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Monthly Archives: June 2021

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycle of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by Judson Brewer
Rebecca Gotlieb
Rebecca Gotlieb
June-29-2021

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycle of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by Judson Brewer

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Even before the increase in mental health challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were living in an era of heightened anxiety. People experience feelings of worry, nervousness, or unease related to their futures or to life circumstances shrouded in uncertainty. In Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycle of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind, Judson Brewer, professor in Brown University’s School of Public Health and Medical School, shows that anxiety is a type of habit, and that the science of habit formation and addiction can help address anxiety. By some estimates, just shy of one-third of U.S. adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some time in their life. This book is helpful for the many people who struggle with anxiety and for individuals who help support people suffering from anxiety.

Anxiety originates from a brain and mind mechanism intended to support survival—i.e., fear is at the root of anxiety, and fear can be key to keeping us out of life-threatening danger. Anxiety is socially contagious and often exaggerated by judgement about our anxiety from ourselves or others. It cannot be avoided with willpower, reason, distraction, substitution, or environmental changes alone. Instead, Brewer suggests that we become aware of our anxiety habit loop and understand the ways in which we reward and reinforce those habits. Identifying a habit loop involves defining a trigger, subsequent behavior, and reward. He suggests practices for breaking bad habits and forming new ones and urges patience in the process of change. Mindfulness, or purposefully and non-judgmentally attending to the present moment, and curiosity, are key parts of unwinding the anxiety habit and curbing perseverative thinking. Brewer argues that mindfulness and curiosity work in part because they do not require changing the thoughts or emotions we have, but instead involve changing our relationship to those thoughts and emotions. For example, when we fall back on a bad habit, rather than chastising ourselves or saying what we “should” do, we can frame the misstep as a learning opportunity. Brewer urges actively saying “hmm” more often. He suggests that between our comfort zone and our danger zone is a growth zone in which we have the potential to help create a new version of ourselves.

Brewer recommends several specific practices for addressing anxiety and forming new mental and behavioral habits. He developed the acronym RAIN to describe one especially helpful practice which involves: 1) recognizing and relaxing into what one is feeling; 2) accepting and allowing those thoughts and feelings; 3) investigating them with curiosity and kindness; and 4) noting what happens in each moment. Paying attention to the present moment, including through breathing exercises, can be very effective. Loving Kindness meditation, which involves wishing yourself and others well, can help us accept ourselves and others as we are, and allowing the feeling of kindness to run through our bodies can provide a sense of calm. Paying close attention to the adverse behavior in a habit one is trying to break and to the good feelings in the new habit one is trying to form can help bring about habit change. Brewer also encourages having faith that you can learn a new skill or habit, practicing those new habits as needed, and focusing on making change in small, manageable chunks of time.

Brewer has examined all these practices through extensive laboratory-based research, as well as through a smart phone app he has developed to change habits. While many people are motivated to address anxiety-related issues because anxiety itself is unpleasant, Brewer offers additional incentive in the form of the wisdom that worrying does not prevent possible future troubles from occurring, but it does rob us of peace in the present moment. To learn more about addressing anxiety and engage with additional resources that Brewer has developed, visit DrJud.com.

Brewer, J. (2021). Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycle of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind.  New York: Avery, Penguin Random House LLC

How to Capture Students’ Attention for Online Readings (tl;dr)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-29-2021

How to Capture Students’ Attention for Online Readings (tl;dr)

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When do students focus while reading online?

When do they lose focus and let their minds wander?

Does the length of the passage being read influence the answer to these questions?

Several researchers, including Dr. Noah Forrin, have been exploring this topic, and have some interesting — and helpful! — answers.

Here’s the story:

The Research Setup

Happily, this question can be explored with well-established methods.

Forrin and his colleagues had 80 college students read articles from Wikipedia: topics included “the galaxy,” “Pompeii,” and “Sartre.” The passages were at a 9th grade reading level, and ran about 500 words.

Students read half of these passages in one-sentence chunks (averaging about 12 words). The other half they read in two-to-six sentence chunks (averaging 30 words).

As students read, Forrin interrupted them to ask if they were thinking about the reading, or thinking about any topic other than the Wikipedia passage.

And — here’s a key point — Forrin’s team asked if the students were mind-wandering intentionally or unintentionally. (Yes: in this field, “mind wander” is a verb.)

Why ask that odd question?

If students mind-wander intentionally, they and their teachers can (presumably) have some control over that problem.

However, if mind wandering is unintentional, then we all might struggle to fix this problem.

