My slides from researchED18

1. Making Kids
Cleverer:
A manifesto for
closing the
advantage gap
researchEd 2018
@DavidDidau

2. 1. The purpose of education
• Everyone wants children to be happy,
healthy, safe, conscientious, creative,
critical thinkers, problem solvers etc.
• But, what’s the best way to achieve these
aims?

3. 2. It’s evolution stupid
• We have evolved to find it easy to learn to
be creative, critical, solve problems and
collaborate
• We have not evolved to find it easy to
learn reading, writing, maths and science.
Tricot & Sweller 2007Geary (2007)

4. 3. Is intelligence the answer?
What is intelligence?
A very general mental capability that, among other
things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve
problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex
ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is
not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or
test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and
deeper capability for comprehending our
surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of
things, or "figuring out" what to do.
Gottfredson, Linda S. (1997). Mainstream Science on
Intelligence

5. Intelligence correlates with…
• Creativity – 0.4
• Leadership – 0.3
• Conscientiousness – 0.4 – 0.6
• Probability of being victim of violent crime –
0.5 - 0.6
• Happiness – 0.5
• Mental health (schizophrenia) – 0.7
• Longevity – 0.7
• Education outcomes – 0.8
• Wearing glasses – 0.4
Ritchie, S. (2015) Intelligence:
All That Matters

6. 4. Nature via nurture
We are not born equal, we are simply born different.
Adam Rutherford
The difference of natural talents in different men is,
in reality, much less than we are aware of … The
difference between the most dissimilar characters,
between a philosopher and a common street porter,
for example, seems to arise not so much from
nature as from habit, custom, and education.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

7. 5. Can we get cleverer?
• Is the brain “like a muscle”?
• Intelligence is made up of fluid & crystallised
intelligence
– Fluid: the ability to reason and solve problems
– Crystallised: the ability to access and utilise
information stored in long-term memory
• The more you know the cleverer you
become.

8. 6. How memory works
• Long term memory overcomes the limits of
working memory

9. 7. You are what you know
• Knowledge is both what we think with and
about.
• We cannot think with or about something
we don’t know.
• The more we know about something, the
more sophisticated our thinking.
• What you know determines who you are.

10. 8. What knowledge?
• Without powerful knowledge children are
dependent upon those who have it
• Powerful knowledge transcends and liberates
children from their daily experience
• Shared and powerful knowledge enables
children to understand, cooperate and shape the
world together
• Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and
sustainable democracy
• Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be
available to all children.
Michael Young,
The Curriculum and the Entitlement to Knowledge

11. Because of an inherent and inescapable inertia in the
knowledge that is shared among hundreds of millions of
people, the Core Knowledge plan was necessarily
traditional, and was criticised in the 1990s for being so. It
appeared to perpetuate the dominance of the already
dominant elements of American life, while the aim of
intellectuals in the 1990s was to reduce that dominance
and privilege, and valorize neglected cultures and women.
So there was quite a lot of controversy attached to the
Knowledge plan, which, though egalitarian in purpose and
result, looked elitist on the surface. The aim of giving
everybody entrée to the knowledge of power ran smack
up against the aim of deprivileging those who are
currently privileged.
Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters

12. There’s always an opportunity cost
The true cost of a choice is…
– explicit value of chosen option (v)
– minus cost of chosen option (c)
– minus implicit value of foregone alternative (a)
v-c-a=TC

13. 9. Practice makes permanent
• A lot of knowledge can be automatised
(automatised knowledge is skill)
• Experts and novices think differently

14. 10. Teaching kids to be cleverer
• We know a lot about effective instruction
• Useful theories make meaningful,
measurable predictions
– Cognitive load theory
– New theory of Disuse

15. Shifting the bell curve
• Who benefits if we raise the intelligence of all
children?
• IQ and intelligence are not the same
• If intelligence = knowledge, then any increase is real
and meaningful
• Although the rich will get richer, the poor will benefit
disproportionately.

16. @DavidDidau
learningspy.co.uk
ddidau@gmail.com
“It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in
being wrong – when the costs of being wrong
are paid by others.”