Week 6: Book Clubs, Socratic Seminars & a Bit More Transfer

In this week’s installment of 643, we discussed transfer some more, along with a few other topical items (gaming, blogs, book clubs). After having talked further about Dr. McGonigal’s TED Talk, I thought more about how her presentation related to what we were learning about transfer. Her main point seemed to be that two seemingly unrelated tasks (playing video games and saving the world) are actually connected. That is, gamers can transfer skills from the video game arena to the real-life, world-saving arena.  Still, it seems unlikely that many gamers are going to give up World of Warcraft or Call of Duty to play games that deal with a looming oil shortage or a finite water supply. In other words, I think for transfer to really be effective, there has to be a more obvious connection between the contexts. 

What was interesting to learn was the apparent divide between classmates who thought transfer was crucial to librarianship and others who felt transfer and librarianship had little overlap. I didn’t discuss it too much in my blog from last week, but I guess I sort of assumed that librarians (especially those who focus on instruction) need to know about transfer. After all, librarians are probably going to be responsible for teaching patrons a host of skills—searching for texts, analyzing resources, using technology—that are going to be useful beyond the library environment. 

The readings this week highlight some of the ways librarians can better engage patrons with what they are reading/learning. Hoffert’s article offered a survey of some of the new methods that are transforming the book club landscape. Probably my favorite one of her ideas was to loosen up the traditional book club convention of having a bunch of people read the same title and then discuss. Instead, Hoffert notes, more book clubs are encouraging thematic discussions in which different readers choose different titles that all fall under a common topic—e.g., magical realism or America in the 1930s. I almost joined a book club at a former workplace, only to find that many of the required readings were not to my liking and so decided to forego the experience. 

I think that if this book club had operated under the theme model, I would probably have stuck it out.

Meanwhile, Metzger and Tredway focus on a concept known as the Socratic Seminar, a method for proactively engaging students with what they are reading. Tredway argues this way of teaching allows students to relate their personal experiences to the material they are reading. Her point suggests that Socratic Seminars might be positive in promoting transfer. If students have a forum for connecting what they learned in a reading with what they’ve learned in another context, then the overall potential for learning has increased.

I preferred Tredway’s article to Metzger’s because of her clear explanation of what is involved in the seminar—reading some text (or watching a film clip or looking at a piece of art, etc.), posing a hook question, and then asking/discussing/clarifying issues from the text—along with her reasoning behind the seminar model (because students must engage with the text more fully, they will also absorb more of the content). I did, however, find Metzger’s discussion of reading comprehension techniques compelling. Her article certainly had some valuable points for encouraging active reading and effective note taking by students. Finally, it seemed neither article really dealt with the issue of nonparticipation by students who are not comfortable speaking up in these types of forums, and I think this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.

Week 5: Gaming, Transfer & More!

In this past week’s class, we discussed formative and summative assessment—their similarities, differences, and respective strengths and weaknesses. I was reassured by professor’s argument that librarians, by nature (or training), are adept at providing formative assessment, usually in the form of helping answer patron questions. Additionally, we discussed some of the various mediums (polls, surveys, etc.) that librarians can employ when wanting to assess the progress of their learners.

We also broke up into groups and organized little pieces of paper (representing either a question or a statement) into appropriate categories. What was most interesting about this activity was being able to observe everyone else’s interpretation of the notes. So many of the classification schemas occurred to me as clever and inspired yet were so far from my own line of thinking. It’s a bit discomforting to realize that there are so many ways of classifying ideas—in other words, there’s really no right or wrong way to categorize. Indeed, my classmates’ work proves that there are several sensible interpretations.

Before learning all about assessment, and even before our classification group assignment, we watched a TED talk given by Dr. Jane McGonigal on video games and their importance. Never having witnessed a TED talk before, I was impressed at the persuasiveness and enthusiasm of the speaker. In particular, I liked how McGonigal was able to communicate her excitement for a specific topic (gaming) to a wide audience of presumably gamers and non-gamers alike. As someone with only amateurish knowledge and interest in gaming, I was still compelled by the speaker’s argument. I speculate that this is because: (1) the speaker’s tone was engaging and straightforward, (2) the specifics of video games were ignored in favor of more abstract concepts, and (3) gaming ideas were related to more mainstream, real-world topics (history, current events, etc.). And with this in mind, it’s time to talk about transfer.

How People Learn defines transfer as the “ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts.” This does not just mean transferring what one learned last night studying his biology textbook to a biology test tomorrow. Rather, transfer is the idea that learning about a subject (like biology) can be somehow later applied in a real-world context (like in a job as a laboratory assistant). More broadly still, transfer can mean being able to reuse conceptual ideas or critical thinking skills in completely different environments. For this reason, the authors of How People Learn stress that abstract learning is important.  

