nyteach

Almost as good as individual tutoring

“The goal of learning is competence, not one’s relative ranking”

Singapore is a nation where coaching and tuition are part and parcel of a child’s education. There are more than 500 tuition centres and Singaporeans reportedly spend more than S$800 million a year on tuition. But does this work? Are there alternatives? Well-know education psychologist Benjamin Bloom, in a now-classic report with his doctoral students, showed that when students are individually coached and tutored, they perform much better (by 98 per cent, on average) than those who received regular classroom instruction. This is a significant and striking observation that gets to the heart of learning. The implication is that it is possible to greatly extend and improve learning beyond traditional classroom lectures, and that under the right circumstances, most students have the potential to perform at a very high level. One important point to note is that much of current education focuses on how students do under a system of teaching (usually lectures), by grading and ranking their performance on tests. Students who receive coaching can be expected to do better than their peers. But in the context of medicine — and I would dare say for most other professions — the goal of learning is competence, not one’s relative ranking. In a medical school like ours, the focus is not just on grading a student but on getting them competent to practice medicine; it matters little that they perform better than their peers if they do not achieve competence. MENTORING WITHIN A TEAM Medical students learn best when they are part of the clinical environment and are, therefore, individually mentored and tutored. To do that, we place students in clinical care teams — that is, teams of doctors and nurses who take care of patients. The students get to watch and learn both the science and art of medicine. They begin to pick up the culture as well as the knowledge, but also critically, the application of knowledge in diagnosing and managing patients. They also learn bedside manners, how to elicit the history and nature of patient complaints and problems, technical skills in performing patient examinations; as well as critical thinking skills in ordering and interpreting tests and then using this information to diagnose, treat and manage the patient. They also learn how to communicate and educate patients and families. They learn how to work with their team in a manner which optimally serves the patient’s interests. The learning happens not only from the main physician or consultant on the team but also, more usually, from fellow members, senior students, house officers, resident physicians, registrars and nurses. This kind of learning is more than individual tutoring; it includes a fair amount of mentoring by being part of a team managing patients. Clearly, this form of environment for learning, with major individualisation, works for medical school learning. But can it be applied to small class sizes and in other settings? Could we scale this type of learning? If so, how? MASTERY LEARNING Bloom proposed a partial solution to improve performance by using simple questioning and testing. He suggested that feedback tests by themselves could improve performance. He called this type of instruction “mastery learning”. He and his group conducted a study comparing three groups receiving regular classroom instruction, mastery learning and tutoring. The regular classroom group and the mastery learning group comprised about 30 students each. The tutoring was for up to three students at a time. The results were impressive. As expected, the students with individual tutoring performed best, but the mastery learning class was also much better than the group that received regular classroom instruction: Remarkably, 70 per cent of students in the mastery class performed at the same level as the top 20 percent of the regular class. In this case, testing and examinations are used as a tool for learning, not as a tool for grading. Physicist and Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, who has a passion for research based educational methods, in a recent article in Science magazine compared a very simple method called “deliberate practice” to conventional teaching. “Deliberate practice” begins with students getting multiple-choice questions on a particular concept, which they then discuss in small groups and answer. Their answers are used by the instructor in a short class discussion to correct and improve their understanding. Similar in intent to “mastery learning”, this was implemented by his post-doctoral student and a graduate student over one week (three times, for an hour each time) for a section of an introductory physics course. The professor continued to teach the other section using the regular setup. The results were dramatic: After this very brief and relatively small change, the students who took part in the deliberate practice session performed twice as well as those who attended the conventional course, in a multiple-choice test of the material. This is another powerful piece of evidence that simple feedback methods which assess and reinforce concepts greatly improve learning. Many variations of this can be adapted for different settings. Such deceptively simple studies hold great promise, showing that a simple feedback system of teaching is better than traditional classroom lectures — and almost as good as individual coaching or tuition. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: K Ranga Krishnan is Dean of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore. A clinician-scientist and psychiatrist, he chaired the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Duke University Medical Centre from 1998 to 2009.

The Earth-Shatteringly Amazing Speech That’ll Change The Way You Think About Adulthood

Makes you think about what we really should be teaching and why.

Why Singapore Education Works.

Exam cramming is not learning

It is common and natural for students to cram ahead of examinations, but unless they have a better concept of the various subjects, they will soon forget what they have learnt in school, defeating the purpose and value of education. Memory and retention is a key ingredient in learning. The frequent occurrence of memories, thoughts and ideas help with the interpretation and understanding of new experiences and ideas. There is extraordinary diversity in how individuals behave in this respect. One remembers well; another, poorly. This is true not only when comparing individuals but also for the same individual in different phases of time (morning and evening) and age (young and old). Memory also varies by content; some can remember music and songs easily, but are remarkably forgetful when it comes to other things. This depends on the intensity of the attention and interest attached by the individual to the content. Some experiences are more universal — the pain of touching fire is a one-shot seared into memory. For most other experiences, frequent repetitions make possible the remembrance. The mastery of vocabulary, multiplication tables, rhymes and poems is generally ensured only by repetition. But even then, if the material is not tapped and used, the ability to recall content is lost over time. The most common way in which students learn is geared towards taking and passing examinations. Students pull all-nighters and cram at exam time. This type of content vanishes fast if it is not grounded by conceptual understanding and later subjected to review. “He who crams fast, forgets fast.” The more the knowledge is used, the more it is retained and helps to grow other knowledge. Conversely, even deeply ingrained content, like one’s mother tongue, is impaired if not used for an extended time — I can attest to that from my own personal experience. This brings up a key issue for learning and forgetting: What do we know about forgetting? German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’ experiments on memory loss are interesting. First, he created a list of 2,000-plus nonsense words, each with one vowel and consonants. He then memorised eight lists of 13 words, waited for some time, then recollected and re-learnt them. He tested himself over periods of 20 minutes, an hour, nine hours, one day, two days, six days and 31 days. He noted how long it took him to relearn the list each time, and then recorded it as a percentage of the original time it took him to learn the list. Forgetting was steep — in 20 minutes, only 58 per cent of the original learning was saved, and over a week, only 25 per cent was retained. What improves retention — repetition. Moreover, repetition spaced over time works better. This is called spaced learning and has been used in various programmes to improve one’s vocabulary. The education methods in our schools need to take into account of this short-lived nature of memory. Let’s discourage our students from cramming everything just before an examination. Instead, let’s encourage them to get a better grasp of the subject matter, so they will not simply learn and forget. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: K Ranga Krishnan is Dean of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore. A clinician-scientist and psychiatrist, he chaired the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Duke University Medical Centre from 1998 to 2009. This is part of a weekly series on the way we learn.

In defence of memorisation and drill work in education

I refer to the commentary, “Learning in the 21st century” (April 26). It was suggested that computers are now available as extensions of our memory, that regurgitating facts in examinations has limited real-world value and that students should instead learn how to “critique, synthesise, analyse” and apply information. No computer can be an extension of an empty mind; there must be something for the computer to extend. The mind must be a bridgehead for electronic devices. The bigger the bridgehead, the more would extension into the realm of knowledge be possible. We cannot and do not have to memorise everything, but we have to memorise a lot of things, not for regurgitation but for internalising knowledge. How I disliked my teachers when they insisted that I memorise poems and more. But I was thankful when I began to see the beauty of these writings, I could not discard them from my mind even when I grew old, and when I attempted to compose my own poetry. Pianists cannot really enjoy a musical piece until they can play it from memory and interpret it from the heart. Only those who memorise Shakespeare’s verses and act them out on stage can really appreciate his genius. Athletes and dancers are compelled to perfection by constant practice. It is strange that such practice is labelled meaningless drill when applied to subjects such as mathematics and literature. I was forced to solve problem sum after problem sum by my mathematics teachers. I was grateful when I had to teach the same material for a living and in front of a sceptical and hostile class. I can never forget my typing teacher who shouted: “Type this page without a single mistake. Retype even if there is one wrong punctuation mark.” Many of her students became good typists like her. There are examinations and there are examinations. “When was the Second World War fought?” is a question that requires only regurgitation. “What part did your country play in the Second World War, and do you think it was justifiable?” is a question that requires knowledge, analytical thinking and moral courage. Memorisation and drill work in education, though not sufficient, are necessary.

