Category Archives: L&B Blog

When picturing a kindergarten classroom in America, chances are you imagine messy finger paint on tables, blocks clinking on the rug, oversized read-aloud books, and little kids climbing through colorful Rubbermaid jungle gyms. (Perhaps you imagine a young Arnold being trampled by 5-year-olds in Radio Flyer wagons).

When picturing mindfulness meditation, you might imagine a serene-faced adult seated cross-legged on an amber silk pillow. Her eyes are closed and she is perfectly impervious to distractions in her surrounding environment.

Most young children have loads of rambunctious energy, hungry for answers to curious questions. And with or without silk props, many meditation practices are designed to cultivate stillness and silence within.

It’s therefore natural to question not only if young children should meditate, but also if young children can meditate. In this article, we’ll explore the evidence for both.

Brain Development in Early Childhood

The first years of a child’s life are crucial to setting up a strong foundation for relationships, learning, and mental health. According to the Center on the Developing Child, neuroscientists have found that typically 700 synaptic connections between brain cells are created every second in a child’s beginning years of life.¹ (If you’re trying to do the math, that’s about a few hundred trillion connections by age 3.) Eventually, this period of synaptic exuberance subsides as the brain naturally prunes away unused connections, a mechanism popularly referred to as “use it or lose it.”

Brain development is shaped by biology, environment, and external experiences and is studied in a number of ways, including a growing field of research known as s. Epigenetics is a subfield of genetics that studies things like how non-genetic factors, typically at the cellular level, can affect the way a given DNA sequence, and therefore the way a gene, is expressed. According to the Center on the Developing Child, “positive experiences, such as exposure to rich learning opportunities, and negative influences, such as malnutrition or environmental toxins, can change the chemistry that encodes genes in brain cells — a change that can be temporary or permanent. This process is called epigenetic modification.”²

Young children experiencing adversity such as neglect, poverty, parental substance abuse, or prolonged periods of stress may be susceptible to a “toxic stress response.” Toxic stress can be as harmful as it sounds, destroying brain cells and significantly disrupting brain circuitry in foundational years, leading to emotional and mental health complications such as anxiety and depression in childhood or even later in adulthood.³

Development in early years often predicts emotional, academic, and social well-being and even physical health in adulthood. Jack Shonkoff, M.D., professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child explains, “Biologically, the brain is prepared to be shaped by experience. It’s expecting the experiences that a young child has to literally influence the formation of its circuitry…If a child is preoccupied with fears or anxiety or is dealing with considerable stress, no matter how intellectually gifted that child might be, his or her learning is going to be impaired by that kind of emotional interference.”⁴

Learn more about the basics of early childhood brain development with Dr. Shonkoff in this short video from the Center on the Developing Child.⁴

Shonkoff recognizes that supporting healthy cognitive development in children is not separate from social and emotional development, making the case for intervention for children in early years. So is mindfulness the type of intervention that might help?

Mindfulness as Early Childhood Intervention

Contemplative practices – an umbrella term for practices like yoga and mindfulness meditation – have been studied primarily in adult and adolescent populations over the last few decades and are associated with increased activation in brain regions related to executive functioning.⁵ Executive functions (EFs) are a range of activities such as planning, decision-making, and self-regulation of attention, emotions and behaviors. As a result of positive findings in older populations, new research investigates the effectiveness of mindfulness interventions on executive functioning in elementary and early childhood settings.

Self-regulation, a type of executive functioning, is broadly considered to be the integration of flexible attention, working memory, and ability to inhibit one’s impulses. Self-regulation in preschool-aged children has been strongly correlated with academic success as measured by progress in emergent literacy and math. An even stronger predictor than IQ, self-regulation in beginning years of life is one of many functions that can predict math and reading achievement in elementary and middle school.⁶

Mindfulness practices have had mixed results in effectiveness on executive functioning in child populations, in part due to weaker design without control groups for comparison and due to reliance on self- or parent-reported data. Without a control group that receives alternative or no treatment, it’s hard to determine if any changes are linked to the actual mindfulness treatment or whether the changes would happen regardless. And with self-reported data like questionnaire and survey responses, it’s hard to calibrate if one person’s perception of “strongly agree” is the same as another’s. It’s utility as a measure of effectiveness, however, is revealing trends and prompting further precision investigation.

In a recent study by Lisa Flook et al. (2010), for example, early elementary children received training Mindful Awareness Practices that included breathing awareness, body awareness and movement, and awareness of environment. Results revealed that, according to teacher and parent reports, children who started the program with difficulties in self-regulation showed significant improvement.⁷

This preliminary study call for more research on mindfulness as an effective intervention in even younger child populations – a way to offer children experiencing adversity a way to self-regulate their emotions and behaviors, potentially preventing disruptions to healthy brain development.

But can young children really meditate?

Given what we know about young children’s development and naturally quick shifts in attention, even 10 minutes of seated silence with children ages 3-5 seems unrealistic. To manage the concern of long periods of quiet, shorter adaptations of meditation practice have been designed to help introduce children to meditational techniques by reading a related story, participating in walking and observation meditations, playing games like “breathing buddies,” as well as reflective activities.⁸

It’s important to remember, however, that in many Eastern classrooms, children are often introduced to more traditional meditational practices at an early age. In a recent research study by Tang et al (2012), 4.5-year-olds in China were trained in integrative body-mind therapy (IBMT) sessions adapted from the original Zen training program for adults. Standard IBMT sessions consist of 5 minutes of modeling and directions by an instructor, 20 minutes of silent meditation or meditation with soothing music, and 5 minutes of reflection. Young children participated in twenty 30-minute sessions – a total of 10 hours of mindfulness practice – over the course of a month. In contrast to a control group, the mindfulness group’s performance on two stimulus-discrimination Stroop Tasks to measure attention significantly improved. The mindfulness training group also showed significant increases in effortful self-control (an executive function) as reported by their parents.⁹

Research is still required to confirm the beneficial impact of integrative body-mind therapy (IBMT) on child brain development, though preceding neuroimaging studies of IBMT in adults demonstrated promising results. After just one month of practice, fMRI on adult participants revealed enhanced functional connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex and striatum as compared to a control group receiving relaxation activities, suggesting that the mindfulness training may enhance focused attention.¹⁰

Yi-Yuan Tang and her team plan to study IBMT in American settings in order to determine the impact of mindfulness on self-regulation in early childhood across cultures.

What does meditation with young children look like?

Mindfulness can take various forms, silence in a seated posture being one of them. Paying attention to the breath or sounds within our outside of the body is another form. Walking mindfully with each step is another. Mindfulness is simply paying attention, without judgment, to the present moment.¹¹

In the last decade, various organizations and programs have emerged to support mindfulness in classrooms. One such organization begun in 2008, Mindful Schools, offers certification and video resources on how to teach mindfulness to elementary-age children. The following sample video offers student-friendly listening to the sounds of bells and sharing their experiences, and it all takes less than fifteen minutes: K-5 Mindfulschools.org Lesson.¹² Scroll down and click on the K-5 Curriculum Demo. At 5:33, you can get a sense of how students receive scaffolding support to move from listening to sounds outside of themselves to listening for sounds inside of themselves).

If meditating silently on external or internal sounds feels less appropriate as a mindfulness introduction to your students, consider adapting mindful practice ideas to meet your young students where they are. For example, you might play a familiar song and have your students gently tap their noses each time they hear a particular note or word. To help encourage awareness and regulation of attention, perhaps sing overlapping rounds of “Row, row, row your boat,” allowing children to learn strategies for how to focus their attention on their part. Equally important is supporting children as they learn to re-focus their attention when they’re momentarily distracted (if you’ve played this singing game before, you know how challenging it can be!). Mindfulness is not simply sitting perfectly still; music and movement often make ideal mindfulness entry points for elementary-age children.

As mindfulness research in early childhood settings continues to grow, so shall science-based, kid-friendly resources for the classroom. Improvement of programs and refinement of research is undoubtedly the ongoing goal, but waiting for perfected materials means waiting to offer potentially life-altering resources to our children while they’re still children. Let’s help them evolve into healthy adults by offering them simple mindfulness tools now.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Center on the Developing Child (2009).Core Concepts in the Science of Early Childhood Development. [Multimedia Article]

2. Center on the Developing Child (2009).Deep Dive: Gene-Environment Interaction. [Article]

3. Shonkoff, J., & Garner, A. (2012). The lifelong effects of early childhood adversity and toxic stress.Pediatrics, 129(1), E232-E246. [Paper]

4. Shonkoff, J. (2009, October 1). Center for the Developing Child: The Science of Early Childhood Development. [Video]

5. 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. [Paper]

6. McClelland, M. M. and Cameron, C. E. (2012), Self-Regulation in Early Childhood: Improving Conceptual Clarity and Developing Ecologically Valid Measures. Child Development Perspectives, 6: 136–142. [Paper]

7. 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. [Paper]

8. Elizabeth Willis & Laura H. Dinehart (2014) Contemplative practices in early childhood: implications for self-regulation skills and school readiness, Early Child Development and Care, 184:4, 487-499 [Paper]

9. Tang, Y., Yang, L., Leve, L., & Harold, G. (2012). Improving Executive Function and Its Neurobiological Mechanisms Through a Mindfulness‐Based Intervention: Advances Within the Field of Developmental Neuroscience.Child Development Perspectives, 6(4), 361-366. [Paper]

10. Tang, Y., Lu, Q., Geng, X., Stein, E., Yang, Y., & Posner, M. (2010). Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,107(35), 15649-52. [Paper]

11. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based interventions in context: Past, present, and future.Clinical Psychology-Science And Practice, 10(2), 144-156. [Paper]

12. Cowan, M. K-5 Curriculum Demo: Class One – Mindful Bodies and Listening – 1^st Grade Classroom. [Resource]

Many believe that intelligent quotient (IQ) tests tell you something about an individual’s inherent, and perhaps unchanging, intellectual capacity. But is intelligence really fixed? Current research suggests it’s not.

