Author Archives: Andrew Watson

Every wonder what it’s like to plan a Big Room presentation for Learning and the Brain?

In this blog post, Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher describe the thought process behind their adventurous presentation at this fall’s conference.

Enjoy!

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 book or 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!

[email protected]

[email protected]

In April of 2014, Pam Mueller and Dan Oppenheimer struck psychology gold with their cleverly titled article, “The Pen is Mightier than the Laptop: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking.”¹

No psychology article that I know of has gotten so much play: in newspaper articles, in teacherly blogs, in faculty room debates.

Heck, it shows up regularly on my Facebook feed, as my exasperated college professor friends vow to ban laptops from their classrooms. That prohibition will benefit students! Science says so!

Among the article’s many strengths: it confirms what we knew all along. The way we did things back in the day—that way was better. (If you’re so inclined, you might now add nostalgic words about high cotton paper positively drinking the ink from a fountain pen…)

More or Less Fidelity

Mueller and Oppenheimer picked a research question with two impressive qualities: teachers agree that it’s a really important inquiry, and it’s relatively easy to investigate.

So, the research team had two groups of students watch a lecture. One group took handwritten notes; the second group took laptop notes. On a later test, which group remembered more?

Being careful researchers, Mueller and Oppenheimer went beyond “laptop notes” and “handwritten notes” to investigate two other potentially important variables.

First: the number of words that students wrote. Did the students who wrote fewer words score higher on the ultimate test? Or, the students who wrote more words?

Let’s imagine the professor says this:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

A student could write lots of words:

• Four score and seven years ago
• Fathers brought forth new nation
• Conceived in liberty
• Dedicated to prop: all men equal

Or, relatively few words:

• Four score and seven
• New nation
• Liberty
• Equality

The second variable: fidelity to the lecturer’s words.

A student could copy down those words verbatim:

• Four score and seven years ago
• Fathers brought forth new nation
• Conceived in liberty
• Dedicated to prop: all men equal

Or, a student could deliberately put those ideas into her own words

• 87 years ago
• Revolutionary war created US
• Two goals; free people, equal people
• Might freedom conflict with equality?

Looking at all these variables—laptops vs. notebooks, number of words, and fidelity of notes—Mueller and Oppenheimer reached three conclusions.

a) The Big Reveal: hand-writers remembered more than laptop note-takers. When it comes to classroom note-taking, in the authors’ words: “the pen is mightier than the laptop.”

b) The number of words does matter. Students who wrote MORE words remembered more information than those who wrote FEWER words.

c) The fidelity of notes does matter. Students who REWORDED their notes remembered more information than those who took down the speaker’s words VERBATIM.

These conclusions align with our preconceptions. After all, a) OF COURSE handwritten notes are better. And, b+c) students who write more words, and write more of their own words, have devoted more mental energy to processing the ideas in the lecture. As we all know, more mental processing = more learning.

Laptops with Limits

These conclusions, however, create a bit of a puzzle. Handwriting takes more time and physical coordination than does typing, so laptop note-takers can write more words than hand-writers. If more words = more learning, why do the wordy laptop note-takers fall short of the relatively taciturn hand-writers on the final test?

Here we arrive at Mueller and Oppenheimer’s key finding: laptop note takers write more words, but they use this excess word capacity to write more VERBATIM words. Because hand-writers simply can’t write down everything the lecturer says, they have to REWORD the ideas in the lecture. This rewording leads to more cognitive effort, and that cognitive effort leads to more learning.

In other words, technology steers note-takers in meaningful directions. Those who use paper-and-pencil technologies write slowly, and therefore must reword their notes. Those who use laptop technologies write quickly, and therefore take down the speaker’s words verbatim. This second choice might seem wiser, but in fact reduces processing and thus undermines long-term learning.

Replacing evil with virtue

Being careful researchers, Mueller and Oppenheimer didn’t stop here. Instead, they asked a crucial question: can laptop note-takers learn to replace verbatim notes with reworded notes? Could they, in other words, use their capacity to write more words for good, rather than for evil?

To answer this question, they repeated their study, and they gave laptop note takers stern instructions: “People who take class notes on laptops … tend to transcribe what they’re hearing without thinking about it much. Please try not to do this as you take notes today. Take notes in your own words and don’t just write down word-for word what the speaker is saying”.

The result? Nothing changed. Defying these admirably clear instructions, laptop note-takers took verbatim notes, and remembered less than the hand-writers, who used their own words.

So, there you have it. Laptop note-takers can’t be retrained to reword their notes. Because hand-writers do reword their notes, the pen is mightier than the laptop…

Case Closed.

