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."
Over at The Anova, Freddie deBoer has a knack for writing about statistical questions and making them not just readable but interesting.
Case in point: he recently explored the New York Times feature about school choice.
Although careful to praise the Times authors for their genuine concern and dedication, he thoughtfully explicates the numerous ways in which their article gets important questions wrong because it doesn’t think its way through statistics carefully enough.
For example: when we say we want students to do better, does that mean we want individual students to rise above the average, or that we want to raise the average for students overall?
As deBoer sees the field, we typically say we want the latter, but focus on (and tell stories about) the former.
DeBoer’s article doesn’t express an opinion about school choice (I’m sure he has one, but he doesn’t tip his hand here). But, it’s an excellent reminder that statistics can help us only so long as we are clear-minded about what they really measure.
As he glumly says in his final paragraph:
It’s not just that we can’t get what we want. It’s that nobody really knows what they’re trying to accomplish.
Oxytocin is often described as the “love hormone.” Apparently lots of oxtyocin is swirling around when mothers interact with their babies, and so its role in maternal affection is much trumpeted.
You may well hear people say that, in schools, we need to be sure that our students have more oxytocin in their lives.
However, folks giving this advice may be unsettled to hear that recent research describes oxytocin as “the relationship crisis hormone.”
Researchers in the US and Norway have found that, in romantic relationships, discrepancies in romantic interest lead to higher levels of oxytocin production.
In my mind, this news underlines an important general conclusion.
a) The study of psychology is complicated.
b) The study of neuroscience is really complicated.
c) The study of hormones is absurdly complicated. I mean, just, you cannot believe how complicated this stuff gets.
As a result, I encourage you to be wary when someone frames teaching advice within a simple hormonal framework. 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 hormones, you’ll get a real dopamine rush by walking away…
Loyal blog readers know that Austin Matte is our local expert on Head Start. To follow up on his recent article, I want to highlight study published in Child Development.
Studying records of nearly 3000 students, the authors find that attendance matters. Head Starters who miss class don’t make as much progress in math and literacy as those who do.
That news might not sound surprising–of course attendance matters!–but it contributes to an important debate about the value of Head Start in the first place.
The Argument, Part I
We’ve got some good research showing that, although Head Start produces impressive gains among its participants, those gains just don’t last. This review, for example, finds that–by 3rd grade–Head Start participants no longer stand out from their non-Head-Start peers.
In the biz, they call this result “fadeout.” Some people argue that fadeout suggests we should give up on Head Start altogether. After all, given that its results don’t last, we should spend our money elsewhere.
Austin’s response to this argument (a response I find persuasive, by the way) is that fadeout in fact demonstrates the benefits of Head Start.
Here’s an analogy:
I’m overweight and my cholesterol is high. My doctor tells me to exercise and eat right. I start jogging four times a week and eating like Tom Brady. A year later–voila!–my doctor reports that I’m the picture of health.
So, I stop with the jogging, and go back to potato chips and lard burgers. Fairly soon, I’m back to my old weight and cholesterol level.
Now: do you blame the jogging? Or, do you blame the end of the jogging?
People who say that “Head Start” doesn’t work are blaming the jogging. But, it just seems obvious that the jogging helped. It was my decision to stop–not to start–jogging that caused the problems.
Isn’t the straightforward conclusion that we should add more years to Head-Start, not eliminate the program that’s clearly working?
The Argument, Part II
Today’s study gets at the same question a different way. If Head Start programs didn’t really help, then doing less of them wouldn’t matter. Gaps in attendance shouldn’t be a problem, because the program being attended wouldn’t actually accomplishing anything.
This research, however, gives the lie to that logic. Clearly, less time in Head Start leads to less learning; or–said the other way around–moretime produces more learning.
(In the biz, they call this “the dosing effect.” A higher dose of something–in this case, Head Start–leads to greater benefits–in this case, greater learning.)
Given that we see a dosing effect, we can have confidence that Head Start does, in fact, cause the changes it claims to cause.
I + II = Yes
Austin’s argument about “fadeout” helps us see the long-term benefits of Head Start. And today’s study about “dosing” helps us see the short-term effects of Head Start.
Exciting news: my book was published at the beginning of April. (I’m resisting the temptation to put in an exclamation point.)
Learning Begins explores the science of working memory and attention, and offers practical strategies for putting this research to work in our classrooms.
