Interview with Paul Kirschner, cognitive psychologist and learning researcher.

Paul Kirschner: “The last major revolution in education was the chalkboard”

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Eva Serra / Xavier Massó

Paul Kirschner is an expert educational psychologist and researcher in the field of learning and cognitive psychology, internationally recognized in his field with more than 450 scientific publications. Widely cited in the most prestigious publications and research, he’s made significant contributions through his work on cognitive load theory, to understand how students learn and on the importance of the most effective teaching strategies. Known for advocating evidence-informed teaching practices, he is a leading critic of constructivist, so-called progressive educational trends that lack solid scientific support, such as certain forms of “discovery learning” that we’ll talk about in this interview. His work also highlights the importance of explicit and structured instruction as a foundation of learning to help students build a solid foundation of knowledge.

Kirschner is Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at the Open University (Netherlands), an honorary doctor of the University of Oulu (Finland), a visiting professor at Thomas More University College (Belgium) and owner of kirschner-ED. He was previously University Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology at the Open University, Visiting Professor of Education with Chair of Learning and Interaction in Teacher Education at the University of Oulu, Professor of Educational Sciences at Utrecht University, Professor of Distance and Contact Education at Maastricht University and Visiting Professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning and Commissioning Editor of Computers in Human Behavior. He is the (co-)author of numerous books, including Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking. The Knowledge Revival.

How would you define the competency based learning educational model? Any relationship with inquiry based learning?

My definition is different from a lot of other people. For me, competency based learning is that it’s the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and an affective way of looking at it. So understanding what it means and what it means for others.

So that’s, for me, very complete learning. Then you’re really competent.

Otherwise you could say you know what it is and how to do it. But if you don’t know what the effects are on others, it’s incomplete.

“The problem with that is very, very simple. You can’t communicate, collaborate, be critical, or think critically about something that you don’t know and understand”

I’m not in favour of inquiry based learning as that is not my lens. From what I have seen from a lot of people is that it means we don’t concentrate on knowledge and domain specific skills, but rather on domain general, so-called 21st century skills to make a child or adolescent competent. And that means we concentrate on communication skills, collaboration skills, critical thinking skills. But the problem with that is very, very simple. You can’t communicate, collaborate, be critical, or think critically about something that you don’t know and understand. So there are no domain general skills. There’s no domain general competency. To be competent in a domain, you need knowledge and skills in that domain.

What insights does cognitive load theory offer, according to you?

The major insight is that our working memory is limited and both the task and the instructional approach used should not exceed the limits of our working memory. If it does, we don’t learn well.

A second insight is that in order to reduce that cognitive load on working memory, you need at least two things. One, a good knowledge store in your long-term memory, so that you don’t have to handle elements as single things, but as chunks. You don’t have to handle six times seven is 42, but you just bring from your long-term memory 42. That saves two or three spaces in your working memory. So that’s one of the major insights from it.

And two is that we should make use of instructional techniques that lead to germane cognitive processing. This processing that helps you learn and doesn’t hinder learning.

How does scaffolding help regulate cognitive load to maintain an optimal level? 

Well, scaffolding helps guide the student in what she or he is doing, so as to not burden the working memory. You present, for example with worked-out problems, all of the steps for carrying out the task, step by step, and then slowly remove one-by-one each of the steps so that the student only has to carry out one operation at a time. That’s the idea behind scaffolding, as the student gets more proficient, you remove the scaffold and in that way, the student is only confronted with one or two information elements at a time instead of seven or eight.

“Cognitive load is determined by the number of new information elements, and the interaction between them. The more knowledge you have in your long-term memory, the lower the number of new or novel information elements”

In what ways does prior knowledge impact cognitive load theory? 

Cognitive load is determined by the number of new information elements in a task, and the interaction between them. The more knowledge you have in your long-term memory, the lower the number of new or novel information elements. So, if you have already automatised the times tables and know that 6 times 7 is 42 or 8 times 6 is 48, that means you can take that as one chunk from your long-term memory to solve the problem instead of, while trying to solve the problem, also having to try to figure out how much is 6 times 8, because 6 times 8, figure that, takes three or four slots in your very limited working memory, whereas retrieving that from long-term memory, or retrieving that salt is NaCl, or retrieving that Vincent van Gogh was an impressionist painter in the nineteenth century, or retrieving that the Constitution of the United States was signed in 1789, those are all things that you can take from your long-term memory to make use of when trying to answer your problem, and you don’t have to think about them. You don’t have to use that costly space in your working memory.

