Why Don’t They Just Read The Bl**dy Instructions???

Some observations on how pupils with weaker literacy skills responded to remote learning during lockdown 2020.

Background

During lockdown, I was asked to be part of the team managing and supporting the “Key Worker or Vulnerable” cohort who had taken up the offer of a place in school. Naturally, I welcomed the opportunity to “do my bit” and also to have contact – albeit socially distanced – with young people.

Our role was to manage, guide and support rather than teach – that would have been vastly unfair on those students not able to attend school.

The result was that I spend 15 days in school monitoring the way that students – some of whom I know well – approached their work. Older, more able students, with good literacy skills, were clearly able to navigate the instructions, despite the increased cognitive load. Weaker students were not.

My observations

I observed pupil after pupil follow a similar pattern:

1.      Open the Home Learning portal and choose a task due today.

2.      Open the task instructions.

3.      Scroll immediately down to the first link and click it – or open any attached file – without reading the instructions.

4.      Scroll through scanning for the task.

5.      Attempt the task.

6.      Submit something inadequate, irrelevant, or undeveloped.

What these students were not doing, was:

1.      Processing the content of the lesson.

2.      Reading and understanding the purpose, aims or requirements of the task.

3.      Taking time to think about the task.

4.      Taking time to plan their response.

5.      Using the resources provided to help.

Even more able students were operating in a similar way at times – often seeking short cuts and workarounds if the instructions were too long or there were too many steps.

Why is this happening?

Students with weak literacy skills use short-cuts and “get-arounds” all day and every day at school and at home. They rely on memory, visual cues and familiarity to navigate tasks. Offering them a “new and engaging” activity in class often leads to poor behaviour unless managed very carefully. Offering something new while the pupil is at home and unsupported will lead to frustration and incomprehension. And no wonder, given what we understand about cognitive load.

While this is a function of weak literacy, it is also human nature to “cut to the chase” – to derive the satisfaction of crossing another task off the list. An unintended consequence of having students working online, is that they are working in the environment in which they play. Students appeared t me to be engaged in a kind of gamification - great if that meant striving for 100% but not so great if they just wanted to clear their task page!

What helps?

Using a familiar and predictable format for instructions

If tasks look the same every time, students quickly learn how to navigate them – think of following a recipe. Equipment, Ingredients, Method…

If every task had a “Resources you will need” box, a “Do this first” instruction and a “Check list” for example, we could reduce the cognitive load significantly.

Keep written instructions to a minimum

In my efforts to be clear and helpful, I wrote lots of helpful advice at first. On reflection, I was wasting my time and obscuring my message. The less writing on the screen, the more chance there is of it being read because it does not appear onerous.

Dual code wherever possible

Using the same icons every time will help students to navigate the instructions and make them feel more familiar.

Read  📙   Listen   👂  Click   👉  Write   ✎   Check   ✅   Watch 👀

Provide content in small chunks with a short, focused task for each chunk

Students with weak literacy will have slow reading rates which equal low comprehension skills. A reading rate of 90 - 100 words a minute is not uncommon. Ideally, you want students to process the knowledge content of the lesson, so give them one key idea at a time and then reinforce it.

Set tasks which the student has encountered before and knows how to engage with

Have you ever set a simple activity which you would think would be boring to find every head bend immediately over their work in silence? It is the power of the task that the students immediately understand. They are engaged in the content, not the activity and it’s a win..

·         Cloze passages (model academic language)

·         Multiple Choice Quiz (low stakes recall)

·         Wordsearch (word recognition and  vocabulary )

·         Match up (low stakes recall)

·         Memory games

·         Online quizzes

What should I avoid?

The biggest mistake that I made at the beginning of lockdown was trying to replicate the sequence of my classroom teaching online. I was thinking like a teacher, not like a child with weak literacy. What I thought was helpful, fun and interesting was in fact going to be ignored.

My father who often supervised PhD students as they tried to design projects to be conducted in space had a mantra which I will keep firmly in mind from now on when setting remote learning – Keep It Simple, Stupid!