is in cognitive science.

So I'm really interested in doing experiments in terms of

understanding how people learn.

And to get a sense of the way that fits in with the research

landscape, because there's a ton of research on learning

and many insights.

I guess the best concept is thinking in terms of

qualitative analyses.

So these rich investigations that you see from a

sociological perspective.

Education schools that will take a student and really take

a very close look at what they're learning.

Explore how they're understanding of algebra and

all the difference misconceptions they can have.

Then there's also things that are much more like randomized

control trials.

So policy workwear.

You might take a bunch of students in the school and

give them a treatment where they

undergo a training program.

And then you can see if that actually has an effect

compared to control group.

And that's a very large scale.

There's longitudinal studies, which, again, are very long

time scale.

Collecting measures, like people's grades or students'

outcomes as they progress through traditional education.

And of course there's working computer science and

Educational Data Mining, where you take very large data sets

in terms of observations, then try and induce what's going on

with learners.

As is terms of the way cognitive science fits in with

this, I think it's in between something like a randomized

control trial, longitudinal study and some light

qualitative analysis.

Because most of the experiments we do on a short

time scale.

And it really involves precisely controlling what

someone's learning in a particular situation and

trying out different forms of instruction and then assessing

how learning is occurring after that.

And you might think that from such micro experiments you

can't learn much.

But that's actually the expertise

in cognitive science.

And I think it's ready insightful.

It's obviously using a lot of insights.

But I think it's ready well suited for online education,

where often you want to ask questions that intermediate

between again, quality of assessment of what's going on,

and running a full-out randomized control trial where

you give people two different versions of the course.

There are questions about how you should frame instruction,

what kind of video you should show someone, and the kind of

strategies you should teach them.

So it just lets you know where it sits in there.

And what's also nice about cognitive science as an

approach is it's pretty interdisciplinary.

In a sense, you've got psychology, which is heavily

focused on experiments.

Philosophy, in terms of really trying to do good conception

analysis of what problem you're facing and classifying

different kinds of learning.

Linguistics, anthropology, as I mentioned, neuroscience, and

of course, AI.

And what's also nice, I think, is that it's also a bit easier

for people in cognitive science perhaps to talk with

the kind of researchers at Google who are interested

often in things like modeling and machine learning.

So to give you a bit of a preview of [INAUDIBLE]

cover.

So I'm going to talk about two ways you

could think about learning.

One that I think gives us a lot of rich insights into how

to improve education.

And I'm going to talk about very quickly three finds in

cognitive science that I find have been

particularly powerful.

It's thinking about what can you do before someone starts

learning in terms of framing their learning as

an answer to a problem?

What can you do during learning in terms of

requesting explanations from the learner?

And then what can you do after learning?

A new and interesting finding here is that you can actually

use assessments as instructional tools.

Having people take a test can actually be more powerful for

learning than having them study material again.

And then having looked at some of what we know about how to

promote learning of a concept or some set of knowledge, it's

worth asking, well, what knowledge can we teach someone

that's actually going to have the biggest impact

practically?

And that's why I think thinking about this idea of

what do people learn that's going to help them learn more?

So it's not just on this concept but across a range of

situations.

And then I'll talk about how you can change people's

beliefs and have a massive effect on their motivation.

You can teach people strategies for learning that

then have trickle down effects on all the content they may

come across.

And then finally, I'm going to talk about online search,

which is something I really started to think about

seriously recently since looking [INAUDIBLE]

of a power searching course.

And I actually think this is a really fascinating topic

that's right at the junction of things that are really

important to industry and the business world, and also

really important to education.

And I think that's actually a great place to focus, because

it allows you to get the benefits of private innovation

as well as academic work.

And also it means that you can use insights across areas.

When you're teaching a business person about search,

you're also learning something about how you could help a

child to be more inventive in the way they discover

information on the internet.

How is my speed in terms of talking?

Because with an accent, it probably sounds

like twice as fast.

And I speak twice as fast, so you're hitting a lot of powers

being raised there.

