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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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The Best Way to Take Notes: More Feisty Debate
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 10, 2018

The Best Way to Take Notes: More Feisty Debate

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Over at The Learning Scientists, Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel asks: is it better to take longhand notes? Or to annotate slides provided by the speaker? Or, perhaps, simply to listen attentively?

longhand notes

(Notice, by the way, that she’s not exploring the vexed question of longhand notes vs. laptop notes.)

Before we get to her answer, it’s helpful to ask a framing question: how do brain scientists approach that topic in the first place? What lenses might they use to examine it?

Lens #1: The Right Level of Difficulty

Cognitive scientists often focus on desirable difficulties.

Students might want their learning to be as easy as possible. But, we’ve got lots of research to show that easy learning doesn’t stick.

For instance: reviewing notes makes students feel good about their learning, because they recognize a great deal of what they wrote down. “I remember that! I must have learned it!”

However, that easy recognition doesn’t improve learning. Instead, self-testing is MUCH more helpful. (Check out retrievalpractice.org for a survey of this research, and lots of helpful strategies.)

Of course, we need to find the right level of difficulty. Like Goldilocks, we seek out a teaching strategy that’s neither too tough nor too easy.

In the world of note-taking, the desirable-difficulty lens offers some hypotheses.

On the one hand, taking longhand notes might require just the right level of difficulty. Students struggle — a bit, but not too much — to distinguish the key ideas from the supporting examples. They worry — but not a lot — about defining all the key terms just right.

In this case, handwritten notes will benefit learning.

On the other hand, taking longhand notes might tax students’ cognitive capacities too much.  They might not be able to sort ideas from examples, or to recall definitions long enough to write them down.

In this case, handing out the slides to annotate will reduce undesirable levels of difficulty.

Lens #2: Working Memory Overload

Academic learning requires students to

focus on particular bits of information,

hold them in mind,

reorganize and combine them into some new mental pattern.

We’ve got a particular cognitive capacity that allows us to do that. It’s called working memory. (Here’s a recent post about WM, if you’d like a refresher.)

Alas, people need WM to learn in schools, but we don’t have very much of it. All too frequently, working memory overload prevents students from learning.

Here’s a key problem with taking longhand notes: to do so, I use my working memory to

focus on the speaker

understand her ideas

decide which ones merit writing down

reword those ideas into simpler form (because I can’t write as fast as she speaks)

write

(at the same time that I’m deciding, rewording, and writing) continue understanding the ideas in the lecture

(at the same time that I’m rewording, writing, and continuing) continue deciding what’s worth writing down.

That’s a HUGE working memory load.

Clearly, longhand notes keep a high WM load. Providing slides to annotate reduces that load.

Drum Roll, Please…

What does recent research tell us about longhand notes vs. slide annotation? Kuepper-Tetzel, summarizing a recent conference presentation, writes:

participants performed best … when they took longhand notes during the lecture compared to [annotating slides or passively listening].

More intriguing, the group who just passively viewed the lecture performed as well as the group who were given the slides and made annotations.

Whether the lecture was slow- or fast-paced did not change this result.

Longhand notetaking was always more beneficial for long-term retention of knowledge than both annotated slides and passive viewing.

By the way: in the second half of the study, researchers tested students eight weeks later. They found that longhand note-takers did as well as annotators even though they studied less.

It seems that the desirable difficulty of handwriting notes yielded stronger neural networks. Those networks required less reactivation — that is, less study time — to produce equally good test results.

Keep In Mind…

Note that Kuepper-Tetzel is summarizing as-of-yet unpublished research. The peer-review process certainly has its flaws, but it also can provide some degree of confidence. So far, this research hasn’t cleared that bar.

Also note: this research used lectures with a particular level of working memory demand. Some of our students, however, fall below the average in our particular teaching context. They might need more WM support.

We might also be covering especially complicated material on a particular day. That is: the WM challenges in our classes vary from day to day. On the more challenging days, all students might need more WM support.

In these cases, slides to annotate — not longhand notes — might provide the best level of desirable difficulty.

As is always the case, use your best professional judgment as you apply psychology research in your classroom.

The Great Homework Debate: Working Memory Disadvantage?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 07, 2018

The Great Homework Debate: Working Memory Disadvantage?

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Here at Learning and the Brain, we think a lot about the great homework debate.

homework debate

Some scholars rail against homework. Some schools are doing away with it. However, other researchers champion its benefits.

