OLDaily

Facilitating Abstraction Through Explanation
Erik Brockbank, Tania Lombrozo, Alison Gopnik, Caren M. Walker, Princeton University, 2022/04/28

Why do we want children to do more in school than just remember things? According to this article (32 page PDF), identifying abstract relations such as 'same' and 'different' is essential for commonsense reasoning. And children who are asked to offer explanations for things, rather than to merely describe them, are better able to learn abstract relations. They are "more likely to discover and use an abstract relational rule when they were prompted to explain observations instantiating that rule, compared to when they received demonstration alone." Obviously, since it's a small sample and a narrow study, we should not be too quick to generalize. But it does explain why children learning through rote memory lack a common sense that children more engaged in problem-solving and explanation demonstrate.

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Here’s why tech companies are investing in learning subscriptions
Amber Burton, Protocol, 2022/04/28

This article looks at Go1, an Australian company "that provides tailored libraries of course options for companies across the globe... The subscription service provides access to over 100,000 courses and services ranging from Pluralsight to Blinkist, the book-summarizing subscription service." On this model, individuals do not subscribe; rather, the organization as a whole will subscribe, and employees will then have access to the library of courses. Here's what's important: "Barnes views the top-down approach that HR leaders used to take for L&D as a thing of the past. Employees now prefer choosing the enrichment courses that they think can best advance their personal lives and careers rather than waiting for an approved course list from their employers."

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Indigenous pedagogies and online learning environments: a massive open online course case study
Danielle Tessaro, Jean-Paul Restoule, AlterNative, 2022/04/28

This paper (10 page PDF) argues through a case study and analysis that "that forms of Indigenous pedagogical practice are possible in the online environment," and specifically, in a massive open online course (MOOC). The effectiveness of the course "is based on whether feedback from learners demonstrate a mirroring of intent," for example, reporting an emotional response where the course intended to generate an emotional response. The Indigenous pedagogy described here takes a holistic approach to learning, using the Medicine Wheel to incorporate all "four aspects of being: spirit, or intuition, emotion, or feelings, body, or physical aspects of being, and mind, or intellectual aspects of being." The course generated the experiential aspect by having learners reflect on their self, for example, through an event or experience they had. Additionally, "the course instructors have implemented online experiential and physical pedagogies in other online courses that require learners to go directly to the land, to reflect on place or to find story sites or gather medicines." Image: Banakonda Kennedy Kish (Bell), ShoShona Kish, UWO Archive.

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Can Confirmation Bias Improve Group Learning?
Nathan Gabriel, Cailin O’Connor, arXiv, 2022/04/28

This is a really interesting paper (24 page PDF) which you should take the time to read completely, though the abstract does an admirable job of summarizing the main argument. "Most investigations of confirmation bias focus on individual learning," write the authors, but "how does the presence of confirmation bias influence learning and the development of consensus within a group?" They use network models to study this question and find, surprisingly, "moderate confirmation bias often improves group learning." It forces the group to consider more alternatives rather than immediately settling on a (possibly wrong) conclusion. More extreme confirmation bias, however, leads to polarization (a rather less surprising result).

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Are employers recognising alternative credentials in hiring decisions?
ICEF Monitor, 2022/04/28

It's a good question. After all, if microcredentials aren't recognized by employers, what's the point? According to this article, "executives are more convinced of the value of microcredentials than are managers more directly involved in hiring decisions." So "the verdict is still out on how much return on investment these credentials provide to students and how compelling they are for employers with hiring needs." Not so fast, though. While an EdSurge article does say this, this post as a whole is basically a loosely collected set of summaries of six papers on microcredentials, most of which report on their benefits and support for them by both employers and employees. The papers: the aforementioned EdSurge article, McGreal and Olcott Jr. on microcredentials and university strategy; an EdSurge article promoting an online course service; a BBC article on the role of microcredentials; SHRM finding a rise of microcredentials in hiring; and Class Central's massive list of MOOC-based microcredentials.

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Effects of captions, transcripts and reminders on learning and perceptions of lecture capture
Eleanor J. Dommett, Larisa M. Dinu, Wijnand Van Tilburg, Samuel Keightley, Benjamin Gardner, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2022/04/28

If I read this as a cynic then I read it as saying that the primary benefit of lecture capture for students is that they do not have to go to the lecture. Why? As the authors state, "students do not always optimally select content to review, nor do they make the most of specific functions... students value lecture capture highly, but do not access it extensively during the teaching period." And in this paper they describe a number of attempts to change that, such as captions, transcripts, and email reminders, but these had little effect on use. Now of course this is just one study with a limited number of participants, but the results do seem consistent with other studies cited in the paper.

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