Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"The Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms survived Viking assaults on their trading ports because the essential weatlth of north-west Europe lay in its agricultural and industrial surplus and internal trade, not in its economic relations with the rest of the continent" - how true is this today? And what are the political implications?

"note taking effects were higher when students were given instuuctor's notes to work from" - B questions?

"It is likely that 'learning to learn' programs that are not embedded in the context of the subject to be learnt are of little value" - I think it depends on the superficiality of the learning technique and its applicability to the subject" - obviously Buzan's Organis Study Method would be useful at University level study across all subjects, but wouldn't offer much to the secondary school maths student.

"..adaptive experts listen for when learning is occurring so that they can work out the point to intervene (or not) to advance the learning." - obviously, no other point in javing teacher in the room

"One of the truisms in most schools is that the year of schooling reflects the spread of capabilities more than anything else. By year 5, there is likely to be at least five years spread in the capabilities of students in the class..." Well I've never encountered that, but is does show that differential insturction is a potentially hopeless aim.

"Only after teachers understand how each student can they make decisions aout how to teach" - except there doesn't seem to be a consensus about how humans learn in general - "conditioning, social cognitive, cognitive information processing, cognitive learning processses, and constructivis[m]"

"Tests are primarily to help teachers to gather formative information about their impact." - Just about the last thing to occur to students or management

Cooperative learning is most powerful after the students have acquired sufficient surface knowledge to be involved in discussion and learning with their peers - usually in some structured manner" - L2 v L1?

"The effect from adjunct questions was 0.40" - adjunct questions?

"Schools cannot help all students to learn if educators work in isolation. Schools must create the structures and cultures that foster effective educator collaboration..." - interesting to think about why this doesn't happen.

"...the debates about desirable curricula in a democratic society are often presumed to be answered by these test-outcome-based questions, rather than based on a debate about what is worth preserving in our society, and what is worth knowing in order to live the desired 'good life'" - teaching what can be tested rather than teaching to the test: a consequence of evidence based education?

"If T is a miracle ("Christ rose from the dead", and S is a closely related hypothesis ("Christ is the son of God"), our degree of belief in S is very dramatically increased if we know that T is true." - as calculated by Bayes rule.

"If we observe a cause - for example, Bobby throws a ball toward a window - most of us can predict the effect (the ball will probably the window). Human cognition works in that direction. But given the the effect (the window is broken), we need much more information to deduce the cause..." - all causes, all effects?

"...we need to know like 95-99 per cent of the words on a page before the challenge of reading a particualr text...Anything less than 50 per cent virtually assures that students are likely to be not engaged" - is this differenc for foreign language reading? 50% seems ridiculously low, I think I give up entirely at less than 80% in Hungarian.

"Another worthwhile way of setting goals is through personal bests"

"Finish each unit or lesson by referring to the learning intention and help students to understand how much closer they are to the success criteria" - a specific recommendation without an effect size citation. My personal experience of goal directed teaching is that it is demotivating, "In this lesson we will..." is an invitation to switch off. It's better to engage their curiosity. Education is not managment.

Where causation is concerned, a grain of subjectivity tells us more about the real world than any amount of objectivity" - is he actually going Kantian without Kant here?

"What is the realtive importance of various causes" - he really needs to nail down what he means by 'cause', 'various causes' is making me nauseous. 'Various conditions' seems just fine.

"[Wright] obtained a quantatitve and by no means obvious result: that 42% of the variation in cost colour is due to heredity." - One, without knowing how heredity causes coat colour, heredity is a black box. Two, I like my causes to 100% tied to effect, does this mean the the colour of 42 guinea pigs out of 100 is determined by heredity, or 42% of any guinea pig's colour is determined by heredity.

Opponents of Wright: "To contrast 'causation' and 'correlation' is unwarranted because causation is simply perfect correlation." - living the issue of time order to one side, I'm sympathetic to the idea that there has to be a 100% connection between cause and effect, time to look again at 'necessary' versus 'sufficient' causes: a quick google suggests the meaning of 'condition' also has to be tied down,

"This set the pattern for generations of scientists after [Pearson]. They would think "due to" and say "associated with" - indicating how difficult it is for humans to shake off causal thinking, but a different argument is needed to establish this is part of human cognitive psychology, or part of reality.

"...students can aim to do everything that the teacher that the teacher asks to the point that they do not learn how to self regulate, self monitor, and self evaluate. While they may gain esteem and success in tasks by attending to these directives, their longer-term success is far from assured when directives are not present." - Hungarian education leads to Hungarian authoritarianism?

"Teachers understand the attitudes and dispositions thats students bring to the lesson, and aim to entrance so that they are a positive part of learning." - this whole section resonates with my teaching experience, so good to have it articulated. Purely focused on attitudes to learning in the classroom, cf The Nurture Assumption says about the specifity of behaviour and environment.

"25% of the specific concepts and principles that students learn are critically dependent on private peer talk or the choice of resources with which students can engages" - So am I missing out the other 75%?

"The ultimate requirement is for teachers to develop the skill of evaluating the effect they have on their students" - requirement for teachers becoming inspired by their work, or requirement to have an educational effect on students?"

"As we confront the realities and challenges of schools and classrooms, we can then choose four roads: quit (as do 50% within the first five years); become disconnected and simply perform the role of teaching; work to become competent and seek promotion out of the classroom; or learn to experience the joy of inspired teaching." - how many leave because of the expectation that they be 'passionate' and 'inspired'?

"...the differences between high-effect and low-effect teachers are primarily related to the attitudes and expectations teachers have when they decide on the key issues of teaching - that is, what to teach and at what level of diffculty, and their understanding of progress and of the effects of their teaching" - not sure that if I understand the first part of this, I would agree with it.

"What is most important is that teaching is visible to the student, and that the learning is visible to the teacher. The more the student becomes the teacher and the more the teacher becomes the learner, then the more successful are the outcomes." - this sounds more like marketing than research, not what I expected at all.

"Indeed, many New Zealand schools did...not abandon homework (because too many parents judge the quality of a school by the mere presence of homework and get upset if there is none)" - a peculiar form of masochism for some parents.

"Retaining students in learning is a highly desirable outcome of schooling, and because many students make decisions about staying in schooling between the ages of 11 and 15, this means that the school and learning experience at these ages must be productive, challenging, and engaging to ensure the best chance possible that students stay in school" - confusingly written and only locally applicable.