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Growing Mindsets in Argentina?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July-10-2019

Growing Mindsets in Argentina?

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Mindset theory has faced increasing skepticism in recent years.

For four decades — literally!–Carol Dweck and other researchers ran thoughtful studies with thousands of students. Over and over, they found that students who think about about their work in particular ways (shorthand, “growth mindset”) do better than those who don’t (“fixed mindset”).

Like other areas of psychology (think “power poses”), Mindset Theory has been caught up in the “replication crisis.”

In brief: if Mindset theory is true, then a mindset intervention should help no matter who does the intervening. It should work when Dweck’s team does it with her students, and when I do so with mine.

If it works only for Dweck, well, that doesn’t really help the rest of us.

And, several researchers have found that various strategies didn’t replicate.

A much publicized meta-analysis, published last summer, suggests that Mindset interventions had very small effects. (I myself think this meta-analysis has been over-interpreted; you can see my analysis here.)

Today’s News

Researcher and NYU professor Alejandro Ganimian has published research about a large-scale mindset intervention in Argentina.

Ganimian had 12th graders at 100 (!) schools read a passage arguing that “persisting through difficult challenges can develop the brain.”

The 12th graders then wrote “a letter to a classmate of their choice on the three main lessons from the reading and how they might help him/her.”

To keep the growth mindset message fresh, those letters were posted in the classroom.

He compared these students to 12th graders at 102 other schools that had not used this intervention.

The results? Nada. Nothin’. Bupkis.

Specifically:

This intervention had “no effect on students’ propensity to find challenging tasks less intimidating.”

It didn’t increase the likelihood that they would pay attention in class.

By some rough/indirect measures, it didn’t have an effect on the participants’ academic success.

As Ganimian sums up his results:

In nearly all outcomes, I can rule out even small effects. …

This study suggests that the benefits of growth mindset interventions may be more challenging to replicate and scale in developing countries than anticipated.

What Should Teachers Do?

First: two clarifying points. a) Ganimian’s research hasn’t been peer reviewed and published in a journal. It is currently a working paper, hosted on his website.

And b) I myself am not a neutral source in this debate. I’ve written a book about mindset research, and so I read Ganimian’s work through that lens.

Second: I think mindset strategies are likeliest to have an effect when used all together as a consistent, unified approach to student motivation.

That is: I’m not at all surprised that a “one-shot” intervention doesn’t have big results. (Some research has found success with “one-shot” interventions; I’ve always been skeptical.)

So, if you want to use mindset research in your classrooms, don’t do just one thing, once. A motivational poster really won’t accomplish much of anything.

Instead, understand the interconnecting strategies that promote a growth-mindset climate, and use them consistently and subtly. Heck, I can even recommend a book that will show you the way.

Third: Here’s what I wrote last October:

We should not, of course, ask mindset to solve all our problems. Nor should we ask retrieval practice to solve all problems. Or short bursts of in-class exercise.

No one change fixes everything.

Instead, we should see Mindset Theory as one useful tool that can help many of our students.

Obsessed with Working Memory, Part II
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July-07-2019

Obsessed with Working Memory, Part II

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In the first post of the series, we looked at the definition of working memory. Simply put, it allows brains to SHREK.

That is:

Select, Hold, REorganize, Kombine

This post considers three core ideas that we need to remember about WM.

1: Working Memory is CRUCIAL to Learning

“No academic information gets into long-term memory except through working memory.”

Simply put, students have to use WM to learn almost anything.

When students try to balance chemistry equations, they use WM.

When they sound out new words: WM.

When they compare Inca and Maya religions: WM.

When they transpose a song into a new key: yup, WM.

It is, in fact, hard to think of much that students do with low WM demands. For instance, when they sing “Happy Birthday,” that’s not much of a working memory task. After all, “Happy Birthday” is in almost everyone’s long-term memory.

Of course, if you’ve forgotten the name of the person whose birthday it is, you might feel your WM scramble when you sing: “Happy Birthday dear Hmm-Hmm, Happy Birthday to you.”

2: Working Memory is LIMITED

In the first post in this series, I asked you to alphabetize five days of the week. You could probably do that quite easily.

If, however, I asked you to alphabetize 10 months of the year, you would — almost certainly — crash before you got there. (Go ahead, try it. See what I mean?)

We have enough WM for five, but not enough for ten.

People experience WM overload frequently. For instance:

driving to an unfamiliar location requires lots of WM.

Exploring a new program on your computer.

Following a multi-step recipe.

