this article (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tea.21169/abstract

in the Journal of Science Teaching by Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw was notable for its lack of evaluation. The research had looked at learning outcomes (with a focus on student misconceptions about science) when instruction in class is followed by group work. The interpersonal interactions required for group work took place either face-to-face (control condition) or were enabled through computer mediated conferencing (CMC)  (the experimental condition). The researchers claim that using CMC for the group work compromised the quality of the learning outcomes; that misconceptions about science tended to persist for students who used this form of communication. The purpose of this blog post is to explain why I think that the discussion and conclusion sections of that research article are misleading.

Wendt and Rockinson-Szapkiw make several references to the lack of embodied communication, behaviours such as pointing, facial expression, as a factor might have influenced the learning outcomes of the students who used CMC for group work. However, it has been demonstrated repeatedly in the research literature that when participants use CMC for group work they adapt by using on a wide range of digital fluency practices for example; metaphor, typography and by appropriating the functionality of the technology for example, threading.  Provided that participants are digitally fluent, they are provided with appropriate facilities, and opportunity for discourse online, the quality of interpersonal interaction for learning should not be compromised by the absence of non-verbal cues.

The key to the success of CMC lies in the design for learning (as is the case for all forms of learning) and it is not a simple case of directly substituting one mode of communication (using CMC) for another (face-to-face). For the research critiqued in this blog entry group work online was presented so that all factors (other than mode of communication) were controlled. It has meant that scholarship of design for this form of learning was ignored and by consequence, professional development for online teaching appears to be lacking. The design did not take into account the constraints (more time is required) of CMC, or capitalize on the affordances. A great advantage of asynchronous discussion is that students can be given the opportunity to reflect and a full textual record of the discussion is available for them to refer to while doing so. The textual record is also available to the teacher whose feedback should be enhanced by access to a full verbal account of the discussion of all the groups involved.  The design did not capitalize on the pedagogic affordances of CMC and when evaluated in this context the conclusion, that CMC is an inferior form of communication for group work, is misleading. The IEE report will amplify the reach of these misleading conclusions and is likely to influence, negatively, the uptake of this form of communication for group work. This is unfortunate given the well-documented advantages that group work online can offer including the potential of Learning Analytics data (which are collected with more granularity and more easily online) for enhancing our understanding of student learning behaviours.

Group work as voodoo teaching: Fair appraisal or not?

In Teacher Proof, by Tom Bennett, group work is characterised as voodoo teaching:  an approach to learning advocated by armchair educationists, based on theory and evidenced by proxy measurements, while from a teacher perspective there are a considerable number of disadvantages for example, inactivity (disguised), unequal participation and too much social chat.

Don’t these behaviours occur whatever pedagogy a teacher uses for imparting knowledge?

When the aim is to improve teaching and learning oppositional conversations are not helpful. If teachers could be convinced of the value of group work then the disadvantages might morph into barriers to be overcome. However, two misconceptions need to be dismissed at the outset. Firstly, learning is not about accumulating factual knowledge and being able to recall it; understanding the knowledge and making conceptual connections are the key indicators of knowledge acquisition. Secondly, the idea of group work is not that students teach each other. The value of inter student interaction lies in the process od developing their  learning of a topic through verbalising their current level of  understanding while communicating it to other members of the group, and by assessing and/or developing the ideas of their peers. With a 1/30 teacher/student ratio it would not be possible for the teacher to undertake this process with every student.  However, the teacher’s expert knowledge is not wasted, she/he can correct any misunderstandings that persist at group level. 

Hard to learn stuff is cognitively and emotionally painful so there is value in easing the emotional strain.  In the UK we have just witnessed the annual duel between the Oxford and Cambridge university boat crews. Although both Oxford teams won easily (for the first time female crews competed on the same course on the same day, albeit not at the same time) it hasn’t always been the case. The media spend a great deal of time describing the commitment and explaining the endurance required by rowers. In 2007 when the Oxford male crew were not doing so well research was carried out that involved comparing threshold for pain when elite rowers trained individually compared with training together in a virtual boat when the physical effort involved was done collectively [1].  Physical effort is known to stimulate endorphin (opioid) release and it has been shown in other studies that high opiate activity is specific to the areas of the brain associated with mood. Could this finding be translated to a group learning context? Does working on a task collectively provide a more conducive emotional climate for the learning? Is the mood of students enhanced in a way that helps them to tackle the painful business of learning? The unknown is whether collective action without physical exertion is sufficient to achieve a positive effect on mood. I propose that it is a sufficiently important area of inquiry for encouraging further research and encouraging teachers to persevere with group work.

