How Humans Learn

I just finished reading How Humans Learn by Joshua Eyler. It’s a widely accessible book and often quoted in articles related to teaching and learning. It combines bite-sized summaries of research in the learning and cognitive sciences, sprinkled with anecdotes from observing ‘master teachers’ in action using a particular pedagogical technique. The research work mentioned was not new to me; I’d read many of the research articles mentioned and some of the books. I appreciated Eyler’s thoughts on his classroom teaching observations. Watching more experienced instructors in action with their varied teaching styles was very valuable to me in my first few years as a professor.

 

Eyler organized his book according to five broad categories which are also his chapter-headings: Curiosity, Sociality, Emotion, Authenticity, Failure. This seems appropriate given that we’re talking about human learning. While true for other creatures, humans in particular have evolved to learn from each other, communicating in gestures and language. Eyler brings in examples from human development (physically, psychologically and cognitively) and while I appreciate this aspect, I think he is remiss by not bringing in the crucial work by Geary. As a result he fails to account for the important differences between biologically primary versus secondary learning.

 

I liked the Curiosity chapter because it brought up the work of John Hutchinson who wrote his own textbook Concept Development Studies in Chemistry. I see his work as a forerunner to the POGIL approach (first developed for General Chemistry in 1994). Why is this in the Curiosity chapter? Eyler ties curiosity with constructivist pedagogical approaches. You may have heard of ‘inquiry learning’, a term oft-used and abused. Should students be engaged in their learning? Yes. Should it always be done discovery-style? I’d argue no. Depends on the topic and the background knowledge of the student. This is why I enjoyed Ian Leslie’s book Curiosity because he recognizes the pitfalls that Eyler avoids dismissively by saying that detractors have ‘misconstrued’ the constructivist argument. I’m with Leslie on this one.

 

The chapter on Sociality highlights Mazur’s peer learning approaches in physics. You may have heard of think-pair-share as a pedagogical tool. I use it regularly when appropriate. Eyler correctly points out that more extensive peer collaborative projects can work fantastically or terribly for a variety of reasons – one of which is poor design. Not everything you want students to learn works better just because you’ve turned it into a group project. And students can mislead each other and increase confusion rather than learning. Reacting To The Past also gets mentioned; I’ve blogged about this pedagogical approach but I’ve not used it in a full-blown multi-class ‘game’. There are other more effective pedagogies that align with my course learning goals in chemistry. As to gamification, the devil is in the details.

 

Having recently read Cavanagh’s book, the chapter on Emotion essentially recaps similar major points. In the chapter on Authenticity, the focus is on ‘authentic’ learning environments. This could be very different in different disciplines. In the natural sciences, lab courses are crucial, especially in chemistry where we have lots of labs! Getting undergraduates involved in research is one of those ‘high-impact’ practices that also checks the authentic learning box. (My department requires it of all our majors.) Eyler however feels compelled to attack the strawman of lecturing as a pedagogical approach. He qualifies this by saying he is opposed to prolonged lecturing. But that’s not saying anything remarkable. We’re all opposed to anything prolonged; that’s what the word ‘prolonged’ implies.

 

In the final chapter on Failure, I have my quibbles with Eyler. He feels compelled to join the chorus on attacking grades. I am in agreement with him that grading has turned into a beast that distorts learning. But that’s just Goodhart’s Law at work. I do feel that unlike twenty years ago, familiarity with the important distinction between formative and summative assessment has improved the conversation. Dylan Wiliam’s book changed how I thought about grades for the better. I’ve also read Susan Blum’s latest edited book on Ungrading (and I have some opinions on it). I also disagree with Eyler’s assessment on Manu Kapur’s pedagogical approach of productive failure. I think it can be narrowly useful in some cases, but I think it is weak or ineffective as a broad pedagogical tool in the material that I teach and my course goals.

 

The problem with how humans learn is that we don’t really understand it. We can’t mind-meld with another person to know what they know and if they know it in the same way that we do. Learning something conceptual in sufficient depth (beyond the superficial) is a gestalt experience and cannot easily (or possibly) be decomposed into its parts. But we are learning more about how learning works, and Eyler’s book brings this information in a readable book. His last two sentences though, make me cringe: “We can avoid the educational fads that come and go and shun the buzzwords that can sometimes shape the discourse about these matters, After all, it turns out that effective teaching has been around for millennia.” Eyler uses those same buzzwords (not necessarily a bad thing), and you’d be hard-pressed after reading his book to agree with that final sentence. By situating his discourse within Geary’s framework and taking into account the explosion of knowledge in the past two centuries and how we build on it to teach and learn efficiently, his book would have been more effective.