IQ was once thought to be stable across the lifespan. Then, in 2011 a study tested participants twice in adolescence and found substantial changes in IQ across time for a third of the sample¹. There was an overall increase in the group’s IQ between early adolescence (12-16 years) and late adolescence (16-20 years), with some individuals gaining or losing as much as 18 IQ points! This is substantial, as by many scoring standards, that’s more points than make up a full standard deviation (for reference, approximately 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of average IQ).

These changes in IQ were also associated with changes in brain structure, suggesting an underlying neural mechanism for changes in intelligence across adolescence¹. This finding has since been replicated in a larger group of individuals covering a wider age range².

The roles of nature and nurture

Both genetics and the environment have an influence on IQ. However, this influence changes across development, with genetic influences generally becoming a greater influence as we get older³. There is also some evidence that individuals with high IQ are influenced by the environment longer than individuals with low IQ⁴.

In a study of children aged 4-12 years, both low and high IQ children showed similar levels of environmental influences on their IQ. However, the teenagers (aged 12-18 years) with low IQ were much less influenced by the environment than high IQ teenagers, who showed similar levels of environmental influences as high IQ children⁴. Both low and high IQ adults (aged 18+ years) showed similar (low) levels of environmental influence on IQ.

In other words, according to this research, the environment may have the greatest impact on IQ in childhood, have a continued impact on IQ for high scoring teenagers in particular, and then balance out again to have a lower impact across adults.

It has been suggested that the extended period of heightened environmental influence in high IQ individuals might reflect an extended period of neural plasticity in these individuals. This idea seemed to be supported by an early study investigating brain development in groups of individuals with varying IQ levels⁵. This study appeared to find evidence for more protracted brain development in groups of children with higher IQs, suggesting that children with higher IQs showed a longer period of “cortical thickening” compared to children with lower IQs⁵. Cortical thickening is related to the grey matter (made of primarily of neuronal cell bodies) of the outermost layer of tissue in the brain, which is involved in many complex cognitive functions. However, the methods involved in this study have been recently been called into question^6,7, and the results have not replicated⁸. This sort of trajectory is common in research, and a reminder to look across studies and time for potentially useful patterns.

A more recent study similarly found a relationship between cortical development patterns and IQ, but with different patterns than what was observed in the earlier study⁸. In children, cortical thinning is associated with higher IQ, whereas in adults, cortical thickening is associated with higher IQ⁸. These results highlight the importance of timing in our understanding of how brain changes could relate to cognitive changes, as one type of brain change in childhood could mean something completely different in adulthood. Indeed, changes in cortical thickness was a better predictor of an individual’s IQ than the actual thickness⁸.

Overall, the individuals with the highest IQs in this study also showed the largest changes in brain structure across the lifespan⁸. This could suggest that greater neural plasticity at any age is associated with greater intelligence.

Moving Forward

So how can we increase our neural plasticity? It has been suggested that continued education keeps the brain plastic longer⁹. This could be true, but the needed studies to test this hypothesis are lacking. To see if prolonged education affects the development of our brain, we would need longitudinal studies tracking individuals with differing education levels between childhood and adulthood.

Until that study exists, the best we can do is draw from existing studies examining changes in intelligence in relation to changes in brain structure and function. While education could theoretically change our level of brain plasticity and intelligence, recent work suggests that our genes also play a large role. One longitudinal study of twins found a relationship between changes in total brain volume and IQ, which appeared to be driven by genes influencing both IQ and brain volume¹⁰. A different twin study found evidence for the same genes that influence an adults general intelligence level are also involved in the structural integrity of brain networks¹¹.

In the meantime, it seems fair to conclude at least one thing: intelligence is not set in stone. And behaving as though our own and our students’ brains can continue to improve and learn with the proper supports certainly can’t hurt.

References & Further Reading 

1. Ramsden, S., Richardson, F. M., Josse, G., Thomas, M. S. C., Ellis, C., Shakeshaft, C., … Price, C. J. (2011). Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain. Nature, 479(7371), 113–116. [Paper]
2. Burgaleta, M., Johnson, W., Waber, D. P., Colom, R., & Karama, S. (2014). Cognitive ability changes and dynamics of cortical thickness development in healthy children and adolescents. NeuroImage, 84, 810–819. [Paper]
3. McClearn, G. E., Johansson, B., Berg, S., Pedersen, N. L., Ahern, F., Petrill, S. A., & Plomin, R. (1997). Substantial Genetic Influence on Cognitive Abilities in Twins 80 or More Years Old. Science, 276(5318), 1560–1563. [Paper]
4. Brant, A. M., Munakata, Y., Boomsma, D. I., Defries, J. C., Haworth, C. M. A., Keller, M. C., … Hewitt, J. K. (2013). The nature and nurture of high IQ: an extended sensitive period for intellectual development. Psychological Science, 24(8), 1487–1495. [Paper]
5. Shaw, P., Greenstein, D., Lerch, J., Clasen, L., Lenroot, R., Gogtay, N., … Giedd, J. N. (2006). Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents. Nature, 440(7084), 676–679. [Paper]
6. Ducharme, S., Albaugh, M. D., Nguyen, T.-V., Hudziak, J. J., Mateos-Pérez, J. M., Labbe, A., … Brain Development Cooperative Group. (2015). Trajectories of cortical thickness maturation in normal brain development – The importance of quality control procedures. NeuroImage, 125, 267–279. [Paper]
7. Mills, K. L., & Tamnes, C. K. (2014). Methods and considerations for longitudinal structural brain imaging analysis across development. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 172–190. [Paper]
8. Schnack, H. G., van Haren, N. E. M., Brouwer, R. M., Evans, A., Durston, S., Boomsma, D. I., … Hulshoff Pol, H. E. (2014). Changes in Thickness and Surface Area of the Human Cortex and Their Relationship with Intelligence. Cerebral Cortex. [Paper]
9. Steinberg, L. (2014). Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. Mariner Books.
10. Brouwer, R. M., Hedman, A. M., van Haren, N. E. M., Schnack, H. G., Brans, R. G. H., Smit, D. J. A., … Hulshoff Pol, H. E. (2014). Heritability of brain volume change and its relation to intelligence. NeuroImage, 100, 676–683. [Paper]
11. Bohlken, M. M., Brouwer, R. M., Mandl, R. C. W., Hedman, A. M., van den Heuvel, M. P., van Haren, N. E. M., … Hulshoff Pol, H. E. (2016). Topology of genetic associations between regional gray matter volume and intellectual ability: Evidence for a high capacity network. NeuroImage, 124, Part A, 1044–1053. [Paper]

• Fjell, A. M., Westlye, L. T., Amlien, I., Tamnes, C. K., Grydeland, H., Engvig, A., … Walhovd, K. B. (2013). High-Expanding Cortical Regions in Human Development and Evolution Are Related to Higher Intellectual Abilities. Cerebral Cortex. [Paper]
• Tamnes, C. K., Fjell, A. M., Østby, Y., Westlye, L. T., Due-Tønnessen, P., Bjørnerud, A., & Walhovd, K. B. (2011). The brain dynamics of intellectual development: waxing and waning white and gray matter. Neuropsychologia, 49(13), 3605–3611. [Paper]
• Neuroskeptic. (2012) How intelligent is IQ? [Blog Post]

Academics have a reputation for using overly technical language. Just as any career comes with its own terminology, scientific fields often use highly precise and specialized vocabulary that is not easily comprehensible to anyone else. Unfortunately, in science this poses a unique issue because findings are often interpreted and applied outside of the field.

It’s a problem with a relatively straightforward (though incomplete) solution: explanation in simpler terms.

In addition to traditional science journalism, efforts such as Ten Hundred Words of Science, The People’s Science Forum, and our very own Learning & the Brain blog address this communication barrier in part by explaining and reducing jargon in sharing scientific research.

However, for educators and scientists looking to communicate about the science of learning, there’s another complicated language issue: when academics and educators use familiar words, but with different meanings attached. Subtle differences in how these professional worlds tend to use key terms may, inadvertently or not, overstate the findings of scientific work and lead to miscommunication.

Let’s take a look at three examples.

