A recent study suggests that 3- and 4-year old children understand as much, and learn as much vocabulary from, digital books as from read-alouds with adults.
This study hasn’t been published–it was presented at a recent conference–so we can’t look at all the details with the specificity that we usually do. (And, skeptics will rightly be concerned that the research was funded by Amazon: a company that might well profit from its conclusions.)
At the same time, the description I’ve linked to sounds plausible and responsible, so I’m not inclined to dismiss this finding out of hand.
The authors’ conclusions conflict with some other findings in related fields. You may remember a recent blog post discussing Daniel Willingham’s conclusion that, on the whole, students learn more from books than from e-readers.
I’ve also been interested in a study by Ackerman and Goldsmith showing that students regulate their learning better with books than e-readers.
But the current study isn’t about college students trying to learn from books; it’s about pre-readers trying to follow a story that’s being read to them. In this one paradigm, the researchers have found that the right kind of e-book can do the job as well as the right kind of adult.
In this 20 minute video, James Kaufman explains how researchers define creativity, and how they measure it.
He also discusses the limitations on both the definitions and the measurements.
(Note, too, the dexterous water-bottle management.)
Although he title of this video is “What Can Neuroscience Offer the Study of Creativity?”, the presentation focuses entirely on psychology: that is, the behavior of the creative mind, not the physical make-up of the creating brain. I’m hoping that subsequent videos explore neuroscience in greater depth.
A friend recently referred me to this online article (at bigthink.com) about this research study: the eye-catching phrase in both headlines being “Teaching Critical Thinking.”
(The online article is even more emphatic: “Study: There Are Instructions for Teaching Critical Thinking.”)
This headline sounds like great news. We can do it! Just follow the instructions!
We should, of course, be delighted to learn that we can teach critical thinking. So often, especially in upper grades, schools emphasize teaching “not what to think, but how to think.”
Every time we say that, we are—in effect—claiming to be teaching critical thinking.
The author of the BigThink article summarizes the societal importance of critical thinking this way:
We live in an age with unprecedented access to information. Whether you are contributing to an entry on Wikipedia or reading a meme that has no sources cited (do they ever?), your ability to comprehend what you are reading and weigh it is a constant and consistent need. That is why it is so imperative that we have sharp critical-thinking skills.
Clearly, students need such skills. Clearly we should teach them.
It Can Be Taught!
The study itself, authored by N. G. Holmes and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, follows students in a college physics course. The course explicitly introduced its students to a process for thinking critically about scientific data; it emphasized the importance of this process by grading students on their early attempts to use it.
For example (this excerpt, although complex, is worth reading closely):
“students were shown weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data to models and then were given a decision tree for interpreting the outcome. If students obtain a low χ2, they would decide whether it means their data are in good agreement with the model or whether it means they have overestimated their uncertainties.”
Early in the course, the instructors often reminded the students to use this process. By term’s end, however, those instructions had been faded, so the students who continued to use it did so on their own.
The results?
Many students who had been taught this analytical process continued to use it. In fact, many of them continued to use it the following year in another course taught by a different professor.
In other words: they had been taught critical thinking skills, and they learned critical thinking skills.
Success!
It Can Be Taught?
Sadly, this exciting news looks less and less promising the more we consider it.
In the first place, despite the title of his article, Holmes doesn’t even claim to be teaching critical thinking. He claims to be teaching “quantitative critical thinking,” or the ability “to think critically about scientific data and models [my emphasis].”
Doubtless our students need this valuable subset of critical thinking skills. And yet, our students think about many topics that defy easy quantification.
If we want our students to think critically about a Phillis Wheatley poem, or about the development of the Silk Road, or about the use of gerundives, we will quickly recognize they need a meaningfully different set of critical thinking skills.
How, for example, would a student use “weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data” to compare the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution of the United States?
To return to the examples offered in BigThink’s enthusiastic paragraph: despite this author’s enthusiasm, it’s not at all certain this procedure for analyzing “scientific data and models” will help us update a Wikipedia entry, or critique an unsourced meme.
(It might, but—unless we’re editing a very particular kind of Wikipedia entry, or reading a very statistical meme—it probably won’t.)
In brief: ironically, the headlines implying that we can “teach critical thinking” generally do not stand up to critical thought.
