The invaluable Daniel Willingham briefly reviews the literature, and concludes that — for the time being — students understand more when they read on paper than when they use e-readers.
Willingham acknowledges that his review isn’t comprehensive. However, he’s recently written a book about reading instruction, and so I suspect he’s more up-to-date than most in this field.
If he’s right, this conclusion should give pause to the many (MANY) schools that are switching to e-textbooks. I know they have advantages; they’re less expensive, more portable, easier to modify to suit a specific teacher’s or student’s needs.
And yet, if students learn less when reading them, none of those advantages matters!
Willingham is hopeful that the quality of e-readers will improve enough to eliminate this discrepancy. Until that happens, and until we have good research showing that students can learn well from e-readers, old-fashioned books seem like the best technology we have.
(Scott MacClintic, this blog’s tech guru, will have some thoughts on this topic soon…)
President Barack Obama greets 2010 Fermi Award recipient Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, in the Oval Office, May 7, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
If you watched the Oscars this past weekend, or simply had lucky t.v. timing over the past few weeks, you may have caught GE’s newest commercial featuring MIT scientist Millie Dresselhaus. The ad aims to promote GE’s upcoming diversity endeavor: 20,000 women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs by 2020. It’s a lofty goal, and I’m rooting for ‘em.
This initiative comes in response to only 18% of GE’s technical workforce being female. Although worrisome for both equity and economic reasons, this statistic is not unusual in the STEM student or professional world. We may be wondering: how has GE, and numerous other similar companies, achieved such low female employment and retention? Which is also to ask: what does it mean for women to persist in the STEM world, and what kind of internal oomph does it take? Luckily, researchers have begun to tackle both questions.
(It’s Not Just GE)
Fewer girls and young women engage with STEM at the advanced placement, college, and career levels than do males. A report published by the National Science Foundation (NSF) found that women represent only around 35% of college students enrolled in physics, mathematics, and computer science courses, and less than 10% of those studying physics and engineering at the graduate level. [1]
Also of concern is the high rate of attrition seen in those who complete undergraduate study and enter the workforce. This turnover leaves women holding only 22% of the math and science jobs available in the U.S.
A Couple of Questions Out of the Way…
Researchers have approached this gender disparity from different angles in hopes of better understanding what is happening.
Some have asked: is it perhaps so that males are just more able mathematicians than females? This conclusion seems unlikely, given that gender differences in math performance barely exist early in development, and tend to emerge at the high-school and college levels. [2]
Others hypothesized: maybe boys are just more interested in STEM than girls? This also seems a stretch, with research showing that throughout at least the elementary school years, a high percentage of both boys and girls (68 and 66 percent, respectively) report liking science. [3]
(See also my fellow-blogger’s post about raising girls’ levels of math participation in the US and India.)
A different approach, then. Several studies have gone beyond theories of disproportionate aptitude and interest and begun to question if social pressures and expectations affect girls’ pursuit of STEM. If yes, then how?
How?
In one such study, researchers at Brown University and Williams College studied the interaction of stereotype threat and mathematics performance in female students. [4]
Stereotype threat is a social occurrence whereby the targets of intellectual inferiority stereotypes, such as women or racial or ethnic minorities, perform more poorly at a task when in an environment that reminds them of this stereotype, such as in the presence of males or the racial or ethnic majority. [5]
In the experiment, college students completed a challenging math or verbal task in groups of three. Each trio included the study participant plus two others: two people of the same gender as the participant (the same-sex condition) or two people of the opposite gender of the participant (the minority condition).
The researchers found that women in the minority condition performed more poorly on the math test than did women in the same-sex condition (males did well on the test despite condition).
The female participants’ performance was also found to be proportional to the number of males in their group, such that women in a mixed-sex majority condition (i.e. two women and one male) still experienced performance deficits as compared to women in the same-sex condition.
Given their findings, the researchers suggested that women in STEM courses or jobs, where their colleagues are predominantly male, may experience stereotype threat. As a result, they are at-risk of performing below their ability, and thus at-risk for attrition.
In another study, students at two universities completed assessments of working memory and mathematics, as well as a self-report anxiety scale regarding their feelings about math. [6] The results statistically demonstrated a chain effect: female students had higher anxiety about math, which in turn affected the working memory resources they needed to complete the math tasks, which in turn lead to lower performance.
