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Clearing up confusion understand that [ confusion is ] a perfectly normal part of learning when you’ re learning really complicated things.”
Campus Review spoke with Lodge to find out more about his research.
Why students need to embrace confusion.
Jason Lodge interviewed by Loren Smith
I
think a lot of people just assume confusion is absolutely a bad thing as a part of a learning process.”“ Huh?” one might reply to Jason Lodge, associate professor at the University of Queensland.
Along with his colleagues at the university’ s Science of Learning Research Centre, together with some from the University of Melbourne, Macquarie University, Curtin University and the Australian Council for Educational Research, Lodge has been studying the potential benefits of a muddled mind.
Specifically, he and his team have analysed student confusion in digital environments, because people increasingly learn this way. Also, it’ s harder for teachers to witness student confusion in this realm, as they can’ t see students’ confused or otherwise facial expressions.
Hence, it’ s important to understand the role of confusion and rearrange digital teaching strategies to suit it.
“ One of the reasons we think confusion is important is because often the kinds of mental structures and schemas that we have, particularly around concepts, need to be partly undone so they can be corrected,” Lodge says.
This insight was gleaned from his study, which used eye tracking, video recording and an electroencephalogram( EEG) on groups of students, working in various digital environments, to measure their reactions to learning material.
Another curious study finding is that very confident and unconfident students may be disadvantaged by confusion.
“ For example, if you’ ve got a student who is highly confident about what they think they know, then they might attempt to plough ahead with learning despite the fact that they may have the wrong conception about something,” Lodge says.
“ Obviously, the other side of it is if you’ ve got students who are not confident enough or don’ t have enough self-efficacy to get through it, then when they reach an impasse, it might just lead them to get frustrated and give up.”
From this, Lodge developed sage advice for teachers:“ Create supportive conditions to allow students to … process experiencing disequilibrium … but at the same time, work with the students to
CR: Firstly, can you tell us what prompted this research into student confusion? JL: There was a lot of work going on, in the US in particular, around people using adaptive learning environments. These digital environments are built to assist students to learn often complex scientific concepts. One of the things they were finding is that students were often getting stuck and having trouble; and you almost always don’ t have the same capacity to intervene when a student’ s working in a digital environment as you do in a classroom, where it’ s a lot more obvious that a student might be confused, because you can generally see it on their face, for example.
That was one of the main drivers behind this work, but it was a program of research that was initially led by Gregor Kennedy at the University of Melbourne and Lori Lockyer, who’ s now at the University of Technology Sydney.
What do you mean by digital environment? We’ re talking about any learning that is mediated by a computer. We’ ve looked at everything from learning through videos, to quite sophisticated simulation environments where you have a conceptual idea and students can then manipulate variables within an online interface to get a better understanding of how gravity works, or how basic biological processes work, that sort of thing.
Does that mean this research could apply to students of all ages? Yes. We’ re mainly interested in the idea of conceptual learning, as opposed to something more procedural. For example, you can watch a YouTube video on almost anything these days. It’ s relatively easy to pick up something that’ s more procedural, like how to bake a cake or put up a fence. Where it gets more complicated is when people need to understand the complex mechanisms of climate change, or some aspect of a biological process so they can diagnose a disease. So that’ s where we’ ve had an interest. This kind of learning can apply at almost any level, even with young kids dealing with conceptual ideas.
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