Here’s the statement from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine:
During adolescence, internal circadian rhythms and biological sleep drive change to result in later sleep and wake times. As a result of these changes, early middle school and high school start times curtail sleep, hamper a student’s preparedness to learn, negatively impact physical and mental health, and impair driving safety. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence shows that delaying school start times positively impacts student achievement, health, and safety. Public awareness of the hazards of early school start times and the benefits of later start times are largely unappreciated. As a result, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is calling on communities, school boards, and educational institutions to implement start times of 8:30 AM or later for middle schools and high schools to ensure that every student arrives at school healthy, awake, alert, and ready to learn.
Of course, schools have many reasons not to make this change: bus schedules, sports schedules, parent schedules, perhaps lunar eclipse schedules.
But in the face of the mounting evidence, all these reasons sound like excuses. Schools exist to help students learn; at many schools, our daily schedule inhibits their learning. We can, and should, solve this problem.
L&tB bloggers frequently write about working memory — and with good reason. This cognitive capacity, which allows students to reorganize and combine pieces information into some new conceptual structure, is vital to all academic learning.
And: we don’t have very much of it.
For example: our grade school students may know the letters C, A, and T. But, putting letters together to form the word “cat” can be a challenge for new readers. After all, that new combination is a working memory task.
Putting those letters together with another letter to make the word “catch” — well, that cognitive effort can bring the whole mental exercise to a halt. (Psychologists speak of “catastrophic failure,” an apt and vivid phrase.)
When teachers learn about the importance of working memory and the limitations of working memory, we often ask an obvious question: what can we do to make working memory bigger?
How to Embiggen Working Memory
This simple question has a surprisingly complicated set of answers.
The first thing to do: wait. Our students’ working memory is getting bigger as they age. We don’t need to do anything special. (Here is a study by Susan Gathercole showing how working memory increases from ages 4-15.)
The second thing to do: watch researchers argue.
Some scholars believe that working memory training does increase its capacity; some companies sell products that claim to do just that.
For the most part, however, the field is quite skeptical. A recent meta-analysis (here) and several classroom studies (here and here) find that working memory training just doesn’t have the effect we’d like it to. And, of course, that ineffective training takes up valuable time and scarce money.
As I read the field, more scholars are skeptics than believers.
Today’s Headline
All that information is important background for a headline I saw recently: “Buzzing the Brain with Electricity Can Boost Working Memory.” (Link here.)
According to this study, weak electrical stimulation to the middle frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule (not joking) temporarily synchronizes theta waves (obvi), and thereby enhances WM function.
Aha! At last! A solution!
When our students struggle with a working memory task, now we just give them a helpful little ZAP, and they’ll be reading like the Dickens. (Or: solving complex math problems. Or: analyzing Sethe’s motivation. Or: elucidating the parallels between US wars in Korea and Vietnam.)
In other words: all those skeptics can now become believers, as working memory problems become a thing of the past.
Beyond the Headline
Or, maybe not yet a thing of the past.
First, it’s always important to remember that science works incrementally. This study is only one study, offering initial testing of a hypothesis.
Second, it’s quite a small study. We’ll need to test this idea many, many more times with many, MANY more people.
Third–and this is my key point–the authors of the study do not even suggest that this technique has classroom uses. Instead, to quote from the Neuroscience News article, “[t]he hope is that the approach could one day be used to bypass damaged areas of the brain and relay signals in people with traumatic brain injury, stroke or epilepsy.”
In other words: the present hypothesis isn’t about helping students with typical working memory capacity to increase it. Instead, it’s about helping people with damaged working memory capacity to boost it — temporarily.
999 Steps to Go
Teachers can be tempted by flashy headlines–oversimplified as they must be–to pounce on scientific advances as practical classroom solutions.
If we’re going to be responsible, even critical consumers of psychology and neuroscience, however, we must learn to read this research in the spirit it is intended. In these scientific realms, the intended spirit is almost always “here’s an interesting incremental step. Let’s think about how to take one more.”
