What Are Teachers Learning About the Science of Learning?

By: Benjamin Riley, J.D., Founder and Executive Director, Deans for Impact

Credit: Elisa Riva from Pixabay

Teaching is an applied science. Deans for Impact, the nonprofit organization I helped found, believes that all teachers should understand basic principles of learning science, and be able to use that knowledge to inform their instruction.

For the past year, Deans for Impact has been working with six teacher-preparation programs to integrate learning science — or cognitive science, as we also refer to it — into the coursework and clinical experiences they provide to future teachers (or teacher-candidates, as we call them). As part of that work, we developed a new assessment to help identify what teacher-candidates know – and don’t know – about learning science. Our initial report can be found here.

To our knowledge, this is the first time that there’s been a large-scale effort of this type that uses an assessment developed with leading cognitive scientists, teacher-educators, and practicing teachers. What’s more, the teacher-preparation programs administering this assessment are using the data to inform improvement efforts they are undertaking, making changes to coursework and clinical experiences. Learning science is meeting improvement science in a very tangible way.

More than 1,000 teacher-candidates across these programs took this test in Fall 2019. In what follows, I’ll summarize some initial insights, offer a glimpse into the work ahead, and conclude with some brief thoughts about the relevance of learning science to STEM teaching in high-need schools.

Initial Findings

Here are three key findings from our assessment:

In general, future teachers are unfamiliar with basic principles of learning science.

Teacher-candidates scored 50 percent correct on questions about basic principles of learning science, and how they apply to teaching. Here’s one sample item they struggled with:

Information you want to remember is more likely to make it into your long-term memory.

Only 18 percent correctly answered this as false. This is one of the harder questions on our assessment, and one that seems counterintuitive to most. But experiments show that simply wanting to learn something does not increase the likelihood it will be remembered. What matters is whether and how the information is processed. It’s possible to think and remember information you have no real desire to learn, just as it’s possible to forget that which you are highly motivated to understand.

Encouragingly, future teachers recognize the critical role that background knowledge plays in learning.

A bedrock principle of cognitive science is that our ability to understand new ideas depends upon what we already know. There’s a great deal of complexity in that seemingly straightforward notion, and we think it’s vital for future teachers — and practicing ones, for that matter — to grapple with its implications. Among other things, this principle underscores the need to teach students a broad array of content across subjects; to carefully sequence how such information is presented to students; and to understand that knowledge is cumulative, such that it becomes easier (or harder) for students to learn new information based on their existing knowledge.

The good news is that many teacher-candidates appear to understand the basic contours of this principle. For example, one item from our assessment asked teacher-candidates to read a short passage from Frederick Douglass’s speech “What Does the 4th of July Mean to a Slave?” and then answer a series of true-false questions, including this one:

Prior knowledge allows students to substitute in information not explicitly stated in the text (e.g., “Fourth of July” = holiday often described as a celebration of freedom) making it more likely they will store the meaning of the text in long-term memory.

Approximately 86 percent of teacher-candidates correctly answered this as true. Since we usually want students to think about the meaning of content, this data suggests future teachers understand the important role that background knowledge (i.e., knowledge that you already possess) plays in building new knowledge. That’s encouraging!

Future teachers struggle to identify effective forms of practice.

At Deans for Impact, we’ve long said that practice is essential to learning something new — but not all practice is created equal. Consider the following options a teacher might choose to help students remember the three branches of the US government and what they do:

a) Have students read the facts for 10 days at the beginning of class.
b) Have students copy the facts into a notebook where they can reference them as needed.
c) Have students take a once-a-week quiz for 10 weeks where they recall the facts from memory.
d) Have students participate in a review game where they have to recall the facts from memory several times in one class period.

The correct answer is (c) — but only 13 percent of teacher-candidates picked this option. In contrast, 60 percent picked (d), the in-class review game. Yet we should want new teachers to prefer using no-stakes quizzing to ensure students regularly have to retrieve information from their memories, which makes learning more durable. An in-class game might be used as one such method of retrieval, but it’s an inferior strategy.

All of these data highlights what we believe is an eminently solvable problem. After all, we should not expect future teachers to start their training with a firm grasp of the principles of learning science. Instead, this specialized knowledge needs to be learned! That learning should begin in educator-preparation programs, so that, by the time they complete their preservice preparation, future teachers both understand the basics of learning science and are able to apply that knowledge in their teaching.

The Work Ahead

We took the somewhat unusual step of releasing this report at the beginning of this network because we want people to see that leaders in teacher preparation are driving transformation to how teachers are prepared — and using learning science as a foundation for that work. We think the data from this assessment provides interesting insights into what future teachers believe about how students learn — and how they think about applying their knowledge to instructional practice.

But much of the work lies ahead. Faculty at participating programs are setting improvement goals, developing change-management plans, and preparing to change their programs in time for the next academic year – even the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed this group down. In time, we will measure the impact of these program design changes on teacher-candidate knowledge of learning science principles, creating a feedback cycle to help programs improve. We are excited about what lies ahead!

Implications of Learning Science for Teaching STEM Subjects in High-Need Schools

So how does a general understanding of learning science connect to the preparation of teachers who may teach STEM subjects in high-need schools? I’ll offer three hypotheses.

First, I believe the most profoundly inspiring principle of cognitive science is that, absent specific cognitive impairment, virtually every student is capable of building their store of knowledge. Taking this principle seriously means that all teachers, but perhaps particularly those serving students in high-need schools, cannot let the challenges of poverty or other external variables serve as an excuse for believing their students “just can’t learn.” They can, they all can, and that is a scientific fact.

Second, on STEM subjects in particular, it is unfortunately all too common to hear students say they just “aren’t good at math” or some similar sentiment. Part of that may flow from the fact that, for too long, math and science were seen as gendered subjects, and that many teachers often taught them in somewhat rote ways. This is starting to change for the better, and learning science is accelerating these efforts, underscoring the need for teachers to design meaningful experiences for their students that require effortful thought, and transfer of knowledge to new situations. After all, knowledge transfer is fundamentally the entire purpose of the scientific enterprise.

Third, science is cool. By making cognitive science central to how we prepare teachers, we signal to them that we value science, and entrust it to inform how we educate the next generation. I have a hunch doing so will make teachers feel rightly valued as the scientific practitioners they are, and perhaps even encourage a greater number of them to teach math and science subjects.

Or so I dare to dream!

Benjamin Riley, Founder and Executive Director, Deans for Impact
briley@deansforimpact.org

Benjamin Riley is the founder and executive director of Deans for Impact. Prior to founding Deans for Impact, Ben conducted research on the New Zealand education system, worked as the policy director for a national education nonprofit, and served as deputy attorney general for the State of California. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and J.D. from the Yale Law School.