Example 1: Self-directed learning

How do educators think about the term “self-directed learning”? Here’s how Mindshift, a popular education blog affiliated with National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), has used the term “self-directed learning” in a several 2015 articles:

• An article about Nick Bain, a student who experimented with taking a completely self-taught trimester of his junior year in high school.
• Examples of how teachers in Boise, Idaho, are structuring their classes to release responsibility to students, teaching them lead and guide their own learning even in a low-income school. This includes implementing Google’s 20% time to allow students to pursue their own interests and learning.
• A two-part series about learning environments that offer the world’s most marginalized children tremendous choice and autonomy in their schooling, from egalitarian school structures to experiments in radical un-schooling.

These articles reflect how educators use and understand the term “self-directed learning”—as a kind of learning in which students take on a high level of personal responsibility and face a broad array of choices.

How do cognitive scientists use the term “self-directed learning”?

A recent review on self-directed learning was published in Perspectives on Psychological Science¹ (results of this paper are summarized here, and point to potential pros and cons of self-directed learning). Notice how the same term is used in this context:

• In traditional cognitive science memory tasks, study participants are often presented with flashcards one at a time. As a more self-directed alternative, study participants choose the timing and order of the terms they wanted to study.
• Cognitive scientists are interested in how people learn to identify different categories, like how to tell the difference between a cat and a dog, or a nail and a bolt. Typically, this takes place by presenting people with lots of examples of objects, one at a time. Some scientists studying self-directed learning instead gave study participants the opportunity to select the objects they wanted to learn about.
• Another major topic in cognitive science is causal learning—how do people figure out causal relationships between different things? Some causal learning occurs just by observing when different variables seem to change together. Studies of more self-directed approaches to causal learning allowed participants to change one variable and observe the consequences.

Here, the term “self-directed learning” generally refers to a highly limited set of learning choices. Rather than having almost no choices as an entirely passive learner being presented with material, people in studies of self-directed learning are typically given a small number of simple choices.

While this might seem like an impoverished view of “self-directed learning,” even these simple choices introduce many new variables for scientists to study. For example, when study participants choose which flashcards to use, scientists were faced with many additional considerations—what aspect of how people used the flashcards explained how well different people learned the material? Was it the order, timing, and/or spacing of how people chose to study that made a difference?

Example 2: Executive functions

“Executive functions” is an umbrella term for cognitive processes that regulate thoughts and actions. The usage of this term in educational contexts tends to focus on higher-level processes like planning, judgment, decision-making, and self-regulation.

However, much of the work on executive functions in cognitive neuroscience focuses on more basic processes.² For example, one commonly studied component of executive functions is called inhibition, or how people suppress simple impulses. One common way of studying inhibition is called the “go/no-go task”. In this task, participants are instructed to press a button in response to some stimuli, and then not to press the button in response to other stimuli (I’ve previously written about a study using this task).

Much research on executive functions does not directly report on some of the higher-level regulatory skills educators might be interested in. Many executive functions, like inhibition, are thought to be building blocks of higher-level tasks, like planning. However, they’re not identical; while these skills are likely related, it doesn’t always make sense to lump them together.

Example 3. Musical ability

The perception of pitch is thought to have a genetic basis. On average, identical twins sharing nearly their entire DNA perform more similarly on a pitch recognition task than fraternal twins, which share approximately half of their DNA.³ And this tends to be true even when one identical twin has invested a lot more time in musical practice than the other.

Does this mean that musical ability is inherited?

It’s tempting to say so, and some articles reporting on similar findings do take this route.

But in an interview with Carry the One Radio, neuroscientist and professional musician Indre Viskontas says that using these lower-level perceptual skills to judge musical ability is “a little like testing the eyesight of a painter to gauge whether or not they’re a good painter, a good artist…I wouldn’t even say that that gets really even that close to what we’d call musicality.”⁴

What we consider a musically gifted performance of course relies in part on the artists’ sensitive hearing, but these two “musical abilities” are quite different in their level of complexity.

Tomato, tomahto. So what?

What’s the pattern here? Some of the same terms that represent highly simplified concepts in the cognitive sciences tend to signify or are mistakenly equated with very complex versions of that idea in the education world.⁵ Exaggeration occurs if conclusions from research in the cognitive sciences are, inadvertently or not, generalized to a much higher level without an empirical basis.

When cross talk happens, it’s not always clear the extent to which people are talking about the same thing. But they’re using the same words—and often nobody clarifies (or knows to)!

Preventing misunderstanding

While new studies can be incredibly exciting, we should interpret them cautiously. Neuroscience reporting is frequently exaggerated, particularly if the initial press release at all overstates the results.^6,7 Even when the reporting is accurate, plenty of published results aren’t replicable, meaning that new researchers repeating the same study don’t find the same results.⁸

In “Combating Neurohype,” Mo Costandi asks researchers to take responsibility for accurate reporting of their results.⁹ I’d argue that part of this responsibility is actively taking into account how readers might interpret word choices with varied emphases in different spheres.

For educators and others reading and talking about science, it’s important to develop a healthy skepticism with regard to the headline. Going beyond it usually reveals that the exciting result is a bit more nuanced and perhaps limited, raising critical questions about when and where such research might be applicable (or not). Developing these critical questions and getting them in front of scientists might propel what we know about learning and the brain even further.¹⁰

 

References & Further Reading

1. Gureckis, T. M., & Markant, D. B. (2012). Self-Directed Learning: A Cognitive and Computational Perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 464–481. [Paper]
2. Miyake, A., & Friedman, N. P. (2012). The Nature and Organization of Individual Differences in Executive Functions: Four General Conclusions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(1), 8–14. [Paper]
3. Drayna, D., Manichaiku, A., de Lange, M., Snieder, H., Spector, T. (2001). Genetic Correlates of Musical Pitch Recognition in Humans. Science, 291, 1969-1972. [Paper]
4. “The Sound of Music(ality)”. (2015). Carry the One Radio. [Audio Podcast]
5. Howard-Jones, P. A. (2014). Neuroscience and education: myths and messages. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 15(12), 817–824. [Paper]
6. O’Connor, C., Rees, G., & Joffe, H. (2012). Neuroscience in the public sphere. Neuron, 74(2), 220–6. [Paper]
7. Sumner, P., Vivian-Griffiths, S., Boivin, J., Williams, A., Venetis, C. A., et al. (2014). The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study. Bmj, 349 (December), g7015. [Paper]
8. Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science Magazine, 349(6251). [Paper]
9. Costandi, Mo. (2015). Combating Neurohype. The Neuroethics Blog. [Blog]
10. Christodoulou, J. A., & Gaab, N. (2009). Using and misusing neuroscience in education-related research. Cortex, 45(4), 555–557. [Paper]

• Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2011). Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function: Working Paper No. 11. [Organization]

Education is intended to be a great equalizer, one that provides everyone with the resources that they need to be successful. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that it might not be as equalizing as many would like. There are still academic achievement gaps, for example between men and women and between European Americans and African Americans^1,2. These performance gaps can’t be entirely explained by differences in background experience. Instead, the stereotypes that students have internalized likely play a significant role.

One pivotal study by Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn¹⁰, for example, found that simply telling women that men do better on a particular math test results in worse performance, a phenomenon referred to as “stereotype threat”. Another study found that just telling a black athlete that a golf task was a test of “sports intelligence” significantly decreased his performance¹¹. Countless studies since have replicated these findings for everything from working memory capacity to test anxiety to high blood pressure. When people expect that they should have some flaw or difficulty, the expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Studies have also found that teacher expectations can have a significant impact on student performance. For example, a series of influential studies from the 1960’s showed that after teachers were told that randomly selected students were about to experience an “intellectual boom,” those students experienced major improvements in their performance, even though nothing had changed aside from their teacher’s opinion of them¹². Subtle features of the environment can shape students’ behavior and self-perception, so it’s essential that we identify ways to minimize stereotype threat in the classroom.

The Power of Values Affirmation

Combating deep-rooted stereotypes is no light task, but research has shown that there are subtle interventions that may at least begin to do this. They’re often called values affirmation interventions because they encourage students to reflect on their personal values. The most common implementation of values affirmation involves writing about one’s values, but the crucial ingredient is that students are conscious of the things that are important to them personally. In one study, half of the males and half of the females in a college physics class participated in a values affirmation activity at the beginning of the semester, while the others did not¹. By the end of the semester, there was a marked difference in the two groups. In the control group (students who did no special intervention), males significantly outperformed females. In the affirmation group, however, this gap was eliminated. This suggests that simply being mindful of one’s values can combat stereotypes that may otherwise hamper girls’ performance.

A similar study examined the effects of a values affirmation intervention in African Americans and European Americans². This study looked at change in GPA over the course of two school years. While the intervention didn’t affect European Americans — there was no difference in GPA change in the affirmation group compared to the group who did not do the affirmation — the GPAs of the African Americans who participated in the intervention increased by .24 points by the end of the two years.

The intervention was especially effective for low-performing African Americans, who experienced a GPA increase of 0.41 points on average and whose chances of repeating a grade or being placed in a remedial class were slashed from 18% to 5%.

Why do these value-affirming interventions work?

They are incredibly simple, involving only a short writing activity that is sometimes repeated a few times, but sometimes only done once. Yet the simplicity might be a key to the success of values affirmation interventions. The authors of the study investigating their effects for African Americans point out that there is often a recursive process at work: students have initial mental states or stereotypes that are compounded over time. The intervention, though small, seems to alter that recursive trajectory, leading to substantial long-term consequences².

