The role of educators in primary school is crucial for the formation of each child. Their work, unfortunately not always carried out in easy conditions, is the basis of the cognitive and social development of future generations.

After many years, I still feel the impact of primary school on my personal growth. The memory of my Teacher, Mrs Rina Bottai, prompted me to sponsor a creative writing award in her honor.

School leavers picture. The signs says “Farewell elementary school”. Mrs Bottai retired that year after a long career in primary education. I am the one on her right.

As well as my family, Mrs Bottai was the architect of my individual development, giving me the tools and fundamental values to face life: education, self-confidence and respect for others.

With this Creative Writing award I therefore want to celebrate all primary educators, their dedication to serving children, their families and the future of our societies.

The winners were awarded on the 5th June 2019 at my old primary school, the Carlo Bini Elementary School in Livorno, Italy.

It was a great thrill for me to get back there after 47 years!

The children have done some fantastic work that I am still reading with pleasure. I have to admit, their Italian is much better than mine!

In total, there were 6 individual winners whose work was judged by a panel of teachers and parents. However, the largest part of the donation was used to buy books for the school library so that all children could benefit.

A sample of the children’s work: an essay titled “Cara Maestra… (Dear Teacher) in which they pretended to be grown-ups and told their teachers how they fulfilled their dreams after primary school. Each essay was accompanied with a drawing.

I’m already thinking about the 2019-2020 edition, where I would also like to involve an English primary school. In these sad times where the divisions between peoples always find a main title on the media, our role as educators is to encourage exchanges and cultural knowledge among the new generations.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank the Director of the Livorno’s educational headquarter, Gianna Valente and the head of my former primary school, Katia Burlacchini who, together with their collaborators, have made this event possible. A special thanks goes to the children who participated in the competition!

Gianna Valente (on my right) and Katia Burlacchini (left) and all the teachers who made this initiative possible.

Parents and children of the Carlo Bini primary school attending the ceremony

Links:

Article about the award in UCL news

Dr Roberto Filippi’s UCL profile page and his lab page

You can also follow Dr Filippi on twitter @psyrob

Dr Alex Hodgkiss from Oxford University’s Department of Education, talked about his recent research looking at whether spatial cognition is a crucial ingredient in the recipe for success in science – at primary school and beyond. See his short video summary as well as links to his papers and other resources below.

You can read more about the research in these papers:

Spatial cognition and science achievement

Development of spatial skills and maths

Development of children’s spatial scaling skills

Alex’s University webpage, which is regularly updated with new research, is here

In this week’s seminar, Christian Bokhove, Associate Professor in Mathematics Education at Southampton University talked about his recent research on geometry learning. He took as his starting point the question of why Asian countries typically score higher in PISA-type maths comparisons than European countries. Luckily for anyone who missed it, the slides of his talk are all available on slideshare here.

As part of the project, he and his partner team in Japan created a set of geometry learning materials which you can have a look at here.

And do check out Christian’s own website to find out more about his diverse research interests, including his presentation on the Top five tips: what teachers should know about research.

You can also follow him on twitter @bokhove

In this week’s seminar, Prof Michael Thomas discussed the background to and the findings of a US initiative set up to consider the possibility of transformative changes to education.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) are jointly exploring whether transformative education solutions can be developed through an accelerated research and development (R&D) effort. The approach would bring together interdisciplinary teams from education research, human development research, learning measurement, evidence-based technology-enhanced practice, professional development, neuroscience, and other fields.

In May 2018, the two philanthropic organizations came together to seek new approaches from practitioners, researchers, and the public to a set of education challenges with enormous implications for the success of all students – and especially those who have faced early trauma or learning challenges. They put out a ‘Request for Information’ (RFI) from a wide range of research, educational, policy, non-profit and business groups to seek information for innovative strategies to help address three pressing challenges they saw:

■Writing: Preparing all high school graduates for the type of nonfiction writing demanded in college and the workplace by developing the necessary habits, skills, and strategies;

■Maths: Preparing all students to deeply understand and apply mathematical skills and knowledge and related mindsets;

■Executive Functions: Improving the ability of all students to think flexibly, wrestle with multiple ideas, and manage their thoughts and actions

The main findings in these areas were:

Writing

The RFI submissions in writing focused on three big areas:

1. Writing for the real world:These approaches provide students with opportunities to engage in writing that more closely mirror the demands of college and the workplace. These range from a partnership with a science museum to promote real-world science writing to developing a community-based peer coaching model.

