Let’s use cognitive science insights for better learning (Mint)

Mains Paper 3: Science and Tech
Prelims level: Testing effect, Spaced practice
Mains level: Cognitive science insights

Context

• Insights about how the human brain gathers and stores information have been accumulating for over a hundred years.
• But there’s a distressing gap in mainstream education: good pedagogical practice—applying what cognitive science—has often taken a back-seat to convenience, scale and tradition.
• The need for better learning points to a significant redesign of existing education systems.

Better learning points

• We learn best in about 10-minute chunks.
• This appears to be related to the way we form short-term memories in the brain.
• If learning exceeds that time, the mind begins to wander.
• Lectures need to be extremely short to be effective.
• Recorded lectures, enabling viewers to pause, rewind or speed up a video, offer a base level of personalization, where students can learn at their own pace.
• By contrast, learning through regular in-person lectures does not offer this flexibility.

Testing effect

• When a learner is tested frequently about the material that she has just learnt, learning is better.
• For example, a learner who is given weaker cues for the test, and therefore struggles more to recall material, will learn better.

Spaced practice

• The testing is best when spaced out over weeks or months.
• This flies in the face of a prevalent and expedient approach of mass practice, in which a student might address a number of problems at the end of a chapter in a short span of time.
• This applies not just to academic learning, but also to sports and motor driving.
• Spaced practice has now been explained to some extent down to the levels of the proteins needed for long-term memory.
• A key aspect of spaced learning is that relearning material is most effective just before the learner forgets the material.

Topics are interspaced with one another

• Fourth, content is best absorbed when topics are interspaced with one another.
• A common practice in education is to take up topics in blocks: multiplication one day, say, followed by division a week later.
• The evidence from extensive research points to the benefits of interleaving practice.
• The benefits have been replicated in a range of subject areas, including mathematics and fine art.

Key aspects of learning

• Novices thus need more “fill in the blank" problems. But as novices gain expertise and develop the schema needed to absorb information, they can be exposed effectively to more open-ended problems.
• Tactile experience, in which a student physically feels angular momentum, or gestures to capture a phenomenon, have been shown to result in better learning than if the learning is purely abstract.
• Prototyping technologies such as 3D printing, Lego Mindstorms, the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, App Inventor, and even the programming language Python, enable hands-on learning. The power at the fingertips of students to actualize their ideas, learn from real creation, seek feedback, and enjoy the pleasure of achievement is unprecedented—and will increase with time.
• Project-based learning, problem-based learning and task-oriented learning are all techniques that give students more agency and purpose.
• Integration is another important aspect of learning, where projects and tasks can help. While learning through discipline-aligned courses can be effective, it can lead to siloed knowledge. Integration refers to connecting topics across silos.
• Techniques such as game-based learning can lead a student through a series of tasks and create an environment where learning occurs naturally. An example is World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that leads players through a post-oil world, forcing them to think about the implications of an oil shock.

Conclusion

• We know far more about how we learn today than we did some decades ago. Yet, we are guilty of not applying these insights to education.
• Modern schools and universities must adopt newer pedagogical models and break away from centuries-old norms.

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1) Consider following statements regarding Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI)
1. It’s a membership organisation representing a network of 500 botanic gardens in more than 100 countries.
2. BGCI is the largest plant conservation network in the world, and aims to collect, conserve, characterise and cultivate samples from all of the world’s plants as an insurance policy against their extinction in the wild and as a source of plant material for human innovation, adaptation and resilience.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 Nor 2

Answer: C
Mains Questions:
Q.1) To what extent the need for better learning points to a significant redesign of existing education systems. Discuss the key aspects of learning in this regard.