L&B Blog – Page 55 – Education & Teacher Conferences

Alcohol and Learning: Does Drinking Harm Memory?

Andrew Watson

March 10, 2018

Alcohol and Learning: Does Drinking Harm Memory?

Back in October, I published one of the blog’s most popular articles: a summary of a study showing that moderate drinking benefits memory.

In brief, that study showed that drinking before learning muddled memories. However, moderate alcohol after learning produced a modest but clear benefit.

You can understand why this research proved such a hit among teachers.

Bottoms up!

More About Alcohol and Learning

Back in December, Olga Khazan published an article in the Atlantic summarizing several studies about the effects of alcohol on memory. Alas, her take on the literature sees more bad news than good.

Most tellingly, she focuses on a study in Britain that tracks participants’ health over time. The short version of the findings: more alcohol meant a smaller hippocampus. And, generally speaking, a healthy hippocampus helps us form declarative memories.

This study also looked at participants’ ability to generate words. (It’s a test called “lexical fluency.”) Here again, even moderate alcohol intake meant that — over time — people had a harder time with this particular test.

Alcohol and Learning: Not All Bad News

Any complex study produces complex results, and this one is no exception.

First, although “lexical fluency” declined over time as a result of alcohol, there was no correlation between alcohol consumption and cognitive ability as measured by multiple tests at the time of the study.

In other words: that one particular mental ability declined, but that didn’t mean all of them did.

Also: the decline in lexical fluency was significant for men, but not women. (I suspect that 51% of you are happy to read that fact.)

Putting It All Together, with a Cozy Glass of Wine

We would, of course, love to have a clear understanding of alcohol’s relationship to learning. And, to brain health. And, to health overall.

Unfortunately, there are too many variables, and too many ways to measure them, for a simple answer.

I myself take medical advice from my doctor, not the interwebs. And, although I don’t drink wine because it might help me learn more, I do enjoy a nice Napa Cab on a rainy Boston evening.

STOP THE PRESSES: New Evidence Against Adult Neurogenesis

Andrew Watson

March 08, 2018

STOP THE PRESSES: New Evidence Against Adult Neurogenesis

For many decades, neuroscientists believed that adult brains don’t generate new neurons. Once childhood is over, the neurons you have are all the neurons you’ll get.

Then, in the 1960s, we started seeing evidence that adult brains DO INDEED create more neurons.That evidence got even stronger in the 1980s — believe it or not by studying songbirds.

When you go to Learning and the Brain conferences, you doubtless hear about adult neurogenesis. It is, we thought until this morning, one of the reasons you can learn new things.

Today’s Headline: No Adult Neurogenesis?

This article has been cropping up all over my newsfeed. It’s headline: “Birth of New Neurons in the Human Hippocampus Ends in Childhood.”

The article is easy to read, and I encourage you to give it a look. It offers a helpful historical context, and digs into the implications of these findings.

The findings are so new that I haven’t yet seen much response to them. I’ll post updates as scholars start to grapple with this research.

In the meanwhile, you can take confidence from this research that skepticism never flags. Even so “well-established” a finding as adult neurogenesis can be overturned when we get better data.

As Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, one of the researchers, say:

“I always try to work against my assumptions in lab,” he said. “We’ve been working on adult neurogenesis so long, it is hard to see that it may not happen in humans, but we follow where the data leads us.”

Omega 3 Fish Oil Doesn’t Help, but Research Does

Andrew Watson

March 06, 2018

Omega 3 Fish Oil Doesn’t Help, but Research Does

In 2012, researchers in Britain found that Omega 3 fish oil benefited students who struggled in schools. In fact, it helped students both concentrate better and learn more.

That was exciting news, because we can provide those dietary supplements relatively easily. It sounded like an easy way to fix to a real problem.

However, other studies didn’t confirm this result. For that reason, the original lab decided to try a replication study. In other words: they repeated what they had originally done to see if they got the same results.

Omega 3 Fish Oil: The Bad News

Nope, they didn’t help.

You can review the study here. Most impressive — and most discouraging: chart after chart and graph after graph showing no meaningful difference between the students who got Omega 3 supplements and those who didn’t.

