Tag: Science of Learning

The Classroom Lie Series: Group Work Builds Collaboration Skills

Throughout much of my teaching career, I used a variety of group projects and activities. I thought that my students would find them more engaging, and that the group work would help build collaboration skills. But let me take you back to a memory of some of those past projects.

Invariably, at least one group would struggle to work together. Despite my best efforts to put students into groups that I thought would support learning, some groups reported that one student wasn’t pulling their weight (missing deadlines, not bringing materials, etc.). Or there would be a group sharing that one student was “taking over” and not incorporating the ideas of the other members. In these situations, I’d go back to our norms and expectations, things would get a bit better, but before long, the problems would reemerge.

The lie that we’re going to address today is the belief that putting students into groups teaches them how to collaborate. I think there is a false belief that grouping kids will lead to learning and collaboration. That’s not what the research tells us.

There is a small nuance that must be addressed: some meta-analyses find that cooperative learning is superior to competitive or individual learning. But cooperative learning is so much more than just putting students into groups. In Setting The Stage for Learning: Equitable, Evidence-Based K-12 Instructional Design and Assessment (found here), Victoria Hobson wrote a chapter on cooperative learning. She points to five key elements of structured cooperative learning highlighted in research by David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson (2018).

I can assure you, the group work that my students were doing was nowhere near this structured, and to be honest, most group work I see is lacking in at least one if not several of these areas. If we use group work to improve collaboration, we actually have to teach our students to collaborate through modeling, discussion, and feedback. In Hobson’s chapter on cooperative learning, she describes several models that support true cooperative learning. As you plan future group work, keeping these models in mind would benefit your learners.

The truth is that unstructured group work consistently leads to social loafing, unequal participation, and the illusion of learning. Collaboration is a skill that must be taught and scaffolded. We don’t create collaborators just by putting students into groups. In a 1979 study, Latené, Williams, & Harkins defined social loafing as a tendency for people to contribute less in groups than when working alone. They describe it as a social disease that negatively impacts individuals, organizations, and institutions. You can read that research here.

Social loafing has a clear cost to classroom learning. Research by Cait Caffrey (2022) suggests that individuals exert less effort and speak less when working in groups. That would be a sign that the effects go past just productivity and actually impact engagement and learning.

An important aspect of social loafing concerns the size of a group. The bigger the group, the larger the impact. It’s a lot harder to loaf when you are in partner pairs or triads than in groups of five or six. As teachers, it is important to keep in mind when developing our cooperative learning groups.

It is also worth noting that students in both high- and low-performing groups reported experiencing social loafing. Students self-report dividing tasks, completing their portion, and then putting the material together for their group, without any reflection on quality, flow, or whether it meets the project’s criteria. True cooperative learning requires integrating the different parts of the project to ensure the work meets the assignment’s expectations.

Going back to the five key elements of structured cooperative learning, a key point is that social skills must be explicitly taught. For students to be successful in collaboration, they must have explicit instruction in those skills. This means things like role-plays, modeling of behavior, and demonstrations of what not to do will help students better grasp the interactions necessary for true collaboration. Jennifer Gonzalez has a great article on how to build explicit instruction tasks. See the section on interpersonal conflict in this article.

Elizabeth Cohen and Rachel Lotan describe Complex Instruction as an approach to address learners’ varied needs and ensure participation across the group. The research suggests that those who do the most will learn the most, so we need to ensure all students are equally engaged in the task. To support equitable participation, teachers might need to help groups recognize the strengths of a low-participation member. For example, a student who speaks Spanish may not feel comfortable in writing a portion of the report, but they might have the skills to help explain the deeper meaning of the lyrics in a Spanish song that could be used as part of the presentation.

Ultimately, in Complex Instruction, the teacher’s message can be: “No one person has all the skills to be successful, but by combining our skills, each one of us has some of the skills needed.”

Another move that teachers can make to ensure equal participation is to assign students roles within the group. A few potential examples might include leader, recorder, questioner, timekeeper, reporter, fact checker, etc. Depending on the group’s context, different roles might be necessary. I’ve seen the assignment of roles used with great success in book club type group work, and having each student fulfill a different role at each meeting ensures equal participation across the task.

