For every enthusiastic voice championing the use of laptops in classrooms, we hear equally skeptical claims. College professors, in particular, have been increasingly vocal about banning distractions to ensure that students stay focused.
In a striking comparison, he views problems with distracted laptop users the same way he views problems with cheating.
If lots of students are cheating on a particular assignment, Lang argues, then it’s time for us to change that assignment.
So too with laptop distractions. If lots of students are browsing FB posts, their disorientation lets us know that this current teaching method just isn’t working.
Lang’s argument implies that even if we take away the laptop, our teaching method hasn’t gotten any better.
Provocatively, this argument shifts an important responsibility from students to teachers; Lang, after all, tells us that students’ attention is as much our job as theirs.
Wisely, Lang offers specific classroom approaches to ensure that students use their laptops for good, not for ill.
Russell Poldrack reviewsSex, Lies, and Brain Scans: How fMRI Reveals What Really Goes on in our Minds, by Barbara J. Sahakian and Julia Gottwald.
As Poldrack emphasizes, it’s falling-off-a-log easy to overestimate the power of fMRI: in fields such as lie-detection and neuro-prediction, we regularly see hype and misunderstanding rather than sober and substantial understanding.
My favorite line from the review: “[N]euroimaging is usually only as solid as the behavioural research that underpins it.”
The take-away for teachers: brain images from neuroscience-world are compelling, but we should be sure to have psychology research as well before we make changes in our schools and classrooms.
Nancy Kanwisher asks: is the brain like a kitchen knife, or is it like a Swiss Army knife?
That is: is it one big all-purpose instrument that we use to accomplish many different tasks? Or, is it made up of many distinct mini-tools, each one to be used in a special way under special circumstances?
And: what tool can we use to answer that question?
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Kanwisher starts hunting for a part of the brain that recognizes faces. Even more intriguing, she looks for the part of HER brain that recognizes faces.
The result: a fascinating exploration of our Swiss-Army-Knife brain, and the limits of our knowledge.
Studies of neglect and maltreatment of young children have revealed a lot about early brain development (e.g., Cicchetti, 2002; Nelson, 2000). These studies have highlighted that experiences in the first years of life can have profound implications across the lifespan.
In a seminal study, Nelson and others (2007) found that children reared in abject circumstances showed severe cognitive delays. Children that were adopted out of these environments and into more supportive homes experienced some cognitive recovery, with children faring better the earlier they were adopted.
Studies of neglect on the developing brain show the consequences of early detrimental environmental factors. Though at the same time, how might we be able to optimize early experiences?
We know that these years present a period when the brain is uniquely malleable. How can we leverage this malleability to set children up to achieve their full potential? What might the optimal circumstances look like for a developing child?
In the first years of life especially, the differences between the environments in which children grow and learn are driven by caregivers. They are the ones responsible for most all of the external factors that affect the child’s development. As I mentioned in my last post, research continues to elucidate specific examples of environmental factors that contribute to early development, and in particular, the role that caregivers play within that environment.
We all presume that parents play an important role in a child’s upbringing, and in fact, studies have revealed that even a normal variation in parenting can have a great influence on brain development (e.g., Francis & Meaney, 1999).
The whole gist of this preamble is to say that we know early experiences matter, and we know that caregivers are largely responsible for those experiences. While we have a good idea of what constitutes a healthy environment for development, we have yet to pin down an optimal set of experiences in the first years of life, if such a thing exists. Further, we just don’t know to what degree subtle changes in the environment affect later outcomes.
In the present post, I present an article published this past summer from the growing body of work on the effects of parent-child interactions. This particular study explores the correlation between a mother’s behavior and her child’s brain development.
The Current Study
Researchers in the present study (Bernier, Calkins, & Bell, 2016) wanted to investigate whether the quality of a mother’s parenting behavior influences the development of the infant’s frontal cortex.
Previous research has shown that the prefrontal cortex, the forward-most region of the frontal cortex, plays a large role in an individual’s executive function (EF): the suite of skills that enables an individual to control her own behavior and emotions. EF has been found to correlate with life-long outcomes. (Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child has created a video that succinctly explains the topic.)