As the researchers say:

“intentional processes are presumably more likely to be changed by instructions and conscious strategies than are unintentional processes.”

So, what did Team Forrin find?

The Results

Sure enough, the passage length mattered.

More precisely, it mattered for unintentional mind reading (but not intentional). When reading the one-sentence passages, students unintentionally mind-wandered 19% of the time; when reading long passages, they did so 24% of the time.

Forrin’s team speculates that long passages act as a signal that students might find the passage uninteresting. In their grim summary, they write that

students’ increase in mind-wandering while reading educational texts may (1) emerge rapidly, (2) persist over time, (3) harm comprehension, and (4) be related to a decrease in interest.

Ugh.

Next Steps

So, what should we DO with this glum news?

First, as is always the case, I think teachers should use our experience to apply research wisely to our circumstances. For instance, if you don’t have your students do online readings, don’t worry about Forrin’s findings!

If, however, your students spend LOTS of time reading online, then his conclusions merit your attention.

Second, I think these findings add to an increasingly clear research conclusion: online reading doesn’t promote learning as much as old-fashioned ink-on-paper does.

To my mind Dr. Lalo Salmeron’s meta-analysis remains the most useful exploration of this question. He goes through important findings (no, the age of the reader doesn’t matter; no, we aren’t getting better at this skill) and interesting exceptions (prose fiction).

Third, Forrin himself offers a practical suggestion. If we MUST assign online readings, and we CAN break them down into smaller paragraphs, then maybe we should. His research suggests that doing so reduces the amount of unintentional mind-wandering.

Potential result: students concentrate better and learn more.

If he’s right, then Forrin’s research will have been well worth reading — long paragraphs and all.

When Do We Trust the Experts? When They Don’t Trust Themselves!
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-22-2021

When Do We Trust the Experts? When They Don’t Trust Themselves!

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Back in 2010, three scholars published a widely-discussed paper on “Power Poses.” The headlines: when people adopt a strong stance (say, fists on hips, like Superman), they…

…take more risks in gambling tasks,

…change various hormone levels, and

…answer questions more confidently in interviews.

In other words, simply changing the way we stand can affect meaningful variables in our biology, and our performance on life tasks.

A TED Talk on the subject has gotten more than 61 million views. (Yes: 61,000,000!)

Of course, any claim this provocative may generate controversy. Sure enough, skeptics weighed in with counter-claims.

Then, in 2016, something quite shocking happened: one of the original researchers publicly withdrew her support for the claim.

Researcher Dana Carney wrote, with bracing forthrightness, “I do not believe that power pose effects are real.” (As you can see in this link, Carney herself put those words in bold type.)

She went on to list her concerns about the initial study (small sample size, “flimsy” data, and so forth), to include her skepticism on her CV, and to discourage others from studying the topic. *

Wow!

What Next?

In theory, science is gradually “self-correcting.” That is: if one group of researchers arrives at an incorrect conclusion, other researchers will – over time – sleuth out their mistakes. (Max Plank wryly observed that the process might take a long time indeed. In his grim formula, opponents don’t change their minds; they die out.)

Looking at Carney’s example, researcher Julia Rohrer wondered if we could speed that process up. What would happen, she wondered, if we gave researchers a chance to change their minds? What if we invited them to do what Carney did?

She and her colleagues spread the word that they hoped researchers might publicly self-correct. As she puts it:

“The idea behind the initiative was to help normalize and destigmatize individual self-correction while, hopefully, also rewarding authors for exposing themselves in this way with a publication.”

The result? Several did.

And, the stories these thirteen researchers have to tell is fascinating.

In the first place, these self-corrections came from a remarkably broad range of fields in psychology. Some researchers studied extraversion; others, chess perception. One looked at the effect that German names have on professional career; another considered the credibility of Swedish plaintiffs.

One – I’m not inventing this topic – considered the relationship between testosterone and wearing make-up.

Stories to Tell

These researchers, in fact, went into great detail — often painful detail — during their self-corrections.

They worried about small sample sizes, overlooked confounds, and mistakes in methodology. They noted that some replications hadn’t succeeded. Several acknowledged different versions of “p-hacking”: a strategy for finding p values that hold up under scrutiny.

A few, in fact, were remarkably self-critical.

Tal Yarkoni wrote these amazing words:

I now think most of the conclusions drawn in this article were absurd on their face. … Beyond these methodological problems, I also now think the kinds of theoretical explanations I proposed in the article were ludicrous in their simplicity and naivete—so the results would have told us essentially nothing even if they were statistically sound.

