Ep 34. Transforming education through behaviour science
with Kimberly Berens
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Jazmin Boisclair.
You can listen to the episode here: Chalk & Talk Podcast.
Ep 34. Transforming education through behaviour science with Kimberly Berens
[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk and Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor, and your host.
You are listening to episode 34 of Chalk and Talk. My guest in this episode is Dr. Kimberly Berens. She is a behaviour scientist, an author, and the founder of Fit Learning. We discuss the fundamentals of behaviour science, the importance of measurable outcomes, the role of reinforcement, and the application of behaviour science to effective instruction, particularly in math.
We also cover concepts like fluency, retention, and endurance in learning. And we discuss the effectiveness of Direct Instruction, precision teaching, and curriculum-based measurement in bringing about significant improvements to student performance.
Kimberly is a passionate advocate for systematic educational change based on scientific approaches. Her passion for science-based teaching is truly inspiring, and I hope you find this discussion as engaging and informative as I did. Just a note that the resource page for this episode lists articles related to topics discussed in the episode.
Now without further ado, let's get started.
It is my pleasure to be joined by Dr. Kimberly Berens today, and she is joining me from Long Island, New York. She has a Ph.D. in behaviour science from University of Nevada, Reno. She's a scientist educator who specializes in applying natural science to the instruction of students. She founded Fit Learning, which is a system of instruction based in behaviour science.
Her learning programs target, among other things, math, reading, and writing, and I bet we'll talk a lot about math today. She is the author of Blind Spots: Why Students Fail, and The Science That Can Save Them, which I recently read. It's a great book, and we'll talk about that today. Welcome, Kimberly. Welcome to my podcast.
[00:02:21] Kimberly Berens: Well, thank you so much for having me. I've been very excited about this one.
[00:02:25] Anna Stokke: We'll have a great conversation today. So an overarching theme in your book is that the education system is failing too many children. A large percentage of children score below proficiency in core academic subjects, and you advocate for behaviour science as a solution. In other words, instruction guided by behaviour science would transform the education system.
So first, let's make sure everyone understands what we’re talking about. So you are a behaviour scientist. Can you briefly explain what is behaviour science? And what's the difference between behaviour science and cognitive science?
[00:03:02] Kimberly Berens: In a simplified description, behaviour science is the natural science study of learning, and so, when people talk about the Science of Learning, which is, there's kind of a new buzzword, to be quite frank, going around in the education world.
That's not a new word for us because we've been known as the science of learning since the 1930s when B. F. Skinner, who's the founder of my field, started doing research on operant conditioning in his basic laboratory with non-human animals. And that research kind of left that laboratory and went into the applied realm trying to improve the lives of human beings in the 1960s.
And really, the father of that was my mentor in graduate school, Dr. Ogden Lindsley. And so, behaviour science is actually the understanding that although biology plays a role in learning, obviously genetics plays a role, and neurology always plays a role, right? Like you can't learn without your brain changing. None of that works in isolation, and it requires a behaving organism in an environment.
For anything to be learned, there is a symbiotic relationship between a behaviour occurring, the consequences of that behaviour in an environment, may they be punishing or reinforcing, and then the simultaneous neurological process that goes on as a result of those interactions.
And so, what we know, and we've known this since 1938, really, is that learning occurs through the repeated reinforcement of behaviour over time. And so that is measured in our science as rate of response. And it has been measured as rate of response since 19- again, the 1930s. And so rate of response being count per time. And the way I apply it is in academic skills is always count per minute, but it doesn't have to be.
It could be any time dimension, count per second, count per month, count per year. But rate of responding is the measure of behaviour and change in rate of responding over time is our measure of learning. And so, when that is applied to instruction, it is profoundly effective because it allows us to actually focus on the observable and countable, measurable phenomenon and focus on what we know to be variables related to learning in the environment such that we can move that trajectory in the way we want it to go, increase it or decrease it.
So, in a nutshell, that's behaviour science.
[00:05:23] Anna Stokke: And also, just because something we talk a lot about on the podcast too is cognitive science. So, what's the difference between behaviour science and cognitive science?
[00:05:33] Kimberly Berens: I mean, when I think back to Chomsky and debates that Skinner and Chomsky would get in around language and how language is acquired. You know, cognitive science and behaviour science have classically been kind of at odds with one another. And the reason that really is because we, you know, cognitive science is actually not a natural science approach.
I don't feel the need to defend that statement because it's actually completely factually, correct. Because when you focus on a natural science approach, and this applies to any natural science, biology, chemistry, physics, now neuroscience, which is a newer field, natural science focuses on the observable only, what you can actually see and measure with your eyeballs, and sometimes it takes a special instrument to do the seeing and measuring for you, but you're measuring actual observable events in the world, natural phenomenon, and then you are actually manipulating variables that you can see and observe.
And you are only explaining events based on those measurable observable variables that you manipulate, and that is, and that is true across all natural sciences. And so that's what behaviour science focuses on with respect to behaviour and learning.
So we would never explain a phenomenon with a construct that's immeasurable and, you know, unobservable. And unfortunately this happens all the time in cognitive science. So, when you're talking about, you know, I mean, to be honest with you, all the stuff that gets inferred about the brain storage processing, you know, memory, now remembering is something we deal with all the time in behaviour science because that's a behaviour that we can operationally define and observe and measure, but we don't talk about memory because memory is a construct that you can't see or observe.
So that's the difference. Like, we would never explain a phenomenon based on a construct that we cannot see, like personality or IQ, So that's the difference between a cognitive science approach and a behaviour science approach.
[00:07:24] Anna Stokke: So, for a behaviour scientist, it's absolutely important that you must be able to observe and measure the phenomenon. A cognitive scientist would say that the definition of learning is it's a change in long term memory.
So what would you say the definition of learning is?
[00:07:47] Kimberly Berens: And I would ask how you measure that. And I promise you the only response is going to be the behaviour of remembering. So the only evidence of a change in long term memory would be that someone is trained to respond to a particular stimulus, let's just pretend it's academic, so kids learning phonics, right?
So, they practice saying phonic sounds for a set of letters, and then they go away from that practice for a little while, and they come back, and then you measure it again. And is there a degradation in their performance in terms of their speed or their accuracy? That would be, from a behaviour science perspective, a measure of remembering.
But I ask you, how would you measure it in any other way? There's no way to measure long term memory without the behaving organism.
[00:08:28] Anna Stokke: And I do want to mention another term that almost certainly is going to come up because it often comes up when we're discussing science-based instruction, and that's fluency because I want to make sure that we've got, define that term correctly.
So, I discussed it in detail on a previous podcast with Brian Poncy. Now, I understand fluency to be a measure of both accuracy and speed. Does that sound right to you, or would you like to expand on that?
[00:08:57] Kimberly Berens: 100%. So, it's interesting because fluency is a term that has been in the vernacular forever. Obviously, you know, when you think about it's a lay term, right? People like when you're fluent in a second language, when you're fluent at a musical instrument, when you're a fluent athlete, people can actually picture what that is, right?
