Peps

SUMMARY

• Elaboration helps students deepen and apply their understanding.
• We can foster it by getting students to summarise, explain, visualise, and enact.
• This works best when it is not cognitively overloading, and students have sufficient prior knowledge.

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Making Sense of Generative Learning Educational Psychology Review - How do learners make sense of what they are learning? In this article, I present a new framework of sense-making based on research investigating the benefits and...

🎓 For more on the theory, check out this review of generative learning activities:

link.springer.com/article/10....

(and for a wonderfully practical exploration, see the Enser’s book on the topic)

And all of them work best when students have sufficient background knowledge, can hold new ideas in mind, and see the point of such exercises.

Some of these activities work better for certain content (eg. diagrams are great for spatial relations) and different age groups (eg. young children can often experience cognitive overload when mapping).

- Enacting: Using movements to represent actions, concepts, or relationships

→ Conceptualise planetary orbits by physically modelling the solar system, walking in circles around a central ‘sun’, and representing different planets.

3/ Visualising

Creating drawings, maps, or diagrams to illustrate key ideas and their connections

→ Create a flowchart to show the steps of cellular respiration, linking glucose breakdown to energy release and waste production.

2/ Explaining

Describing how ideas work, comparing examples, or predicting outcomes, either to others or oneself

→ Explain Newton's third law to a peer by describing how pushing against a wall results in an equal and opposite force.

1/ Summarising

Reworking the main ideas in one’s own words to deepen comprehension

→ Rewrite the main points of photosynthesis in your own words, focusing on key stages like light absorption and glucose production.

This process, known as elaboration, often requires teacher guidance, as learners aren’t typically inclined to do it naturally.

Examples of activities that foster elaboration include:

During externalisation, if we prompt students to expand upon new ideas, integrate them with prior knowledge, or organise them in more meaningful ways, we can help them to deepen their understanding and better apply it to new situations.

Prompting students to externalise their thinking through activities such as talking, writing, or drawing can enhance learning.

This works by focusing attention, strengthening encoding, and fostering clarity of thought.

Elaboration:

The key to deepening understanding and transfer

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SUMMARY

• At appropriate points, prompting students to externalise their thinking can boost learning.
• Such as getting them to talk, write, or draw.
• This works via boosting attention, strengthening encoding, and forcing clarity.

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Theories of the generation effect and the impact of generation constraint: A meta-analytic review Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - The generation effect is the memory benefit for self-generated compared with read or experimenter-provided information. In recent decades, numerous theories have...

🎓 For more, check out this review of the generation effect and its underpinning mechanics:

link.springer.com/article/10....

Externalised thinking works best when we provide as few clues as possible to the answer (eg. free recall tends to be more powerful than MCQs), while still ensuring that students think the right thing (and if not: we provide immediate feedback & prompt re-thinking).

Note → Despite these benefits, externalising our thinking can sometimes feel less productive, in part because it tends to require more effort.

It’s not that internal modes aren’t useful—just that they can be enhanced when combined with external modes, because this can:

• Increase the chances of attention being paid
• Strengthen encoding, via neural activation
• Force greater clarity of thought

Externalisation is the product of things like talking, writing, or drawing… in contrast to more internal thinking processes generated by things such as reading, watching, or listening.

This is a fairly basic idea that will be intuitive to most teachers. However, just because it’s basic doesn’t mean it’s easy to apply in sophisticated ways.

For example, instead of just explaining an idea, if we also ask students to discuss it... or instead of just reading something, we also ask students to create a written summary in their own words... they are more likely to understand and remember better.

At appropriate points in our teaching, if we prompt students to externalise their thinking, it can lead to stronger learning than if we just let them think in more internalised ways.

“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”
— Graham Wallas

How to harness the 'Generation Effect' by externalising thinking...

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SUMMARY

• One reason learning styles may be so popular is due to their ‘moral appeal’.
•They align well with our admiration for individuality, choice, and natural approaches.
• However, applying such liberal ideals to the process of schooling may limit our ability to achieve liberal outcomes.

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Why the learning styles myth appeals and how to persuade believers otherwise Many teachers and researchers, among others, continue to believe, despite the lack of evidence, that learning will be more effective if educators matc…

🎓 For more, check out this analysis of the wonky moral intuitions that underlie the learning styles myth:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

In these reactions, we are merely reflecting the deeply held moral positions of our society. However, despite the best of intentions, when we let such gut feelings get in the way of the evidence, we risk thwarting the very values we seek to advance.

and why some folks—including me—can find ourselves experiencing an negative emotional response to things like consistent routines, centralised curricula, and choral response (at least until we better understand the cause and effect of the classroom).

Liberal overreach explains why notions such as student-led education, personalised learning, and inquiry teaching have such intuitive appeal (irrespective of their efficacy)...

This represents a particularly pernicious form of means-ends conflation, which we might call ‘liberal overreach’.

For example, the more we provide students with choices during their schooling, the more we may inadvertently limit their ability to make choices in the future (because they’re not always in a good position to make wise decisions about the what and the how of their learning).

However, we find ourselves in a logical pickle when we fail to recognise that sometimes applying liberal ideals to the process of schooling can limit our ability to achieve liberal ideals as the outcomes of schooling.