Andrew Watson – Page 12 – Education & Teacher Conferences

About Andrew Watson

Andrew began his classroom life as a high-school English teacher in 1988, and has been working in or near schools ever since. In 2008, Andrew began exploring the practical application of psychology and neuroscience in his classroom. In 2011, he earned his M. Ed. from the “Mind, Brain, Education” program at Harvard University. As President of “Translate the Brain,” Andrew now works with teachers, students, administrators, and parents to make learning easier and teaching more effective. He has presented at schools and workshops across the country; he also serves as an adviser to several organizations, including “The People’s Science.” Andrew is the author of "Learning Begins: The Science of Working Memory and Attention for the Classroom Teacher."

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Starting Class with “Prequestions”: Benefits, Problems, Solutions

Andrew Watson

February-05-2023

Starting Class with “Prequestions”: Benefits, Problems, Solutions

We’ve known for many years now that retrieval practice works.

That is: after we have introduced students to a topic, we might REVIEW it with them the next day. However, they’ll remember it better if we ask them to try to RETRIEVE ideas and procedures about it.

As Dr. Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain write, we want students to “pull information out of their brains” (retrieve) not “put information back into their brains” (review).

Sadly, we know that students’ intuition contradicts this guidance. They really want to reread or review their notes, rather than ask themselves questions.

In this (very sad) study, for instance, Dr. Nate Kornell and Dr. Lisa Son found that students think review works better than retrieval even when they do better on quizzes following retrieval!

Yes, even the experience of learning more doesn’t persuade students that they learned more.

YIKES.

The More Things Change…

Let’s take this retrieval practice idea one step further.

I wrote above that answering questions helps students learn AFTER they have been introduced to a topic.

But: does answering questions help students learn a topic even BEFORE they study it?

On the one hand, this suggestion sounds very strange. Students can’t get these “prequestions” right, because they haven’t yet studied the topic.

On the other hand, we’ve got research showing that this strategy works!

In one of my favorite studies ever, Dr. Lindsay Richland found that “prequestions” help students learn. And, she then worked really hard to disprove her own findings. When she couldn’t explain away her conclusions, she finally accepted them. *

Similarly, a more recent study suggests that learning objectives framed as questions (“Where are mirror neurons located?”) helps students learn more than LOs framed as statements (“You will learn where mirror neurons are located.”).

Although this prequestion strategy hasn’t been studied as much as retrieval practice, I do think it has enough research behind it to merit teachers’ respectful attention.

However, I do think this approach has a practical classroom problem…

Sustaining Motivation

For the most part, my high-school students are an amiable lot. If I ask them to do something … say, answer retrieval practice questions … they’ll give it a go.

And, they almost certainly want to get those questions right.

In a class discussion about Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance, we might compare Janie’s three “husbands.” If I ask a student the following day to list some points of comparison from memory (retrieval practice!), they’ll feel that they ought to remember an answer or two.

Let’s try this logic with prequestioning.

Imagine I ask my students this prequestion: “Why do you think the novel’s protagonist will have the nickname ‘Alphabet’?”

My students will gamely try some answers.

However, I worry that – over time – they’ll start losing interest.

They almost never get these answers right.

And, there’s no “penalty” for getting them wrong, or reward for getting them right. (We don’t want students to focus on rewards and penalties, but schools typically work this way…)

From the student perspective, in other words, the whole prequestion strategy feels like an exercise in futility.

Why should they bother to think seriously about these un-answerable questions? They feel like wasted mental effort…

Two Solutions

First: I’ve tried in the past to solve this problem by using the strategy infrequently.

If my students don’t experience this quirky frustration too often, I hope, they won’t mind participating in this odd ritual.

Recent research, however, offers a second solution – a more honorable solution than mine.

In this study, by Dr. Steven Pan and Dr. Michelle Rivers, prequestions consistently helped students learn.

However, students didn’t really notice the benefit of prequestions – even when they learned more from answering them. (This result sounds a lot like the Kornell and Son study about retrieval practice; students don’t register the benefits they experience.)