They can see an effortless, really expert-level performance. And so, Carl Binder, who is a big, you know, person in my branch of behaviour science, he actually brought fluency into the vernacular of precision teaching, which is the application of behaviour science to academic instruction. He brought that term in because of its familiarity in the public, right?
Because he wanted teachers and parents to understand what rate actually gives you in terms of your understanding of proficiency or mastery. And so, fluency, yes, can be defined as rate, which is count per minute, which is an accuracy plus speed measure, right? Cause we measure count correct per minute, count errors per minute. oftentimes we count prompts per minute, skips per minute, we'll count any of those things.
But fluency in our branch of behaviour science has been expanded to really encompass something called functional mastery, which is grandly missing from education. And so, what functional mastery means is a predictive measure of performance outcomes. So really, it's a rate of responding that predicts three important things.
The first being that a skill is what we would call retained. The cognitive scientist might say long term memory, but we would say a skill is retained over time in the absence of practice, meaning the rate of corrects and the rate of errors remain the same high levels of corrects and high levels of errors over time without practice, that's retention.
So fluency predicts retention of skills. Fluency predicts increased intention span, which we would call endurance. So the ability to sustain fluent performance over long testing periods and in the face of distractions. And then the third measure of fluency is the ability to apply skills to the learning of something more difficult with relative ease, meaning your accuracy and your fluency is actually pretty strong on the get-go, right out of the gate, when you're provided a new task that builds on a skill you've actually acquired to fluency.
So, although fluency is measured as rate, for us, fluency is a measure of functional mastery, which means a tested outcome with a learner that tells us that that skill is actually mastered. It's not just some arbitrary thing that we said is mastery, like 90%, 100%, 80% or, you know, whatever it may be. That's irrelevant to the learner unless that's a functionally masterful skill.
And we actually test for that at Fit learning and in precision teaching in general. That's something we do. We test. We do retention tests, endurance tests, and application tests with every single skill we train with every single learner we work with.
[00:11:55] Anna Stokke: Just to summarize, there were three things for functional mastery. The first one was that the student actually retains the skill, and that makes sense. I mean, you can learn something one day, and you might actually be able to do it, but does that mean you actually learned it? You want to retain the skill over time.
[00:12:15] Kimberly Berens: Yes.
[00:12:16] Anna Stokke: And the second one was endurance. So, the ability to perform the skill at high rates over long testing durations or in the presence of distractions. And then the third one was what I would call generalization, like being able to use that skill in a new setting, right?
[00:12:38] Kimberly Berens: 100 percent.
[00:12:40] Anna Stokke: So now we understand fluency. Now how can behaviour science be used to design effective instruction of core academic skills like math?
[00:12:51] Kimberly Berens: So what's really great, and I've talked about this before, but science gives you generality of method. You know, natural science, I will tell you, not all social sciences don't give you generality of method, but natural science gives you generality of method. And what does that mean?
That means that from basic science, a set of principles are discovered, right? And so, when we're talking about behaviour science, a set of principles have been discovered in behaviour science that, you know, learning requires repeated reinforcement over time. That's number one, we've already talked about that, but what's also been discovered is a shaping.
And so what that is that a complex repertoire can actually not be learned all at once, even for very rudimentary organisms like rats and for human beings, it's the same across the spectrum of mammals. So, what that means is a complex skill has to be broken into component skills. And those component skills must first be learned and mastered and then that repertoire is gradually shaped over time.
And so that applies to learning any skill. Any skill, I don't care what it is, I don't care if it's talking, walking, learning to play with toys, if it's learning to make friends, or playing a sport, playing a video game, playing a musical instrument, or anything in academics.
So, the way behaviour science is applied to math, and I am an expert in this because I have done this for, you know, 30 years where I am applying behaviour science to academic instruction, and I spend a lot of time in mathematics because that is terribly instructed throughout the United States.
But math is an unbelievably complicated repertoire of skills, and it requires being broken down into tiny fundamental components, and those components must be repeatedly practiced and reinforced over time until fluency is achieved before a child is moved up the ladder. And so, behaviour science applies to teaching anything, and math is absolutely one of those things, which is why we move kids almost 40 percentile ranks in 40 hours on math assessments by doing just this, not by working on algebra with eighth graders who come in and can't add.
We actually work on adding with algebra students who can't do algebra. We go way back.
[00:15:04] Anna Stokke: You're absolutely preaching to the choir here, and I'm not a behaviour scientist; I'm a mathematician, and I teach math, and I know that there are often two problems, which you just mentioned. So, the first one often is that people don't seem to recognize just how, I call it, relentlessly hierarchical math is that it's like a ladder.
And you know, if you're missing any of those rungs on the ladder, it's going to be really difficult to learn something more complicated. So, I think that part of breaking things down into components is often missing in instruction. But then the second thing, which you've mentioned a few times now is repeated practice.
That is huge. You know, anybody that's gotten good at math should really know this, that it's like, how do you get good at it? You get good at it by practicing. And I think generally that is one of the biggest problems in schools is that kids just aren't getting enough practice.
Does that ring true to you?
[00:16:06] Kimberly Berens: One hundred thousand percent. And this is what I mean by generality of method. So, I'm a classical guitarist. I play the classical guitar, which is an unbelievably complex repertoire behaviour. It's a really complex instrument.
So, I do the exact same thing for my guitar practice as I do for kids in, at, fit in mathematics or writing or reading or, or critical thinking and problem-solving. because learning is the same. I don't care what skill it is. I'll tell you again in pop culture, this has been referred to like Malcolm Gladwell wrote that book about, you know, how many hours of practice it takes to become an expert.
And he talks about the 10,000 hours. Well, that's not true either because we know in behaviour science that there's no magical formula. It's not like you practice something for a certain amount of time and magically you're masterful at it. No, it depends on so many things. It depends on the type of skill, it depends on what your barriers might be with respect to that skill.
And those barriers vary across all human beings, like no human being, although the learning process is the same repeated, reinforced practice of component skills over time and gradually shaping complex repertoires. That is it across any living organism, but that process is very different depending on the person because they have very different histories, right?
So some kids show up and they are really sloppy lookers. They have had no instruction, no practice at engaging in finite visual discriminations. And so, they just don't see the difference between the plus and the minus sign or they don't even look to see if it's multiplication or division.
So those kids have a different barrier than a kid who comes in and actually doesn't even have the ability to fluently read numbers. So, these kids have different histories, and they have different skills deficits and different skill fluencies that you must understand it to individualize instruction.
And I know we have to teach kids in classrooms, I get it. Teachers are not getting trained on how to do this stuff, man, and it's why 70 percent of kids are below proficiency in math and all subjects.
[00:18:01] Anna Stokke: I heard you say a couple of things there. And so, one of them was almost like, well, not every student's the same, right? On the other hand, that one of the myths in your book, and we should talk about this because I'll often hear people say, “Well, there's no, one best way to teach every student,” but you list this as a myth.