OUCH.

With equally scathing self-criticism, Simine Vazire wrote:

I cherry-picked which results to report. This is basically p-hacking, but because most of my results were not statistically significant, I did not quite successfully p-hack by the strict definition. Still, I cherry-picked the results that made the contrast between self-accuracy and peer accuracy the most striking and that fit with the story about evaluativeness and observability. That story was created post hoc and chosen after I had seen the pattern of results.

Others, however, critiqued their own methodology, but held up hope that their conclusions might be correct; “These claims may be true, but not because of our experiment.”

What Should Teachers Do?

These self-corrections might tempt us, or our colleagues, to cynicism. “See? Science isn’t objective! Researchers are just makin’ stuff up…”

I would understand that reaction, but I think it misses the point.

In truth, all ways of knowing include weaknesses and flaws.

Science, unlike many ways of knowing, acknowledges that awkward truth. In fact, science tries to build into its methodology strategies to address that problem.

For this reason, research studies include so many (gruesomely tedious) details.

For this reason, psychology journals require peer review.

Indeed, for this reason, researchers try to replicate important findings.

Obviously, these strategies at self-correction don’t always work. Obviously, researchers do fool themselves…and us.

However, every time we read stories like these, they remind us that — as a profession — scientists take correction (and self-correction) unusually seriously.

In fact, I think the teaching profession might have something to learn from these brave examples.

How often do schools — how often do teachers — admit that a success we once claimed might not hold up under scrutiny?

As far as I know, we have few Yarkonis and Vizires in our ranks. (I certainly have never made this kind of public statement.)

In brief: this kind of self-correction makes me trust both the profession of psychology and these individual researchers even more. If you’re conspicuously willing to fess up when you’re wrong, you deserve a much stronger presumption of trustworthiness when you ultimately say you’re right.

* By the way: one of Carney’s co-authors continues to defend power poses emphatically. You can read Amy Cuddy’s response at the end of this article.

 

Beyond Slogans and Posters: The Science of Student Motivation
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-15-2021

Beyond Slogans and Posters: The Science of Student Motivation

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In many cases, cognitive science offers clear teaching advice.

You’re curious about working memory? We’ve got LOTS of strategies.

Wondering about the limits of attention? Good news!

Alas, in other cases, research doesn’t give us such clarity. If, for instance, I want to ramp up my students’ motivation, what should I do?

Should I put up posters with uplifting quotations?

Should I encourage grit?

Or, should I promote a “growth mindset”?

If you’d like answers to these specific questions — and the broader questions that prompt them — I have a place to start: meet Peps Mccrea.

In his new book Motivated Teaching, Mccrea sorts though dozens/hundreds of studies to create a clear, readable, research-informed, and practical guide to the science of student motivation.

Here’s the story…

Evolution, and Beyond

Mccrea, sensibly enough, starts with an evolutionary perspective.

Humans face a cognitive problem: the environment offers us so many stimuli that we can struggle to know where to focus our attention. (Teachers REALLY care where students focus their attention.)

Motivation helps solve this problem. If I’m motivated to do Y, I will attend to Y; if I attend to Y, I just might learn it. As Mccrea pithily writes, “Motivation is a system for allocating attention.” *

How then do teachers amp up motivation?

For an initial answer to this question, Mccrea turns to behavioral economics. In his formulation, students feel motivated to learn when

… they see the VALUE in what they’re learning,

… the ODDS ARE GOOD that they can learn it, and

… the COSTS of learning are low.

If we manipulate these variables just right — increasing the odds of learning, reducing the costs — those teacherly efforts create student motivation.

For instance, I’ve spent years emphasizing the importance of classroom routines. From my perspective, they reduce working memory load — usually a good thing.

From Mccrea’s perspective — thinking about that cost/benefit formula above — routines reduce the costs of learning. Once students have classroom systems and mental systems in place, they can easily use them to learn more complex material.

As Mccrea says: we should make “the process of learning easy, whilst keeping the content of learning challenging.” (You see what I mean about his catchy summaries?)

Learning Is Individual AND Social

Of course, learning takes place in a social context, and Mccrea studies that research pool as well.

For instance, he highlights the importance of school and classroom norms. If students see that, around here, we all act a particular way, they’re likelier to join in the normal behavior they see.

For this reason, Mccrea advocates taking the time we need to articulate and re-establish our norms. Early work now will pay off later in the year.

