Skip to main content

Monthly Archives: October 2021

Understanding Adolescents: Emotion, Reason, and the Brain
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-28-2021

Understanding Adolescents: Emotion, Reason, and the Brain

Read More

Kurt Fischer — who helped create Learning and the Brain, and the entire field of Mind, Brain, and Education — used to say: “when it comes to the brain, we’re all still in kindergarten.”

He meant: the brain is so FANTASTICALLY complicated that we barely know how little we know.

Yes, we can name brain regions. We can partially describe neural networks. Astonishing new technologies let us pry into all sorts of secrets.

And yet, by the time he left the program he founded at Harvard, Dr. Fischer was saying: “when it comes to the brain, we’re now just in 1st grade.”

The brain is really that complicated.

Fascinating Questions

Adolescents — with their marvelous and exasperating behavior — raise all sorts of fascinating questions.

In particular, we recognize a real change in their ability to think abstractly.

Unlike their younger selves, teens can often “infer…system-level implications…and lessons that transcend the immediate situation.”

We can say in a general way that, well, teens improve at this cognitive ability. But: can we explain how?

More specifically, can we look a their brains and offer a reasonable explanation? Something like: “because [this part of the brain] changes [this way], teens improve at abstract thinking.”

A research team at the University of Southern California wanted answers.

Networks in the Brain

These researchers showed 65 teens brief, compelling videos about “living, non-famous adolescents from around the world.” They discussed those videos with the teens, and recorded their reactions.

And then they replayed key moments while the teens lay in an fMRI scanner.

In this way, they could (probably) see which brain networks were most active when the teens had specific or abstract reactions.

For example, the teen might say something specific and individual about the teen in the video, or about themselves: “I just feel so bad for her.”

Or, she might say something about an abstract “truth, lesson, or value”: e.g., “We have to inspire people who have the potential to improve society.”

If some brain networks correlated with specific/individual statements, and other networks with abstract/general statements, that correlation might start to answer this question.

As usual, this research team started with predictions.

They suspected that abstract statements would correlate with activity in the default mode network.

And, they predicted that concrete statements would correlate with activity in the executive control network.

What did they find?

Results and Conclusions

Sure enough, the results aligned with their predictions. The orange blobs show the teens’ heightened neural activity when they made abstract statements.

And: those blobs clearly overlap with well-established regions associated with the Default Mode Network.

Neural correlates of abstract construals. Results from a whole-brain analysis reveal regions whose activity while responding to documentary-style stories positively correlates with abstract construal scores from the interview (N = 64). The image is subjected to a cluster forming threshold of P < 0.001, and cluster extent thresholded at k = 177 voxels (for illustrative purposes). The in-set image depicted in purple correspond to 6 mm spherical ROIs located in the DMN. The in-set scatterplot depicts participants’ average parameter estimates (β) from all voxels within the identified ROIs relative to abstract construal scores. Each dot represents one participant. Inf-post PMC = inferior/posterior posteromedial cortices; DMPFC = dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; VMPFC = ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Unless provided in the caption above, the following copyright applies to the content of this slide: © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The study includes a second (even more intricate!) picture of the executive control network — and its functional overlap with concrete statements.

The headline: we can see a (likely) brain basis for concrete and abstract thought in teens.

Equally important, a separate element of the study looks at the role of emotion in adolescent cognition. (One of the study’s authors, Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, has worked on this topic for years.)

In brief, emotions don’t necessarily limit thinking. They can focus and motivate thinking:

“Rather than interfering with complex cognition, emotion in the context of abstract thinking may drive adolescents’ thinking forward.”

The much-discussed emotionality of teenage years might not be a bug, but a feature.

A Final Note

I’m especially happy to share this research because its lead author — Dr. Rebecca Gotlieb — has long been the book reviewer for this blog.

If you’ve ever wondered how she knows so much about the books she reviews, well, now you know.

Because of work that she (and so many other) researchers are doing, Dr. Fischer could now say that we’re entering 2nd grade in our understanding of the brain…

A Final Final Note

Neuroscience studies always include more details than can be clearly summarized in a blog post. For those of you who REALLY want to dig into the specifics, I’ll add three more interesting points.

