Following up on Rina Deshpande’s post looking at the benefits of cognitive routines, here’s a fun article about the upsides — and downsides — of creative changes to our daily habits.
In brief: it seems that Dave Birss broke his brain…
Author Archives: Andrew Watson
About Andrew Watson
February 17, 2017
Now that you’ve been to LaTB, we’d love to hear your story.
What did you learn? What did you try? How did it go?
If you’d like to share your experience, please send me an email with:
- Who you are and what you do.
- The research and the researcher that inspired you (and, at which conference you heard this idea).
- What you did with this inspiration.
- The results you saw.
Please be sure to include a specific source (a speaker, a book, or an article) for the ideas that you tried. And, keep in mind that you’re writing for a blog audience—short and punchy entries are especially welcome.
We won’t be able to publish every entry, but…we hope to hear from you!
For an example, check out this early LaTB Story by Alexander Wonnell.
February 17, 2017
Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork have argued that the right kind of difficulty can facilitate ultimate learning. These difficulties–“desirable difficulties”–require extra cognitive engagement, and thereby promote long-term memory formation.
Presenters at Learning and the Brain conferences often talk about “spacing,” or “interleaving,” or the “testing effect.” (In fact, Ian Kelleher has recently blogged about these strategies.) All these techniques boost learning by increasing desirable difficulty.
Nicholas Gasperlin wanted to know: is it desirable to divide students’ attention? Would that kind of difficulty enhance learning?
The short answer: No. Forcing students to focus on two things does ramp up the level of difficulty; however, it does not increase learning.
(However, it decreases learning much less than I would have predicted.)
The big news here, in my opinion, is that researchers are starting to ask this question. Up until now, we have heard a great deal about desirable difficulties, but haven’t gotten much guidance on UNdesirable ones. Now–finally–we’re starting to get research-based answers.
February 15, 2017
A recent meta-analysis of 100 years of research (you read that right — 100 years) suggests that both ability grouping and appropriate grade acceleration benefit students.
Interestingly, the authors argue that ability grouping benefits students across the academic spectrum: “Overall, high-, medium-, and low-ability students benefited equally from ability grouping” (p. 889).
The authors of this study focus on academic benefits, and don’t look at studies that focus solely on social-emotional results. When it comes to grade acceleration, however, they do see a trend: “Numerous studies have investigated the peer dimension of acceleration and generally reported not only no harm but also small to moderate social–emotional benefits of academic acceleration” (p. 853).
For these acceleration programs, selection criteria make a real difference. At least one of the studies they review finds “socio-affective benefits for students selected on the basis of academic readiness and social and emotional maturity, but also cautions that these programs may be harmful to individual students who are arbitrarily selected on the basis of IQ” (p. 892-3).
In other words: we can’t rely solely on cognitive tests to make such placement decisions.
Given the passion surrounding this debate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see zealous push-back in upcoming weeks.
February 13, 2017
February 11, 2017
February 09, 2017
February 07, 2017
Here’s a handy anatomy of ADHD, complete with treatment options.
The key point: people are different, and not all ADHD diagnoses are the same. We need to attend to individual differences if we want to help all our students learn.
February 04, 2017
January 27, 2017
Recently, I linked to a study suggesting potential downsides to bilingualism: in at least this one study, bilingual students were less successful with metacognition than monolingual students.
In that post, I noted that this one detriment doesn’t mean that bilinguals are “bad at thinking” in some broad way, or that bilingual education is necessarily a bad idea. Instead, that study was one interesting data point in a large and complex discussion.
Well, that discussion has gotten even larger and more complex. A research team at the University of Montreal has explored the neural mechanisms that help adult bilinguals focus on some information without being distracted by other kinds of information.
Neuroscience is always complicated, but the simple version is this: bilinguals use more efficient networks to maintain focus on a particular information stream.
In other words: we’ve got research showing both advantages (efficient attention processing) and disadvantages (reduced metacognition) to bilingualism. So, what should we do?
In the end, teachers and parents can draw on research to explore these questions, but we must put many conflicting pieces together to draw the wisest conclusions.