Video Motivation theory, learning theory

0:00 <Untitled Chapter 1>

0:03 so welcome back to communicating computer science in unit 3 I want to show you a few bits of motivation and learning theories that hopefully help you as a backdrop for developing your lessons it's not that we will try to throw in these terms in our lessons it's more how do you design your lesson you knowing that's some of these things just happen in in most humans and so you can try to adapt a little bit to how you present things uh I think some of it is you can replace a lot of this just with experience and common sense but you may not have the experience and it's sometimes just a shortcut to Common Sense so why not make use of what um people learned

0:54 so the goal for this unit is a to give you the vocabulary if you in your lesson want to talk about some of these things so there's there's just a few buzzwords that may help you find the right sources and maybe frame your ideas um and the the Practical side of things applying it where it makes sense now the pre-session task was to First go through this exercise of uh the bark scores um

1:13 Pre-Session Task

1:29 I'll probably have to do this here again uh so we had the visual aspects where it's interesting I think I'm I'm fairly high on visual the way I filled it out more of you are on the low scores here that's interesting and then uh hearing okay oh this is not sorted by numbers okay I have to be careful so somewhere in the middle is the peak and read write that's a that's a tricky one I think this is really hard to judge because it depends quite a bit on what you read uh and okay the last one uh running around many of you found that helpful so this is all nice and might be useful sometimes uh as a framing but the theory behind it that your one specific type and you should try to make your learning cater to the different types just seems not to be reflected in in any of the studies seems not to be true it might still be useful the the core message is try to be uh try to be teaching on various levels and that seems to be effective so it's the the lesson that comes out of these scores might actually go in the right direction so in a way it's harmless if you want um but the the core assumption that

3:01 you're a specific type isn't so this is just a warning there's there's stuff out there this work scores they still exist people still kind of there's still this website some people follow it it's sometimes hard to say uh they sound reasonable so um just as a warning not because not everything that has a nice website is necessarily backed up by science so be a bit critical in this

3:34 I think I said this already so um representing things in different ways is is useful just for different reasons there's two bits I want to talk about one is uh why do people do things motivation Theory and specifically for learning things and the other bit is what does learning itself mean a little bit of a background for that so uh motivation can be described in in many different ways a simple characterization is extrinsic versus intrinsic I guess that's uh that's fairly clear to you now extrinsic motivation is very popular because it's so much easier to create as a teacher it's something you have under your control because it's about the environment and the uh assessments and goals and so on um and well I know this from from our Primary School it can be very effective no doubt and it can be fun all sorts of gamification I think is effectively extrinsic motivation that sometimes spills over if people start to buy into the games it could become intrinsic motivation the dangerous it might become intrinsic motivation for the game for the stars and not for the part that's behind it so as much fun as it can be to get just people moving you have to be balancing this and of course you can also go this is

4:18 Extrinsic Motivation

5:08 not something we promote these days but it is effective sadly um interesting motivation um comes from within so it's very hard to instill from the outside but you can try to set the environment right so that it can emerge and again uh some some forms of positive reinforcement might trigger intrinsic motivation or might set the stage for it to grow so it's it's hard to really pin this down but I think it has to do with being interested in in doing something and enjoying it uh there's a Natural Curiosity that you see in almost all children and sometimes school is very effective at destroying that to a certain age not with all kids but with some and there's lots of socioeconomic background that plays into this but curiosity is something built into humans so this is something this is one of the cards you can play uh you just have to dig it out under all the rubble uh and other things easier as you can if you can find something that is is already a goal of the person and you just tack on to that goal what you want to teach

5:14 Interesting Motivation

6:36 yeah so this is the Dilemma is clear intrinsic is what we want extrinsic is what we can control now uh one Theory I mentioned I think earlier in some units where does this intrinsic motivation come from and this is this is one of the theories I found helpful because it at least breaks it down into two power parts so extrinsic motivation intrinsic motivation comes from uh is is the the product of two factors the expectancy and the value so uh how valuable do you perceive achieving whatever it is that you're you're supposed to do and do I have uh at least the reasonable expectation to succeed in this and you can imagine if one of the two is at zero then the whole thing will not work um I'll leave it with just these two ideas just keep this in mind that you want both it's it's fairly clear if you think about it but if you design tasks the the challenge can be this this second bit the first bit you often just needs framing but might be framing for different groups so try to find something that is versatile the second bit also needs adapting to where kids are in their in their prior knowledge obviously that that differs so that's the uh the other two passwords um low