Solving the problem in this video.

Let’s pause for a moment and put #1 and #2 together. Working memory is both CRUCIAL and LIMITED. That’s a very bad combination. (If you have a wry sense of humor, you might say it sounds like your school’s budget.)

So, let’s ask a vital question: how can we increase this vital cognitive resource?

3a: Good News about INCREASING Working Memory

We don’t have to do anything special. Working memory gets bigger as students get older.

In this way, WM is a  bit like height. As long as we’re treating students (and their bodies) well, they get taller. As long as we’re treating students (and their brains) well, working memory gets bigger.

The details here get technical — after all, we have several different ways we can measure WM. But, you can be confident that your 4th graders have more WM than they did when they were in 2nd grade. And, the 6th graders have more WM still.

This growth levels off in our early 20s. Alas, WM probably begins to decline (very slowly) soon after. But, don’t worry. All the extra information you have in your long-term memory makes up for the very modest decrements in your WM.

3B: Bad News about INCREASING Working Memory

We can’t.

Better said: we can’t artificially increase WM, beyond the natural increase that comes with growth and schooling.

Better said: we can’t YET do that.

LOTS of thoughtful people are working very hard on this problem, and have had some intriguing wins.

But, as of this post, we don’t have broad data suggesting that we can train up students’ WM with specially designed computer games, or exercises, or special diet, or whatever.

To be clear: this is a controversial field, and very accomplished people have devoted years of work to it. I hope — at some point — that this breakthrough does happen.

1+2+3a+3b = ?

We know

#1: that working memory is CRUCIAL in classrooms.

#2: that it’s LIMITED.

#3a & #3b: that we CAN’T artificially make it bigger.

Put those three conclusions together, and you arrive at this conclusion:

Teachers have to work effectively WITHIN THE WM CAPACITY THAT OUR STUDENTS HAVE.

In fact, we should be EXPERTS at working effectively within their WM capacity.

Every time we go beyond their limited capacity, they experience WM overload.

And, when students experience WM overload, they stop learning. This is why I’m OBSESSED with WM.

How do we do that? How can we work effectively WITHIN their working memory capacity?

The next several posts will cover this essential topic.

Beyond the Mouse: Pointing in Online Lectures
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July-05-2019

Beyond the Mouse: Pointing in Online Lectures

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You know, of course, that the right kind of movement can help students learn. The nascent field of “embodied cognition” works to explore the strategies that work most effectively.

Here’s a collection of resources.

And, here’s a recent blog post about kindergarteners moving to learn the number line.

You also know that online learners easily get distracted, often because they multitask. (I say “they” because you and I would never do such things.)

This recent post shows that even folding laundry — a harmless-seeming activity — reduces online learning.

What happens when we put these two research pools together?

Specifically: can movement reduce distraction, and increase learning, for online learners?

Benefits of Online Pointing?

Several researchers — including the estimable Richard Mayer — wanted to answer that question.

Specifically, they wanted to know: do pointing gestures made by the teacher help online students learn?

They had students watch an online lecture (about “neural transmission,” naturally).

For the first group of students, the teacher pointed at specific places on relevant diagrams.

For the second group, the teacher pointed generally toward the diagrams (but not at specific pants of them).

For the third, the teacher moved his hands about, without pointing specifically.

For the fourth, the teacher didn’t move his hands.

Do different pointing strategies help or hurt?

Benefits Indeed

Sure enough, pointing matters.

Students in the first group spent more time looking at the relevant parts of the diagrams.

They did better on a test that day.

And — most important — they did better than the other groups on a test a week later.

Now: a week isn’t exactly learning. We want our students to remember facts and concepts for months. (Preferably, forever.)

But, the fact that the memories had lasted a week suggests it’s MUCH likelier they’ll last longer still.

Practical Implications

If your classroom life includes online teaching, or teaching with videos, try to include specific pointing gestures to focus students on relevant information. At least with this student population, such gestures really helped.

By the way, this study doesn’t answer an interesting and important question: “does student movement as they watch online lectures help or hurt their learning?”

We know from the study cited above that irrelevant movement (like folding laundry) doesn’t help. But: should students mirror your gestures as they watch videos? Should you give them particular gestures to emulate?

We don’t know yet…but I hope future research helps us find an answer.

Obsessed With Working Memory: Part I
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
July-02-2019

Obsessed With Working Memory: Part I

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When I attended my first Learning and the Brain conference, I had never even heard of working memory.

Now, I obsess over working memory. And, I think all classroom teachers should join me.

