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Monthly Archives: April 2020

“Seductive Details”: When Do Cool Stories and Videos Interfere with Learning?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April-25-2020

“Seductive Details”: When Do Cool Stories and Videos Interfere with Learning?

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As an English teacher, I really do enjoy (almost) everything I teach. I love discussing Macbeth, and coaching strong writing, and parsing English grammar. (No, really!)

My students? Not so much with the enjoying.

They’re a good-natured lot, and so — for the most part — amiably play along with my enthusiasm. But, at times I feel I should enliven a topic with a story or a picture or a video.

If our Macbeth conversation slips into neutral, I might talk about an actor’s a funny mistake during a recent production of The Crucible.

If they just can’t focus on the difference between a predicate nominative and a predicate adjective, I might start using my Godfather voice and ask them to show respect for the family. (They LOVE it when I do that…)

But here’s the question: do those funny/gross/intriguing side treks ultimately benefit or harm learning?

Seductive Details

In research world, we call these additions “seductive details.”

For instance, my lesson plan might focus on the geological forces that cause volcanoes to erupt. Past experience tells me that the lesson itself can be a bit of a slog, so I start it off with the story of Krakatoa’s eruption — which killed more than 35,000 people.

Maybe I break out some pictures of Vesuvius — an eruption that buried and preserved an entire Roman city.

In these cases, my stories enliven the general topic: “volcanoes are super deadly!” But they don’t add to the specific learning goal: geological forces that cause eruptions.

Such stories are “seductive,” but not — shall we say — “substantive” in their contribution to the lesson.

This topic gets lots of scholarly interest, and has led to many publications. Quite recently, Dr. NarayanKripa Sundararajan (Kripa Sundar) and Dr. Olusola Adesope published a meta-analysis that crunched the data of 68 different experiments.

What did they learn?

Many Questions, Helpful Answers

Given so many studies to examine, these researchers had lots of ways to parse the data:

Does it matter if the “seductive detail” is a photo or a video or an audio recording?

Does it matter how researchers measure ultimate learning?

Perhaps it matters if the “seductive details” is at the beginning, middle, or end of the lesson?

Does it matter if the students had some prior knowledge of the materiel?

With so many variables (and lots more), Sundararajan and Adesope have LOTS of conclusions to report. Rather than list them all, I’ll highlight a few that struck me as most important.

First: seductive details matter. They do, in fact, interfere with learning. Depending on which variable they studied, the researchers found different effect sizes. But, quite consistently, additional “seductive” information ended up lowering final measurements of learning.

For video and audio. If the details were at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. For novices and experienced students. Etc…

Second: the length of the lesson matters. Specifically, seductive details have a considerable effect in short lessons (less than 5 minutes), but no statistically significant effect on longer ones (more than 10 minutes).

Practically speaking, I think this means that typical classroom lessons (which very rarely last less than 5 minutes) won’t suffer terribly from the inclusion of seductive details.

But — and this is an important exception — our current climate of online teaching might well prompt us to create brief lessons. In such lessons, seductive details will be much more distracting.

Third: the meta-analysis suggests that suggestive details create bigger problems for novices than for experts — or even for students who have some baseline knowledge of the topic. So, as Dr. Sundararajan wrote to me, “perhaps it’s not a good idea to use [seductive details] when introducing new content but perhaps not too bad in a review.”

What Should Teachers Do Now?

To start off, in the researchers’ words: “educators should minimize the use of seductive details in their instruction.”

That advice holds true especially if those details might…

… distract students from the essential ideas under discussion,

… remind students of prior misconceptions that you want to override,

… take up lots of space (say — a diagram on a page),

… take place in a relatively short (online?) lesson.

Another strategy: rework those seductive details so that the DO connect DIRECTLY to the learning goal. So, rather than simply focus the Vesuvius story on the destruction it wrought, instead talk about Roman conceptions of the causes of volcanoes. Those mythical explanations aren’t literally true, but they point the way toward — and might even align with — the scientific content you want to cover.

