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Imagining the World Factfully

UP aims to cultivate world-citizenship in its students. We see this in Vision 2020’s push to foreground opportunities and curricula that support internationalism, our robust study- abroad programs, the 69 Fulbrights students have won, as well as CISGO’s set of outcomes for Global and Intercultural Learning.

Part of such student learning depends on faculty possessing a quantitatively accurate understanding of the modern world.

Have you tested yourself lately?

An enjoyable opportunity can be found in Hans Rosling’s 2018 book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think – a book I devoured over spring break.

Rosling was a quirky Swedish TED-talk and global affairs speaker (one known to punctuate talks with displays of sword swallowing). He died from pancreatic cancer in 2017, just as he was finishing this career-capping overview of the true state of the world, as supported by numbers.

Readers start the book confronted by a 13-question multiple-choice quiz on such things as how people are distributed across the planet’s continents, the amount poverty has decreased, rates of girls’ education, access to electricity, and global life expectancy. Sad to say, you and I will achieve a predictably bad score (as Rosling’s three decades of audience testing has determined) – a score likely worse than if we had merely guessed the answers.

Most Westerners’ concept of the world, as Rosling explains, comes from a patchwork of outdated assumptions, unfamiliarity, media sentimentality, fear of the foreign, and a natural instinct for negativity. This leads us to operate with an “overdramatic worldview.” His solution is to cultivate a factful worldview – one based on numbers, proportions, and comparisons, gathered from across our planet’s 200+ countries.

And so we learn that the majority of the world lives in middle-income countries (just 9% live in extreme poverty), 80% of humans have access to electricity, girls worldwide spend an average of 9 years in school (boys spend 10), and 80% of people around the world have had at least one vaccination (on this planet, anti-vaxxers are decidedly outnumbered). This is not a bunch of global trivia but rather the shaping of a worldview – one lit with possibility. Amid the good news, he prioritizes things we should worry about: global pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.

Along the way, Rosling reminds us of basic strategies for avoiding being fooled by data (e.g. getting proportionality with your information, avoiding urgency to maintain clear thinking, questioning categories). He presents helpful charts for visualizing the world and its (often confusing) data, and offers a concrete, four-level way to categorize countries by income (to replace the long-outdated “first/third-world” mode).

While lies inevitably travel faster than facts, Rosling’s data helps fight the War on Error.

In the right course, Factfulness would be an eye-opening inclusion. Knowing that in 2100, 80% of the population will most likely live in Asia and Africa would help our students keep their eye on the future’s true continental leaders (a recognition not given by most Western popular culture). Knowing that world population is not spiraling out of control would help calm fears. Recognizing how the past century has radically reduced global poverty and increased world health and safety would offer hope as we work on more intractable problems of our planet. And re-committing to truth would help keep us from bending it amid the panic of the day’s urgencies (as Rosling insists, “Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intention”).

Faculty can prepare the next several generations of global citizens by first ensuring our characteristically inaccurate and overdramatic worldviews are better tethered to Factfulness.

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Lesson Planning: At the Intersection of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Knowledge Dimensions

Revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy

In the 1950’s Benjamin Bloom and other researchers collaborated to create what is known as Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive processes. This has been revised over the years and includes today six cognitive dimensions:

  • Remember: recall facts and basic concepts (e.g., define, list, state)
  • Understand: explain ideas or concepts (e.g., describe, explain, summarize)
  • Apply: use information in new situations (e.g., solve, complete, change)
  • Analyze: draw connections among ideas (e.g., contrast, categorize, connect)
  • Evaluate: justify a stand or decision (e.g., criticize, defend, prioritize)
  • Create: produce new or original work (e.g., design, modify, write)

The accompanying verbs can be used to develop and organize learning goals and objectives for our curricula, courses, and daily lesson plans. Many UP faculty already use Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide for planning, but we can enhance the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy by considering our objectives through the lens of knowledge dimensions that Anderson and Krathwohl added to the taxonomy in 2001. The four dimensions are:

  • Factual knowledge (basic elements to learn in the discipline)
  • Conceptual knowledge (interrelationships between basic elements within a larger context)
  • Procedural knowledge (methods in the discipline)
  • Metacognitive knowledge (awareness of how learning work in relation to one’s self)

Anderson and Krathwohl developed a matrix for combining cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions that can be adapted when planning courses and lessons. As faculty, we can adapt this matrix in our own lesson planning. Here’s an example from a 300-level applied linguistics course that I teach in the Department of International Languages and Cultures.

