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Right up my alley

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The Best Innovations in Online Learning

From holographs and educational games, to drones and robots, 21st century educators are forging new and amazing trails in technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Virtually Inspired is a place where educators can come for inspiration by perusing each video showcase below to see how creative professionals around the globe are infusing technology with learning.

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Virtually Inspired: Showcasing Online Learning Innovation

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From holographs and educational games, to drones and robots, 21st century educators are forging new and amazing trails in technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Virtually Inspired is a place where educators can come for inspiration by perusing each video showcase below to see how creative professionals around the globe are infusing technology with learning.

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Emotions, Learning and the Brain

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Educators have long known that students' emotional experiences greatly impact their learning. Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang offers a neurobiological account of why this may be the case. In Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience, Immordino-Yang explains in a series of essays that the brain constructs complex emotional experiences that help us learn, socialize, and act morally by coopting the same brain regions that help us regulate our viscera and basic survival-related mechanisms. She argues that, contrary to centuries old theory that emotions interfere with rational thinking, our "emotional rudders" steer our rational actions and ability to learn. Learning occur through a complex interplay of our biological beings, psychological selves, and cultural contexts.

Immordino-Yang is uniquely positioned to offer insights from affective neuroscience for education because of her interdisciplinary background and experiences; she was a junior high school science teacher and currently is a human development and affective neuroscience researcher, an associate professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and the rising president of the International Mind Brain and Education Society. She encourages educators to join with her in a critical conversation about how to build bridges between an understanding of the complex process of students' learning and feelings in real-world classroom settings and the lab-based neuroscientific research about the brain's construction of emotion.

Immordino-Yang argues then that our ability to learn is contingent upon our ability to feel emotions. For example, individuals who suffered brain damage in a part of the frontal lobe that impacted their social and emotional behavior (but not IQ) were subsequently unable to develop intuitions in new learning situations to guide rational thought or action. Students benefit when emotions, such as interest and inspiration, are harnessed in the classroom and when educators respect students' emotional intuitions. It is not surprising that these social emotional experiences matter so deeply for learning and creativity when we consider that our ability to feel these emotions is evolutionarily entwined with our ability to regulate our basic life-supporting physiological functioning (e.g., breathing).

In an fMRI experiment Immordino-Yang found that feeling admiration or compassion for other people activated brain networks associated with inwardly-directed thoughts rather than thoughts about the outside world. As such, she constructs a compelling argument that supporting students in developing their ability to reason complexly about the future and about social, emotional, and moral quandaries may necessitate giving students time to reflect and direct their thoughts inward.

Immordino-Yang offers a fascinating case-study about the affective skill, emotional prosody, and general functioning of two boys-Nico and Brooke-who have each had one hemisphere of their brains removed. These boys are both remarkably successful and even show a good deal of proficiency with tasks typically thought to be governed by the hemisphere that they have lost. For neurologically typical students these boys' ability suggests the power of capitalizing on one's unique strengths and the importance of reframing problems such that they are solvable given the skills that one possess. Immordino-Yang suggests also that these boys show that our emotional experiences affect us throughout the learning processes-even in the way we come to gather information when learning. Drawing on her work with Nico and Brooke as well as recent advances in our understanding of the brain's mirror neuron areas, which maps both one's own actions and the observation of another's' actions, Immordino-Yang argues that our interpretation of actions is culturally situated. Students must understand a teacher's goals and intentions and develop an appropriate plan for their own actions.

Immordino-Yang concludes with a timely discussion about the way in which social and affective neuroscience can help us understand how to facilitate interactions with digital devices. The more the human-computer interaction is like an authentic social interaction-in which goals are transparent and each party has a role in shaping the exchange-the more satisfied people are likely to be with the design of the technology.

