Minds Online Minds Online TEACHING EFFECTIVELY WITH TECHNOLOGY MICHELLE D. MILLER Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Michelle D., 1968– Minds online : teaching effectively with technology / Michelle D. Includes bibliographical references and index. Computer-assisted instruction.
Internet in education. Teaching— Computer network resources. Learning, Psychology of.33—dc23 2014006755 For my father, Thomas Clay Miller, Jr. Contents Preface ix Chapter 1: Is Online Learning Here to Stay? 1 Chapter 2: Online Learning: Does It Work? 19 Chapter 3: The Psychology of Computing 42 Chapter 4: Attention 64 Chapter 5: Memory 88 Chapter 6: Thinking 117 Chapter 7: Incorporating Multimedia Effectively 148 Chapter 8: Motivating Students 165 Chapter 9: Putting It All Together 196 Notes 237 Acknowledg ments 269 Index 273 Preface I N 1978, most kids had never seen a computer up close, let alone been allowed to touch one.
But stashed away in a back room of my elementary school there was a PLATO terminal, a device designed to present interactive tutorials on mathematics, typing, foreign lan- guages, and the like. We students each got just one hour a week of PLATO time, and for figuring out how to get started or work through the lessons, we were pretty much on our own. Even so, for me, a ten- year-old seriously bogged down in fifth-grade math, this was a novel and utterly engaging experience. I credit it with setting me on a life- long path of curiosity about minds, machines, and learning.
PLATO’s 16-by-16 touch-screen grid enabled direct and intuitive communication between user and computer, and it was able to show not just text but also blocky, single-color graphics. It spent each of my one-hour sessions patiently presenting round after round of a pet- store-themed game designed to teach fractions. PLATO was even capable of flashing a little wit, admonishing “Shelly, you have a fish on your finger!” when I failed to drag and drop exactly one-third of my goldfish inventory into a customer’s order. Luck and an unusually well-funded school district made me one of the few people of my generation who experienced cutting-edge instructional technology from the student perspective.
Now nearly four decades later, you’d be hard pressed to find an educational in- stitution that doesn’t use instructional technology in one form or another. Within higher education, the impact has been especially x PREFACE dramatic. Few issues of publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, or Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, go by without a new article on teaching and learning with technology, and there are entire scholarly journals and international organizations dedi- cated to the topic (EDUCAUSE, the Sloan Consortium, and the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, to name a few). Centers supporting online learning are an increasingly common part of university infrastructure, as are specialized learning man- agement systems such as Moodle, Canvas, and Blackboard.
Although traditional paper textbooks still dominate the market for primary required course materials, computer-based auxiliaries have multi- plied across the disciplines, offering everything from self-testing systems that adapt to the needs of individual learners to animated lab rats in simulated Skinner boxes. With this explosion of interest in technology came serious inquiry about the most effective practices for online teaching and learning, including the call for a more substantial theoretical rationale for how we design online learning activities and learning environments. This call coincided nicely with the rise of cognitive psychology, a sub- discipline focused on mental processes such as memory, language, and reasoning, which had been around since the 1950s but entered the wider academic and popular consciousness much later. On the one hand, this new focus on cognition could potentially create the powerful theoretical frameworks and novel insights needed to move forward in the design of new learning technologies.
But it also creates a new set of pitfalls stemming from the difficulty of inter- preting and applying technical research within cognitive and brain sciences, particularly for nonspecialists. These pitfalls are no reflec- tion on anyone’s good intentions or intellectual acumen; rather, they are the unfortunate side effect of the ways in which cognitive re- searchers conduct and disseminate their work. Cognitive and brain sciences have undergone a phase of rapid development that makes it hard even for those of us within the field to stay on top of current thinking. Memory research is a case in point.
Our understanding of how people remember information has progressed well beyond the “three box” theory focusing on distinct sensory, short-term, and long-term memory components. And yet, you still find scattered references to PREFACE xi this concept, including within some contemporary writing about teaching and learning. The last twenty years, in particular, have given rise to a proliferation of new theories and thousands of empirical findings pertaining to memory, making it difficult to impossible to identify and usefully apply the most important concepts. Similarly, neuroscientific work on cognition has gone through a period of remarkable productivity and change.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, has come from its inception as a new technol- ogy in the late 1980s to a mainstream method of psychological inquiry. Spirited debates continue about the interpretation and significance of functional imaging studies, even as more and more such studies are produced, further complicating the task of synthesizing what the research might mean for educational applications. Besides the growing pains wrought by rapid development of the science, jargon and nonintuitive study design also conspire against application of the research. All academic disciplines suffer from opaque terminology to one degree or another, but in cognitive psy- chology, the problem is particularly acute.
