 Welcome back viewers, day five of the 2020 Global Online Moodle Mood, and you're in the education room. We've got a great session coming up now, and I've got Annalise Dijonkir from Wooklap, and she's going to be talking about the education technology to empower the contributions of cognitive science. So I'll hand it over to you, Annalise. Thank you, Chris, for the nice introduction. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. I hope that you have found a nice spot at home where you're comfortable to join this session. My name is Annalise Dijonkir, and I am head of expansion at Wooklap. Thank you for joining me today for a session on education technology to empower with the contribution of cognitive science here in the education room today. All right, so I'd like to start with some dynamic questions guys. So to get to know you and you to get to know me. So please take your smart devices, a mobile phone, a laptop, a tablet, so you can connect yourself with the QR code you see on the screen. So you can just use your cameras, and this will open to join the event, or you just go to the URL that is presented on the screen. So I'm going to wait a few more moments. I see four people connected, five, six, seven. Maybe we get some more. Ten, even. This is really nice to see, 11, 12, 13. All right, we're at 14. Just wait some seconds more, and then we're going to launch our dynamic questions to get some ice breaking going on. Lovely to see you guys connect it so fully. So we have 22 now, 23. When I'm going to start, you still will be able to connect yourself through the URL you will see on the screen. All right, so I am very curious to know where you guys are all from because this is the Moodle Mood Global event. And I really love to see, okay, hello Australia, hello Germany, Switzerland, Detroit, Melbourne. This is amazing, Mexico, Oklahoma, US, some of Belgium. Yes, this is amazing. Thank you guys. So I'm going to close this vote. And let's see where you guys are coming from. This is a nice word cloud going on. Great. So would you be able to pinpoint where I am from in Europe? You might have seen some hints in the information provided by the organizers. But let's see where you guys are from. Where you think I am from, let's say. Coming from Italy, coming from France, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium. Okay, very interesting, very interesting to see. I'm popping up everywhere guys. This is nice. Even from Spain. Lovely. All right, well, let's close down this voting. And let's see. I am from Belgium guys. I'm not having any fries, chocolate or beer today for you. But this might change in the future if we are going to a more live setting. Who knows. Okay. So this is the agenda for the session. I will start by asking a provocative question later on about digital natives. Then we will briefly discuss the main concepts revolving around the learning process, attention and memory. And this will allow us to move on to the tree techniques that professors should use in their classrooms and how to implement them with the help of a student response system of their choice. And of course, all of this will lead me to the conclusions. So which of the following claims about digital natives are supported by research? One, traditional education is in trouble as they possess new ways of knowing and being. Two, there is a digital revolution going on and they are driving it. Three, they are in Italy or inherently tech savvy as opposed to older educators. They are multitaskers, team oriented and collaborative. They have a short attention span and they have a need to immediate gratification or none of the above or I don't know. So let's see how you guys are responding to this. Very curious to see the answers. All right. So we see answer five has most of the responses. Okay. Very interesting. You can see the timer running. You still have 30 seconds about 30 seconds to answer. Okay. Very curious to see 26 people of the 39 connected have answered 27 for now. So we still have five, four, three, two, one and voting is closed. So let's look at the correct answer. The correct one was none of the above guys, none of the above. So in 2001, American writer Mark Perensky coined two terms. The first is digital natives for young people who have been immersed in technology all their lives and from whom all forms of information and communication technology allegedly represent a preferential form of learning. The other is a counterpart, digital immigrants of course, that is all of those that try to keep up with those natives. This ID became quickly popular and the concept expanded beyond the original ID. So most of the claims about digital natives, however, are not supported by research. In fact, despite popular belief, traditional education is not in trouble. Digital natives do not possess new ways of knowing and being. They are not driving a digital revolution and either they are not innately or inherently tech savvy and are no different from older educators, all right. They cannot be defined as especially multitaskers, team oriented and collaborative. And their attention span is no shorter or longer for that matter than their elders and they do not need immediate gratification. So research evidence shows that there may be as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations. And popular claims that young people adopt radically different learning styles are not supposed, supported by research evidence either. So very important. The existence of a new generation of students cannot be cited as a reason for radical changes to the existing educational structure. Political choices should not be blurred by these myths. Okay. Attention is key for every generation. But what is attention? Teareticians tend to disagree, as you can see on this slide. William Jane says that everyone knows what attention is. Then we see that Hall-Pasher has another ID and actually no one knows what attention is according to him. And then Britt Anderson