More videos from Bradley Busch
Video transcript
okay bradley what is your fifth and final tip for us please okay uh fifth and final tip uh i’ve gone for something a bit more generalized as opposed to a specific like wait times everything um i guess my fifth tip i think for all teachers who are interested in becoming more research informed is to ask yourself uh what evidence would i require to change my mind about something because we alluded to some of the growth mindset stuff earlier uh i was very bullish when i read some initial research and then you read conflicting research so it doesn’t disprove anything but it just paints a more richer picture and so it’s interesting to think about what evidence would be required to change your mind because sometimes research it’s very easy and we all sit here very proudly with ourselves that the profession is much more research engaged but do we just use it as a way to confirm our initial beliefs and we add more weight to the studies that kind of cement our previous position and we find easy ways to discredit studies that don’t cement our position and yeah i think it’s really interesting to consider what would it take to change your mind on a position that you have and so i’m for example i think retrieval practice and spacing is probably about as strong a bet as you get when you look at 30 years of research um i don’t see that changing anytime soon but what research would it take for me to change my mind on that i think it’s a healthy conversation because i think we do have to be quite discerning users with research in terms of asking awkward questions of ourselves um and i think it’s i think researchers can give guidelines but each new study does change how i view stuff like i now view retrieval practice slightly differently to how i did three years ago based on some stuff i’ve read um and i think that’s an interesting discussion around yeah what would it take to change your mind either from personal experience with students all from research that fact that you’ve read this is a brilliant one this i want to dig into this as specifically in a second valley but i’m just intrigued by that that retrieval thing what was it that you’ve changed your mind about in terms of retrieval um so like i guess yeah so for example i read one really interesting study um it came out about two years ago i only read it last month around should you give hints during retrieval practice and what they found is for example students love it when you give them hints and students perceive it to help them with their learning more but yeah actually when you check how much they’ve actually learned those who’ve been given quite a lot of hints tend to remember less so you have it again comes back to our timeless about what you like and what’s best for you um and so now i kind of i now think about how it’s not just enough to do retrieval actually i need to do retrieval that’s difficult but still successful yeah um that still probably is followed by feedback it doesn’t have to be but i think it’s better if it is so it’s not just the acts of retrieving though that has benefits it’s more this nuanced approach of how we do retrieval i’ll tell you another example i used to think and i still think it’s okay you do achieve it at the end of the lesson based on the lessons that you’ve taught but i now kind of think of that more akin to checking for understanding whereas actually now i think maybe it’s better to do retrieval on stuff you did two or three weeks ago because i know from a whole bunch of studies retention rates are really high in the first day forgetting that right uh and they’re actually doing quizzing on stuff that i don’t expect you to get it all right but i want to see what’s bubbling away so maybe i do retrieval more stuff he did two weeks ago than opposed to this lesson um so yeah it’s just it’s not wholesale change it’s not like i was pronouncing that it’s more about just the nuance of the application i think that’s what we’re kind of improving our understanding of got it um i’ll tell you what’s interesting for me here bradley so when i first started reading research i’ve been teaching for 12 years before i read my first piece of research and when i read it i thought this is amazing because this has all the answers here you read a piece of research it tells your summer and then you go and do it in the classroom and everyone’s happy and then as we spoke about earlier on in this conversation you read something that says either the exact opposite or contradicts what you’ve said and so on now i mean you’ve probably read 10 times the amount of research that i’ve read but i’ve read a fair bit but i don’t know but i’ll tell you something i don’t know about you here i still don’t think i’m at the point where i can accurately decide whether a piece of research is is valid or reliable because like a classic example of this is um i used to think john hatty’s visible learning and effect size and stuff we’re kind of the be-all and end-all i thought this is amazing this is combining you know all the best research studies into one like a meta-analysis what could be better than that and then on ollie lovell’s education research reading room they had a whole episode where a guy was just tearing apart had his work on like say metro analyses are loaded in answers and i’m thinking how can i as a teacher get my head around this and then you’ve got you know sample sizes significance levels all this kind of stuff random control trials so it’s real dangerous isn’t it because like i’m with you i think retrieval is amazing but somebody could come along to me and say look there’s this study that says the worst thing you can ever do is space learning and i’d have to i’d have to really look hard at that study and i don’t know if i’ve got the tools to think is that a valid or reliable study or not it’s difficult isn’t it yeah uh so i guess a couple of things i’d say so one thing that i’m finding you mentioned effect sizes is i now pretty much don’t care about effects on yeah i care about effect size kind of relative to the time cost so if you’re doing an intervention that’s only 20 minutes from a research paper and it led to a small effect size well i’m not