Classroom uses may be at the end of this journey of a thousand steps. Until then, we should keep our students–and our own–working memory limitations clearly in mind.
In fact, many aspects of our cognition are inherently emotional. When one’s emotional well-being suffers, so does her cognition. Because of the inseparable nature of emotion and cognition, the way we feel has a profound effect on our learning.
And yet, the emotional processing inherent in cognition is not always considered in pedagogical practices. What is measured is what is emphasized, and when it comes to traditional schooling, the thing getting emphasized is content knowledge. We place so much weight on the assessment of the content knowledge that we gloss over how it may be best received by students.
If instructors were also encouraged to tailor the delivery of the course material, they could enlist students’ emotional processing to ultimately better enable students to engage with, learn, and understand that same content.
What Gets Measured Is What Gets Emphasized
Traditional pedagogy largely takes on a vacuum-sealed, content-centric approach to learning. Content is passively transmitted to the students to then be assessed, most often via a written test. Derived largely from these tests are letter grades, GPA, class rank, overall school performance, etc. What gets measured is what gets emphasized, and the thing that’s measured is content knowledge.
While it may seem counterintuitive, focusing so narrowly on the content knowledge that we want students to learn prevents them from best learning it. One study, for example, revealed that students of teachers who are told to ensure that their students perform well on a given exam tend to fare more poorly than students of teachers who are told to facilitate student learning (Flink, Boggiano, & Barrett, 1990; Flink et al., 1992, as cited in Diamond, 2010).
Let’s take a step back and look at what the science says about the way we are wired. We are emotional beings. By disregarding our emotional processing, we fundamentally disregard the way in which we store and access information.
Emotions and School Performance
Studies relating the social and emotional well-being of students to their academic performance underscore the interrelationship of the two.
If students’ emotional well-being is not sound, their cognitively capabilities–and thus academic performance–are necessarily hindered. For this reason, ensuring student social and emotional well-being can improve academic outcomes.
Students’ motivation and interest in school, for example, can be predicted by the positive support they receive from peers, teachers, and parents (Wentzel, 1998). Relatedly, teachers’ expectations of student achievement, which has an emotional component, affect student motivation, academic self-perceptions, and academic performance (Jussim & Harber, 2005).
This enhanced engagement may be due, at least in part, to the fact that when teachers create a positive social environment, students feel safe to explore and take risks in their learning, without the fear of failure (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). At the same time, stress can greatly hamper our thinking and cognition (Diamond, 2010).
Let us not lose the view of the forest from among the trees. We want students to perform well on assessments, so we focus on the content. However, students perform better when their social and emotional processing are engaged throughout the learning process. This improvement has even been found to be true for performance on standardized tests (Weissberg, et al., 2008), on which many high-level decisions are based.
Emotion and Executive Function
What may help to explain this improved school performance is the role emotion plays in cognition–in particular, our executive function (EF).
EF includes fundamental capacities like working memory, inhibitory control, and attentional control, which are building blocks for other skills and capacities, like cognitive flexibility, creative problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. (Diamond, 2010). All of these, I think we can agree, are important underlying skills to possess for academic (and professional) success.
(For a broader review of EF, see this post by my fellow blogger, Lindsay Clements.)
In a simple, though somewhat mean-spirited study, Baumeister, Twenge, and Nuss (2002) compared cognitive assessments of two groups of people: one group was told by the researchers that they would have close relationships throughout their lives, the other group was told that they would likely end up alone in life.
The groups showed no difference on assessments of simple memorization tasks. They did, however, show differences on complex cognitive tasks that require use of EF; unsurprisingly, the group told that they were likely to end up alone fared worse. This group also performed more poorly on assessments of IQ and on a widely used measure of academic achievement: the GRE.