Values Affirmation & the Brain

Work by Lisa Legault and colleagues suggests that effects of self affirmation can be seen at the neural level³. The brain’s electrical patterns can be recorded through electroencephalography (EEG), and different cognitive processes have different signature patterns. One well-known pattern is called the Error-Related Negativity (ERN). Just 100ms after people make an error on a task, there is a negative electrical spike, as their dopaminergic neurons (those that encourage us to keep doing more of what we’re doing) stop firing. They hypothesized that when we feel affirmed, we are more sensitive to our errors (in order to learn from them), and therefore that people who had undergone a self-affirmation measure should show an increased ERN response to making errors and an improved performance on a task. On the flip side, people whose self-affirmation was undermined might show a blunted ERN response and a decreased task performance.

All participants received a list of 6 values and rated them in terms of their importance to themselves. Those in the affirmation condition then wrote about their top value, while those in the non-affirmation condition wrote about their lowest one. They then performed a straightforward task: when they saw an M on the screen, they had to quickly press a response button; when they saw a W on the screen, they were to do nothing. This type of task is often called a go/no-go task. They did indeed find that participants who completed the values affirmation task had both increased performance and “neuroaffective sensitivity to task errors” compared to those in the non-affirmation group.

This research adds to our understanding of why values affirmation improves performance in groups facing stereotype threats. It seems to reduce depletion by improving our detection of and sensitivity to errors, reduce defensiveness, and motivate people to succeed.

A values affirmation intervention has also been effective for attaining weight loss goals⁴, demonstrating that the mechanism through which it works affects motivation and empowerment beyond the classroom. Another research group investigated neural activity while people were exposed to messages about ways to improve their health by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)⁵. Participants who had completed a values affirmation exercise before hearing the mentions showed more activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a region of the brain associated with self-related processing and positive valuation) than those who did not reflect on their values before receiving the same message.

Together, these studies suggest that after reflecting on our values, our brains may process incoming information differently, allowing us to make the best of constructive feedback and motivating us to improve our performance the task or goal we’re focused on.

Facebook as an Unexpected Tool for Self-Affirmation

Are there other ways to tap into the benefits of self affirmation? Recent work suggests that Facebook may provide one way of doing so⁶. College undergraduates were placed in one of four groups: (1) the Facebook self-affirming group had 5 minutes to explore any aspect of their own Facebook profile they chose; (2) the Facebook non-affirming group had 5 minutes to explore someone else’s profile; (3) the values affirmation group wrote for five minutes about something they valued; and (4) the values control group wrote about something they valued very little. After doing the associated task, participants received feedback on a speech they had done at the very beginning of the experiment. Everyone received the same generic negative feedback, and they were then asked to rate different aspects of that feedback, like how useful it was and how competent the person who gave it to them was. If participants were self-affirmed before receiving their feedback, they should be more accepting of the negative feedback they received. This was exactly what the researchers found, regardless of whether the affirmation came in the form of the traditional writing intervention or by looking at their own Facebook profile. In fact, both forms of affirmation were equally effective. This study still leaves the mechanistic question unanswered; that is, why does viewing our own profile encourage us to reflect on our values? Is it only important that we focus our thoughts on ourselves, or is there something about a Facebook profile that reminds us of what we believe in and value?

In a second experiment, these same researchers asked whether people actually seek out Facebook’s self-affirming abilities after a negative experience. Again, they performed a speech and received generic feedback. This time, half of the participants received negative feedback, while the other half received neutral feedback. They were then invited to take place in a second experiment online and could choose which experiment they wanted to take place in: one that involved Facebook, YouTube, music, news, or games online. Those who received the negative feedback chose to go to Facebook significantly more often than those who received the neutral feedback, suggesting that Facebook is one outlet that people seek out to affirm themselves after an injury to their ego.

While students can certainly use Facebook to engage in many activities that are not affirming (some of which may in fact be the disaffirming), current research suggests that we may not want to dismiss the platform as solely a hindrance to education. Instead, we may want to entertain the counterintuitive possibility that it may be affirming for students, especially when looking at their own profiles.

Incorporating Affirmation in Education

Fortunately, values affirmation activities take little time and no money to implement. They help those who are most likely to be battling stereotypes without hurting others. So far, they seem to be a win-win. But there are still lots of aspects of affirming interventions that need to be better understood. Is an intervention as effective if students are aware of its intentions as if they are unaware? Is more affirmation always better? What other ways can it be implemented – perhaps by looking at photos, listening to music with positive messages, or engaging in an activity that one is good at?

Until more of these questions are addressed, teachers who want to reduce the role of harmful stereotypes in their classrooms can consider one of the forms of affirmation that we know to be beneficial. Whether students are affirmed through Facebook, writing about values, or other unknown sources, keeping the power of self-affirmation in mind may help us bring education closer to the great equalizer it was intended to be.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Miyake, A., Kost-Smith, L.E., Finkelstein, N.D., Pollock, S.J, Cohen, G.L, & Ito, T.A. (2010). Reducing the gender achievement gap in college science: A classroom study of values affirmation, Science, doi: 10.1126/science.1195996. [Paper]
2. Cohen, G.L., Garcia, J., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Apfel, N., & Brzustoski, P. (2009). Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap. Science, doi: 10.1126/science.1170769. [Paper]
3. Legault, L., Al-Khindi, T., & Inzlicht, M. (2012). Preserving integrity in the face of performance threat: Self-affirmation enhances neurophysiological responsiveness to errors. Psychological Science, doi: 1177/0956797612448483. [Paper]
4. Logel, C. & Cohen. G.L. (2011). The role of the self in physical health: Testing the effect of a values-affirmation intervention on weight loss. Psychological Science, doi: 10.1177/0956797611421936. [Paper]
5. Falk, E.B., Brook O’Donnell, M., Cascio, C.N., Tinney, F., Kang, Y., Lieberman, M.D., Taylor, S.E., An, L., Resnicow, K., & Strecher, V.J. (2014). Self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messages and subsequent behavior change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1500247112. [Paper]
6. Toma, C.L. & Hancock, J.T. (2013). Self-affirmation underlies Facebook use. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, doi: 10.1177/0146167212474694. [Paper]
7. Gonzales, A.L. & Hancock, J.T. (2010). Mirror, mirror on my Facebook wall: Effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, doi: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0411. [Paper]
8. The Value of “Values Affirmation”: Stanford Graduate School of Business [Article]
9. Pedersen, T. (2013). Facebook profile often used for self-affirmation. Psych Central. [Article]
10. Spencer, S.J., Steele, C.M., Quinn, D.M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35, 4-28. [Paper]
11. Stone, J., Lynch, C.I., Sjomelin, M., Darley, J.M. (1999). Stereotype threat effects on black and white athletic performance. Journal of Personality and Psychology, 77(6), 1213-1227. [Paper]
12. Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers’ expectancies: Determinants of pupils’ IQ gains. Psychological Reports, 19, 115-118. [Paper]

It’s an age old debate. Does it matter if your students like you? Ask any teacher, anywhere, and you will most likely get answers split down the middle. In Aaron Podolner’s book, “How Would You Handle It: Hundreds of Answers for Classroom Teachers”, this very question was asked. One teacher responded with the following:

“Do you want your students to like you? The answer is yes, but with a qualifier. It matters why you want your students to like you… If they like you because you genuinely like them and show a real interest in their growth, then they will also respect you and work hard for you. Students do not learn because of teachers, they learn for teachers.”¹

While it’s been viewed as mostly a personal choice, research seems to suggest that it is important that students like their teachers. The teacher in Mr. Podolner’s book may have been onto something with her statement that students don’t learn because of teachers, but rather for them. Improving students’ relationships with their teachers have not only academic implications, but social implications as well.

Why it Matters that Your Students Like You: The Research
The brain is a social organ and close relationships, such as a positive student-teacher relationship, encourage learning, in part, because they promote a positive learning environment². From birth, we learn from our interactions with other people; this includes, family, friends and yes, teachers. Positive teacher-student relationships in the school setting have positive implications not only for students, but for teachers and the school climate as a whole.⁷

For this reason, students who are in classrooms with teachers that they like and have a close relationship with may learn more. For teachers, teaching students who like you makes their job easier. Teachers who experience close relationships with students report that their students have better attendance, cooperate more, are more engaged and are more self-directed³.

These little things can make a big difference.

In a recent study done in Germany⁴, kindergartners were shown a picture of different teachers before solving a problem. Students performed faster when they were shown a picture of a teacher they had a close relationship with before solving the problem versus a teacher they didn’t have a relationship with. While this study shows the direct effect of students thinking about teachers that they are close to prior to solving a problem, it also gets at a deeper message.

When students have positive relationships with their teachers, it affects how they view school and how engaged they are. Students who have these kind of relationships have more positive feelings about school, are more engaged, and in turn, are often higher achievers⁵. Think for a minute about any high achieving student you know. More than likely, this student enjoys school, or at least likes it. Now, think about that students’ relationship with his/her teachers. I’m sure at least one teacher that student has a positive relationship with will come to mind. While positive student teacher relationships can result in more engagement, and higher grades among students, negative relationships can have the opposite effect⁶.

