Education Bookcast

Hello everyone, I have not been recording podcast episodes for over a year. This is because I started a company this year, Panglot Labs Ltd, and I've had to put all my energy into it. This looks like it will continue for at least the medium term, so I've decided to formally state that I'm not going to be adding new material to the podcast regularly anymore for the foreseeable future. At Panglot Labs we make language learning apps for minority and endangered languages. We're currently working with the indigenous Formosan languages of Taiwan in collaboration with the Taiwanese government's Council of Indigeous Peoples; there are several other upcoming projects as of the end of 2024. My ambition is to create the most effective language e-learning experience in the world (based on my own experiences learning 9 languages and on my understanding of cognitive science and instructional design), but to use it specifically to help with the global problem of language endangerment. If you're a member of a minority or endangered language community, please don't hesitate to get in touch - you can search for Panglot Labs online or contact me via the podcast. In this episode I explain what I've been doing in 2024, my three biggest lessons from 8 (or 9) years of Education Bookcast, and recommendations I would have given myself all the way back in 2015 when I was reading education books and articles in preparation for starting the podcast. I mention the book Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications by Siegfried Engelmann and Doug Carnine; I forgot to mention Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning, which I also recommend. It has been a long journey. I believe it has been a success. I hope it has been of use to the audience. Wishing you all the best in 2025 and beyond! Goodbye :)

In order to understand learning, we need to understand the result of learning - expertise. This is much easier to approach in so-called "kind" domains, such as chess, where the rules are fixed and all information is available. However, there exist more "wicked" domains than this, such as tennis (where your opponent changes each match) or stock market investment (where the world is different each time). How do we study the development of expertise in fields such as these? Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, entitled Toward Deliberate Practice in the Development of Entrepreneurial Expertise: The Anatomy of the Effectual Ask, concerns expertise in the art of entrepreneurship. This is a wicked domain par excellence, so much so as to throw into doubt the applicability or at least the generalisability of ideas about expertise from other domains, and yet the Handbook has a chapter approaching this topic, which is commendable.  In this episode, you will hear about two key concepts that have arisen out of research on expert entrepreneurship - the Effectual vs. Predictive Frame; and the Entrepreneurial Ask. In other words, we will look at what research has to say about successful entrepreneurs' true attitudes vs. the popular conception in the media, and how they develop their skills. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 125. Entrepreneurship education and conspicuous consumption 125+. Interview with Rasmus Koss Hartman

There has been a ton of research on how experts see things differently than novices. (Like, with their eyes.) Everything from where they look, how long they focus for, and their use of peripheral vision, to their ability to anticipate what is going to happen through picking up subtle visual patterns. In this episode, I summarise and discuss this research. Enjoy the episode.

Mindset was the first thing I spoke about on this podcast. I even did a separate episode going into the controversies surrounding replication of Carol Dweck's original work. Then there were stress mindsets, introduced by Kelly McGonigal in her book The Upside of Stress. (I happen to have also covered a book by her twin sister Jane, Reality is Broken, about applying the motivational principles learned by game designers in wider life situations). But now I've encountered another kind of mindset: self-motivation mindset. Although the authors of Self-Regulation of Motivation: A Renewable Resource for Learning (2019) didn't name it that, it clearly is a type of mindset, in that it is a belief about oneself and one's potential. So now that we have not one, not two, but three mindsets to think about, I think it's time we tried to generalise as much as we can, and simply admit: mindsets matter. What other beliefs could there be that are affecting people's learning? Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 1. Mindset by Carol Dweck 68. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal 131. Mindset: Does it Replicate?

I haven't spoken on the podcast yet about my personal experience learning dancing. At university, I took part in dancesport, which is competitive ballroom and latin dancing; and in the last few years I have been learning to dance tango. I am struck by the differences in philosophies, skill sets, values, and learning cultures between these dance styles, so I wanted to share my experience with you. Enjoy the episode. *** Music used in this episode: Uno by Anibal Troilo https://open.spotify.com/track/5TFzKLS8tjVMikVaOllr8L?si=69d0c8fbee934d2e Orgullo Criollo by Osvaldo Pugliese https://open.spotify.com/track/74CjrywI50qOpaLrXo02ik?si=91b1644591a74407 Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! https://open.spotify.com/track/0ikz6tENMONtK6qGkOrU3c?si=76304e73b1b04754 Dear Future Husband by Meghan Trainor https://open.spotify.com/track/3cU2wBxuV6nFiuf6PJZNlC?si=0dd4a5e2a23c46bc ...plus one surprise I won't spoil.

This is my first ever attempt at a VIDEO podcast. If you just listen to the audio, you should be fine. This was a video produced for the STEM MAD conference in Melbourne in October 2023. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the conference, so I made this video to introduce the panel discussion on the role of generative AI in education. Enjoy the episode.

This is a quick review of where I am now after 150 episodes and just short of 8 years of Education Bookcast. Thanks for all of your support! Feel free to leave a review of the podcast, or, if you wish, support me on https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast . Enjoy the episode.

Since I've now reached episode 150, I've decided to do something I've never done before - discuss a fiction book. (This episode contains spoilers.) A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel from 1968, a time when the genre was still not very well-developed. Ursula Le Guin deliberately wanted to contravene some trends she saw in the existing genre, including the main characters being fair-skinned, and war as a moral analogy. In this book, the key issues are internal to a character, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as we read further. The main character Ged (a.k.a. Sparrowhawk) goes through several educational regimes - a local witch who wants to take advantage of him; a regional wizard, Ogion, who hopes to provide him with the wisdom not to abuse his precocious powers; and a school, on the island of Roke, which teaches him all the knowledge he wants. Ged learns through bitter experience the value of Ogion's wisdom, though he spurns it as a child hungry for knowledge, power, and other people's approval. I've read this book at least four times, and in three languages - English, Polish, and Spanish. Although its relevance to education is tenuous, I wanted to take advantage of episode 150 to talk about the book I've read the greatest number of times in my life. Enjoy the episode.

A lot of the classic expertise research, especially the research about deliberate practice and the "10,000 hour rule", is inspired by K. Anders Ericcson's study of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory. However, we have seen before how misleading sampling a particular culture and generalising the findings over the whole of humanity can be. Thankfully, Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn gives us something of an antidote to this classical music bias. Green's book is based on interviews with 14 musicians in south-east England, of which 13 were instrumentalists and one, a singer. Their musical genres were all "guitar-based popular music" which includes rock and folk music. In her book, a number of findings undermine standard narratives about learning, including the inevitability of practice being unpleasant (the musicians enjoy their practice, unline classical musicains); the need for sheet music in order to learn (they all worked from recordings, and most couldn't read music); and the need for instruction (none of these musicians had been extensively formally trained, and those who had been had found it unhelpful). Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Check out other episodes on anthropology and culture, and how they help provide wider samples for our understanding of psychology: 144. Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom 121. Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology 116. Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West by Jin Li 106. The Anthroplogy of Childhood by David Lancy 89. The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond 39. The Geography of Thought by Richard NIsbett SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .  

