Learning and Memory: Lesson Observation
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #90
Last time, I wrote in a bit of depth about the distinction between learning and performance. Hope you enjoyed the post!
To briefly summarise, we can often mistake temporary improvements in performance, such as a student’s responses in class, for permanent learning. The latter is typically our real goal, but is harder to achieve and to demonstrate. Cognitive psychologists such as Soderstrom and Bjork (2015) have argued that something only counts as learning if it is retained over time, and can be used (or ‘transferred’).
Today I’ll address the implications of this idea for observations of teaching practice.
Lesson observation: Performance?
Have you ever had a mentor or manager sit in your class, and make a judgement of how well your students have learned? Or do you observe classes yourself?
Lesson observation is widespread across teaching, and naturally, feedback and guidance is important. But given what has been established about temporary performance, we might ask whether such an observer can actually observe learning at all. After all, learning is best judged after a delay – not within less than an hour of the initial input and practice session.
This may mean that it is very hard for observers to comment on how well students have learned. They may be misled by things like:
accurate answers to a teacher’s questioning
high levels of success on tasks
satisfactory completion of plenary tasks or exit quizzes
These things are not a reliable guide to how learning is progressing. In fact, classes where students perform well on such tasks may actually be learning worse than in a comparable class where there is more struggle and more errors. This relates to the desirable difficulties discussed last time.
Lesson observation: Difficulties
The flip-side of the issue above is that difficulties are a good sign. An inexperienced observer might feel that mistakes, struggle and errors reflect badly on the teacher, and conclude that the class is poorly prepared. In fact, students in this situation might be progressing better than a class who are getting everything right.
By analogy, how impressed would you be by someone’s performance on a video game or exercise machine if they had put it on the easiest setting?
This reflects the idea, shared last time, that performance and learning are often negatively correlated. In short:
tasks that are too easy lead to better performance but worse learning;
tasks that are harder lead to worse performance but better learning.
Implications
These issues mean we should be wary about judging learning based on performance in one class. We simply can’t ‘see’ learning in the short term.
However, this doesn’t make it impossible to judge how well a class is learning. Rather than focusing on the outcome of tasks, an observer should focus more on the process – how are the activities supporting learning?
We should be seeing the productive struggle associated with tasks such as retrieving information from memory after a delay (see update #56), engaging in challenging, meaning-based tasks such as explanatory questioning (see update #16), and making metacognitive judgements (see update #21).
An observer who informs themselves of these issues, and is aware that learning can only be demonstrated over long timescales, will be in a strong position to provide valuable feedback to the class teacher.
Connecting the ideas
In the following blog post, I discuss how several of the issues I’ve covered recently might play out in the classroom, and what this means for observation:
Firth, J. (2021). Misled by short-term performance in lessons: Applying the science of memory in the classroom. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/misled-by-short-term-performance-in-lessons
Again, it’s not impossible to judge an effective lesson. The key idea is that we shouldn’t equate student performance with learning.
Have a great week!
Jonathan
p.s. if you will be at researchED Delaware this Saturday (19th Oct), please do come and speak to me – I’d love to connect! #rEDDE on Twitter and BlueSky.
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.