At Last, The Right Message

President Obama addressed the students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia on Sept 8, 2009. The speech was televised nationally and most of the children watched it at their schools though there were reports that some schools did not allow their kids to watch it. Some parents didn’t let their kids go to school for the fear of the president spreading his socialist agenda through his speech. What a ridiculous thought!

The president and his education secretary want to increase the length of the school day and the school year in the hope that it would make the American children more competitive, which certainly is a faulty logic. However, this time he got it right. President Obama insisted the students spend more time studying, doing homework, asking for help, and help themselves and their country. The message was very simple and straightforward, but a part of media were hell bent on spreading the wrong message that he was trying to drive his socialist ideologies into the kids’ minds.

For the last few years, I have been studying how people learn and my conclusion is – study, study, and study – because there are no shortcuts in education. And this was the message delivered in his speech.

Watch the video and decide for yourself.

Does the Length of a School Year Help Increase Competitiveness?

President Barack Obama said in March this year that he would like to increase the length of a school day and a school year to help the American kids compete in the world. Last year too, he had mentioned in his speech that the American children need to compete with the Indian and Chinese kids. The Education secretary, Arne Duncan, echoed his views – “You’re competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; 11, 12 months a year.”

Are Obama and Duncan right in thinking that the American children need to be more competitive? In a word, yes. Definitely. But what about them believing that increasing the length of a school day and year would lead to the children studying more and being competitive? Again, in a word, doomed. This proposal, I think, is based on the assumption that the more time you spend at school, the more you study (or spend on academic activities). But is it necessarily true? No, it is not. While it’s true that the result of an activity is a function of the time spent on that activity, including studying, it’s a misconception that children would study more if they stay at school longer.

In the past, studies have been conducted with children in advanced countries across the world and it has been found that Singapore children score the highest on standardized tests though they spend lesser time in school than American children. India and China were not included in those studies so data is not available for Indian and Chinese students.

What increases competitiveness is competition. And the fear of competition, failure, and not getting where you want to be. The American children have always had it easy. All physical amenities from the day they are born. There is nothing to aim higher for. If you already have a house and a car, other things are pretty much way cheap. If you have a stable job, you can easily keep paying installments on the car and the mortgage payments on the house. There is a small fraction of very talented people who start up companies, help grow businesses, and in the process create lots of jobs, which are available to the rest of the population. When the children know that they are going to have everything easily, there is nothing to go after, and hence, there is no will or necessity to be competitive.

Zero-teen, One-teen, … and the Importance of Pattern Identification

My three-and-a-half year old son, Divyanshu (who became Divi to help people at least pronounce his name), knows the numbers 0 through 10. Last week, I got a set of flash cards to teach him 11 – 25. As an utterly clueless father, I don’t know how other children at this age react to learning, but Divi is a very avid learner, with an attention span of five seconds.

I started teaching him trying to relate the new larger number to the smaller numbers he already knows:

Say one and one eleven.
One and two twelve.
One and three thirteen.
… and so on.

After 25, I started again from zero. In this round, he somehow figured out that if you insert ‘teen’ after a number, it becomes another number – four-teen, six-teen, seven-teen, eight-teen, and nine-teen. And when I reached 20, two and zero, he said ZERO-TEEN. However, I continued and so did his idea of the new numbers. After zero-teen came one-teen (21), two-teen (22), three-teen (23), four-teen (24) and five-teen (25). I smiled, corrected him, and restarted from 0. To my horror, he didn’t identify 10 by ‘ten’, which he knows but ‘zero-teen’. This is when I realized that he had identified a pattern, to suffix the number at units place with a teen. And this round resulted in yet hilarious ‘new’ numbers. So both 11 and 21 became one-teen, 12 and 22 became two-teen, and so on.

Divi might have developed misconceptions by identifying a pattern in the numbers, but pattern identification is what differentiates an expert from a novice. By pattern, I mean the underlying principles, meaningful arrangements, and logical reasonings.

If a chess board with some randomly placed pieces are shown to a chess expert and a non-expert for a few seconds and then asked to arrange the pieces on another board from memory, both persons fare poorly. However, when the pieces are arranged in a meaningful way, as in an actual game of chess, the expert chess player is able to arrange most of the pieces correctly, while the non-expert fares as poorly as before. The expert, in the second case, is able to identify the pattern of the pieces on the board.

Similarly, expert students are able to identify the appropriate laws of motion in word problems while novices try to plug in variable values in formulas and do not know the underlying principle on which the problem is based.

Divi’s is an oversimplified case (and resulting in a misconception) but … you get the idea.

The Problems with Technology-based Learning? The Technology Itself.

I’ve been working in the technology-based learning industry for many years now, initially as an instructional designer on Computer-based and Web-based training courses for information technology users and school children and later managing technology-based products and projects for higher education.

Technology has been in use since times immemorial. Leaves, rocks,  and paper are the earliest forms of technology. These days technology has become synonymous with the Internet, though other electronic devices such as audio and video tapes, projectors, and mp3 players are examples of technology too. Technology solves a number of problems, most notably convenience and learning. You can use technology to make your life convenient (ebooks) or you can use technology to learn a subject matter (online videos). The problem arises when one is confused with another. A still bigger problem is the perception that technology will help people learn a subject no matter how poorly designed or presented the content is. A case in point is the conversion of  a physical book into a pdf document or a Web site and the conversion of a pdf document to a Web site. Having a Web site instead of a book has its benefits such as searching or anytime, anywhere access, but a static Web site does not help with learning any more than a book.

Many people believe that multimedia elements such as podcasts, PowerPoint presentations, and videos will help people learn effectively irrespective of the design, context, or structure of the online materials. Unfortunately, learning is a very complex and time-consuming endeavor. Even more difficult is the transfer of that learning to new contexts. The developers of online courses mostly focus on learning, that is, scoring on quizzes. The quality of quizzes is definitely a factor in learning but again, assessment itself is a difficult task.

Do online videos on real-world situations help people learn and transfer that learning to new situations? May be, may be not. It depends on a number of factors. But the perception that technology solves all learning problems is a myth. And learners pay the price.

An Enigma: Better Known as Stanford

Stanford – a word, which, after Harvard, elicited my deepest respect and awe before I went there to do my master’s. Like most of the things you achieve in life, the ‘awe’ factor finally goes away, and what remains is the feeling of contentment, achievement, and on top of the world. But this feeling arrives after you’ve been to Stanford. Before that, it’s a word, and an enigmatic world, especially from thousands of miles away, in India.

When I decided to come to the US for a graduate program in technology-based learning, I applied to three universities and Stanford, thinking that there is no harm in applying though I was convinced that I would not be admitted. How could a simple and average person like me go to one of the best universities in the world (a line of thought that has changed since then)? When I received an email from the graduate admissions office, I went ballistic. This was unbelievable. And equally shocking was the cost of studying there – about $52,000, that’s 2.4 million in Indian currency. You could buy a three bedroom apartment in a nice locality in Bangalore, the (so called) silicon valley of India.

I couldn’t arrange for the money, and had to forego the admission offer, and was heartbroken. Though I did get admitted to the other three universities, I decided to wait another year and apply again. The next year, I applied to to some PhD programs too. Though Michigan State University offered me to join their Cognitive Psychology PhD program (by the way, their CP program was ranked 3rd in the US), I decided to go for the master’s at Stanford. This was then when I didn’t know much about Stanford, which was about to change …

I landed at the San Francisco airport on September 11, 2005 (9/11, if you will) and was received by a lovely old couple whom I’d met for the first time, thanks to the Home Stay program for international students.