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."
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.
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.
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.
This study could not have been simpler. Researchers had students lie quietly in an fMRI scanner in a caffeine-free state on one day. After 48 hours, the same students took a caffeine pill and repeated the scan.
(Just to be sure that order didn’t matter, half of the students took the pill first for the first scan. The other half took the pill for the second scan.)
What did they find?
Caffeine and Cognition: The Complicated Results
After they took the caffeine pill, the students had more good brain stuff.
In this case, the good brain stuff was “brain entropy.”
concept of brain entropy has been defined as the number of neural states a given brain can access.
The same study also finds that higher levels of intelligence — measured by the Shipley Vocabulary test and WASI Matrix Reasoning test — are associated with higher levels of brain entropy.
(Important note: “associated with” doesn’t mean “cause.” It means that people who have higher levels of one often have higher levels of the other. But, we shouldn’t — in fact, can’t — infer causality.)
If we’re feeling daring, we might pose this hypothesis: taking caffeine raises brain entropy, and brain entropy helps you think better.
That’s an especially tempting hypothesis because caffeine increases brain entropy in the pre-frontal cortex. You hear a lot about the PFC and Learning and the Brain conferences, because so many important cognitive and self-regulatory functions use those networks.
What Should Teachers Do?
At present, this study points in the direction of that tempting hypothesis. But, it doesn’t directly support it.
We need lots more testing to confirm this idea.
In fact, the whole concept of “brain entropy” is still in its early stages, and we need to investigate the fully idea before we reach strong conclusions based upon it.
So: ponder brain entropy while you’re drinking your next cup of joe. You’ve got lots to consider.
In our frantic, stressed-out, technology-addled world, it just makes sense: we should all take some time to rest our brains.
And: what better way than mindfulness?
We’ve all heard so much about the benefits of focused breathing. The energy that derives from specific poses. The insights that come from curious attention to our bodies.
20 of these students went through a combined yoga and mindfulness program. This program has good research behind it, and was led by an experienced professional. As the researchers describe it,
The session content included breathing exercises, guided relaxation, and several Vinyasa and Ashtanga poses appropriate for third graders.
And, the school devoted real time to this program. Students met before school 10 times, for forty minutes each session. 400 minutes shows real commitment!
Researchers also kept track of 33 other high-anxiety 3rd graders who had been randomly selected as the control group.
Both before and after the yoga/mindfulness program, the students answered a list of questions that measure physical, emotional, and social quality of life. (It’s euphoniously called the PedsQL.)
So: did those 400 minutes help?
The Benefits of Mindfulness
In part, it seems the program helped.
For example, the 3rd graders who participated in yoga and mindfulness saw an increase in their emotional PedsQL score of more than 18 points. Given that the scale ranges from 1 to 100, and that they started with an average score of 52, AND that the control group’s average fell by just under a point — that’s a dramatic improvement!
Researchers also found a statistically significant improvement in their psychosocial PedsQL score.
In a parallel track of this investigation, researchers offered a professional development session on mindfulness for the school’s teachers.
As a result, they found that more teachers used mindfulness and yoga with their students during the class day. Depending on how you count, teachers roughly doubled the number of sessions they used in their classrooms.
So far, so good.
The Perils of Mindfulness Research
Despite all these measurements, I remain unpersuaded by this study.
Three concerns jump out at me.
First: the study includes a control group…but the control group didn’t do anything different from their normal routine. (They were treated for anxiety in the school’s usual way.)
So: the benefits described above might have resulted from the yoga and mindfulness. But, it might just have well resulted from doing something different. Maybe these students would have scored higher on the PedsQL if they’d gone hiking. Or, made music. Or simply arrived at school 40 minutes early and done something relaxing.
We just don’t know.
Second: the students did score higher on the emotional and psychosocial PedsQL, but those are only 2 of the 6 measures on the test. Their scores on the other scales — school, social,physical, and overall — weren’t statistically significantly improved.
In fact, if you look at table 2 instead of table 3, it seems that only the emotional and not the psychosocial scores improved. (Table 3 shows the results of more sophisticated statistical modelling.)
Even in the best case, then, the yoga and meditation helped students on some measures. On 2/3 of the measures, however, it didn’t make a measurable difference.
Third: in this study, classroom teachers started doing additional yoga with their students as well.
