Category Archives: Book Review

Debunking Myths: Memory, Attention, and Technology in Education

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In our hyper-connected world, it’s tempting to think that technology like Google, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and our smartphones have rendered memory obsolete. But is that really true?

I recently participated in a book club offered by Oregon State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. The book we read, Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World by Michelle D. Miller, challenges misconceptions about how technology affects our memory and attention and offers valuable insights for educators. Let’s explore some key takeaways.

Memory Still Matters

There has been a growing backlash against memorization in education, with critics claiming it’s outdated and harmful to creativity and critical thinking. But here’s the kicker: memory actually supports robust, transferable thinking skills. Memory and thinking aren’t enemies – they’re complementary partners in learning.

Despite the “Google it” mentality, memory remains crucial. It’s not just about recalling facts; it’s about building a foundation for critical thinking and creativity. For one thing, it’s impossible in certain situations to stop and look things up (think emergency room doctors or lawyers during a trial). But more than that, our own memorized knowledge in a discipline allows us to consider context and practice skills fluently.

We’re all familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy and its bottom level: “Remembering”. Michelle Miller recommends that, instead of viewing memory as the “lowest” level of thinking, consider it the foundation. Higher-order thinking skills interact with and reinforce memory, creating a two-way street of learning.

The Power of Testing

Contrary to popular belief, quizzes and tests aren’t the enemy. Research shows that retrieval practice actually strengthens long-term retention, supports complex skills, and can even reduce test anxiety. It’s not about memorizing for the test; it’s about reinforcing learning.

In addition, “pre-quizzing” – that is, giving a quiz before introducing the material (ungraded or graded for participation only) – has been shown to help activate prior knowledge, integrate new information into existing schemas, and identify gaps or misconceptions that instructors can address.

Attention Spans: Not What You Think

The idea that “attention spans are shrinking” isn’t backed by solid science. In fact, in attention research there’s no such thing as “attention span”! And that “Students can only pay attention for 10 minutes at a time” idea? It’s based on outdated, poorly designed studies.

What about the idea that technology worsens our attention? There is no strong evidence that technology is affecting our ability to pay attention. While people often report this phenomenon (about themselves or others), a more likely explanation seems to be our decreased tolerance for boredom rather than our actual ability. However, smartphones can indeed be very distracting, and they can also affect memory negatively through the “I can Google it” effect – the expectation that information will be available online anytime can reduce our memory encoding.

Handwriting vs. Typing: It’s Complicated

The debate over handwritten versus typed notes isn’t as clear-cut as you might think. What matters most is your note-taking strategy. The best notes, regardless of medium, involve synthesizing ideas rather than transcribing verbatim.

Enhancing Memory in the Classroom

The good news is that there are many things an educator can do to help students remember essential content. Here are some strategies:

  1. Create meaning and structure: When we process information deeply and evaluate it for meaning we remember it better than when we perform shallow processing. Organizational schemes like narrative structures help information stick, and active learning techniques such as project-based learning ensure a deeper level of engagement with the content.
  2. Connect to prior knowledge: Ask questions to elicit information, draw explicit connections with previous material, and use pre-quizzing to help students see the gaps and stimulate curiosity.
  3. Embrace visualization: We’re visual creatures – use this to engage your audience. Create and ask students to create mind-maps, infographics, or other visual representations.
  4. Engage emotions: Both positive and negative emotions can enhance memory, but aim for a supportive atmosphere, which has been shown to improve learning outcomes. The emotion of surprise is a powerful memory enhancer.
  5. Connect to goals: Show how information is relevant to students’ immediate objectives.
  6. Use the self-reference effect: Relating information to oneself boosts memory. Ask students to bring their own experience or interests into the learning process through personalized assignments.
  7. Implement retrieval practice: Regular quizzing with immediate feedback can significantly boost retention.
  8. Space it out: Distribute practice over time instead of cramming.

Conclusion

In this age of information overload, understanding how memory works is more crucial than ever. By debunking myths and implementing evidence-based strategies, we can help students navigate the digital landscape while building strong, adaptable minds. I’ve only touched on a few points, but this book is chock-full of interesting information that’s useful not just for educators but for everyone!

What myths about memory and technology have you encountered in your teaching? How might you incorporate these insights into your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

References

Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and forgetting in the age of technology: teaching, learning, and the science of memory in a wired world (1st ed.). West Virginia University Press.

Media Literacy in the Age of AI, Part II: A Review of Verified

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For the first part of this post, please see Media Literacy in the Age of AI, Part I: “You Will Need to Check It All.”

Just how, exactly, we’re supposed to follow Ethan Mollick’s caution to “check it all” happens to be the subject of a lively, forthcoming collaboration from two education researchers who have been following the intersection of new media and misinformation for decades.

In Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, November 2023), Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg provide a kind of user’s manual to the modern internet. The authors’ central concern is that students—and, by extension, their teachers—have been going about the process of verifying online claims and sources all wrong—usually by applying the same rhetorical skills activated in reading a deep-dive on Elon Musk or Yevgeny Prigozhin, to borrow from last month’s headlines. Academic readers, that is, traditionally keep their attention fixed on the text—applying comprehension strategies such as prior knowledge, persisting through moments of confusion, and analyzing the narrative and its various claims about technological innovation or armed rebellion in discipline-specific ways.

The Problem with Checklists

Now, anyone who has tried to hold a dialogue on more than a few pages of assigned reading at the college level knows that sustained focus and critical thinking can be challenging, even for experienced readers. (A majority of high school seniors are not prepared for reading in college, according to 2019 data.) And so instructors, partnering with librarians, have long championed checklists as one antidote to passive consumption, first among them the CRAAP test, which stands for currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. (Flashbacks to English 101, anyone?) The problem with checklists, argue Caulfield and Wineburg, is that in today’s media landscape—awash in questionable sources—they’re a waste of time. Such routines might easily keep a reader focused on critically evaluating “gameable signals of credibility” such as functional hyperlinks, a well-designed homepage, airtight prose, digital badges, and other supposedly telling markers of authority that can be manufactured with minimal effort or purchased at little expense, right down to the blue checkmark made infamous by Musk’s platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

Three Contexts for Lateral Reading

One of the delights in reading Verified is drawing back the curtains on a parade of little-known hoaxes, rumors, actors, and half-truths at work in the shadows of the information age—ranging from a sugar industry front group posing as a scientific think tank to headlines in mid-2022 warning that clouds of “palm-sized flying spiders” were about to descend on the East Coast. In the face of such wild ideas, Caulfield and Wineburg offer a helpful, three-point heuristic for navigating the web—and a sharp rejoinder to the source-specific checklists of the early aughts. (You will have to read the book to fact-check the spider story, or as the authors encourage, you can do it yourself after reading, say, the first chapter!) “The first task when confronted with the unfamiliar is not analysis. It is the gathering of context” (p. 10). More specifically:

  • The context of the source — What’s the reputation of the source of information that you arrive at, whether through a social feed, a shared link, or a Google search result?
  • The context of the claim — What have others said about the claim? If it’s a story, what’s the larger story? If a statistic, what’s the larger context?
  • Finally, the context of you — What is your level of expertise in the area? What is your interest in the claim? What makes such a claim or source compelling to you, and what could change that?
“The Three Contexts” from Verified (2023)

At a regional conference of librarians in May, Wineburg shared video clips from his scenario-based research, juxtaposing student sleuths with professional fact checkers. His conclusion? By simply trying to gather the necessary context, learners with supposedly low media literacy can be quickly transformed into “strong critical thinkers, without any additional training in logic or analysis” (Caulfield and Wineburg, p. 10). What does this look like in practice? Wineburg describes a shift from “vertical” to “lateral reading” or “using the web to read the web” (p. 81). To investigate a source like a pro, readers must first leave the source, often by opening new browser tabs, running nuanced searches about its contents, and pausing to reflect on the results. Again, such findings hold significant implications for how we train students in verification and, more broadly, in media literacy. Successful information gathering, in other words, depends not only on keywords and critical perspective but also on the ability to engage in metacognitive conversations with the web and its architecture. Or, channeling our eight-legged friends again: “If you wanted to understand how spiders catch their prey, you wouldn’t just look at a single strand” (p. 87).

SIFT graphic by Mike Caulfield with icons for stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.

Image 2: Mike Caulfield’s “four moves”

Reconstructing Context

Much of Verified is devoted to unpacking how to gain such perspective while also building self-awareness of our relationships with the information we seek. As a companion to Wineburg’s research on lateral reading, Caulfield has refined a series of higher-order tasks for vetting sources called SIFT, or “The Four Moves” (see Image 2). By (1) Stopping to take a breath and get a look around, (2) Investigating the source and its reputation, (3) Finding better sources of journalism or research, and (4) Tracing surprising claims or other rhetorical artifacts back to their origins, readers can more quickly make decisions about how to manage their time online. You can learn more about the why behind “reconstructing context” at Caulfield’s blog, Hapgood, and as part of the OSU Libraries’ guide to media literacy. (Full disclosure: Mike is a former colleague from Washington State University Vancouver.)

If I have one complaint about Caulfield and Wineburg’s book, it’s that it dwells at length on the particulars of analyzing Google search results, which fill pages of accompanying figures and a whole chapter on the search engine as “the bestie you thought you knew” (p. 49). To be sure, Google still occupies a large share of the time students and faculty spend online. But as in my quest for learning norms protocols, readers are already turning to large language model tools for help in deciding what to believe online. In that respect, I find other chapters in Verified (on scholarly sources, the rise of Wikipedia, deceptive videos, and so-called native advertising) more useful. And if you go there, don’t miss the author’s final take on the power of emotion in finding the truth—a line that sounds counterintuitive, but in context adds another, rather moving dimension to the case against checklists.