Howard Gardner aptly summarized Immordino-Yang's strength in the foreword of this fascinating book: "Mary Helen stands out for the way in which she has drawn on the findings and perspectives of [multi-disciplinary] scholars, initiated important lines of research in these areas, brought together her work with those of other innovative scholars into original powerful syntheses, and articulated the educational implications of cutting edge work in psychology, neurology, and other strands of the cognitive sciences."

Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2015) Emotions, Learning and the Brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

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Emotions, Learning and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, EdD

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Educators have long known that students' emotional experiences greatly impact their learning. Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang offers a neurobiological account of why this may be the case.

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for educators

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Publications, lessons, and activities for teachers.

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What Is ‘Transfer of Learning’ and How Does It Help Students?

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The Science of Learning - How does learning transfer to new situations in/outside of the classroom?

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BETHLEHEM, PA -College students who are conducting their job search and want to impress employers with their resumes should emphasize their abilities to solve problems and work as part of a team, according to a new survey report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

When NACE asked employers participating in its Job Outlook 2018 survey which attributes-beyond a strong GPA-they most value, employers indicated that problem-solving skills and an ability to work in a team are the most desired attributes and are of equal importance. (See Figure 1.) This is the second consecutive year that the largest percentage of employers will search for these attributes on students' resumes.

Following problem-solving skills and teamwork abilities, written communication skills, leadership, and a strong work ethic are also highly valued attributes that employers want to see evidence of on resumes.

Employers also provided insight into the influence of attributes when deciding between two otherwise equally qualified candidates. This year, NACE added four attributes-all related to work experience-to the original list that had been used in the past.

While past surveys consistently found the student's major to be the deciding factor between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, this year the most influential factors are whether the candidate completed an internship with the hiring organization and whether the candidate has internship experience within the hiring organization's industry. (See Figure 2.)

Additionally, general work experience and no work experience are found to be more of a deciding factor than a candidate's high GPA (3.0 or above), involvement in extracurricular activities, school attended, and volunteer work. The only other attribute that held its ground with the addition of the new attributes is leadership. It continues to follow immediately after the student's major in terms of influence.

About the Job Outlook 2018 survey: Data for the Job Outlook 2018 survey were collected from NACE's employer members from August 9, 2017, through October 2, 2017. A total of 201 surveys were returned-a 20.5 percent response rate. Of those responding, 14.4 percent of respondents were from the West, 25.9 percent were from the Northeast, 23.9 percent were from the Southeast, and 35.8 percent were from the Midwest. The Job Outlook 2018 report is available for purchase at www.naceweb.org/store/2017/job-outlook-2018/.

About NACE: Since 1956, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) has been the leading source of information about the employment of college graduates. For more information, visit www.naceweb.org. NACE maintains a virtual press room for the media at www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/.

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The Key Attributes Employers Seek on Students' Resumes

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College students who are conducting their job search and want to impress employers with their resumes should emphasize their abilities to solve problems and work as part of a team, according to a new survey report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

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Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice

Thinking about One's Thinking

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.

Initially studied for its development in young children (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1985), researchers soon began to look at how experts display metacognitive thinking and how, then, these thought processes can be taught to novices to improve their learning (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986). In How People Learn, the National Academy of Sciences' synthesis of decades of research on the science of learning, one of the three key findings of this work is the effectiveness of a "'metacognitive' approach to instruction" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 18).

Metacognitive practices increase students' abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991). They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter: they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts. When Pintrich (2002) asserts that "Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them" (p. 222), notice the students must "know about" these strategies, not just practice them. As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a " conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]" (p. 179).

Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc. A key element is recognizing the limit of one's knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to "actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67).

The absence of metacognition connects to the research by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger on "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003). They found that "people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence," lacking "insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills." They identified this pattern across domains-from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters' knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians' knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills (p. 83-84). In short, "if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else's, are right or wrong" (p. 85). This research suggests that increased metacognitive abilities-to learn specific (and correct) skills, how to recognize them, and how to practice them-is needed in many contexts.