Heck, I think everyone who cares about learning, curriculum, teacher training, and education should think about working memory. All. The. Time.

In this series of posts, I’ll start by defining working memory (WM) today. And in succeeding posts, I’ll talk about using that knowledge most helpfully.

Trust me: the more we think about WM, the more our students learn.

Working Memory: An Example

As an example of WM in action, I’m going to give you a list of 5 words. Please put those words in alphabetical order. IN YOUR HEAD. (That’s right: don’t write anything down…)

Okay, here’s the list:

Think of the five workdays of the week. (Hint: if you live in a Western society, the first one is ‘Monday.’)

Now, go ahead and put those five words into alphabetical order. Don’t peek. I’ll wait…

 

Probably you came up with this list:

Friday, Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday

I do this exercise with teachers often. For most everyone, that’s fairly simple to do. I’m guessing you got it right quite easily.

Working Memory: A Definition

To succeed at that task, you undertook four mental processes.

First, you selected relevant information. Specifically, you selected the instructions that you read. And, you looked into your long-term memory to select the workdays of the week.

Next, you held that information. If you had let go of the instructions, or of the days of the week, you couldn’t have completed the task.

Third, you reorganized the days of the week according to the instructions. You started with a chronological list (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…), and converted it into an alphabetical lest (Friday, Monday, Thursday…).

In many WM tasks (but not this one), you might not only reorganize, but also combine information. If, for instance, you added up 7+12+4+18+6 in your head, you selected, held, and combined those numbers into a new number.

So:

Working memory is a limited, short-term memory capacity that selects, holds, reorganizes, and combines information from multiple sources.

In a later post, I’ll talk about some finer points in the definition of WM. For the time being, focus on those four verbs: select, hold, reorganize, combine.

Working Memory: An Acronym

Because WM is so important, it would be great if there were a handy acronym. Happily, there is!

Select

Hold

REorganize

Kombine

What does that get you? SHREK! (I know: I misspelled ‘combine.’ But: I lived in Prague for a year, so you can forgive me for that useful alteration.)

Working Memory in the Classroom

Now, ask yourself: which of these classroom tasks requires working memory?

That is: in which of these cases do your students have to select, hold, reorganize, and/or combine information?

Solving a word problem.

Comparing W.E.B. du Bois and Booker T. Washington.

Transposing a song into a new key.

Applying a new phonics rule to various combinations of letters.

Choreographing a dance routine.

The correct answer is: ALL OF THEM.

In fact, practically everything we do in school classrooms requires working memory. Often, it requires A LOT of working memory.

To Sum Up

We use WM to select, hold, reorganize, and combine (SHREK) information.

Students use WM constantly in classrooms, for practically everything they do.

Simply put: no academic information gets into long-term memory except through working memory. It’s that important.

Up next: we’ll highlight key facts about WM. Then we’ll talk about using that knowledge in your teaching.

If you’d like some homework, here it is:

Ask yourself: what work that students do in your own classroom requires working memory? Try to be specific: what are they selecting? What are they holding? And so forth…

Also ask yourself: what work does not require WM?

Does Smartphone Addiction Boost Anxiety and Depression?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-29-2019

Does Smartphone Addiction Boost Anxiety and Depression?

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We frequently hear about the dangers of “smartphone addiction.” If you search those words in Google, you’ll find this juicy quotation in the second link:

The brain on “smartphone” is the same as the brain on cocaine: we get an instant high every time our screen lights up with a new notification.

“An instant high.” Like cocaine? Hmmmm.

You might even have heard that we’ve got research about the perils of such addictions. But: can we rely on it?

A recent study asked a simple question, and got an alarming answer.

How Do We Know What We Know About Phone Usage?

Studies about smartphones typically ask participants to rate their cell phone usage — number of minutes, number of texts, and so forth. They then correlate those data with some other harmful condition: perhaps depression.

Researchers in Britain wanted to know: how accurately do people rate their cellphone usage?

When they looked at Apple’s “Screen Time” application, they found that participants simply don’t do a good job of reporting their own usage.

In other words: depression might correlate with people’s reported screen time. But it doesn’t necessarily correlate with (and certainly doesn’t result from) their actual screen time.

In the modest language of research:

We conclude that existing self-report instruments are unlikely to be sensitive enough to accurately predict basic technology use related behaviors. As a result, conclusions regarding the psychological impact of technology are unreliable when relying solely on these measures to quantify typical usage.

So much for that “instant high.” Like cocaine.

