Science of Learning: What Is That?
Science of learning is concerned about understanding how people and how to make teaching more effective. The field has made considerable progress in recent years based on recent results in research in Cognitive science, which is a study of how brain works. Although there is interest among educators involved in this field, an average faculty member in professional colleges do not appear to have a clear idea of what is this new style of pedagogy and how best to incorporate it into their teaching. Why should they care? Why should parents and care? The main motivating reason is due to the near universal recognition that present methods of teaching, which is text-book and classroom-based lecturing, is increasing becoming irrelevant in the current era. Access to knowledge via Internet allows one to easily find information and learnt how to apply that to the problem. What one needs to learn is an ability to find right problems to work on and an ability to transfer knowledge acquire across different domains.
When one tries to understand the new styles of pedagogy advocated by science of learning, one encounters new terms such as active learning, peer-learning, collaborative learning, learning-by-doing, project-based learning etc. The academic definitions of these terms appear straight-forward but the ambiguity inherent in therein make implement difficult. As an example, consider the term “active learning”. This is frequently defined as a learner (student) taking charge of the process of learning, i.e, acquiring knowledge at their own pace and with meta-knowledge about what they are learning. Not quite helpful in figuring out how to change one’s teaching to incorporate active learning. What is the role of teacher in active learning? Does active learning is to replace traditional practice of teacher-provided information? What is the difference if any between Active learning and learn-by-doing? What types of subjects are best taught with active learning or should all subjects are best taught that way?
I believe that the following example would clarify the basic concept and also point a way towards introducing active learning in curriculum courses. In one of the famous early studies, this concept of learning was examined with an experiment whereby two groups of children practiced throwing darts at a target under water (described in Judd, 1908; see a conceptual replication by Hendrickson and Schroeder, 1941). One group of students received an explanation of the principle of refraction of light, which causes the apparent location of the target to be deceptive. The other group was allowed to practice dart throwing, without such an explanation. Both groups did equally well on the practice task, which involved a target 12 inches under water. Next, they were asked to do the same when the target was under only 4 inches of water. What is interesting to note is that the group that had been instructed about the abstract principle did manage to hit target more frequently and with fewer tries. Clearly, knowing the principle and then doing experiment led students to understand things in a way that made it easier to transfer that knowledge to another situation.
Although there is not mention of it in further research related to this experiment, the second group of students could have been subjected to additional such experiments each time varying depths of water. By doing that and with some amount of self-questioning could have led them to “discover” the principle of refraction of light. Or at least they would have understood that how near the target underwater appears to be to an observer depends on the depth of water between object and student. That would be what one would call pure learn-by-doing approach. Moreover, although no data was accumulated on long-term retention of the knowledge of each participant, it is quite likely that the knowledge gained by first group was more permanent and would have allowed that knowledge of principles to understand rainbow effect of a light passing through a glass prism.
The above experiment shows the limitations of the pedagogy that relies only on pure learn-by-doing. With that style of teaching, the process of accumulating knowledge of general principles would be tedious and slow. Moreover, sometimes it might not even lead to where abstract principles become transferrable to other situations. On the other hand, although not confirmed in this experiment, it stands to reason that simply having been told about refraction of light principle would not have made students any wiser (or quicker) in applying the knowledge to other domains. In general, people are known to be rather poor at extending and applying the knowledge from specific situations to abstract principles. Thus, I conclude that best teaching should be a hybrid of learn-by doing and discussion of abstract principles involved.
The above experiment was conducted with school age students. So, the experiment was focused on teaching a simple law of physics. A question arises about can the same approach be useful for teaching physics of light at an advanced level. In the following, I suggest how this could indeed be done.
When bending of light is observed as in this experiment, the teacher could ask further questions such as to how much does the light bends? Why the bending only occurs at the boundary between water and air? Is the measure of light bending, i.e., the angle of refraction, dependent on the depth of water)? Does the angle change for another material such as oil or glass or ice instead of water? Asking such questions, and at times asking students to design and carry out experiments so that students work to find correct answers would get students engaged in learning deeper secrets about light.
Taking this directed inquiry pedagogy one step further, one could lead students to ask about what does the angle of refraction depend on? The density of medium? Viscosity of the medium? The answer by the way is that it does not depend on either. The angle depends on optical density of medium, which is different than mass density of the medium. This line of questioning would lead students could lead them to learn about the particle nature of light and how light passes through a medium. This line of inquiry would also lead to an answer to the question of why different colors of lights have different angle of refraction and how that leads to the rainbow effect produced when a beam of light passes through a glass prism. And, I leave it to reader of this post to then go on to explain the mystery of a rainbow produced in the sky under certain atmospheric conditions and its semi-circular shape.
The example of above describes a kind of active learning where an expert teacher guides the process of inquiry. No doubt a precocious student can have completely self-directed active learning where such questions are self-formulated — a kind of meta thinking about what is being learnt — and then answers are obtained by search of literature or via Internet surfing. In fact, it would be desirable for a teacher to encourage all students to learn how to ask such meta-questions about any subject under study. That would be the best form of learning one could get in a classroom. Of course, a course where one aims to teach this kind of process of inquiry to become a habit for students would require different mode of performance evolution of students. In that case, a teacher’s role becomes more of an examiner of learning process and not of knowledge a student acquires. Ideally, a teacher can mix these two modes — teacher-directed inquiry as well as teaching self-aware thinking in a single class on the subject.
The quality of self-directed acquisition of knowledge will likely not be satisfactory unless students have been well-versed in how to do critical thinking on the subject at hand. Perhaps, it is best to first conduct few teacher-directed active learning courses, in which students are sensitized and taught how to think deeply about a new subject and ask interesting questions. A corollary to this style of teaching of a subject is that it is not important for a teacher to impart exhaustive knowledge of a subject. Teach basic principles and teach students how to ask questions that can direct acquisition of additional deeper knowledge.
Finally, I can see how fact-based hard science teaching courses can be transformed to this style of teaching — not saying it would be easy but certainly easy to see how to apply this technique to such subjects. The question I would like to try to answer is how well does the similar technique of teaching work with soft sciences such as sociology and economics. Or, to acquisition of soft skills such as effective oral and written communications, negotiations, critical thinking, and such.