So, Pan and Rivers tried several solutions. Specifically, they found benefits to a multi-step approach:

Step 1: have students learn some info with prequestions, and some without.

Step 2: give them a no-stakes quiz on the info.

Step 3: let them see that they remembered information better after prequestions.

Step 4: next time, ask students to recall how well they remembered after answering prequestions.

In other words: students need to experience the benefits and to have them repeatedly pointed out. This combination, probably, helps students believe that prequestions really do help.

This insight (probably?) helps with the motivation problem that has been troubling me in the past.

In other words: students who believe that prequestions will help are much likelier to participate in the curious mental exercise of trying to answer questions whose answer they can’t yet know.

TL;DR

When students answer questions about information they’re about to learn, they remember that information better – even if they get the answers wrong.

This strategy might be effective in the short term, but hamper motivation over time. After all, why should students even try to answer questions if they’re unlikely to know the answer?

To counteract this motivational problem, take students through Pan & Rivers’s procedure for them to experience and remember the benefits that prequestions provide.

We don’t have LOTS of research on this strategy, but we do have enough to make it a plausible approach.

* Sadly, the “prequestion” strategy has frequently been called “pretesting.” Of course, the presence of the stem “test” both confuses the strategy (there’s no testing!) and disinclines people from participating (who wants more testing?).

So, let me emphasize: “prequestions” are simply questions. They’re not a test.

BTW: I’ve recently seen the word “pretrieval” as a way to avoid the “pretest” moniker. You might like it better than “prequestions.”

Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019). Powerful teaching: Unleash the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Kornell, N., & Son, L. K. (2009). Learners’ choices and beliefs about self-testing. Memory, 17(5), 493-501.

Pan, S. C., & Rivers, M. L. (2023). Metacognitive awareness of the pretesting effect improves with self-regulation support. Memory & Cognition, 1-20.

Richland, L. E., Kornell, N., & Kao, L. S. (2009). The pretesting effect: Do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 243.

Sana, F., Forrin, N. D., Sharma, M., Dubljevic, T., Ho, P., Jalil, E., & Kim, J. A. (2020). Optimizing the efficacy of learning objectives through pretests. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 19(3), ar43.

Andrew Watson

January-30-2023

The Trad/Prog Debate Gets Weird

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.”

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.

Andrew Watson

January-23-2023

The Hidden Lives of Learners

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.

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.

Andrew Watson

January-17-2023

To 600, and Beyond…

WordPress 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

January-08-2023

My Detective Adventure: “VR Will Transform Education”

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

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

January-02-2023

How Teachers Can Use Neuroscience in Education

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?

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:

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. Neuroscience, 159(3), 1044-1054.

Andrew Watson

December-27-2022

Warning: Misguided Neuroscience Ahead

I recently ran across a version* of this chart:

As you can see, this chart lists several neurotransmitters and makes recommendations based on their purported roles.

If you want to feel love, you should increase oxytocin. To do so, play with your dog.

If you want to feel more stable, you should boost serotonin. To do so, meditate, or go for a run.

And so forth.

On the one hand, this chart seems harmless enough. It recommends that we do quite sensible things — who can argue against “self-care,” or “hugging your children”? — and so can hardly provoke much controversy.

I, however, see at least two reasons to warn against it.

Willingham’s Razor

Most everyone has read Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? (If you haven’t: RUN, don’t walk, to do so.)

Professor Willingham has also written a less well known book called When Can You Trust the Experts?, which offers lots of wise advice on seeing though bad “expert” advice.

One strategy he recommends:

Reread the “brain-based” teaching advice, and mentally subtract all the brainy words. If the advice makes good sense without them, why were they there in the first place? **

In the lists above, do we really need the names of the neurotransmitters for that advice to make sense?

To feel a sense of accomplishment, accomplish something.

If you want to feel better, eat chocolate.

To calm down, walk (or run) outdoors.

Who could object to these suggestions? Do we need multi-syllable words to embrace them?

I worry, in fact, that such charts create bad mental habits for teachers. Those habits sound like this:

If someone knows complicated neuro-terminology, then their teaching advice must be accurate. When a blogger uses the phrases “corpus callosum” and “research says,” therefore, I have to take their teaching advice.

