We know that our students spend too much time sitting down. They’re antsy and unhappy, and — increasingly — overweight. Wouldn’t it be great if we could add even quick exercise breaks into the class day?
Of course, we have lots of reasons to be skeptical about this possibility.
Even if we get them to move more in class, they might just be more sedentary later in the day.
If they burn more calories at school, they might eat more later on.
And: let’s be practical. If we get our students up and moving around, it might take FOREVER to get them settled back down again.
Which is to say: if they move more, they might learn less.
Quick Exercise Breaks: The Research
A research team has been exploring each of these questions, and they’ve got LOTS of good news.
In brief, almost all of these fears are groundless.
We were right to be skeptical, right to ask all those questions. But the answers turn out to be: “not to worry!”
Phrases like “inquiry learning” or “project-based learning” inspire both enthusiasm and skepticism.
In part, the difference of opinion results from a very basic problem: it’s hard to define either term precisely. What, exactly, are the essential elements of inquiry learning?
If we can’t even answer that question, it will be jolly hard for researchers to know if the method “really works.”
Questions without Answers; Hands-On Learning
A study published earlier this year focuses on two key elements of inquiry learning.
First: teachers should let students investigate a scientific phenomenon without telling them what they’ll find. It’s called inquiry learning because teachers withhold the correct answers.
Second: teachers should encourage hands-on learning. As much as possible, students should do the work themselves, not watch the teacher do it.
If you approach education with a constructivist lens, you’re likely to favor both approaches. Students who make sense of ideas on their own — with their own thoughts and their own hands, without too much teacher guidance — are likeliest to think deeply about concepts.
If instead you start with cognitive load theory, you’re likely to worry about these practices. Students have relatively little working memory with which to process new ideas. The absence of teacher guidance, and the need to manipulate physical objects might well overwhelm precious cognitive resources.
What They Did; What They Found
Researchers taught 4th and 5th graders about converting potential energy to kinetic energy. They used balls rolling down ramps of different heights to illustrate these concepts.
In one case, a teacher told the students what to expect: the higher the ramp, the farther the ball will roll. The students then watched the teacher do the experiment. (That is: “direct instruction.”)
In another, the teacher told students what to expect, but let them roll balls down the ramps.
In the third case, the teacher didn’t tell students what to expect, and let them do the experiment. (That is: “inquiry learning.”)
So: which combination of inquiry techniques yielded the most learning?
Direct instruction did. By a fair peg. (Cohen’s d was 0.59: not huge, but certainly respectable.)
In fact, in this paradigm, “inquiry learning” was the least effective at helping students take these concepts on board.
(To be complete: direct instruction helped students a) remember what they learned and b) reason with that new knowledge. On a third measure–applying this new knowledge to real world situations–both approaches worked equally well.)
At least in this one research paradigm, working memory limitations made constructivist pedagogy too difficult.
On The Other Hand…
When I first planned this post, I was excited to contrast Zhang’s study with a dramatic report from Washington State.
According to this report — here’s a one-page summary — 9th- and 10th-grade students who followed a constructivist inquiry curriculum (including hands-on learning) learned four extra months of science over two years.
That’s a simply staggering result.
I was hoping to argue that we should expect contradictory studies, and learn from the tensions between them.
In particular, the difference between a 1-shot study and a 2-year-long study should really get our attention.
Alas, I can’t make that argument here.
Compared to What?
In the ramp-and-ball study, Zhang’s three student groups learned under three equally plausible conditions. That is: she compared something to something else.
The Washington study, however, compares something to nothing.
That is: teachers at some schools got a shiny new curriculum and lots of dedicated professional development. Teachers at comparison schools got bupkis.
So, it’s entirely possible that the inquiry curriculum caused the extra learning.
It’s also possible that simply doing something new and exciting enlivened the teachers at the inquiry schools.
They might have been equally enlivened by some other kind of curriculum. Who knows: they might have found a well-designed direct-instruction curriculum inspiring.
Unless your control group is doing something, you can’t conclude that your intervention created the change. “Business as usual” — that’s what the researchers really called the control group! — doesn’t count as “doing something.”
An Invitation
Do you have a well-designed inquiry learning study that you love? Please send it to me: [email protected]. I’d love to write about it here…
I should note: Gonzalez cites the well-known Mueller & Oppenheimer study showing that handwritten notes help learning more than laptop notes do. Long-time readers know that I don’t think this study supports that conclusion.
In fact: I think it suggests that the opposite is true. My argument is here.