Case Reopened?

Let’s try an analogy here. When I tell my students how to subordinate a quotation in a participial phrase, they often try and fail. When they try and fail, I conclude that they can’t do it, and so I stop asking them to subordinate quotations in participial phrases. In brief, I give up. Isn’t that what you do?

Well, of course not. We’re teachers. When we show our students how to do something, they ALWAYS fail the first time. And, most likely, several more times. For this reason, we naturally build in time for students to practice. Learning any meaningful skill requires structured repetition. Obviously.

And yet, Mueller and Oppenheimer insist just the opposite. You can hear them cry: “Those laptop note-takers really should have used their own words BECAUSE WE EXPLICITLY TOLD THEM TO.”

Once. You told them to, once.

Did they get to practice? No. Did you tell them why? Not really. And: you’re surprised they didn’t change a behavior they’ve been practicing since they first started taking notes on laptops? Really?

A New Hypothesis

Let’s combine our experience as teachers with Mueller and Oppenheimer’s research.

Teacherly wisdom shows that we can train students to learn new skills: how to multiply fractions, how to use the subjunctive, how to throw a knuckleball. It seems highly likely that we can train laptop note takers to reword their notes. This training might take some time. The students’ progress probably won’t be constant. But, they can learn to do it.

After all: hand-writers have learned to reword their notes, so it’s hard to understand why laptop note-takers can’t.

If students succeed in this project, then they will end up with an awesome classroom superpower: the ability to write more words AND reworded words. With this superpower, they should remember even more than the hand-writers, who write fewer words that are reworded words. This likelihood, in fact, flows directly from Mueller and Oppenheimer’s research.

Under the right circumstances, the laptop just might defeat the pen.

Mind you: the study to test this hypothesis has not—to my knowledge—been done. But the hypothesis is, I think, the best interpretation of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s research.

Some Final Thoughts

1. I should admit my own biases here. I take laptop notes. In fact, I’m a touch typist. I’m even a touch typist on the Dvořak keyboard. Like Liam Neeson, I’ve put a lot of hours into learning a particular set of skills. I’d be sad to learn those skills were weakening, not strengthening, my learning.
2. Wise teachers often object that laptops introduce many other sources of potential distraction: Insta-snap-face-chat-gram, or email, or—heaven help us—Netflix. This objection is obviously true; in fact, Faria Sana has done impressive research into the power of these distractions.² However, this objection doesn’t focus on Mueller and Oppenheimer’s underlying claim: the very technology that we use to take notes shapes their helpfulness. If laptop notes can truly boost learning more than hand-written notes, then we should help our students get those benefits without losing them to YouTube distractions.
3. Even if Mueller and Oppenheimer’s study were done perfectly, teachers should still be cautious about adopting its conclusions. As you have read many times in this blog, we should look at bodies of research, not only at individual studies.
4. The collaboration between psychology and education should be a conversation, not a lecture. When psychologists say “do this,” teachers should a) look hard at the research that led to that guidance, and b) use our own experience to ask hard questions. In other words: we should not take verbatim notes when psychologists speak—we should reword and reconsider as we go.
5. We should ask those hard questions even when—perhaps especially when—psychology research seems to confirm beliefs that we have held all along. If we’ve always known that handwritten notes are best, then we should be thoughtfully skeptical of research that tells us what we want to hear. Me included.

Reference & Further Reading

1. Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 0956797614524581. [Paper]
2. Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31. [Paper]

Is mindful meditation good for learning?

If you work in or near a school—or if you often read this blog¹—you have surely heard about meditation’s potential benefits for just about everything: executive function, stress reduction, strategic backgammon decision making. (I think I made that last one up.)

So what do you make of an article with this title: “Increased False-Memory Susceptibility After Mindfulness Meditation”?

If you’re like me, such an article might give us pause. If meditation promotes “false-memory susceptibility” of any kind, it must be bad for learning. No? Time to call a halt to all those meditation programs. Am I right?

List vs. Gist

Here’s a fun game you might try at your next dinner party.

I’m going to give you a list of words, and your job is to remember them.² Ready? Here we go:

Table, sit, legs, seat, soft, desk, arm, sofa, wood, cushion, rest, stool 

A few minutes from now, when I ask you to write all those words down again, you’re likely to remember several of them. You’re also likely to include a word that wasn’t actually on the list: chair.

After all, while the word “chair” doesn’t appear in that list, it is implied by or associated with all the other words. Tables and desks and sofas and stools often accompany chairs; people sit on chairs; chairs have legs and arms and cushions.

In other words, when you remember that list of words, you remember not only the specific items on it, but also its gist. The gist includes the idea of “chair,” even though the list itself did not.

The Beginning of the End?

Brent M. Wilson and his colleagues wondered if meditation would increase the formation of gist memories. Their thought process went like this:

Because meditation promotes judgment-free observation of the world, people who have recently meditated might be less likely to distinguish between (that is, form judgments about the source of) internally and externally generated words. If this hypothesis is correct, meditators are less likely to see differences between (external) list memories and (internal) gist memories. They are therefore likelier to include gist words when they join us for our dinner party game.

To test this idea, Brent Wilson invited 140 college undergraduates to dinner. (Ok, no. The students did this exercise in a psychology lab. You have to admit, however, that my version sounds more fun.)

For fifteen minutes, half of the participants were invited to “focus attention on their breathing without judgment”: that is, they were guided through meditation. The other half spent fifteen minutes in a mind-wandering exercise: a common control task in studies of mindful meditation.³

Sure enough, when Wilson tested the post-meditation students, they were likelier to include gist words than students in the control group. Seemingly, meditation promotes the formation of false memories.

To make doubly sure, Wilson tried another research paradigm as well. Students saw 100 words on a computer screen; each word was half of a common pair (shoe/foot, for example, or hot/cold). They were then shown another 100 words—half of which were on the first list, and half of which were pairs of words from that list. Students who meditated were likelier than those in the control group to “remember” a new word as if it were an old one.

So, there you have it: meditating increases false-memory susceptibility. By definition, anything that promotes false memories harms learning. No doubt, Wilson’s study is the beginning of the end of school-based meditation.

Let Me Count the Ways

And yet, perhaps you do have some doubts. So do I. And here’s why…

First, it’s important to emphasize that Wilson and his crew never draw the conclusion that I have implied. As teachers, we might read the title of the article and plausibly extrapolate that meditation must be a terrible idea. But the study’s authors never say so.

And, even if they did, we must keep in mind that this study is…one study. The effects of mindfulness have been researched in hundreds of studies. Given that volume, we should expect some studies to show negative results, and others to show neither benefit nor harm.

In short, we should be interested in bodies of research as well as individual studies.

Second, when we read the specifics of this individual study, we can see how small the effects really are. In that dinner party game, for example, 26% of the control group thought that they “remembered” gist words, whereas in the meditation group, 34% did. This increase is statistically significant, but hardly alarming.

(For you statistics junkies, the Cohen’s d values are 0.38 and 0.28 in the two studies I described. Again: not nothing, but not much of something.)

Third: say it with me now—context always matters.

In some classes, a gist memory might be a bad thing. For example, a colleague of mine has her students learn a song to help them memorize all English prepositions. In this case, she doesn’t want her students to add to that list by forming a gist memory. Instead, she wants them to remember all the words in the song, and only the words in the song.

Specifically: “although” might feel like a preposition, and a student’s gist memory might try to incorporate it into that list. But “although” isn’t a preposition; it’s a conjunction. For this reason, Wilson’s research suggests that my colleague might not have her students meditate just before they learn the song. In this case, gist memory detracts from learning.

In other classes, however, gist memory might be my goal. When I teach Macbeth, for example, I want my students to recognize how Shakespeare constantly pits forces of order against forces of chaos. Every page of text includes multiple instances.

For instance: Lady Macbeth is extravagantly polite to King Duncan when he arrives in her castle. And yet, her display of social order masks her determination to commit regicide—the ultimate form of social disorder.

While I certainly want my students to remember specifics from the text, I also want them to feel the bigger picture, to identify both trees and forest. In other words, the event that Wilson calls “false memory” a teacher might call “learning.” Wilson’s research, thus, suggests that I might want my students to meditate before Macbeth class.

Context always matters.

Or, to paraphrase my wise blogging colleague Rina Deshpande, “our role as educators is not to dismiss or adopt a practice right away, but to consume with care.”⁴

Balancing Curiosity with Skepticism

I’ve explored this study in some detail because it points to helpfully contradictory points:

A. Although mindful meditation has gotten a lot of recent buzz, teachers should pause before we make it a part of our practice. All classroom techniques have both benefits and perils, and we should seek out information on both. In this case, for example, meditation might lead to a particular sort of false memory.

B. Terminology from psychology and neuroscience—terminology such as “false memories”—might be unhelpful, even misleading. In some cases—lists of prepositions—we don’t want students to create gist memories; in other cases—themes of literary works—we do. But alarming phrases like “false memories” shouldn’t distract us from thinking through those possibilities.

