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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.

“But I Study Much Better With My Music On”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 13, 2019

“But I Study Much Better With My Music On”

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You have, no doubt, heard of the “Mozart Effect.”

The short version is: “listening to Mozart makes you smarter!” (Translation: “Parents: run right out and by Mozart recordings for your children!”)

The longer version is: “in one study, children who listened to Mozart before they took a spatial reasoning test did better than those who didn’t. The effect lasted, at most, fifteen minutes.”

That initial study turned into several books, and several extravagant claims. In 1998, the governor of Georgia wanted the state budget to buy every child a classical music recording.

Plausible Extrapolation?

If listening to Mozart before a spatial reasoning test improves performance, then … just maybe … listening to music while I do my schoolwork will help me think better.

I know LOTS of teenagers who insist that this is true. Whenever I talk about brain research at schools, high-schoolers assure me quite passionately that they learn more with their music playing.

That’s a plausible claim. Let’s research it.

Perham and Currie tested this claim quite simply. They had adults take a reading comprehension test adapted from the SAT. Over headphones, they heard either…

…music they chose because they liked it (Frank Ocean, Katy Perry),

…music they didn’t like (thrash metal),

…music that didn’t have lyrics, or

…silence

What Perham and Currie find?

Quite clearly, these learners did their best thinking in silence.

More specifically, when they answered reading comprehension questions in silence, they averaged 61%. Listening to music without lyrics, they averaged a 55%. Music with lyrics — either likable-Katy Perry or disliked-thrash metal — led to a 38% average.

The drop from a 61% to a 38% should get everyone’s attention.

Here’s a straightforward summary for our students.

Would you like to increase your reading comprehension 20%?

TURN OFF THE MUSIC and read in silence.

Asking the Right (Narrow) Question

To sum up:

Perham and Currie’s study strongly suggests that listening to music with lyrics interferes with reading comprehension.

This study strongly suggests that listening to music during a task interferes with students’ creativity.

But, this study suggests that listening to upbeat music before a task increases creativity.

And, this study might — or might not — suggest that students who join band classes in high school improve in their ability to process language sounds … which might (or might not) have beneficial academic effects.

In other words: to understand the relationship between music and learning, we need to ask narrow, precise questions.

When students say “I study better with music because, Mozart Effect,” we can say:

a) we’ve got good research showing that’s not true,

and

b) we can’t extrapolate from very tentative Mozart findings to your homework.

One final point deserves emphasis.

I understand the desire to say: “students should study music because it helps them do this other thing better.”

I’d rather say: “everyone should make music, because it connects us to our humanity and to each other.”

Mozart or Frank Ocean or Thrash Metal. Bring it on…

Overcoming Potential Perils of Online Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 10, 2019

Overcoming Potential Perils of Online Learning

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Online learning offers many tempting — almost irresistable — possibilities. Almost anyone can study almost anything from almost anywhere.

What’s not to love?

A tough-minded response to that optimistic question might be:

“Yes, anyone can study anything, but will they learn it?”

More precisely: “will they learn it roughly as well as they do in person?”

If the answer to that question is “no,” then it doesn’t really matter that they undertook all that study.

Rachael Blasiman and her team wanted to know if common at-home distractions interfere with online learning.

So: can I learn online while…

…watching a nature documentary?

…texting a friend?

…folding laundry?

…playing a video game?

…watching The Princess Bride?

Helpful Study, Helpful Answers

To answer this important and practical question, Blasiman’s team first had students watch an online lecture undistracted. They took a test on that lecture, to see how much they typically learn online with undivided attention.

Team Blasiman then had students watch 2 more online lectures, each one with a distractor present.

Some students had a casual conversation while watching. Others played a simple video game. And, yes, others watched a fencing scene from Princess Bride.

Did these distractions influence their ability to learn?

On average, these distractions lowered test scores by 25%.

That is: undistracted students averaged an 87% on post-video quizzes. Distracted students averaged a 62%.

Conversation and The Princess Bride were most distracting (they lowered scores by ~30%). The nature video was least distracting — but still lowered scores by 15%.

