Page 70 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

58
The underlying difficulty with these testing processes is that the rote learned reading, writing and mathematical recall and processes, is reliant on our ability to learn by rote and as we have seen, the combination of nature and nurture of genetic capability and the quality of the learning environment at home, we will only ever possibly see very small gains in rote learned tasks. Therefore, it should not be surprising that test scores have not increased outside the margin of error, once best practice is established.
When we apply four of our learning systems, all learners display roughly equal capability, by default, everyone should reach the same capability level in school. They don’t! The reason for this is that in schools, learners’ access to knowledge is primarily via reading and writing – our +(1) learning system; ‘the one that is not like the rest’. Reading and writing is the limiting media format and many learners stumble at the first hurdle and struggle to learn new ideas and concepts because they must access the information and report their understanding of what they have learned via reading and writing. We can partially minimise that outcome, as was mentioned earlier in this resource, by introducing knowledge as it is required, Just-In-Time. However, this will reduce, but not eradicate the disparity between student outcomes.
This difficulty is further compounded by the fact that the individual components of learning to read and write are not additive but multiplicative.104 So, if a child finds it hard to recognise and remember (1) letter shapes by a factor of two; (2) the sounds of letters by a factor of two; (3) the combinations of sounds by a factor of two; (4) the sounds to become words by a factor of two; and (5) the sequences of words by a factor of two, they do not find the process 2+2+2+2+2 = 10 times harder, but rather 2x2x2x2x2= 32 times harder.
We need to start looking at solutions to this dilemma to make learning more equitable. So ... what if we allowed learners to opt into using video as a learning platform as an option? What is the downside of doing that? There are down sides, but there also upsides. We need the debate!
When a parent teaches a learner to drive a car, they keep the amount of rote- learned knowledge to a minimum, while they introduce the concepts of driving one at a time and in the correct sequence, beginning with starting the car, stopping by using the brake and they then move on to steering, parking, using mirrors to gain a sense of their immediate environment... The sequence is quite precise. There is no reading and writing in the practical driving test and the amount of rote learning is kept to an absolute minimum, as a result, everyone learns to drive at the same rate with a very small distribution curve. Contrast this to learning to read and write where most of the initial learning must be rote learned, our weakest learning system and the one that gives us the largest distribution curve of success.
When we start adding all these elements together we can start see what education systems could look like if we started using the technologies we have and the emerging pedagogies to substantially reduce the variation in success that learners experience in school. Identifying these strategies is the aim of this project.
104 Diamond, P. (2014). Quora. ’A physics professor lays out a scientific explanation for why some people are successful and others aren't’. [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/Why-do-only-a-few-become-really-successful-although-many-more-are-equally- intelligent/answer/Patrick-Diamond?srid=iXqaandshare=e349ecb0