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Monthly Archives: June 2022

The Power of Us by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD
June 21, 2022

The Power of Us by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

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The broad use of social media, internet search engines, personalized news feeds, and other emerging information technologies have influenced the ways we have been constructing our identities. This has only accelerated during the ongoing pandemic as many of our social connections are accessed only through likes, links, and subscriptions. Taking a moment to reflect, we all notice how our identities are channeled into group memberships and conceptual echo chambers which have served to increase socio-political polarization and reduce the number of people we interact with who might challenge our views. The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel is an important update on identity research with direct relevance to the current landscape. The title suggests a monumental task, and the authors meet their proposal head-on, methodically taking the reader on an exploration of multiple identities and group affiliations while offering direction toward progress on many seemingly intractable problems.

Watching the news can often lead to a sense of loss, hopelessness, and confusion, but this text acts as a conceptual scaffolding allowing us to perceive the world in a way that reduces the sense of overwhelm. Keeping up with current events and managing our emotional responses leaves little time to identify and integrate new research into our perspectives and make sense of this changing world. Packer and Van Bavel do an exemplary job of translating and integrating social, psychological, cognitive, neuroscientific, and even genetic research and heightening your curiosity. Many of us are familiar with the early work on bias, racism, and in- and out-group relations, but when was the last time you checked your understanding and updated those ideas?  They unpack many of our socialized myths and misconceptions about previous research while offering new interpretations and tantalizing new avenues of thought. Integrating research in the lighter areas of food flavors, school spirit, and competitive sports outcomes with the weightier topics of race relations, violence, political divides, international politics, and fake news, the reader experiences the rigor without the exhaustion.

The rhetorical style feels like a coffee shop conversation with engaging intellectual appetizers keeping the text light and easy to digest, but still rich enough to drive a deeper intellectual challenge. This is no lecture from an ivory tower but instead an engaging debate. Unlike much of what we see every day, you will leave this text feeling integrated into the society around you, not a passive participant or confused onlooker. The multiple selves within you and those around you are connected and we can ignore or renew these connections; this initiates this process by making the unconscious conscious and adding to the conceptual foundation for personal and societal development.

Given that scientific thought is under constant attack, the book also addresses many of the challenges brought against science itself. But it does not attack the critics; instead, it offers up an important internal critique of the scientific process through a discussion of metascience and the search to discover if science is indeed uncovering truths or has created its own echo chambers. Overall, they find the scientific process successful but offer advice. For the researchers, it asks the important question of whether their labs have evolved to support their views or if researchers have actively sought intellectual debate and disagreement. While the authors rightly elevate scientific thinking as part of the solution, they increase awareness that science, like all other human endeavors, is not immune to bias. This same approach is important for educators, policymakers, and administrators to consider: how is the system you are part of addressing identity formation and what needs to change?

A common approach to social divide and fake news is to offer more information, but as the authors point out, more information does not remove the bias, and sometimes more information adds more interpretations. We need to build individual practices, systems, and opportunities to challenge and enrich our knowledge. After reading this book, you will be left with a sense of hope. While the book is critical and planned in its approach to the literature, it also is optimistic lighting potential paths out of the darkness and confusion.

“It’s Good for the Brain!”: The Perils of Pollution, the Benefits of Blueberries
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 19, 2022

“It’s Good for the Brain!”: The Perils of Pollution, the Benefits of Blueberries

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When I talk with teachers about psychology and neuroscience research, I frequently get a question in this shape:

“I’ve heard that X is really good for the brain. Is that really true?”

In this sentence, X might be blueberries. It might be water. It might be nature walks. Perhaps it’s a good night’s sleep, or green tea, or coffee, or merlot ice cream. (I think I made up that last one, but anything’s possible…)

So, should schools start serving blueberries, merlot ice cream, and green tea (and black coffee) to our students? Perhaps with a side of salmon — brain food for sure!

Works (Almost) Every Time

Here is a completely unsurprising research finding: the brain is a part of the body.

The brain is, in fact, physically attached to the body.

