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The Trad/Prog Debate Gets Weird
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Few debates rage hotter in education circles than that between educational progressives and educational traditionalists. (I’m emphasizing “educational” in these phrases, because they don’t necessarily align with political trad/prog divides. This blog doesn’t do politics.)

One recent summary — relying heavily on Dewey — describes the debate this way:

Educational traditionalists “argue that teachers should carefully select and sequence the best knowledge from their subject areas and then deliver it directly to the whole class, while maintaining order.”

A graphic of two heads facing each other in conversation: one with a lightbulb inside, the other with a question mark.

Whereas

Educational progressives “argue that teachers should focus on facilitating individualised learning experiences in which pupils can explore their natural inclinations, thus nurturing their interests and developing general thinking skills.”

Of course, the debate gets MUCH more complicated than these summaries, but it’s handy to have a quick definition. According to this summary article cited above, roughly 2/3 of teachers side with one or the other of these two positions.

But: do we have research favoring one approach or the other?

Problems and Solutions

Because both educational philosophies encompass substantial sets of teaching ideas — everything from pedagogy to curriculum to motivation to metacognition — they resist efforts to evaluate them in their entirety.

We might run a study that shows … say … this “ed prog” unit motivates 6th graders more strongly than the analogous “ed trad” unit. However, such a study doesn’t necessarily mean that the philosophy itself works for all students, all subjects, all cultures, and all definitions of “works.”

So, what to do?

Education scholars Dr. Sam Sims and Dr. John Jerrim have found an ENORMOUS data set from Germany that just might make this possible.

It shows how much academic progress several thousand German students made over several years.

It measures their expressed motivation for studying German and math.

Heck, it even tracks their metacognative facility.

And,

It asks questions about their teachers’ expressed place on the ed prog/ed trad continuum.

It also asks questions about the teachers’ educational practices (PBL, lecture), to see if they align with those expressed beliefs.

WOW.

If we crunch the numbers just right, we should be able to answer several questions:

Do students learn more in one or the other of these approaches?

Does their motivation vary depending on them?

Is one approach or another better for more or less successful students?

So, what do Sims and Jerrim discover when they run their equations?

Not What I Was Expecting

The blog title promises something “weird.” So, here goes…

Because the ed prog/ed trad debate has an ethical valance to it, it often prompts dramatic calls:

“This way is the right way, so our profession really must do it right! After all, anything else is wrong.”

This study — weirdly — comes to an astonishingly bland conclusion.

That is:

Which philosophy helped students learn more?

Honestly, both worked equally well.

But wait: which one helped struggling learners more?

Meh. Both worked equally well.

But surely one fostered student motivation more than the other!

Well, kinda. Educationally traditional teaching practices resulted in slightly higher levels of motivation in German. But, not in math. And, not much even in German.

Um, metacognition?

Again, no big difference — although a slight benefit for team ed trad.

So, this ferocious debate we’ve been having for decades? Maybe we’ve been arguing about the wrong topics…

Trying to Process

Honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my head around this research. (By the way, I heard about it from Peps Mccrea. If you haven’t signed up for his “Research Snacks,” do so NOW. And, you can hear his webinar on motivation March 18th.)

Here’s a random grab-bag of my early thoughts:

First, I don’t doubt that LOTS of people will simply reject these findings. One easy way to do so: they’re published not in a peer reviewed journal, but as a working paper.

Debates about the relative merits of peer review rage in the scholarly community. Readers who typically reject working papers for their lack of formal peer review might simply set this one aside.

Second, if these two approaches basically work equally well, then we shouldn’t focus on choosing one or the other: we should focus on doing both as well as we possibly can.

My own view is that cognitive science will help us do so. For instance: no matter my educational philosophical stance, my students will benefit if I understand how working memory works.

Third, the finding about motivation seems especially surprising — or at least provocative.

Champions of educationally progressive education typically trumpet motivation as one of its obvious benefits. (Hence the contemptuous phrase “drill and kill” to mock direct instruction.)

This research suggests that educationally traditional methods produce slightly higher levels of motivation (in one of the two subjects they measured).

