hello and welcome to this talk at the kahoot at work summit i'm sarah mcelwee and i work
in the research and thought leadership team at cambridge assessment english which is part of
the university of cambridge we are experts in the teaching assessment and learning of english
this evening i'm going to be talking about key research in adult learning that's relevant
not just to language learning but to learning in the workplace more generally
more than ever now organizations are looking for ways to support their learners who are working
remotely and learning online so i hope that this talk will give you some evidence-based ideas to
think about and some suggestions for how you might use cahoots effectively in your own workplace
i wanted to begin by sharing this quote which is about adult english language learners
um just to remind us of the richness and complexity of adult learning
adults bring this breadth of educational and personal
experience to learning situations but they might have very different approaches to how they learn
at cambridge english we know a lot about the motivations of adults who learn english and this
is reflected in research in the discipline of learning and development more broadly
so what do we know well we know that adult learners usually have a goal in mind
and their learning is often connected to a personal purpose that might be to further
academic studies to progress their careers to more effectively for their own business
but learners need to see the application and purpose of what they are studying and something
as simple as developing their own learning objectives at the outset can really help with this
research shows that adults want their workplace training to be relevant to their daily work
lives and to be focused on completing specific tasks they need to see a clear purpose for it
if a workplace training program doesn't really seem to speak to an employee
and if the point of it is unclear or it seems to benefit the organization more than more than
the learner then we know that engagement will drop as well as these clear social drives for learning
adults have the cognitive kit that really helps them to learn efficiently although although there
might be some individual differences in this by adulthood working memory capacity is fully
developed and that's the ability to hold a piece of information in mind in order to do something
purposeful with it like problem solving adults are able to hypothesize about ideas and scenarios
and to hold abstract and conceptual thoughts and to to think about them most importantly we
also know that adults are able to reflect on their own thinking sometimes independently or sometimes
they may need a prompt to support this but it helps them to understand where they are in their
particular learning process at any given time and to diagnose what will help them to improve
so what else do we know about adult learners well i'd like to start with a story from research about
different ways that adults approach learning in this seminal research study university students
were asked to do a task that's very familiar to them they were asked to read an academic article
in this case it was about education systems and their reform and they were asked some questions
about the content the researchers then asked the students to reflect on how they had gone about
the task of reading the article and they got a really wide range of responses
some admitted that they had just tried to memorize chunks of the text that they thought might be
important while others had really focused on telling the story of the article trying to
get a grasp of the main arguments that the author was making to make sense of it for themselves and
to relate it to things that they already knew as you might imagine the impact was clear the people
who had worked to make their own meaning from the text remembered it better immediately afterwards
but they also did much better when they were tested again on it six weeks later those who
had tried to wrote learn bits without really understanding the context of the piece overall
struggled and sometimes they even completely misinterpreted what the author had meant
following that research and many more studies in in later years backed up the pattern that
the researchers saw and these approaches to learning became known as deep and surface
surface learning tends to focus on breaking material down into small chunks but these can
often be quite disconnected the learner tries to memorize but maybe in a disorganized way
not seeing the whole picture we know that surface learning is more likely to happen when a learner
is motivated just to get a qualification done and finished and to move on from it when they don't
really see the personal relevance or when they're scared of failing deep learning on the other
hand comes with a focus on on the big picture the learner really wants to understand the material to
make it meaningful meaningful for themselves and to understand how the arguments and concepts apply
to them so they're really motivated to develop competence in what it is that they are learning
it's a really important bit though surface and deep approaches to learning are not stable traits
that are fixed in people you are not a surface or a deep learner although some people might lean
more towards one approach than the other depending on their previous educational experience what we
know is that two factors play a big part in how a student learns one is the context that they're
learning in so for example research shows that when teachers are really focused on transmitting
knowledge rather than facilitating learners understanding the learners are more likely
to report taking a surface approach the other thing that's really important is the learner's
own perception of their learning environment and context so for example where they feel that their
learning workload is inappropriate or excessive they're more likely to adopt a surface approach or
where they don't really see the relevance to them of the learning material interestingly what they
understand about the assessment and the aims of any assessment in a learning
in a learning situation also impacts whether they adopt deeper surface learning approaches
and there's been some interesting research to show that really well-designed learning courses and
centered around problem-based learning that should be perfect for inspiring a deep approach
can actually fail if the learners believe that the assessment at the end is still only going to
be focused on straightforward factual recall and doesn't require integration of knowledge
so what does this look like in the language learning context for cambridge english well
