Monthly Archives: March 2016

On some days, I just want my students to pay attention. Really, is this too much to ask?

“Attention” can be difficult indeed, and for multiple reasons. In the field of psychology, that is, “attention” includes several subcategories.

First of all: are my students awake enough to pay attention? Or, perhaps Red Bull overload has made them too awake?

In either case, I can help students pay attention by moderating their levels of alertness. (“Alertness” is one subcategory” of “attention.”)

If they are already appropriately alert, then perhaps the world around them has too many distractions: the smell of formaldehyde in the Biology classroom, or the sound of the squeaky door outside my English classroom, or the symphonic melodies of text message DINGS resounding down the corridors. If my students orient to these distractions, they can’t orient to me. (“Orienting” is another subcategory of “attention.)

In these cases, I can make attention likelier by reducing these disorienting stimuli: I’ll lemon pledge the lab, oil those hinges, and persuade teens that texts aren’t that important. (How hard can this be?)

But perhaps I need to look in the mirror. Perhaps the problem is that my own teaching isn’t quite zippy enough. All those other stimuli might be disorienting because, frankly, my own work doesn’t pull students in. What, then, can I do?

Beyond the Basics

This question is, I suppose, among the most basic a teacher can ask: how do I make my teaching interesting enough for my students to notice? In a perfect world, intrinsic motivation would keep them panting for more knowledge, but few schools in that perfect world are hiring.

Here’s one excellent source of ideas: in Teach Like a Champion¹ Doug Lemov offers dozens of practical strategies to improve a teacher’s craft. From lesson plans to behavioral expectations, Lemov has advice drawn from years of observing highly effective teachers.

Throughout TLAC, Lemov offers strategies to make classroom content the center of attention. For example, he argues (persuasively) for the advantages of cold calling—as long as the technique is used correctly—and offers multiple ways to extend the wait time between questions and answers.

These techniques, and others he outlines, go well beyond the basics in helping teachers make classroom content our students’ focus.

WAAAAY Beyond the Basics

Lemov’s answers, although interesting and helpful, don’t draw on research from neuroscience and psychology—certainly not with the emphasis that Learning and the Brain readers expect. What brain research, then, can most helpfully answer this question?

For me, one research finding stands out for its surprising usefulness. Karl Szpunar’s lab looked at the effect of quizzes on attention, and his results certainly upended my predictions.

Here’s the setup:²

Szpunar had two groups of students watch an online lecture on statistics. (As many graduate students know, it can be a real challenge to make Stats an interesting topic, so this video serves as a useful test case of our teaching problem.) For both groups, the lecture video was divided into 4 segments. One group took a brief break between those 4 segments, but the second group took a short-answer quiz on the factual information they had just learned.

While students were watching these videos, Szpunar’s team interrupted them occasionally to ask if they were paying attention, or if their minds were wandering. In other words, were they orienting to the lecture, or were they disoriented?

And, after the video was over, they gathered two more kinds of data. First, they had students take a test on the lecture, to see who had absorbed more of the material. And second, they asked students to rate the experience in a number of ways. (We’ll get back to these ratings in just a moment…)

Good, Better, Worst

When looking over the data, Szpunar’s team first wanted to know what effect the short quizzes had on mind wandering; that is, did the students who took those quizzes focus on the lecture more or less than the students who simply took a break between the video segments?

Answer: the quizzes cut the mind-wandering in half. Students who took a break between video segments said they were mind-wandering 39% of the time, whereas students who took quizzes said so 19% of the time.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that if I know I’m about to be quizzed on something, I’m much likelier to attend to it.

Did those quizzes affect how much students ultimately learned? Szpunar’s data show that quizzed students did much (MUCH) better on the final test as well. Group 1 students—who took the break between video segments—scored, on average, 59% on that test; Group 2 students—who took short quizzes—scored an 84%.

Because they were taking quizzes, they were focusing more on the lecture; because they were focusing more, they got a B on the final test, not an F.

So, the good news is that, at least in certain contexts, short quizzes make it likelier that my students will focus on the content that we’re covering (and, perhaps, less likely that they’ll focus on that text message). And the better news is, they learn more when they do so.

But the classroom implication of this research could be alarming indeed: do we really want to be adding more testing pressure to the classroom? Do we—in this age obsessed with high stakes testing—want to have still more tests?

Anxiety is Underrated

I promised we’d get back to ratings. You remember that Szpunar had students rate their experience: in particular, he had them rate their anxiety levels. And the students in the Quiz Group were less anxious…not more anxious, LESS anxious…than those in the Break Group. (Their average anxiety rating was a 2, compared to a 3.75 for those who didn’t take quizzes.)

We associate tests and stress so readily that these results seem baffling. How can it be that quizzes reduced stress? Two answers stand out.

First: the quizzes helped the students monitor their own progress. Every fifteen minutes or so, they got feedback about their own understanding. If they knew the answer to a question, then they could be confident that they were in fact learning the material. And, if they didn’t know the answer, they could look to pick up that information in later segments of the lecture. Quizzes provided feedback that boosted confidence.

Second: the quizzes themselves were low stakes and formative. The quizzes weren’t graded, or fussed over, or factored into class averages. The students simply answered a few questions, and then kept going with the lecture. The tone surrounding the quizzes shaped the students’ experience of them.

Szpunar’s research, although surprising, aligns with other studies on the effect of frequent assessment. When Frank Leeming used daily tests instead of one term-end exam in his college Psychology class, his students were skeptical.³ (You’d be skeptical too if you had to prepare for a test each class.) By the end of the term, however, he found that they learned more than students had in previous years, that they preferred daily tests to final exams, and that they recommended he continue the test-a-day plan in future years.

Lab to Classroom

In my experience, frequent low-stakes quizzing creates a virtuous cycle. The feedback that quizzes provide—here’s what I do know, here’s what I don’t—gives students confidence in the work that they’re doing effectively; it also helps them focus specifically on the problems they identify. Their confidence and focus, in turn, motivate them to work more effectively. And they see the results of this redoubled effort when their quiz grades improve.

In other words, frequent, low-stakes quizzes help create the intrinsic motivation we typically expect to find only in that perfect world school—the one that isn’t hiring.

Two final caveats.

First, the tone of these formative quizzes really does matter. We can tell our students why we’re using them, and even get feedback from them on their usefulness. If they feel burdensome and alarming, then they might cause more harm than good.

Second, note that both of the studies quoted here focus on college students: students who have seen enough academic success to get into college, and whose self-regulatory skills have allowed them to do so. As is always true with this kind of research, teachers must translate the ideas into our own contexts: the school where we teach, the students and the material we teach, and our own personalities.

But for now: put away the Red Bull, shelve the Lemon Pledge, and start thinking of fun quizzes to elevate your students’ attention.