But wait: if students in ed trad classes felt more motivation but didn’t learn more, something very strange is going on.

Perhaps (dare I write it?), motivation doesn’t matter for learning? (How can that possibly be?)

Perhaps (dare I write it?), ed trad methods produce slightly more motivation but slightly less learning — and those two effects balance each other out? (All my ed trad friends just howled in rage.)

Or perhaps there’s some other obvious explanation I’m missing?

Currently, I’m stumped.

Next Steps

Me, I’m going to watch the responses to Sims and Jerrim’s working paper, and see what additional wisdom shakes out.

If you’ve got additional or alternative perspectives, I hope you’ll share them in the comments.

 

CHATTER BY ETHAN KROSS
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

The founder and director of the Emotional and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, Ethan Kross has been a leading voice in a field that is helping us understand the workings of the conscious mind and how understanding its mechanisms can enable us to live happier and more fulfilled lives. While much of our daily life is spent mind wandering and listening to our inner voice, we do not always think about the dynamic ways it is directly linked to our daily experiences. The chatter of our internal voice can seem to be a distracting and destructive cacophony of internal thought. In Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, Kross synthesizes his and others’ research in the field concentrating on this inner voice from a scientific perspective, a book sorely needed to help us understand and take advantage of this all too human condition.

The rich narratives of research, mini-bios, and the wonderings and personal experiences of the author give the reader the sense that they are sitting down and having an intriguing dinner conversation with Kross. We hear about chatter through various anecdotes that we can all relate to and then how individuals overcome the debilitating chatter and move toward a constructive internal discourse. Among these great relatable narratives are a distracted baseball player, a neuroscientist who experienced a stroke losing her inner voice, and an anxious applicant for a job at the NSA among many others. While still theoretically laden and packed tight with empirical research, this book reads much more like a friendly storytelling ­­– always a refreshing approach to science.

This is not just a book explaining what the inner voice is, it is a book about our conversations with ourselves and those around us. How are those conversations affecting that inner voice, and how is our inner voice affecting those conversations? It also demonstrates the intrinsic connectivity between chatter and the environment suggesting ways we can improve our ability to manage chatter by changing our surroundings and some of our basic daily habits. These little nudges to our daily practice are summarized at the end of the book in a set of concrete tools but the real joys of these are in the narrative support the author gives throughout the text.

Beyond the rich, relatable, and entertaining stories, this is also an exceptional example of translational research bringing together neuroscience, psychology, psychobiology, and sociology in a truly interdisciplinary translational endeavor. The artful interweaving of the book’s main ideas across conceptual levels demonstrates the importance of this type of interdisciplinary work.

But this book also hit me in a personal way enriching my own conversations. I could not help but send an uncontrolled stream of texts to friends as I read the book. It captured the essence of many conversations about self-improvement, but it reframes the discussion, grounding it in research but also asking us to consider experimenting in our own lives. It was immediately accessible and curiosity-inducing to family, friends, and colleagues. And there is something authentic for every reader from advice for the psychotherapist to how best to support yourself and your friends. Our internal voice is so visible and yet our ability to reflect on it is limited. Kross gives us some window into those relationships we can improve with ourselves and those around us and it clearly sends the message that chatter is socially embedded and not an individual endeavor.

This short book could easily be read in an afternoon of cerebral escapism tickling your curiosity about your own mind and filling your stores of knowledge with fun and personal narratives easily shared with friends. But it’s a must-read for anyone listening to their inner crickets.

The Hidden Lives of Learners
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Many times over the last several years, I’ve heard enthusiastic reviews of a seemingly-magical book called The Hidden Lives of Learners, by Graham Nuthall.

Book Cover for The Hidden Lives of Learners by Graham Nuthall. The cover shows a mountain range in front of a blue and cloudy sky.

Here’s the magic: Nuthall’s frankly astonishing research method.

Working in New Zealand classrooms in the 1980s, he put mics on all students and teachers. And, he had cameras in the classroom.

He and his team also broke down the teachers’ unit plans into granular learning goals. For instance, a unit on Antarctica might have 80 specific facts or concepts that the students should learn.

