Title: Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy
When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic (“rote”), or more thoughtful (“reflective”). But do people notice when others are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish repetitiveness as a cue for rote behavior (Experiment 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Experiment 2). We also find that the more a person's feedback seems similar across groups (indicating greater rote‐ness), the more negatively their teaching is evaluated (Experiment 3). A word‐embedding analysis of an open‐response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Experiment 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote‐ness given contextual explanation (Experiment 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Experiment 6). These results empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, and suggest an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning. more »« less
Koellner, Karen; Seago, Nanette; Placa, Nicora; Riske, Amanda; Carlson, David
(, Proceedings of the 45th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)
Fernández, C; Llinares, S; Gutiérrez, A; Planas, N
(Ed.)
This study captured middle and high school teachers’ perceptions of what they learned from professional development 3-4 years after participating in one of three NSF funded year-long professional development (PD) projects. We surveyed teachers (n=66) from three different PD projects on the types of content, pedagogy, and resources that they remembered learning and continue to use when teaching mathematics. Results indicate that teachers remember and use many aspects from PD experiences 3-4 years down the road especially those they find relevant to their current teaching position. Most residual learnings from PD also appear to be highly aligned with the goals and intentions of the PD developers and researchers and these learnings have evolved through colleague collaboration and other PD opportunities.
Ho, M. K.l; Austerweil, J. L.
(, Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference)
When teaching, people often intentionally intervene on a learner while it is acting. For instance, a dog owner might move the dog so it eats out of the right bowl, or a coach might intervene while a tennis player is practicing to teach a skill. How do people teach by intervention? And how do these strategies interact with learning mechanisms? Here, we examine one global and two local strategies: working backwards from the end-goal of a task (backwards chaining), placing a learner in a previous state when an incorrect action was taken (undoing), or placing a learner in the state they would be in if they had taken the correct action (correcting). Depending on how the learner interprets an intervention, different teaching strategies result in better learning. We also examine how people teach by intervention in an interactive experiment and find a bias for using local strategies like undoing.
This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design. This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers: 1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-back car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms. In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances? We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP). In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in.
Abramovitch, S.; Sevian, H.
(, NARST 94th Annual International Conference)
null
(Ed.)
The way teachers design activities and interact with students during instruction directly impacts students' opportunities to learn (OTL). Previous research has shown the merits of formative assessment (FA) in supporting students' active sense-making, leading to improved student success outcomes. We examined 22 STEM teachers' classroom videos, performing FA in class, taken from two different years of teaching in high-need districts. We then coded the videos according to two basic teaching moves - eliciting information about students' thinking or advanced learning. These moves can also be categorized as more authoritative (univocal) class discourse or more dialogic (multivocal). Our results show that thirteen out of the twenty-two teachers in this study diversified their teaching moves over time as they gained experience while persisting in high-need districts. The results also suggest five different teachers' clusters, representing different changes over time in these teachers' teaching moves. Teachers' reflections on challenges they faced while teaching and changes in their assessment practices over time suggest that changes in their teaching purposes resulted in shifting their teaching moves. These shifts supported their students' different challenges, building meaningful relationships with their students, and allowing them more OTL.
Learning to teach is a culturally situated activity. As teachers learn, it is important to understand not only what teachers learn, but how they learn. This article describes a qualitative case study of a subset of four teachers’ learning during a professional development surrounding a plate tectonics curriculum. Using qualitative methods, this study tells the story of how the four teachers negotiated professional vision for science teaching around dilemmas that emerged throughout the professional development. By taking a sociocultural perspective on professional vision, researchers can gain insight into how and what teachers learn in professional develop- ment settings because it renders teacher learning complex and nuanced. Additionally, we argue negotiating professional vision parallels sensemak- ing. Sensemaking around science teaching includes grappling with epis- temic issues of science in addition to pedagogy and curriculum. Implications for science teacher education are discussed. Specifically, we argue learning to teach requires teachers to engage in conversations that create opportunities to “get somewhere” in relation to dilemmas they have about teaching. In this way, professional vision is an ongoing process of learning that has no endpoint or ideal articulation of teaching or science. Therefore, by framing professional vision as a process of learning we are able to push back on simplistic descriptions of teaching and science.
Bass, Ilona, Espinoza, Cristian, Bonawitz, Elizabeth, and Ullman, Tomer D.
"Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy". Cognitive Science 48 (6). Country unknown/Code not available: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13470.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10515265.
@article{osti_10515265,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10515265},
DOI = {10.1111/cogs.13470},
abstractNote = {When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic (“rote”), or more thoughtful (“reflective”). But do people notice when others are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish repetitiveness as a cue for rote behavior (Experiment 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Experiment 2). We also find that the more a person's feedback seems similar across groups (indicating greater rote‐ness), the more negatively their teaching is evaluated (Experiment 3). A word‐embedding analysis of an open‐response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Experiment 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote‐ness given contextual explanation (Experiment 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Experiment 6). These results empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, and suggest an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning.},
journal = {Cognitive Science},
volume = {48},
number = {6},
publisher = {Wiley},
author = {Bass, Ilona and Espinoza, Cristian and Bonawitz, Elizabeth and Ullman, Tomer D},
}
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