What can brain researchers contribute to this discussion? Knowing what we know about brains and minds, how can we reconsider this argument?

Working Memory in Schools

All academic learning depends on a crucial cognitive capacity: working memory — often abbreviated as WM.

WM allows students to hold pieces of information in mind, while simultaneously reorganizing or combining them.

Clearly, students use WM all the time. For example:

Performing mathematical operations.

Following instructions.

Applying literary terminology.

Combining letters into new words.

Comparing famous figures.

Using scientific principles in new situations.

All these mental operations — and many, many more — require students to hold and process information simultaneously. Whenever students hold and process, they use WM.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have very much of this essential cognitive capacity. As a simple test: you can probably alphabetize the five days of the work week in your head. (Go ahead — try it!)

But, you probably can’t alphabetize the twelve months of the year. Why? You just don’t have enough WM. (Don’t worry: almost nobody does.)

Working Memory and the Homework Debate

A just-published study by Ashley Miller and Nash Unsworth points to a possible connection between WM and our views on homework.

Imagine, for instance, I give my students a list of random words to learn. Later, I ask them to recall words from that list. As you can imagine, the longer the list, the harder that task will be.

As it turns out, a student’s WM influences her performance on that task. The lower her WM, the more she will struggle to recall all those words.

The Miller and Unsworth study adds a crucial twist. As students see the same word list more and more often, the difference between high-WM students and low-WM students gets smaller.

In some ways of measuring, in fact, it simply goes away.

Put simply: repetitive practice can eliminate this functional difference between high-WM and low-WM students.

What’s another name for “repetitive practice”? Homework.

In other words, homework designed in a particular way might help students who traditionally struggle in school. Although a relatively low WM typically makes learning very difficult, a well-structured assignment might ease some of those difficulties.

If teachers could make cognitive life easier for low-WM students, we’d be going a long way to making school more fair and beneficial.

Caveats (Of Course)

First: this argument says that the right kind of homework can help some students. Of course, the wrong kind of homework won’t. In fact, it might be a detriment to most students.

Second: Miller and Unsworth’s study suggests that repetitive practice can reduce the effect of WM differences. However, teachers might struggle to make “repetitive practice” anything other than really, really dull. We’ll need to be insightful and imaginative to ensure that the solution to one problem doesn’t create a new problem.

Third: To be clear: Miller & Unsworth don’t say that their research has implications for assigning homework. However, as I thought over their findings, it seemed the most direct application of this study in a school setting.

Finally: Teachers might object: we rarely ask students to recall random words. This research paradigm simply doesn’t apply to our work.

And yet, we face an awkward truth.

The words that our students learn might not seem random to us, but they nonetheless often seem random to our students.

We know why the words “chlorophyll,” “stomata,” and “Calvin Cycle” are related to each other. However, until our students understand photosynthesis, even that brief list might feel quite random to them.

Words and ideas that live comfortably in teachers’ long-term memory systems must be processed in our students’ WM systems. The right kind of homework just might make that processing easier.

Pro Tips: How To Think Like A Cognitive Scientist
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 04, 2018

Pro Tips: How To Think Like A Cognitive Scientist

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Here’s an enthusiastic article from down under.

cognitive science principles

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Victoria University has introduced an “intensive” course model. Students don’t take multiple courses over many weeks. Instead, they take one course for four weeks. Students absorb a full term of learning in one zealous month.

The students interviewed by the paper were enthusiastic. 19-year-old Alice Growden says:

I am learning a lot more; I feel like the information is easier to understand this way. It’s easier to do better. You are not slammed by four different assignments at once. It is much more balanced.

The Morning Herald’s tone (and my Twitter feed) insist on the benefits of these intensive courses. Seemingly only grouchy professors — who fret that they won’t have enough time for research — object.

Cognitive Science Principles, Take 1: The Spacing Effect

Despite this article’s enthusiastic tone, cognitive scientists will quickly doubt the benefits of this “intensive” course schedule.

After all, we have lots of research showing that spreading practice out over time creates more learning than bunching that practice all together.

For instance, Doug Rohrer looks at shorter and longer lengths of time that courses cover topics. His conclusion — in the modest language of research:

Long-term learning is best achieved when the exposures to a concept are distributed over time periods that are longer rather than shorter.

