Category Archives: L&B Blog

A Google image search for “stress” makes our culture’s attitude about the concept immediately clear. There are pictures of people pulling their hair, eyes wide and mouth gaping, a word cloud filled with words like “worry” and “depression,” and even a woman intensely biting her laptop.

In short, we hate stress.

Although it is often an unpleasant feeling and is linked to a host of health problems from headaches to Alzheimer’s Disease, stress is not all bad. In some forms, it can motivate and push us to excel. We can reap these benefits by keeping stress under control, but another, less obvious way to harness stress productively is to reframe the way we think about it.

Although it might be easy to imagine children’s lives as carefree, students of all ages face stress. Whether from standardized testing¹, non-ideal home situations like poverty², or even being around others who are stressed³, children’s minds and bodies can become acquainted with stress and anxiety from a young age. When we become stressed, our brain becomes doused in norepinephrine, and our body receives a rush of adrenaline⁴. This sympathetic nervous system response is often referred to as our body’s fight-or-flight mode because the arousal it triggers will allow us to react quickly (by doing things like fighting or fleeing) in the face of immediate danger. The amygdala plays a crucial role in stimulating this often automatic physiological response to a threatening situation.⁵

This can be a beneficial response, for example, if we need to save a child from drowning or hammer our a paper right before a deadline. In these cases, stress is often referred to as eustress, because it positively affects our performance in the moment. It can also become a deleterious response if it becomes a lasting state, making our body feel like we may need to save a drowning child at any second, when in reality we are simply sitting in traffic on the highway. This is the type of stress we often think of – referred to as distress for its negative impacts on our mental wellbeing.

Stress in the Classroom

Prolonged stress compromises classroom performance. It produces dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain necessary for high-level cognitive tasks like reasoning, decision-making, and memory. As such, long-term stress hurts a person’s working memory capacity⁶, a trait that is linked to different features of intelligence⁷. Although this working memory impairment is likely to be evident in the classroom, chronic childhood stress resulting from poverty or other adverse situations predicts working memory deficits as a young adult⁸.

Children and teenagers whose minds are preoccupied by stressful circumstances — whether in the of excessive pressure to perform, discord at home, or bullies at school — are less able to focus on their academic work. Since much of what we learn in school is cumulative, building on previous concepts that teachers assume that students have learned, we can see how the effects of stress on educational performance can quickly snowball into a situation that adds even more stress for the student.

Fortunately, there are many ways of coping with stress. One antidote that continues to gain traction is to cultivate mindfulness, an enhanced awareness of one’s surroundings and stressors. In particular, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven effective for reducing both physical and psychological consequences of stress⁹. As previously discussed on Learning & the Brain, children can and should be taught to incorporate mindfulness and meditation into their lives.

Changing the Way We See Stress

Another effective method for dealing with stress that has received less popular attention than MBSR is reframing our mindset. Through a process known as reappraisal, we can alter the way we feel about a situation by altering the way we think about it.¹⁰ Focusing on the positive features of stress — for example, its ability to encourage the development of initiative, mental toughness, and a sense of mastery — can influence not only our subjective experiences of stress, but our body’s physical responses to it as well¹¹. If the idea of stress stresses us out, it can become an endless feedback loop. If we can come to terms with the time and place for stress in our lives, it may actually be easier to keep under control.

In one study by Alia Crum and colleagues, employees of a large company were exposed to three different 3-minute long videos over the course of a week. The three videos were different, but for each employee, all three either presented stress as an enhancing or debilitating force. By the end of the week, a questionnaire revealed that people changed their mindsets about stress. Those who saw the debilitating videos began to think of stress as more negative, while those who saw the enhancing videos began to think of it more positively. Further, people in the enhancing group reported better psychological symptoms and work performance after the week, which did not happen for the debilitating group. These findings suggest that changing the way people think of stress can have important downstream consequences for their mental well-being and performance.

A follow up study investigated the effect of stress mindsets in undergraduates. At the beginning of the semester, students completed a personality assessment, and later in the semester, they provided saliva samples. During a subsequent class, they were asked to rate themselves on dimensions including confidence, emotional intelligence, persuasion, and presence/authenticity, and to prepare a speech in ten minutes that they could deliver to the class. They were told that 5 students would be randomly selected to deliver their speeches, and their classmates would rate them on their charisma. This setup created a realistic stressful situation for the students, and saliva samples were again collected to compare to the baseline samples taken earlier. The students also learned that those who were chosen would have the opportunity to receive feedback from professionals, and those who weren’t chosen could also receive feedback on their speeches at a later time. All students rated their desire for feedback. Students whose personality assessments revealed that they had a “stress is enhancing” mindset were more likely to desire feedback than those who thought of stress as debilitating. The students who believed stress could be enhancing also showed more adaptive cortisol profiles in their saliva.

Implications for the Classroom

Believing that stress could be positive encouraged students to put themselves in a position to grow by expressing more willingness to receive feedback. Beyond influencing behavior, this mindset also affected students’ physiological responses to a stressful situation, allowing them to be less reactive than students who held the “stress is debilitating” mindset. Together with the previous study, these results demonstrate first that our mindsets about stress are malleable, and can be shaped simply by watching a few short movies. They also show us that students who took on a more positive mindset about stress reacted less to acute stress and put themselves in a situation to receive valuable feedback and grow from their experience. These are exactly the traits most educators would like to see more of in their students.

What steps can we take to help more students achieve these positive results?

• Emphasize that stress can enhance performance. Help students learn to cope with distress while promoting the beneficial effects of eustress.
• Provide students with opportunities to thrive under stress. Creating situations that are moderately stressful, such as delivering a speech to the class, will show students that they can thrive under stress, thus solidifying that stress can truly enhance performance.
• Practice what you preach. Students often learn from example, so they will internalize their educators’ stress mindsets, whether those mindsets are made explicit to them or not. As such, it is important for teachers to also adapt a “stress is enhancing” mindset.
• Make metacognition a part of your classroom culture – or encouraging your students to think about their own thinking. Be honest with your students about what stress is, what it’s for, and when it becomes dangerous. Sometimes having an understanding of how we work can provide us with the tools to better control and reappraise our experiences and emotions. Provide resources for students who feel distress, as well as strategies for them to practice reframing.

Although all people will undoubtedly face some negative stress throughout their lives, being mindful to the way we react to all stress, physically and mentally, will help us cultivate more positive mindsets. Mindsets are often self-fulfilling prophecies, and the key to thriving under stress may simply lie in believing that we can do so.

References & Further Reading

1. Fleege, P.O., Charlesworth, R., Burts, D.C. & Hart, C.H. (1992). Stress begins in kindergarten: A look at behavior during standardized testing. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 7(1), 20-26. [Paper]
2. Curry, A. (2015). Why living in a poor neighborhood can make you fat. Nautilus, 31. [Web Article]
3. Scully, S.M. (2015). You can “catch” stress through a TV screen. Nautilus, 31. [Web Article]
4. Tennant, V. (2015). The powerful impact of stress. New Horizons for Learning. [Web Article]
5. LeDoux, J. (2015). The amygdala is not the brain’s fear center. The Huffington Post, [Web Article]
6. Mizoguchi, K., Yuzurihara, M., Ishige, A., Sasaki, H., Chui, D & Tabira, T. (2000). Chronic stress induces impairment of spatial working memory because of prefrontal dopaminergic dysfunction. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(4), 1568-1574. [Paper]
7. Oberauer, K., Sϋß, H., Wilhelm, O. & Wittmann, W. (2010). Which working memory functions predict intelligence? Intelligence, 36(6), 641-652. [Paper]
8. Evans, G.W. & Schamberg, M.A. (2009). Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory. PNAS, 106(16), 6545-6549. [Paper]
9. Chiesa, A. & Serretti, A. Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(5), 593-600. [Paper]
10. Ochsner, K. N., Silvers, J. A. & Buhle, J. T. (2012). Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: A synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251, E1-E24. [Paper]
11. Crum, A.J, Salovey, P. & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733. [Paper]

It is difficult to argue that bad air isn’t bad for your health. Unlike many of the polarizing environment and health issues, like global warming, it is commonly agreed upon that ambient air pollution is a public health threat[i] [ii]. In the U.S. alone, more than 100 million people are exposed to varying amounts of particulate matter (PM), lead, sulfur and/or nitrogen dioxide in the air in quantities that exceed the recognized health standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)[iii] [iv].

 

The danger lies in PM of 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter (or approximately 1/30 of the width of a human hair), which is small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and other organs of the body. Although trends observed by the EPA have shown that hazardous emissions polluting our air have actually decreased over the course of the past decade, it remains that, as of 2013, over two million deaths a year can be directly linked to air pollution[v].

 

Historically, much of the attention on the risks of air pollution tends to center around cancer and other diseases affecting the respiratory and cardiovascular system[vi]. This makes sense, especially considering the important and obvious links between air quality and lung and heart health. However, recent empirical investigations of the brain have observed concerning evidence about the potential impact of pollution on neurological functioning and wellbeing. In other words, bad air quality has been found to have an unprecedented and insidious impact on our brain.

 

Air Pollution & The Brain

Research suggests air pollution can affect everything from neurodevelopment in-utero to accelerating cognitive decline in older people[vii]. Given the delicate nature of the prenatal environment and its importance for fetal health, it may come as no surprise that toxins found in the air are harmful to healthy brain growth both during pregnancy and throughout the lifespan. Indeed, given the detrimental brain effects on children living in heavily polluted cities, the past few years have witnessed a surging interest in the correlations between ambient air pollution and compromised brain health[viii] 7. For example, one research group using animal models found mice exposed to average metropolitan area levels of pollution performed worse on learning and memory tasks compared to a control group in a container with filtered air. Additionally, in a companion study by the same group, the mice in the polluted air showed more depressive-like and anxiety-like symptoms and behaviors than their filtered-air counterparts[ix].

 

Although these findings are concerning, results from animal studies can’t always be generalized to humans. However, we do know that children’s physiological development is uniquely vulnerable to the exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants compared to adults. Simply from a lung function perspective, children breathe in higher levels of polluted air relative to their weight and also tend to spend greater amounts of time outside, leaving them even more susceptible to the disease and dysfunction caused by pollutants[x].

