You can’t spend a decade building a curiosity focused ed-tech company without being wildly & continuously curious about understanding exactly how learning works. At Packback, we fuel our own curiosity on this subject matter via primary research studies, interviews with members of our 200,000+ professor & student partners, and of course pouring through countless academic journals & books. In this article, I’d like to delve into one book in particular: Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
The book summarizes an astounding body of research, serving to depict the science of successful learning. In this article, I’ll cite a brief refresher on a few of the main themes that I felt most inspired by, and then share my perspective on the how these findings relate to our passion for developing & improving habits of inquiry via Packback Questions.
The authors, being “two cognitive scientists who have dedicated our careers to the study of learning & memory”, profess that learning occurs in at least the following 3 steps:
- Encoding
- Consolidation
- Retrieval
While the authors elevate these as three core pillars of learning, they also specify a myriad of contributing factors that strengthen the learning process, including:
- Elaboration: “the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material. …relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to life outside of class.”
- Generation: “The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or solution. Which can be as simple as rephrasing key ideas in your own words.”
- Interleaving: mixing in multiple different topics & concepts together when studying or practicing. “…interleaving helps learners reach beyond memorization to higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building more rounded, deep , and durable learning.”
- Spaced practice: “Embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of the new learning) are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge …durable learning requires time for mental rehearsal and the other processes of consolidation.”
- Effort: “The more effort you have to expend to retrieve a knowledge or skill, the more the practice of retrieval will entrench it.”
- Writing to learn: “…express the main ideas in their own words and relate them to other topics covered in class.”
For the sake of this article, let’s call these factors “learning nutrients”. The light-bulb moment for me was in realizing that each time we combine multiple learning nutrients to the mix, the more durable that period of learning becomes. Take Retrieval + Spacing + Interleaving, for example. As the authors put it (embolden emphasis is mine):
“Retrieval practice that you perform at different times and in different contexts and that interleaves different learning material has the benefit of linking new associations to the material. This process builds interconnected networks of knowledge that bolster and support mastery of your field. It also multiplies the cues for retrieving the knowledge, increasing the versatility with which you can later apply it.”
Ah, “versatility”, what an appropriate word choice! At Packback, when we obsess over awakening & fueling curiosity, thus helping students to develop weekly habits of inquiry, it’s because the medium of asking a question is jam-packed with learning science versatility.
Imagine how many of these combinations might be present in a well-conducted (easier said than done) student-driven discussion. Actually, let’s go ahead and explore a small microcosm. Here’s an average-to-low-end Packback thread. 76 & 50 Curiosity Points respectively; just barely passes the the AI-moderation bar in a Packback community. Let’s see what learning nutrients we can find:
In this small instance, the course concept of “Operant Conditioning” is retrieved and applied to dialogue by both the questioner and the respondent. A small occurrence of generation occurs, as the questioner grapples with how best to apply the concept to healthy eating, and consolidation occurs within the respondent’s brief reply. This may seem simple, and as demonstrated by a mid-level Curiosity Score, it is. However, these learning nutrients have a way of compounding throughout a semester when nourished in a weekly habit of inquiry. All contributing to a more durable learning period (in this case, a 16 week college semester).
Of course, we’re not satisfied yet. The intentional design of Packback Questions serves to foster an intrinsically motivated learning environment(as our co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Jessica, was invited to write about in Forbes) wherein quality of inquiry & dialogue gradually improves!
So let’s level it up. We’ll assume the students have gone through several weeks of experiencing low-level posts being “Auto-Moderated”, followed up by direct “Coaching Emails”, and prompted for a revised draft guided by subtle “In-Line Feedback” as they write. We’ll factor in a few weeks of the instructor spending 15–20 minutes pulling their levers-of-influence to “Praise” and model excellent student questions & responses (I’m talking about high-level Bloom’s Taxonomy!). And of course, as the most fascinating student posts are curated into the weekly “Curious Reader Digest”, it’s fair to expect that curiosity-at-large has been sparked in the course. That’s what a Packback Questions community feels like.
Now let’s take a look at what learning nutrients might be found when a healthy discussion community catalyzes even a single question of the 90+ Curiosity Score caliber:
How thrilling is that to see! When the carefully crafted conditions for online discussion are nourished, habits of increasingly higher-level inquiry can flourish. Each time a student practices & elevates their questioning abilities, they pack in the learning science nutrients of Retrieval, Consolidation, and a myriad of additional factors that strengthen the Encoded durability of concepts learned in & outside of the classroom.
Of course, as with all impacts worth pursuing, this is easier said than done. The devil is in the details. Why habits of inquiry matter has been made clear in this book and most all of the learning science literature out there. How to achieve that reality, especially in high enrollment course scenarios, is a big hairy audacious challenge we face as an education community. Therein lies Packback’s focused specialty, of which we’ll further elaborate in a series of additional articles & white papers throughout 2020.
With you in the mission to Awaken & Fuel Lifelong Curiosity,
Mike
*Curious to learn more right away? Request a demo of Packback Questions, and we’ll get right back to you today!
Originally posted here on Medium Jan 23, 2020·5 min read