He finds this conclusion to hold even for intensive language courses, where teachers most often champion the strategy.

Many other scholars have reached this same conclusion. Nicholas Cepeda (along with Doug Rohrer, Hal Pasher, and others) worked with more than 1300 students, and retested them up to a year later.

Their conclusion? Spread learning out over time.

This idea holds even for flashcard study strategies.

Pro Tip #1: If you want to think like a cognitive scientist, beware teaching strategies that promote lots of learning in a relatively short time.

Cognitive Science Principles, Take 2: The Illusion of Knowing

As quoted above, student Alice Growden emphasizes the ease with which she learns:

“I am learning a lot more; I feel like the information is easier to understand this way. It’s easier to do better.”

Yet here again, cognitive scientists will be skeptical.

Remember this principle: easy learning doesn’t stick. Instead, teachers should foster a desirable level of difficulty.

In fact, this principle helps explain the principle above. Spreading practice out over time helps students learn better because it creates additional cognitive challenges.

The extra mental work that students do, in turn, creates more enduring neural networks to encode new memories.

Another example: rereading the textbook.

Students LOVE rereading the book, because it’s relatively easy. This study strategy gives them the illusion of knowing. They say to themselves: “I recognize that passage! I must know this!”

Alas, this illusion comforts students, but isn’t helping them learn more.

I frequently cite Nick Soderstrom’s comprehensive article distinguishing between two results of study: performance vs. learning.

Students often believe that if they “perform” well — say, they recognized everything in their notes — then they have studied effectively. Alas, higher early performance often results in less learning.

Pro Tip #2: If you want to think like a cognitive scientist, beware teaching strategies that emphasize how easy new learning will be. Easy learning doesn’t stick.

 

Is Dopamine For Motivation or Learning?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 01, 2018

Is Dopamine For Motivation or Learning?

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Neuroscientists talk a lot about neurotransmitters. These chemicals move from one neuron to another at synapses, and in this way help brain cells communicate with each other.

dopamine, motivation, and learning

We’ve got several dozen different kinds of neurotransmitters.

Some you never hear about. When was the last time you heard about tyramine? Or, octopamine? (I really hope it has eight legs.)

Others you hear about all the time. Serotonin. Glutamate. Oxytocin.

And dopamine.

Dopamine, Motivation, and Learning

Teachers hear a lot about dopamine, because it’s an essential ingredient in neural networks central to both learning and motivation.

Of course, we care deeply about both of those topics, and so we naturally want to know more.

However, learning and motivation aren’t the same thing.

They interact, of course. I might learn something that, in turn, motivates me. Or, my general academic motivation might help me learn. But, each is possible without the other.

How, then, do we make sense of dopamine’s role in our world?

In his recent article What Does Dopamine Mean, John Burke sums up the question this way:

Dopamine is a critical modulator of both learning and motivation. This presents a problem: how can target cells know whether increased dopamine is a signal to learn or to move?

Speed Counts. Or, Not.

Often, different rates of dopamine change have been held up as explanations to answer this question.

According to this theory: slow dopamine change = motivation. Fast dopamine change = error detection and learning.

Burke, however, has a different theory:

Dopamine release related to motivation is rapidly and locally sculpted by receptors on dopamine terminals, independently from dopamine cell firing. Target neurons abruptly switch between learning and performance modes, with striatal cholinergic interneurons providing one candidate switch mechanism.

Got that? It’s all about the striatal cholinergic interneurons.

Implications for Teaching

About a year ago, I wrote this:

I encourage you to be wary when someone frames teaching advice within a simple framework about neurotransmitters. If you read teaching advice saying “your goal is to increase dopamine flow,” it’s highly likely that the person giving that advice doesn’t know enough about dopamine.

BTW: it’s possible that the author’s teaching advice is sound, and that this teaching advice will result in more dopamine. But, dopamine is a result of the teaching practice–and of a thousand other variables–but not the goal of the teaching practice. The goal of the teaching is more learning. Adding the word “dopamine” to the advice doesn’t make it any better.

In brief: if teaching advice comes to you dressed in the language of neurotransmitters, you’ll get a real dopamine rush by walking away…

Burke’s article, I believe, underlines that point. At present, scientists don’t know the answer to very basic questions about dopamine’s effect on students’ learning and motivation.

As teachers, we can be curious about dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin. But we should focus on teaching and learning…not on the dimly-understood neurotransmitters that make them possible.