The researchers discussed this chain as lending support for Processing Efficiency Theory, which suggests that anxiety negatively affects the central executive component of working memory. The central executive is responsible for processing information stored in verbal and visuospatial working memory, both of which come in pretty handy when completing mathematics tasks.
There’s Probably More to Persist Through than we Think
Studies such as these suggest that our social environment likely has a large impact on how women navigate, among other things, the STEM world. So we ask: what engenders women’s worried feelings around mathematics? How are messages of inferiority transmitted? After all, most girls grow up with some combination of family members, teachers, and/or other role models reciting the message that girls can excel in STEM just as boys can. Yet we still see that, by age six, girls are more likely to group boys into the category of “really, really smart” than they are to categorize their fellow ladies as such. [7]
First, let’s not underestimate the messages that waft in the background of girls’ daily lives. For example, picture a middle school student sitting down at her kitchen table to work on science homework. She can faintly hear CNN from the living room t.v. as she works on a diagram of Newton’s laws of motion. And what CNN happens to be covering that evening is Nobel scientist Tim Hunt’s rationale for promoting gender-segregated workplaces, which is that women in science laboratories are too at-risk of falling in love with their male colleagues.
Collective groan…but so what? Surely CNN will move to another story, the diagram will be skillfully completed, and the student will clear her books from the table so that she can eat her dinner. But not so surely will that story’s message be erased from her subconscious. And that’s a big ‘what’.
Second, as adult women and educators, we should try to get in the habit of taking a look at our own emotional navigation of STEM. Again, let’s not underestimate: one study recently found that heightened math anxiety in female teachers at the beginning of the school year is associated with lower math performance over that school year for their female students. [8] And that anxiety is communicated much more subtly than seeing a math problem and making a run for it.
In other words: better understanding our own subconscious relationship with, and reactions to, STEM disciplines can help us better understand the implicit messages that we transmit to young girls.
Third, let’s talk about it. Now, I would be remiss not to include the caveat that we cannot fully encourage girls to pursue, and persist in, STEM without also considering the importance of encouraging boys and young men to pursue female-dominated fields, such as nursing and early childhood education. Nonetheless, researchers have suggested that efforts to mitigate gender differences in math-related fields are inadequate unless they target specific factors, such as worry about math, in girls and women. [9]
So let’s talk about that worry. And, given what we know about social psychological phenomena (e.g., the prevalence of stereotype threat), the positive effects of such conversations may be maximized within all-girls STEM classes and extracurriculars. A quick Google search can lead us to organizations, such as Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS), the Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls, and NSF’s National Girls Collaborative Project, that are eager to provide guidance and resources for exactly this purpose.
Because oddly enough, the best way to empower girls to brush off gendered nonsense like Tim Hunt’s argument for workplace segregation, may just be to separate boys and girls for a bit.
National Science Foundation (1996). Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering: NSF Publication No. 96–311. Arlington, VA: Author. [link]
Lindberg, S. M., Hyde, J. S., Petersen, J. L., & Linn, M. C. (2010). New trends in gender and mathematics performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 1123–1135. [link]
National Science Foundation (2007). Back to school: Five myths about girls and science. NSF Press Release No. 07-108. Arlington, VA: Author. [link]
Inzlicht, M. & Ben-Zeev, T. (2000). A threatening intellectual environment: Why females are susceptible to experiencing problem-solving deficits in the presence of males. Psychological Science, 11, 365-371. [link]
Aronson, J., Lustina, M.J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C.M., & Brown, J. (1999). When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 29–46. [link]
Ganley, C. M., & Vasilyeva, M. (2014). The role of anxiety and working memory in gender differences in mathematics.Journal of Educational Psychology, 106 (1), 105-120. [link]
Bian, L., Leslie, S.J., Cimpian, A. (2017). Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests. Science, 355(6323), 389-391. [link]
Beilock, S. L., Gunderson, E. A., Ramirez, G., & Levine, S. C. (2010). Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 107, 1860–1863. [link]
Ganley, C. M., & Vasilyeva, M. (2014). The role of anxiety and working memory in gender differences in mathematics.Journal of Educational Psychology, 106 (1), 105-120. [link]
According to new research, a key difference might be the choice of opponent. Whereas men typically prefer to compete against others, women often choose to compete against themselves.