Any teacher in a Western cultural context knows that classroom behaviour is the most challenging part of the job. A lot of the time, it seems like crowd control is the main issue, and "teaching" is secondary. Unfortunately, teacher training courses don't do a good job of preparing teachers for this reality, with behaviour management rarely instructed at all.  Bill Rogers has been helping teachers develop their classroom behaviour management and discipline skills for decades. He has brought his calm and relationship-focused approach to innumerable schools, often including those with very challenging behaviour, or those in "special measures". His practical insights into what to do in the classroom, and the principles behind his approach, offer a valuable guide for teachers struggling with this aspect of their jobs. I intend this to be one of several behaviour management books that I will cover on the podcast. Hopefully, in this way I can direct some teachers and school leaders to some useful resources, share some practical advice, and draw some general conclusions about school discipline and learning. Enjoy the episode. *** SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

Dr Guy Emerson (a.k.a Guy Karavengleman) is a computational linguist working at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. In this episode, we discuss issues surrounding LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-4, and Google Bard. Guy is concerned about misinterpretations of what the technology does and is capable of. As a computational linguist, he works on language models with a focus on semantics and human language acquisition, and thus questions of linguistic meaning and understanding are particularly relevant to his work. While LLMs are an impressive technology with startling capabilities, we need to be aware of when we may be fooling ourselves about their potential. In this episode, we discuss what LLMs are; ways in which they have been misrepresented and misinterpreted; ethical questions about the companies developing this technology; and what they might be used for.  Enjoy the episode. *** SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast .

In the second part of this two-part episode about lessons learned from my time working in the education technology sector, I wanted to share a very significant quantitative finding to improve learning: what I call the "90% rule". Desirable difficulties is a concept that many know about and try to apply to teaching situations, but there is a question of how difficult one should make things. Surely there is a level at which things are too difficult? In which case, what is the perfect level of difficulty that we should aim for? The secret is this 90% number. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES Eglington, L.G., Pavlik Jr, P.I. Optimizing practice scheduling requires quantitative tracking of individual item performance. npj Sci. Learn. 5, 15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00074-4 See also the SuperMemo Guru wiki: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Optimum_interval. SUPPORT If you would like to support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, you can do so at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I've now been working as a data scientist in educational technology for over four years. In that time I've thought a lot about various educational concepts within edtech, and I want to share some of what I've learnt. In the first part of this two-part episode, I want to talk about what I call the Fundamental Duality of Educational Materials. The Fundamental Duality is that we use our content to measure our students / users (e.g. what they know), but we also use our users to measure our content (e.g. how difficult it is). This leads to a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, where all we see is the interaction of the users with the content, but from that single fact we have to somehow extract information about the two different interacting entities. For example, suppose that a user gets a question wrong. This could mean one of a number of things: Is the question difficult? Does the user not know this area very well? There is also a third possibility: Is this question faulty? i.e. did the user actually answer the question correctly, but it was marked as incorrect due to a bug in the system, or in the way the content was created? Answering these questions is difficult because they are apparently all possible in this situation. This is an illustration of the Fundamental Duality. In the episode, I make some mention of Item Response Theory (IRT), which is a method used in computerised adaptive testing (CAT) to handle this very issue. But IRT is quite difficult to explain to a lay audience, especially without the use of images, so I will focus on Elo and Glicko rating systems as examples of handling this duality. Enjoy the episode. *** You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

This is the second part of the message for my friend Guy about becoming a better lecturer. In this part, I go over 27 practical techniques and tips for improving lecturing (as well as improving the way homework exercises are designed), referring to the principles and theory outlined in the previous part to explain how and why these work. To be completely honest some of the suggestions are more general pedagogical suggestions rather than being specific to lecturing, but I decided to throw them in as well for completeness. Enjoy the episode. *** You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Another in the series of "really long voice notes from Staś". My friend Guy is a lecturer in natural language processing. He asked me if I could give him some tips about how to lecture better, so I told him I would record a podcast episode about it. I've divided the episode into two parts. In this first part, before we speak about practical things to do, I will discuss what the basic aims are, and some important preliminary framing questions - what are we trying to achieve? How does learning work? And when can I stop punching the ground with my fist? There is some extra pressure when talking about how to be a good lecturer, as in effect I might ironically give a bad lecture about how to lecture well. I think I did ok. Enjoy the episode. *** You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by going to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Benjamin Bloom is best known for Bloom's Taxonomy, a scheme for categorising ways of thinking about or interacting with learning content on a scale from less to more sophisticated. However, the project he led investigating the lifelong development of expertise should be much more famous. The book's full title makes it feel as though it was published in 1685 rather than 1985: The dramatic findings of a ground-breaking study of 120 immensely talented individuals reveal astonishing new information on Developing Talent in Young People. Bloom's team looked at extraordinary achievers in six domains: pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and neurologists, so that he had two each from artistic, athletic, and academic pursuits. He was trying to understand the life circumstances during childhood and adolescense - particularly the practice routines and social milieu - which led to the development of the subjects' expertise. Their research methods were unusual. Rather than using a large sample and taking quantitative data (which would have been difficult anyway due to the lack of a large number of exceptional people, by definition) or presenting qualitative interviews of individual case studies, Bloom's team interviewed around 20-30 people from each domain and then summarised the findings of these interviews. It leaves us with a sense of the qualitative experience of going through their learning processes, while also reducing the chances of over-generalising from a single case. Pianists were the main focus of discussion where Bloom and his colleauges tried to generalised the findings, although all six categories had a full exposition as to the findings for their domain in particular. The pianists followed an especially clear pattern which is worth starting from, and subsequently comparing with the others. In the context of an abundance of information about how people think and learn on shorter timescales (from seconds to weeks), having information about how people develop over the lifespan is invaluable. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot in future. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES This book is related to the development of expertise, which I talk about on a lot of episodes, but the one specific one I mentioned in the recording was: 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum via Buy Me a Coffee using the following link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Cover image: horse and rider by Nadia, age 5. The nature of talent is something that I dealt with near the beginning of the existence of Education Bookcast, reviewing books like Genius Explained, Outliers, The Talent Code, and Bounce. The general consensus was that talent is an illusion - people simply get better at things through exposure and practice. My confidence in this assertion was shaken when reading the IQ literature, but now, in the book The Road to Excellence edited by K. Anders Ericsson, the article The Rage to Master: the Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts by Ellen Winner. She points out how some exceptional children are obsessed with drawing, and draw in a way that is qualitatively different to ordinary children. She argues that the aforementioned orthodoxy of talent apparently not really existing is in fact incorrect, in light of these prodigies and their extraordinary output. In the recording, I discuss these findings and try to find a way to put it all together. Benjamin Bloom's book Developing Talent in Young People also comes in handy, as not only does Ellen Winner cite it (incorrectly, in my view), but he also provides a valuable insight into his forty years of research into learning in schools which helps us make sense of the conundrum of talent's apparent non-existence while we have well-documented examples of extraordinarily talented individuals, in the visual arts at least. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 18. Bounce by Matthew Syed 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Season 2 of the Pedagogue-Cast is here! The Pedagogue-Cast is a separate podcast project I share with Justin Matthys, founder of Maths Pathway. We discuss the kinds of questions that teachers might have about good practice which touch on cognitive science, making sure both to make the most of the research findings while also making it practical for use in the classroom. In this new season, Justin and I are going to discuss music, flow, focus, student choice, social & emotional learning interventions, and how motivation develops over time. Some places where you can find the Pedagogue-Cast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pedagogue-cast/id1637019084 - Apple podcasts https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc - Spotify https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xOTg0NDY3LnJzcw?hl=en - Google podcasts You can also try searching for the Pedagogue-Cast in your favourite podcast app. Enjoy!