Finally, Nuthall’s team tested students both before and after these units.

Given this quite extraordinary data set, Team Nuthall could look at remarkably specific questions:

How much information about each topic did students already know before the unit began?

How much did they learn?

What, very specifically, did each student do and say to learn each specific new concept?

You can see why readers have responded so strongly to Nuthall’s method.

So, based on all his data, what did Nuthall conclude?

The Magic Number

Regular blog readers already know about the Spacing Effect.

That is: students learn more when they spread practice out than when they do the same amount of practice all at once.

In my experience, this research finding started getting broader notice in … say … 2015 or so. (I completed my grad program in 2012, and I don’t remember the spacing effect getting much — or any — attention at that time.)

Well, Nuthall’s research led him to a very similar conclusion more than a decade before.

That is: in Hidden Lives, Nuthall writes…

We discovered that a student needed to encounter, on at least three different occasions, the complete set of the information she or he neede to understand a concept.

If the information was incomplete, or not experienced on three different occasions, the student did not learn the concept. (63)

Similar to research into the spacing effect, Nuthall’s research shows that students must devote brain space to an idea several times — spread out over more than one class meeting — to consolidate that idea in long-term memory.

Later in Hidden Lives (p. 126), Nuthall suggests that students should “encounter the complete set of information” on four occassions — not three.

For me, the precise number (is it 4? is it 3?) is less important than the broader concept: teachers should build curricula that ensure students delve into an idea several times. One or two encounters can’t create enough momentum to change memory systems.

I think that Nuthall’s method provides substantial support for translating the spacing effect research into classroom practice. Both psychology research AND Nuthall’s deep classroom investigation arrive independently at substantially similar ideas.

Changing the Focus

Most research in this field focuses on what teachers do. Nuthall — wisely — insists that we focus on what students do.

His methodology — all those microphones, all those transcripts — helps him recognize all those “encounters” with ideas. And, crucially, students often “encounter” ideas in their conversations and projects with other students.

This observation leads to several important insights.

First, students often have prior knowledge about a topic.

When that prior knowledge is incorrect, it BOTH hinders their understanding of new ideas AND hampers their classmates’ efforts to learn correct ideas.

For this reason — I’m extrapolating from Nuthall here — teachers really should focus on students’ prior misconceptions.

Unless we know what our students (wrongly) think they know, their misinformation will substantially muddle the learning process.

Second, building classroom culture matters.

This seemingly obvious statement comes from one of Nuthall’s most alarming findings (well: alarming to me).

The students in these classes were AMAZINGLY unkind to one another. Casual insults — even racial epithets — made up a regular part of classroom dialogue.

Nuthall proposes two solutions to this problem.

Option A: “Teachers therefore need to know who is in which friendship groups, who wants to be liked by whom, who has status, who is rejected.

They also need to know the kinds of beliefs and culture — about music, clothes, curriculum, learning, co-operating, and the like — that hold students’ relationships together.” (p. 37)

While I understand the logic behind this statement, it strikes me as frankly impossible. As I think over my various sophomore and senior English classes, it’s simply inconceivable to me that I would know — with any level of consistent detail — what the exact relationships are among all these people.

I might have a dim idea that this student is especially popular, or that those two are dating, or that some song or another has everyone’s attention. But for that knowledge to be broad and current: no way.

In fact, I think it would be inappropriate for me to know such things. Inquiring too closely into students’ personal and romantic lives does not strike me as healthy or appropriate.

A Better Way?

Happily, Nuthall proposes Option B:

“Some teachers have tried to deal with this problem [peer-to-peer unkindness] by creating an alternative culture within their classrooms — a culture of mutual respect and cooperation, a culture in which everyone is expected to succeed in some significant aspect of classroom activities.” (p. 37)

Now, this approach seems healthy, appropriate, and necessary.

Yes, I want my students to learn about Macbeth and topic sentences, but I also insist that they know how to treat one another well.

Nuthall’s findings about casual peer cruelty has reminded me how much happens in my classroom that I can’t see (“hidden lives of learners”), and how important it is that I solve those invisible problems.

