1. The opportunity and perils of group work, projects and independent learning
Adam Boxer
@adamboxer1
achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com

2. “All too often, we’ve seen an over-emphasis on group work - in practice, children chatting to each other - in the belief that is a more productive way to acquire knowledge than attending to an expert.”
(2013

3. Emotions clearly run high in this topic
Emotions clearly run high in this topic. I took this screenshot on 26/4/18

5.
TeacherTapp, May 2018, n=2449

6.
TeacherTapp, June 2018

8. Group work advocates claim it is:
An excellent way to learn
Superior for problem solving
Develops team working skills
Improves student’s oracy
Is engaging and motivating
Sources for all of these can be found throughout the material in this session

9. 1 7 8 2 6 3 4 5 Adam Boxer, @adamboxer1, aboxer@jcoss.barnet.sch.uk
Educational zombies
Matthew effect
Improves affective outcomes
Factors affecting CWME
Need for: 1
Pyramid of learning
Individual accountability
Group goals 7 8
Complexity of task
Slavin
Master teachers: ability to elaborate 2
Transaction costs
Collective WM effect
Lop-sided impact
Communicating with others
Co-ordination of actions
Off-task behaviour
Available resources 6
Social loafing
Group Work 3
Skills for the workplace
Correct context 4
Oracy 5
Collaborative inhibition
Principled objection
Primary and secondary knowledge
Vs. Explicit instruction
Group  individual
Clear benefits
Factors from workplace research
System-wide approach
Brainwriting
Collaborative inhibition
Electronic brainstorming
Novices and experts
Balance of personality
Length of time
Adam

10. The research cannot provide you with a clear cut answer
All I can do is provide you with things to consider

11. Justification 1: it’s a good way to learn

12. “The pyramid suggests that certain teaching methods are connected with a corresponding hierarchy of student retention. No specific credible research was uncovered to support the pyramid”
Lalley and Miller, 2007

13. When requests were sent in for the original research:
“It was developed and used by NTL Institute at our Bethel, Maine campus in the early sixties when we were still part of the National Education Association's Adult Education Division. Yes, we believe it to be accurate - but no, we no longer have - nor can we find - the original research that supports the numbers.”

14. “There is within educational psychology a voluminous literature on remembering and learning from various mediated experiences. Nowhere in this literature is there any summary of findings that remotely resembles the fictitious retention chart.” 
Subramony et al, 2014
Can’t get hold of the original article, great summary and digest here

16. We will get to the “best ways” to learn and remember later

17. The collective working memory effect

18. Challenge time Buzz word:
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

19. 7 + 9 = ?
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

20. 7 + 9 = 16
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

21. 7 x 9 = ?
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

22. 7 x 9 = 63
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

23. 79 x 979 = ?
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

24. 79 x 979 = 77,341
“ResearchEd rocks and I am going to sign up to the national conference”

25. Environment
Working memory
Long-term memory

26. 63000
630
4900
79 x 979
70 x 9
70 x 900
70 x 70
630 x100
63 x10
7 x 9 = 63
Times tables, automatic numeracy

27. Challenge! No pen/paper, phone, laptop etc In groups of 4 calculate:
538 x 47

28. Answer:
25286

29. Multiple elements
Multiple elements
Multiple elements
Multiple elements

30. Multiple elements

31. ~ Low complexity task High complexity task Individual ✔ ✘ Group
Depends on structure of task and opportunity for transaction costs
They had predicted that transaction costs would make the group/LC condition worse performing. See next slide. It ended up being similar on some metrics, but there is evidence to suggest that the hypothesis holds.
as per note in slide above, I do not follow the exact mechanism by which this works

32. Conflicting effects
“In terms of CLT, this [collaborative work] has two conflicting consequences.”
Offloading elements: load ↓
Effort involved in social operation: load↑

33. Cognitive load = 𝐷𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑡𝑎𝑠𝑘 𝐴𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑠 Reif, 2010
Classroom ready?
Cognitive load = 𝐷𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑡𝑎𝑠𝑘 𝐴𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑠
Reif, 2010
In the lab, all the resources are readily available, that’s how they build the task, to eliminate need for prior knowledge etc. not how it works in the class

34. Conclusion: Maybe, but more research needed!
Certainly not classroom ready
In the lab, “off task” talk is non-existent
Very difficult to achieve in the classroom!
In the lab, the tasks were highly structured with all elements for success provided
In class we are using tasks which rely on prior knowledge and expertise
What is actually being learned?

