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Andrew Watson 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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Marshmallows and Beyond: Cultural Influences on Self-Regulation
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September-25-2022

Marshmallows and Beyond: Cultural Influences on Self-Regulation

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Few psychology studies have created a bigger stir than Walter Mishel’s research into marshmallows.

Okay, he was really doing research into self-control.

But the marshmallow images were adorable: all those cute children desperately trying not to eat one marshmallow right now, so that they’d get two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.

Mishel’s studies got so much attention because they suggested that self-control correlates with SO MANY good things: high grades, better jobs, better health, etc.

And, they suggested that self-control is relatively stable. Some studies suggested that the marshmallow test, given at to a child at age five, could offer insights into their lives decades later.

Now, this research pool includes lots of complexity.

If, for instance, you saw Dr. Mishel at our 2015 conference in Boston, you know that trustworthiness matters.

Children waited for the 2nd marshmallow more often if they had reason to believe that the experimenter would actually follow through on their commitments. (Smart kids!)

So, do other factors matter?

The Power of Culture

A research team in Japan, led by Kaichi Yanaoka, wondered if cultural factors might shape self control.

So, for instance, in Japan waiting for food gets cultural priority — much more so than in the United States (where Mishel did his research).

But, Japanese culture does not emphasize waiting to open gifts as much as families in the US often do.

For instance, as Yanaoka explains in this study, Japanese parents often leave gifts for their children, with no cultural expectation that the children should wait to open them.

So, do these cultural differences shape performance on the marshmallow test?

Hypothesis. Data.

Based on these cultural norms, team Yanaoka hypothesized that children from the US would be better at waiting to open gifts, but worse at waiting to eat marshmallows, than their Japanese counterparts.

Because research requires precision, this study includes LOTS of details. (For instance, the researchers checked to be sure that the Japanese children had eaten marshmallows before, so they knew what temptation they were resisting.)

But the overall design was quite simple. In the US and Japan, children waited either to eat marshmallows, or to open gifts. Researchers followed a simple script:

Now it’s gift time! You have a choice for your gift today. You can either have this one gift to open right now, or if you wait for me to get more gifts from the other room, you can have two gifts to open instead. […]

Stay right there in that chair and I’ll leave this right here, and if you haven’t opened it […] before I get back, you can two to open instead.

Of course, for the children getting marshmallows, the script said “marshmallow” and “eat” rather than “gift” and “open.”

So, what did the researchers find?

Sure enough, cultural expectations shape self control.

In this case, Japanese children waited for the second marshmallow (median time: 15 minutes) much longer than US children (median time: 3.66 minutes).

But, US children waited to open the gift (median wait time: 14.54 minutes) longer than Japanese children (median time: 4.62 minutes).

When you look at the graphs, you’ll be impressed by the precise degree to which cultural expectations reverse wait times.

The Big Picture

So, what do we do with this information?

I think Yanaoka’s study offers us a specific reminder, and a general reminder.

Specifically, this study lets us know that self-control is NOT one monolithic, unchangeable thing.

Self-control varies across people and cultures. Yes, self-control matters; but, performance on one test — even a test with marshmallows — doesn’t tell us everything we need to know.

Generally, this study reminds us that culture always matters.

So, teachers should indeed welcome advice that experts offer us about — say — adolescence. But, that advice always includes cultural constraints. Adolescence, after all, differs in Denver, Kyoto, Sao Paolo, Reykjavik, and Gaborone.

So too cultural norms around stress. And feedback. And appropriate relationships between adults and students. Yes, and self-control.

No advice — not even research-based advice — gives us absolute guidance across all cultural norms.

Yanaoka, K., Michaelson, L. E., Guild, R. M., Dostart, G., Yonehiro, J., Saito, S., & Munakata, Y. (2022). Cultures crossing: the power of habit in delaying gratification. Psychological Science, 33(7), 1172-1181.

Translating Research to the Classroom: the Case of Discovery Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September-18-2022

Translating Research to the Classroom: the Case of Discovery Learning

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Here at Learning and the Brain, we want teachers and students to benefit from research. Obviously.

When psychologists discover important findings about the mind, when neuroscientists investigate the function of the brain, schools might well benefit.

Let’s start making connections!

At the same time, that hopeful vision requires care and caution. For instance, research (typically) operates in very specialized conditions: conditions that don’t really match most classrooms.

How can we accomplish our goal (applying research to the classroom) without making terrible mistakes (mis-applying research to the classroom)?

A Case in Point

Today’s post has been inspired by this study, by researchers Angela Brunstein, Shawn Betts, and John R. Anderson.

It’s compelling title: “Practice Enables Successful Learning under Minimal Guidance.”

Now, few debates in education generate as much heat as this one.

Many teachers think that — because we’re the experts in the room, and because working memory is so small — teachers should explain ideas carefully and structure practice incrementally.

Let’s call this approach “high-structure pedagogy” (although it’s probably better known as “direct instruction”).

Other teachers think that — because learners must create knowledge in order to understand and remember it — teachers should stand back and leave room for adventure, error, discovery, and ultimate understanding.

Let’s call this approach “low-structure pedagogy” (although it has LOTS of other names: “constructivism,” “project/problem-based learning,” “minimal guidance learning,” and so forth).

How can we apply the Brunstein study to this debate? What do we DO with its conclusions in our classrooms?

If you’re on the low structure team, you may assume the study provides the final word in this debate. What could be clearer? “Practice enables successful learning under minimal guidance” — research says so!

If you’re on the high structure team, you may assume it is obviously flawed, and look to reject its foolish conclusions.