Despite our disagreement on this one point, there’s so much to savor in this summary that I recommend it highly.
Do you have to print out emails before you read them, because you just hate screens?
Or, do you take your Kindle everywhere, because old-fashioned books are just too cumbersome?
The “paper vs. screens” debate has raged for quite a while now.
I occasionally visit schools that have “done away with books” altogether. For reasons of cost and convenience, administrators tell me, e-readers are the only way to go.
Paper vs. Screens: Today’s news
Although I have written about tentative answers to this question, we would love to inform the debate with substantive research. As of today, we can.
Lalo Salmeron and colleagues have completed a meta-analysis comparing the two formats. Their research included several dozen studies, and included more than 170,000 participants.
The results?
In almost every case, students understand better and learn more when they read from paper than when they read from screens.
Some highlights:
Surprisingly, we aren’t getting better at reading from screens. In fact, more recent screen technologies produce greater gaps than previously. As Salmeron writes, “the screen inferiority effect has increased in the past 18 years, and … there were no differences in media effects between age groups.”
Especially when students faced time pressure, the length of the text didn’t matter. That is: even short passages that don’t require scrolling are harder to understand on screen than on paper.
Another surprise: screens made reading information harder. But, they didn’t make reading narrative harder. The teaching implication: e-readers work better for novels than for textbooks.
Paper vs. Screens: Today’s reality
Salmeron’s team has a practical bent as well:
“Given the unavoidable inclusion of digital devices in our contemporary educational systems, more work must be done to train pupils … with reading tasks in digital media.”
On standardized tests, for instance, our students will almost certainly have to read on screens at important moments in their academic lives.
We do need more research on particular strategies. In the meanwhile, this article recommends Lauterman & Ackerman’s article on “Overcoming Screen Inferiority” for places to start.
In the meanwhile, we can help our students understand by having them read from good old-fashioned paper. And no: despite “cost and convenience,” e-readers are not the best way to learn.
Oscar Wilde famously said that he could resist everything but temptation.
This may be the only way that I’m a lot like Wilde. You, too, probably resemble this great Irish wit.
Misunderstanding Self-Control
Self-control seems like a straightforward concept.
In front of me is a slice of chocolate cake. Or pizza. Or the very latest tech gizmo.
I really want it. Like, a lot.
But I steel myself and, like Odysseus resisting the Sirens, I deny myself this treat. That’s self-control.
Much of the research into self-control resembles this scenario. Roy Baumeister, one of the best-known self-control researchers, often asked study participants to resist chocolate chip cookies.
If you can resist freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies…well…that’s self-control.
Clearly, if we want to helps our students with self-control, we should help them resist such temptations.
The Self-Control Paradox
Or, maybe not.
Maybe you, and me, and Oscar Wilde are all really bad at resisting temptation. Maybe that’s not how self-control works at all.
People who successfully resist temptation don’t stare down the chocolate chip cookies and boldly exert their self-control.
Instead, they use their self-control to avoid temptation in the first place.
That’s right: effective self-control isn’t exactly self-control. Instead, people who score highest on measures of self-control use it to develop virtuous habits and avoid tempting situations.
The reason I’m good at, say, staying on my diet is NOT that I resist cupcakes.
Instead, I’m good at dieting because a) I have gotten in the habit of making a salad, and b) my lunchtime walk never approaches the pizza joint.
I never have to resist temptation, because I use self-control to avoid temptation in the first place.
Odysseus, Reconsidered
Come to think of it: Odysseus didn’t use his self-control to resist the Sirens. He was, after all, tied to the mast at the time he sailed past them.
Instead, he used his self-control to prepare for temptation. Because he knew he couldn’t resist it, he made a plan to ensure the temptation wouldn’t lead him astray.
If we want our students to improve their executive functioning, if we want them to get better at self-control, then we should not focus on resisting temptation.
Instead, we should focus on avoiding temptation.
Resistance might be futile. But: the self-control paradox suggests we can bypass resistance altogether.
Students who have both exceptional talents and learning difficulties have been understudied and underserved in the educational system. Fortunately, Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties helps shed light on this unique and diverse population. This volume contains contributions from over 30 talented scholars and practioners and was edited by Scott Barry Kaufman, who brings a special sensitivity to the topic because of his own experiences as a twice exceptional (2E) student. Kaufman, whose books we have reviewed previously (see here and here) envisions an educational system in which every student receives individualized, challenging, and supportive instruction. Until that dream is realized, it is especially important to provide that kind of individualization to 2E students or students who “demonstrate exceptional levels of capacity, competence, commitment, or creativity in one or more domains coupled with one or more learning difficulties” (P. 7). This book, filled with examples of students with varying 2E profiles, provides guidance about best practices for identifying and supporting 2E students, spotlights specific 2E sub-populations, and concludes with examples of schools that successfully support 2E students.