First: knowing that scientific research focuses too much on one narrow social stratum, the researchers made a point to work with students who aren’t typically included in such studies.

In this case, they worked with students with a lower “socio-economic status” (SES), as measured by — among other things — whether or not they received free- or reduced-priced lunch. Researchers often overlook low SES students, so it’s exciting this team made a point to widen their horizons.

Second: researchers found that IQ didn’t matter to their results. In other words, “abstract social reasoning” isn’t measured by IQ — which might therefore be less important than some claim it to be.

Third: teachers typically think of “executive function” as a good thing. In this study, LOWER activity in the executive control network ended up helping abstract social thought.

Exactly what to make of this result — and how to use it in the classroom — is far from clear. But it underlines the dangers of oversimplification of such studies. Executive functions are good — obviously! But they’re not always beneficial for everything.

Rebecca Gotlieb, Xiao-Fei Yang, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Default and executive networks’ roles in diverse adolescents’ emotionally engaged construals of complex social issues, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2021;, nsab108, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsab108

Let’s Get Practical: Signaling a Growth Mindset
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-22-2021

Let’s Get Practical: Signaling a Growth Mindset

Read More

Most teachers know about Mindset Theory: the idea that students’ beliefs about intelligence shape their success in learning.

Specifically:

If I think that intelligence (whatever that is) can’t change, I learn less.

If I think that intelligence can change, I learn more.

Once widely believed and championed, this theory now faces real doubts — especially following two meta-analyses by Sisk and Burgoyne showing that mindset strategies produce (on average) negligibly small effects.

Alas, Mindset debates often fall into two extreme camps:

“Tell students about growth mindsets — they’ll learn more!” or,

“Mindset research is nonsense; skip the whole thing.”

Ugh.

Perhaps we can do better?

Doing Better

Dan Willingham (I believe) has argued that contrary findings about growth mindset don’t exactly “disprove” Mindset Theory. Instead, they remind us that getting mindset strategies right takes precision and care.

We shouldn’t blithely think: “I’ll just do some mindset stuff now.”

Instead, we should think: “I need to ensure my mindset strategy aligns with research, and with my students, quite precisely.”

For instance: I’m skeptical that simply telling students about mindset — the most common strategy I hear about — has much enduring effect.

Instead, I think we need to have quiet and consistent classroom policies and procedures that re-enforce Growth Mindset messages.

Obviously, if we tell our students that intelligence CAN change and act as if we believe it CAN’T, our actions reveal what really matters to us.

One Recent Example

One research group from Washington State wondered if the syllabus of a college course might be enough to communicate a professor’s mindset.

They created two mindset versions of a Calculus syllabus.

The Fixed Mindset Syllabus, for instance, said:

“If you have not mastered these concepts, you should consider dropping the course.”

“I do not take attendance in class [because] I do not penalize students with strong math abilities.”

It also had one heavily-weighted final exam.

The Growth Mindset Syllabus, by contrast, said:

“I you have not mastered these concepts, you should see me or a teaching assistant and we will provide resources.”

“All students will learn something new and attending class is the best way to learn.”

This syllabus had many exams, equally weighted.

Sure enough: both men and women assumed a) that the professor who wrote the FM syllabus indeed had a fixed mindset, and b) that this professor probably assumed that women are “naturally worse at math” than men.

And, women (but not men) who read the FM syllabus did worse on a subsequent math test than those who read the GM syllabus.

Beyond the Syllabus

These perceptions, it turns out, influenced learning beyond the syllabus.

This research team had students rate their professors’ mindsets.

In 46 courses across the university, students — both male and female — rated their STEM professors’ mindsets similarly. That is: some professors rated strongly at the fixed mindset end of the scale — and the students’ gender didn’t matter in that rating.

And, both male and female students assumed that fixed-mindset professors believed that “women struggle to do well in advanced math.”

Sure enough: men had higher average grades in classes taught by FM professors. Women had higher average grades in classes taught by GM professors.

In other words: those syllabus policies — combined with other classroom factors — influence students’ learning.