References & Further Reading

1. Lemov, Doug. (2015). Teach Like a Champion 2.0. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Book]
2. Szpunar, K.K., Khan, N.Y., and Schacter, D.L. (2013) “Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(16) 6313-6317. [Paper]
3. Leeming, Frank C. “The exam-a-day procedure improves performance in psychology classes.” Teaching of Psychology3 (2002): 210-212. [Paper]

Last year, a paper in Science led to a public spotlight on the scientific process. It pointed to a problem that’s being called the replication crisis (or reproducibility crisis) that has led many to wonder: Is science broken?

Here’s what happened: The Open Science Collaboration asked labs across the nation to repeat others’ experiments as closely as possible and share their results. The original experiments were taken from papers published in three widely respected, peer-reviewed journals in psychology and cognitive science. Of the 100 experiments that were chosen for replication, 97 had statistically significant results when initially published.

But only 36 of the replications of those studies reported significant results.¹

Most research studies use tests to gauge how likely the results researchers found are due to chance. “Significant results” means that the results passed those tests according to a generally agreed upon rule of thumb, which is often what’s called a “p-value” of at least .05. Getting a p-value of .05 roughly translates to “there is a 5% chance you would get these results even though they are not accurate.” Using p-values to determine “significant results” is the standard (though there is a lot of longstanding controversy about this practice²) so this was one of the primary measures in the big replication study.

So, statistically speaking, only replicating “significance” in 36 of the original results doesn’t mean that all of the original studies were wrong. If all of the studies were replicated a third time, we would probably see a different array of studies with significant results. This is one reason why replication over time is such an important theoretical part of the scientific process, though replication studies, especially costly ones, are rarely a priority because of the pressures on modern researchers.

This mega-experiment does suggest that many (perhaps even a majority!) of psychology’s published results might be due to error or chance. And this problem isn’t limited to psychology—the biomedical research community is dealing with serious replication challenges, too.*³ 

Of course, even replication studies can be prone to messiness and error, as many researchers, such as Dr. Dan Gilbert of Harvard University, have contested these results in recent weeks. You can follow the ongoing debate here.

The replication crisis brings to light the reality that the answers to many important questions are buried in messy evidence. Educators will influence how the next generation of scientists and citizens make decisions on challenging issues (sometimes called “wicked problems”) at the intersection of science and society, including climate change and global health crises. In classrooms everywhere, students from Pre-K to college are learning how to understand, integrate, and evaluate evidence.

Here are three ideas on how we can do this better, in all kinds of classrooms.

1. Tackle conflicting evidence

In one classroom, students listened to the popular podcast Serial, which reports on the true story of Adnan Syed, convicted of murdering his girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999.⁴ The students dissected its transcripts, mapping out a maze of inconsistent claims and evidence to examine their beliefs about Syed’s guilt or innocence.

Can students learn from this approach? Many teachers worry that introducing conflicting information only confuses students. However, research in higher education suggests that tasks with “cognitive conflict” (involving different viewpoints and no single answer) can lead to better mastery of the basic concepts⁵, though it’s unclear whether this is true for younger children.

Tackling conflicting information might support deeper learning of the content material, while giving students a chance to develop critical thinking skills in ways that closely mirror the challenges of ambiguity in the professional workplace.

2. Consider student’s developing ideas about causation, probability, and statistics

What were Juliet’s motives? What started the War of 1812? And how do kidneys work, anyway? Causes and effects are discussed across the sciences and humanities, but little attention is paid to the structures of causal reasoning.

One distinction worth being aware of is the difference between deterministic and probabilistic causation. In deterministic causation, effects follow causes. In probabilistic causation, effects follow causes, but not always. For example, smoking causes lung cancer, but not always. Plants grow from seedlings, but not always.  

Many of the challenges that we face as a society involve complex probabilistic causation, including our changing climate, the collapse of ecosystems, and the global transmission of disease.⁶ And children struggle to learn and apply models of probabilistic causation (among other types of causal models) in science classrooms.⁶ Some research recommends probing students’ developing ideas about causality via explicit discussions, introducing and paying careful attention to causal language.⁶

Others are calling for a greater general emphasis on statistics and probability in mathematics education.⁷ These subjects present a structured approach to evaluating claims and grappling with uncertainty, while opening the door to interdisciplinary learning as students use mathematical approaches to answer empirical questions.

3. Do experiments

A report on a 2011 survey conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress states:

Although doing grade 8 hands-on science activities is nearly universal, carrying out the steps of an investigative process is not. Twenty-four percent of the grade 8 students never discuss their results, thirty-five percent never discuss measurement for their science project and thirty-nine percent of the grade 8 students don’t design an experiment.⁸

This suggests that the majority of hands-on activities occurring in science classrooms do not involve conducting experiments. Limited time, resources, and the pressure to cover content can make it hard to prioritize experimentation.

However, experiments and inquiry are integral to science education⁹ by supporting content knowledge and fostering critical thinking.¹⁰ Other hands-on learning activities (building models, observing demonstrations, etc.) don’t give students experience with the process and tools to answer questions for themselves. The opportunity to conduct experiments pushes students to grapple with challenges of measurement and when to consider new evidence as “proof.”

Conceptual breakthroughs that might push students to understand more complex ideas can come from close examination of issues related to experimental error. When initially confronted with trying to understand why they didn’t see anticipated results, why results look different from one day to the next, or why results look different between groups, students might be tempted to excuse their results or patch their current understandings. But looking more closely at error in discussion and written reports might add to students’ mental models by falsifying certain ideas, or giving room for students to build from counter-evidence.⁶

Finally, embracing failure has received tremendous attention in education for building character. Viewing “error” in experimentation as a learning experience may have similar potential.

Conclusion

Understanding the replication crisis is a complex, authentic challenge for science and society. It’s the kind of issue that students might examine in a classroom striving to deeply engage students in understanding the nature of science. It takes depth and nuance to reconcile the notion that science is a limited, biased, human endeavor with the idea that it’s also a powerful tool for understanding the world.

If you’re interested in learning more about skills that are critical for evaluating evidence, follow the Twenty-first Century Information Literacy Tools initiative via The People’s Science. Run by the Learning and the Brain Blog Editor, Stephanie Fine Sasse, this non-profit organization is developing a framework for tackling these issues. You can read more about their model and other models in the recently released book, “Four-Dimensional Education,” whose authors include one of our own contributors, Maya Bialik.

The ideas presented here—including student opportunities for experimentation, tackling conflicting evidence, considering causality, and a different outlook on error—can be used across grade and subject levels to help students understand the nature of science and its place in society more deeply.

For a few starting points on how to carry these out in the classroom, check out the teacher resources below. If you know of other resources, feel free to share in the comments!