Positive student-teacher relationships also have the power to positively improve school climate, something that can affect everyone involved in a school. School is, in a very general way, student and staff perception of their school. We can think of it this way: Students who have positive relationships with their teachers tend to be more engaged. Students who are more engaged typically are more likely to succeed. Being successful in school leads to positive educational experiences which in turn, creates a positive perception of school. Of course there are exceptions and limitations to this logic and not all students, teachers, and schools are the same – but the research suggests it’s worth paying attention to. Teachers play a huge role because they can very well shift the climate of their school by building stronger relationships with their students.

What Do Positive Student-Teacher Relationships Look Like? And How Can You Build Them?

Positive student-teacher relationships are characterized by low-conflict, feelings of closeness and support and independence². Positive student teacher relationships benefit both the students and the teachers. Students feel safe, supported and cared for, while teachers feel competent and important. Here are a few more examples of what positive student teacher relationships look like:

“A high school student chooses to share the news that he recently got a part in a community play with his teacher because he knows that his teacher will show genuine interest in his success.

A fourth grade boy who is struggling in math shows comfort in admitting to his teacher that he needs help with multiplying and dividing fractions even if most of the students in the class have moved beyond this work.

A middle school girl experiences bullying from other students and approaches her social studies teacher to discuss it because she trusts that the teacher will listen and help without making her feel socially inept.”³

While the importance of student teacher relationships seems rather straight forward, building relationships with students isn’t always so easy. In most cases, our students who could benefit from these relationships the most are the hardest students to deal with. Below you’ll find a few tips I’ve found helpful in building relationships with my students.

Note: These tips are rooted in my personal experiences, not peer-reviewed research.

1. Sincerity
When building a relationship with your students it’s important to be sincere. Ask yourself why you want to have a better relationship with the student. If your reason is simply because you have him/her in your class and you don’t want it to be a miserable experience for both of you all year, be honest about that. In my experience, students have an amazing ability to detect when someone is not genuine. Keep in mind that even if you are approaching a student with sincerity, he/she may have his/her defenses up, especially if he/she has not had many positive relationships with adults. Keeping your intentions pure and being honest with the student about why you want to get to know him/her and conveying that you truly care are important first steps.

2. Consistency
This may be the most important factor. In any relationship, consistency is key. Showing your students that you are going to show up and be there for them every day by actually doing it says a lot. Conveying the message that you care over and over again may eventually reach even the most stubborn students.

3. High Expectations
A hard lesson I learned in my early years of teaching is the importance of having and keeping high expectations. If you truly care about your students, you hold them to a high standard because anything less would be a disservice to them. I used to think that taking it easy on my students by accepting excuses when they didn’t do their homework, or turning a blind eye when they occasionally misbehaved, was showing that I cared. I’ve learned that in holding high expectations of my students I’m conveying the message that I believe you are capable of doing something great and so, I’m not going to accept anything less than greatness from you.

Where to Go from Here
While there are great implications for having a positive relationship with your students, the fact of the matter is that it’s not possible to have a great relationship with every student. As teachers, what’s most important is that we hold every student to high expectations and put forth an honest effort to show support and genuine interest in as many of our students as we can. While we may not have amazing relationships with every student, the ones we really take the time to nurture can make all the difference in the world.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Podolner, A. S., Matuch, J. B., Nemeth , M. M., Royston, L. S., …Shah, N. (2014). How We Handle It: Hundreds of Answers from Classroom Teachers. [Book]
2. Cozolino, L. (2013). Nine Things Educators Need to Know About the Brain. [Book Excerpt]
3. Riff-Kaufman, S. & Sandilos, L. (n.d.). Improving Students’ Relationships with Teachers to Provide Essential Supports for Learning. [Guide]
4. Ahnert L,Milatz A, Kappler G, Schneiderwind J, and Fischer R. (2013). The impact of teacher-child relationships on child cognitive performance as explored by a priming paradigm. Dev Psychol. 49(3):554-67. (Paper)
5. Van Maele, D., & Van Houtte, M. (2011). The quality of school life: Teacher-student trust relationships and the organizational school context.Social Indicators Research, 100, 85–100. (Paper)
6. Pianta, R., Hamre, B., & Allen, J. (2012). Teacher-student relationships and engagement: Conceptualizing, measuring, and improving the capacity of classroom interactions. In S. L. Christenson, A. L. Reschly, & C. Wylie (Eds.),Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 365–386). New York: Springer. (Book Chapter)
7. Larson, A. (2014). How Student-Teacher Relationships Influence School Climate: A Literature Review. (Review)

The Increase in Preterm Survival Rates

Preterm birth is on the rise. According the World Health Organization (WHO)¹, preterm birth is defined as any birth occurring prior to 37 weeks of pregnancy, or fewer than 259 days since the mother’s last menstrual cycle². The youngest premature babies have been reported to survive around 22 weeks gestation with the youngest ever recorded born at just 21 weeks or 5.5 months³. Strikingly, complications arising from preterm birth are responsible for approximately 35% of all neonatal deaths that take place in a given year, roughly 3.1 million globally².

There are numerous reasons why a pregnancy might end prematurely, including a wide variety of complex social and environmental factors, as well as genetic and epigenetic influences that affect conception and circumstances of birth. For example, contributors such as advanced maternal age are being increasingly linked to rises in numbers of preterm babies, and couples in western societies seeking assistance conceiving a child are much more likely to carry multiple pregnancies (such as twins and triplets), which are 10 times more likely to result in a preterm birth compared to mothers carrying a single child². Other notable factors include complications related to obesity, such as high blood pressure and chronic conditions like diabetes, however many preterm births occur due to reasons are that unknown or unclear¹.

Regardless of the reason behind these increased rates, the number of premature babies continues to rise AND survive at younger and younger gestational ages. In 1960, the survival rate for an infant weighing 3.3 lbs or less was just 28%. Today, surviving premature infants can be the length of a standard 5-inch pen and weigh as little as 1 lb. Advancements in medical and neonatal care technology are in part to thank for these startling survival rates, with many hospitals across the United States building sophisticated newborn facilities (called NICUs), equipped with anything that might be needed by surgeons and specialists to care for the most vulnerable of babies. In fact, it has been estimated that every decade, the age of viability for premature infants goes down by 1 week⁴.

The New Challenges That Come with Progress

The power and impact of these medical technologies is remarkable, however the increasingly high survival rates of younger and younger babies come at a price. For one, the hospital stay for a child born prior to 32 weeks ran up an average medical bill of over $280,811 in 2014. More importantly, both physicians and parents are forced to make unbearably difficult ethical decisions, because even if the child defies the odds in the first few hours, days or weeks of life, the chances of survival with a severe lifelong disability are significant⁵. For example, anywhere from 17% to 48% of babies born preterm will have some kind of neuromotor abnormality, whereby displaying signs of having neurological issues and/or problematic motor control; this includes conditions like cerebral palsy (CP) which can lead to a life of severe intellectual and physical disability⁵.

Studies across a number of scientific fields have attempted to determine whether cognitive and social capacities are in some way impaired in premature children born without complications. Many premature babies will still pass initial newborn screening tests, which typically include an assessment of sensory (such as hearing) and basic motor reflexes as well as blood tests. However, even in cases where the child appears typically developing during the first few months of life, preterm children, on average, have been found to struggle in school compared to their full-term counterparts, regardless of race, ethnicity and socio-economic background⁶.

One 2013 study tested over 1300 8-year-old children (ranging from full term to severely premature) on a number of cognitive tests with the objective of investigating high cognitive load in preterm children. The results showed that a “higher” workload (requiring the brain to simultaneously coordinate many pieces of information) brought out more pronounced cognitive deficits in children born preterm compared to participants born full term. In other words, the shorter the pregnancy, the more severe the deficit during high “cognitive load” tasks⁷.

These findings are corroborated by a 2015 Nature study which found preterm children to be more vulnerable in tasks requiring mathematical reasoning and visuospatial processing, which in turn was corroborated by deficits found in tasks investigating working memory and processing speed⁸. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that these differences are reflected in observational studies exploring social outcomes of adults born prematurely. Two of the larger longitudinal investigations were conducted by the National Child Development Study (NCDS), beginning in 1958 and the British Cohort Study (BCS), beginning in 1970 which found that, by age 42, people who had been born prematurely were significantly more likely to experience lower overall wealth, with greater rates of unemployment and reports of financial hardship compared to people born full-term⁹. This of course is not true for all preterm babies, but the frequency with which additional challenges are faced raise new questions about how to help.

Addressing the Challenges in Education

The questions now are (i) whether anything can be done to prevent the consequences of preterm birth, particularly as it relates to motor and cognitive disabilities, and (ii) whether educational policy should take the unique challenges of preterm babies into account (and if so, what that would look like).

Currently, many programs in the form of post-discharge early intervention programs are being implemented, with the aim of preventing or lessening the effects of preterm birth via multi-modal sensory stimulation during the first few weeks of life. This involves a combination of tactile, visual, vestibular and auditory stimulation with the objectives of improving motor, physiological and eventually cognitive and social functioning later in life¹⁰. However, some have expressed skepticism on how effective these measures are in the long term. A recent meta-analysis of 21 studies (including over 3000 randomized children) investigated the effectiveness of early developmental intervention methods on infants born prematurely (prior to 37 weeks). The effect found was significant but relatively small. To complicate matters further, it is difficult to say whether it is the timing of the delivery of these programs or the content of the intervention themselves that do not stand the test of time.

Although severe cognitive disabilities due to premature birth are still relatively uncommon, 15 million babies a year are born preterm worldwide¹ and even small increases in cognitive impairment due to rising prematurity may have considerable effects on society in general, and education in particular. Yet as the number of preterm children increase, so do the demands placed on the education system. Some have suggested the aggressive implementation of accessible educational interventions, particularly targeting student achievement in mathematics, which many research groups argue to be a common point of concern^11,12. The idea is to design educational interventions in the form of computerized training programs for school-aged children, built to deliver information in a slower, more sequential manner so as not to overwhelm struggling children by presenting lots of forms of information simultaneously⁷.

The implementation of such educational tools to curb learning difficulties in struggling children is a decisive nod towards the ongoing controversial debate surrounding the practice of classroom “grouping” or “tracking” based on academic ability. Divvying up classrooms based on ability — regardless of biological age — has been a subject of contention as far back as the 1930s, whereby education researchers and specialists have since disputed over the efficacy of ability grouping with the objective of catering for the needs of each child. Generally speaking, the most common forms of grouping are (i) within-class ability grouping and (ii) between-class grouping. In the former, individual teachers place children into smaller sub-groups within the same class while the latter is done at a more systematic level involving formal allocation of children into separate classes or curricular tracks based on achievement¹⁴. One pioneering study found that overall, between-class grouping did very little for student achievement, if only partially benefitting higher-achieving students¹³. To make matters worse, it has been argued that students placed in lower tracks can suffer lower motivation towards school compared to their advanced-track peers¹⁴. That being said, some success has been observed for within-class grouping, particularly if implemented for one or two select core subjects (such as mathematics and reading), while remaining within their respective heterogeneous classes for other courses¹³.

Clearly, future research is needed to address these concerns; both in terms of the research on the neurodevelopment of premature children as well as the best way to educate kids that might be struggling in school. Unfortunately, the situation is exacerbated by the lack of suitable training and information given to teachers about what to potential learning issues to expect and how to deal with them. Despite the eagerness of teachers to understand the best way to address issues children face in school, more often than not schools do not or cannot provide the necessary training and guidance teachers need⁹.

As the survival rates for preterm babies continue to rise, we must remain cognizant of how our advancements in technology and medical care are impacting how we understand and think about education’s ability to address the needs of all children.

 

References & Further Reading

1. World Health Organization (WHO). (2015). Fact sheet N°363 Preterm Birth. [Report]
2. Blencowe, H., Cousens, S., Chou, D., Oestergaard, M., Say, L., Moller, A.-B., … Lawn, J. (2013). Born Too Soon: The global epidemiology of 15 million preterm births. Reproductive Health, 10(Suppl 1), S2. [Paper]
3. Bird, C. (December 2014). World’s Smallest Preemies. [Report]
4. Kluger, J. (2014, June 2). Saving Preemies. Time, 183 (21), 26-31. [Article]
5. Abbott, A. (2015). Neuroscience: The brain, interrupted. Nature, 7537, 24–26. [Article]
6. Baker, L. (October 2000). Children Born Prematurely Remain at Risk for Educational Underachievement at Age 10. University at Buffalo, SUNY News Center. [News Release]
7. Jaekel, J., Baumann, N., Wolke, D. (2013). Effects of Gestational Age at Birth on Cognitive Performance: A Function of Cognitive Workload Demands. PLoS ONE 8(5): e65219. [Paper]
8. Simms, V., Gilmore, C., Cragg, L., Marlow, N., Wolke, D., & Johnson, S. (2012). Mathematics difficulties in extremely preterm children: evidence of a specific deficit in basic mathematics processing. Pediatric research, 2, 236–244. [Paper]
9. Wolke, D. (2015, September 3). Premature birth linked with lower wealth: how education could help bridge the gap. The Conversation. [Article]
10. Feldman, R. (2002). Intervention programs for premature infants: considering potential mechanisms for change, Newsletter of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, 10 (3-4). [Newsletter]
11. Basten, M., Jaekel, J., Johnson, S., Gilmore, C., & Wolke, D. (2015). Preterm Birth and Adult Wealth: Mathematics Skills Count. Psychological science, 10, 1608–1619. [Paper]
12. Jaekel, J., & Wolke, D. (2014). Preterm birth and dyscalculia. The Journal of pediatrics, 6, 1327–1332. [Paper]
13. Slavin, R. E. (1987). Ability Grouping and Student Achievement in Elementary Schools: A Best-Evidence Synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 57(3), 293–336. [Review]
14. Collins, C.A., & Gan, Li. (2013). Does Sorting Students Improve Scores? An Analysis of Class Composition, NBER Working Paper Series (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research)[Report]

 

A previous article argued, paradoxically, that remembering can cause forgetting. Today’s entry reverses the paradox: forgetting, you see, benefits remembering.

You read that right: if you want to remember, it helps to forget.

Let me explain.

Today in class, I taught my students a new verb tense (or a new technique for proving that lines are parallel, or the Ideal Gas Law). I’ve got twenty practice problems for them to do: what’s the best schedule for those problems?

When I learned French (and Geometry, and Chemistry) in high school, the answer was clear: do all the practicing right now. Whatever I studied in class today, I should practice tonight. In other words, I did those 20 practice problems then night after I learned the new material.

There is, of course, another conceptual option: I could ask my students to spread that practice out over time. They could do five problems tonight, and five tomorrow night, and so on.

Either plan seems plausible: which was is better? Happily, teachers don’t have to guess—we can look at research.

Here’s an example². Hal Pashler’s research team had students come to his lab to learn an unusual math procedure, and practice it by doing 10 problems. A week later, half of those students returned to take a quiz on this procedure; the other half of the students took the same quiz…a MONTH later.

Then, Pasher had another group of students learn the same unusual math procedure—which they practiced by doing 5 problems (not ten, five). They all returned a week later, and did five more practice problems. A week later, half of those students returned to take the quiz; the other half of the students, again, took that quiz a month later.

So, both groups studied the same procedure, and did ten practice problems. The only difference: the schedule on which they did that practicing. Half of them did all the practice at once; the others spread their practice out.

Which group did better?

To put that picture into fewer than a thousand words: by spreading their study out, the second group remembered twice as much as the first group did.

Why did this technique work? Simply put, the second group had time to forget. The first group spent all their time learning. The second group learned, and then forgot, and then learned again. The forgetting benefitted ultimate remembering.

Two serious problems, however, might interfere with our ability to put this research result to practice.

Problem number 1: the students.

Pasher’s research result feels intuitive to most teachers—we’ve always known its’s better to spread practice out over time—but it feels profoundly counter-intuitive to students. They feel deeply in their gut that they should practice, practice, practice RIGHT NOW.

To help students see the benefits of spacing their practice, I regularly show them Pasher’s study. Students LOVE the idea that they can double the amount they remember (61%, instead of 31%) without doing any more practice problems.

Problem number 2: the syllabus.

Although “The Spacing Effect” sounds like a good idea when I think about any one topic, it leads to a potential problem with my syllabus. In the old days, I’d teach one topic on Monday, and then have my students practice that topic Monday night. On Tuesday we’d do the next topic, and they’d practice it on Tuesday night. In short, my syllabus looked like this:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
In Class	Topic A	Topic B	Topic C	Topic D	And So On
Homework	20 A Problems	20 B Problems	20 C Problems	20 D Problems	And So Forth

However, if spread my practice out—perhaps by doing 5 problems per topic each night—my new syllabus will look like this:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
In Class	Topic A	Topic B	Topic C	Topic D	You
Homework	5 A Problems	5 A Problems 5 B Problems	5 A Problems 5 B Problems 5 C Problems	5 A Problems 5 B Problems 5 C Problems 5 D Problems	Get The Idea

The result: Thursday’s homework is a mess. It seems entirely possible that Spacing benefits learning when you do it with one topic in the psychology lab, but that—when teachers try it in the classroom—the muddled syllabus might undermine all the benefits that Spacing should provide. In brief: Spacing Good, Muddling Bad.

Researcher Doug Rohrer has investigated this question, and here’s what he found³.

He had one group of students come to his lab to learn four unusual math procedures. These students read one tutorial, and did practice problems for that procedure; they then read the next tutorial, and did those practice problems, and so forth.

Topic A		Topic B		Topic C		Topic D
A Practice Problems		B Practice Problems		C Practice Problems		D Practice Problems

Another group read all four tutorials, and then did the same practice problems. However, their practice problems were all jumbled together:

Topic A

Topic B

Topic C

Topic D

B

D

A

C

D

B

C

A

C

B

A

D

A

C

D

B

You can see that the first group looks like my first syllabus: nicely organized; the second group looks like Thursday night on my second syllabus: a jumbled muddle. (Rohrer, more politely, calls this second structure “interleaved.”)