Teachers’ experience of group work in practice is that it can lead to a loss of control and increased disruption. Provided that a school has the technological infrastructure to support forums group work could be done online i.e. mediated by a digital device and associated software. Students would know that the teacher could be monitoring their interactions without being physically co-present in either time or space and that a persistent record of their conversations is available. That should wrest some control back to the teacher.

1.         Cohen, E.E.A., et al., Rowers' high: behavioral synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds. Biology letters, 2009. Evolutionary biology.

Pitching for the VLE : the distance student voice

Neil Selwyn is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash and worth following if, like me, you get disturbed by ‘technology for education’ hype.  From reading some of Selwyn’s previous research I have constructed him as a defender of democracy in Education. For December reading 2014 he has posted up an article on his academia site https://monash.academia.edu/NeilSelwyn titled ‘minding our language’ in which he draws a contrast between the ‘complex realities’ of Education and by implication, what it means to be a student, and the ‘ restricted ‘ language of ‘Ed-Tech Speak (he provides a list of 50 ED-Tech Speak terms in the appendix).

So far so very good (and that is largely my overall conclusion). However, I am going to challenge one of his  suggestions; that it would be more appropriate to refer to ‘virtual learning environments’ (VLE) as ‘teaching management systems’. I make this challenge in the context of one genre, the distance student, by drawing from experience as both a distance student and a distance teacher.  For distance students at the Open University UK (OUUK), its VLE means much more than a ‘teaching management system’. For these students it is their campus, a place where they can get access to other students and all those other intellectual assets that are a significant aspect of being a student in Higher Education. For many the VLE is their University substantiated, a place where they can feel that they belong.  Previously that ‘sense of belonging’ to a University was only fleetingly and marginally achieved. By the  way - 'belonging' is another term that Selwyn is suspicious about when used by Ed_Tech )  

Distance learning, as pioneered by the Open Universities of the world, has democratised education for many and when technology is harnessed appropriately it can make the sense of being a student ‘real’.  A well crafted VLE, i.e. one  that is much more than a teaching management system, is the key component. So while I totally agree with Selwyn’s appraisal of Ed-Tech Speak as a ‘powerful means of advancing the interests and agendas of some social groups over others‘  (Selwyn, 2014, p.2) I wanted to speak up on behalf of the the VLE, as situated in the history of Open and Distance Learning.

Selwyn, N. (2014). Minding_our_Language. https://monash.academia.edu/NeilSelwyn. 

Virtual Social Interaction - does it mean Mind Change?

As someone who has been studying Virtual Social Interaction for the last 10 years I intend to read Susan Greenfield latest book Mind Change – How digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains. Its publication has attracted a great deal of media attention and today Susan Greenfield was the invited speaker at the Royal Society of Arts, UK, the audio recording of this event is here.

The chair of the event, Jonathan Rowson, who leads the Social Brain project at the RSA, asked Greenfield about her vision when writing the book.  By response she listed her three personal aspirations for 'folks' of the future; a strong sense of identity, fulfillment and that they would be useful to society, with all three achieved through creativity. The interpretation that some have made is that Greenfield is suggesting that the Internet is compromising creativity and therefore  those aspirations.

For example, one of the issues she raised at the RSA event is the effect that the Internet is having on interpersonal communication skills.  In an interview for Hard Talk here

with Stephen Sakur she also addressed this issue, and  in more detail. I quote

(In everyday life) 'we’re trying to process what we’re each saying. We’re judging from voice tone, from body language, what the person is feeling. On the screen, those cues are not available to you. …………..So if you are constantly rehearsing a form of communication where you don’t practice eye contact, body language, voice tone interpretation it seems not unreasonable to say you’re not going to be so good at those things’.

 Susan Greenfield is not the first to raise concerns on this issue; the question of whether remote interpersonal communication mediated by a computer compromises the quality of interpersonal interaction has been debated for over 3 decades.   However, her academic discipline, neuroscience, has led her to question the impact on the brain, as well as socially.  

It is why her book is a must read for me since I am researching from both these perspectives.  I am investigating interpersonal interaction in  online forums when writing is the mode of communication, and monitoring the process neurally.    Being able to interact remotely has the potential to benefit distance education profoundly and is why I have been beavering away at trying to understand more about the student experience of this form of interaction.  Given the growing popularity of MOOCs  (Massive Open Online Courses) for example, as offered by Futurelearn,  https://www.futurelearn.com/ it is likely to remain a  topic for debate (MOOCs rely on text based forums for social interaction)as the answer is important.  As is evidence, and that is what I am hoping to provide. Evidence, or more specifically the lack of it, is an area where Susan Greenfield is often challenged see Professor Dorothy Bishop’s comments here http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/ and Ben Goldacre’s here .

