Calculating Learning Efficiency: NESI Conversation 3

This third conversation with Dr. W.E. Doynit extends a series of short descriptions of how to accelerate learning dramatically by increasing learning efficiency rates with and without Tablet and other mobile PCs.

Topics: calculating learning efficiency, learning analysts, learning generics and learning genomics

Tablet PC Education: I’d like to jump right into this conversation by asking how learning analysts calculate learning efficiency in your New Era School Initiative or NESI. As I understand what you said earlier, learning efficiency is central to how students complete K12 academic performance in six years. You introduced us previously to how you approach learning. Please clarify what you mean by learning efficiency. Who are learning analysts and how do they calculate learning efficiency?

Doynit: Yes, learning efficiency is central. Learning efficiency indicates the number of academic performance pattern adoptions by a learner in relation to something else, let’s say to clock time. The larger the number of adoptions, let’s say in a minute, the more efficient the learning.

A companion part of accelerated learning occurs through the careful selection of what students should learn in each lesson.

By lesson plan, learners will adopt key procedures for breaking various codes commonly used by the best thinkers to communicate information about their specialties.

Tablet PC Education: Did you say, “will learn”? How can you be so sure they will learn the lesson?

Doynit: We have confidence in our lessons and data to indicate the degree of confidence. We practice the principle that instructional failure is not an option.

That means we micro manage each lesson’s planning and offering.

We “know” that our lessons and instruction will yield reaching learning criteria for all of our students. That means that our students pass all state minimum academic performance criteria for each grade from K through 12th.

So do teachers in other schools know what their lessons will yield. They know from experience and from standardized test results that about 60 to 80 percent of their students will meet or exceed minimum learning criteria. That is, earn a grade of D- or higher.

Tablet PC Education: I follow your words about measured confidence. How though can you get those results when so many other educators do not?

Doynit: We show NESI students in minutes how to use the various academic, literary, and scientific codes the state requires them to demonstrate.

For example, we show them in minutes the codes for reading Standard English.

One part of the code starts at the upper left hand corner of a page, reading across the line and then beginning the next line at the left hand margin, reading across that line, and then beginning the next, etc. from top to bottom of the page before going to the top left hand corner of the next page.

We also systematically show them other parts of this reading code and do the same for math, science, music, and other aspects of the curriculum.

And yes, we work with the 32 or 37 (depending on which list we use) generic plots specialists have identified in English literature.

Tablet PC Education: That sounds so mechanical, so cold and uninspiring. Teachers argue such approaches as in NESI only teach conformity, rote learning, not creativity and higher level learning skills. Why would anyone want to go to a school like that?

Doynit: As I understand it, people apply to NESI, because they want to learn school offered content faster than through conventional public school programs.

And, Yes, we have addressed directly each of the points you mentioned.

For example, for higher levels of thinking, sometimes called higher levels of learning, we use a Terman and Merrill (1960) approach to measuring problem solving.

In short, they use vocabulary that most peers at a given age know to address more advanced logic needed to solve a problem. This ratio is an operational way to give priority to rules of logic over vocabulary familiarity.

We plan such ratios into lessons, so students can generalize beyond a specific code.

As for creativity, that’s another discussion. In short, creativity means having the power to make something novel appear. That idea assumes omnipotence, more than we have time to address now.

Rather, our students place high in science fair, music, writing, and similar competitions that school educators generally consider creative exercises. NESI students tell us they can do so, because they know those codes required to make their entries competitive.

We can address creativity in more detail at another time, if you’d like.

Tablet PC Education: Thanks for letting me drill down on how NESI teachers have such high levels of confidence in their lessons yielding superior learning rates. Now, back, please, to how learning analysts contribute to those rates.

Doynit: Learning analysts calculate ratios of instructional presentations to correct responses and other patterns of learning variables. They are to learning what a financial analyst is to finance. They describe changes in relevant variables that others may use to refine efforts to accomplish something.

In short, learning analysts do in more elaborate, tangible form what teachers and their supervisors have likely done “forever” in their heads.

At first, learning analysts performed these calculations in their heads.

Then, pioneering learning analysts adopted established observation protocols from classroom and laboratory based behavioral learning research projects. They manually counted frequencies of specific behavior patterns, posted these frequencies on record sheets, and calculated basic ratios of occurrences.

