Ep 48. How we learn: Naive, purposeful, and deliberate practice with Stephen Chew

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair.

You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.

Timestamps:

[00:00:00] Introduction to Chalk and Talk

[00:02:53] Understanding naive, purposeful, and deliberate practice

[00:13:46] The importance of feedback in learning

[00:20:03] Effective use of worked examples

[00:25:13] Addressing student misconceptions

[00:31:18] Debunking learning myths: Struggle and engagement

[00:34:58] Is active learning just a buzzword?

[00:37:40] The problem with research on active learning

[00:42:35] Nine cognitive challenges for effective teaching

[00:44:51] Building trust in the classroom

[00:47:55] Desirable difficulties vs. unnecessary challenges

[00:51:23] Formative assessment techniques for large classes

[00:53:47] The complexity and importance of teaching

[00:54:32] Bridging the gap between research and practice

[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host.

Welcome back to another great episode of Chalk and Talk. My guest today is Dr. Stephen Chew, an award-winning cognitive psychology professor at Samford University, whose research focuses on the science of effective teaching and learning. In this episode, we talk about the different types of practice: naive, purposeful and deliberate practice, and why understanding the difference can change the way we teach and learn.

We also talk about how to use feedback effectively, how to structure worked examples, how to confront common student misconceptions, and how to build trust in the classroom. We even tackle the term active learning, whether it actually means anything useful and why the research on it may not be as clear as it seems.

I walked away from this conversation with a lot of practical ideas that I know will improve my own teaching, and I hope you find it just as helpful. Just a note, you'll find links to my guest's work and other articles relevant to our conversation on the episode's resource page. Now, without further ado, let's get started.

It is a pleasure to have Dr. Stephen Chew with me today and he is joining me from Alabama, where he is a professor of psychology at Samford University. He is a cognitive psychologist, and one of his primary research areas is the cognitive basis of effective teaching and learning. He is the recipient of multiple national awards for his teaching and research, including being named US Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Supportive Education and the award for distinguished career contributions to education and training in psychology from the American Psychological Association.

He serves as the chair of the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology. He also translates learning research for teachers and students, and he is the creator of a series of YouTube videos for students on how to study effectively, which have been viewed almost 3 million times, and that is a lot.

So, I've spent a fair bit of time over the past couple of weeks devouring your articles on teaching because they're really great and there's lots of great stuff that I learned from them. So, I'm really excited to talk to you today. Welcome, Stephen.

[00:02:51] Stephen Chew: Thank you, Anna. I'm thrilled to be here.

[00:02:53] Anna Stokke: So, you sent me a great article that you wrote on practice called Practice is Essential for Developing Expertise, but Often Misunderstood, and I will link to that article on the resource page. And in your article you discuss the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson, who studied practice and expertise, and he described three kinds of practice: naive, purposeful, and deliberate. So, I was thinking we could talk about that. So maybe we could go through each one.

So, let's start with naive practice. What is naive practice?

[00:03:27] Stephen Chew: Well, naive practice is when you simply go through the motions and maybe you hope that you'll get better at it. It's, it's disengaged practice. It's what, what happens, uh, you'll hear the term “drill and kill,” and that's basically what naive practice is, where the students are just going through the motions, they aren't engaged, they aren't processing feedback, so they're just kind of doing it.

And maybe there's some hope that they'll get better if they do it. So you'll see this in, you know, students, they're like doing math problems and they're just trying to get through them, and whether they get the right answer or not, you know, it, it doesn't matter.

And if they get the wrong answer, they don't, they're not curious about why they got that wrong. So, naive practice is low effort, and it gets you through it, but it's highly unlikely it's going to lead to better learning.

[00:04:16] Anna Stokke: Let's talk about purposeful practice. So, what is that?

[00:04:19] Stephen Chew: Purposeful practice is engaged practice where a student on their own is working through problems or exercises in attempt to get better. So, there's a goal of getting better. And so, they are, by paying attention to their steps, you know, trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work, maybe trying to become more efficient, trying to find the best way of solving problems.

So, you know, that's fruitful practice and that's what we want students to engage in.

[00:04:51] Anna Stokke: Okay, so purposeful practice is better than naive practice, right?

[00:04:55] Stephen Chew: Absolutely. But naive practice is easier and students fall into that trap of engaging in naive practice rather than purposeful practice.

[00:05:05] Anna Stokke: Yes, I definitely can see that. Okay. So how about deliberate practice? What is that?

[00:05:10] Stephen Chew: Deliberate practice requires a teacher or a mentor or a coach where the teacher provides exercises or activities that build understanding. So, you have a mentor or a teacher who understands the concepts and can structure it in such a way that it makes the learning of the student more efficient.

And so that's a very, that's the most powerful form of practice if you have a good mentor and teacher who can provide you with the kinds of practice that you need.

[00:05:44] Anna Stokke: Okay, so this to me brings to mind music. Like when you have a piano teacher, the piano teacher is very careful about what they assign you. There's lots of feedback and it's kind of one-on-one. Would that fall into the deliberate practice category?

[00:06:02] Stephen Chew: Absolutely. Where you have a good piano teacher, so they, you know, assign exercises and pieces and they give you the kind of feedback you need and the kinds of activities you need to get better. I mean, that's the hallmark of a, of a master teacher.