You know, that actually all students don't learn differently. So there's that piece of it. Not all kids are the same, right? Like they might learn at different rates.
[00:18:29] Kimberly Berens: Hundred percent.
[00:18:30] Anna Stokke: So, can you just expand on that a little bit?
[00:18:33] Kimberly Berens: I'm considered a controversial figure because I say this, that the learning process is the same across all human beings and all, really all living things.
Now, humans are able to acquire more complex skills than like rats and dogs because language makes things very different for us, but the learning process is the same regardless of the skill. However, the way that learning process occurs, in terms of what skills have to be targeted, how skills must be broken down, the types of reinforcers that actually work to strengthen a skill for a kid, they differ across kids.
Preferences vary how much time it's going to take a kid to acquire fluency. That's very different. And also, it's not just different across kids, it's different across skills. For one person, there's variability in how quickly they learn or how that learning process is going to look for something they're learning.
It just depends on the skill and it depends on the person. The way that process occurs is different for every single human being on the planet, but the learning process itself is the same, which provides such power. I feel so bad for teachers, that they're told all these myths. They're trained in myth because they're told not to talk about method; method’s not allowed to be written into IEPs.
“There's no one method.” Yes, there actually is like, and that's why I know that education isn't based on science because there is a decades and decades and decades old method that is based in science that has generality across any skill and across any learner. And it is always the best. Always the best. Decades of science suggests that's the case, and it's just crazy to me that we're in 2024 and this is still something we're talking about. It's just, it's very shocking.
[00:20:16] Anna Stokke: And so, the method that's the best, what is that method? The method really is just breaking things down into component parts, repeated practice, and measurement, right? Measurement to ensure that the student has learned, correct?
[00:20:33] Kimberly Berens: One thing that got left out is reinforcement, so although it is breaking skills down, repeated, repeated practice and measurement, it's repeated reinforced practice, meaning immediate feedback, correction on errors and immediate positive reinforcement. Like learning doesn't happen without reinforcement, we've known this since 1938. So, we have to add the reinforcement.
And so, you can add that into practice, repeated reinforced practice, which is what I always say.
[00:20:57] Anna Stokke: So reinforced as in “Great job, you got that correct.”
[00:21:02] Kimberly Berens: Yes, like this is what teachers need to be learning. I had a lot of friends in education when I was in college, and the things they had to do, make mobiles, make bulletin boards, talk about how they were going to arrange and design their classrooms.
Nothing to do with instruction. Teachers need to be expert instructional designers. And what do I mean by that? I have an entire, my own certification process for the people that work for me because you can't hire anybody to do this, right?
So people go through hundreds of hours of training with me and become certified in our method of instruction because they have to learn how to be fluent. And I mean, fluent at breaking skills down into component parts, like looking at a complex repertoire, like grammar instruction, you got to learn the components and mechanics of writing. Just like you got to learn the components and mechanics of math and reading. It's all the same.
So you got to figure out how to break down a complex repertoire of behaviour and academics into its component pieces. And sometimes you have to, you didn't do it good enough. Like that happens to me all the time. I've been doing this for 30 years. And there are times where I'm like, “God, why is this kid not mastering - why is this kid flatlining on this chart?” and I'm like, “Oh my God, I haven't thought about this component skill.”
And then you figure out a new one. So instructional design means knowing how to take a huge complex repertoire, break it into the tiniest pieces, and then know how to effectively instruct those pieces in terms of it being a concept and in terms of its execution, in fluency-based practice and measure that practice over time to ensure to know when mastery has been achieved and then know when to move the kid up to the next step and what the next step is. That's what teaching is.
[00:22:43] Anna Stokke: Now in practice, how can an educator measure learning and, you know, how do they know when a student has actually learned a skill?
[00:22:53] Kimberly Berens: Well, so precision teaching, which is the branch of behaviour science that I'm talking about, which is really well, precision teaching is really a measurement system, okay. It's the application of something called the Standard Celeration Chart.
And the reason Ogden Lindsley, who was the founder of this measurement system, he was one of B. F Skinner’s students and he was one of my mentors in graduate school. And he was a hero of a human being. He designed a measurement tool, a chart that teachers could use in classrooms, and this was in the 1960s, that was akin to the measurement system B. F. Skinner used in his laboratory, but it was applicable to applied settings.
And so it was just this blue paper chart that measured rate over days. And so, every time you, and every skill a kid performed is timed with a timer, because you can't understand anything about rate or learning without time, because the two fundamental properties of behaviour are count and time, okay?
And that changes over time. So, count in time changes over time. And that's what tells you what's going on with your learner. Okay, so this blue chart teachers used, you know, and this happened in schools in the 1960s, and it was happening in group instruction where kids were actually trained to use this chart.
So they would do practice timings, they would have like classical music playing on a one-minute loop on like a tape, right? Like that was back when there was nothing digital, so kids would wait to hear the music. There'd be a pause between the minute and they would restart and they'd know when their one-minute timings were starting.
And so kids would independently practice following this musical timing that was happening in the background. And at the end of the timing, the kids would look at their scores and count, like, see if they could find what they made wrong, got wrong.
And the teacher was constantly walking around and checking the scores for them. And then the kids would write their scores at the top and then they'd get ready for another timing and they'd wait for the music to start again. And then they'd start again. And then the teacher would collect all the papers and she would, and they would also chart their performance, but then the teacher would also check their charts and make sure they were correct.
So ,this started happening in classrooms where teachers were measuring rate in academic instruction. And now there's all these amazing digital tools. So we use something called PrecisionX Fit Learning. And this is a digital charting platform where you can literally time a kid, measure their corrects and errors and input it into a screen and it automatically creates your standard acceleration chart for you.
And I think I jumped ahead and didn't explain what acceleration means. So, acceleration is the derivative of acceleration and deceleration, right? The reason being is because it's telling you about change in rate over time. And so as rate increases, it gives you a slope. And on the standard acceleration chart, those slopes are standard. So, we know what like times twos look like, times threes, times fours. Like when, you know, when skills get two times faster, three times faster, four times faster, we can see those learning pictures and the same for deceleration of errors, right?
So that's why it's called celeration because behaviour changes multiplicatively, just like anything in the organic world, right? Like physics, the moving objects, they don't add, they multiply. Cancer cells multiply. So does behaviour. So when behaviour is growing, it multiplies and when it's decreasing, it divides.
And so this chart lets you see those slopes. And so what's so cool is every single person in my organization who's on the frontline with a kid, well, guess what? They're putting kids' scores in and they're immediately seeing their learning picture. And so they know in a moment, if their kids have their kids doing, and the teachers may not be able to take this much data on a daily basis.
Of course they can't, but they can once a day, they could take a measurement of what something the kids are practicing in the classroom. Once a week, I mean, there's ways to build this into instruction and it's easier than ever now because it's there's literally and PrecisionX isn't the only one there's other charting platforms that you can use.
It's just something that school districts have to agree to invest in that ongoing measurement of learning is important and giving teachers the power to act like scientists in the classroom is the way to change the way education is going 100 percent.