35. Vital team-working skills for the workplace

36. confederation of british industry

37. Problems with this line of reasoning
Principled point
Can it even be taught?
How do teams work in the workplace?
Length of time
Balance of personalities
Novices and experts

38. The Principled Point
PTE count 120(!) suggestions so far this year

39. Can it even be taught? Geary: Primary vs. secondary knowledge

40. Reading and writing vs. speaking and listening

41. Primary knowledge
Secondary knowledge
20C
Quantum mechanics
Newtonian mechanics
Roman numerals
Biblical morals,
200,000BC
Bedrock of primary knowledge
Aristotle, Euclid
Arabic numerals, algebra
Atomic theory
Linnaeus’ taxonomy
Alchemy

42. Need for instruction
Primary/Secondary Gap Size

43. The need for instruction – primary/secondary gap
Prehistory
Modern era

44. That learning is unconscious, effortless, rapid…
The manner in which we learn to recognize faces and learn to speak provides startling examples of our ability to discover large amounts of complex knowledge without explicit instruction…
That learning is unconscious, effortless, rapid…
…biologically primary information needs neither explicit instruction nor a conscious effort.
Sweller, 2011

45. Is working as a team primary or secondary?

46. Employers are more satisfied with graduates…this could be a function of what they do in University and that it is a selected sample, but to my mind it is just about being mature and developing in terms of those primary areas.

47. Even if it were possible, is school the right context?

48. Even if it were possible, is school the right context?
“If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work.
This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis.
Putting together people who are neither experienced at doing something, or particularly inclined to want to do it, is not how you learn to do that something.”
Andrew Old, 2008

49. Teamwork in the workplace
There is a MASSIVE wealth of research out there on this. I am just going to highlight a couple of points

50. Length of time
In band of brothers they portray really well how as time goes on and new replacements come in, it is harder to work as a team. They don’t trust each other and struggle to work together. Even other members of the team who go off with injury then come back have problems re-integrating.

51. Consider crews flying commercial airplanes
Consider crews flying commercial airplanes. The National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its database occurred on a crew’s first day of flying together, before people had the chance to learn through experience how best to operate as a team
…a NASA study found that fatigued crews who had a history of working together made about half as many errors as crews composed of rested pilots who had not flown together before.
J. Richard Hackman, 2009
Harvard Business Review

52. Balance of personalities

54. “Effective team staffing considers team members’ knowledge, skill, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) as well as the configuration of team member KSAOs and their relations, called team composition.
Team staffing experts widely acknowledge the importance of team composition and urge practitioners to consider the combination of team members as well as the tailoring of these combinations to specific task and team parameters when making teamstaffing decisions”
Bell and Brown, 2015
Bell and Brown. Bell works for NASA on building teams to go to Mars

55. Is this possible in a classroom?

56. Assuming all the above were not true, is having students work as a team the best way to prepare them to work as a team?

57. Novices and experts

58. By analogy
“Within the UK, the development of inquiry and practical skills tends to dominate, especially in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”
Gatsby, 2017

59. The Domain

62. Edge of the domain: experts
Within the domain: novices

63. Edge of the domain: experts New knowledge being added to the domain
Within the domain: novices
Old knowledge is being learned

65. We call this phenomenon the expertise reversal effect.
Several instructional techniques have been designed to facilitate schema construction and automation by reducing working memory load.
Recently, however, strong evidence has emerged that the effectiveness of these techniques depends very much on levels of learner expertise.
Instructional techniques that are highly effective with inexperienced learners can lose their effectiveness and even have negative consequences when used with more experienced learners.
We call this phenomenon the expertise reversal effect.
Sweller et al, 2003

66. Differences between novices and experts
Development of schema
Working in knowledge addition or knowledge acquisition
Expertise reversal effect
Summary: if you want a novice to be able to work in the way that an expert does, they should not emulate the expert

67. Oracy

68. What is oracy?
“…[it] can be characterised as the development and application of a set of skills associated with effective spoken communication”
Millard and Menzies, 2016

69. School21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=292&v=2ADAY9AQm54
Play the video. There is a lot in there that is worth discussing. I think the way that they teach students to talk and listen is very good. What is frustrating in the video is that they cut the audio straight after the sentence starter e.g. “I disagree that…” There is no point knowing how to talk well if you do not know anything worth talking about! No doubt these students do, but I would like to see more and the emphasis on learning rather than the skills as discrete entities.

70. Mercer and Mannion, 2015
We need to recognise that group work may fail simply because it is badly executed…

71. a systematic approach to training children in the art of discussion leads to significant gains in subject learning…(cites Slavin, 2010 and Howe, 2009)
What's more, by learning how to work well in teams, young people are acquiring the soft skills that are valued by employers throughout the world…
Chief among those soft skills is oracy. Group work is a fantastic tool for teaching the ability to speak and to listen…

72. …you need to construct better ground rules…the research offers plenty of examples to frame discussions. For example:
Everyone should contribute and take turns to speak.
All ideas should be shared and considered.
Ideas should be justified with reasons.
Challenges are encouraged but students must disagree with the point, not the person.
Try to reach agreement, don't just agree to differ.

