Why Books Don't Work: Constructivism Over Transmissionism

Info This article is my response to Andy Matuschak’s article Why books don’t work. If you haven’t please read it first. However, if you want you can read this article now. I believe the following content should still make sense. It took me over a year to finish reading this article. Why? Incremental Reading Constructivism over Transmissionism In summary: lectures don’t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model. It’s (implicitly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn—transmissionism—which we can caricaturize as “lecturer says words describing an idea; students hear words; then they understand.” - Andy Matuschak I’d say constructivism is a more accurate cognitive model than transmissionism to describe how we actually learn. Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.: Constructivism’s central idea is that human learning is constructed, that learners build new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning. This view of learning sharply contrasts with one in which learning is the passive transmission of information from one individual to another, a view in which reception, not construction, is key. Information may be imposed, but understanding cannot be, for it must come from within. The first [important idea of constructed knowledge] is that learners construct new understandings using what they already know. There is no tabula rasa on which new knowledge is etched. Rather, learners come to learning situations with knowledge gained from previous experience, and that prior knowledge influences what new or modified knowledge they will construct from new learning experiences. On the role of teachers and educators: An important restriction of education is that teachers cannot simply transmit knowledge to students, but students need to actively construct knowledge in their own minds. […] This constructivist view of learning considers the learner as an active agent in the process of knowledge acquisition. The [constructivist] classroom is no longer a place where the teacher (“expert”) pours knowledge into passive students, who wait like empty vessels to be filled. In the constructivist model, the students are urged to be actively involved in their own process of learning. The teacher functions more as a facilitator who coaches, mediates, prompts, and helps students develop and assess their understanding, and thereby their learning. It took me over half a year to finish reading this paper. Why? Again, Incremental Reading Constructivism learning model provides a good foundation to explain why books don’t work and understand how we actually acquire knowledge. Transmissionism puts the learner at the back seat while Constructivism at the driver seat. One analogy of Transmissionism is that students are like sponges “soaking up” the knowledge. For Constructivism it’s more like piecing together a puzzle that’s different for everyone. Whether it’s reading a book, watching a video, or attending a lecture, for Transmissionism the focus is on “absorbing”, “putting in” or “taking in” the information presented. For Constructivism, what matters is what you do with (i.e., construct) the information, not what and how it’s delivered. I believe Constructivism is a central theme behind Make It Stick, Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, Learning as a Generative Activity: Eight Learning Strategies that Promote Understanding. They all describe “what works”, but if you view it as “Constructivism vs. Transmissionism” we can get a glimpse of “why others don’t work” since these are two opposing ideas. With a learner-centric perspective, you can see that what works has one underlying principle: the learner is an active agent “making sense” of the information. The following are some quotes from them. Make It Stick This story is a bit long but it illuminates the impact it has on learning when switching from Transmissionism to Constructivism: Michael Young is a high-achieving fourth-year medical student who pulled himself up from rock bottom by changing the way he studies. Young entered medical school without the usual foundation of premed coursework. […] Despite his spending every available minute studying his coursework, he barely eked out a 65 on his first exam. “Quite honestly, I got my butt kicked,” he says. “[…] I mean, you come to class, and in a typical day you get about four hundred PowerPoint slides, and this is dense information.” Since spending more time studying wasn’t an option, Young had to find a way to make studying more effective." What did change? He explains it this way: I was big into reading, but that’s all I knew how to do for studying. I would just read the material and I wouldn’t know what else to do with it. So if I read it and it didn’t stick in my memory, then I didn’t know what to do about that. What I learned from reading the research [on learning] is that you have to do something beyond just passively taking in the information. He became more mindful when he studied. “I would stop. ‘Okay, what did I just read? What is this about?’ I’d have to think about it. ‘Well, I believe it happens this way: The enzyme does this, and then it does that.’ And then I’d have to go back and check if I was way off base or on the right track.” “When you go back and review, instead of just rereading you need to see if you can recall the learning. Do I remember what this stuff was about? You always test yourself first. And if you don’t remember, then that’s when you go back and look at it and try again.” The process was not a natural fit. “It makes you uncomfortable at first. If you stop and rehearse what you’re reading and quiz yourself on it, it just takes a lot longer. […]” But the only way he knew of to cover more material, his established habit of dedicating long hours to rereading, wasn’t getting the results he needed. As hard as it was, he made himself stick to retrieval practice long enough at least to see if it worked. “You just have to trust the process, and that was really the biggest hurdle for me, was to get myself to trust it. And it ended up working out really well for me.” Really well. By the time he started his second year, Young had pulled his grades up from the bottom of his class of two hundred students to join the high performers, and he has remained there ever since. […] He has been invited to tutor struggling students, an honor few are given. He has been teaching them these techniques, and they are pulling up their grades." This is essentially the transition from Transmissionism to Constructivism: from re-reading thinking he’ll “soak up” the information to constructing the knowledge through self-explaining and self-testing. Learning as a Generative Activity Generative learning is helping learners to actively make sense of the material so they can build meaningful learning outcomes that allow them to transfer what they have learned to solving new problems. Learning is a generative activity when learners actively generate their own learning outcomes by interpreting what is presented to them rather than by simply receiving it as presented. Suppose you sit down to read a book chapter, you attend a PowerPoint lecture, or you view an online multimedia presentation. You are proficient at reading and listening, so you can easily understand all the words. Yet, when you are finished with the lesson, you are not able to apply what you have learned to new situations or to use the material to solve problems. What could you have done to help you understand the material rather than simply to process every word? Our proposed solution is that you could engage in generative learning strategies during learning - activities that are intended to prime appropriate cognitive processing during learning (such as paying attention to the relevant information, mentally organizing it, and integrating it with your relevant prior knowledge). For example, you could try to summarize the material in your own words (perhaps by taking summary notes), you could create a spatial summary of the material as a matrix or network, you could make a drawing that depicts the main ideas in the text, or you could just imagine a drawing. These are all ways of translating the lesson into another form of representation. Alternatively, you could give yourself a practice test on the material (such as trying to answer some questions), you could explain the material aloud to yourself during learning, you could explain the material to someone else, or you could use concrete objects to act out the material in the lesson. These are all ways of elaborating on the material. Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques You can see that learning techniques rated moderate and high are learner-centric: Elaborative interrogation: asking and answering the questions yourself. Self-explaining: explaining the concepts in your own words, how it relates to personal experience or coming up with examples. Practice testing: Active recall (retrieving information from memory), e.g., doing flashcards. Distributed practice and interleaved practice: making the retrieval process “harder” (desirable difficulty). You don’t want to review the flashcards immediately: it’s too easy, but at the same time, you don’t want to do it too late that you’ve completely forgotten about it. However, not all “learner-centric” learning methods are effective: summarization, keyword mnemonic, “imagery use for text learning” are quite “thinking intensive” but they are rated low in utility. One reason has to do with the criterion tasks. For example, with “imagery use for text learning”, mentally imagining how the heart works doesn’t help with answering inference-based questions about the heart. For more please see the original discussion Why lectures don’t work