Let me offer some other suggestions…

Early Steps

In everyday speech, the word “bias” has a bad reputation. In the world of science, however, we use the word slightly differently.

We all have biases; that is, we all have perspectives and opinions and experiences. Our goal is not so much to get rid of biases, but to recognize them — and recognize the ways they might distort our perceptions.

So, a good early step in applying research to our work: fess up to our own prior beliefs.

Many (most?) teachers do have an opinion in this high-structure vs. low-structure debate. Many have emphatic opinions. We should acknowledge our opinions frankly. (I’ll tell you my own opinion at the end of this post.)

Having taken this first vital step, let it shape your approach to the research. Specifically, try — at least temporarily — to convince yourself to change your mind.

That is: if you believe in low-structure pedagogy, look hard for the flaws in this study that seems to champion low-structure pedagogy. (BTW: all studies have flaws.)

If your biases tend you to high-structure pedagogy, try to find this study’s strengths.

Swim against your own tide.

Why? Because you will read the study more carefully — and therefore will likely arrive at conclusions that benefit your students more.

Gathering Momentum

Now that you have a goal — “change my own mind” — look at the study to answer two questions:

First: who was in the study?

Second: what, exactly, did they do?

You should probably be more persuaded by studies where…

First: …the study’s participants resemble your students and your cultural context, and

Second: …the participants did something that sensibly resembles your own possible teaching practice.

So, in this case: the participants were undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University.

If you teach undergraduates at a highly selective university — the Google tells me that CMU currently admits 14% of their applicants — then this study’s conclusions might help you.

However, if you teach 3rd graders, or if you teach at any school with open admission, those conclusions just might not offer useful guidance.

After all, high-powered college students might succeed at “minimal guidance” learning because they already know a lot, and because they’re really good at school. (How do we know? Because they got into CMU.)

What about our second question? What exactly did the participants do?

In this study, participants used a computer tutor to solve algebra-ish math problems. (The description here gets VERY technical; you can think of the problems a proto-Kendoku, with algebra.)

What about the guidance they got? How “minimal” was it?

Getting the Definition Just Right

At this point, Brunstein’s study reminds us of an essential point.

When teachers talk about educational practice, we use handy shorthand phrases to capture big ideas.

Metacognition. Mindfulness. Problem-based learning.

However, each of those words and phrases could be used to describe widely different practices.

Before we can know if this study about “minimal guidance” applies to our students, we have to know exactly what these researchers did that they’re calling minimal guidance.

Team Brunstein says exactly this. They see discovery learning and direct instruction not as two different things, but as ends of a continuum:

“No learning experience is pure: students given direct instruction often find themselves struggling to discover what the teacher means, and all discovery situations involve some minimal amount of guidance.”

In this case, “minimal guidance” involved varying degrees of verbal and written instructions.

This study concludes that under very specific circumstances, a particular blend of structure and discovery fosters learning.

So, yes, in some “minimal guidance” circumstances, students learned — and practice time helped.

However — and this is a big “however”:

In one part of the study, 50% of the students at the extreme “discovery” end of the spectrum quit the study. Another 25% of them went so slowly that they didn’t finish the assignment.

In other words: this study in no way suggests that all kinds of minimal guidance/discovery/PBL learning are always a good idea.

The “just right” blend helped: perhaps we can recreate that blend. But the wrong blend — “extreme discovery” — brought learning to a standstill.

Final Thoughts

First: when using research to shape classroom practice, it helps to look at specific studies.

AND it helps to look at groups of studies.

Long-time readers know that I really like both scite.ai and connectedpapers.com. If you go to those websites and put in the name of Brunstein’s study, you’ll see what MANY other scholars have found when they looked at the same specific question about minimal guidance. (Try it — you’ll like it!)

Second: I promised to tell you my own opinion about the low- vs. high-structure debate. My answer is: I think it’s the wrong question.

Because of working memory limitations, I do think that teachers should provide high structure during early stages of studying a topic.

And, for a variety of reasons, I think we should gradually transition to lower-structure pedagogies as students learn more and more.

That is:

We should use high-structure pedagogy with novices, who are early in schema formation.

And, we should use low-structure pedagogy with experts, who are later in the process of schema formation.

The question is not “which pedagogy to use?”

The better question is: “how can we identify stages along the process of students’ schema development, so we know when and how to transition our teaching.”

Research into that question is still very much in the early phases.

Brunstein, A., Betts, S., & Anderson, J. R. (2009). Practice enables successful learning under minimal guidance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(4), 790.

Have You Heard of…”Prospective Memory”? What It Is, Why Teachers Should Notice
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September-15-2022

Have You Heard of…”Prospective Memory”? What It Is, Why Teachers Should Notice

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Most of the time, we remember things experienced in the past:

My most recent birthday

A childhood vacation

An obscure factual tidbit from the news

However, we also spend some time remembering the future:

An errand to complete on the way home from school

A phone call I have to make this evening

A coffee date this weekend

When we remember the future, we’re using our prospective memory.

Here’s why this distinction matters:

Schools focus primarily on remembering the past: the topic or formula students learned last week, class rules, concepts and skills from a previous unit.

We also spend a fair amount of time relying on prospective memory.

Students remember the third step of the instructions while they do the first. That’s prospective memory.

Teachers remember an announcement that we should make at the end of class. That’s prospective memory.

What can research tell us about this under-discussed cognitive capacity? And, does any research provide practical classroom advice?

Start with the Basics

We know (all too well) that remembering the past can be difficult. After all, students regularly forget the ideas they seemed to know so well just last week. (Let’s admit it: we do too.)

Perhaps we’re not surprised to learn, therefore, that prospective memory creates cognitive strain. Simply put: we don’t remember the future very well either.

