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."
Why do adolescents learn and remember specific information more easily than younger children?
We have, of course, many answers to this question.
For instance: working memory increases during childhood, and so adolescents have–on average–greater working memory capacity than younger students.
Also, prior knowledge usually makes acquisition of new knowledge easier. And so, adolescents–who have more prior factual knowledge than children–can more easily take in new information.
Today’s Headline
New research from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development offers yet another reason: hippocampal development.
The hippocampus, tucked in below the cerebral cortex below both of your temples, helps process and form new long-term memories. It turns out that the hippocampus is developing much longer than we had previously known. Far from being fully developed in childhood, it continues its maturation at least until the teen years.
The specific teaching implications of this research are still years away. For the present, this article at Neuroscience News gives a helpful overview of what we know now, and how this new research fits into our current understanding.
If you’re attending Learning and the Brain’s “Merging Minds and Technology” Conference in November, you’re probably interested in Mona Moisala’s research. After all, Moisala wants to know if media multitasking influences distractibility among 13-24 year olds.
That is: does switching from Instagram on an iPad to Angry Birds on an iPhone to email on a laptop make it harder for students to pay attention in class later on? (Moisala has your attention now, right?)
And, just to make her research even more intriguing, she investigates the relationship between time spent playing video games and working memory capacity.
Here’s what she found:
First: the more that students reported media multitasking, the more they struggled with attention tasks in the lab.
Second: the more that students reported playing daily computer games, the higher working memory capacity they demonstrated.
Third: more daily computer game play also correlated with improved reaction times, and with higher ability to switch from visual to auditory attention.
The Question You Know Is Coming…
Moisala finds a relationship between these uses of technology and various cognitive functions. However, which direction does causality flow?
Does media multitasking cause students to struggle with attention? Or, are those who already struggle with attention drawn to media multitasking?
Moisala’s research doesn’t yet answer that question–although she’s applying for funding to study longitudinal data. (Data showing changes over time ought to reveal causality.)
Some Tentative Answers
Although this research doesn’t answer causality questions, I have some suspicions.
First: I think it’s unlikely that daily video game play increases working memory capacity. Instead, I suspect that people who have a high working memory capacity enjoy the complexity of video-game play more than those who don’t.
Why do I think this? Well: for the most part, we haven’t had much luck increasing working memory capacity outside of psychology labs. So, it would be big and surprising news if playing everyday video games grew working memory.
Second: I suspect that playing video games does improve reaction time and attention switching. Those cognitive capacities are trainable, and video games ought to help train them.
Third: I suspect–although this is purely conjecture–that media multitasking and attentional difficulties feed each other. That is: people with short attention spans are prone to media multitasking; and media-multitasking trains people to reorient their attention more frequently.
Here’s an even better answer: if you come to the November conference, you’re likely to meet people who have researched these very questions.
Does neuroscience education help reduce a teacher’s belief in neuromyths?
According to this recent study: not as much as we would like.
In some cases, neuroscience education does help teachers.
For instance, 59% of the general public falsely believe that listening to classical music increases reasoning ability. That number is 55% for teachers, but drops to 43% for teachers who have had neuroscience training.
Similarly, teachers with knowledge of neuroscience are less likely to embrace a “left-brained vs. right-brained” understanding of learning than teachers without. (See video here.)
However, neuromyths about learning styles and about dyslexia persist–even among teachers with neuroscience education.
Among the general population, 93% of people incorrectly believe that “individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style.” That number falls to 76% among teachers–but is almost identical (78%) for teachers who know from neuroscience.
And: teachers who have studied neuroscience believe that writing letters backwards is a sign of dyslexia at almost the same rate as those who haven’t.
The Big Question
Studies like these lead me to this question: why are some neuromyths so sticky? Why do so many of us teachers believe in, say, learning styles theory despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary?
Why does this belief persist even among those–like we who attend Learning and the Brain conferences–who have placed science at the center of our professional development?
Research findings that support later high-school start times have been more and more common in recent years. (See also here.) And teachers I know are increasingly vocal about letting teens sleep later.
And yet, when I talk with high school leaders, they ruefully cite sports schedules to explain the impossibility of making serious changes.
(I’ve also read that bus schedules get in the way.)
Here’s another–quite surprising–reason that this change might be hard to accomplish: parental uncertainty. According to this recent study, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, half of parents whose teens start school before 8:30 don’t support a later start time.
The study concludes that we need to do a better job educating parents about the biological changes in adolescent sleep patterns.
The more that parents understand how melatonin onset–and, hence, sleepiness–changes with adolescence, the more they might understand that their awake-at-midnight teens aren’t simply being willful. They are instead responding to powerful chemical signals.
Given all we know about adolescent sleep, and the effect of sleep on learning, teachers and parents should be champions of reasonable high school start times.
Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a skeptic about gender differences in learning. Although they certainly do exist–I think particularly about differences in 3d mental rotation–I often think they’re overstated or overemphasized.