 

A number of recent investigations conducted between 2012 and 2015 have looked into analyzing brain imaging data belonging to children living in urban areas with the objective of pinpointing some of the dangerous side-effects of living in heavily polluted areas on the brain, particularly in light of poor outcomes on psychometric tests on behalf of children living in these areas[xi]. For instance, upon examining brain structure (i.e. the physical architecture that comprises the brain), results indicate abnormalities in the brain’s white matter, which are often highly correlated with a number of psychological and cognitive diseases and deficits[xii].

 

Unsurprisingly, the structural findings were corroborated by “functional” anomalies (meaning parts of the brain are behaving differently than in a typical population). Examples include compromised senses, including smell and hearing, as well as a number of cognitive deficits, consistent with the poor psychometric assessments noted previously. In fact, many research groups have consistently found that school-aged children located in highly polluted areas perform less well on cognitive and neurological tests, all while controlling for confounding factors such as low-SES, gender, age and mother’s IQ12.

 

Further cases of such studies include a 2010 investigation showing that children with exposure to high levels of nitrogen dioxide scored between 6 and 9 points less on measures of working memory[xiii]. This continues to hold true in 2015, when a research group from the University of Texas found lower grade point averages among El Paso fourth-and-fifth graders exposed to high levels of ambient air pollution[xiv]. Perhaps more alarmingly, evidence shows these effects can start early, whereby children with high levels of prenatal exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons (a group of chemicals that get released upon burning substances such as coal, oil, gasoline and trash) were recorded to have lower than expected IQ scores at the age of 5 compared to children that had not had such exposures in-utero[xv] [xvi].

 

What does this mean for students?

So the bottom line is: how does all this affect how children grow, develop and learn? Despite the body of evidence confirming the negative effects of ambient air pollution on children’s health (as well as the routine air quality monitoring by the EPA), few investigations have been carried out to examine the consequences of the associations between air quality and academic performance. To complicate matters, many groups disproportionately places low-income and ethnic minority communities in areas with high levels of air pollution – segments of the population already associated with lower performance on standardized tests[xvii] 10 Reasons for this may be due to factors such as parental educational disadvantages and school location in urban centers near busy roads, which in turn are populated by greater proportions of at-risk student populations16. However, these links are not found ubiquitously, and many theorists have shown a robust enough relationship between high exposure to air pollutants and compromised academic performance to withstand confounding variables including school size, school location and student demographics10.

 

So what could be the true outcomes of these findings? Based on the sheer number of studies purporting the negative impacts of air pollution on overall health and the brain, it would not be a stretch to imagine the ramifications of even mild exposure to air toxins beyond GPA or IQ – for instance some have anecdotally discussed how newly occurring or exacerbated respiratory problems increase fatigue and attention problems in school, with greater bouts of absenteeism as a result.[xviii]

 

The danger herein lies in the insidious nature of these ill-effects, because it is not likely that common issues such as asthma or attention-deficit disorders be linked with poor air quality; and even if air quality was the primary culprit behind these problems, it would be hard to effectively disentangle it from other possible etiologies. Needless to say, the links between academic performance, air pollution exposure as well as other related health problems remain poorly understood and require further research in order to produce realistic solutions to combat the problem.

 

What can we do about it?

Given the complex nature of pediatric air pollution research, extensive interdisciplinary collaboration between fields like neuroscience, radiology and epidemiology (to name a few) is necessary in order to create greater awareness and build efforts on behalf of schools and educational facilities to improve indoor environment quality. This, coupled with a more comprehensive understanding of the damage of air pollution on the brain will hopefully facilitate more effective interventions to compensate for the ill-effects of bad air quality on future generations8.

 

From a survey of the current literature, a number of research groups have initiated studies on the effects of poor air quality; however relatively few have posed any concrete solutions to the problem. As of October 2015, select federal agencies (such as the EPA) along with public health officials have acknowledged some of the research discussed in this article and have responded by organizing online events and workshops to work with schools and educational institutes to better monitor indoor air quality in schools:

 

1. Creating Healthy Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Schools: http://www.epa.gov/iaq-schools

 

2. Webinars hosted by the EPA on improving air quality in schools: http://www.epa.gov/schools/schools-webinars
3. A list of organizations working to combat air pollution:

http://www.inspirationgreen.com/organizations-air.html#AirPollutionOrganizations

REFERENCES

 

 

1. Katsouyanni, K. (2003). Ambient Air Pollution and Health, British Medical Bulletin, 68, 143-156.
2. World Health Organization (WHO). (2014). Fact sheet N°313 Ambient (outdoor) air quality and health.
3. Lelieveld J., Evans J.S., Fnais M., Giannadaki D., Pozzer A. (2015). The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale. Nature, 525(7569):367-371.
4. World Health Organization. (2003). Health aspects of air pollution with particulate matter, ozone and nitrogen dioxide, report, 98 pp., Bonn, Germany.
5. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2015, September). FAQ. Retrieved From the Environmental Protection Agency website: http://www3.epa.gov/pmdesignations/faq.htm
6. Silva, R. A. et al. (2013). Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 8, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034005
7. Chen, J.C., Wang, X., Wellenius, G.A., Serre, M.L., Driscoll, I., Casanova, R., McArdle, J.J., Manson, J.E., Chui, H.C., Espeland, M.A. (2015). Ambient air pollution and neurotoxicity on brain structure: evidence from women’s health initiative memory study. Annals of Neurology. 78, 466–476.
8. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Torres-Jardón, R., Kulesza, R. J., Park, S.-B., & D’Angiulli, A. (2014). Air pollution and detrimental effects on children’s brain. The need for a multidisciplinary approach to the issue complexity and challenges. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 613. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00613
9. Fonken, L.K., Xu, X., Weil, Z.M., Chen G., Sun Q., Rajagopalan S., Nelson, R.J. (2011). Air pollution impairs cognition, provokes depressive-like behaviors and alters hippocampal cytokine expression and morphology. Molecular Psychiatry, doi: 0.1038/mp.2011.76
10. Mohai P., Kweon B.S., Lee S., Ard K. (2011). Air pollution around schools is linked to poorer student health and academic performance. Health Affairs, 30 (5):852–62.
11. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Solt, A.C., Henriquez-Roldan, C., Torres-Jardón, R., Nuse, B., Herritt, L., Villareal-Calderón, R., Osnaya, N., Stone, I., Garcia, R., Brooks, D.M., et al. (2008). Long-term air pollution exposure is associated with neuroinflammation, an altered innate immune response, disruption of the blood–brain barrier, ultrafine particulate deposition, and accumulation of amyloid beta-42 and alpha-synuclein in children and young adults. Toxicologic Pathology. 36, 289–310.
12. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Cross, J.V., Franco-Lira, M., Aragon-flores, M., Kavanaugh, M., Torres-Jardón, , et al. (2013). Brain immune interactions and air pollution: macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF), prion cellular protein (PrPC ), interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin 1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), and serum interleukin-2 (IL-2) in cerebrospinal fluid and MIF in serum differentiate urban children exposed to severe vs. low air pollution. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 183.
13. Freire C., Ramos R., Puertas R., Lopez-Espinosa M.J., Julvez J., Aguilera I., Cruz F., Fernandez M.F., Sunyer J., Olea N. (2010). Association of traffic-related air pollution with cognitive development in children. Journal of Epidemiological & Community Health, 64:223–228.
14. Clark-Reyna, S., Grineski, S.E., Collins, T.W. (2015). Residential exposure to air toxics is linked to lower grade point averages among school children in El Paso, Texas, USA. Population & Environment, 1-22. doi: 10.1007/s11111-015-0241-8.
15. Edwards, S.C., Jedrychowski, W., Butscher, M., Camann, D., Kieltyka, A., Mroz, E., et al. (2010). Prenatal exposure to airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and children’s intelligence at 5 years of age in a prospective cohort study in Poland. Environmental Health Perspectives, 118, 1326–1331.

1. Suglia F., Gryparis A., Wright R.O., Schwartz J.,Wright R.J. (2008). Association of black carbon with cognition among children in a prospective birth cohort study. American Journal of Epidemiology. 167(3):280–6.
2. Pastor M., Morello-Frosch R., Sadd J. (2006). Breathless: pollution, schools, and environmental justice in California. Policy Studies Journal, 34(3):337–62.
3. Miller, S., Vela, M. (2013). The Effects of Air Pollution on Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Chile (Working Paper No. IDB-WP-468). Retrieved from Inter-American Development Bank website: http://www.iadb.org/en/research-and-data/publication-details,3169.html?pub_id=IDB-WP-468

 

[xviii]

It is difficult to argue that bad air isn’t bad for your health. Unlike many of the polarizing environment and health issues, like global warming, it is commonly agreed upon that ambient air pollution is a public health threat^1,2. In the U.S. alone, more than 100 million people are exposed to varying amounts of particulate matter (PM), lead, sulfur and/or nitrogen dioxide in the air in quantities that exceed the recognized health standards set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)^3,4.

The danger lies in PM of 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter (or approximately 1/30 of the width of a human hair), which is small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and other organs of the body. Although trends observed by the EPA have shown that hazardous emissions polluting our air have actually decreased over the course of the past decade, it remains that, as of 2013, over two million deaths a year can be directly linked to air pollution⁵.

Historically, much of the attention on the risks of air pollution tends to center around cancer and other diseases affecting the respiratory and cardiovascular system⁶. This makes sense, especially considering the important and obvious links between air quality and lung and heart health. However, recent empirical investigations of the brain have observed concerning evidence about the potential impact of pollution on neurological functioning and wellbeing. In other words, bad air quality has been found to have an unprecedented and insidious impact on our brain.

Air Pollution & The Brain

Research suggests air pollution can affect everything from neurodevelopment in-utero to accelerating cognitive decline in older people⁷. Given the delicate nature of the prenatal environment and its importance for fetal health, it may come as no surprise that toxins found in the air are harmful to healthy brain growth both during pregnancy and throughout the lifespan. Indeed, given the detrimental brain effects on children living in heavily polluted cities, the past few years have witnessed a surging interest in the correlations between ambient air pollution and compromised brain health^8,7. For example, one research group using animal models found mice exposed to average metropolitan area levels of pollution performed worse on learning and memory tasks compared to a control group in a container with filtered air. Additionally, in a companion study by the same group, the mice in the polluted air showed more depressive-like and anxiety-like symptoms and behaviors than their filtered-air counterparts⁹.