2. Getting students more feedback:Many of these submissions focus on developing students’ writing skills or providing feedback to students from a diverse group of readers, including outside experts such as journalists, to complement classroom teachers.

3. Next generation writing environments:A number of submissions focus on how to put technology at the disposal of teachers to help personalize writing instruction. These range from a tool to capture qualitative data from students’ drafts to help teachers see patterns in student writing, to an online learning environment that would make visible students’ contributions to peer feedback, so that teachers would know when to coach the class or an individual learner.

Mathematics

The RFI submissions in mathematics focused on four key topics:

1. Practice and feedback: These approaches provide students with rich opportunities to engage in deliberate practice and receive actionable feedback that leads to deep mastery of foundational math knowledge and concepts. Many of them employ digital games, intelligent tutoring, and technology-based platforms to tailor learning experiences for individual students.

2. Novel instruction and experiential learning:These approaches provide students with the opportunity to discuss real-world math problems of interest to them to help develop a positive math identity. One proposal invites students to consider the real-world and ethical implications of math questions.

3. Improved measurement systems: These solutions propose to narrow the gap between assessment and instruction by providing richer indicators of student progress.

4. Empowered teachers: These submissions propose using technologies that deliver real-time information on student learning to teachers with recommendations for adjusting instruction. The intent is to support teachers to differentiate their approaches for students with a wide range of proficiency levels, as well as to enable teachers to try new pedagogical strategies

Executive Functions

The RFI submissions in this area fell into three broad buckets:

1. Measures of executive functions: There were promising approaches to developing better measures of executive functions across basic and applied research. Such measures are needed to understand which interventions best target individual students’ needs and to help teachers make informed judgments. Some submissions offer tools to help teachers understand and support students’ development of executive functions, and to provide teachers with professional development in this area.

2. Interventions to build executive functions:These submissions include ideas for scaling some existing products as well as for basic research. They range from low-cost, targeted strategies that represent the essential “active ingredients” in effective programs to develop students’ social, emotional, and cognitive skills, to efforts to build adults’ knowledge and development of executive functions, which research has found is strongly associated with children’s development of such skills.

3. Tools and techniques to support programs that develop executive functions:These ideas would support and buttress existing efforts to develop executive functions

The full findings are available in this report. More information on the background to the RFI can be found here. And their website also has useful resources for teachers and educators which are regularly updated.

Susannne De Mooj, PhD student at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, tells us about the work she has been doing in collaboration with Dutch educational company, Oefenweb, using data from over 300,000 individuals using the company’s maths and language e-learning apps.    Online learning environments have the ability to continuously adapt and accommodate differences between learners, and changes within individual learners over time.  Susanne is investigating innovative ways these apps may be tailored to enhance different aspects of the online learning experience.

Learning is an inconceivably complex system, as many elements interact with each other; general mental ability, prior knowledge, learning styles, personality characteristics, motivation, anxiety, and many more. These interactions over time result in extensive individual differences in the cognitive trajectory, making it difficult for education and research to optimise learning for everyone. Online learning environments can have a positive impact on education and individual students in general by providing individualized computer adaptive practice and monitoring tools. Tracking the individual development of both accuracy and response time can shed some new light on the complexity of learning, which is illustrated below by three individual time series of children practicing single mathematical problems (i.e. 1 + 5) for a long period (adapted from Brinkhuis et al., 2018). For example, in the upper and low panel of this figure you see a three-stage pattern, moving from mainly incorrect response, to fast correct responses.  On the other hand, the middle panel shows a child who does not learn 3 + 4, while practicing this item for 61 times, with some correct responses alternated with errors. The highly variable patterns within and between the learners shows that tailoring and monitoring their learning experience is essential.