By the way, Mccrea’s chapter here reminded me of a powerful story. At the high school where I work, a new freshman once used a mild slur to insult a classmate. Before the teacher could do anything, one of the student leaders looked up and said five simple words: “We don’t do that here.”

Imagine the power of that sentence. If the new student wanted to be a part of “we” and “here,” he needed to change his behavior pronto.

Norm established.

The Big Pictures

In Mccrea’s system — to answer the questions that opened this post — motivation does not result from uplifting posters. It produces grit, but does not result from it. (Mccrea does not specifically mention growth mindset.)

In fact, he specifically discounts “fun” as a good way to motivate students. Fun is an extrinsic driver: one that we should use sparingly, and as infrequently as possible.

Instead, he argues that if teachers focus on five key drivers of motivation, their cumulative results will foster motivation; and thereby attention; and thereby learning.

When you start reading Mccrea’s book, be aware that he’s explicitly aiming for “ultra-concise.” He has, in fact, boiled an early draft of 200,000 words to this slim volume of 10,000 words. (You read those numbers right — two hundred thousand words boiled down to ten thousand. **)

To achieve that goal, he gives few detailed examples, and saves research for links that you can follow. To imagine Mccrea’s suggestions at work in your context, you really should take time with the exercises he outlines on his page 112.

In other words: because he condenses research so effectively — like a bouillon cube — we readers need to soak it in our own context to let it expand and work its flavorful magic. You won’t get a detailed motivation checklist; you’ll get something much better — a way to think about motivation in many classroom contexts.

As someone who has written a book about research on motivation, I can tell you: Motivated Teaching is an excellent, readable, and practical book. It’s so short, you can easily read it twice.

In fact, after you’ve finished your first reading, you’ll be highly motivated to do so.

* Mccrea is GREAT at this sort of succinct formulation. In this review, I’m working really hard to limit the number of quotations from the book. I suspect I could compose a review almost entirely of his wise sentences.

** At the same time I read Mccrea’s book, I listened to Ollie Lovell’s podcast interview with him. This astonishing fact comes from that interview. By the way, if you DO like podcasts and you DON’T yet follow Lovell, now is an excellent time to start. He’s a one-man Learning and the Brain podcast in Australia.

Does Chewing Gum Improve Memory and Learning?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-08-2021

Does Chewing Gum Improve Memory and Learning?

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I recently read a striking Twitter claim from a well-known teacher: chewing gum helps memory and concentration.

In fact, according to the teacher, research supports this claim: the tweet cites this study as one of many to make this gum-chewing suggestion credible.

I’m always on the lookout for practical strategies to boost memory and attention. If chewing gum gets the job done, well, that’s exciting news. (I can already hear the catchy new jingle: “Double your learning, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint gum!”)

At the same time, I confess, the idea has a Mozart-effect whiff of implausibility.

I can imagine that, perhaps, chewing gum raises alertness levels (for some people); this increased alertness might result in greater learning. But I suspect that effect would wear off fairly quickly.

Of course, if good research consistently supports the claim, then I’ll admit my instincts mislead me. However, I’d like to take a look at that research first…

Early Steps

We start with good news. The well-known teacher said that research supports the claim, and then cited research.

I’m amazed how often that second step doesn’t happen.

Folks regularly claim that “research shows” that a teaching technique provides specific benefits, but won’t identify any specific research. “Oh, you know, all the research shows that…” (Pro tip: in psychology, it is NEVER true that “all the research” shows  anything. If someone says that to you, you can politely and confidently decline their advice.)

This teacher, however, gives us the crucial details. We can look for ourselves.

When we do, we get a bit more good news. This research study does indeed conclude that chewing gum helps with memory and attention. So far, so good.

At the same time, we can register some important concerns.

First: the study includes sixteen participants. Now, researchers have good reasons to run small studies; they let scholars know if they should run larger studies testing the same idea. However, teachers should never change our classroom based on such a small sample. We want MUCH more evidence. (How much more? Keep reading…)

Second: the study is published in The International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Development. I don’t know anything about it (although its website says that it does use peer review). However, I’m inclined to rely on memory research in journals that focus on memory, rather than on engineering.

Third: the researcher’s technique for measuring attention is rather hunchy. The researchers videotaped participants, and looked for behavior that suggested inattention. As I’ve written before, that strategy doesn’t sound highly scientific.

And so: we can conclude that — yes —  this research supports the claim that chewing gum improves memory and attention. But given its size, provenance, and methodology, we probably want more evidence before we start making big changes to our teaching.