References & Further Reading

1. Collabo, O. S. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science, 349(6251). [Paper]
2. Cohen, J. (1990). Things I Have Learned (So Far). American Psychologist, 45(12), 1304–1312. [Paper]
3. Prinz, F., Schlange, T., & Asadullah, K. (2011). Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets? Nature Reviews. Drug Discovery, 10(9), 712. [Paper]
4. 4. Flanagan, L. (2015, March 11). What Teens are Learning From ‘Serial’ and Other Podcasts. KQED: Mindshift. [Link]
5. Springer, C. W., & Borthick, a. F. (2007). Improving Performance in Accounting: Evidence for Insisting on Cognitive Conflict Tasks. Issues in Accounting Education, 22(1), 1–19. [Paper]
6. Perkins, D. N., & Grotzer, T. A. (2000). Models and Moves: Focusing on Dimensions of Causal Complexity to Achieve Deeper Scientific Understanding. [Paper]
7. Fadel, C. (2014). Mathematics for the 21st Century: What should students learn? Boston, MA. [Paper]
8. Ginsburg, A., & Friedman, A. (2013). Monitoring What Matters About Context and Instruction in Science Education : A NAEP Data Analysis Report. [Paper]
9. National Science Teachers Association. (2007, February). The Integral Role of Laboratory Investigations in Science Instruction. [Link]
10. Committee on the Development of an Addendum to the National Science Education Standards on Scientific Inquiry; Board on Science Education; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council. (2000). Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning. (S. Olson & S. Loucks-Horsley, Eds.). The National Academies Press. [Link]

• Causal Cognition in a Complex World, Teacher Resources. [Link]
• Critical Media Literacy, Teacher Resources [Link]
• Ongoing Reproducibility Debate, Harvard University [Link]

A Google image search for “stress” makes our culture’s attitude about the concept immediately clear. There are pictures of people pulling their hair, eyes wide and mouth gaping, a word cloud filled with words like “worry” and “depression,” and even a woman intensely biting her laptop.

In short, we hate stress.

Although it is often an unpleasant feeling and is linked to a host of health problems from headaches to Alzheimer’s Disease, stress is not all bad. In some forms, it can motivate and push us to excel. We can reap these benefits by keeping stress under control, but another, less obvious way to harness stress productively is to reframe the way we think about it.

Although it might be easy to imagine children’s lives as carefree, students of all ages face stress. Whether from standardized testing¹, non-ideal home situations like poverty², or even being around others who are stressed³, children’s minds and bodies can become acquainted with stress and anxiety from a young age. When we become stressed, our brain becomes doused in norepinephrine, and our body receives a rush of adrenaline⁴. This sympathetic nervous system response is often referred to as our body’s fight-or-flight mode because the arousal it triggers will allow us to react quickly (by doing things like fighting or fleeing) in the face of immediate danger. The amygdala plays a crucial role in stimulating this often automatic physiological response to a threatening situation.⁵

This can be a beneficial response, for example, if we need to save a child from drowning or hammer our a paper right before a deadline. In these cases, stress is often referred to as eustress, because it positively affects our performance in the moment. It can also become a deleterious response if it becomes a lasting state, making our body feel like we may need to save a drowning child at any second, when in reality we are simply sitting in traffic on the highway. This is the type of stress we often think of – referred to as distress for its negative impacts on our mental wellbeing.

Stress in the Classroom

Prolonged stress compromises classroom performance. It produces dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain necessary for high-level cognitive tasks like reasoning, decision-making, and memory. As such, long-term stress hurts a person’s working memory capacity⁶, a trait that is linked to different features of intelligence⁷. Although this working memory impairment is likely to be evident in the classroom, chronic childhood stress resulting from poverty or other adverse situations predicts working memory deficits as a young adult⁸.

Children and teenagers whose minds are preoccupied by stressful circumstances — whether in the of excessive pressure to perform, discord at home, or bullies at school — are less able to focus on their academic work. Since much of what we learn in school is cumulative, building on previous concepts that teachers assume that students have learned, we can see how the effects of stress on educational performance can quickly snowball into a situation that adds even more stress for the student.

Fortunately, there are many ways of coping with stress. One antidote that continues to gain traction is to cultivate mindfulness, an enhanced awareness of one’s surroundings and stressors. In particular, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven effective for reducing both physical and psychological consequences of stress⁹. As previously discussed on Learning & the Brain, children can and should be taught to incorporate mindfulness and meditation into their lives.

Changing the Way We See Stress

Another effective method for dealing with stress that has received less popular attention than MBSR is reframing our mindset. Through a process known as reappraisal, we can alter the way we feel about a situation by altering the way we think about it.¹⁰ Focusing on the positive features of stress — for example, its ability to encourage the development of initiative, mental toughness, and a sense of mastery — can influence not only our subjective experiences of stress, but our body’s physical responses to it as well¹¹. If the idea of stress stresses us out, it can become an endless feedback loop. If we can come to terms with the time and place for stress in our lives, it may actually be easier to keep under control.

In one study by Alia Crum and colleagues, employees of a large company were exposed to three different 3-minute long videos over the course of a week. The three videos were different, but for each employee, all three either presented stress as an enhancing or debilitating force. By the end of the week, a questionnaire revealed that people changed their mindsets about stress. Those who saw the debilitating videos began to think of stress as more negative, while those who saw the enhancing videos began to think of it more positively. Further, people in the enhancing group reported better psychological symptoms and work performance after the week, which did not happen for the debilitating group. These findings suggest that changing the way people think of stress can have important downstream consequences for their mental well-being and performance.

A follow up study investigated the effect of stress mindsets in undergraduates. At the beginning of the semester, students completed a personality assessment, and later in the semester, they provided saliva samples. During a subsequent class, they were asked to rate themselves on dimensions including confidence, emotional intelligence, persuasion, and presence/authenticity, and to prepare a speech in ten minutes that they could deliver to the class. They were told that 5 students would be randomly selected to deliver their speeches, and their classmates would rate them on their charisma. This setup created a realistic stressful situation for the students, and saliva samples were again collected to compare to the baseline samples taken earlier. The students also learned that those who were chosen would have the opportunity to receive feedback from professionals, and those who weren’t chosen could also receive feedback on their speeches at a later time. All students rated their desire for feedback. Students whose personality assessments revealed that they had a “stress is enhancing” mindset were more likely to desire feedback than those who thought of stress as debilitating. The students who believed stress could be enhancing also showed more adaptive cortisol profiles in their saliva.

Implications for the Classroom

Believing that stress could be positive encouraged students to put themselves in a position to grow by expressing more willingness to receive feedback. Beyond influencing behavior, this mindset also affected students’ physiological responses to a stressful situation, allowing them to be less reactive than students who held the “stress is debilitating” mindset. Together with the previous study, these results demonstrate first that our mindsets about stress are malleable, and can be shaped simply by watching a few short movies. They also show us that students who took on a more positive mindset about stress reacted less to acute stress and put themselves in a situation to receive valuable feedback and grow from their experience. These are exactly the traits most educators would like to see more of in their students.

What steps can we take to help more students achieve these positive results?