The Bigger Picture
Cognitive scientists, in fact, regularly doubt the possibility of teaching a general set of critical thinking skills. And here’s one big reason why:
Different disciplines require different kinds of critical thought.
Critical thinking in evolutionary biology requires different skills than critical thinking in comparative theology.
The field I’m in uses psychology and neuroscience research to inform teaching; hard experience has taught me that the fields of psychology and neuroscience demand very different critical thinking skills from their practitioners.
Perhaps your own teaching experience reveals the same pattern:
The English department where I taught included some of the sharpest minds I know: people who can parse a sonnet or map a literary genre with giddy dexterity. Their critical thinking skills in the world of English literature can’t be questioned.
And yet, many of these same people have told me quite emphatically that they are hopeless at, say, math. Or, chemistry. Or, doing their taxes. Being good critical thinkers in one discipline has not made them successful at critical thought in others.
Chapter 2 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School explores this argument at greater length.
The Smaller Picture
There’s a second reason that it’s hard to teach general critical thinking skills: knowledge of details.
To think critically about any topic, we need to know a very substantial amount of discipline-specific factual information. Finding those facts on the interwebs isn’t enough; we need to know them cold—have them comfortably housed in long-term memory.
For example: to use Holmes’s critical thinking technique, you would need to know what “weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data” actually are.
Even more: you’d need to know how to calculate them.
If you don’t have that very specific kind of detailed knowledge, you’re just out of luck. You can’t think critically in his world.
Another example. Much chess expertise comes from playing lots and lots of chess. As Chase and Simon’s famous study has shown, chess experts literally see chess boards differently than do chess novices.
You really can’t think like a chess expert (that is, you can’t engage in critical chess thinking) until you can see like a chess expert; and, seeing like a chess expert takes years. You need to accumulate substantial amounts of specific information—the Loomis gambit, the Concord defense—to make sense of the chessboard world.
Your own teaching experience almost certainly underlines this conclusion. Let me explain:
How often does it happen that someone learns you’re a teacher, and promptly offers you some heartfelt advice on teaching your students more effectively? (“I saw this AMAZING video on Facebook about the most INSPIRING teacher…”) How often is that advice, in fact, even remotely useful?
And yet, here’s the surprise: the person offering you this well-meaning advice is almost certainly an expect in her field. She’s an accomplished doctor, or financial adviser, or geologist, or jurist. In her field, she could out-critical-think you with most of her prefrontal cortex tied behind her occipital lobe.
Unfortunately, her critical thinking skills in that field don’t transfer to our field, because critical thinking in our field requires a vast amount of very specific teaching knowledge.
(By the way: twice now this post has assumed you’re a teacher. If you’re not, insert the name of your profession or expertise in the place of “teacher.” The point will almost certainly hold.)
Wishing and Thinking, not Wishful Thinking
As so often happens, I feel a bit like a grinch as I write this article. Once again, I find myself reading news I ought to find so very exciting, and instead finding it unsupported by research.
Truthfully, I wish we could teach critical thinking skills in general. If you’ve got a system for doing so, I genuinely hope you’ll let me know. (Inbox me: [email protected])
Even better: if you’ve got research that shows it works, I’ll dance a jig through Somerville.
But the goal of this organization—and the goal of Mind, Brain, and Education—is to improve psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy by having these disciplines talk with each other deeply and knowledgeably.
And with that deep knowledge—with critical thinking skills honed by scientific research—we know that critical thinking skills must be taught discipline by discipline; and, they must be honed through extensive and specific practice.
This task might sound less grand than “teaching critical thinking skills.” And yet, by focusing not on lofty impossibilities, but on very realistic goals, we can indeed accomplish them—one discipline at a time.
How can we encourage young women to pursue STEM fields?
In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, school leaders tried a substantial reform: they increased the math requirement during the final two years of high school. Instead of taking math three days a week, all students had to take math four days a week.
What were the results of increasing the math requirement by 1/3 for 2 years? (That sentence sounds like a word problem, no?)
A mixed bag.
The good news: this reform reduced the gap between male and female achievement scores in math. On the surface, in other words, it seems young women learned more.
This result should be very exciting. However…
The so-so news: this additional math work did very little to increase women’s participation in STEM fields in college. Instead, it increased the STEM interest of male college students–the enrollment gap remained about the same.
And, the bad news: although the women learned more math, they felt worse about their own math abilities.
The reason for this last result isn’t clear — the author’s hypothesis honestly sounds a little convoluted to me.