Yet another strategy: don’t sweat too much. Seductive details don’t permanently destroy all possibility of understanding. If used the wrong way, yes, they can get in the way. But — as all teachers know — sometimes students need a lively distraction to perk them up. As long as we use those details sparingly and thoughtfully, we don’t have to panic about occasional side-tracks.

By the way: I’m not the only one who thinks this. When I emailed Dr. Sundararajan with questions about the meta-analysis, part of her answer was:

“I think it is also important for teachers to remember that the effect is fairly small and not to feel more guilt than they need to – avoid seductive details when possible.

If your kids need a laugh, bring [seductive details] in and be aware that you might want to revisit that content with other learning strategies to help reinforce the learning (e.g. retrieval practice, or note-taking).

Along the same lines, keep in mind that kids are kids and sometimes you just have to let them process the distraction and restart.”

In other words: seductive details matter, but other things matter too. As long as we keep this research in mind as we make our teaching decisions, we’re welcome to talk about Super Deadly Volcanoes from time to time.

By the way: Dr. Sundararajan has expressed an interest in working with teachers on questions and materials. You can reach her at her website, and find her on twitter: @kripasundar.

How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now by Stanislas Dehaene
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
April-21-2020

How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now by Stanislas Dehaene

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What is learning and how do we accomplish it? Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuropsychologist and professor at the Collège de France, addresses these questions in How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now. He defines learning as the process of forming an internal model of the outside world and describes four critical elements of learning—attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation. Human brains are more efficient learners than computers or other species because they are so skilled in reasoning about probabilities and extracting abstract principles from observations. Our ability to learn, especially from one another, allows us to adapt to unpredictable circumstances and is responsible for our success as a species. This book will be of interest to individuals wishing to better understand learning, how humans do it well, and implications of brain development and functioning for learning.

Dehaene contends that babies are not born as blank slates, which is important since learning requires possessing a model of the world. Further, they efficiently refine their naïve theories with experience. He reviews evidence showing that babies are born with evolutionarily programmed knowledge about, for example, the continuity of time and space, relative quantities, and the importance of faces. Additionally, learning (e.g., of language) starts in the womb.

Just as babies are born with theories about the world, they are born also with major brain structures are already in place. Still, brain development is experience dependent. Dehaene discusses “sensitive periods,” or periods of time when brain areas are especially plastic. Areas of the brain involved in supporting our senses lose plasticity first, while areas involved in our most complex cognitive functions remain plastic the longest. He argues that only extreme brain differences affect differences in cognition and that generally there is only minor variability among peoples’ brains. He shows also that there is never complete determinism from genes; experience and learning can significantly change the brain.

 

Our great ability to be learners has been key to human success. This ability, Dehaene suggests, is primarily built upon our ability to attend to our focus on what matters, our curiosity and ability to actively engage, our ability to correct our understanding in the face of mistakes, and our ability to consolidate or automate what we have learned. Attention involves selecting information on which to focus, amplifying that information, and tuning out other information. We are unlikely to learn things to which we do not attend, which is why it is so important for teachers to attend to students’ attention.

Information that is processed with greater depth will be more deeply understand and better remembered. As such, reducing passive learning, inspiring curiosity and question-asking, and creating structured opportunities to learn via discovery are important. Learning occurs when we are surprised and make mistakes. As such, mistakes should not be penalized, but rather the specific error should be quickly noted for the learner.

Testing, especially when spaced out frequently, can promote learning and retention by allowing mistakes to occur and be corrected frequently. When skills or knowledge transition from being slowly and consciously processed to quickly and automatically processed learning has occurred. That is, we must consolidate what we learn.

Sleep is key to consolidation. When sleeping we strengthen existing knowledge, and we record it in a more abstract way, which can allow for greater insight. Improving the length and quality of young people’s sleep is a powerful way to improve their learning.

