From lipstick to learning: Research goes to school
HGSE Professor Kurt Fischer
To narrow the gap between research and practice in education, HGSE Professor Kurt Fischer is leading an effort to build schools that join the work of researchers and practitioners. These living, community-based “research schools” will create a fundamental infrastructure for generating usable knowledge in education.
ROSS SCHOOL FACULTY MEMBER: One of the things that really stuck out for me from your presentation, amongst many, was the fact of the scores related to teaching content explicitly.
FISCHER: Right.
FACULTY MEMBER: And then how that also kind of related back in my mind for when you’re talking about how the neurons are firing when a kid was seeing something done. And what that sort of means for our instruction in the classroom, is that not-- and I kind of wonder this in a way, it’s like making things explicit for kids, but still giving them a chance to experience things on their own and try to find that balance.
FISCHER: Right. Exactly. It’s the balance you want. So like the optimal level functioning, you have to be giving them guidance. You know, when I first got those findings and presented them to educators, they immediately said, “Well, I guess that means we should do optimal for all the time now, you know.” I was horrified, of course, because what you want is the kids to be able to do it on their own. But giving them that optimal help helps them see where they need to go so they can direct their own learning more effectively.
We study that process. We call it bridging. Where you use a learner-- students use something like a shell that’s got empty variables in. I mean, they don’t know they’re doing this, but it’s kind of like Algebra and behavior. You know, they’ll be trying to figure out how a toy works, and they’ll get the idea that something they do leads to some characteristic action in the toy, and then they start exploring to sort of figure out what the X and the Y are. Though they don’t realize that it’s Algebra in what they’re doing. So one of the things we do as educators is to help them see where they need to go in order to learn what they need to learn. And there’s always this balance back and forth between our helping them see where they need to go, and our then letting them construct the knowledge they need in order to be able to do that on their own.
There’s a Physics teacher, and he spends a good bit of time teaching about how to figure out what’s going to happen when you drop a ball off a tower. And then on the final exam, he asks a question that’s a little bit different. There’s a big hole in the ground, and you’re dropping a ball into the hole, tell me what happens with the ball.
All the students said, “We don’t have any idea. How could we do that?” But it’s the same problem exactly, except it’s dropping it into a hole instead of dropping it off a tower, but they didn’t know that they could make that generalization. There’s a famous film of Harvard graduates, many of them in science, and MIT graduates in another film, being asked questions like, “Why is it warmer in the summer than in the winter?” You know that one? Yeah?
You know, so many of them give this really stupid answer, you know, like the earth is closer to the sun in the summer. It’s actually farthest from the sun in July, right? It’s just amazing how people don’t make those kinds of generalizations. And what we need to do, even more in the modern world than before, is to be able to do that. Because we need to be able to move from one job to another to another, and use our knowledge in these very different situations. So we’re trying to figure out how to educate people more effectively so they can do that better.
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