So, perhaps the change we saw resulted from the special yoga and mindfulness intervention. Or, perhaps it resulted from the additional classroom yoga. Or, perhaps from the combination.
Again: we just don’t know.
The Perils of Mindfulness Research: The Big Picture
My point here is not to criticize this study. I am, in fact, quite glad that researchers are working with students in schools.
In fact, these researchers — quite helpfully — asked teachers about the biggest impediments for having a mindfulness program in the school.
Instead, I want to highlight how difficult it is to be confident about cause and effect.
In truth, I really want to be persuaded. I want to be able to tell teachers that we’ve got a sure-fire solution to real school problems.
But, my desire to be persuaded means I must be especially vigilant about the research I rely on.
Ultimately, if we’re going to tell students to come to school early, if we’re going to ask them to spend 400 minutes doing something, if we’re going to create new programs and hire more staff, we need to be sure that this cause produces this effect.
If you teach teenagers, you almost certainly want to know the answer to that question. Whenever I talk with adolescents about brains, it’s one of the first questions I get.
Alas: an important muddle makes that question noticeably hard to answer.
The Nap Research Problem Explained
On the one hand, we’ve got plenty of research showing that naps boost learning.
If I give you a list of words to study, you’ll remember more of them after a nap than you would if you hadn’t taken that nap.
“An ultra short period of only 6 min of napping is already sufficient to significantly boost declarative memory performance beyond waking control levels.”
You read that right. Even a SIX MINUTE nap helped participants recall more words.
But wait: there’s a problem.
We know that good night-time sleep is essential for consolidation of long-term memories. (Here’s a great article on the subject.)
It seems plausible to me that an afternoon nap might feel good at the time, but might make it harder to sleep at night.
If that’s true, then the short-term benefit of the nap will be more than offset by the long-term detriment of a bad night’s sleep.
In other words: I might remember that list of words better after the nap, but I might be likelier to forget everything else.
This uncertainty has always held me back from recommending naps.
The Nap Research Problem, Solved
Researches in Jintan, China looked at the cognitive results of napping — and their method fixes this research problem.
They gathered nap and night-time sleep data from 363 6th graders. And, they tested them on a variety of cognitive functions: executive control, spatial memory, and complex cognition among them.
What did they find?
First: frequent nappers get better nighttime sleep than infrequent nappers.
Yup: naps didn’t make it harder for these 6th graders to sleep. In fact, they slept better.
Second: frequent nappers did better on a variety of the cognitive tests. For instance, they did better on tests of sustained attention. (In schools, we require A LOT of sustained attention).
They also did better on tests of non-verbal reasoning.
In brief: frequent naps don’t make it harder to sleep at night, and they do improve some cognitive functions. Win win!
Nap Research in Context
This study’s authors wisely note two key limitations.
First, the data on sleep come from self-reports. This method, alas, allows for participants’ faulty memory to skew the results.
Second, the study took place within a particular cultural context. Naps are a cultural norm in China. That norm just might have an influence on the relationship between napping and cognition.
We just don’t know.
(To think more about the important of context, consider the perils of WEIRD neuroscience.)
For me, this study’s specific findings about cognitive capabilities are interesting. However, its general finding that naps don’t interfere with nighttime sleep means that the other studies about naps’ benefits can be taken at face value.
He argues, in effect, that 2 of those 3 chunks don’t really help teachers do our jobs.
We need to know what empirical observations tell us about learning — especially those well-established empirical observations that are consistently applicable to learners and learning. For example: the limitations of working memory, or the difficulties of transfer.
This information can offer teachers essential guidance on the best ways to help our students learn.
If we overwhelm our students’ working memory capacity, for example, learning simply comes to a halt.
The Limits of Psychology
Although these well-established observations — Willingham calls them “Empirical Generalizations” — help teachers, the other two categories really don’t.
In fact, they might distract and mislead us.
At best, they’re likely to overwhelm our own working memory resources.
For instance: psychological theories not only organize lots of empirical observations. They also make as-of-yet untested predictions about what might happen in other circumstances.
That is, in fact, part of the job of a theory.
However, those untested predictions don’t help teachers. Either we’re aware they’re untested, in which case they don’t tell us what to do (or not to do).
Or we’re NOT aware they’re untested, in which case they might prompt us to try unsupported teaching experiments.
And, epistemic assumptions are typically too broad to be useful.
