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."
Some days I wonder if I have linked to too many articles debunking claims about “brain training games.” Invariably, as soon as this thought crosses my mind, I hear another advertisement for Lumosity, and I realize that I haven’t linked to debunking articles often enough.
So, as my public service for today, here’s another study that makes this point:
People who practiced games that were supposed to improve working memory got better at the games, but they didn’t get better at other working memory tasks.
Put another way: you might decide to spend $15 a month for the fun of playing such games. But, don’t do so because you think they’ll help your cognitive functioning. So far, we just don’t have good evidence that they do.
(Just as a reminder: Lumosity was fined $ 2,000,000 for deceptive advertising.)
Many teachers I know are baffled by the attraction of video games; some are heartily disgusted by them. (A few play them on the sly, but…ahem…no identities revealed here.)
Even if you don’t have much patience with video games yourself, you can still ask yourself this question: could they help us understand how our students learn?
After all, the many hours (and hours) that people devote to online gaming create vast quantities of data. Researchers can use those data to understand the habits that lead to the greatest improvement for the most number of people.
Well: researchers at Brown University have done just that. By studying two online games–Halo Reach and StarCraft 2–Jeff Huang and his intrepid crew have reached two quite helpful conclusions about this particular kind of learning.
It’s All in the Timing
If we want our students to learn a complex process, clearly practicing helps. And, presumably, more practice is better than less. No?
No. (Or, not exactly…)
Huang’s team found that the people who played the most Halo weren’t the people who improved the fastest. Instead, the players who took some time off — playing roughly once every other day, rather than every day or multiple times a day — raised their score most quickly.
If you’ve spent any time in Learning and the Brain world, you have heard about the spacing effect: practice spread out over time produces greater learning that lots of practice done all at once. (For just one example, see this article.)
Huang’s research in video games falls nicely into this pattern, but gives it an extra twist.
The spacing effect suggests that, if you’re going to play Halo 20 hours this week, you’ll improve faster if you spread those hours out than if you play them all in a row.
Huang’s research suggests that, if you want to improve quickly, you’re better off playing fewer hours with breaks in between sessions than more hours all at once.
In the classroom, this finding suggests that my students are better off practicing problems using the inscribed angle theorem with fewer, well-spaced problems than with more, rapid-fire problems.
It’s Also in the Warm Up
When the researchers turned their attention to StarCraft 2, they asked different questions and got usefully different answers.
In StarCraft (I’ve never played, so I’m taking the authors’ word for this), a player must control many units at the same time–sometimes issuing up to 200 commands per minute to execute effective strategy.
To simplify these demands, players can assign ‘hotkeys’ and thereby command many units with one button.
Huang’s team found that the best players used hotkeys more than others. And, even more interesting, they “warmed up” using hotkeys at the beginning of the game when they didn’t yet have many units to command.
In other words: even when they didn’t have complex cognitive work right in front of them, they were already stretching the necessary cognitive musculature to have it ready when it was needed.
This “cognitive warm up” behavior strikes me as a potentially very useful. When students do very simple problems–like the early StarCraft game without many units–they can already push themselves to think about these problems in complex ways.
If it’s easy to spell the word “meet,” you might encourage your students to think of other words that have a similar sound but are spelled differently: “heat,” “wheat,” “cheat.”
If it’s easy to find the verb in a sentence (“The porcupine painted the tuba a fetching shade of puce”), students might ask themselves if that sentence has an indirect object.
In each of these cases, students can use a relatively simple cognitive task as an opportunity to warm up more complex mental operations that will be coming soon.
The Bigger Picture
While I hope these specific teaching strategies might be useful to you, I also think there’s a broader point to make:
Teaching is fantastically complicated because learning is fantastically complicated–at least, much of school learning is. For that reason, teachers can use all the wise guidance we can get–from psychologists, from neuroscientists, and…yes…from video-game players.
Here’s the statement from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine:
During adolescence, internal circadian rhythms and biological sleep drive change to result in later sleep and wake times. As a result of these changes, early middle school and high school start times curtail sleep, hamper a student’s preparedness to learn, negatively impact physical and mental health, and impair driving safety. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence shows that delaying school start times positively impacts student achievement, health, and safety. Public awareness of the hazards of early school start times and the benefits of later start times are largely unappreciated. As a result, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is calling on communities, school boards, and educational institutions to implement start times of 8:30 AM or later for middle schools and high schools to ensure that every student arrives at school healthy, awake, alert, and ready to learn.
Of course, schools have many reasons not to make this change: bus schedules, sports schedules, parent schedules, perhaps lunar eclipse schedules.
But in the face of the mounting evidence, all these reasons sound like excuses. Schools exist to help students learn; at many schools, our daily schedule inhibits their learning. We can, and should, solve this problem.
L&tB bloggers frequently write about working memory — and with good reason. This cognitive capacity, which allows students to reorganize and combine pieces information into some new conceptual structure, is vital to all academic learning.
And: we don’t have very much of it.
For example: our grade school students may know the letters C, A, and T. But, putting letters together to form the word “cat” can be a challenge for new readers. After all, that new combination is a working memory task.
Putting those letters together with another letter to make the word “catch” — well, that cognitive effort can bring the whole mental exercise to a halt. (Psychologists speak of “catastrophic failure,” an apt and vivid phrase.)
When teachers learn about the importance of working memory and the limitations of working memory, we often ask an obvious question: what can we do to make working memory bigger?
How to Embiggen Working Memory
This simple question has a surprisingly complicated set of answers.
The first thing to do: wait. Our students’ working memory is getting bigger as they age. We don’t need to do anything special. (Here is a study by Susan Gathercole showing how working memory increases from ages 4-15.)
The second thing to do: watch researchers argue.
Some scholars believe that working memory training does increase its capacity; some companies sell products that claim to do just that.
For the most part, however, the field is quite skeptical. A recent meta-analysis (here) and several classroom studies (here and here) find that working memory training just doesn’t have the effect we’d like it to. And, of course, that ineffective training takes up valuable time and scarce money.
As I read the field, more scholars are skeptics than believers.
Today’s Headline
All that information is important background for a headline I saw recently: “Buzzing the Brain with Electricity Can Boost Working Memory.” (Link here.)
According to this study, weak electrical stimulation to the middle frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule (not joking) temporarily synchronizes theta waves (obvi), and thereby enhances WM function.
Aha! At last! A solution!
When our students struggle with a working memory task, now we just give them a helpful little ZAP, and they’ll be reading like the Dickens. (Or: solving complex math problems. Or: analyzing Sethe’s motivation. Or: elucidating the parallels between US wars in Korea and Vietnam.)
In other words: all those skeptics can now become believers, as working memory problems become a thing of the past.
Beyond the Headline
Or, maybe not yet a thing of the past.
First, it’s always important to remember that science works incrementally. This study is only one study, offering initial testing of a hypothesis.
Second, it’s quite a small study. We’ll need to test this idea many, many more times with many, MANY more people.
Third–and this is my key point–the authors of the study do not even suggest that this technique has classroom uses. Instead, to quote from the Neuroscience News article, “[t]he hope is that the approach could one day be used to bypass damaged areas of the brain and relay signals in people with traumatic brain injury, stroke or epilepsy.”
In other words: the present hypothesis isn’t about helping students with typical working memory capacity to increase it. Instead, it’s about helping people with damaged working memory capacity to boost it — temporarily.
999 Steps to Go
Teachers can be tempted by flashy headlines–oversimplified as they must be–to pounce on scientific advances as practical classroom solutions.
If we’re going to be responsible, even critical consumers of psychology and neuroscience, however, we must learn to read this research in the spirit it is intended. In these scientific realms, the intended spirit is almost always “here’s an interesting incremental step. Let’s think about how to take one more.”
Classroom uses may be at the end of this journey of a thousand steps. Until then, we should keep our students–and our own–working memory limitations clearly in mind.
Greg Ashman is enthusiastic about research, and yet skeptical about innovation.
Ashman’s argument resonates with me in large measure because it helps explain the power of Mind, Brain, Education as an approach to teaching.
Of course, MBE does offer its own specific pedagogical suggestions. For example: if you’ve spent any time at Learning and the Brain conferences, you know the benefits of active recall. (Both Ian Kelleher and Scott MacClintic have blogged on this topic recently.)
The Bigger Picture
More broadly, MBE gives teachers a consistent rubric with which we can measure the value of many other pedagogical approaches. Here’s what I mean:
Is project based learning a good idea? How about flipped classrooms? Service learning? 1-to-1 laptop programs? Design thinking? Or, the new idea that will inevitably surface tomorrow?
If you’re being encouraged to try one of these approaches, it can be hard to know how to measure its effectiveness. All of them have research (of some kind or another) showing how beneficial they are. All of them have enthusiastic endorsements by earnest-seeming teachers. All of them have books and conferences and websites and … I don’t know … Ben & Jerry’s flavors named after them.
But: do they all work? How can they – some seem to conflict with each other.
The more you know about MBE, however, the more tools you have that allow you to make consistent comparisons.
Here’s what I mean…
The First Tool in the Toolbox
If you’ve learned about working memory at an LaTB conference, then you already know it is a short-term memory capacity that allows people to hold several pieces of information, and then reorganize and combine them into some new pattern.
For example: if I ask you to put the 6 New England states into alphabetical order, you have to hold all six names in your memory, and then reorganize them in a particular way. That’s working memory.
You may also know that working memory is very small; you can probably alphabetize 6 states, but you couldn’t do sixteen – at least, not without writing them down.
Once you understand even a few simple facts about working memory, then you can use that MBE knowledge to analyze all of the pedagogies listed above.
Is project-based learning a good idea? Well: what might it do to working memory?
Do 1-to-1 laptop programs increase or reduce working memory demands?
In other words: now you have a consistent criterion – one you can use to analyze all new proposals that come across your doorstep.
More Where That Came From
Michael Posner’s work on attention provides an equally useful yardstick. It might tell you, for example, whether flipped classrooms are likely to enhance or diffuse attention. (Or, more likely, both…)
So too Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, and Claude Steele’s work on stereotype threat. And Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang’s work on emotion.
And so: MBE allows you both to learn about specific psychology- and neuroscience-based teaching strategies and to develop a system for measuring all the other pedagogical proposals that crowd your inbox.
As Ashman implies: research helps us not only because it allows innovation, but also because allows consistent, skeptical analysis of innovation. Our students will benefit from both.
It has long been true that men are diagnosed with dyslexia more often than women. This article (rather technical, by the way) offers one potential explanation: processing speed.
What is processing speed? It’s an unusually straightforward concept in psychology.
Imagine that I show you a piece of paper with several rows of different shapes. There might be a square, and then a star, and then a rectangle, and then a circle. And so forth.
To test your processing speed, I simply ask you to name all those shapes as quickly and accurately as you can. Or, I might ask you to say the colors of the shapes: the first one is green, the second is purple, and the third orange.
If you accomplish these tasks relatively quickly, you have a high processing speed.
Overall, women have slightly higher processing speed than men–especially in verbal tasks. The authors of this new study find that this difference in processing speed gives women an edge in reading fluency–and reduces the likelihood that they will be diagnosed with dyslexia.
There are no immediate teaching implications of this finding; however, anything that helps us understand how learning differences come to be…and, come to be diagnosed…might help us improve reading and learning in the future.
You have heard before, and will doubtless hear again, that students don’t need to memorize facts because everything we know is available on the interwebs.
Mirjam Neelen and Paul A. Kirschner explain all the ways in which this claim is not just wrong, not just foolishly wrong, but dangerously wrong.
(The danger, of course, is that if we believe it, we’ll fail to teach our students all sorts of things they need to know.)
Students can do critical thinking if and only if they already know lots (and lots) of factual material. We don’t stifle creativity or deep thinking by teaching facts: we make creativity and deep thinking possible.
Brain research can be thrilling; it can be useful; it can be confusing. This article is–frankly–depressing.
Over ten years, from 2005 to 2015, the authors find that the number concussions has more than doubled–even though the sports participation rate has remained almost the same.
They also find that the concussion rate is lower for boys playing (American) football than for girls playing (what Americans call) soccer. You read that right: girls playing soccer are in greater danger of experiencing a concussion than boys playing football.
The greatest rate of increase in concussions over these ten years? For boys: baseball. For girls: volleyball.
Given the short- and long-term dangers of concussions, this research merits careful attention.
Dr. Savo Heleta, a scholar at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, argues that scholars should devote more of their work to communicating with readers outside of the university.
Heleta explains that, to his dismay, professors have few incentives to write for a broader audience. As a result, scholars most often write for each other–and, in truth, not very many of each other. (According to one study, 82% of articles published in humanities journals are never cited by another scholar. As my grandmother wryly noted: never is a long time.)
So, how are you part of the solution?
In my experience, Learning and the Brain (along with the related scholarly discipline, Mind Brain Education) is one of the few places where such connections happen regularly and successfully.
You’re a 6th grade science teacher, and you want to learn about the latest research in synapse formation?
You’re an academic psychologist who studies adolescent motivation, and you want to know what high school teachers really struggle with day to day?
You work with special needs students, and you’d like to understand the research into executive function with greater sophistication?
In each of these cases, and dozens more, you’d like to join a dialogue between researchers and K-12 professionals.
You are–simply put–doing what Helata wants the world to do: helping highly specialized knowledge get out of the ivory tower and into the everyday world of education. In Helata’s hopeful phrase, you just might be changing the world.
About Andrew Watson 
