Looking closely at 2 cognitive principles

For my NPQLTD I have been asked to choose two cognitive principles from ‘The Science of Learning’ - Deans for Impact, 2015 and ‘reflect on their implications for the practice of teachers in my school’.  Rather than my school I have reflected on their implications for my subject. (I couldn’t help myself).

Cognitive Principle 1: ‘Information is often withdrawn from memory just as it went in. We usually want students to remember what information means and why it is important, so they should think about meaning when they encounter to-be-remembered material.’

Practical implications for the classroom: ‘Teachers can assign students tasks that require explanation (e.g., answering questions about how or why something happened) or that require students to meaningfully organize material. These tasks focus students’ attention on the meaning of course content.’

In D&T teachers often require students to explain their design choices or justify their plans or specification points. As a D&T teacher I find myself often reminding students to ‘remember to provide justification’. This seems to be a repeated phrase throughout key stages. Providing an explanation to why a product is designed the way it is or why certain choices have been made is a fundamental back bone of the subject. Applying theory content regarding properties of materials and manufacturing processes into the sphere of ‘why’ cements and reinforces the original content and gives applied context to the content. This in turn enables the student to fully understand the choices of designers and aids their own decision making as a designer.

Lessons can be structured in such a way to give opportunities to students to explain their understanding of a concept or piece of course content whilst also giving opportunity to focus the students understanding of the reasons why. In D&T teachers explicitly teach students how to succinctly annotate designs and/or images with clear explicit skills taught in analysis and evaluation. This gives students the opportunity to unpick the reasons behind any content and question meanings and larger context behind all course content.

Practical implications for the classroom: ‘Teachers can help students learn to impose meaning on hard-to-remember content. Stories and mnemonics are particularly effective at helping students do this.

In design and technology there are many different tricks teachers use to embed key facts and information that need to be repeated throughout the learning journey of a KS3 student. Many of these ‘tricks’ are continually referred to throughout KS4 and 5.

Mnemonics, rhymes, visual clues and stories are utilised in many different ways. Below are some specific examples of these ‘tricks’ used in design and technology lessons. (These ideas have come from a variety of different teachers who I questioned about this.)

• When completing a design drawing one teacher tells the students to remember to ‘soar like superman’. With a visual aid on the board/in books or in the form of classroom posters this teacher reminds students to first sketch, then outline, annotate, and render their drawings to produce the best possible outcomes. When students are first introduced to this mnemonic in year 7 students may not have encountered some of this vocabulary before and may not have understood the common misconceptions around the difference between simply labelling and annotating and what it means to render rather than simply colour in. This mnemonic serves to unpick these discussions and then embed the presentation technique. This teacher refers to ‘SOAR’ with all their year groups.

• When asking students to remember the names of the two most commonly used saws in the workshop, one teacher tells the students to remember that a coping saw must ‘cope’ with the curves it has to encounter. A coping saw is also in the shape of a C for coping. When teaching students how to hold their tenon saws the same teacher reminds students they have ten fingers and need to use all ‘ten’ for their ‘tenon’ saw.

• A graphics teacher refers to the text ‘skeleton’ when teaching how to create typography by hand. This is a term the teacher has coined themselves to aid the technique of bubble writing. This teacher reminds students to use their skeletons further up the school.

• When introducing struts and ties into a KS3 scheme of work on mechanisms and forces one teacher tells a funny story about another teacher (known and liked in the school community) who ‘struts his stuff’ to hold up a falling head teacher. In the story another teacher catches the head teacher by the tie. This comical image helps aid the memory of a strut being under compression and a tie being under tension.

• When teaching the textiles core content one teacher use the following phrase to aid knowledge retention: ‘Warp goes up and down, Weft goes weft to wight’.

• In mechanisms several teachers use ‘123FLE’ as a method for remembering types of Levers.

• One teacher uses the phrase ‘Measure twice, cut once’ as a mantra in her lessons.

• An alternative to ‘SOAR’ is ‘3CAVE’ (3D,colour,annotation, views and explanation).

• As a play on the coffee brand Nescafe, one teacher uses ‘MESCAFE’ when introducing students to specification writing and/or product analysis. (Materials, ergonomics, safety, cost, aesthetics, function and environment.) This is also an alternate to ‘ACCESSFM’ which is used in many classrooms across the country. (Aesthetics, customer, cost, environment, safety, size, function and material). Another similar mnemonic to these is ‘CAFEQUE’. (Cost, aesthetics, function, environment, quality, user and ergonomics). These mnemonics are all useful but there is a danger when using more than one in a department that staff may confuse students and lose the learning benefits of repetition. They also do not have a fully consistent lists of points with some elements omitted from some of them.

It has been interesting to investigate some of the methods teachers use in lesson to impose meaning on hard-to remember content within the context of D&T. I will continue to investigate methods and ‘tricks’ teachers use to aid knowledge retention within D&T. Many of these examples also relate to the following cognitive principle:

Cognitive Principle 2: ‘We understand new ideas via examples, but it’s often hard to see the unifying underlying concepts in different examples’

When considering underlying concepts some of the examples above come into play in D&T lessons. When using ACCESSFM as a scaffold for both product analysis and specification writing, students are encouraged to analyse other designer’s choices (often in a wide variety of situations and for a wide variety of briefs) and then use the same scaffold to their own thinking. This encourages self-reflective designing and a meta-cognitive approach. Students are analysing and evaluating their own choices as they make them all the while providing justification for their choices.

Practical implications for the classroom: ‘For multi-step procedures, teachers can encourage students to identify and label the sub steps required for solving a problem. This practice makes students more likely to recognize the underlying structure of the problem and to apply the problem-solving steps to other problems.’

When reading this practical implication it first comes to mind that of a maths problem that has to be broken down into several component parts before finding the solution, however in the context of D&T it could be argued that the (albeit non-linear)sub steps to the design process are taught explicitly and when practised throughout the key stages repeatedly students start to innately call on the steps to aid in their problem solving. For example, if a student could not solve a certain problem on paper they would implicitly know to move on to prototyping in 3D either digitally or in the workshop. In turn the repetition of the design process and the ‘sub-steps’ enables more experienced students to make these calls innately with little to no scaffolding in place from a teacher.