Technology relies on blindly brushing questions and learning is ineffective...
"Learning" in the classroom, where to go
"I have completed four years of undergraduate studies, completed all the compulsory courses and also completed many elective courses, and I have passed all the examinations required for graduation. However, as a masters student, I still cannot cope well now Real-life problems," said Liu Yufei, a master's student at Beijing Normal University.
Coincidentally, at the Beijing Two Sessions held at the beginning of this year, Song Weizu, founder of the Beijing Design Society and deputy director of the Central Cultural Committee of the Democratic League, received a proposal from a fourth-grade primary school student to simulate the CPPCC. The primary school student expressed his interest in learning in the proposal. anxiety.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres once said that young people are facing a learning crisis, they often do not learn the skills needed in the technological revolution in school, and students also need to learn how to learn.
Today, with the rapid development of science and technology, the channels for acquiring knowledge are more abundant and diverse, and learning seems to take place anytime, anywhere. At the same time, it is an era where knowledge is updated faster and faster. The knowledge that people learn today may fall behind tomorrow. .
Therefore, whether it is a primary school student or a graduate student, many people have different degrees of learning confusion.
Especially in the context of the epidemic, many young people around the world have to leave campus, which makes learning more complicated.
More and more people in the classroom and in the classroom are thinking: what is real learning, is going to school the same as learning?
Does good test scores mean strong learning ability?
Can learning textbook knowledge be enough to solve real-life problems?
Is technology the "master key" to bridging the education gap and solving the learning crisis?
Technology bridges education gaps, but also creates new crises
The "learning crisis" is not a new concept. The World Bank clearly stated in the 2018 World Development Report "Learning to Realize the Promise of Education" that the world is facing a "learning crisis", and pointed out that although the opportunities for education have increased compared with the past, the Some young people around the world, especially those who are poor or marginalized, have not even mastered the basic skills they need to live, and many middle-income countries have workforces that are far below the skills level that these countries aspire to.
Going to school and not learning is not only a waste of development opportunities, but also a huge injustice to children and young people around the world.
The report points out that "going to school" does not equal "learning", because those young people who go to school do not acquire the skills to survive in today's rapidly advancing technology.
Socioeconomic development appears to be the cause of the "learning crisis".
Yao Jia, a student of Beijing Normal University, has participated in evaluation work in the least developed regions of my country.
During her work, she reached out to four families and "identified three distinctive features of a learning crisis: underutilization of technology, lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient access to quality education."
A few years ago, a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily interviewed the principal of a secondary school in Enshi, Hubei.
Once, as a pilot representative of provincial education informatization, she went to a university on the southeast coast for training. Although her school was already at the forefront of the province in terms of informatization, when she saw the advanced teaching equipment in eastern schools, Still feel like my school is an "antique".
Due to the impact of the epidemic, many students who were supposed to go to school had to leave the campus and rely on the Internet and information technology to complete their studies.
In this case, education is facing greater challenges. "These challenges are manifested in the digital divide, which is the gap between regions that have access to modern information and communication technology," Yao Jia said.
Obviously, building reliable network infrastructure, using convenient learning tools and platforms, and providing appropriate digital learning resources are necessary means to bridge the "digital divide" and deal with the learning crisis.
However, many scholars have found that there is now another tendency - overemphasis and overreliance on technological means.
"We do not exclude high-tech technology, but high-tech technology should not be the main and ultimate goal of education, it should play a supporting role," said Yang Liu, an undergraduate student at Beijing Normal University.
The concerns of young scholars have been confirmed by some front-line teaching workers in primary and secondary schools.
The principal of a middle school in Beijing told a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that several educational technology companies have recently recommended information-based products. These products can scan a large number of test papers in a short period of time, make quick judgments, and give evaluation reports.
"In fact, these products are quite similar, just one of them is enough." The principal said that in the final analysis, the improvement of education quality does not really rely on these technical means.
Learning in the classroom should solve real problems outside the classroom
For young people with many years of study experience, the "learning crisis" may exist in the moment of powerlessness when they go to society and apply knowledge.
There is such an Internet joke that will become a hot topic for young people from time to time: When they are children, ice cream is dropped, homework is lost, clothes buttons are dropped, and everyone subconsciously shouts, "Mom"!
But when a child becomes an adult, is late for work, can't cook, and the appliances at home are broken, everyone will still call "Mom"!
"It's me, that's right." Under these short videos, this sentence became the most liked comment.
For these adults who have gone through nine years of compulsory education, and even most of them have gone through several years of higher education, when solving practical problems in life, the accumulated knowledge of the previous years seems to have lost their effect in an instant.
Liu Yufei had a deep understanding of such a sense of powerlessness.
Not long ago, Liu Yufei became a volunteer teacher, teaching English in a school.
She was in charge of 3 classes, and at the beginning, she modeled the teaching of this course according to the professional knowledge she had learned.
“But at the end of teaching, I realized that the same model doesn’t work in all situations, and different students learn differently. When 3 classes share the same course, two classes have seen positive learning feedback, but one class exception."
"I can't figure out, why am I so powerless in real teaching? So how do I assess my undergraduate study outcomes over the past four years?" Liu Yufei said.
What exactly should learning in the classroom be like?
Many people are beginning to realize that it should solve real problems outside the classroom.
Zhu Xuan studied in a university in the United States.