Given the acceleration of machine learning, will lateral reading and SIFTing hold up in the age of AI? Caulfield and Wineburg certainly think so. Building out context becomes all the more necessary, they write in a postscript on the future of verification, “when the prose on the other side is crafted by a convincing machine” (p. 221). On that note, I invite you and your students to try out some of these moves on your favorite chatbot.

Another Postscript

The other day, I gave Microsoft’s AI-powered search engine a few versions of the same prompt I had put to ChatGPT. In “balanced” mode, Bing dutifully recommended resources from Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard on introducing norms for learning in online college classes. Over in “creative” mode, Bing’s synthesis was slightly more offbeat—including an early-pandemic blog post on setting norms for middle school faculty meetings in rural Vermont. More importantly, the bot wasn’t hallucinating. Most of the sources it suggested seemed worth investigating. Pausing before each rabbit hole, I took a deep breath.

Related Resource

Oregon State Ecampus recently rolled out its own AI toolkit for faculty, based on an emerging consensus that developing capacities for using this technology will be necessary in many areas of life. Of particular relevance to this post is a section on AI literacy, conceptualized as “a broad set of skills that is not confined to technical disciplines.” As with Verified, I find the toolkit’s frameworks and recommendations on teaching AI literacy particularly helpful. For instance, if students are allowed to use ChatGPT or Bing to brainstorm and evaluate possible topics for a writing assignment, “faculty might provide an effective example of how to ask an AI tool to help, ideally situating explanation in the context of what would be appropriate and ethical in that discipline or profession.”

References

Caulfield, M., & Wineburg, S. (2023). Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online. University of Chicago Press.

Mollick, E. (2023, July 15). How to use AI to do stuff: An opinionated guide. One Useful Thing.

Oregon State Ecampus. (2023). Artificial Intelligence Tools.

Media Literacy in the Age of AI, Part I: “You Will Need to Check It All”

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Have you found yourself worried or overwhelmed in thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence for your discipline? Whether, for example, your department’s approaches to teaching basic skills such as library research and source evaluation still hold up? You’re not alone. As we enter another school year, many educators continue to think deeply about questions of truth and misinformation, creativity, and how large language model (LLM) tools such as chatbots are reshaping higher education. Along with our students, faculty (oh, and instructional designers) must consider new paradigms for our collective media literacy.

Here’s a quick backstory for this two-part post. In late spring, shortly after the “stable release” of ChatGPT to iOS, I started chatting with bot model GPT-3.5, which innovator Ethan Mollick describes as “very fast and pretty solid at writing and coding tasks,” if a bit lacking in personality. Other, internet-connected models, such as Bing, have made headlines for their resourcefulness and darker, erratic tendencies. But so far, access to GPT-4 remains limited, and I wanted to better understand the more popular engine’s capabilities. At the time, I was preparing a workshop for a creative writing conference. So, I asked ChatGPT to write a short story in the modern style of George Saunders, based in part on historical events. The chatbot’s response, a brief burst of prose it titled “Language Unleashed,” read almost nothing like Saunders. Still, it got my participants talking about questions of authorship, originality, representation, etc. Check, check, check.

The next time I sat down with the GPT-3.5, things went a little more off-script.

One faculty developer working with Ecampus had asked our team about establishing learning norms in a 200-level course dealing with sensitive subject matter. As a writing instructor, I had bookmarked a few resources in this vein, including strategies from the University of Colorado Boulder. So, I asked ChatGPT to create a bibliographic citation of Creating Collaborative Classroom Norms, which it did with the usual lightning speed. Then I got curious about what else this AI model could do, as my colleagues Philip Chambers and Nadia Jaramillo Cherrez have been exploring. Could ChatGPT point me to some good resources for faculty on setting norms for learning in online college classes?

“Certainly!” came the cheery reply, along with a summary of five sources that would provide me with “valuable information and guidance” (see Image 1). Noting OpenAI’s fine-print caveat (“ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts”), I began opening each link, expecting to be teleported to university teaching centers across the country. Except none of the tabs would load properly.

“Sorry we can’t find what you’re looking for,” reported Inside Higher Ed. “Try these resources instead,” suggested Stanford’s Teaching Commons. A closer look with Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine confirmed that the five sources in question were, like “Language Unleashed,” entirely fictitious.

An early chat with ChatGPT-3.5, asking whether the chatbot can point the author to some good resources for faculty on setting classroom norms for learning in online college classes. "Certainly," replies ChatGPT, in recommending five sources that "should provide you with valuable information and guidance."

