On touch-typing and simple interventions in education [1/3]

Simple Interventions

In a previous post, I explored the importance of categorising educational activities before considering their implementation and evaluation. It is my long-held view that this piece of the jigsaw is often missing in schools. To provide the foundations for this line of enquiry, I proposed the categories of Simple, Complicated and Complex interventions / innovations.  In this post, I will focus on the category of Simple.

What are the 3 ingredients of a simple intervention?

For a Simple activity:

1. The intervention is well-defined and uniform across students; 

2. The mechanism for change is clear and obvious;

3. The outcome is predictable and measurable.

When the intervention is Simple, the teacher or school leader knows exactly what the proposed input entails. In other words, the input would be exactly the same across different teachers, different students and different settings. This is what is meant by 'well-defined' here. In brief, we could pick up the intervention, drop it into another school and it would look exactly the same for every student. 

Furthermore, the mechanism for change is implicit in the intervention: it is well understood how and why the intervention will work. There is no secret sauce! 

Finally, it is clear from the outset what kind of change is expected and it is clear how it could be measured. 

It seems to me that the majority of educational interventions are implicitly and wrongly categorised this way. In search of golden bullets and bang-for-buck, schools can reach for what look like neat solutions on the surface. However, in reality, I would argue that Simple activities are very rare beasts. They are very much in the minority in the education landscape. In fact, any intervention delivered by humans to other humans is going to have an inherent 'messy' factor. I believe we have to move into the realm of educational technology to find examples that fit a Simple framework - in effect, removing some of the human messiness from the game. For example, I recently saw something like the following activity in a Computer Science observation.

An example of a Simple Intervention

Let's imagine a piece of software designed to improve "touch-typing". Students work at their own pace through levels in this gamified programme towards touch-typing proficiency. They access higher levels by increasing their speed and accuracy. In turn, this frees up working memory in essay-based subjects. I watched as students worked through the levels as a starter activity in Key Stage 3 Computer Science, with the teacher providing tech support rather than any explicit content delivery.

Did it pass our 3 tests for a Simple categorisation?:

1. Here, the input was indeed clear and well-defined: independent work on the app / software via a uniform device in the classroom. No teacher input needed beyond support of individuals around accessing the task and some tech trouble-shooting. We could pick this activity up, drop it into any classroom in the country and it would indeed look exactly the same.

2. The mechanism for change was also clear: dedicated practice of the skill should result in greater efficiency and speed of typing. There was an obvious muscle-memory effect at work. Students could see some progress very quickly and challenged each other as they moved through the level and challenges.

3. The desired outcome was also measurable and implicit in the intervention: correct words per minute before and after the intervention / level achieved on the app. We know exactly what success looks like and can predict the precise change we expect - speed and accuracy of typing.

Now, even in this example, there will be some subtleties of delivery and differentiation by support of some students with SEN. Clearly, those with quicker decoding and reading speeds will access the task more easily. However, in this post I'm more interested in the over-arching design of the intervention. While some adaptive support would be needed, the fundamental design of the task is Simple. 

For the teacher, the planning here is minimal, leaving more time to focus on those students with additional needs during the task. Beyond the wrap-around support and tech requirements, the intervention should run itself. In terms of planning, we can see a neat backwards-engineering at play - i.e. the desired change is clear - touch-typing proficiency; we'll know if this has been achieved via crystal clear performance indicators and data; the mechanism for change is baked-in to the activity; and finally (/firstly!) the delivery is well-defined, requiring little training. 

[In this post, we'll leave the broader opportunity-cost of dedicating time to the particular curriculum outcome of touch-typing - although it is an interesting debate for another day - in the modern world, could there be a more efficient skill to learn at an early age? ]

Back to the point: while I contend that such an intervention is rare in its simplicity, it is helpful as a counterpoint to the more prevalent and slippery categories of Complicated and Complex. These will be covered in future posts. I'm also keen to nail down the 3 categorisation tests of interventions: input, mechanism for change and outcome measurability. 

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References for all Complexity Theory posts are here: https://educatinghumansblog.blogspot.com/p/references-and-further-reading.html

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