Learning Aloud

I wrote a couple of tweets this morning critical of the “hour of code”. In doing so, I violated a personal rule. Twitter is a poor tool for explanation or deep thinking so it is best to avoid it if you want to communicate effectively.

I am not against programming and have benefitted greatly because I had the background necessary to develop the software necessary to do my research.

Here is a way to understand what I think is wrong with educator interest in the “hour of code”.

Take elementary or middle school “STEM” initiatives as an example. The concern being addressed is that younger students and certain categories of students do not see themselves in STEM careers. As a consequence, they do not take the coursework necessary to prepare for STEM majors at the college level or do not take secondary preparatory courses seriously enough should they enroll. Many STEM activities attempt to change such perspectives. Such activities might be described as “teasers” intended to create interest and a sense of personal relevance.

Here is what is different with programming. Many K-12 districts do not offer programming courses and most states do not recognize programming courses that are available as satisfying a science or math requirement. The “hour of code” is a tease without the opportunity for follow through.

We have considerable experience evaluating limited programming experience (from the wave of interest in LOGO). What the research suggests is that most limited experiences develop little expertise and little evidence of transfer (some now would label this as computational thinking).

So, if you (administrators or teachers) are really interested in the value of programming start with what matters. Does your institution offer a programming course? Does your state “count” the credits earned from taking such a course?

An hour of code might matter if it generated enthusiasm for what could come next.

My content resources for coding and computational thinking

I have spent a considerable amount of time during the past 40 years reading and highlighting documents. The methods have changed. Early on, I would highlight articles in journals or books I owned and create index cards referencing these articles with summary information and a citation. As technology came on the scene, I switched my card file over to various database applications. Most recently, I have stored pdfs of articles (highlighted and annotated using various tools) and referenced these articles using various bibliographic systems (I pay for Endnote, but also use other systems – ReadCube, Mendeley).

I have encountered a new “system” I find very impressive. It is not free, but $3 a month is far less expensive than what I pay for Endnote).

PaperPile is a cloud-based system that works through a chrome browser (including a Chromebook). As I said, it will cost academics $3 a month, but you can give it a try at no cost. Paperpile saves bibliographic information in its own servers and sends pdfs uploaded in association with bibliographic entries to a folder it establishes in Google drive. Converting an existing system is fairly easy (I pretty much just pointed PaperPile at my Mendeley site and everything happened automatically).

PaperPile recommends metapdf  (same company) for highlighting and annotation of the pdfs stored in Google drive.

It is too early for me to decide if these tools will be my focus. Working with tools in implementing long-term writing projects is really the only way to make such a choice, but the service looks very promising.

My first impression is that this service or something similar will be a significant challenge to expensive products such as EndNote. I see this as similar to the Google challenge to Microsoft Office. The issue has nothing to do with the quality of MS Office or EndNote. The issue is really the cost for quality products with many capabilities that are not necessary for most users.

Diane Ravitch appears to be on a campaign to devalue “competency based education”. Evidently, competency based education represents a flawed “reform” model. I think this translates as “may replace teachers”, but you will have to read the Ravitch blog to reach your own conclusion. The Ravitch link I provide here summarizes a post from Emily Talmage connecting recent “competency based” effortswith BF Skinner. I am guessing this association (note my title) is intended to elicit a feeling of revulsion among teachers.

Quick – provide a definition for competency-based education. Does the phrase have a negative or positive valence? What is your answer if the name Skinner is included in the same sentence.

When I began working at the institution from which I retired, the Education College was dominated by humanists. The dean at the time was a prominent humanist and attempted to build a college with this orientation (actually there was the college of education and the “new school” which eventually merged). I was not a member of either program. However, because my focus in psychology was on educational practice, I was interested in who they hired. After a while, I began to understand how things worked and I would wince should a candidate in his or her job talk make a positive reference to objectives or any term that might be associated with behaviorism. Such candidates had little chance of being employed. To me, a teacher education program with a narrow orientation was not the way to prepare future professionals. A good debate is a great learning experience and a debate among people is prefered to a debate between a person and a concept (i.e., straw man).

I think I rejected academic tribalism early on because of what I taught and the way I thought about things. I assumed the explanations for human behavior were rooted in biology, but the state of the biology of thought and learning was incapable of offering much in the way of useful guidance to educators. Still is. I tend to think of schools of thought as models rather than reality and the most useful model depends on how the model fits the data and offer applications that generate data. Using “data” is the theme here.

I tried to teach “learning theories” when I taught Introduction to Psychology by offering examples of phenomena suited to being understodd from a given perspective. I emphasized cognitive explanations of learning in my own work, but cognitive models seemed suited to studying reading comprehension, study behavior, and self-regulation in learning – the topics I prioritized.

I am not certain how critics are using the phrase “competency-based education”. If I understand the concerns about recent “reforms” correctly, I would prefer the descriptor – mastery learning. I have been following research on mastery learning since the late ‘60s. It is true that mastery learning, at least the form promoted by Fred Keller, came from a behavioral tradition. Many early publications appeared in JABA – Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis. However, I would identify the other major figure in promoting mastery learning as Benjamin Bloom. I do not label Bloom as a behaviorist, but others might.

There seems to be a little more in the present criticism – some connection of competency based education (or mastery learning) with computers (teaching machines). I am guessing the underlying motive is the assumed intent to replace teachers with machines. I agree that present technology may allow an implementation of mastery ideas. Sometimes the big new idea is not about the idea, it is about a way to make the idea practical.  Technology provides a way to make the individualization proposed in certain variants of mastery learning (Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction) practical.

I think I can take the campaign against whatever “competency based education” is about one step further. It does seem that there is greater use of such innovations in charter schools. Skinner, behaviorism, competency-based education, technology, charter schools = bad!

Rather than replacing teachers, I think that blended model is a more accurate representation of what is being explored in some charter schools (see Blended – Horn & Staker). I prefer to understand such situations using what Bloom described as the two sigma problem. Bloom proposed that the best learning environment would be a student working with a human tutor and other approaches to teaching could be judged by how close these methods could come to the producting of a student and tutor. I see technology within the competency based approach as a weak version of tutoring. The core question is how much time can a good classroom teacher offer each student that would qualify as tutoring. If the answer is “not much”, then some use of technology offers an option worth evaluating.

If the concern is that charter schools are using technology as a substitute for teachers, say so. Salivating over the mention of Skinner is too obtuse for me.