Research summary - Features of Excellent Schools

What is education for?

One useful approach to exploring current thinking on education might be to consider where we stand in relation to three central ideas about the purposes of education. These three central ideas (education for initiation into desirable knowledge and skills, for personal meaning and for the development of self) are summarised as follows:

• Education is concerned with the initiation into knowledge, skills and logical thought processes regarded by society as important and desirable (e.g. for future employment and for appreciation of the cultural legacy). This view leads typically to a “core” curriculum for all pupils.  Active involvement and motivation on the learner’s part are also important.  This theory underpins current Scottish curricula, such as 5-14 and Standard Grade.
• Education aims to develop personal meaning through purposeful, reflective thinking, hypothesising and collaborative work with teachers and other learners. Active engagement, curiosity, intuition, imagination are important, as well as logical thought,  and produce learners motivated to meet new challenges.
• Education is the process of “becoming a person”, which continues lifelong and is not confined to people’s experiences in educational establishments but includes all their experience of the society in which they live.  Learners pursue “identity” goals which are unique to their own personal development, leading to adaptable, self-confident, fully accepted members of society.

Many aspects of Scottish Executive Education Department (SEED) policy in recent years suggest that, while cultural legacy, education for employment and personal understanding of what is studied remain important, there have been significant moves towards the broader idea that education should be a process of becoming a person. This process includes learning about the things that society feels a need to “pass on” as valuable and building one’s own understanding of key aspects of culture in the process. It also involves the development of complex thinking, learning and social interaction skills. It continues beyond school leaving age and ideally is lifelong.

SEED’s agenda is grounded in the Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc. Act 2000, which places a duty on education authorities to secure that education aims to develop the personality, talents and mental and physical abilities of the child or young person to their fullest potential.

SEED’s Ambitious Excellent Schools (2004) highlights their belief in the potential of all pupils to become rounded individuals who can make a personal contribution to society. 
The publication goes on to identify key aims as:

• Enabling pupils to be successful learners, confident, responsible citizens and effective contributors to society
• Providing choices and the opportunity for them to realise their own potential fully
• Giving teachers and schools freedom to tailor learning to individual needs
• Developing personal support systems to ensure that all young people, including those in challenging circumstances, have equal opportunities to benefit from learning
• Meeting the full range of personal needs by integrating all children’s services in Community School developments
• Arranging for training for schools and education authorities in promoting action to combat such social evils as sectarianism, discrimination and racism.

Brain research

The recent SCRE review (summarised in Spotlight 92, Hall 2005) offers a number of important reminders of what is currently known for sure about neuroscience and education, as opposed to 'myths'.

 

Are there critical periods for brain development?

Certain types of learning are developed strongly in sensitive periods, particularly during the first three years of life. The result of responding to stimuli in the environment is an enormous growth in the brain’s connective synaptic highways.  As part of our evolutionary inheritance, the types of learning most susceptible to these sensitive periods are those in which the brain expects visual, auditory and tactile stimuli constantly present in their environment,  resulting in the development of sensory, motor and language skills.

Other forms of learning, which include the passing on of culturally acquired knowledge systems, occur only when the need arises for them.  These forms of learning are not related to sensitive periods when the brain is growing, but rely on the brain working effectively through the ‘pruning’ of synaptic connections.  However, neuroscience has established that “plasticity”, the brain’s ability to change and reform synaptic connections as a result of learning or in response to environmental changes, is particularly apparent in early childhood. There may be a sensitive period of development of reasoning and problem-solving in teenage years. However, we can continue to learn new things at every stage of life.

Do enriched environments improve learning?

The SCRE review argues that there are noted detrimental affects on brain development in artificially deprived environments (where normal stimuli are limited). However, there is only limited evidence that enrichment programmes for the very young improve learning later in life.

Does brain laterality impact on how we learn?

One of the oldest neuromyths concerns the idea that the two halves of the brain work in fundamentally different ways, the left brain managing logicality, verbal reasoning and problem-solving and the right intuition, creativity, and images rather than words.  This is an over-simplification, as even a simple task, such as reading a number, activates parts of the brain in both hemispheres.  Most tasks require multiple areas of the brain to work together.  The research reinforces ideas about the complexity of learning and about the value of multi-sensory approaches to it.