After my last episode on behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism ("A Message for Zoë"), I heard back from Zoë herself, and also heard from Malin Tväråna, an education researcher in Sweden. I decided that it was worth recording an episode relating what I heard from them, and my thoughts about it. Enjoy the episode. ### REFERENCES Miłosz, Czesław (1953): The Captive Mind. Radford, Luis (2016): The Theory of Objectification and its Place among Sociocultural Research in Mathematics Education. Radford, Luis (2018): Teaching and learning (algebra or something else): Working together to make sense of similarities and differences between theories (and understanding oneself).

My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message. I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, and I think it generally gets a pretty poor treatment. Hopefully this will clear things up for a lot of people. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Note how the distribution of episodes reflects the importance of topics. Behaviourism is important to know about but it really isn't current as a way of thinking about learning, it's more of a historical relic with some lasting applicability to animal training. Constructivism is a mistaken and misleading theory that keeps negatively affecting educational practice and never seems to go away, so I keep having to talk about it. Cognitivism is a really effective approach which deserves to be known more widely - it took me a long time to find out about it, hence why the episodes about it tend to be more recent. Behaviourism: 3. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor Constructivism: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra; 87. Experiential Learning by Colin Beard and John Wilson; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die; 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences Cognitivism: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham; 132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through; 132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence; 135. Professional writing expertise; 136. Congitive architecture and ACT-R; 136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture REFERENCES I mention the following article as one where the authors (eminent figures in cognitive architecture, one of whom is a Nobel Prize winner) ask Constructivists to stop misrepresenting their work and saying things in direct contradiction to the evidence. Anderson, Reder, & Simon (1999). Applications and Misapplacations of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education. SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

In the previous recording, I was speaking about political economy using the example of prison gangs, taken from David Skarbek's book Social Order of the Underworld. In this recording, I give the example of 18th-century Atlantic pirates, as discussed in Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook. (It's a pun on Adam Smith's "invisible hand of the market".) We may have an image of pirates as fearsome, but this is at least somewhat deliberately manufactured by the pirates themselves. They wanted to have such a reputation so that their victims wouldn't resist as they looted their ships. There are parts of the pirate lifestyle, such as democracy and voluntarism, that we don't tend to discuss because they were part of life on a pirate ship but not something that they felt the need to advertise widely. What is most notable is that pirates' way of life seemed to be significantly preferable, and their governance significantly more "progressive", than that on merchant ships, which tended to be highly autocratic and abusive. It also provides a different perspective when we realise that sailors went into piracy at a time of labour market oversupply due to the ending of the War of Spanish Succession, when the British Navy didn't have the funds to keep on so many sailors, and yet this was the career of tens of thousands of young men who now had to find a job elsewhere. Overall, in these two recordings, I hope to have shown you that thinking about people's motivations and situations from the perspective of political economy makes a lot more sense, and builds a much richer picture, than merely psychological or sociological explanations (such as childhood trauma, psychopathy, or people's fundamental evil or violent nature). With this in mind, I hope that in future we can use more of this thinking when considering education, so that we can understand better how it works and how to improve it. Enjoy the episode.  

Please be advised that this episode contains mentions of violence and may be unsuitable for some listeners. I'd like to flesh out what I've been saying before about the power of economic analysis in explaining people's actions. Whereas when we normally think about motivation we think in terms of psychology, economists naturally think in terms of incentives. This kind of thinking is generally missing in educational discourse. There are two books that I found particularly fascinating and instructive on this point: The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek; and The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson. This recording focuses on the former. David Skarbek's book is fascinating and rich in both detail and theoretical explanation, so I focus on what I find most compelling and most relevant to transfer over to thinking about other contexts. First of all, he introduces existing criminological theories that aim to account for the rise in prison gangs, namely Deprivation theory and Importation theory. The former suggests that inmate behaviour is a result of the pain of imprisonment, and the latter focuses on pre-prison beliefs and experiences that are brought into prison. Skarbek departs from both of these theories, grounding his own analysis in political economy. He introduces us to the basic assumptions of economics - that people are self-interested and respond rationally to incentives - and goes on to describe the role of governance in society. His fundamental thesis is that prison gangs provide governance, meaning that they provide a form of public good which enhances personal safety and opportunities for trade (mostly in drugs). While I'm yet to fully apply the ideas of political economy to education (except for reading about it inThe Beautiful Tree, China's Examination Hell, and Education and the State), I feel that digging in to some examples like this can help us appreciate the reasons why people do things. Crucially, they are not all psychological. Enjoy the episode.

