Generation, Creativity, and Predictions
Generation, Creativity, and Predictions
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #30
Hello all! The last couple of editions of these updates focused on creativity. You can find them here and here.
I recently led several school sessions on creativity too, and the discussions with staff certainly cemented my thinking around its relevance. I hear a similar message in many schools – of students too focused on exam content, and reluctant to think more broadly.
Creativity is about generating multiple possible ideas, and choosing among them, rather than focusing on one ‘correct’ outcome. I believe that developing the skills to think this way can help with learning in many situations. Creativity is certainly relevant to research, and to teaching, as well. Planning classes is a creative task, for example.
I couldn’t help but notice the links between these ideas and a recent talk that I went to as part of the seminar series by the Centre for Educational Neuroscience.
These cover a range of psychology and neuroscience issues applied to education, including wellbeing, autism, memory, motivation. Many of the previous talks have recordings available, if you’d like to check them out:
Seminar series – Centre for Educational Neuroscience
The talk I attended was by Dr Dietsje Jolles, who works at the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition. The topic was generation, and in particular, learners’ ability to generate predictions.
In particular, the learners she and her team study were making predictions about science prior to finding out facts. These were then better remembered than if the same information was given in a different order, so that a learner made an estimate ‘after the fact’ of what they might have predicted.
This is clearly applicable to the classroom. In many situations, students could be asked to make a prediction before being told about or reading something. Dr Jolles’ research suggests that these are especially memorable when the finding is surprising, i.e. when typical predictions are out of line with the facts.
I am sure that many teachers do this intuitively, asking their learners to speculate and predict in subjects as diverse as History, Music, and science subjects.
However, teachers perhaps miss a trick when presenting aims or learning intentions in a more conventional way. ‘Today, we are going to be learning about…’ Wouldn’t it be better to get learners curiously speculating?
The link between this idea and creativity is that when making predictions, learners are coming up with something new (and useful) on the basis of their existing knowledge. More broadly, prediction falls within what is commonly known as generative learning. Generative learning covers multiple situations where students use their schemas to come up with something that has not been directly provided to them by the teacher/instructor.
Some of the things that students might be asked to generate include:
A prediction
An example
A summary
A concept map
The answer to a pre-question
That is to say, they have some factual knowledge, and they have to use it to create something new.
On a metacognitive level, Dr Jolles explained some of the possibilities in terms of how learners react and integrate new information depending on how it fits with their existing knowledge. If it seems too outlandish, they may treat the fact as an isolated case, or reject it entirely.
Often, the best-case scenario is that surprising information causes them to rethink and reorganise their schemas (what Piaget described as disequilibrium).
There is much more to say about this, and about generative learning as a whole. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on generating predictions, and whether you currently use this strategy as part of your teaching.
All the best,
Jonathan
Last week: Metacognition Boosting Creativity.
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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