(Don’t worry; the researchers let the participants in on the secret at the end of the study, and reassured them they wouldn’t die alone…)
A neuroscience study also confirmed the notion of hindered cognition due to social exclusion. In this study, people who experienced feelings of social exclusion showed less brain activity in certain regions when required to do difficult math problems (Campbell, et al., 2006). The researchers suggest specifically that social exclusion interferes with an individual’s ability to focus their attention, which then affects other aspects of cognition.
You’re Being So Emotional
Despite what any economist may try to tell you, we are not rational beings. Emotional processing is necessarily and inextricably woven throughout many aspects of cognition.
Conventional wisdom may say that human decision-making void of emotion is rational. This is probably due to the fact that we can easily find examples of emotions driving us to irrationality, e.g., some individuals fear flying over driving, despite flying being statistically safer.
It also turns out that human decision-making void of emotion can also become quite irrational. When posed with two alternative dates for an appointment, an individual with an injured ventromedial prefrontal cortex–a region of the brain associated with emotions and decision-making–took close to 30 minutes to weigh out the pros and cons of each date, considering anything one could reasonably think about that might impede his ability to make the appointment on either day (Damasio, 2006).
According to Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007), cognition, especially the aspects of cognition that we ask of students in school, “namely learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion.”
Emotional processing is necessary for students to be able to transfer that which is learned in the classroom to the outside world; simply having the knowledge does not necessarily mean that students will take advantage of it in different contexts. They suggest that emotional processing provides a “rudder to guide judgement and action” (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007).
Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) end their piece with the following lines:
When we educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all.
The Delivery of the Content Matters
Learning is an inherently emotional process. Our emotional well-being affects our ability to learn; when we are not stressed, nor feeling anxious, we are best able to engage with material. Though what’s more, our emotions can be leveraged in the learning process; when we are excited about something, we will be able to push ourselves to learn it better.
To create this kind of beneficial emotional environment, schools might need to rethink policies. They might also adopt new pedagogies that emphasize emotional involvement–for example, inquiry-based learning.
A constructivist approach, inquiry-based learning motivates and engages students by encouraging them to grapple with concepts, often with hands-on activities (Minner, Levy & Century, 2010). Unlike traditional, passive pedagogies, it makes learning active and emotionally salient.
Of the many findings from their meta-analysis of inquiry-based science learning, Minner, Levy and Century (2010) suggest that teaching techniques where students are actively engaged in their learning process through investigations are more likely to increase conceptual understanding than are students in passive learning environments.
The researchers also cite a study which found that students in active learning environments better retained their conceptual understanding over a longer period of time.
While I give inquiry-based learning only a cursory mention, I do so to emphasize that pedagogies can create engaging, real-world activities that encourage students to grapple with concepts, and make them emotionally engaging for students.
Conclusion
Teachers who are most concerned with student performance tend to neglect student emotion, which, ironically, leads to lower levels of student achievement. The same could be said at the systemic level: we have tried to quantify and assess what we believe to be student learning, and in doing so, we have overlooked the fact that learning is a complex, personal process and is necessarily consumed by our emotional processing.
Armed with this information, we can begin to design learning experiences to meet the social and emotional needs of students. It just so happens that there are pedagogies which lend themselves to do just that. In any classroom setting, creating an environment that incorporates students’ social and emotional learning, and which has students emotionally engrossed, will better enable them to engage with, grapple with, and ultimately better understand the content material which we hold so near and dear to our hearts.
Continue Reading
Here is a link to a Learning and the Brain blog post reviewing Immordino-Yang’s book: Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience.
For more on social-emotional learning, visit the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) website here.
References
Baumeister, R. F., Twenge, J. M., & Nuss, C. K. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive processes: anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 817. [link]
Campbell, W. K., Krusemark, E. A., Dyckman, K. A., Brunell, A. B., McDowell, J. E., Twenge, J. M., & Clementz, B. A. (2006). A magnetoencephalography investigation of neural correlates for social exclusion and self-control. Social Neuroscience, 1(2), 124-134. [link]
Damasio, A. R. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, New York: Avon Books.