In other words: “false memory” sounds like a bad result, but once we realize that “gist memories” are a potentially useful kind of “false memory,” the phrase isn’t so scary any more.

C. For this reason, we must always look at the specific actions performed by specific study participants. If an article’s title claims that “high ambient temperature reduces learning,” you might find that interesting; your classroom often seems unreasonably warm, and your students unreasonably sluggish. However, if you read the study’s particulars, you might find that mice learn a water maze faster in cold water than in warm water. Because your students aren’t mice, aren’t learning mazes, and—I’m assuming—aren’t up to their necks in water, this study may not really apply to you. Perhaps you’ll find more relevant research elsewhere…⁵

Once More, With Feeling

So, to return to my initial question: Is mindful meditation good for learning?

My answer is: that’s too big a question to answer sensibly. Reading studies (like Wilson’s), we can balance specific potential perils of meditation against the specific potential benefits that Rina has wisely summarized.

References & Further Reading

1. Deshpande, R. What we’re getting right—and wrong—about mindfulness research. [Blog]
2. Roediger, H.L., & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21 (4), 803-814. [Paper]
3. Wilson, B.M., Mickes, L., Stolarz-Fantino, S., Evrard, M., & Fantino, E. (2015). Increased false memory susceptibility after mindfulness meditation. Psychological science, 26 (10), 1567-1573. [Paper]
4. Deshpande, R. What we’re getting right—and wrong—about mindfulness research. [Blog]
5. I made this study up too. Just for fun, here’s an article on the complex relationship between room temperature and working memory: Sellaro, R., Hommel, B., Manai, M., & Colzato, L.S. (2015). Preferred, but not objective temperature predicts working memory depletion. Psychological research, 79 (2), 282-288. [Paper]

On some days, I just want my students to pay attention. Really, is this too much to ask?

“Attention” can be difficult indeed, and for multiple reasons. In the field of psychology, that is, “attention” includes several subcategories.

First of all: are my students awake enough to pay attention? Or, perhaps Red Bull overload has made them too awake?

In either case, I can help students pay attention by moderating their levels of alertness. (“Alertness” is one subcategory” of “attention.”)

If they are already appropriately alert, then perhaps the world around them has too many distractions: the smell of formaldehyde in the Biology classroom, or the sound of the squeaky door outside my English classroom, or the symphonic melodies of text message DINGS resounding down the corridors. If my students orient to these distractions, they can’t orient to me. (“Orienting” is another subcategory of “attention.)

In these cases, I can make attention likelier by reducing these disorienting stimuli: I’ll lemon pledge the lab, oil those hinges, and persuade teens that texts aren’t that important. (How hard can this be?)

But perhaps I need to look in the mirror. Perhaps the problem is that my own teaching isn’t quite zippy enough. All those other stimuli might be disorienting because, frankly, my own work doesn’t pull students in. What, then, can I do?

Beyond the Basics

This question is, I suppose, among the most basic a teacher can ask: how do I make my teaching interesting enough for my students to notice? In a perfect world, intrinsic motivation would keep them panting for more knowledge, but few schools in that perfect world are hiring.

Here’s one excellent source of ideas: in Teach Like a Champion¹ Doug Lemov offers dozens of practical strategies to improve a teacher’s craft. From lesson plans to behavioral expectations, Lemov has advice drawn from years of observing highly effective teachers.

Throughout TLAC, Lemov offers strategies to make classroom content the center of attention. For example, he argues (persuasively) for the advantages of cold calling—as long as the technique is used correctly—and offers multiple ways to extend the wait time between questions and answers.

These techniques, and others he outlines, go well beyond the basics in helping teachers make classroom content our students’ focus.

WAAAAY Beyond the Basics

Lemov’s answers, although interesting and helpful, don’t draw on research from neuroscience and psychology—certainly not with the emphasis that Learning and the Brain readers expect. What brain research, then, can most helpfully answer this question?

For me, one research finding stands out for its surprising usefulness. Karl Szpunar’s lab looked at the effect of quizzes on attention, and his results certainly upended my predictions.

Here’s the setup:²

Szpunar had two groups of students watch an online lecture on statistics. (As many graduate students know, it can be a real challenge to make Stats an interesting topic, so this video serves as a useful test case of our teaching problem.) For both groups, the lecture video was divided into 4 segments. One group took a brief break between those 4 segments, but the second group took a short-answer quiz on the factual information they had just learned.