The Neuroscience of Intelligence: “Slim” Neural Networks
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 29, 2018

The Neuroscience of Intelligence: “Slim” Neural Networks

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We’re a “more is better” culture, and so we’re quick to assume that more brain stuff is better.

slim neural networks

Presumably, we want to have more neurons. We want to have more synapses. We want to have higher brain volumes in essential brain regions.

However, recent research suggests an alternate theory.

Slim Neural Networks

According to a recent study by Erhan Genç, published in Nature Communications,

the neuronal circuitry associated with higher intelligence is organized in a sparse and efficient manner, fostering more directed information processing and less cortical activity during reasoning.

Or, as Genç writes:

Intelligent brains are characterized by a slim but efficient network of their neurons. This makes it possible to achieve a high level of thinking with the least possible neural activity.

So: despite our cultural preferences, more isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes, a “slimmer” neural network works better than a more complex one.

Slim Neural Networks: “Blooming and Pruning”

When neuroscientists talk about the neural network development, they often talk with gardening terminology: “blooming” and “pruning.”

Networks “bloom” when neurons join together to create a memory or facilitate a particular function.

The “prune” when the brain simplifies those networks.

Sometimes pruning happens because of disuse. If you learned to juggle when you were younger, you have to keep practicing. If not, that network will start to thin.

Sometimes pruning happens because of expertise. If you keep practicing your juggling, you’ll use fewer neurons than when you started.

As teachers, therefore, we’re working to help brains simultaneously bloom and prune.

We want our students to develop new skills and acquire new information.

And, as they develop their expertise, we want those networks to prune.

The best teaching/gardening, in other words, requires both seeds and clippers.

 

For more thoughts on the relative size of brain regions, click here.

Default Image
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 26, 2018

No Grades? Doug Lemov Just Isn’t Having It…

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If you’ve read Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, you know he focuses not on the theoretical but on the practical.

no grades

When Lemov sees teachers doing something that works (he’s got a rigorous definition of “works”), then he thinks you should do that. When they do something that doesn’t work (ditto), he thinks you should stop.

No Grades, No Meritocracy?

Although lots of people champion doing away with grades, Lemov strongly dissents. In his view, the end of grades would inevitably result in the end of meritocracy.

As you can imagine, his post has prompted a heated debate — much of it articulate and thoughtful. Check it out at the link above.

Should Mothers Help Children With Homework?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 24, 2018

Should Mothers Help Children With Homework?

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Does a mother’s homework help benefit her children? Do they study better? Do they learn more?

mother's homework help

Over the years, researchers have found conflicting answers to these questions.

Perhaps that conflict results from the different kinds of “help” that mothers might provide. Researchers in Finland wanted to find out.

Asking the Right Questions

Jaana Viljaranta and her colleagues worked with several hundred 2nd-4th graders, their mothers, and their teachers.

(The researchers don’t explain why they focus on mothers. I imagine they assume that mothers offer more help than fathers, and – to be precise – focus on “maternal behavior” rather than “parental behavior.”)

Rather than simply ask “do you help your children with their homework,” they had mothers rate themselves in three categories.

Perhaps these mothers provide actual help or guidance.

Perhaps they simply check to see if their child has done the homework.

Or, perhaps they “grant autonomy”; that is, “trust that the child takes care of home assignments by him/herself.”

They looked for a connection between these self-ratings and two results.

First, what effect did this maternal behavior have on task-persistence? They had teachers answer questions like “does the student actively attempt to solve even difficult situations and tasks?”

And second: what effect did it have on students’ learning? Here, researchers used a standard measurement of reading and math skill – not the students’ grades.

A Mother’s Homework Help: Finding the Answers

Because researchers measured so many variables, they’ve got a lot of potential relationships to map.

The short version is:

When mothers help with homework, children are less task-persistent on their own.

When mothers grant autonomy, children are more task-persistent.

And, when mothers check that homework got done, that doesn’t influence task-persistence either way.

(These three findings apply to 2nd and 3rd grade, not 4th.)

In turn, increased task persistence suggested higher grades, and decreased task persistence suggested lower grades. (For both those findings, the results didn’t quite achieve statistical significance.)

In sum: help doesn’t help. Granting autonomy does.

A Mother’s Homework Help: Explaining the Answers

Why is this so? Why doesn’t homework help help?