No, you really DON’T have to take their advice. LOTS of people use the language of neuroscience to make their suggestions sounds more authoritative.

As I’ve written elsewhere, neuroscience rarely produces classroom-ready teaching advice.

PSYCHOLOGY gives teachers great ideas about memory and attention and learning and motivation.

A biological understanding of what’s happening during those mental functions (i.e., neuroscience) is fascinating, but doesn’t tell teachers what to do.

In brief: beware people who use neuro-lingo to advise you on practical, day-to-day stuff. Like, say, that chart about “happiness chemicals.”

When Simplification Leads to Oversimplification

My first concern: the chart misleadingly implies that neuroscientific terminology makes advice better.

My second concern: the chart wildly oversimplifies fantastically complicated brain realities.

For instance, this chart — like everything else on the interwebs — calls oxytocin “the love hormone.”

However, that moniker doesn’t remotely capture its complexity. As best I understand it (and my understanding is very tentative), oxytocin makes social interactions more intense — in both positive AND NEGATIVE directions.

So: when we add oxytocin, love burns brighter, hatred smoulders hotter, jealously rages more greenly.

To call it the “love hormone” is like saying “the weather is good.” Well, the weather can be good — but there are SO MANY OTHER OPTIONS.

The statement isn’t exactly wrong. But its limited representation of the truth makes it a particular kind of wrong.

So too the idea that dopamine is a “reward chemical.” Like oxytocin’s function, dopamine’s function includes such intricate nuance as to be difficult to describe in paragraphs — much less a handy catchphrase. ***

By the way: the most comprehensive and useful description of neurotransmitters I know comes in Robert Sapolsky’s book Behave. As you’ll see, they’re REALLY complicated. (You can meet professor Sapolsky at our conference in February.)

TL;DR

Yes, walking outside and hugging children and exercising are all good ideas for mental health.

No, we don’t need the names of neurotransmitters to make that advice persuasive.

We might worry about taking advice from people who imply that neuro-lingo does make it more persuasive.

And we can be confident that neurotransmitters are much, MUCH more complicated than such simplistic advice implies.

* I’ve made my own modified version of this chart. The point of this blog post is not to criticize the individuals who created the original, but to warn against the kind of thinking that produced it. “Name and shame” isn’t how we roll.

** I’m paraphrasing from memory. I’m on vacation, and the book is snug at home.

*** [Update on 12/30/22] I’ve just come across this study, which explores some of the contradictions and nuances in the function of serotonin as well.

The Limitations of Retrieval Practice (Yes, You Read That Right)

Andrew Watson

December-18-2022

The Limitations of Retrieval Practice (Yes, You Read That Right)

Last week, I wrote that “upsides always have downsides.”

That is: anything that teachers do to foster learning (in this way) might also hamper learning (in that way).

We should always be looking for side effects.

So, let me take a dose of my own medicine.

Are there teaching suggestions that I champion that have both upsides and conspicuous downsides?

Case in Point: Retrieval Practice

This blog has long advocated for retrieval practice.

We have lots (and LOTS) of research showing that students learn more when they study by “taking information out of their brains” than “putting information back into their brains.” (This phrasing comes from Agarwal and Bain.)

So:

Students shouldn’t study vocabulary lists; they should make flash cards.

They shouldn’t review notes; insted, they should quiz one another on their notes.

Don’t reread the book; try to outline its key concepts from memory.

In each of these cases (and hundred more), learners start by rummaging around in their memory banks to see if they can remember. All that extra mental work results in more learning.

SO MUCH UPSIDE.

But wait: are there any downsides?

Let the Buyer Beware: Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

Sure enough, some researchers have focused on “retrieval-induced forgetting.”

Yup. That means remembering can cause forgetting.

How on earth can that be? Here’s the story…

Step 1: Let’s say I learn the definitions of ten words.

Step 2: I use retrieval practice to study the definitions of five of them. So, I remembered five words.

