On Books-The Used Book Store

I visited a brand-new local bookstore today.  It is named Rabbit Hole Books (https://www.facebook.com/rabbitholedayton/), a play on the Rabbit character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books. There is a big picture of the Rabbit checking his pocket watch in the front window. A humorous and evocative image to welcome book dorks like me.

It is affiliated with the Dayton Book Fair (https://daytonbookfair.com/). The Dayton Book Fair is a large yearly book fair, one that I am sure exists in all cities of a certain size, having enough residents who read to warrant a yearly exchange of books. They depend on local donations for the books, and price the books cheaply.  The organization makes enough money to sustain their operations, the book hoarding bibliophile gets a chance to create space in the deep dark corners of their basement for more books, and other bibliophiles buy those books to occupy a brand new deep dark corner in their homes. It is a win-win-win.

The idea of the Rabbit Hole Books is a really good one. The Dayton Book Fair organization has enough books in their warehouses that they can curate the collection and sell those books year-round in a brick-and-mortar location. They had enough books to fill it up while still able to run the yearly book fair. The bookstore is an extension of the mission, and it lowers the warehousing cost, keeps more books in circulation, and gives readers a chance at many different titles, again: win-win-win.

The space occupied by the bookstore is very inviting, made so by, I imagine, the countless hours spent by the volunteers who put the location together. It is a street-facing storefront although I had to look a bit.  It is next to a parking garage if you are looking. They are planning on having a rolled ice cream shop that is collocated within the store.

The organization of the store is not unlike all the other bookstores: sections devoted to politics, general history, biography,  kids’ books, literature, fiction, foreign language books, humor, etc. The math and science section is obviously limited because their selection is dependent on the tastes of the people who donate and what they donate.

I was eavesdropping on a conversation between someone who is organizing the store and one of the new volunteers and found out that they will group nonfiction work of fiction writers together their fiction work, figuring that if people were interested in the author’s fiction books, they might also be interested in the author’s nonfiction works as well, which made good sense. There is a small section devoted solely to books on the craft of writing. A nice touch.

I had written two other articles on bookstores. One on the bookstore for everybody (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/09/on-books-confessions-of-bookstore-snob.html). A follow-up article on my favorite independent bookstores. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-books-confessions-of-bookstore-snob.html). This is the third kind of bookstore; this is the kind of bookstore that is extremely enticing and dangerous for my wallet.  I tell people that I am polymathic and curious reader, someone who is eager to read about many topics. In truth, I am just easily bored and too curious for my own good. The price is usually right in used bookstores. This place was no exception: every book is a dollar. Oh dear God! Win-win-win!

I only bought three books this time. They were somewhat eclectic in the subject matter. One is Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe a hardback by Sherman K. Stein. I had never heard of it. He was a mathematics professor at UC-Davis. It was published in 1976. The second book is paperback published in 2006, a Doris Kearns Goodwin tome about Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet titled Team of Rivals. The third book is a hardback by Milan Kundera titled Slowness. I was tempted by a couple of biographies of Gladstone, since I was just reading about the Gladstone Library in the UK and I realized that I didn't know that much about Prime Minister Gladstone, but they were quite hefty and I had already decided to buy Goodwin’s book, so I decided I didn't need another doorstop type of book. There was also a biography of Edmund Burke, the Conservative philosopher, yet another hefty tome. I thought I needed to learn about Burke since he is considered the father of the modern conservative ideology, a bit of opposition research as it were; but once again, I thought it was too hefty. I was also once again tempted by the fictional works of Iris Murdoch sitting on the shelf, even though I only know of her philosophical books. They even had her husband John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, but I was successful in resisting.

What makes this kind of bookstore so dangerous for me? First, the price is right. A buck a book. I believe any reader worth his salt would kind of figure: what's a buck, right? The other part of the seductive nature of the used bookstore is its serendipity: every time we go into this or any used bookstore is like entering a new bookstore, full of new surprises because the stocks turnover with regularity but with the exciting uncertainty of the books that one would find every single time. Finally, I enter the store with no expectations since I am not looking for anything in particular, I am playing with house money, no pressure, no wanton desires for a specific tome that I just have to own. I could walk out empty-handed, a very rare occurrence, although it has happened; or I can walk out with a very heavy box, or two,  which has happened much too often. Win-win-win.

