Yearly Archives: 2015

Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do suggests that the best way to instill a love of reading in kids is to start the child reading now, regardless of his age, and have fun doing it. In his 2015 book, Daniel T. Willingham, University of Virginia Professor of Psychology, offers digestible, practical tips, supported by psychological research about what parents of kids of all ages—newborn through teenagers—as well as K-12 teachers can do to encourage kids to read. Although Willingham mentions positive life outcomes associated with being a devoted reader, the book is premised on the belief that reading is an intrinsically valuable activity for learning about our world and appreciating the magnificence of it and its inhabitants.

Willingham argues that students should be internally motivated to read and eventually be able to decode text easily and understand a work’s meaning. He is troubled by the fact that enjoyment of reading decreases across childhood and that enjoyment is very low among high school students. Students who learn from their parents that “we are a family that reads,” who see themselves as a reader, and who enjoy reading are likely to read more.

The greatest difficulty in learning to decode text is mapping letters with their sounds (e.g., “o” can sound like “oh” or like “uh”). This is a challenging task in English given that the language is an amalgamation of other languages. Predictably then, students in first grade in almost all western continental European countries have twice the reading comprehension scores of first grade students in England. Another challenge—promoting comprehension while reading—can be addressed by increasing learners’ general knowledge as background information is key to comprehension and filling in a text’s implied information.

Willingham provides reading preparation tips for caregivers of infants through preschool age children. Baby talk or “motherese” helps very young infants distinguish sounds as do rhyming and word-play games. As early as nine months babies can recognize some words. Building their vocabulary through constant talking is important. Adults can help children realize that letters have meaning and are ubiquitous by pointing them out in signs and logos. Willingham offers tips for making reading a fun and beneficial part of a family’s regular daily routine, as well as tips for creating an environment in which young children want to read for leisure. More important than the age (within reason) that a child begins reading is indulging the child’s abundant natural curiosity to help them acquire general knowledge.

In kindergarten through second grade students learn the mechanics of reading. After reviewing the debate about teaching reading through phonics or whole-world instruction, Willingham concludes that in both theory and practice teaching phonics is the marginally better way to teach reading to the majority of students. Most U.S. elementary school teachers use a “balanced literacy” approach that draws on both instructional practices. Willingham argues that less time should be spent on non-essential language arts activities for students in K-2 and more time should be spent teaching other subjects (e.g., social studies, science) that increase students’ general knowledge. Adults should model enthusiasm for reading and help the child feels like a skilled reader. Willingham emphasizes the value of parents and children reading together daily for short bursts of time. Parents should ask their children questions, such as “what did you do today?”, so that kids practice telling a coherent story.

Fluent readers in third grade through high school should be able to read with prosody such that they understand how the text might sound if spoken. They should be able to make inferences from texts and reason about an issue based on content they read. Parents of these older children ought to continue encouraging reading and making it part of family-time.

Technology plays a large role in education at older ages. Because of online content people are actually consuming more words today than ever before, but students are not good at discerning credible sources. Some argue that with all of human knowledge so easily “googleable” students do not need to learn as much content. Willingham generally disagrees; background knowledge is key to comprehension.

Although this book is written for the typical reader, Willingham alludes to a mechanism for teaching dyslexic, reading-disabled, or garden-variety poor readers when he says that supporting students who find reading challenging means acknowledging the difficulty that they experience, praising the effort that they exert, and exposing them to enjoyable reading materials. He cautions that many reward schemes (e.g., praising performance) may undermine the intrinsic pleasure of reading.

With an abundance of suggestions, Willingham charts a path for cultivating learners who first and foremost find reading pleasurable and secondarily are stronger students because of it.

Willingham, D. T. (2015). Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do. John Wiley & Sons.

What is worth knowing? What should students learn in school? Or, as the insolent student in the back of the room might ask midway through a lecture, “why do I need to know this?” These are difficult questions to answer and made all the more challenging because educators must prepare students for an unknown tomorrow.   In his newest book, Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor and founding member of Project Zero, David Perkins, offers a framework for responding to these questions. Perkins does not tell his readers what is worth knowing—the answers are dynamic and person-specific. However, he provides scaffolds to help school boards, textbook authors, principals, teachers, parents and students make decisions about what is worth learning. Curricula, he argues, should be “lifeworthy,” “lifeready,” and embedded with interdisciplinary thinking and 21^st century skills.