Although these findings are concerning, results from animal studies can’t always be generalized to humans. However, we do know that children’s physiological development is uniquely vulnerable to the exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants compared to adults. Simply from a lung function perspective, children breathe in higher levels of polluted air relative to their weight and also tend to spend greater amounts of time outside, leaving them even more susceptible to the disease and dysfunction caused by pollutants¹⁰.

A number of recent investigations conducted between 2012 and 2015 have looked into analyzing brain imaging data belonging to children living in urban areas with the objective of pinpointing some of the dangerous side-effects of living in heavily polluted areas on the brain, particularly in light of poor outcomes on psychometric tests on behalf of children living in these areas¹¹. For instance, upon examining brain structure (i.e. the physical architecture that comprises the brain), results indicate abnormalities in the brain’s white matter, which are often highly correlated with a number of psychological and cognitive diseases and deficits¹².

Unsurprisingly, the structural findings were corroborated by “functional” anomalies (meaning parts of the brain are behaving differently than in a typical population). Examples include compromised senses, including smell and hearing, as well as a number of cognitive deficits, consistent with the poor psychometric assessments noted previously. In fact, many research groups have consistently found that school-aged children located in highly polluted areas perform less well on cognitive and neurological tests, all while controlling for confounding factors such as low-SES, gender, age and mother’s IQ¹².

Further cases of such studies include a 2010 investigation showing that children with exposure to high levels of nitrogen dioxide scored between 6 and 9 points less on measures of working memory¹³. This continues to hold true in 2015, when a research group from the University of Texas found lower grade point averages among El Paso fourth-and-fifth graders exposed to high levels of ambient air pollution¹⁴. Perhaps more alarmingly, evidence shows these effects can start early, whereby children with high levels of prenatal exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons (a group of chemicals that get released upon burning substances such as coal, oil, gasoline and trash) were recorded to have lower than expected IQ scores at the age of 5 compared to children that had not had such exposures in-utero^15,16.

What does this mean for students?

So the bottom line is: how does all this affect how children grow, develop and learn? Despite the body of evidence confirming the negative effects of ambient air pollution on children’s health (as well as the routine air quality monitoring by the EPA), few investigations have been carried out to examine the consequences of the associations between air quality and academic performance. To complicate matters, many groups disproportionately place low-income and ethnic minority communities in areas with high levels of air pollution – segments of the population already associated with lower performance on standardized tests^17,10. Reasons for this may be due to factors such as parental educational disadvantages and school location in urban centers near busy roads, which in turn are populated by greater proportions of at-risk student populations16. However, these links are not found ubiquitously, and many theorists have shown a robust enough relationship between high exposure to air pollutants and compromised academic performance to withstand confounding variables including school size, school location and student demographics¹⁰.

So what could be the true outcomes of these findings? Based on the sheer number of studies purporting the negative impacts of air pollution on overall health and the brain, it would not be a stretch to imagine the ramifications of even mild exposure to air toxins beyond GPA or IQ – for instance, some have anecdotally discussed how newly occurring or exacerbated respiratory problems increase fatigue and attention problems in school, with greater bouts of absenteeism as a result ¹⁸.

The danger herein lies in the insidious nature of these ill-effects, because it is not likely that common issues such as asthma or attention-deficit disorders be linked with poor air quality; and even if air quality was the primary culprit behind these problems, it would be hard to effectively disentangle it from other possible etiologies. Needless to say, the links between academic performance, air pollution exposure as well as other related health problems remain poorly understood and require further research in order to produce realistic solutions to combat the problem. 

What can we do about it?

From a survey of the current literature, a number of research groups have initiated studies on the effects of poor air quality; however relatively few have posed any concrete solutions to the problem. As of October 2015, select federal agencies (such as the EPA) along with public health officials have acknowledged the research discussed in this article and have responded by organizing online events and workshops to work with schools and educational institutes to better monitor indoor air quality in schools:

 

1. Creating Healthy Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Schools: http://www.epa.gov/iaq-schools
2. Webinars hosted by the EPA on improving air quality in schools: http://www.epa.gov/schools/schools-webinars
3. A list of organizations working to manage with air pollution: http://www.inspirationgreen.com/organizations-air.html#AirPollutionOrganizations

Clearly, given the complex nature of pediatric air pollution research, extensive interdisciplinary collaboration between fields like neuroscience, radiology and epidemiology (to name a few) is necessary in order to create greater awareness and build efforts on behalf of schools and educational facilities to improve indoor environment quality. This, coupled with a more comprehensive understanding of the damage of air pollution on the brain will hopefully facilitate more effective interventions to compensate for the ill-effects of bad air quality on future generations⁸.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Katsouyanni, K. (2003). Ambient Air Pollution and Health, British Medical Bulletin, 68, 143-156.
2. World Health Organization (WHO). (2014). Fact sheet N°313 Ambient (outdoor) air quality and health.
3. Lelieveld J., Evans J.S., Fnais M., Giannadaki D., Pozzer A. (2015). The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale. Nature, 525(7569):367-371.
4. World Health Organization. (2003). Health aspects of air pollution with particulate matter, ozone and nitrogen dioxide, report, 98 pp., Bonn, Germany.
5. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2015, September). FAQ. Retrieved From the Environmental Protection Agency website: http://www3.epa.gov/pmdesignations/faq.htm
6. Silva, R. A. et al. (2013). Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 8, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034005
7. Chen, J.C., Wang, X., Wellenius, G.A., Serre, M.L., Driscoll, I., Casanova, R., McArdle, J.J., Manson, J.E., Chui, H.C., Espeland, M.A. (2015). Ambient air pollution and neurotoxicity on brain structure: evidence from women’s health initiative memory study. Annals of Neurology. 78, 466–476.
8. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Torres-Jardón, R., Kulesza, R. J., Park, S.-B., & D’Angiulli, A. (2014). Air pollution and detrimental effects on children’s brain. The need for a multidisciplinary approach to the issue complexity and challenges. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 613. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00613
9. Fonken, L.K., Xu, X., Weil, Z.M., Chen G., Sun Q., Rajagopalan S., Nelson, R.J. (2011). Air pollution impairs cognition, provokes depressive-like behaviors and alters hippocampal cytokine expression and morphology. Molecular Psychiatry, doi: 0.1038/mp.2011.76
10. Mohai P., Kweon B.S., Lee S., Ard K. (2011). Air pollution around schools is linked to poorer student health and academic performance. Health Affairs, 30 (5):852–62.
11. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Solt, A.C., Henriquez-Roldan, C., Torres-Jardón, R., Nuse, B., Herritt, L., Villareal-Calderón, R., Osnaya, N., Stone, I., Garcia, R., Brooks, D.M., et al. (2008). Long-term air pollution exposure is associated with neuroinflammation, an altered innate immune response, disruption of the blood–brain barrier, ultrafine particulate deposition, and accumulation of amyloid beta-42 and alpha-synuclein in children and young adults. Toxicologic Pathology. 36, 289–310.
12. Calderón-Garcidueñas, L., Cross, J.V., Franco-Lira, M., Aragon-flores, M., Kavanaugh, M., Torres-Jardón, R., et al. (2013). Brain immune interactions and air pollution: macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF), prion cellular protein (PrPC ), interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin 1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra), and serum interleukin-2 (IL-2) in cerebrospinal fluid and MIF in serum differentiate urban children exposed to severe vs. low air pollution. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7, 183.
13. Freire C., Ramos R., Puertas R., Lopez-Espinosa M.J., Julvez J., Aguilera I., Cruz F., Fernandez M.F., Sunyer J., Olea N. (2010). Association of traffic-related air pollution with cognitive development in children. Journal of Epidemiological & Community Health, 64:223–228.
14. Clark-Reyna, S., Grineski, S.E., Collins, T.W. (2015). Residential exposure to air toxics is linked to lower grade point averages among school children in El Paso, Texas, USA. Population & Environment, 1-22. doi: 10.1007/s11111-015-0241-8.
15. Edwards, S.C., Jedrychowski, W., Butscher, M., Camann, D., Kieltyka, A., Mroz, E., et al. (2010). Prenatal exposure to airborne polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and children’s intelligence at 5 years of age in a prospective cohort study in Poland. Environmental Health Perspectives, 118, 1326–1331.
16. Suglia F., Gryparis A., Wright R.O., Schwartz J.,Wright R.J. (2008). Association of black carbon with cognition among children in a prospective birth cohort study. American Journal of Epidemiology. 167(3):280–6.
17. Pastor M., Morello-Frosch R., Sadd J. (2006). Breathless: pollution, schools, and environmental justice in California. Policy Studies Journal, 34(3):337–62.
18. Miller, S., Vela, M. (2013). The Effects of Air Pollution on Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Chile

Confusion is a powerful feeling.

If it doesn’t turn to frustration, it can give rise to curiosity, motivation, and engagement. So why do we tend to think of confusion as a negative feeling, as the opposite of understanding, our goal?

In order to address the roots of the issue, we’ll have to re-examine two of the assumptions in our teaching and curriculum designing.

Assumption 1: The purpose of education is the outcome; students need to learn to solve these problems (write these essays, respond to these questions) correctly.

Assumption 2: The best way to teach students a complex concept is to break it down into manageable chunks.

Let’s tackle the first one first. While we know that successful parroting of knowledge is not the ultimate goal of education (especially in an age where anyone can google the answer to anything), this ideology is a hard one to shake. After all, we cannot peer into the heads of our students and assess them on their process; all we can do is test the degree to which they’ve understood the difficult concepts.

This leads to a very behaviorist way of looking at learning, which assumes that all we can know is the students’ behavior so we should not try to speculate about cognitive processes we cannot see. This does no one any good, as the students may not be learning any transferrable concepts or skills except following directions.

Of course, this works differently for different subjects, but the core idea remains the same. In math it may be the difference between mechanically doing calculations and exploring relationships and representations; in social studies it may be the difference between memorizing dates and understanding the social trends that contributed to historical events; in science it may be the difference between remembering and being able to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree from memory, and understanding the fluid evolutionary process that it represents.

