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Author Archives: Andrew Watson

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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It’s Funny (but It’s Not): Our Instincts about Learning are Often Badly Wrong
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-25-2022

It’s Funny (but It’s Not): Our Instincts about Learning are Often Badly Wrong

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Every now and then, research is just plain funny. Here’s the story:

If you’ve spent even a hot minute at a Learning and the Brain conference, you know that multitasking is not a thing.

When we undertake two cognitively demanding tasks “simultaneously,” we actually switch rapidly back and forth between them.

The result: we do worse at both.

That is: if you’re reading this blog post while listening to the news, you won’t understand or remember either very well. (That is: not as well as you would have done with each task separately.)

Where’s the funny?

In 2017, Shalena Srna published research about our perceptions of multitasking.

She found that we do better at activities when we think we’re multitasking than when we think we’re monotasking.

For instance, participants transcribed a video lecture about sharks.

Researchers told half of the participants that listening and transcribing are two different things, so they would be multitasking.

They told the other half that listening and transcribing are one thing, so they’re not multitasking.

Sure enough, the group that perceived transcription as multitasking transcribed more words, and remembered more content, than the group who perceived the same task as monotasking.

Amazing.

Srna’s team suspects that people who think they’re multitasking concentrate harder, and so do better.

Hence this paradox: people don’t multitask well, but we monotask better when we think we’re multitasking.

The Bigger Picture

So, what do we do with this comical finding?

On the one hand, I don’t think it has direct teaching implications. That is, we teachers should NOT pretend to our students that they’re multitasking so that they’ll monotask better. (Why not? Well, misleading students is usually a very bad idea…)

On the other hand, this study provides an important reminder:

Humans don’t intuitively understand how we think and learn.

We teachers (and we students) might just FEEL that a particular learning strategy works well for us. Sadly, those powerful feelings are often just plain wrong.

I can think of several research examples of this not-so-funny problem.

In 2009, Dr. Nate Kornell and Dr. Lisa Son published a study about retrieval practice.

Students learned some word pairs.

They practiced HALF of those words with simple review.

They practiced the OTHER HALF with retrieval practice.

Unsurprisingly (to the researchers — and to us), the students remembered more words after retrieval practice than after review. (About 6% more.)

Surprisingly, they PREDICTED that they would remember more words after the review. (About 7% more.)

That is: even thought they actually formed stronger memories after retrieval practice, they thought they formed stronger memories after another (less effective) strategy.

Why, because (say it with me):

Humans don’t intuitively understand how we think and learn.

Honestly, this insight is just bad news.

The Bigger Picture

Another study — actually a literature review — makes the same point more broadly.

Dr. Nick Soderstrom, working with Dr. Robert Bjork, reviewed research into short-term performance and long-term learning.

To summarize this ENORMOUS review, they found that teaching strategies which benefit short-term peformance do not consistently benefit long-term learning.

That is: imagine that I introduce a new topic in class, and give my students a quick low-stakes quiz at the end of that class. The strategies that boost class-end quizzes probably won’t help students learn well enough to demonstrate understanding on a later test.

They understood it today, but not long-term.

The Even Bigger Question: So What?

So far, these research findings have the whiff of humor.

Ain’t it funny that we monotask better when we think we’re multitasking? LOL.

In truth, this consistent finding — humans don’t intuitively understand how we think and learn — has important implications.

Here’s what I mean:

In theory, the field of Mind, Brain, and Education creates conversations among equals: psychology researchers, neuroscience researchers, and teachers/academic leaders.

In practice, this field often results in researchers telling teachers what to do.

I myself, in my own work, spent LOTS of time championing the voice of teachers.

We teachers can, should, MUST speak up for ourselves. Our experience — both individual and professional — matters in these conversations. We’re not here to obey; we’re here to share ideas for mutual benefit.

However, because “humans don’t intuitively understand how we think and learn,” we must speak up for our experience AND we must do so modestly.

We must do so with an open mind.

Yes, my experience tells me that teaching this way helps students learn.

But, my definition of “learn” is “do well on the class-end quiz.” Soderstrom shows us — very convincingly — that class-end quizzes don’t predict long-term learning and understanding. (Of course: “long-term learning and understanding” is my goal!)

Yes, my experience tells me that I can multitask! Alas, research shows I’m just monotasking efficiently.

My gut tells me that simple rereading results in more learning than retrieval practice. Alas, my gut is just plain old wrong.

In other words: we teachers should have a role in this Mind, Brain, Education conversation. To be most effective in that role — to merit that role — we must acknowledge the limitations of our insight, training and professional experience.

This balance is VERY DIFFICULT to get right. I hope we can talk more about finding a harmonious tension between speaking up and listening with humility and curiosity.