6:47 Where Does this Intrinsic Motivation Come from

8:07 floor high ceiling try to find tasks where you can get started easily without much background but whereas there's lots of room to grow yeah if you're more advanced and want to dig deeper it's often possible but needs a bit needs a bit of thought how to put that into a lesson that works for everyone uh here's here's a module that um was used in in teacher training for us when I was a postdoc in Waterloo I found this this is an online thing where you can just click through I found this quite nice in terms of making these theories more concrete with lots of examples from higher education so it's not for for teaching kids specifically but a lot of these things are essentially the same at least from from the age group that we're looking at it's not so different

9:12 so how can we try to instill value uh that's a a tough one and um because you're you're trying to do this with very different human beings so you have to have a portfolio of different approaches uh you could try to get to where people are in their lives so it's try to solve some real problem that they might have or at least that they can uh imagine to have or pick up some device or something that they use and challenge them to think about do they actually know what's going on inside or do they just view this as a magic block maybe you can break that open a bit uh you can try to go over the people that invented something it can be quite quite interesting because there's often memorable stories this is more about how human memory works we often are much better at memorizing a narrative a cohesive story step by step where one thing follows from the other if you can if you have an interesting story to tell about the history of a topic that might be enough to motivate people to care about it for some people at least the last one is is often uh easy to start with but then going back to a small topic is tough if you

10:34 wanted to play the it's good for society card yeah after at some point bring it back to what can we do in this in this small limited scale but it's it's very motivating to do something to improve the world make it fun and enjoyable in the way your present it helps and we talked about this last time one easy trick is to give student Choice students choice so hopefully they can pick something that they care about we'll see if that works with you with the lessons um and somewhat orthogonal you can try to embed something that's just creative that caters to other types of engagement or um again some people enjoy it more to make something new or make something artistic and others not so much um try and have a bit of both of everything

11:37 another bit that uh motivates people is the social context if there's a peer group that pushes you you are much more likely to succeed in in studies and many other things there's this famous saying you you join a company but you quit a manager a lot is a lot is determined by how you interact with other people and learning is the same so it's it can be uh a positive thing if you feel like you belong in a group and you feel this reinforce reinforcement from a learning group or from the larger cohort it can also be uh a problem if you're the odd one out um the the tricky bit is it might not be actual hostility by anyone the feeling that you if you feel you don't belong the damage is already done and it's real if you feel it it's not about objectively it's measuring is someone really making your life harder uh in a way you make it for yourself harder but it's not to be blamed on you either it's just a tough one uh but we have ample evidence that whatever makes you feel standing out in some way uh can be negative then or can can make is this a negative experience for you and it has an impact

11:38 The Social Context

12:58 so it's that's a tough one to solve but uh one exercise I would invite you to do is think about some context where you were the odd one out think about what's uh how you felt in that in that situation um and what might have helped you at the point so what definitely helps uh if your teaching is you can uh you can try to keep a few things out of your teaching so that at least you don't trigger these things more than necessary uh stupid jokes about stereotypes we just don't need those we could tell other jokes um you can if if you have to invoke uh personas characters in in some story you can try to play make those more diverse more much more effective than this is having role models and having some representation of various people show that you can belong to this group uh this is a tough one to solve I think it just needs a little empathy and in the small groups of a classroom it's on one side easier because you can try to get into into talking to individual students on the other hand it's much harder because they already come and bring their social context from the classes and to be fair it can be heartbreaking

14:27 sometimes if you see uh certain students isolated in in the group and there's not much you can do about it in one session but you can show empathy and make sure that at least your session doesn't contribute to that

14:46 so yeah social motivation is a strong one uh unfortunately in both ways um another uh nice nice vocabulary or something that that uh I like very much is this idea of of the growth mindset

15:05 The Growth Mindset

15:10 um so I want to contrast these two things and this is a way how you approach learning and uh it it plays into motivation that's why in this it's it's coming up here uh but it's it's also specifically about um your approach to learning yeah it's easier to start with the fixed mindset um so the thinking is if something goes wrong then it's your fault and it won't change so any mistake in some exercise is your personal failure you can't do that I'm not good at a certain thing so as a consequence it's not even worth trying uh I put it I put mafs here just because this is how it's very often framed uh even okay I don't want to claim that that this is still the case but I remember that this was at least said in in my school time there's there's math persons and and the others the good thing is uh we don't have any scientific evidence for that to be true now definitely people differ in how much they enjoy and approach certain topics from an intrinsic motivation so some some kids jump at math puzzles and others don't really bother and just color in the puzzle pieces but we don't have evidence for mental capacity how to have a fixed