[00:27:04] Anna Stokke: So, would you say assign a target to a certain skill, let's talk about times tables cause that one, everybody will get that. So you could say this student has mastered this skill when they can get X correct per minute, right?
[00:27:23] Kimberly Berens: Yes, it would never be percent correct because percent predicts nothing about human learning. And you miss so much important information about a learner, because Sally and Jane Could both get 100 percent on a math test and Sally gets it done in 10 minutes and Jane barely gets it done in an hour, who's more proficient? But you never know that, right?
You're missing so much information and we know this in behaviour science because we've known this since the 1930s, that rate is the most fundamental and sensitive measure of behaviour and learning. So if I was gonna say this kid has mastered these times tables, I would say, well, they've hit our fluency aim, which is a rate of response, and our aim at Fit Learning for math facts is 60 per minute, one a second.
The only reason we know it's around 60 is because we've tested this with thousands of kids over these years. And that is typically what produces those outcomes we talked about. So the ability to apply multiplication facts in multi-digit multiplication or in long division or in word problems, right? The ability to perform in distractions or for really long timings. And then we also put it on retention. Meaning we don't have them practice those sets of facts for a while. Then we check them again.
Are they still fluent? And they are. So that's what fluency gives you. So that's how I would know a skill is mastered. At Fit Learning, basic computation aims are between 50 and 60 a minute, it's a range. But, you know, we get kids close to one a second on math facts because they have to be like sight words, one hundred percent.
You have to have those math mechanics like you would sight words in reading.
[00:28:47] Anna Stokke: I do see why you're frustrated though, because I mean, I don't know what it's like necessarily where you are, but there are a lot of people here that are actually just against assessments, period. Never mind time. You bring up time and that's just really wild.
[00:29:04] Kimberly Berens: Well, I was just going to comment on the whole myth about timing performance causes anxiety.
The mad minute was a phenomena like in the 90s, okay. So this is when, you know, this happens all the time in education. Well, they'll glom one thing from our field like fluency got glommed from our field, but it got glommed incorrectly because it's some subjective qualitative assessment of reading rather than a measured level of performance.
So, what other thing got glommed was timed practice, right? That got kind of taken out of behaviour science and incorrectly applied. So mad minutes were this thing that happened like in the nineties where teachers were required to run one-minute timings on math facts with their kids in the classroom every day, which sounds like, “That's amazing.” Like, “What a great idea.”
Well, guess what? So many bad things happen as a result of that because teachers were not trained and the curriculum they were provided was terrible. And so they weren't provided with the right materials - because we always talk about skills in slices like an onion because it is. Like if you think about a whole onion, so math facts - our onion of math facts at Fit Learning is 380 facts, okay, that kids need to know backwards and forwards.
So all of that, we go through nines, right? For all, for everything in our basic comp, because we usually get generativity on the higher numbers because of all the other stuff we do.
So it's basically adding and subtracting through nines and multiplying and dividing through nines, right? And actually, for multiplying, divide, we do go through twelves. But anyway, the point being, those are what kids have to have like mental math. People like to talk about it, mental math, but that's a lot of facts.
You got to break those down into slices, into little pieces, right? Well, that's not what happened in mad minutes. They were like all the facts jumbled up, no sequence, no order, no rhyme or reason. Also, the one-minute timing was just blanketly applied. And there really was no analysis of each kid's performance and any kind of troubleshooting to help a kid do better.
And so kids hated that freaking part of the day. Why? Because they didn't get better, their performance didn't improve, and of course they started dreading and hating and getting nervous about it. So then that got blanketly applied to timing practice makes every kid anxious. Which is wrong.
Timing practice is not a fad. It's actually a system of measurement that stems from science. It's not a fad. The reason we time practice is because it's based in how we measure learning.
It's not about being a fad, number one, number two, if your kid is dreading or fearful about anything you're working on, then guess what? You haven't designed instruction properly, which means that you haven't broken the skill down into achievable parts, and you haven't provided the right kind of reinforcement and the right kind of practice and the right kind of troubleshooting to ensure that your kid is actually meeting what we call.
At Fit Learning, personal bests. Every single time a kid should hit a personal best. If it's properly designed, a kid should hit a personal best, meaning one better than their last timing. Every time. And a personal best is a big deal at fit.
When kids hit a personal best, they get tons of points and lots of reinforcement and praise. And then they get to try again and, and hit another personal best. And so none of that's being done in typical time to practice in schools. So that blanket statement that timing practice causes anxiety really makes me annoyed.
[00:32:12] Anna Stokke: I had Robin Codding on the podcast, and we actually talked about, do time tests cause math anxiety? And she talked about all the research about this.
But I actually want to ask about a specific label I've been hearing lately: math trauma. What do you think about that?
[00:32:28] Kimberly Berens: I really think people need to step back and reflect on what constructs actually do, especially in the area of education. Because when you're constantly naming a problem, and then presenting it as an explanation, you are ensuring that that problem never gets solved.
All you've done is name a pattern of behaviour. You've named a skills deficit or you've named a way a child behaves with respect to math material or any academic material for that matter. That is a behavioural pattern that you have named, but because of the way psychology has dominated our culture, pop psychology, really, has dominated our culture, it makes the public believe we've explained it.
So why is my kid so fearful of math? Oh, they have math anxiety. “Oh, that doesn't tell me anything.” The reason your kid is fearful of math is because they have an extremely aversive history in mathematics. They've only received bad grades, there's been punitive consequences for their poor math performance, and it's aversive because they're not competent.
I've been working with kids in the private sector and academics for decades, and I would never in my life explain a kid's behaviour with a construct because guess why? It doesn't produce effective action. It's not pragmatic. There's no solution. Now, would I observe that behaviour?
I absolutely would. And what I say now, this is a behaviour we need to address because every time something with mathematics related is presented, the child recoils or the child starts engaging in aberrant behaviour, like running away from the session or hiding under the desk. Those are things we have to address.
And so we address them by looking at two things. Number one, are the materials being presented at the child's instructional level? Yes or no. And that requires assessment and a proper assessment that allows you to identify where a child's core skill fluency actually falls off and their intervention has to start exactly where they need to be, number one.
Number two, is any positive reinforcement being used for approach and completion versus only reinforcement being presented for fleeing? Like, think about how many kids receive reinforcement in the form of escape from freaking out around math. That also can become an extremely enabled behaviour.
So, constructs don't give us anything, and it makes people think you've explained something, but it's actually unbelievably devastating for kids because it ensures that problems never get solved.
[00:34:56] Anna Stokke: So let's move on to what you talked about in your book called the technology of teaching, which I understand isn't a new phrase though I hadn't actually heard it before. So you say this is highly effective and it's something you use at Fit Learning, it's based on behaviour science.
So it combines Direct Instruction, that's capital D, capital I, precision teaching and curriculum-based measurement into one method. So, let's go through those. So Direct Instruction would be the method of instruction, correct? Let's go through that one.
