Dylan Smith

🇨🇦 Educator, Researcher, Writer.
Recent book: "Ready to Learn: A Crash Course in Development, and How Children Experience School"

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

A new trailer for my book, "Ready to Learn: A Crash Course in Development, and How Children Experience School."

Thank you for sharing.

Available now at Friesen Press BookStore:
https://t.co/35rE5i9EJv

The book will become available in the coming days at your fav bookstores.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@ShakinthatChalk

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@memneon @BarbaraBleiman LIV golf.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@EdSacredProfane @New_Old_Paul 😆

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@DTWillingham Nicely done, good points!

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@mathillustrated Wow.
Carl needs to travel and tour systems where school staffs collaborate in ongoing ways to scale good teaching.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

Thank you for stepping up to say this.

“Learning science” is a legit term that’s been co-opted by some trad educationalists who view themselves as cogpsy authorities in ed.

In the intro of my book, Ready to Learn, I describe how developmental psych was swept up toward the end of the last century by a broad movement toward multidisciplinary research. See attached.

The term “learning sciences” was one of many that arose out of that swirling cauldron of change. In 1989, Roger Schenk founded an institute and periodical for the "learning sciences." The hallmark characteristic of the term was, and still is, broad and genuinely

MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH.

[Paul Kirschner @New_Old_Paul]

@KateJones_teach I consider myself to be a cognitive and educational psychologist as I've done cognitive and educational research and written >450 articles about the two. Learning scientist and learning science, as I've said before, is empty or could be anything and says absolutely nothing.

[Benjamin Doxtdator @doxtdatorb]

Do surgeons and pilots use checklists or scripts ? How are they different?

Would a surgeon follow a script during an operation? Why not?

I guarantee teachers are using mental and written checklists all the time.

[Andy Hargreaves @HargreavesBC]

Pedagogy is not like surgery or pharmacology. It is more like eldercare, psychiatry, or community medicine. Its effects cannot easily be isolated or generalized without reference to person or context. Research is a guide but the craft of practice and the knowledge of the people and place, in the moment have to be taken into consideration. It is that judgment that defines the professionalism of teaching.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@dperkinsed Gracious of you, Drew, but that's exactly why I discount them... They're myopic interlopers!

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

Fine with all of your observations.

Don’t think I was unfair to self-report but did point out a limitation in that it taps cog appraisal—especially relevant to the research Q and eventual conclusion of the study in question.

The way we look for bidirectionally in motivational matters reminds me of how for decades we viewed sensory modalities as having dedicated primary sensory regions in the brain. Now we know so much more, and unimodal views of brain org are passé.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

I don’t believe the main finding in Garon-Carrier et al. (2016) tells the whole story in a definitive way, but it’s a crackerjack study that attended to detail. Impressive.

The big reason for my skepticism? I don't think we can drill down and bare biological and cognitive factors with sufficient proficiency to draw the conclusions we’re hoping to draw. Not yet.

More exactly: Is it possible for us to look at nature and observe a truly bidirectional relationship? Don't think so. I think we flatter ourselves and hold our constructs in too high a regard. Biological systems are multidimensional, and discussions of bidirectionality, while helpful at this point in time, are only a reflection of those constructs and our current (lack of) understanding.

And then the big problem of how to measure our constructs… Self-report questionnaire items to measure motivation will likely tap a more “cognitive” brand of motivation with origins in cog appraisal/reappraisal. That’s a problem when you’re looking for a directionality effect involving cog versus biological motivation. One of the questionnaire items in Garon-Carrier et al. (2016) was “I do mathematics even when I am not obliged to do so,” and to me draws on achievement➡️motivation, a pretty clear invitation to artifact.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@MrLeeBates @cbokhove @dperkinsed Yeah, all that's great, Lee. I know we agree on important things. My only issue today was with this post:
https://t.co/CBQwR0l0I3

[Lee Bates @MrLeeBates]

@warmMagnet @cbokhove @dperkinsed Yes. ‘Knowledge in LTM’ reduces to make it a manageable concept to cognise with.

We can imagine a drawn dot node in a network within a circle LTM which is a place within the brain.

This biological knowledge nicely aligns with how we imagine subject knowledge interconnects.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@MrLeeBates @cbokhove @dperkinsed A further connection that might be of interest:
Abstract knowledge is exactly why students don't need perfect domain knowledge to think critically. Abstract conceptual knowledge, however imperfect, can be used to think critically.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

I think "metrics" is an important word. My knowledge examples were all unidimensional. What happens to knowledge representation when the knowledge is multidimensional, i.e., abstract. Then the idea of neurons or nodes that are a certain distance apart will fail miserably.

Another tack: Imagine the word "bank" being in a knowledge network and sitting close, as it were, to the words "money" and "building." But the word "bank" also refers to the side of a hilly terrain... It might sit in my knowledge network close to nodes such as "ground" or "terrain," far away from other close associations of "bank."

Just trying to say—perhaps awkwardly, with another long post, apologies—that the node-and-network model of abstract associationist knowledge can't really cut it.

Another quick example: The kid who is eating clam chowder for the first time who senses something hard in his mouth and instantly spits it out is surely "acting on knowledge." But it's abstract knowledge that's formed thru experience that's arrived over many ways and days, has never been articulated, and was never stored anywhere.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

Going to push back on this one, Lee... That's not biological knowledge you cited. The popular 2-D view of knowledge as networked associations is one of those lay/cog models that's very "wrong but useful."

Some forms of learning/knowledge come close to being "things." For example, words seem to be nodes in a 2- or 3-D knowledge network.

And there are many various print forms of lowercase "e" that each signals to me I am looking at the letter e. Researchers have conceptualized our representation of such knowledge as "templates," or prototypic "exemplars" (not unlike faces). Safe to say those templates are broadly represented in the brain, but they do indeed map to acoustic/phonic properties in locations within temporal lobe cortex.

More interesting example: Imagine you have a colony of lab rats and train each of them in a skinner box with a metallic grid floor for 15 mins/day. You deliver a mid-frequency tone for 2secs followed by an electric shock. The rat learns the tone. Couple days later, you change the tone, and the anxious rat learns the new tone. Couple days later, you change the tone again. Each rat's brain will veridically represent the *dimensionality* of those tonal frequencies right there in its cortex. In side-by-side neurons. That's pretty close to knowledge as a thing.

But let's get real. Even those best-chance examples aren't strong evidence that knowledge is a thing that's stored in a place in our brain. For millennia, we've used the words "knowledge" and "memory" and "recall" to help us conceptualize how we "store" "knowledge-as-things." But it's a very naive conceptualization.

I think if people would visit a biology lab and have a rubbery, formaldehyde-soaked brain passed to them to hold and behold, they might agree with me... Yes, knowledge is a noun, but it isn't a thing with physical dimensions that can be empirically seen and measured.

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

@oliviajune82 @StephenVainker @adamboxer1 @C_Hendrick By "literally," you mean "in my opinion."

[Dylan Smith @warmMagnet]

And then in 1986, Gough & Tumner set out the eventual basis for SoR with the Simple View of Reading. One implication of the formula is that as a student's decoding skills improve, their ability to understand spoken language will more directly dictate reading comprehension gains.

[Greg Ashman @greg_ashman]

@ded6ajd @MichaelRosenYes @MusicEdu4all @BarbaraBleiman Scene: 1965. Andrew Wilkinson invents the term ‘oracy’ to give speaking and listening a higher status in schools.