Step 3: Good news! Retrieval practice means I’ll remember the five words that I practiced better.

Step 4: Bad news! Retrieval-induced forgetting means I’ll remember the five words I didn’t practice worse. Yes: worse than if I hadn’t practiced those other five words.

In brief: when I remember part of a topic, I’m likelier to FORGET the part I didn’t practice. (Although, of course, I’m likelier to REMEMBER the part I did practice.)

So, retrieving induces forgetting. Now that’s what I call a downside.

Potential solution?

How do our students get the good stuff (memories enhanced by retrieval practice) without the bad stuff (other memories inhibited by retrieval practice)?

Here’s an obvious solution: tell our students about retrieval-induced forgetting.

Heck, let’s go one step further: tell them about it, and encourage them to resist its effects.

One research group — led by Dr. Jodi Price — tried just this strategy.

The research design here gets quite complicated, but the headline is:

They ran the same “retrieval-induced forgetting” study that others had run, and this time added a brief description of the problem.

In some cases, they added encouragement on how to overcome this effect.

So, what happened when they warned students?

Nothing. Students kept right on forgetting the un-practiced information (although they kept right on remembering the practiced information).

In brief: warnings about retrieval-induced forgetting just didn’t help. (Heck: in some cases, they seemed to promote even more forgetting.)

Alternative Solutions?

Much of the time, we benefit our students by telling them about reserach in cognitive science.

I routinely tell my high-school students about retrieval practice. I show them exactly the same studies and graphs that I show teachers in my consulting work.

In this case, however, it seems that sharing the research doesn’t help. Telling students about retrieval-induced forgetting didn’t stop retrieval induced forgetting.

Conclusion: it’s up to teachers to manage this side effect.

How? We should require retrieval of all essential elements.

For example:

When I teach my students about comedy and tragey, the definitions of those terms include lots of moving pieces.

I know that ALL THE PIECES are equally important. So I need to ensure that my retrieval practice exercises include ALL THE PARTS of those definitions.

Students don’t need to remember everything I say. But if I want them to remember, I need to ensure retrieval practice happens.

Each of us will devise different strategies to accomplish this goal. But to get the upside (from retrieval practice) we should mitigate the downside (from retrieval-induced forgetting).

TL;DR

Retrieval practice is great, but it might cause students to forget the parts they don’t retrieve.

Alas, we can’t solve this problem simply by warning our students.

So, we should structure our review sessions so that students do in fact retrieve EVERYTHING we want them to remember.

If we create such comprehensive retrieval, students can get the upsides and without the downsides.

Price, J., Jones, L. W., & Mueller, M. L. (2015). The role of warnings in younger and older adults’ retrieval-induced forgetting. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 22(1), 1-24.

Upsides Always Have Downsides: “Side Effects” in Education Research

Andrew Watson

December-11-2022

Upsides Always Have Downsides: “Side Effects” in Education Research

Here at Learning and the Brain, we believe that research can improve education.

Specifically, research into psychology (“how the mind works”) and neuroscience (“how the brain works”) can help teachers and schools. After all, we spend all day working with students’ minds and brains!

Every now and then, we should stop and look for flaws in our assumptions.

Are there ways that research might not help learning? Might it actually limit learning?

A recent article by Yong Zhao explores this important — and troubling — question.

The Medical Model

Doctors have long relied on research to test their hypotheses.

Does this treatment work better than that treatment? Let’s run a “randomized control trial” to find out.

Notably, medical research always includes this important question: what side effects* does a treatment produce?

That is:

Any treatment might produce specific benefits.

And, it might also produce specific harms.

Medical research looks for and reports on BOTH.

Sadly — and this is Zhao’s key point — education research tends to skip the second question.

Researchers look for benefits:

Does mindfulness reduce stress?

Can retrieval practice enhance learning?

Should students exercise mid-class?

When they measure the potential upsides of those “treatments,” they don’t always look equally scrupulously for downsides.

And yet: almost everything has downsides.

What to Measure, and When?

Why do we overlook the downsides?

Zhao offers two hypotheses.

First, we all agree that education is good.