Have you ever driven home and forgotten to pick up milk on the way?

Have your students ever forgotten the 3rd instruction while working on the first?

Yup: we struggle to complete prospective memory tasks.

I myself think of this problem as (basically) working memory overload.

After all, working memory selects, HOLDS, reorganizes, and combines information from multiple sources.

Prospective memory requires us to HOLD that information for a long period of time — and thus strains working memory.

Simply put: when we ask students to use prospective memory, we increase working memory load and thereby make learning harder.

Sound familiar?

Problems Require Solutions

Teachers are a practical lot. Once we learn about a problem, we’d like a solution.

Happily, we have some steps to follow.

Step #1: recognize the problem. 

If I tell my students five steps to follow, I’m creating a prospective memory problem. They must remember to do all five steps in the future.

Once I recognize the prospective memory load inherent in this task, now I know to change something.

Step #2: rely on long-term memory.

If students have routines in long-term memory, they don’t need to HOLD them in working memory.

So, if I always stop at the grocery store as I drive home on Wednesday, I’m much less likely to forget that errand this upcoming Wednesday. It’s part of my routine.

If students always start by circling the verbs in a sentence, they’re much less likely to be stumped by instructions that begin with that task.

Simply put: routines reduces prospective memory load.

Step #3: Recent Research

Today’s blog post was inspired by a recent study about prospective memory, led by Dawa Dupont. Specifically, the study wondered if we can reduce prospective memory load by writing down information we will need in the future. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m oversimplifying here — I’ll come back later to the definition of “writing down.”)

This three-part study came up with several answers.

Answer #1: YES. When we write down important information, doing so reduces prospective memory load. Students remember it better.

Answer #2: SURPRISE: writing down important information helps us process less important information as well.

By reducing prospective memory (working memory) load, we help both complex and simple cognitive processes.

Answer #3: Re-SURPRISE: when students can’t write down important information, this limitation harms recall of important info more than recall of less important info.

In other words: in prospective memory, we often get priorities wrong.

All these answers lead to a helpfully straightforward solution to prospective memory problems: let students write stuff down.

That is: don’t just describe five instructions. Have students write them down. (Or, give them a written copy.)

Don’t try to remember the announcement at the end of class. Write in your lesson plan the announcement you need to make.

Simply put: offload prospective memory burdens onto paper — or some other technology reminder.

Important Definitions

I said above that I was oversimplifying when I said “write stuff down.” Let me now unpack a bit more complexity.

In this study, participants played a simple video game.

In some versions, players could mark objects in a special way. This marking reminded players what to do with those objects in the future.

In other versions of the game, players couldn’t create those reminder marks.

Those special markings were, in effect, a technology strategy for “offloading” prospective memory. Players didn’t have to remember “move this one to the left” in the future. They had already put in a reminder marker to do so.

In other words, players didn’t exactly “write stuff down.” They created a kind of technology reminder.

However — this is important — the first sentence of this study suggests that “writing stuff down” and “creating a kind of technology reminder” serve the same prospective memory function:

Individuals have the option of remembering delayed intentions by storing them in internal memory or offloading them to an external store such as a diary or smartphone alert.

Researchers didn’t study the “written diary/calendar” option here, but the logic is very much the same.

Even More Important Definitions

I’m being quite transparent about these definitions because I worry that other sources are extrapolating too far.

I found Dupont’s study by following this headline: “Using smartphones could help improve memory skills.”

Um, what?

If students use their cellphones to write down their homework, or take pictures of instructions I’ve written on the board, or do some other task-focused activity, doing so could reduce prospective memory load.

But:

First, that’s not at all the same thing as “improving memory skills,” and

Second, having cellphones handy in class can produces all sorts of other distractions. I mean, are students honestly using cellphones for “task-focused activities”?

True confession: more often than not, my students aren’t using cellphones for good. (I had one student answer his phone in class. No, really.)

So, I think Dupont’s study supports cellphone use in class only in narrowly defined ways. In no way does it generally support the idea that cellphones are good because they “improve memory skills.”

TL;DR

Prospective memory allows us to remember the future (yay). And, it creates working memory load (boo).

We can reduce that load by a) recognizing the problem, b) developing classroom routines, and c) creating reminders — written or technological — to offload those prospective memory burdens.

Anyone who says this research broadly supports cellphone use in classrooms is — in my view — dramatically misrepresenting its conclusions.

Dupont, D., Zhu, Q., & Gilbert, S. J. (2022). Value-based routing of delayed intentions into brain-based versus external memory stores. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Online Teaching + Research: Insights from Cognitive Load Theory
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September-10-2022

Online Teaching + Research: Insights from Cognitive Load Theory

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Most of us spent the last 2 years learning LOTS about online teaching.

Many of us relied on our instincts, advice from tech-savvy colleagues, and baling wire.

Some turned to helpful books. (Both Doug Lemov and Courtney Ostaff offer lots of practical wisdom.)

But: do we have any RESEARCH that can point the way?

Yes, reader, we do…

Everything Starts with Working Memory

This blog often focuses on working memory: a cognitive capacity that allows new information to combine with a student’s current knowledge.

That is: working memory lets learning happen.

Many scholars these days use Cognitive Load Theory to organize and describe the intersection of working memory and teaching.

In my view, cognitive load theory has both advantages and disadvantages.

First, it’s true (well, as “true” as any scientific theory can be).

Second, it’s a GREAT way for researchers to talk with other researchers about working memory.

But — here’s the disadvantage — it’s rather complex and jargony as a way for teachers to talk with other teachers. (Go ahead, ask me about “element interactivity.”)