Here’s what the first Amazon reviewer wrote:
“This book feels more like a personal discussion with the author. Andrew shares stories with meaning, current useful research, and provides clear suggestions to better teaching methods and student supports. A quick and easy read! Andrew is a proficient educator himself who knows his audience and uses humor and story telling to reach them!”
I hope you’ll read it, and let me know what you think! (Okay, I gave in. There’s the exclamation point.)
(BTW: if you email me–[email protected]–I’ll give you a code for a 20% discount from the publisher.)
Should 9th graders start music classes–even if they’ve never played an instrument before? Are there academic benefits to studying music? Is 9th grade too late a start to get those benefits? Should my school’s STEM program become a STEAM program?
A recent study by Adam T. Tierney offers some answers to these compelling questions.
The Short Version
Tierney & Co. followed 19 high school students who enrolled in a high school music ensemble, and compared them to 21 students at the same school who started a JROTC program.
These groups started off nicely matched in various academic and linguistic measures. However, at the end of 4 years, the group that had studied music improved in some suggestive ways.
First, the neural signatures of their response to speech changed meaningfully; oversimplifying a bit here, they were “more mature.”
Second, the musicians improved more than the JROTC participants in their ability to distinguish between and manipulate language sounds.
Reasons to be Excited
Tierney’s study gives us several reasons to perk right up.
For example: we’ve known for a long time that life-long musicians have these language processing benefits. Now we have good reason to think that even those who pick up an instrument later in life get them as well.
Another example: this study compares the musicians to the JROTC participants. That is, it does not compare them just to some random collection of non-musicians. Like these new musicians, the JROTC students had a highly disciplined practice schedule, had to function in a structured group, and so forth.
Because the study includes this “active control group,” we can be sure the results don’t come from–say–just being part of an organized school activity.
Most exciting: the students’ improvement in their ability to process language sounds.
This ability–called “phonemic awareness”–gets a lot of research attention, because it can predict success in several essential language skills: reading and writing, to name two.
We test phonemic awareness in many ways. For instance:
“Which one of these words does not rhyme with the others: bell, swell, full, tell.”
“Say the word ‘boat.’ Now, say that again without the ‘b’ sound.”
“How many syllables are there in the word ‘ventricle’?”
If music practice–even music practice begun in high school–can improve students’ phonemic awareness, it just might be able to help them do well in other courses where they have to process language–which is to say: all of them.
Reasons to Remain Calm
Tierney’s study is exciting, but we shouldn’t require all of our students to join band just yet. Here are a few important gaps in this research:
The students enrolled in music class improved their phonemic awareness, but Tierney didn’t measure if that improvement had any impact on, say, their performance in English class; or, perhaps, their ability to learn a new language. That effect is plausible, but not demonstrated here.
Also, Tierney & Co. measured two other linguistic abilities beyond phonemic awareness: phonological memory, and rapid naming. They found no statistically significant difference between the music students and the JROTC students in these two measures.
If one measure out of three shows improvement, that’s good. But it’s not a home run.
And, a point about the research methodology here. These students chose to join band or JROTC; they were not–in the “gold standard” of research–randomly assigned to do so. (Of course: there are many good reasons to let students choose, rather than forcing them into one group or another.)
The differences we see, therefore, might not have to do with the experience of band vs. JROTC. Instead, they might be differences in the kind of 9th grader who wants to be in band vs. the kind of 9th grader who wants to be in JROTC.
In other words: perhaps those band students were always a little better at discriminating among sounds, which is why they were drawn to music in the first place. Tierney’s team did try to rule that out with their various pre-study measures, but perhaps those differences are not captured by the tests we have.
We just don’t know. (Or, better said: we don’t “know” in the way that scientists want to know things.)
A Final Point
I understand why people are attracted to this argument: “students should do art because it makes them better at other things we do in school.”
I am more attracted to this argument: “students should make art because it’s an essential expression of human joy, sorrow, love, solitude, fun, reverence, and hope.”
In other words: I don’t think schools should foster art because it makes people better at STEM. I think schools should champion art because it makes people better at being people.
A just-published study asks about the effect of schooling on the brain. (A chatty, readable summary by one of the authors can be found here.)
More specifically, it looks at a young child’s ability to self-regulate: a skill that early schooling emphasizes–and, of course, one that’s highly necessary for sustained success in almost any meaningful activity or relationship.
