Video Motivation theory, learning theory

0:00 Intro

0:08 all right so welcome back to com 335 uh in this unit we'll talk a little bit about motivation and about learning theory theories behind what motivates students and theories behind how learning happens

0:21 Outline

0:24 Goal for this unit

0:26 i basically want to give you vocabulary things that you can use in your essay as well basically terms that someone who takes uh pedagogy seriously should just need should just know or at least be able to recognize maybe you don't need a lot of detail about these at that stage but you should know that these exist and maybe be able to look it up and so i'll basically fire a few different things at you they're all relevant for designing your lessons i think but they're more in the background you will see what this means um in a second and i'll sprinkle in between those kind of theoretical topics some best practices that people have applied how how you can put that into practice in teaching

1:15 Pre-session activity

1:15 um i want to start with a little warning and that was your your pre-session task uh we can go through your your results in a second but the story behind these uh learning types so just to recap um your task was to assess yourself in this varg learning styles um framework so visual auditory read writing and kinesthetic and there was um an observation by some by some education researcher that that kids use different representations of material at different efficiency and so he came up with this theory that maybe every person has a dominant way how they like their material to be presented and then they're more effective it just turns out that this doesn't seem to be true there are different ways to represent things and sometimes one is more efficient sometimes another is more efficient but separating your learners by different styles just doesn't seem to help and if anything it might even hurt if you i distribute your attention so it's it's a nice example that demonstrates that you have to do empirical research if you come up with such a theory you need to test it in a in an in a proper setting something i will come back a bit in in the fourth unit uh how to do that or at least how to

2:45 read about these otherwise you can just claim random things and we'll never know if they're really effective or if they just sound plausible you can have a quick hands without a long slider question was this known to you or was this new uh who knew about the styles learning styles and that they were kind of bogus

3:10 so the rest didn't know it have you heard about learning styles before yeah good uh so i hope this worked this worked as a little revelation for you then uh it's there's still some some valuable um insights in this observation uh i mean these these four categories i think they're they're a useful way to categorize different representation for material and representing things differently actually helps so there's there's supporting uh research that shows if you present things in multiple ways uh that helps everybody it's just the part that's not true is there's visual learners and they prefer always the visual things and we learn better with visual representations that seems not true but combining different representations is universally good if it's used in a sensible way uh and it's it's still somewhat interesting that maybe people have a certain preference for different representations but it's it's probably quite dependent on the task so i should probably have asked you to think about a specific task learning about a specific topic and then we do the evaluation some of the questions were specific but still

4:34 if we have a look at the answers for the different scores that you gave it's very nicely spread out we have people who don't care much about visuals and we have one each in the other categories and interestingly it looks quite similar for the other ones it's very spread out and so there seem to be differences in some way but separating you guys according to those is not a good idea

5:12 okay so you can you can use these profiles if you find them fun but that's probably about it so let's look instead at the more established theories the ones that turned out to be true over and over again in experiments

5:32 and i really like to structure this in two parts the first is what motivates people to do something and the second is what is learning itself uh what does what does that really mean

5:42 Forms of motivation

5:46 okay let's talk about motivation first um it's easy to categorize motivation into two big forms it can be extrinsic if someone else essentially motivates you to do something through certain ways of forcing you in one way or another there can be marks or grades so you have an incentive to perform well because you want that mark but it's extrinsic motivation because you're not really caring about the task itself you care about the mark it's a difference rewards are a positive way of extrinsic motivation but they're extrinsic and punishment well if people are motivated by punishment or fear or pressure definitely extrinsic motivation kind of works but maybe not what we want

6:34 intrinsic motivation by contrast is something that comes from within you if you're interested in performing a task just because of the task and this has a lot to do with little children playing or climbing trees or experimenting with sticks they don't do this because we tell them to or because they expect to be a pad a pat on the shoulder if they assemble the sticks correctly they just do it and no one told them to do it well they would still do it even if no one told them so it seems that tasks are inherently enjoyable or fun in this case or you have some ambition to reach a goal even though there's no external pressure applied to you and probably has a lot to do with natural curiosity as well

7:21 now uh for you as a prospective teacher or for someone who designs learning environments extrinsic motivation is easy to achieve because that's under your control you can set rules you can set marking guidelines you can give rewards that's perfect you can control this um and then it's it's there but unfortunately um intrinsic motivation is a much stronger motivation it keeps you going for longer it motivates you for the actual task and not just a proxy for it so we really would like to foster intrinsic motivation but it's something that comes from within the children or the learners in general so how can we do that we can only do it indirectly