[00:35:33] Kimberly Berens: So Direct Instruction would definitely be the method of instruction. And, Direct Instruction, talk about something that just got completely misinterpreted and brushed under the rug. I mean, it's just shocking to me because the science, the evidence on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction is, there's no evidence that exists that's more supportive of that method in education, it's shocking.
I mean, that goes back to the sixties. So Direct Instruction is our method for really teaching concepts. Engelmann, who's the founder of Direct Instruction, was a brilliant instructional designer. And even though he wasn't in behaviour science per se, he kind of became a behaviour scientist without knowing it.
And then later on when he really became a part of behaviour science, he got kind of why, because he almost just understood this as a common-sense thing, but then it all got embraced by behaviour science and it became one thing, but anyway, so Ziggy Engelmann was brilliant at number one, breaking down complex skills and really presenting how to teach first things first.
But what Ziggy was the most brilliant at was the emphasis on faultless communications of concepts and the importance of active, immediate responding by the class with active, immediate feedback presented by the teacher, another name for that is methetics.
He created unbelievably brilliant ways of presenting concepts like something as simple as a square to something as complicated as a, fraction in like the components of a fraction and knowing, and really dealing with the importance of creating a clear, concise rule around a concept, and then how to present that rule in relationship to positive and negative examples of it to ensure mastery of the concept.
So we use DI in every concept we teach with kids, as well as when we're doing kind of error corrections after a fluency-based practice timing. If a kid makes an error, we'll use a DI type interaction with a kid to facilitate correction of that error. So DI is a, is really an overarching method of, of really creating concept understanding, I would say.
And then precision teaching is obviously our measurement system. It's how we measure every single thing we teach, and we even time and chart concept instruction. We time and chart every single thing a kid practices, and that's using that measurement system I described.
And then curriculum-based measurement, which was really launched by Stanley Deno, and he was also influenced by precision teaching, you know, Stanley Deno brought rate into ongoing weekly, very implementable assessments by teachers back in the 80s. And these are these little one-minute, like assessments that resembled classroom curriculum in reading and math and writing and spelling, that teachers could really quickly implement their learners once a week and understand if their kids were on track.
And then it allowed them to immediately make some decisions about kids in their classrooms that weren't on track. And then, rather than waiting for one standard assessment at the end of the school year, so those three things are highly researched. I mean, they're the most researched methodologies in education and we combine them into one approach, which is profoundly effective.
[00:38:40] Anna Stokke: A couple of questions on Direct Instruction. you mentioned sort of these traditions in the classroom that we have that have gone on for years. And I mean, I've done these things myself when I teach hand raising. So you ask the class a question or, and then, you know, you wait, someone raises their hand and they get to speak.
So in the way that you apply Direct Instruction, do you use hand raising? If not, what do you use instead?
[00:39:07] Kimberly Berens: Hand raising, in my opinion, is really the most tragic tradition in education let's go back to generality of method and behaviour science. So we know that learning occurs and only occurs through the repeated reinforcement of a behaviour and that behaviour actually has to actually occur, the child has to, the learner has to actually engage in the behaviour for that behaviour to contact the consequence and the environment and for that neurological learning process to happen.
So kids can't learn by sitting and staring. No kids learn that way. And so, when you're teaching a lesson in a classroom, you know, first of all, I've spent a lot of my career absorbing classrooms. A lot of my early part of my career, I spent in classrooms. And so, I can't tell you how much behaviour a teacher engages in and how little behaviour their learners engage in.
The person doing most of the behaving during that class is the teacher. But the people who should be behaving the most are the kids, because they're the ones that need to be learning, not the teacher. So, what happens is the teacher does a whole bunch of talking, and then finally gives the learners the opportunity to respond.
But what happens, kids have to raise their hand, and then one kid gets chosen to answer and receive feedback. So, one kid in that classroom has had an effective learning opportunity. And unfortunately, more often than not, the kid who gets chosen already knows the answer, and they actually don't need a learning opportunity in that moment.
They're the ones that actually don't need it at all. And so, hand raising is the, is by far the greatest indication that the educational establishment has actually no understanding of how learning actually takes place from a scientific perspective, which is what Ziggy Englemann got. And this was back in the 1960s for crying out loud.
And so, the reason why hand raising needs to go away is because number one, every school that's that launches DI as a school-wide intervention dramatically improves its test scores 100 percent and that is just a fact, okay. Project Follow Through also 100 percent supports what I just said. So, when you use effective Direct Instruction, you are using short, you know, quickly presented either questions or statements to the class, and then you use some kind of signal, like a snap or a clap or a hand up for the entire class to respond.
So every learner in that classroom has the opportunity to respond, then the teacher can immediately give feedback. Now, the teacher can also notice when some of the kids in the class don't respond strong, or half the class doesn't respond at all. So, she can say, “Okay, nope, try again, I want the whole class answering, get ready and say it.”
Or she can say, “Okay, I noticed that these kids are struggling. I'm going to represent that in a different way and see if they respond better. And if they don't, then I'm going to keep that in my head and I'm going to pull them into a small group later and we're going to do something more on this on the side while the rest of the class is practicing this because these kids are a little lost.”
So to be honest with you, Direct Instruction gives teachers an ongoing assessment of how well their kids are learning, what the lesson that they're, that the teacher is trying to teach, which is the point, right?
[00:42:00] Anna Stokke: So there's two reasons to do something like a choral response. One reason is that you don't want the students zoning out. Like a lot of students will. I mean, I know this at, from teaching at the university level too. In fact, people might find this bizarre, but I sometimes do choral response in my university calculus class.
And it's sometimes just like, is this the correct answer? Yes or no, right. And everybody has to answer. So you want to come up with some method in which you get everyone participating and it doesn't have to be group work. You're teaching and you want to make sure that the students are listening and you also want to make sure that the students understand what you're talking about and it gives you a way to tell if you need to maybe re-explain or something like that.
And then the other thing while we're on this topic of, some of the traditions in schools. One that you mentioned, and we discussed this on my episode with Jonathan Plucker, is grade-level advancement. And honestly, I'll tell you, I actually hadn't thought that much about this.
It's just something that I know happens, we've always done it. And he brought this up that there are these huge disparities, like they've done studies on this, many differences in grade level between students in a class and this just gets larger and larger and larger as the grades go on and teachers are asked to differentiate as though this is something easy, though it's not at all.
So, what he advocates for is flexible ability grouping, starting quite early actually. Is that where you sit with this?
[00:43:40] Kimberly Berens: One hundred percent. The whole notion of grade levels stems actually from developmental psychology's impact on education that goes back a really long time. Unfortunately, a lot of developmental psychology is based on theory and no science whatsoever of categorizing kids and suggesting that age is the number one most important variable in childhood, which actually it is not.
You know, what we know is the number one most important variable in childhood is, the number of learning opportunities a child has throughout their lifetime in the home environment and in the school environment and after school, that is what is the most critical thing for a kid.