In testing the correlation between parenting and frontal lobe development, researchers carried out two types of assessments: mothers’ parenting behavior, and children’s frontal resting electroencephalogram (EEG) power at 5, 10, and 24 months of age. (More on “EEG power” in a minute…)
Researchers assessed mothers’ parenting behavior in the first of three visits. They gave mothers two simple infant toys, keys and a rattle, and instructed them to interact with their infants as they normally would at home, for a total of two minutes. Researchers studied four areas of maternal behavior:
Sensitivity – the extent to which the mother’s interactions related with the infant’s behavior. Does she acknowledge the infant’s feelings? Soothe the child? Pick up on the infant’s interests?
Intrusiveness – the extent to which the mother displayed over-controlling behavior or was focused on her own agenda. Does she ignore the infant’s cues? Force toys on the infant? Demonstrate intrusive physical interactions?
Positive Affect – the extent to which the mother expressed positive emotions through her tone of voice and facial expressions.
Physical Stimulation – the extent to which the mother directly stimulated her infant’s body for the purpose of heightening the infant’s level of arousal. Does she tickle her infant? Exercise her infant’s limbs?
Now, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, two minutes is not a long period of time to assess the quality of a mother’s interactions with her child–especially when the researchers want to relate those two minutes to the child’s brain development. While these assessments were not meant to be robust, they are considered to be indicative of the interactions that the child has with the parent in general.
Next, children’s resting EEG power of the frontal lobe was assessed during each of the three visits, timed when the children were 5, 10, and 24 months of age.
Two points to clarify.
First, the researchers were most interested in parenting habits that may contribute to the development of a child’s executive function, which depends on processing in the prefrontal cortex. The current study focuses on this region of the brain because of this known association between EF and the frontal lobe.
Also, what is “resting EEG power”? EEG measures electrical activity in the cortex, or the outermost layer in the brain. EEG power essentially grows in a linear fashion across infancy, and is thus thought to be an indicator of brain development (Bell & Fox, 1992; Cuevas & Bell, 2011).
Just know that higher EEG power in infancy, even at rest, is thought to indicate further brain development. (Of course, there is a lot of variation in the growth of EEG power from person to person (e.g., Cuevas et al., 2012).)
Findings
While many of this study’s findings are very nuanced, I highlight here what I believe to be the most important takeaways.
(I’ll emphasize below that the findings are strictly correlational. They might be due to causation, but given the nature of the study, we cannot say this for certain.)
To begin with, a mother’s display of positive emotions, as seen when interacting with her infant, was essentially unrelated to frontal lobe EEG power when the children were 5 months old. This finding may be due to a number of reasons: perhaps, by 5 months of age, a mother’s expression of positive emotions has not yet had time to influence the child’s brain development. Again, merely speculation.
The other interesting finding from the study I’d like to point out is in regard to children of mothers who expressed positive emotions AND heightened their children’s emotional arousal LESS through physical contact, like through moving their limbs. These mothers did not barrage their children with physical stimulation, and instead engaged them with their voice and facial expressions.
This group of children displayed higher EEG power at both 10 months and 24 months. Further, the resting frontal EEG power of these children increased at the quickest rate between 5 to 10 months of age, and then again from 10 to 24 months of age.
One possible interpretation of the results might suggest that by expressing positive emotions and refraining from heightening the level of arousal through physical contact, a mother can increase the resting EEG power of her child’s frontal lobe, thought to be a sign of cognitive development.
Possible Reasons for the Correlations – Be a Good Skeptic
I cannot convey strongly enough the skepticism with which you should consider these, and all correlational findings. In this case, the magnitude of the correlations was small, and there are a number of things that could account for these changes.
One possible, and plausible, explanation for these results may be that a mother’s behavior and her child’s brain development both encourage one another; change in one spurs change in the other.
As mentioned above, the mother’s behavior while interacting with her child was studied for only two minutes–hardly a robust assessment. The study does not take into consideration any other environmental factor which could play a role, for example:
paternal behavior when interacting with the child,
the quality and availability of toys at the children’s home,
child care settings,
siblings & grandparents, or
the multitude of other environmental factors that play a role in shaping how a child’s brain develops.