Education Bookcast released its first episode on the 1st of January 2016. I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the big things that I think I've learned in that time. I speak about: Psychology is overrated - the replication crisis and the bias in cultural sampling, and therefore the importance of anthropological evidence; Psychology is underrated - how amazing the field of cognitive architecture is, and how little known it appears to be as a field; apparent resistance to scientific findings from some people in the field of education; understanding expertise as a key to knowing how to improve education; the power of economic thinking in understanding motivation and behaviour; the failure of behaviourism, and the incorrect conclusions some people have drawn from it; and how school seems to be good for society, but the mechanisms of how this happens aren't completely clear, and I remain neutral on this point as I gather further evidence. Enjoy the episode. ### SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

This is the second episode concerning self-related beliefs taken from chapters of The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. Here I talk about self-efficacy, which concerns how much you believe that you can do something specific, e.g. solve a particular kind of maths problem. Self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy - it's easy to get confused with so many "self-words" flying around. There are even other words which aren't used by academics but are in common parlance, such as self-belief. I go into more detail and give more examples of the difference in the recording, but basically, whereas self-concept concerns your attitude to an entire domain (e.g. how good you think you are at sports), self-efficacy refers to how likely you think you would be to succeed in a specific class of activity (e.g. do you think you could run a marathon). Like self-concept, self-efficacy has been found to be strongly correlated with a bunch of positive behaviours, such as perseverance, but also outcomes, such as academic interest and academic performance. Unfortunately causality doesn't seem to have been established (as far as I can tell from the article), which blunts my enthusiasm about it somewhat. Nevertheless, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. The article also explains the sources of self-efficacy beliefs, which are four: mastery experiences (succeeding or failing); vicarious experiences (watching another person suceed or fail); social persuasion (including encouragement); and physiological state (e.g. anxiety). This list suggests interventions that can be used to increase self-efficacy, namely encouragement and the presentation of models (i.e. peers who can also succeed, possibly after some struggle). One thing I forgot to mention in the recording: in Chinese culture, it is common to tell children stories of famous successful people both from China and from around the world who struggled through great difficulties to achieve their life goals. Marie Curie seems to figure particularly prominently in these biographies, being somebody who had to move to a foreign country (France) to study, breaking the mould as a woman in science, being famed for her extraordinary work ethic, and going on to be the first person to ever achieve a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines (Physics and Chemistry). While there are many ways to interpret the details of how such stories would affect people, it might in part have a self-efficacy effect, by showing young people that it is possible to succeed even in difficult circumstances. Enjoy the episodes. *** RELATED EPISODES 13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen 45. The problem with self-esteem 46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff SUPPORT If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, you can visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

Among the huge academic tomes that I've been ploughing through recently is The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. I've long felt that my understanding of motivation is superficial and incomplete, and I wondered whether motivation was understood at all by anybody in the academic literature, or whether remained a mysterious and convoluted problem. The Handbook has shown me that there is much good research that has been done that sheds light on motivation, interest, curiosity, and how they relate to learning. The Handbook starts off with five chapters on "The Self and Its Impact". I have previously covered a number of self-related concepts on the podcast, such as self-esteem, stereotype threat, self-affirmation theory, and self-compassion, but my conclusion was that raising self-esteem does nothing to help people academically or to improve their character, and in fact could lead to narcissism, which is now at epidemic levels following the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980's. However, the Handbook has shown me that a closer look at self-related beliefs paints a more positive picture, and shows that such beliefs are central to students' academic success, as well as to people's life outcomes. I have had to radically change my understanding of the role and impact of this kind of belief, as well as greatly increasing how important encouragement seems to be for young people to flourish. In this first of two episodes on the science of self-belief and beliefs relating to the self, I will discuss self-concept, which is similar to self-esteem but domain-specific rather than global. For example, somebody might have a high self-concept for physical appearance (i.e. they think they are handsome / beautiful), but a low self-concept for physical performance (i.e. they think they are bad at sports); or a high self-concept for English (i.e. they think they are good at those classes) but a low self-concept for Mathematics (they think they are bad at maths). This domain specificity allows us to see through experiments where self-esteem interventions seem to do little, as often they do a lot for one specific self-concept, while not affecting the rest, thus making it seem that globally not much has changed, when in fact there has been a major positive impact. Overall, self-concept seems to be a very important concept (ha) for understanding what makes people successful, and a vital lever to pull in helping people reach their potential. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 13. The Psychology of Self-Defense: Self-Affirmation Theory by David Sherman & Geoffrey Cohen 45. The problem with self-esteem 46. Self Compassion by Kristin Neff SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

In this interview, I have the honour to speak with Professor Christian Lebiere, researcher in cognitive architecture, co-author of The Atomic Components of Thought, and one of the main developers of the ACT-R architecture. We talk on a range of topics relating to cognitive architecture, cognitive modelling, and psychology. My questions are listed below, by theme. A note on cover art: this is a diagram of ACT-R version 2.0 from 1993. More modern versions of ACT-R contain somewhat different components, but we discuss this diagram in the interview so I have shared it here. OVERVIEW. What is cognitive architecture? What is ACT-R? Why should we care? EVIDENCE. What evidence is there for ACT-R? How much evidence is there? What sort of human activities can it model? Can it model non-goal-driven behaviours such as daydreaming, for instance? Has ACT-R been tested with people of different ages (children vs. adults vs. the elderly)? Has it been tested with people of different cultures? SCOPE & ELEMENTS. ACT-R version 2.0 had no working memory component - why not, and what were the circumstances that led to it being introduced? How does ACT-R deal with consciousness? How is ACT-R being extended to deal with emotions? APPLICATION. When did ACT-R become mature enough as a theory for you to move from basic science and theory-building to application? What are the educational applications of ACT-R? PUBLIC RELATIONS. It took me over 7 years before I found out about cognitive architecture as a field. Nobody in education, or in the general public, seems to know about it, and it seems to never be mentioned by the vast majority of psychologists either. Given its achievements in modelling human cognition, why do so few people know about it? Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 79. What learning is 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters 82. Memorable Teaching by Peps McCrea 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting http://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I have recently discovered the field of cognitive architecture. I have been reading around the area for the last couple of months, and I would like to introduce it to my audience. It's an area of study with incredible achievements which revitalises my belief in psychology as a field, but which for some reason is not at all well known, even in education circles where it deserves to be known to all as the most impressive set of theories of cognition and learning ever produced. I particularly focus on one theory known as ACT-R, though I have also been reading about other architectures such as Soar, LIDA, EPIC, and CLARION. I will be able to go into more detail about some of these in later episodes of the podcast. For the moment, the biggest takeaway is what a cognitive architecture is and how impressive the achievements of the field have been so far. Cognitive architectures aim to describe human thinking and learning through analysing the mind into parts, and clearly specifying the role of each part and its interaction with other parts. It then makes predictions of how people would behave in a given situation based on these models - predictions that often achieve startling levels of accuracy, over a wide range of scenarios. The field is now mature enough that the architectures are routinely used by some psychologists to explain the results of their experiments, and the architectures are also used in technology as a basis for robot cognition or for computer game AI characters. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 79. What learning is 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters 82. Memorable Teaching by Peps McCrea 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

