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."
A friend remembered to send me an article on the perils of forgetting.
In particular, if you read piles of books, you’re much less likely to remember the specifics of each one. The same holds true if you binge-watch This is Us or Mr. Robot. Or power your way through three movies in an afternoon.
Author Julie Beck explores the science behind this irksome truth.
For instance, she helpfully cites Betsy Sparrow’s research into the perils of Google. In brief, if I think a piece of information is available on Google, I’m less likely to remember it in the future.
Read the whole thing. And remember: quiz yourself about the article later…
We got a Twitter question earlier this week about the educational experience of military children. A quick review of the research suggests we can start to answer this question: does military deployment hinder learning for those children?
The most comprehensive study I found looks at data for over 56,000 (!) children. Researchers Engel, Gallagher, and Lyle wanted to know: when a parent goes away on deployment, what happens to their child’s academic performance?
Of course, parental absence might well upset children and prompt greater academic struggles. Children typically benefit from the structure that intact households can provide.
The researchers also hypothesize that deployment might improve academic performance. The child, they reason, might develop a greater sense of responsibility when one parent is away. Or, perhaps, the extra household income that comes from “hostile fire pay” might benefit learning.
So, which is it?
Military Deployment Hinders Learning, Slightly…
Engel, Gallagher, and Lyle found that a parent’s absence because of deployment does affect their children’s learning.
Specifically, deployment itself brings down standardized test scores 0.42%; each additional month prompts and additional 0.11% reduction. The averages are slightly higher in math and science, and lower in reading in social sciences and reading.
Importantly, these effects last. Engel & Co. found that these children were still slightly behind their peers four years later. By the fifth year, however, they had — on average — fully caught up.
The researchers got data only for those children who attend on-base schools. Engel & Co. argue that schools run by the military are better equipped to help these students than other school systems, and so the gaps may be even greater for children in school off base.
These data, by the way, come only from army bases. There’s no obvious reason that the numbers would be different for other branches of the military.
What to make of these numbers?
On the one hand, 0.11%/month hardly seems like much. That’s one tenth of a percentage point — hardly enough to notice.
On the other hand, those numbers add up quickly. For a 12-month deployment — with the initial decrement of 0.42% — that adds up to almost two full percentage points. Knowing that students experience even greater difficulties in math and science, we can genuinely worry about their progress in these disciplines.
And, this pattern creates problems for lots of families. In 2007, 700,000children saw a parent leave on military deployment.
When we’re talking about that number of children, we should be keenly interested in helping.
How We Can Help?
In the first place, it’s important for teachers to know about these data. When a student’s parent deploys, we should be on the lookout for some initial academic difficulties. And, we should know that they might well increase over time.
Math and science teachers in particular should keep this potential on their radar.
The best way to help, of course, will vary. Perhaps a teacher can provide extra support and understanding. Perhaps a school has programs that provide much-needed structure.
We should also note that these problems might linger. Few of us are surprised that a child whose parent is leaving experiences distress, or that this distress might lead to academic struggle.
However, we might well be surprised that this struggle can last for years. And so, we should keep our eyes on those students whose parents have recently deployed, and also those whose parents have returned in the last few years.
At the same time, we should keep in mind that this research reports averages. Some students clearly struggle during this difficult time. However, not all of them do. Some might — as the researchers initially hypothesized — see a parent’s absence as a time to assume greater responsibility.
Clearly, student resilience is an important story in these data.
With this information in mind, teachers and schools can better serve the children whose parents are serving their country.
To explore that question, we can also reverse it: what inhibits creativity?
Two researchers at the University of Toronto wondered if information structure hinders creativity. That is: do we interfere with imaginative impulses if we give people information within clear and logical hierarchies.
If that’s true, could we encourage creativity by presenting information in unstructured ways?
100 Nouns
Kim and Zhong explored this possibility with two different research paradigms.
In the first, they gave college students lists of 100 nouns and asked them “to generate as many sentences as they want” using those words.
Half of these students were given nouns in obvious groupings. All the “games” were listed together: chess, bingo, backgammon. All the “bodies of water”: river, ocean, waterfall. All the “tools,” “pieces of jewelry,” and “trees.” In other words, students got these nouns within a clearly structured system.
The other half of the students saw those 100 nouns listed in a jumble: meteor, wildebeest, soccer, hotel, Ukraine. This second list, clearly, lacks any coherent system.
When the sentences that students wrote were rated for creativity, researchers found a clear difference. Students who saw nouns in a structured list wrote notably less creative sentences that those who saw the jumbled list.
For these students, logical structure hinders creativity. Absence of that structure promotes it.
Lego Aliens
To be sure of their conclusion, Kim and Zhong then asked different students to build an alien out of Lego bricks.
As you’ve already predicted, half of the participants got their Legos pre-sorted by shape and color. The other half got the same pieces all mixed together in a bin.
Here again, structure reduced creativity. Legos mixed together prompted more creative aliens than Legos sorted into tidy categories.
Reading this study, teachers who value creativity might be tempted to reduce cognitive structures as much as possible.
Here’s my advice: DON’T DO THAT.
Why? Beginners need structure to learn. This study was done with experts. College students are already very good at writing sentences. They devoted childhood years to building objects out of Lego.
In other words, they were not learning a new skill. They were, instead, being creative with a well-tuned skill.
For this reason, we should take this study as guidance for student creativity in skills they have already mastered. For skills they are still learning, students need lots of guidance, and structure.
According to this new study, bilinguals learn new languages faster than monolinguals.