kind of okay with that i care a lot more because this exercise is small and it’s been a 10 week intensive program so i think more like the ratio is like an interesting part um i sometimes talk about research papers i think i think there’s something i don’t even know if this is a thing i’ve just made it up uh i like the tripadvisor effect um where like basically people only go on tripadvisor to give something five stars because they loved it yes or one star because i hated it and you see that with research all the time is this paper is brilliant five stars it proves my point or this paper is rubbish that debunks the whole theory uh and that isn’t the way to do research or even understand research so if you find one paper that essentially gives for one of a better phrase space learning one star on tripadvisor for me that doesn’t debunk i actually hate the word debug but i don’t debunk uh spacing that study adds to our knowledge of the existing research and so we kind of talked about in our in our book uh right at the start we said one study is kind of like a single thread but taken together when you zoom out you can see it’s like the whole tapestry yeah and so i think that’s why one study wouldn’t change my mind on something it might raise some questions but i’d have to see how does that fit in with both all the stuff i’ve read but also the stuff i’ve experienced as well so i don’t think we should discount that either um so i think you can find this balance and i don’t think you need to be as a teacher you don’t need to be this expert judge on quality of research and where one study proves or disproves it just helps us paint a picture and now i actually get quite excited when studies show up results that i’m not expecting because it does make me ask awkward questions of myself and my practice but i think that’s the only way we get better and we have to get better because it’s too important to get wrong so we shouldn’t shy away from these studies and if retrieval practice works better in some conditions or some age groups than others i want to know about that and i also want to know why i like so it’s not a case of disproving retrieval practice it’s about i was interesting that these type of retrieval works better for older students than for primary age students that’s that’s an interesting conversation and that one is a community we should be having as part of our professional dialogue yeah i actually it’s a good thing when i see studies that might suggest stuff like that it’s fascinating and just final thing on this so what interests me if we take something like rose and shine’s work now rose and shine that has been around for for decades years and years and years and yet it’s only in the last kind of three or four years it went absolutely mental enough it’s posters in every school wall and so on and i think a lot of that was to do with tom sherrington writing a really nice concise easily accessible book and so on so for busy teachers out there bradley obviously this curation of research and summaries of it is a really important part of this but obviously we have that downside that with them relying on somebody to have taken a representative sample and interpret it right and so on um do you have other do you have kind of kind of favorite curators who you look to you think you know this is a good place to at least start and then is your process then to read the original source or how do you go about kind of digesting the you know the mountains of research that are out there yeah so yeah like you it’s been interesting taking rose and china as the example uh i think the work that tom has done has been incredible um because it’s just made it accessible uh which i think is a big part uh so yeah i’m a huge fan i think it’s been incredible for the profession um one thing we wrestle with because that’s basically what we do is we try and be kind of a google translate because the stuff behind paywalls or it’s written for other psychologists a lot of the time um one thing that generally keeps us up at night and we wrestle with is to make stuff accessible yet still being true to the original research because the original research has nuances and yet everyone wants a neat headline and sometimes the two and so the more accessible you make something do you risk dumbing down or veering from the original research so finding reliable sources is tricky um i’m a huge fan of i think the education endowment foundation do brilliant stuff i’m a huge fan of evidence-based education chartered college for teaching to be remiss not for me not to talk about our insight in a drive we think we try to do a good job at that but one thing i think i’m getting more and more interested in is seeing classroom teachers blogging themselves about how they’ve applied research so what i’m always interested there is not the actual research itself um it’s their interpretation of how it applies to their setting and that’s that little bit that’s the interesting part um because it’s not up to it shouldn’t be up to teachers to explain the research much that’s the researcher’s job the teacher’s job is working out which stuff is appropriate for my context and trial era and sharing that i think that’s a brilliant form of cpd of hearing how other people are wrestling with the same sort of problems um but yeah i wouldn’t worry too much about one-off sample size or randomized controlled trials because i’m not hanging my hat on any one study yeah so therefore if one studies large scale and one study smart i don’t discount the small scale study it might be really appropriate for that design of that research um and i think it’s been really endearing it’s lovely to actually see the profession over the last five would say five years or so ten years maybe uh really embrace research and translate and take it their own and people always worry about lethal mutations i’m not too worried about lethal mutations because i think we need that trial and error and we need that i wouldn’t want anyone to go this is what they did in the studies that’s what we have to do in my setting because they are meant to be different so i kind of i kind of like the mutations because that’s how we make informed judgments i think