My book buying habit has evolved into a specific algorithm: if I'm looking for a specific book on a specific topic, I would go to the many online used bookstores to look for them. I would inevitably find them. If I could not find a used copy, and I truly needed to get my hot hands on a copy, I would buy a newly published book from one of the many independent bookstores that are out there: Powell’s. Tattered Cover, or Carmichael Books.

But if I wanted to dawdle, to evaluate, to learn about the unknown, or to read bits of the book that I had picked out from the many unknown and unfamiliar books that sat in front of me. To borrow this used bookstore’s motif, I would jump down the rabbit hole, try all the potions, meet all the Cheshire Cats, Red Queens, White Queens, Carpenters, Walruses, and oysters, and have my own grand adventures while never leaving the store. I usually spend 45 minutes to an hour, maybe more on these journeys of exploration. The pressure of trying to find something specific is gone. It is now time to enjoy the uncertainty of the book shopping experience and the serendipity of the eclectic collection.  These are places where I find myself on my hands and knees looking at the bottoms of piles, hoping to find treasures that are hidden as I am also trying to hang onto my glasses with my mouth because I have old eyes. It is an adventure, an adventure that is gifted to me by me. It is also an investment of time, one that I love investing in, but rarely commit to because, you know, life.

I didn’t get to indulge myself  too much this time, but I will next time

Three books $3.00, tag on $0.23 in taxes, about $1.20 on parking; an investment of $4.50 for an hour and a half worth of my sojourn down the Rabbit Hole. It was well worth the investment. Which is what I think every time I go to a used bookstore.

Learning and Teaching-Cognitive Load Theory Part 1

When I started to teach engineering classes after many years away from teaching at a college level, I was looking for ways to buttress my teaching and I was looking for a solid reference to give me confidence to overcome my own fear of failure in the classroom.

My first instinct was to research the latest teaching literature for help. Most of what I was reading was focused on the techniques and tools that were available to the teacher or coach, not exactly a how-to approach.

As I broadened my investigation, the literature eventually steered me towards the cognitive sciences: how learning and retention works neurologically, a different direction than what I had expected. Instead of focusing on strategies and tactics for the teacher/coach to be more effective, this approach focuses on how the instructor should adjust their teaching philosophy to conform to how students/players can best learn.

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) shows up continually on my radar, I first learned about it from the books that I had read upon the recommendation of Coach Vern Gambetta. (Brown, 2014) (Lemov, Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students On The Path to College, 2010) (Lemov, The Coaches Guide to Teaching, 2020) (Lemov, Woolway, & Yezzi, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, 2012). Even as I was intrigued by those books, I still felt lacking in background on CLT, so I read a couple of papers, both by the originator of the concept, John Sweller. His original paper was published in 1998. (John Sweller, Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design, 1998). He also wrote another paper celebrating   the 20^th  anniversary of the original paper, discussing the developments that had augmented and evolved from the original theory after its initial introduction (John Sweller, Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later, 2019).

Somewhere along the line, a monograph Cognitive Load Theory in Action by Oliver Lovell  (Lovell, 2020) came onto my radar, which focused on not only the theory but has neatly summarized teaching strategies which turns CLT from concept into effective and tangible practice. Lovell had worked in close consultation with Sweller to organize and summarize the CLT ideas that were in the original paper while also broadening the original idea with  additional work that was done in the intervening years.

What follows is a discussion structured along Lovell’s monograph, after I added some thoughts on the topic that are specific to my situation: teaching college engineering classes, coaching junior volleyball, and applying the method to my own learning practice. I do this s a means to help me understand topics that I felt were important. It aligns with the following quote from Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

What is CLT?

Cognitive Load Theory is primarily based on what we know of the structure of the human memory and how that structure affects how humans learn and more importantly, recall all the information, knowledge and experience which makes up our learning arsenal.

There are five main principles which underlie CLT.

1.     Memory has Architecture.

2.     Knowledge is Categorized as Biologically Primary or Secondary

3.     Working Memory can be Categorized as either Intrinsic or Extrinsic

4.     The Knowledge Can be Either Domain-General or Domain-Specific

5.     Element Interactivity is the Source of Cognitive Load

Memory has Architecture.

The first essential principle of CLT states that humans’ memories have an architecture which consists of three major resources: environment, working memory and long-term memory.