says there is no such thing as attention. So despite all these definitions issues, we adopt a functional approach. Okay. Educators and cognitive scientists agree that attention is an important concept to teach their students. It's best described as a limited capacity resource. So most established mind teeteries say that we can only process a limited amount of information at any one time. It is almost impossible to pay attention to more than one thing at the exact same time. So there are many popular claims about the maximum attention span people can deal with, nearly all of them must be discarded for a reason or another. So attention or its opposite mind wandering is not an easy concept to define. Moreover, we can measure mind wandering. Do we? Again, not really. It varies depending on what the person is doing. So we mind wander more if the task is easy than when it's difficult. But we mind wander more when it's very difficult. So it is complicated and ultimately meaningless to give an average mind wandering rate. Let's just say that half the time students are not paying attention to what the teacher is saying in class. We see that mind wandering is correlated with missing important information, impairing later reading comprehension, bad memory performance, during test, poor time management, and of course what drives attention towards learning. Make the material more salient. Saliency comes from internal motivation or from external techniques. No control over individual interests. So improve the situational interests. Clear communication that at the right difficulty level, concrete examples help. So in short, you should optimize the sensory or the encoding stage. As during the encoding stage, unattended information is just lost forever. So we cannot understand what strategies to use in the classroom with student response systems if we do not grasp a few fundamental concepts about how the mind is working. So this is on the next slides. So according to most psychologists, memory goes through three phases. Encoding, where we have the acoustic, visual, tactile, and semantics ways to be able to encode. We have the storage and there we see memory traces, your working memory, your short-term memory, but also your long-term memory. And then we have retrieval, where we can retrieve in terms of sequences, cues, associations, and other various techniques. So what is important is getting the information from the short-term to the long-term memory, of course. Your short-term memory process essentially decides what's worth keeping and what can be forgotten after a 15, 30-second window, let's say. But the short-term memory is limited and just in terms of time, not only, but also in terms of how many separate pieces of information it can store. So most people tend to have a span of five to nine items. Let's do a little test. So memories are made of this. It's really, try to remember this set of letters. It's really not a lot, but still, it is a bit difficult, isn't it? But when we arrange them in this order, of course, we see that it's more feasible to understand and to get it into your memory. Why is that? Well, we have chunked our data here. So that we have less items with more information. We found meaning in it. So meaning or semantic encoding is particularly powerful. So this technique is called chunking, and it's very, very useful to remember unstructured information. We also had it on the retrieval practice. So moving to more elaborate techniques, we find that in that retrieval practice. So in an experiment, you can see here on the slide, students were assigned to one among two strategies to encode recently exposed material. The first group had to review the content by simple proof reading, that is reading again, of course. The second group had to write down everything they remembered on a blank sheet of paper. The knowledge both groups of students acquired was tested then after five minutes, after two days, and one week. So what do these results tell us now? Mainly, we can see that reviewing by proof reading produces better results than reviewing by means of open-ended questions, as long as students take the test soon after they have reviewed the content. After a few days, in fact, the opposite happens. So this phenomenon is called the test effect. So how to implement this in the classroom? There are several advantages on quizzing the students. Firstly, and they are obviously teachers' instrument of choice for measuring their student skills. Secondly, students themselves use exams to develop their self-assessment skills. So what experts call metacognition, from which they will learn about their strengths and weaknesses to better organize revisions at later states. So a test not only measures learning, but it also changes it. It's very important. What do we have next? Space repetitions, space quizzes, but quizzing only is not enough, according to Erwin Ebbinghaus. With a considerable number of repetitions, it is much more advantageous to distribute them properly over a period of time than to prove them together in one single step. So this sentence is a result of the century-old pioneering studies of Mr. Ebbinghaus, and he based his research on his own experience, which is something that wouldn't be accepted by today's standards, but is still found out that the same amount of repeated studying of the same information spaced over time leads to a great retention of that information in the long run. So in terms, using the same time to memorize the same content in a single session leads to lower performance. Another approach is commonly referred to as cramming, and is typical of students attempting to memorize content at the very last moment before their exams or a test. Let's take a look at this experiment. So students were divided based on their study group, single mass reading and distributed reading, and the time of tests also immediately after study, or within two-day delays, or between the study and the test. So the histogram