And also, you see this with students who are, piano students are engaged and so they're practicing, you know, trying to master certain, you know, runs and things like that, versus a student who is not really that interested and they're just practicing by, like, going through the notes and not really thinking about musicality.

I gave that example in the essay because my son is musical and he took piano and it, you know, he was practicing deliberately until he, until he got to a point where he really wasn't that interested anymore. And then it was kind of like pulling teeth and the practice became more of like a naive practice.

[00:06:53] Anna Stokke: That sounds familiar to me too, having had kids that took piano lessons. Is deliberate practice then quite common in sports and music, do you think?

[00:07:03] Stephen Chew: I think it is quite common. I think there's a difference between different coaches and different teachers, and so it's, it's set up, but it, I wouldn't say there's a sort of a set of steps that any teacher can learn and then they can provide deliberate practice.

I think it comes out of experience and teaching with different students and different situations, and it also is somewhat student-specific where, you know, students seek out the teachers that they need. It comes from some experience in teaching, but yeah, it is more commonly seen in coaching sports and also in in teaching music and things like that.

[00:07:43] Anna Stokke: Okay. So, it seems to me that deliberate practice is really the best type of practice for learning. Is that right?

[00:07:49] Stephen Chew: I think so if it's done, if it's done well, but, you know, teaching students how to do purposeful practice on their own because they won't always have that teacher. And if you want students to continue to learn after they leave your class, then, you know, teaching them purposeful practice, you know, effective learning strategies, motivation, self-assessment is really important.

[00:08:09] Anna Stokke: The way I'm seeing it then is deliberate practice may be the best type of practice for learning, but it's not necessarily always practical. So, we want to give students techniques so that they're engaging in purposeful practice because that's really the next best thing. Does that sound right?

[00:08:26] Stephen Chew: Exactly, yeah.

[00:08:28] Anna Stokke: Okay, excellent. Do you think that people recognize that deliberate practice or purposeful practice or ideal for learning in the same way they might recognize that they are for sports?

[00:08:41] Stephen Chew: I think, you know, master teachers, excellent teachers have developed this body of knowledge so they can carry out deliberate practice. But you know, there are other teachers who are really trying to, you know, they may be very well committed to student learning, but they haven't quite figured out like how to structure that kind of practice.

In a sense, it takes teachers purposeful practice to develop the knowledge and need to use deliberate practice on their students. So, you have to practice at teaching like anything else. And developing those exercises and those activities, recognizing like what a student needs and knowing how to sort of structure their class activity to engage in that, I think that's part of the deliberate practice of becoming a really good teacher.

[00:09:31] Anna Stokke: I agree with you, and I think over time you kind of develop these ideas about what students will do correctly, what they won't do correctly, the type of things they want to practice, the type of things they don't want to practice, and a lot of that comes with experience. Would you say?

[00:09:47] Stephen Chew: Absolutely. There's actually a name for it, pedagogical content knowledge, it was outlined by Lee Shulman. And so, he talks about that and, and that is something that you only get with experience in teaching where you're paying attention to your teaching.

[00:10:11] Anna Stokke: So, what are some ways that teachers can move students toward purposeful practice?

[00:10:16] Stephen Chew: That's a great question and there's not a set formula for it. One thing about teaching is it's always, you always have to adapt to the students you have and the class you have learning is very contextual; it depends on a lot of different factors. And teaching is exactly the same way.

The teacher is constantly. Adapting their teaching practice, assessing how well it's working then making changes on the fly. It's like, “Well, that didn't work, so we're not gonna try this.” And so, you know, sometimes the end of a lesson, you're not on plan B, you're on plan L or M or something like that, trying to figure out ways of, of bringing about that deliberate practice that's really going to work for that student.

That's what makes teaching really complex and really challenging to do.

[00:11:04] Anna Stokke: Do you think teachers can facilitate deliberate practice in subjects like math?

[00:11:10] Stephen Chew: Oh, absolutely. I think teachers who are experienced, they anticipate difficulties, like they know common confusions that students are going to have. They know misconceptions they know concepts that are more, that take extra time. So an experienced teacher, I think will know when they need to slow down when they need to spend extra time, how to anticipate problems. And that's part of just being a skilled teacher, I think.

[00:11:36] Anna Stokke: In your YouTube videos for students, do you have tips for them about how to engage in purposeful practice?

[00:11:44] Stephen Chew: I don't talk about purposeful practice specifically there, but I do talk about learning strategies that they need to use. I talk about having full attention and I talk about using effective learning strategies. The problem with effective learning strategies is that they're effortful and students, well, we all are cognitive misers. We want to avoid effort if we can, and one of the things about ineffective study strategies is they're very easy to do.

So, students like to engage in them because they're easy to do and they fill up time as opposed to meaningful or effective study strategies are very effortful thinking through problems, you know, where you're really, you know, trying to understand abstract concepts. It's the most efficient way of learning, but it is effortful to do. And so, you can have a student who spends the time and engages in studying, but they use ineffective study strategies and they don't, they don't learn.

One of the things I say is that good intentions can't overcome poor study strategies. And, and so the, you have to convince the student that they need to engage in those effortful study strategies, and that's really the most efficient way of learning.

[00:12:53] Anna Stokke: So I have a friend, by the way, that's a biologist, and he talks about that in a different way. He said, “All animals will take the path of least resistance. They'll always try to do the easiest thing possible.” You know, this is humans wanting to do the easiest thing they can when they're studying, but actually at the end of the day, it's not the easiest thing because you're just going to have to do more work if you didn't study effectively in the first place.