As Willingham argues, the assertion that “learning is social” leads to differing specific recommendations if you’re a behaviorist or a constructivist.
Beyond the Limits of Psychology: Mental Models
Willingham suggests that teachers need fewer theories and more models: representations of the connections between and among all the empirical findings.
For instance: the image accompanying this article is my own model to represent the relationships among working memory, long-term memory, emotion, motivation, and attention.
That image doesn’t attempt to make predictions, as theories do. Instead, it shows that each of these five topics interacts with all of the others. It suggests that working memory stands “between” the experiential world and long-term memory. It emphasizes the overlap between emotion and motivation as concepts.
Its strives, in other words, to help teachers remember key points about these topics, and to understand the connections among them.
(To be clear, this image draws on the work of many previous scholars — including Willingham.)
A Final Note
Although I agree with Willingham’s broad argument, I do think there’s an important exception. As schools increasingly rely on neuroscience and psychology research to inform our practice, we should have an on-site expert in these disciplines.
Although most teachers should indeed focus on empirical findings, we’ll all benefit if at least one of our colleagues has a rich knowledge of the theories and epistemological assumptions that inform and shape those findings.
As you’ve read here so many times before, our reliance on research brings with it a need for informed and curious skepticism.
When brain researchers answer our questions, that feels like helpful advice.
However, when they give us unsolicited advice, that can feel like nagging. After all, teachers and students already have plenty of people telling us what to do.
This truth puts researchers in a bind. If we are doing something foolish, and they know we’re doing something foolish, they (helpfully) want to give us a warning.
But, if we haven’t asked for that warning, then we’re likely to ignore it. In fact, we might even get angry that we got it.
Research-based Advice for Students: The Problem
This paradox has particular power for researchers who want to advise students.
We’ve got lots of research showing that students use highly inefficient study strategies.
Better said: students use strategies that give them the feeling that they’re making progress right now. Sadly, however, those strategies don’t often result in long-lasting learning.
(This review article by Nick Soderstrom does an excellent job sorting through difference between short-term performance and long-term learning.)
Research-based Advice for Students: A Solution
Three scholars — Miyatsu, Nguyen, and McDaniel — have hit upon a strategy to offer advice without seeming to nag.
Rather than tell students to stop doing what they really want to do, they’ve written an article on using the study strategies students already prefer more effectively.
Other such articles might say: “Stop rereading the text! You’re wasting your time!”
This article prefers an alternate approach: “If you’re going to reread the text, here’s the best way to do it.”
For example: long-time readers of this blog know that rereading the text yields much less learning than retrieval practice.
But: college students LOVE rereading the text. 78% of them use it as a core study strategy.
So, Miyatsu & Co. offer some advice:
Rereading works best for factual material.
Rereading works best when there’s a big gap between the first and second read, AND when there’s a big gap between the second read and the test.
Finally, rereading works best when you use particular strategies to be sure you’re learning from that second read.
See? No nagging!
They also have advice for other key study strategies, including highlighting, outlining, and using flash cards.
Research-based Advice for Students: A Hopeful Prediction
Miyatsu, Nguyen, and McDaniel note that college students rely on study habits formed over years. That is: they …
…appear to hold strong preferences for study techniques that they have used throughout their educational careers; consequently, attempts to sell them on new strategies may be met with resistance.
This note implies that those of us who teach younger students can have a powerful effect by shaping study strategies earlier on.
That is: if we can
inculcate the habit of using retrieval practice;
guide students to choose their study locations well;
help them spread practice out over time;
we can create the (good) study habits that will be hard to break.
In other words: Miyatsu’s article might be immensely helpful right now. However, if we can shape our students’ study habits well, they might not need it when they get to college.
The good folks over at TedEd have produced another helpful brain video — this one exploring different brain-scanning techniques.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B10pc0Kizsc
This video does a particularly good job exploring both the strengths and the weaknesses of each technology.
Location, Location…oh, and Timing
In particular, EEG is very good at measuring timing precisely. Sadly, it can’t pinpoint location very accurately.
On the other hand, fMRI can zoom in on location within a few millimeters. However, its timing measurements are only rough-n-ready: within a few seconds or so.
Surprisingly, the video doesn’t discuss magnetoencephalography (MEG) — which does with magnetic waves what EEG does with electrical waves.
For fun: this video shows the MEG image when the brain reads the single word “dog.”