How can teachers get the advantages and avoid the disadvantages?

One recent solution: Oliver Lovell’s splendid book — which explains cognitive load theory in ways that make classroom sense to teachers.

Another solution, especially helpful for online teaching: a recent review article by Stoo Sepp and others.

“Shifting Online: 12 Tips for Online Teaching” takes the jargon of cognitive load theory and makes it practical and specific for teachers — especially when we need to use these ideas for online teaching.

Examples, Please

Because Team Sepp offers 12 tips, I probably shouldn’t review them all here. (Doing so would, ironically, overwhelm readers’ working memory.)

Instead, let me offer an example or two.

Cognitive load theory (rightly) focuses on the dangers of the split attention effect, but it can be tricky to understand exactly what that means.

Sepp translates that phrase into straightforward advice, as you can see in this diagram:

The version on the right integrates the descriptive words into the diagram: well done.

The version on the left, however, places the descriptive words below — readers must switch their focus back-n-forth to understand the ideas. In other words, the left version splits the reader’s attention. Boo.

Team Sepp’s straightforward advice: when teaching online, be sure that diagrams and videos embed descriptive words in the images (as clearly as possible).

Managing Nuances

This insight about split attention might seem to answer an enduring question for online instruction: should the teacher be visible?

That is: if I’ve created slides to map out the differences between comedy and tragedy, should my students be able to see me while they look at those slides?

At first glance, research into split attention suggests a clear “no.” If students look at my slides AND at me, well, they’re splitting their attention.

However, when this question gets researched directly, we find an interesting answer: the instructor’s presence does not directly reduce (or directly increase) students’ learning.

In other words: video of the teacher doesn’t create the split attention effect.

Sepp and colleagues combine that finding with this sensible insight:

“A visible instructor provides learners with important social cues, which help them feel connected to and be aware of other people in online settings.”

Researchers call this “social presence,” and it seems to have positive effects of its own. That is: students participate and learn more when they experience “social presence.”

As is always true, we can’t boil cognitive load theory down to “best practices.” (“No split attention ever!”)

Instead, we have to take situations and subtleties into account. (“Avoid split attention; but don’t worry that our presence creates split attention.”)

Team Sepp balance these complexities clearly and well.

Final Thoughts

This blog post introduces Sepp’s review, but it doesn’t summarize that review. To prepare for the possibility we might be back to online learning at some point, you might take some time to read it yourself.

Its greatest benefits will come when individual teachers consider how these abstract concepts from cognitive load theory apply to the specifics of our curriculum, our students, and our own teaching work.

Sepp’s review article helps with exactly that translational work.

Sepp, S., Wong, M., Hoogerheide, V., & Castro‐Alonso, J. C. (2021). Shifting online: 12 tips for online teaching derived from contemporary educational psychology research. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

Teaching Minds & Brains: the Best Books to Read
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September-05-2022

Teaching Minds & Brains: the Best Books to Read

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When I started in this field, back in 2008, we all HUNGERED for good books.

After all, teaching is profoundly complicated.

And, psychology is mightily complicated.

And, neuroscience is fantastically (unbearably?) complicated.

If we’re going to put those three fields together — and that is, after all, the goal — we need authors who know a great deal about three complicated fields.

These authors need to know enough to synthesize those fields, and explain that synthesis clearly. Can it even be done?

Back in 2008, the goal seemed unreachable…

Places to Start

Since then, the publishing pace has started to pick up. In fact, we now face the reverse problem: too many good books.

My stack of “I must read these RIGHT NOW or I will lose all credibility” books gets taller by the week.

Where to begin?

Long-time readers know one of my mantras:

Don’t just do this thing; instead, think this way.

Applied to book recommendations, that mantra becomes:

I shouldn’t just recommend individual books; instead, I should suggest helpful categories of books.

So, these three categories seem most helpful to me.

Getting Specific

When authors combine teaching, psychology, and neuroscience, they can focus their interest on one specific topic.

This approach has lots of benefits. In particular, one-topic books can explore the field in depth, give lots of classroom examples, delve into critical nuances.

So, for instance, if you’d like to learn more about long-term memory formation, you won’t do much better that Powerful Teaching by Agarwal and Bain.

Carol Dweck’s book on Mindset is, of course, a classic in the motivation field. But: if you want to explore motivation more substantially, you really should know Peps Mccrea’s Motivated Teaching.

How about adolescence? I’m a big fan of Lisa Damour’s Untangled: wise, practical, funny, humane.

Blog readers certainly know that working memory deserves all the attention it can get. Ollie Lovell’s recent Cognitive Load Theory in Action makes this theoretical approach as concrete as possible. (My own book Learning Begins focuses on working memory without the cognitive load theory framework.)

You might even want to know about the role of evolution in this field. Paul Howard-Jones’s Evolution of the Learning Brain is a delightful and informative read.

Ready for More

These books — and MANY more — explore one topic in depth.

However, you might be ready to put all those small pieces together. These authors consider the individual pieces (attention, stress, evolution, working memory), and try to build them together into a coherent picture.

The first of these put-the-pieces-together books, of course, is Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School.

The first book of its kind for a general audience, WDSLS? boils all those topics above into several core principles: “factual knowledge must precede skill” or most famously, “memory is the residue of thought.”

Now in its third edition, this book offers splendid and friendly guidance for those of us who want psychology (and some neuroscience) research to guide our thinking.

You might pick up How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene. (This book is so good, our blog published two separate reviews of it.) Dehaene considers “Four Pillars” of learning, and how they work together support students’ progress.