When it came to the practice problems, as I feared, the students in the jumbled group didn’t do very well: they got 60% of the problems right, compared to 88% in the traditionally organized group.

However, what happened when Rohrer’s groups came back two weeks later to take a test? The jumbled group, once again, remembered about 60%. The traditionally organized group remembered 20%.

Yes, 20%. Their score fell 66% in two weeks.

Why did that happen?

Two ideas seem most plausible.

First: Rohrer’s first group learned the four math procedures, but they didn’t practice deciding when to use each one. Because their practice problems always aligned with the technique they had just practiced, they never had to figure out when to use which one. So, two weeks later, they struggled to know which equation to use.

Second: Rohrer’s group had more opportunities to forget. Because their practice problems required them to switch from technique to technique, they never could get into a groove. Each problem, they had time to forget the techniques they weren’t practicing, and so had more opportunities to remember those techniques anew.

These two research pools lead to these conclusions: spacing benefits learning (because it allows forgetting). And, spacing requires a jumbled/interleaved syllabus—which also benefits learning (because, again, it allows forgetting).

A final note about research. The “Spacing Effect” is very well documented, and at this point is not controversial. The benefits of interleaving, however, have been shown by fewer studies; and some of the studies with high-school aged students have been equivocal¹. But this much is clear; the combination of spacing & interleaving leads to more learning than the traditional syllabus.

Because, as you now remember, forgetting can help you learn.

References & Further Reading

1. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. [Paper]
2. Pashler, H., Rohrer, D., Cepeda, N. J., & Carpenter, S. K. (2007). Enhancing learning and retarding forgetting: Choices and consequences. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 14(2), 187-193. [Paper]
3. Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2010). Recent research on human learning challenges conventional instructional strategies.Educational Researcher, 39(5), 406-412. [Paper]

• Brown, P., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M.A. (2014) Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [Book]
• Carey, B. (2014). How we learn: The surprising truth about when, where, and why it happens. New York: Random House. [Book]

Our world is becoming increasingly globalized. This interconnectedness grants us access to languages of countries we have never been to. Through the migration of people, languages have also migrated to places they never existed even ten years ago, and many countries are now host to countless languages beyond their native tongue.

Should this change the languages that we learn to speak?

There are many obvious advantages to knowing multiple languages. When traveling, for example, you can ask where the bathroom is or how much something costs. When at the airport, you may be able to translate for a fellow passenger struggling to communicate. You can dig more deeply into a favorite story with foreign roots by enjoying it in its original language. These may be little things, but they can make life a little easier and a lot more exciting. But the perks are more profound than that.

The Cultural Value of Speaking the Language

Language is like a window into another culture’s values, history, and perspective. As such, being able to speak another language helps you connect with that culture more deeply. The range of words can give you insight into what is prioritized in a society and the nuanced synonyms can give you a sense of what concepts call for the most attention. Fluency can even provide hints about a culture’s history through the language’s evolution over time.

I lived in Thailand for two years before I made a conscious effort to learn some Thai. Learning and understanding even the basic greeting taught me so much. “Have you eaten yet”, is one of the first few things you ask someone when greeting one another. Much of Thai culture is centered around food, and they are world famous for their hospitality, so it makes sense that this would be mirrored in their language. As I continued to learn more Thai, I also learned much more about the culture that crafted the tongue.

The Complicated History of Bilingualism

Being bilingual is seen as a valuable skill and an advantage today. This, however, has not always been the case. There was a time when speaking another language in the U.S. was looked down upon (one may argue, in some places it still is). Not too long ago, when families immigrated to the U.S., in an attempt to assimilate to society, parents would sometimes not allow their children to speak their mother-tongue – even at home. My friend, whose family moved from Egypt, tells me how his parents prohibited him and his siblings from speaking in Egyptian to one another, and even remembers being smacked on occasion when he repeatedly did so.

There was a time when English language learning was not thought to be the responsibility of schools. Educators and policy makers believed that the students from language minorities should be able to do the linguistic adjustment on their own. When these children were not able to achieve academically, the parents and home environments were marked as the predominant issue. This attitude sheds light on why my friend experienced such strong reactions from his parents when he would speak Egyptian. They were afraid.

The Myth of Bilingual Deficits

Historically, there has also been a predominant fear that exposing children to more than one language at an early age will cause severe confusion and delay in language skills. Behavioral studies at the time suggested that young children’s brains were not developed enough to handle so much information, so two languages would be detrimental to brain development¹.

If this were true, it’s unlikely I would be writing this essay today. Growing up, my family regularly spoke four languages. My mother spoke in Urdu to us, my father spoke in English, our nanny spoke Hindko – a language of northern Pakistan, and my parents – in an attempt to not disclose private issues, would speak to one another in Punjabi (little did they know, we picked it up quite early on). To my knowledge, all of my family members are (at least objectively) fully functioning, fully literate adults.

We now know from research that learning one or two languages results in no major differences in developmental trajectories². Children learning two languages do sometimes struggle with “code switching”; but that just means that they may mix grammar or words from the different languages. This is a normal part of language learning and not indicative of language learning difficulties³. In early years, children’s vocabulary for each language on its own may be smaller compared to monolingual children, but when both languages are taken into account the total vocabulary is on par with monolingual children… and continues to grow⁴.

So knowing more than one language is awesome for traveling, meeting people from different countries, even landing some cool jobs. And being bilingual, to our knowledge, does not disrupt a child’s normal functioning. But what does bilingualism look like at the neural level? Do our brains looks different? Do we reap some benefits of knowing more than one language? Turns out, the answer seems to be yes.

The Neural Benefits of Bilingualism

There is evidence that bilingualism may improve executive functioning. Executive function is thought to be primarily housed in the front most part of the brain, in what we call the pre-frontal cortex (though research suggests it’s also part of much more complicated brain-wide networks). Executive function is a catch-all term for a lot of our cognitive processes, including working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, and problem solving as well as planning and execution – a lot of important things!

With such a wide range of executive functions, most study carve off a specific function that they’re interested in learning more about. Some studies, for example, have focused on how we process conflicting information. These researchers have found that those who were bilingual outperformed their monolingual counterparts on tasks that required conflicting information. These studies were done with the Stroop task and the “Simon Tests”, which judge how fast you respond to conflicting or confusing stimuli⁵.

The Stroop task consists of showing the word BLUE, for example, on a screen, but it’s written in yellow font. You must name the color of the font. and ignore the written word.
Sounds easy, but it’s difficult to do it with speed and accuracy when the color and word do not match. Try the test here.

This requires some inhibitory control as you are receiving competing perceptual information. Bilinguals were found to be better than monolinguals at tasks that used inhibitory control, and also at switching between two tasks in terms of speed and accuracy.

Apart from being better at sorting out conflicting information, other studies have found that bilinguals are also better able to filter out noise and distractions. On average, they seem to have the ability to exhibit greater focus regardless of what is going on around them. At a basic level, bilinguals seem have a heightened ability to monitor their environment.

Scientists theorize that the switching between languages quite often requires a “hyperawareness,”; it’s possible that the bilingual brain is primed to quickly code switch, or pick up what language is being spoken. In this study bilinguals both performed better and had less activity in the parts of the brain associated with monitoring. This may indicate that they are able to toggle between the two more efficiently and with less cognitive demand⁵.

So far we’ve discussed how being bilingual may improve executive function by having greater inhibitory control, being better able to switch between tasks, being able to filter out distractions and having a heightened ability to monitor their environment.

What else can it do? Turns out gives us some long-term aging benefits too.

How Bilingualism May Preserve the Brain

A growing body of evidence seems to indicate that language multiplicity can delay the onset of dementia by up to 5 years! In multiple studies Alzheimer patients who were bilingual reported the onset of symptoms at 77.7, whereas most monolinguals reported them at 72.6. Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that many of these studies are correlational. However, what’s particularly interesting is that in follow up studies it was found that the brains of the bilingual people actually had twice as much physical atrophy in regions associated with Alzheimers. Interestingly, despite the bilinguals’ higher amount of atrophy, they performed on par with monolingual counterparts who had less diseased brains⁶. This suggests that the bilingual brain may be excellent at consolidating resources, requiring less healthy tissue to achieve the same results.

Although scientists don’t fully understand why this is the case, some assume that it has something to do with how language shapes the brain. Some theorize that speaking two languages increases blood and oxygen flow to the brain, keeping nerve connections more “fit” and active in a sense⁵.

In studies at Harvard they found that bilinguals seem to have more white matter in their frontal lobes (remember this is where our executive function area is) and temporal lobes (which is an area important to language)⁷. White matter is essentially the long fibers (axons) that connect cells in the brain, kind of like a communication pipeline. More white matter suggests more connections. These studies support previous studies that show that bilingualism may shape the brain function and structure in a unique way.

The Future of Bilingualism

After reading this you may think, well hey, I should really take up Spanish or maybe I shouldn’t have slacked off so much in class.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be how this works.

