Ecc2012 13 5

ECC 2012-13

Educational/cognitive
technology: how to use the
evidence
Cargo cult science

TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION

Why being interested?

EVIDENCE-BASED ATTITUDE

Fair test: pay attention to…

Evidence about cognitive effects & learning…

The trouble with transfer and generalization

NEURO- & TECHNO-MYTHS

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Cargo cult science
•  1964 Feynman participates to a
Commission for evaluation of
math teaching manuals
•  New math

•  Feynman is greatly disappointed
both by new math and by the
outcomes of the Commission’s
work

•  And by education and
psychology as sciences that he
considered cargo cult sciences
or pseudoscience

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¤  Feynman 1974

¤  There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics
methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the
reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite
of the fact that we continually use these same people to
improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that
doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know
that their method should work?

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¤  All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example,
there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes,
and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very
interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where
the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He
wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from
wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door
where the food had been the time before
¤  The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the
other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures
on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he
thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to
change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the
rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the
laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and
still the rats could tell.
¤  He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when
they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So
he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to
fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed
any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

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¤  Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one
experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running
experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the
rat is really using--not what you think it's using. And that is the
experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to
use in order to be careful and control everything in an
experiment with rat-running.
¤  I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next
experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr.
Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the
corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right
on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention
to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not
referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the
rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to
discover something about rats. But not paying attention to
experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult
science."

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¤  In the South Seas there is a cargo cult
of people. During the war they saw
airplanes land with lots of good
materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they've
arranged to imitate things like
runways, to put fires along the sides of
the runways, to make a wooden hut
for a man to sit in, with two wooden
pieces on his head like headphones
and bars of bamboo sticking out like
antennas--he's the controller--and
they wait for the airplanes to land.
They're doing everything right. The
form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn't
work. No airplanes land.

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¤  So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're
missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

¤  Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think
ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this
pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to
teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it
some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking
that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad
boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the
rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to
the experts.

¤  A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject
and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject.
Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty.
That's why the planes didn't land--but they don't land.

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Reasons for being concerned by
technologies in education

¤  Digital revolution
¤  Digital natives/Digital literacy
¤  Technomyths
¤  The impact of technologies on cognition & the human nature

¤  Educational technologies
¤  Educational methods that exploit or are inspired by
technologies

¤  Technology’s inspired educational interventions
¤  Video games
¤  Multi-media interactive technologies

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1. The digital revolution

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…cognitive impact of technologies

¤  Claims that the use of technologies
changes our mind/nature
¤  Digital natives/Generation Y have
special skills
¤  Are more intelligent
¤  Stupid
¤  Violent
¤  Addicted

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¤  Prensky 2001

¤  What should we call these “new” students of today? Some
refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But
the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital
Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the
digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.
¤  So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were
not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in
our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most
aspects of the new technology are, and always will be
compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

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¤  Prensky 2001

¤  Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of
the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments,
or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really
big discontinuity has taken place.
¤  Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant
messaging are integral parts of their lives.
¤  It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the
sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and
process information fundamentally differently from their
predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most
educators suspect or realize.
¤  “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “
says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine … it is very
likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are
different from ours – as a result of how they grew up.
¤  But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that
their thinking patterns have changed.

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¤  Media Awareness Network Canada

¤  Established and internationally accepted definitions of digital
literacy are generally built on three principles:
¤  the skills and knowledge to use a variety of digital media software
applications and hardware devices, such as a computer, a mobile
phone, and Internet technology;
¤  the ability to critically understand digital media content and
applications;
¤  and the knowledge and capacity to create with digital
technology.