Merely learning a skill or a bit of knowledge is no guarantee that meaningful learning is occurring. The authors point out numerous examples of research that show students who learn how to do something without understanding the underlying reasons why demonstrate lower transfer rates. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind what students already know. That is, to promote additional learning, educators need to build upon—or challenge—prior learning. This is important because it safeguards against unintended learning consequences, usually by interpreting new concepts incorrectly in terms of past experiences.

The second article for this week (“Put Understanding First”) also focused on transfer, but the authors, Wiggins and McTighe, are especially concerned with how this transfer can occur within educational environments. Accordingly, they outline a 12-step lesson plan for implementing real learning and real transfer in classrooms. Overall, the message of their article—stress meaning and transfer over content—seems valid, but their prescribed procedure for encouraging better learning is probably not applicable in all situations. I was, however, in agreement with the authors’ recommendation for creating a syllabus for high school classes that would outline how a course would lead to improved transfer, meaning and acquisition.

This week’s reading about learning and transfer also reminded me of the screencast assignment two weeks ago, especially how our instructor emphasized that we should try to point out in our tutorial skills that carry across multiple contexts—e.g., searching a library catalog can be a lot like searching Google. This idea makes sense on its own, but reading this week’s chapter of How People Learn really hit home the message: effective learning means being able to transfer skills. As an instructor, you want your students to learn specific skills and content, but you also want to offer them a broad enough knowledge base that they can apply what they’ve learned in one lesson in another context. After all, learning that can only be narrowly realized (e.g., through successful test taking) is of little value.

Week 4: Assessment & Learning Environments

Assessing what people have learned is a difficult task, not least of all because there is no clearly defined “best” criteria for assessing knowledge. Two of the most common approaches to assessment—formative and summative—seem to mirror the two teaching methods mentioned in the first chapter of How People Learn. Formative assessment involves gradual monitoring of a student’s knowledge through test feedback, paper revisions, and the like. Meanwhile, summative assessment tests a student’s knowledge after the end of a learning unit (for example, a textbook chapter). Formative assessment appears to be an extension of the learner-focused instruction, as this method emphasizes ongoing learning, discussion about misconception, and most importantly, a focus on engaging the student and his goals. On the other hand, summative is related to the old-school way of unloading a lot of information on a student then expecting him to reiterate these facts somehow.

In Sadler’s article, I was particularly struck by her argument that formative assessment is meant to “improve the student’s competence by short-circuiting the randomness and inefficiency of trial-and-error learning” (120). This seemed especially true with respect to much of my own in-class learning experiences. The first assignment (be it paper, project, or exam) of any course always carries with it a great deal of uncertainty when the formative assessment model is being used. It is not likely that a student will know exactly what an instructor is looking for in a paper, even if explicit criteria are laid out beforehand, largely because of the subjectivity (or randomness) of grading written material. Similarly, a test may or may not contain a section of material the student studied, rendering the assessment process as “random” in the mind of the learner.

Following along with this idea, and drawing upon the concept of different learning environments introduced in How People Learn, it’s useful to think about how learners’ attitudes and backgrounds shape instruction and assessment. Students are (not surprisingly) influenced by previous learning experiences, and they may be expecting new educational experiences to closely resemble those of the past. We know, of course, that this is often not the case. Chapter 6 of How People Learn points out that it is important to keep in mind how norms and values are constructed in the learning community (e.g., classroom or library) so that learning is fostered or hindered. For example, if students aren’t comfortable approaching the teacher to ask for individualized help, his learning will suffer. Moreover, this learner will probably have to undergo the trial-and-error sessions that Sadler mentioned, as he repeatedly guesses at portions of the coursework that are unclear to him.

In terms of librarianship, I think that it is important to keep in mind a few things in particular from this week’s readings: (1) how we shape the learning environment for our students, and (2) how we can determine (or assess) how much our students are actually learning. Practically speaking, I think that the first of these issues is easier to address. We can, among other efforts, encourage our learners to work at their own pace, ask questions, discuss their findings with others, etc. All of these actions can produce an atmosphere that is catered to learning. For librarians, though, the question of assessment is harder to figure out. Because most librarians don’t have the opportunity to spend long periods of time (i.e., an academic year) instructing, observing and monitoring the progress of their learners, the notion of assessment is tricky indeed. If we are teaching patrons how to perform research using scholarly databases to write a paper for a 19^th century American history course, the ability to assess the students’ knowledge belongs foremost to the history professor, as he/she will have the advantage of reading the finished product. Accordingly, it is probably easier for librarians to implement some variation of formative assessment, as this can be carried out over shorter durations, even in the course of a reference interaction or a one-shot workshop.