Stickiness Once More: Questions of Reading for Online Teaching

Online teaching has a sizeable vocabulary for naming its goals.  Recent attention to “stickiness” has shown what this term from learning theory offers to course design of all kinds and to the battle for attention among easily distracted students in a culture saturated with digital media. According to Peter Brown, Henry Roedinger, and Mark McDaniel in Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press, 2014) stickiness refers to “acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.” It is reflected in steady engagement with course content, attention to its meanings, and understanding its uses. An online learner who “makes it stick,” like those in conventional classrooms, learns to pay attention to course resources and how the mind employs them. This session features recognition of reading in gaining stickiness in learning and how we might guide expectations for online course design and teaching.  
        The session will be in four parts. The first offers a brief account of “stickiness” and how it has been incorporated into accounts of online postsecondary education. For example, stickiness can be presented as a category in course analytics. Thus, “Analytics that monitor both effective and affective engagement can assist academics to build online courses that not only command attention but also prompt action and improve a student’s ability to retain the learning” (Ainslie Robinson and David Cook, “ ‘Stickiness’: Gauging Students’ Attention to Online Learning Activities,” Information and Learning Science [2018]).  Popular websites are designed according to well developed techniques for audience building and increasing sales. Plainly educational institutions need something different, although some have contemplated “customizing” Learning Management Systems to yield a metric reflecting time spent in reading an assigned article or book, and the length of posts and responses at discussion boards. Even heavily enrolled MOOCs can plan for and measure stickiness, or how students perceive the features of a course that keep them engaged in learning, including the motions and gestures of the instructor and what the platform provides for peer interaction (e.g. Barbara Oakley, Debra Pool, and Mary Anne Nestor, “Creating a Sticky MOOC,” Online Learning, 20 [2016]).  
        Yet another approach to representing stickiness can be found in Make it Stick. Given its subtitle, The Science of Successful Learning, the book is suitably empirical. But Brown and his colleagues also test the authority of a science of learning in narratives of individual stickiness. There are stories of a medical student, a freshman studying psychology, and a professional actor  displaying different paths to finding and using the techniques for making stickiness central to their learning, or what are named “desirable difficulties” for learners:  retrieval, elaboration, generation, reflection, calibration (and more), each defined in Make it Stick in the vocabulary of cognitive theory. Accounts of successful businesses, like Jiffy Lube and Anderson Windows, show what can be applied to organizations. The point is the same, learning of all kinds gains from attention to principles of study and mastery of skills, or what individuals can do to “make it stick.”         
       The second part of the session invites attention to reading as a critical feature of online learning, a location for seeking stickiness, or self-conscious techniques for engagement in all subjects. Alas, some theorists of online teaching see reading as “passive,” like the lecture, and a weak design option for “active learning.” For them, print has given way to screens with their distinctive textual demands, particularly for brevity and speed.  Make it Stick, though it urges a very deliberate approach to learning in any medium, stops short—as the session is designed to show—in an important category of it.  
       The problems facing readers today are well known. As technology historian Nicholas Carr put it in his widely cited article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” (2008), and then elaborated in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2010): “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
        Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf is another anxious observer of the fate of reading in our time. Her synthesis of research on the reading brain shows it to be adapting to screens with gains and losses. Readers have access to more than ever, and agile ones can move effectively among texts in projects of inquiry. But at the same time, as is increasingly recognized, there are threats to the sustained attention necessary for serious reading (in print or on screens), including what is associated with higher education (Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Harper, 2018).  
       Like Brown, Roedinger, and McDaniel, Wolf turns to narrative to demonstrate the workings (or not) of stickiness in learning with an account of her own history as a reader. It is the subject of the third part of the session.  But Wolf’s story reverses the advice Make it Stick has for students in avoiding rereading, or “sustained poring over texts,” in favor of frequent self-directed quizzing. The texts Brown and his colleagues have in mind appear to be the textbooks that students encounter in undergraduate courses like economics or physiology. It is reading that features information. Wolf’s experiment shows the limits in their view and what must be added to thinking about stickiness in order for it to account for the wide range of reading experiences in the curriculum.
      To probe what she takes to be losses in reading deriving from our digital preoccupations Wolf rereads a favorite and internationally acclaimed novel she had first encountered years ago. Her memory of focus and immersion in its details now yields to a form of reading she had adopted in keeping with our digital transformation. But skimming, or what she claims dominates today, offered none of what she believed valuable from her first reading of the text. It was rereading at a suitable pace and with deliberate attention to the structure of the text and its ideas that made it stick, once more. As a cognitive scientist herself (like two of the authors of Make it Stick) Wolf recognizes the limits of her N=1 experiment. But she shows what we must confront about reading in seeking, with stickiness, the benefits of online learning.  True enough, Make it Stick acknowledges what can come from rereading something that, over time, may have faded in impact. But Brown, Roedinger, and McDaniel ignore what stickiness can mean for the many varieties of reading students encounter—including demanding long form texts.          
       Finally, to see beyond her story, Wolf specifies the collective challenges we face to make  reading for online learning as sticky as possible. “Unlike in the past,” she says, “we possess both the science and the technology to identify potential changes in how we read--and thus how we think--before such changes are fully entrenched in the population and accepted without our comprehension of the consequences.” Thus, the fourth part of the session is organized around contributions from participants. It features questions that readers today (in this case teachers, course designers and other IT professionals) can ask themselves to probe their experience, practices, and expectations.  
        Wolf’s goal is to promote stickiness in reading, or the place where cognitive structure and habits meet the conditions of educational conditions of the digital age. Her questions, to be shown in PowerPoint and distributed as a handout to participants, include:  
1. Are you reading with limited attention and memory for what you have read?
2. Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest?
3. Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy?
4. Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning?
5. Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of it?
6. Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available?
7. Have you begun to suspect that you often don’t have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book?
     A session wrap-up will invite discussion of responses. And participants will also be asked about what configuration of these strategies they believe can be most effective in promoting stickiness in reading as a form of active learning: using the syllabus to direct students to resources about reading; in class guidance from the instructor; and dedicated peer-to-peer interactions.