A final fix to keep in mind: Students must have the competencies needed to complete the project. Group work before students have a solid foundation in a topic will invariably lead to social loafing. Students’ perceptions might be, “I can’t do it because I don’t understand the material.” One of the failures I have seen in project work is that the project is the driver of the learning, but without background knowledge, students may struggle to even start the task. 

In the past, I’ve discussed the Novice-to-Expert continuum. Students at the novice level of learning cannot be expected to develop meaningful learning of a skill or concept. They must be beyond the novice stage before we set them free to independent or group project work.

Ultimately, a key takeaway here is that social loafing is not an inevitable reaction to group work, it’s a predictable response to poor structure.

Well-designed cooperative learning does work, and there is detailed research on that. For success, we must ensure the 5 elements listed above are in place. When something doesn’t go well in cooperative learning, the problem is almost never entirely the students’ fault, it’s the design.

What are your thoughts? Are there things that you have found key to successful group projects? What are some of your past failures? Share with us in the comments below.

The Classroom Lie Series: The forgetting curve

It was late in the school year, and I was giving my students an end-of-course assessment. We had worked hard all year, done some review leading up to assessment day, and both the students and I felt confident that we would be ready. So when I started grading the assessment, I was surprised to see that the topics that my students did worst on were some of the ones that we had learned most recently. As a teacher, when we were reviewing, the students and I felt we needed to focus more on the material we had learned earlier in the year and spend less time reviewing our new material. The data told me something different.

At the time, I assumed something had gone wrong in my instruction of what we had learned most recently. Maybe the students were not as engaged in the learning because we were doing it in May. Or maybe it was something about my instruction – was it too theoretical and not concrete enough? Did I model enough to support their learning? Or maybe something else went wrong. Ultimately, it felt like I had failed my students in that portion of the learning.

What I know now is that there is a truth to how the brain works that I didn’t understand while I was still in the classroom. You see, forgetting is a default state of memory. It’s not a sign of failure, it’s how the brain works. Our students will forget about two-thirds of what you teach them this week!

The human brain does not prioritize information that we have not reviewed. The research that helps us understand this actually dates back to the late 1800s and has been replicated in a variety of cognitive science studies over the years. Hermann Ebbinghaus used his research to create what has become known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.

What this curve tells us is that if we teach something in class today, by tomorrow, students will only remember about 60% of what they learned. If we review that material tomorrow, we decrease that rate of forgetting. Each time we review the material, we increase a student’s ability to retrieve it. This is why spaced retrieval (also known as spiral review) is such a powerful tool. It doesn’t prevent students from forgetting something – students are going to forget what you teach them because that is the default state of the brain – instead, it exploits the brain’s ability to move information from working memory to long-term memory, and helps develop the neural pathways for learners to access that information.

More recent research suggests nuance in what learners will forget and what they might remember more easily. Bjork & Bjork (1992) note that forgetting can be highly variable and dependent on the student’s context. The student who loves baseball is likely to recall more details from a story about a baseball player than students with no interest in baseball. However, even with these factors, the study reinforces that the newest information we learn generally does not stick.

Most teachers probably aren’t aware of what this study tells us about memory (I know I wasn’t until researching this series of articles). The first thing we learn from the research is the idea of retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength is the ease with which something can be recalled. As educators, remembering the names of our current students has a high retrieval strength, like remembering your best friend’s phone number when you were in high school. Storage strength is how well we’re able to recall something learned in the long-term. I know that all of us say we’ll “never forget” our students, but we have probably all run into a former student in a public place and not been able to recall their name. Or that number of your best friend that you dialed every day is a number you haven’t used in years, and now you can’t recall.

Our brains are good at storing information we use regularly, but when we no longer use it, the pathway to that information becomes weaker. Likely it is still there – there is no known limit to human memory – but if you don’t use it, the retrieval strength goes away.

Periodic recall of information increases the retrieval strength. While Ebbinghaus’s curve tells us that we might forget something the day after we learned it, that memory has not been erased. Instead, since it hasn’t been retrieved recently, our brains don’t have a strong connection to the information. In a classroom, the risk we run is assuming our students know something because they have a high retrieval strength of the material during the lesson, but if it’s the first time we’re learning that thing, our storage strength is low.

