Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
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Can't you learn about the world through fiction? 

8/29/2012

 
The Common Core standards for English Language Arts call for a significant dose of non-fiction reading, in support of reading comprehension, a finding I’ve discussed before. That requirement has led to some puzzlement (and occasional indignation). Can’t kids gain knowledge of the world from fiction as well? Information about science, history, technology, civics, geography, etc?

The answer is “they can and they do.” But there is an important caveat on this conclusion. Beth Marsh and her colleagues offer an excellent summary of this research in a new article published in Educational Psychology Review.

The advantage of fiction is that the narrative can engage students, transport them into the story. The fear is that readers will assume that information in fiction is true, whereas fiction may well contain inaccuracies. We don’t expect fiction to be vetted for accuracy the way a non-fiction source would be. (Certainly Hollywood movies are notorious for playing fast-and-loose with the truth.)

Isn’t it possible, then, that these inaccuracies would be later remembered by subjects as true?

Yes. In her experiments Marsh uses short stories that refer to facts about the world. The facts are either accurate (it happened on the largest ocean, the Pacific) inaccurate (it happened on the largest ocean, the Atlantic)  or in a control condition, absent (it happened on the largest ocean). 

Later, subjects take a general information test that includes a probe of the target information (Which is the largest ocean on earth?) . The question is whether reading the accurate or inaccurate information influences subjects’ response to the question (compared to the control condition).
Picture
Left panel: Correct answers on final test, given the type of information in the story: correct, neutral (i.e. control) or misleading. Right panel: Incorrect answers on final test, given the type of information in the story.
As shown in the figure, seeing the correct information makes it more likely you’ll get the answer correct  on the test (left panel) and less likely you’ll get it wrong (right panel). Reading the misleading information makes it less likely you’ll get it correct (left panel) and more likely you’ll get it wrong (right panel).

Thus, students are influenced by inaccurate information (at least for the duration of the experiment, as long as a week) and prior knowledge is not protective. In other words, the misleading information has an impact even for stuff that most of the students knew before the experiment started.

Even more alarming, a general warning “there may be misinformation here” was not effective (Marsh & Fazio, 2006). It may be that readers are caught up in the narrative and don’t worry overmuch about evaluating each bit of factual content they come across.

The good news is that a specific warning telling subjects exactly which bit of information cannot be trusted is very effective in preventing subjects from absorbing the inaccuracy into their beliefs (Butler et al 2009).

And “absorbing” is the right word: typically, readers later report that they “knew” the inaccurate information before the start of the experiment.

So, can fictional sources be used to help students learn new knowledge about the world? Yes, but teachers must be aware that the inaccuracies may be learned as well, and ideally they will inoculate students against inaccuracies with specific warnings.

Butler, A. C., Zaromb, F., Lyle, K. B., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2009). Using popular films to enhance classroom learning: The good, the bad, and the interesting. Psychological Science, 20, 1161–1168.

Marsh, E. J., Butler, A. C. & Umanath, S. (2012) Using fictional sources in the classroom: Applications from cognitive psychology. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 449-469.

Marsh, E. J., & Fazio, L. K. (2006). Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories. Memory & Cognition, 34, 1140–1149.

Jason Millard link
8/29/2012 01:49:13 pm

Excellent post Dan! I'd also like to point out to readers that in your first book, "Why Don't Students Like School," you've referenced that positing non-fiction in a narrative way can be both factually correct as well as cognitively engaging!

crazedmummy
8/29/2012 02:15:37 pm

But fictional does not necessarily mean that general facts are inaccurate. The lack of vampires does not mean there are no lovely castles on mountaintops where the weather is bleak. Maybe we could select readings that incorporate correct descriptive information, like the Grapes of Wrath, or Jane Eyre, or even I, Robot. I am pretty concerned that someone thinks we are going to do a great deal in the area of reasoning and synthesizing ideas for students who regard every piece of written information as literally correct to the extent that we cannot expose them to these works. (run-on sentence: if there was place to stop for breath, I would have put commas in, but I can't find out where!)

Roger Sweeny
8/30/2012 04:42:17 am

This is not really on point but one of your statements bothered me: "In other words, the misleading information has an impact even for stuff that most of the students knew before the experiment started."

From what I can tell, the experimental design did not involve finding out beforehand if the students knew what the biggest ocean was. It would, of course, be difficult to do so without causing the students to change the answers they will give later.

I suspect that the experimenters assumed that the students knew this fact because it had been covered in school previously. However, this is illegitimate. As a high school teacher, I am continually struck by how little of what students have supposedly learned actually becomes usable knowledge.

Instead, students generally follow a (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious) strategy of "learn and forget." Knowledge is retained until the test is taken or the project is completed. Unless the information is used after that (and it rarely is; most school "units" are pretty self-contained), it decays. Very little is left very quickly.

So much research and rhetoric in the education field assumes that once a test or a course is passed, the test passer or course passer "knows" the material covered by the test or course. This is simply not true. Period. Full stop.