The second assumption comes from a reductionist perspective, which assumes that any whole can be explained by breaking it down into its constituent parts. In other words, the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, and no more. As we are learning from Complex Systems science, it is often not the particular pieces but their relationships and interactions that give a substance its qualities. For example, all of matter is made of the same elements (hydrogen, oxygen, and so on) but it is their different configurations that lead to different materials. Learning all of the steps that make up solving a complex math problem may be like learning the elements that make up metal without ever having the experience of actually touching metal. It does not mean that one understands the relationships between the concepts that they are manipulating.

When students are taught a subject like math in pieces, without seeing how the pieces fit together, it can be discouraging, and make math seem boring and frustrating. If instead, math is taught as an exploration of relationships, with guidance toward noticing patterns, the process can be creative, and can show students the deep beauty of mathematics. For a great example, see Alan Kay’s TED talk.

Further, students do not begin as empty vessels. Rather, they have already built models for understanding the world. Complex concepts are often complex because they are unintuitive, and simply presenting the pieces to students is often not enough for them to truly integrate the ideas with their existing conceptual frameworks.

Taken together, these assumptions lead to the conclusion that confusion is the result of unsuccessful teaching, and not, as research suggests, a valuable catalyst for deeper learning and better retention.

“We are as curriculum designers and teachers and educators, over-engineering the curriculum, and we’re surgically removing the thinking, so that our kids are simply following instructions, painting by the numbers, and getting the grade. We need to get thinking back at every desk.”

Dr. Derek Cabrera in his Ted Talk

* * *

Many teachers are already successfully making this happen in their classrooms, but it is becoming increasingly difficult as they receive pressure from administration, parents, lawmakers, and corporate reformers about what and how they should teach. Reconsidering educational goals and how deep learning could feel may help contribute to a conversation that can align the views of these various stakeholders and create the space teachers need to teach effectively.

In his TED talk, Tim Harford talks about frustrating disruptions leading to improvement in all kinds of tasks from solving a murder mystery to writing a rock and roll album. He talks about how we shy away from creating difficulties for ourselves and in doing so we miss opportunities for greater creativity and learning.

So how can we create an environment of thinking deliberately in our classrooms?

1. Repackaging problems to make them active.

Textbook math problems often suffer very severely from the reductionist and behaviorist mindsets described above. This is evident, for example, when math problems take a real-world scenario, convert it to mathematical terms, formulate the question, break the solution down into a step-by-step process, and label the steps a., b., c., and d.

 

In his Ted Talk, Dan Meyer discusses this process for typical math problems.

“What we’re doing is we are taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we’re paving a smooth straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way.”

This illustration is from math class, but of course a similar process it taking place across the curriculum. To “get thinking back at every desk,” as Cabrera describes it, we need to un-pave that path.

Start with the complexity – it will confuse the students – but that confusion can be a good thing.

Guide them as they traverse the difficult terrain between the question and the answer, but do not give in to the temptation of trying to make it as easy and painless as possible, as this will ultimately help no one.

This does not mean that each educator has to reinvent the entire curriculum. It can be as simple as taking off all of the training wheels provided by the design of the question, and collectively rebuilding them together. For example, in his talk Dan Meyer describes taking the problem pictured above and offering students only the visual image of the skiers and the question: which section is the steepest? After discussion, students will generate the idea of labeling the skiers in order to more easily refer to them and overlaying a grid in order to more precisely think about steepness. “The math serves the conversation; the conversation does not serve the math.”

This idea of some sort of struggle as essential to learning has long been known in the research, under the umbrellas and in the manifestations of several different concepts.

• Active Learning: In one meta-analysis of 158 studies, students who learned STEM material by listening to a lecture performed 6% worse on the exam and were 1.5 times more likely to fail than otherwise identical students who learned the same material through active learning.¹ Being given the answers (or even the questions!) is significantly less effective for deep learning than figuring that material out for oneself.

• Desirable Difficulty: It is easier to study by packing study sessions together and blocking practicing on the same topic together. However research² has shown that creating a desirable difficulty in one’s study habits makes the studying more effective. Spacing rather than massing study sessions; interleaving rather than blocking practice on separate topics; varying how to-be-learned material is presented all have better outcomes on memory.

• Disfluency: Better memory for tasks that take more effort can happen due to superficial features such as font. In one study, high school students given material in a difficult font performed better than those given the same material in an easy to read font. This was true across many classes and subjects.³ Even if the extra effort is superficial, it can still make the material more memorable.

• Russel’s Core Affect Framework: In a study⁴ that measured change in students’ affect while they learned using a computer tutor, researchers were able to calculate which affective states most often led to which other states.

 

In the graphic above, the x axis represents valence: on the right is positive and on the left is negative. The y axis represents arousal: on the top is high and on the bottom is low. Boredom, at the bottom, is negative and disengaging, and it is also a dead end as far as affect goes.

Confusion, located in the slightly negative and slightly aroused area can turn into Frustration (if the task is too hard) or it can turn into Flow (if the task is the optimal challenge). This is notably different from what we might consider to be a similar affect — surprise, or a positive affect — delight, which do not predictably lead to any other affective states. In other words, it takes a challenge to enter a state of flow in order to overcome it. The researchers found that Confusion and Flow were positively correlated to learning whereas Boredom was negatively correlated.

2. Cognitive Disequilibrium.

As mentioned above, students do not come into a classroom as a blank slate; they have already, consciously and subconsciously, constructed their own ways of understanding the world.

Complex ideas are often complex because they are counterintuitive. Presenting students with information that does not fit into their model will cause them to expend mental effort in order to accommodate or assimilate this information into their schema. That mental effort helps them to learn the material deeply. This idea was embraced by two of the founding fathers of Developmental Psychology: Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.⁵

Jean Piaget created a model of learning that places disequilibrium at its center. Students avoid disequilibrium because it is an uncomfortable state, and also seek it out because of curiosity; it indicates to them that their model is incomplete. Disequilibrium then leads to accommodation of their mental model to make sense of their new experience, thus updating their mental model.⁴

Lev Vygotsky coined the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development. This is the set of tasks that a learner is not able to complete on their own, but can complete with some guidance. That extra bit of struggle and challenge makes this the most optimal zone for learning. It is important to note that this zone will be different for different students, and a problem that is in the ZPD for one student may be too easy for another and too difficult for a third.

3. Lead with the most Relevant or Beautiful

One reason that students are disengaged is that it is often difficult to see the direct relevance of the material in the textbook with their daily lives.

For this reason there has been a large movement toward project based learning, often with a community service lens. For example, many schools have implemented projects that teach students about surface area and volume by challenging them to design a more environmentally friendly package for something they use, and send the design to the company. This places the seemingly abstract notion of equations into an actionable and meaningful context.

There is another angle for engaging students, which is less often discussed: beauty.

By the time material reaches the page of a textbook, it has been isolated from the puzzle that spurred it and from the context which makes it meaningful. As a result, students must memorize the names of various parts of a cell and learn to mechanically manipulate equations, without a grain of interest or joy. It’s no wonder that people do not look favorably on this dry material.

And yet, what often drives researchers in a given discipline is the inherent beauty and curiosity they feel about the subject matter. How can we put this beauty front and center? For a fast-paced example of math’s undeniable beauty take a look at any of the videos of Vi Hart (some of my favorites are the ones on plants, hexaflexagons, or the mobius strip).

In Alan Kay’s ted talk (mentioned above) he tells the story of a teacher who asked her 6 year old students to choose a shape, and make a larger version of that shape out of those shapes (for example a rhombus made of rhombuses). She then had them fill out a chart about how many pieces they needed to add to the shape before to make it the next shape, and how many pieces total the shape took up.

She then led the students to come together and share their results. They realized that even though they had chosen different shapes, the higher level patterns were the same; the students were baffled.

This result brought with it so many more mathematical questions to explore than answers to end up at. Without knowing the term “differential equations,” these 6 year olds experienced the beauty of math in a way that many college students (who do know this term) never get to experience.

To engage students and help them to learn material more deeply, we can up-end the way we normally teach all subjects, to highlight their beauty, their relevance, and to place their challenges front and center.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415. [Paper]
2. Bjork, R. A., & Linn, M. C. (2006). The science of learning and the learning of science. APS Observer, 19(3).
3. Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Vaughan, E. B. (2011). Fortune favors the (): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118(1), 111-115. [Paper]
4. D’Mello, S. (2012). Monitoring affective trajectories during complex learning. In Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 2325-2328). Springer US.[Paper]
5. Blake B., Pope, T. (2008) Developmental Psychology: Incorporating Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s Theories in Classrooms. Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Education 1(1) 59 – 67. [Paper]

• Meyer, D. (2010). Math class needs a makeover. [Ted Talk]
• Harford, T. (2015). How frustration can make us more creative. [Ted Talk]
• Cabrera, D. (2011). How thinking works [Tedx Talk]

Recently, my sister and I were watching a TV show that explored the minds and brains of geniuses through history. One particular point in the program caught my attention: a man considered a genius was found to have a higher than average number of glial cells – “glue” cells, also thought of as helper cells, that typically support and protect nerve cells – in his brain.

This fact was interesting, yes, but when used as the reason for why this person could be considered a genius, my gut reaction said that this oversimplified claim doesn’t stick. A lot of people have above average numbers of glial cells, but their brains may function quite differently from one another.

That said, it is truly an incredible time: we can tap into electronic newsfeeds to find various interpretations and translations of the latest research related to education, health, and more. In the sphere of mindfulness – an area of personal interest and study – I see intriguing presentations of new findings every day that could be useful in self-development and supporting our next generation as teachers and parents. As consumers of media-disseminated research, however, it’s also important to recognize gaps in and the boldness of causal claims. In other words, just because things are correlated, that doesn’t mean they directly affect each other.

As we continue exploring the world of mindfulness and yoga research and education – an area showing a lot of promise for executive functioning and socioemotional development in youth and throughout adulthood- let’s pause to evaluate a few common claims.

Claim 1: Mindfulness leads to healthy brain development in kids.

So far, mindfulness meditation research has shown neural benefits in studies with primarily adult participants. In particular, mindfulness meditation has been associated with increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex of the brain related to executive functioning, or planning and problem-solving, as well as significantly reduced levels of stress.¹

Presently, brain-imaging research on the effects of mindfulness is lacking in younger populations due to high cost of money and time (usually 30-45 minutes for a child brain MRI). As touched upon in the Young Meditators article , however, we do know that childhood adversity such as stress, neglect, and substance abuse can significantly hinder healthy development of a young brain, which can lead to complications later in life.