One of the patrons of the podcast wrote to me on the forum that while I have covered the research on learning to read in a fair amount of detail, I'm yet to speak about learning to write, and he would really like to know more about this since he teaches writing day to day. I happen to have been reading Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance edited by the late great K. Anders Ericsson (among others), and there is a chapter entitled Professional Writing Expertise which I thought might be relevant. So this one's for you, Tom. The chapter starts with an overview of the definition of what expert writing is as a task, followed by a description of the characteristics of expert writers, and finally goes on to describe something of the learning process of becoming a writer. Writing is a difficult skill to characterise because it comes in so many different forms, genres, and domains of expertise, but commonalities among expert writers are still possible to elucidate. While this article is more of a study of experts and expertise rather than a detailed map of how to go from zero to hero in writing, it does help us to understand the nature of the task and the kinds of skills that need to be mastered in order to write well, as well as identify the sorts of issues that even the pros struggle with. Enjoy the episode. *** If you would like to support the podcast and join the community forum, go to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

In this episode, I have Judith Millecker on as a guest. Judith is the author of the Philosocats series of books, which aims to help children ages 4-10 to engage in philosophy. It is an outgrowth of her work running philosophy for children sessions in London. We discuss her most recent book, social and emotional learning, critical thinking, and how pedagogy might vary by domain. Enjoy the episode.

I was reading the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance edited by K. Anders Ericsson yesterday, and after going through a chapter on medical experts, something struck me about the nature of expertise, automaticity, and Kahnemann and Tversky's System 1 vs. System 2 (also known as dual-process theory, popularised by their book Thinking, Fast and Slow), which joined together what I know about chess players, doctors, and how literacy works. I'm excited to share it with you today. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann 17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey 79. What learning is 95. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham 114. Philosophy of Science - the good bits 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences SUPPORT To support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, visit www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I now have a new podcast, the Pedagogue-Cast! Together with Justin Matthys, co-founder of Australian education technology company Maths Pathway, we discuss how education research can be applied in the classroom. It's designed to be an easier listen for busy teachers, with a more immediate practical takeaway. Website: https://thepedagoguecast.com.au/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/437GYDF4jkkFxfkGR4cknc I've shared the first episode of Season 1 in this recording so you can get a sense of what the podcast is like. To listen to further episodes, visit the Pedagogue-Cast itself. I'm excited! Enjoy the episode.

In this part of the episode, I will discuss the evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, drawing from Project Follow Through, but also from 50 years of studies that have been published since. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley Becker, Douglas Carnine, and Russel Gersten (1988) No Simple Answer: Critique of the "Follow Through" Evaluation by Ernest House, Gene Glass, Leslie McLean and Decker Walker (1978) Follow Through Revisited: Reflections on the Site Variability Issue by Russel Gersten (1984) The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Jean Stockard, Timothy Wood, Cristy Coughlin and Caitlin Rasplica Khoury (2018) RELATED EPISODES 76. Comprehensive School Reform SUPPORT To support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I've spent a lot of time on the podcast so far discussing discovery learning, but not had any episodes explicitly dedicated to what might be considered its antithesis, Direct Instruction. In this episode I finally get round to this worthy topic. First of all, uppercase "Direct Instruction", or DI for short, should be distinguished from lowercase "direct instruction". The latter refers to explicit teaching in general, whereas the former, as a proper noun, refers to a specific implementation and philosophy as designed by Siegfried Engelmann and colleagues, starting in the early 1960s. Direct Instruction is also considered to be a type of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR), and indeed, in my episode covering a meta-analysis of CSR I pointed out that DI was one of the three most effective CSR models. Direct Instruction came to fame in the early 1970s as a result of Project Follow Through, which was the largest educational study ever funded by the United States government. DI was one of the 13 models used in the program and performed very well. Since then it has had a further half century of evidence gathering, which will give us plenty to look at. In this first part of the episode, I introduce the nature and methods of Direct Instruction, as well as a brief introduction to Project Follow Through. The aim is to have you familiar with exactly what this approach is before we go into how well it does or doesn't work in the later recordings of this episode. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES The Direct Instruction Follow Through Model: Design and Outcomes by Engelmann et al. (1988) The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research by Stockard et al. (2018) RELATED EPISODES 74. Marva Collins' Way by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin 76. Comprehensive School Reform 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die SUPPORT You can support Education Bookcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

[By the way, the cover image is of the proportion of children in different countries who have a growth mindset (darker red is more). The data was taken from PISA 2019 and I constructed the image using Python. Grey countries are those for which I didn't have data.] I was initially a huge supporter and admirer of Carol Dweck's work on fixed vs. growth mindset. The very first episode of the podcast was about her book, and I mentioned it many times afterwards, talking about how amazing it was. Then a couple of years ago I lost confidence. Angry about being misled by advocates of constructivist, project-based, or discovery learning, and pessimistic about psychology as a whole with my recent discovery of the degree to which studies would have completely different results depending on cultural sample, I heard that Dweck's work was having trouble replicating. In episode 100, I spoke about my concerns with mindset, which was particularly bitter since I'd once been such a strong advocate of it. It just seemed like the entire field of psychology was collapsing around me and there was nobody I could trust. Since then, a listener of the podcast asked me to elaborate on my position regarding mindset. Why had I changed my view? What do I currently think? I decided to take a deeper look at what had been happening in the mindset scene, and this episode is the product. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 1. Mindset by Carol Dweck 68. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal (about stress mindsets) REFERENCES Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance): Does mindset affect children's ability, school achievement, or response to challenge? Three failures to replicate by Li & Bates (2018) Failure to Replicate: Testing a Growth Mindset Intervention for College Student Success by Brez et al. (2020) Changing Mindsets: Effectiveness trial Evaluation Report from the Education Endowment Foundation (2019) To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses by Sisk et al. (2018) THE ONE VARIABLE THAT MAKES GROWTH MINDSET INTERVENTIONS WORK by Russell T. Warne (2020) Schools are buying "growth mindset" interventions despite scant evidence that they work well by Brooke Macnamara (2018) What Can Be Learned From Growth Mindset Controversies? by Yeager & Dweck (2020) SUPPORT If you would like to join the Education Bookcast community and support this podcast, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