[00:13:20] Stephen Chew: Exactly. And that's, that's kind of what I try to get through in the videos and when I give talks to students about effective studying, it's like, you know, the quickest way to get, to master material is to engage it meaningfully. And so, I have demonstrations of that. And it's a common misconception that students have that learning equals time studying, but it's the quality of the studying that matters, not, not really the time.

[00:13:46] Anna Stokke: So, what about feedback? Like what role does feedback play in effective practice?

[00:13:51] Stephen Chew: Oh yeah. Feedback is really important, and I think it's much more complex topic than a lot of people think is like, “Well, I just give you feedback,” but feedback, there's no hard and fast rule about how to give effective feedback.

You hear, you hear guidelines like it should be actionable and it should be specific, and that's, that's true. But it should also, you know, be supportive. There's work by David Yeager at the University of Texas on wise feedback, which increases trust, especially in minoritized populations, minoritized students.

And, you know, the more they trust you, the more willing they are to work hard. So wise feedback has three components, it's very simple. Like the feedback I'm giving you is not personal, it's the result of me holding the class, the whole class, to high standards, then I think you're capable of achieving those standards if you put forth the right kind of effort, and then third, I will help you to achieve that. I will give you the resources you need.

So that kind of aspect isn't directly like, you know, “No, you made a mistake here when you squared this variable.” It's like the way I deliver it is important and perhaps just as important as accurate feedback it itself. So giving feedback is another one of those activities I think that you develop experience about what is productive, constructive feedback and what's not.

[00:15:17] Anna Stokke: Do you have some specific strategies that you would suggest to get students to actually use the feedback they receive? Because this is a big problem.

I mean, I see this all the time, right? So I could give students the test back, I could write all sorts of things on the test, and the student might make the exact same mistake on the next test.

[00:15:39] Stephen Chew: Yeah, it is difficult to get students to use the feedback because, especially if they've like made a, the students who most need the feedback are the ones who have done poorly, like on an exam or something, and it's unpleasant for them to, you know, to revisit what they did wrong and things like that.

So, and also what happens is a lot of teachers structure their class so that, you know, you do the exam, you get the feedback, and then you move on to the next topic. So there really isn't an opportunity. So, what you really need to do is find ways to provide that feedback and give students a chance to exercise that feedback.

So there are different ways of doing that. In, in literature classes, I've heard people like they'll, you know, keep 10% of the grade, like 90% for the paper you turn in and 10% for the, the changes you make based on the feedback that, that I give you. In math, you can have like, you know, formative assessments, practice problems which students have to turn in, but then, you know, that's low stakes and so then you make them correct that feedback.

So one of the things I do is, in my statistics class, is exit problems where, you know, I, at 10 minutes to go, I give them a problem and it’s “When you solve it, you know, show me and you can go.” And so that way it, it makes them confront the fact that they don't, they may not be understanding it.

Because you have a lot of students who are kind of nodding along, hoping that someone else can explain it to them after class is over. But I want them to confront that then, you know, and I can give them feedback about the, what problems they might be having and then it's not on the exam.

So they have a chance to incorporate that feedback, and then I have other opportunities after that. So, you know, that kind of formative assessment is really valuable for, you know, the use the feedback and tell students like, “You know, you wanna make your mistakes when they don't matter, so now's the time to make those mistakes.”

[00:17:33] Anna Stokke: Yeah, great idea. And it probably helps ensure that your students pay attention in class too, because sometimes they do zone out.

[00:17:40] Stephen Chew: No, absolutely. Oh, my students never zone out. I don't know, but.

[00:17:45] Anna Stokke: We always have to kind of work on that. Make sure they're paying attention.

[00:17:48] Stephen Chew: Exactly right.

[00:17:49] Anna Stokke: So before we wrap up this segment on practice, I just wanna make a note, and I don't know if I'm right on this, but I feel like a lot of times people say things like, “Oh, too much practice is drill and kill and it turns people off math.” And I hear those sort of things a lot actually. And actually practice is really essential for getting good at math.

So, I wonder though, if what is happening is people are talking about what you called naive practice, that kind of practice where the students are just kind of going through the motions, they don't care, they're not thinking about what they did wrong or what they could do better.

So, I wonder if it's maybe just a misconception about this and the problem is that we really want students engaging in purposeful practice or deliberate practice. Does that ring true to you?

[00:18:43] Stephen Chew: Absolutely. And you know, the students need to see the point of what they're doing. And part of that is, this is another area that I study, is the student trust in the teacher. So, if the student trusts the teacher, that the teacher's assigning activities that are going to be valuable to them, they will engage more in purposeful practice.

If they think the teacher is just simply going through the motions and setting up obstacles and hoops to jump through that, you know, you just have to get through the class, you do them, you get a passing grade, you never have to think about it again, they're going to engage in the least effortful practice possible, which is naive practice.

So you need to set up an atmosphere where the students buy in to what you're doing and you need to show them the value. Just to use an example, in my statistics class, we went through linear regression and we, in order to get there, you have to do means and standard deviations.

And so, I'm filling the board and at the end I said, you know, “Look at what you've learned how to do.” You know, “So from the beginning of class when you thought the standard deviation formula looked difficult, you know, just look at how much you've accomplished” and so that, you know, give them feedback about how much they have gained through engaging in purposeful practice.