For this reason, everything that is good for the body is good for the brain. (Because, again, the brain is a part of the body.)

Is sleep good for the brain? Well, it’s good for the body, so; yes.

How about water? Yup.

Fruits/veggies? Sure.

Exercise? I’m in!

Simply put, when we take care good care of our bodies, we simultaneously tend to our brains — as a physical, biological object.

Said the other way around: we don’t need to develop special “brain enhancing” diets or programs or regimens. Anything that promotes our students’ physical health will automatically help their brains.

I was, in fact, inspired to write this post by an article I saw today about pollution. The summary:

“Higher exposure to air pollution is associated with higher functional brain connectivity among several brain regions in preadolescents.”

This conclusion strikes me as entirely sensible. Pollution changes the body; unsurprisingly it changes the brain. (Say it with me: the brain is a part of the body.)

Checking the Details

This first answer to the question works most of the time.

If, however, we need a more specific answer, we can easily investigate.

I once heard that, because brains need appropriate levels of hydration, we should think of water as “brain food.” The speaker exhorted us with this cry: “A bottle of water on every desk!”

And yet, the speaker’s logic collapses immediately. Yes, too little water is bad for the brain (because it’s bad for the body). We do want students to be properly hydrated.

But this obvious truth does not remotely suggest that additional water above that level yields extra benefits.

Yes, we should let students drink if they’re thirsty. Yes, a hot day in an arid climate might prompt us to provide “a glass of water on every desk.”

But we don’t need to make a big deal about extra water as an avenue toward extra learning.

You won’t be surprised to know: when I googled “Water is brain food,” the top hits were NOT research studies. They were advertisements for companies selling water.

Magical Blueberries

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the “brain food” claim often settles on blueberries. They’ve got antioxidants, I’m told. They’re great.

I’ve done just a little research here, and so far I’m underwhelmed.

First: there honestly isn’t much research on this topic.

Second: the research often focuses on rats. (Long time readers know my mantra: “Never change your teaching based on research into non-human animals.)

Third: the research on humans focuses on aging and dementia.

Now, I’m 56. I’m ALL IN FAVOR of dietary changes that reduce the likelihood of dementia.

But the idea that “because blueberries are brain food, students should nosh on them before a test” has absolutely no research backing (that I can find).

Students should eat blueberries because fruits and vegetable — in the right proportion — provide health benefits for the body. As far as I can tell, we don’t need to focus on targeted brain benefits.

TL;DR

Most everything that is good for the body is also good for the brain. So, don’t worry about special “brain benefit” claims.

If, instead, someone claims that X is good for learning, we teachers should indeed pay close attention — and especially pay attention to the details of the research.

Getting the Order Just Right: When to “Generate,” When to “Retrieve”?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 12, 2022

Getting the Order Just Right: When to “Generate,” When to “Retrieve”?

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When teachers get advice from psychology and neuroscience, we start by getting individual bits of guidance. For instance…

… mindful meditation reduces stress, or

… growth mindset strategies (done the right way) can produce modest benefits, or

… cell phones both distract students and reduce working memory.

Each single suggestion has its uses. We can weave them, one at a time, into our teaching practices.

After a while, we start asking broader questions: how can we best combine all those individual advice bits?

For instance: might the benefits of growth mindset strategies offset the detriments of cell phones?

Happily, in recent years, researchers have started to explore these combination questions.

Retrieval Practice, Generative Learning

Long time readers know about the benefits of retrieval practice. Rather than simply review material, students benefit when they actively try to recall it first.

So too, generative learning strategies have lots of good research behind them. When students have to select, organize, and integrate information on their own, this mental exercise leads to greater learning. (Check out a handy book review here.)

Now that we have those individual bits of guidance, can we put them together? What’s the best way to combine retrieval practice with generative learning?

A recent study explored exactly this question.

Researchers in Germany had college students study definitions of 8 terms in the field of “social attribution.”

So, for instance, they studied one-sentence definitions of “social norms” or “distinctiveness” or “self-serving bias.”

One group — the control group — simply studied these definitions twice.