The Finnish researchers based their study on a well-known theory about motivation: Self-Determination Theory. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan argue that people are motivated by a desire for three things: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Viljaranta and colleagues reason thus: when mothers help their children with homework, they reduce their child’s autonomy, and imply that they think their children lack necessary competence.

By holding back from helping, on the other hand, mothers boost their children’s sense of autonomy. They also show that they believe their children can get the work done on their own.

By promoting autonomy and competence, these mothers help their children develop intrinsic motivation, and thereby improve task persistence.

Not Too Fast…

All research has limitations, and we should keep this study’s limitations in mind.

This is only one study.

It was done in a very particular cultural context. (Grade school in Finland.)

And: researchers found a task-persistence effect only in 2nd and 3rd grade, not 4th. (And, they didn’t find statistically significant difference in learning at any point.)

Finally: researchers report on averages. Your child isn’t average.

Even if many (or most) children benefit when they get autonomy, others just might need some more support.

Research can help inform our decisions, but we must make those decisions one child at a time.

Addendum

After I wrote the post above, I discussed this research with a colleague who teachers in Finland. He responds thus:

The conclusion of the study may contain a cultural bias [as all research does — editor’s note.] Generally speaking, parents in Finland are quite hands off with schools — the very opposite of helicopter parenting. There is also a cultural preference for developing independence from a young age.

In other words: “granting autonomy” is already a cultural norm in Finland in ways that it might not be elsewhere. This background might influence our understanding of this research.

Crucial in the Classroom: Distinguishing between Experts & Novices
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 21, 2018

Crucial in the Classroom: Distinguishing between Experts & Novices

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Over at A Chemical Orthodoxy, Adam Boxer explores the crucial distinction between novices & experts.

novices & experts

In particular, he offers some helpful diagrams to depict key differences. Not only do novices and experts know different facts and feel at ease with different procedures. They think very differently about the facts and procedures they know.

A few of Adam’s essential conclusions:

Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices…

Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort…

Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others…

Novices & Experts: The Teaching Implications

First: We can’t teach novices by treating them like experts. They won’t learn what we want them to learn, because they don’t yet think like experts.

In fact, as this famous chess study demonstrates, they don’t even notice the same things that experts see. Even before they think about the world, experts literally perceive the world differently. (I’m an English teacher, so when I say literally, I mean literally.)

Second: This insight gives teachers a clear goal.

To lead our students to ultimate expertise, we want them to know the facts, procedures, and patterns essential to a particular discipline.

Adam’s article gives two helpful examples of exactly this work. How do we help novices become experts in English? In Geography? And—by extension—the topics you teach? Check out the link above.

Novices & Experts: Project Pedagogies

Third: Some pedagogical strategies that sound good just might not work.

“Authentic assessment,” for example, has a nice ring to it, and plenty of authentic assessments can motivate students to learn deeply.

At the same time, some authentic assessments might ask novices to behave like experts. If my senior elective in business economics asks my students to start a business…there’s a real danger here. This expectation might require more expertise of my novice learners than they can plausibly demonstrate.

To return to the list above:

They might not yet notice patterns of employee or consumer behavior that experts would spot in a second…

They might need LOTS of attentional effort—far more than they plausibly have to spare—to pull up essential information from different places. Clearly, they have to consider payroll, marketing strategies, the lease they’re negotiating, and the applicable state laws…

My own expertise in running a business doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve explained any of those points clearly enough in the first place.

If you run across a teaching philosophy that asks novices to think like experts, you should at least ask hard questions.

Better yet: revise its expectations so that the novices we teach can make the gradual progress that least ultimately to expertise.

If you’d like to read further on this topic, Chapter 6 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?  will guide you well. It’s grounding principle: “Experts think differently from novices.”

Let’s Get Practical: More Flashcards Are Better
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 19, 2018

Let’s Get Practical: More Flashcards Are Better

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Teachers certainly can benefit from background brain knowledge. It’s fascinating, for instance, to learn about the intricacies of neural network formation.

flashcard strategies

At the same time, we and our students often want practical classroom guidance. What exactly should we DO — and, in particular, what should we DO DIFFERENTLY?

For example: given the enthusiasm with which our students turn to flashcards, we should welcome any guidance on their best use.

Here’s a helpfully specific question: should our students use relatively small or relatively large stacks of cards?

Theory Meets Practice: Flashcard Strategies

Psychologists have a theory that should answer that question.