Putting Metacognition into Practice

In " Promoting Student Metacognition," Tanner (2012) offers a handful of specific activities for biology classes, but they can be adapted to any discipline. She first describes four assignments for explicit instruction (p. 116):

Preassessments-Encouraging Students to Examine Their Current Thinking: "What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?"

The Muddiest Point-Giving Students Practice in Identifying Confusions: "What was most confusing to me about the material explored in class today?"

Retrospective Postassessments-Pushing Students to Recognize Conceptual Change: "Before this course, I thought evolution was... Now I think that evolution is ...." or "How is my thinking changing (or not changing) over time?"

Reflective Journals-Providing a Forum in Which Students Monitor Their Own Thinking: "What about my exam preparation worked well that I should remember to do next time? What did not work so well that I should not do next time or that I should change?"

Next are recommendations for developing a "classroom culture grounded in metacognition" (p. 116-118):

Giving Students License to Identify Confusions within the Classroom Culture: ask students what they find confusing, acknowledge the difficulties

Integrating Reflection into Credited Course Work: integrate short reflection (oral or written) that ask students what they found challenging or what questions arose during an assignment/exam/project

Metacognitive Modeling by the Instructor for Students: model the thinking processes involved in your field and sought in your course by being explicit about "how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you check your work, how you know when you are done" (p. 118)

To facilitate these activities, she also offers three useful tables:

Questions for students to ask themselves as they plan, monitor, and evaluate their thinking within four learning contexts-in class, assignments, quizzes/exams, and the course as a whole (p. 115)

Prompts for integrating metacognition into discussions of pairs during clicker activities, assignments, and quiz or exam preparation (p. 117)

Questions to help faculty metacognitively assess their own teaching (p. 119)

Weimer's " Deep Learning vs. Surface Learning: Getting Students to Understand the Difference " (2012) offers additional recommendations for developing students' metacognitive awareness and improvement of their study skills:

"[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and concerted ways we make students aware of themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not only 'What are you learning?' but 'How are you learning?' We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches." (emphasis added)

She points to a tool developed by Stanger-Hall (2012, p. 297) for her students to identify their study strategies, which she divided into " cognitively passive" ("I previewed the reading before class," "I came to class," "I read the assigned text," "I highlighted the text," et al) and " cognitively active study behaviors" ("I asked myself: 'How does it work?' and 'Why does it work this way?'" "I wrote my own study questions," "I fit all the facts into a bigger picture," "I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered," et al). The specific focus of Stanger-Hall's study is tangential to this discussion, ¹ but imagine giving students lists like hers adapted to your course and then, after a major assignment, having students discuss which ones worked and which types of behaviors led to higher grades. Even further, follow Lovett's advice (2013) by assigning "exam wrappers," which include students reflecting on their previous exam-preparation strategies, assessing those strategies and then looking ahead to the next exam, and writing an action plan for a revised approach to studying. A common assignment in English composition courses is the self-assessment essay in which students apply course criteria to articulate their strengths and weaknesses within single papers or over the course of the semester. These activities can be adapted to assignments other than exams or essays, such as projects, speeches, discussions, and the like.

As these examples illustrate, for students to become more metacognitive, they must be taught the concept and its language explicitly (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), though not in a content-delivery model (simply a reading or a lecture) and not in one lesson. Instead, the explicit instruction should be "designed according to a knowledge construction approach," or students need to recognize, assess, and connect new skills to old ones, "and it needs to take place over an extended period of time" (Zohar & David, p. 187). This kind of explicit instruction will help students expand or replace existing learning strategies with new and more effective ones, give students a way to talk about learning and thinking, compare strategies with their classmates' and make more informed choices, and render learning "less opaque to students, rather than being something that happens mysteriously or that some students 'get' and learn and others struggle and don't learn" (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223).