OK.

And one thing I'll cover at the end is I put on the

website just a list of resources that I found really

useful in terms of knowing what the literature is that

has shown really impressive effects on learning.

When you go in Google Scholar, I mean literally there are

thousands of papers there.

And I think that can be daunting.

And it's just easy to start with your

problem and work on that.

But there's always tons of really

interesting relevant work.

And so I tried to put aside some of the resources that I

found most useful.

So I have hyperlinks to some of the papers there and brief

explanations of what they're about.

And also information about other things that I'll talk

about at the end.

So in terms of learning, I think one kind of challenge,

even after studying learning for all my adult life, I still

think that there's this kind of intuition or this intuitive

theory that I have about learning that holds me back,

or misleads me when I'm making instructional decisions.

I think it's something that's sort of common

across many of us.

In the Cambridge Handbook of Learning and Sciences they

refer to this idea that when you learn something, you're

just dropping it into a bucket.

Learning is transferred from the teacher to the student.

So let's think about some content.

For example, learning from a video, like from a power

searching online video, a Khan Academy video.

Or reading text, which is how we absorb most of our

information.

Or you could think about learning from an exercise.

So a student solving a math problem, or someone attempting

to process a financial statement or do some budgeting

or solving a problem of managing

relationships with coworkers.

Anytime you can see those icons I need to represent, you

can stick your personal content in there.

So if you have a favorite example of learning or one

that's particularly relevant to your everyday experience or

your job, just feel free to insert that every time that

flashes out.

But I'll try to illustrate it with examples.

Because again there's good evidence that that's an

important thing to do for learning.

So I think there's this intuition that what learning

is about is just adding information.

So it's almost as if we have this model where

the mind is a bucket.

And so what does it mean to learn?

Well it means to take information and drop it in

that bucket.

Whether it's videos, text, solving stuff, just put it in.

And later on you can come back and get it.

But actually I think a much better way of thinking about

learning is that it's like taking a piece of information,

integrating it into the internet, and assuming it had

a web page.

So that galaxy is the internet.

And you can guess what those big giant planets are.

So how might you think about this analogy shedding more

light on learning?

Well under this kind of view, when you're adding content to

the internet, first of all, you have to

think about three stages.

Well what do you do before the content arrives?

Or what do you do in linking it to what's already known?

So it's really important now.

You're not just dropping in a bucket.

You're actually linking it to web pages that already exist

by citing them.

You're putting on a particular domain.

And so I think this is very analogous to the challenge we

face as learners of how do you get information to link up to

what people already know?

And in what kind of knowledge are you linking

new concepts to?

And I think that some things are obvious

when we look at it.

But it's definitely not at the forefront, I think, of a lot

of instructional decisions.

Also if we think now even of processes people engage in

while they're learning.

Everyone on the internet, time is limited, they're not going

to read your whole page.

If you're lucky they will even read the first few lines.

So we have to ask questions like, how do you structure the

information on a web page so that the really core

concepts jump out?

What are the key principles?

Or depending on the person, is the web page structured so

they can get to the information they need?

And so this is analogous to when we're processing

something like a video or a bunch of text, it's actually

just flat out impossible to remember all that information.

So what are the cognitive operations you're engaging in

that pick out some information as being more

important than others?

Some relationships or some principles or some details of

whatever content you're learning.

And then finally, what's the last part of getting a web

page off of the internet?

Again, I think you guys all have a better advantage in

answering these audience type [INAUDIBLE] questions.

But it's actually being able to find it.

And this is probably the most underlooked part of what

learning involves.

Because anytime you learn something, it's only going to

be learning if it influences your mind in a way that, at

some point in the future, you're going to act

differently because of it.

So you have to retrieve that information somewhere.

So for example, the final stage of learning is it's got

to be set up in a way that it's got the right cues or the

right connections that when someone goes looking for that

information, they're actually going to find it.

For example I might be really interested in things about

mathematics from a video.

And you could say that I know it.