[00:20:03] Anna Stokke: Yes. And even I think just displaying your own love for the field. And you know, maybe there's some people out there that don't love math like I do, or psychology or statistics like you do, but they're teaching it. You have to at least pretend. If you're the one at the front of the room, you have to have a really good attitude and display a love for the subject because that's when you're gonna run into those issues.

When the students are saying, “Well, why do I have to learn this? You know, like, you don't even seem to care about it. I think that can go a long way. So let's move on to worked examples, and worked examples that's a really important topic for people who teach math in particular. And you've actually done some research on worked examples. So, can you give our listeners some advice for how to structure and use examples and worked examples effectively?

[00:21:01] Stephen Chew: Examples are one of those practices that everyone agrees is valuable. There's never been a pedagogical approach that said, “Don't use examples, they're a waste of time.” But using examples is really complicated. There's a number of factors that go into them and oftentimes teachers don't really think through their examples very well.

They just kind of come up with them intuitively, and they just generate a few examples. They don't, the examples aren't related to each other and they may be very complicated. They don't think about designing examples in terms of what students know and where you want them to be after working the examples.

And they never assess the examples like, “did the students understand them?” And I think a, a good teacher kind of develops useful examples, it's part of that deliberate practice where you develop examples that are particularly valuable to students. I'll start with a story. A friend of mine in, in, in chemistry flipped his classroom where, you know, the students were watching the lecture and then they had to solve problems.

And so, I asked him like, well, “Did you design these problems to like go from like simple to complex” and, and he goes, “No. I asked problems that like are equal to difficulty that they might see on the exam.” And I said, “Well, they're just seeing this for the first time. You know, maybe you can scaffold these examples, you know, from a, a fairly straightforward to more difficult,” and it had not occurred to him.

And he's, you know, he loves to teach and he's dedicated to his students, but it never crossed his mind to think about examples in terms of what students are capable of and then where you want to take them. Because that's, it's that curse of expertise. It's like all examples are easy if you've, you know, been doing it for the last 30 years.

So, there's a number of factors about examples. First, the example should be simpler than the concept they're trying to explain. You need to have examples that are that hopefully are familiar and straightforward, at least to start with, to the students. So, I know you've talked about cognitive load before on your podcast and you can build in a lot of extra structure, and if the students are just overwhelmed by the example, then they're not going to be able to, to do that.

The way to design examples, I think is to think about like the cognitive load, think about how engaging they are. Then, sort of start with simpler examples and go to more complex examples. And there's a paper I have on examples, which kind of gives a couple of ways of doing that. There's fading examples, which you kind of give a complete work example, and then an example with everything except the end is explained and then you know, a little less explained.

There's that, and then there's scaffolding, the examples where you go from simple to complex. So I think a lot of teachers could improve by thinking through the sequence of examples and structuring the sequence of examples.

[00:24:09] Anna Stokke: So, going from very simple and straightforward and building up, so scaffolding.

[00:24:15] Stephen Chew: Now, one way, one thing that I do that I think is a good practice is I have just videos of me working examples, you know, on my LMS, and it's where I think aloud, so I have an example, I tell them to try and solve it before they hear me explain it, but then I try to be very complete in my explanation.

So, it, you know, when I'm in class I may skip over steps because it's obvious to me, but I forget, it's not obvious to the students, but, so I try to be really intentional, like, “this is how I know what kind of problem this is,” you know, and “this is the information I'm given and this is the information I need.”

And so, I literally walk through the whole thing, and I think that's really valuable, especially the students who are, who are struggling because they can watch it multiple times. And so, I think that's a really valuable learning activity that technology allows us to do.

[00:25:13] Anna Stokke: And yeah, so I do that too. I have little mini videos that are just examples. So I would never replace my instruction with videos, that's me anyway, but I do have little mini videos that my students can use when they're studying, and I think they find them quite helpful actually.

So, let's talk about misconceptions next. Now, you've studied misconceptions and how difficult they can be to correct. I'm quite familiar with misconceptions that students have in math, by the way, and I'll mention a few of those in a minute, but can you talk about some of the research on misconceptions?

[00:25:57] Stephen Chew: There is a large depressing literature on misconceptions and how difficult they are to correct. Some of them are pretty easily corrected, but others are more difficult and the research shows that you can correct them in class and you still won't get through to necessarily all the students, but then when you do follow-ups, what you find is a lot of times the students go back to the misconception after they finish your class.

So, I think if it's a very common misconception, it actually takes a curriculum-level solution where the misconception is challenged in multiple classes at multiple times to get students over that.

But yeah, misconceptions are challenging to correct because oftentimes because they're supported by intuition and popular media and things like that. The best thing you can do is to, sort of, not just tell students about them, but have them sort of commit to them and use them and then show how they're, show how they're wrong.

[00:27:03] Anna Stokke: And I think that we think when we tell the students, “Don't do this,” and you might even know it's a misconception. So, some examples in math common one would be, we call it “the freshman's dream.” So, if you have (a + b)^2, students will think that's a^2 + b^2 instead of a^2 + 2ab + b^2.

So, that I would consider a common misconception. You can't just say it, right, like you know they do it. You can't just say it. You have to actually make sure that they somehow engage with it, is what you're saying. Am I right?