Although there is research that recognized 2E students dating back to the 1920s, federal education laws have been slow to do so. In the 1980s there was a shift in gifted education towards recognizing a greater variety of gifts and trying to develop students’ talents rather than assuming that students are either gifted or not. It was not until 2004 that federal disability laws first acknowledged that students with disabilities can also be gifted. Today, parents still face resistance in getting services for 2E children. For example, while 7% of the general student population participates in gifted education, only 1% of students who receive disability services are involved in gifted education.
Contributing to this problem may be difficulties related to defining and assessing both “disability” and “giftedness.’ Additionally, the interacting effects of students’ disabilities and giftedness can contribute to the students’ unique profiles not being recognized. That is one’s exceptionality can hide his disabilities (making adults characterize the student as lazy), one’s disabilities can hide her exceptionalities (making adults underestimate the student’s potential), or one’s disabilities and exceptionalities can each mask the other (making adults miss great potential and great need for support). What 2E students need is to have their unique intersections of exceptionality carefully described and monitored across time and context. Several chapters in this collection provide guidelines for comprehensively assessing students’ learning profiles.
2E students need their strengths, talents, and interests developed. Unfortunately, too much attention is given to compensating for these student’s weaknesses rather than developing their strengths. We should strive to help them reach their fullest potential. We should support students in being assertive self-advocates. When they can advocate for themselves they typically set higher expectations for themselves than others would set for them. Beyond self-advocacy, tending to and developing the social-emotional needs and abilities of 2E students is important for helping them have the resilience to persist through the difficulties they will inevitably face in school. Another key principle for supporting 2E students is creating effective collaboration among family members, teachers, friends, coaches, psychologists, and medical professionals. This book offers several strategies for strengthening the relationship between families and schools.
Several chapters in Twice Exceptional profile certain categories of 2E populations and offer strategies for supporting these populations with a strengths-based approach. For example, attention deficit hyperactive disorder could be reframed as an attention divergent hyperactive gift. Similar ideas are applied to students with autism spectrum disorders, sensory processing issues, and dyslexia or other reading disorders.
One of the most valuable contributions of this book is the focus in two chapters, on an especially underserved 2E sub-population—that of 2E students who are also racial or ethnic minorities. For several problematic reasons, students of color are underrepresented in gifted education. Having other exceptionalities compounds this problem further. To serve 2E students of color it is important to remain flexible, set high expectations, offer role models, and be creative about how to draw out these students’ strengths.
Twice Exceptional concludes by describing real model schools that are designed to support 2E students. These schools celebrate strengths, differentiate curriculum, incorporate social-emotional learning into academic learning, provide a safe space filled with positive peer and teacher relationship, and remain flexible, patient, and optimistic. Above all, they develop autonomy in their students by encouraging the 2E students to assume primary responsibility for shaping their learning.
Kaufman’s Twice Exceptionaloffers a much need consolidation of information about 2E students to raise awareness about this population and help researchers, parents, and educators better serve 2E students.
Kaufman, S. B. (Ed.). (2018). Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties. Oxford University Press.
Teachers worry a lot about stress. For that reason, this blog regularly scans research updates for useful news about stress and stress reduction techniques.
One of our favorite studies offers a surprisingly simple approach to stress reduction: writing about it.
We like this study so much, we’ve posted about it twice: here and here.
So here’s an important question: do we actually know that the strategy works?
Put in a different way: how do psychologists and neuroscientists know what they claim to know?
Replication, Replication Crisis
To answer this question, we can describe research methodology. The ritual of science publication, in fact, requires almost gruesomely soporific descriptions of EXACTLY what the scientists did.
(What computer model did they use? What software version did they use? What size was the font? How far away from the computer did the participants sit? You get the idea…)
Here’s another answer: to be sure we know what we know, we double check. When one group of researchers arrives at a conclusion — especially an exciting or novel conclusion — other researchers see if they get the same result.
To be fancy, we can say they try to “replicate” the original result. As we get more replications, we feel more confident that we know.
Here’s the problem: psychology is facing a replication crisis.
A Case in Point: Writing About Stress
In recent years, more and more psychology studies just don’t replicate. We thought we knew, but now we’re not so sure.