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

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

Test Anxiety: How and When Does It Harm Students?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-16-2022

Test Anxiety: How and When Does It Harm Students?

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When our students learn, we naturally want them to show us what they’ve learned.

Most schools rely, in varying degrees, on tests. The logic seems simple: if students know something, they can demonstrate their knowledge on this quiz, or test, or exam.

But, what about students who feel test anxiety?

These students might learn the material, but not be able to show what they’ve learned — at least, not as well.

The idea of test anxiety has been around for decades, and a significant pool of research suggests it correlates with measurably lower test grades.

How do we fix the problem?

Step 1: Defining the Problem

As always, we can’t really fix a problem until we understand the problem.

When we consider test anxiety, the explanation seems entirely straightforward.

Most students feel some degree of stress during tests. That’s normal, and can be helpful.

Some students, however, feel unhelpfully high levels of stress during tests. Distracted by sweaty palms and intrusive thoughts, they don’t concentrate on the cognitive task at hand.

In short: test anxiety harms the student during the test. Teachers can help students by reducing their stress in the moment. (Yes, we have lots of strategies to do so — see below.)

But wait!

What it that theory isn’t true? What if test anxiety muddles cognitive performance at some other time? If that’s true, then our “in-the-moment” strategies won’t help — or, won’t help enough.

Intriguing Hypothesis

How would we test this unsettling question?

A group of researchers in Germany discovered a thoughtful strategy.

Medical students in Germany spend lots of time (like, say, months) preparing for a high-stakes final exam.

Dr. Maria Theobald worked with over 300 of these students, who used an online learning platform to study. On this platform, these students…

… practiced problems from previous exams, and

… took five practice tests.

She also measured their test anxiety in two ways.

First, she measured their overall test anxiety, with a standard questionnaire.

Second, she measured their day-to-day test anxiety, rating their “tension about the upcoming study day” on a 1-5 scale.

And, of course, she measured lots of other things. (Spoiler alert: Theobald measured students’ working memory — a detail that will be important later.)

What happens when these researchers put all these pieces together?

Surprising Results

Here are the headlines:

Test anxiety does not harm students’ exam performance in the moment.

Instead, it does harm their performance during the preparation for the exam.

Why does Theobald reach this conclusion?

If test anxiety harms students in the moment, then these students should do worse on the FINAL TEST than they did on the PRACTICE PROBLEMS and the PRACTICE TESTS.

Imagine that a student averaged an 85 on practice problems and an 84 on practice tests, but score a 75 on the final test. We would say:

“Something strange happened.

It looks like anxiety prevented students from demonstrating the knowledge they obviously have. (They obviously have it because they scored so well on the practice problems/tests).”

Theobald’s data, however, did not fit that pattern at all.

Instead, anxious students made less progress during the months of study BEFORE the test. And, their final test score was right in line with that earlier (lower) performance.

That is: anxious students scored 75 on the practice problems and practice tests … and then a 75 on the final exam as well. (These numbers are examples, not real data.)

So, we find ourselves saying:

“Hmm. These anxious students scored consistently lower than their peers — both on the final test and on the months of practice work they did.

Their anxiety didn’t lower their final score in the moment. It interfered with their learning trajectory as they prepared for the final test.”

Reader: I did not expect these results.

What Should Teachers Do?

First, we should — in my view — continue with stress reduction strategies in the moment.

We’ve got evidence that letting students vent their stress improves exam performance. And we’ve got evidence that helping students reframe stress as positive (“I’m excited!”) helps as well.

So, I wouldn’t give up on these pre-test strategies just yet.

Second, this research encourages us to take the long view. “In the moment” strategies might help some, but longer-term strategies now sound more urgent.

Because Theobald’s research is so new, I haven’t seen any responses to it — much less research based suggestions.

But I think of “values affirmation” as one potential (let me repeat: “potential”) way to reduce this kind of test anxiety.

I’ll be keeping my eye out for others. If you hear of a promising one, I hope you’ll let me know.

Potential Limitations

First: an important limitation.

All research studies include limitations, so it’s no criticism to say this study does too.

Specifically, this research was done with students completing medical school. That is: they (probably) have been highly academically successful for decades. They (probably) bring higher levels of motivation than many students.

And, their test-anxiety profile might not match those of my students, or of yours.

Until these findings are replicated in other students populations (and cultural contexts), I would rely on professional experience to adapt them to our own settings.

Second: an important non-limitation.

I noted above that Theobald measured students’ working memory. (Long-time readers know: I’m obsessed with working memory.)

This research team speculated — plausibly — that working memory capacity might mitigate the effects of test anxiety.