Perhaps the experimenter here should find a similar group of students and ask them what the biggest ocean is. Do it to one sub-group as an open response, and to a different group as a multiple choice (with the answers alphabetized, or 4 sub-sub-groups with 4 different oceans first to deal with the fact that students may pick the first answer that sounds familiar). Will there be substantial differences between the two sub-groups? My hypothesis: yes. Will there be substantial differences between the 4 sub-sub-groups? Again, my hypothesis is yes. Will the answers be substantially different for people on the east coast, west coast, and inland areas of the USA? I'm not nearly as sure here, but if my life depended on it, I would bet yes. In other words, lots of the kids just don't know.

For many of them, the incorrect passage is not overwriting correct knowledge that they had previously learned. Instead, it is filling a pretty much empty space, where there is nothing but a sorta kinda vague impression.

Dan Willingham
8/30/2012 04:56:17 am

@Roger: the point you raise (would students really know what the largest ocean) is addressed by the control group. Sixty percent got the question right on the test when "pacific" was not mentioned in the story. Because students in the "correct" and the "misleading" groups were similar to these control subjects, about 60% of them would have gotten the question right on the test, if not for the information (correct or misleading) that they read in the story.

Elizabeth Marsh
8/30/2012 06:04:37 am

We also have a new study coming out in JEP:General where students answered the general knowledge questions before coming into the experiment, so we could be sure of what a given individual knew prior to the study. Being able to produce a fact ahead of time did not protect against learning misinformation. Students even picked up some story errors that contradicted correct answers previously made with high confidence.

Roger Sweeny
8/30/2012 09:07:31 am

This suggests to me that they didn't really "know" the fact very well before they read the story. Being able to "produce a fact" may mean accessing some vague memory that isn't part of any larger understanding.

Roger Sweeny
8/30/2012 08:55:11 am

Of course. But shouldn't the Correct, Neutral, and Misleading bars for the two panels add up to 100% for each pair? It looks like there were no answers at all from 17% of the students who read the correct story, 30% of those who read the neutral story, and 25% of those who read the incorrect story. I hope I'm missing something because this doesn't seem right.

educationally incorrect
9/2/2012 11:52:31 am

Another thing is that there are subjects which have very little "accurate fiction" written about them to begin with, like, for example, the physical sciences.

When I was getting my masters in education they made us take a "literacy" class and were were supposed compile lists of "trade books" to feed to our students. I searched high and low for any fiction that could teach physics to students and i was only able to come up with a single title, "Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson. I've never seen anything come even close. Most of my other choices for trade books were books by people like Michael Crichton even though there was nothing there that was remotely useful for teaching the subject matter. It was sufficient to fool the "professor"

The powers-that-be in education seem convinced that there is "accurate fiction" available by the ton. You'd think that the education PHD who taught this class would know better than to think that "Sphere" could teach physics to HS students.

Tracy W
9/3/2012 12:03:28 am

Issac Asimov didn't help?

educationally incorrect
9/3/2012 06:17:39 am

I'm talking here about subject matter being studied at the hs level, like Newton's laws, not things like the laws of robotics.

The only reason that many people push for fiction is because that's what they understand. For example, one big education fad was "combining subjects". It makes some sense to combine, say, physics with math, chemistry with biology, or literature with history. But that's never what the powers that be want to see. It's always "literature" combined with something else. "Literature" with math, "literature" with physics, etc. Why? Because most of your admin types, as well as ed-school types, are math/physics/chemistry idiots, but by "combining" these subjects with some kind of story they can feel smarter than a 5th grader when they come to observe your class or grade your unit plans.

educationally incorrect
9/3/2012 06:41:46 am

I'm talking here about subject matter being studied at the hs level, like Newton's laws, not things like the laws of robotics.

The only reason that many people push for fiction is because that's what they understand. For example, one big education fad was "combining subjects". It makes some sense to combine, say, physics with math, chemistry with biology, or literature with history. But that's never what the powers that be want to see. It's always "literature" combined with something else. "Literature" with math, "literature" with physics, etc. Why? Because most of your admin types, as well as ed-school types, are math/physics/chemistry idiots, but by "combining" these subjects with some kind of story they can feel smarter than a 5th grader when they come to observe your class or grade your unit plans.

educationally incorrect
9/3/2012 06:42:01 am

I'm talking here about subject matter being studied at the hs level, like Newton's laws, not things like the laws of robotics.

The only reason that many people push for fiction is because that's what they understand. For example, one big education fad was "combining subjects". It makes some sense to combine, say, physics with math, chemistry with biology, or literature with history. But that's never what the powers that be want to see. It's always "literature" combined with something else. "Literature" with math, "literature" with physics, etc. Why? Because most of your admin types, as well as ed-school types, are math/physics/chemistry idiots, but by "combining" these subjects with some kind of story they can feel smarter than a 5th grader when they come to observe your class or grade your unit plans.


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