73. Into the classroom: You need a system wide approach
Which of the aims cannot be met through explicit instruction? (come to this later)
Is there really evidence for it? (come to this later)

74. Collaborative inhibition and creativity
Brown and Paulus, 2002

75. Collaborative inhibition and creativity
Brown and Paulus, 2002
Brown and Paulus, 2002

76. Semantic networks and associative memory models
Still with Brown and Paulus above. The fact that people bring their own schema forwards means you can manipulate your ideas with theirs
Step 1: be in a group
Step 2: retrieve from long term memory “one cannot effectively brainstorm on a topic one knows nothing about”
Step 3: concepts that are closely connected are activated, ones which are less connected are not
Step 4: build off ideas which are more connected for others leading to creativity
Step 5: production blocking prevents this

77. Problem from environment
Still with Brown and Paulus above. The fact that people bring their own schema forwards means you can manipulate your ideas with theirs
Step 1: be in a group
Step 2: retrieve from long term memory “one cannot effectively brainstorm on a topic one knows nothing about”
Step 3: concepts that are closely connected are activated, ones which are less connected are not
Step 4: build off ideas which are more connected for others leading to creativity
Step 5: production blocking prevents this

78. Production blocking
talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk
Production blocking. Doesn’t only work when one person is “hogging” the speech. Even if they speak for the correct amount of time, are concise and measured, follow the rules etc., this still occurs

79. Production blocking In a group, members cannot talk over each other
Leads to a delay between generation and expression of an idea
Your “train of thought” decays with time
The delay lengths are also unpredictable
Monitoring the length of delays requires yet more cognitive capacity
Leads to further decays
Nijstad et. al. 2003
the exact mechanism for unpredictability is not clear, but hypothesised as described

80. Potential solutions Group then individual brainstorming Brainwriting
Electronic brainstorming
Individual and group brainstorming
Group first, then individual
Best of both worlds, hear from other people with alternative connections then build on it yourself
Brainwriting
First person brainstorms as an individual onto a piece of paper
Passes it to the next person who reads through and adds
No verbal communication!
Electronic brainstorming
Working via computers gets around verbal problems
Can cause issues with larger groups by the sheer volume of ideas generated

81. Into the classroom?
Highly structured rules to guide student talk may not be helpful (c.f. oracy)
A mix of group followed by individuals
Skip the group, teacher to lead a discussion then students to do individual work?

82. Perils Social loafing Does the evidence really support it?
Comparison to Explicit Instruction
Matthew Effect
Collaborative inhibition (covered)
Personality matching (covered)

83. Social Loafing

84. The Ringelmann Effect
That individual members of a group become less productive as the size of the group increases
Often explained by reference to social loafing

85. Co-operative learning: what makes group work work?
Slavin, 2010
Co-operative learning: what makes group work work?

86. “Co-operative learning methods are among the most extensively evaluated alternatives to traditional instruction in use today. Use of co-operative learning almost always improves affective outcomes. Students love to work in groups and they feel more successful and like subjects taught co-operatively.”

88. “Engagement is a poor proxy for learning.” Coe, 2013
“Our research shows that students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40-50% of what the teacher is teaching.” Nuthall, 2007
“Nuthall’s work shows that students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they’re comfortable with and already know how to do as opposed to the more uncomfortable enterprise of grappling with uncertainty and indeterminate tasks.” Hendrick, 2015
“Engagement is a poor proxy for learning.” Coe, 2013
So student affect does not necessarily mean anything. More important to think about learning.

89. Slavin distilled:
Group work can result in learning gains over traditional instruction
Requires:
Group goals (everyone has same objective)
Individual accountability

90. Ashman’s critique, 2017
A lot of the rewards and set-ups are not transferrable to a normal classroom (e.g. ranking all students’ performance on a board)
Dodgy control conditions e.g. students working together with limited instruction vs. students working individually with limited instruction
Only 63% of studies showed significant positive results (likely to be null unpublished studies)
In one paper cited, the authors admitted it was confounded

91. Lop-sided impact
 In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees.
As people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance. 
HBR, 2016
This is kind of similar to social loafing but not quite the same. In loafing, people sit back and let the lead get on with things. What this shows is that even if everyone is working hard, one person is still responsible for the bulk of the output. This leads to the effect in the next slide
More research on the impact of the “extra miler” is here

92. Size of bubble is how much they like their jobs
Size of bubble is how much they like their jobs. So what’s interesting is the people who everyone wants to work with are unhappy.

93. Down at the other end: the “Matthew” effect?

94. The Matthew Effect
“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Matthew, 25:29

95. To consider:
Is it inevitable that one student will produce most of the work?
Can you really build your task to anticipate that?
What are the ramifications on the emotional affect of that one student?
If a student has limited prior knowledge then by definition they will have more limited contributions

96. Comparison to Explicit Instruction

98. Cites Slavin

99. Things to consider Is this the best way to teach this content?
Group goals
Individual accountability
Motivational effect on all learners
Elaboration on learning
Ensure students know about the material first
Collaborative inhibition
Personality matching
Time spent as a team