Dehaene concludes by reminding his readers that people do not reach their full potential if their environment is not set-up to support them in doing so. As such, he offers several tips for supporting early learning. These include taking advantage of infants’ naïve intuitions, offering diverse, rich environments, attending to learner’s attention, promoting curiosity and effort, making learning feel fun and challenging, setting expectations and offering feedback, and sleeping. He suggests that the enterprise of education should be guided by interdisciplinary scientific research. For example, he calls for providing teachers with training in the science of learning to help them in their work. How We Learn is an expert scholar’s interesting dive into fundamental and important questions about learning.

Dehaene, S. (2020). How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now. Viking.

Beyond Retrieval Practice: The Benefits of Student-Generated Questions
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April-18-2020

Beyond Retrieval Practice: The Benefits of Student-Generated Questions

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Retrieval Practice has gotten a lot of press in recent years — especially at our conference last fall on Deeper Learning.

The short version: students don’t benefit much from simple review — say, rereading a passage. But, they benefit a lot from actively trying to recall information — say, answering questions about that passage.

Dr. Pooja Agarwal puts it this way: Students should practice not by trying to put information into their brains, but by trying to take information out.

(She and Patrice Bain have written a great book on the topic: Powerful Teaching.)

We have LOTS of research showing that retrieval practice yields great benefits. Can other strategies match it?

Here’s an idea: maybe instead of having students answer questions (retrieval practice), we should have them create questions to be answered. Just perhaps, generating questions might boost learning more than simple review. Or — let’s get crazy: maybe generating questions boosts learning as much as retrieval practice? Even more?

Generating Research

Over the years, the “generation effect” has been studied occasionally — alas, not as much as retrieval practice. Often, research in this area includes a training session where students learn how to ask good questions. That step makes sense … but it might discourage teachers from adopting this strategy. Who has the time?

Researchers in Germany had three groups of college students read slides from a lecture about infant developmental psychology.

The first group practiced the information by rereading it. Specifically, the were instructed to memorize the content of those slides.

Group two practiced by answering questions on each slide. They if they couldn’t remember the answer, they were allowed to go back and review the slide. In effect, this was “open-book retrieval practice.”

In group three,

“students were instructed to formulate one exam question in an open response format for the content of each slide [,] and also to provide an answer to that question.”

That is: they generated questions.

So, here’s the big question: when they took a surprise quiz, how did students in each group do?

Drum Roll Please…

First: Students who generated questions scored ~10% higher on that surprise quiz than those who tried to memorize information.

Second: Students who generated questions did as well as those who used retrieval practice.

Third: Questioners got these benefits even without explicit training in how to ask good questions.

Fourth: Question generators (and retrieval practicers) scored higher than mere reviewers on both factual question and transfer questions.

Fifth: Researchers got these impressive results even though the surprise quiz took place one week later. (In research like this, those quizzes often happen right away. Of  course, a week’s delay looks a lot more like genuine learning.)

We could hardly ask for better results than these. In this research paradigm, question generation worked as well as retrieval practice — which works better than almost anything else we know of to help students learn.

Explaining Amazing Results

Why would this be? Why does generating questions help students as much as answering them?

This study doesn’t answer that question directly, but it suggests a rough-n-ready answer.

Both common sense and lots o’ research tell us: students learn more when they think hard about something. (Obvi.)

If we increase the challenge of the thinking task, we prompt students to think harder and therefore to learn better.

Psychologists talk about “desirable difficulties”: a level of mental challenge that forces students to work their synapses but doesn’t overtax them.

In this case, we can reasonably hypothesize that students who must create a question on a topic have to think hard about it. To come up with a good question, they have to think at least as hard as students answering questions on that topic.

And, they have to think considerably harder than students who simply reread a passage.

Voila! Generating questions help students learn.

A Few Caveats

As always, research provides teachers with helpful guidance. But: we need to adapt it to our own circumstances.