(As always: be careful about oversimplifcation of gender roles. I myself am much likelier to compete against myself than others. As Todd Rose notes, averages often give us useful information about groups, but never about individuals.)
Here’s the magic question: how can teachers help motivate students?
After all, most of our students don’t lack the cognitive capacity to learn the material; instead, all too often, they lack the desire to do so.
Frankly, those of us who work in the classroom would LOVE some help from the world of psychology and neuroscience to understand what gets our kids energized…
Trinsic: In- or Ex-
For well over a decade, the field of Mind, Brain, Education has been guided and informed by the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
When I curl up with a crossword puzzle, for example, I do so for the crisp pleasure of problem solving. I don’t get anything from these puzzles, other than the joy of doing them. That’s intrinsic motivation.
Often, however, we undertake a particular activity to get something else from it. Perhaps I take a class in research methodology not because I’m fascinated by it, but because I know I need that credit to get my psychology degree. Or, I take it because my parents have made it a condition of helping with my college tuition. (Quirky parents, I know.)
In these cases, I’m driven by extrinsic motivation.
Of course, these motivations differ from person to person. I might go to an art museum because I love the works of Archibald Motley, Jr. (intrinsic), or because I want my boss to see me at the exhibit (extrinsic). You might go camping because the great outdoors refreshes your soul (intrinsic), or because a certain special someone might also be joining the group (extrinsic).
So, too, some of our students solve math problems because they are genuinely fascinated to discover the area under a curve; whereas others want to impress a classmate, or get a good grade, or earn admission to MIT.
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts?
What, then, do teachers do with this information? How does it help us to distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation?
At the very first Learning and the Brain conference I attended, Edward L. Deci offered one answer to that question. His answer is, in fact, the one you hear most often.
What happens, Deci wanted to know, when you add extrinsic and intrinsic motivation together? For example: if a student loves learning to spell new words for the pure pleasure of doing so (that’s intrinsic), what happens if I also give him a sticker for every ten new words he learns (that’s extrinsic)?
When Deci started exploring this question, no one had thought much about it. He remembers there was a vague sense that adding two kinds of motivation together should—common sense tells us—create even greater levels of motivation. But no one new how much, or precisely why.
Deci’s research, however, led to a surprising conclusion: extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation. That is: my enthusiastic speller will feel less enthusiastic once I start rewarding him. In Deci’s research, he is less likely to break out the dictionary on his own, and more likely to wait until I break out the sticker packs again.
How did Deci find this out?
In one well-known study [1], he had college students solve a particularly intriguing kind of puzzle—sort of an early Rubik’s cube. He then offered half of them a reward for solving more puzzles, while simply instructing the other half to do so. Third, he gave both groups some free time—and watched whether they continued to solve puzzles, or instead read magazines that he provided.
The result: the students who had been rewarded were less likely than the unrewarded group to continue solving puzzles.
That is: the extrinsic reward sapped intrinsic enthusiasm.
Classroom Implications
Deci’s remarkable finding provides a direct challenge to one of education’s most enduring traditions: grades.
When school folk try to justify grades as a useful incentive—they motivate our students!—Deci’s team can argue right back: yes, but at such a cost!
Even if grades do motivate (and, do they?), they undermine the love of learning that we want to instill. Students who once spent their free time obsessing about Civil War battlefields will now do so only for the promise of extra credit. What kind of motivation is that?
Deci and his frequent co-author Richard Ryan have an explanation for this effect. They argue that people are motivated by a desire for—among other things—autonomy. When you give me a grade for something that I already want to do, I feel that you’re trying to control me: that is, trying to reduce my autonomy.
In other words: your extrinsic rewards reduce my intrinsic drives by taking away my independence.
January 2017: Revolution
This account of motivation—and the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—has been common in the field of MBE for at least a decade. But in January, a new study came out which challenges this whole logical chain [2].
Two scholars at the University of Chicago—Goswami and Urminsky—ask this question: what if extrinsic motivation only seems to reduce intrinsic motivation because we’ve been measuring the wrong way? The problem is not in the motivation, but in our research paradigms?