If doing X helps students learn, then X is good! Its obvious goodness makes potential badness invisible.

Second, downsides take time — and alternative methods — to discover.

An example. I hypothesize a particular method will help students sing better. So, I test my method in a randomized control trial.

Sure enough, students with the new method sang better! My method worked!

However, my new teaching method just might make students hate singing.

To discover this “side effect,” I have to measure different variables. That is:

I need to check how well they sing (one set of measurements),

AND how much they like singing (a different set of measurements).

It’s also possible that the downside takes longer to arise. The improvement (right now) results in less enjoyment of singing (later on). If I don’t keep measuring, I’ll miss this “side effect.”

New Habits

As Zhao argues, our habit of overlooking potential downsides creates real problems.

For instance, Zhao takes the example of Direct Instruction.

Its proponents can show lots of research suggesting its strengths. Its detractors likewise.

How can these contradictory realities exist?

Well, any complex teaching method will have benefits and detriments. If we focus only on one — if we measure only one — we’ll necessarily miss the other.

Instead, Zhao argues, we should develop the rigorous habit of looking for both: the benefits of any teaching strategy, and also its downsides.

This realisic, complex reality will allow us to make better decisions in classroom and schools.

One More Step

Although Zhao doesn’t mention “opportunity costs,” I think they’re an important part of this conceptual re-think.

That is:

Every time I do use a particular teaching strategy, I don’t use the other one.

If I take time for this stress-reducing technique, I don’t have time for that stress-reducing technique.

Even if a strategy has good research behind it, even if it has relatively few “side effects,” I always want to know: have I given up a better strategy to make time for this merely good strategy?

For example, this point often comes up in discussion of Learning Styles Theory.

If you’ve spent any time in this field, you know: Learning Styles Theory simply doesn’t have good research support behind it.

Alas: it has LOTS of popular support, even among teachers.

When I show teachers the comprehensive research reviews contradicting the theory, they occasionally respond this way:

“Okay, but what harm is it doing? It might be true, so why not teach to my students’ learning style?”

For me, the clear answer is opportunity cost.

If we teachers ARE spending time on teaching methods that have no research support, we ARE NOT spending time on those that do.

If students ARE studying on the treadmill because they’re “kinesthetic learners,” they ARE NOT using study strategies with research support behind them.

Measuring opportunity cost requires subtle and humble calculations. We just might have to give up a long-prized approach to make time for an even better one.

If our students learn more, that sacrifice will have been worth it.

TL;DR

Like medical researchers, we should look both for benefits and for potential harms of any teaching suggestion.

This balanced perspective might take additional time, and might require consideration of opportunity costs.

It will, however, result in a more realistic and useful understanding of teaching and learning.

* Many years ago, I read that the phrase “side effects” is misleading. It makes unwanted effects seem unlikely, even though they’re just as likely as the wanted effects.

For that reason, I’m putting the words “side effects” in quotations throughout this post.

I believe it was Oliver Sacks who made this point, but I can’t find the citation so I’m not sure.

If you know the correct source of this insight, please let me know!

Zhao, Y. (2017). What works may hurt: Side effects in education. Journal of Educational Change, 18(1), 1-19.

Getting the Details Just Right: Retrieval Practice

Andrew Watson

December-06-2022

Getting the Details Just Right: Retrieval Practice

Can we ever research a topic too much? Can we reach a point where, well, there’s nothing really more to say about teaching better and learning more?

Perhaps, for instance, we’ve reached peak retrieval practice.

Blog readers – and conference attendees – know that actively recalling information results in greater learning than simple review.

For example: rather reminding my students of yesterday’s discussion of the Harlem Renaissance, I can ask them to write down the key details from memory. When they make the mental effort to remember, they learn more.

This blog and many authors have written about this topic at length. What more is there to say?

I recently found a study that reminds us: there’s always more to say. If we want to combine teaching experience with researcher insight, we need to take time to get the details just right.

Here’s the story.

A Problem, a Solution, Another Problem

One problem with retrieval practice: it takes time.

I ask the question.

The students write their answers to the question.