A second group FIRST reviewed these words with retrieval practice, and THEN generated examples for these concepts (that’s generative learning).

A third group FIRST generated examples, and THEN used retrieval practice.

So, how well did these students remember the concepts — 5 minutes later, or one day later?

The Envelope Please

The researchers wanted to know: does the order (retrieval first? generation first?) matter?

The title of their study says it all: “Sequence Matters! Retrieval practice before generative learning is more effective than the reverse order.”

Both 5 minutes later and the next day, students who did retrieval practice first remembered more than those who came up with examples first (and, more than the control group).

For a variety of statistical reasons, I can’t describe how much better they did. That is: I can’t say “These student scored a B, and these score a B-.” But, they did “better enough” for statistical models to notice the difference.

And so, very tentatively, I think we teachers can plan lessons in this way: first instruct, then have students practice with retrieval, then have them practice with generation.

Wait, Why “Tentatively”?

If the research shows that “retrieval first” helps students more than “generation first,” why am I being tentative?

Here’s why:

We can’t yet say that “research shows” the benefits of a retrieval-first strategy.

Instead, we can say that this one study with these German college students who learned definitions of words suggests that conclusion.

But: we need many more studies of this question before we can spot a clear pattern.

And: we’d like some 1st grade students in Los Angeles, and some 8th grade students in Reykjavik, and some adult learners in Cairo before we start thinking of this conclusion as broadly applicable.

And: we’d like to see different kinds of retrieval practice, and different kinds of generative learning strategies, before we reach a firm conclusion.

After all, Garvin Brod has found that different generative learning strategies have different levels of effectiveness in various grades. (Check out this table from this study.)

To me, it seems entirely plausible that students need to retrieve ideas fluently before they can generate new ideas with them: hence, retrieval practice before generative learning.

But, “entirely plausible” isn’t a research-based justification. It’s a gut feeling. (In fact, for various reasons, the researchers had predicted the opposite finding.)

So, I think teachers should know about this study, and should include it our thinking.

But, we shouldn’t think it’s an absolute conclusion. If our own students simply don’t learn well with this combination, we might think about switching up the order.

TL;DR

Students learn more from retrieval practice, and they learn more from generative learning strategies.

If we want to combine those individual strategies, we’ll (probably) help students more if we start with retrieval practice.

And: we should keep an eye out for future research that confirms — or complicates — this advice.

Roelle, J., Froese, L., Krebs, R., Obergassel, N., & Waldeyer, J. (2022). Sequence matters! Retrieval practice before generative learning is more effective than the reverse order. Learning and Instruction, 80, 101634.

Brod, G. (2020). Generative learning: Which strategies for what age?. Educational Psychology Review, 1-24.

The Bruce Willis Method: Catching Up Post-Covid
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 05, 2022

The Bruce Willis Method: Catching Up Post-Covid

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In the third Die Hard movie, Brue Willis and his unexpected partner Samuel L. Jackson need to get to Wall Street a hurry. They commandeer a cab.

An experienced cab driver, Jackson suggests taking 9th Avenue south, but Willis insists on going through Central Park.

It turns out: he doesn’t mean taking the road that runs through the Central Park, but driving through the park itself — across crowded lawns, through busy playgrounds, past famous fountains, down winding bike-paths.

His desperate short-cut helps the team catch up.

In education these days, it seems that we need our very own Bruce Willis.

Because of Covid, our students are WAY BEHIND.

5th graders don’t know as much math as they used to. 2nd graders can’t read as well as they once could. 9th graders have lost even more social skills than 9th graders usually lose.

Because our students know less and can do less, we teachers want to help them CATCH UP.

And so we ask: what’s the educational analogue to driving through the park? How can we — like Bruce and Samuel — help our students learn faster?

Like lots of folks, I’ve been thinking about that question for a while now. I’ve got bad news, and worse news; and I’ve got good news.

The Bad News

The Bruce Willis Method does not exist in education.

We can’t “drive through the park.” We can’t, in other words, help students “learn the same amount, only faster.”

