Here’s a pre-Thanksgiving question: How much good news can you pack into one psychology study?
Lots of psychology research focuses on human difficulties:
Why is it hard to learn and develop?
Why do people struggle to connect?
What happens when mental health decays?
The field of positive psychology — as the name suggests — turns its focus to the upsides of mental experience: human flourishing, connection, wellness, and development.
For instance: how about gratitude?
What does research tell us about gratitude? After all: we could all use a little positive focus these days…
Benefits of Connection?
A research team in Hong Kong wanted to know: how does the feeling of connection with other people help us in schools?
Working with high school students, they measured lots of variables:
students’ connection with parents, teachers, and peers
their perceived academic confidence, with things like:
study skills, time management, & creative thinking
Because they measured these variables at different times, they could identify an interesting causal pattern.
Students who felt more connected to teachers, parents, and peers (that’s good!) also felt higher levels of gratitude (that’s also good!).
And: that gratitude boost resulted in higher levels of things like study skills, time management, creative thinking, and investment in learning (those are all good too!).
This good thing (connection) led to that good thing (gratitude), which increased these other good things (school work habits and values). That’s a whole lotta positive in one psychology study.
Research Implications
Honestly, I don’t know we teachers will do much differently as a result of this study. I suspect we were in favor of connection before we saw this research, and we’re still in favor of connection now.
We were pro-gratitude; we still are.
At this time of year — after a 2020 that hasn’t given us much to celebrate — it might lift our spirits to see such results. Many of us got into teaching because, well, we value the connections we have with our students.
Yes: Shakespeare is great. Yes: an appreciation of Mali ‘s Imperial past inspires awe. Yes: black holes are amazingly cool and fun to study. But it’s the people we study with that really make the job joyful and worthwhile.
In other words: schools should devote lots of time to our students’ knowledge.
And: the time we take to connect with our students helps them master that knowledge.
In this year that has created so much stress — at a time we remember all that makes us thankful — it’s good to know: gratitude itself is something we can be grateful for.
A surprising research finding to start your week: parachutes don’t reduce injury or death.
How do we know?
Researchers asked participants to jump from planes (or helicopters), and then measured their injuries once they got to the ground. (To be thorough, they checked a week later as well.)
Those who wore parachutes and those who did not suffered — on average — the same level of injury.
Being thorough researchers, Robert Yeh and his team report all sorts of variables: the participants’ average acrophobia, their family history of using parachutes, and so forth.
They also kept track of other variables. The average height from which participants jumped: 0.6 meters. (That’s a smidge under 2 feet.) The average velocity of the plane (or helicopter): 0.0 kilometers/hour.
Yes: participants jumped from stationary planes. On the ground. Parked.
Researchers include a helpful photo to illustrate their study:
Representative study participant jumping from aircraft with an empty backpack. This individual did not incur death or major injury upon impact with the ground
Why Teachers Care
As far as I know, teachers don’t jump out of planes more than other professions. (If you’re jumping from a plane that is more than 0.6 meters off the ground, please do wear a parachute.)
We do, however, rely on research more than many.
Yeh’s study highlights an essential point: before we accept researchers’ advice, we need to know exactly what they did in their research.
Too often, we just look at headlines and apply what we learn. We should — lest we jump without parachutes — keep reading.
Does EXERCISE helps students learn?
It probably depends on when they do the exercise. (If the exercise happens during the lesson, it might disrupt learning, not enhance it.)
Does METACOGNITION help students learn?
It probably depends on exactly which metacognitive activity they undertook.
Do PARACHUTES protect us when we jump from planes?
It probably depends on how high the plane is and how fast it’s going when we jump.
In brief: yes, we should listen respectfully to researchers’ classroom guidance. AND, we should ask precise questions about that research before we use it in our classrooms.
Usually I blog about specific research findings that inform education.
Today — to mix things up — I thought it would be helpful to talk about an under-discussed theory pertinent to education.
This theory helps us at least two ways:
First: it gives useful insights into student motivation. (Teachers want to know everything we can know about motivation.)
Second: it provides useful background for a second up-n-coming theory — as I’ll describe below.
Education and Evolution
Let’s zoom the camera WAY BACK and think about individual human development from an evolutionary perspective.
Certain human interests and abilities can promote our evolutionary fitness.
Tens of thousands of years ago, humans who — say — understood other people and worked with them effectively probably had a survival advantage.
So did humans who took time to make sense of the natural world around them.
Oh, and the physical world as well.
Given those probabilities, humans who learned about people, the natural world, and the physical world would — on average — thrive more than those who did not.
If that’s true, then we probably evolved to learn those things relatively easily. (Obviously, this is a great oversimplification of evolution’s complexities.)
For instance: we rarely teach children to recognize faces — our species evolved to be good at that. We don’t teach them to walk or talk; they do so naturally. (We encourage and celebrate, but we don’t need to teach.)
We don’t have to encourage people to explore the natural or physical world. Throwing rocks, climbing trees, jumping in puddles, chasing small animals: we evolved to be intrinsically interested in those things.
Primary and Secondary
Evolutionary Psychologist David Geary describes these interests as biologically primary. We evolved to be interested in and learn about what he calls “folk psychology” (people), “folk biology” (the natural world), and “folk physics” (the physical world).
Geary contrasts these several topics with others that we learn because human culture developed them: geometry, grammar, the scientific method, reading. He calls such topics biologically secondary because need for them does not spring from our evolutionary heritage.
We are MUCH less likely to be interested in biologically secondary topics than biologically primary ones. We didn’t evolve to learn them. Our survival — understood on an evolutionary scale — does not depend on them.