[00:27:38] Stephen Chew: Exactly. And because if you say it, they'll accept it, but then when it comes to practice, they'll go right back to the misconception. So you need to, in real-time, find some activity to kind of like, you know, catch them doing that and then, you know, show directly that that is, that that is wrong. You can't be kind of, they do it on homework and two days later they get the, they get the feedback about it. You really need to raise it, make them aware of it, and then sort of challenge it right there.

It's called refutational teaching. It's the most effective method, but even the most effective method is not a hundred percent effective. You just have to keep going after that kind of misconception in statistics, it's like the sum of xy is not the same as the sum of x times the sum of y. And you know, so students will still periodically just slip into that kind of kind of mistake, or the sum of x^2 is not the same as the quantity sum of x^2.

So, you just have to emphasize that. When you're teaching it, you can give them chances to sort of do problems and show them when they've made that that mistake.

[00:28:51] Anna Stokke: So, I did something like this last week, and I'll explain what I did and you can tell me if I did this correctly or how you would do it, because I've been reading about your work on misconceptions.

I teach a second-year linear algebra class, and I won't go through what the misconception is because a lot of people won't know what I'm talking about. But there's something that I know students do incorrectly, and so I kind of do the analog clickers, right? So, my students have cue cards and they have A, B, C, D on them.

And I put up four options and I knew the mistake that students are going to make, that was one of them, I had the right answer, and I had two other answers. And I asked them, and of course, half the class picked the misconception, which I was expecting. And then I tried to convince them to change their answer without telling them what the answer was.

A bunch of them changed. And so, and I did that a few times throughout the class, and the next day at the end I got a hundred percent correct. So, is that a good way to address misconceptions?

[00:29:54] Stephen Chew: Yeah, it is. Those kind of, what are sometimes called clicker questions, it's a form of assessment and it's a great way to use refutational teaching, I think that's really good.

One thing, it's very similar to a method that Eric Mazur, a physicist, came up with called peer instruction. He actually kind of developed a pedagogy around these, they kind of gave rise to this whole idea of clicker questions, but he actually had the students discuss among themselves before.

So you, you give the problem, you do the poll however you want to want to do it, and note cards are perfectly fine, you don't have to have fancy clickers to do this, and as I think note cards, or I actually just have them hold up fingers. 1, 2, 3, and 4 is better in that kinda situation because they can see what everyone else is responding, they're, they're taking personal responsibility for their answer.

Then you have them discuss, especially trying to find someone who has a different answer among themselves. And then you take the poll again, and then you, you discuss, and there's really good evidence that that's an effective way of teaching and of trying to address misconceptions.

There's a lot of misconception research that comes out of physics and that kind of peer instruction is an effective way of trying to address those misconceptions. So yeah, you're doing a great, you're great job.

[00:31:18] Anna Stokke: Okay, so I got an A plus. Okay, awesome, that's what I was aiming for. Okay, so now there are lots of misconceptions in math, but there are also lots of misconceptions about teaching and learning. So, what are some of the most common learning misconceptions that you've encountered in your teaching career?

[00:31:36] Stephen Chew: One of the ones that I think I see with teachers a lot is the idea that struggle equals learning. So that the more you make students struggle, then the more they'll learn.

And that's not really true at all. It really getting your students to think, which is effortful, but putting students through effort, through struggle doesn't necessarily mean they're going to learn. They may just learn to resent the fact that they're having to do all this, all this work. Good learning is effortful, but not all effort leads to learning.

So teachers will sometimes like think that like a 10-page paper is better than a five-page paper because it's, you know, you have to write five additional pages when really it's like, what is the quality of thought that that the assignment is making the students do, you know, that's what's going to lead to the student, the student learning.

So there's that, and the other one is engagement. When the students are interested and engaged, it doesn't necessarily mean they're learning. It means they're interested. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient for learning. They also have to engage in good learning strategies and retrieval and application.

So just if you have a student, a class that's engaged, that's great, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're, they're learning.

[00:32:53] Anna Stokke: Yeah, that's one we've talked a lot about, and actually it's a really important thing to talk about because I think a lot of people make that mistake, that engagement is learning.

You can see why it makes us all feel good when the students are engaged, and the students feel good, the teacher feels good because it seems like everybody's happy. But actually, you have to make sure that the students are learning. That's, you have to actually measure it somehow, right. Just engagement actually isn't learning. They can learn absolutely nothing and be very engaged.

[00:33:29] Stephen Chew: That's right. Like they're engaged in video games, but that doesn't mean they're, they're learning the video games.

[00:33:36] Anna Stokke: In your article, you emphasize that what you think about while studying is the most important factor for learning, but you know, there are all these other things that people think are the most important factors for learning, like you said, motivation, engagement or the time you spent studying, actually learning styles, that's a big one too, right?

So why do you, why do you think people believe those things are more important for learning?

[00:34:00] Stephen Chew: It's, well, it's intuitive because learning does, I mean, motivation is helpful as long as you're using a good learning strategy. If you don't have motivation, though, it doesn't matter what learning strategy. So, it's like necessary and it's important, but it's not sufficient.

You know, the thing that's sufficient is getting the student to think through the material meaningfully and to use that information. So, motivation is one way of making it more likely that they'll do that, but you could be highly motivated if you use poor learning strategies, you're not going to learn. You know, paying attention is another one of those examples of if you don't pay attention, you're not going to learn.

But if you're paying attention, it's necessary, but it's still not sufficient. I can see what people like, recognize that's part of successful learning, but it's not sufficient for, for successful learning.

