225 – Expanding on Personalised Education

[00:00:07] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:16] David: Hi Santiago. I guess we are gonna get into precision about, I suppose, the five quiz model.

[00:00:25] Santiago: Well, we’ve already done an episode on the five quiz model. So my understanding was that we wanted precision on how we achieve the textbooks of future, including that five quiz model.

[00:00:40] David: Including the five quiz model and part of why I think the five quiz model is central to this. The point which is so important is one of the elements of personalisation, which I don’t think is talked about enough is what we have as the first and the last quiz in the five quiz model.

[00:01:00] Santiago: Sorry, we are talking about personalisation of education.

[00:01:05] David: Absolutely, yes. So actually, as in the previous episode we were discussing, this could be individual personalisation, this could be relating it to context. But within all of the things you can do to personalise it, I think the elements that I believe for a standardised curriculum, again, we’re saying, getting better education to help people succeed at a standardised curriculum, which maybe leads to high stakes exams.

I believe one of the key elements, one of the key things, which is not given enough attention, is the first and the last quiz in our five quiz model as in prerequisites and extension. I’d like to maybe just very quickly remind people about the five quiz model, I’ll let you do that quickly, and then dig into the first and the last.

[00:01:55] Santiago: Yes. So, we have first prerequisites, get the basics right, get up to scratch with what you need to know. Then there’s instruction or content. Third is mastery. Fourth is some form of test or assessment. And the last one, which we call the last one, but it could fit in at any stage of the framework, is the extension, why is this important, how do we contextualise what we’re learning, how we show what could come from what we’re learning, how do we push the boundaries a bit more and make it more relevant.

[00:02:44] David: It’s what I would consider optional. The extension material shouldn’t be forced on people, but it should be things that people want to do because they have an interest either in the nature of the extension or in being challenged or in what are any other forms. So maybe it’s a good point to start with the extension.

I think really if we look at the idea of actually having to prepare people for standardised content, well, the way you get people really good at that content is by taking them beyond it so that that content is deeply ingrained, especially in mathematics, that once that content is part of you, it’s easy.

[00:03:27] Santiago: So often I have students saying, oh, the problems you’re giving me are too hard, and I say, well, I believe you’re able to solve them and if you can solve the ones that are too hard, the other ones are gonna be easy.

[00:03:40] David: Yep. And so some extension is about being challenging, more challenging than the ones you are going to be tested on in your standardised exam. I still remember myself as a undergraduate student, one year I took a course, which was an advanced course, which had as prerequisites some of the courses that I needed to study.

I ended up not studying the courses I needed to study and just studying this hard course, and I actually failed it. It’s one of the few courses I failed in my university career. But I aced the, um, prerequisite courses without having studied for them because I needed those concepts to understand the advanced course.

This is the thing, mathematics, in this sort of sense, you know, I’d understood the concepts that were needed before really well, which were the things I was supposed to be learning because I was learning this more advanced topic, which needed them.

[00:04:33] Santiago: But another question that I get from students is why are we learning this? And some students, irrespective of their natural ability or their level of understanding, need to feel that they’re working towards something practical or applicable. So the extension quiz could come in together, with a content quiz, to present, okay, this is the content, but this is how it’s relevant to your daily life or your future careers, or your future needs. And that would motivate a lot of students to say, okay, this is worth spending time on.

[00:05:16] David: And I think what you can see, which I think is so enriching about the extension is there’s no limit to what we could do. You mentioned the extension quiz, but that’s not how I see it at all. I see the extension as being many different quizzes, lots of things that could be suggested, could be chosen and presented based on people’s interests.

This could be highly, it’s absolutely natural to personalise this in really different ways because this is beyond the content that everybody needs to have mastered and needs to be on top of. And so, enabling people to go off in different directions with that content, to deepen their understanding and knowledge of it in different ways, some needing something more abstract, more challenging, some needing something more applied, more concrete, more practical. Great, the extension quiz can offer all that in many different variants in many different forms.