I stumbled across a fascinating paper looking into how children conceptualise the world around them. Mental Models of the Earth: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood shares an experiment where children were asked questions about the shape of the Earth, and the authors found six (!) different mental models that the children had: rectangular, disc-shaped, spherical, flattened sphere, hollow sphere, and the bizarre "dual Earth" model. There are important theoretical and pedagogical implications of an enquiry like this. Cognitive scientists argue about the right way to think about novices' preconceptions - do they have small, fragmented pieces of knowledge with no consistency on further probing; or self-consistent "alternative theories" that can generate answers to novel questions, albeit wrong answers? The answer to that theoretical question leads to different implications about teaching - are we aiming to provide knowledge where there is very little, and consolidate the little bits of correct thinking into a larger whole; or are we looking to change children's theories of how the world works, which would generate some resistance from the children, and would require careful targeting of the weak points of their existing models? In the case of basic astronomy, this paper supports the latter view, that children construct self-consistent "alternative theories" that make sense as a whole, given the constraints on their thinking based on their everyday experiences. There are some fascinating examples of children making up imaginative models to accord with what they've been told and what they have experienced, and overall it offers a window into the way that children think. Enjoy the episode. *** REFERENCES Mental Models of the Earth: a Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood by Vosniadou & Brewer (1992) SUPPORT If you would like to join the Education Bookcast community and support this podcast, visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

You can now support Education Bookcast and join the community forum, where we discuss all things education. Visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast to learn more.  

This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me). The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many internal contradictions. They propose a new perspective on transfer called Preparation for Future Learning (PFL), as opposed to the generally accepted standard which they label Sequestered Problem Solving (SPS). In short, when you ask people to solve an unfamiliar problem and grade them on whether they get the right answer (SPS), they universally do badly; but when you ask them how they would approach solving the problem, including what questions they would ask (PFL), then you get a completely different perspective - not only do people do much better on the whole, but more educated people tend to do better, showing that education is apparently teaching some more broad kinds of problem solving (which is otherwise very hard to demonstrate). In addition, when you allow students a bit of time to invent solutions to problems at the start of the class before teaching the standard solution, not only do they perform just as well in a test as those who spend the whole time learning the solution, but they far outperform them on measures of transfer of learning, getting in one case almost triple the score of the control groups. Mind-blowing! When I discovered this article I was slightly shocked and somewhat whiplashed, as I felt forced to change my mind again on discovery learning, to a third position (it has its place at the start of a class learning a new concept, where it can dramatically improve transfer of learning for students). I was sort of ready for it though, as I had been thinking recently that while I had seen a lot of research on discovery learning and more didactic approaches (such as Direct Instruction), I hadn't yet seen anything where the two were used within the same lesson. Well now I have, and the results are astonishing. Enjoy the episode. *** Link to paper: https://aaalab.stanford.edu/assets/papers/2005/Efficiency_and_Innovation_in_Transfer.pdf RELATED EPISODES: Mention of generative learning: 127. Necessary Conditions of Learning by Ference Marton Transfer of learning: 98. Range by David Epstein; 108. Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock; 110. Transfer of Learning by Robert Haskell Discovery learning: 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning, the idea that won't die

I wanted to talk a bit about some areas in which my thinking about education has improved with the addition of nuance, and about the ways in which thinking can be more nuanced. Desirable difficulty - a case where quantification and the awareness of countervailing forces / costs improved my initial, flawed understanding. Cognitive load theory - a case where I was so enamoured with the power of the model that I had started to equate the it with truth (or confuse the "map" with the "territory"), but a well-put listener comment made me realise that there are phenomena that the theory cannot account for. Motivation - a case where perspectives offered from other cultures and other disciplines undermined my initial confidence in the findings of psychologists. I also discuss the idea put forward by Ference Marton in discussing the following questions: Is learning by yourself better than learning by being taught? Does homework enhance learning? Is problem-based learning better than lectures for big classes? Is individualized learning preferable to group work? Is project work a good idea? Marton writes: The problem with questions of this kind is that they cannot be answered. It is not that they cannot be answered yet, and it is not because of a scarcity of research funds or a scarcity of good ideas. They are simply imponderable because of the degree of generality. Asking these questions is like asking whether pills are better than operations, or whether a hammer is better than a screwdriver, or whether eating is good for your health. While I do believe that there are some ideas that can be flatly considered wrong or unhelpful, there is something to say for Marton's view. Ultimately a mature understanding requires a well-developed worldview or philosophy, which can't be transmitted in a single sentence. Questions at the level of generality of "Is eating good for your health?" demand a structure to be put in place explaining the nature of human nutrition and digestion, not simply a "yes" or "no" answer. Enjoy the episode.

A listener of the podcast by the name of Malin Tväråna (senior lecturer at Uppsala University's Department of Education) requested in a review of the podcast that I cover this book, and so here it is! Ference Marton is a professor of Education at Göteburg University. His big idea is about discernment of important features of a situation (what he calls "critical aspects") being a (the?) key element of learning, and therefore the importance of the nature and quantity of variation in instruction. He explains his ideas in theory at length, after which he provides a number of examples of experiments that provide evidence for his interpretation. This is one of those cases of a simple and apparently obvious idea being particularly fruitful when thoughtfully applied. Of course we can't learn something if we can't notice it, and of course it's difficult to notice something if it's always the same - hence the classic "fish in water" problem. But this retrospectively obvious principle can be used to make learning more effective, and, among other things, is partly responsible for Chinese students doing so well at mathematics. The book also brings a few other interesting ideas to light, such as starting a lesson from "discovery learning" with a problem and following up with instruction causing a kind of pre-testing effect (I have elsewhere on the podcast spoken about the danger of the former and the value of the latter); and the bizarre case of "generative learning", where people do better on a delayed test than on an immediate test. Marton uses his own theory in trying to explain these and other anomalies (who could blame him?), even in cases where I would find it more natural to reach for a different kind of explanation, but I'm grateful for hearing about these counterintuitive tidbits regardless. Thank you again Malin! Were it not for you, I wouldn't have known about this author or this book. Enjoy the episode.

"Are you left-brained or right-brained?" Brain lateralisation has been known about in neuroscience since the early days, but it has been a taboo over the past few decades since pop science sources distorted the literature and made the topic disreputable. Neuroscientists could detect differences between the hemispheres in different activities, but they were having trouble understanding the big picture of why there was asymmetry at this fundamental level of brain structure. Iain McGillchrist used to be an academic of English literature at the University of Oxford, but after becoming frustrated with what he saw as the over-analysis of poetry so as to make it lose its implicit meaning, decided to change career entirely and pursue medicine. Since that time, he has taken ten years to research and write this book about brain lateralisation and its importance to life, culture, and our moment in history. For me personally, reading this book made me realise that my most commonly used approach to thinking about the mind - cognitive load theory, dividing long-term memory from working memory, and describing the structure and schemata of long-term memory in order to understand the nature of knowledge and learning - never included any reference to brain lateralisation, despite, as it turns out, enormous differences between the two sides. I also had some takeaways regarding my own philosophy and ways of thinking. In this episode, we will be focusing on McGillchrist's characterisation of the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, with references to many findings from scientific papers, as well as overall themes that emerge from this synthesis. While I can see no real practical insights regarding what to do in a classroom, I believe that this book is a major contribution to our understanding of the mind, the brain, and humanity, and therefore it should interest many listeners. Enjoy the podcast.