Here’s their argument: when Deci gave those students another chance to solve puzzles, he measured their motivation immediately after they had completed the reward round. If their intrinsic motivation was only temporarily reduced, this research paradigm would have no way of capturing that result. After all, their desire to draw might bounce back. It might even come back more strongly than before.
To test this hypothesis, Goswami and Urminsky developed a new research method: one that gave participants multiple chances to demonstrate intrinsic desire to do something—before, during, and after a reward.
Participants in their study chose between solving a fun math puzzle (a problem that involved a little cognitive effort) and watching a short video (which involved no cognitive effort). In either case, this particular activity took only half a minute. They made this choice not a few times times (as in Deci’s study), but 30 times.
The first eight times, participants simply chose between solving a math problem and watching a video. Because the math problems were—in fact—fun to do, participants chose them almost 70% of the time.
During the next section of the study—ten more trials—half of the participants were given a small reward for choosing to do the math problem. (That is: an extrinsic reward was added to their obvious intrinsic interest.) Unsurprisingly, they now chose the math problems almost 90% of the time.
In the third round of the study—twelve more trials—the reward was removed. If, as Deci and Ryan predict, extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation, we would expect to see a persistent change. Participants should now prefer the video to the math problem, perhaps by a considerable margin.
What did Goswami and Urminsky find?
Round 3, Trial #4
Consistent with Deci’s study of college puzzle solvers, participants initially turned away from the math problems. Whereas 90% had chosen them during the reward round, only 50% did so during the next trial, and only 55-60% during the two trials after that.
But then, something remarkable happened.
Participants returned to the math. In fact, in trial #4 of the third round, more people chose math problems than those in the control group—who had never been offered a reward. In fact, for the remainder of the study—7 more trials—the participants who had been offered rewards chose math problems more often than the control group even though the reward was no longer available.
In other words: in this study, extrinsic motivation did not reduce intrinsic motivation. Instead, it (very slightly) increased intrinsic motivation.
To be sure of their results—and to test some other predictions as well—Goswami and Urminsky repeated versions of this study 4 more times, and consistently got the same answer.
Boom. Revolution.
Where Do We Go from Here? (Round 1)
Goswami and Urminsky’s study has quite literally just been published. Because their conclusions upend such widely known research, they will doubtless be debated, challenged, explored, perhaps contradicted.
In the meantime, what’s a teacher to do?
First: we can, I think, no longer say with such confidence that “extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation.” (Of course, it might—after all, lots of research suggests that conclusion.)
However, Goswami and Urminsky propose a new way of exploring this question, and I think we should admit the reasonableness of their critique and the usefulness of their methodology. We’ve got a chance to learn more, and we should take it.
For now, that means we should look frankly and honestly at the value of grades, prizes, and rewards. They might be beneficial, or harmful, or both; but we can’t be sure that their extrinsic motivation is harmful. (If you’d like some guidance in these discussions, you might look at Timothy Quinn’s book, On Grades and Grading.)
As a simple example: I’m married to someone whose interest in school was based ENTIRELY on grades, prizes, and competition. In at least this one case, grades provided an immensely useful extrinsic motivation that made up for a real lack of intrinsic motivation.
Where Do We Go from Here? (Round 2)
This research revolution might also inspire us to return to Deci and Ryan with fresh eyes and clearer understanding. Here’s what I mean:
In my experience, teachers who read up on this research often infer that students will naturally become intrinsically motivated to pursue schoolwork if we don’t get in their way. Because extrinsic motivation interferes with intrinsic motivation, the absence of extrinsic motivation will naturally produce intrinsic motivation.
But Deci and Ryan don’t say that [3]. In fact, they say quite the opposite: “it is critical to remember that intrinsic motivation will occur only for activities that hold intrinsic interest for an individual—those that have the appeal of novelty, challenge, or aesthetic value for that individual” (p. 59-60); as they say elsewhere, it is “catalyzed (rather than caused)” (p. 58).
Instead, Deci and Ryan accept that students simply aren’t intrinsically motivated to do many of the things that school asks them to do. It is not our job to cause them to be intrinsically motivated—because we can’t.