[00:06:15] Santiago: And in the episode where we describe the framework, we mentioned a bridging course from GCSE to A Level that we did during COVID as a sort of solution for school closures where we had four different types of extensions. Not all the extensions were suitable for all the kids. Some were more suited to a few, some were more suited to others.

[00:06:43] David: Absolutely. And this is the whole point that the extension, this is something which you can really go wild on. This could be exciting, it could be diverse, it could be deep, there could be lots of different ways where this is used to enable people to dig in.

Let’s also go to the prerequisite.

[00:07:04] Santiago: Okay.

[00:07:04] David: Do you have something else on the extension?

[00:07:07] Santiago: I think that extension is perhaps the most difficult, but the most valuable to achieve.

[00:07:15] David: This is where I would argue, let me translate that into the fact that I believe the extension is where we can have the most human effort. This is where actually really what we need is we need teachers to be thinking, we need teachers to be spending their time on extension. And this is what many teachers would enjoy, to get to know a particular student and figure out what’s the right extension for this student and to be able to do this.

This is where we want that bond between teacher and student to be connected on a way of engaging with the resources, going beyond what’s needed, but to where there’s that spark. This is what teachers should be working on, and I believe it’s where teachers want to be working.

[00:08:03] Santiago: I would agree to some extent with that. But I think it’s not only teachers. I think that community leaders, people with life experience, can really add value, as we’ve been discussing in many episodes, it is about community, understanding the community where the personalisation or the adaptation is happening. The rural context in Kenya is very different to the urban context in Kenya, and the types of extension could look extremely different, and the teacher alone might not be sufficient to achieve that.

[00:08:50] David: Well, absolutely. But I think the thing which I would say here is that even if we think about the extension as being something which communities engage with, this is exactly what’s successfully happening in high resource environments. There’s a lot of literature about maths circles, and how maths circles are creating those communities, which are a form of extension. They’re taking people beyond, but they’re seen as extracurricular.

What we could be doing is bringing those elements of extracurricular, mathematical enjoyment and spark into a system, which is just part of what’s expected and part of what the system is.

[00:09:35] Santiago: And I think a great example of that distinction is maths camps. In a lot of contexts, maths camps are there to get the top end mathematicians and take them further. The maths camps that we’ve been running for over a decade now in several African countries, they’re different, they’re about bringing enjoyment and understanding of what mathematics could be to students who are not necessarily engaged with the subject.

[00:10:15] David: Well, they’re both, of course, ’cause in Ethiopia, you haven’t been to the Ethiopian maths camp, which does only take the top students and which is still focused on the enjoyment and the fun, but there’s all of these different layers, but you are absolutely right. The math camps in these contexts, which we’ve done a few episodes on, these are about bringing everybody on board.

And that’s what I could see this extension doing. It really could be this opportunity to make mathematics accessible, interesting, engaging as part of the whole. And it’s something which could become, which could evolve rapidly. It could become localised, it could become contextualised, as it evolves.

[00:10:59] Santiago: Maybe we need another name because extension is not doing it justice.

[00:11:05] David: You’re probably right, but let’s get back to the prerequisite because that’s the other key one, which again, I believe needs serious human effort. And this actually comes back to the first time I ever came across MOOCs. This was back before the year of the MOOC, which I believe was 2012, a MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course.

And the very early MOOCs, their first publications related to assessment. And they had this sort of question, if you have a hundred thousand students doing your course and only 2% of them get a question wrong in a particular way, that’s still 2000 students. You can get a lot of data about what that misconception is, how you can help people to prepare better to avoid those misconceptions.

Whether it’s in mathematics or any other subject, actually, a lot of the problems students face, they’re not with the material they’re being taught, they’re with misconceptions they have about previous material or prerequisites, so to speak. And so my claim is that if we had a coherent, cohesive effort around prerequisites, we could help many more students be prepared for any given topic so that they’re ready to tackle it in a way that, at the moment, is one of the main causes of failure. Most students fail on specific topics because of a prerequisite. That’s my experience.