In 2004, Mayer reviewed studies published between 1950 and 1980, comparing discovery learning and direct instruction. His research highlights consistent evidence against the self-discovery approach over more than 7 decades. How do you account for the enduring appeal of constructivism?

Well, he suggested there should be a three strikes rule, which is part of the name of the paper that he wrote. This comes from the idea, in the United States, that in baseball, three strikes and you’re out You have three chances to swing at the ball, and if you miss the ball three times, you’re out and you have to leave. He said they should have that for education because this constructivist approach of unguided or minimally guided discovery has failed under three different names in three different decades. And we should stop. That was his idea. How do I account for it? Let’s see.

Number one is that the notion of discovery aligns with a very romantic view of education, where children are seen as naturally curious and capable of constructing knowledge independently, if just given the right environment. That’s from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And that’s very appealing. Yes, this romantic ideal of children are perfect and teaching corrupts them, so then let them discover it themselves and it will work better.

The second is that there’s an appeal of children engaging with material. When they’re doing discovery learning, working on projects, they’re very engaged, but they’re often not cognitively engaged in what they’re doing. They’re not really thinking about it. Children who are making papier-mâché volcanoes and painting it and filling it with Coca-Cola and then throwing a Mentos mint into it and having it overflow, having spent three or four weeks working on this project, you have the idea they’re really engaged. It’s really, really good. But if you ask them afterwards, what’s the difference between lava and magma? How does plate tectonics relate to volcanism? They look at you as if you’re crazy, because they didn’t do that. They were very physically and socially engaged and active, but not cognitively engaged and active.

The third is an overgeneralization of what scientific thinking is. I once wrote a paper called Epistemology or Pedagogy? That is the question. It’s a very well-received paper. Scientists discover new knowledge. That’s their job. But as Derek Hodson said, a scientist does science, and a student learns science. These experts have extensive background knowledge that allows them to explore effectively. A student is a novice and lacks this foundation, making discovery very inefficient, and it often leads to misconceptions. This idea that you can translate the epistemology of the expert to the pedagogy, in Dutch we’d say didactiek (instruction), of the learner, that’s an overgeneralization. It’s actually a misconception.

A fourth reason is probably when students struggle through discovery learning, it feels like they’re learning. You could call it the illusion of understanding. They have this illusion that they’re learning deeply because their effort and their engagement is high. You don’t want to have the idea that you’re putting in all of this effort and getting nowhere. So you have this illusion that you’re learning.

“You also have something called the constructivist fallacy. Constructivism is a philosophy (…) but that philosophy of constructivism is not a pedagogy or a didactique for teaching”

You also have something called the constructivist fallacy. Constructivism is a philosophy. This philosophy says that the way I look at and see the world around me is different from yours because of my experiences, because of what I know, of what I’ve learned. It’s very, very true. I see the world different than you do, but that philosophy of constructivism is not a pedagogy or a didactiek for teaching. That’s the fallacy that people made.

I could also talk to you about progressivism and this progressive idea is the resistance to structure. You could say that’s the result of my generation that were hippies in the 1960s and 70s and now want their children to be free to learn in the way that they want to and learn what they want to. But how can you let someone who has no idea about something decide what she or he wants to learn in something? And so it’s just appealing.

I could go on for hours, but maybe a final thing is what you could call superficial success stories or the confirmation bias, that when you look back, there are a few salient points maybe in all that you’ve learned, which you remember clearly, and that might have been the things that you discovered yourself. But the 95% of the time that it didn’t work you tend to forget, and the 98% of the learning that you did from actual good instruction, you tend to forget also. So you have this misconception that if you once had success, so it’s successful for everything.

As an expert in educational psychology, how do you think self-discovery learning methods might influence students’ reasoning and preparedness in the long term once they reach maturity? Are there any studies supporting this?  

I don’t know of them. How do I think self-discovery or discovery learning might influence? It often leads to misconceptions, leads to frustration, leads to wrong answers, and doesn’t lead to effective and efficient learning without proper guidance.

What people forget is explicit instruction also contains room for students to experiment and discover under guidance and without guidance also. If you look at the Ten Principles of Bark Rosenshine, you’ll see it leaves quite enough room for students to experiment, to discover, but they only do that after they’ve gained the necessary knowledge to be able to do that.

“If you look at the Ten Principles of Bark Rosenshine, you’ll see it leaves quite enough room for students to experiment, to discover, but they only do that after they’ve gained the necessary knowledge to be able to do that”

Some suggest that technology shapes the brain. Do you believe artificial intelligence, AI, in education has the potential to reshape the learning process?

No. I think it will reshape possibly what people learn by having them learn less because a chat GPT gives them the answer.