I check their answers.

The minutes tick by.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could skip a few steps. How about this abbreviated version:

I ask the question.

The students think about their answers to the question.

I move on.

If my students truly think about the answers, then they’ll get the retrieval practice benefit in much less time.

This solution, however, creates its own problem.

If my students don’t write anything down, how can I know they actually think about the answers? Couldn’t they just nod and look earnest?

After all, what’s their motivation to do the thinking?

Let’s Check

A respected research team in this field has explored this set of problems, and their potential solutions.

In a recently published study, Megan Sumeracki and Johanny Castillo wanted to see if that first problem exists.

They had college students read a short passage. Some wrote answers to review questions; some were instructed to think about answers to those questions.

What happened a few days later?

Sure enough, the students who just thought about (but did not write down) answers were relatively confident that they’d remember information. (That is: they were more confident than those who wrote answers down.)

However, the thinkers actually remembered less than the writers.

Sure enough, as we predicted, students don’t always follow instructions to think about answers.

In other words: when I solve the first problem (retrieval practice takes time) by asking students simply to think, I create a second problem (students don’t really think).

How do we solve this conundrum? Can I solve BOTH problems?

Despair Not

Sumeracki and Castillo had an idea.

They repeated the “think about it” strategy, but this time with an additional ingredient: cold calling.

That is: they asked students to try retrieval practice by thinking about the answer. AND then they cold-called one student at random. (That is, they called on one student who hadn’t raised a hand.)

The researchers hoped to communicate this message: when told to think about the answer, students really should think about it – because they might actually have to answer the question.

What did they find?

Sure enough: students who thought about the answer now remembered as much as the students who wrote down their answers – presumably because they really did the thinking.

This two-part strategy – “retrieval practice by thinking” plus “cold calling” – takes less time AND produces the learning benefits of retrieving.

Problem solved!

One More Problem?

Some readers will have noticed that I raced past a potential controversy.

Truthfully, people do worry about cold calling.

Teachers worry that it creates a hostile, punitive environment. One grad school professor told me that cold calling ramps up stress, and stress destroys the hippocampus, so cold calling is malpractice.

Honestly, we don’t have lots and lots of research here.

One study I’ve found pushes back on the “ramps up stress” narrative. Others support that narrative.

And, as far as I know, we just don’t have good research in K-12 classrooms.

My own instincts say: yes, cold calling can be done badly. But, anything can be done badly. The key point is that cold calling can be done well.

If we create a classroom environment where making mistakes is an entirely normal part of the class routine – an environment that Doug Lemov calls a “culture of error” – then the potential stress of cold calling shouldn’t be a problem.

But, until we have actual research in many different classrooms, I can’t make that recommendation too emphatically.

The Sumeracki and Castillo strategy strikes me as a sensible solution to a real problem. More research on cold calling will make it more persuasive still.

Sumeracki, M. A., & Castillo, J. (2022). Covert and overt retrieval practice in the classroom. Translational Issues in Psychological Science.

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About Andrew Watson

The More Things Change…

Sustaining Motivation

Two Solutions

TL;DR

Problems and Solutions

Not What I Was Expecting

Trying to Process

Next Steps

The Magic Number

Changing the Focus

A Better Way?

The Very Big Picture

Read This Book If…

A Man, a Plan

Surprise #1: One Size Does Not Fit

Surprise #2: People Are COMPLICATED

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

Surprise #4: Psychology First

TL;DR

Act I: The Investigation Begins

The Plot Thickens

The Payoff

Key Point #3

An Early Verdict

Beyond “Mental Tasks”

Results, Please

The Matrix Could Be Real?

Glitches in the Matrix

An Example

TL;DR

Willingham’s Razor

When Simplification Leads to Oversimplification

TL;DR

Case in Point: Retrieval Practice

Let the Buyer Beware: Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

Potential solution?

Alternative Solutions?

TL;DR

The Medical Model

What to Measure, and When?

New Habits

One More Step

TL;DR

A Problem, a Solution, Another Problem

Let’s Check

Despair Not

One More Problem?

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