Lifeworthy learning, a phrase coined by Perkins, teaches students ideas and skills that are likely to matter in the lives they are expected to lead. Lifeworthy learning is not sufficient if students think only about that information and not with that information. To think with knowledge students need “lifeready learning”—knowledge they use to solve problems, weigh options, make decisions, and better understand their world. Perkins contends that given that students’ level of school engagement decreases as they progress through the educational system, increasing the lifereadiness of curricula is critical.

He argues that the educational research community aggressively tries to address race- and income- based achievement gaps, but an equally if not more harmful gap in education is the relevance gap. Closing the relevance gap between what students are taught and what they will need to know in the future can be achieved when educators consider whether content is lifeworthy and lifeready. Teaching students with the goal of promoting “big understanding” leads to deep insights into how the world works, how to take action, how to be ethical, and how to apply knowledge in varied circumstances.

Perkins argues that educators need to think more about what to include in curricula. One problem he identifies is the “crowded garage effect”—new content is continually added but rarely removed from the curriculum. Currently, curricula attempt to touch on a broad range of topics, but coverage is shallow. Smart sampling or choosing to cover only exemplary, resonant and accessible ideas or cases within a discipline can help stem this problem. Rather than seeking to develop experts, the goal of pre-university education, according to Perkins, should be developing “expert amateurism,” so that students understand basic concepts within a discipline and can apply them appropriately and in a range of circumstances.

Perkins emphasizes the need to inspire wonder in learners, which can occur in part by asking penetrating questions. When we press students to think about what the real issues behind a problem are or how things would be different if not for an assumption we make we can ignite their passion.

Perkins suggests changes to: 1) the way disciplines are approached, 2) the way thinking is taught, and 3) the emphasis placed on relationship skill development. Given the types of challenges students will need to address in the future and the types of skills future employers will need in their employees, today’s curricula should build bridges between disciplines, reframe existing disciplinary content in terms of real-world challenges, and include additional disciplines (e.g., social science disciplines) in the curriculum. Teaching students about different ways of knowing, the ways of reasoning within a discipline, and metacognitive skills are often neglected because of the pressure to cover content. Perkins suggests that students should be taught a discipline’s content and ways of thinking in unison. He says that to be productive citizens of the 21^st century, students need to develop empathic abilities and ethical understanding. He offers a comprehensive list of personal and interpersonal skills and knowledge that are worth knowing.

Perkins tells of an instance in which Gandhi lost a sandal on the train tracks. Unable to retrieve it because the train was in motion, he tossed his remaining sandal next to the lost one. One sandal did him no good, but an abandoned pair might have great value for someone else. Perkins argues that Gandhi demonstrated “big understanding” in this moment of insight. He took action to advance an ethical outcome. Cultivating this kind of wisdom is a tall order for schools amidst a packed curriculum. Yet teaching only facts is too low a bar. Inspired by this example, Perkins concludes by suggesting a compromise: “maybe a reasonable aspiration for education, even pre-university education, is not so much wisdom but knowledge on the way to wisdom.”

Perkins, D. (2014). Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World. John Wiley & Sons.

 

Amidst the adoption of controversial Common Core state standards and as students across the U.S. prepare to take end-of-year exams, it is important to reflect about the implications of a centralized and test-based educational system. Chinese-educated University of Oregon Professor Yong Zhao’s recent book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World, is a polemic against authoritarian educational systems. He argues that China’s leading performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has made western countries, including the United States, admire and strive to emulate China’s educational system so as to avoid China developing a superior workforce. However, Zhao argues that China’s two thousand year old tradition of authoritarian educational system produces good test-takers but extirpates the critical qualities, such as creativity, that actually produce thought leaders and make a society and its workforce thrive. The greatest threat the U.S. faces from China is not that the Chinese educational system is better, but rather that the allure of its flawed educational system might lead the U.S. to diminish its investment in developing entrepreneurial, divergent thinkers thereby compromising what has made the U.S. educational system so successful.

