Month: September 2015

I have long been interesting in tools and tactics for personalizing text. This is my way of saying I am interested in highlighting, underlining, and annotating. This interest predated technology and influenced some of the educational research I did. Who should highlight or take notes and who should not? Do we benefit from the practice of marking up content and/or from the review of this personally enhanced content? What about the highlights and notes of others – there is a research topic that considers the potential benefit of using the material generated by “expert” note takers rather than relying on our own work. I cannot say I remember similar work with highlighting.

Technology has added some new wrinkles to my interest and the topics to be considered. For example, with Kindle books, there is the opportunity to consider the most commonly highlighted material. Think of this as a “wisdom of the crowd” replacement for the expert highlighter. Other technological options make shared highlighting easier. This brings me to my suggestion for a service you might explore.

Highly is an extension for the Chrome browser. It is presently available, but in beta so whether it will show up for other browsers or whether additional features will appear has yet to be determined.

When the extension is added, a highlighter icon will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window. This icon activates and deactivates the tool. When activated, dragging text adds the highlights. Tools at the bottom right-hand corner of the window allow access to the multiple ways for sharing highlights.

If shared with another user who has not installed the extension, the user will see the highlighted material only and not the highlighted material in context. Try it to see some content I highlighted.

How might this be used:

1) highlight a recommendation for peers or students – the highlights are a way to demonstrate what it is that you wanted them to notice

2) ask students to show you what they have highlighted – do they seem to identify the content that is relevant to a particular task. I remember a research paper I read (too long ago for me to recall the reference) that compared no, free, and restricted highlighting. Without review, the study found that restricted highlighting was most beneficial. One interpretation is that making decisions about relative importance requires a deeper processing of the content.

I wish Highly allowed both highlighting and annotation. Perhaps additional features will eventually be added.

In my opinion, the connection between educational researchers and educators is problematic. Researchers tend to be hesitant to offer specific recommendations and educators label researchers as removed from practical situations. My concern is that educators end up influenced by sources offering specific suggestions which ignore basic principles of learning. Suggestions can be framed in a way that sound good but are based on concepts that are known to be flawed. Some common practices have been proven over and over again to be less effective than other practices that suffer simply because the practices have long been promoted. New ideas are not always superior.

Deans for Impact is an organization attempting to establish a list of principles that are supported through research. This group working with Dan Willingham are attempting to put together a document that summarizes these principles and offers related classroom guidelines. The document is short, but well referenced. My thought was that a grad ed psych class might find the reference list to be a great reading list.

Science of Learning (this link will download as a pdf the present version of this document)

It is time for new students to report to campus. An interesting controversy has developed over the issue of which students go where. Should institutions use the ACT or SAT to determine which students are allowed to attend. Some institutions have decided to drop these tests proposing that this move allows greater equity of access. The true motives of these institutions have been called into question.

I spent a good part of my academic career instructing and researching the study performance of beginning students. Let me say from personal experience and from the data I collected that allowing poorly prepared students into a college unsuited to their needs is not doing anyone a favor.

As a researcher, I did not use SAT or ACT data in my work. I primarily made use of a measure of reading skill. My course of interest was the Introduction to Psychology. I taught large groups of students and a major part of the student’s grade was based on several multiple-choice question exams based on student understanding and application of lecture and textbook content. My interest as a researcher was in study behavior and I made heavy use of an online study activities allowing me to operationalize how well, when, and how much students studied textbook content. My interest was in evaluating how such variables were related to examination performance.

As one would expect, reading comprehension skill was strongly correlated to examination performance. Without going further, in the large course environment in which I worked, I would suggest that poorly prepared students are going to struggle and allowing admission as an equity commitment may simply set certain students up for failure.

My research goes further to address related issues. I will say that my main research interest was to see if I could create online technology tools to assist poor readers in identifying specific areas of failed understanding to improve self-remediation. The biggest problem in publishing my research over the years was this. I continually ran into a problem that would call into question any effort I might make to evaluate the value of my intervention strategy. The problem was that more effective readers made greater use of the study tool than the poorer readers. This alone is a very interesting finding, but not of great value if what you want to do is develop cost-effective ways to assist poorly prepared students. Use of my study technique was predictive of higher examination performance, but use of my technique was also predicted by being a better student.

I am not defending the use of textbooks, multiple choice examinations, or large classes for the least experienced college students. Each of these issues would warrant a much longer analysis. Whatever one thinks of any of these issues, one important reality is that the commitment to each of these tactics is partly determined by the cost of higher education. I would have loved to work with groups of 25 intro students, but large state institutions cannot make this approach work on the tuition students are willing to pay.

So, having struggled with this situation for many years and having spent countless hours attempting to develop interventions that I felt would partly respond to the cost issue, I must say that  increasing the range of aptitude, background knowledge, motivation, etc. of students at the beginning level is not a strategy that will be successful without major interventions that are likely to be expensive. I would include as a short list – smaller classes and much more personal contact.