That is: students with more cognitive space to think might feel less distracted by anxious thoughts.

However, their data did not support that hypothesis. Students with high working memory are just as troubled by test anxiety as those with lower working memory.

TL;DR

In this study with German medical students, test anxiety interferes NOT with student performance on the final test, but with their learning before the test.

If further studies support this conclusion, we should refocus our work on helping those students during the weeks and months before the test itself.

Theobald, M., Breitwieser, J., & Brod, G. (2022). Test Anxiety Does Not Predict Exam Performance When Knowledge Is Controlled For: Strong Evidence Against the Interference Hypothesis of Test Anxiety. Psychological Science, 09567976221119391.

Does Mindfulness Help? A Blockbuster New Study
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-09-2022

Does Mindfulness Help? A Blockbuster New Study

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Few ideas in education sound better than mindfulness.

If mindfulness programs work as intended, teachers and schools can help students center their attention and lower their stress.

We’ve got suggestive research indicating that, when done properly, such programs can improve wellbeing.

Perhaps they can even helps students learn more. (We school people really like research that helps students learn more.)

What’s not to love?

Not Feeling the Love; Really Feeling the Love

Although I’ve linked to suggestive research above, this field does have a research problem.

Most mindfulness studies include relatively few people.

And, their study designs aren’t often persuasive. (The topic of “study design” gets technical quickly. The simplest version is: to say that “research shows this” convincingly, a study needs to check A LOT of boxes. Not many mindfulness studies do.)

So, we’d love a study with LOTS of people. And, we’d like a really good study design.

So, how about:

A study with 8,000 students.

In 85 schools.

Lasting over two years.

With a pre-registered study design.

In this study, researchers paired similar schools: for example, two large schools, located in Wales, with similar socio-economic makeup, and so forth.

One school in that pair got a 10-week curriculum in School Based Mindfulness Training. School teachers ran these sessions, which included mindfulness exercises and home practice and so forth.

The other school in the pair continued the SEL work that they were doing. (Researchers evaluated the extant SEL programs to ensure they were good quality.)

So: did the Mindfulness training benefit students more that ongoing SEL work?

What Researchers Measured; What They Found

This research team measured three primary outcomes: risk for depression, social-emotional functioning (with a “Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire”), and well-being.

And, believe it or not, they measure twenty-eight secondary outcomes: executive function, drug and alcohol use, anxiety, and so forth.

Did the students who got the mindfulness training show statistically significant differences compared to those who got the “teaching as usual” SEL training?

The researchers themselves had been optimistic. In the reserved language of research, they write:

Our premise was that skills in attention and social-emotional-behavioral self-regulation underpin mental health and well-being across the full spectrum of well being.

“Skills in attention and social-emotional-behavioral self-regulation” sounds A LOT like mindfulness, doesn’t it?

Their review of earlier research, and their own pilot study, showed a “promise of effectiveness.” But, they designed and ran this 2-year-8000-student study to be sure.

What did they find?

Basically, nothing.

They write that they “found no evidence that [school based mindfulness training] was superior to [teaching as usual]” one year after the training was over.

In the primary outcomes, they found no differences for depression, well-being, and social-emotional function.

In the secondary outcomes, in fact, they found students in the mindfulness group had slightly worse results in five categories:

… higher levels of self-reported hyperactivity and inattention,

… higher panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive scores,

… lower levels of mindfulness skills.

And so forth.

These differences weren’t large, but they certainly don’t suggest that mindfulness training is better that other SEL programs.

Remaining Questions

Any study including 8000+ people, and measuring 30+ variables (!), will result in LOTS of details, and lots of questions about methodology.

These points jump out at me:

First: these researchers have done an impressively thorough job.

Reasonable people will push back on their findings. But this research team has obviously taken extraordinary care, and provided an immense amount of information for others to examine. (Check out their website.)

Second: I’ve traditionally been skeptical of “teaching as usual” control groups. Here’s why:

Some teachers got a shiny new thing: mindfulness training! Other teachers got nothing: the SEL curriculum they’ve been doing all along.

I’m rarely surprised when the new thing produces better results — it’s new!

However, in this case, the new thing DIDN’T produce better results. The results, basically, were identical.

So, my typical objection doesn’t really apply here.

Third: although 43 schools added mindfulness programs, more than half of them continued with the SEL training they were already doing.

That is, we’re not exactly comparing mindfulness to other SEL approaches. Some schools did only mindfulness; others did only SEL; others offered a blend of both.

Would the mindfulness programs produce better results if they replaced the SEL programs rather than combined with them? We don’t know.

Fourth: Why didn’t the mindfulness programs help?

On reason might be: most students just didn’t do the mindfulness exercises consistently.