Zhao explains that in 2009 and 2012 students in Shanghai were the top performs in the world in all three PISA exam subjects (math, reading, and science). China’s educational system garnered praise. President Obama described the realization that China was outeducating the U.S. as a “Sputnik moment.” Zhao argues that this hype is misplaced in part because the PISA exam is a flawed measure. Data collection and analysis techniques are widely criticized. Some claim the test is culturally biased. A PISA score is merely an indicator of content mastery in three academic subjects; it does not measure social-emotional aspects of development that are critical for educating young people who will be successful adults. One test cannot possibly serve as a proxy for summarizing the strength of an entire educational system. Zhao argues that PISA scores indicate the extent to which students have been “homogenized” to think a certain way and cannot assess their creative capabilities.

According to Zhao, Chinese students perform well on these exams because of a tradition dating back to at least 605 AD when the Keju testing system was invented to “meritocratically” select people for highly sought government posts. The Keju test, which was administered until 1905, did make citizens highly value education, but it rewarded obedience and respect for authority, while diverting some of China’s brightest minds away from being innovators. Zhao says today’s college entrance exam, gaokao, drives similar intense competition and denies students the opportunity to develop themselves holistically. He describes a secondary school, Mao Zhong, in which students and parents work relentlessly for a year and spend thousands of dollars, to improve college exam scores.

Even if PISA scores were a perfect indicator of an educational system’s quality, the myopic focus on test scores has deleterious effects. Zhao argues that students from rural areas and students with disabilities are disadvantaged and overlooked. The testing culture has fostered an insidious, rampant, billion-dollar cheating culture. In 2013, when a cheating scheme for the college exam was stopped, rioters in the Hubei province chanted, “there is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.” At several levels of the educational structure a system of rewards and punishments exists to promote publishing academic papers. This has propelled China to become the second largest producer of scientific journal articles; however, some of these are based on false results and those that do not falsify results are not as highly regarded (as measured by citations) as research from other countries. There has been a 32-fold increase in patents, but many are essentially useless. The recent Atlanta test cheating scandal is an early indicator of the corrupting influence that an obsession with test scores can have here as in China.

The Ministry of Education made some attempts to dilute the emphasis on testing and rank, but these changes did not materialize. There is a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts; no individual student or parent is willing to cease doing everything possible to increase his test score and prospect of admission to a selective school when he knows that other students will still be doing the same, regardless of governmental messages to the contrary. Thus, not only does an authoritarian educational system suppress creative thinking, but a society that has become authoritarian in its educational practices is difficult to change. This should serve as a warning to us here. To create and support an educational system that produces globally-minded, innovative, citizens for tomorrow, it is critical to encourage the pursuit of intellectual passions and to scaffold social emotional development.

 

Zhao, Y. (2014). Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. John Wiley & Sons.

Because the 2014 writing guide Steven Pinker authored is truly essential for improving writing, all writers would certainly benefit from reading it. “Purists”, as Pinker calls the sticklers for grammatical rules, might identify four or five errors in the previous sentence. In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21^st Century, Pinker, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at Harvard University, argues that the “texting generation” has not ruined English as some fear; rather poor writing has always abounded. Pinker’s aim is to help good writers become better. He draws on psychological and linguistic research to explain in an entertaining voice the underlying principles behind why his practical tips will improve writing.

Pinker reminds us that good writers are avid readers who have honed their writing craft over time. Good writing requires critical analysis of language usage and decision-making in the face of ambiguous and evolving rules. Pinker characterizes writing as an unnatural way to communicate because it deprives us of many of the tools we use in speech. Style is critical for building understanding and trust between writer and reader because it helps preserve the elements of oral communication that can get lost on the page.

Pinker says the most damning obstacle to good writing is the curse of knowledge. Cognitive science research suggests that people are minimally competent in knowing what another person knows or thinks. They are not good at imagining what it would be like for another person not to know something that they know already. The curse of knowledge leads to the overreliance on jargon, abbreviations, and onerous chunks of information. It leads to the underutilization of explanations, examples, concrete descriptions of visual images, and digestible packets of information. The best way to avoid these problems and to write with the needs of the reader in mind is to revise. Asking someone with less knowledge about the topic to edit a work is critical. Pinker says that authors often organize their ideas in an arbitrary order rather than in the order that will facilitate the reader’s understanding and retention. Creating an outline and being clear in one’s own mind about the purpose of the writing can help minimize this tendency. A writer should also repeatedly edit her written work.

Pinker argues that writing in a classic style can help people avoid the pitfalls that make writing stuffy. Good writers assume that they and their readers are equally intelligent, but unequally familiar with the topic at hand. Clarity and simplicity are the hallmark of good writing. Good writers are not anxious, apologetic, or trite. For example, they make claims in the first person and avoid the use of clichés.