Metacognition instruction should also be embedded with the content and activities about which students are thinking. Why? Metacognition is "not generic" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 19) but instead is most effective when it is adapted to reflect the specific learning contexts of a specific topic, course, or discipline (Zohar & David, 2009). In explicitly connecting a learning context to its relevant processes, learners will be more able to adapt strategies to new contexts, rather than assume that learning is the same everywhere and every time. For instance, students' abilities to read disciplinary texts in discipline-appropriate ways would also benefit from metacognitive practice. A literature professor may read a passage of a novel aloud in class, while also talking about what she's thinking as she reads: how she makes sense of specific words and phrases, what connections she makes, how she approaches difficult passages, etc. This kind of modeling is a good practice in metacognition instruction, as suggested by Tanner above. Concepción's " Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition " (2004) includes his detailed "How to Read Philosophy" handout (pp. 358-367), which includes the following components:

What to Expect (when reading philosophy)

The Ultimate Goal (of reading philosophy)

Basic Good Reading Behaviors

Important Background Information, or discipline- and course-specific reading practices, such as "reading for enlightenment" rather than information, and "problem-based classes" rather than historical or figure-based classes

A Three-Part Reading Process (pre-reading, understanding, and evaluating)

Flagging, or annotating the reading

Linear vs. Dialogical Writing (Philosophical writing is rarely straightforward but instead "a monologue that contains a dialogue" [p. 365].)

What would such a handout look like for your discipline?

Students can even be metacognitively prepared (and then prepare themselves) for the overarching learning experiences expected in specific contexts. Salvatori and Donahue's The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (2004) encourages students to embrace difficult texts (and tasks) as part of deep learning, rather than an obstacle. Their "difficulty paper" assignment helps students reflect on and articulate the nature of the difficulty and work through their responses to it (p. 9). Similarly, in courses with sensitive subject matter, a different kind of learning occurs, one that involves complex emotional responses. In " Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses" (Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, 2009), students were informed about the common reactions to learning about racial inequality (Helms, 1995; Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; see student handout, Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, p. 23-24) and then regularly wrote about their cognitive and affective responses to specific racialized situations. The students with the most developed metacognitive and meta-affective practices at the end of the semester were able to "clear the obstacles and move away from" oversimplified thinking about race and racism "to places of greater questioning, acknowledging the complexities of identity, and redefining the world in racial terms" (p. 14).

Ultimately, metacognition requires students to "externalize mental events" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67), such as what it means to learn, awareness of one's strengths and weaknesses with specific skills or in a given learning context, plan what's required to accomplish a specific learning goal or activity, identifying and correcting errors, and preparing ahead for learning processes.

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1 Students who were tested with short answer in addition to multiple-choice questions on their exams reported more cognitively active behaviors than those tested with just multiple-choice questions, and these active behaviors led to improved performance on the final exam.
References

Adams, Maurianne, Bell, Lee Ann, and Griffin, Pat. (1997). Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook. New York: Routledge.

Bransford, John D., Brown Ann L., and Cocking Rodney R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Baker, Linda, and Brown, Ann L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In Paul David Pearson, Michael L. Kamil, Rebecca Barr, & Peter Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of research in reading: Volume III (pp. 353-395). New York: Longman.

Brown, Ann L. (1980). Metacognitive development and reading. In Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer, (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education (pp. 453-482). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chick, Nancy, Karis, Terri, and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009). Learning from their own learning: how metacognitive and meta-affective reflections enhance learning in race-related courses . International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(1). 1-28.

Flavell, John H. (1985). Cognitive development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Hatano, Giyoo and Inagaki, Kayoko. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In Harold Stevenson, Azuma, Horishi, and Hakuta, Kinji (Eds.), Child development and education in Japan, New York: W.H. Freeman.

Lovett, Marsha C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. In Matthew Kaplan, Naomi Silver, Danielle LaVague-Manty, and Deborah Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Donahue, Patricia. (2004). The Elements (and pleasures) of difficulty. New York: Pearson-Longman.