Their age is actually irrelevant. again, hand raising and grade level advancement based on age and not skill mastery. You know, there's a reason, and you can see these data on my website, if you go to drkimberlyberens.com, there's a whole set of data I've put up there, graphs on the National Assessment of Educational Progress data, the NAEP, which is our, you know, national assessment that's done on a cycle.
So you'll see on that, in one of my charts, and these are data that are publicly available, right? I am literally just presenting these in graphic form. These data were collected by other people. So our proficiency rates in the United States decline throughout the course of schooling.
So there are a greater percentage of fourth graders that score as proficient on the NAEP than eighth graders. And there are a greater percentage of eighth graders as 12th graders, which is probably not surprising to you as an educator, but I think a lot of the public find this shocking because you'd think that as students move through the grade levels, they become more and more and more proficient, but they actually become less proficient.
Why? Because kids are pushed along without prerequisite skill mastery. And as they, again, get up to the higher and higher grades, they become incapable, not because there's something wrong with their brains but because there's something wrong with their learning histories, they become incapable of learning grade-level content.
And it is a toxic tradition. It is why, again, we are at close to 70% of American schoolchildren who are below proficiency in all academic subjects. And when you then look at kids who live in poverty, or children of colour who live in poverty. We're at 90% - 90% are graduating below proficiency. That is a shockingly horrifying number. So, we've got to do something. And there's not like schools haven't done this.
So there's a school and is one of my mentors and heroes, Kent Johnson, Dr Kent Johnson. He's the founder of Morningside Academy. It's in Seattle, Washington, and it's based on, the whole school is designed according to the technology of teaching, Direct Instruction, precision teaching, and CBM.
They basically have two schools. They have a lower school, and they have a middle school. They don't have grades. They have kids who are in the lower school, they have kids who are in the middle school.
They cluster them according to kind of like age ranges, but not according to yearly, yearly chronological age. And what that means is kids move around to different groups and clusters based on the skills they've mastered or something they might be struggling with, but when you use that kind of effective instruction for so long, it's kind of amazing how over time kids actually do start kind of moving more similarly together because they don't have such gaping holes in their repertoires.
So once kids hit like the middle school at Morningside, they're all very similarly proficient. And then they spend a lot of their time doing group work, doing project-based learning, writing. Because they've, they're so fluid in their financial skills. I mean, their data for Morningside are undeniable.
It's profoundly effective. It works, it's just the school system is so entrenched in traditions that are not about student outcome, has nothing to do with student outcome.
[00:47:20] Anna Stokke: Having said this, the hand raising thing is easy for an individual teacher to change, that teacher can change the way that they get feedback from students and determine what's going on in the class. The grade level thing isn't, yeah, that would be wonderful if the students weren't grouped according to age and instead grouped according to where they're at in their learning history.
And they've got students that are at all different levels in their class. So, what do they do?
[00:47:52] Kimberly Berens: Well, my first recommendation is that teachers need to get angry. And I say this in my book, and I actually was part of a documentary on reading called The Truth About Reading, and I say it in the documentary as well, schools aren't going to change until enough parents and enough educators actually launch really a grassroots campaign of a fury because teachers have paid a lot of money for the training they have.
And their training actually does not prepare them to do the job they're expected to do. Not only that, the school policies and the arbitrary timelines that districts require teachers to follow actually ensure that they can't do their jobs effectively, but then they're blamed for it. This is a shocking and horrific situation, which is why more teachers are exiting education than ever before.
Why there's a lower rate of teacher satisfaction everywhere where no one's entering, like very few people are entering that profession. This is a crisis of catastrophic proportions because although I may be a critic, a vocal critic of the education system, I am a staunch advocate for public education and public school, public educators.
You know, you can be a critic of the public education system and an advocate for it at the same time. And to be honest with you, if I didn't care about the public education system and public school teachers, then I wouldn't say this. I think that every child in the United States has a right to an effective education, and that cannot happen through private schooling and school vouchers.
That is a categorical impossibility, and it's absurd, and it's an insult to all of us as citizens of a democracy. Every single child in the United States, regardless of where you're born and the zip code you live in, should be able to access a free and effective education, period. However, that doesn't mean that I'm going to tiptoe around and say that everything's hunky dory.
It isn't. Our school system is atrocious and needs to be improved. And it's not the teacher's fault. It's arbitrary school rules and policies and the curriculum overhauls that get implemented every other year that actually have, make no impact and none of it's based on science and evidence.
So teachers have can do very little. That's what the tragedy is. What can a teacher do when she's an eighth-grade math teacher and a majority of her kids don't even understand fractions? Have never been able to, don't even know the relationship between a fraction, a decimal, and a ratio and a percent.
That's the most common deficit I see in middle school and high school students. And the number, the number one reason why they come to Fit is because they have unbelievable math deficits that go back to primary school, basic computation, and the relationship between fractions, decimals, percents, and ratios, they do not understand.
And if they don't understand that and aren’t fluent in those things, you can forget upper-level mathematics.
[00:50:23] Anna Stokke: Absolutely.
[00:50:24] Kimberly Berens: What can a teacher do? She's expected to follow the timeline even though her kids are still like using calculators for like 10 plus two. It's an unworkable situation. And so, you know, people always ask me, “What's your advice for teachers?” I'm going to be brutally honest, my advice for teachers is to get angry and demand things change.
Demand effective training, demand science-based instruction in classrooms, demand that ridiculous school policies that have nothing to do with student outcomes are changed, and that teachers are empowered to act like scientists and be actually effective in their classrooms, and that requires a systemic overhaul of the system, I have to say.
Now, we do provide and services for schools that, but you're just your administrator has to get on board. We have a scientist educator workshop model where people get trained to implement our technology of teaching with any curriculum. And then there's another type of certification that's just for literacy called Fit Lite, where we're training them in our scope and sequence for phonics and phonological awareness.
So we do have those options for teachers through Fit Learning. But I'll be honest, it's really hard for teachers to implement anything effectively in the classroom because of all the stuff they're up against. It's an unworkable situation. I know that's not the answer that people want to hear.
[00:51:42] Anna Stokke: But I mean, we have talked about some things that, that I hope will help teachers, right. We've talked about Direct Instruction.
[00:51:48] Kimberly Berens: Yep. That'll help.
[00:51:49] Anna Stokke: Precision teaching. That's something I want to learn more about, and I'm going to learn more about that. And by the way, I did want to mention because you mentioned about cognitive science versus behaviour science at the beginning, and I'll say as someone who actually isn't either or a psychologist at all, you're actually kind of saying the same things.
You're talking about breaking things down into component parts and the cognitive science people say that too. And that's because of working memory. They'll say, right? And also they talk, about Direct Instruction, same idea.
The one thing I think that might be missing more from that side of the conversation is the measurement. And so I think that measurement piece is something that's really important. So I actually really like your idea of combining Direct Instruction and precision teaching. That makes a lot of sense to me.
And speaking of which, so measurement is really important to a person who advocates for science-based instruction, and in order to measure something, you actually have to have defined it because you need to know what you're measuring. I see this as a big issue because I hear a lot of terms and it's not clear what they mean.