15:31 The Fixed Mindset

16:43 limit if you care enough if someone teaches you enough you seem to be able to push it further and further until you run out of lifespan but there's no uh to my knowledge no fixed limits which is quite encouraging if you think about it so if you if you carry a fixed mindset with you it's only something within you you can change it uh and we can try to avoid again calling things up like this in in teaching now I should mention fixed and growth mindset is again it's not some personality trait that divides the population into two parts you usually uh exhibit one or the other depending on a different area so you could say uh well I'm I was never able to be stretchy and do yoga and this thing so I don't even try that's fixed mindset in one thing at the same time the same person could say oh well um I'm not I'm not good at football yet but I'll just keep practicing every afternoon and I'll I'll improve and if I'm I don't know if I if I never score a goal I'll just have to practice more um so it's it's funny how the same things go together in one person so the positive way to phrase this is

17:15 Fixed and Growth Mindset

17:36 Fixed Mindset

18:01 if you do things wrong you just learn something from it not yet is the key tag phrase that people try to use this I don't know if you've noticed this on on food packaging there's always these recycle uh advice so it's locally recycled blah blah or not get recycled a lovely feature of growth mindset even though maybe in this case it's a little uh a little cheeky because um the hope with the growth mindset is that there's some models some anticipation for improvement all right uh

18:46 the weight the way you can um you can use this in teaching is I guess again the same same solution the low floor high ceiling tasks we have several tasks try to give um several chances and make it clear that failing at one task is not a failure of the person all right uh have you heard this term before growth mindset

19:17 I think it's it's more well known these days but it's it's something I I just want to uh stress so that's that's the bit on motivation um questions about this part before but I move on to the the learning that probably will be short uh I just want a very very briefly touch on these things to the point where we will feel their impact in the lessons so what does it mean to learn something is actually not so clear there's two main definitions with um others that I'm leaving out but the key main difference is you could either say learning means some person's behavior is changing and that's in a way that I can observe from the outside so the standard thing for that is is reinforcement learning and like the old style I'm not talking about machine learning in this case so if you train your dog to anticipate the treats if you ring a bell and then you ring the bell and you see the the truth is collecting then you have conditioned the dog so you have changed the behavior the dirt the dog obviously has learned something even though in that case maybe a weird Association is the actual thing uh sadly teaching often is like that in particular assessments often

19:47 What Does It Mean To Learn

20:13 Reinforcement Learning

20:46 take this Viewpoint you have learning outcomes so you start designing learning outcomes and then you try to design how do I get my students there to some degree you need this but you may potentially not want to focus on this entirely the other part the other end of the spectrum says learning is not something you can necessarily see from the outside it's something inside the learner's brain so there's some transformation going on and there's some some really lovely experiments that illustrate this concept

21:25 um a bit late so maybe maybe um we don't have time to watch the video has someone seen Piaget's experiments with children there's one about um the the most famous one I think is the one where they they uh show that up to a certain stage in their development children are not really able to count now you teach them counting teaching the numbers and they just regurgitate one two three so they they memorize the numbers they play it back but they haven't internalized what the concept of a number is of uh counting entities and the way they show this in this video is uh is really sleek so you place objects in a row and then you ask the kids is there more of this or more of this it's two rows same objects but spaced out differently and up to a certain age the kids will always point to the row where there's the items more spread out even if it's fewer and that shows they didn't count they didn't understand that they're supposed to count how many there are they just replace that with a simple a simpler question that they can understand which is size and then from a certain point on magically it the client the the coin drops and they start to count

21:30 Piaget's Experiments with Children

22:54 I repeated this experiment with my youngest who's six today as this was well over a year ago and he couldn't do it and then soon after he did it's it's magic it seems uh counter-intuitive that there's this magic moment and it's not something that you do from the outside he counted before if you told him to count he could do it so watch this video um there's many other examples of this we

23:24 as you can imagine it's hard to study this empirically because you have to set up really smart experiments for this simple counting okay you can you can imagine how this this might might work um so I think the the trouble with this is it's harder to really establish knowledge what are the concepts that need this trigger moment well what does this mean for teaching is that you're you can only be a guide you can set up the environment and set up all the pieces and then the learner has to do the rest uh which can be can be a a test for your patients as a teacher most most of our teaching today is a combination of both obviously and the way I'm bringing this up is if you design uh some activity for your lesson um you might try to do both a little bit many people are very motivated about some some interest who are very into some topic tend to design things including myself that are heavily on the constructivist side so you design something where the kids play around and then they're supposed to get it and it seems to work well with some kids and it seems to completely lose others