The authors take advantage of the arbitrary cut-off date for schooling, and look at brain development for children who were just old enough–or not quite old enough–to enroll in 1st grade.
The research question was: can we find meaningful differences in self-regulatory areas of the brain after a year of 1st grade (children just within the cut-off date) compared to a year of kindergarten (children just beyond the cut-off date)? Did these brains develop alike over the course of this year, as part of typical human development? Or, did the more academic structure of 1st grade influence brains to develop differently than the more playful freedom of kindergarten?
The result:
The research team found meaningful developmental differences in a specific region of the prefrontal cortex, and also in the posterior parietal cortex. Earlier work has shown both regions to be parts of neural networks that participate in self-regulation.
In other words: the greater structure of 1st grade seemed to bulk up neural regions often used for self-regulation.
In quite predictable ways, that is, schooling changes brains.
The Bigger Picture
I was drawn to this study because of a headline: “How does going to school change your brain?”
In the current world of education, we hear this phrasing quite often:
Taxi drivers in London–who must learn very complex street maps–have different brains from people who don’t learn those maps. Map learning changes your brain!
Learning a foreign language actually changes your brain!
Playing the bagpipes not only makes you sexy, but it also changes your brain!
You may well have heard this claim quite often in the world of education. It’s an especially popular point among folks who have something to sell.
So here’s an important secret: if you do something often, practically everything changes your brain.
If you nap regularly at 3, I suspect your brain is different from the brains of people who don’t. If you run marathons, doing so changes your brain. Or, juggling. Or, learning calculus.
Or–I don’t know–walking up stairs backwards.
Brains change. Often. It’s what they do.
I honestly don’t quite understand the reverence with which people utter the words “collecting chia pets actually changes your brain!” Over a decade ago, neuroscientists believed that brains didn’t change much once they were fully formed, so I understand why they are still awestruck by this fairly recent discovery.
But the rest of us? I’m surprised most non-neuroscientists are invested enough in the changelessness of brains to care one way or the other.
Here’s a test I occasionally use: when I hear the words “actually changes your brain,” I mentally substitute the words “happens while you’re breathing.” If that second sentence would surprise me, then I’ll be surprised by the first.
So, for example: “Ball-room dancing classes actually change your brain!” becomes “Ball-room dancing classes happen while you’re breathing.” Nope, not surprised.
Back to Where We Started
If it’s not surprising that a structured academic environment (1st grade) affects brains differently than a playful environment (kindergarten), what should we do with this study?
For teachers, the answer is: not much. This research result is interesting, but not at all surprising. When one group of students spends a year in a somewhat different environment than another group, those groups develop differently–both in their behavior and in their neural structures.
Put differently, we might summarize the research result this way: at the neural level, 1st grade works. It creates the changes we want it to change. (Or, more precisely: the changes we see in neural networks make sense given what we know about their behavioral correlates.)
For neuroscientists, the answer is: celebrate. Given that neuroplasticity is a relatively recent finding, it’s quite amazing that specialists can now predict where brain changes might happen, and then find those very changes after 9 months. 20 years ago, all of this would have been impossible. Today, it’s not only doable–it’s been done.
In other words: I don’t think you and I will teach any differently because of these findings. But, this study gives us even more confidence that neuroscience and education will come to inform each other more and more often.
In recent weeks, this blog has written about the dangerous assumption that students can just get all their information from The Google, and the implication that they therefore don’t need to know much factual knowledge. (Those posts are here and here.)
In yesterday’s New York Times, Daniel Willingham took up the same topic. If you don’t know Willingham’s work, a) you should, and b) this article will be a lovely introduction to his thoughtfulness and clarity.
This story offers both good and bad news: I’ll let you sort out whether there’s more good than bad…
The bad news: according to a just-published study, 58% of college professors in Britain believe in learning styles theory. This belief persists despite considerable evidence showing that…well…the theory just isn’t true.
(More precisely: considerable evidence showing that the many conflicting versions of the theory don’t have good evidence to support them.)
The good-ish news: although 58% is too high, it’s also lower than other numbers found in surveys of British K-12 teachers.
The oddly good news: although many profs believe in this theory, relatively few of them do anything about it. That is, only 33% report using any specific techniques that they ascribe to learning styles theory.