And often the people that are talking about them, I feel can't define them appropriately. But the one that I really want to talk about is conceptual understanding because this is something that a lot of people really want to strive for. And I'm wondering if you have a definition for conceptual understanding of a math concept, and how you would measure it.
[00:53:29] Kimberly Berens: Oh yes. So we do a lot of concept work at Fit, and we definitely deal with what, you know, you would call conceptual understanding. Let's just break down understanding first. So again, understanding is one of those constructs that is just all over the place in lay language and it's been brought into education and in cognitive science.
And again, it seems harmless, but it's not harmless because it's actually, understanding and knowledge. Those kinds of things are all over state standards and it's something teachers are actually responsible for, right? So, like, if you look at any state standard, I'm from New York, so if you look like any state standard, a lot of them, the objectives will be “Students will understand the relationship between fractions, decimals and percents.”
Let's just pretend that's one of them, right? Will understand. How would you measure that? How do you measure understanding? You can't measure understanding. And so from our perspective and behaviour science, we want to talk about understanding we would say “Behave effectively,” or “Engage in accurate and rapid responding,” with respect to a particular stimulus or a particular subject matter, right?
So, from our perspective, understanding is, do you behave effectively with respect to it? And we could define effectively by correct and rapid, right? A high rate of corrects. So again, everything is measurable. Now, do we think that understanding also involves thinking, 100,000 percent.
Oftentimes understanding is a private behaviour. And, cognitive scientists, again, this is a long age-old fight between the two disciplines, but people in cognitive psychology, and now it's called cognitive science, they like to suggest that behaviour scientists don't focus on thinking because we can't see it.
But I want to make sure that, people understand that that's actually a misunderstanding. That in behaviour science we 100 percent acknowledge that, what we would call private events, occur. So things that are private, behaviours that are private, that you can't see being performed, but are absolutely occurring.
We acknowledge those absolutely exist. The difference is we would, we acknowledge them as behaviours that are learned in the same way as behaviours that you can see and observe and measure. There's many ways that we deal with concept learning. So, first of all, we use Direct Instruction for concept learning, right?
So, we're, we're presenting very short, clear, concise rules to kids. we have a way of, of analyzing what we would say would be kind of “understanding a concept,” and I'm using air quotes, with respect to, can a child answer flexible and varied questions about that concept?
So, even something as simple as a square, So, does a kid understand what a square is? Well, what that means is, can a kid answer a yes, no question about a square? Can a kid discriminate a square from other shapes? Can a kid say the definition of a square? Can the kid answer a misleading question about squares?
Can the kid answer a leading question about squares? Can the kid engage in a question about squares that has to do with putting it in the frame of not? And we do that in a timing where one of my coaches is presenting all these questions, rapid fire and all varied, weird questions. And the kid is responding and we actually count correct answers and errors and prompts.
And we put that on chart and then we know when a kid is fluid at that “understanding” of that concept, I’m going to be using air quotes again, because their chart tells us they do, right? But that's not enough. Then we have to go into them flexibly and fluently executing that concept in lots of different ways, right? Like on a worksheet, discriminating between squares and other shapes or whatever it might mean.
But the same thing applies to like, what's a denominator versus a numerator? When do fractions equal one, and what is a fraction greater than one and what is a fraction less than one, right? Like same exact thing, but it's just more complicated, that's what I would define as concept understanding, but it's measurable.
[00:57:21] Anna Stokke: So basically, if we're talking about something that has a definition, they should know the definition, but not just know the definition. They should be able to discriminate and answer a number of questions about that particular concept in varied settings, and it’s measured with respect to time.
[00:57:40] Kimberly Berens: Yes.
[00:57:41] Anna Stokke: So let's talk a bit about evidence and effectiveness. Again, you talked about Direct Instruction and then you talked about precision teaching. So, we have talked a bit about Project Follow Through on the podcast in the past. If you want, you can say a few words about it, it doesn't hurt to recap that.
And then I'm wondering if you can talk about the Great Falls Precision Teaching Project, which I hadn't heard of.
[00:58:06] Kimberly Berens: Anyone who's listening is interested in Project Follow Through, I implore you to read Kathy Watkins. It was either a comprehensive exam or her dissertation, I can't remember; it was years ago, but she's written a monograph that you can actually get.
Quickly, I'll just say. So Project Follow Through was the largest federally funded study ever conducted on educational methods in America and Direct Instruction was evaluated amongst a lot of other approaches that matched kind of more of the progressive ideology that is now really the dominant ideology in education, which is discovery-based learning, which now is promoting guessing and guess and check, not telling kids the answer and like just smiling knowingly at kids rather than just telling them what they're supposed to know.
It's like, just tell them, right? So those things were also going on back during Project Follow Through and Direct Instruction outperformed every other method by multiple standard deviations, not only on academic achievement tests, but also on measures of self-esteem. Whereas a lot of the other methods not only worsened, self-esteem, but also worsened academic achievement measures.
But when these data were presented to Congress, it was the progressive methodologies that matched the ideology of the educational establishment that got funded and Direct Instruction did not get funded, even though the evidence was undeniable at its effectiveness. Why? Because the educational establishment has always been an ideological institution, not a pragmatic institution based in science.
It's based in beliefs. So, what schools like is when teachers teach in a manner that matches with how they believe teachers should be teaching, not in a manner that matches the evidence about what effective teaching is. So belief is tragic in the educational establishment, and there's no place for it. Think about all the things in our society just dramatically evolved since the turn of the 20th century.
Technology, engineering, agriculture, medicine, all those things, light years better. What has not evolved? Our education system. Why? Because it can't evolve because it's not based on scientific practices.
[01:00:20] Anna Stokke: What about the Great Falls Precision Teaching Project?
[01:00:24] Kimberly Berens: Yeah, so this was a great, a study that happened back in the, it was late 60s, early 70s. And this is, what's amazing about this study is that, first of all, it's so unknown. Like very few people know about it. So what happened in this project was that a certain number of schools in a district started implementing 10 minutes a day of timed practice, put on charts with feedback provided to kids, which is what precision teaching is, right?
Timed practice, counting corrects and errors with kids on basic academic skills and charting those. And the teachers were making decisions and working with the kids to improve their performances, right? This happened for 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day in a number of schools in a district. And the rest of the district was just, you know, business as usual.
And at the end of the school year, the kids in the precision teaching schools in 10 minutes a day had gained greater than one year of growth. And some were close to two years of growth as compared to the schools not using precision teaching, and a lot of the schools not using precision teaching, a majority of their kids didn't even make one year's growth in a calendar year.
So, it got expanded to more districts and more schools. And those outcomes were replicated again with a greater sample of schools and districts. And it was literally 10 minutes a day of practice. I mean, this is what we show at Fit Learning all the time. Like, so although our benchmark at Fit is 40 hours, that's really an enrollment and 40 hours entails kids showing up to session, you know, lots of stuff that happens in a session besides being in a timing, right?
