The Future of Learning?
Raising the next generation is hard. Like really hard. Whether you’re a parent, an educator, a mentor, or just a person that cares about the world, what we teach our youngest citizens will determine the future state of the world. It’s a big deal. Not everyone carries this burden as heavily in their minds and that’s okay. As long as we are intentional, collaborative, and thoughtful about how we prepare our children we can and should be hopeful for what the future brings. This is the mindset of the research community and the change makers of the world who refuse to settle for the status quo, for good enough. To that end, when we discover more about how we learn, we should revisit old models and answer for ourselves, “is there a better way?”.
That’s what researchers from Georgetown set out to do when they examined real-world STEM classrooms using the “mental model theory” of learning. This is the theory that our minds “spatialize” or create a representation of concepts we’re presented with. So in essence, a student would read a sentence and the mental process “spatializes” the information and constructs a model of the information. Knowing the neurological processes behind learning can help us better teach children. And, it turns out, we can measure the process in the brain itself rather than through test scores and grades!
So, great, we can measure learning physically instead of monitoring students’ performance on tests and assigning subjective grades. What does that look like in real life? Well without putting down “big data”, sometimes generalizing about students’ through standardized testing isn’t a great way to measure their progress. There’s also the issue of testing anxiety. And we’ve long known small class sizes get better results. Could this new research provide a path to individualized instruction? Maybe! Martin Lindstrom coined the term “small data” to identify individualized trends for business but Jennifer Medbery applied the idea to K-12 learning in her HuffPost article Small Data: Cracking the Code of Student Success. But what about behavior? Couldn’t simply knowing each student better result in high quality relationships, and therefore fewer behavioral challenges? Perhaps! It may be worth a try if it means students fare better. And that’s better for everyone.
Their work was published in Science Advances August 10, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo3555