[00:12:53] Santiago: And we discussed how the last extension quiz could fit in any other layer of the framework. The prerequisite could as well fit in several other places. It’s not necessarily a compulsory quiz, it’s not necessarily a compulsory component. I mean, we’ve done courses where you attempt a question and if you’re not answering it correctly, then the feedback itself identifies what it is that you need to freshen up on and takes you to that area, in this context, to that prerequisite quiz, to that specific prerequisite quiz that would allow you to then get on top of the content that you need and help you consolidate the basis you need for that.

[00:13:48] David: And this can get built into these education systems in extremely powerful ways if, again, we have a coordinated and coherent effort across many educators, all working towards building this understanding of how to create and how to fill in gaps and misconceptions so that people are ready to learn specific topics.

Again, we’re instilling the context of a standardised education system where you have to learn specific topics which are going to be examined and there’s a high stakes exam at the end of it. And so the prerequisite to being able to tackle a topic are central to this. And again, we don’t put enough effort into that.

And that’s something where this is a huge human effort that can and should be put into determining the prerequisites. And then when you actually have got those two extremes, the prerequisites and the extension, the rest of it, well, that’s a relatively bounded effort. The extension and the prerequisite, these are hard problems.

Any given topic, there’s plenty of good textbooks out there already on how to teach a given topic well, assuming you have the prerequisites and assuming you can get students motivated and interested, or you can push them further afterwards. So I feel that this makes the whole task feasible if we think about the human effort, and this is the new type of human effort that we need, which is this continued evolving, deep educational learning because that’s what you need for the prerequisite, serious studies to be able to figure it out and understand what’s needed.

And that’s where, if we think of this differently, that’s a very practical but achievable set of systems that you could put together into a coherent whole.

[00:15:40] Santiago: And, it applies in all contexts. It’s just the prerequisite might look very different for different contexts. It might be that in certain contexts the prerequisite takes you to the content or mastery quiz from another earlier topic, and that is just a sort of virtuous cycle if the whole system is set up, or in some other contexts like we’ve worked with, with top students at university, the prerequisites just lead you to some previous lecture notes where independent learning is encouraged and assumed almost, so that there’s just reference to content.

[00:16:28] David: Exactly the details of this are not fixed and should never be fixed. They should evolve as we build learning into the systems to understand in different contexts what is it that works in those contexts. And that’s what’s so exciting about this as an approach.

[00:16:45] Santiago: Before we close, I think it’s worth saying, we have been working on a lot of the pieces of the puzzle, as we said in the last episode. And we have collaborations with different groups which are being formalised into a sort of collaboratory as we like to call, which we are hoping to expand in order to develop these type of resources.

And it requires community, it requires local knowledge, it requires subject knowledge, it requires technical knowledge in the sense of how are we actually going to achieve this adaptable delivery, and get this textbooks of the future. And this collaboratory that potentially has emerged already, and we’re hoping to grow, I think is the right mechanism to work towards something like this.

[00:17:42] David: And that’s part of, I think, what’s so exciting about it, it’s not just that it’s a new technology, it is a way for collaboration to work differently with technology and towards a different type of education. Much like the printing press was able to transform what teachers could be and how they could work, I come back, and this was an analogy which was used in the last episode, I really think that we could get a real transformation if we can get the right large scale collaborations to be happening, drawing knowledge in drawing learning in, and putting it all into a common, coherent system. Anyway.

[00:18:28] Santiago: Unfortunately, we didn’t give ourselves enough time to go into much more detail. But I think this clarified a few points from the last episode that were not concrete enough. So thank you very much, David, and look forward to continuing this discussion in future episodes.

[00:18:48] David: Thank you.