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Yearly Archives: 2020

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An Unexpected Strategy to Manage Student Stress
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January-09-2020

An Unexpected Strategy to Manage Student Stress

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School includes lots of stress. And, sometimes that stress interferes with academic life.

It might make it harder for students to encode new information. It might make it harder for them to show what they know — on tests, for example.

So, how can we help students manage their stress?

We’ve got some research suggesting that mindfulness helps. Can we do anything else?

Rethinking Our First Instinct

Imagine that a student comes to me and says, “Whoa! I’m really stressed out about this test…”

My gut instinct might be to say something reassuring: “No worries — you totally got this. Just stay calm and I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

This instinct, however, has a built-in problem. An anxious student experiences well-known physiological symptoms: a racing heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth, etc.

My student might try to persuade himself that he’s calm. But, all that physiological evidence reminds him — second by second — that he really isn’t calm.

Researcher Alison Wood Brooks wondered: could she encourage students to adopt a positive emotional framework with those same physiological signs?

Rather than encouraging a student to “be calm,” Brooks thought she might encourage him to “get excited.” After all, the bodily signs of excitement are a lot like those of stress. And, whereas stress feels mostly negative, excitement is (obviously) positive.

Testing (and Retesting) the Hypothesis

Brooks tested out this hypothesis in an impressive variety of stressful situations.

She started by having participants sing in a karaoke contest. One group prepped by saying “I am anxious.” A second group said “I am excited.” A third didn’t say either of those things.

Sure enough, the “excited” group sang their karaoke song considerably more accurately (81%) than their “anxious” peers (53%).

She then tried the ultimate in stress-inducing situations: public speaking.

Half of the speakers prepped by declaring themselves “calm” (which was my go-to suggestion above). The other half declared themselves “excited.”

As Brooks expected, independent judges rated the “excited” speakers superior to the “calm” speakers in persuasiveness, competence, and confidence.

One more approach may be most interesting to classroom teachers: a math test.

When getting reading for a “very difficult” test including eight math questions, students were told either “try to remain calm” or “try to get excited.”

You know how this story ends.

The students instructed to “get excited” scored, on average, about 1/2 point higher than their “calm” peers.

Every way that Brooks could think to measure the question, the advice to “get excited” proved more beneficial than the traditional advice to “remain calm.”

Not Persuaded Yet?

Perhaps this video, which neatly recaps Brooks’s study, will persuade you. Check out the handy graphic at 1:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rRgElTeIqE

 

Starting the Year Just Right: Healthy Skepticism
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January-07-2020

Starting the Year Just Right: Healthy Skepticism

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I regularly tell teachers: if you want to be sure you’re right, work hard to prove yourself wrong.

If, for example, you think that dual coding might be a good idea in your classroom, look for all the best evidence you can find against this theory.

Because you’ll find (a lot) more evidence in favor of dual coding than against, you can be confident as you go forward with your new approach.

Well: I got a dose of my own medicine today…

People Prefer Natural Settings. Right?

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’m a summer camp guy. I’ve spent many of the happiest hours of my life hiking trails and canoeing lakes and building fires.

Many of the best people I know devote their summers to helping children discover their strengths and values surrounded by pines and paddles.

And: I’m not the only one. We’ve got LOTS of research showing that people prefer natural settings to urban ones. Some of that research shows this preference cross-culturally. It’s not just Rousseau-influenced Westerners who feel this way, but humans generally.

In fact, it’s easy to speculate about an evolutionary cause for this preference. Our species has been around for about 250,000 years; only a tiny fraction of that time has included substantial urban development.

If our preference for natural environments has an evolutionary base, then we would expect children to share it. They don’t need adult coaxing to enjoy the natural beauties to which their genes incline them.

Right?

Trying to Prove Ourselves Wrong

If we’re going to follow the advice above — that is, if we’re going to seek out evidence at odds with our own beliefs — we might wonder: can we find research contradicting this line of thought?

Can we find evidence that children prefer urban settings to rural ones? That they adopt adult preferences only slowly, as they age?

Yes, we can.

Researchers in Chicago worked with children and their parents, asking them to say how much they liked (and disliked) images of natural and urban settings.

In every category, children liked the urban images more than adults (and their parents) did, and disliked natural images more than adults (and their parents). (Check out figure 3 in the study.)

And: that preference changed — almost linearly — as the children aged.

That is: the four-year-olds strongly preferred the urban images, whereas that preferential difference decreased as the children got older. (Figure 4 shows this pattern.)

