We take advantage of this effect (The REFLECTION EFFECT) in the key element in TAPS: the requirement that students think ALOUD. But it only works if students have already been taught how to do the problem. (if they’ve never seen it before you won’t have time for reflection, only teaching –and often confusion since the TAPS space isn’t designed for first time teaching).
Then you the TAPS coach can say: Great you got it right, now explain how you got that answer. Then you coach can ask: Why did you do it that way? Are there other ways you could have used?
Learning is more effective if a lesson or experience is deliberately coupled with time spent thinking about what was just presented, a new study shows. In “Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance,” a team of researchers from HEC Paris, Harvard Business School, and the University of North Carolina describe what they call the first empirical test of the effect of reflection on learning. By “reflection,” they mean taking time after a lesson to synthesize, abstract, or articulate the important points.
The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar
In the lab portion of the study, participants completed a math brain teaser under time pressure and wrote about what strategy they used or might use in the future to solve the problem. This group did 18 percent better in a second-round test than their control-group counterparts, who were not given time to reflect. In the field study, groups of newly-hired customer-service agents undergoing job training were compared. Some were given 15 minutes at the end of each training day to reflect on the main things they had learned and write about at least two lessons. Those given time to think and reflect scored 23 percent better on their end-of-training assessment than those who were not. And these improvements weren’t temporary—they lasted over time, researchers found.
via Study: You Really Can ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’ – Nanette Fondas – The Atlantic.