In case you’re wondering: men and women were equally muddled by these distractions.

Teaching Implications

In this case, knowledge may well help us win the battle.

Blasiman & Co. sensibly recommend that teachers share this study with their students, to emphasize the importance of working in a distraction-free environment.

And, they encourage students to make concrete plans to create — and to work in — those environments.

(This post, on “implementation intentions,” offers highly effective ways to encourage students to do so.)

I also think it’s helpful to think about this study in reverse. The BAD news is that distractions clearly hinder learning.

The GOOD news: in a distraction-free environment, students can indeed start to learn a good deal of information.

(Researchers didn’t measure how much they remembered a week or a month later, so we don’t know for sure. But: we’ve got confidence they had some initial success in encoding information.)

In other words: online classes might not be a panacea. But, under the right conditions, they might indeed benefit students who would not otherwise have an opportunity to learn.

I’ve just learned that both of Dr. Blasiman’s co-authors on this study were undergraduates at the time they did the work. That’s quite unusual in research world, and very admirable! [6-11-19]

“How You Got to Be So Smart”: The Evolution of our Brains
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 08, 2019

“How You Got to Be So Smart”: The Evolution of our Brains

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When did learning first begin?

For me, individually, you might say it began when I first attended preschool. But, truthfully, learning began well before then.

I learned how to walk and speak, and to do (a very few of) the things my parents told me to do.

In the womb, I even learned to recognize sounds – like my mother’s voice.

But, let’s go much further back.

When did our species start learning? Or, before then, great apes? Or, even earlier, mammals?

Did dinosaurs learn?

How about those little one-celled organisms that developed when life began, over 3.5 billion years ago? Did they do anything we could meaningfully call “learning”?

Paul Howard-Jones answers that question with a resounding yes. And, most intriguingly, the biological mechanisms that allowed them to learn still help us to do so…all these billions of years later.

As Howard-Jones writes, learning “changes not just our mental world but also our biological form.” The basic biological and chemical mechanisms necessary for the earliest kinds of learning still help us learn today.

The Story Begins

Let’s start with E. coli. This single cellular organism has a bad rep, but we’ve got lots of very useful E. coli in our guts. And, they can – in a manner of speaking – learn.

In order to eat, E. coli have to move. And, they have two options for movement. If they’re successfully getting nutrition as they move, they want to keep going straight. If they’re not, they want to move randomly about – until they stumble into a better path to follow. Once they do, they start going straight again.

To accomplish this goal, E coli need to “remember” how much nutrition they were getting a few seconds ago, and compare that level to the current intake. Remembering, of course, is a kind of learning.

Howard-Jones helpfully describes the cellular mechanism that allows this memory comparison to happen. It’s a little complicated: think “methyl groups” and “receptors.” But, this clever and efficient system allows cells to remember, and thereby to eat and flourish. (Check out pages 24-5 for a full version of this story.)

Learning gets even cooler from there.

As evolution brought single-cellular organisms together into eukaryotes – from which sprang reptiles and amphibians and mammals and you – it produced ever-more-intricate systems for learning.

For instance, neurons evolved to ensure that multi-cellular organisms could coordinate their movements. (If each cell did its own thing, then we’d get no benefits from having all those cells.)

And, of course, neurons now form the biological basis of learning that happens in our brains.

Vertebrates and Primates

As evolution led to the development of more-and-more complex organisms, so too it produced increasingly complex kinds of learning: the ability to organize information by association, for example, or to recall something that happened yesterday.

The Evolution of the Learning Brain, devotes considerable time to primate development. In particular, it asks this question: since most evolutionary developments favor specialization, why did our species prove so successful? After all, our brains allow for great cognitive flexibility – the ability to be generalists, not specialists.

Howard-Jones answers this question by looking at the extraordinary climatic and geological upheaval at the time of our evolution.

Primates developed cognitive complexity – probably – in order to keep track of larger and larger social networks.

For instance, female vervet monkeys recognize their own offsprings’ cries. When they hear their children cry, unsurprisingly, they look at the child. When they hear someone else’s child cry, amazingly, they look at that child’s mother.

The story gets even more complicated when we look at chimpanzee dominance networks.

At the same time, later primates developed basic “theory of mind”: the ability to think about what others are thinking.

In one astonishing study, chimpanzees preferred to steal back food when researchers weren’t present – or when the container from which they stole the food was opaque. That is, chimps can think about what others can see, and behave accordingly.

All this complexity – social intelligence, theory of mind – proved especially important during the opening of the Great Rift in Africa: geological changes that led to rapidly changing climate and terrain. In this unusual set of circumstances, a species (like, say, Homo sapiens) with extra cognitive complexity was in a better position to manage upheavals.

As Howard-Jones writes:

The unique geology of the Rift Valley …is thought to have produced extreme climate variability with cycles lasting 400,000 or 800,000 years. […]

This inconsistent environment provided a novel genetic testing ground in which different hominin species were pursuing different approaches to survival, including generalizing vs. specializing. […]

Rather than evolving to fit one change, [Homo sapiens] evolved greater ability to respond to change itself.

Wow.

Classroom Implications

How should this understanding of evolution and learning shape our classroom practice?

Howard-Jones remains helpfully modest in answering this question. As he writes:

Evolution cannot tell us how to teach and learn, but it can help us frame and understand this research.

In his closing chapters, therefore, Howard-Jones encourages us to think about teaching with this perspective.

He suggests several insights about a) engagement, b) building of knowledge, and c) consolidation of learning that have evolutionary and neuro-biological grounding.

For instance: engagement. How can we help students pay attention?

Teachers have long known that novelty helps students focus. (Evolution helps explain why. Anything new could be a threat. Or, it could be food!)

Howard-Jones points out that shared attention is itself motivating:

Our strong motivation to share attention is a uniquely human characteristic that may have played a key role in our ancient cultural accumulation of knowledge, as it does today. When self-initiated, this capturing of shared attention also leads to reward-related brain activation.

In other words: schooling works because we invite our students to look with us, and to look with each other.

Another practical application: embodied cognition. Howard-Jones details several studies where a particular kind of movement helps students learn particular content.

He also explains why numbers and reading – more cultural practices than evolved cognitive capabilities – prove an enduring challenge to our students.

In Sum

Howard-Jones brings together many disciplines and a few billion years of history to tell this story.

Some readers might wish for more immediate, concrete teaching strategies. Some specialists, no doubt, disagree with his interpretation of the evidence.

I recommend this book so highly not because it tells us to do particular things, but because it helps us think in new and fresh ways about the work we have to do.

If we understand the evolutionary and neuro-biological sources of our difficulties and our enormous potential, we can think more realistically about avenues of success in schools.

In the words of Howard-Jones’s subtitle, we’ll understand how we got to be so smart. We might even understand how to get smarter still.

Why Do “Learning Styles” Theories Persist? [Updated 6-7-19]
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 05, 2019

Why Do “Learning Styles” Theories Persist? [Updated 6-7-19]

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Over on Twitter, Blake Harvard has started a lively discussion about the persistence of Learning Styles Theory.

Given that the theory has been so widely debunked, why does it — zombie-like — stagger on?

To answer this question, Harvard checked out the websites of the top ten schools of education in the US. He searched for “learning styles,” and explored the first page of the search results.

His findings? Of those first pages:

One school (Columbia Teachers College) included a link that debunked the myth.

Two schools had no relevant mentions.

The remaining seven (including the ed school I attended!) included links to a neutral or positive description of learning styles.

Frying Pan, Meet Fire

Since posting his results, Harvard has raised the stakes.

In this twitter post, he invited readers to check out their own ed schools’ pages to see what they found.

The grim responses will dismay you. I haven’t tabulated the numbers — the list keeps growing — but the “roughly 70%” level seems plausible.

Imagine, for instance, that medical schools were still teaching miasma theory to explain cholera. Or that law schools were teaching that it’s unconstitutional for women to vote in federal elections.

In effect, that’s happening in today’s schools of education.

An Alternative, Additional Explanation

Perhaps this myth persists because our professional schools teach it. (Or, fail to root it out.)

Perhaps it persists because — you might want to sit down for this one — it’s mostly false but partly true.

For example: we do learn material better if we have many different ways to access a memory.

If I say: “I’m thinking of an actor from Australia,” you might or might not know who I’m talking about.

But:

If I say: “I’m thinking about an actress. She’s from Australia. She was in that movie about Virginia Woolf. And she was married to Tom Cruise,” you’re MUCH likelier to figure out that I’m talking about Nicole Kidman.

Instead of calling up 2 neural networks (profession, people from Australia), I’ve called up 5 (profession, gender, people from Australia, Virginia Woolf movies, people married to Tom Cruise.)

So, too, if you believe learning styles theory, you’re likely to teach everything multiple ways (visually, auditorily, kinesthetically). That is, you’re giving students three distinct cues to access a particular memory.

This strategy WILL help students learn better, but NOT because some are visual learners and others are auditory learners.

If this explanation is true, then we have to go beyond “the theory is wrong.” We need to say “this part of the theory works for this reason, and that part works for that reason. But, the theory itself isn’t correct.”

That message requires more nuance, but might be more effective in persuading teachers — and schools of education — to update their understandings of teaching and learning.

A note on credit. I believe that this “mostly false but partly true” hypothesis comes from The Learning Scientists’ blog. Alas, I haven’t been able to locate the precise source. Credit for this idea shouldn’t go to me, but … at the moment of writing this post … I can’t determine who really gets it. I’ll update the post once I find out.

[Updated 6-7-19] Yana Weinstein-Jones has helpfully pointed me to the Learning Scientists source. It is this blog post, by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel. I recommend it highly.

Handshakes at the Door: Hype, or Helpful?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 03, 2019

Handshakes at the Door: Hype, or Helpful?

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You’ve seen the adorable videos. Teachers have special handshakes they use to greet students as they enter the classroom. For instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0jgcyfC2r8

I can’t help but smile when I see a video like that. What could set a better mood to start an academic day?

Of course, I’d smile even more if we had research to show such a strategy might be effective.

Well, let me shake your hand this morning with good news: we do have such research.

Beyond Cute Videos

All teachers recognize the problem. In the hallway between classes, students revel in their freedom. We want them to settle down and get working.

How can we best make that vital tonal transition happen?

A large research team investigated a proactive strategy they call “positive greetings at the door.” The strategy focuses on two steps:

First: greeting each student positively at the door: “Good morning, Dan — great hat!”

Second: offering “precorretive” reminders: “We’re starting with our flashcards, so be sure to take them out right away.”

The researchers trained five teachers (in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) in these strategies.

Happily, the researchers did a great job to ensure the validity of their research. For instance, the control group was not merely five other teachers going about “business as usual.” Instead, this control group was also trained by school administrators in other classroom management strategies.

In other words: all ten teachers got training. Five practiced “positive greetings”; five practiced “attention control.” Overall, more than 200 students were in these classrooms.

The Envelope Please

What effect did all these greetings and all these proactive reminders have?

Researchers video-taped classes before and after these trainings.

For the control group, little changed. Time on task was in the mid-to-high 50%, while disruptive behaviors took place about 15% of the time.

For the positive greeting group, researchers saw big changes.

Time on task went from the high-50% to more than 80% of the time.

Disruptive behaviors fell from ~15% to less than 5% of the time.

All that from positive greetings.

Will This Strategy Work for Each of Us?

Researchers chose classrooms that were both racially and economically diverse.

At the same time, they asked principals to nominate classes that had seen higher-than-average levels of disruption.

That is: if your class is already well behaved, you might not see much of a change. (Of course, if your class is already well behaved, you don’t really need much of a change.)

Another important point: the video above shows a teacher demonstrating verve and drama. If that level of energy doesn’t match your style, don’t worry. You DO NOT need a big performance to make the strategy work.

You can keep it simple and quiet.