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2. Teaching machines
¤  1900: Educational film

¤  1924: Teaching Machines(Pressey)

¤  1954: Teaching Machines (Skinner)

¤  1966: Sesame Street

¤  1967: Logo Turtles (Papert)

¤  1970s-1990s: Computer based training/
learning CBT/L

¤  1970s-1990s: Computer aided instruction
CAT

¤  E-learning

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… fair evaluation of effects

¤  Theoretical
understanding of the
principles (and limits)
¤  Empirical, experimental
evaluation of the
effects

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3. Technology-inspired education

36 good learning principles
embedded in video games
(Gee 2005)

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¤  Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, Gee 2004

¤  Will video games change the way we learn?
¤  We argue here for a particular view of games—and of learning—as
activities that are most powerful when they are personally
meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the
same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach to the
design of learning environments that builds on the educational
properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of
learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new
technologies.
¤  We argue that to understand the future of learning, we have to look
beyond schools to the emerging arena of video games.
¤  We suggest that video games matter because they present players
with simulated worlds: worlds which, if well constructed, are not just
about facts or isolated skills, but embody particular social practices.
Video games thus make it possible for players to participate in
valued communities of practice and as a result develop the ways of
thinking that organize those practices.

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… evaluation of effects

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… fair evaluation of claims

¤  playing is intrinsically motivating, because one plays for the fun of it
and not because one has to.
¤  contradiction: even if games are for fun, if one has to play a game for
learning, the game is no more just for fun.

¤  playing makes learning fun and effortless
¤  opposed to school learning, which is considered as boring and effortful
¤  Unfair comparison: the kind of learning that is proposed at school can
hardly not be effortful because it concerns skills that do not come
naturally to us

¤  good games are motivating because they are concrete, multi-
modal, interactive, and involve the player learner in first person
actions
¤  Sure it works better?

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Fair tests: ay attention to…

¤  Causality vs correlation
¤  (Rosser et al, 2007)

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¤  Equivalence between
experimental and control
group
¤  Gopher 1994

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¤  Active controls
¤  (Robertson 2009)

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¤  Expected effect
¤  (Owen et al 2010)

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¤  Polarized, ideological debates & the
power of anecdotes

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Evidence about cognitive effects &
learning

¤  Cognitive training in the
elderly: memory, problem
solving, rapid visual
identification
¤  Ball et al. 2002

¤  Alzheimer
¤  Papp et al 2009

¤  Brain Training
¤  Owen et al 2010
¤  Bavelier, Green & Dye
2011

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¤  Video-games & Visuo-
spatial attention
¤  Green & Bavelier 2008
¤  Bavelier, Green & Dye
2010
¤  Boot et al 2008
¤  Boot et al 2011

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The trouble with transfer and
generalization

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¤  Willingham 2010
¤  Concrete cases and
variation is not enough

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¤  Bransford et al 2000, p. 44

¤  In one of the most famous early studies comparing the effects of
"learning a procedure" with "learning with understanding," two
groups of children practiced throwing darts at a target underwater
(Scholckow and Judd, described in Judd, 1908; see a conceptual
replication by Hendrickson and Schroeder, 1941).
¤  One group received an explanation of refraction of light, which
causes the apparent location of the target to be deceptive. The
other group only practiced dart throwing, without the explanation.
Both groups did equally well on the practice task, which involved a
target 12 inches under water.
¤  But the group that had been instructed about the abstract principle
did much better when they had to transfer to a situation in which
the target was under only 4 inches of water.
¤  Because they understood what they were doing, the group that
had received instruction about the refraction of light could adjust
their behavior to the new task.

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¤  Bransford et al. 2000, p. 52

¤  A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center
of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from
the fortress. All have been mined so that while small groups
of men can pass over the roads safely, a large force will
detonate the mines. A full-scale direct attack is therefore
impossible. The general's solution is to divide his army into
small groups, send each group to the head of a different
road, and have the groups converge simultaneously on the
fortress. Students memorized the information in the passage
and were then asked to try another task, which was to solve
the following problem

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¤  You are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant
tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the
patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed the patient will die.
There is a kind of ray that may be used to destroy the tumor.
If the rays reach the tumor all at once and with sufficiently
high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed, but surrounding
tissue may be damaged as well. At lower intensities the rays
are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the
tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to
destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid
destroying the healthy tissue?

