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Vanessa Wester - How does a mastery approach to fractions impact low ability learners?
emphasised that we need to make connections between ideas, in order for ideas to become more meaningful and importantly for these ideas and connections to be handled within the working memory but also embedded in the long-term memory for effective recall and remembering.
Graphic Schemas
Caviglioni in his Dual Coding CPD talk and accompanying book (2019) tries to visually represent his principles and he links his theories and subsequent graphic schema designs to the work of Paivio and his ‘Dual Coding Theory’ (1971). For him the formation of mental images aids in learning can help cognition and understanding and has been utilised by Caviglioni to create easy to understand images and schemas to support the teacher application of this cognitive science.
Figure 4 – A simplified version of Paivio’s dual coding theory. It stressed the importance of long-term memory and how encoding can support knowledge being embedded. Diagram taken from https://www.olicav.com/#/diagrams/
What was missing in our revision in 2019 was the ability for student to recall, the long memories were no present for some students. According to Sweller, the contents of long-term memory are “sophisticated structures that permit us to perceive, think, and solve problems,” rather than a group of rote learned facts. These structures, known as schemas, are what permit us to treat multiple elements as a single element. They are the cognitive structures that make up the knowledge base (Sweller, 1988). The more I look at the idea the recall of long-term memories, the more I needed to think carefully about how dual coding can be used to produce an organised system of information. I have also looked at the work of Michael Chiles (@m_chiles) who I have followed for a while due to his work at Ormiston Bolingbroke Academy and examiner and developer of some of the geographic content on Seneca. In his book ‘Craft of Assessment’ and Seneca Online learning course, Chiles emphasises that the retention of semantic memories will deteriorate over time and that we need to strengthen our memories to improve retention and knowledge recall (Chiles 2020). He drew upon the work of Herman Ebbinghaus who suggested that after 31 days, only 21% of knowledge can be readily recalled. He emphasised that spaced learning could be a tool to overcome this (perhaps a CPD Journal topic for next year!) I was initially quiet pleased with how I used dual coding this year. However, on reflection my initial attempts to use dual coding probably had made some pitfalls as suggested here:
Figure 5 – Dual coding Analysis. My initial venture into dual coding, on reflection, focused on low knowledge, low skills and not entirely sure the right visual was attached to the right word. Source: https://www.olicav.com/#/posters/
Figure 6 – example of initial attempts to use dual coding. Source: KLW I used a video to help student understand the topic. Then images were used to link to keywords but there were little connections and probably if you ask my year 9’s to try to recall the knowledge from this attempt at using dual coding the long term recall would be poor as we did not make connections, rather than just dealt with these images in isolation.
The success of the subsequent task was impacted as the students understood the task (see below) but were unable to make progress, as they could not make meaning using these images.
Figure 7 – Example of task to use the dual coding images to develop their explanation about impacts. Source: KLW The revision guide was clear but the use of the images confused:
Figure 7 – CGP revision guide. Many students were confused as to what image represented which of the four factors in the revision book. Source: CGP revision guide for Geography Edexcel B. I am not going to say the lesson was a failure, but more so that my intention of using these images to support semantic memories, did not work as I had intended. The student may well have more episodic memories of the lesson linked to how they tried to draw these images and then how I also tried to draw them (as an aside - ask my students about my cloud / sheep / tree drawings – for a person with an A in A Level art, there is a striking similarity between all 3!) This is another example from a year 11 revision session. The use of the dual coding was more effective as the revision book and the images correlated more coherently. In addition, the video stimulus supported the text and images. However, the connections between the ideas were not explored – a schema or graphic organiser could have helped to explore connections and perhaps a deeper understanding of the impacts.
Figure 8 – Example of where the ‘right’ dual coding images were used.
Figure 9 - Source: CGP revision guide for Geography Edexcel B.