Observers used data to form hierarchies of observations in order to identify which calculations helped most to increase learning rates.

Then, learning analysts worked with software developers to write a program for a Tablet PC to calculate and report these ratios in real time, as do cardiac monitors for heart rates and blood pressure.

That program archives reports in a dynamic database.

Analysts assess academic performances of individuals and aggregates of students by such factors as time of day, location, lesson, instructional material, content topics, etc. in order to provide prompt real time feedback to teachers.

Instructors use these data to provide on-the-fly as well as preplanned optional procedures to increase learning rates for individuals as well as classes.

I think we have about 30 ratios identified in order to monitor ongoing variations in frequency and intensity of learning throughout assignments.

In these and other ways, learning analysts give priority to developing, monitoring, reporting, and interpreting learning efficiency ratios for use by teachers in planning and offering their instruction.

We’re also seeing a small cadre of learning analysts addressing school policy and administrative impacts on learning rates.

Tablet PC Education: Why go through all these calculations? As you said, teachers already do this. It seems like you’re denying the validity of experience teachers have earned for making instructional decisions. Why inject another person into the mix?

Doynit: Learning efficiency calculations provide three advantages for teachers.

First, they scale up and formalize one part of what teachers do. Learning analysts provide more calculations and analyses than teachers have time or formal training to handle.

Second, they provide teachers with a databased reference against which to compare their own insights about how learning progresses. These databases formalize the way some teachers think as they progress through a lesson or evaluate Tablet PC software and other instructive material.

Third, learning efficiency calculations provide prompt formal extensions of how students learned in previous lessons. In this way, teachers have the benefit of a real-time heads-up-display of current and past academic development of each student, the class, and other students the teacher has not encountered.

Tablet PC Education: I still don’t understand. How can you measure learning efficiency across students, classes, and these others you mentioned? That doesn’t make sense. All students, classes, schools, and teachers are different. That’s one of the chief points teachers make against state academic standards, scripted lessons, and standardized tests. Surely, you don’t pretend to claim that you’ve figured out how to solve that problem.

Doynit: You’re right. We don’t pretend that we’ve solved charges against the use of these procedures when planning learning efficiency.

We accept individual and group differences, however identified and measured.
We also accept that behavioral scientists have identified commonalities in how people learn.

So, we monitor two commonalities to calculate learning efficiency. We call these commonalities learning generics and learning genomics, two terms referring to the same set of phenomena. They’re like genomes in the study of biology.

Learning generics provide a profile of how a person learns across learning tasks and venues. We examine correlations between vocabulary and logic and adoption of academic behavior patterns.

Tablet PC Education: What do you observe to form this profile? Are vocabulary and logic the DNA and RNA of learning? That sounds too abstract to be useful.

Doynit: Learning, or adoption of learning patterns as well call it, consists fundamentally of using vocabulary and logic differently from previously.

Learning genomics provides people with an observable, tangible way to assess the value of advice and instruction. We see how it can contribute in unmeasured ways to learning in and out of schooling with and without mobile PCs.

It joins an emerging bandwagon toward more individualized learning-on-demand. We think of this bandwagon as a mass market of independent learning.

Tablet PC Education: If it’s as powerful as you say, why haven’t others described and harnessed it before to increase learning? Are you bluffing me about this?

Doynit: No bluff. We see learning genomics as a new science based on scientific behavioral literature of the past century. For whatever reasons, our team has figured out how to use vocabulary and logic to assess learning efficiency.

We have had to overcome several technical obstacles, with some remaining, before learning generics became a reality for metering learning efficiency with Tablet PCs.

We think of learning genomics as a path worth exploring rigorously, promptly. Yet, we recognize that the education research market may not accept this concept as promptly as we need.

So we’re using clinical practice strategies to introduce the idea into conversations about mobile learning research and schooling.

Tablet PC Education: Oh my, I see we’re out of time again. Thank you for reviewing more of the NESI infrastructure with my readers. I look forward to learning more during our next meeting.

References

Accelerated K12 Mobile Learning: Press Release

Accelerated Learning Interview Part 4

Mass Market of Independent Learners in A Classroom with Mobile PCs