While students were watching these videos, Szpunar’s team interrupted them occasionally to ask if they were paying attention, or if their minds were wandering. In other words, were they orienting to the lecture, or were they disoriented?

And, after the video was over, they gathered two more kinds of data. First, they had students take a test on the lecture, to see who had absorbed more of the material. And second, they asked students to rate the experience in a number of ways. (We’ll get back to these ratings in just a moment…)

Good, Better, Worst

When looking over the data, Szpunar’s team first wanted to know what effect the short quizzes had on mind wandering; that is, did the students who took those quizzes focus on the lecture more or less than the students who simply took a break between the video segments?

Answer: the quizzes cut the mind-wandering in half. Students who took a break between video segments said they were mind-wandering 39% of the time, whereas students who took quizzes said so 19% of the time.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that if I know I’m about to be quizzed on something, I’m much likelier to attend to it.

Did those quizzes affect how much students ultimately learned? Szpunar’s data show that quizzed students did much (MUCH) better on the final test as well. Group 1 students—who took the break between video segments—scored, on average, 59% on that test; Group 2 students—who took short quizzes—scored an 84%.

Because they were taking quizzes, they were focusing more on the lecture; because they were focusing more, they got a B on the final test, not an F.

So, the good news is that, at least in certain contexts, short quizzes make it likelier that my students will focus on the content that we’re covering (and, perhaps, less likely that they’ll focus on that text message). And the better news is, they learn more when they do so.

But the classroom implication of this research could be alarming indeed: do we really want to be adding more testing pressure to the classroom? Do we—in this age obsessed with high stakes testing—want to have still more tests?

Anxiety is Underrated

I promised we’d get back to ratings. You remember that Szpunar had students rate their experience: in particular, he had them rate their anxiety levels. And the students in the Quiz Group were less anxious…not more anxious, LESS anxious…than those in the Break Group. (Their average anxiety rating was a 2, compared to a 3.75 for those who didn’t take quizzes.)

We associate tests and stress so readily that these results seem baffling. How can it be that quizzes reduced stress? Two answers stand out.

First: the quizzes helped the students monitor their own progress. Every fifteen minutes or so, they got feedback about their own understanding. If they knew the answer to a question, then they could be confident that they were in fact learning the material. And, if they didn’t know the answer, they could look to pick up that information in later segments of the lecture. Quizzes provided feedback that boosted confidence.

Second: the quizzes themselves were low stakes and formative. The quizzes weren’t graded, or fussed over, or factored into class averages. The students simply answered a few questions, and then kept going with the lecture. The tone surrounding the quizzes shaped the students’ experience of them.

Szpunar’s research, although surprising, aligns with other studies on the effect of frequent assessment. When Frank Leeming used daily tests instead of one term-end exam in his college Psychology class, his students were skeptical.³ (You’d be skeptical too if you had to prepare for a test each class.) By the end of the term, however, he found that they learned more than students had in previous years, that they preferred daily tests to final exams, and that they recommended he continue the test-a-day plan in future years.

Lab to Classroom

In my experience, frequent low-stakes quizzing creates a virtuous cycle. The feedback that quizzes provide—here’s what I do know, here’s what I don’t—gives students confidence in the work that they’re doing effectively; it also helps them focus specifically on the problems they identify. Their confidence and focus, in turn, motivate them to work more effectively. And they see the results of this redoubled effort when their quiz grades improve.

In other words, frequent, low-stakes quizzes help create the intrinsic motivation we typically expect to find only in that perfect world school—the one that isn’t hiring.

Two final caveats.

First, the tone of these formative quizzes really does matter. We can tell our students why we’re using them, and even get feedback from them on their usefulness. If they feel burdensome and alarming, then they might cause more harm than good.

Second, note that both of the studies quoted here focus on college students: students who have seen enough academic success to get into college, and whose self-regulatory skills have allowed them to do so. As is always true with this kind of research, teachers must translate the ideas into our own contexts: the school where we teach, the students and the material we teach, and our own personalities.

But for now: put away the Red Bull, shelve the Lemon Pledge, and start thinking of fun quizzes to elevate your students’ attention.

References & Further Reading

1. Lemov, Doug. (2015). Teach Like a Champion 2.0. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Book]
2. Szpunar, K.K., Khan, N.Y., and Schacter, D.L. (2013) “Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(16) 6313-6317. [Paper]
3. Leeming, Frank C. “The exam-a-day procedure improves performance in psychology classes.” Teaching of Psychology3 (2002): 210-212. [Paper]