Schoenfeld, Alan H. (1991). On mathematics as sense making: An informal attack on the fortunate divorce of formal and informal mathematics. In James F. Voss, David N. Perkins, and Judith W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp. 311-344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Weimer, Maryellen. (2012, November 19). Deep learning vs. surface learning: Getting students to understand the difference. Retrieved from the Teaching Professor Blog from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/deep-learning-vs-surface-learning-getting-students-to-understand-the-difference/.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Nancy Chick Print Version Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice Thinking about One's Thinking Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess...

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Blakemore and Firth Publication to Investigate

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Blakemore and Firth Publication to Investigate

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Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's Research Lab Website

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Pak tha ca

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Neil Burgess: How your brain tells you where you are

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How do you remember where you parked your car? How do you know if you're moving in the right direction? Neuroscientist Neil Burgess studies the neural mechanisms that map the space around us, and how they link to memory and imagination.

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Feats - crazy

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There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique -- called the memory palace -- and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him.

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Online Learning Consortium Institute: Workshops: Log in to the site

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How well do students learn when a lesson is mainly in PowerPoint? Henrik Berger Jørgensen, CC BY-NC-ND

For a brief period in the history of teaching, using PowerPoint automatically qualified you as a tech-savvy professor - an innovator who wouldn't settle for the usual combination of staticky black-and-white overhead films and hand-scrawled chalkboard notes.

Now, it's hard to believe that PowerPoint was once considered innovative by anyone. Popular criticism includes everything from tongue-in-cheek comments about death by PowerPoint to serious claims that it fundamentally degrades how we think and communicate.

But much of today's college instruction isn't in face-to-face classrooms, a setting in which PowerPoint was traditionally used. It's in the burgeoning field of online learning.

So if more learning is moving online, does that mean that teaching with PowerPoint is becoming a thing of the past?

Surprisingly, the answer is no.

Passive learning through PowerPoint?

Even though there's little research that directly addresses whether PowerPoint affects learning in college students, critics have questioned its value in educational settings.

Some ask whether PowerPoint might indirectly undermine the quality of teaching by reinforcing a passive learning approach.

We know that lecturing is less effective than alternative methods. It therefore makes sense for teachers in face-to-face classrooms to question how much of their class time ought to be spent on slideshows.

But the fact is "slideshows" remain a popular method for presenting content in today's online courses.

Technically, these are often not PowerPoints, but decks generated using other types of specialized programs.

And they may differ from standard in-class PowerPoint presentations in important ways.

For example, taking advantage of the increased flexibility of the online environment, they give students more control over how quickly to go through the material and when to backtrack. They can also have more interactive features, such as quizzes, that ask students to apply material while they are learning it.

Even so, the basic - and flawed - idea is the same: put the material in front of students, and learning will happen.

What's wrong with slideshows in online courses

As a psychologist specializing in teaching techniques and course design, when I talk to faculty about teaching effectively with technology, I sometimes tell them to follow the ABS principle: anything but slideshows.

I'm only half-kidding with that blanket statement.

After all, we learn with the same brains in online environments as we do face-to-face; the principles of learning don't change just because the medium changes. And today's learning theorists agree: active involvement trumps passive viewing.

Students need to grapple with challenging problems, practice skills, discuss and defend viewpoints. But for this kind of active learning to happen, instructors need to ensure they do not rely too heavily on slides.

There are alternatives: simulations, problem-based learning, even educational games are all proven methods for drawing students in. They also transplant well into online learning.

Using slideshows the right way

So do slideshows have any place in a well-designed online course? Possibly.

They can be used strategically for things they are best at: giving students an overview of new material, or providing a refresher on concepts students will need for an upcoming activity.

Slides are also great for for integrating visual illustrations. This is important because visuals - diagrams, figures, photos and the like - have a powerful impact on learning.

Visual information is almost always more memorable than sound, text or other modalities.

This isn't because of the now-debunked idea that some people are "visual learners," but more likely stems from how the brain codes images. There are separate systems for representing verbal and visual information in the brain. When we save information in both places, it is easier to recall.