The Very Big Picture

One final point stood out for me in Nuthall’s book, although my interpretation of it might not persuade you. Here’s the story…

Because Nuthall measured how much students already knew, and what they did to learn new information, he could track important patterns. One pattern went like this:

Students who didn’t know much about the topic learned most from the teacher.

Students who already knew a lot learned most by working on their own, or with peers. (pp. 86-7)

I think this finding might help us see past a controvesial binary in the field of education.

Current schooling debates have encouraged us to pick sides. Either we believe in direct instruction, or we believe in project pedagogies. (This sentence oversimplifies a very complex debate, but is a useful shorthand at this moment.)

Nuthall’s findings (and my own reading of schema theory) suggest an alternative viewpoint. Perhaps

Students who don’t know much about a topic (a.k.a. “novices”) learn most from the teacher (a.k.a. “direct instruction”), whereas

Students who already know a lot (a.k.a. “relative experts”) learn most by working on their own, or with peers (a.k.a. “project pedagogies”).

That is: before we say whether direct instruction or independent investigation is better for a student, we have to know where the student lies on the novice/expert continuum.

Novices need lots of guidance; relative experts benefit from more open-ended, self-driven exploration.

To be clear: I’ve been quietly advocating for this view for a few years now. It seems to me — although I could be wrong — that Nuthall’s data roughly support it.

Read This Book If…

…You’re intrigued by the possibility of extremely granular classroom research, focusing directly on the students’ experience,

…you want to see how the spacing effect plays out in the classroom,

…perhaps you want to know more about how students actually treat each other in day-to-day interactions.

…you want to hear an inventive and thoughtful researcher think aloud about his findings.

I don’t agree with everything that Nuthall has written. For instance, his account of working memory is not at all in line with current models of this cognitive function.

But, gosh: he and his book have given me lots to think about, and new ways to think about old ideas.

To 600, and Beyond…
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Photograph of the author, wearing a blue shirt, pink tie, and glasses, smiling at the cameraWordPress informs me that this is the 601st article I’ve posted on this blog. That’s a few hundred thousand words since 2015 or so.

I’ve been honored over the years to meet so many of you who read this blog, and who think aloud with me about its topics. (If you see me at a Learning and the Brain conference, I hope you’ll introduce yourself!)

And, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunities I’ve had to chat with researchers and other scholars as I try to understand their arguments.

As I look back over these years, some emerging themes stand out to me:

A Man, a Plan

When I attended my first Learning and the Brain conference in 2008, I knew what was going to happen:

Step 1: the “brain researchers” would tell me what to do.

Step 2: I would do it.

I would, thus, be practicing “brain-based teaching.” My students would learn SO MUCH MORE than they had in the past.

How hard could it be to follow researchers’ instructions? It turns out: it’s extremely hard simply to “follow researchers’ instructions.”

In the years since that conference, I’ve realized — over and over — how little I knew about what I didn’t know.

Surprise #1: One Size Does Not Fit

The first problem with my 2-step plan: I almost certainly SHOULDN’T DO what the researchers did.

Why?

Let’s say researchers studying the spacing effect asked college students to study three math topics.

Those students did five practice problems once a week for five weeks.

Voila: those students learned more than students who just did all 25 problems at once.

So, I should have my students do five practice problems once a week for five weeks, right?

Hmmm.

I’m a high school teacher. I teach English. I might not teach only three topics at a time. I might have more than 25 practice problems.

So, I can’t simply use the researchers’ formula for my own teaching plan.

Instead of doing what the researchers did, I should think the way the researchers thought.

The researchers’ successes resulted — in part — from the goodness of fit between their method, their students, and their topic.

To get those same successes in my classroom, I have to adapt their ideas to my particular context.

And: all teachers have to do exactly that kind of adapting.

In Step 2 above, I can’t just do what the researchers did. I always have to tailor their work to my teaching world.

Surprise #2: People Are COMPLICATED

Back in 2008, I assumed that “brain-research” would consistently show the same correct answers.

If I knew a correct answer, I could simply do the correct thing.

Alas, it turns out that research studies doesn’t always arrive at the same answer — because PEOPLE ARE COMPLICATED.