8:11 so in the rest of this section we'll look at where intrinsic motivation comes from and there's different theories around this but the one that i found found most useful is is fairly simple it says there's two things that play into intrinsic motivation and you kind of need both at least to some degree for it to work otherwise you're you lose the motivation and well if you think about it's not it's not very surprising um one one factor is the goal of the task that you're working on has to have some value for you it must somehow change something for you to have achieved that or there must be something positive coming out of it maybe not even just for you as as one person maybe it's good for society at large or something like this but there must be a value that you attribute to a goal so it's a subjective thing and we can sometimes influence how this task is perceived but ultimately it's it's the people who learn themselves who have to assign a value to the task and the second is a little more tricky maybe uh if you need to have a certain expectation as a learner to succeed in this task if you if you feel it's either completely boring you already know this

8:18 Expectancy-Value Theory

9:34 is beyond your standard or you can do this blindfoldedly with hands tight on the back you lose interest or if you don't see any any chance for you to achieve it it has a lot to do with how computer games have to balance the difficulty if it's too hard then people lose interest if it's too easy it's not fun or not challenging and i think this is this is very much um the same principle applies also to learning in general and maybe to anything in life if you don't have a reasonable expectation to succeed you're probably not going to do it so these two things have to be there um in the literature people often put a plus sign between those two so it's like the total motivation is the sum of these two i would rather put a multiplication between them because if either of them is close to zero the whole motivation will be zero i think there's no no thing if if a task is super valuable but you will never ever exceed succeed you won't do it and if a task has no value at all but it's of the right difficulty you still don't care so i would i would say factors is better than sumans

10:47 i'll link them so in the in the slides that i'll put on the website there's a clickable link that you can check out uh it's a nice little um online um online course on teaching learning for higher education but i think all of these principles apply without any changes related to to any context and there's some more well self-paced activities where you can go through click through some some stories around it so i found this useful that's why i put a link there but i want to keep it short for hearing class

11:26 what does this theory mean for us we have to make sure that both factors are are okay so if there's a barrier for any of them we have to deal with it and do something about it so far so good

11:42 How can we make learning matter to students?

11:45 so let's look at at this first one uh the value you assigned to a task how can we make something we want to teach people how can we make that valuable for the children the learners there's different ways how you can do this and they're not always equally effective and not equally effective for everyone but you can try combinations of this and if we have time at the end i'll show you some example where we tried this last year and you're my judges if it worked or not but you'll you'll probably see some of these things at least whimsical attempts to apply it one one way to create value is to connect it to the natural environment of your learners so either solve a real problem that they have that they can feel in their everyday lives or explain how something works that they're using all the time this creates value because it's closer to your learners you might also discuss like the historical context is sometimes very motivating because then people see there's a similarity maybe not to the task but to the person who discovered it so that also has to do with role models and showing showing the people behind certain inventions or material discoveries and sometimes you can point out that

13:05 certain things deliver something towards a good cause help society at large in some way it's not as direct as the other things but many people find that more motivating if there is something to be achieved in the long run while learning this so you could say i don't know programming apps can help if you can design an app that helps people avoid garbage then that's a goal that everyone might agree is a good thing to do and so you make the the task that you're actually teaching a step towards this goal

13:47 humor and stories embedding something in in some some cohesive story some narrative with characters i i think this is a again something that often uh computer games or other games also use or children's books use and you can apply this to other contexts as well i think it works in higher education as well it just is well two things humor is already is always enjoyable if it's the right kind of humor and stories our brains like cohesive narratives they like if things are connected that helps us remember it better it helps it helps to make it more unique and memorable so this can be effective if it fits the topic another way is this is slightly different if you give your learners choices what they're doing like for example you ask your students to pick their own essay topics right they might enjoy this because they can pick something that's more relevant to them and also just the the mere fact that you give control to the learners helps them feel this is maybe also on the expectancy side of things feel that they're more in control of the learning it's it's a two-sided uh thing because it can also overwhelm or create a cause confusion so you have to kind of strike a balance between guiding things and

15:09 giving choices and well creative tasks embedding in the learning is very open but maybe you can do an arts project like the programming examples where basically create nice pictures artistically looking pictures through code that can be motivating for someone who else would not be like infused by some mathematical puzzle on an abstract level so just create more variety of how things can be applied and that way you can try to find something that matters for every of your kids

15:54 and yeah it's not easy but it's worth investing your time and thought into it because this will make a big difference another kind of orthogonal con dimension to this is value can also come from being in a certain context so if you're doing group work and the group matters to you maybe the task doesn't really matter to you personally but you want your group to succeed because some other members in the group are very enthusiastic about the topic so you kind of play along to not let them down even though the task itself doesn't make much sense to you maybe that's strong enough to keep you going again group work is is a delicate topic students traditionally are not very fond of group work for many reasons but if used in the right way it can be very motivating