Being careful not to confuse the titles, you might also grab Understanding How We Learn, by Weinstein and Sumeracki. These two scholars founded The Learning Scientists, a consistently excellent source of online wisdom in this field.

If you’d rather read a synthesis book by classroom teachers (rather than university professors), Neuroteach by Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher provides all the scholarly background knowledge combined with a teacher’s practical insights.

All these books — and others like them — unite various topics into a coherent and thoughtful system.

Build Your Own Adventure

The first category of book explores one topic in depth. The second category puts several topics together in a coherent, unified structure.

The third category provides the individual pieces (like the first category) and lets the reader synthesize them (like the second category).

I think of two major players in this field.

Back in 2019, Bradley Busch and Edward Watson (no relation that I know of) published The Science of Learning. This book — and a follow-up volume — offers 2-page summaries of 77 studies in several core topics: metacognition, parents, memory, and so forth.

Busch and Watson, in effect, provide teachers many vital building blocks. We can then use those blocks to build our own structures — that is, our own synthesis.

Each of us is our own Dan Willingham.

In 2020, Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick published How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice.

As the title suggests, this volume explores 25+ papers making foundational arguments about the intersection of psychology and teaching.

How can we invite students to think more deeply? What is the role of elaboration? Why and how should we make thinking visible? Kirschner and Hendrick explore those questions by carefully summarizing and unpacking the most important papers investigating them.

Earlier this year, Jim Heal joined Kirschner and Hendrick to publish How TEACHING Happens, looking at similar questions for teachers and teaching.

Here again, we teachers can use these building blocks to build our own synthesis.

My synthesis might not look like yours.

But that’s okay: I’m a high school English teacher; you might be a 2nd grade reading specialist; whereas he might be a college music theory professor. We need (slightly) different syntheses, because we do different things, and are different people.

Where to Begin?

I suspect that the best place to begin depends on your prior knowledge. (Of course, almost all learning depends on prior knowledge.)

If you’re new-ish to the field, probably single-topic books will give you the biggest bang for your reading buck.

You won’t learn everything about the field, but you will know enough about one topic to make real progress.

Once you’ve got a good foundation laid, I think the synthesis books will offer lots of wisdom.

After all, teachers need to think about attention AND memory AND stress AND development. If I have some prior knowledge about most of those topics, I’ll have some real chance to understand how Willingham (and Dehaene, and Weinstein/Sumeracki, and Whitman/Kelleher) put those ideas together.

Or, perhaps you’re more of a choose-your-own-adventure reader. If you like the cognitive quest of building your own castle, these books (Busch/Watson, Kirschner/Hendrick/Heal) give you the very best research bricks to build with.

And, honestly, at some point, we all need to do this synthesis work ourselves. That is: we all need to build our individually tailored models.

Because we teach different curricula to different age groups in different cultural contexts, we will draw more on some kind of research than others.

And, of course, our students might have different learning profiles. And, of course, each of us has our own strengths and muddles in the classroom.

In other words: I suspect we all need to start by studying specific topics. And, someday, we will all be grateful for the books that help us create our own unique syntheses.

Author’s confession: I could EASILY double the length of this post by including more books I love and admire. I’m trying to give a useful sample; in doing so, I’m inevitably leaving out lots of splendid texts.

Perhaps in the comments you can add your own favorite book!

How Students (Think They) Learn: The Plusses and Minuses of “Interleaving”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August-27-2022

How Students (Think They) Learn: The Plusses and Minuses of “Interleaving”

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As the school year begins, teachers want to know: can mind/brain research give us strategies to foster learning?

We might also wonder: what will our students think of those strategies?

College Students Sitting in Hallway

It seems plausible — even likely — that students will prefer the strategies that help them learn. If those strategies help, why wouldn’t students like them?

Strategies to Foster Learning

Some classroom truths seem almost to basic to say out loud. For instance:

#1: We want our students to learn several different sub-topics within any particular topic.

And

#2: Students need to practice to learn.

When teachers think about those basic truths at the same time, we often adopt a specific strategy.

We ask students to practice (that’s #2) each individual subtopic (that’s#1) on its own. So:

Students practice identifying nouns, and then they practice identifying verbs, and then the practice identifying adjectives.

Or, angles, then circumferences, then areas.

Or, backhand, then forehand, then serve.

We could represent this strategy this way: AAA, BBB, CCC. Each sub-topic gets its own discrete practice session.

But, would a different strategy be better? How about: ABC, CBA, BCA?

In other words: should students jumble different topics together when they practice?

Interleaving: Old Research, and New

The answer to that question is YES: students SHOULD jumble different sub-topics together when they practice.

For research confirmation, you can check out this study by Rohrer and Pashler.

Or, for a broader synthesis, explore Agarwal and Bain’s great book, Powerful Teaching.

Or, you might ask a pointed question: “has this strategy been tested in actual classrooms, not just in psychology research labs?”

The answer to that question is also YES.

A recently published study by Samani and Pan tried this strategy in a college physics class.

Sure enough, students learned more when their homework problems were interleaved than when sub-topics were practiced one at a time.

That is: students whose practice problems covered Coulomb’s Law by itself learned less than those whose practice problems also included capacitors and composite wires.

So, we arrive at this tentative teaching advice:

No doubt, you have your students practice — either in class, or with homework, or both.

When students practice, they should work on a few sub-topics at a time, not just one.

So far, so good.

Paradox: Teaching Solutions Create Studying Problems

Let’s return to the question that opened this blog post: do students prefer the study strategy that fosters learning. (They should; after all, it helped them learn!)

Reader, they do not.

Why?

In Samani and Pan’s study (and many others), students found that effective learning strategies are more difficult.