It might be hard to identify exactly what causes this effect, but mindset certainly seems to be an important part of the equation.

What Should K-12 Teachers Do?

Few pre-college teachers have a syllabus with the gravitas of a college syllabus.

We do, however, have about policies and procedures. We talk about policies and procedures with our students. This study (and many others) encourages us to rethink those policies with their mindset implications in view.

For instance: does our rewrite policy suggest we think that students can get smarter? (I say to my students: “If you say to me you want to work harder and learn more, why would I say no to that? OF COURSE you can revise the essay!”)

Do we have different policies for “smart students” than “other-than-smart students”?

Do we — heaven help us — have a program for students we call “Gifted”?

In brief: we should not think of mindset as a topic we discuss once in a special program.

Instead, we should consider — bit by bit, day by day — what signals we send to our students. If the language we use, the policies we communicate, the procedures we follow all demonstrate “I think you can get smarter,” our students just might believe us.

If we think they can, they will.

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion by Wendy Suzuki
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD
October-19-2021

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion by Wendy Suzuki

Read More

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion takes a refreshing look at an emotional state, anxiety, that is often seen as a problem to be avoided and kept at bay; but here, Wendy Suzuki asks us to honor this aspect of our lives, understand it, and even embrace it. She asks that we interpret feelings of anxiety as useful indicators of the way we are framing contexts. We can use that information to adjust our perspectives so that anxiety can be a potential source of positive personal energy.

While emphasizing that anxiety falls along a spectrum, she does not minimize the clinical conditions of anxiety that are debilitating to the lives of many. Her descriptions are helpful heuristics to assist us in understanding what aspects of our anxiety may benefit from professional help. But, her approaches throughout the book may be applied anywhere along the spectrum from these severe situations to everyday anxieties. The framing of our events that lead to anxiety is flexible and can be tweaked offering us a reprieve from the perpetual anticipation of what could go wrong and even pave the way toward a more actualized self.

As educators our focus is too often on getting through a long list of endless tasks: grading, preparing, going to meetings, attending to parents, and of course still mindfully attending to students. But all these tasks bring with them some degree of uncertainty and anxiety: Will I get it done? What will they think? Do I know how to run a zoom call? Am I doing my job effectively? But we still push through, dismissing these emotions in favor of checking off another task as done. We imagine that getting tasks done will make us feel better, but things are never really ‘done.’

Suzuki recognizes that while we all experience anxiety, we seldom take the time to engage the emotion and give it the respect it deserves. Ignoring anxiety does not make it go away; it compounds until we fight, flee, or freeze – are we attending to these adaptive responses that tell us something is wrong? Even a persistent low level of anxiety has deleterious effects on our body and mind. If we do not respect anxiety, we virtually guarantee that we will not be performing at our best which can further drive rumination and further deleterious anxiety. This book is a guide on a journey to building a healthier relationship with our anxiety and incorporating our knowledge into our lives for our benefit.

Through her engaging and scientifically accurate descriptions of the physiological processes, she helps us see anxiety as a biological system that has evolved for our protection but is flexibly under our influence. Bringing together an array of up-to-date research, she integrates the neuropsychology of both top-down and bottom-up processes into a set of practices that allow us to take advantage of the neuroplasticity of the system: relaxing the body, calming the mind, redirecting and reappraising, monitoring responses, and learning to tolerate the uncomfortable.

Authentic personal and third-person narratives illustrate the lessons in this book in an accessible and engaging way. You will see yourself in the various scenarios having made similar choices increasing your understanding of your past and future actions, but also giving you insight into the actions of others, helping improve our lives and the lives of our students. The narratives clearly illustrate how, when harnessed, anxiety may help you achieve your goals if you listen and engage this emotion appropriately.

The final portion of the book gives us some valuable assessment tools to help us gain a more mindful awareness of our mental state. Reading this book gently brings anxieties into view, affording us the opportunity during its reading to work with our anxiety. These assessment tools take us full circle back to the contents of the book and the menu of strategies we can draw from to address our evolving processing of anxiety.