Said the other way around: if I don’t explicitly teach my child to walk, she’s highly likely to do so anyway. If I don’t explicitly teach my child calculus, she’s highly unlikely to figure it out on her own. (Newton and Leibnitz did…but that’s about it.)
If you’re keen to understand its nuances, Geary’s 100 page introduction to his theory is here.
Implications: Motivation
If Geary’s correct, his theory helps answer a persistent question in education:
Why don’t students love learning X as much as they loved learning to climb trees/play games/mimic siblings/build stick forts/etc.?
This question usually implies that schools are doing something wrong.
“If only we didn’t get in the way of their natural curiosity,” the question implies, “children would love X as much as those other things.”
Geary’s answer is: playing games is biologically primary, doing X is biologically secondary.
We evolved to be motivated to play games. Our genes, in effect, “want” us to do that.
We did not evolve to learn calculus. Our culture, in effect, “wants” us to do that. But cultural motivations can’t match the power of genetic ones.
In effect, Geary’s argument allows teachers to stop beating ourselves up so much. We shouldn’t feel like terrible people because our students don’t revel in the topics we teach.
Schools focus on biologically secondary topics. Those will always be less intrinsically motivating (on average) than biologically primary ones.
Implications: Cognitive Load
A second theory — cognitive load theory (CLT) — has been getting increasing attention in recent months and years.
CLT helps explain the role of working memory in human cognition. (Frequent readers know: I think working memory is the essential topic for teachers to understand.)
In recent years, CLT’s founders have connected their theory to Geary’s work on biologically primary/secondary learning.
That connection takes too much time to explain here. But, if you’re interested in cognitive load, be aware that Geary’s work might be hovering in the background.
Watch this space.
Reactions
Some scholars just love the analytical power provided by the distinction between biologically primary and secondary learning.
Paul Kirschner (twitter handle: @P_A_Kirschner), for instance, speaks of Geary’s theory with genuine admiration. (In one interview I read, he wished he’d thought of it himself.)
Others: not so much.
Christian Bokhove (twitter handle: @cbokhove), for instance, worries that the theory hasn’t been tested and can’t be tested. (Geary cites research that plausibly aligns with his argument. But, like many evolutionary theories, it’s hard to test directly.)
I myself am drawn to this framework — in part because evolutionary arguments make lots of sense to me. I do however worry about the lack of more evidence.
And: I’m puzzled that so little work has been done with the theory since it was first published in 2007. If it makes so much sense to me (a non-specialist), why haven’t other specialists picked up the topic and run with it?
For the time being, I think teachers should at least know about this theory.
You might start considering your students’ interests and motivations in this light — perhaps Geary’s distinction will offer a helpful perspective.
And, I don’t doubt that — as cognitive load theory gets more attention — the distinction between biologically primary and secondary learning will be more and more a part of teacherly conversations.
We’ve heard so much about retrieval practice in the last two years that it seems like we’ve ALWAYS known about its merits.
But no: this research pool hasn’t been widely known among teachers until recently.
We can thank Agarwal and Bain’s wonderful Powerful Teachingfor giving it a broad public audience. (If you had been attending Learning and the Brain conferences, of course, you would have heard about it a few years before that.)
Of course, we should stop every now and then to ask ourselves: how do we know this works?
In this case, we’ve got several answers.
In addition to Agarwal and Bain’s book, both Make it Stick (by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel) and How We Learn (by Benedict Carey) offer helpful surveys of the research.
You could also check out current research. Ayanna Kim Thomas recently published a helpful study about frequent quizzing in college classrooms. (It helps!)
All these ways of knowing help. Other ways of knowing would be equally helpful.
For instance: I might want to know if retrieval practice helps in actual classrooms, not just in some psychology lab somewhere.
Yes, yes: Agarwal and Bain’s research mostly happened in classrooms. But if you’ve met them you know: it might work because they’re such engaging teachers! What about teachers like me — who don’t quite live up to their energy and verve?
Today’s News
A recent meta-analysis looked at the effect on retrieval practice in actual classrooms with actual students. (How many students? Almost 8000 of them…)
Turns out: retrieval practice helps when its studied in psychology labs.
And, it helps when vivacious teachers (like Agarwal and Bain) use it.
And, it helps when everyday teachers (like me) use it.
It really just helps. As in: it helps students learn.
A few interesting specifics from this analysis:
First: retrieval practice quizzes helped students learn more when they were counted for a final grade than when they weren’t. (Although: they did help when not counted toward the grade.)
Second: they helped more when students got feedback right away than when feedback was delayed. (This finding contradicts the research I wrote about last week.)
Third: short answer quizzes helped learning more than multiple choice (but: multiple choice quizzes did produce modest benefits).
Fourth: announced quizzes helped more than unannounced quizzes.
and, by the way
Fifth: retrieval practice helped middle-school and high-school students more than college students. (Admittedly: based on only a few MS and HS studies.)
In brief: all that good news about retrieval practice has not been over sold. It really is among the most robustly researched and beneficial teaching strategies we can use.
And: it’s EASY and FREE.
A Final Note
Because psychology research can be — ahem — written for other psychology researchers (and not for teachers), these meta-analyses can be quite daunting. I don’t often encourage people to read them.
In this case, however, authors Sotola and Crede have a straightforward, uncomplicated prose style.
They don’t hold back on the technical parts — this is, after all, a highly technical kind of writing.
But the explanatory paragraphs are unusually easy to read. If you can get a copy — ask your school’s librarian, or see if it shows up on Google Scholar — you might enjoy giving it a savvy skim.