That is: they require more thought, and frequently lead to more short-term mistakes. (Students did relatively badly on the homework before they did relatively well on the tests.)

From one perspective, this finding makes perfect sense.

If we do difficult mental work, we will struggle and fail more often. And yet, all that extra hard thinking will ultimately lead to more learning. (Soderstrom and Bjork have written a GREAT review article on this topic.)

That encouraging perspective, however, runs into a perfectly understandable alternative: most people don’t like struggle and failure.

We shouldn’t blame students for disliking the interleaving. It hurt their heads. They did badly on the homework. YUCK.

As teachers, we have the long-term perspective. We know that short-term struggle leads ultimately to greater learning.

But, most students lack that perspective. They feel the struggle and the pain, but don’t recognize the long-term benefits.

Teaching Advice 2.0

Given all these findings, how should we structure students’ practice?

I think all these findings add up to this guidance:

First: interleave practice.

Second: tell students that you are doing so, and explain why.

The language you use and the level of explanation will, of course, vary by the age of the student. But, let them know.

Third: structure grading systems to value ultimate learning more than immediate understanding.

After all, if we both require interleaved practice (which is quite difficult) and grade students on the success of their practice, we will — in effect — force them to have lower grades. They will rightly feel the injustice of this instructional paradigm.

In other words: this practice strategy — in my view — does imply a grading policy as well.

TL;DR

Students, of course, must practice to learn.

Teachers should structure their practice to cover a few sub-topics simultaneously.

We should explain why we’re doing so; “interleaving” ultimately results in more learning.

We should create grading structures that account for the initial difficulty of interleaved practice.

If we get this balance right, students will willingly face early learning challenges, and ultimately learn more.

Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2010). Recent research on human learning challenges conventional instructional strategies. Educational Researcher, 39(5), 406-412.

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

Samani, J., & Pan, S. C. (2021). Interleaved practice enhances memory and problem-solving ability in undergraduate physics. NPJ science of learning, 6(1), 1-11.

Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176-199.

How To Make Sure Homework Really Helps (a.k.a.: “Retrieval Practice Fails”)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August-14-2022

How To Make Sure Homework Really Helps (a.k.a.: “Retrieval Practice Fails”)

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Most research focuses narrowly on just a few questions. For instance:

“Does mindful meditation help 5th grade students reduce anxiety?”

“How many instructions overwhelm college students’ working memory?”

“Do quizzes improve attention when students learn from online videos?”

Very occasionally, however, just one study results in LOTS of teaching advice. For instance, this recent research looks at data from ELEVEN YEARS of classroom teaching.

Student Doing Homework with Laptop

Professor Arnold Glass (writing with Mengxue Kang) has been looking at the benefits of various teaching strategies since 2008.

For that reason, he can draw conclusions about those strategies. AND, he can draw conclusions about changes over time.

The result: LOTS of useful guidance.

Here’s the story…

The Research

Glass has been teaching college courses in Memory and Cognition for over a decade. Of course, he wants to practice what he preaches. For instance:

First, when Glass’s students learn about concepts, he begins by asking them to make plausible predictions about the topics they’re going to study.

Of course, his students haven’t studied the topic yet, so they’re unlikely to get the answers right. But simply thinking about these questions helps them remember the correct answers that they do learn.

In research world, we often call this strategy “pretesting” or “prequestions.”

Second, after students learn the topics, he asks them to answer questions about them from memory.

That is: he doesn’t want them to look up the correct answers, but to try and remember the correct answers.

In research world, we call this technique “retrieval practice” or “the testing effect.”

Third, Glass spreads these questions out over time. His students don’t answer retrieval practice questions once; they do so several times.

In research world, we call this technique “spacing.”

Because Glass connects all those pretesting and retrieval practice questions to exam questions, he can see which strategies benefit.

And, because he’s been tracking data for years, he can see how those benefits change over time.

The Results: Good & Bad

Obviously, Glass’s approach generates LOTS of results. So, let’s keep things simple.

First Headline: these strategies work.

Pretesting and retrieval practice and spacing all help students learn.

These results don’t surprise us, but we’re happy to have confirmation.

Second Headline: but sometimes these strategies don’t work.

In other words: most of the time, students get questions right on the final exam more often than they did for the pretesting and the retrieval practice.

But, occasionally, students do better on the pretest question (or the retrieval practice question) than on the final exam.

Technically speaking, that result is BIZARRE.

How can Glass explain this finding?

Tentative Explanations, Alarming Trends

Glass and Kang have a hypothesis to explain this “bizarre” finding. In fact, this study explores their hypothesis.

Glass’s students answer the “pretesting” questions for homework. What if, instead of speculating to answer those pretesting questions, the students look the answer up on the interwebs?

What if, instead of answering “retrieval practice” questions by trying to remember, the students look up the answers?

In these cases, the students would almost certainly get the answers right — so they would have high scores on these practice exercises.

But they wouldn’t learn the information well, so they would have low scores on the final exam.

So, pretesting and retrieval practice work if students actually do it.

But if the students look up answer instead of predicting, they don’t get the benefits of prequestions.

If they look up the answer instead of trying to remember, they don’t get the benefit of retrieval practice.

And, here’s the “alarming trend”: the percentage of students who look up the answers has been rising dramatically.

How dramatically? In 2008, it was about 15%. In 2018, it was about 50%.

Promises Fulfilled

The title of the blog post promises to make homework helpful (and to point out when retrieval practice fails).

So, here goes.

Retrieval practice fails when students don’t try to retrieve.

Homework that includes retrieval practice won’t help if students look up the answers.