Dr Rasmus Koss Hartmann is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of the article that I covered in the first part of this episode, entitled Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur. In this interview we spoke about where he got the idea, the damage that Veblenian entrepreneurship can do to the economy, urban myths about entrepreneurship, potential flaws of popular mottos such as those promoted in The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, and the role of entrepreneurship education. Enjoy the episode.

Entrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are not the only reasons that people become entrepreneurs. Some do so to fulfil a kind of fantasy, or simply to look good. And there is an entire educational sub-industry offering to help them to indulge this fantasy, for a price. In Towards an "Un"trepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur, authors Hartmann, Spicer, and Krabbe try to explain a strange trend in recent years: while entrepreneurial activity has gone up, success rates for entrepreneurial ventures have gone down. After considering several possible explanations, they ultimately conclude that a major reason for "excess entry" into what one might call "high-class" entrepreneurship (e.g. founding a tech start-up) is due to a sub-class of entrepreneurs who are not driven to pursue real opportunities in the market, but are simply trying to adopt the identity of an entrepreneur because of its high social status. Dubbed "Veblenian entrepreneurs" (or sometimes "wantrepreneurs") after Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist who coined the term conspicuous consumption at the end of the 19th century, these are individuals who are drawn in by a huge industry designed to sell people a dream and a lifestyle which can take them away from everyday mundanity and make them seem successful to their peers. Consumers of the entrepreneurship industry's products (such as courses, conferences, publications, and consultancy) have been shown to engage in more entrepreneurial activity, while actually having lower success rates. This idea is somewhat analogous to the notion of human capital vs. signalling in education economics - in other words, what is the value of education? Does it make you a better and more productive person, or does it just make you look good to employers? (What is the value of entrepreneurship? Does it contribute to the economy, or does it just make you look good on social media?) It also has implications for entrepreneurship educators. Should we really be encouraging entrepreneurship for everybody who is interested, or should we be discouraging those who are least likely to succeed, so that they can make better choices? Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 115. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber 103. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee 23. So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport

I picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused with ideological stances commonly supported and even dogmatically preached in educational circles, whose major tenets have been shown wanting time and again by empirical evidence from cognitive science - not to mention the practical experience of teachers. The whole thing is made all the more facepalm-worthy for the extent to which the author emphasises that his ideas apparently are based on "cognitive science" ideas of "deep learning". In practice he has paid attention to some important facets of the cognitive science of learning (mainly the value of the novice vs. expert axis of comparison), but draws from this ludicrous conclusions which are not, in fact, supported by the science at all. Ultimately, I decided that this book is a good opportunity to discuss widely circulated claims which are invalid or misleading. Among these are the denigrating of "instructionism" (read: common sense teaching) by use of a combination of straw men and false dichotomies; the suggestion that learning should be "authentic" (i.e. inefficient); motte-and-bailey arguments concerning the (un)importance of factual knowledge; and the fallacy of gaining expertise by direct mimicking of experts' day-to-day activities (even though that isn't the way those experts themselves became experts). Enjoy the episode.

How the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me than it would have been when I started. After introducing some basics of brain anatomy, the author starts to describe learning, covering a lot of ground that we've already seen in this podcast in a generally acceptably accurate way. As usual for books about learning with "brain" in the title, it feels as though this word is maintained largely for the purposes of hype, as references to brains in this book, as in others, do little to help us understand the nature of learning. The book does have several important flaws, most striking of which is the author's apparent lack of understanding of the concept of working memory, perhaps the most important learning concept to grasp. The author seems to think that cramming for a test only keeps information in working memory and doesn't allow for transfer to long-term memory, which suggests that crammers have miraculous working memories that can hold far in excess of the pruported limit 2-7 items of information, and that they hold this information in there for days (presumably there is nothing they can divert their attention to in the meantime). How the Brain Learns does contain a few interesting nuggets, and there are a number of ideas that it explains more or less correctly. This puts it way above its apparent cousin Brain-based Learning, put still far behind Why Don't Students Like School? and other books on this podcast for helping us understand how learning works. I do not recommend it, but I've seen worse. Enjoy the episode. ### RELATED EPISODES 53. Brain-based Learning by Eric Jensen - a similar, though considerably worse, book about learning and brains. 79. What learning is - about the modal model of memory (cognitive architecture: working memory and long-term memory), the most important thing I've learned in six and a half years of researching this stuff. 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham - the classic cognitive science book for teachers. 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters - a model very similar to the modal model of memory.

In my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that Matters I spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them. Jones' argument rests on data showing that IQ correlates positively with patience, win-win thinking, productivity in teams, supporting "good" policies (i.e. those endorsed by experts), and saving more money. There is also data to indicate that richer countries tend to have higher average IQ, and some indications that causality goes from IQ to national wealth. The Flynn effect - a constant increase by the equivalent of 3 IQ points per year around the world throughout the 20th century - shows that IQ can be increased, but a more important question is whether that increase can be encouraged somehow. Jones also covers this ground, although it seems that we don't really know good answers to this. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop authors like David Didau in Making Kids Cleverer proposing that the purpose of school is to increase IQ so that children can benefit from the associated health, wealth, and other benefits. Overall, by combining economics and intelligence research, Hive Mind brings new perspectives to each of these domains. Enjoy the episode. ### RELATED EPISODES 111. Intelligence: All that Matters by Stuart Ritchie

This is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need. In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the extent to which Attachment Theory as it is currently formulated makes sense within these example societies. We will see the themes of the child not "belonging" to parents, alloparenting or additive parenting, the need for the mother to get back to work after birth, the lack of an ideology of mother love, and child autonomy and choice concerning its caregivers as factors that undermine the basic thinking of Attachment Theory, and expose it as ultimately ethnocentric. Finally, we will see an example of where application of Attachment Theory's suggestions seems to actually lead to harm, as a final demonstration of the shortcomings of this psychological theory. Enjoy the episode.