Diamond, A. (2010). The evidence base for improving school outcomes by addressing the whole child and by addressing skills and attitudes, not just content. Early Education and Development, 21(5), 780-793. [link]
Immordino‐Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3-10. [link]
Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of Educational Research, 79(1), 491-525. [link]
Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. [link]
Minner, D. D., Levy, A. J., & Century, J. (2010). Inquiry‐based science instruction—what is it and does it matter? Results from a research synthesis years 1984 to 2002. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(4), 474-496. [link]
Weissberg, R. P., Durlak, J. A., Taylor, R. D., Dynmicki, A. B., & O’Brien, M. U. (2008). Promoting social and emotional learning enhances school success: Implications of a meta-analysis. Unpublished manuscript.
Wentzel, K. R. (1998). Social relationships and motivation in middle school: The role of parents, teachers, and peers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90(2), 202. [link]
Greg Ashman is enthusiastic about research, and yet skeptical about innovation.
Ashman’s argument resonates with me in large measure because it helps explain the power of Mind, Brain, Education as an approach to teaching.
Of course, MBE does offer its own specific pedagogical suggestions. For example: if you’ve spent any time at Learning and the Brain conferences, you know the benefits of active recall. (Both Ian Kelleher and Scott MacClintic have blogged on this topic recently.)
The Bigger Picture
More broadly, MBE gives teachers a consistent rubric with which we can measure the value of many other pedagogical approaches. Here’s what I mean:
Is project based learning a good idea? How about flipped classrooms? Service learning? 1-to-1 laptop programs? Design thinking? Or, the new idea that will inevitably surface tomorrow?
If you’re being encouraged to try one of these approaches, it can be hard to know how to measure its effectiveness. All of them have research (of some kind or another) showing how beneficial they are. All of them have enthusiastic endorsements by earnest-seeming teachers. All of them have books and conferences and websites and … I don’t know … Ben & Jerry’s flavors named after them.
But: do they all work? How can they – some seem to conflict with each other.
The more you know about MBE, however, the more tools you have that allow you to make consistent comparisons.
Here’s what I mean…
The First Tool in the Toolbox
If you’ve learned about working memory at an LaTB conference, then you already know it is a short-term memory capacity that allows people to hold several pieces of information, and then reorganize and combine them into some new pattern.
For example: if I ask you to put the 6 New England states into alphabetical order, you have to hold all six names in your memory, and then reorganize them in a particular way. That’s working memory.
You may also know that working memory is very small; you can probably alphabetize 6 states, but you couldn’t do sixteen – at least, not without writing them down.
Once you understand even a few simple facts about working memory, then you can use that MBE knowledge to analyze all of the pedagogies listed above.
Is project-based learning a good idea? Well: what might it do to working memory?
Do 1-to-1 laptop programs increase or reduce working memory demands?
In other words: now you have a consistent criterion – one you can use to analyze all new proposals that come across your doorstep.
More Where That Came From
Michael Posner’s work on attention provides an equally useful yardstick. It might tell you, for example, whether flipped classrooms are likely to enhance or diffuse attention. (Or, more likely, both…)
So too Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, and Claude Steele’s work on stereotype threat. And Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang’s work on emotion.
And so: MBE allows you both to learn about specific psychology- and neuroscience-based teaching strategies and to develop a system for measuring all the other pedagogical proposals that crowd your inbox.
As Ashman implies: research helps us not only because it allows innovation, but also because allows consistent, skeptical analysis of innovation. Our students will benefit from both.
It has long been true that men are diagnosed with dyslexia more often than women. This article (rather technical, by the way) offers one potential explanation: processing speed.
What is processing speed? It’s an unusually straightforward concept in psychology.
Imagine that I show you a piece of paper with several rows of different shapes. There might be a square, and then a star, and then a rectangle, and then a circle. And so forth.