Cognitive profile and time perception. Any learning environment (offline or online) creates a certain cognitive load particularly to attention and working memory. This load can be increased through the presence of irrelevant objects/information (e.g. gamified sounds, flashing objects, alternative answer options), but also through external stimuli such as worried thoughts about performance. These stressors can either drive children to use more efficient strategies or it could compete with the attention necessary to learn new skills. One particular stressor used in a lot of game-based learning platforms and experiments, is time pressure. In one of our smaller sample studies we found that the presence of the time pressure on the screen has an impact on maths performance. Critically, we found that an individual’s ability to inhibit irrelevant information is key to whether this has an impact on the learning experience. Eye movement patterns in this study also showed that whether time pressure is visible or not in the learning environment in combination with their cognitive profile affects where and how much the children attend to. Although bigger studies are needed, time perception and individual cognitive profile are features that we might need to consider in adaptive frameworks.

Mouse tracking. In most educational tools, the most widely used indicators of learning are response time and accuracy, as shown in the individual time series figure. Although these measurements are well-suited to indicate the overall performance, they cannot be used as continuous measures of the underlying cognitive process. A promising online measure designed to track the timing of evolving mental processes is mouse tracking (Freeman, Dale, & Farmer, 2011; Song & Nakayama, 2009; Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich, 2005). For this paradigm, the speed and movement of a mouse point as well as where it is placed on the screen is tracked to see how much attention the user pays to certain stimuli. Mouse tracking is becoming popular on commercials website as a way to gain insight into behaviour, however it is also available and potentially useful for researchers, see for example the recent implementation in the online experiment builder Gorilla. One of our current studies tracks the mouse movements of 100.000 active users for a month while practicing arithmetic skills. Specifically, we are interested in the attraction towards alternative answer options, not selected as response, to get a better understanding of the user’s possible misconceptions. The aim of this online technology-based assessment of the misconceptions is to adapt feedback and instruction on an individual basis.

Large scale measure of (dis)engagement.

The way a student engages in learning is essential to their experience. Engagement is mostly defined as attentional and emotional involvement with a task (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012). However engagement is not stable, but fluctuates throughout the learning experience. Different measures are used to assess initial but also sustained engagement, such as self-report questionnaires, heart rate changes, pupil dilation and emotion detection. For large scale, online detection, head movement has been proposed as an estimate of the dynamics of the user’s attentional state. Generally, studies find that head size, head posture and head position successfully capture engagement, such that when the person is deeply engaged, movement is less and when distracted/bored more head movement follows. To measure engagement within an online learning platform or in typical psychological experiments, we use an automated detection algorithm where we track (multiple) faces with a simple webcam during the learning experience or afterwards from videos. Our current study (N=83 children, 8-12 years old) investigates how head movement relates to both emotional and cognitive engagement and whether we can predict whether children are in the ‘flow’ or are about to disengage from the task. Hopefully, this will enable us to prevent high dropouts and adapt the presentation and content to the individual learner’s state.

Alex Black has been a science teacher for over 30 years; for many of those he has been using the CASE teaching tools developed using Piaget’s theories.

His presentation described how researchers Shayer and Adey identified the difficulties that children learning sciences experienced, particularly 11 to 16-year-olds. The researchers wanted to develop an evidenced-based theory of science learning and teaching using Piaget’s model of developmental stages. This involved really getting to grips with students’ thinking and their understanding of the formal operational schemata essential for learning abstract scientific principles in the curriculum. The researchers developed and validated instruments for testing students’ understanding with a huge nationwide survey of 11,000 school students and were alarmed by the low proportion who had reached formal operational thinking by the age of 16. This led them to explore two strategies:

The first was to develop the CAT (Curriculum Analysis Taxonomy) to allow sequencing and matching of curriculum objectives to the cognitive readiness of the students. The second was to develop and validate a programme to accelerate the movement of students from concrete to formal thinking. The ideas of Piaget, Vygotsky and Feuerstein were incorporated into the teaching methodology and teacher training which led to the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) and later CAME in Mathematics with students in Year 7 and 8.

These programmes have since been extended across wider age ranges and put into practice in Finland, Pakistan, Israel, USA, Ireland, Australia, and Tonga. Further, the pedagogy has been extended to English as well as to more generic programmes such as Learn to Think in China.

Find out more about the resources available for teachers in English, Maths and Science on the group’s website letsthink.org.uk/

You can also follow Alex as well as Let’s think on Twitter