In one course, he and his team tried to design a low-cost educational curriculum for students in rural areas.
In the beginning, Zhu Xuan designed many simulation experiments, trying to teach knowledge through these simulation scenarios.
However, a teacher's suggestion made him change his mind - Zhu Xuan's previous designs have been replicating the educational model of urban schools.
“In cities, we are farther from natural resources, so our learning is actually simulating production and life scenarios, allowing students to experience things they can’t really do. But for rural areas, students can actually feel the various raw materials and traditional manufacturing techniques.”
Zhu Xuan suddenly realized his own "learning crisis": learning is not for learning, but to really contact, understand and solve problems in real life.
At this point, rural children are closer to the essence of learning.
"I realized that I needed to change my perspective and put myself in rural areas. I also began to think about the fundamental difference between urban and rural life, which was a valuable change for me," Zhu Xuan said.
At the 2022 Global Smart Education Conference held not long ago, Gong Ke, former chairman of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations and executive director of China's New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategy Research Institute, pointed out that today, digital education must highlight "practicality".
In the past two years, Gong Ke and his colleagues have conducted a nationwide survey on campus recruitment, summarizing dozens of hot topics in the job descriptions, and the first one is "practical experience".
"These surveys reflect the orientation of the job market and the relative weakness of current education in practice."
There is a sea of questions between "Classification Test" and "Metaverse"
When college students realized their own "learning crisis", a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily found in an interview that this "crisis" had already existed in some primary and secondary schools.
"I want an emo, and two good friends are going to another class." In the new semester, Xiao Xiao (pseudonym) was promoted to the second grade of high school.
As the school approached, the class group was welcoming new students for a while, and saying goodbye to old classmates for a while, and everyone's emotions were ups and downs.
After the list was announced, Xiao Xiao finally let go of his fear of being shunted out.
Xiao Xiao's class is the key class of the grade.
Near the beginning of the semester, students of all grades returned to school to take an exam. The results of this exam and the final exam of the previous semester were the basis for re-classification.
Xiao Xiao was ranked around 25th in the class last semester in the final exam. Although she was not at the bottom, she was very anxious because "the gap between the scores between the classmates is not big, and the students who were two points lower than me were already ranked after the 30th. already."
During the whole holiday, Xiao Xiao rubbed the questions one by one, hoping that he would not be too bad in the test and would not be diverted.
"Sometimes I'm really confused, what is the meaning of reviewing the questions over and over again." Xiao Xiao said.
Xiao Xiao originally planned her own study. She liked biology. In her first year of high school, she discussed and agreed with her teacher on a topic to study the living habits of fruit flies, and she has been conducting experiments.
She wanted to use the summer vacation to continue the experiment and present the whole experiment process in the form of video, while participating in an international competition.
In fact, Xiao Xiao's study has undergone earth-shaking changes since the beginning of the project.
To keep abreast of the latest developments in the research topic, the teacher gave her several university papers, many of which were in English.
In order to "gnaw" on these papers, she checked a lot of literature online and felt that her knowledge reserve was growing rapidly.
And in order to prepare the video for the competition, she taught herself the full set of operations for shooting and editing videos online.
However, in order to prepare for the placement test, Xiao Xiao failed to implement the plan of in-depth experiments in the summer vacation.
A few days before the end of the holiday, she summed up the previous experiments in a hasty manner, cut out a small piece and submitted it to the competition.
"Although I didn't get diverted this time, I wasn't very happy, because if I missed a few sets of questions next time, I might be overtaken by others. Compared with this, being able to complete my experiment will make me More sense of achievement." Xiao Xiao looked very frustrated, "I saw the award-winning works of the past, and many middle school students abroad have a very subtle perspective on problems, and some people choose a very small research perspective, but they drill deeply. I have to read the questions over and over again. What about the metaverse? I think I am still far away from real scientific research.”
Experts are also worried about the same problem.
Especially after the "double reduction", after primary and secondary school students were freed from the heavy burden of extracurricular training and homework, many experts said that they should consider what students should learn and what is real learning.
After the concepts of "digitalization", "metaverse" and "artificial intelligence" that are full of technology have entered the traditional classroom, how should "learning in the classroom" be transformed?
"We should study how to cultivate students' practical exploration ability, let students learn to learn independently, and improve students' self-cultivation ability." Song Weizu said that with the entry of technologies such as intelligence and networking in the metaverse era, education will have new characteristics , the future education needs to build a new scene.
Zhao Qinping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out that at present, the digital transformation of education and smart education have become a new stage of the development of education informatization. In the process of systematic reform of education, the digital capabilities of teachers, students and managers are the key.
"The most important factor in education is people. Technology must be applied by people, serve teaching, and improve people's digital literacy and skills. The innovation and development of educational informatization is a systematic project, and the key is to seize the opportunity of new education infrastructure. , around the teaching application of teachers and students, provide digital learning content, platforms and tools, and improve the level of education digital services and governance."
"The world is entering a new economic development period dominated by the information industry, and education must play a fundamental, overall and leading role in the digital transformation of society." Gong Ke proposed three measures for the digital transformation of education: pay attention to Basic subject learning integrates knowledge transformation in interdisciplinary fields; teaching combines technical attributes and social attributes to promote learning through practice; cultivates qualified teachers with both professional knowledge and sense of responsibility.
China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Fan Weichen Ye Yuting Source: China Youth Daily