• Emphasize that stress can enhance performance. Help students learn to cope with distress while promoting the beneficial effects of eustress.
• Provide students with opportunities to thrive under stress. Creating situations that are moderately stressful, such as delivering a speech to the class, will show students that they can thrive under stress, thus solidifying that stress can truly enhance performance.
• Practice what you preach. Students often learn from example, so they will internalize their educators’ stress mindsets, whether those mindsets are made explicit to them or not. As such, it is important for teachers to also adapt a “stress is enhancing” mindset.
• Make metacognition a part of your classroom culture – or encouraging your students to think about their own thinking. Be honest with your students about what stress is, what it’s for, and when it becomes dangerous. Sometimes having an understanding of how we work can provide us with the tools to better control and reappraise our experiences and emotions. Provide resources for students who feel distress, as well as strategies for them to practice reframing.

Although all people will undoubtedly face some negative stress throughout their lives, being mindful to the way we react to all stress, physically and mentally, will help us cultivate more positive mindsets. Mindsets are often self-fulfilling prophecies, and the key to thriving under stress may simply lie in believing that we can do so.

References & Further Reading

1. Fleege, P.O., Charlesworth, R., Burts, D.C. & Hart, C.H. (1992). Stress begins in kindergarten: A look at behavior during standardized testing. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 7(1), 20-26. [Paper]
2. Curry, A. (2015). Why living in a poor neighborhood can make you fat. Nautilus, 31. [Web Article]
3. Scully, S.M. (2015). You can “catch” stress through a TV screen. Nautilus, 31. [Web Article]
4. Tennant, V. (2015). The powerful impact of stress. New Horizons for Learning. [Web Article]
5. LeDoux, J. (2015). The amygdala is not the brain’s fear center. The Huffington Post, [Web Article]
6. Mizoguchi, K., Yuzurihara, M., Ishige, A., Sasaki, H., Chui, D & Tabira, T. (2000). Chronic stress induces impairment of spatial working memory because of prefrontal dopaminergic dysfunction. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(4), 1568-1574. [Paper]
7. Oberauer, K., Sϋß, H., Wilhelm, O. & Wittmann, W. (2010). Which working memory functions predict intelligence? Intelligence, 36(6), 641-652. [Paper]
8. Evans, G.W. & Schamberg, M.A. (2009). Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory. PNAS, 106(16), 6545-6549. [Paper]
9. Chiesa, A. & Serretti, A. Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(5), 593-600. [Paper]
10. Ochsner, K. N., Silvers, J. A. & Buhle, J. T. (2012). Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: A synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251, E1-E24. [Paper]
11. Crum, A.J, Salovey, P. & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733. [Paper]

It is difficult to argue that bad air isn’t bad for your health. Unlike many of the polarizing environment and health issues, like global warming, it is commonly agreed upon that ambient air pollution is a public health threat[i] [ii]. In the U.S. alone, more than 100 million people are exposed to varying amounts of particulate matter (PM), lead, sulfur and/or nitrogen dioxide in the air in quantities that exceed the recognized health standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)[iii] [iv].

 

The danger lies in PM of 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter (or approximately 1/30 of the width of a human hair), which is small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and other organs of the body. Although trends observed by the EPA have shown that hazardous emissions polluting our air have actually decreased over the course of the past decade, it remains that, as of 2013, over two million deaths a year can be directly linked to air pollution[v].

 

Historically, much of the attention on the risks of air pollution tends to center around cancer and other diseases affecting the respiratory and cardiovascular system[vi]. This makes sense, especially considering the important and obvious links between air quality and lung and heart health. However, recent empirical investigations of the brain have observed concerning evidence about the potential impact of pollution on neurological functioning and wellbeing. In other words, bad air quality has been found to have an unprecedented and insidious impact on our brain.

 

Air Pollution & The Brain

Research suggests air pollution can affect everything from neurodevelopment in-utero to accelerating cognitive decline in older people[vii]. Given the delicate nature of the prenatal environment and its importance for fetal health, it may come as no surprise that toxins found in the air are harmful to healthy brain growth both during pregnancy and throughout the lifespan. Indeed, given the detrimental brain effects on children living in heavily polluted cities, the past few years have witnessed a surging interest in the correlations between ambient air pollution and compromised brain health[viii] 7. For example, one research group using animal models found mice exposed to average metropolitan area levels of pollution performed worse on learning and memory tasks compared to a control group in a container with filtered air. Additionally, in a companion study by the same group, the mice in the polluted air showed more depressive-like and anxiety-like symptoms and behaviors than their filtered-air counterparts[ix].

 

Although these findings are concerning, results from animal studies can’t always be generalized to humans. However, we do know that children’s physiological development is uniquely vulnerable to the exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants compared to adults. Simply from a lung function perspective, children breathe in higher levels of polluted air relative to their weight and also tend to spend greater amounts of time outside, leaving them even more susceptible to the disease and dysfunction caused by pollutants[x].

 

A number of recent investigations conducted between 2012 and 2015 have looked into analyzing brain imaging data belonging to children living in urban areas with the objective of pinpointing some of the dangerous side-effects of living in heavily polluted areas on the brain, particularly in light of poor outcomes on psychometric tests on behalf of children living in these areas[xi]. For instance, upon examining brain structure (i.e. the physical architecture that comprises the brain), results indicate abnormalities in the brain’s white matter, which are often highly correlated with a number of psychological and cognitive diseases and deficits[xii].

 

Unsurprisingly, the structural findings were corroborated by “functional” anomalies (meaning parts of the brain are behaving differently than in a typical population). Examples include compromised senses, including smell and hearing, as well as a number of cognitive deficits, consistent with the poor psychometric assessments noted previously. In fact, many research groups have consistently found that school-aged children located in highly polluted areas perform less well on cognitive and neurological tests, all while controlling for confounding factors such as low-SES, gender, age and mother’s IQ12.

 

Further cases of such studies include a 2010 investigation showing that children with exposure to high levels of nitrogen dioxide scored between 6 and 9 points less on measures of working memory[xiii]. This continues to hold true in 2015, when a research group from the University of Texas found lower grade point averages among El Paso fourth-and-fifth graders exposed to high levels of ambient air pollution[xiv]. Perhaps more alarmingly, evidence shows these effects can start early, whereby children with high levels of prenatal exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons (a group of chemicals that get released upon burning substances such as coal, oil, gasoline and trash) were recorded to have lower than expected IQ scores at the age of 5 compared to children that had not had such exposures in-utero[xv] [xvi].

 

What does this mean for students?

So the bottom line is: how does all this affect how children grow, develop and learn? Despite the body of evidence confirming the negative effects of ambient air pollution on children’s health (as well as the routine air quality monitoring by the EPA), few investigations have been carried out to examine the consequences of the associations between air quality and academic performance. To complicate matters, many groups disproportionately places low-income and ethnic minority communities in areas with high levels of air pollution – segments of the population already associated with lower performance on standardized tests[xvii] 10 Reasons for this may be due to factors such as parental educational disadvantages and school location in urban centers near busy roads, which in turn are populated by greater proportions of at-risk student populations16. However, these links are not found ubiquitously, and many theorists have shown a robust enough relationship between high exposure to air pollutants and compromised academic performance to withstand confounding variables including school size, school location and student demographics10.