Image 1: An early, hallucinatory chat with ChatGPT-3.5

As Mollick would explain months later: “it is very easy for the AI to ‘hallucinate’ and generate plausible facts. It can generate entirely false content that is utterly convincing. Let me emphasize that: AI lies continuously and well. Every fact or piece of information it tells you may be incorrect. You will need to check it all.”

The fabrications and limitations of chatbots lacking real-time access to the ever-expanding web have by now been well-documented. But as an early adopter, the speed and confidence ChatGPT brought to the task of inventing and describing fake sources felt unnerving. And without better guideposts for verification, I expect students less familiar with the evolution of AI will continue to experience confusion, or worse. As the Post recently reported, chatbots can easily say offensive things and act in culturally-biased ways—”a reminder that they’ve ingested some of the ugliest material the internet has to offer, and they lack the independent judgment to filter that out.”

Just how, exactly, we’re supposed to “check it all” happens to be the subject of a lively, forthcoming collaboration from two education researchers who have been following the intersection of new media and misinformation for decades.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post with the second installment of “Media Literacy in the Age of AI,” a review of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg (University of Chicago Press, November 2023).

References

Mollick, E. (2023, July 15). How to use AI to do stuff: An opinionated guide. One Useful Thing.

Wroe, T., & Volckens, J. (2022, January). Creating collaborative classroom norms. Office of Faculty Affairs, University of Colorado Boulder.

Yu Chen, S., Tenjarla, R., Oremus , W., & Harris, T. (2023, August 31). How to talk to an AI chatbot. The Washington Post.

Assessment Design: Ideas from Ungrading Book

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A group of instructional designers at Ecampus participated in a book club reading “Ungrading” (Kohn & Blum, 2020). We learned many creative ways of designing assessments through participation in this book club. If you happen to be searching for ideas on designing or re-designing assessments in your teaching, we would highly recommend this book!

The idea of “Ungrading” may sound radical to many of us. Yet instructors at all types of educational institutions have tried ungrading in many different courses, ranging from humanity courses, to STEM courses, and from primary education to higher education. Starr Sackstein (author of Chapter 4 “Shifting the Grading Mindset” of the book) encourages educators to consider “ways to adjust small things in the classroom that will lead to important growth for students”. And this suggestion of starting small is coherent with what James Lang proposes in his book “Small Teaching” (Lang, 2016) and Thomas Tobin’s +1 strategy for implementing new teaching and learning strategies (Tobin & Behling, 2018). Sackstein provides a table comparing the grades vocabulary that focuses on judgement or criticism, with the non-grade vocabulary focusing on assessing and opportunity for improvement.

In chapter 5, Arthur Chiaravalli proposed a way for teaching without grades: Descriptive Grading Criteria, such as A for outstanding, B for Good, C for Satisfactory and I for Incomplete. Do you remember elementary school report cards that use E for Excellent, S for Satisfactory, and NI for Need Improvement type of categories? I think that is exactly what descriptive grading criteria represent. 

In chapter 7, Christina Katopodis and Cathy Davidson offer a new approach to start a new term/semester by asking students:” What is Success in this class for you? And How can I help you achieve it?” (p. 107) Katopodis and Davidson also remind us the importance of explaining why when you challenge your students to take their own learning seriously and give students opportunities for metacognitive reflections about the learning activities themselves. Katopodis and Davidson also offer a model of contract grading for Twenty-First Century Literacies and a model of collaborative peer evaluation. Students’ grades in the course come from self-and-peer evaluations using detailed evaluation forms. 

In chapter 8, Christopher Riesbeck described his critique-driven learning and assessment design of do-review-redo submission process for his intermediate-level programming course. I have used similar approach in my own teaching before and it works very well for any course with manageable number of students. The advantage for this approach is every one of your students can improve their first submissions based on feedback they receive from the instructor. The disadvantage for this approach is the potentially extended time instructors may spend on providing the feedback and reviewing the submissions and re-submissions. The key to this assessment method is making sure that the workload of providing feedback and reviewing revisions is manageable. In chapter 9, Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh provided her experience of using ungrading in her organic chemistry II course, giving students opportunities to practice evaluating their own work.

And that is only snippets of what I took away from a few chapters from this book. Many resources about ungrading outside the book were shared during our book club meetings, such as two-stage exams, group exams  and public exams. To answer a common question that ungrading practices may fit humanity courses more easily, Cyndie McCarley shared “Grading for Growth” blog written and maintained by two math instructors Robert Talbert and David Clark. To learn about all the creative assessment design methods introduced in this book, read it yourself either through library ebook or get a hard copy and enjoy reading, designing and experimenting! 

References

Kohn, A. and Blum, S. (2020). Ungrading. West Virginia University Press. 

Lang, J. (2016). Small Teaching. Jossey-Bass. 

Tobin, T.J. and Behling, K.T. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone. West Virginia University Press.