(By the way: nobody knew who got the supplements until after the study. It was, as they say, “blind.”)

In the muted language of research, the authors conclude:

In summary, this study did not replicate the original findings of significant, positive effects of omega-3 DHA on either learning or behavior. No systematic adverse effects from the supplementation were observed. As such the study does not provide supporting evidence for the benefits of this safe nutritional intervention.

Alas, this easy solution simply doesn’t pan out.

The Good News

The system worked.

When researchers come across a positive finding, they should both spread the news and double check their work.

That is, they should let us know that omega 3 fish oil might be beneficial, and run the study again to be sure.

Of course, replicating a study is expensive and time consuming; it’s easy to decide that other research priorities are more important.

In this case, however, the researchers did what they ought to have done. As a result, we know more than we did before. And, we’re not wasting time and money stuffing our children with needless dietary supplements.

We should all tip our hats to this research team for doing the right thing. I don’t doubt they’re disappointed, but they’ve shown themselves to be a real model for research probity.

(For another example of researchers sharing conflicting results, see this story from last October.)

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PS: After I finished writing this post, I came across another article about fish. It might not help with working memory, but it just might help prevent MS.

Despite the Skeptics, a Champion of Direct Instruction

Andrew Watson

March 03, 2018

Despite the Skeptics, a Champion of Direct Instruction

In the debates between “progressive” and “traditional” educational theories, few arguments rage hotter than the battle between project based learning and direct instruction.

PBL’s proponents take a constructivist perspective. They argue that people learn by building their own meaning from discrete units of information.

In this view, teachers can’t simply download conclusions into students’ brains. We can’t, that is, just tell students the right answer.

Instead, we should let them wrestle with complexities and come to their own enduring understanding of the material they’re learning.

An Alternative Perspective: The Benefits of Direct Instruction

In a recent meta-analysis, Jean Stockard’s team argues that direct instruction clearly works.

Looking at 300+ studies from over 50 years, they conclude that DI benefits students in every grade, in a variety of racial and ethnic groups, with a variety of learning differences, from every socio-economic background.

Of course, this research conclusion challenges some often-repeated assurances that direct instruction simply can’t help students learn.

(The recent meta-analysis is, unfortunately, behind a paywall. You can, however, see some impressive graphs in an earlier white paper by Stockard.)

Another Alternative Perspective: Reinterpreting “Constructivism”

Interestingly, Stockard doesn’t disagree with a constructivist understanding of learning. Instead, she sees direct instruction as a kind of constructivism.

“DI shares with constuctivism the important basic understanding that students interpret and make sense of information with which they are presented. The difference lies in the nature of the information given to students, with DI theorists stressing the importance of very carefully choosing and structuring examples so they are as clear and unambiguous as possible.”

(This quotation comes from a brief pre-publication excerpt of the meta-analysis, which you can find here.)

In other words: in Stockard’s view, the difference between PBL and DI isn’t that one is constructivist and the other isn’t.

Instead, these theories disagree about the kind of information that allows students to learn most effectively.

Simply put: PBL theorists think that relatively more, relatively unstructured information helps students in their mental building projects. DI theorists think that relatively less, relatively tightly structured information benefits students.

Stockard makes her own views quite plain:

“It is clear that students make sense of and interpret the information that they are given–but that their learning is enhanced only when the information presented is explicit, logically organized, and clearly sequenced. To do anything less shirks the responsibility of effective instruction.”

You might mentally add a “mic drop” at the end of that passage.

Other Sources

Of course, lots of people write on this topic.

John Hattie’s meta-meta-analyses have shown DI to be quite effective. This Hattie website, for example, shows an effect size of 0.60. (For Problem based learning, it’s 0.12; for Inquiry based teaching, it’s 0.35.)

If you like a feisty blogger on this topic, Greg Ashman consistently champions direct instruction.

And, I’ve written about the difficulties of measuring PBL’s success here.

Surfing Brain Waves to Better Concentration

Andrew Watson

February 27, 2018

Surfing Brain Waves to Better Concentration

What’s the difference between a gamma and a delta wave? Why do we care?