Here’s why I say so:

If we knew how to teach any faster, we would have been doing so already.

Seriously. Do you know any teacher who says, “I could have covered this curriculum in 10 weeks. But what the heck, I’m going to drag it out and take 12 or 13”?

I don’t. And I suspect you don’t either.

We have always been helping our students learn as best we could. If we knew better ways, we would have been using them.

Of course Willis can get through the park faster; it was a MOVIE!  Alas, we can’t follow his example.

I am, in fact, quite worried about all the talk of “catching up.” In my mind, it creates two clear dangers:

First Danger:

If we try to catch up, we’ll probably — in one way or another — try to speed up. We will, for instance, explore a topic in 2 weeks instead of 3 weeks. We will combine 3 units into 1.

However, the decision to speed up necessarily means that students spend less time thinking about a particular topic.

As Dan Willingham has taught us: “memory is the residue of thought.” If students spend less time thinking about a topic, they will learn less about it.

The result: they won’t catch up. Instead, they will be further behind.

In other words: such efforts to help students recover from Covid learning muddle will — paradoxically —  hinder their learning.

Second Danger:

If we believe that “catching up” is a realistic short-term possibility, we open ourselves up to inspiring-but-unfounded claims.

People who don’t work in schools will tell us that “you can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created those problems in the first place.”

Their claims might include words & phrases like “transformational” or “thinking outside the box” or “new paradigm” or “disrupt.”

These claims will almost certainly come with products to buy: new technology here, new textbooks there, new mantras yon.

They will sound uplifting and exciting and tempting and plausible.

But…

… any “research-based” claims will almost certainly extrapolate substantially beyond the research’s actual findings;

… these ideas won’t have been tested at scale in a realistic setting;

… such claims will defy core knowledge about cognitive architecture. (No, students can’t overcome working memory limitations simply because “they can look up everything on the internet.”)

In other words: because the goal (“catching up”) is so tempting, we might forget to be appropriately skeptical of inspiring claims (“your students can catch up if you only do THIS THING!”).

Now is the time to be more skeptical, not less skeptical, of dramatic claims.

The Good News

Despite all this gloomy news, I do think we have a very sensible and realistic option right in front of us.

I propose three steps for the beginning of the next school year.

Step 1: determine what our students already know.

In previous years, I could reasonably predict that my students know this much grammar and this much about Shakespeare and this much about analyzing literature.

Well, they just don’t anymore. I need to start next year by finding out what they really do know. (Hint: it will almost certainly be less — maybe dramatically less — than they did in the past.)

Step 2: plan a realistic curriculum building from that foundation.

If we meet our students where they are, they are much likelier to learn the new ideas and procedures we teach them.

In fact, they’re also likelier to strengthen and consolidate the foundation on which they’re building.

Yes, I might feel like my students are “behind.” But they’re behind an abstract standard.

As long as they’re making good progress in learning new ideas, facts, and procedures, they’re doing exactly the right cognitive work. They won’t catch up this year.

But if they make steady progress for several years, they’ll be well back on track.

Step 3: draw on the lessons of cognitive science.

In the paragraphs above, I’ve been highly skeptical of uplifting, simplistic quick-fix claims. (“If we revolutionize education with X, our students will learn calculus in 6th grade!”)

At the same time, I do think that teachers can make steady and coherent improvements in our work. When we understand the mental processes that lead to long-term memory formation, we can teach more effectively.

We should study…

… working memory function: the core mental bottleneck that both allows and impedes learning;

… the importance of desirable difficulties — spacing, interleaving, retrieval practice — in forming long-term memories;

… the sub-components of attention that add up to concentration and understanding;

… a realistic framework for understanding student motivation.

And so forth.

Understanding these topics will not “revolutionize education overnight.”

However, teachers who design lessons and plan syllabi with these insights in mind can in fact help their students consolidate ideas more effectively.

In other words: don’t follow Bruce Willis through the park.

Instead, we should learn how learning takes place in the brain. When our teaching is guided by that knowledge, our students have the best long-term chance of getting back on track.