Over the last few years, but not isolated to them, anxiety has been on the rise: the pandemic, elections, tense race relations, changing political landscapes, and further global catastrophes. This barrage is complemented by our unfortunate practice of ‘doom scrolling’ generating a feedback loop that seems like an endless drive toward harmful anxiety. What will the world throw at me next, and will I be able to cope? Students, parents, and teachers are doing their best to work through this moment, but we have been ill-equipped. When reading this book, fill it with sticky notes and bookmarks encouraging a return to strategies for checking, evaluating, and adapting your relationship with anxiety. Suzuki offers a useful tool to help us all on the road to recovery and prepare our minds and bodies for challenges yet unknown.

How Do Experts Think?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-12-2021

How Do Experts Think?

Read More

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

It means, more or less, we see what we’re trained to see.

If I bring a problem to a plumber, she’ll think about it like a plumbing problem. An economist, like an economics problem. A general, a military problem.

What does research tell us about this insight? And, does that research give us guidance about teaching and learning?

The Geoscientists and the Balloon

A research team led by Dr. Micah Goldwater wanted to explore this topic.

So, they asked a few hundred people these questions:

“A balloon floating is like _________ because _________.”

“Catching a cold is like _________ because _________.”

Those who answered the question fell into four distinct groups:

Expert geoscientists — who had an MA or PhD in geoscience

Intermediate geoscientists — who were studying geoscience

Expert vision scientists –who had an MA or PhD in vision science

Non-expert adults — who had not studied science in college

Goldwater’s team wanted to know: how often would people offer causal analogies? “A balloon floating is like hot water rising in a cold sea because they result from the same underlying causal principle.”

Deeper still, they wanted to know how often people offer those causal analogies spontaneously, and how often they need to be prompted to do so. (The research details get tricky here, so I’m simplifying a bit.)

Archimedes Catches a Cold

Sure enough, expert geoscientists spontaneously offered causal analogies for the balloon question — because they have a relevant geoscientific rule, called “Archimedes’ principle.”

However, expert vision scientists did not spontaneously give causal analogies, because their branch of science does not include a causally relevant analogy.

And neither group spontaneously proposed many causal analogies for “catching a cold,” because neither field builds on underlying relevant principles.

This finding — along with other parts of Goldwater’s research — suggests this conclusion: hammers typically see nails.

That is: experts spontaneously perceive, contemplate, and understand new information (“floating balloons”) through core principles of their field (“Archimedes’ principle”) — even though balloons don’t come up very often in geoscience.

Teaching Implications: Bad News, and Good

As I visit schools, I often hear teachers say “I want my students to think like historians” or “think like scientists” or “think like artists.” To accomplish this goal, some pedagogies encourage us to give students “expert tasks.”

Alas, Goldwater’s findings (and LOTS of other research) suggest that this bar might be MUCH too high. It takes years — decades? — to “think like a researcher” or “think like a coach.”

Even people with PhD’s in vision science don’t think causally about floating balloons unless explicitly prompted to do so.

As Dan Willingham writes in Why Don’t Students Like School?, “cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training” (127).

This message often feels like bad news.

All those authentic tasks we’ve been giving students might not have the results we had hoped for. It’s extraordinarily difficult for students to think like a mathematician, even when we give them expert math tasks.

However, I see glimmers of hope in this gloomy conclusion.

My students (I teach high school English) won’t think like literary critics. However, I think they can and do become “experts” in much smaller sub-sub-sub-fields of English. (Warning: I’m about to switch from summarizing research to speculating about a classroom anecdote.)

When Comedy is Tragic

For instance: I recently gave my students a fairly complex definition of “comedy and tragedy.” This section of the unit required LOTS of direct instruction and LOTS of retrieval practice. After all: I’m the expert, and they’re novices.

My students then read a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri called “A Temporary Matter.” I asked them to look for elements of comedy and tragedy in that story.

Not only did they find those elements, they SPONTANEOUSLY pointed out Lahiri’s daring: she uses traditionally comic symbols (food, music, celebration, childbirth) as indicators of tragedy (“death and banishment”).

And, since then, they’ve been pouncing on tragic/comic symbolism, and other potentially innovative uses thereof.