Or maybe an assessment of genetics would explain these correlations. Or maybe not. We just don’t know.
The Big Takeaway
I hope you–like me–find this study fascinating, and while at the very least it provides possible direction for future lines of inquiry, it is possible that this simple variation in a mother’s behavior had some effect on her child’s brain development. In fact, when taken into consideration with findings from other studies, the authors believe it to be likely that these variations in motherly interactions do in fact affect a child’s brain development. In any case, this study’s results continue to shed light on what an optimal environment may be for early brain development, underscoring specific parenting characteristics that show promise.
Further, however, there is a bigger takeaway which bolsters what we already know: early experiences matter, and they matter very early on. By 10 months of age, there are measurable differences in the frontal brain function of normally-developing infants associated with variations in maternal input. There is so much that we do not know about the developing brain, however, we do know that experiences in the first years of life have a measurable impact. We should not wait until we can define precisely what an optimal infancy looks like before we start getting serious about how we prepare the next generation. References
Bell, M. A., & Fox, N. A. (1992). The relations between frontal brain electrical activity and cognitive development during infancy. Child Development, 63(5), 1142-1163.
Bernier, A., Calkins, S. D., & Bell, M. A. (2016). Longitudinal associations between the quality of mother–infant interactions and brain development across infancy. Child development.
Cicchetti, D. (2002). The impact of social experience on neurobiological systems: Illustration from a constructivist view of child maltreatment. Cognitive Development, 17, 1407–1428. doi:10.1016/S0885-2014(02)00121-1
Cuevas, K., & Bell, M. A. (2011). EEG and ECG from 5 to 10 months of age: Developmental changes in baseline activation and cognitive processing during a working memory task. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 80(2), 119-128.
Francis, D. D., & Meaney, M. J. (1999). Maternal care and the development of stress responses. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 9(1), 128-134.
Nelson, C. A. (Ed.) (2000). The effects of early adversity on neurobehavioral development. The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, 31, (Vol. 31). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.
Nelson, C. A., Zeanah, C. H., Fox, N. A., Marshall, P. J., Smyke, A. T., & Guthrie, D. (2007). Cognitive recovery in socially deprived young children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project. Science, 318 (5858), 1937-1940.
This open letter–signed by many psychologists and neuroscientists well-known to LaTB audiences–argues that current panic about “screen time” isn’t based on evidence.
The authors argue that guidelines ought to be based on clearer thinking and deeper research.
In at least this one college classroom, non-academic laptop use is inversely related to performance on the final exam.
Of course: school teachers may be able to supervise and control our students’ activities while using computers. In other words: this study is interesting to us, but shouldn’t be the final word in the debate.
Imagine you’ve got 17 sheep and four pens to put them in. Just for fun, you decide to put an odd number of sheep in each pen. How would you proceed?
As it turns out, this is quite a difficult problem. You might be inclined to tell me it’s impossible. The secret is…well, I won’t tell you the secret just yet. (Don’t look now, but there are some solutions down below.)
Your ability to solve this problem might depend on internal, mental characteristics. For example: more creative people typically find a solution more rapidly than less creative people.
At the same time, your ability – and, crucially, your students’ ability – might well depend on the external, physical actions used to solve the problem.
If you give your students a tablet on which they can write, draw, and erase, the chance that they’ll find a solution remains low. However, if you give them pipe-cleaner pens and little plastic sheep, the odds get a lot better.
In one study by Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau [1], 0% of college students who used the tablet figured out the solution, whereas 43% of those who used the pipe-cleaners and sheeplets did so. (In a slightly different research paradigm, 17% of tablet users found solutions, vs. 54% of model builders who did.)
That is: manipulating meaningful objects increased the likelihood of success.
* * * * *
In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on the topic of embodied cognition: the influence that our bodies (not just our brains) have on our thinking.
Susan Goldin-Meadow and Sian Beilock, for example, have studied the role that gestures play in cognition [2]. In one of their studies, a particular set of gestures helped some students learn math problems more effectively. (Intriguingly, students who said the wrong words but made the right gestures tended to learn more quickly than other students.)