To reach this conclusion, this research looked at brain wave signatures as participants learned an artificial language.
(Understanding electroencephalogram research is always tricky. Don’t feel bad if you’re not totally clear on what a P600 might be.)
The short version is this. As they learned this new language, neural patterns for bilinguals resembled native speaker patterns relatively quickly. Those patterns for the monolinguals developed more slowly.
Limitation to Bilingual Advantage Research
We can’t be sure that this finding extrapolates to the real world. After all, this particular artificial language has only 13 words in it–four nouns, two adjectives, two adverbs, and so forth.
However, the study does tentatively support a widely-believed conclusion: the hardest language to learn is the second…
(By the way: we’ve posted about the potential benefits and detriments of bilingual education several times in the last year. You can click on “bilingual education” in the tags list on the right to see other articles.)
The hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin has developed a great brand.
It gets credit for all sorts of good things. When new lovers meet, their giddy glow might result from oxytocin. When mothers hold their babies, oxytocin seems to widen their smiles.
Little wonder, then, that oxytocin has earned the nickname “the love hormone.”
You’ve heard a lot of information about neurons at the Learning and the Brain conferences that you attend. Perhaps a quick review would be helpful to consolidate your learning?
You have no doubt seen the tidy pyramid: students remember 5% of what they hear in a lecture, 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, and so forth.
In crafting such a pyramid, its creators promote more active kinds of learning. The bottom of the pyramid, for example, might be “teaching others”: a highly active kind of learning that seems to generate all sorts of learning.
The Learning Pyramid Myth
The problem with the pyramid is not merely that it’s inaccurate, but that it’s incoherent. The Effortful Educator does a nice job of pointing out its obvious flaws, and of backing up his critique with specific sources.
As an easy introduction to that critique: any research producing numbers that are all divisible by 5 does seem rather suspicious…
(I first heard this critique from Charles Fadel at a Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco 3 or 4 years ago. It just so happens that he’ll be speaking at the upcoming LatB conference–although on a different subject.)
The important lesson here goes beyond “always check the sources.” After all, if you look to see if this pyramid has been published elsewhere, you’ll find all sorts of examples.
Instead, the point is “always check the specific claims.” In this case, for example, you don’t need to see if someone has published a similar pyramid before; you need to see how the author supports the specific claim that students remember only 5% of what they hear in a lecture.
In fact, you should be most interested in research that focuses on students like yours.
Let’s imagine you found a study showing that students in a college art history class remembered 80% of what they heard in a lecture. That’s very interesting to college art history teachers–especially those who teach in the same way this particular professor does.
But, if you teach 5th graders, it doesn’t really help you very much.
Graphical representation of data can be inspiring: that’s one reason to be certain that the information in the graphic is correct.
[Addendum: 1/27/18] I’ve recently gotten some additional data on the “Learning Pyramid” from Charles Fadel. Enjoy!
Several years ago I taught Jacob: an affable high school sophomore notable for his quick wit, his impressive height…and his immaturity. He was, technically speaking, goofy. Jacob’s peers noticed, and didn’t appreciate his antics. (Neither did I.)
When I met his parents for a teacher conference, I commented on his surprisingly juvenile behavior. They exchanged glances, and his mother said: “Well, he is the youngest student in the sophomore class. He could be a freshman.”
This news made all the difference to me. I had been fooled by Jacob’s 6′ 2″ frame. His behavior, odd for a 10th grader, was entirely appropriate for a 9th grader. When I started giving the structure he needed, he calmed down. And grew up.
By the end of the year, he worked with his classmates very effectively.
The Travails of Relatively Young Students…
A recent BrainBlogger post describes the Jacobs of the educational world. If a school has a strict cut-off date for a particular grade, then some students will be almost a full year younger than others.
In college, this difference shouldn’t matter much. After all, 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds should be emotionally and cognitively well matched.
In younger grades, however, that age difference can be huge. The age-appropriate developmental differences between the youngest and the oldest kindergartener might be substantial.
BrainBlogger’s author–identified only by her first name Naomi–outlines the alarming and ongoing consequences of this early developmental gap.
Relatively young students are likelier to be criticized for their immaturity–as happened with my student Jacob.
They are likelier to be diagnosed with ADHD.
Relatively older students are likelier to be accepted into Gifted programs, even if they’re not gifted.
Relatively young students are less likely to take the high-stakes exams that shape educational possibilities in some countries.
They are less likely to attend college, and also less likely to graduate from college.
…and, some benefits
At the same time, Naomi is careful to note the complexity of the question.
In the first place, as she writes, “the impact of [relative age effects] on educational attainment is…probabilistic not deterministic.” That is, some younger students will do just fine, even if their group is less likely to do so.
In fact, some research shows the advantages of being at the younger end of a grade’s age spectrum. For instance, younger students get the message that they need to work harder to succeed as much as their older peers, and so might have a better work ethic.
Next Steps
If you’d like to think more about this complex question, I’d start by looking over Naomi’s article. She lays out the research well, and includes sources from many different countries.
In the meanwhile, you’ve now got a helpful new question to ask. When working with students whose behavior makes you wonder about ADHD, you might start by looking up their age.
As schools focus more on STEM disciplines, teachers strive to help our students master complex STEM concepts.
After all, it’s hard enough to say “magnetic anisotrophy,” much less understand what it is.
Researchers Dane DeSutter and Mike Stieff have several suggestions for teachers. Specifically, they argue that spatial thinking–essential to many STEM concepts–can be enhanced by appropriate gestures.
About Andrew Watson 
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