So, how do we increase both the retrieval and storage strength of a topic? Cepeda et al.’s (2006) meta-analysis of 254 studies shows that distributed practice produces 10-30% better retention than massed practice. What does that mean?

Distributed practice is when we practice a skill a little bit every day over a long period of time. Let’s say that we spend 20 minutes a day over 2 weeks. That’s almost 5 hours of practice! Massed practice is when we practice the same skill in a single day. The research shows that when learners are tested on those skills, those who used distributed practice show 10-30% more retention than those who used massed practice.

Knowing this research should be a sign for all of us – creating opportunities for our students to practice a skill again and again, with time to forget in between – will strengthen their retrieval strength for that piece of information. When students have to recall something they have started to forget, we increase both retrieval and storage strength.

One way to support this in our learning is to build a spiral review into our lesson planning. Imagine if you added a section near the end of your lesson plan for review questions from today’s lesson. Have a spot for “tomorrow,” “next week,” and “next month.” Then, when you are planning today’s lesson plan, you go back to your plans from yesterday, last week, and last month. Your warm-up has been created by your past self, and your future self will thank you!

The key thing to remember is that people don’t forget things because they are careless, but because the brain’s ability to remember something is directly related to how often it has to recall that information. The forgetting curve helps describe a learning process that we, as teachers, can exploit in thoughtful design to boost learning.

What does this make you think about in terms of your practice? Are there changes you might make knowing more about how we can exploit the brain’s natural state of forgetting? Let us know in the comments!

The Bottleneck

This fall, The Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning at the University of Indianapolis is offering a Science of Learning Micro-Credential. When I saw information about it over the summer, I immediately signed up. I have long been fascinated by the human brain’s learning process. That makes sense, as I was reminded in a recent professional development session, because learning is the top value I selected when reading “Dare to Lead” by Brené Brown.

This Micro-Credential has an engaging format, comprising a total of 8 asynchronous modules and 4 synchronous learning opportunities. InnerDrive, a mindset coaching company based in the United Kingdom, presents the asynchronous learning. The company works closely with education. The first module of learning focused on Cognitive Load Theory, which I have previously written about (you can find those posts here, here, and here).

If you haven’t learned about Cognitive Load Theory, it’s based on the idea that our working memory has a limited capacity (for most people, approximately 4-7 pieces of information), while our long-term memory is very large – potentially even unlimited. During the first asynchronous module, InnerDrive presented an interview with Zach Groshell. He is a teacher, instructional coach, educational consultant, and author. I’ve referenced him and his book Just Tell Them in past posts.

He describes Cognitive Load Theory and the process of moving information from working memory to long-term memory as a bottleneck. If we define learning as creating a change in long-term memory, then our job as educators is to determine how to address that bottleneck.

Credit: Scott H. Young, Cognitive Load Theory and its Applications for Learning

Research tells us that there are several ways to address the concept of the bottleneck:

  1. Break learning into smaller bits: If you chunk information, you’re able to take complex ideas into smaller and more digestible steps. That might include starting with simple examples and then gradually adding complexity. Alternatively, you might use a worked example where you show step-by-step most of the problem, leaving students to complete the last portion on their own. Or you might scaffold learning by providing support like a sentence starter or graphic organizer, and you fade the scaffolds over time.
  2. Remember that busy does not equal learning: As I mentioned earlier, learning is about making a lasting change to long-term memory. One of the realities of education is that sometimes we focus more on what students are doing than what they are learning. Cognitive science tells us that utilizing retrieval practice, promoting connections between topics of learning, utilizing spaced practice, and creating opportunities for students to utilize self-explanation out loud or in writing.
  3. Success drives motivation: All humans gravitate towards assistance and support. When we feel successful in a learning environment, we strive to learn more. I don’t know about you, but I love to utilize YouTube as a learning tool. I can’t tell you how many of my YouTube searches involve fixing something. The other day, I was told that one of my brake lights had gone out on my truck. I spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out how to access the brake light, and finally pulled out my phone, watched a 30-second clip, and had the brake light replaced in under 2 minutes. Because of that success, I feel comfortable trying to learn more through a video format again. As teachers, it’s essential to find ways to help our students achieve success within the classroom setting. That maintains their motivation in the learning environment.

Understanding how the human brain learns is a key part of supporting students. We need to focus on the key points of learning. It’s what we’re here for!