This week in the science of learning
Oral language, math wars, curriculum and more — April 21, 2024
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Research pieces: Bite-sized for the weekend
* The science of reading can’t forget about the importance of oral language, Sonia Cabell told Education Week this week. Cabell, an associate professor and researcher at Florida State, has written a new book outlining a framework for back-and-forth ‘serve-and-return’ conversations.
“Some of my own research has shown that the conversations in preschool classrooms relate to children’s vocabulary growth and that the language teachers use, and the complexity of that language, matters,” Cabell said.
Serve-and-return conversations took their own turn in Friday’s newsletter, too.
* The fight over procedure versus understanding in math has been going on for…a while. The 2008 National Math Advisory Panel made a series of recommendations for math learning based on the results of 16k studies, Panel member and Brookings policy analyst (and former math teacher) Tom Loveless told Anna Stokke on her Chalk and Talk podcast this week.
But the Panel’s findings on teaching and learning were largely ignored. This fascinating listen explains some of the history of math reforms, and how—like a lot of ideas in education—they swing wildly back and forth.
* Is *what* students learn all day finally going to get the attention it deserves? Well worth your time to read American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio’s long but important story in The 74 examining the research behind giving teachers a quality curriculum to teach with, part of a report from the Hoover Institution marking the 40th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk.”
Pondiscio cites some research I included in a story last year on the importance of textbooks—and confirms my reporting that a lot of teachers I talk to like having high-quality materials to teach with, and assessments to match. They don’t have to work so many extra hours designing lessons and making tests, teachers have told me, and they can see how the organized materials help students learn more.
“The principal point here is to return to teachers time spent needlessly or excessively planning units and lessons from scratch so that they can spend more time on higher-yielding activities,” Pondiscio writes. “Studying student work, giving feedback, deepening their subject expertise, and building relationships with students and families.”
Culture Walk:
I love it when teaching and learning show up in the world of culture.
* How is Tennessee Titans’ defensive coordinator Denard Wilson going to whip the defense into shape in the off-season? Thanks to my friend and Titans superfan Christina Lane for asking me if Wilson was talking evidence-based teaching practices at their latest press conference. She got the idea because a couple of weeks ago I very loosely compared practicing football to practicing math, suggesting practice gets you good at both.
“We are building a foundation of small things, stacking days and stacking concepts,” Denard told the press in Nashville this week. “We are conceptually teaching, so they can understand the big picture. The more they can do, then you give them more information.”
(Find the science of learning out in the world, featured in culture? Drop me a line and I’ll include it!)
This week @ The Bell Ringer:
* I’m about as obsessed with memorization as I am with practice. Maybe from all those Shakespeare speeches and scenes from John Hughes movies I committed to memory as a teenager? Maybe from the *hours* I spent learning every word to this song (which I could still sing for you, by the way)?
This week, journalist and Knowledge Gap author Natalie Wexler tells me that memorization has gotten a bad rap—not only is it *not* harmful, it’s vital to learning. That’s something I think isn’t talked about enough, either in schools or among parents.
Learn more about what she and other experts told me parents should know about the research on learning, including ways to help kids memorize their stuff.
Hi Holly,
Thanks for sharing my podcast episode with Tom Loveless! There's a comment about gist and verbatim memory in the Task Group Reports of the National Math Advisory Panel (Chapter 4).
"Memories occur in either verbatim or gist form. Verbatim recall of math knowledge is an essential feature of math education, and it requires a great deal of time, effort, and practice. Gist memory is the form of memory that is typically relied on in reasoning. A combination of gist knowledge and verbatim knowledge is critical for success in math."
It's the chapter on learning processes. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED502980.pdf
Your discussion of memorization relates to the distinction between gist memory and verbatim memory. Gist memory is recalling the general idea of what was said, while verbatim memory is recalling what was said exactly, word-for-word. Most memories are stored in the brain as gist memory--remembering them exactly is not important. However, storing things as verbatim memory (“rote memorization”) is useful when the exact details matter. For example, it makes sense to recite a poem word-for-word rather than to paraphrase it. And 6 x 8 = 48, not “around 50.”