At the same time, my emphasis on this point might obscure the fact that at the population level, gender differences in learning do sometimes exist. Two articles are, I think, particularly helpful in understanding these ideas.
First, this weighty research review considers the number of women in STEM fields and reaches three broad conclusions:
“Males are more variable [than females] on most measures of quantitative and visuospatial ability, which necessarily results in more males at both high- and low-ability extremes; the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive.”
“Females tend to excel in verbal abilities, with large differences between females and males found when assessments include writing samples. “
“We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics.”
The article stands out to me not only for its thoroughness, but for its all-star list of authors. Janet Shibley Hyde, for example, is well known for her skepticism about gender differences; in fact, she authored a widely-cited article called The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. If a known skeptic is on board with these conclusions, then I’m comfortable being there too.
(Another author, Diana Halpern, by the way, is a former president of the American Psychological Association.)
Second, Hyde has published an exploration of the first argument above: that men show greater variability in quantitative and visual abilities. This hypothesis suggests that–although large populations of men and women will have the same average math scores–we would expect to see more men who are very good at math (say, the top 5%) and also who are very bad at math (say, the bottom 5%).
Hyde’s article shows the complexity of this hypothesis. In particular, given that these variations differ from country to country, and can change over time, we have to recognize the social and historical context of any data set.
My prediction would have been that if I have a glass of wine before I learn some new vocabulary words, I won’t learn those words as well as I would have fully sober.
That prediction, it turns out, is correct. New learning that takes place post-alcohol just doesn’t consolidate very well. It seems that alcohol inhibits long-term potentiation.
I also would have predicted that if I have a glass of wine just after I learn some new vocabulary words, that wine would muddle my memory of those new words as well.
That prediction, however, is just wrong. My post-study wine–surprise!–improves my recall of those words the next morning.
In fact, a recent study shows that this effect holds true not only in the psychology lab, but also at home. When participants (not just college students, by the way) went home after they learned new words and raised a pint or two, they remembered more of those words than their fully-sober counterparts.
Even more remarkable, they did better than their alcohol-free peers not because they forgot less, but because they remembered even more. That is, their recall score in the evening was in the mid 30% range; the next morning, it was in the low 40% range.
Theories, theories
The standard hypothesis to explain such a result goes like this: when we drink alcohol, the brain forms fewer new memories. The hippocampus takes advantage of this pause to consolidate previous memories.
In other words: since the brain has some alcohol-induced down time, it uses that time to firm up what it already knows.
The authors of this study suggest an alternate explanation: sleep. As they explain, alcohol increases the proportion of slow-wave sleep compared to rapid-eye-movement sleep. Because slow-wave sleep is good for the formation of factual memories, this SWS increase benefits factual learning.
(An implication of this hypothesis is that alcohol might be bad for other kinds of memory formation–such as procedural memory–which require more rapid-eye-movement sleep. That is: alcohol might help you learn more facts, but fewer skills.)
Some Caveats, and an Invitation
Needless to say, I’m not encouraging you to drink heavily to promote learning.
And, I wouldn’t share these results with my 2nd graders.
However, after a long evening of study, I just might feel a bit less guilty about relaxing with a cozy Cabernet.
And, when you come to this fall’s Learning and the Brain conference, you should definitely join us at the wine and cheese reception.
Over at Newsweek, Alexander Nazaryan wants to vex you. Here’s a sample:
Only someone who has uncritically mastered the intricacies of Shakespeare’s verse, the social subtexts of Elizabethan society and the historical background of Hamlet is going to have any original or even interesting thoughts about the play. Everything else is just uninformed opinion lacking intellectual valence.
If you’d like a more nuanced version of this argument, check out Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School.
In particular, you might read…
Chapter 2: “Factual knowledge must precede skill”
Chapter 4: “We understand things in the context of what we already know, and most of what we know is concrete”
Chapter 5: “It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice”
and chapter 6: “Cognition early in training is different from cognition late in training”
From another vantage point: my own book Learning Begins discusses the dangers of working memory overload lurking in efforts to teach critical thinking.
Whether you prefer Nazaryan’s emphatic declamations, or Willingham’s and my more research-focused commentary, take some time to think critically about all the cognitive legwork that must precede real critical thought.
You’d like an 8 page summary of Cognitive Load Theory, written in plain English for teachers? You’d like three pages of pertinent sources?
Click here for a handy report from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (That’s not a typo; the Centre is in New South Wales, Australia.)
For example: you might check out the “expertise reversal effect” described on page 7; you’ll gain a whole new perspective on worked examples.
Should young children count on their fingers when learning math?
You can find strong opinions on both sides of this question. (This blog post uses 4 “No’s” and 5 exclamation points to discourage parents from allowing finger counting.)
Recent research from the University of Bristol, however, suggests that finger counting–when combined with other math exercises–improves quantitative skills more than either intervention by itself.
The study design is quite complex; check the link above if you’d like the details. But, the headline is clear: for 6- and 7-year-olds, a taboo against finger counting may well hinder the development of math skills.
About Andrew Watson 
