Do you know how a ballpoint pen works? If you’re immediate answer was “yes”, you are in a majority that includes people who think they know how a ballpoint works (though in actuality their understanding is superficial) or people who believe it isn’t too complicated and they could immediately look it up and understand it pretty easily (this phenomena is known as the “natural born cyborg” and toes the line of the extended mind thesis, a conversation for another time).

What about a toilet? Do you know how a toilet works?

My first reaction is, “I sure do! I use toilets all the time! How could I not know how they work? I depress the handle, water comes down into the bowl and then everything goes away.” Which is technically right. That is how a toilet functions. But the physics and magic about how all that happens is not easy to articulate.

I don’t think I could draw an accurate diagram though. Gosh – maybe I don’t know how toilets work after all (spoiler alert, it’s not just gravity – siphoning is a big part, too, and helps explain how rats, snakes, and – eek! – even spiders have no issues crawling up toilet plumbing).

This is what is known as the Illusion of explanatory depth and was studied by two Yale scientists in 2002¹.

In their study, the researchers asked participants to rate their understanding of a device or phenomenon on a scale of one to seven (shallow, partial, or deep understanding). In addition to toilets, the researchers asked for personal ratings on a speedometer, a zipper, a piano key, a cylinder lock, a helicopter, a quartz watch, and a sewing machine (side note – if you had an affinity for the book series “The Way Things Work” by David Macaulay you would have loved this experiment as that was the source of the concepts participants had to rate).

Guess what?

“Nearly all participants showed drops in estimates of what they knew when confronted with having to provide a real explanation, answer a diagnostic question, and compare their understanding to an expert description.”

And these are things that they use all the time!!!

Now imagine students trying to learn new, complex information. Our brains convince us that we have learned things we don’t quite fully understand. In the book Make it Stick, Peter Brown posits:

“When they hear a lecture or read a text that is a paragon of clarity, the ease with which they follow the argument gives them the feeling that they already know it and don’t need to study it. In other words, they tend not to know what they don’t know; when put to the test, they find they cannot recall the critical ideas or apply them in a new context. Likewise, when they’ve reread their lecture notes and texts to the point of fluency, their fluency gives them the false sense that they’re in possession of the underlying content, principles, and implications that constitute real learning, confident that they can recall them at a moment’s notice².”

This danger is amplified by students who encounter the same (misleading) feelings when reading and highlighting in a textbook – students have a familiarity with the ideas (even to the point of knowing exactly where on a page the idea was written) though that is no indication that students can adequately describe the idea; they are just comfortable with the idea.

How do we help students overcome this illusion? In Uncommon Sense Teaching, Barbara Oakley suggests that it’s important to tell students that it’s perfectly normal not to understand something difficult on their first attempt. For particularly complex content, I preempt the class by reminding students that “it isn’t important that you remember how to do something – just remember that it can be done. You can always look up how to do something (a call to build a cadre of auto-didactic learners!).

You could also tell students about the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) – metacognition goes a long way.

Oakley also suggests a scaffolded, active learning approach to lessons. For instance, in a lesson for Punnett squares she suggests two main stages – making the Punnett square and then deciphering the Punnett square. Each stage has three phases – “I do“, “We do“, and “You do“³.

Making the Punnett Square

In the I do phase, the teacher slowly presents the facts. Perhaps talk about eye colors and how one might predict the eye color of offspring. Invite students to share the colors of their parents’ eyes. The teacher might externalize their inner monologue as they draw the first Punnett square.

In the We do phase the students practice creating their own. The teacher would encourage each dyad to verbalize their thought process and use the vocabulary that was introduced (dominant, recessive, heterozygous, and homozygous) in the first example. This affords the learner a sandbox to play in and make small corrections to their thinking. In this sandbox, students can help each other – or neighboring groups.

In the last part of the “making” part, You do, students are tasked with solving some similar problems on their own “to solidify the learning and build automaticity”.

Deciphering the Punnett Square

Now the teacher can introduce more complexity (like probability). It is okay to amplify the complexity here – students have already had some hands-on experience with the basic framework.

In the I do phase, the teacher is again slowly describing what they are doing as they are constructing the Punnett squares. In fact multiple examples should be provided, eliciting input from the students. The teacher leaves the three or four examples visible for the next two phases.

The penultimate phase, the We do phase, is the same as it was before – students work with a partner to explore more examples, wondering aloud and helping each other out.

Finally, in the You do phase, students have no support and should work through some more examples. It is okay to have problems of varying complexity – part of the challenge is having the student pause to reflect on what type of problem each example is.

Helping students understand the illusion of explanatory depth (also known as the illusion of mastery) is a good first step for teaching foreign material. And scaffolding the examples while providing time for students to engage with them is a great active learning experience. You might also want to check out Webb’s Depth of Knowledge framework.

Next time we will look at the flip side of this – the Curse of Knowledge (and how it gets in the way of teaching).

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¹   Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive science, 26(5), 521-562.

²   Roediger, H. L., McDaniel, M. A., & Brown, P. C. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press.

