e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: CMU

  • Empirical Educator Project/CMU Updates

    Empirical Educator Project/CMU Updates

    As promised, I’m returning to Carnegie Mellon University’s announcement of the $100 million contribution of tools, software, and content to support the democratization of learning science, as well as the relationship of that contribution to the Empirical Educator Project.

    Just that first sentence shows how much meat there is yet to be put on the bones. “Contribution?” “Democratize learning science?” What does all that mean? These are fair questions. Jeff Young has some good reporting up at EdSurge that connects some dots on what’s public so far. I’m going to do my best to explain why the answers are not yet as clear as they might be, when and how they will be come clearer, and then give some reminders of past conversations here on e-Literate that provide some breadcrumbs leading in the direction of where all this is going. There will be more news in the press that will drop on Wednesday, followed by some more analysis by me on Thursday. From there, the story will build in pieces, through the Empirical Educator summit on May 6th and 7th, and afterward.

    Let’s start with the big picture. Carnegie Mellon has been a pioneer in various types of theoretical and applied educational and cognitive science research—which is now fashionable to roll up into a ball and call “learning science”—for decades. While their work often doesn’t get the publicity it deserves, the breadth and depth is astounding. I’ve had the privilege of visiting a few times and taking deep dives. ((When I say deep, I mean deep. See, for example, https://mfeldstein.wpengine.com/can-there-be-microscope-of-mind/.)) There are very few institutions in the world that are in their league in terms of the scope of what they do.

    The university made a decision to take a lot of their work product—over $100 million worth, in fact—and make it broadly accessible to the academic community. Honoring this commitment in a real and practical way is…hard. Very, very hard. It’s about more than just releasing the source code to software, which is hard enough to do right in and of itself. This is about making science—not just the output but the practice—accessible and useful to non-scientist educators. On top of that, the components of the contribution were not all designed together as a single software platform. They consist of many research projects, developed by different teams and that may be more loosely or tightly related to each other. Imagine if a top research laboratory decided to turn itself into the Smithsonian Institution, making itself a hands-on science museum accessible to everyone without dumbing itself down. That’s not exactly the goal that Carnegie Mellon’s Simon Initiative has set for itself, but its’ the same spirit. It’s incredibly ambitious and not easily imagined, much less described in a single press release.

    In fact, doing this well is itself going to take some empirical experimentation. And that’s where the partnership with the Empirical Educator Project comes in. Carnegie Mellon had already offered to host this year’s summit on May 6th and 7th. I’m honestly not sure how long they’ve been mulling over this idea of the giant release, but at some point they came to the conclusion that we would be good pilot partners for their effort. This week, we will be describing our high-level approach to our pilot design for helping to make CMU’s contribution accessible. And not just CMU’s contribution, either, since EEP is based on the premise that many academic institutions have innovations to contribute if only we can get better at sharing them. The scale of CMU’s contribution has given us an opportunity to challenge our assumptions about how we should be going about this work. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

    As I said, more details while emerge in the coming days, weeks, and months, first as we learn how to tell such a big story and later as we learn from the grand experiment as it unfolds. For now, I want to leave you with two video playlists. The first is a set of interviews of Carnegie Mellon faculty that I recorded while visiting a few years ago. At the time, I had no agenda other than to capture their individual and collective views on “learning science” and its relationship to classroom teaching. The second is a set of interviews from participants after the first day of the first EEP summit. Taken together, I think you will see why there is a good fit.

    CMU interview YouTube playlist.

    EEP interview YouTube playlist.

  • Fear Itself

    A little over a week ago, I wrote a “recommended reading” post pointing to a piece from Inside Higher ed and The Times Higher Ed called “Fear of Looking Stupid” about research from Carnegie Mellon University anthropologist Lauren Herckis about faculty resistance to “innovative” approaches. (I use quotes here not to imply a value judgement but to indicate that “innovative” was the word used in the article.) The title of the article gives you a pretty good sense of the angle taken by the author. The comment thread on that article was fascinating, as was John Warner’s terrific column in response.

    We are lucky to have a guest post from Dr. Herckis and her colleagues Richard Scheines and Joel Smith with some additional perspective and follow-up information. I took the liberty of adding a title to their post.

    – Michael

    We were delighted that Times Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed reported on the anthropological research being conducted at Carnegie Mellon on the roadblocks to implementation of demonstratively effective pedagogical innovations. We’d like to take the opportunity to expand the conversation.

    Our research exposes multiple factors behind faculty resistance to making changes to their teaching practice, including the institutional barriers encountered by faculty adopting evidence- or research-based practices and especially where technology is involved. There are, of course, many effective teaching practices in use, and current research helps to explain why they work when they do. But that research also points to many other tools and practices that increase teaching effectiveness.

    Our aim is to develop a detailed and actionable understanding of what impedes and what helps faculty adopting research-based practices.

    The idea that faculty are invested strongly in avoiding embarrassment, and are thus sometimes reluctant to adopt innovative tools or practices – as reported in the THE/IHE article – is true. But the story is richer.

    Faculty do not want to waste students’ time; they want to teach well. Using methods that they have honed is therefore important. Faculty learn to teach over years of practice, as most of us have little or no training in teaching. Tried and true methods are appealing because faculty have reason to think that they work.

    If students have seemed to enjoy the material and report learning from the course, why change? Methods that leave students feeling good about the course (and the professor) are appealing, both because they are validating (“yes, I AM a good professor!”) and because happy students provide good evaluations of teaching, which are vital for faculty job security.

    Until we change the incentives and provide alternative sources of personal identity affirmation, faculty will not be motivated to invest time and energy in changing their teaching to adopt practices shown by research to be more effective.

    Our research on implementation of research-based instruction shows that faculty care about their students, and want to ensure that students have a good experience. Yes, some faculty at Carnegie Mellon hesitate to use unfamiliar methods or technology because they don’t want to embarrass themselves in class. Few of us want that. But they also don’t want to waste students’ time if something goes awry, want the validation of satisfied students, take student satisfaction as a sign that things are going well, fear the professional consequences of poor teaching evaluations, don’t think alternatives are a good fit, are sceptical of literature that supports alternatives, and believe that institutional support for alternatives is lacking.

    Innovation for the sake of innovation doesn’t serve faculty or students. But the use of research-based, effective teaching methods does serve students, and it is in our interest to learn how to support faculty in adopting and sustaining the use of such methods.

    To do this, we need to step back, look at the big picture, and address the multiple contributing factors to success and failure in implementing evidence-based practice. Our research shows that systematically incorporating anthropological analysis is an important and rarely used tool for understanding roadblocks to, and enablers of, meaningful innovation in higher education. Without it, we are flying blind.

    The research results that we had time to report in our brief presentation at the Global Learning Council meeting  (and reported in THE/IHE) are only a small part of what we have learned about implementation of instructional innovation. A full report detailing our findings will be available in September 2017 at http://cmu.edu/simon.  Academic articles regarding methodology and results will be submitted for peer review in the coming months; these articles will be shared at http://www.cmu.edu/simon/projects/flagship-projects/barriers-to-tel.html as they are published

    Lauren Herckis is Simon Initiative research scientist and adjunct instructor, Richard Scheines is dean of Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Joel Smith is distinguished career teaching professor, all at Carnegie Mellon University.