“Short-term memory,” for example, seems like a straightforward enough term, and most people use it to refer to what they remember from the last few hours or days. Researchers, on the other hand, generally use it to mean really recent information, commonly only a few second’s worth. Cognitive research studies also depend on a repertoire of study techniques, including recordings of minute time differences (think thousandths of a second) in responses, that bear little resemblance to real-world situations, or are, frankly, highly contrived. This approach is scien- tifically defensible, given the need for precise control over study conditions, but hard to link to practical application.
Popu lar and mainstream media are of little help either in decod- ing major developments in the field, being notoriously prone to zooming in on the most controversial-sounding findings— Men use only half their brains to listen! Political party is neurally hardwired! iPads are doing something to kids’ brains!—without tying them in to larger, more important developments in what we know about human cognition. The challenges to meaningful, useful applications of cognitive research are substantial, but so are the opportunities, especially given the new avenues for teaching with technology. The confluence xii PREFACE between rising interest in cognitively based teaching approaches, rapid growth in scientific understanding of cognition, and rapid spread of educational technology is what motivated me to write this book. This book explains how principles of human cognition can in- form the effective use of technology in college teaching.
But be- yond that, I hope to also convey something that really excites me about contemporary instructional technology: the unprecedented opportunity it affords us to align our teaching with the way the mind works. Here are some of the key ways in which technology can help us optimize the way we teach: Technology enables frequent, low-stakes testing, an activity that powerfully promotes memory for material. Technology encourages better spacing of study over the time course of the class and helps prevent cramming. Technology facilitates presentation of material in ways that take advantage of learners’ existing knowledge about a topic.
Technology facilitates presentation of material via multiple sensory modalities, which, if done in the right ways, can pro- mote comprehension and memory. Technology offers new methods for capturing and holding students’ attention, which is a necessary precursor for memory. Technology supports frequent, varied practice that is a necessary precursor to the development of expertise. Technology offers new avenues to connect students socially and fire them up emotionally.
Technology allows us to borrow from the techniques of gaming to promote practice, engagement, and motivation. I believe that technology gives us many advantages over and above traditional, face-to-face classroom techniques, but a clarification is in order. I don’t believe that instructional technology promotes learn- ing by its mere presence. Nor does it let us evade some of the appar- ently immutable truths about how we learn— especially the fact that learning requires focused attention, effortful practice, and motiva- tion.
Rather, what technology allows us to do is amplify and expand the repertoire of techniques that effective teachers use to elicit the attention, effort, and engagement that are the basis for learning. PREFACE xiii This is not a new idea; Arthur Chickering and Steven Ehrmann laid out something much like it in the mid-1990s.1 They explained how technologies, even basic ones such as e-mail and discussion boards, could be used to advance the practices laid out by Chicker- ing and Zelda Gamson in their seminal 1987 article “Seven Princi- ples for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.”2 Chickering and Ehrmann point out that the power of instructional technol- ogy comes from its alignment with specific aims, such as increas- ing the meaningful time spent practicing skills or offering frequent feedback—not just by mere presence. In this book, we will explore the cognitive principles that enable us to create new and better learning experiences with technology, and strategic uses of technology that tie into cognitive principles. The first part of the book focuses on the impact and importance of technology in the contemporary higher education landscape, empha- sizing the common principles underlying good teaching in online and face-to-face modalities while addressing some of the major con- cerns faculty have about the quality of online learning experiences.
I’ll then discuss in detail each of the three broad areas of cognition that are most relevant to teaching and learning— attention, mem- ory, and thinking—with an eye to how those processes can guide good design of online learning experiences for college students. The next section of the book takes on practical ways to integrate all these strategies into online learning experiences, discussing how to use multimedia effectively and how to apply research-based strate- gies for getting students motivated to do the work. The final chapter illustrates what all of these different arenas of research— cognitive, multimedia, and motivation—might look like embodied in an actual course, with specific strategies mapped onto each arena and a sample syllabus showing how these strategies might come together in an actual course. As you may have already noted, I am being fairly loose in my ter- minology around instructional technology and online learning.
This mirrors the breadth of ways in which technology is used in higher education today, as well as the fact that boundaries are breaking down between strictly traditional, face-to-face classroom instruction and online instruction. Boundaries and strict defi nitions continue to fall xiv PREFACE apart as more institutions “blend” in-class contact time with struc- tured time spent online, and as more instructors augment their face- to-face classes with activities and assignments conducted online.