 

The role of emotions in learning

The significance of emotional factors in learning is widely recognised.  In discussing the place of the emotions, relationships, personal motivation and commitment in education, reference is frequently made to Daniel Goleman (1995, 1998, 2003), who has contributed much on the development of "emotional intelligence". 

There is earlier work, eg., by David Ausubel (Ausubel 1968 and Ausubel and Robinson 1969) on the effect of personality and attitude on learning in general.  Ausubel identifies three motivating forces for success: 

• The first is ego-enhancement, as a result of success of competition with oneself and between peers
• The second force for Ausubel is the desire to be accepted and respected by others, one’s peer group and other groups, such as teachers
• A cognitive motivating factor: success in previous learning and interest in a stimulating challenge.

The research of Ausubel and other social psychologists have implications for styles of learning and teaching, in particular:

• The use of positive feedback
• Inclusive ethos
• Achieving of personal ambitions
• Teachers having high though not unrealistic expectations.

Meaningful learning

"Meaningfulness" is a key idea underpinning different concepts of the process of learning.

Meaningful 'reception learning'

To the extent that Scottish education promotes "reception learning" of knowledge and skills to which teachers introduce pupils, some features derived from the idea of learning as "behaviour modification" are important:

• Sharing of clearly defined goals
• Progress towards the overall aim is achieved through a series of logically planned sub-goals
• Stimuli, in the form of information, explanation  and tasks, are provided, which require the learner to interact with the teacher and the task
• Adequate time is given to working on the tasks and the thinking involved
• Reinforcement of successful learning is provided through assessment and constructive feedback.

This tightly structured teaching approach underpins the concept of “mastery learning”, the influence of which can be discerned behind the specification of “attainment targets” or “learning outcomes” in national courses and curriculum guidelines.

Deep, meaningful learning

This concept relates to a "constructivist" concept of learning, with the learner building new understandings on the basis of previous experience and understanding. Writers associated with this idea include Ausubel (1968, 1969) and Entwistle (1981, 1988).

A key distinction is between surface learning, often as aresult of attempts to learn by  rote, and deep meaningful learning. The types of task set and teachers’ expectations can influence learners' approaches.

Features tending to encourage rote learning include:

• questions testing only “surface” knowledge” (e.g. straightforward facts)
• anxiety about meeting expected assessment/examination requirements
• overloading syllabuses with factual information to be recalled
• periodic short answer tests.

In the deep approach, the learner has an intention to grasp the heart of a text or body of information being studied/explained, relates ideas to one another, looks for patterns and principles and uses evidence to justify reaching a conclusion. 

Students’ need to pass assessments creates a hybrid (strategic) approach between the two models.  This focuses on two concerns: the academic content; and the demands of the assessment tasks.  The interest in the content is typical of a deep approach, but the alertness to assessment requirements is typically strategic. Well designed assessments/examinations can foster a deep/strategic approach.  If the assessment tests only surface knowledge, students are likely to prefer a rote learning approach.

Versatile learning strategies

Gordon Pask suggested that we all tend to have naturally one or other of two types of learning strategy, by which we pursue our preferred type of meaningfulness.

Comprehension learning - holist approach. The learner:

• attempts to grasp "the big picture" the whole of of a task
• makes many linkages to other topics, other experiences
• uses analogies to make sense of the new learning

Operational learning - serialist approach. The learner:

• has a narrower focus
• works in logical, sequential steps
• concentrates on details and successive steps, rather than broad analogies and links to wider experience.

Pask points out that teachers need to be aware of and adaptive to individual pupils' natural holist or operational preference, but also that successful learning requires a versatile use of both types of approach. He reinforces the idea that learners’ “own words” explanations are vital to understanding. Successful learners engage in a “conversational" process in which they question and try out ideas on another person or on another part of their own mind. This process requires both recognition of the logic and detail of what is being learned and linkage to what the learner has experienced and already knows. Full understanding is evident when the learner can explain the topic to himself or to another and apply the principles learned in a new situation. Pask's arguments suggest  that, as well as taking account of what we know from brain research about the importance of multi-sensory learning, teachers should both develop pupils' own preferred learning strengths and introduce them to and encourage use of other approaches that are not their "natural" ones but which may be essential to give them versatile strategies.

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