This video from BrainFacts.org offers lively explanations to help you understand brain waves.

You’ll also learn more about the technology we use to measure them — and why we care in the first place.

Does Pollution Really Harm Children’s Working Memory?

Andrew Watson

February 24, 2018

Does Pollution Really Harm Children’s Working Memory?

This glum question has a glum answer: yes, pollution harms working memory.

Researchers in Barcelona focused on children walking to school. Working with over 1200 students, 7-10 years old, they reached a grim conclusion. Children whose walk was more polluted experienced slower development of working memory.

(The same research project had already concluded that pollution in school slows working memory development as well.)

Why teachers care

If you’ve been to a Learning & the Brain conference, you know that working memory is essential for all classroom learning. It allows students to combine pieces of information into new, meaningful ideas.

The less working memory students have, the slower they are to read, acquire math skills, compare historical figures, and learn new oboe melodies.

In other words, damaging working memory is one of the worst things we can do in schools.

What teachers should do

Of course, pollution is too big a problem for teachers and schools to solve right away. We’ll need lots of social effort–and lots of political will–to make meaningful changes.

In the short term, the study’s authors warn against one seeming solution. We might reason that walking to school exposes children to pollution, so we should encourage them to ride in cars or buses. However, the health benefits of walking are obvious and important; we should encourage–not discourage–physical activity.

In the short term, the best we can do is encourage students to walk less polluted routes: away from major highways, closer to parks and forests.

Of course, such a solution isn’t available to all students. We’ll need bigger fixes over the long term.

For the time being, knowledge of the danger is the power that we have.

Investigating Mindfulness: How Do We Know Its Benefits?

Andrew Watson

February 22, 2018

Investigating Mindfulness: How Do We Know Its Benefits?

Does mindfulness truly benefit people?

On the one hand, the obvious answer is “yes.” We’ve all heard that meditation reduces stress, improve concentration, deepens sleep, and whitens teeth. (I think I made that last one up.)

Some of you reading this post may have embraced mindfulness, and perhaps tell your neighbors and friends about its healing powers.

This sort of evidence–coming from personal experience–can be powerfully persuasive.

Other Ways of Knowing

On the other hand, if we want to know about mindfulness in a scientific way, we’d like some research. Please.

Research on topics like these typically follows a predictable pattern. In the early days of Mindset theory, for example, Dweck worked with a few dozen people for an hour or so.

When these studies showed promise, she then followed larger groups of people for longer periods of time. In one study, for example, she and Lisa Blackwell followed hundreds of 7th graders for over 4 years.

One recent analysis I saw looked at Mindset data for 125,000 grade-school students. Yup: 125,000.

This trajectory–from small test studies to large and rigorous trials–makes sense. We can’t fund huge investigations of every idea that comes along, so we need to test for the good ideas before we examine them in depth.

But, once an idea–like, say, mindfulness–shows promise in early trials, we’d like to see larger and more rigorous trials as the years go by.

So: is that happening? Are we seeing better studies into mindfulness?

Investigating Mindfulness

Sadly, not so much. That’s the conclusion of a recent study, which compared early mindfulness research to more recent examples.

We would like to see studies with larger sample sizes, active control conditions, longer-term evaluation of results and so forth. This study finds some positive trends, but overall isn’t impressed with the research progress over the last 13 years.

Of course, their conclusion doesn’t mean that mindfulness doesn’t help.

It does mean, however, that our evidence isn’t as strong as it might seem to be, because we haven’t yet “taken it to the next level.”

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By the way: you’ll have the chance to learn more about mindfulness, and about the ways that researchers investigate it, at the upcoming Learning and the Brain conference in New York.

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child development, 78(1), 246-263.

Goldberg, S. B., Tucker, R. P., Greene, P. A., Simpson, T. L., Kearney, D. J., & Davidson, R. J. (2017). Is mindfulness research methodology improving over time? A systematic review. PloS one, 12(10), e0187298.

Sleeplessness Harms Women’s Thinking More Than Men’s?

Andrew Watson

February 19, 2018

Sleeplessness Harms Women’s Thinking More Than Men’s?

You can understand why this study lit up my twitter feed recently. It makes a remarkable claim: women — but not men — experience working memory declines after a sleepless night.

Why We Care

We have at least two powerful reasons to care about this study.

First, it makes strong claims about gender differences. According to lead author Rangtell (and 8 colleagues), women’s performance on a working memory task gets worse after a sleepless night.

On the other hand, men’s working memory performance remains just as good as when they had a cozy 8-hour sleep.

(I’ve written about gender differences before. You may recall that I’m often skeptical of specific claims, but do think that there are some important differences at the population level.)

So, this study plays an important role in the ongoing debate.

Second, Rangtell’s study focuses on working memory. And, working memory is really important in school.

What is working memory?

When a student works on a word problem in math, she first has to select the key information from the sentences. Then she holds that information in mind. Third, she reorganizes all that information into the correct formula. And finally she combines pieces of that formula appropriately: for example, she combines “7x+8x” into “15x.”

Whenever students select, hold, reorganize, and combine information, they’re using working memory.

And, our students do that all the time. They use working memory to conjugate a new Spanish verb. And, when they apply new terminology (“protagonist”) to a specific book (“Sethe is the protagonist of Beloved.”) And, when they balance chemical equations.

Basically, schools are shrines we build to honor successful working memory functioning.

If there truly is a gender difference in working memory function, that’s a really big deal.

Sleeplessness Harms Women More Than Men?

This study is, conceptually, very straigtforward.

Ask some people to do a working memory task after a full night’s sleep. Then, ask them to do the same task after they’ve been up all night. Is there a difference in their working memory performance?

Rangtell and her colleagues say: for men, “no”; for women, “yes.”

However, this study includes a very serious problem. The task that they use to measure working memory DOESN’T MEASURE WORKING MEMORY.

(You read that right.)

The researchers asked these people to listen to a list of numbers, and then type those numbers into the computer in the same order.

That’s simply not a test of working memory. After all, the participants didn’t have to reorganize or combine anything.

Instead, that’s a test of short-term memory.

Now, short-term memory is related to working memory. But, “related to” isn’t good enough.

Imagine, for instance, I claimed that sleeplessness makes people shorter. The way I determine your height is by measuring the length of your arm.

Of course: arm length and height are related. But, they’re not the same thing. Tall people can have short-ish arms. I can’t measure one thing and then make a claim about a related but different thing.

So too, Rangtell can’t measure short-term memory and then make claims about working memory. She didn’t measure working memory.

Does sleeplessness harm women’s working memory more than men’s? We just don’t know.

(By the way: I’ve reached out to the lead researcher to inquire about the working memory/short-term memory discrepancy. I’ll update this post if I hear back.)

Neuroplasticity and Myelin: Fascinating Brain Mysteries

Andrew Watson

February 17, 2018

Neuroplasticity and Myelin: Fascinating Brain Mysteries

If you attend the more hard-core neuroscience talks at Learning and the Brain conferences, you’re familiar with words like “myelin,” “neuroplasticity,” and perhaps even “oligodendrocytes.”

How do all these terms fit together? Here’s the scoop…

Step 1: Neuroplasticity

For much of the 20th century, neuroscientists believed that brains developed during early childhood. However, relatively quickly, they arrived at their final, unchanging form.

With newer technologies, however, we now know that brains keep changing throughout our lives. We’ve even got a word for a brain’s ability to change: “neuroplasticity.” (“neuro” = brain; “plastic” = change.)

Because this finding contradicts so many decades of neuroscientific belief, researchers have been REALLY excited about it. When you hear them at a talk, you can see their eyes grow wide with wonder.

Brains change throughout our lives.

Step 2: Myelin

Like babies, neurons are born naked.

Of course, neurons carry electrical signals, and exposed wires don’t do that very effectively. Over time, therefore, your brain needs to insulate those naked neurons.

It does so with “myelin sheathing”; a phrase that neuroscientists use so they don’t have to say “little white hot-dog buns made of fat.” But: that’s what myelin sheathing is — fat.

Myelination benefits all sorts of human activities. When neurons myelinate, they carry their signals up to 100 times faster, and so perform the same job considerably more efficiently.

For example: babies learn to walk when the motor neurons responsible for that part of the body myelinate. (If you’re particularly interesting in myelination, check out this video.)

How does the brain myelinate those neurons? Highly specialized brain cells — with the poetic name “oligodendrocytes” — work like tiny bricklayers to create this essential coating.

Step 3: Neuroplasticity and Myelin

In a recent article over at Searching for the Mind, Dr. Jon Lieff explores the complexities of these essential processes. In particular, as he describes it, he sees myelination as essential for “whole brain neuroplasticity.”

It’s an article for those of you who really want to know more about highly complex brain mechanics. If you don’t have time for graduate school work in neuroscience, here’s a fascinating place to start.

Motivation vs. IQ: Which Is More Important?

Andrew Watson

February 14, 2018

Motivation vs. IQ: Which Is More Important?

Do students benefit more from a high IQ or from high levels of intrinsic motivation?

Over at Quartz, Rebecca Haggerty argues for the importance of motivation. To make this argument, she draws on the research of Adele and Allen Gottfried. By gathering data on a group of children for decades, they conclude:

Kids who scored higher on measures of academic intrinsic motivation at a young age—meaning that they enjoyed learning for its own sake—performed better in school, took more challenging courses, and earned more advanced degrees than their peers. They were more likely to be leaders and more self-confident about schoolwork. Teachers saw them as learning more and working harder. As young adults, they continued to seek out challenges and leadership opportunities.

Even more than a high IQ, intrinsic motivation points students toward a fulfilling life.

Parenting to Promote Motivation

According to the Gottfrieds, how can parents encourage this trait?

Unsurprisingly, parental behavior can influence child development. Inquisitive parents foster inquisitiveness. Parents who read to their children promote a love of reading.

No matter how many parenting books say it’s okay, paying children for grades squashes a love of learning for its own sake.

In any case, the examples we set early on endure. In one of the Gottfrieds’ findings, children encouraged to be curious when they were eight took more science classes years later in high school. That’s parenting for the long haul.

(For some thoughts on teaching strategies to promote intrinsic motivation, click here.)

Motivation vs. IQ: A Caveat and Two Puzzles

A caveat:

Whenever thinking about the “motivation vs. IQ” question, we should pause to remember its complexity. It might be tempting to discount IQ completely. And yet, we know that something like intelligence exists, and that it’s good to have.

Richard Nisbett explores these questions here.

Two points in Haggerty’s article strike me as puzzling.

First, the Gottfrieds speak of children being “motivationally gifted.” However, we know from Dweck’s research that such praise demotivates students.

We should stop praising children for who they are (“gifted, talented, a natural”) and focus on praising them for what they do (“detailed and imaginative work”).

Second, a detail. Haggerty writes that 19% of the Gottfrieds’ subjects have an IQ of higher than 130. That’s an astonishingly high number.

In a typical population, just over 2% of people have an IQ in that range.

In raw numbers: 25 of their subjects have “genius-level” IQ, and we would expect than number to be about 3.

If Haggerty got that number right, then we should be hesitant to extrapolate to the general population from this remarkable sample.

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More About Alcohol and Learning

Alcohol and Learning: Not All Bad News

Putting It All Together, with a Cozy Glass of Wine

Today’s Headline: No Adult Neurogenesis?

Omega 3 Fish Oil: The Bad News

The Good News

An Alternative Perspective: The Benefits of Direct Instruction

Another Alternative Perspective: Reinterpreting “Constructivism”

Other Sources

Why teachers care

What teachers should do

Other Ways of Knowing

Investigating Mindfulness

Why We Care

Sleeplessness Harms Women More Than Men?

Step 1: Neuroplasticity

Step 2: Myelin

Step 3: Neuroplasticity and Myelin

Parenting to Promote Motivation

Motivation vs. IQ: A Caveat and Two Puzzles

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