at cambridge english our approach to learning and assessing english language skills is based on the
learner developing competence in communication and interaction we think that knowing vocabulary and
verbs and grammar structures is important as the building blocks of language but it's not enough
language use is action oriented and it has a purpose in the real world we want our learners
from the very beginning of their learning journey with us to be practicing the types of things that
they will use language for in real life we focus on all the skills of reading listening
writing and speaking and we're always trying to find innovative ways to do this authentically
that integrates those skills in a way that reflects how learners will do it in real life
our learning materials curricula and assessments are all designed with this in mind
so for example linguist skill is an online assessment that is designed to ensure
employees have the communicative skills they need to perform effectively in the workplace
so making meaning is important what else do we know about setting learners up for success
well one really important thing is that encouraging learners to practice retrieving
material from from memory is really key to boosting learning a lot of adults rely on ways of
studying or learning that are quite passive like rereading texts or underlining little bits of it
and this is a problem because it makes us think that we're learning because we become increasingly
familiar with the text but we're not really working to make any meaning when we do this
and it's not giving any feedback on where the gaps in the learner's understanding are
research shows that embedding just a single quiz or test in a learning module can boost scores on a
on an end of course assessment and there are a couple of things you can do to make it even better
we know that when retrieving information from memory is effortful it helps to embed the learning
more so if you can delay a quiz for just a little while to allow some time for for forgetting
it's more effective using straightforward questions to get your learners to recall
facts is useful again as the building blocks of what they need to know but think about where you
can add questions that require the learner to make inferences to really try and understand the bigger
picture and the context it doesn't have to be the teacher or the learning facilitator who develops a
quiz or a challenge either learners can do this for themselves or for each other and think back
again to this idea of making meaning in order to be able to write a quality quiz question learners
have to be able to make sense of the material for themselves so there's the double benefit of making
meaning and practicing the retrieval and games and challenges can be a really good way to do this
at cambridge english we know that using well-designed games for language learning
can really help to engage learners they reduce any stress or anxiety in learning situations
which can increase motivation for the learners and we know that it can help them to achieve a
state of flow which is that point when you're really absorbed absorbed in what you're doing
and enjoying it and that can all spark more positive attitudes to learning
in the workplace these kinds of collaborative games let colleagues have fun interacting in more
informal ways which is probably really important when people are working remotely these days
and so it can help to support the development of working relationships too
so we've talked about the importance of making meaning and practicing retrieving information
maybe using quizzes and challenges the next thing to think about is finding the right
level of challenge when you are testing your learners we know that when quizzes and tasks in
assessment are too easy learners quite enjoy them because they get a nice feeling of success from it
but it doesn't support further learning on the other hand if if a quiz or a task is far
too difficult it makes learners feel stressed and frustrated perhaps leads to fear of failure
and all of those emotions are more likely then to spark surface approaches to material and in the
way that learners are trying to approach their learning getting the pitch right takes practice
about really knowing your learners but when a task is within a learner's grasp challenging them
maybe to think about a problem before they see the solution encouraging them to reason and
answer before being told it really helps to encode and embed the material a little bit of challenge
helps it to stick better and wrong answers are fine they still support learning as long as
the feedback that learners get is constructive and supportive and they don't feel undermined
so hopefully by now with what you've heard you might be thinking how your organization might
use cahoots to just to support learning keeping some of these principles in mind
and there are lots of different ways that you can use them kahoots can be used to practice or
review material that you've already taught maybe at the end of a unit or for learners in their own
independent study but you can use them in any stage of a sequence of learning so you might
use them as a warm-up to capture attention or to refocus learners at a certain point when you need
to bring them together again they can be used to create a positive learning atmosphere and to relax
your learners a little bit or to provide support and stretch to learners who are ready for it
you can even use them to prompt reflection at just the right time so as i mentioned before
you can get your learners creating their own kahoot challenges which hopefully encourages
the sort of deeper conceptual understanding of the topic material that promotes effective learning
kahoot's work is a task in face-to-face learning and training
but more than ever probably in at the moment in the current situation with covet 19
working remotely they can be integrated into both online and offline learning to help keep
your learners engaged to get them working together or maybe just to provide those
just-in-time prompts of the sort that a trainer might do automatically in a traditional classroom
so in this short talk i hope i've provided some insight into adult varied approaches to learning
and how you can help set them up for success and using just some of these very simple principles
you can either help to develop learning materials and games and quizzes that could have a real
impact for your learners or perhaps they will help you to evaluate resources that are already
out there to decide if they're right for you thank you for joining me for the talk
you