Teachers don't have to stick with static images, either. Even basic animations can illuminate conceptual relationships - such as cause and effect, or the unfolding of a process over time - in ways that text can't.

Furthermore, as University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Richard Mayer has discovered, visuals and the spoken word pair up in powerful ways, so that audio plus visuals produce better learning than either alone.

Research also tells teachers some things not to do with visuals. Instructors should avoid purely decorative graphics, as these can actually hamper learning.

They should also eschew reading text verbatim, instead using a conversational, natural speaking style for voiceovers and verbal explanations.

What this means in the larger context of online learning

In sum, slideshows can be a useful part of online instruction, when used for the right things and designed in the right way. But they shouldn't be the main, or the only, method of instruction - any more than lectures should dominate face-to-face classes.

But it's not just instructors who need to hear this message.

Publishing and educational technology companies, who provide many of the tools that educators rely on, can do more to develop products that push beyond familiar formulas and draw on the latest learning science.

We need tools that make it easy to create assignments that ask students to apply what they have learned, in scenarios that are as realistic and challenging as possible.

These learning tools also need to be adaptive, adjusting the material and pace to the individual learner. This kind of educational technology does exist, but far more can be done to expand the available options.

Teaching in the age of technology comes with its own set of opportunities as well as challenges. And online education presents educators and tech developers with a rare opportunity to fundamentally rethink what we do.

Will we use it to explore new avenues for learning, or will we fall back on the the same old techniques that don't work well in face-to-face classrooms?

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Learning from PowerPoint: is it time for teachers to move on?

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Slideshows, when designed right, can be a useful part of online instruction. But they shouldn't be the main, or the only, method of instruction.

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Summary: A cognitive theory of multimedia learning based on three main assumptions: there are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information; there is limited channel capacity; and that learning is an active process of filtering, selecting, organizing, and integrating information.

Originator: Richard Mayer (1947-)

Key terms: dual-channel, limited capacity, sensory, working, long-term memory
Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer)
The principle known as the "multimedia principle" states that "people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone" (p. 47)[1]. However, simply adding words to pictures is not an effective way to achieve multimedia learning. The goal is to instructional media in the light of how human mind works. This is the basis for Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning. This theory proposes three main assumptions when it comes to learning with multimedia[2]:

1. There are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information (sometimes referred to as Dual-Coding theory);

2. Each channel has a limited (finite) capacity (similar to Sweller's notion of Cognitive Load);

3. Learning is an active process of filtering, selecting, organizing, and integrating information based upon prior knowledge.

Humans can only process a finite amount of information in a channel at a time, and they make sense of incoming information by actively creating mental representations. Mayer also discusses the role of three memory stores: sensory (which receives stimuli and stores it for a very short time), working (where we actively process information to create mental constructs (or 'schema'), and long-term (the repository of all things learned). Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning presents the idea that the brain does not interpret a multimedia presentation of words, pictures, and auditory information in a mutually exclusive fashion; rather, these elements are selected and organized dynamically to produce logical mental constructs. Furthermore, Mayer underscores the importance of learning (based upon the testing of content and demonstrating the successful transfer of knowledge) when new information is integrated with prior knowledge.

Design principles including providing coherent verbal, pictorial information, guiding the learners to select relevant words and images, and reducing the load for a single processing channel etc. can be entailed from this theory[3][4].

For more information, see the following recommended resources:

Richard Mayer's book: Multimedia Learning
The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology)
References

1. Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press.

2. Mayer, R. E. (2002). Multimedia learning. Psychology of learning and motivation, 41, 85-139.

3. Mayer, R. E. (1997). Multimedia learning: Are we asking the right questions?.Educational psychologist, 32(1), 1-19.

4. Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.

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Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (Mayer)

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Summary: A cognitive theory of multimedia learning based on three main assumptions: there are two separate channels (auditory and visual) for processing information; there is limited channel capacity; and that learning is an active process of filtering, selecting, organizing, and integrating information.