So, to make homework help (and to get the benefits of retrieval practice), we should do everything we reasonably can to prevent this shortcut.

Three strategies come quickly to mind.

First: don’t just use prequestions and retrieval practice. Instead, explain the logic and the research behind them. Students should know: they won’t get the benefits if they don’t do the thinking.

Second: as must as is reasonably possible, make homework low-stakes or no-stakes. Students have less incentive to cheat if doing so doesn’t get them any points. (And, they know that it harms their learning.)

Third: use class time for both strategies.

In other words: we teachers ultimately can’t force students to “make educated predictions” or “try to remember” when they’re at home. But we can monitor them in class to ensure they’re doing so.

These strategies, to be blunt, might not work well as homework — especially not at the beginning of the year. We should plan accordingly.

TL;DR

Prequestions and retrieval practice do help students learn, but only if students actually do the thinking these strategies require.

We teachers should be realistic about our students’ homework habits and incentives, and design assignments that nudge them in the right directions.

 

Glass, A. L., & Kang, M. (2022). Fewer students are benefiting from doing their homework: an eleven-year study. Educational Psychology, 42(2), 185-199.

The Best Book on Cognitive Load Theory: Ollie Lovell to the Rescue
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
August-07-2022

The Best Book on Cognitive Load Theory: Ollie Lovell to the Rescue

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Teaching ought to be easy.

After all, we have a functionally infinite amount of long-term memory. You don’t have to forget one thing to learn another thing — really.

So: I should be able to shovel information and skills into your infinite long-term memory. Voila! You’d know everything

Alas, to get to your long-term memory, “information and skills” have to pass through your working memory. This very narrow bottleneck makes learning terribly difficult — as teachers and students well know.

If only someone would come up with a theory to explain this bottleneck. If only that theory would help teachers and students succeed despite its narrow confines.

Good News, with a Twist

Happily, that theory exists. It’s called “cognitive load theory,” and several scholars in Australia (led by John Sweller) have been developing it for a few decades now.

It explains the relationship between infinite long-term memory and limited working memory. It explores practical classroom strategies to solve the problems created by this relationship.

Heck, it even muses upon evolutionary explanations for some quirky exceptions to its rules.

In other words, it has almost everything a teacher could want.

Alas — [warning: controversial opinion] — it does include one glaring difficulty.

Cognitive load theory helps educational psychologists talk with other educational psychologists about these topics.

However, it relies on on a long list of terms, each of which describes complex — sometimes counter-intuitive — concepts.

If you start reading articles based on cognitive load theory, you might well discover that …

… a particular teaching practice works this way because of the “split attention effect” (which doesn’t mean exactly what it sounds like),

… but it works that way because of the “expertise reversal effect,”

… and “element interactivity” might explain these contradictory results.

For this reason, paradoxically, teachers who try to understand and apply cognitive load theory often experience cognitive overload.

As a result, teachers would really benefit from a book that explains cognitive load theory so clearly as not to overwhelm our working memory.

Could such a book exist?

Ollie Lovell To The Rescue

Yes, reader, it exists. Oliver Lovell has written Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory In Action (as part of Tom Sherrington’s “In Action” series).

Lovell’s book does exactly what teachers want it to do: explain cognitive load theory without overloading our cognitive faculties.

Lovell accomplishes this feat with three strategies.

First, he has an impressive ability to explain cognitive load theory concepts with bracing clarity.

For instance, let’s go back to that “expertise reversal effect.” Why might a teaching strategy benefit a novice but not an expert?

Lovell’s answer: redundancy. Redundant information taxes working memory. And, crucially:

“What is redundant for an expert is not redundant for the novice, and instructional recommendations are reversed accordingly.”

That’s the “expertise reversal effect.” Pithy, clear, sensible.

Because he writes and explains so clearly, Lovell helps teachers understand all that cognitive load theory terminology without feeling overwhelmed.

Second, Lovell gives examples.

SO MANY CLASSROOM EXAMPLES.

Whatever grade you teach, whatever topic you teach, you’ll find your discipline, your grade, and your interests represented. (I believe Lovell is a math teacher; as a high-school English teacher, I never felt slighted or ignored.)

Geography, piano, computer programming. It’s all there.

Knowing that clear explanations of worked examples can reduce working memory load, he provides plenty.

Practicing What He Preaches

Third, Lovell simplifies needless complexities.

Students of cognitive load theory will notice that he more-or-less skips over “germane” cognitive load: a category that has (ironically) created all sorts of “extraneous” working memory load for people trying to understand the theory.

He describes the difference between biologically primary and biologically secondary learning. And he explains the potential benefits this theory offers school folk.

However, Lovell doesn’t get bogged down in this niche-y (but fascinating) topic. He gives it just enough room, but not more.

Heck, he even keeps footnotes to a minimum, so as not to split the reader’s attention. Now that’s dedication to reducing working memory load!

Simply put: Lovell both explains and enacts strategies to manage working memory load just right.

In Brief

No doubt your pile of “must read” books is intimidatingly large.

If you want to know how to manage working memory load (and why doing so matters), Lovell’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action should be on top of that pile.

A final note:

I suspect Lovell’s explanations are so clear because he has lots of experience explaining.

Check out his wise, thoughtful, well-informed podcasts here.

The Bruce Willis Method: Catching Up Post-Covid [Reposted]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July-31-2022

The Bruce Willis Method: Catching Up Post-Covid [Reposted]

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Because of Covid, our students have fallen behind. How can we help them “catch up”?

As I argued back in June, Bruce Willis might (or might not) have helpful answers to that question.

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

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

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

His desperate short-cut helps the team catch up.

