On learning by stage not age
Why Masters is both right and wrong
My recent conversation with Sally Larsen was enlightening in so many ways. We chatted about the really complex area of heritability in education, but in a kind of abstract sense. Neither we, nor the learning scientists, seem able to imagine (to a helpful degree of detail) how some of this knowledge about the interplay of biology and learning might apply to the daily lives of teachers and students.
In particular, she put me onto this paper by Sokolowski & Ansari, which got me thinking about the Masters Curriculum Review. For my UK and US readers, one of the more surprising features of the review was a recommendation to teach students according to stage, not age. Students would ostensibly progress at their own pace and only move on to more challenging skills and content when they had mastered certain benchmarks. There’s a truthiness to the idea of personalised learning and mastery.
But any leader or teacher will immediately grasp the pragmatic and developmental problems with this model, with no solutions offered in the review regarding the endless differentiation or maturity levels that would necessarily be present in any one classroom. However, there are some merits to the thinking and I’m going to pose some thoughts on why Masters was both right and wrong.
On the interaction of biology and education
I’m going to start with a brief explainer. The authors find that large scale interventions (like universal early childhood programs) improve mean outcomes but do little to close the gap - students regress to the mean after intervention, a kind of ‘fade’ effect. This could be because the effects of passive environment (the environments like the home, childcare and schools that children have no control over) are less influential as students get older. Think of the ways that your influence over your own children fades over time! This could suggest that a standardised educational product, consisting of direct instruction, strong routines and the like, may not have the same impact as personalised learning. Stay with me here.
The so-called industrial model of schooling could be perceived as a similar broad-scale intervention. While all students can benefit from such interventions, the rank order feature remains. In terms of Masters’ stage not age model, it’s easy to see how he might have a philosophical objection to large learning gaps between our strongest and weakest students. It feels like the No Child Left Behind slogan. What Masters doesn’t take into account is that students may not maintain their rank, suggesting some students respond to intervention better than others, a biological reality that is not addressed by the model. If greater equality of outcomes are the aim, then the model remains problematic.
In addition to this, discussions about learning have been dominated by biases toward the power of ‘nurture’ and may overstate the contribution of educational interventions to learning outcomes. The authors say,
This nurture assumption assumes that individual differences have no biological basis, and therefore can be easily overcome with interventions. However, the idea that a program can overcome individual differences contradicts what we know about the biological underpinnings of learning.
Contrary to popular belief, Australia has been found to offer a fairly uniform and high quality education, making the effects of heritability more pronounced. The idea here is that differences in environment are largely controlled, due to the high-quality education offered. This makes heritability (ability, responsiveness to intervention, gene-environment relationships) even more important to consider in our context. This is something that as a profession we don’t often talk about and neither did Masters.
There is an aspect of Masters’ approach that deserves attention. As far as I could tell, he didn’t draw on behavioural genetics, but instead a single, fairly anecdotal example of a teacher implementing stage not age in the US. Still, there may be some basis to his model. The authors talk about gene-environment correlations with the active environment playing a positive role, where student choice fosters a more positive interplay of heritable traits and environment. Unlike the passive environment, elements like subject choice and the resulting extrinsic motivation that arises have a greater impact on achievement in later adolescence. Under more personalised teaching and learning conditions, where teachers enable students to play to their strengths and develop their weaknesses, it’s plausible that the teaching and learning environment could have greater impact on student motivation and learning.
The authors share a common aim with Masters:
the most important goal of educational policy is to implement equitable systems that provide individuals within the population the opportunities to reach their individual levels of achievement across a kaleidoscope of potential educational outcomes.
but here is the catch:
The biological research … clearly demonstrates that a system that insists that all students can reach the same educational levels of achievement both within and across different educational outcomes, severely overestimates the potential of environmental effects, and therefore lacks sufficient consideration of individual differences and human diversity.
It seems quite probable that Masters’ proposal was driven more by a Rousseauian ideal of ‘natural’ development and without a coherent justification suffers from a lack of credibility. This is compounded by a societal focus on individualism and the ideas that persist in education that every student learns differently. Individual differences in ability do not equate automatically to a need for wholly individualised learning. But when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity because Masters’ intent has merit. Students should progress in relation to their own prior knowledge and skill levels. More of a focus on how we could achieve this within our current frameworks may have yielded greater benefit.
I’m going to offer some ideas about how individual progress could happen, and I welcome the ideas of better-informed minds than mine:
Stage not age could prevent some of our most vulnerable learners from making the year on year progress that happens for most, just by virtue of progressing through the curriculum each year. Instead of measuring absolute progress, we can measure and report on relative improvement in the form of rank shifts, improvement relative to self and in relation to the standardised benchmarks we already use. This data is already collected by schools.
We could develop more timely diagnostic tools for interventions. NAPLAN is the golden opportunity here. There is currently no real reason why results should be delayed, other than for writing which is a contentious area anyway. As an industry we haven’t yet come up with a coherent or effective way to intervene for students that are not achieving at stage level - the funding and implementation of this is an urgent issue that unfortunately won’t be solved by Masters’ plan.
We can ensure that initial teacher education and school based PD or coaching develop teacher capacity to deliver the best quality direct instruction to the majority. We can also develop teacher knowledge so they are able to capitalise on whole class and differentiated feedback in a meaningful way. The combination of quality instruction, time for gradual release of responsibility, and high impact formative assessment tools could ensure that personalised learning is both impactful and sustainable.
While a lot of us run compulsory subjects with little opportunity to give true student choice, we can foster goal setting and motivation to engage students as stakeholders, creating more active environments.
There are a lot of reasons that stage not age is unworkable. I think it would be a well-intentioned but dangerous social experiment. As the Sokolowski and Ansari say, individual progress is desirable; but without taking into account biological variables we run the risk of students and teachers labouring under absolute measures of progress, potentially treading water for years.
I’m a newbie to behavioural genetics in education. I’m all for learning more, so feel free to help me refine my thinking on Twitter or in the comments.