In my view, that’s good news (because relatively few people are doing anything with a potentially harmful theory), but also bad news (because we want teachers to use the (correct) conclusions of learning science that they believe in).
In other words: in our ideal world, we want all teachers to KNOW what psychology and neuroscience can accurately tell us about learning–and we want them to USE that knowledge.
Learning Styles vs. Individual Differences
Paradoxically, many people believe in learning styles theory because they misunderstand it.
The theory says that we can divide people up into different groups of learners (“visual, auditory, kinesthetic” is the best-known version of the theory), and then teach those groups in ways that match their style. If we do so, they’ll learn better.
However, I think most people understand learning styles theory this way: “all people learn differently, and therefore I should present my content in different ways to be sure that all people can get it in their unique way.”
This theory a) is absolutely true, and b) is NOT what learning styles theory says.
Learning styles theory, again, says that we can diagnose distinct categories of learners, and teach people within those subgroups the same way.
This second theory–called “individual differences”–says that we all learn somewhat differently from each other.
There is no group of people who learn exactly the same way I do. I’m a learning style of one.
For this reason, we could “teach to a student’s learning style” only if everyone were tutored individually. Because schools teach students in groups, teachers should indeed teach all content in many different ways–so that each of us with our individual learning styles can grok these new ideas.
If I truly believed in learning styles theory, I should–instead–test all of my students to determine their style, and then sort them into distinct groups. After that sorting has happened, I should then teach each group differently; all people in each subgroup learn the same way, so they’ll learn best when I teach in that one style only.
What to Do with this Research?
Are you already teaching your content in multiple different ways? If yes, then you’re already following an individual differences theory (not learning styles theory). Keep doing what you’re doing.
If no, try to do so as much as possible. If your students don’t understand when you explain a concept one way, try drawing a picture. Or, use several analogies. Or, have a hands-on demo. Or, give several examples, and have students abstract a principle from them. Or, have students explain it to each other. Or, find a song that enacts the concept you want to explain. Or…
If you’re still a learning styles enthusiast, I suggest that you click some of the links above and see why psychologists just don’t believe the theory. You might also check out Chapter 7 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?; as always, he does an excellent job of clarifying a complex topic.
You should also keep asking questions when you get to the next Learning and the Brain conference. You’ll meet plenty of wise and well informed people who can distinguish between “learning styles” and “individual differences,” and contrast the evidence behind both.
Regular readers of this blog remember Scott MacClintic’s post about “data informed instruction”; quoting W. Edwards Deming, Scott notes that “without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
Of course, gathering the right kind of data can be very tricky. What should we gather? How should we gather it?
Researchers at San Francisco State University have specific answers to both of these questions.
As they pondered STEM teaching, this research team asked some basic questions: how much classroom time is devoted to lecture, how much to pair discussion, and how much to reflective writing or clicker questions?
(The underlying goal: encourage more discussion and writing.)
To answer these questions–that is, to gather this kind of data–they developed a system that can listen to classroom sound and keep track of lecture time, discussion time, and silent working time.
We can hope a) that this system will be tested for other disciplines and other academic levels, and b) that it will be as handy as an app in the near future.
If these hopes come true, then with the click of a few buttons, we can get useful information about our own teaching practices, and fine-tune the balance of our pedagogical strategies.
(The “DART” is currently “under revision”; I don’t know when it will be back up and running.)
Until then, it’s good to know that–despite all the vexations that come with technology–it can still help us hone our craft and benefit our students.
You think grades interfere with learning? You’d like to do away with them? And yet, you’d like some consistent way to measure students’ academic development? And to communicate that development to others?
You’re not alone.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium seeks to accomplish these very goals.
The plan itself is layered and intricate; if you’re interested, it’s worth your time to read this article from Inside Higher Ed.
At present, the plan is in its very early stages: no schools currently use it, because it doesn’t yet exist. But, having just gotten a $2 million dollar grant to develop it, the consortium is hopeful that they have launched a movement that can reshape the educational landscape.
[Full disclosure: this plan has been developed by Scott Looney, head of Hawken School outside Cleveland, OH. I myself was a lifer at Hawken, and have spoken with Mr. Looney about his plans. Although I have done some consulting work with Hawken faculty, parents, and students, I am not involved in the Mastery Transcript project.]
About Andrew Watson 