First: this study took place with college students. We should take care that our students can — in fact — come up with good questions.

For instance, I’m a high-school English teacher. I would use this technique with Their Eyes Were Watching God or Passing or Sula. But I don’t think I’d use it with The Scarlet Letter or Hamlet. My students struggle to understand the basics with those texts; I’m not sure they’d do a good job coming up with resonant exam questions.

More precisely: I’d structure those assignments quite differently. I suspect I could be open-ended with an assignment to create Passing questions, but would offer a lot more guidance for Scarlet Letter questions.

Second: yes, this study found that retrieval practice and question generation resulted in additional learning. And, we have a reasonably hypothesis about why that might be so.

But, we have MUCH more research about retrieval practice. Before we invest too heavily in question generation, we should keep our eyes peeled for more studies.

Third: In this paradigm, trying to memorize resulted in less learning. However, we shouldn’t conclude that students should never try to memorize. At times, “overleaning” is essential for reducing working memory load — which facilitates learning.

As long as we keep these caveats in mind, we can be excited about trying out a new review technique.

And: this can work in online settings as well!

An Exciting Event In Mindfulness Research [Repost]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April-10-2020

An Exciting Event In Mindfulness Research [Repost]

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I’ve been reviewing old posts, looking for information that might be particularly helpful in today’s strange times.

This post — from September — gives us greater confidence that mindfulness helps reduce stress.

It’s particularly persuasive research because it studies both mental behavior (psychology) and neural behavior (neuroscience) at the same time.

And, we could all use a little stress reduction today…

Let’s imagine a GREAT study on the benefits of mindfulness.

As school people, we’re happy that mindfulness might be helpful at home or at work, but we really want it to be helpful to students. So, we’d love for this study to take place at school.

We’d like the study to show that mindfulness changes mental processes. For instance, we’d love to know that it helps students feel less stress.

And, we’d like the research to look at brains as well as minds. That is: we’d like to have some fMRI data showing relevant changes in brain regions.

At the same time that students report they feel less stress (that’s the mind), we might see neural modulation typical of less stress (that’s the brain).

Finally, the study’s methodology would hold up to scrutiny. It would, for instance, include a plausible control group. (I’ve written about problems with control groups, including this study about mindfulness.)

Lo and Behold

Sure enough, this study exists!

Working with 6th graders at a school outside Boston, Clemens Bauer randomly assigned half to a mindfulness program and half to a coding training program.

Both groups devoted 45 minutes, four times a week to this effort, for 8 weeks. And, by the way, students in both groups enjoyed this time equally. (So: AT LAST we’ve got a plausible and active control group.)

Bauer’s team had students fill out a stress survey before and after this 8-week stretch. (Sample question: “In the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?”)

And, he performed fMRI scans on them before and after as well.

When looking at those scans, Bauer’s team had a specific prediction. High stress responses typically includes elevated amygdala activation. Often, we can manage that stress response by using the prefrontal cortex–the part of the brain right behind your forehead.

If mindfulness helps manage stress, we would expect to see…

…greater connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, and

…concomitantly reduced activity in the amygdala.

That is, we’d be able to see that mindfulness strengthened connections between self-control systems in the prefrontal cortex. In turn, this increase in self-control would help mitigate stress responses in the amygdala.

Of course, I’m offering a very simplified version of a fantastically complex neural story. Books have been written on these connections, and it’s not blog-friendly kind of information.

Results, Please

If you’re a fan of mindfulness, you’re going to LOVE these results.

Students who practiced mindfulness reported less stress than those in the control group.

They showed higher levels of prefrontal cortex connectivity with the amygdala.

They showed lower levels of amygdala activity when they looked at angry faces.

So: both in their mental activity (reported stress level) and in the neural activity (in the amygdala, between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex), eight weeks of mindfulness led to beneficial results for these students.

Technically speaking, that’s a home run.