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very eye opening

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This blog post has some pretty useful information. So print it out; get out your highlighter and take off the cap.

Ready? Now throw it away, because highlighters don't really help people learn.

We all want for our kids to have optimal learning experiences and, for ourselves, to stay competitive with lifelong learning. But how well do you think you understand what good learning looks like?

Ulrich Boser says, probably not very well. His new research on learning shows that the public is largely ignorant of, well, research on learning. Boser runs the science of learning initiative at the left-leaning thinktank the Center for American Progress. He has a new book out, also about the science of learning, titled Learn Better.

He recently surveyed a representative sample of more than 3,000 Americans to test their beliefs about common learning myths.

"We wanted to document this gap between public perception and good practice," he told NPR Ed. "In our paper we call it the, 'Been there, done that' problem. People went to school, so they have a feeling they know what good teaching looks like."

But in fact, public opinion diverges from reality.

If you want to test your own knowledge, take our version of the Learning Myths quiz here. Then come back and read the rest of this post.

Here are some of the most striking results:

Close to 90 percent of Boser's respondents agreed that students should receive information in their own "learning style."

The idea that individuals have different learning styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic, is a pernicious myth. Boser compares it to the flat-earth myth - highly intuitive, but wrong.

Even the U.S. Department of Education sent out an email just this week encouraging teachers to "make [their] own call on how to utilize learning styles in the classroom." One major recent review of research, among many others, stated that the authors "found virtually no evidence" for the idea.

71 percent of respondents indicated that teachers should motivate students by praising them "for being smart." A large body of research by Carol Dweck at Stanford and others suggests that this kind of praise is countereffective. Praising effort, rather than ability, is far more likely to motivate students to work hard and improve.

On the topic of "growth mindset," more than one-quarter of respondents believed intelligence is "fixed at birth". Neuroscience says otherwise.

More than 40 percent of respondents believed that teachers don't need to know a subject area such as math or science, as long as they have good instructional skills. In fact, research shows that deep subject matter expertise is a key element in helping teachers excel.

And finally, despite their overall poor showing, more than 75 percent of respondents considered themselves "above average" in their ability to judge the work that teachers do.

This last finding, which could be called the confidence gap, really matters for the education kids are getting, Boser argues.

"It helps explain why teaching has been so devalued for a long time. We see that in how teachers get paid and treated."

Public schools, in particular, are governed by school boards often composed of non-educators. They are subject to pressure from parents, too. "Parents' opinions are important, but teaching is a real craft," Boser says. "A lot of science goes into it. And we need to do more to respect that."

If the public doesn't understand what active learning looks like, he adds, or why growth mindset is important, then schools may be pushed in the wrong direction.

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You Probably Believe Some Learning Myths: Take Our Quiz To Find Out

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A new survey shows widespread misconceptions and unfounded confidence about learning.

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SAGE Video - Human Memory is not a Videocamera

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Professor Steve Joordens discusses memory and how memory works. He describes episodic memory and explains that memory recall is actually memory recreation. M

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testing is OK. Supports open book, low stakes

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Day 5 - SOM Version - Influences on Memory - with Closed Captions

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The creative brain

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The surprising habits of original thinkers

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How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals -- including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”

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Day 4 - Learning to Think - SOM version with closed captions

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UC 199 Part 2: Processes - Building Memory Power

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Part 2: Processes - Building Memory Power Animation; Dr. Michelle Miller

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Miller Day 3 SOM Version with Captions (2) (Copy)

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What College Teachers Should Know About Memory: APerspective From Cognitive Psychology

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What College Teachers Should Know About Memory: APerspective From Cognitive Psychology

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Great article and surprising myth about chunking

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Basic Framework for New Brain based Learning

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connection between play and neurotransmitters

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connection between play and neurotransmitters

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No wonder you remember better while having fun

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Growth Mindset

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The power of believing that you can improve

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Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.

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In particular I was interested in why the brain doesn't heal itself in certain situations.

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After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver