Andrew Watson – Page 67 – Education & Teacher Conferences

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 Potential Benefits of High School Music Classes

Andrew Watson

May 27, 2017

The Potential Benefits of High School Music Classes

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.

Andrew Watson

May 24, 2017

School, Self-Regulation, and the Brain

The Study

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.

Andrew Watson

May 21, 2017

What He Said

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.

Good News ! (?) College Profs Don’t Use the Untrue Learning Styles Theory That They Nonetheless Believe

Andrew Watson

May 18, 2017

Good News ! (?) College Profs Don’t Use the Untrue Learning Styles Theory That They Nonetheless Believe

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.

(Here’s yet another article showing the falsity of the theory.)

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.

Andrew Watson

May 15, 2017

Classroom Data to Enhance STEM Teaching

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.

Andrew Watson

May 12, 2017

A Future Without Grades?

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.]

Andrew Watson

May 10, 2017

Once Upon a Digital Time…

A recent study suggests that 3- and 4-year old children understand as much, and learn as much vocabulary from, digital books as from read-alouds with adults.

This study hasn’t been published–it was presented at a recent conference–so we can’t look at all the details with the specificity that we usually do. (And, skeptics will rightly be concerned that the research was funded by Amazon: a company that might well profit from its conclusions.)

At the same time, the description I’ve linked to sounds plausible and responsible, so I’m not inclined to dismiss this finding out of hand.

The authors’ conclusions conflict with some other findings in related fields. You may remember a recent blog post discussing Daniel Willingham’s conclusion that, on the whole, students learn more from books than from e-readers.

I’ve also been interested in a study by Ackerman and Goldsmith showing that students regulate their learning better with books than e-readers.

But the current study isn’t about college students trying to learn from books; it’s about pre-readers trying to follow a story that’s being read to them. In this one paradigm, the researchers have found that the right kind of e-book can do the job as well as the right kind of adult.

Andrew Watson

May 07, 2017

The Science of Creativity

In this 20 minute video, James Kaufman explains how researchers define creativity, and how they measure it.

He also discusses the limitations on both the definitions and the measurements.

(Note, too, the dexterous water-bottle management.)

Although he title of this video is “What Can Neuroscience Offer the Study of Creativity?”, the presentation focuses entirely on psychology: that is, the behavior of the creative mind, not the physical make-up of the creating brain. I’m hoping that subsequent videos explore neuroscience in greater depth.

Thinking Critically about Teaching Critical Thinking

Andrew Watson

May 05, 2017

Thinking Critically about Teaching Critical Thinking

A friend recently referred me to this online article (at bigthink.com) about this research study: the eye-catching phrase in both headlines being “Teaching Critical Thinking.”

(The online article is even more emphatic: “Study: There Are Instructions for Teaching Critical Thinking.”)

This headline sounds like great news. We can do it! Just follow the instructions!

We should, of course, be delighted to learn that we can teach critical thinking. So often, especially in upper grades, schools emphasize teaching “not what to think, but how to think.”

Every time we say that, we are—in effect—claiming to be teaching critical thinking.

The author of the BigThink article summarizes the societal importance of critical thinking this way:

We live in an age with unprecedented access to information. Whether you are contributing to an entry on Wikipedia or reading a meme that has no sources cited (do they ever?), your ability to comprehend what you are reading and weigh it is a constant and consistent need. That is why it is so imperative that we have sharp critical-thinking skills.

Clearly, students need such skills. Clearly we should teach them.

It Can Be Taught!

The study itself, authored by N. G. Holmes and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, follows students in a college physics course. The course explicitly introduced its students to a process for thinking critically about scientific data; it emphasized the importance of this process by grading students on their early attempts to use it.

For example (this excerpt, although complex, is worth reading closely):

“students were shown weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data to models and then were given a decision tree for interpreting the outcome. If students obtain a low χ2, they would decide whether it means their data are in good agreement with the model or whether it means they have overestimated their uncertainties.”

Early in the course, the instructors often reminded the students to use this process. By term’s end, however, those instructions had been faded, so the students who continued to use it did so on their own.

The results?

Many students who had been taught this analytical process continued to use it. In fact, many of them continued to use it the following year in another course taught by a different professor.

In other words: they had been taught critical thinking skills, and they learned critical thinking skills.

Success!

It Can Be Taught?

Sadly, this exciting news looks less and less promising the more we consider it.

In the first place, despite the title of his article, Holmes doesn’t even claim to be teaching critical thinking. He claims to be teaching “quantitative critical thinking,” or the ability “to think critically about scientific data and models [my emphasis].”

Doubtless our students need this valuable subset of critical thinking skills. And yet, our students think about many topics that defy easy quantification.

If we want our students to think critically about a Phillis Wheatley poem, or about the development of the Silk Road, or about the use of gerundives, we will quickly recognize they need a meaningfully different set of critical thinking skills.

How, for example, would a student use “weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data” to compare the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution of the United States?

To return to the examples offered in BigThink’s enthusiastic paragraph: despite this author’s enthusiasm, it’s not at all certain this procedure for analyzing “scientific data and models” will help us update a Wikipedia entry, or critique an unsourced meme.

(It might, but—unless we’re editing a very particular kind of Wikipedia entry, or reading a very statistical meme—it probably won’t.)

