My New Areas of Study: Motivation, Habits, and Success

I have been in teaching, training, or designing instruction in various capacities for roughly the past 13 years. For the past 6 years, I have studied in the field of educational technology and instructional design and have earned 2 graduate degrees and published several articles in the field. I have found a home in this field, and it has been a great joy to learn what I have about instructional effectiveness.

The Purpose of Education
At the broadest level, one could state that the purpose of education (and by extension instructional design) is to enable an individual to live a successful, meaningful, contributing life. I believe that I have a basic grasp of how to help students gain knowledge and skills, but I believe I have an opportunity to understand more about how I can positive influence students to adopt outstanding habits, build their motivation, and help them move forward with success in their lives.

A Shift in My Research Interests
I am now beginning to feel a shift in my personal research interests. I have realized that some of the most important aspects of a student's success learning do not occur outside of an individual (e.g. the instruction we present to a learner). In the field of educational technology and instructional design we tend to focus on doing something to students to influence there learning and behavior. I know from research and experience that using effective strategies to provide students with learning experiences is vital to helping a student succeed. However, I also believe that the internal motivation, habits, and characteristics of a student are perhaps even more important than the external strategies we use to help instruct them.

Learning About the Internal
All of my own research has focused on what the instructor or instruction (external to the student) does to engender learning. I have asked fundamental questions about what good instructors do, what strategies more effectively help students learn, and what steps designers can take to create effective instruction. I will never stop seeking the answers to these questions; however, there are other fundamental questions about learning that I plan to start to investigate.

My Emerging Interests
Among other things, here are the general topics that I am interested in learning more about. These are areas that I have some knowledge of, though my knowledge is more peripheral and perhaps biased.


Motivation

• What are the psychological and neurological features of motivation?
• What creates the motivation to act in an individual?
• What strategies can be used used to influence and create motivation in an individual?
• What are the most effective strategies for influencing motivation in an individual?

Habits

• What are the psychological and neurological features of habits?
• How are habits formed?
• How can undesirable habits be eliminated or modified?
• How can positive habits be created and automated in a person's life?
• What strategies can be used to help others eliminate undesirable habits?
• What strategies can be used to engender positive, automated habits in another individual?

Success

• What are the psychological and neurological features of success?
• What makes an individual successful in achieving meaningful, difficult goals?
• What strategies can be used to help an individual be successful in his or her own life?

Day 2 AECT 2012: Part 2 - Problems with Sampling in EdTech Research

This post is part of a Multiple Part Series on the 2012 AECT Convention.

#AECT 2012

Went to a presentation by Patrick Lowenthal on some of the issues that we come across in higher education research. He discussed a few interesting key points:

• We assume that we know what the research shows. For example: "Most of the research in _____ is quantitative in nature." Unfortunately, this is often just an assumption and it may not be totally accurate. A systematic review often reveals that our assumptions are incorrect.
• We often have issues with our research because we do convenience sampling. For example, the research done in some forms of online interaction nearly all focused on classes in education-related fields in higher education. This tends to skew our view of what education is like. Anyone going into education most likely had a nice educational experience, so they might approach their learning in different ways. 

Patrick asks a key question:

These kinds of ideas are appropriate and important for researchers. We base our assumptions about instructional design on the models research we are exposed to. And we base our work on those assumptions. This is a pretty scary proposition, and it implies that we often do this in other areas of life. I have my assumptions on how things work - instructional design, business, higher education, nutrition, etc. - but these are only based on what I know, on what I think based on my limited experiences and exposure to the environment. By gaining knowledge of what is actually there and identifying my own assumptions, I could potentially increase my personal ability to be effective at what I do.

This is related to something my philosopher friend at Franklin University continually hammers on. We live, believe and behave based on our assumptions about life.  However, he argues that most people usually do not base their assumptions on evidence or logic, and this can have disastrous consequences. I hope to write more on this when I have a little time.

Putting Wikipedia in its Place: Problems and Pitfalls

I was recently introduced to a graphic (shown below) which apparently summarizes some of the latest information related to Wikipedia, the massive online community-created encyclopedia. In the knowledge society, information and knowledge is paramount, and having access to current, accurate, useful knowledge is absolutely vital. So, how important is a site like Wikipedia in this current society? Here are my thoughts.