I’m almost 74. I’ve seen language labs, movies, overhead projectors, video, video discs, CDI, learning management systems, video, television, radio, and each one of them was going to reshape education, change it completely, and none of them have. The last major revolution in education was the chalkboard. It made it possible for one teacher to teach 30 students at a time instead of one-on-one. That was a revolution. And before that, the printing press was a revolution, that you could get texts not only into the hands of the elite, but into the hands of all students.

Every new technology is touted as the new educational revolution, and I haven’t seen it happen yet. Can it have its uses? Yes. When I’m busy writing an article, I’ll often get into a dialogue with chat GPT to test my ideas. I think a teacher can do that, to test her or his ideas for the next lesson. I think that a student might be able to use it as a tool to help think about what’s going on and what they’ve thought of themselves. But it’s nothing more or nothing less than a tool that if used properly, let’s take a knife, you can use to make a three-star Michelin meal. The knife, if used improperly, can cut someone’s throat and kill them. It’s a tool and nothing more.

What intersections currently exist between neuroscience and educational psychology? Do these fields collaborate effectively?  

No, they don’t. While, in my opinion, neuroscience can help us because we learn when we learn we strengthen certain nerve circuits in our brain and through lack of use, other nerve circuits are deactivated or decline. If you look at the number of circuits and brains in an infant’s head, it’s quite a lot smaller than in an adult because we have certain paths that we’ve strengthened and other paths that have been lost through lack of use.

“I don’t see very much effective collaboration between neuroscientists on the one hand and what that means for teaching and learning (…) on the other hand”

 So, there is a definite relationship between them, but at this moment, it’s kind of the relationship between quantum physics and Newtonian physics. With Newtonian physics, I can figure out the speed of a car or the acceleration of a car or I can make a car engine more efficient or effective. Of course that all relies upon what happens at the atomic and sub-atomic level, but that level at this moment is not really very relevant, in my opinion, for learning and instruction.

Maybe in the future, it will be and we can make use of it to understand better how instructional techniques work and why and when and why not. Maybe in the future, that will happen, but not at the moment. And I don’t see very much effective collaboration between neuroscientists on the one hand and what that means for teaching and learning, so the cognitive scientists on the other hand.

They’re at this moment still two completely different worlds.

What pedagogical strategies would you recommend to teachers? I know it’s a very general question.

It’s really a very general question. I think if I was going to classify it in two areas, I’d say make use of desirable  difficulties,  propagated, thought up by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, and make use of generative learning activities or teaching activities, which is from Logan Fiorella and Rich Mayer. The first one is desirable difficulties make the learning process involve more mental effort, but in a good way, in ways that lead to learning, spacing practice, retrieval practice, using interleaving, decreasing feedback, mixing contexts. 

Those are all ways that get you to think more about and make use of your long-term memory, and generative activities in which you take the information that comes in in one way, and you shape it into something else. You take something that the teacher said, and you paraphrase it or summarize it, or you make a drawing of the process, or you explain it to someone else. You do something with the information.

Those are the two broad categories that I would say teachers should make use of for better long-lasting learning.

In the recent book, Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking. The Knowledge Revival, the authors (one of whom is you) advocate for a structured and comprehensive curriculum, countering the trend of content reduction in classrooms. Is there evidence supporting the notion that reducing contents enhance critical thinking? What criticism has this book received? 

Reducing content does the exact opposite. Without knowledge, you can’t think critically about something. That’s completely absurd.

“The major criticism that it has received, and that’s not very much, is that people confuse knowledge-rich curriculum with information-rich curriculum”

The major criticism that it has received, and that’s not very much, is that people confuse knowledge-rich curriculum with information-rich curriculum. That it means just giving them a lot more facts, whereas knowledge contains the relationship between the facts and the concepts and the procedures and things like that, and put together in a coherent, structured way, so that when you learn something in one class, you also make use of it in another class, or that a teacher knows in grade four what the child has learned in grade two. So it’s coherent both horizontally and vertically, and it’s based upon knowledge, which is the relationship between facts, procedures, concepts, and not based upon information, a series of unrelated facts.

If education is shaped by society, and today’s social climate is marked by considerable uncertainty, what steps should we take to safeguard education?

Well, that’s not something to ask a cognitive psychologist. The only thing I could say about this is make sure that our learners gain the knowledge that they need to deal with the uncertainty, that they’re capable of weighing different possible paths or solutions in order to determine their use, their… their worth. And not just take someone else’s word for it. I talk about evidence-based or evidence-informed. A lot of what we see is eminence-based. Because someone says it (she or he is an eminent physicist), we take it as true even though their eminence is from a different field from education and learning.