Basic concept: Individual differences in language learning

Knowledge Dimension: Factual knowledge

Bloom’s Taxonomy Cognitive Process: Remember (Related actions verbs: define, list, state, recall, identify)

Learning Goal: Students can accurately define individual differences and list examples.Writing assistance working with student

Assessment: Students take a low-stakes quiz in which they define individual differences and provide examples they recall from the reading and group work activity.

Learning Experiences: 

  1. Students read section on individual differences in How Languages are Learned respond to reading prompts before class.
  2. In class, students work in groups to identify individual differences in written profiles of learners and present their findings.

Intersecting with multiple knowledge dimensions

As faculty, we can also run concepts and theories we teach through both multiple knowledge and cognitive process dimensions as we plan instruction. Let’s take, for example, the social cultural theoretical perspective of second language acquisition from the same applied linguistics course

Factual dimension / Remember

Instructor provides learning experiences so that students practice recalling definitions of terms and characteristics and elements of the theory.

Conceptual dimension / Understand

Students participate in learning experiences that guide them to start explaining principles and models of the social cultural perspective. It’s important to note that at this level, the students are not just restating an author’s or instructor’s explanation; that would be remembering. Rather, they are using concepts, terms, and paraphrasing to explain the concept or theory.

Procedural dimension / Analyze

Eventually, students point out passages in a research text that indicate the linguistics researcher is writing from the social cultural perspective of second language learning. They are using their knowledge of the theory as an analytical tool.

Metacognitive dimension / Apply

Finally, the instructor can work with students to develop and apply motivational and language learning strategies that are based on a social cultural perspective of second language learning.

The above processes can also be reorganized into a class lesson planning tool.

Application in your teaching

The combination of Bloom’s Taxonomy and knowledge dimensions create a powerful approach for your faculty toolbox in support of our efforts to provide the excellent undergraduate education opportunities to our students. For more about deploying Bloom’s Taxonomy and the four dimensions of knowledge, check out Laurie Richlin’s Blueprint for Learning: Construction College Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and Document Learning (2006), one of the sources of today’s TLC blog entry. If you would like to explore in more detail using dimensions and Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs in a lesson planning form, download this MS Word version.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in the Shepard Academic Resource Center in Buckley Center 163, where he trains tutors to reach Level 1 of the International Tutor Training Program Certification. He also teaches German, an applied linguistics course, and a preparation course for study abroad in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey is currently the president-elect of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He is happy to meet over coffee or lunch to discuss course and lesson design, training, and teaching in higher education and can be reached at white@up.edu.

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Sticky Skills

Recently, UP’s College of Arts & Sciences held its annual book-club reading of a work on pedagogy. This year’s title was Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning (P. Brown/H. Roediger/M. McDaniel, 2014), and Jeffrey White led faculty in a discussion.

If you were among the participants, did the book’s methods “to learn better and remember longer” actually stick?

Whether you are new to the book or not, here’s a quick overview of a few of its lessons for the classroom.

Make it Stick was published the same year (2014) as Benedict Carey’s How We Learn. It contains similarly counterintuitive lessons that were derived from research in the cognitive psychology of learning (my two-page overview of that book can be found here).

The book’s epigraph comes from Aeschylus: “Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” Make it Stick insists that human learning primarily originates not through new information but through remembering what you have already encountered. (For so often, it takes this kind of reflection to recognize – often for the first time – the value your experiences hold.)

The authors point to data showing how our classic learning strategies of cramming, underlining, highlighting, and repetition simply do not have long-term value for remembering.

They would have us replace these ineffective methods with tools that actually work: ones that are more effective in disrupting the natural process of forgetting. So, for our purposes of teaching at UP here are six challenges drawn from the book:

How might you integrate “interleaving” into your curriculum? As the book explains interleaving involves practicing different topics or skills in a series – rather than focusing long and hard on just one. Learning at different times, in different spaces, and with different subjects helps multiply “retrieval cues,” fostering better access to our memories.

How might you integrate forgetting into your curriculum? Students should remember to forget in order to exercise the muscles of retrieval. Make it Stick suggests we honor the fact that “learning is an iterative process that requires you to revisit what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge” (21-2). While “the amount of study time is no measure of mastery” (10), a more dependable criterion for mastery involves the number of times you forget and then remember a topic or skill. Time and interleaving can foster the crucial practice of forgetting. (They suggest, for example, deliberately employing days between classes to forget, so that we then start our classes by having students try to remember what was covered in the last meeting.)

