Online Versus Live-Classroom Learning | Which Students Suffer the Most?
Educational research sheds new light on the groups of students whose performance suffers the most when learning moves online.
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Evidence. Based. Teaching.
If you’ve been in education for any time at all, you know these three words have dominated the field for the better part of two decades.
Evidence-based teaching involves the promotion and use of strategies that have been empirically validated through controlled laboratory studies.
To validate such strategies, an intervention is applied to a group of (hopefully) randomly assigned students, and the results are evaluated against a non-intervention control group.
If the intervention group demonstrates superior performance (however that might be defined), that intervention is henceforth deemed to be an ‘evidence-based’ teaching strategy.
Moreover, to stack the evidence for any given intervention, groups of studies are often pooled together to create a 'meta-analysis'. That, for instance, is what John Hattie did with his popular Visible Learning book.
Now, this all may sound like a powerful way to determine which teaching strategies hold the most promise for increasing student achievement … and in many respects it is.
But unfortunately, it is not the infallible panacea that many would have us believe.
Evidence-based teaching suffers from some significant problems, including an over-dependence on standardized tests, a stark research-funding bias, and a narrow definition of what student success means.
Perhaps the biggest problem with relying too heavily on such models, however, is that teachers are insidiously disempowered as the control over classroom instruction gradually shifts to educational researchers -- many of whom have never spent even a single day in a live classroom.
In other words, when teachers are not only told what to teach but how to teach it, they slowly lose agency and autonomy over their craft as they become cogs in a blunt system that lacks any trace of nuance or appreciation for the individual student.
Okay, so maybe that’s a bit grim … but it’s very cold and overcast outside as I write these words, so please excuse me if I’m being hyper-dramatic ;)
Anyway, in this From Theory to Practice video, I explore a piece of research that can help us develop a deeper appreciation for this issue in a sort of roundabout way:
Is It Live or Is It Internet? Experimental Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction (David Figlio, Mark Rush, Lu Yin)
Here are some of the questions I tackle in this installment:
-- How can relying on global averages sometimes cause us to overlook key information when assessing research findings?
-- What is stratification, and how can it help us achieve a more nuanced understanding of otherwise unremarkable data?
-- With regard to live versus digital learning, which groups of students tend to suffer the most when thrust into the latter environment?
-- What are two key takeaways from this research that can help teachers approach their craft with more agency and personalization?
Give it a watch, and let me know what you think in the comments.
And, as always, if you find this video valuable, interesting and/or entertaining, you can support our channel by liking, sharing and subscribing ;)
#eLearningVersusLiveClassroom #OnlineLearningResearch
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JARED COONEY HORVATH | PhD, MEd
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is an award-winning cognitive neuroscientist, best-selling author and renowned keynote speaker with an expertise in human learning, memory, and brain stimulation.
Dr. Horvath has published 4 books, over 30 research articles, and currently serves as an honorary researcher at the University of Melbourne and St. Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne.
His research has been featured in popular publications including The New York Times, WIRED, BBC, The Economist, PBS's Nova and ABC’s Catalyst.
www.lmeglobal.net/media
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LME GLOBAL
LME Global is a mission-driven company aiming to serve teachers, students and educators through applied brain science.
Пікірлер: 9
Hi all. My new book '10 Things Schools Get Wrong (and How We Can Get Them Right)' is now available on Amazon. You can also learn more at LME(dot)global/10-things
@joevasquez4671
Ай бұрын
Being Hispanic in an online undergrad program, would you offer some suggestions to offset the statistics cited here? I'd be extremely grateful.
Great explanation of why stratified sampling/ analysis is so useful when digging into the impact of a new teaching and learning practice..
Thank you Jared for your clear and concise videos. I can think of no other capable of making research available this way to educators all over the world (me being from the Netherlands). I found your book to be of great value even to someone who has read a lot of the available books on evidence in education.
Such a great video. Makes so much sense. Brilliant strategies to bring stratification into our own classroom data. Thank you.
The data here makes perfect sense. However, that might be because simply posting a recorded lecture online is poor online pedagogy. What works in a brick and mortar setting doesn't always transfer to an online environment. If the same lecture was paced out in digestible video chunks accompanied by a post-chunk formative assessment with automated video feedback, or if the recording was edited to leverage multimedia learning principles, the data might suggest something different. For instance, if a major issue with low achieving students is the habit of trying to 'multitask' (i.e. looking at their phone while half listening to the lecture; something they are less able to do in a classroom), then short video segments with free recall quizzes could boost their focus and engagement. There are other variables to consider as well-What was the audio and video quality? Was the recording shot as a whole-class wide angle, multiple cameras, or just a single frame that zoomed in and out on the lecturer? Were the slides clear and constant throughout the recording? Was it closed-captioned? Was there a discussion component directly after? Was the recording viewed at a similar time of day as the live lecture? Were students instructed to hand-write their notes rather than type their notes? Were polls or clickers used in the live lecture, and was there a polling supplement in the online version? A lot of factors play into the efficacy of an online lecture. If those aren't taken into consideration, there will be major gaps in instructional quality. Having said that, what this data might also suggest is that the way traditional lectures are designed and delivered is not that effective to begin with. And, a first-person traditional lecture set in a brick and mortar environment viewed in a third-person digital context, without considering other factors, might not transfer well. A question to ask here isn't, "do lectures have comparable efficacy across contexts?", but "what are the most effective, efficient, and enjoyable practices to encode information in a given context?" Would love to here your thoughts. Love your videos. Read all your books. Big fan. Thank you for doing what you do.
@MulberryDays
Жыл бұрын
THANK YOU like i know this was intended as a concise video illustrating stratification and it does that, but the study itself is *weird.* because that's absolutely not how to digitize a curriculum. the benefits of video lectures are that you can watch them more than once, pause, rewind, that they have clear subtitles when you can't hear a thing properly, etc. that means we have to put effort into their quality and be designing those *for* online consumption, not just copypasting a crappy video of a lecture designed for a live interactive class. (gawd i hope the lecture was designed for interaction or else that's a bad lecture being translated badly) and THEN we have to ask about the digital space where the lecture exists - have we built or cultivated any kind of online forum where students can interact, where the teacher is accessible? is there any attempt at facilitating that online community? and the benefits of that kind of space, when properly built, is that conversations can happen between people who maybe are slower to consider or respond to points - either because they're busy, or because they're shy, or because they need or like to look up all the terms and references in the discussion. asynchronous dialogue is inherently different from live rapidfire question-and-answer or just chatting. (and *again* the language barrier comes up, if i'm autistic and have trouble focusing on words in real time or articulating them, then a digital space is going to allow me to participate more effectively than a live one.....which is actually where i thought this video was going when he started talking about stratification :/ )
However, did the researchers control for whether or not the Asian and Hispanic students in the digital group indeed DID NOT speak English as their first language? There's an implication that these students were ELL, but is that actually the case? Of course, caucasians speak many non-English languages also... Just wondering what the finer details were in the study. Incidentally, I teach college English and the "one size fits all" EBP dictates are RAMPANT. I am super skeptical of any "ideas" educational researchers have, especially when they don't get granular and examine the stratified subgroups. You did a GREAT job here adding some common sense and truth to a highly contentious topic!
Another winner! Thanks Jared.