On a 0-5 scale, students on average rated their mindfulness practice as 0.83. As in, less than 1. As in, they simply didn’t practice much mindfulness.

If I don’t take my migraine medication, it won’t help reduce my migraines. If I don’t do my mindfulness exercises, I’m unlikely to get the benefits of mindfulness.

Would these programs work if they took place in school, so students practiced more mindfulness? We don’t know.

TL;DR

This well designed study — including more than 8000 participants — strongly suggests that mindfulness training doesn’t produce more (or fewer) benefits than other SEL approaches.

This research doesn’t suggest we must cancel the programs we have. However, it pushes back against the argument that mindfulness provides distinct advantages, and that all responsible schools must adopt such programs immediately.

As long a schools tend responsibly to their students’ social-emotional needs, a variety of approaches can work equally well.

Kuyken, W., Ball, S., Crane, C., Ganguli, P., Jones, B., Montero-Marin, J., … & MYRIAD Team. (2022). Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness training compared with normal school provision in reducing risk of mental health problems and promoting well-being in adolescence: the MYRIAD cluster randomised controlled trial. Evidence-based mental health, 25(3), 99-109.

The Unexpected Problem with Learning Styles Theory
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October-02-2022

The Unexpected Problem with Learning Styles Theory

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I recently read a much-liked Twitter post that said (I’m paraphrasing here):

If you try to debunk Learning Styles Theory and you face unexpected resistance, start looking for the profit motive.

Hmmm.

To be clear: learning styles theory just doesn’t have plausible research support.

If and when we can debunk it, we certainly should.

But, in my own experience at least, teachers who believe the theory often do so with the best of motives.

Mocking those motives — or, even worse, implying believers have wicked motives — seems unfair. And, likely to prove counterproductive.

Yes, grifters exist. Yes, we should call them out. But most teachers who offer “unexpected resistance” can explain why — for reasons that have nothing to do with profits. (Honestly, if teachers were driven by profits, would we have joined this profession?)

Surface Plausibility

In the first place, MANY teachers learned about Learning Styles Theory in their education programs.

In fact, Blake Harvard — “The Effortful Educator” — searched the websites of 9 major schools of education, and found that MOST referenced Learning Styles Theory positively.

Can we be surprised that teachers believe what their professors teach them?

Equally important, this theory seems to align with much of our classroom experience.

After all, daily classroom life suggests that students learn differently. Some students respond well to this approach, while others need another approach entirely.

So, it seems that Learning Styles Theory (helpfully?) explains these differences, and (helpfully?) suggests a coherent way to respond to them.

Why wouldn’t teachers believe a theory that a) we learned in graduate school, and b) aligns with our daily experience?

Getting Personal

In fact, “unexpected resistance” to Learning Styles Theory often stems from an even deeper source.

Many dedicated teachers have been relying on it for years. Often, their self-definition as a good and caring teachers begins with or includes their fidelity to this theory:

“My students know I care about them because I tailor my instruction to their learning style!“

When we tell teachers that we simply have no evidence to support the theory (and, to be clear, we don’t), we’re not simply asking them to change what they do and believe.

Instead, we are — in effect — asking them to admit their their exemplary teaching practice was (at best) useless, and (possibly) detrimental. FOR YEARS.

That admission, of course, is incredibly painful and troubling.

For us to mock teachers (“look for the profit motive!”) for this painful struggle … well, I simply don’t understand how that approach will help. I can’t remember the last time that mockery helped me change my teaching practice for the better.

Plausible Alternatives

If we shouldn’t accuse people of being charlatans (hint: I think we mostly shouldn’t), how should we contradict these misbeliefs?

As I’ve written before, I do think this is a very difficult problem.

We really should contradict those false beliefs, but I’m not at all sure that doing so encourages people to adopt new ones.

My current approach relies on these steps.

First: rather that asking teachers to stop believing one thing, I encourage them to start thinking about something else.

My hopeful theory: the more time they’re thinking about, say, working memory, the less time they’re thinking about Learning Styles Theory.

Second: I don’t contradict in public. I try to chat with believers one-on-one.

Honestly, this approach includes perils. If I don’t contradict in public, others might believe that theory does have merit.

However, as noted above, I think increasing shame reduces the likelihood that new advice will stick.

Third: I provide research, and ask lots of genuinely curious questions.

I hope that peer-to-peer curiosity will ultimately change more minds than more confrontational strategies.

 

To be clear, I’m not certain that my approach has more merit than others. I certainly have no research suggesting that it will work.

But experience tell me that “supportive listening” beats “questioning motives” as a motivational approach.

If you’ve got suggestions and strategies, please share them!

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.

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