So: is focusing on Growth Mindset a good idea?

Although Mindset Theory has been VERY popular, it also generates lots of controversy.

Should schools require mindful meditation?

Ditto.

How much classroom decoration is too much?

If you look at the comments on this post, you’ll see that many teachers REALLY don’t like research-based answers to that question.

In other words, I can’t just “do what the research tells me to do,” because research itself comes up with contradictory (and unpopular) answers.

Surprise Research #3: “Brain Research” Isn’t (Exactly) One Thing

Throughout this post, I’ve been putting the words “brain research” in quotation marks.

Why?

Well, I was surprised to discover that researchers study the “brain” in at least two different ways.

If you really like biology, and want to study the “brain” as a physical object, you’ll go into a field called “neuroscience.”

You’ll look at neurons and neurotransmitters and glial cells and fMRI and EEF and myelination and the nucleus accumbens.

You’ll look at cells under microscopes, and prod them with pointy things while wearing gloves.

BUT

If you really like thoughts and emotions, and want to study the “brain” according to its mental processes, you’ll go into a field called “psychology.”

You’ll look at attention and memory and stress and learning and perception.

Notice: psychologists don’t look at attention under a (literal) microscope. They can’t pick up “stress” the way they can pick up a brain or an amygdala. They don’t need to wear gloves. Nothing damply biological is happening.

Yes, these days these neuroscience and psychology are blurring together. We have people interested in “neuro-psychology”: the biological underpinnings of all those mental processes — memory, curiosity, generosity.

But that blurring is very recent — a couple of decades at most.

And most people in those fields don’t blur. They stick to one team or the other. (For most of the 20th century, these two fields eyed each other with disapproval and suspicion.)

Surprise #4: Psychology First

I don’t like the sentences I’m about to type, but I do think they’re true.

Back in 2008, when I first got into this field, I was REALLY interested in the neuroscience

The very first question I asked at a Learning and the Brain conference was “where does attention happen in the brain?”

But, the more time I spend in this field, the more I think that teachers need information from psychology more than from neuroscience.

Yes, the neuro is fascinating. But, it almost never helps me teach better.

For instance:

I don’t need to know where long-term memories are stored in the physical brain. (That’s a question that neuroscientists try to answer.)

I do need to know what teaching strategies help students form new long-term memories. (That’s a question that psychologists try to answer.)

I focus on this topic — the relative importance of psychology for teachers — because so many people use neuroscience to boss teachers around.

Heck, I recently wrote a post about the bizarre claim that “neurotransmitters are happiness chemicals“: a claim that uses neuroscience to tell teachers what to do.

I myself think that anyone who wants to tell teachers “do this new thing!” should have tested that new thing directly with students. We call that research “psychology.”

TL;DR

Here’s what I would tell my 2008 self:

“This field you’re entering will help you and your students SO MUCH!

And, you should know:

You’ll always be translating research findings to your own classroom.

Because researchers and teachers disagree, you’ll always sort through controversy before you know what to do.

Neuroscience research is fascinating (fMRI is SO COOL), but psychology research will provide specific and practical suggestions to improve your teaching and help your students learn.”

I hope this blog has helped make some of those ideas clear and interesting over the years. And: I’m looking forward to exploring them with you even more…

My Detective Adventure: “VR Will Transform Education”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

A friend recently sent me a link to an article with a click-baity headline: something like “Virtual Reality Will Change Education Forever.”

Man wearing Virtual Reality goggles, making gestures in the air

Her pithy comment: “This is obviously nonsense.” (It’s possible she used a spicier word that ‘nonsense.’)

On the one hand, I’m skeptical that ANYTHING will change education forever. Heck, if Covid didn’t transform education, who knows what will.

More specifically, ed-tech claims about “transforming education” have been around for a long time. Their track record doesn’t dazzle. (Smart boards, anyone?)

On the other hand, I always like to find reserch that challenges my long-held beliefs. After all, if I can’t learn from people who disagree with me, who can I learn from?

So, I followed my usual process.

In essence, I switched into Detective Mode, and started asking lots of questions.

