Project: Designing effective learning environments
Education, in all of its forms, is undergoing enormous change. What are some of the features of what is happening in education and what are some of the challenges that have barely been addressed?
- 1. Technology (computers the internet) has dramatically altered how learning takes place.
- 2. The effectiveness of schools from preschool to universities has undergone review, scrutiny, and change.
- 3. Increasingly both public and private schools compete with one another for funds, and students, based on some measure of effectiveness.
- 4. Cognitive science tools and knowledge has just begun to be used in redesigned schools and learning environments. In part this has required sifting through hype from value and translating science in a form that can be applied in real world situations.
Several collaborative projects are currently being developed (and posted here) based on what is known about cognition (learning, memory, problems solving, decision making). One of these projects focuses on training of a variety of types of clinicians who work with drug abusing clients and patients. The training involves providing the most recent knowledge about brain science in general and the neurobiology of drug abuse in particular. As the project proceeds findings and activities will be tracked on this post.
Some of the features of an effective learning environment?
E-Learning Collaboration Project
From A to Z: What are features of an effective learning environment
To: Otto Oppenheimer, coordinator of collaborative projects, New Bretten mind-brain consortium
From: James Nottingham, Director of e-learning programs for the Jupiter Corporation
I am writing you this short note to let you know that we at Jupiter are among the growing number of groups in the private sector that are engaged in trying to design effective learning environments. We design e-learning tools for both corporations and government agencies. As you well know many e-learning projects are promoted with more in promises than substance. Too often, the design of e-learning and other educational environments are not based on current leaning science knowledge or effective evaluative instruments. We appreciate how difficult it is to make e-learning effective and reliable. Perhaps, as we get to know one another, we might collaborate on a project that integrates the talents of your consortium and our talented group of learning experts (applied and basic researchers).
You have posted a number of articles on issues relating to education in general and more specifically on the application of cognitive neuroscience to education. Most recently the New Bretten Consortium (EMS) posted a dismal picture of the value of current mind-brain science knowledge for education. An additional posting took issue with EMS’s position but it was a muted rejoinder. I thought that I would provide a list which I have entitled, From A to Z: What are features of an effective learning environment. In the future we can share with you how we have actually applied these features in learning environments (particularly e-learning programs).
Features
a. Evaluation of what the learner knows and how that knowledge is organized. This is a feature on the EMS list of elements that promote effective learning.
b. Testing throughout learning. Retrieval testing is a particularly important element assuring effective learning. Testing, retrieval of learning should be integrated in each learning module. The work of Henry Roediger and others highlight the unequivocal importance of retrieval testing.
c. Identify the level of expertise that is the goal of learning. How much and how deep learning should be expected.
d. Identify what aspects of learning should be automatic and what facets of learning should be under the deliberate control of the learner.
e. Multiple media coding of information (verbal, visual) to promote better, deeper, encoding.
f. Spacing effect. This is a very old strategy for enhancing learning. Distribute learning over time rather than trying cram lots of learning in a single module.
g. Preview expectations of the learner. Be clear and explicit in your learning goals.
h. The generation effect. Learners should have lots of opportunities to generate answers rather than to simply recognize to-be-learned information.
i. Learning should be active and not passive.
j. Promote organizational thinking through opportunities to integrate information including tasks such as outlining.
k. Stories and other similar scenarios that both serve to organize information and present to-be learned information in the context of storytelling.
l. Feedback throughout learning.
m. Design learning at a level of difficulty that takes into account what the learner already knows as well as at a level that requires work that is substantial but not overwhelming.
n. Likewise, assignments should be designed with level of difficulty in mind (not too easy or too hard).
o. Modules. Break learning into digestible parts.
p. Probing learning with challenging questioning by the learner and the learning program.
q. Self-regulated learning. Learners should have opportunities to become expert at learning that goes beyond the learning of to-be learned information in any module. Learning to learn is skill learning.
r. Perfect metacognitive skills. Self-tracking of level of success in learning is often inaccurate. Learners must learn how to gauge the level of their own learning success.
s. Evaluation must be a part of any new learning initiative. You will never know what worked, what didn’t and why without effective evaluation tools in place at the beginning of a project.
t. Component analysis of complex learning. In designing a learning environment that involves complex skill and knowledge training it is important to understand the component cognitive parts that make up the whole.
u. Be prepared to study learning failures. It is part of good evaluation research.
v. If possible and sample size allows it, consider looking at systematic individual differences in effective learning outcomes.
w. Try to gather interdisciplinary teams of learning environment designer who have learned to communicate with one another. Design of effective learning environments obviously requires skilled programmers as well as educators, cognitive scientists, out come researcher. The whole of such a group can and should be far more effective than the sum the disciplinary parts.
x. Be patient. Design of learning environments is difficult.
y. Regularly make use of independent evaluators to look at what you have accomplished.
z. Continue to learn. Learning environment designers must be also be learners.
Let us talk and learn from one another.
James Nottingham
PS one of my colleagues has written a report that organizes what we know about different types of knowledge. We would be happy to send you an outline of the project.
The valurama project
Applying behaviral and neuroscience knoweldge to the measurement of the value of almost anything, now and in the future. In addition we will explore how to reliably change value through information, individual and social interactive networks.