What’s Next

First: to repeat, this study is powerful and persuasive. We can simply revel in its conclusions for a while.

Second: as teachers, we’re glad that student stress levels are lower. The next question is: do students learn more? We can assume they do, but we should measure as well. (To be clear: I think lower stress is an important goal on its own, whether or not it leads to more learning.)

Third: as the study’s authors acknowledge, the sample size here is relatively small. I hope they get funding to repeat it on a much larger scale.

As noted in this study, there’s a disappointing history in the world of mindfulness research. Small studies–often lacking random assignment or a control group–come to promising conclusions. But, the bigger the study–and the better the methodology–the smaller the results.

So: now that we’ve gotten strong effects with a randomized study and a plausible control group, I hope to see these same results at a much larger scale.

I might go sit quietly for a while, and try to clear my mind of extraneous thoughts.

Dr. Kurt Fischer: A Tribute
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April-03-2020

Dr. Kurt Fischer: A Tribute

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Professor Kurt Fischer changed my professional life. If you’re reading this blog, odds are good he helped change yours as well.

Throughout most of the 20th century, teachers, psychologists, and neuroscientists had little to say to one another.

Even psychology and neuroscience — two fields that might seem to have many interests in common — eyed each other suspiciously for decades. Certainly teachers weren’t a welcome part of any wary conversation that might take place.

As we all know, and Dr. Fischer helped us see, these fields have so much to learn from each other.

Today’s growing consensus that these disciplines — and several others — should be in constant conversation results in large measure from his insight, effort, generosity, and wisdom. So: he’s changed our lives, and greatly benefited our students.

Since I heard of his death, I’ve been thinking how Dr. Fischer’s great skill was to keep the bigger picture in mind. He did so in at least two essential ways.

Creating Interdisciplinary Institutions

Academic disciplines exist for good reasons. And yet — despite all the good that they do — they can create barriers and restrict conversations.

To foster inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conversations, Dr. Fischer knew we needed institutional systems. In our field, he helped start all the essential ones.

He helped create the Mind, Brain, and Education strand at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. It was, I believe, the first such program in the world.

He helped found the International Mind Brain Education Society (Imbes.org), which works to “to facilitate cross-cultural collaboration in biology, education and the cognitive and developmental sciences.”

He helped found the Mind Brain Education Journal, which publishes vital interdisciplinary research.

And, of course, he helped organize the very first Learning and the Brain conference — to ensure that these conversations took place not simply in academic institutions, but with classroom teachers as well.

In starting all these institutions and starting all these conversations, Dr. Fischer created a generation of leaders — those who now champion the work we do every day.

That’s the bigger picture he could see from the beginning.

Understanding Brains in Context

Dr. Fischer saw the bigger picture in his teaching life as well.

As part of his work at Harvard’s School of Education, he taught a course on “Cognitive Development, Education, & the Brain.”

Over those weeks, he returned frequently to an especially damaging fallacy, which he called “brain in a bucket.”

That is, he wanted his students not to think about individual brains operating in some disembodied ether. Instead, he wanted us to think constantly about context:

How does the brain interact with the body?

In what ways is it shaped by development?

How do family interactions shape self? Social interactions? Cultural interactions?

How should we think about hormones, and about ethics, and about evolution, and about genetics?

In other words: neuroscience teaches us a lot about brains. But we should always think about the bigger picture within which that brain functions, and about the forces that created it in the first place.

Never focus on “a brain in a bucket,” because that brain makes no sense without the context that surrounds and shapes it.

In Conclusion

So for me, that’s Dr. Fischer’s legacy. He helped create the context that shaped so many of our brains:

Graduate programs in Mind, Brain, Education,

Learning and the Brain conferences (55 and going strong),

Professional associations and journals,

The scholars and conversations that inspire teachers and improve teaching.

The world is better because he lived, and a poorer place now that he’s gone. Happily for us, he left great wisdom and greater understanding behind.