Beilock’s recent book How the Body Knows its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel offers a substantial introduction to this fascinating topic.
Vallée-Tourangeau’s just-published research – both the “17 Sheep” problem, and another study into mental math [3] – fits nicely under the heading of embodied cognition. After all, students who use their bodies a particular way think more effectively than students who use their bodies a different way.
* * * * *
What practical teaching advice flows from these insights?
First, we should recognize that this research is in very early stages, and specific teaching strategies haven’t yet been tested. At this point, we’re making plausible extrapolations, not relying on well-tested hypotheses. (Unless, that is, you’re teaching students how to fold sheep creatively.)
Second, this research pool encourages teachers to translate problems into objects both for step-by-step routines and for problems that require new insight.
Step-by-step routines: Vallée-Tourangeau’s mental math study shows that students who could move tiles around as they added digits in their head accomplished this task much more effectively than those who were forbidden from moving their hands.
Mental addition is – for most college students – quite a routine cognitive task. And yet, by combining bodily movement with cognitive efforts, students noticeably improved their performance.
Problems that require new insight: The solution to the “17 Sheep” problem requires a sudden AHA!, a flash of insight: the sheep pens might overlap with each other.
When Vallée-Tourangeau’s students thought about the “17 Sheep” problem in two dimensions, they had very little luck. When they thought about that same problem in three dimensions, however, that extra dimension prompted new – and successful – thought patterns. That is: physical objects made new insights easier to uncover.
This study suggests that we can help our students leap to surprising new ways of thinking by inviting them to move physical objects around.
Of course, the specifics of this suggestion have yet to be researched. They will doubtless depend on the subject you’re teaching, the students you’re teaching, and your own comfort with this kind of inventive extrapolation.
Despite these uncertainties, these researchers offer us exciting new approaches for teaching both basic procedures and complex insights.
Our students may well benefit from such strategies, and from our own classroom experiments.
Vallée-Tourangeau, F., Steffensen, S. V., Vallée-Tourangeau, G., & Sirota, M. (2016). Insight with hands and things. Acta Psychologica, 170, 195-205. [Link]
Goldin-Meadow, S., & Beilock, S. L. (2010). Action’s influence on thought: The case of gesture. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(6), 664-674. [Link]
Vallée-Tourangeau, F., Sirota, M., & Vallée-Tourangeau, G. (2016). Interactivity mitigates the impact of working memory depletion on mental arithmetic performance. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 1(1), 26. [Link]
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Ever been in her brother’s shoes? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t, even in recent weeks. (Ok, it was yesterday.)
I love Lamott’s description of her brother’s immobility while facing the “hugeness” of a long put-off task; it’s a familiar experience across all ages. Avoiding daily routine and flailing under cognitive overload happens to us all: with school homework, work deadlines, exercise–even putting clothes in the hamper. In these moments of pileup, we might look back wishing we had more discipline in our daily lives.
Right now, if you look into early childhood and elementary classrooms as the new calendar year begins, you’ll likely see teachers re-creating a foundation of routine and general predictability – colorful calendars with days of the week clearly labeled, morning songs, schedules posted for the day with pockets of time for important free play.
There is more to routines than simply managing children. Research reveals the importance of patterned activity and consistent interaction in a child’s brain development.[1] It’s possible that helping young children to develop healthy habits, and to understand the value of routine, can promote their cognitive development and reduce their stress over a lifetime.
Habit in, and on, the Brain
A habit is an automatic behavior or thought that may have developed with ease or with perseverance. We might reflect and notice healthy habits in our lives, such as eating a nutritious daily breakfast ; we might feel “off” if we don’t practice our writing, dance, or other craft regularly.
We also might notice habits we’d like to change, such as waking early if usually sleeping in late, or limiting screen time if we find ourselves constantly reaching for our phone.
In research, habit learning is defined as “the acquisition of associations between stimuli and responses.”[2] In other words, behaviors that receive some kind of reward tend to be repeated, and behaviors which are not reinforced tend to be extinguished (a pattern known as operant conditioning). Habits are developed when procedures and even thoughts become more and more fixed after days, weeks, months, even years of repetition.