Stand at the door. Greet students by name. Perhaps shake their hands. Give them proactive reminders of how to start well.

The volume level doesn’t matter. Your daily personal reconnection with each student does the work.

Constructivism: In The Brain, In The Classroom
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 01, 2019

Constructivism: In The Brain, In The Classroom

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In this helpfully provocative post, Mike Hobbiss argues that we often misapply the theory of constructivism.

For Hobbiss, the theory makes perfect sense when describing learning. However, he  worries that constructivism is unlikely to be helpful as a theory of pedagogy.

As he argues, drawing on extensive neuroscientific research, we can help students construct their own understandings by creating multiple, partial, and overlapping mental schema.

That kind of “constructivism as learning” might not be best fostered by “constructivism as teaching.”

Hobbiss offers this potentially controversial argument in measured and thoughtful tones. Even if you disagree with him — perhaps especially if you disagree with him — his ideas merit a careful read.

But Does It Work In The Classroom? (A Hint: YES!)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 30, 2019

But Does It Work In The Classroom? (A Hint: YES!)

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Teachers who follow brain research have probably heard of “interleaving.”

This teaching strategy encourages us to mix up different kinds of practice problems, rather than sort them tidily into distinct bunches.

Imagine, for instance, that your math curriculum includes these four units:

A: graphing lines

B: calculating the area of circles

C: simplifying expressions

D: solving inequalities

I might be tempted to have have my students review graphing one night. The next night, they would focus on circles. The next, they would simplify expressions. And so forth. (Researchers call this “blocking.”)

Or, I could have them practice all four skills each night. (“Interleaving.”)

So, does blocking or interleaving help students learn better?

One Useful (but Incomplete) Answer

We have “known” the answer to this question for a long time.

The answer is: interleaving. By a lot.

When students interleave while practicing, they learn information more durably.

However, the verb “know” is in quotation marks above because we “know” that answer in a very particular setting.

The best-known research of interleaving took place in a college psychology lab.

Students learned formulas to calculate the volumes of irregular solids. Those who interleaved practice did better on a quiz two weeks later than those who blocked.

To be clear: this is a great study. (I always show it when I talk about interleaving with teachers. The graphs get gasps — really!)

But: does interleaving work for K-12 students? Does it work for anything other than irregular solids?

And, crucially: does it work beyond 2 weeks? We want our students to remember for months — even years. Two weeks is nice, but…we’re actually curious about much longer periods of time.

A Second (Much More Complete) Answer

Doug Rohrer’s team have just published a study looking at real-life interleaving in real-life classrooms.

They worked in five different schools, with fifteen different teachers, and almost 800 7th graders.

And, the test covered quite different topics — the four listed at the top of this post: graphing lines, calculating areas, simplifying expressions, solving inequalities.

And, get this: the study lasted for several MONTHS. From the first interleaved practice set to the final test was something like 145 days.

The results: the students who interleaved remembered more than those who blocked. By a lot.

(If you’re statsy, you’ll be impressed to know that the Cohen’s d averaged 0.68. For an intervention that costs basically nothing, that’s HUGE.)

In addition to these data, Rohrer &  Co. gathered information from an anonymous teacher survey.

They got lots of good news. For instance:

14 teachers agreed (or strongly agreed) that interleaving raises scores.

13 thought it helped low-achieving students. (15 thought it helped high-achieving students.)

11 said they could use interleaving without changing the way they usually teach.

12 said other teachers can do it with little or no instruction.

(Check out page 9 for further survey results.)

Why Does Interleaving Work?

Rohrer’s team offers two answers to this question.

First, interleaved practice automatically produces two other benefits: spacing and retrieval practice.

Second, think for a minute about blocking. If students do practice problems that all require the same strategy (aka, blocking), then they have to execute that strategy. But, as Rohrer points out:

“Interleaved practice requires students to choose a strategy and not merely execute a strategy.”

This additional level of desirable difficulty requires students to practice selecting strategies: an essential part of using learning in the real world.

In Sum:

Rohrer’s study concludes with a few caveats.