And everything that you see and read and hear, you should look at it with a critical eye. So that means, number one, you need the knowledge to do that. And number two, you need to learn explicitly how to look at an argument and critically dissect it and think about it. That’s a skill. It doesn’t happen by waving a magic wand. You need to be taught it, practice it, and receive feedback about it. You need to be put in situations in which you can make use of knowledge and you’re guided as to how you deal with the assumptions, the assertions of something in a critical way. You can learn to think critically, but only if you have the knowledge and skills to do it.

Should teachers clearly distinguish between evolutionarily primary and secondar knowledge y?

The answer to that is they have to know what the difference is and what that means. Why is that? Because evolutionarily or biologically primary knowledge is gained with a minimum of cognitive effort. The reason for that is because it’s necessary, or it was necessary, to shape, allow for our survival and procreation. If you couldn’t distinguish between your mother and someone else, you didn’t get fed. If you couldn’t communicate that you were hungry, you didn’t get fed. If you didn’t understand that rocks or boulders roll down hills, you didn’t get out of the way of that boulder and you were crushed. They’re all things necessary to be able to procreate and continue the species. That’s biologically primary learning. But that’s not the way to learn to read or write or learn geography or art or music, because those are cultural artefacts that you don’t need to survive.

“I don’t think if you put a child and locked her or him up in a library, that they would very quickly learn how to read. It takes instruction and effort. That’s biologically secondary”

These are things that are relatively new, that our evolutionary system hasn’t made into something hardwired. You don’t have to be able to read to have children. There are enough illiterate people in the world who have children. So that’s not biologically primary. And for biologically secondary, you need good, explicit instruction. People who say, and I’ve even heard professors say it, if a child can learn to talk without being explicitly taught how to do it, they can also learn to read and write without being explicitly taught.

No, that’s like a million monkeys with a million typewriters. I don’t think if you put a child and locked her or him up in a library, that they would very quickly learn how to read. It takes instruction and effort. That’s biologically secondary.

The Swedish professor Jonas Linderoth remarked that “in the 1990’s, teachers who supported direct instruction, were linkened to the fictional and sadistic teacher “Caligula·, as a nickname. Even today such teachers are often viewed unfavourably and labelled as reactionary (in Spain they are sometimes referred as “rojipardos[1]”). What do your findings reveal about this perception? 

Yes, in the Netherlands, they’re only actually called things like dinosaurs, or reactionaries, or things like that. I wrote a blog, I’d suggest that for this interview, you go look at it.

The English version was that traditional is the new progressive.

Yes, I call them traditional. And it is perceived by certain groups of people as being a dinosaur, old fashioned, or whatever. But I see in the Netherlands that that group is getting smaller and smaller. Either teachers have seen the light and realized that good teaching is good teaching, and that you can motivate and have fun and enjoy the teaching and learning process, if you do it traditionally, because traditional isn’t just standing in front of a board and lecturing. 

Traditional is making use of instructional techniques that work. They’ve also experienced that so called progressive  approaches don’t work. They take much more time are and are less efficient, less effective, and also aren’t very enjoyable or fulfilling, because it takes more effort from the teacher and the children learn less.

“You always maintain a group of idealists who don’t make use of what educational research and cognitive psychological research has taught us, and maintain their idealistic, romantic view of how children should learn”

The other aspect of this is, you always maintain a group of idealists who don’t make use of what educational research and cognitive psychological research has taught us, and maintain their idealistic, romantic view of how children should learn. They look at their own learning process. And although it doesn’t work, they refuse to change. And, yes, you can’t do anything about that.

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[1] The term “rojipardo” is a coloquial expression in Spain used to describe individual sor groups who blend left-wing (associated with “rojo”, meaning “red”, a symbol of socialism or comunism) and rght-wing or nationalist (linked to “pardo”, a reference to the brown uniforms of fascist movements) ideologies, like the hitlerian “brown shirts”. It is often used pejoratively to criticise those who, while identifying with the political left, advocate for views considered reactionay, nationalistic or anti-globalist positions tipically associated to with the far right. The term highlights a percieved ideological contradiction, suggesting a fusión of progressive rhetoric with autoritarian stances.

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Paul Kirschner PAPERS:

• Cognitive load theory

• Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

• How learning happens: Seminal works in educational psychology and what they mean in practice

• Applying collaborative cognitive load theory to computer-supported collaborative learning: Towards a research agenda

• Stop propagating the learning styles myth

• Paul Kirschner BLOG

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons