On March 30, 2022, the Next Level Lab hosted a presentation by Dr. Sae Schatz, Director of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a science, technology, and policy program under the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the U.S. Department of Defense. Before joining the government in 2015, Dr. Schatz worked as an applied human–systems scientist, with an emphasis on human cognition and learning, adaptive systems, learning technologies, performance assessment, and modeling and simulation.
Dr. Schatz’s presentation, Modernizing Learning, addressed the impact of information overload, cognitive biases, and importance of learning design for mitigating these impacts in the future learning ecosystem. Given that modern environments bombard learners with excessive amounts of information, educators play a crucial role in fostering the appropriate conditions that will ensure the retention of this new knowledge. “Modernizing learning” is not just about the technology or about increasing the quantity of education to address the needs of lifelong learning and the 60-year curriculum, but also about developing experiences that support self-regulation, enable social learning, and incorporate a broader context. To this end, Schatz proposes the following suggestions for educators seeking to design effective learning experiences:
1. Support self-regulation, metacognition, and reflection.
In a world where students and workers need to constantly be learning and drawing from diverse sources (e.g., mentors, research, training programs, massive online courses), they might struggle if they do not have the skills for self-regulated learning—what Schatz defined as “being able to personally control one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions while learning.” To help students develop self-regulated learning, practitioners need to nurture students’ confidence. Educators must convey, through their instructional techniques, that students are in control of their own learning. Schatz went on to encourage practitioners to support learners in setting learning goals and planning out their learning and performance activities. This includes clarifying the what, when, where, and how of the activities.
And even if learners already have the appropriate self-regulation skills, the bits of information and knowledge they accumulate in learning settings might not surface at the point of need if they have not actively connected those bits to prior knowledge when the initial learning occurred. For this, it is important to build students’ abilities for reflection and for monitoring their own internal mechanisms such as their thoughts, emotions, biases, and understandings. Schatz recommended incorporating metacognitive and reflective exercises into lessons so as to prompt students to think about their learning and make explicit connections (for example, asking students, “how does this topic relate to the topic we covered last week”). These exercises should not be a brief side-note or after-thought, but rather, an intentional and integral component of the experience.
2. Deliberately make space for forms of social learning.
Schatz discussed two models of learning: hierarchical and networked. The hierarchical is more formal and standardized—involving experts lecturing, putting together curricula, and testing knowledge acquisition via assessments. On the other end, the networked approach is less structured and focuses on peer-to-peer networks and contextualized group sense-making (e.g., engaging in a discussion board conversation with one’s classmates around the affordances of emerging technologies for teaching science in Boston’s K-12 schools). Schatz championed for practitioners to integrate both approaches, enabling formal and collaborative—or “connectivist”—settings for learning. This can be achieved by incorporating deliberate ways for students to share and collaborate, giving students the authority to speak and form groups, and by creating spaces, whether digital or physical, where groups and communities can form and interact toward the goal of social learning. For evaluation, practitioners should move away from practices like group grades and instead consider alternative methods (e.g., 360 or qualitative assessments).
3. Consider the desired outcomes and how all the pieces of the learning experience come together toward achieving those outcomes.
Learning experience design (LXD) is the integration of usability and user experience design with pedagogy and learning sciences. It utilizes insights from fields such as human-systems integration, experience design, UX/UI design, instructional design, marketing, and behavioral science. Leveraging LXD principles, Schatz recommended practitioners to concentrate on the desired outcomes of the learning experience. What needs to happen with this experience? How do these experiences engender feelings of confidence and motivation? Educators should also think about the holistic context in which the learning experience is being delivered (i.e., physical, political, social, and emotional environment) and to which it will be transferred. Do the experiences have the right kind of context—are they useful beyond the particular setting? Lastly, in constructing the experience, practitioners should use user-centered design, taking into consideration that students are human, and humans are irrational beings with limited attention and surrounded by abundant distractions.
Throughout the presentation, Schatz stressed the significance of developing and exercising metacognition. According to Schatz, if we fail to modernize learning, underdeveloped metacognitive skillsets might contribute to the next “digital divide.”
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by Ashley Etemadi, Ed.M. (NLL Research Assistant)