The title of this episode might ruffle some feathers. Attachment Theory is developmental psychology's shining star, the theory with the greatest predictive success, and one which has become popular among child psychiatrists. You can now hear it spoken about wherever child psychology is the main topic, and it has become something of a buzzword. Could this scientific theory really be "cultural ideology"? What would that even mean? Attachment Theory as Cultural Ideology is the name of an essay within the volume Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Universal Human Need which I talk about in the recording. It is a collection of essays written by anthropologists plus one evolutionary psychologist on the problems with existing Attachment Theory - mainly its lack of applicability outside of a Euro-American context. The Cultural Ideology essay in particular was the one that got me to buy the book, and it shows how Attachment Theory is in fact deeply intertwined with 20th century Western moralisms around the treatment of children. In this part of the episode, I describe what Attachment Theory is, how it was developed, and biological evidence that would at least partially weaken its existing claims. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Anthropology: 39. The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett; 106. The Anthropology of Childhood by David Lancy; 116. Cultural Foundations of Learning, East and West by Jin Li

Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education? Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state. I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is! In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart in the Time of the Fifth Sun: An Examination of Aztec Education by Timothy Reagan. You will hear about Aztec society and values, and how the education system fit within the society in order to achieve its educational aims. You will also hear a lot of bloody stories of human sacrifice. Enjoy the episode.

I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself. For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience: Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections Practice and repetition -> myelination ...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages. This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in the complex world of teaching and learning. Secondly, it is grounded in the idea that learning is all about addition to long-term memory, which is now a deeply ingrained idea with me. Thirdly, it is in line with the way that most teachers would teach, which makes sense - you would think that teachers tend to do something more or less right after so many years of experience. However, there is one anomaly that I couldn't place in this model: pre-testing. It turns out that when you are given a test on something before you start learning, even if you're completely ignorant of the topic, it boosts your learning compared to just starting off with study straight away. How could this make sense with the above? For a while I just brushed it aside, but now I realised how it would fit in, as "stage zero": humility, or realisation of ignorance. As I understand it, this is a stage where you can overcome your cognitive biases which make you not want to expend effort to learn anything, by assuming that you already know this, or that there is nothing to learn. Immediate exposure to a test shatters this illusion, and makes you more able - even subconsciously - to pay attention to the lesson. One of the great things about this way of thinking is that it makes room for some "progressive" ideas within the starkly "traditional" view of stages 1 and 2. While I still feel that progressive education is largely a bad idea and a failure, I don't want to become dogmatically married to another way of thinking, especially not one which is to some extent defined by its opposition to progressivism. The chance for at least some reconciliation through synthesis is something that I warmly welcome. In the recording, I also discuss how this relates to ideas of mental warm-ups, desirable difficulty, and the differences between learning and performance. Enjoy the episode.

This book touched my heart, and it changed my mind about neuroscience. I wasn't going to read this book. While I was at my friend's house, I picked this book up and read the preface, written by Will Self. He wrote that Oliver Sacks is extraordinary in the way in which he fuses such humanity with his scientific probing of the brains of his patients. At that point, I got interested, and my friend told me I could borrow it. I gobbled the book up in two days. Having read the book, I can see what Will Self was saying. I used to feel that neurologists were dehumanising of people, seeing them as a pile of neurons, and seeing themselves arrogantly as masters of the most important discipline. Oliver Sacks couldn't be more different. He has a real care for the humanity, for the soul of his patients, even as he describes the areas of brain damage. He marries up scientific description and human concern in a way that is life-affirming and touching. I used to think that neuroscience is too low-level to be relevant to education, and that higher-level cognitive science is enough. To  a large extent, I still believe this. Neuroscience in education seems to me like trying to understand why your browser plugin isn't working properly by inspecting your computer's microchips - yes, the fundamental problem is there somehow, but it's just not the best way of solving the issue. Eric Jensen's useless book Brain-based Learning also vividly showed how neuroscience seems incapable of making a tractable theory or set of coherent principles for teachers and others in education to work from (I covered this book in detail in episode 53). However, I now see a different relevance to neuroscience. Just as psychologists have been sampling too narrowly by focusing almost exclusively on Western university undergraduates, so have they been sampling too narrowly by only looking at people without brain damage. I see neurology now as a new ground in which to sample widely, in order to get a proper sense of how the mind works by considering really different minds, or minds that don't seem to work properly. Enjoy the episode.

This episode feels almost nostalgic, as it is a return to the theme of the roles and interactions of the conscious and subconscious mind, something which I focused on early in the podcast and came out strongly in my main series on expertise (around episode 20). It also shares some relation to books on the topic of cognitive biases on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has two main points to make: firstly, that ignorance and cognitive biases often outperform knowledge and "clear thinking"; and secondly, he proposes a way in which gut feelings work. On the first point, Gigerenzer points us to some experiments which are convincing of their point but difficult to know how to make use of. It turns out that, in tasks like guessing which of two cities has the larger population, if you've heard of one but not the other, the one you've heard of is probably more populous. This requires that you are "somewhat ignorant" - you know one city but not the other - as if you are completely ignorant (not heard of either) or somewhat knowledgeable (heard of both) then you can't use this trick. It seems very impractical to try to reach a perfect state of mild ignorance in everything in order to use this trick, and you would have to give up the benefits of knowledge in order to do so... Nevertheless, the theoretical point is well made. On the second point, Gigerenzer proposes that gut feelings are simple rules that cut out most of the information, and they often make use of an algorithm called "take the best". The algorithm works like this: you compare whether the available options in the most important feature, then the next important feature, and so on, until in one of the comparisons one of the options is clearly better, at which point you choose that one. So, for example, if you're choosing a restaurant, maybe you first think about the food, but two places both have good food; then you compare atmosphere, but both atmospheres are good; then you compare price, and find one is considerably cheaper, so you go there. Overall Gigerenzer's work makes a welcome contribution to thinking about the nature of intuition. Probably the most insightful idea is that gut feelings use simple rules, because that way they can cut out the noise and make decisions easier. Richard Dawkins apparently once claimed that when we catch a ball we must be implicitly solving partial differential equations; Gigerenzer shows that this is probably not what happens. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Phenomenology of learning / relation between conscious and subconscious mind: 7. The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner; 9. The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey; 10. Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi; 17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; 49. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin; 64. What Bruce Lee taught me about learning Mental architecture: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters Expertise: 18. Bounce by Matthew Syed; 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe; 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Expertise in "wicked" domains: 98. Range by David Epstein; 108. Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock The world is complicated: 113. The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland Cognitive biases: 11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; 12. "Picture yourself as a stereotypical male" by Michelle Goffreda