For example: that study we love? The one about “reducing stress by writing about it?” A new replication crisis project tried to replicate it, and got no results.
In this replication, the benefits of writing about stress were…nada.
In fact, this group of researchers tried to replicate all 21 studies published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Depending on how you count, 13 of them replicated. That means that eight of them did not replicate.
YIKES.
What’s a Teacher to Do?
This news might seem like a disaster. If so much research doesn’t replicate, we might be tempted to stop relying on science in our teaching.
Although understandable, this dis-spirited conclusion goes too far. Instead, the replication crisis should remind us of two essential points:
First: teachers should adopt teaching ideas that have lots of research support.
If you see one study suggesting that (say) chewing gum helps students convert fractions to decimals, DO NOT adopt that technique. At a minimum, you should look to see if other researchers have replicated that finding.
In fact, you’d like several researchers to have explored this idea — preferably in different grades and schools, with different research paradigms.
(You should also weigh the other pluses and minuses. All that gum chewing might be really distracting.)
Second: we should be ready to change our minds. If a wave of research points one direction, we might adopt a particular strategy.
However, if better research over longer periods of time discounts those findings, then we have to be willing to try something else.
The best-known example of this problem: “learning styles.” Early research suggested that they might exist, but the vast weight of evidence shows clearly that they don’t.
In brief: we should adopt evidence-based theories only if we’re willing to let go of them as further evidence dictates.
Final Thoughts
But what about that stress-reduction technique? Do we have to give it up, now that it didn’t replicate?
That’s a surprisingly complicated question.
True enough: this attempt at replication failed.
However, in the original study, researchers Ramirez and Beilock tried their technique twice — just to be sure they had it right.
In fact, they tried it twice in the psychology lab and twice more in a local high school.
Like so many who study psychology, we at LatB are terribly sad to learn that Walter Mischel has died.
The New York Times obituary describes his importance — both in revolutionizing the field of psychology, and in popular understanding of self-control.
Personality in Context
For psychologists, Mischel emphasized the importance of context.
Personality theory suggests that “I’m this kind of person, not that kind of person.” Mischel’s research emphasizes that “I’m this kind of person in these circumstances, and that kind of person in other circumstances.” Context always matters.
This insight can’t be over-emphasized among teachers who want to teach with research in mind.
We shouldn’t just hear about a particular psychology study and adopt its methodology. We should, instead, check to see if the method that worked in that context might also work in this context. Which is to say: our classroom.
After all: most psychology research happens with college students. If you don’t teach college students, you need to adapt that research to your context.
Marshmallows in Context
In popular culture, Mischel is best known for the “marshmallow test” (which, by the way, included other treats beyond marshmallows”).
You’ve seen videos of adorable 5-year-olds desperately trying to resist yummy goodness. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L-n8Z7G0ic
The often-oversimplified test includes many nuances. For instance, the 5-year-olds respond differently based on how much they trust you.
But the headline remains important: self-control matters.
Those of us who got to see Walter Mischel speak at the November 2015 conference will not soon forget his clarity, thoughtfulness, and warmth.
He even helped Kelly Williams organize the very first Learning and the Brain conference.)
Dr. Fischer meant that even though we’ve been studying the brain for over 100 years, we still haven’t figured out very much about this infinitely complex part of our daily lives.
Years later, by the time I finished graduate school, he had started to admit we might be in Brain 1st Grade.
Exciting brain scanning techniques — especially fMRI — have shown us extraordinary and unexpected truths about our brains’ development and function.
Brain 2nd Grade?
Two recent discoveries make me wonder: are we in second grade yet?
First, a just-published study identifies a new brain cell — one that might, in fact, be unique to humans.
We don’t know much about “rosehip neurons”; for instance, we don’t know exactly what they do. They’re a kind of inhibitory neuron, but what they inhibit and why, we don’t yet know.
More than 100 years after Santiago Ramon y Cajal produced his amazing drawings of various brain cell types, we still haven’t identified them all.
Second, another just-published study suggests a new way for the brain to communicate with the body’s immune system.
The details here are quite complex (unless you’re already up to speed on aseptic meningitis and neutrophils).
But the surprise remains. Even now, we’re still figuring out basics: like, how does the brain talk with the immune system?
New Brain Cell: Classroom Implications
Of course, this news doesn’t yet tell us how to teach differently.
This new brain cell does, however, provide us an important reminder. Practically everything we learn about the brain in the 20-teens and 2020s will be tentative, initial, and incomplete. We should be excited with each development…and always ready to have old beliefs overturned by new findings.