If I ask the right questions, I thought, I’ll get a much clearer picture of potential educational benefits of VR.

Act I: The Investigation Begins

When I reviewed the article my friend sent, I noticed a troubling gap: the article didn’t link to underlying research.

As I’ve written in the past, this absence creates a red flag. If the article champions “research-based innovation,” why not link to the research?

So, I asked my first detective question. I emailed the author of the article and asked to see the research.

How simple is that?

Obviously, any resistance to this request — “sorry, we can’t share that at this moment” — would underline my friend’s skeptical verdict: “nonsense.”

However, the author responded immediately with a link to a research summary.

A promising development…

The Plot Thickens

This research summary showed real promise.

In brief:

Some college students in an introductory Biology course followed the typical path — readings, lectures, labs. (That’s the “control group.”)

Other students in the same course followed an alternative path: readings, lectures, supplementary Virtual Reality experience, alternative labs based on the VR experience.

When researchers looked at all sorts of results, they found that students on the alternative VR path did better.

That is: not only did the students enjoy the VR experiences; not only did they engage more with the material; they (on average) learned more.

However — and this is a BIG however — this research didn’t look like it was published.

In fact, when I asked that direct question, the article author confirmed that the research hadn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Now, the topic of peer review creates LOTS of controversy. The peer-review system has MANY troubling flaws.

However, that system probably reduces the amount of deceptive nonsense that gets published.

I almost never blog about research that hasn’t been peer reviewed, and so I thought my detecting was at its logical end. The VR claim might not be ‘nonsense,’ but it didn’t yet have enough published evidence to strengthen it.

And then, an AMAZING thing happened: the lead researcher emailed me to say she would be happy to talk with me about the study.

Over the years, I have occasionally reached out to researchers to be sure I understand their arguments.

But no researcher has EVER straight-up volunteered for such a meeting. And I mean: EVER.

The Payoff

Honestly, I’d love to transcribe my conversation with Dr. Annie Hale and Lisa Fletcher (“Chief of Realm 4”) — both at Arizona State University because it was both fascinating and inspiring.

Because you’re busy, I will instead boil it into three key points:

First:

Hale and Fletcher have done — and continue to do — incredibly scrupulous research.

For instance, in the description above, I put the words “control group” in quotations marks.

I did so because of Hale and Fletcher’s insistance. The two groups of Biology students had somewhat similar academic experiences.

But the research paradigm required enough differences to make the words “control group” technically inappropriate.

Hale and Fletcher insisted on this precision throughout our discussion. For instance, they regularly pointed out that a particular calculation suggested a positive result, but didn’t reache statistical significance.

In other words, they highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of their own argument.

This habit, it my view, makes them MUCH more reliable guides in this field.

Second:

Here’s a shocker: Hale and Fletcher do not claim that virtual reality will transform education.

No, really, they don’t.

The headline of the article my friend sent me made that claim, but the researchers themselves don’t.

Instead, they make a very different claim. The alternative Biology path included at least three big changes from the typical path:

Change #1: students had the VR experience (and their lab was based on that experience)

Change #2: the key underlying biology concepts had been translated into stories. For instance, this “narratively-driven virtual reality” includes an imaginary species called the Astelar. (Some of the students got QUITE protective of these imaginary creatures.)

Change #3: the TAs in these alternative path classes got special training, inspired by Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.

We can’t know — and, Hale and Fletcher don’t say they know — which of these three parts made the biggest difference.

We can tentatively suspect that these three elements working together produced all those learning benefits. And, Hale and Fletcher are planning lots of further research to confirm this tentative belief.

But, they’re not trying to get VR goggles on every forehead.

Key Point #3

Here’s one of my mantras:

Researchers isolate variables. Teachers combine variables.

In other words: research — as much as possible — looks at the effect of just one thing.

For instance: “mid-lecture aerobic movement improves learning in college students.”

However, teachers juggle hundreds of variables at every second. All those isolated variables studied by researchers might not provide me with useful guidance.

For instance: if I teach in a business school, my formally-dressed students might not appreciate my insistance that they do jumping jacks in the middle of the lecture hall.

