At some point during the summer holidays, my son became convinced that Velcro would no longer be acceptable come September and so, last week, I found myself teaching him to tie laces.
I started out confident. You can’t edit the leading education publication in the world and not pick up some tips. So I chunked my material, I scaffolded, I used worked examples and I ensured deliberate, spaced practice. What could go wrong?
Well, first up, my son’s motor skills. The finer movements involved in tying laces were slightly beyond him - it looked like he was trying to eat noodles holding the very ends of the chopsticks. Then there were the distractions: siblings orbited his lessons, enticing him with “fun”. And, surprisingly, motivation was a factor: I had presumed he would be motivated to engage as the activity was his suggestion. I was wrong: he found the whole thing boring.
At this time, I was proofing our cover feature on the cognitive science (cogsci) kickback. The Education Endowment Foundation publication that John Morgan reports on delves deep into the techniques that I had attempted to use and it finds that, while evidence for the concepts is strong, evidence for applying them in educational settings (or my own home) is relatively weak. It appears that, away from the controlled conditions of a laboratory, and testing on older teens in carefully constructed studies, we know relatively little about how well such techniques work in your average classroom.
Why teachers need to be careful with cognitive science research
This isn’t new, of course. Many teachers have raised an eyebrow at levels of devotion to this area of research, particularly in government policy. But the EEF has a strong reputation and its warning has had an impact.
I felt the limitations in my own experience. There is little that cognitive science can offer me to fast-track my son’s motor skills or give me in terms of behaviour management, and on motivation it is, putting it lightly, light.
Some schools have tried to fill these gaps. On behaviour, we have seen a shift to school conditions that mimic lab conditions - reducing variables so as to get as close to the environment that had excellent returns from cogsci as they can. And on motivation, the line we get often now is that success breeds motivation, and that cogsci breeds success.
On the first issue, we have to be careful of the tail wagging the dog; and on the second, motivation research is complex and difficult to unpick, and also too lean, so that claim is shaky. Discussing these caveats as well as the benefits of cogsci is crucial, but we rarely get a balanced discussion now. It is this, rather than anything in the EEF report, that I think is the real danger for cogsci.
Teachers were the ones who brought cogsci to education in the first place but that open adoption appears to have become - at some point - a closed, mandated relationship. Government has done much of the damage here by seeming to shift “evidence-informed practice” to become “cogsci-based teaching”. What was investigative among teachers has now become ideological between teachers. And we’re all worse off for it.
There is much more that we don’t know about the application of cogsci than we do know. Through open discussion and investigation in schools, backed by funding for time and training, we could find answers.
Instead, the inference from some inside and outside government is that the translation exercise is complete, that we already know enough. This undermines all the good that teachers have already done and limits what they can do next. Whether it is teaching a child how to tie laces or how to manage factorials, teachers need to drive innovation in education. Cogsci could have been our exemplar of how to do that, but instead it may become a cautionary tale.
@jon_severs