The environment is everything that exists outside of our brain, all the external resources that we can consult for information: anything and everything that surrounds us which can be used to augment our working and long-term memory. Both Barbara Tversky’s (Tversky, 2019) and Annie Murphy Paul’s  (Paul, 2021) books have chapters devoted to how humans use the space surrounding us in extending our memories to that space.

The second architecture is the working memory:

·       It has limited capacity, able to keep 3-7 elements of information at one time.

·       It is where all the thinking takes place.

·       It is the domain of conscious thought: that is, we are actively managing the memory consciously.

·       It is the limiting factor of human thinking, the bottleneck to our ability to learn effectively.

·       It is where the unfamiliar and unknown at that instant takes up more of the working memory capacity than the familiar and known.

·       It uses chunking and automating the information to reduce the cognitive load on the working memory.

The last architecture is the long-term memory:

·       It is unlimited in capacity although the information that is most often recalled is those that are most easily recalled, i.e., those that are most often recalled or had been recalled most recently.

·       It is divided into three key form of knowledge:

o   Episodic: refers to life events,

o   Semantic: refers to factual information

o   Procedural: refers to process memories.

An analogy can be drawn comparing the human memory definition to computer system configuration. Working memory is analogous to Random Access Memory (RAM), long term memory is analogous to the hardware memory: HDD’s or SSD’s. Whereas the CPU is the brain itself, serving as the central traffic control for the knowledge that is being passed around. Even though this analogy can only carry us so far, as the human brain and nervous system are not as clearly defined as a computer system because the computer system is essentially a Von Neumann machine designed to be a simple imitation of what we think human cognition functions. Another place where the analogy falls apart is the transfer of knowledge from the working memory to the long-term memory. Human memory is such that it takes many iterations of transferring the knowledge from working to long-term memory before it is made permanent, whereas the computer has a specific storage function to more the data from the working memory to the long-term memory.

The analogy holds true for our purposes. The working memory actively using the brain to consciously process all the new and unknown information, knowledge, and experiences; while recalling the familiar and known information, knowledge, and experiences without using the brain because the information has been chinked and automated so that the recall is done subconsciously, without adding to the cognitive load.

This architecture is the foundational model for CLT, the arguments for implementing the strategy and tactics suggested by CLT are built upon the bedrock assumption that the three-resource model is correct.

Knowledge is Categorized as Biologically Primary or Secondary

The second essential principle states that knowledge can be categorized as either biologically primary or secondary.

Biologically primary knowledge refers to knowledge that:

·       Are unconscious, fast, frugal, and implicit.

·       Are acquired by humans through evolution.

·       Are Knowledge that cannot be taught.

Biologically secondary knowledge refers to knowledge that:

·       Are slow, effortful, deliberate, and conscious.

·       Have evolved through the last 1000 years.

·       Needs to be taught.

Working Memory Load can be Categorized as either Intrinsic or Extrinsic

The third essential principle states that our working memory can be categorized as either intrinsic or extrinsic cognitive loads.

Intrinsic cognitive loads are those that are critical to learning whatever it is that we need to learn. They are:

·       Part of the nature of the information that we are learning.

·       Core learning.

·       Information that we WANT the learner to have in their working memory.

Whereas the extrinsic cognitive loads are:

·       A part of  the manner and structure of how the information is conveyed to the learners.

·       Disruptive to the learning task because it distracts the learner from learning by occupying valuable working memory space.

The crux of the problem is that the working memory capacity is finite; that is, the intrinsic and the extrinsic loads are vying for the same finite resource: the working memory. Ideally, the learner needs to optimize the use of the working memory for intrinsic loads and minimize the use of the working memory for extrinsic loads. Note that it is desirable to optimize the intrinsic load rather than also minimizing the intrinsic load as we want to minimize the extrinsic load. The reason for the difference in goals is that we wish to devote as much of the working memory to the intrinsic (productive) learning mode, what is variable is whether an appropriate amount of intrinsic load is placed on the working memory for optimal learning, or whether too much, or too little intrinsic load is placed on the working memory.

The Knowledge Can be Either Domain-General or Domain-Specific

A fourth essential principle states that the knowledge that the learner is being exposed to can be  divided into domain-general versus domain-specific.

Domain-general skills are:

·       Biologically primary

·       General capabilities

·       Generally applicable

·       Transferable

·       Examples are:

o   Problem solving

o   Creativity

o   Communication

o   Teamwork

o   Critical thinking

Domain-general skills are assumed to exist, can be taught, learned and transferred.

