What can Behavioural Science teach Education?

Filia talks about her training in psychology, how lectures used to be hours of frantic scribbling, bringing behavioural insights to her work as an educator, and how data analytics can help improve the learning experience for students of any age. Education used to be a one-way transfer of information and learners were expected to keep up somehow. Now, educators have new tools and techniques for gauging how learners are going, and what needs to change to help them.

Also, we discuss how personalised, timely and constructive feedback can have benefits for learners, as well as the impact of COVID on driving changes to online and face-to-face education.

‍Pocket Change is a series of pocket-size videos about a key aspect of behaviour change.  Each episode features a BehaviourWorks Australia Researcher explaining their area of expertise in a clear and simple manner.  

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Transcript:

Geoff

Hi everyone. This month I'm talking to Filia Garivaldis.We're going to talk about, education and behavioural science. So I guess we'll kick off with question one. In what way is behavioural science important in education?

Filia

Okay. Well, if we think about the core business of behavioural science, and that is to change behaviour, to change behaviour in ways that improves the lives and well-being of individuals, of organisations and communities, we run into a lot of parallels, actually, with education.  Because education actually has a lot of those similar goals about, you know, empowering graduates, providing them with the knowledge, information they need to have to go out into the world and create a better place. Educators have a really rich pedagogical toolkit. They go in and learn how to be great educators, how to use tools to make education student centred, how to engage students, facilitate, active learning.

But it's all about projecting information and providing information to students. That's fundamentally, what education is all about. And if you think about, how education was received by maybe some of us in our generation, you know, I have memories of sitting in large lecture theatres and just being talked to for two hours and scrambling to make notes, and to gather and to remember as much as I could.

That was education back then. I think we've come a long way, but there are certainly ways that we could improve further some of the tools that we do use in education.

Geoff

Your background is education psychology. Was it mainly psychology?

Filia

Yes. So I went straight through and did a psychology degree in the psychology, master's in the psychology, PhD, and I loved academia, the context of academia and, and teaching and learning.

And so that's what I fell into. My discipline is psychology and behavioural science. but my practice is education. I'm really fortunate that I can bring those two together and, combine my love for behavioural science and apply that as much as I can to education.

Geoff

So when it comes to learning, did you ever think there's got to be a better way of doing this? That there's got to be a better way of educating people?

Filia

Yeah, definitely. I've had lots of experiences in the classroom where I'm just not getting through to students. And likewise, I've had a lot of experiences where the atmosphere, and the vibe in the classroom is just absolutely great and inspiring. And I think any educator can identify both of those experiences and they know exactly what it feels like.

Sometimes it's harder to pinpoint why is it, what is it that, creates a difference?  To attribute that difference to something, what it is we often don't know.  But behavioural science is, has prospects, I guess, in helping create more of the latter type of experience than the former experience.

Geoff

So when it comes to education, how can behavioural science help?

Filia

There's a lot of literature from the field of behavioural science. And it can be categorised, I guess, into literature that helps us understand, how we make decisions, and the biases and blind spots that we have in decision making, and therefore, how we can overcome those. Behavioural science also enables us to identify opportunities to make changes to behaviour so that our behaviour aligns better with our personal and professional agendas or our education agendas.

Behavioural science offers us tools in co-creating solutions with other people so that those tools are better informed.  And also evaluating the impact of those tools, on learning outcomes, and on learning behaviour. So there are lots of lots of things that educators are doing that you could say, have behavioural science input. So, for example, learning and learning analytics helps us measure behaviour.

So capturing data on if, when and how students use learning materials.  And also data on the impact of certain, innovations or solutions, educational solutions that we use during teaching feedback as well, such as assessment feedback is essential in helping to shape behaviour.

It enables individuals to gain information about how they are performing, to have insight into their behaviour and to make adjustments to their behaviour in light of certain needs or the environment.  We can use behavioural science to make feedback even better, such as by making it timely, by personalising that feedback. And by making that feedback constructive.

So we can use behavioural science tools on how we define behaviour to make it very clear to students as to what we expect them to be doing differently, and how that will impact their performance next time.

Most of the time, more is not better, right?  More information is not better. So, as educators, sometimes we wait. We wonder why aren't students following, following our instructions with regard to their assessment - oh, I need to give them more information. I need to tell them more about what they need to do, or I need to put links here to academic integrity guidelines.  Or give them an instruction manual on how to upload a video into YouTube.  

So we provide students with a lot more information, but actually that doesn't often lead to better outcomes.

Geoff

Has Covid and the move online changed the way educators haveto engage with students do you think?

Filia

I think so. I think educators have been made more aware of the need to check in with students to take into consideration their own students preferences and student needs when it comes to delivering information, in a face to face context.

You know, there are cues that we use to gain that sort of information on nonverbal cues as well as the verbal cues. But in an online environment, those cues are compromised. So often we can't see how students are really receiving the information that we provide to them. So we do need to find other ways of engaging students and meeting those needs.

Geoff

Is it a tougher job for educators these days, do you think, or if they just got to look at more, more ways and more tools to use?

Filia

Well, actually, I think it's a case of just developing some different habits to what we might have had before and used before. So the more we engage with these more interactive, student centred strategies in teaching, the more natural they become to us.

So actually, it's not more effortful. The effortful part is when we're learning and when we're acquiring new behaviours. But with repeated practice that, those behaviours can be automatic and can come naturally. And I think that's what makes a good educator from, you know, or an early career kind of educator, those that have had a lot of practice know how to hold a group.

They've got that intuition and that experience to draw on. That's good. That's going to help them. And that just comes with practice. And that's what learning analytics is. It's that data. Well, learning analytics is a type of data. We can gather all the data. We can talk to students. We have citu feedback that the university facilitates and collects from every unit, every delivery.

So there is data, there's an abundance of data. The question is how much are we using that data and whether we're acting on it? Are we making changes to the way we teach based on that data? And I think only if we start doing that, can we really get close to providing students with a learning experience that is not only going to provide them with information, but is also going to provide them with the skills, and the confidence to go out and create a workforce and a workplace environment that will support all of this new learning that they've acquired.

It's human nature for us to make assumptions and to use our biases. And that helps get us by most of the time, but making assumptions with regard to why students behave the way they do can sometimes, lead us to apply strategies that aren't going to be as effective as we'd like.  To really target our education to the needs of students, we should avoid using assumptions and instead use more systematic approaches to understanding and gathering evidence.

Geoff

Thank you very much.

 Filia

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

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