I agree with Greenfield that it is important to raise questions about the effect that the Internet is having on the brain, and on our culture. I also agree with Bishop and Goldacre, evidence that is open to review by peers should be what provides the answers.  Hopefully we can address some relevant questions, and and answers,  at an upcoming event  that we are starting to plan between the Technologies  SIG and the Neuroscience & Education SIG at BERA  http://www.bera.ac.uk/ sometime during  Spring of 2015. 

Goodbye to Neuromyths

Being able to collect data in digital form has been profound for Neuroscience.  It has led to a rapid increase in knowledge about brain processes. Realising the potential of this knowledge for education i.e. what the brain might be doing while we learn has been bedevilled by neuromyths (interventions that claim to be informed by neuroscience but do not have any scientific provenance). Although these interventions have been challenged by both Neuroscientists and Educationalists they haven't always been dispelled. Yesterday, at the annual conference held by BERA http://www.bera.ac.uk/ Steven Spence from university of Derby and colleagues provided recent evidence (collected from NQTs, and also more senior practitioners) that supports this assertion.

Two other presentations,  one in the context of enabling social interaction for children with autism, the other on virtual social interaction, provided examples of how multidisciplinary work can progress in a principled way and be of value to learning.  There were some notable  similarities between them

•   Iterative development of procedures based on a true synergy between education & neuroscience

•   A pragmatic approach to method

•    Data collected in the wild, i.e. the classroom, the online forum, without compromising the complexity of these contexts.

As the presenter for one of these, virtual social interaction, it was exciting (and reassuring!) to find other researchers subscribing to this approach. Although I have attended a great many events on EdNeuroscience, starting with the TLRP seminar series 2005-2006 http://www.tlrp.org/users/cs5.html

the presentation by Jackie Ravet & Justin Williams, University of Aberdeen, was a first experience for me; a 'hard core ' neuroscientist and practitioner focused drama specialist demonstrating so clearly how they work together to test out the value of a Neuroscience knowledge base in an formal education context.

Presenting to an audience of educationalists, many of who have extensive practitioner experience and also a wide research interests, was a great opportunity to have our  work interrogated. There is real hope that we can say goodbye to the discourse of neuromyths and get on with the business of making neuroscience knowledge useful for Education.

London Virtual Interaction Workshop

This work shop was organised by Antonia Hamilton and  Sylvia Xuini Pan, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience  hamilton lab.

Why did I attend? I study social interaction when it is mediated by a computer and takes  takes place asynchronously between distance students who have no previous knowledge of each other -  I study virtual social interaction. Many of the contributors to this workshop are studying aspects of social interaction (eye gaze, body movement, facial expression, sound) that are not available in online contexts that use computer mediated communication (CMC) but they did address processes that are common to each such as joint attention, affiliation, trust, reciprocity, turn taking (a process that is disrupted when communication is asynchronous) and the most challenging concept of them all,  synchrony. Synchrony was a concept that pervaded most of the talks therefore I was both reassured and disappointed when questions posed later in the conference - why is synchrony important for social interaction? is there a neural explanation? could not be answered by any of the delegates, apparently

What are my headlines from this event.

•   Be alert to circular reasoning (delegate)

•   Realism is not a realistic criterion - realism is a relative notion -challenge the critical parameters and values that matter (Beatrice de Gelder)

•   Joint attention - KNOWING we are both looking is the critical factor (Leonard Schilbach)

•   Important to think about social scaffolds i.e put the social into social interaction (Daniel Richardson)

•   Social interaction is a one trial problem ( Antonio Hamilton)

Ideas that arose for me that I need to pursue in order to study social interaction in a learning context

For joint tasks decision there may be a difference between situations that require a right/wrong answer as opposed to the construction of knowledge and production of a joint artefact ( the processes that underpin group work in FE and HE and organisations ) -an idea stimulated by Bahador Bahrami

An experience that is often voiced by students that use CMC is that the others involved do not seem to be real.  Therefore I need to explore the work on plausibility (as described by Mel Slater).

Antonia Hamilton seeded the final discussion session by suggesting a model for how synergy is achieved between the study of social interaction by psychologists and the HCI folk who provide the technology behind virtual interaction. Could I take anything from this that would help me develop a synergy between virtual interaction in practice ( i.e. students using CMC for group work ) and theoretical models of social interaction that are neuro-scientifically plausible?

Thanks to all those who contributed list of contributors - you  all provided great value