You might reasonably wonder: doesn’t this depend on the environment in which the children grew up and attended school?

The researchers wondered the same thing. The answer is, nope.

They used zip codes to measure the relative urbanization of the places where these children lived. And, that variable didn’t influence their preferences.

So, contrary to my confident predictions, children (in this study, with this research paradigm) don’t share adults’ preferences. They prefer urban to natural settings.

Lessons to Learn

To be clear: this study does NOT suggest that we should give up on outdoor education.

The researchers aren’t even asking that question.

Instead, they’re examining a plausible hypothesis: “our adult love of nature might be an evolutionary inheritance, and therefore we’ll find it in children too.”

These data do not support that plausible hypothesis.

But, they also don’t contradict the many (many benefits) that humans — adults and children — get from interacting with the natural world.

So, for me, the two key lessons here are:

First: when introducing young children to natural environments, don’t be surprised if they don’t love them at first. We might need to plan for their discomfort, anxiety, and uncertainty.

Second: even if we really want to believe something to be true; even if that “something” is super plausible — we really should look for contradictory evidence before we plan our teaching world around it.

By the way: here’s a handy resource to aid you in your quest for more effective skepticism.

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Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January-04-2020

Home News

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Congratulations to one-time Learning and the Brain blogger, Dr. Kate Mills.

The Association for Psychological Science has named her a “Rising Star” for her “innovative work [that] has already advanced the field, and signals great potential for [her] continued contributions.”

Dr. Mills now specializes in “the social, biological, and cognitive processes underlying the development of skills needed to navigate the social environment.”

You can explore her current work here.

How Best to Achieve our New Year’s Resolutions
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January-02-2020

How Best to Achieve our New Year’s Resolutions

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When teachers seek out guidance to improve our teaching, we can turn to psychology and neuroscience research for inspiration.

When we just want to accomplish — at last!! — our New Year’s resolutions, can we find help here as well?

Turns out: we can!

Building Virtuous Habits

Several years ago, Charles Duhigg wrote a wonderful book called The Power of Habit.

We often think of habits as mere routines that dull our lives. But, if we can create good habits, we can be much more productive — in whatever way we define productive.

Duhigg created a handy flow chart to help explain the habit-building process: cues, rewards, and routines. There’s LOTS of science behind the recommendations, and you should look at his book if you want to know more.

If you just want to jump-start your new-year’s habit right away, you can check out that flow chart here.

The Self-Control Reservoir

To achieve our new year’s resolutions, we need to use self-control. So: what’s the best way to do that?

The first step, of course, is to understand: what kind of thing is self-control?

Back in the day, psychologists thought it was a personality trait. Some people are basically patient; some impatient. Some are basically conscientious. Others, not so much.

So, psychologists thought of self-control that way.

Over the years, Roy Baumeister has persuaded many folks to rethink that approach. In his view, self-control is more of a reservoir.

That is: I start with a certain amount of self-control. When I start using it — say, by resisting a second helping of cake — I drain my reservoir a bit.

If my host keeps offering me cake, and I keep saying “no thank you,” I drain it further and further. At some point, if the reservoir gets low enough, I won’t be able to maintain self-control.

Either I’ll accept that second slice, or I’ll say something rude about the badgering. After all, it took lots of self-control to maintain my temper.

We probably all start with somewhat different reservoirs of self-control. But, whatever reservoir we’ve got, it drains as we resist temptation. And then refills when temptation goes away.

Maintaining the Reservoir

If self-control is a reservoir, then we need to use it sparingly.

As Baumeister explains in his book Willpower, our typical New Year’s Resolution strategy runs directly counter to this understanding.

If I’ve got five resolutions, and I commit to all of them at once, I’m likely to drain the reservoir too much and too fast.

Instead, I should prioritize. I’ll pick the most important of the five, and use a bit of my self-control reservoir to building this new virtuous habit. (See Duhigg above.)

Only after I’ve created that new habit should I get to work on the second resolution. And, once that has become habit, I’ll turn my attention to the third.

By 1) spreading out this self-control effort, and 2) consciously building virtuous habits, I’ve got a much better chance of meeting my goals for this year.

And: no, thank you, no more cake for me.

I should say that, as is so often the case, the research cited by Duhigg and Baumeister does include some controversies. Not everyone is persuaded. For the time being, however, I think these theories hold up well, and are the best we’ve got.

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