These students aren’t (yet) expert literary critics. But on this very narrow topic, they starting to be flexible and inventive — a sign of budding expertise.

As long as I have a suitably narrow definition, a focused kind of pre-expertise is indeed a reasonable and achievable goal.

In Sum

Like lots of research in the field of “novices and experts,” Goldwater’s study warns us that experts really do think differently from novices, and that true expertise takes years to develop.

However, that insight shouldn’t scare us away from well-defined tasks that build up very local subsections of developing expertise. Our students aren’t yet capital-E Experts. And, the right-sized educational goals can move them towards ultimate Expertise.

 

Teachers’ Gestures Can Help Students Learn
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-05-2021

Teachers’ Gestures Can Help Students Learn

Read More

Over the years, I’ve written about the importance of “embodied cognition.”

In other words: we know with our brains, and we know with and through our bodies.

Scholars such as Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow and Dr. Sian Beilock have done splendid and helpful work in this field.

Their research suggests that students might learn more when they make the right kind of gesture.

Other scholars have shown that — in online lectures — the right kind of pointing helps too.

What about the teachers‘ gestures? Can we help students learn in the way we use our hands?

Dr. Celeste Pilegard wanted to find out…

Steamboats, East and West

Pilegard invited college students to watch brief video lectures. The topic: the differences between Eastern and Western steamboats. (You think I’m joking. I’m not joking.)

These students watched one of four versions:

In the first version, the teacher’s gestures focused on the surface features of the steamboats themselves (how deep they sit in the water, for instance).

In the second version, the gestures focused on the structure of the lesson (“Now I’m talking about Eastern steamboats, and NOW I’m talking about Western steamboats.”).

Third version: gestures emphasized BOTH surface AND structural features.

Fourth version: a control group saw a video with neutral, content-free gestures.

Did those gestures make a difference for learning?

Pilegard, in fact, measured learning in two ways:

Did the students remember the facts?

Could the students apply those facts by drawing inferences?

So, what did she discover?

No, but Yes

Researchers typically make predictions about their findings.

In this case, Pilegard predicted that neither the surface gestures (about steamboats) nor the structural gestures (about the logic of the lesson) would help students remember facts.

But, she predicted that the structural gestures would help students draw inferences. (“If a steamboat operates on a shallow river, what does that tell you about the pressure of the steamboat’s engine?”) Surface gestures, she predicted, would not improve inferences.

Sure enough, Pilegard was 2 for 2.

Watching gestures didn’t help students remember facts any better. However, students who watched structural gestures (but not surface gestures) did better on inference questions. (Stats types: the Cohen’s d was 0.39; an impressive bonus for such a small intervention.)

When Pilegard repeated the experiment with a video on “innate vs. acquired immunity,” she got the same results.

Implications and Cautions

As teachers, we know that every little bit helps. When we use gestures to reinforce the underlying logical structure of our explanations, doing so might help students learn more.

As we plan, therefore, we should be consciously aware of our lesson’s logical structure, and think a bit about how gestures might reinforce that structure.

At the same time, regular readers know that all the usual cautions apply:

We should look at groups of studies, not just one study.

Pilegard’s research focused on college students. Will this strategy work with other students? We don’t know for sure.

These video lessons were quite short: under two minutes each. Will this strategy work over longer periods of time? We don’t know for sure.

In other words — this research offers a promising strategy. And, we need more research with students who resemble our own classrooms and lessons that last longer to have greater confidence.

I myself do plan to think about gestures for upcoming lessons. But I won’t ignore all the other teaching strategies (retrieval practice, cognitive load management, etc.). Here’s hoping that future research can point the way…

By the way:

Teachers often ask how they can get copies of research to study it for themselves.

Easy answer #1: Google Scholar.

If that doesn’t work, I recommend easy answer #2: email the researcher.

In this case, I emailed Dr. Pilegard asking for a copy of the study — and she emailed it to me 11 minutes later.

In honor of her doing so, I’m creating the Pilegard Award for Prompt Generosity in Sharing Research with People who Email You Out of the Blue.

No doubt it will be much coveted.