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

Because of Covid, our students are WAY BEHIND.

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

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

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

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

The Bad News

The Bruce Willis Method does not exist in education.

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

Here’s why I say so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Danger:

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

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

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

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

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

Second Danger:

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

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

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

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

They will sound uplifting and exciting and tempting and plausible.

But…

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

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

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

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

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

The Good News

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

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

Step 1: determine what our students already know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: draw on the lessons of cognitive science.

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

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

We should study…

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

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

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

… a realistic framework for understanding student motivation.

And so forth.

Understanding these topics will not “revolutionize education overnight.”

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

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

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

Do Classroom Decorations Distract Students? A Story in 4 Parts… [Reposted]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July-24-2022

Do Classroom Decorations Distract Students? A Story in 4 Parts… [Reposted]

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As we prepare for the upcoming school year, how should we think about decorating our classrooms?

Can research give us any pointers?

This story, initially posted in March of 2022, paints a helpfully rich research picture.

Teacher training programs often encourage us to brighten our classrooms with lively, colorful, personal, and uplifting stuff:

Inspirational posters.

Students’ art work.

Anchor charts.

Word walls.

You know the look.

We certainly hope that these decorations invite our students in and invigorate their learning. (We might even have heard that “enriched environments promote learning.”)

At the same time, we might worry that all those decorations could distract our students from important cognitive work.

So, which is it? Do decorations distract or inspire? Do they promote learning or inhibit learning? If only we had research on this question…

Part I: Early Research

But wait: we DO have research on this objection.

Back in 2014, a team led by Dr. Anna Fisher asked if classroom decorations might be “Too Much of a Good Thing.”

They worked with Kindergarten students, and found that — sure enough — students who learned in highly-decorated rooms paid less attention and learned less than others in “sparsely” decorated classroom.

Since then, other researchers have measured students’ performance on specific mental tasks in busy environments, or in plain environments.

The results: the same. A busy visual field reduced working memory and attention scores, compared to plain visual environments.

It seems that we have a “brain-based” answer to our question:

Classroom decorations can indeed be “too much of a good thing.”

Taken too far, they distract students from learning.

Part II: Important Doubts

But wait just one minute…

When I present this research in schools, I find that teachers have a very plausible question.

Sure: those decorations might distract students at first. But, surely the students get used to them.

Decorations might make learning a bit harder at first. But ultimately students WON’T be so distracted, and they WILL feel welcomed, delighted, and inspired.

In this theory, a small short-term problem might well turn into a substantial long-term benefit.

And I have to be honest: that’s a plausible hypothesis.

Given Fisher’s research (and that of other scholars), I think the burden of proof is on people who say that decorations are not distracting. But I don’t have specific research to contradict those objections.

Part III: The Researchers Return

So now maybe you’re thinking: “why don’t researchers study this specific question”?

I’ve got good news: they just did.

In a recently-published study, another research team (including Fisher, and led by Dr. Karrie Godwin, who helped in the 2014 study) wondered if students would get used to the highly decorated classrooms.

Research isn’t research if we don’t use fancy terminology, so they studied “habituation.” As in: did students habituate to the highly decorated classrooms?

In the first half of their study, researchers again worked with Kindergarteners. Students spent five classes studying science topics in plainly decorated classrooms. (The visual material focused only on the topic being presented.)

Then they spent ten classes studying science topics in highly decorated classrooms. (These decorations resembled typical classroom decorations: posters, charts, artwork, etc.)

Unsurprisingly (based on the 2014 study), students were more distractable in the decorated classroom.

But: did they get used to the decorations? Did they become less distractable over time? Did they habituate?

The answer: a little bit.

In other words: students were less distractible than they initially were in the decorated classroom. But they were still more distractible than in the sparsely decorated room.

Even after ten classes, students hadn’t fully habituated.

Part IV: Going Big

This 2-week study with kindergarteners, I think, gives us valuable information.

We might have hoped that students will get used to decorations, and so benefit from their welcoming uplift (but not be harmed by their cognitive cost). So far, this study deflates that hope.

However, we might still hold out a possibility:

If students partially habituate over two weeks, won’t they fully habituate eventually? Won’t the habituation trend continue?

Team Godwin wanted to answer that question too. They ran yet another study in primary school classrooms.

This study had somewhat different parameters (the research nitty-gritty gets quite detailed). But the headline is: this study lasted 15 weeks.

Depending on the school system you’re in, that’s between one-third and one-half of a school year.

How much did the students habituate to the visual distractions?

The answer: not at all.

The distraction rate was the same after fifteen weeks as it was at the beginning of the year.

To my mind, that’s an AMAZING research finding.

Putting It Together

At this point, I think we have a compelling research story.

Despite our training — and, perhaps, despite our love of decoration — we have a substantial body of research suggesting that over-decorated classrooms interfere with learning.

The precise definition of “over-decorated” might take some time to sort out. And, the practical problems of putting up/taking down relevant learning supports deserves thought and sympathetic exploration.

However: we shouldn’t simply hope away the concern that young students can be distracted by the environment.

And we shouldn’t trust that they’ll get used to the busy environment.

Instead, we should deliberately create environments that welcome students, inspire students, and help students concentrate and learn.

Fisher, A. V., Godwin, K. E., & Seltman, H. (2014). Visual environment, attention allocation, and learning in young children: When too much of a good thing may be bad. Psychological science, 25(7), 1362-1370.

Godwin, K. E., Leroux, A. J., Seltman, H., Scupelli, P., & Fisher, A. V. (2022). Effect of Repeated Exposure to the Visual Environment on Young Children’s Attention. Cognitive Science, 46(2), e13093.

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