Over the last few years, more studies using cognitive tasks, surveys, and observations as data support the potential benefit of yoga and mindfulness on child self-regulation – a type of executive functioning.² Executive functioning, sometimes referred to as “EF” in the science community, is defined as the cognitive self-regulation skills required for planning and the completion of complex tasks.³

To know for sure how mindfulness can impact development of a child’s actual brain, particularly those related to executive functioning in the prefrontal cortex, technology like fMRI is required. Existing qualitative research, while somewhat limited by survey and observation bias, is required as initial steps to pave the way toward neuroimaging research in mindfulness practice’s impact on the brain.

Claim 2: Mindfulness triggers better test scores.

While practicing a few minutes of mindfulness meditation doesn’t necessarily guarantee that 100% on an English final, mindfulness practice may indirectly influence school performance. As previously mentioned, present qualitative research suggests that mindfulness in elementary and early childhood populations may enhance EF. Given that EF is an established predictor of a number of performance indicators, including math and language gains from pre-k through kindergarten,⁴ mindfulness may indirectly influence school achievement through its impact on EF.

Practicing mindfulness may also support the “Spacing Effect,” a phenomenon crisply explained in a recent article by Learning and the Brain contributor, Andrew Watson. In the Spacing Effect, ample time (space) to forget content or a skill in order to remember it again can lead to stronger retention. One of many forms of mindfulness practice includes drawing attention away from surroundings in order to focus on the breath, more or less giving the mind a “break.” Allowing the mind to focus on the physiology and sensations of breathing might offer space to the brain to forget learned content or skill, requiring concerted effort to “remember anew” and leading to stronger long-term memory.⁵

Claim 3: Mindfulness is only effective in high-needs populations

Mindfulness and yoga practices can offer benefits for all, but a few recent studies have revealed stronger improvements in children who tend to struggle with self-regulation. In a study led by Lisa Flook, elementary students either received 30 minutes twice a week of Mindful Awareness Practice – breath, body, and thinking awareness – or received no training in a control group. Overall, teachers and parents reported improvement of all children in the mindfulness program. Interestingly, children who showed difficulty in executive functioning in the mindfulness group showed much stronger improvement across the eight weeks of training as compared to children struggling with executive functioning in the control group. These results suggest that while mindfulness practice may be helpful for all children in managing daily demands, mindfulness could intentionally be used as an intervention for children struggling specifically with EF.⁶

Additionally, Karen Bluthe and colleagues found improved perception of stress and life satisfaction overall in a community sample of teens following participation in a six-week BREATHE mindfulness program. Bluthe also identified especially strong reductions of perceived stress and depression symptoms in at-risk adolescents.⁷ These findings suggest that mindfulness programs may not only support students managing high-poverty circumstances, but general adolescent populations.

As research in mindfulness continues, more patterns will certainly be found allowing us to make more generalized, sturdy claims – shifts in executive functioning in children may be seen in the prefrontal cortex through fMRIs, mindfulness curriculum may offer similar results when replicated across various student populations.

For now, our role as educators and parents is not to dismiss a practice right away, but to consume with care to best support our children.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Lazar, S. W., Bush, G. L., Gollub, R., Fricchione, G., Khalsa, G., & Benson, H. (2000). Functional brain mapping of the relaxation response and meditation. NeuroReport, 11(7), 1581-1585. [Article]
2. Flook, L., et al. (2010). Effects of mindful awareness practices on executive functions in elementary school children. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 26(1), 70-95. [Article]
3. S.K. Thurman, C.A. Fiorello (Eds.), Applied cognitive research in K-3 classrooms, Routledge, New York, NY (2008), pp. 41–84 [Book]
4. Fuhs, M., Nesbitt, K., Farran, D., Dong, N., & Eccles, Jacquelynne S. (2014). Longitudinal Associations Between Executive Functioning and Academic Skills Across Content Areas. Developmental Psychology, 50(6), 1698-1709. [Article]
5. Watson, A. The Science of Homework: Why Timing is Everything. [Blog]
6. Flook, L., et al. (2010). Effects of mindful awareness practices on executive functions in elementary school children. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 26(1), 70-95. [Article]
7. Bluth, Roberson, & Gaylord. (2015). A Pilot Study of a Mindfulness Intervention for Adolescents and the Potential Role of Self-Compassion in Reducing Stress. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. [Article]

Whether you want to learn to tie a tie or you want to learn about galaxies and cosmology, the Internet can be a gateway to knowledge. This is exciting, but comes with a huge caveat: most of the world does not have Internet access¹. This problem fuels the nonprofit Learning Equality², whose focus is on “bringing the online learning revolution offline.” In order to do this, they’ve created a platform called KA Lite³, an offline version of material from Khan Academy that is downloaded onto tablets.

The goals of KA Lite and Learning Equality more generally extend beyond increasing access to existing resources. Although at first glance it may seem that they make teachers less relevant, they in fact include functionality that facilitate teachers and help them to become even more effective. Although many teachers may want to give thorough feedback on students’ work as often as necessary, their time is limited. Resources like Khan Academy and KA Lite alleviate some of this difficulty by giving students immediate feedback, as well as relaying this information to teachers who can use it to identify each students’ progress much more efficiently.

Another pervasive struggle not only with online educational content but also with in-person content is maintaining students’ motivation to learn. By implementing a points system, in particular a system that is both consistent and includes elements of randomness, learning takes on a game-like quality. In effect, the point system allows students to become engaged in a “game” tailored to their level. If doing math problems for the sake of improving math skills feels tedious to many students, doing the problems in order to advance in a game is likely to be much less so.

I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Tibbles, a fellow grad student in UC San Diego’s Cognitive Science department and a cofounder of Learning Equality. We discussed KA Lite, the organization’s offline version of Khan Academy, which has been downloaded onto tablets and distributed throughout the world. Throughout our conversation, I learned what KA Lite offers students, how it capitalizes on what we know about human users and learners, and the organization’s goals for continuing to bridge the global digital divide.

After speaking with Richard, I felt optimistic about the future of global education, as Learning Equality (and many others) increase access to high-quality materials and improve our understanding of how to best teach – both at home and around the world. I hope this piece similarly inspires you!

Check out the interview below:

 

References & Further Reading

1. Rodriguez, S. (2014). 60% of the world’s population still won’t have Internet by the end of 2014. The Los Angeles Times. [Article]

2. Learning Equality [Organization]

3. KA Lite [Initiative]

• Wang, D. (2015). Beyond the edge of the internet: Learning equality crowdsources funding for offline education. UC San Diego News Center. [Article]

If you teach middle or high school—or if you parent teens—you have no doubt wondered at the chaotic muddle of teenage lives. How can adolescents possibly be so…adolescent?

As you stare in bafflement and awe, dread and bemusement, you may occasionally wish for a wise, insightful, humorous guide: a Virgil who can talk your Dante through the wild experience around you.

Well, let me introduce you to your Virgil: her name is Lisa Damour.

Introductions

Dr. Lisa Damour directs Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls. (If you don’t subscribe to their newsletter, you should: https://www.laurelschool.org/page.cfm?p=625&LockSSL=true.)

With this experience—combined with her private psychotherapy practice, and her work at Case Western Reserve University—she knows not only the research on adolescence and adolescents, but also their daily school reality.

She understands teens, she understands teachers, and she understands schools—and, she knows from the research. How’s that for a guide?

To help make sense of adolescent muddle, Dr. Damour describes seven predictable and healthy transitions that teens must undertake to arrive at successful adulthood. In her view, many of the puzzles of adolescent behavior—and many of the questions on how to help teens effectively—become manageable and even plausible when understood within this transition framework.

No More Peter Pan

In Damour’s transitional framework, adolescents must first “Part with Childhood” to arrive at adult maturity. As teachers, we don’t always know our students before they come to our classrooms, and so it can be difficult to know their younger selves—and how hard they must work to shuck those selves.

Many of the surprising behaviors of adolescence aren’t so surprising when understood as our students’ fierce attempts—either knowing or unknowing—to put aside childish parts of their past. Feisty rejection of adult authority, indifference to helpful guidance, abrupt swerves between competence and incompetence: all of these dramatic, teenly behaviors make sense when seen as their awkward attempts to negotiate this treacherous first transition.

Deep Pools

One of Damour’s strengths as a writer is her ability to conjure vivid analogies—analogies that both clarify a situation and suggest how to manage it well.

For example: when thinking of your role in a teen’s attempt to part with childhood, consider a swimming pool. (Yes, a swimming pool.)

The water represents the mature, grown up experience in which teens want to swim. And you—the teacher, the parent—are the edge of the pool. You establish the boundaries within which the teens take on their mature experiences. And, crucially, you provide a reliable handhold when they need to hang on to something solid.

In this way, Damour explains one of the most puzzling and painful parts of working with adolescents: “the push off.” After exhausting themselves trying out mature experiences, teens may need to swim back over and hang on to the pool’s edge for a while. That is, they stay close to us, relying on our strength and support. And then, the need to part with childhood strongly reasserts itself, and the teen pushes off. Hard. Suddenly, adult support and experience are as foolish and useless as they were dependable and necessary just a moment ago.

Although Damour does not say so, I think this “pool” analogy helps explain some difficult teacher/parent dynamics as well. Sometimes, teens can hang on to “edge-of-the-pool” teachers in place of “edge-of-the-pool” parents: a hurtful vision for any parent already missing the close connection of years past.

Behind the Lines

Many years ago, I relied on a wonderful school counselor for guidance and advice. During one of our conversations, she said: “I’m not trying to give you a script here…”

I interrupted her: “Why not? I really like your scripts!”

It turns out, her husband hated it when she scripted conversations for him, so she was avoiding providing me with lines.

This counselor’s husband would like Untangled as much as I do, because Damour provides both sample scripts to follow and the logic behind them.

Here’s an example (lightly edited with ellipses) on the topic of sexting:

Find an opportunity to say something such as, “I’ve heard that some boys think it’s okay to text a girl…to ask her to send nude photos or do sexual things. This goes without saying, but just to say it, that’s totally inappropriate behavior on the guy’s part…” Your daughter might brush you off with, “Geez, of course I know that it’s wrong!” but your breath wasn’t wasted…Your daughter will be glad to hear that she’s not the one acting crazy.

For me, knowing both the lines and the reasons behind them makes her suggested words especially helpful.

“More Alike Than Different”

If you didn’t look closely at the subtitle to Untangled, then I may have succeeded in keeping a small secret up to now: Damour centers her book on the experience of adolescent girls. (Perhaps Damour’s next book will focus on boys. Potential title: emBATtled MAN)

I’ve postponed mentioning this focus for a simple reason: much of Damour’s analysis and guidance applies equally well to girls and boys. And—although she pauses every now and then to note gendered differences in adolescent experience—Damour is refreshingly non-doctrinaire about those differences. As she writes in her introduction, “Fundamentally, girls and boys are more alike than they are different, so don’t be surprised to discover that some of the stories and advice that follow speak to your experience of knowing or raising [or, I would add, teaching] a teenage boy.”

In short, while Untangled is informed by the experience of an all-girls school, it will benefit teachers of boys as well. (In fact, in her section on LGBTQ identity, Damour talks briefly about students who identify as transgender. In other words: gender is important in her analysis, but not absolute.)

Final Thoughts 

Given my enthusiasm for Untangled, you may wonder if Damour is a relative, or a creditor. (For the record, she is neither. My niece did attend Laurel School, but they never met.) Although this is one of the most helpful books about adolescents I’ve read in a while, I do think that teachers should approach it ready to make two kinds of translations.

First, Damour focuses on families: adolescent girls and their parents (and, to a lesser degree, siblings). Little of her advice is framed specifically for teachers. As a high school teacher, I do think that the “Seven Transitions” framework is greatly helpful in understanding our students’ behavior. Translating this framework to a teacher’s perspective, in other words, should be easy to do.

Second, teachers will necessarily balance Damour’s experience with their own; in some cases, we may simply disagree. I myself was surprised to read that—in extreme circumstances—she believes that paying students for grades is a least-bad option. For me, the other options would need to be dire indeed to resort to such a strategy.

Damour writes not only about a teen’s need to part with childhood, but also about several other key transitions: joining a “new tribe,” managing emotions, sexual discovery, and so forth. In each of these chapters, her insight, knowledge of research, humor, and empathy all make this tumultuous time seem familiar and manageable to the adults who teach and parent them.

Untangled was released February 2, 2016 and is available here.

Accepting The Need to Belong

Last fall, we heard about highly charged situations arising across countless college campuses. ^{1 2 3} Some people reacted strongly by name-calling and spreading accusations of “bad parenting” or “lack of discipline” to explain these students’ actions.⁴ As a student of education and psychology, I asked myself:

What are these students really asking for? Why are they protesting?

Of course, I’m not the first person to examine these questions. Annie Murphy Paul, a psychology journalist, answered these questions in her recent article in Time Magazine.⁵ What these students really want, she concludes, is a “sense of belonging.”

Over the years, students have repeatedly asserted their desire to belong. Two years ago at Harvard, for example, students of color started the “I too am Harvard” movement to increase representation of marginalized communities on campus.⁶ Again, they are sending the same message: I am here, and I want to feel that I belong here too.

What does it mean to “belong?” And what impact might it have on students’ academic achievement and motivation? After spending four years of their lives on a campus, what factors help students to reach a level of ease and comfort, where they can feel as much at home as their peers? What factors prevent them from feeling comfortable?

Perhaps it’s easier to start with what doesn’t make students feel like they belong. It may be a lack of teachers from minority groups. It might also be a lack of representation of students’ minority group in the books they read and the movies they watch in class. It may be that there are few role models for them to follow. It may be the normalization of the majority culture in education while marginalized communities subject areas are referred to as “ethnic studies”. It may be the exclusion of minority students in student government or groups. The list goes on and on.

Students are speaking up because they seem to feel that they are stuck in the “out-group”, and politics aside, from a psychological perspective, I hope we can all agree that’s not how our campuses should be making any student feel.

The Science of Belonging

When we find ourselves in situations where we are the “out- group” or in an environment in which we feel like an outsider, we use our mental energy to monitor for threats, leaving fewer resources for higher cognitive processes. When students feel as if they don’t belong in a school setting, the cognitive energy that should be used on social engagement and learning is being used to scan for group barriers, discrimination and stereotypes.

As adults, we rarely acknowledge the importance of fun. Being part of a social group in school encourages us and motivates us to go to class. As Lev Vygotsky put it, we are “social learners.”⁷ School is a time when you are finding your sense of identity, and this is largely determined through who we hang out with. It is important that students’ conceptions of their identities allow them to believe that academic work holds value for them. If they believe that speakers of their language and members of their gender, racial, and ethnic groups do not have the ability to attain certain academic standards, they will act according to that belief. This belief can sometimes lead to what Claude Steele refers to as “stereotype threat.” Stereotype threat is feeling “at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype” about their race, gender, ethnicity etc.⁸

Claude Steele, a social psychologist, posits that when a group’s stereotypes are emphasized, their academic performance tends to deteriorate. In one experiment, when Black college students’ race was emphasized, they performed worse on standardized tests than their White counterparts. When race was not mentioned, they performed on par and sometimes better than the White students. These results, along with others focusing on stereotypes pertaining to other groups, such as his experiments on female mathematicians, showed the harmful effects of being aware that you are being viewed through the lens of a stereotype.⁸ Several factors seem to cause this decrease in academic performance triggered by stereotype threat: anxiety, physiological stress, and reduced capacity of our working memory.⁹

For a person facing a stereotype threat, the process of thinking through the possibility of confirming a stereotype by performing badly on a test causes a great deal of anxiety. In turn, this anxiety places a drain on a student’s energy and cognitive resources. As a result, the capacity of working memory is diminished, and performance is impaired.

Working memory is the ability we have to mentally manipulate information over short periods of time. Working memory can be thought of as your scratch pad, or your personal search engine, or as a mental workspace that we can use to store important information in the course of our mental activities. You can see how having an impaired working memory could affect your ability to mentally search through vast quantities of information. Even if you did manage to remember the necessary information, your mental workspace may still be in disarray.

Stereotype threat has physiological, as well as cognitive, effects. Social threat or disconnection seems to be processed in the brain in the same way as the threat of physical harm.¹⁰ When the threat is detected, a range of neurophysiological processes are set in motion. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) goes into overdrive, releasing a hormone called cortisol. Not surprisingly, cortisol is often called the stress hormone. High levels of cortisol seem to decrease neural connections the hippocampus, part of the brain associated with learning and memory and stress control. ¹⁰ Cortisol can negatively impact the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with high-order cognitive abilities.

For more details watch this short clip from TEDEd on How Stress Affects the Brain.

As educators, we need to make it a priority to create an environment where our students strive and can learn to their full potential.

Why Belonging Matters in the Classroom 

Research has also shown that academic outcomes, such as motivation, dropout rates and academic performance, were correlated with feelings of belonging.¹¹ A study demonstrated that college students’ self-reported of level of school belonging in high school positively corresponded with academic achievement in college.¹²

Walton and Cohen studied what happened when minority students and white students were made aware of the percentage of people in their chosen field of study who belonged to their ethnic or racial group. They compared how this knowledge affected minority and white students’ performance in their chosen field. An intervention that mitigated any doubts of belonging in a specific field had a positive effect on academic achievement. ¹³

This finding is consistent with Ladson-Billing’s research, which found that having role models to look up to, whether through literature or a teacher, has an impact on students and how they define what is attainable.¹⁴

In this country there is a very clear image of what success looks like. These ideals of success apply to all domains of life, not just the academic aspects. If we are in the majority culture, then it may appear that the system works well – but that’s not always the case for marginalized students.

Often, it is not only in school that minority students do not feel they belong – it is in every facet of society. The problems faced in schools is the effect of bias in society at large. However, the school is one place where we should be able to completely control whether students’ voices can be heard and their opinions can be of value. The classroom has the unique opportunity to provide equal support and equitable opportunities to all students.

Will our students end up feeling the same when they reach college? What are we doing in our classrooms, in our cafeterias, on our playgrounds, to ensure that our students, staff and leadership feel as if they belong. Are we being intentional about how we structure our classrooms to encourage a sense of belonging?

Like earlier research, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) also found that students who had a greater sense of belonging were more inclined to have a higher level of engagement in class and tended to have high levels of academic performance. ¹⁵ The report posits that student engagement has “more to do with the culture of the school, and teachers and principals can play a strong role in creating a positive culture.”

Other studies underscore the importance of the role of teachers and administrators, who have the power to enforce policies and practices that promote social inclusion for the enhancement of students’ engagement and overall academic performance.¹⁶

Moving Forward with Intention

Research has shown that having academic material mirror student’s’ home life and culture helps them relate to the curriculum and take ownership in learning, improving academic achievement in a significant way. ¹⁷ Culturally Responsive Teaching(CRT) aims to address these challenges. It makes an effort to legitimize all cultures. It gives students the space to take ownership of their cultural heritage. It shows them the value of maintaining this heritage and to do so with pride. There is an effort to create an environment where there are no subtle or overt pressures for students to disavow their own culture and assimilate to the majority culture.

Policies, practices of inclusion and CRT are a start, but I think that even before implementing these solutions, the first step needs to be a self- awareness. For our students to be accepting of one another the attitude shift must start at the adult level. If we, as the leadership, staff, or teachers, do not display an attitude of inclusiveness and celebrate differences, how can we expect our students to act any differently?

Change must start with us, the role models that students follow. We must be introspective and honest with ourselves, recognizing our own biases and assumptions. Do we expect less from the Hispanic student than we do from others? Do we quickly punish our black students and take time to listen to others? Can we empathize with our students? Do we want to make an effort to change how to run things in our classrooms?

This article is not intended to provide easy answers. It is merely raising awareness about important issues that are affecting our students right now. When we’re ready, we can start looking for some practical answers.

Let’s not be one of the teachers and school leaders who tell are students that they are still welcome, even if they “don’t fit the mould” of our institution.¹⁸ Let’s break that mould. There should be no mould based on race, ethnicity or socio economic status. We all should be welcome with our own individualized moulds. For it is in diversity that we truly flourish.

Belonging is important. Our social interactions greatly impact our ability to learn and excel academically. Our students need to feel they belong. From a young age, they need to feel they belong. I hope that our students won’t be fighting this same battle that college students are fighting today.

Let’s not put our students in the same place.

References & Further Reading

1. Kennedy, R. (2015). Black Tape at Harvard Law. The New York Times, November 27 2015. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/opinion/black-tape-at-harvard-law.html?_r=0
2. Gebreyes, R. (2015). Yale Student Explains Why Students Were Offended By Halloween Costumes Email. HuffPost College, November 12 2015 Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yale-student-halloween-costumes-christakis_5644baa8e4b045bf3dedfe1e
3. Eligon, J. (2015). At University of Missouri, Black Students See a Campus Riven by Race. The New York Times, November 12 2015. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/us/university-of-missouri-protests.html?_r=0
4. Kimball, R. (2015). Rise of the College Crybullies. The WallStreet Journal, November 13 2015. Retrieved from: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-the-college-crybullies-1447458587
5. Murphy Paul, A. (2015). The Yale Controversy is Really About Belonging. Time Magazine, November 11 2015. Retrieved from: http://time.com/4108632/yale-controversy-belonging/
6. Butler, B. (2014).‘I, Too, Am Harvard’: Black students show they belong. The Washington Post, March 5 2014. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2014/03/05/i-too-am-harvard-black-students-show-they-belong/
7. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society:The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.
8. Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797-811. doi:10.1037/0022- 3514.69.5.797
9. Schmader, T., Johns, M., & Forbes, C. (2008). An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance. Psychological Review, 115, 336-356. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.115.2.336
10. Eisenberger N. & Cole S.W. (2012). Social neuroscience and health: neurophysiological mechanisms linking social ties with physical health. Nature neuroscience, 15 (5), 669-74
11. Osterman, K. F. (2000). Students’ need for belonging in the school community. Review of Educational Research, 70, 323-367. doi:10.3102/00346543070003323
12. Pittman, L. D. & Richmond, A. (2007). Academic and psychological functioning in late adolescence: The importance of school belonging. The Journal of Experimental Education, 75, 270-290. doi:10.3200/JEXE.75.4.270-292
13. Walton, G. M. & Cohen, G.L. (2007). A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement. J Pers. Soc. Psychology, 92(1), 82-96.
14. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995a).  Multicultural teacher education: Research, practice, and policy.  In J.A. Banks & C.A.M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education(pp. 747-759). New York: Macmillan.
15. Willms J.D. (2000). Student Engagement At School and A Sense of Belonging and Participation. Retrieved from:http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/programmeforinternationalstudentassessmentpisa/33689437.pdf
16. Reichl, C. J. (2000). The principal’s role in creating inclusive schools for diverse students: A review of normative, empirical, and critical literature on the practice of educational administration. Review of Educational Research 70 (1): 55–81.
17. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995b). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy.  Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.
18. Zeilinger, J. (2015).These Students Were Told They Don’t Fit Their College’s Mold But They’re Fighting Back. November 13 2015. Retrieved from: http://mic.com/articles/128453/these-students-were-told-they-don-t-fit-their-college-s-mold-but-they-re-fighting-back#.44mUgwf7Q
19. Bidgood, J. (2016). Students Say Racial Hostilities Simmered at Historic Boston Latin School. The New York Times, January 30th 2016. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/education/students-say-racial-hostilities-simmered-at-historic-boston-latin-school.html

• Faircloth, B. S., & Hamm, J. V. (2005). Sense of belonging among high school students representing 4 ethnic groups. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(4), 293-309. 10.1007/s10964-005-5752-7
• Schmader, T. (2010). Stereotype threat deconstructed. Cur- rent Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 14-18. doi: 10.1177/0963721409359292
• During the course of writing this article news emerged from Boston Latin School of similar issues. Read more here

My first year of teaching, I was all about bribery; I had no problem stocking an endless supply of bulk mixed candy bags, so long as I thought it could help my students learn.

Though the Starburst and Twix caught their attention, I had mixed feelings about using rewards in my classroom. Like many teachers and parents, I wanted my students to take the right steps—like completing their homework, answering review questions, and organizing their notebooks—for themselves. But if my 9^th graders were having trouble linking their short term actions to their long term goals, I reasoned, what was the harm in using a couple of fun-sized treats to ease the way? Was I sending the wrong messages about the reasons for doing work? What about healthy eating? And weren’t grades in themselves a kind of reward system, anyway?

Soon enough, bribery fell by the wayside. Instead of relying on tangible rewards to get things done, I could count on my classroom culture and partnerships with families. Still, the occasional promise of getting to pick a prize did make for more riveting review days.

What I didn’t know was that there is rich knowledge on motivation and learning that can tell us when rewards are most useful, and when they’re a distraction or waste of effort. Of course, science isn’t designed to tell us exactly what rewards are appropriate in the classroom, but there’s now enough evidence for teachers, schools, and communities to make an informed decision.

Here’s what we know about how offering concrete, tangible rewards tends to affect behavior:

1. To make rewards more enticing, offer them ASAP.

Rewards can be effective at changing decision-making and behavior, and it’s a no-brainer that rewards are more effective when they have a high value.

However, a surprisingly important part of this value calculation is when a reward is delivered. The phenomenon of assigning less value to future rewards is called “delay discounting.” Some research suggests that rewards offered immediately are processed using a separate neural system than those involving a time delay.¹

So if a powerful reward system is what you’re after, choose something students want and minimize the time between the effort and the gain. The promise of an end-of-year pizza party may be too distant to convince students to work harder now.

2. When it comes to rewards, be careful what you wish for.

Because rewards are generally effective at producing more of what’s being rewarded, it’s important to be thoughtful about deciding what to reward.

Cognitive scientist and popular book author Daniel Willingham uses this example:

When I was in fourth grade, my class was offered a small prize for each book we read. Many of us quickly developed a love for short books with large print, certainly not the teacher’s intent.²

A reward system based on producing a quantity of work may do little to improve the quality of work,³ and some suggest that it may even incentivize students to sacrifice quality.

3. Need to learn something boring? Rewards can help.

In one study, offering money improved people’s memory for the answers to trivia questions—but only for uninteresting questions.⁴ Also, this was only the case after a time delay. On average, people remembered the answers to interesting trivia questions at a similar rate whether or not they were offered money.

This suggests that tangible rewards may be valuable in boosting performance when it comes to learning boring items—but not if the learner is cramming.

Though this hypothesis remains untested, the authors of the study suggest that this may be due to the time it takes to complete a well-known memory stabilizing process. This process requires communication between the midbrain, a part of the brain where reward-related neurotransmitter dopamine is produced, and the hippocampus, an area of the brain often involved in learning and encoding new information). The authors propose that communication between these reward and learning regions might explain their results.⁴ 

4. In some cases, offering rewards for doing something can reduce the likelihood of it recurring.

We’ve known for decades that in some circumstances, receiving rewards can lower intrinsic motivation, or how much you’re driven to do something based on internal factors (like preference or passion). In a 1973 study, some 3-5 year old children were told that they would receive a certificate for drawing, others received a surprise certificate after drawing, and a third group received no certificate at all.⁵

Later, when given free access to drawing materials, the children who were told beforehand about the reward spent less time drawing than the others.

Surprisingly, when an anticipated reward goes away, people don’t just revert back to whatever they were doing before. In some cases, they’ll perform the rewarded behavior even less.

This is called sometimes called the “undermining effect” (or sometimes the “overjustification hypothesis”). And it’s particularly true for behaviors that people were motivated to do in the first place. Basically, it suggests that if there’s something you like doing and want to do anyway, working for a reward might reduce how much you do it. 

Recently, researchers have examined this phenomenon in the brain using fMRI.⁶ In one study, participants played an enjoyable game in the scanner. One group was told they’d be rewarded with money for playing well, while another group was told they’d receive a bonus based on how well someone else played.

Later, both groups played the game in the scanner a second time without bonuses. When scoring in this round, the group whose own performance was previously tied to money had decreased blood flow (suggesting less neural activity) in the striatum and midbrain as compared to the control group. The striatum and midbrain are both thought to be involved in processing reward feedback. Based on these findings, the researchers suggest that initially playing for money decreased the perceived value of scoring in the game.

5. It’s possible to “undermine the undermining effect” ⁷

How does the undermining effect work?

Some scientists think that being rewarded for a behavior partially “overwrites” our original motivation. This would suggest that the 3-5 year old children in the study (described in #4) started out believing “Drawing is something I do for fun”. Working for a reward then partially overwrote that motivation with “Drawing is something I do for certificates.” Changes in underlying motivation are thought to be partially responsible for changing how people behave.

One strategy for protecting against the undermining effect might be to actively “overwrite” the motivation with something durable to encourage students to persist even when rewards have vanished.

In one study, giving 3^rd-5^th grade students a personally-relevant reason to do a tedious handwriting activity (without the promise of a reward) was associated with greater time spent on the activity when they were no longer rewarded.⁷ This personal reason came in the form of complimenting the students with a trait label either before or after the reward. The researchers said to the students,

You know, I thought you’d say you wanted to do this handwriting activity because you look like the kind of [girl/boy] who understands how important it is to write correctly, and who really wants to be good at it.⁷

While the limitations of this approach are still unknown, the researchers noted that this was a bit ironic: instead of undermining motivation with a reward, they were able to undermine the reward with motivation!

How should we use rewards in the classroom?

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham makes three suggestions for educators when it comes to using rewards in the classroom²:

1) Consider possible alternatives.

2) Use rewards for a specific reason, like conquering the times tables or motivating a student who is no longer willing to try.

3) Have a defined ending that limits how long the incentive system is in play.