My particular combination of variables doesn’t helpfully align with that isolated exercise variable.

Here’s my point: Hale and Fletcher seem to be changing the research half of this paradigm.

In their research, notice that they aren’t isolating variables. They are, instead, looking at combinations of variables.

VR + stories + Lemov training –> more learning

In fact, if I understand their argument right, they don’t really think that isolating variables can produce the most useful results — at least not in education research.

After all (and here I’m adding my own perspective), if teachers combine variables, shouldn’t research also look at combinations?

An Early Verdict

I set out on this detective adventure feeling quite skeptical. Both the initial claim (“transform education!”) and the absence of links made me all-but-certain that the strong claim would implode. (Example here.)

However, by persistently asking reasonable detective questions, I’ve arrived at a very different place:

VR + [concepts as stories] + [Lemov-inspired TA training] just might produce big learning gains, at least for some students.

And — crucially — a thoughtful, precise, imaginative, and cautious group of scholars is exploring this possibility in detail.

As I said back at the beginning, I’ve always got something to learn.


This post was edited on April 7, 2023 to correct Lisa Fletcher’s title.

How Teachers Can Use Neuroscience in Education
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

I recently saw two very different looks at neuroscience and learning, and I thought they made a useful pairing for this blog. Here goes…

 

Regular readers know that I’ve recently been exploring research into movement and learning. That is: does walking around – especially outside – help us think, learn, attend, and create?

An image of a brain in a human head, with EEG waves in the background

Because I really want the answer to be “yes,” I force myself to be extra skeptical when I look at the research. And even with all that extra skepticism, the answer is – for the most part – YES!

How do we know?

Well, various researchers have people walk around – or sit still – and then do various mental tasks. Often (although not always), they do better after walking than after sitting.

BOOM.

But wait! Wouldn’t it be great to have more evidence than walkers’ “performance on mental tasks”? Wouldn’t it be great to know what’s going on in their brains?

Beyond “Mental Tasks”

I recently read a Twitter post about this study:

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had several 9 and 10-year-olds take various tests in reading comprehension, spelling, and math.

Researchers also had these students take tests on “attentional control” — which means, more or less, what it sounds like.

Students took these various tests once after sitting still for 20 minutes, and another time after walking at a moderate pace for 20 minutes.

Sure enough, these young students controlled their attention more effectively after walking than after sitting. And, they did better on the reading comprehension test after walking than after sitting.

Now: here’s the brain part.

Researchers also hooked students up to an electroencephalography (EEG) array while they took those tests.

EEG measures electrical activity on the outer-most layer of the brain, so – VERY roughly – it shows how various brain surfaces are acting at particular moments in time.

Here’s where things get very technical. (Neuroscience is ALWAYS very technical.)

EEGs produce up-and-down squiggles; they look a bit like lie detector tests in the movies.

Research with adults has consistently shown that exercise produces a change at the third squiggle in various brain regions. Because that squiggle (sort of) goes up, it’s called the “third positivity,” or P3.

This P3 (third positive squiggle) correlates with better attentional control in adults. Researchers hypothesized that they would get the same result with these young children.

Results, Please

Here’s the big neuroscience news – researchers DID get the same results for children as addults

Changes in P3, induced by walking, took place when the students did better at attentional control.

So, why does this research finding matter?

If students’ minds behave differently after walking – they perform better at attentional control – we would expect that their brains behave differently.

Now we know: they do!

In the field, we call this pattern “converging evidence.” Two very different kinds of research — psychology AND neuroscience — support the same conclusion.

Now we can be even more confident that walking benefits cognition – even though, as you remember, I’m trying to be extra skeptical.

So, here we have the FIRST way that teachers can use neuroscience to support their teaching:

After psychology research suggests that a teaching suggestion might be beneficial, neuroscience can provide converging evidence to make this idea even more persuasive.

FANTASTIC. (By the way: I’ll come back to this study about walking and attentional control at the end of this blog post.)

The Matrix Could Be Real?

I said that I’d seen two articles about neuroscience worth sharing. The first – as you’ve seen – is very specific and researchy.