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¤  Few college students were able to solve this problem when
left to their own devices.
¤  However, over 90 percent were able to solve the tumor
problem when they were explicitly told to use information
about the general and the fortress to help them.
¤  …. Despite the relevance of the fortress problem to the
tumor problem, the information was not used spontaneously
—the connection between the two sets of information had
to be explicitly pointed out.

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¤  Bransford et al. 2000, p. 23

¤  In one study, a chess master, a Class A player (good but not
a master), and a novice were given 5 seconds to view a
chess board position from the middle of a chess game. After
5 seconds the board was covered, and each participant
attempted to reconstruct the board position on another
board. This procedure was repeated for multiple trials until
everyone received a perfect score. On the first trial, the
master player correctly placed many more pieces than the
Class A player, who in turn placed more than the novice: 16,
8, and 4, respectively.
¤  However, these results occurred only when the chess pieces
were arranged in configurations that conformed to
meaningful games of chess. When chess pieces were
randomized and presented for 5 seconds, the recall of the
chess master and Class A player were the same as the
novice—they placed from 2 to 3 positions correctly.

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¤  “Ericsson et al. (1980) worked extensively with a college
student for well over a year, increasing his capacity to
remember digit strings (e.g., 982761093 …). As expected,
at the outset he could remember only about seven
numbers. After practice, he could remember 70 or
more… How? Did he develop a general skill analogous to
strengthening a "mental muscle?" No, what happened
was that he learned to use his specific background
knowledge to "chunk" information into meaningful
groups. The student had extensive knowledge about
winning times for famous track races, including the times
of national and world records. For example
941003591992100 could be chunked into 94100 (9.41
seconds for 100 yards). 3591 (3 minutes, 59.1 seconds for
a mile), etc. But it took the student a huge amount of
practice before he could perform at his final level, and
when he was tested with letter strings, he was back to
remembering about seven items.” (Bransford et al. 2000,
p. 40)

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Is technology making us more stupid/
intelligent?

¤  Carr 2008
¤  "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will
you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL
pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave
Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant
scene toward the end of
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey…
“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly.
“I can feel it. I can feel it.”
¤  I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve
had an uncomfortable sense that someone,
or something, has been tinkering with my
brain, remapping the neural circuitry,
reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t
going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can
feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

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¤  Chabris & Simon 2010
¤  The alarmists cite the concept of "neural plasticity" and talk of
technology "rewiring" the brain to convince us that the new
distractions make us not just less willing but less able, on a
physiological level, to focus.
¤  ….The appeals to neural plasticity, backed by studies showing that
traumatic injuries can reorganize the brain, are largely irrelevant.
¤  The basic plan of the brain's "wiring" is determined by genetic
programs and biochemical interactions that do most of their work
long before a child discovers Facebook and Twitter. There is simply no
experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies
fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects
one's ability to focus.
¤  Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a
new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without
fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay
attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.

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Two neuro-myths

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Considerations

¤  There's a logic in this apparent limitation of the brain
¤  an infinitely malleable brain that would change a wealth of
configurations for each new acquisition would risk to loose useful
capacities just because of a new acquisition in a completely
different domain
¤  A certain level of modularity and segregate learning effects
seem to be justified, in addition to be widely demonstrated in
many studies about perceptual, motor and cognitive training.

¤  The limits of transfer are a big preoccupation for educators
¤  education is meaningful only when it transfers towards
ecological situations – that is outside the classroom or away
from the video game console: in the real life

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…and technomyths

¤  Technomyth
¤  Google generation has different
mindset/skills
¤  Use of internet
¤  Attention/multi-tasking
¤  Risks with technomyts
¤  Illusion of understanding
¤  Illusion of attention
¤  Feeling confortable,
secure, and skilled

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