15:59 Social motivation

16:49 you have to be careful that yeah the classroom climate remains somehow i guess we all have our stories where we kind of felt as an outsider in some group and it's not nice it seems just part of the human nature is this in-group out-group behavior it's strongly ingrained in our in our psychology so especially children at some age um naturally fall into this pattern and well school teachers know how to um that this is a an eternal fight um but whenever you can do something like establish rules in a class like demand that discussions are constructive there's no

17:44 torpedo arguments that basically kill the discussion because they they don't express some some factual argument but just um attack the person personally these are things you should ban but yeah it's um it's definitely challenging and depending on the age might be really tough to put into practice what you can do at least is be a good role model try to avoid any stereotypical or presentations if you if you use examples with a with people you can try to not always have the same type of people these are all little nudges in the right direction that won't change the picture um by themselves but yeah you can you can do your little share in this

18:29 Growth Mindset ys. Fixed Mindset

18:33 the other thing is is more about the expectancy and that again is very subjective if you're really able or equipped to solve a task is probably not written in stone and that's the idea of growth mindset as opposed to fixed mindset i don't know if you've heard these terms before growth mindset is kind of the the idea that if you make mistakes that's an opportunity for you to learn to grow whereas a fixed mindset would be to say uh if i make a mistake that just shows that i can't do it and it even worse it shows everyone how stupid i am so i i won't make mistakes or i won't admit them i will avoid it i'd rather not even try it right a very nice tag phrase for growth mindset is not yet if you can't do something it's always not yet and you can you can improve from there as opposed to saying this is just beyond your your skills your reach your talent talent is a is a very dangerous word i think um because it sounds like something that's that's given god given and fixed and if you don't have the talent tough luck you'll never do it and if you have the talent you don't have to keep trying

19:45 both both ways are actually harmful okay how you deal with failure her deal with struggling um differs and this is another another one i want to mention for fixed mindset thinking uh this this guy this girl has a math brain is again it's kind of same as saying talented for

20:13 it's probably not useful to keep thinking in these terms and what i found very reassuring is there's really no scientific evidence i'm aware of that would support this fixed fixed mindset mentality it doesn't seem to be true that there's like a very fixed limit that you can't get beyond is clearly it clearly might mean that you need more time or more support but we're not aware of very fixed barriers and even these things like does talent really exist is not so clear i'm rather inclined to believe no unless someone can prove me wrong because i like the consequence because it means every fixed mindset thinking is really just within us and we can overcome it by denying that it exists and it seems to be closer to the truth than it might feel intuitively or as it felt for me when i first heard about it i think we're teaching we should essentially ban this idea that someone is inherently good or bad at something it's always not yet and it's always something they can change and a lot has to do with how you approach things if you're constantly told you're a girl you can't play football well probably you can cannot because you never you never try you never practice and the other way around um

21:34 especially with gender i'm i'm sometimes very frustrated to observe how how it's sometimes still kind of ingrained in in society and even our our context uh that certain things are separated by gender it drives me mad but yeah it's a it's a continuous fight we're a long way to go there but growth mindset is a good term to keep in mind

22:03 okay that was the part about motivation um if you wanted to ask or tie into anything maybe before we switch to learning the learning part is shorter all right if that's not the case then let's look at what learning means

22:20 Learning Theories

22:24 and maybe this is something you can can reflect a bit uh what does it really mean to learn something if you wanted to define this it's kind of a tricky term and people came up with with different different definitions or different philosophies and they came from different philosophical ideas that got generalized to learning and it's basically these two i'll go through this in a in in some detail but um one is it's called behaviorism or instructionism and the key idea there is that learning is something that affects your behavior so i teach you something and after that you can do something and i can observe that from outside this is completely extrinsic it's not really talking about what happens inside you will come to that and instead it's i'll teach you a skill afterwards you can do this you can you have this skill you can do it i can observe it that's that's the idea of behaviorism and it has its origins in in pavlov's dog i don't know you probably know this experiment uh he wanted to study digestions uh digestion of dogs and fed them things and whenever he fed them something he rang a bell and he noticed after a while if he just rang the bell uh the dogs would start uh slobbering and look

23:46 like they're expecting the um the treat some food and they even had physiological reactions showing that so he kind of uh trained them to associate the bell with food and that's that's the type of of learning that behaviorism has in mind it's externally observable but also this origin is a bit um it's a bit dangerous because it's uh it sounds like training dogs is what you do when you teach children that's hopefully not the metaphor you want to have in mind but still this theory is is more about repetition and drill exercises because that's how you do reinforcement learning