The second article – pointed out to me by my friend Rob McEntarffer — spends time speculating, musing, and wondering.

 

Crudely speaking, this article wonders if something Matrix-like could happen. Could Laurence Fishburne ever download kung fu into Keanu Reeves?

The article, in WIRED Magazine, opens with a fascinating scene. Doctors have implanted electrodes in a patient’s fusiform face area – the FFA. (Most neuroscientists think that the FFA helps the brain identify and recognize human faces.)

When the researchers stimulate the FFA, this patient – very briefly – sees human features on a blank box: an ear, a sideways smile, an eye.

In other words, electrical current applied to the brain surface created bits of a face. THE MATRIX EXISTS.

Wait. [Sound of record scratch.] Nope. No it doesn’t.

This article does a great job pointing out all the extraordinary complexities going from this tiny baby step to actually “implanting learning in the brain.”

As in, we are nowhere near being able to do anything remotely like that.

Glitches in the Matrix

The idea itself seems plausible. As Adam Rogers writes:

The brain is salty glop that turns sensory information into mind; you ought to be able to harness that ability, to build an entire world in there.

However, all sorts of problems get in the way.

At a very basic level, there are just too many neurons for us to be able to control precisely — something like 50,000 to 100,00 in an area the size of a grain of rice.

To make anything like perception happen, we’d have to get thousands of those stimuli just right. (Imagine how complex LEARNING would be.)

The proto-matrix also faces a timing problem:

Perception and cognition are like a piano sonata: the notes must sound in a particular order for the harmonies to work.

Get that timing wrong and adjacent electrical pings don’t look like shapes — they look like one big smear, or like nothing at all.

Finally — and this point especially merits attention:

The signals you see when a brain is doing brain things aren’t actually thought; they’re the exhaust the brain emits while its thinking.

In other words: all those cool brain images can’t necessarily be reverse engineered. We can measure electrical activity when a brain does something — but artifically recreating such electrical activity won’t guarantee the same underlying thought process.

So, here’s the SECOND way to use neuroscience in teaching:

When teachers understand how fantastically complicated neuroscience — and the underlying neurobiology of thought and learning — truly are, we can see through hype and extravagant claims often made about this field.

Rogers’s article does a GREAT job highlighting that complexity.

An Example

I promised to return to that study about walking and attention, so here goes:

I do think that this study offers some converging neuroscientific evidence that movement prior to learning enhances attentional control.

However, twitter post citing this study implied it reaches a different conclusion: movement during learning is good for attention, creativity, etc.

That is: it claimed that teachers should design lessons that get students up and moving, and that this research requires this conclusion.

In particular, it highlights this image to show changes in brain activity between walking and sitting.

Rogers’s article in WIRED encourages us to think about all the neural complexity underlying this blithe suggestion.

After all, that image is simply a representation of a few dozen P3 graphs:

Many graphs showing electroencephalography results at the 3rd positivity.

Unless we have a clear idea what those squiggles mean, we shouldn’t be too confident about that image showing “changes in brain activity.”

And, by the way, people are often much too confident in interpreting such images. As in: it happens EVERY DAY.

To be clear: I think some movement during class often makes sense — although, as always, the students’ age and the school’s culture will influence this decision.

And this neuroscience research does provide “converging evidence” that movement built into the school day is a good idea.

But it certainly doesn’t require teachers to have students walking from place to place during lessons; that’s not what the any of these researchers measured, and it’s not what they claim.

TL;DR

Neuroscience research focusing on the brain can benefit teachers by supporting — or contradicting — psychology research focusing on the mind.

If both kinds of research point the same direction, we can be especially confident that a teaching suggestion makes sense.

And a deep understanding of the complexity of neuroscience (a la Rogers’s WIRED article) can help us resist overconfident advice that seems to have (but really does not have) neuroscientific backing.


Hillman, C. H., Pontifex, M. B., Raine, L. B., Castelli, D. M., Hall, E. E., & Kramer, A. (2009). The effect of acute treadmill walking on cognitive control and academic achievement in preadolescent children. Neuroscience159(3), 1044-1054.