What Should Teachers Do

As I’ve written before, I think research into technology use is often too muddled and contradictory to give us good guidance right now.

Here’s what I wrote back in May:

For the time being, to preserve sanity, I’d keep these main points in mind:

First: don’t panic. The media LOVE to hype stories about this and that terrible result of technology. Most research I see doesn’t bear that out.

Second: don’t focus on averages. Focuses on the child, or the children, in front of you.

Is your teen not getting enough sleep? Try fixing that problem by limiting screen time. If she is getting enough sleep, no need to worry!

Is your student body managing their iPhones well? If yes, it’s all good! If no, then you can develop a policy to make things better.

Until we get clearer and more consistent research findings, I think we should respond — calmly — to the children right in front of us.

I still think that advice holds. If your child’s attachment to the cellphone seems unhealthy, then do something about it.

But if not, we shouldn’t let scary headlines drive us to extremes.

Debunking Education Myths (Without Accidentally Reinforcing Them…)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-27-2019

Debunking Education Myths (Without Accidentally Reinforcing Them…)

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Sadly, lots of learning myths clutter the field of education.

Right-brain/left-brain thinking? Myth.

The “learning pyramid”? Myth.

And, of course, “learning styles”? Epic myth.

How can we best combat all these myths?

As teachers and school leaders, we see an obvious strategy. If we want people to stop thinking the wrong thing, we should teach them the right thing.

More information, more skill in processing that information, will save the day.

Or, Not…

Alas, we’ve got lots of research showing that this obvious strategy doesn’t work.

In fact, it produces “backfire effects.”

The more we talk about about all the facts that rebut the myth, the more familiar the myth seems. Our attempts to undo a myth turn out to reinforce it — simply because people hear so much about it.

Another problem: the more facts we use to rebut myths, the less mental processing space people have to consider them. As is so often the case: when trying to rebut myths, less information is more powerful.

A Handy Resource

Happily, John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky have produced “The Debunking Handbook” to help us end myths without reinforcing them.

The focus on highly practical strategies:

Using best alternative explanations

Using graphics

Limiting contradictory information

With this handbook as a guide, you can help your colleagues get past the quaint falsehoods that interfere with learning.

And as a result, you’ll clear up time for the teaching strategies that truly help students flourish.

 

Powerful Evidence: Self-Control Training Works — and Changes Brains
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-24-2019

Powerful Evidence: Self-Control Training Works — and Changes Brains

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Whenever we put a lot of effort into a project, we really want to believe that it helped.

For that reason, we might somehow overlook the signs that our efforts fell short. Or, we might exaggerate skimpy data to suggest that we succeeded.

To overcome these all-too-human tendencies, we need well designed research to gather and analyze data. The only way to demonstrate success is to look hard for failure.

Taking It Up a Notch

To look especially hard for failure, we might look at two different kinds of evidence.

For example: does self-control training work?

To answer this question, let’s start by having 11-year-olds go through a self-control training program. At the same time, we’ll identify a control group that doesn’t get the training.

We can see if the training worked in two different ways.

First: several years later, have those children (now 25 years old!) provide information about their lives. Have they completed high school? College? Do they have a job? Have they been arrested? Do they frequently get in fights?

We can also have their parents fill out similar surveys. Oh, and we’ll have the control group fill out surveys as well.

Are the children who got self-control training likelier to have more education and a job? Less likely to harm themselves and others? If yes, those differences suggests that they used those self-control strategies well.

Second: we can look at their brains.

In particular, we have decades of research showing the importance of a particular brain region for self control.

Roughly speaking, we want self-control regions of the brain — the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — to communicate well with the emotional drivers of human behavior. Better PFC communication means better self-control.

That brain region is in the middle (medial) part of the underside (ventral) of the PFC. So, we call it the ventromedial prefrontal cortex: vm-PFC. (Important note: neuroscience is fantastically complicated. This summary is a very streamlined version of a wildly intricate web of brain connectivity.)

So, after we survey the students who went through self-control training, we can have them hang out in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) gizmo.

Our hypothesis: trained students should have better vm-PFC connectivity between the PFC and brain regions that process emotions.

Today’s Research

A team of 14 researchers have in fact done all that.

An organization in rural Georgia called “Strong African American Families” wanted to improve the prospects of children living in poverty. They developed a program that included training for parents, and for their 11-year-old children.

Parents learned about “emotional support, [and] high levels of monitoring and control.”

The children “focused on forming goals for the future and making plans to attain them.” They also learned about strategies to use when encountering racism.

14 years later (!!), the researchers gathered both kinds of data described above. That is: the children (now 25) filled out surveys. And the had an fMRI scan to measure vm-PFC connectivity.

Sure enough, both measures suggested that the training made a real difference.

That is: the children who had the training did better on measures of adult self-control. And, they had higher levels of vm-PFC connectivity.

Reasonable Conclusions

The program run by Strong African American Families was tailored to the circumstances of its participants. We should not, in other words, conclude that their program will work for everyone.

But: we have quite persuasive evidence that their program had the effects it intended — poor children grew up as more responsible adults than un-trained peers.

And: we have a good neurobiological explanation for the different behavior — their altered life trajectory included developmental differences in the vm-PFC.

All these findings give us hope that well designed self-control programs can indeed have the effect that we want them to. That’s not just wishful thinking.

Putting The Canary on a Better Book Shelf
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-22-2019

Putting The Canary on a Better Book Shelf

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Take a moment to evaluate this statement:

The canary is an hour long.

You didn’t have to think very hard to decide that this statement is false.

Why? Because “canary” and “an hour” belong in different mental categories. One is a physical object; the other is a unit of time.

Unless you’re Emily Dickinson, they can’t be the same thing.

Over at 3-Star Learning Experiences, Mirjam Neelen and Paul A. Kirschner want us to think about our students as they learn new concepts.

In particular, students often have ideas in the wrong categories. When that happens, these “prior misconceptions” make correct understanding extremely difficult.

To help them learn new concepts, therefore, we don’t simply need to ply them with more information. Instead, we need to help them rethink prior misconceptions.

In other words, we need to help them reshelve old ideas in new mental categories.

For Example…

In my classroom, students struggle with the idea that The Scarlet Letter is a romance.

Why? Because they already have a very clear concept of the word “romance.” Their pre-existing definition doesn’t include … well … anything that happens in Puritan Boston.

Could anything be less romantic than, say, Hester and Dimmesdale meeting in the woods with Pearl?

My teacherly mission: help students build a new concept of “romance.” Once they think about romance as Hawthorne did, they’ll have a new category of knowledge. And, that category quite comfortably fits all the oddities that make Scarlet Letter so strange and wonderful.

For further thoughts on this process, check out Neelen and Kirschner’s post. Me: I’m looking forward to Part II!

Decorating the Classroom: How Much Is Too Much?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-19-2019

Decorating the Classroom: How Much Is Too Much?

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Classrooms should do more than simply house our students. We want them to welcome students. To set an encouraging and academic tone. To reflect the values our schools champion.

That’s a lot of work for one classroom to do.

As a result, our rooms sometimes end up looking like the nearby image: a busy tumult of color and stuff.

Does this level of decoration have the desired result? Does it make students feel welcome, valued, and academic? Realistically, might it also distract them?

Two researchers in Portugal wanted to find out.

Today’s Research

Several people have studied the effect of classroom decoration on learning. (In perhaps the best-know study, Fisher, Godwin and Seltman showed that kindergarteners learned less in a highly decorated classroom.)

Rodrigues and Pandeirada wanted to know exactly which mental functions were disrupted by all that decoration. Their study design couldn’t be simpler.

These researchers created two study environments.

The first looks basically like a library carrel with a dull white finish.

The second added lots of lively, upbeat photos to that carrel.

The result isn’t as garish as the photo above, but it’s certainly quite busy. (You can see photographs of these two environments on page 9 if you click the link above.)

Rodrigues and Pandeirada then had 8-12 year-olds try tests of visual attention and memory.

For instance: students had to tap blocks in a certain order. (Like the game Simon from when I was a kid.) Or, they had to recreate a complex drawing.

Crucially, these 8-12 year-olds did these tasks in both environments. Researchers wanted to know: did the visual environment make a difference in their performance?

It certainly did.  On all four tests — both visual attention and memory — students did worse.

In short: when the visual environment is too busy, thinking gets harder. (By the way, visual distraction is not a “desirable difficulty.” It results in less learning.)

Two Sensible Questions

When I discuss this kind of research with teachers, they often have two very reasonable questions.

Question #1: how much is “too much”? More specifically, is my classroom “too much”?

Here’s my suggestion. Invite a non-teacher friend into your classroom. Don’t explain why. Notice their reaction.

If you get comments on the decoration — even polite comments — then it’s probably over-decorated.