[00:34:58] Anna Stokke: I thought we'd talk a little bit about something called active learning. I don't know how commonly that phrase is used at the K to 12 level, but I hear it a lot in post-secondary. It's definitely something I'd like to talk about, and you have this great little article on it, which I was happy to read, and it's called Active Learning Is an Educational Buzzword (and Not Particularly Useful). Your article, on the other hand, is very useful.

You've described active learning as a mostly meaningless buzzword. So, what do you mean by that?

[00:35:31] Stephen Chew: First of all, I want to make clear I'm not making fun of people who promote active learning, I think they're very sincere and, you know, well-intentioned. I just think the concept itself is so broad, and so vague that it's not, it's not useful. It’s kind of a signal that you really care about teaching effectively and that's, and that's great, but it is so broad. It can define anything from a two-minute, like, Think-Pair-Share to like a semester long, like problem-based learning and it's so broad.

There's no possible way that you would know exactly when you're engaging in active learning and when you're not. The definition really is so broad, it's like anything other than like mindless, relentless lecture, which virtually no one, I mean, surveys have shown, no one engages it.

So, you've got this control group that's, that's really like everyone would agree as poor practice. And then you've got active learning. And well, active learning is going to look good compared to that, but is it because active learning is effective or is it because your control group is really a weak control group?

So active learning needs more specific definition and it really doesn't have one. The problem with active learning is that the criteria for active learning is the same as the evidence for active learning. It's like the students learn more, how do you know if they're doing active learning? They learn more. And then you use that to prove that active learning leads to better or active learning leads to better learning.

And so, of course, it's always going to work because that's your definition of what active learning is. I don't know if I explained that very well, but that's part of the problem.

[00:37:17] Anna Stokke: Okay. So I think what you're saying is that it's a circular definition.

[00:37:22] Stephen Chew: Exactly.

[00:37:22] Anna Stokke: So, what's the definition of active learning? Active learning improves learning, and if it improves learning, it's active learning.

[00:37:30] Stephen Chew: There's got to be an independent way of knowing when you're engaging in active learning and when you're not. And there just isn't an example or there isn't a criteria for that.

[00:37:40] Anna Stokke: And I've encountered this. So I've had people refer to active learning as what they often mean as something, I would call it flipping the classroom. So, the students are watching a lecture or studying something at home, and then they come to class the next day and they work in groups. So, I've seen it referred to as that. And then someone else, I heard them refer to active learning and it became clear that what they meant is that the student is engaged in practice, which is a completely different thing.

So you don't really know what it means. But having said that, there are all these studies that that claim that active learning improves student achievement. So why do you find the evidence unconvincing, the so-called evidence?

[00:38:25] Stephen Chew: Well, because the definition that most people use of active learning is because it is anything that improves learning. So, and the only thing that they, the control group then is this relentless passive lecture. And when you pick your control group that way, then active learning is going to look good in comparison, what you need to do is see if your active learning approach is better than what you normally do.

You know, that's the best control group and that's rarely done where you're comparing what you normally do with this new pedagogy or this additional pedagogy. If you see an improvement there, then you know, then you have solid evidence. But if your comparison is something that you would never do and is no one considers a good practice, then it's not helpful to find a difference between the two.

[00:39:17] Anna Stokke: Are you familiar with that Freeman et al. meta-analysis?

[00:39:21] Stephen Chew: Oh yeah, absolutely.

[00:39:23] Anna Stokke: Yeah, see that's the one I've had sent to me a few times actually. It's interesting though, and like, here's the definition of the control group, the traditional lecturing, “continuous exposition by the teacher. Under this definition, student activity was assumed to be limited to taking notes and/or asking occasional and unprompted questions of the instructor.”

So essentially the kind of lecturing where someone's at the front of the room and they're really not engaging with the class.

[00:39:51] Stephen Chew: That's right. It doesn't matter if there's one student there or 500 students there, they're talking exactly the same way.

[00:39:56] Anna Stokke: Just out of curiosity, how often do you think people teach in that way?

[00:40:01] Stephen Chew: Well, I mean, there's actually surveys of teaching practice and it's very rare. You know, teachers will pause for questions. I mean, it doesn't mean they're necessarily effective. Like no one intentionally says, “Well, I'm just going to be relentlessly expository today.” They, you know, most times they, they try to think of activities or ways to break it up or questions they can ask and things like that.

So that kind of sort of relentless lecture is really rare, and on top of that, there is really good evidence that effective lecture, where you have a mix of like formative assessments, can be very effective. You know, the students aren't active and they're not moving around necessarily, but they're engaged and they're challenged, and their interest is peaked and held.

So you can, you can have effective lecture and oftentimes these active learning articles kind of, you know, dismiss lecturers as you know, out of hand. And there there's many different forms of lectures, some of which are, can be highly effective and you have excellent lecturers out there.

[00:41:08] Anna Stokke: Would an excellent lecturer look like that?

[00:41:11] Stephen Chew: I think an excellent lecturer gives very clear explanations and they work on those explanations to be clear, and they have multiple ways of explaining concepts. So that your students come in with a wide variety of prior knowledge and interest in the subject, so, you need to have sort of multiple opportunities for different students to learn the, the concept.

So some will get it on the first try, others won't get it until you get an example, or you do a formative assessment. So, you have multiple opportunities there to capture as many of the students as possible, and then you provide opportunities for them to use the information and get feedback about the accuracy of their information before you do the summative assessment.

And you know, that can be done in lecture, it can be done in, in most anyway. I think the crux of learning isn't tied to any particular practice. You know, you can engage in it, and you can get students to learn in multiple different ways. So this whole idea of best practice, this is also another, to me, a kind of a red herring where what you need to do is figure out the best way to get learning out of the practice that you prefer to use.

Those multiple opportunities, that support of learning, identifying and correcting misconceptions, all part of, of really good teaching.

[00:42:35] Anna Stokke: So, are there specific cognitive principles that you believe should guide teaching more than vague terms like active learning then?

[00:42:43] Stephen Chew: It just so happens that longtime friend and collaborator of mine, Bill Cerbin and I, have put out a, a framework of nine cognitive challenges that students and teachers have to negotiate for successful learning. So we've tried to summarize the research literature on learning into these nine challenges.

So instead of saying like, you should use flipped classroom or you should use problem-based learning, what we're saying is here are the challenges that you need to address, and how you address them is up to you, and you need to adapt your pedagogy to the students you have and the situation that you have, but no matter what your preferred pedagogy or what your academic context, these are the nine challenges that you need to pay attention to.

And I think, I mean, I hope that that will be a more productive way of thinking about teaching than like you need to use active learning, although we're not quite sure what it is.

[00:43:46] Anna Stokke: I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense. So. Instead of focusing on like a name or a buzzword, focus on specific principles. What are your favourite ones on the list?

[00:43:59] Stephen Chew: Well, we've talked about a number of them, misconceptions is there, we talked about student trust, learning strategies, metacognition, which I know you've ,talked about like students' awareness of their level of understanding, you know, their attitude, trying to get them to see the value of what they're doing. transfer of, of learning is an important one, and prior knowledge is really important, especially, I don't have to tell you, in math it's really important.

I can't name a favourite one, I guess. I will tell you though, that I think the one that I think is the most understudied is trust. I've talked about that, the importance of students trusting you, seeing you as a partner in their learning rather than an obstacle to them getting a good grade in the class. So, I've done a lot of research on trust as an underappreciated variable in learning.

[00:44:51] Anna Stokke: Sure. Do you want to tell us a bit about that? How do you build trust?

[00:44:54] Stephen Chew: You know, trust is different from rapport. You know, people, there's a lot of research on rapport, like how approachable you are, but trust is composed of competence, that students see you as being skilled as a teacher and knowledgeable as a teacher. So, you can carry out the pedagogy that you want, you can conduct a good class.

Then it's integrity where you treat them as, you treat your students with respect. You know, you put their learning, you prioritize their learning. You keep your word, you arrange policies that, so that it's in the best interest of students and then beneficence, which is where you will work to promote the student's learning, you're a partner in their learning.

And there's no single best way to to develop trust, but it can start with a syllabus even where you can just have a statement on there that “I hope you'll find this class valuable.” You know, “I want you to succeed, and if you put forward the effort, I will help you to succeed.”

And then, you know, the way you approach that, every activity you explain, like “this is meant to help you learn.” You know, “I'm doing this because this will be valuable to you, and this will be important in your future.” So, you kind of keep that in the back of your mind and that will help to build trust.

[00:46:03] Anna Stokke: Let's talk a little bit more about students. And you mentioned one misconception students have, that they think learning is a function of time spent studying. So, they use bad study strategies and they think that because they've spent time studying that they should do well on a test.

Can you say a bit more about that and why they engage in bad study strategies, and are there other misconceptions that students might have about learning?

[00:46:32] Stephen Chew: The most common misconception is that students think that learning is a function of time spent studying. So, they will find the easiest way to spend those hours studying, and the easiest ways, of course, are the least effective ways of studying.

So, they engage in bad study strategies because they're easy, and then it makes them overconfident because they've spent all that time studying and then they're stunned when they make a poor grade and they'll come and say, you know, “I studied hours,” and I believe them, but you know, they've used ineffective study strategies. So that really you have to like move them away from that idea, that time studying is what leads to learning and to quality of study is what leads to learning.

And then, you know, multitasking, obviously you, I know you've covered that before, and then part of poor studying is like memorizing concepts independent of each other rather than trying to understand sort of how concepts are related to each other, you know, you download the electronic flashcards, you memorize definitions and then you virtually never get tested over that because we give problems, which involve like working through problem using concepts and so that's another common misconception that students have.

[00:47:55] Anna Stokke: And I'm going to link to your videos on the resource page so that teachers can use those and university profs can use them too, because that would be really helpful because we do want to address these misconceptions for students so that they, they're more likely to succeed.

But I also wanted to follow up on difficulties and making things difficult. And I, I think you mentioned this earlier in our conversation that some professors or teachers or instructors, they want to make things really difficult for students. They think that making things difficult for students is going to result in better learning, but there is something called a desirable difficulty.

Can you explain the difference between a desirable difficulty and simply making things harder for the sake of making them harder?

[00:48:46] Stephen Chew: I think that's a common misconception that teachers have around desirable difficulty and desirable difficulty is when you make things harder, either as a teacher or even as a student, but that difficulty leads to better long-term learning. Like spacing practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, all, I know you've talked about all of those, which are more time consuming and effortful to do, but they lead to better long-term retention.

So that's desirable difficulties, but there are difficulties that aren't desirable, which would be making students do things which aren't related to their learning just because they're effortful. I can't think of an example other than I had my niece from Japan was visiting, and they had actually, it was a math lesson she was doing and a part of that lesson was to recopy the lesson 20 times.

So, she had to just write it out 20 times and you just think that someone must assume that just writing this out 20 times is going to help to reinforce the lesson when it's adding difficulty, but I don't think it really was adding any sort of learning to that. There's got to be an equivalent to like a regular classroom, but just making students go through extra steps that aren't really related to their learning.

[00:50:11] Anna Stokke: That was kind of used as punishment when I was growing up, they called that writing lines. But anyway, that's an interesting way to teach math. I've never heard that one before, but, okay. So, I would say sort of the common thing in math right now that we sometimes hear about is called productive struggle.

And so, what that means is giving a student a problem and just sort of letting them struggle with it, and they may not have the tools to solve that problem. I would consider that an undesirable difficulty. I mean, I don't know what you think.

[00:50:43] Stephen Chew: Yeah. There is some evidence that supports that kind of strategy. I don't have any evidence to support that, but yeah, I think it's really context-specific. I think it's got to be a problem that's like within their like, you know, zone of proximal learning, like it's something that's just a little beyond.

But if you give them a problem that's way too advanced, you'll just end up with, you know, learned helplessness and frustration on the part of the student. You know, any learning practice can be applied inappropriately. And I think that's one where you can easily, you've got to be very careful about, about how you implement that kind of practice.

[00:51:23] Anna Stokke: So I guess again, the term productive struggle is one of these terms that's quite vague and people use it in different ways. So if we're talking about Bjork's desirable difficulties like spacing or interleaving, those definitely are useful.

And I think what you are saying is if productive struggle were to mean hitting a sweet spot just beyond the student's ability to solve a problem that makes sense and can be helpful for learning. But if the problem is too difficult, which I think is often the case, when people talk about or implement what they call productive struggle, the students will get frustrated and this likely won't be helpful for student learning.

So, do you have any formative assessment techniques for a large university class?

[00:52:21] Stephen Chew: Well, actually what you talked about with the peer instruction, you can do it in a very large class, it's one of the advantages. Think-Pair-Shares you can do with a large, with a large class. You know, if you have the clickers, then you can get, you can gather data from a large class, but a lot of times they aren't really needed just, you know, holding up the cards or holding up fingers and letting people see that there's not, like, there's not consensus or there is consensus on an answer.

So, there are definitely formative assessments that you can use in a large class and get students talking to each other. So, you know, peer instruction is one. I've come up with, I've adapted an icebreaker game called two truths and a lie, if you're familiar with that game. You give someone, in the icebreaker, you give three statements: two are true about you and one is a lie, and so that people have to try and figure out which one is the lie.

Well, it, you can use it as a formative assessment by putting up three statements about, you know, a concept, two of which are true, and one is like a misconception. And then you have the students think to themselves, you know, which one is the lie, which one is false, and then you can do the card response that you want.

And then you can go through and explain like, you know, why this one is true and why this one is true and why this one is a lie. So, you can do that one in large groups as well.

[00:53:47] Anna Stokke: Okay, that's a good idea. I'm going to use that one actually. So, thanks for that. So is there anything else you wanna add to the conversation?

[00:53:54] Stephen Chew: Just one last thought I had the model that Bill Cerbin and I came up with the nine cognitive challenges. One thing I think it shows is just how complicated teaching is. What a challenging, sophisticated skill that we are trying to engage in.

It takes, you know, your whole career, you continue to improve. And a lot of times people outside of teaching don't really appreciate just how complicated it is. So, I think one of the byproducts of that model is just showing that we teachers are really engaging in complex, difficult tasks and trying to create an atmosphere where all of our students can learn.

[00:54:32] Anna Stokke: Definitely, it's a hard job and it's also a really important job. So we'll close off with this. So cognitive psychology has given us a lot of insight into how people learn best. So why do you think these principles aren't more widely known or applied in education?

[00:54:48] Stephen Chew: Well, I guess it's just, it's been a sort of, they're, they're kind of siloed. You know, in psychology, we do this research and, you know, I've heard like researchers say, “Well now we've done the hard part, so all teachers have to do is implement it and the students will learn well,” and they don't really appreciate the complex environment that teachers teach in, the many different factors they have to consider.

And then teachers, you know, we've come up with this research, but you know, there's a lot of unanswered questions and they have to come up with solutions. They can't wait for us to do research on these things. And so, they come up with like, you know, intuition and, and assumptions and this often gets codified into practice.

And so, the two seem to have kind of been moving along in parallel. And what we're trying to do now is to, you know, get the two camps to talk with each other and, and podcasts like yours and work with like between collaborations between researchers and teachers I think are going to be really valuable for that kind of thing.

[00:55:55] Anna Stokke: Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk to me today about your great work, and it's been a great pleasure to meet you and to talk to you and I really appreciate it.

[00:56:05] Stephen Chew: Thank you so much. I had a great time.

[00:56:16] Anna Stokke: As always, we've included a resource page that has links to articles and books mentioned in the episode. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Chalk and Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke. Transcript and resource page by Jazmin Boisclair and Deepika Tung.

Subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available. You can follow me on X, Blue Sky, or LinkedIn for notifications or check out my website, annastokke.com for more information. This podcast received funding through a University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact grant funded through the Anthony Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.