Learning in the 21st century

We live in a digital and mobile world where Google, the Internet and mobile technologies have disrupted traditional classroom learning and requirements for immediate recall. Internet-accessible resources are extensions of our memory. There are over 30 trillion links and 2 billion plus users. Our students are using these resources from all around the world to learn. Tomorrow, there will be more and more technologies that thrust information at students, stimulating curiosity and thinking. Our challenge is how to adapt our learning strategy in a way that leverages and maximises these opportunities, to facilitate what will be needed of our students in future. Unfortunately, remembering facts and regurgitating them in exams has limited real-world value today. The need to store facts in our head is vastly reduced because of the expansive store of knowledge now at our fingertips. What is valued is the ability to use knowledge critically and analytically. Students today need more skills and competence than ever before to function in tomorrow’s world. One of the most important skills is the ability to reinvent themselves for lifelong learning. They also need to develop both technical competence and emotional maturity. METHODS STILL OLD-SCHOOL While the world has changed, schools and educational systems, however, have been slow to adapt. New ways of delivering content online through massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those organised by Coursera and Udacity, have become popular with millions of students around the globe. These methods are in their early stages; most still use a lecture format, albeit delivered to an audience of millions. Indeed, traditional lectures remain the dominant method of teaching around the world, even though numerous studies indicate that this approach is ineffective by itself. At best, these methods provide only basic information; conceptual understanding comes from more interactive learning. Teaching is not simply presenting ideas and insights, nor filling students’ heads with what we know or transmitting information. Learning is not just committing facts to memory but the ability to critique, synthesise, analyse, use and apply information. However, the curricula for most subjects are packed with vast content — those facts that faculty feel students should commit to memory; facts that are now available at their fingertips. The packed curriculum leaves little time for students to acquire a conceptual understanding of the subject and how to use that knowledge. The addition of greater interactivity is essential to make knowledge transfer in universities more meaningful in today’s world. But how do we integrate the digital world’s resources into classroom-based learning? How do we create the foundation for lifelong learning, so that someone recognises what he knows and what he doesn’t know; knows how to seek information; knows how to use and critically assess multiple resources; and can effectively articulate his rationale for solutions to problems? These are key issues that educators around the world are beginning to tackle. REAL-WORLD USE To accomplish these aims, we have to be clear what is it that we want students to learn. We have to understand that recall of knowledge or fact, as traditionally assessed in school, is only the first step. A key element in any directed learning environment is the assessment of competence in that knowledge. Psychologist George Miller developed a simple framework for assessing levels of knowledge in relation to competence, specifically in medicine, but it is applicable to other subjects. The first step — “knows” — is knowledge about a subject, such as recalling facts. The second is to “know how” to use the knowledge, such as in analysing a problem. The third step is to demonstrate proficiency in applying the knowledge — “shows how”. In medicine, for example, this is assessed by observed examination of patients or actor-patients. The fourth step is to see how the knowledge is integrated into the real world. This requires assessing competence when a person is working and, in the case of physicians, is part of the ongoing assessment after they enter practice. The final step, “mastery”, refers to the competence of an expert who teaches the next generation. The field of medicine is fortunate in that the bedside clinical experience — where students talk to and examine the patient and relate what they find to lessons or go back to their resources to fill in the gaps in their knowledge about the condition — assists in the long-term retention and better conceptualisation of knowledge. But this approach, of linking what is learnt to the real world, can just as easily be adapted to any other field of learning, helping students to consolidate and learn to apply concepts. This is the start of a weekly series on learning and education. In the articles to follow, Professor K Ranga Krishnan will use what is known from pedagogical work, psychology and the neuroscience of learning, as well as experience at Duke-NUS, to contribute to the ongoing conversation in Singapore on approaches to education. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: K Ranga Krishnan is Dean of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore. A clinician-scientist and psychiatrist, he chaired the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Duke University Medical Centre from 1998 to 2009. This article has input from his colleagues, Drs Robert Kamei and Sandy Cook.

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Don’t make it easy for our students! To engage them, they have to be challenged.

Reinventing Education

Teach students to be performance ready, not content ready.
How true, especially in this age where information is so readily available on the net!

Do you dare to dream?
Change is development. Stepping out of our comfort zone does not make it disappear. It only expands our comfort zone.

A new education story