To test your processing speed, I simply ask you to name all those shapes as quickly and accurately as you can. Or, I might ask you to say the colors of the shapes: the first one is green, the second is purple, and the third orange.
If you accomplish these tasks relatively quickly, you have a high processing speed.
Overall, women have slightly higher processing speed than men–especially in verbal tasks. The authors of this new study find that this difference in processing speed gives women an edge in reading fluency–and reduces the likelihood that they will be diagnosed with dyslexia.
There are no immediate teaching implications of this finding; however, anything that helps us understand how learning differences come to be…and, come to be diagnosed…might help us improve reading and learning in the future.
You have heard before, and will doubtless hear again, that students don’t need to memorize facts because everything we know is available on the interwebs.
Mirjam Neelen and Paul A. Kirschner explain all the ways in which this claim is not just wrong, not just foolishly wrong, but dangerously wrong.
(The danger, of course, is that if we believe it, we’ll fail to teach our students all sorts of things they need to know.)
Students can do critical thinking if and only if they already know lots (and lots) of factual material. We don’t stifle creativity or deep thinking by teaching facts: we make creativity and deep thinking possible.
Brain research can be thrilling; it can be useful; it can be confusing. This article is–frankly–depressing.
Over ten years, from 2005 to 2015, the authors find that the number concussions has more than doubled–even though the sports participation rate has remained almost the same.
They also find that the concussion rate is lower for boys playing (American) football than for girls playing (what Americans call) soccer. You read that right: girls playing soccer are in greater danger of experiencing a concussion than boys playing football.
The greatest rate of increase in concussions over these ten years? For boys: baseball. For girls: volleyball.
Given the short- and long-term dangers of concussions, this research merits careful attention.
Dr. Savo Heleta, a scholar at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, argues that scholars should devote more of their work to communicating with readers outside of the university.
Heleta explains that, to his dismay, professors have few incentives to write for a broader audience. As a result, scholars most often write for each other–and, in truth, not very many of each other. (According to one study, 82% of articles published in humanities journals are never cited by another scholar. As my grandmother wryly noted: never is a long time.)
So, how are you part of the solution?
In my experience, Learning and the Brain (along with the related scholarly discipline, Mind Brain Education) is one of the few places where such connections happen regularly and successfully.
You’re a 6th grade science teacher, and you want to learn about the latest research in synapse formation?
You’re an academic psychologist who studies adolescent motivation, and you want to know what high school teachers really struggle with day to day?
You work with special needs students, and you’d like to understand the research into executive function with greater sophistication?
In each of these cases, and dozens more, you’d like to join a dialogue between researchers and K-12 professionals.
You are–simply put–doing what Helata wants the world to do: helping highly specialized knowledge get out of the ivory tower and into the everyday world of education. In Helata’s hopeful phrase, you just might be changing the world.
This New York Times article offers a handy overview of research into the importance of movement for learning.
However, before you read it, you have to stand up and move around for three minutes.
(By the way, if you’re interested in gestures–that is small, specific motions–rather than movement–that is full body actions–you should check out Sian Beilock’s book How the Body Knows its Mind.)
This article summarizes the current debate — call it a “controversy” — about brain training. (The authors prefer the phrase “cognitive training.”)
The authors conclude that intelligence can be increased, but … so far … only in controlled lab settings. That is: NOT in schools with various training programs…
This article does get a bit technical; for instance, the authors debate whether or not a particular series of studies ought to have been included in Melby-Lervag’s & Hulme’s well-known meta-analysis. (Melby-Lervag & Hulmedid not include the studies, and these authors think they should have.)
At the same time, I think the complexity of the question is the point. If you or your school plan to devote the considerable time and money that this kind of training requires, you should know all sides of the argument.
(Caveat emptor: this article is, in effect, an advertisement for the authors’ book. I haven’t read that book, but … based on the thoughtful balance of the article … they strike me as sensible folk.)