 

So what could be the true outcomes of these findings? Based on the sheer number of studies purporting the negative impacts of air pollution on overall health and the brain, it would not be a stretch to imagine the ramifications of even mild exposure to air toxins beyond GPA or IQ – for instance some have anecdotally discussed how newly occurring or exacerbated respiratory problems increase fatigue and attention problems in school, with greater bouts of absenteeism as a result.[xviii]

 

The danger herein lies in the insidious nature of these ill-effects, because it is not likely that common issues such as asthma or attention-deficit disorders be linked with poor air quality; and even if air quality was the primary culprit behind these problems, it would be hard to effectively disentangle it from other possible etiologies. Needless to say, the links between academic performance, air pollution exposure as well as other related health problems remain poorly understood and require further research in order to produce realistic solutions to combat the problem.

 

What can we do about it?

Given the complex nature of pediatric air pollution research, extensive interdisciplinary collaboration between fields like neuroscience, radiology and epidemiology (to name a few) is necessary in order to create greater awareness and build efforts on behalf of schools and educational facilities to improve indoor environment quality. This, coupled with a more comprehensive understanding of the damage of air pollution on the brain will hopefully facilitate more effective interventions to compensate for the ill-effects of bad air quality on future generations8.

 

From a survey of the current literature, a number of research groups have initiated studies on the effects of poor air quality; however relatively few have posed any concrete solutions to the problem. As of October 2015, select federal agencies (such as the EPA) along with public health officials have acknowledged some of the research discussed in this article and have responded by organizing online events and workshops to work with schools and educational institutes to better monitor indoor air quality in schools:

 

1. Creating Healthy Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Schools: http://www.epa.gov/iaq-schools

 

2. Webinars hosted by the EPA on improving air quality in schools: http://www.epa.gov/schools/schools-webinars
3. A list of organizations working to combat air pollution:

http://www.inspirationgreen.com/organizations-air.html#AirPollutionOrganizations

REFERENCES

 

 

1. Katsouyanni, K. (2003). Ambient Air Pollution and Health, British Medical Bulletin, 68, 143-156.
2. World Health Organization (WHO). (2014). Fact sheet N°313 Ambient (outdoor) air quality and health.
3. Lelieveld J., Evans J.S., Fnais M., Giannadaki D., Pozzer A. (2015). The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale. Nature, 525(7569):367-371.
4. World Health Organization. (2003). Health aspects of air pollution with particulate matter, ozone and nitrogen dioxide, report, 98 pp., Bonn, Germany.
5. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2015, September). FAQ. Retrieved From the Environmental Protection Agency website: http://www3.epa.gov/pmdesignations/faq.htm
6. Silva, R. A. et al. (2013). Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 8, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034005
7. Chen, J.C., Wang, X., Wellenius, G.A., Serre, M.L., Driscoll, I., Casanova, R., McArdle, J.J., Manson, J.E., Chui, H.C., Espeland, M.A. (2015). Ambient air pollution and neurotoxicity on brain structure: evidence from women’s health initiative memory study. Annals of Neurology. 78, 466–476.
8. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Torres-Jardón, R., Kulesza, R. J., Park, S.-B., & D’Angiulli, A. (2014). Air pollution and detrimental effects on children’s brain. The need for a multidisciplinary approach to the issue complexity and challenges. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 613. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00613
9. Fonken, L.K., Xu, X., Weil, Z.M., Chen G., Sun Q., Rajagopalan S., Nelson, R.J. (2011). Air pollution impairs cognition, provokes depressive-like behaviors and alters hippocampal cytokine expression and morphology. Molecular Psychiatry, doi: 0.1038/mp.2011.76
10. Mohai P., Kweon B.S., Lee S., Ard K. (2011). Air pollution around schools is linked to poorer student health and academic performance. Health Affairs, 30 (5):852–62.
11. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Solt, A.C., Henriquez-Roldan, C., Torres-Jardón, R., Nuse, B., Herritt, L., Villareal-Calderón, R., Osnaya, N., Stone, I., Garcia, R., Brooks, D.M., et al. (2008). Long-term air pollution exposure is associated with neuroinflammation, an altered innate immune response, disruption of the blood–brain barrier, ultrafine particulate deposition, and accumulation of amyloid beta-42 and alpha-synuclein in children and young adults. Toxicologic Pathology. 36, 289–310.
12. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Cross, J.V., Franco-Lira, M., Aragon-flores, M., Kavanaugh, M., Torres-Jardón, , et al. (2013). Brain immune interactions and air pollution: macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF), prion cellular protein (PrPC ), interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin 1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), and serum interleukin-2 (IL-2) in cerebrospinal fluid and MIF in serum differentiate urban children exposed to severe vs. low air pollution. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 183.
13. Freire C., Ramos R., Puertas R., Lopez-Espinosa M.J., Julvez J., Aguilera I., Cruz F., Fernandez M.F., Sunyer J., Olea N. (2010). Association of traffic-related air pollution with cognitive development in children. Journal of Epidemiological & Community Health, 64:223–228.
14. Clark-Reyna, S., Grineski, S.E., Collins, T.W. (2015). Residential exposure to air toxics is linked to lower grade point averages among school children in El Paso, Texas, USA. Population & Environment, 1-22. doi: 10.1007/s11111-015-0241-8.
15. Edwards, S.C., Jedrychowski, W., Butscher, M., Camann, D., Kieltyka, A., Mroz, E., et al. (2010). Prenatal exposure to airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and children’s intelligence at 5 years of age in a prospective cohort study in Poland. Environmental Health Perspectives, 118, 1326–1331.

1. Suglia F., Gryparis A., Wright R.O., Schwartz J.,Wright R.J. (2008). Association of black carbon with cognition among children in a prospective birth cohort study. American Journal of Epidemiology. 167(3):280–6.
2. Pastor M., Morello-Frosch R., Sadd J. (2006). Breathless: pollution, schools, and environmental justice in California. Policy Studies Journal, 34(3):337–62.
3. Miller, S., Vela, M. (2013). The Effects of Air Pollution on Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Chile (Working Paper No. IDB-WP-468). Retrieved from Inter-American Development Bank website: http://www.iadb.org/en/research-and-data/publication-details,3169.html?pub_id=IDB-WP-468

 

[xviii]

It is difficult to argue that bad air isn’t bad for your health. Unlike many of the polarizing environment and health issues, like global warming, it is commonly agreed upon that ambient air pollution is a public health threat^1,2. In the U.S. alone, more than 100 million people are exposed to varying amounts of particulate matter (PM), lead, sulfur and/or nitrogen dioxide in the air in quantities that exceed the recognized health standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)^3,4.