³   Oakley, B., & Sejnowski, T. J. (2021). Uncommon sense teaching: Practical insights in brain science to help students learn. Penguin.

Photo by Sachin Khadka on Unsplash

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Imagine Inga and Otto live in the city and are independently walking to the museum. Inga has a fabulous memory and knows the precise location of the museum on 53^rd street. Since she has a deep orientation of the city navigating there is very easy for her.

Otto, on the other hand, does not know where the museum is. He needs to consult the notebook he carries around with him all the time (he is a fan of the city and keeps a log of the places he wants to go). But once he sees that it is on 53^rd street, all Otto has to do is pull out his trusty map and find a path to the museum.

This scenario was pitched by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in the late nineties in a paper called “The Extended Mind” (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). Their argument was that environmental supports are leveraged by human reasoners all the time. While Clark and Chalmers further argue about the cognitive implications and semantics, the takeaway is that humans have relied on tools and physical objects for reasoning and remembering for centuries.

Diaries and journals help us remember our past. Slide rules help us with complex computations. GPS helps us figure out where we are going (helpful for other streams of information such as construction, accidents, toll road notification, too). Michelle Miller suggests in her new book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology that at a basic level, using a tool such as a spreadsheet can offload some mundane work that affords us time to be productive elsewhere. On an abstracted level,

These tools can change our mastery of the skills associated with the software, producing intellectual impacts that persist even when we aren’t actively using that tool any more. So for example, my spreadsheet app might change the ways in which I think about organizing quantitative information, helping me develop a more sophisticated conceptual understanding of how things like formulae work, thereby producing an improvement in my cognitive abilities.

Miller, p. 30

This idea that physical objects outside the – as Clark and Chalmers call it – “skin/skull barrier” can influence the way we think and extend our cogntive capabilities are at the heart of the Extended Mind Theory. Think about long division – it is certianly much easier with a pencil and a piece of paper. David Kirsh and Paul Maglio discussed the notion of epistemic actions – “physical actions that make mental computation easier, faster, or more reliable-are external actions that an agent performs to change his or her own computational state” (Kirsh and Maglio, p. 513). As an example, they pointed out that Tetris players often rotate the pieces on the screen before they know where the pieces will end up because a physical rotation and examination of the screen is much quicker than mentally rotating the piece and figuring out where to put it (300ms compared to 1000ms). You may observe the same behavior playing the New York Times Spelling Bee game or Words with Friends where physically scrambling the letters helps jolt anagram discovery or patterns.

In the museum story, Otto had instant, reliable, and self-endorsed access to the information he needed. So did Inga. But was there a cognitive advantage to Inga? Sure, Otto’s notebook might get damaged or lost. But Inga equally might forget the address of the museum over time – or she may have an injury that affects her memory. It’s plausible that Otto’s notebook may run out of room but he could always get another one. Inga might not even remember all the places she wants to go, so in this dimension perhaps Otto is better suited using his method. 

The Extended Mind Theory is more than off-loading cognitively complex actions (or mundane information, or reminders, or things to look up) to technology; it is about extending our abilities because of our ability to work in concert with technology.

Whereas we grew up using stickynotes as a mechanism for remembering, right now we have a much more sophisticated hierarchy of “stickynotes” – OneNote, for instance. OneNote (and similar software like Evernote, Notion, and Cursive) have features like organization, tagging, collaboration, searching, linking, integrations with email, and other features. Can these features alter the way we think (both individually and collectively) in a similar way that Marshall McLuhan posited that media changes our social behavior (McLuhan, 1994)?

Michelle Miller (and other scientists) seems to think so:

The existence of calculation tools like spreadsheets doesn’t just extend my abilities and it doesn’t just change my own mind. It could change all of our minds as far as how we think about data and calculation in general. In other words: Spreadsheets change how we think about numbers. So did calculators, and so did abaci. Word processing changes how we think about language. So does the existence of a written alphabet (Priess and Sternberg, 2013). In sum: The unique properties and affordances of the things that we invent all color, shape, and eventually transform the things we think about.

Miller, p. 31

There is a lot to unpack in Miller’s new book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology. The list of chapters includes:

• What Technology Does to Us (and for Us)
• Why We Remember, Why We Forget, Enhancing Memory and Why it Matters (Even though Google Exists)
• Memory Requires Attention
• The Devices we Can’t Put Down: Smartphones, Laptops, Memory, and Learning.

Each chapter includes an itemized list of techniques educators can leverage to enhance student learning.

The book is worth reading – and not forgetting.

REFERENCES

Clark, A. (2004). Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 29(3), 471.

Clark, Andy & Chalmers, David. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7-19.

Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive science, 18(4), 513-549.

McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT press.

Miller, M. D. (2022). Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World.

Preiss, D. D., & Sternberg, R. J. (2005). Technologies for working intelligence. RJ Sternberg, & DD Preiss, Intelligence and Technology: The Impact of Tools on the Nature and Development of Human Abilities. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 183-208.

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