The Adventure Continues

To see how others responded to this study, I plugged it into my two favorite ai platforms: scite.ai and connectedpapers.com. Alas, neither search produced any results. I’m guessing (but I don’t know) that the journal doesn’t meet the standards that these websites use.

Next, I searched for papers about chewing gum and learning.

The most cited paper, according to Google Scholar, comes from 2002. In it, Wilkinson and others conclude that chewing gum does indeed help memory (but not attention).

However, according to this paper by Tucha,

the chewing of gum did not improve participants’ memory functions. Furthermore, chewing may differentially affect specific aspects of attention. While sustained attention was improved by the chewing of gum, alertness and flexibility were adversely affected by chewing. In conclusion, claims that the chewing a gum improves cognition should be viewed with caution.

And this 2009 study by Smith concludes,

The results of this study showed that chewing gum increases alertness. In contrast, no significant effects of chewing gum were observed in the memory tasks. Intellectual performance was improved in the gum condition. Overall, the results suggest further research on the alerting effects of chewing gum and possible improved test performance in these situations.

In other words: three studies show a cluttered hodgepodge of results.

If we look at research findings about, say, retrieval practice, we find that – over and over – it helps! In this case, however, no consistent message comes through.

I’ve even looked for a meta-analysis about chewing gum and memory. (I wonder if I’m the only person in history to google “chewing gum meta-analysis.”)

This overview, noting that we can find clear evidence of both benefits and detriments, concludes that “the robustness of reported effects of gum chewing on cognition has to be questioned.”

To Sum Up

First: We have a surprising (to me) amount of research into the cognitive effects of chewing gum. However, that research doesn’t provide a clear picture if its benefits, or detriments.

We might have school or classroom policies about gum, but we shouldn’t claim that research has given us clear guidance one way or another.

Does chewing gum improve memory? We just don’t know.

Second: People often tell us: “you should change your teaching or your school policies: research says so!”

When that happens, start by looking at the research they cite. If it doesn’t inspire confidence, keep looking…

Jerome Kagan: A Teacher’s Appreciation
Guest Blogger
Guest Blogger
June-02-2021

Jerome Kagan: A Teacher’s Appreciation

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A guest post, by Rob McEntarffer

 

I didn’t get to learn about Jerome Kagan (1929-2021) during my teacher’s college training. I regret that.

While I was a teacher, my contact with Kagan’s research was limited to teaching about temperament research during the developmental psychology unit of the high school psychology class I taught for 13 years.

Students learned about how Kagan measured infant temperament, and how those reactions predicted temperament later in life (Kagan, 1978). This research often helped my students think about how their thinking and behavior might be influenced by earlier factors in their lives, which opened a door for some of them in how they thought about themselves.

Kagan’s research helped us start great, research-informed discussions.

As a public-school administrator (assessment/evaluation specialist), I now realize that I could have learned much more from Kagan’s research.

I often focus exclusively on specific aspects of teaching and learning (like cognitive load, working memory, and retrieval practice) and ignore other important elements. As Chew (2021) and many others highlight, our models of teaching and learning need to include much more: student fear/mistrust, student mindset, and other self-perception and emotional factors that directly influence what students learn.

Kagan (2006) said:

“Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, … they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need. This inbuilt ethical sense is a biological feature of our species.”

As I help teachers figure out how to create assignments that allow students to express what they are thinking, Kagan might remind me to think about how ethics, and an “inbuilt” ethical sense, could be usefully included in classroom discussions and assignments.

I experienced this sense often as a teacher: in my psychology classroom, our discussions about research often moved into discussions about ethics and feelings of compassion. We talked about what should be, not just what is.

As an administrator, Kagan can remind me to include these ideas in my current work. In the end, teaching and learning are also about ethics and care, not just about what environments create the most likely context for elaborative encoding.

I’m grateful for Jerome Kagan’s thoughtful, caring research, and thinking about this work will change how I work with teachers.

 

References:

Kagan, J., Lapidus, D., & Moore, M. (1978). Infant Antecedents of Cognitive Functioning: A Longitudinal Study. Child Development, 49(4), 1005-1023. doi:10.2307/1128740

Stephen L. Chew & William J. Cerbin (2021) The cognitive challenges of effective teaching, The Journal of Economic Education, 52:1, 17-40, DOI: 10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266

Kagan, J. (2006). On the case for kindness. In A. Harrington & A. Zajonc (Eds.), The Dalai Lama at MIT. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dr. McEntarffer is an Assessment and Evaluation Specialist with the Lincoln Public School System in Lincoln, Nebraska.

You can read more at his blog, Not For Points.