24:33 and uh for the teacher the role of the teacher here is is the central figure who controls everything uh the teacher delivers the material um it's the key active role in learning who decides the structure the content the activities everything is designed by the teacher and the learner kind of suffers through this um it's also a bit of a one-way street and finally um a piece of vocabulary summative assessment means something like an exam an assessment where you you do a task with learners and the goal is to check how well they've learned it comes after learning you can also use assessment in a formative way where maybe this is something like like slido questions if i was to ask you about these concepts while you're still exploring and learning them that can be a formative assessment where i'm not even checking who got what answer right it's more to inform you how far you got or if you understood some concept okay but behaviorism is really about summative assessment because you want this external and constructivism is kind of the opposite approach it's all focusing on the learner and learning means something inside your brain changes you build structures you build concepts by observing patterns

25:57 if you haven't heard of piaget's experiments with children okay this sounds terrible is observing children solving certain tasks definitely watch this video it's hilarious to watch and it just shows you teaching children certain concepts at a certain age is bound to fail they haven't made the step that's necessary to understand for example what a number means and no no matter how often you you drill them how often you repeat a concept they will not get it until they've made this internal step until they've learned the concept so this is very enlightening but um not so relevant for us at this stage the role of the teacher in constructivism is quite different you're really a person standing on the side setting the stage but then the learner has really to to do everything so the key role is for the learner the teacher facilitates learning or sets up the environment or organizes opportunities like this open the door thing would show the door but the learner has to eventually do it

27:10 so i don't know um i think we skipped this question but i would assume that most people interested in teaching are very much on the constructivism side of things and don't really like the idea of drill exercises and telling telling kids every little step that they should do and then you write the exam and you move on it's usually not what people consider interesting or good pedagogy

27:40 Constructivism-only fallacy

27:41 i just want to again warn a little bit that constructivism in isolation or in an extreme form is usually not that helpful and the problem is that um it's kind of a um a bias you you as one person who's interested in pedagogy you're kind of a biased sample for what works for learners and so you probably are interested and self-motivated in computing at computer science at least whereas not every child that you might teach will be and so for you constructivism or constructivist approaches work very well but they might not work for everyone because often the the choice and the the necessary self-motivation is is a is a barrier uh so i've experienced this with some something we designed um we won't get to that part today uh but yeah so the question was um what do i have to do now tell me the next step uh when i first saw this i was disappointed because i thought this is about exploring you're just supposed to explore and enjoy and uh and play um but for some for some of the kids this was this was too much they were overwhelmed by this so you have to give some guidance um scaffolding is a way so you give some intermediate steps and you you make the

29:10 gaps shorter between that or you tell them at least afterwards this is what you should have seen should have in quotes like this is what you could have seen this is what you can learn from this exploration activity another good way is to to ask specific questions before you post some activity and then use this to guide the exploration a bit then it's not quite as as open-ended

29:41 Cognitive load theory

29:48 another little vocabulary uh is cognitive load this is kind of separate from from the other learning theories it's uh if you design things try to keep this in mind but it's a it's a little hard in practice i feel the the idea here is that you you treat the working memory that you that learners have at their um have available as a very limited thing essentially seven kind of chunks similar to how many things you can memorize each chunk can be a complex thing in its own if that is something that you already understood that the learner already has internalized so it essentially just means you want to give tasks at the right size and you want to connect it to existing knowledge both of which is is a very natural thing to do in good teaching anyways but this is kind of the

30:51 Bloom's Taxonomy

30:54 okay last piece of terminology is bloom's taxonomy who has heard this term before uh it's it's something that educational researchers love and it's much more than these three levels i think it's usually okay i don't want to embarrass myself something like between five and eight different levels of mastery how deep have you understood or internalized some concept

31:19 i was very happy to see that the acm the like the u.s american version of of bcs or well the computer scientists association they they have a recommendation for cs curricula in higher education there and they status they simplify bloom's taxonomy to these three levels so here are just the definitions um i don't really want to read this out um the idea is there's a superficial understanding where you can essentially reproduce knowledge there's a way where you can apply it but it's more of a of a skill level and then assessment is you you kind of understand the pros and cons you can say when it's appropriate to do this these are just different levels of how deep you can understand something and the use for this is you want to use it in assessments to balance your questions you can't have an exam where you only do assessment tasks you don't want to only do familiarity otherwise it's just book work you want to have a balance of of these different levels you will probably recognize if you if you go through some old exams again you will recognize that usually questions quite clearly fall into one of these three categories

32:42 all right uh questions about this that's been a lot of terms just keep them keep them on the back burner um and if yeah if you discuss topics in your essay that kind of feel like they touch on one of these then follow some of the links and read a bit more about it