The danger lies in PM of 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter (or approximately 1/30 of the width of a human hair), which is small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and other organs of the body. Although trends observed by the EPA have shown that hazardous emissions polluting our air have actually decreased over the course of the past decade, it remains that, as of 2013, over two million deaths a year can be directly linked to air pollution⁵.

Historically, much of the attention on the risks of air pollution tends to center around cancer and other diseases affecting the respiratory and cardiovascular system⁶. This makes sense, especially considering the important and obvious links between air quality and lung and heart health. However, recent empirical investigations of the brain have observed concerning evidence about the potential impact of pollution on neurological functioning and wellbeing. In other words, bad air quality has been found to have an unprecedented and insidious impact on our brain.

Air Pollution & The Brain

Research suggests air pollution can affect everything from neurodevelopment in-utero to accelerating cognitive decline in older people⁷. Given the delicate nature of the prenatal environment and its importance for fetal health, it may come as no surprise that toxins found in the air are harmful to healthy brain growth both during pregnancy and throughout the lifespan. Indeed, given the detrimental brain effects on children living in heavily polluted cities, the past few years have witnessed a surging interest in the correlations between ambient air pollution and compromised brain health^8,7. For example, one research group using animal models found mice exposed to average metropolitan area levels of pollution performed worse on learning and memory tasks compared to a control group in a container with filtered air. Additionally, in a companion study by the same group, the mice in the polluted air showed more depressive-like and anxiety-like symptoms and behaviors than their filtered-air counterparts⁹.

Although these findings are concerning, results from animal studies can’t always be generalized to humans. However, we do know that children’s physiological development is uniquely vulnerable to the exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants compared to adults. Simply from a lung function perspective, children breathe in higher levels of polluted air relative to their weight and also tend to spend greater amounts of time outside, leaving them even more susceptible to the disease and dysfunction caused by pollutants¹⁰.

A number of recent investigations conducted between 2012 and 2015 have looked into analyzing brain imaging data belonging to children living in urban areas with the objective of pinpointing some of the dangerous side-effects of living in heavily polluted areas on the brain, particularly in light of poor outcomes on psychometric tests on behalf of children living in these areas¹¹. For instance, upon examining brain structure (i.e. the physical architecture that comprises the brain), results indicate abnormalities in the brain’s white matter, which are often highly correlated with a number of psychological and cognitive diseases and deficits¹².

Unsurprisingly, the structural findings were corroborated by “functional” anomalies (meaning parts of the brain are behaving differently than in a typical population). Examples include compromised senses, including smell and hearing, as well as a number of cognitive deficits, consistent with the poor psychometric assessments noted previously. In fact, many research groups have consistently found that school-aged children located in highly polluted areas perform less well on cognitive and neurological tests, all while controlling for confounding factors such as low-SES, gender, age and mother’s IQ¹².

Further cases of such studies include a 2010 investigation showing that children with exposure to high levels of nitrogen dioxide scored between 6 and 9 points less on measures of working memory¹³. This continues to hold true in 2015, when a research group from the University of Texas found lower grade point averages among El Paso fourth-and-fifth graders exposed to high levels of ambient air pollution¹⁴. Perhaps more alarmingly, evidence shows these effects can start early, whereby children with high levels of prenatal exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons (a group of chemicals that get released upon burning substances such as coal, oil, gasoline and trash) were recorded to have lower than expected IQ scores at the age of 5 compared to children that had not had such exposures in-utero^15,16.

What does this mean for students?

So the bottom line is: how does all this affect how children grow, develop and learn? Despite the body of evidence confirming the negative effects of ambient air pollution on children’s health (as well as the routine air quality monitoring by the EPA), few investigations have been carried out to examine the consequences of the associations between air quality and academic performance. To complicate matters, many groups disproportionately place low-income and ethnic minority communities in areas with high levels of air pollution – segments of the population already associated with lower performance on standardized tests^17,10. Reasons for this may be due to factors such as parental educational disadvantages and school location in urban centers near busy roads, which in turn are populated by greater proportions of at-risk student populations16. However, these links are not found ubiquitously, and many theorists have shown a robust enough relationship between high exposure to air pollutants and compromised academic performance to withstand confounding variables including school size, school location and student demographics¹⁰.

So what could be the true outcomes of these findings? Based on the sheer number of studies purporting the negative impacts of air pollution on overall health and the brain, it would not be a stretch to imagine the ramifications of even mild exposure to air toxins beyond GPA or IQ – for instance, some have anecdotally discussed how newly occurring or exacerbated respiratory problems increase fatigue and attention problems in school, with greater bouts of absenteeism as a result ¹⁸.

The danger herein lies in the insidious nature of these ill-effects, because it is not likely that common issues such as asthma or attention-deficit disorders be linked with poor air quality; and even if air quality was the primary culprit behind these problems, it would be hard to effectively disentangle it from other possible etiologies. Needless to say, the links between academic performance, air pollution exposure as well as other related health problems remain poorly understood and require further research in order to produce realistic solutions to combat the problem. 

What can we do about it?

From a survey of the current literature, a number of research groups have initiated studies on the effects of poor air quality; however relatively few have posed any concrete solutions to the problem. As of October 2015, select federal agencies (such as the EPA) along with public health officials have acknowledged the research discussed in this article and have responded by organizing online events and workshops to work with schools and educational institutes to better monitor indoor air quality in schools:

 

1. Creating Healthy Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Schools: http://www.epa.gov/iaq-schools
2. Webinars hosted by the EPA on improving air quality in schools: http://www.epa.gov/schools/schools-webinars
3. A list of organizations working to manage with air pollution: http://www.inspirationgreen.com/organizations-air.html#AirPollutionOrganizations

