More tips from Dylan Wiliam
Video transcript
okay tip number four please tip number four is more a caution than a tip but the big idea here comes from the distinction that psychologists make between learning and performance so robert bjork has done a lot of work in this area and he’s shown that students really like being successful in completing learning activities but that is often a very poor guide to whether they’re going to remember it in two or three weeks time and so performance is the performance in the task that’s designed to teach them something and learning is the long-term changes in capability that result and the point is that they’re not the same there’s some evidence that there’s a slight negative relationship between these two things now obviously um if the task is so challenging the students give up then little learning will take place but probably bjork has invoked this phrase desirable difficulties we need to struggle a little bit in the task obviously if we struggle too much we might be unsuccessful but i think the thing that is really important for me is we have very little insight into our learning so we are very bad at predicting whether we’re going to remember something in the future and obviously if there’s a very strong emotional resonance i will never forget where i was when i heard about the death of princess diana or the assassination of jfk you know or the attacks on the twin towers in new york i mean i remember where i was when i heard that but most school life isn’t like that and so we’re actually not very good at predicting whether we’re going to learn something we’re going to remember i have lost track of the number of times i’ve put something in my freezer and i haven’t bothered to label it because i know i’m going to remember what it is and six weeks later i haven’t got a clue what it is the fact that i forgot is not interesting what is interesting is how certain i was that i would remember we don’t have very good insights into our own learning and we often use the word learn in a very kind of unhelpful sense so i had a leaking tap in the in a wash basin in our house and american taps are different from british tap so i watched a and i learned how to change the tab but i didn’t learn it because if i needed to do it again i would need to watch the video again so we often use this i learned how to do this in a way that actually says i learned how to follow a set of instructions to achieve the desired result and so we often use the word learning whenever the word performance would be more appropriate i think it’s really important to remember that students say i know this now i’ve got this first of all we don’t know whether it’s going to get through to long-term memory and we also need to remember the dunning-kruger effect the less you know about something the more likely you are to overestimate your achievement you know this is why self-reports are so inaccurate 93 of american car drivers believe they’re better than average they can’t all be right can they now we used to think that the reason for this was because they didn’t want to admit that they didn’t know and part that is probably the case but the biggest reason why so many people think they’re good drivers is they don’t know enough about good car driving to know that they’re not very good at car driving as david dunning himself says rule one of donning kruger club is you don’t know you’re in dunning and so i think we teachers just need to be constantly skeptical about whether students say i get this now and there’s this thing about student voice and asking students you know to to say what the what they like in learning they don’t know they are novices they’re not experts and so you know i think we should listen to our students but we shouldn’t trust their insights into their own learning i think that’s the important thing i’m a big believer in self-assessment self-assessment cost will make students sharper and clearer in asking for help but we shouldn’t trust that a student saying i understand this means they understand it because they may not know enough about what it means to understand to actually really understand it at the level that you want them to understand so tip four is we have lit all human beings have little insights into their own learning and you need to be vigilant to be focusing on the long-term learning not just the improvements in task performance that’s brilliant that dylan just a couple of thoughts on that it goes back to something you said earlier on um often this is used and i i’ve read david diedo’s argument almost kind of our argument kind of not against formative assessment is too strong but a cautionary tale about primitive assessment because of this learning performance um division but as you said earlier on if if you ask a good formative assessment question whether it’s a diagnostic question or whatever it is and the kids can’t do it you can be pretty sure they’re not going to learn it so it’s it’s almost kind of a bit of a checking point isn’t it it’s not the end of the story but it’s it’s a necessary step on the path to path to learning and the other thing that i just wanted to raise there is what i’ve started doing now for a start it took me about 12 years to to realize the distinction between learning and performance which is error number one again but when i did learn it it then took me another few years to realize the importance of sharing this with the kids because it’s one thing for teachers to be aware of it but it’s frustrating for students right if they if they think oh i’ve nailed this today and then next week they’ve forgotten it or next month so making them aware of the distinction themselves and sometimes i will show them a diagram of the forgetting curve just to show students how quickly things go but the positive side of that is if we retrieve it and think hard about it then we start to flatten out this forgetting curve i think visuals like that and i’m kind of bringing students kind of behind the curtain on how memory works and things like that that feels to me quite important to to get that buy-in and also kind of negate some of the frustration they may feel if that makes sense absolutely i mean i i’ve talked about this as a user manual for the human brain we actually have quite a lot a lot of insights into how learning works and what’s interesting is it’s not how most people think that only work so john donovsky and his colleagues did a review for the association of psychological science on student self-study strategies and what is interesting is people think that rereading or summarizing or highlighting is an effective review technique and it really isn’t and i think this distinction between performance and learning is really important when it comes to revision because students read something that they read yesterday and they think they know it yeah i know this because i read it yesterday the point is robert bjork’s work allows us to say yes it’s familiar because retrieval strength is high you retrieved it from your memory yesterday so yes it’s available to you right now it doesn’t mean you you’ve actually learned it and so getting students to be much more kind of self-critical yes it feels familiar but you know can i close the book and not look at the book and retrieve what’s you know what’s in it can i can i give myself some revision practice from something i last read two weeks ago rather than yesterday just getting students to understand how easy is to be seduced by this familiarity yeah i’ve got it now i know it yes that’s retrieval strength it’s not storage strength and of course retrieval strength is good for passing exams but if you want long-term learning then we also have to focus on story strength you know how well it connect it is connected to everything else in your memory absolutely final point on this jit dildon just thinking of videos when you mentioned your story about about the tap there i see this a lot with kids i can only speak of maths here but there’s thousands of maths videos on youtube and kids will often say oh i revised last night because i watched the video on that infractions or whatever and this is your classic familiarity effect you can nod your way through a video thinking oh yeah i get this i get this i guess and at the end of it you think you’ve understood it but you don’t have a clue so i’ll often say to kids two things one obviously the best way certainly to learn math is to practice math so as you say make sure you can do it with no cues around and you’ve got questions and so on but if you are going to watch videos keep pausing and just just asking yourself what’s just happened there and what do i think is going to happen next just to make it a bit more of an active part of the process as opposed to just let’s just watch a five minute video not our way through and then we think we’ve learnt it so there are little tricks aren’t there if the kids are aware how memory works and stuff that we can teach them you