Syntax is important because it converts a nest of jumbled ideas into a coherent string of words. Psychological research shows that people more easily comprehend meaning when a topic is introduced before the comments about the topic are made and when related ideas are next to one another; this is also syntactically desirable. Extra words, varied terms for the same concept, and the use of multiple negative words encumber readers with a greater cognitive load and more demands on working memory; brief sentences are preferable.

Pinker concludes with two lists. One is a catalog of grammatical rules and word-meanings that purists might embrace. He argues that the items on the list are not necessarily violations of grammatical conventions. For example, there is a place for “ain’t” in English; beginning a sentence with a conjunction is usually just fine; dangling modifiers with clear subjects are permissible; ending a sentence with a preposition often leads to better comprehension. Those who are sticklers for language will find this list interesting and challenging; those who are tired of having their grammar corrected may find this list vindicating; all English-language users can benefit from being exposed to the controversies on this list. He concludes with a list of common grammatical or word-meaning mistakes made by writers that are true errors to be avoided. Pinker uses humor and pithy comics, has a flexible attitude about writing rules, and explains the underlying cognitive motivation for these rules. This makes his writing style guide an approachable, useful, entertaining, and clear tool to helping any competent writer become great.

 

Pinker, S. (2014). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. New York, New York: Penguin.

“I will become what I think” (p. 14). Texas A&M professor W.R. Klemm explains in a comprehensible and personable voice how neuroscientific evidence supports the axiom above. Drawing on his experience as a neuroscientist and his training in veterinary medicine, Klemm argues in his 2014 book, Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate, that through our own thoughts we shape what we become. He argues that consciously and unconsciously we construct our sense of self and we do indeed have freewill. This book will be of interest not only to neuroscientists engaged in the debate about free will but also anyone interested in the science of self-improvement, personal responsibility, and the development of a sense of self.

Klemm describes what neuroscience at-large knows about how the brain works and the implications of this for consciousness. He discusses the importance for brain functioning of, for example, the topographical map, synaptic connections and different types of brain cells. Critically, he describes the brain’s circuit impulse patterns (CIPs), which can be thought of as a set of instructions about how every neuron in a given brain circuit should fire. CIPs in the neocortex play a critical role in determining conscious thoughts and binding information together. Klemm asserts that the conscious mind not only arises from, but also is equivalent to, CIP functioning.

Consciousness is a mental state in which the brain is aware of what it knows and feels and is able to fill the gaps of the sensory information it perceives. Wakefulness and working memory are necessary for consciousness. Consciousness is the basis for our formation of sense of self. He explains that there is a two-way interaction between the conscious and unconscious mind. Consciousness and sense of self develop in the last couple of months of a pregnancy and continue developing, certainly into young adulthood, and in some ways throughout life, according to Klemm. He presents evidence that some animals have a rudimentary sense of self and consciousness.

Many scientists argue that consciousness does not have a purpose and that free will is an illusion. Klemm details the arguments these scientist use to support that position, but ultimately he disagrees. He believes that consciousness enhances sensations, feelings, thoughts, and social interactions and may have evolved because it helped us outcompete other species. He uses the analogy of an avatar—our CIPs construct a being that acts on behalf of the brain and body. We come to understand that avatar as our sense of ourselves as a subject, as our conscious “I”. Klemm details the brain structures and wave signals associated with consciousness. He discusses the religious, cultural, and political corollaries of consciousness (e.g. investment in language and the arts) and the implications of a belief in freewill (e.g. the appropriateness of a criminal justice system).

Klemm hesitantly wades into the world of “spooky science.” For example, he suggests that quantum mechanics in general and wave functions in particular may one day help us understand consciousness more fully. He also states that our mental life or “life force” is more than the sum of our brain chemistry. For example, science has yet to explain why many people who come back from the precipice of death describe an out-of-body experience in which they see themselves hovering over their body or feel a warm, loving embrace.

Above all, Klemm urges us to remember that we can teach our brains to unlearn maladaptive habits, learn more efficient ways of thinking and embody a better attitude and emotional state. We can change our CIPs by altering what we sense, think and do. We have free will to change our lives and ourselves.

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology: The New Science of how the Brain and Mind Relate. Prometheus Books.