Clearly, given the complex nature of pediatric air pollution research, extensive interdisciplinary collaboration between fields like neuroscience, radiology and epidemiology (to name a few) is necessary in order to create greater awareness and build efforts on behalf of schools and educational facilities to improve indoor environment quality. This, coupled with a more comprehensive understanding of the damage of air pollution on the brain will hopefully facilitate more effective interventions to compensate for the ill-effects of bad air quality on future generations⁸.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Katsouyanni, K. (2003). Ambient Air Pollution and Health, British Medical Bulletin, 68, 143-156.
2. World Health Organization (WHO). (2014). Fact sheet N°313 Ambient (outdoor) air quality and health.
3. Lelieveld J., Evans J.S., Fnais M., Giannadaki D., Pozzer A. (2015). The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale. Nature, 525(7569):367-371.
4. World Health Organization. (2003). Health aspects of air pollution with particulate matter, ozone and nitrogen dioxide, report, 98 pp., Bonn, Germany.
5. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2015, September). FAQ. Retrieved From the Environmental Protection Agency website: http://www3.epa.gov/pmdesignations/faq.htm
6. Silva, R. A. et al. (2013). Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 8, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034005
7. Chen, J.C., Wang, X., Wellenius, G.A., Serre, M.L., Driscoll, I., Casanova, R., McArdle, J.J., Manson, J.E., Chui, H.C., Espeland, M.A. (2015). Ambient air pollution and neurotoxicity on brain structure: evidence from women’s health initiative memory study. Annals of Neurology. 78, 466–476.
8. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Torres-Jardón, R., Kulesza, R. J., Park, S.-B., & D’Angiulli, A. (2014). Air pollution and detrimental effects on children’s brain. The need for a multidisciplinary approach to the issue complexity and challenges. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 613. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00613
9. Fonken, L.K., Xu, X., Weil, Z.M., Chen G., Sun Q., Rajagopalan S., Nelson, R.J. (2011). Air pollution impairs cognition, provokes depressive-like behaviors and alters hippocampal cytokine expression and morphology. Molecular Psychiatry, doi: 0.1038/mp.2011.76
10. Mohai P., Kweon B.S., Lee S., Ard K. (2011). Air pollution around schools is linked to poorer student health and academic performance. Health Affairs, 30 (5):852–62.
11. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Solt, A.C., Henriquez-Roldan, C., Torres-Jardón, R., Nuse, B., Herritt, L., Villareal-Calderón, R., Osnaya, N., Stone, I., Garcia, R., Brooks, D.M., et al. (2008). Long-term air pollution exposure is associated with neuroinflammation, an altered innate immune response, disruption of the blood–brain barrier, ultrafine particulate deposition, and accumulation of amyloid beta-42 and alpha-synuclein in children and young adults. Toxicologic Pathology. 36, 289–310.
12. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Cross, J.V., Franco-Lira, M., Aragon-flores, M., Kavanaugh, M., Torres-Jardón, R., et al. (2013). Brain immune interactions and air pollution: macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF), prion cellular protein (PrPC ), interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin 1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), and serum interleukin-2 (IL-2) in cerebrospinal fluid and MIF in serum differentiate urban children exposed to severe vs. low air pollution. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 183.
13. Freire C., Ramos R., Puertas R., Lopez-Espinosa M.J., Julvez J., Aguilera I., Cruz F., Fernandez M.F., Sunyer J., Olea N. (2010). Association of traffic-related air pollution with cognitive development in children. Journal of Epidemiological & Community Health, 64:223–228.
14. Clark-Reyna, S., Grineski, S.E., Collins, T.W. (2015). Residential exposure to air toxics is linked to lower grade point averages among school children in El Paso, Texas, USA. Population & Environment, 1-22. doi: 10.1007/s11111-015-0241-8.
15. Edwards, S.C., Jedrychowski, W., Butscher, M., Camann, D., Kieltyka, A., Mroz, E., et al. (2010). Prenatal exposure to airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and children’s intelligence at 5 years of age in a prospective cohort study in Poland. Environmental Health Perspectives, 118, 1326–1331.
16. Suglia F., Gryparis A., Wright R.O., Schwartz J.,Wright R.J. (2008). Association of black carbon with cognition among children in a prospective birth cohort study. American Journal of Epidemiology. 167(3):280–6.
17. Pastor M., Morello-Frosch R., Sadd J. (2006). Breathless: pollution, schools, and environmental justice in California. Policy Studies Journal, 34(3):337–62.
18. Miller, S., Vela, M. (2013). The Effects of Air Pollution on Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Chile

Confusion is a powerful feeling.

If it doesn’t turn to frustration, it can give rise to curiosity, motivation, and engagement. So why do we tend to think of confusion as a negative feeling, as the opposite of understanding, our goal?

In order to address the roots of the issue, we’ll have to re-examine two of the assumptions in our teaching and curriculum designing.

Assumption 1: The purpose of education is the outcome; students need to learn to solve these problems (write these essays, respond to these questions) correctly.

Assumption 2: The best way to teach students a complex concept is to break it down into manageable chunks.

Let’s tackle the first one first. While we know that successful parroting of knowledge is not the ultimate goal of education (especially in an age where anyone can google the answer to anything), this ideology is a hard one to shake. After all, we cannot peer into the heads of our students and assess them on their process; all we can do is test the degree to which they’ve understood the difficult concepts.

This leads to a very behaviorist way of looking at learning, which assumes that all we can know is the students’ behavior so we should not try to speculate about cognitive processes we cannot see. This does no one any good, as the students may not be learning any transferrable concepts or skills except following directions.

Of course, this works differently for different subjects, but the core idea remains the same. In math it may be the difference between mechanically doing calculations and exploring relationships and representations; in social studies it may be the difference between memorizing dates and understanding the social trends that contributed to historical events; in science it may be the difference between remembering and being able to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree from memory, and understanding the fluid evolutionary process that it represents.

The second assumption comes from a reductionist perspective, which assumes that any whole can be explained by breaking it down into its constituent parts. In other words, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, and no more. As we are learning from Complex Systems science, it is often not the particular pieces but their relationships and interactions that give a substance its qualities. For example, all of matter is made of the same elements (hydrogen, oxygen, and so on) but it is their different configurations that lead to different materials. Learning all of the steps that make up solving a complex math problem may be like learning the elements that make up metal without ever having the experience of actually touching metal. It does not mean that one understands the relationships between the concepts that they are manipulating.

When students are taught a subject like math in pieces, without seeing how the pieces fit together, it can be discouraging, and make math seem boring and frustrating. If instead, math is taught as an exploration of relationships, with guidance toward noticing patterns, the process can be creative, and can show students the deep beauty of mathematics. For a great example, see Alan Kay’s TED talk.

Further, students do not begin as empty vessels. Rather, they have already built models for understanding the world. Complex concepts are often complex because they are unintuitive, and simply presenting the pieces to students is often not enough for them to truly integrate the ideas with their existing conceptual frameworks.

Taken together, these assumptions lead to the conclusion that confusion is the result of unsuccessful teaching, and not, as research suggests, a valuable catalyst for deeper learning and better retention.

“We are as curriculum designers and teachers and educators, over-engineering the curriculum, and we’re surgically removing the thinking, so that our kids are simply following instructions, painting by the numbers, and getting the grade. We need to get thinking back at every desk.”

Dr. Derek Cabrera in his Ted Talk

* * *

Many teachers are already successfully making this happen in their classrooms, but it is becoming increasingly difficult as they receive pressure from administration, parents, lawmakers, and corporate reformers about what and how they should teach. Reconsidering educational goals and how deep learning could feel may help contribute to a conversation that can align the views of these various stakeholders and create the space teachers need to teach effectively.

In his TED talk, Tim Harford talks about frustrating disruptions leading to improvement in all kinds of tasks from solving a murder mystery to writing a rock and roll album. He talks about how we shy away from creating difficulties for ourselves and in doing so we miss opportunities for greater creativity and learning.