The “spacing effect” says that the same amount of practice spread out over time (“spaced“), rather than done all at once (“massed“), yields more learning.

If a student has — for example — only 5 flashcards in a pile, then she’ll encounter those words more frequently. On the other hand, if she has 20 flashcards in that  pile, then more time passes between each repetition.

5 flashcards = massing; 20 flashcards = spacing. Therefore, 20 flashcards ought to be better.

Nate Kornell, a practical researcher who writes with welcome clarity, tried just this experiment.

Students learned some word pairs with 4 piles of 5 flashcards each. They learned other word pairs with 1 pile of 20 flashcards.

Which flashcard strategy led to better recall the following day?

As the theory predicted, the larger pile of flashcards lead to better memory. In one trial, massed practice resulted in score of 38%. Spaced practice led to a score of 65%.

Crucially: students had the same amount of time to study the same number of words. Simply organizing those words one way (the big pile) rather than the other way (little pile) resulted in more learning.

A Paradox, and a Resolution

In Kornell’s study, larger stacks of flashcards yielded more learning for 90% of the students. And yet, even after they themselves had tried both approaches, 72% preferred the (ineffective) small stacks.

What gives? Why do they prefer ineffective flashcard strategies?

Kornell suspect that students prefer the study approach where they feel they’re making faster progress. Sadly, as happens quite often, the strategy that feels good in fact creates less learning.

Another example of this phenomenon: students typically prefer to reread passages rather than quiz themselves. Rereading doesn’t help them learn much, but it does make them feel more confident. (“I recognize that part! I must have learned it…”)

Flashcard Strategies: The Perfect Number

Given Kornell’s research, it’s tempting to think that students should always sort their flashcards into stacks of 20.

Instead of focusing on number, we should instead focus on relative challenge. The flashcard pile should be big enough so that

a) students feel stretched by the information they’re practicing, but

b) they don’t feel discouraged or overwhelmed.

That number will probably be higher than they would naturally choose. But it won’t be huge.

We might prefer to have more precise guidance than this. However, no one rule will apply equally well to all students.

The correct number of cards in a pile will be different in 2nd grade, 8th grade, and college. It will be different in subjects when students struggle and in subjects where they thrive. It will be different for flashcards that contain a lot of information and those with just a word or two.

Combining our teacherly experience with Kornell’s researcherly insight will lead to the best result we can hope for: flashcard strategies that promote optimum learning conditions.

Concerned about Concussions: Athletes and Actors
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 16, 2018

Concerned about Concussions: Athletes and Actors

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If you’re interested in brains, then you’re almost certainly worried about concussions.

Stories about professional athletes have made these concerns especially vivid.  When we see yet another story about a Wheaties-box sports star changed beyond recognition by multiple concussions, we worry about sportsy students in our own schools. And families.

(By the way: data about sports concussions reveal many surprises. Girls playing soccer are in greater danger of concussion than boys playing football. The sports that have seen the greatest increase in concussions in the last decade? Boys’ baseball and girls’ volleyball. Yes: volleyball.)

Today’s News: Actors and Concussions

Recent research suggests that the dangers of concussions go well beyond the hockey rink.

A survey of theater professionals shows that 67% of them had at least one concussion during their careers. Almost a third of them report 5 concussions.

That’s a very troubling number. Each concussion can cause more damage than the previous one, and even two concussions raise the possibility for long-term damage.

Just as troubling: what happened next. Most of the theater pros kept going; almost half didn’t even report what happened.

Clearly, in theater as in sports, professional culture tells adults to play through the pain. If that culture seeps down into schools, it could produce real problems.

Of course, this survey looks at theater pros, not amateurs. I haven’t been able to find data about dangers to younger actors.

At a minimum, this research should prompt us to recognize concussions in places we might not have looked for them.

Arachne’s Example

In 2010, Natalie Mendoza played a leading role in the Broadway production of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. While starring as the villain Arachne, she was struck in the head by a rope backstage and suffered a concussion.

What did she do next?

She finished the Sunday performance. And she played Wednesday evening as well.

And then: she left the show.

Rather than risk her brain health further (in a remarkably athletic role), she left a choice Broadway role.

Our theater students should know Mendoza’s example. A starring role on Broadway can be the pinnacle of a career. But that career won’t mean much if it fundamentally disrupts the brain.

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