How might you add more quizzes to your course? The book champions an increased number of low-stakes quizzes across the semester, to help foster the practice of self-quizzing. This simple activity gives students a more accurate understanding of how much they know and don’t know (for overconfidence in what one knows is all too common). And it helps interrupt forgetting.

How might you integrate the habit of “writing to learn” into your course? A regular habit of low-stakes, informal writing in your class (journal entries, freewrites, targeted reflections) provides cognitive variety in a lecture-based class, and fosters personal connections necessary to unite students with new concepts. By thinking on paper, students are practicing “retrieval, elaboration, and generation” – internal activities that no lecture can provide.

How might you integrate the “concrete and personal” into your curriculum? We remember things best when they matter to us. Make it Stick urges that instructors not be shy about weaving personal anecdotes into the content of their lessons: “Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal” (11). While it might seem self-indulgent to bring yourself into the picture, serving as a model to students of how to integrate a subject into our everyday lives helps clarify the stakes involved.

How might you make learning more difficult in your class? This wildly counterintuitive strategy suggests we stop streamlining our curriculum for ease – for the best, most long-lasting learning happens when the learning is hard. Students do better when we give them the room to struggle with difficulty. Forms of such “desirable difficulty” include adding to your class more puzzles, problems, and riddles than you currently do: “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution” (88). So if we truly want to learn (and remember) a concept, we should turn off that pleasurable TED talk, and reach instead for the textbook.

(In other words, stop reading featherweight, short-form reviews like this one, and crack open Make it Stick!)

-Lars Erik Larson, UP English Dept, 2018

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Music in the Classroom

Ever considered using music in the classroom? The following excerpt comes from the book Music and Learning by Chris Brewer, 1995. In this article, Brewer describes simple ways music can be used to positively affect learning in the classroom. Visit the links to the music as within the body of the article to listen the music mentioned.

TURNING MUSIC ON IN YOUR CLASSROOM

You will find many ideas that feel comfortable and exciting to you. You will probably also find techniques that do not resonate for you. Keep in mind that you do not have to use music in all the ways presented here in order to be effective in enhancing learning through music. The addition of even one music technique in your classroom will add richness and improve the learning process. My suggestion is for you to begin your musical journey by incorporating one technique that resonates greatly with your teaching style. When you have mastered this use of music in your classroom, go on to explore a new method. Your students enthusiasm and response will be a guideline and incentive for future ideas and uses.

Music for Learning Suggestions
Focus and Concentration Music
Play as background music while students study, read, or write to:
· increase attention levels
· improve retention and memory
· extend focused learning time
· expand thinking skills

  • Relax with the Classics. The LIND Institute. Accelerated Learning research indicates slow Baroque music increases concentration.
  • Velvet Dreams. Daniel Kobialka‘s exceptional music-favorite classics such as Pachelbel’s Canon at a very slow tempo.
  • Celtic Fantasy. Kobialka uses the warmth of Celtic music played slowly to facilitate relaxed focus.
  • Music for Relaxation. Chapman and Miles. Quietly sets a calming mood.
  • Baroque Music to Empower Learning and Relaxation. The Barzak Institute uses slow and fast Baroque era music to hold attention.
  • Mozart and Baroque Music. The Barzak Institute. A useful compilation with 30 minutes of Mozart and 30 minutes of Baroque music.
  • Mozart Effect: Strengthen the Mind Enhance Focus with Energizing Mozart, selected by Don Campbell.
  • An Dun. Calming the Emotions Chinese music that actually does calm and appeals to all ages.
  • Accelerating Learning. Steven Halpern‘s music assists learners in focus and is good background for reading-free-flowing and peaceful.

Creativity and Reflection Music
Play as background for activities such as:
· writing
· problem-solving or goal-setting
· background for project work
· brainstorming

  • Pianoforte. Eric Daub. This thoughtful classical piano music sets the tone for introspective creativity and processing. Excellent!
  • Medicine Woman I or II. Medwyn Goodall gives us music to delve into deep thoughts and meaningful feelings.
  • Oceans. Christopher Peacock. Motivating and great team-building music.
  • Mozart Effect: Relax, Daydream and Draw. Don Campbell’s collection of reflective Mozart for gently enhancing creativity.
  • Fairy Ring. Mike Rowlands’ touching music in a classical style. Long cuts hold the mood. Good for reading with important information or stories.
  • Living Music and Touch. Michael Jones uses solo piano music to encourage reflection.

Source: Johns Hopkins / School of Education / New Horizons for Learning

Read the original article here.