Domain -specific skills are:

·       Biologically secondary

·       Applicable to only specific domains.

The difference between novices and experts in each domain is that experts have more relevant domain-specific knowledge. Which means that the novice uses more thinking in performing tasks while experts use more knowledge. The novices use up more of the working memory to think (conscious) rather than recall and the experts use up more of the working memory to recall knowledge rather than to think (subconscious).

An expert:

·       Has a larger collection of situations and associated actions stored in their long-term memory.

·       Can explain why these situations imply taking the specific actions,

·       Can derive the solutions from foundational principles,

·       Can explain the mechanism behind them,

·       Can recognize the situations and execute an appropriate action,

The payoff is that the expert can recognize a larger cache of problems and situations and the necessary actions to deal with each problem and situation, whereas the novice has a much smaller cache of memory.

If the biologically secondary domain-specific knowledge is not transferable, how does the learner go about improving their performance in a specific domain? The answer, according to Lovell and Sweller, is to increase domain specific knowledge in the long-term memory to expand the number of potential solutions available from the long term memory which can be recalled into the working memory.

Conversely, how does one leverage the biologically primary, domain-general, and transferrable  knowledge to improve the biologically secondary, domain specific, and non-transferable knowledge? The answer is to apply transferable knowledge within the context and the constraints of the specific domain. It is an indirect way of leveraging what is already resident within us when we are born to acquire new knowledge that is new to us?

Element Interactivity, the Source of Cognitive Load

The final principle is that the number of elements in a given problem and situation and the amount of interactivity each element has with the other elements determine the amount of cognitive load being placed on the working memory. Element interactivity depends on the nature of the activity as well as the background knowledge stored in the long-term memory inherent in the learner: novice learners will have minimal knowledge base to draw upon, while the expert will have an extensive knowledge base. In addition, the expert also is experienced, so that they can effectively “chunk”, i.e. consolidate and automate the knowledge to effectively bypass thinking and allow their knowledgeable self to react automatically.

Perniciously, the amount of interactivity rises geometrically as the number of elements increases linearly, this kind of growth in interactivity will overwhelm the working memory in short order.  The elements and the interactivity of the elements can also be divided into intrinsic and extrinsic loads following the second principle stated.

Indeed, this is the main idea that saves our working memory from constantly being overwhelmed: we can separate the intrinsic and the extrinsic; optimizing the learning from the former and minimizing the chatter from the latter.

According to Lovell, intrinsic load is optimized through well-crafted curriculum sequencing and the extrinsic load is minimized through good instructional design. All of which is also covered Lovell’s book, digging deeper into the granularity of

·       Strategies and tools to optimize the intrinsic load.

·       Strategies and tools to minimize the intrinsic load.

Which will be covered in a separate article, CLT Part 2, because this first part has optimized my intrinsic memory, and I need a break.

Part 2 is on how teachers can minimize extrinsic load on the learner through honing their  presentation. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/04/learning-and-teaching-cognitive-load.html)

Part 3 is on how teachers can minimize the extrinsic load on the learner through structuring their practices and lessons. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/05/learning-and-teaching-cognitive-load.html) 

Part 4 is on how teachers can optimize intrinsic loads on the student. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/08/learning-and-teaching-cognitive-load.html)

References

Abrahams, D. (2022). Retrieved from Daniel Abrahams: Helping People Perform: https://danabrahams.com/blog/

Brown, P. C. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Canbridge MA: Belknap Press.

John Sweller, J. J. (1998). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design. Educational Psychology Review, 251-296.

John Sweller, J. J. (2019). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later. Educational Psychology Review, 261-292.

Lemov, D. (2010). Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students On The Path to College. San Francisco: Jossy-Bass Teacher.

Lemov, D. (2020). The Coaches Guide to Teaching. Clearwater, FL: John Catt Educational Ltd.

Lemov, D., Woolway, E., & Yezzi, K. (2012). Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass.

Lovell, O. (2020). Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory In Action. Melton, Woodtidge UK: JohnCatt Educational Ltd.

Paul, A. M. (2021). The Extended Mind-The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Tversky, B. (2019). Mind In Motion-How Action Shapes Thought. New York: Hachette Book Group.