Interleaving probably takes (a little) more time than blocking.

It probably has less of an effect over shorter periods of time. That is: you’ll see bigger results on chapter tests and year-end assignments than on weekly quizzes.

Crucially: students probably need a little blocked practice early on to get hold of a topic or concept. We shouldn’t start interleaving while initially explaining an idea.

But, the headlines focus on great news.

Interleaving works with real students in real classrooms. It’s easy to add to our teaching habits. It costs almost nothing. And: it genuinely helps students learn.

 

 

 

More Contradictions in the Adolescent Sleep/Technology Debate
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 27, 2019

More Contradictions in the Adolescent Sleep/Technology Debate

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A month ago, I described an impressively large study (17,000+ adolescents) looking at the effects of technology on adolescent sleep and well being.

As I summed it up in the title of that post: “Surprise! Screen time (even before bed) doesn’t harm adolescents.”

Today, I’m linking to another large study (6600+ adolescents) showing … just the opposite.

The main findings for this study was that late-night technology use — especially once the room lights were off — predicted a lower “health-related quality of life” for adolescents.

At this point, I’m frankly flummoxed. I just don’t know how to sort out the contradictory research findings in this field.

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.

Best Font Name Ever: “Sans Forgetica”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 25, 2019

Best Font Name Ever: “Sans Forgetica”

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For well over a decade, teachers have heard that we should strive for the right level of “desirable difficulty.”

In brief: easy learning doesn’t stick. If we want to ensure our students learn material in lasting ways, we need to be sure they wrestle with the material just the right amount.

(Of course, getting to “just the right amount” requires lots of teacherly thought, experience, and wisdom.)

Many years ago, a Princeton undergraduate had an intriguing idea. Maybe we could increase desirable difficulty by using a difficult-to-read font.

His theory went like this. If readers have to concentrate just a little bit more to make sense of what they’re reading, that extra measure of concentration will be a “desirable difficulty.” The result just might be more learning.

He tested his theory in a psych lab. And then — being a thorough sort — he tested it for ten weeks in a nearby high school. The result: students learned more when they read material in a hard-to-read (aka, “disfluent”) font.

Amazing.

Today’s News

Researchers in Australia wanted to take this idea to the next level. They wanted to design an optimally difficult font.

They tried out several different strategies, including:

leaving out parts of letters,

having letters slant the wrong way,

even having parts of letters misalign with each other.

By testing different combinations of these potentially desirable difficulties, they came up with a winner — which they have deliciously dubbed “sans forgetica.”

In two different experiments, students remembered word pairs better when they studied them in sans forgetica, rather than a typically “fluent” font, or in other excessively “disfluent” fonts.

If you’re keen to play with typefaces, you can download that font at the link above.

You can check out their video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO2Eo6D5tNQ

Reasons to be Cautious

Of course, we should look before we leap.

First: later studies into disfluent fonts have led to decidedly mixed results. According to this meta-analysis, the results average out to zero.

My own hypothesis, as I’ve written here, is that disfluent fonts help only in particular circumstances.

If the cognitive challenges of a problem are already high, then a disfluent font might make them too hard. If the cognitive challenge is quite low, then a disfluent font might raise them to just the right level.

(As far as I know, no one has tested that hypothesis.)

Second: the Australian researchers haven’t published their findings. So, this research hasn’t yet been vetted in the way that research usually gets vetted. (The link above — like all news about sans forgetica — goes to a university press release.)

Third: common sense suggests that disfluent fonts include an important flaw: the more students read a particular font, the more fluent that font will become.

In other words: sans forgetica might start out optimally disfluent. However, over time, students will get used to the font. It will be increasingly fluent the more they use it.

If you want to try disfluent fonts, therefore, I suggest you use them sparingly. You should, I imagine, use them for particularly important information and assignments.

But, to ensure they remain disfluent, you should not have them be a regular part of your students’ reading experience.

To be clear, we have no research guidance at this granular level. As must be true with phrases like “desirable difficulty,” teachers must translate the helpful concept to the specifics of our daily classroom lives.

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