Information is Not Instruction
Wikipedia provides its readers with information, but as the great learning researcher Dr. David Merrill often says, "information is not instruction." As a summarizing source, Wikipedia provides readers with surface-level, basic knowledge. This can be seen as a lower level of learning- we can remember what we learn, perhaps understand it but may not be able to apply, analyze, or evaluate with what we learn from a Wikipedia page. There is a fair amount of educational research indicating that to achieve these higher levels of learning, people need to have specific instructional experiences that will help them gain more meaningful learning.


Wikipedia does not encourage critical thinking. As members of society, we have to be very careful about what we believe - we must be willing to check the facts, go deeper, look at multiple perspectives, draw conclusions. Accepting things in wikipedia as fact without thinking is dangerous, particularly because (in my experience) the information is often inaccurate.

Wikipedia is Not Peer-Reviewed  
Clearly there is some level of "peer-review" in Wikipedia, but in this review process, one is left to ask who the peer is. (I discuss this further in number 1 below).

Is Wikipedia Bad?
No, Wikipedia is very good, a tool that I sometimes use. Wikipedia is the premier example of user-created content, a very powerful democratic and pragmatic movement. My thoughts in this post are not intended to slam the site, just to put it in its place. Remember, "information is not instruction," and if we want members of our society to really understand and be able to use knowledge in meaningful ways, we must provide experiences (in the form of well-designed instruction) that will help them gain the necessary knowledge and skills.

My Thoughts on the Graphic
As I mentioned above, I was directed to a graphic that summarized some information about Wikipedia. It is an attractive graphic, but I find it misleading, in some ways- not that the information is necessarily inaccurate (though it doesn't provide information sources for what it is representing), but that the way it is organized might imply certain things that are not accurate. I will share the graphic below and then share my critique.


Via: Open-Site.org
 Here are some observations and critiques of the image above:

1. Comparing college textbooks and wikipedia implies that Wikipedia is almost as good, but the comparison is on accuracy and not on the actual content. A textbook is likely much more effective at teaching than wikipedia because of the strategies that are potentially used in the textbook. Also, which college texts and wikipedia articles are being compared? Which subjects? What level of education (Associates, Bachelor, Master, Doctorate)? This information is not provided, and I am confident that there was no comparison of all Wikipedia articles and all college textbooks. I know for a fact that the Wikipedia articles that summarize key knowledge in the field of instructional design (you can review it here) and instructional technology (you can view it here) have fundamental inaccuracies, and when I attempt to change the pages, the changes are sometimes rejected by someone else who is not a scholar in the field as I am. This is a huge problem.
2. Comparing Wikipedia and libraries is also a poor comparison. Because Wikipedia is in a sort of a "encyclopedia" format, it is meant to be a summary of knowledge. This kind of summary can be useful, but without deeper resources like those found in the library it would be surface-level information and likely not deep enough to delve into a field to any meaningful level.
3. there is probably not a lot of evidence that it is Wikipedia alone that has "stopped the presses" for Britannica. There are literally billions of other sites on the internet providing information.
4. Comparing the number of visits to libraries and to Wikipedia is not a valid comparison. When I go to the library, I skim through many different books and interact with their online database for several minutes, learning a great deal from that interaction alone. I usually check out several books and read them for literally hours and hours, obtaining deep knowledge about the subject I am studying, and this is all resulting from just one visit to the library. A visit to Wikipedia, on the other hand, is probably tracked as simply a user visiting a page, which could last literally 3 seconds. This is a very poor comparison that does not measure the right thing (time spent on learning or amount of knowledge gained).
5. On this graphic, there are no references. Everything as facts but do not tell where you get the facts. This is a big problem- if I am going to put stock into some of the stats and research results that you cite, I really need to be able to review the studies and find out what they actually mean. If a site visit to Wikipedia is tracked as a click on a page, that is not very robust tracking. Every stat and every piece of research has more to it than just the numbers, and not being able to check the references and verify what actually happened in the study is a big problem.

I think my reactions above reveal my worry that people think that they can get all the information they need from Wikipedia and from a quick internet search. This is absolutely not true. I personally use Wikipedia to get a basic introduction to a topic, but to really get meaningful content, I find that I must locate and study resources that are more robust, more credible, and that provide much deeper knowledge than a simple Wikipedia page. Without such things as books and libraries, scholarly journals and professional associations, we would live in a world of surface-level knowledge and surface-level thinkers. Wikipedia is useful for some basic knowledge-gathering, but to gain meaningful knowledge the individual must be willing to (1) not accept the article as absolute truth, (2) check the facts in the article for accuracy, (3) research more credible, robust sources for deeper knowledge.

Wikipedia is certainly a meaningful phenomenon, but it needs to be put in its place.