But, given the size of the data pool behind this study, the conclusion seems clear: requiring more math may boost math learning, but — for women — it’s not sufficient to boost math confidence and interest in STEM fields.
At a minimum, the study suggests that we should think not only about how much math students learn, but how they learn it.
A further point: I don’t know how the math curriculum in a typical Baden-Württemberg high school compares to that of a school in the US. Before we try this intervention, we should (again) think not only about how much math students learn, but what math they learn.
Some days I wonder if I have linked to too many articles debunking claims about “brain training games.” Invariably, as soon as this thought crosses my mind, I hear another advertisement for Lumosity, and I realize that I haven’t linked to debunking articles often enough.
So, as my public service for today, here’s another study that makes this point:
People who practiced games that were supposed to improve working memory got better at the games, but they didn’t get better at other working memory tasks.
Put another way: you might decide to spend $15 a month for the fun of playing such games. But, don’t do so because you think they’ll help your cognitive functioning. So far, we just don’t have good evidence that they do.
(Just as a reminder: Lumosity was fined $ 2,000,000 for deceptive advertising.)
Many teachers I know are baffled by the attraction of video games; some are heartily disgusted by them. (A few play them on the sly, but…ahem…no identities revealed here.)
Even if you don’t have much patience with video games yourself, you can still ask yourself this question: could they help us understand how our students learn?
After all, the many hours (and hours) that people devote to online gaming create vast quantities of data. Researchers can use those data to understand the habits that lead to the greatest improvement for the most number of people.
Well: researchers at Brown University have done just that. By studying two online games–Halo Reach and StarCraft 2–Jeff Huang and his intrepid crew have reached two quite helpful conclusions about this particular kind of learning.
It’s All in the Timing
If we want our students to learn a complex process, clearly practicing helps. And, presumably, more practice is better than less. No?
No. (Or, not exactly…)
Huang’s team found that the people who played the most Halo weren’t the people who improved the fastest. Instead, the players who took some time off — playing roughly once every other day, rather than every day or multiple times a day — raised their score most quickly.
If you’ve spent any time in Learning and the Brain world, you have heard about the spacing effect: practice spread out over time produces greater learning that lots of practice done all at once. (For just one example, see this article.)
Huang’s research in video games falls nicely into this pattern, but gives it an extra twist.
The spacing effect suggests that, if you’re going to play Halo 20 hours this week, you’ll improve faster if you spread those hours out than if you play them all in a row.
Huang’s research suggests that, if you want to improve quickly, you’re better off playing fewer hours with breaks in between sessions than more hours all at once.
In the classroom, this finding suggests that my students are better off practicing problems using the inscribed angle theorem with fewer, well-spaced problems than with more, rapid-fire problems.
It’s Also in the Warm Up
When the researchers turned their attention to StarCraft 2, they asked different questions and got usefully different answers.
In StarCraft (I’ve never played, so I’m taking the authors’ word for this), a player must control many units at the same time–sometimes issuing up to 200 commands per minute to execute effective strategy.
To simplify these demands, players can assign ‘hotkeys’ and thereby command many units with one button.
Huang’s team found that the best players used hotkeys more than others. And, even more interesting, they “warmed up” using hotkeys at the beginning of the game when they didn’t yet have many units to command.
In other words: even when they didn’t have complex cognitive work right in front of them, they were already stretching the necessary cognitive musculature to have it ready when it was needed.
This “cognitive warm up” behavior strikes me as a potentially very useful. When students do very simple problems–like the early StarCraft game without many units–they can already push themselves to think about these problems in complex ways.
If it’s easy to spell the word “meet,” you might encourage your students to think of other words that have a similar sound but are spelled differently: “heat,” “wheat,” “cheat.”
If it’s easy to find the verb in a sentence (“The porcupine painted the tuba a fetching shade of puce”), students might ask themselves if that sentence has an indirect object.
In each of these cases, students can use a relatively simple cognitive task as an opportunity to warm up more complex mental operations that will be coming soon.
The Bigger Picture
While I hope these specific teaching strategies might be useful to you, I also think there’s a broader point to make:
Teaching is fantastically complicated because learning is fantastically complicated–at least, much of school learning is. For that reason, teachers can use all the wise guidance we can get–from psychologists, from neuroscientists, and…yes…from video-game players.
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]