Instead, it is the teacher’s job to find healthy extrinsic motivators rather than unhealthy ones: “because many of the tasks that educators want their students to perform are not inherently interesting or enjoyable, knowing how to promote more active and volitional (versus passive and controlling) forms of extrinsic motivation becomes an essential strategy for successful teaching” (p. 55).
When they champion classrooms that foster autonomy, relatedness, and competence, Deci and Ryan are partly trying to allow intrinsic motivation to flourish. But, more often, they are trying to promote good kinds of extrinsic motivation—in which students recognize the value of the work that they are doing, and take it on willingly to benefit themselves and their world.
After all: I might not have taken that research methodology class with intrinsic enthusiasm, but the extrinsic motivation that got me through has been a great boon to my understanding of science.
Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105. [link]
Goswami, I., & Urminsky, O. (2017). The dynamic effect of incentives on postreward task engagement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(1), 1. [link]
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), 54-67. [link]
If you’re a Learning and the Brain devotee, you may have heard about p-values; you may even have heard about the “p-value crisis” in the social sciences — especially psychology.
This white paper by Fredrik deBoer explains the problem, offers some useful context, and gives you several strategies to see past the muddle.
Although deBoer’s considering very technical questions here, he writes with clarity and even a bit of humor. If you like digging into stats and research methodology, this short paper is well worth your time.
(As you may know, deBoer writes frequently — and controversially — about politics. I’m neither endorsing nor criticizing those views; I just think this paper makes an abstruse topic unusually clear.)
Following up on Rina Deshpande’s post looking at the benefits of cognitive routines, here’s a fun article about the upsides — and downsides — of creative changes to our daily habits.
In brief: it seems that Dave Birss broke his brain…
Now that you’ve been to LaTB, we’d love to hear your story.
What did you learn? What did you try? How did it go?
If you’d like to share your experience, please send me an email with:
Who you are and what you do.
The research and the researcher that inspired you (and, at which conference you heard this idea).
What you did with this inspiration.
The results you saw.
Please be sure to include a specific source (a speaker, a book, or an article) for the ideas that you tried. And, keep in mind that you’re writing for a blog audience—short and punchy entries are especially welcome.
We won’t be able to publish every entry, but…we hope to hear from you!
Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Ligon Bjork have argued that the right kind of difficulty can facilitate ultimate learning. These difficulties–“desirable difficulties”–require extra cognitive engagement, and thereby promote long-term memory formation.
Presenters at Learning and the Brain conferences often talk about “spacing,” or “interleaving,” or the “testing effect.” (In fact, Ian Kelleher has recently blogged about these strategies.) All these techniques boost learning by increasing desirable difficulty.
Nicholas Gasperlin wanted to know: is it desirable to divide students’ attention? Would that kind of difficulty enhance learning?
The short answer: No. Forcing students to focus on two things does ramp up the level of difficulty; however, it does not increase learning.
(However, it decreases learning much less than I would have predicted.)
The big news here, in my opinion, is that researchers are starting to ask this question. Up until now, we have heard a great deal about desirable difficulties, but haven’t gotten much guidance on UNdesirable ones. Now–finally–we’re starting to get research-based answers.
A recent meta-analysis of 100 years of research (you read that right — 100 years) suggests that both ability grouping and appropriate grade acceleration benefit students.
Interestingly, the authors argue that ability grouping benefits students across the academic spectrum: “Overall, high-, medium-, and low-ability students benefited equally from ability grouping” (p. 889).
The authors of this study focus on academic benefits, and don’t look at studies that focus solely on social-emotional results. When it comes to grade acceleration, however, they do see a trend: “Numerous studies have investigated the peer dimension of acceleration and generally reported not only no harm but also small to moderate social–emotional benefits of academic acceleration” (p. 853).
For these acceleration programs, selection criteria make a real difference. At least one of the studies they review finds “socio-affective benefits for students selected on the basis of academic readiness and social and emotional maturity, but also cautions that these programs may be harmful to individual students who are arbitrarily selected on the basis of IQ” (p. 892-3).
In other words: we can’t rely solely on cognitive tests to make such placement decisions.
Given the passion surrounding this debate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see zealous push-back in upcoming weeks.