“What a wonderfully colorful room!” sounds like a compliment. But, if your students see a “wonderfully colorful room” every day, they might be more distracted than energized.

Question #2: Won’t students get used to the busy decoration? My classroom might look over-decorated now, but once you’ve been here for a while, it will feel like home.

This question has not, as far as I know, been studied directly. But, the short answer is “probably not.”

The Fisher et al. study cited above lasted two weeks. Even with that much time to “get used to the decoration,” students still did worse in the highly-decorated classroom.

More broadly,  Barrett et al. looked at data for 150+ classrooms in 27 schools. They arrived at several conclusions. The pertinent headline here is: moderate levels of decoration (“complexity”) resulted in the most learning.

In other words: students might get used to visual complexity. But: the research in the field isn’t (as far as I know) giving us reason to think so.

Summer Thoughts

Here’s the key take-away from Rodrigues and Pandeirada’s research: we should take some time this summer to think realistically about our classroom’s decoration.

We want our spaces to be welcoming and informative. And, we want them to promote — not distract from — learning.

Research can point us in the right direction. We teachers will figure out how best to apply that research to our classrooms, for our students.

A final note: I’ve chatted by email with the study’s authors. They are, appropriately, hesitant to extrapolate too much from their library-carrel to real classrooms.

They show, persuasively, that visual distractions can interfere with attention and memory. But: they didn’t measure what happens in a classroom with other students, and teachers, and so forth.

I think the conclusions above are reasonable applications of these research findings; but, they are my own, and not part of the study itself.

Design Thinking: How Does It Work In The Classroom?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June-16-2019

Design Thinking: How Does It Work In The Classroom?

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Design thinking invites students to approach learning with an engineer’s perspective.

Students begin with a problem, and think their way towards several possible solutions. Each design thinking framework includes its own particulars, but all include variations of these steps:

deliberately explore the problem,

brainstorm several possible solutions,

create those solutions,

repeat these steps as necessary (with healthy doses of metacognition).

Here, for instance, is a 1-pager from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education that summarizes key design-thinking ideas and protocols.

To be confident that this approach has merit, we should ask ourselves two hard questions:

First: do students who learn design thinking apply it in new circumstances? If not, then the method might help students solve a specific problem — but not help them think differently about problems in general.

Second: when students apply design thinking to novel problems, do they learn more than others who don’t? If not, then this new way of thinking doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

So: how might we answer these tough questions?

Researchers at Stanford’s School of Education wanted to give it a try…

The Research Plan

A large research team worked with 6th graders in a California public school. They had students practice two distinct design thinking systems.

One group practiced a system that urged them to seek out corrective feedback. That is: they got in the habit of looking for constructive criticism.

A second group practiced a different design-thinking system that emphasized creating several different prototype models before deciding on which one to pursue.

Helpfully, the study design insured that students learned and used these 2 systems in different classes.

Math class (2 weeks)

Social Studies (1 week)

Science (1 week)

A week later, students took a test gave them the chance to apply those skills.

However — and this is the key point — the test didn’t resemble any of the previous design thinking work that they had done. For this reason, the test let researchers answer this question:

“Do students who practice design thinking for a full month spontaneously apply those strategies when facing new, not-obviously-related problems?”

And, given how well they did on this test, it let them answer a second question:

“Do these design thinking strategies help students solve problems more effectively?”

That is: this study design let researchers answer the two hard questions we asked ourselves at the beginning of this post.

Two Answers

This study, I suspect, will be something of a Rorschach test for people who look at its conclusions.

Skeptics — and, by the way, I myself am often in the “skeptic” category — may focus on the most straightforward finding: “there was no stand-alone effect of treatment.”

In other words: the training didn’t have a statistically measurable effect.

Optimists, however, might well have a different take.

To explore their results in greater detail, Chin & Co. analyzed data for the students based on their prior academic accomplishment.

For students in the high-achieving group, and the middle-achieving group, the design thinking training had no statistically measurable effect.

However, for those in the low-achieving group, it certainly did.

An optimist’s summary might go like this.

“Mid- and high-achieving students are ALREADY doing what design thinking teaches. That is, those student ALREADY seek out constructive feedback, and try different models before they decide on one.

The design-thinking training helped low-achieving students behave more like their mid- and high-achieving peers.

That’s great!”

If, in fact, a design thinking curriculum can help some students develop the good learning habits that other students already have, that is in fact great news.

The best way to use design thinking will clearly depend on your own school’s culture and demographics. This study gives us some hope that — used the right way with the right students — it can help students learn.

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