Why Learning Apps Fail and How to Actually Motivate Learning
The flashy learning-app fad is doomed to fail and what everyone should understand about learning and motivation.
Hello Bar-setters!
I recently listened to one of Cal Newport’s podcasts titled: A Deep Response to Distraction. In it, Newport explains why the mainstream educational emphasis on making learning “effortless” and “addictive” is misguided.
Newport’s analysis was prompted by a recent Ted Talk from Luis von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo. In Ahn’s talk, he suggests that learning apps can make learning “addictive” by copying the model of social media apps, like TikTok, and that this will transform the future of education.
Anyone in education will be well acquainted with this pitch and the damage it has already done. I’ve written about this in my book and in this piece for Quillette. Newport attempts to put this issue to bed once and for all by giving a masterclass on learning and motivation. As he explains…
Learning Apps are Designed to Fail
You are competing with applications that are also trying to hack the dopamine system. So now you need to out-reward them. You want your dopamine neurons associated with Duolingo to have a stronger rewards response than these other attention engineered applications. And the reason why I think that is almost certainly not going to happen is because you cannot engineer out the reality that learning requires strain. Learning is hard…
…how you learn a complicated new procedure is through a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice forces you to strain yourself with the activity at hand, be it conceptual or physical, past where you’re comfortable. And it’s in that straining past where you are comfortable that you are able to move forward your capabilities…
You can add as many owls with glasses and streaks around (your learning app) as you want, but TikTok doesn’t have the unpleasant strain. It’s just like saying if I want you to eat more broccoli, I can put it in a happy meal box…
…The reward is simply much more pure with TikTok. Just like if you wanted to compare TikTok to meth, the reward for meth is probably much stronger than TikTok because now you have a substance that is crossing the blood brain barrier. Right, so if I’m a meth-addict, I’m like: I like TikTok but what I’d really like is some meth…
…Does this mean we are out of luck? No!
See how I left you with a cliffhanger? I’ll get to the solution, but first, let’s summarize where we are.
Despite the wishes of tech elites and many progressive educators, and despite the number of school districts and policy makers who have been swept away by the “let’s make learning easy and addictive” delusion, smartphones and deep learning remain in conflict.
Still, we should acknowledge that this movement is rooted in an admirable desire to democratize education.
People want to make education more accessible to all those who aren’t lucky enough to be raised in a culture of learning. But these efforts are doomed to failure because they neglect foundational principles of learning and motivation. They try to beat addictive apps at their own game, rather than establish a game where learners can be successful.
How to Beat Dopamine
We will always lose to our incessant impulse-candy if we try to fight dopamine with educational dopamine. But the good news is, there is an even more powerful motivational system that we should be focused on: Episodic Future Thinking (EFT).
The EFT system was made to beat the dopamine system. It is a survival mechanism built to give us the ability to transcend our immediate impulses in favor of long term benefits.
Newport uses the example of a nomadic person who finds a lot of honey. This hypothetical nomad desperately wants to eat the honey, but doing so will likely attract bears to him and increase his odds of being eaten by a bear. The EFT system is what gives him the ability to not eat the honey.
To put it in terms you’ll be more familiar with, the EFT system is the delayed gratification system—the don’t eat the marshmallow system.
It isn’t an overstatement to say that the EFT is what allows for civilization to exist. It is responsible for almost every admirable act of humanity, from soldiers running into battle, to parents being patient with their children, to college students who choose to study rather than join their friends for more video game time.
So how does Newport suggest that we activate our students’ and our childrens’ EFTs?
“We have to fill each student’s hippocampus with concrete details, experiences, and memories,” which allow them to connect desirable behaviors with desirable futures. In other words, the best way to motivate students to learn is to give them strong values and a clear vision of a desirable future that they are working towards.
This models my rationale for the Fire Carrier ideal. The prescription:
Clarify values. Clarify heroes and ideals. Read in front of your kids. Have bookshelves. Play sports! Play music! Be a parent who lives richly! Surround yourself with people who you want to be like! Go where they go!
This is consistent with the childhoods of exceptional people.
Clarify standards, milestones, levels, and a path to becoming something greater.
ON THE FLIP SIDE, we must actively limit/prevent/avoid exposing our children to the supernormal stimuli (social media, video games, etc.) that drain their psychological bandwidth and blunt their aspirational inclinations.
But Tech Can Help
For the record, I’m not saying technology cannot assist with learning in any way. Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory effectively demonstrates that television and other media can have a profound effect on behavior and values. The Chinese government takes advantage of this with their aspiration-oriented brand of TikTok, Douyin.
Apart from this, technology can support learning in many fantastic ways. For example, Synthesis seems to be an unbelievable educational program.
Likewise, Khanmigo allows a student to pick a debate topic and go back and forth with a fantastic AI. Once you start a debate, it is hard to stop and you learn so much in the process.
These are examples of educational technology that is built in alignment with the science of learning.
What Is the Best Way to “Democratize” Education?
The make learning addictive movement is spurred on by those who wish to democratize education. But these efforts are doomed to fail because they neglect fundamental principles of learning and motivation. Worse still, these attempts do great damage, because they legitimize the absurd belief that students can learn well by utilizing the very device that is most disruptive to focus and deep learning.
This has been demonstrated well in a study, aptly titled, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” As Dr. Jonathan Haidt summarizes:
The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use—just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in one’s pocket sapped students’ abilities.
Rather than pander to the tech-obsessed, we’d be far better off if we focused on democratizing the scholastic mindset and the values that we know to be far more fruitful. In times when values such as discipline, education, and personal responsibility are the norm, there is greater social mobility. In subcultures where these values are emphasized, there is greater social mobility.
This is made evident, for example, by a recent article in Time titled Why the Children of Immigrants Are the Ones Getting Ahead in America, which explains that:
The children of first-generation immigrants growing up close to the bottom of the income distribution (say, at the 25th percentile) are more likely to reach the middle of the income distribution than are children of similarly poor U.S.-born parents.
It’s not sexy, but values and expectations are the only reliable path to democratizing educational success. There is no cheat code.
The reality is we won’t democratize education unless we are willing to insist upon certain values and norms. The only way to democratize education is through leadership and culture.
An Educational Imperative
When schools promote the delusion that flashy apps will help students learn, they make it less likely that educational values will take root.
Part of the reason that this approach persists is that very few teachers or educational policy-makers have studied the science of learning and motivation.
How do students learn best?
That should be a fundamental part of each educator’s expertise. Sort of like, doctors should have expertise in the science of how a human body works. But the science of learning is a topic I’ve rarely heard mentioned in educational circles.
For more on this idea, I’ve put together a short informational guide called, Learning 101: For Teachers and Students
In it, I lay out the basics that every student and teacher should know about how to study and develop the skill of learning. This is core curriculum as far as I’m concerned. Just as the medical system must be based on the science of health, our education system should be built around the science of learning. But that topic is rarely, if ever, mentioned among school employees or district administrators.
No one learns how we learn. Nothing is based on how students learn best. This should be a core part of an educator’s expertise. And we should teach it to our students.
To get the guide, click the link below.
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