Libsyn Directory

141. Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism - a message for Zoë

Release Date: 02/25/2023

Education Bookcast

In order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis (where your opponent changes each match) or stock market investment (where the world is different each time). How do we study the development of expertise in fields such as these? Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, entitled Toward Deliberate Practice in the...

155. How experts see

Education Bookcast

There has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual patterns. In this episode, I summarise and discuss this research. Enjoy the episode.

154. Mindsets everywhere

Education Bookcast

Mindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also covered a book by her twin sister Jane, Reality is Broken, about applying the motivational principles learned by game designers in wider life situations). But now I've encountered another kind of mindset: self-motivation mindset. Although the authors of Self-Regulation of Motivation: A...

153. Comparing learning different dance styles: Argentine Tango vs. Ballroom & Latin (Dancesport)

Education Bookcast

I haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets, values, and learning cultures between these dance styles, so I wanted to share my experience with you. Enjoy the episode. *** Music used in this episode: Uno by Anibal Troilo Orgullo Criollo by Osvaldo Pugliese Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! Dear Future Husband by Meghan Trainor ...plus one...

152. [VIDEO] Education and generative AI: conference video for STEM MAD Melbourne, October 23

Education Bookcast

This is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine. This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the role of generative AI in education. Enjoy the episode.

151. 8 years, 150 episodes

Education Bookcast

This is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast. Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on . Enjoy the episode.

150. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

Education Bookcast

Since I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.) A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to contravene some trends she saw in the existing genre, including the main characters being fair-skinned, and war as a moral analogy. In this book, the key issues are internal to a character, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as we read further. The main character Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk) goes through...

Education Bookcast

A lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the findings over the whole of humanity can be. Thankfully, Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn gives us something of an antidote to this classical music bias. Green's book is based on interviews with 14 musicians in south-east England, of which 13 were instrumentalists and one, a singer....

148. You Know the Fair Rule by Bill Rogers

Education Bookcast

Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all. Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought his calm and relationship-focused approach to innumerable schools, often including those with very...

147. Large language models (LLMs) - interview with Dr Guy Emerson

Education Bookcast

Dr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard. Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does and is capable of. As a computational linguist, he works on language models with a focus on semantics and human language acquisition, and thus questions of linguistic meaning and understanding are particularly relevant to his work. While LLMs are an impressive technology with startling capabilities, we...

More Episodes

My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message.

I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, and I think it generally gets a pretty poor treatment. Hopefully this will clear things up for a lot of people.

Enjoy the episode.

***

RELATED EPISODES

Note how the distribution of episodes reflects the importance of topics. Behaviourism is important to know about but it really isn't current as a way of thinking about learning, it's more of a historical relic with some lasting applicability to animal training. Constructivism is a mistaken and misleading theory that keeps negatively affecting educational practice and never seems to go away, so I keep having to talk about it. Cognitivism is a really effective approach which deserves to be known more widely - it took me a long time to find out about it, hence why the episodes about it tend to be more recent.

Behaviourism: 3. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor

Constructivism: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra; 87. Experiential Learning by Colin Beard and John Wilson; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die; 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences

Cognitivism: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham; 132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through; 132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence; 135. Professional writing expertise; 136. Congitive architecture and ACT-R; 136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture

REFERENCES

I mention the following article as one where the authors (eminent figures in cognitive architecture, one of whom is a Nobel Prize winner) ask Constructivists to stop misrepresenting their work and saying things in direct contradiction to the evidence.

Anderson, Reder, & Simon (1999). Applications and Misapplacations of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education.

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