So how can we create an environment of thinking deliberately in our classrooms?

1. Repackaging problems to make them active.

Textbook math problems often suffer very severely from the reductionist and behaviorist mindsets described above. This is evident, for example, when math problems take a real-world scenario, convert it to mathematical terms, formulate the question, break the solution down into a step-by-step process, and label the steps a., b., c., and d.

 

In his Ted Talk, Dan Meyer discusses this process for typical math problems.

“What we’re doing is we are taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we’re paving a smooth straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way.”

This illustration is from math class, but of course a similar process it taking place across the curriculum. To “get thinking back at every desk,” as Cabrera describes it, we need to un-pave that path.

Start with the complexity – it will confuse the students – but that confusion can be a good thing.

Guide them as they traverse the difficult terrain between the question and the answer, but do not give in to the temptation of trying to make it as easy and painless as possible, as this will ultimately help no one.

This does not mean that each educator has to reinvent the entire curriculum. It can be as simple as taking off all of the training wheels provided by the design of the question, and collectively rebuilding them together. For example, in his talk Dan Meyer describes taking the problem pictured above and offering students only the visual image of the skiers and the question: which section is the steepest? After discussion, students will generate the idea of labeling the skiers in order to more easily refer to them and overlaying a grid in order to more precisely think about steepness. “The math serves the conversation; the conversation does not serve the math.”

This idea of some sort of struggle as essential to learning has long been known in the research, under the umbrellas and in the manifestations of several different concepts.

• Active Learning: In one meta-analysis of 158 studies, students who learned STEM material by listening to a lecture performed 6% worse on the exam and were 1.5 times more likely to fail than otherwise identical students who learned the same material through active learning.¹ Being given the answers (or even the questions!) is significantly less effective for deep learning than figuring that material out for oneself.

• Desirable Difficulty: It is easier to study by packing study sessions together and blocking practicing on the same topic together. However research² has shown that creating a desirable difficulty in one’s study habits makes the studying more effective. Spacing rather than massing study sessions; interleaving rather than blocking practice on separate topics; varying how to-be-learned material is presented all have better outcomes on memory.

• Disfluency: Better memory for tasks that take more effort can happen due to superficial features such as font. In one study, high school students given material in a difficult font performed better than those given the same material in an easy to read font. This was true across many classes and subjects.³ Even if the extra effort is superficial, it can still make the material more memorable.

• Russel’s Core Affect Framework: In a study⁴ that measured change in students’ affect while they learned using a computer tutor, researchers were able to calculate which affective states most often led to which other states.

 

In the graphic above, the x axis represents valence: on the right is positive and on the left is negative. The y axis represents arousal: on the top is high and on the bottom is low. Boredom, at the bottom, is negative and disengaging, and it is also a dead end as far as affect goes.

Confusion, located in the slightly negative and slightly aroused area can turn into Frustration (if the task is too hard) or it can turn into Flow (if the task is the optimal challenge). This is notably different from what we might consider to be a similar affect — surprise, or a positive affect — delight, which do not predictably lead to any other affective states. In other words, it takes a challenge to enter a state of flow in order to overcome it. The researchers found that Confusion and Flow were positively correlated to learning whereas Boredom was negatively correlated.

2. Cognitive Disequilibrium.

As mentioned above, students do not come into a classroom as a blank slate; they have already, consciously and subconsciously, constructed their own ways of understanding the world.

Complex ideas are often complex because they are counterintuitive. Presenting students with information that does not fit into their model will cause them to expend mental effort in order to accommodate or assimilate this information into their schema. That mental effort helps them to learn the material deeply. This idea was embraced by two of the founding fathers of Developmental Psychology: Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.⁵

Jean Piaget created a model of learning that places disequilibrium at its center. Students avoid disequilibrium because it is an uncomfortable state, and also seek it out because of curiosity; it indicates to them that their model is incomplete. Disequilibrium then leads to accommodation of their mental model to make sense of their new experience, thus updating their mental model.⁴

Lev Vygotsky coined the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development. This is the set of tasks that a learner is not able to complete on their own, but can complete with some guidance. That extra bit of struggle and challenge makes this the most optimal zone for learning. It is important to note that this zone will be different for different students, and a problem that is in the ZPD for one student may be too easy for another and too difficult for a third.

3. Lead with the most Relevant or Beautiful

One reason that students are disengaged is that it is often difficult to see the direct relevance of the material in the textbook with their daily lives.

For this reason there has been a large movement toward project based learning, often with a community service lens. For example, many schools have implemented projects that teach students about surface area and volume by challenging them to design a more environmentally friendly package for something they use, and send the design to the company. This places the seemingly abstract notion of equations into an actionable and meaningful context.

There is another angle for engaging students, which is less often discussed: beauty.

By the time material reaches the page of a textbook, it has been isolated from the puzzle that spurred it and from the context which makes it meaningful. As a result, students must memorize the names of various parts of a cell and learn to mechanically manipulate equations, without a grain of interest or joy. It’s no wonder that people do not look favorably on this dry material.

And yet, what often drives researchers in a given discipline is the inherent beauty and curiosity they feel about the subject matter. How can we put this beauty front and center? For a fast-paced example of math’s undeniable beauty take a look at any of the videos of Vi Hart (some of my favorites are the ones on plants, hexaflexagons, or the mobius strip).

In Alan Kay’s ted talk (mentioned above) he tells the story of a teacher who asked her 6 year old students to choose a shape, and make a larger version of that shape out of those shapes (for example a rhombus made of rhombuses). She then had them fill out a chart about how many pieces they needed to add to the shape before to make it the next shape, and how many pieces total the shape took up.

She then led the students to come together and share their results. They realized that even though they had chosen different shapes, the higher level patterns were the same; the students were baffled.

This result brought with it so many more mathematical questions to explore than answers to end up at. Without knowing the term “differential equations,” these 6 year olds experienced the beauty of math in a way that many college students (who do know this term) never get to experience.

To engage students and help them to learn material more deeply, we can up-end the way we normally teach all subjects, to highlight their beauty, their relevance, and to place their challenges front and center.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415. [Paper]
2. Bjork, R. A., & Linn, M. C. (2006). The science of learning and the learning of science. APS Observer, 19(3).
3. Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Vaughan, E. B. (2011). Fortune favors the (): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118(1), 111-115. [Paper]
4. D’Mello, S. (2012). Monitoring affective trajectories during complex learning. In Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 2325-2328). Springer US.[Paper]
5. Blake B., Pope, T. (2008) Developmental Psychology: Incorporating Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s Theories in Classrooms. Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Education 1(1) 59 – 67. [Paper]

• Meyer, D. (2010). Math class needs a makeover. [Ted Talk]
• Harford, T. (2015). How frustration can make us more creative. [Ted Talk]
• Cabrera, D. (2011). How thinking works [Tedx Talk]