24:49 so it's it's tempting to do exploratory activities only and I'm listing this because it's exactly what I did and um again it was a bit heartbreaking for me to see that for some kids it works so well and for others not at all there were just not clear what to do now okay I can say um that's the fault of the teachers who know they spoon fed them up to here and now they can't explore anymore on their own even if that were true like what point is it uh that's still the case um and probably it's it's not quite Fair uh

25:29 if you think about how you uh I was I I hope that you all have something in mind where you understood some concept by playing around in one way or another uh if you're fair with yourself you probably didn't start playing completely in the open you had some things that build up to that and if you take that out of your activity it will it will fail for those kids who didn't already do these steps so uh a way out of this is scaffolding you give some some partial steps and you leave just some parts to uh to fill in for the kids freely another option is after the fact tell them what they what they could have observed without blaming them if they didn't

26:27 it might become more concrete if you're thinking about specific lessons or specific activities rather uh the last bit is uh is a very big one so this this cognitive load theory that says um our working memory is is limited in some way so uh if you're just told to memorize digits or something it's often seven that that the average person is the limit unless you start to play memory tricks the interesting bit is we speak of seven chunks because what this individual thing is is not so limited it can be seven really abstract and big and complicated topics if you have internalized them enough it counts as one chunk so uh you um the theory behind it is you have some some things already connected up if you have then they only take up a single Chunk in your in your working memory and so you have more space left for the task so there's there's parts that come from the tasks that are inevitable and then there's usually something else on top because you're you're teaching it in one way or another the goal of course is to reduce this but that's in this abstract setting uh really useless but what helps is to to point out connections of topics so that things are

26:38 Cognitive Load Theory

28:05 not unconnected dots that you have to keep all in your working memory at the same time but to First connect them into one chunk I think that's one one big uh reason why people try to have terminology why you try to coin specific terms for things because that helps you to to chunk them up under this term

28:35 this one's hard to do for our sessions because uh we're basically given what the students come with is this is more useful if you're designing a longer curriculum uh then you can try to build things up um and not throw too many things on the pile at the same time

28:59 Bloom's Taxonomy

28:59 last one uh is is Bloom's taxonomy I think this is probably another very well-on-one have you seen this okay some some happened uh it's in essence it's a way of saying How Deeply do you uh engage or understand something uh understand is not a great term so it's um the the original one has many more levels but I agree with the ACM with the computer science Association that uh for me there's really three distinct levels that that make a lot of sense to me and maybe let's go through these just to make it more concrete so the the most basic level of of Mastery of how much you uh how much you mastered a topic I think that's that's really the nicest way to put it is familiarity so you you've memorized the definition you've seen it before so you're aware that these things exist

29:47 Basic Level of of Mastery

29:57 Familiarity

30:11 um and you can ask questions about uh what what do you know about this in a way it's reproduction so it's uh taking things you've seen before and you can reproduce them in your own words maybe but it's it's not much deeper than that uh usage goes beyond that so you can apply some concept in some some concrete but new way so it's not something that you've seen in exactly this way before um but you can uh use some template on a new example so uh it's about what can you do or uh what you know how to do in say in an algorithms class this could be knowing some some basic performance of some algorithm which you've covered in class so you just write that down and this could be apply an algorithm on an example so you can demonstrate that you know how it works which is more than just memorizing the code you have to apply it and then assessment is the the last level of this which is comparing different things

31:18 Assessment

31:26 um and um comparing their quality in in an informed way so it's uh you're given Chester a task and you have to come up with the algorithm to solve it uh and so I mean usually the idea is not that you just shoot down some algorithm but you justify why that is a good choice

32:01 I think most mostly these are uh to balance out assessments so far for your lesson maybe it's not that relevant to think about but it's useful to to keep in mind that these are three different levels that you usually go through in succession you can't really use something if you're not familiar with it and you can't assess it if you're not not able to understand how it works

32:31 so the main the main uses in or for tasks assessments to say at what level do they do they shoot and ideally you want to balance this out in your teaching uh all three are important and relevant sometimes

32:47 sometimes forgotten again if you're super excited about something you tend to focus oh let's just do the assessment all the other it's boring anyone can do it uh but that that's a mistake usually

33:03 all right um and any questions about these learning theories did it make some make sense it's it's a backdrop really so um don't feel feel like pressured to squeeze as much of this into your lesson by force uh and modify your your idea so long um until everything pops up in it um but take each of these theories look at your lesson and think about if there's something where your plan would contradict that theory would I don't know uh exclude some kids uh play against the social dynamics uh in still a fixed mindset any of these is is essentially a check that you haven't done any obvious things a due diligence task