In brief: ironically, the headlines implying that we can “teach critical thinking” generally do not stand up to critical thought.

The Bigger Picture

Cognitive scientists, in fact, regularly doubt the possibility of teaching a general set of critical thinking skills. And here’s one big reason why:

Different disciplines require different kinds of critical thought.

Critical thinking in evolutionary biology requires different skills than critical thinking in comparative theology.

The field I’m in uses psychology and neuroscience research to inform teaching; hard experience has taught me that the fields of psychology and neuroscience demand very different critical thinking skills from their practitioners.

Perhaps your own teaching experience reveals the same pattern:

The English department where I taught included some of the sharpest minds I know: people who can parse a sonnet or map a literary genre with giddy dexterity. Their critical thinking skills in the world of English literature can’t be questioned.

And yet, many of these same people have told me quite emphatically that they are hopeless at, say, math. Or, chemistry. Or, doing their taxes. Being good critical thinkers in one discipline has not made them successful at critical thought in others.

Chapter 2 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School explores this argument at greater length.

The Smaller Picture

There’s a second reason that it’s hard to teach general critical thinking skills: knowledge of details.

To think critically about any topic, we need to know a very substantial amount of discipline-specific factual information. Finding those facts on the interwebs isn’t enough; we need to know them cold—have them comfortably housed in long-term memory.

For example: to use Holmes’s critical thinking technique, you would need to know what “weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data” actually are.

Even more: you’d need to know how to calculate them.

If you don’t have that very specific kind of detailed knowledge, you’re just out of luck. You can’t think critically in his world.

Another example. Much chess expertise comes from playing lots and lots of chess. As Chase and Simon’s famous study has shown, chess experts literally see chess boards differently than do chess novices.

You really can’t think like a chess expert (that is, you can’t engage in critical chess thinking) until you can see like a chess expert; and, seeing like a chess expert takes years. You need to accumulate substantial amounts of specific information—the Loomis gambit, the Concord defense—to make sense of the chessboard world.

Your own teaching experience almost certainly underlines this conclusion. Let me explain:

How often does it happen that someone learns you’re a teacher, and promptly offers you some heartfelt advice on teaching your students more effectively? (“I saw this AMAZING video on Facebook about the most INSPIRING teacher…”) How often is that advice, in fact, even remotely useful?

And yet, here’s the surprise: the person offering you this well-meaning advice is almost certainly an expect in her field. She’s an accomplished doctor, or financial adviser, or geologist, or jurist. In her field, she could out-critical-think you with most of her prefrontal cortex tied behind her occipital lobe.

Unfortunately, her critical thinking skills in that field don’t transfer to our field, because critical thinking in our field requires a vast amount of very specific teaching knowledge.

(By the way: twice now this post has assumed you’re a teacher. If you’re not, insert the name of your profession or expertise in the place of “teacher.” The point will almost certainly hold.)

Wishing and Thinking, not Wishful Thinking

As so often happens, I feel a bit like a grinch as I write this article. Once again, I find myself reading news I ought to find so very exciting, and instead finding it unsupported by research.

Truthfully, I wish we could teach critical thinking skills in general. If you’ve got a system for doing so, I genuinely hope you’ll let me know. (Inbox me: [email protected])

Even better: if you’ve got research that shows it works, I’ll dance a jig through Somerville.

But the goal of this organization—and the goal of Mind, Brain, and Education—is to improve psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy by having these disciplines talk with each other deeply and knowledgeably.

And with that deep knowledge—with critical thinking skills honed by scientific research—we know that critical thinking skills must be taught discipline by discipline; and, they must be honed through extensive and specific practice.

This task might sound less grand than “teaching critical thinking skills.” And yet, by focusing not on lofty impossibilities, but on very realistic goals, we can indeed accomplish them—one discipline at a time.

Promoting STEM for Women by Requiring More High School Math. Or, not.

Andrew Watson

May 03, 2017

Promoting STEM for Women by Requiring More High School Math. Or, not.

How can we encourage young women to pursue STEM fields?

In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, school leaders tried a substantial reform: they increased the math requirement during the final two years of high school. Instead of taking math three days a week, all students had to take math four days a week.

What were the results of increasing the math requirement by 1/3 for 2 years? (That sentence sounds like a word problem, no?)

A mixed bag.

The good news: this reform reduced the gap between male and female achievement scores in math. On the surface, in other words, it seems young women learned more.

This result should be very exciting. However…

The so-so news: this additional math work did very little to increase women’s participation in STEM fields in college. Instead, it increased the STEM interest of male college students–the enrollment gap remained about the same.

And, the bad news: although the women learned more math, they felt worse about their own math abilities.

The reason for this last result isn’t clear — the author’s hypothesis honestly sounds a little convoluted to me.

But, given the size of the data pool behind this study, the conclusion seems clear: requiring more math may boost math learning, but — for women — it’s not sufficient to boost math confidence and interest in STEM fields.

At a minimum, the study suggests that we should think not only about how much math students learn, but how they learn it.

A further point: I don’t know how the math curriculum in a typical Baden-Württemberg high school compares to that of a school in the US. Before we try this intervention, we should (again) think not only about how much math students learn, but what math they learn.

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