Willingham suggests that it makes sense to develop tangible reward structures toward concrete learning goals, like learning the multiplication tables, the elements of the periodic tables, or the events on a historical timeline. When the reward system ends, students might stop engaging in the rewarded behavior—but if it comes at a point when they’re ready to move on anyway, it’s not a problem. When they’ve learned the material and the reward structure ends, the class can move on to more complex, interesting questions that rely on this basic knowledge.²

On the other hand, it might not make sense to use tangible reward structures for teaching lifelong habits. Willingham points out that implementing long-term reward structures cost a lot of time and energy, and the rewarded behaviors tend to stop when the rewards stop. This is not to recommend against responding to positive habits, but to find other ways to do so, like praise.²

In the end, rewards are a complicated and much-debated topic. They can be effective at shaping behavior. But some find their use to be deeply problematic. And, as Education Week teacher and author Justin Minkel points out, rewards are a lousy substitute for cultivating a profound love of learning.

That said, science adds a perspective that can help educators reflecting on how and when they’d like to use rewards—if at all.

 

References & Further Reading

1. McClure, S. M., Laibson, D. I., Loewenstein, G., & Cohen, J. D. (2004). Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards. Science, 306, 503–507. [Paper]
2. Willingham, D. T. (2007). Should Learning Be Its Own Reward? [Link]
3. Jenkins, G. D. J., Gupta, N., Mitra, A., & Shaw, J. D. (1998). Are financial incentives related to performance? A meta-analytic review of empirical research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(5), 777–787. [Paper]
4. Murayama, K., & Kuhbandner, C. (2011). Money enhances memory consolidation–but only for boring material. Cognition, 119(1), 120–4. [Paper]
5. Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137. [Paper]
6. Murayama, K., Matsumoto, M., Izuma, K., & Matsumoto, K. (2010). Neural basis of the undermining effect of monetary reward on intrinsic motivation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(49), 20911–6. [Paper]
7. Cialdini, R. B., Eisenberg, N., Green, B. L., Rhoads, K., & Bator, R. (1998). Undermining the Undermining Effect of Reward on Sustained Interest. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28(3), 249–263. [Paper]

• Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M.. (2001). Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in Education: Reconsidered Once Again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1–27. [Paper]

It is no secret that American students’ math and science standardized test scores don’t break any records^1,2. In 2012, the US scored below average for developed countries in math and close to average in science. We also know that many of the most pressing problems facing us today and in the future, from halting climate change to combatting terrorism, require science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) mastery and innovation. For this reason, educators and policymakers continue to increase their emphasis on STEM education.

Students’ time in school is finite, so spending more time learning to program or construct electrical circuits often means spending less time reading literature and engaging in arts, as these activities are often considered less practical. This STEM myopia can also be problematic, as those “less practical” fields may impart critical thinking and creativity³, perseverance, teamwork, and commitment⁴ in ways that STEM fields may not.

This understanding has prompted the STEAM movement, dedicated to incorporating the arts into a STEM educational framework.

I had the opportunity to talk with Nan Renner, a researcher at UC San Diego’s Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence (CREATE). Nan’s work is focused on how we learn by interacting with the world – using language, objects, environments, and other people. With an initiative called the Art of Science Learning, she directed an Incubator for Innovation in San Diego to bring community members together to seek creative solutions for the water crisis in the region. She also teaches undergraduate courses in Cognitive Science. One course is called Distributed Cognition, a class that expands how we think about thinking to include our bodies and social and cultural contexts. Another is Cognitive Ethnography, a project-based research course that encourages students to understand human cognition through observing and analyzing behaviors. Collectively, her work is an exemplar for STEAM proponents, demonstrating not only a seamless integration of sciences and arts, but also working towards making STEAM a natural part of education.

What is STEAM, really?

Defining STEAM as simply the integration of arts with STEM fields is an oversimplification, especially for those of us who have been raised on the distinctions between the subjects. Traditionally, students learn science in science class and art in art class.

How could these very different subjects be combined?

There are some obvious ways to integrate them: students can use physical materials like clay or styrofoam to make models of cells or the solar system, and they can learn songs about concepts like Avogadro’s number. But Nan pointed out that we should think more broadly about what arts really are when trying to make education more “STEAM-y.” Instead of always incorporating art per se, we can incorporate an artistic spirit into STEM lessons. Art encourages and requires exploration, an emotional engagement and sense of ownership, and flexibility, all of which are key ingredients for success in science. For this reason, these same attributes should be components of STEM education.

Factor 1: Exploration

When we take a paintbrush to a canvas, a bow to a violin, or our eye to a camera lens, we are exploring. We explore the world around us, our bodies, and the media that we’re using to create the art. At an abstract level, it is this exploration that STEAM advocates promote for science classrooms. The goal of science is to predict and explain phenomena in the world, and that can’t happen without exploration.

To illustrate the value of exploration, Renner told me about the Hands On Lab, a mini science course for high school students held by CREATE at UCSD. Students learned about molecular self-assembly by creating and exploring bubbles and observing how dish soap alone could move boats across water. They also used microscopes to examine cells from fruits and vegetables, comparing and contrasting cells from the tougher outsides to the fleshier insides. By getting their hands dirty (or wet), students were able to explore the scientific principles in an unstructured way, freely experimenting with contrasts and causality. These activities create a foundation that students can build on once they learn more structured scientific terms and processes for explaining those phenomena.

Factor 2: Emotional Engagement & Ownership

Another key feature of art is that someone (or some people) created it. Regardless of whether the piece of art is a knitted scarf, a Broadway musical, a digitally rendered graphic, or a gourmet meal, the artist becomes emotionally invested in the project, leading to a strong feeling of ownership. Children especially are often rightfully proud of their artwork. These feelings of engagement and ownership are crucial to science as well, and they were central to a series of workshops also held at UCSD called Informath. Educators who participated in Informath gathered for workshops with the goal of creating professional development programs that brought art and math together to enhance learning. They received materials like paper strips, straws, and pipe cleaners, and after “playing” for a little while, had arrived at intriguing ways to teach concepts like fractals, recursive relationships, and geometric proofs.

Using the materials to make their models meant that those sculptures were now theirs – not only did the educators own the finished products, but they also owned the processes they had taken to arrive at them. As in the Hands On Lab, the lessons that the teachers created at Informath fostered ownership and engagement through a personal exploration process.

Extensive research on Self Determination Theory has focused on uncovering the social-contextual conditions that enhance individuals’ motivation and development⁵. One of these conditions is autonomy, which can be facilitated by granting students choices so that they have ownership over their exploration processes and means for expressing what they have learned⁶. Science lessons that revolve around art and exploration will introduce ownership into the classroom, instilling motivation, curiosity, and deeper understandings.

Factor 3: Flexibility

Flexibility is yet another hallmark of art. When you’re in a musical ensemble or a theater troupe, for example, you need to be constantly aware of the whole, and adapt so that you fit in. Likewise, scientific exploration requires this constant awareness of how new pieces of information fit into existing knowledge frameworks and the willingness to alter hypotheses or procedures as new information is accounted for.

These traits are central to the Incubator for Innovation, a project that Nan was involved with through the Art of Science Learning. In San Diego, the incubator’s focus was on the mismatch between supply and demand for water, a challenge chosen by public vote. The Incubator participants included scientists, artists, educators, and students who were invested in the problem. The teams learned arts-based techniques that they used to continuously come up with ideas, test them, and communicate about them. Iteration was a crucial component of the incubator: as teams tested their ideas and continued to learn about what did and did not work, they continually improved their innovations.

Similar incubators took place to address problems of access to fair and equitable nutrition (in Chicago) and new transportation solutions (in Worcester, MA). In 2016, a traveling exhibit will showcase the projects that came out of all 3 incubators and emphasize the importance of bringing creativity to science and innovation. Collaborating, iterating, and incorporating new information into prototypes are all crucial components of the incubator that drive home the importance of flexibility for innovation and success.

Creating a STEAM-ier classroom

A few times during our conversation, we circled back to a resounding theme: The most crucial part of STEAM is integration. Nan pointed out that “when we engage in real-world problem-solving, the disciplinary boundaries fade into the background. We blend and merge creative and critical thinking, representing ideas with words, metaphors, numbers, images, forms. We can be inquisitive and thoughtful about what these different modalities offer, in education and the workplace, and expand our collective repertoire for identifying and solving big challenges.”

How can we accomplish this in our STEAM lessons?

• Keep the goals of exploration, emotional engagement, and flexibility at the forefront when designing STEM lessons and incorporate hands-on lessons whenever appropriate.

• De-emphasize curricular boxes – although there will inevitably be certain topics and lessons that fall within our definition of science or math more than others, help students to be holistic thinkers by encouraging them to answer questions using whatever knowledge and tools they have available, as opposed to sticking to the confines of one traditional subject.

• Try metaphorming – a form of brainstorming that involves making multi-dimensional, freeform, symbolic models and can lead to deeper insights and more creativity.

• Promote the arts – students who learn to play as part of an orchestra, who gain confidence in ballet class, or who become comfortable getting their hands dirty with a pottery wheel will take those lessons and mindsets with them to the science classroom.

• As a teacher, take some creative liberties when planning science lessons. Students will learn best by observing a role model who incorporates arts and science (for inspiration, check out the #sciart hashtag on Twitter).

One intuition might be that the key to improving STEM education is to focus students’ time more on STEM subjects and less on the arts. However, we have solid evidence suggesting that STEM and arts aren’t incompatible ends of a spectrum, but instead can – and should – be integrated. When we integrate arts, and more broadly, an artistic mindset, into science lessons, we open the door for exploration, emotional engagement and ownership, and flexibility; indispensible skills for success in science and in life more generally.

The STEAM movement suggests that arts and sciences may have a synergistic relationship – even better when combined than each in isolation. The movement reminds us that when it comes to treasured school subjects – arts and sciences – we can have our cake and eat it too.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Chappell, B. (2013). U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science. NPR. [Article]
2. Desilver, D. (2015). U.S. students improving – slowly – in math and science, but still lagging internationally. Pew Research Center. [Article]
3. Zakaria, F. (2015). Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous. The Washington Post. [Article]
4. Williams, Y. (2014). Rhythm and bruise: How cuts to music and the arts hurt kids and communities. Huffington Post Education. [Article]
5. Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. [Paper]
6. Stefanou, C.R., Perencevich, K.C., DiCintio, M., & Turner, J.C. (2004). Supporting autonomy in the classroom: Ways teachers encourage student decision making and ownership. Educational psychologist, 39(2), 97-110. [Paper]

• Beilock, S. (2015). How the body knows its mind: The surprising power of the physical environment to influence how you think and feel. [Book]
• STEAM to STEAM [Organization]