Chronotype appears to be largely determined by the genetic composition of an individual’s circadian clock. An individual may be able to choose to change their sleep/meal/activity time due to day-to-day schedule impositions, but they may not be able to shift their internal clocks in the same way, due to its genetic basis.
I want to emphasize the rarity of this explanation. In the worlds of psychology and neuroscience, almost everything results from a combination of nature and nurture.
IQ? Nature and nurture.
Grit? Nature and nurture.
Processing speed? Nature and nurture.
So: don’t let this one instance fool you into thinking that genes routinely determine our fates.
Of course, age has an influence on chronotype as well. Puberty magically transforms more of us into owls. As we age, we might well revert to our initial larkiness — or at least to finchitude.
Note well: students have no control whatsoever over either of these influences. They can’t control their genes, and they can’t control their developmental stage.
In other words: adolescent owls aren’t simply being stubborn when they go to bed late. They’re often simply not tired enough to sleep.
Point #2: Chronotype Influences Grades
Researchers Smarr and Schirmer looked at the relationship between chronotype and grades in college.
Their finding? In brief: we do best when class time matches our chronotype.
Larks do best in morning classes. Owls catch up in evening classes.
However … and this is a BIG however … owls consistently have lower GPAs than larks and finches.
Even in evening classes, larks and finches have higher GPAs than do owls — although the difference is smaller than in morning classes.
One explanation — favored by morning people everywhere — is that larks are simply smarter than owls.
A better explanation: school schedules benefits larks and make life difficult for owls. After all: when classes begin early in the morning, owls just don’t get enough sleep before class.
And — as you remember — these sleep-deprived owls aren’t being stubborn. They’re just not tired enough to fall asleep in time to get the 8 or 9 hours they need.
In other words: we teach owls, larks, and finches. Our school schedules should work well for all of them. When we favor one sleep species over another, we needlessly disadvantage real students who want to learn.
The seductive allure of neuroscience often blinds us.
In fact, the image on the right shows the part of the brain — the focal geniculative nucleus — that lights up when we’re taken in by false neuroscience information.
Ok, no it doesn’t.
I’ve just grabbed a random picture of a brain with some color highlights.
And: as far as I know, the “focal geniculative nucleus” doesn’t exist. I just made that up.
(By the way: brain regions don’t really “light up.” That’s a way of describing what happens in an fMRI image. You’re really looking at changes in blood flow, indicated by different colors. Brains aren’t Christmas trees or smokers; they don’t light up.)
And yet, for some reason, a picture of a brain with some bits highlighted in color just makes us go wild with credulity.
The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience: Today’s Research
We’ve known for a while that people believe general psychology research more readily when it includes a picture of a brain.
Is that also true for research in educational psychology? That is, does this problem include research in teaching?
Soo-hyun Im investigated this question with quite a straightforward method. He explained educational research findings to several hundred people.
Some of those findings included extraneous neuroscience information. (“This process takes place in the focal geniculative nucleus.”)
Some also included a meaningless graph.
And some also included an irrelevant brain image (like the one above).
Sure enough: people believed the claims with the irrelevant brain image more than they did the same claim without that image.
In fact, as discussed in this earlier post, even teachers with neuroscience training can be taken in by misleading science claims.
Teaching Implications
If you’re reading this blog, if you’re attending Learning and the Brain conferences, you are almost certainly really interested in brains.
You want to know more about synapses and neurotransmitters and the occipital cortex. You probably wish that the focal geniculative nucleus really did exist. (Sorry, it doesn’t.)
On the one hand, this fascination offers teachers real benefits. For a number of reasons, I think it helps (some) teachers to know more about the process of synapse formation, or to recognize parts of the brain that participate in error detection.
At the same time, this interest confers upon us special responsibilities.
If we’re going to rely on brain explanations to support our teaching methods, then we should get in the habit of asking tough-minded questions.
Why are you showing me this brain image? Is the claim credible without the image?
What does that highlighted brain region have to do with learning?
Who says so? Can you cite some articles?
If the person presenting the information can’t — or won’t — answer these questions, then put down the fMRI image and step away from the research.
The teaching method itself might be sound, but the brain claims behind it are simply relying on the seductive allure of neuroscience.
Like Odysseus, you might be tempted — but do not give in to these neuro-Sirens.
About Andrew Watson 