shows the number of IDs units recalled for these groups. So we see that on an immediate test, performance was greater after mass rereading than after distributed rereading or a single reading. In contrast, on a delayed test, performance was greater after distributed rereading than after mass rereading or single reading. So learning with distributed rereading is durable, and learning with mass rereading is not. We also have peer instruction. Classroom response systems can also be used in a different way, guys. So peer instruction was formalized by Professor Miser from Harvard in the early 90s, shocked by the way his students substituted understanding with memorization, and the students are given the course material in advance, so they can read it at home. This way they can prepare for the lectures. So one can devise strategies to give an incentive for this step. So during class, the professor briefly summarizes the topic and provides the students with a conceptual question. This sort of question is especially designed and focuses on one key notion at a time. For instance, it can ask to predict the impact of a variable over a system without using equations or written reasoning. This question is asked through a student response system. So let's take a look here. Students think by themselves and answer. They're also asked about their degree of confidence. For example, one of I just guessed or quite convinced or very convinced. And the professor notes the poll's results and faces three potential outcomes, which is less than 30% of the students choose the correct answer. Initial understanding is very poor. Hence, it is necessary for the teacher to revisit the concept, all right. The rate of success is greater than 70%. This result is satisfying. The professor explains the answer and proceeds to the next concept. Between 30% and 70% of correct answers in this case, students are invited to spend some time trying to convince each other of the choice they have made. And after a while, they must answer the same question. So after peer discussions and after the same question is asked once again, it's usually where the magic happens, guys. So results show that both the percentage of correct answers and the confidence of students increases. So the teacher can safely move on to the next topic. So what about the people that didn't get it right the first or the second time? If they still have uncertainties, this system will give them a red flag. So they will have more elements on how to prioritize their study before the exam. Besides boosting the performance of students, this method has several other advantages. So when answering the quiz, the students are forced to be committed to an answer to various degrees of conviction. Students have to externalize their answer, turn to the neighbor and convince them of their reasoning. And by doing this, students answer changes from a simple fact to a articulated reasoning. So eventually, the student gets emotionally invested in the learning process and research in cognitive sciences found that emotional kind of encoding is among the best to store information. So information is now easily accessible to the students. Classroom thought lessons can no longer be used solely to transmit this information. Engagement when facing an audience is therefore key. So to allow your students to get the most out of these class sessions, always remember to encourage active participation in the classroom. That is very important. So this brought me to our conclusions. Tests are most often used for assessment purposes, but the act of retrieval itself strengthens memory. So making information easier to remember later. Practicing retrieval is a powerful way to improve meaningful learning of information and is relatively easy to implement in the classroom. We also know that the benefit of spaced practice to learning is arguable. One of the strongest contributions that cognitive psychology has made to education and spaced practice is ready to be implemented in the classroom and at home or at distance. Peer instruction in turn could be a first step, a first effective step indeed in the large world of active learning and flipped classrooms. And when talking about learning, no generation is privileged as such. And with the help of technology, of course, the discoveries of cognitive and behavioral sciences are empowering everyone to achieve their maximum potential at scale. And this, my dear audience, is our mission at Wouklap. I'm going to thank you for all of your attentions. Hopefully listen to some of your questions if you might have them. And if you'd like to know more about Wouklap or like to know more about Wouflash, please leave your email address and we'll be happy to send you some more information on that. Thank you guys. Annalise, that was amazing. I was, I was blown away, it brought me back to a lot of things. So highlighters to try and remember all the bits and pieces. But this, this amazing, if you can learn your own memory, a guy like me could remember what I did yesterday. It would be great. And I'll look you up for a beer and a bag of chips when I'm next in Belgium. Do let me know if you're coming to Belgium. I will. I've got, I don't have any question. I've got, there's one comment from Angus and it was, I've never believed in the digital natives. They have technology skills only in the use of their immediate technology. I'm always surprised at how much 20-somethings need, need with technology in education. So there you go. I'll leave you that. So look at everybody. So I just, on behalf of everyone, I want to thank you Annalise. The, obviously they won't be able to participate in the part that we just participated in, which was great. And I knew you were from Belgium. But everyone, you can watch the re, re-recordings later on. But for now, we're going to take a 20 minute break. I think it is. So Annalise, I'll see you down at the cafe for a coffee. And it's bye from the education room. Thank you guys. Bye.