So like reinforcement time or getting feedback from a coach or whatever happens. But we just did an analysis just for kicks, eight of our kids, two in math, two in reading. And I really wanted to see the ratio of time spent in practice of already introduced concepts to learning new concepts, right? And as I predicted, it's two to one, it was like 256 minutes spent in fluency-based practice and 109 minutes spent introducing new concepts with kids, okay.
So to combine, that's about six hours of instruction in timed instruction and those kids on average moved 46 percentile ranks on academic achievement tests or on the really CDMs, in basically six hours of instruction and practice. So what I want to emphasize is this is what the Precision Teaching Project showed us back then and it's still the case.
It is unbelievably effective and it is unbelievably efficient. You can build so much learning into a short timing when you're really thinking about rate, right. When rate matters, you're getting kids responding like we did in our, in some of our reading programs, kids are doing 100, 150 per minute on tasks.
Think about all that learning, a hundred per minute? That's a lot of responding that's getting reinforced and a lot of neurology that's changing during that, right. So, it's an effective and an unbelievably efficient way to dramatically improve learning outcomes with kids. that's what's shown in that, study years and years and years ago.
[01:03:28] Anna Stokke: That's amazing. and I'll just mention that I am going to put links to these things on the resource page, Now, did you want to talk any more about the data that you've collected at Fit Learning?
[01:03:39] Kimberly Berens: Well, I would love to. I mean, and again, there's a ton of these data in my book. We have about 22 physical locations around the world, and now I just launched Fit Learning online. To increase access we started doing online in 2013, but when COVID hit, we had to shut everything down.
We really launched online as an organization-wide thing. And we did it of course, because we're scientists, we did a big study and it showed that our outcomes were identical. So our online kids and our live kids made the same exact amount of growth, which is 35 to 40 percentile rate gains in a standard enrollment.
All of our locations, we call them learning laboratories, because every single kid enrolled with us, we do natural science with. Meaning that in our active instruction, we are doing science with that kid. Well, first of all, they go through a comprehensive skills assessment, which pinpoints exactly where their core skill fluency falls off.
And that leads my team to develop a specific, you know, instructionally appropriate fluency building program, like where we're starting, like, I don't care if you're in 10th grade, if you don't get basic fractions and how to add and subtract and multiply and divide, that's where you're starting, man.
And parents know that from the beginning. We're going to actually fix the underlying problem forever. We're not putting a Band-Aid on this. So we have an assessment that allows us to do that, and then as soon as kids start sessions, every single thing they do is timed. Every single thing they do is measured. Every single thing they do is put on a learning chart, for every single skill.
And what's amazing is our parents have access to every single learning chart, ongoing access. So what that means is after every session, our parents can log into their kid's profile and see every single learning chart and see their learning pictures for every single skill they're working on, so it's so transparent. There's a ton of accountability.
So not only are we taking data on every single thing their kids are practicing during sessions such that we can make evidence-based decisions about instruction and ensure rapid and robust learning gains, but we're also doing benchmark reassessments every 40 hours of instruction on each individual kid.
And then on a cycle, we're doing organization-wide analysis of our outcomes, which is why I can tell you like sitting here right now that we produce between, on average, 35 to 40 percentile rank gains on CDM assessments in 40 hours of training as an organization with thousands of kids. We've replicated these data.
We're a science-based organization at every level of the organization. So, you know, it's not just we're using evidence-based methods, like methods that have basis in science. We're doing science. Which is a difference, like that's a big difference, right? It's not just, “Oh, I'm using this phonics curriculum because there's evidence to say it's effective.”
Well, it's, I promise you, it's probably not going to be blanket effective for every kid you work with. You better be measuring the performance of every single one of your learners that you're using it with and making decisions and tailoring it to those kids. So that's the difference between evidence-based versus actually doing science and collecting evidence on every learner,
[01:06:37] Anna Stokke: That's awesome. Is there anything else you want to add today?
[01:06:40] Kimberly Berens: I do want to say one thing. The debates that happen between cognitive science and behaviour science and traditional educators and people who do Direct Instruction and precision teaching, those can be interminable arguments. One of the most profound things I got out of graduate school was actually being able to learn about philosophy of science.
And I got to read Stephen Pepper. This is another book you can put in your show notes, World Hypothesis. And Stephen Pepper talks about goals in science as the really only way to reach a resolution with anybody who might share a contrary viewpoint. And so, I got so much out of this because I was able to really stop fighting and debating with my constructivist friends and my cognitive friends because I got to really understand that my goal is creating an effective change for a learner.
I mean, I'm an applied scientist. I'm a clinician. My number one goal is to produce the biggest impact with our learners at Fit as possible. I'm not an academic. I literally am an applied practitioner, that just happens to do science and is trained as a scientist.
So, my goal is effective, is successful working or taking effective action. And so that's why I'm a pragmatist, which is why behaviour science works for me because behaviour science is what allows me to make the most effective outcome with every single child I work with, and that's my goal. However, there may be other goals like describing things in more interesting ways or creating a more comprehensive kind of understanding of a phenomena.
I don't know. There are other goals that people have. What are our goals? That should unify us, and education should involve one goal, and that goal should be effectively educating every single learner to the best of their ability. So, that should be the goal of education. And if there's any other goals, like being right, or proving yourself right, or proving your theory right, or proving your belief right, or collecting evidence to prove your theory, then I think you're in the wrong business.
I think you're in the wrong industry because if you're in education, you should have one goal and that goal is effectively educating a kid, as many kids as you can. That should be the unifying goal. And if that is the goal, then I really, I powerfully urge you to explore the things we've talked about on this podcast today. Direct Instruction, precision teaching, curriculum-based measurement, behaviour science.
Those are your access points for being profoundly effective. And that's very empowering, not only for you as an educator, but for the kids who are under your care.
[01:09:26] Anna Stokke: Definitely, everybody should think about the things we talked about today. And like I said, I'm going to include a bunch of links on the resource page that hopefully help with that. I want to thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your passion and knowledge with my listeners and with me. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
[01:09:47] Kimberly Berens: Well, I had a blast and I really respect your work and I got so excited to come in here because I got connected to you from Zach on Twitter, you know, the Progressively Incorrect podcast. And I saw all your posts and I'm like, “I have to really know this lady, I need to be friends with her,” because we align so much, like everything you said.
So, it was really nice to meet you and this was really fun.
[01:10:06] Anna Stokke: I agree, it was great to meet you too. Thank you.
[01:10:09] Kimberly Berens: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[01:10:12] Anna Stokke: As always, we've included a resource page that has links to articles and books mentioned in the episode.
If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Chalk and Talk is produced by me, Anna Stokke, transcript and resource page by Jazmin Boisclair, social media images by Nicole Maylem Gutierrez.
Subscribe on your favourite podcast app to get new episodes delivered as they become available. You can follow me on X for notifications or check out my website, annastokke.com, for more information. This podcast received funding through a University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact grant funded through the Anthony Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.