Experience Expectable Environments
How can we help children learn to self-manage their time and tasks–not only in childhood, but throughout adulthood? We can guide children in developing their own routines when possible.
A report by the Center of the Developing Child (CDC) at Harvard explains the importance of starting early:
“Once a particular circuitry pattern becomes established, it is difficult [but still possible] for the effects of new and different experiences to alter that architecture. This means that early experience has a unique advantage in shaping the architecture of developing brain circuits before they are fully mature and stabilized.”[3]
Research by Paro and Gloeckler (2016) emphasizes the perils that can result from inadequate structure. In their review, infants and toddlers in orphanages who lacked a predictable environment and caregiver interaction often showed deficits in speech and vocabulary, and even lower-than-average IQ scores.[1]
For this reason, they suggest that early childhood is a crucial time develop “autonomy with connectedness” by way of “experience expectable environments.” Such “experience expectable environments” may reinforce children’s anticipation and enjoyment of a sequence of events: such as arrival times, reading time, lunchtime, and playtime. Within this supportive context, children may begin making age-appropriate decisions with teacher or caregiver help about what they’d like to do with their time during free choice periods.
Freedom AND Structure
Additional research supports Paro and Gloeckler’s argument. In one study, 125 early learning settings were categorized either as “Structured-Balanced Classrooms” or “High Free-Choice Classrooms.” Children in Structured-Balanced classrooms had more chances to take part in literacy and math activities with teacher involvement, whereas children in High Free-Choice classrooms spent over ¾ of time in student-led activity and fantasy play. [4]
To ensure the validity of their research, researchers included intentionally diverse learning environments: public preschool programs, private preschools or community childcare, and licensed home-based family childcare programs.
Results showed that young children in both Structured-Balanced classrooms and Free Choice classrooms had similar results in socio-emotional learning and math reasoning scores.
However, children in Structured-Balanced classrooms involving more teacher-guided interactions also showed higher language scores. Given the importance of early vocabulary and language as predictors of lifelong learning, [5] this study is a springboard for investigating the value of Structured-Balanced classrooms, with appropriate amounts of time for free choice.
As an elementary school teacher, I often grappled with this delicate balance. How much structure is too much structure? How much free choice is too much free choice, given that I am responsible for my children’s learning and advancement to the next grade?
I found that rather than question “how much” structure or free choice, the more precise question is “when?” In the teaching world, we recognize the importance of mastery-based learning (e.g.., mastering cardinal numbers by repeated counting on a number grid) as well as unstructured exploration (e.g., freely discovering patterns on a number grid [5] click to try! I bet you’ll be surprised at what you see).
By asking ourselves when we should offer structure and free choice, we acknowledge different learning goals for our students:
(a) to unlock conceptual understanding and encourage innovation,
(b) to solidify important skill sets, or
(c) some combination of these intentions.
Free reading time can allow students to identify their own interests and make connections; teaching the skill of identifying metaphors in a story may require a more structured “I Do – We Do – You Do” lesson format.
A simple step I can take right now: ask students to recognize differing purposes in both structure and freedom during our school day, eventually supporting them in creating space for both in their personal and academic lives.
Let’s give our children the foundation to not only follow routines, but to explore and build their own. With exposure to the benefit of habit from a young age – its lower level of stress and reduction of cognitive overload – children can learn how to prioritize and enjoy meeting their own goals by living ‘bird by bird.’
1 La Paro, K., & Gloeckler, M. (2016). The Context of Child Care for Toddlers: The “Experience Expectable Environment”. Early Childhood Education Journal, 44(2), 147-153. [Paper]
2 Gasbarri, Pompili, Packard, & Tomaz. (2014). Habit learning and memory in mammals: Behavioral and neural characteristics. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 114, 198-208. [Paper]
3 National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2007). The timing and quality of early experiences combine to shape brain architecture: Working paper No. 5. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu. [Link]
4 Fuligni, Howes, Huang, Hong, & Lara-Cinisomo. (2012). Activity settings and daily routines in preschool classrooms: Diverse experiences in early learning settings for low-income children. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(2), 198-209. [Paper]
5 Number Grid. Retrieved on January 1, 2017 from Eduplace.com. [Link]