Professor Gigi Luk, from Harvard University, focuses on research on bilingualism. Her findings show that many of the benefits described are connected to a lifelong language experience that begins in childhood and continues through adulthood⁷. During childhood, the brain is in great flux, and it may be that language has a particular influence on brain networks during that stage, which can result in major benefits later in life. While it doesn’t seem like brushing up on that Spanish or French will help in this regard, it couldn’t hurt.

What we can take away, however, is just how much of a gift it may be to teach multiple languages to our students. While it may take a bit longer for them to reach full mastery of either language, once they do, and if they continue to practice both throughout their life, the richness of their global experience and the socio-cultural doors that will open to them are countless. With research pointing to its cognitive benefits, and our world becoming increasingly culturally interconnected, it seems clear that the goals of education align with the potential of bilingualism.

Children can’t typically make this choice for themselves, so it’s up to us to work towards a system that gives them the best of what education can offer.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Abutalebi, J., & Weekes, B. S. (2014). The Cognitive Neurology of Bilingualism in the Age of Globalization. Behavioural Neurology, 536727. [Paper]
2. Werker J. Perceptual Foundations of Bilingual Acquisition in Infancy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience. 1251, 50-61. [Paper]
3. Genesee, F. (2009). Early childhood bilingualism: Perils and possibilities. Journal of Applied Research on Learning, 2, (2). [Paper]
4. Marchman, V., Fernald, A., & Hurtado, N. (2010). How vocabulary size in two languages relates to efficiency in spoken word recognition by young Spanish-English  J. Child Language, 37, 817-840. [Paper]
5. Bialystok E, Craik FIM, Klein R. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon Task. Psychology and Aging, (2), 290-303. [Paper]
6. Bialystok E, Craik F. I., Freedman M. (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the on set of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45(2), 459-464. [Paper]
7. Luk G., Bialystok E., Craik F.,I.,M., Grady C., L. (2011). Lifelong bilingualism maintains white matter integrity in older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(46), 16808–16813. [Paper]

• Mechelli A., Crinion J. T., Noppeney U.,Neurolinguistics: structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, [Paper]

 

To teach math through a problem like the one below, an effective math teacher would first try the problem herself.

“It’s June 1st, and you’ve begun receiving an allowance of $8 dollars on the first of each month. You’ve had your eye on a new jacket that costs $27, not including the additional 8% sales tax. If you want to have at least $2 per month for incidental spending, what percent of your $8 monthly allowance would you choose to save in order to buy the jacket before the start of the new year? Explain your thinking.”*

At minimum, one attempt may lead her to a solution. To more holistically prepare, she would ideally practice several strategies, conceptualizing the problem in many different ways to anticipate and stretch various students’ thinking.

An effective teacher of math explores math herself. It therefore makes sense that in order to effectively teach children about the benefits of mindfulness -psychological, physiological and social¹ – a teacher would explore and practice mindfulness herself.

How can mindfulness practice help kids?

Mindfulness practice is being adapted for school implementation to support healthy emotional, mental, and physical development. Children face rigorous testing and extracurricular demands and may be susceptible to high levels of stress beginning at the elementary level. Additionally, in underserved urban environments in the U.S., children experience higher levels of stress and exhibit fewer prosocial behaviors than wealthier counterparts, which has been linked with lower academic performance.²

Susan Andersen and Martin Teicher, researchers of developmental biopsychiatry at Harvard Medical School, suggest that chronic stress exposure at young ages may have effects on neurobiological development. Structures in the brain involved in emotion-regulation and decision-making may be compromised by stress during child development.

In a 2009 review, Andersen and Teicher studied the system between the nucleus accumbens – a basal forebrain structure that interacts with the hippocampus and is involved in memory and emotion – and the prefrontal cortex – known to be involved in decision making and social behaviors. Under times of stress in childhood, the review suggests, this system can be compromised. It is possible that this may be involved in the development of maladaptive behaviors that may affect school performance, including substance abuse.³

Mindfulness – paying attention to the present moment – has begun to show promise as a school-based approach to support children’s emotional and mental well-being. Rather than mental and social health as an “aside” from academics – mindful self-management in classrooms is now being linked with higher math scores even after just a few weeks.⁴

The potential impact of mindful practice on student stress management, neurological development, and academic performance is gaining credibility. So if we want to encourage children to utilize mindfulness practice, why would it matter if teachers practice?

Why should teachers practice mindfulness?

If we’re preaching to children about the importance of mindful self-regulation to successfully navigate life but we’re doing it with pained, distracted looks and yesterday’s graded papers still stuck to our tired faces, chances are that mindful practice might not land well with our kids.

I paint this as a comical picture, but how physically and emotionally demanding teaching can be is no laughing matter. Teachers work daily to support students’ socio-emotional progress, manage individual and whole-class behaviors, internalize the latest curricular expectations, and tailor instruction to all children’s unique learning needs. Under heavy demands, teacher practice of stress and emotion regulation are crucial for two reasons: (1) enhanced teacher wellbeing may implicitly enhance the classroom environment, and (2) teachers practicing strategies themselves would likely be much more effective, authentic models of the practice when leading students through them.

In a recent review of teacher “extra-role time,” which accounts for the hours teachers spend outside of school days grading and planning or leading student activities on evenings and weekends, U.S. schoolteachers were found to spend an average of 1,913 hours on teaching-related work per week in a 36-week academic year. That’s an average of about 53 hours of work per week. To couch this in context, an average full-time employee works an average of 40 hours per week spread out over 48 weeks.⁵ Such concentrated, energy-demanding work runs the risk of leading to teacher burnout.

In a 2007 policy report by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, the teacher attrition rate in the U.S. had doubled since the 1990s at nearly 17% nationally and 20% in urban schools. In analyzing possible reasons outside of retirement, the report suggests that stress may be a significant factor: “The problem is not finding enough teachers to do the job – the problem is keeping them in our schools.”⁶

How can we help teachers feel emotionally balanced and less stressed in their work? In a 2011 study, mindfulness meditation was linked with increases in “positive reappraisal,” an emotion regulation strategy used to re-contextualize a stressful event as positive or harmless.⁷ Positive reappraisal has historically been shown to mediate reductions in stress. In a recent brain imaging study, mindfulness practice in healthy adults was positively associated with activity in the left and right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), the brain regions supporting, among other things, emotion regulation.^8,9 Mindfulness therefore may be an effective tool for adult emotion regulation and reduction of stress, and may allow teachers to better manage day-to-day stressful experiences when workload shows no sign of decreasing.

A 2015 pilot study assessed effectiveness of a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) adapted for educators specifically.¹⁰ As its name would suggest, the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, M.D., was designed to help lower levels of stress through an 8-week mindfulness intervention adapted from historically Buddhist practice for clinical settings. Its benefits have been documented over the last few decades as it has been adapted for adolescents, the elderly, patients with cancer, those struggling with PTSD, and more.

In the MBSR pilot for educators, 18 healthy high school teachers participated in 8 weeks of mindfulness practice and 18 teachers were assigned to a waitlist control group. Mindfulness participants engaged in two-hour weekly sessions guiding them on body awareness, breathing awareness, yoga, mindful eating, mindful walking, and additional meditation techniques with opportunities for reflection. They also were asked to practice with a guided meditation CD for 25-30 minutes daily.

Teachers in the intervention group reported significant improvement in multiple measures of self-compassion including diminished over-identification, which is similar to dwelling on negative thoughts. They also reported significant improvement in ability to remain present and calm and better sleep quality when compared to the control group.

These initial findings may invite more investigation of mindfulness practice for educators, though the study is not without limits. While there is much psychological and neurobiological evidence in academic literature to support the effects of mindfulness on emotion regulation in adults, the present study is one of the first to focus on educator mindfulness specifically, and therefore relied solely on self-report as a measure of effectiveness.

Additionally, a wider and larger sample than 36 teachers will help reduce environmental influence on participant progress. In the pilot, the mindfulness group was comprised of teachers from one school and the control group consisted of teachers at a different school. School culture may have therefore contributed to differences when comparing groups in mindfulness and self-compassion. A larger sample size of teachers across multiple schools, with teachers participating in either waitlist or control at each of those schools, could better isolate effectiveness of MBSR for educators.

Nevertheless, collectively, the research points to the benefits of teachers engaging with the mindfulness practices that they promote to their students.

Taking the Jump

A mindfulness practice may appear to be another requirement piled onto an already full teaching plate, but even a few minutes of daily practice might soften the stress of teaching demands. Here are a few simple ways to begin:

• Dr. Kristin Neff specializes in self-compassion research. Check out www.self-compassion.org for free guided meditations and more.

• For a simple, calming breath technique, consider trying this 3 Minute Full Complete Breath Audio (recorded for you by yours truly!).

A teacher practices math to support her students in math. A teacher practices emotion regulation and mental wellbeing to support students in emotion regulation and mental wellbeing.

Our children and teachers face what seems like a growing number of stressors in life that may not be easily removed. With openness to a personal mindfulness practice, teachers would not only have a chance to feel better in stressful circumstances as helping professionals, they may better guide children in mindful practice from a more grounded, earnest place. As role models to our students, this has the potential to encourage healthy habits and dramatically improve their quality of life.

*(And for the record, I’d save 62.5% of my monthly allowance, or $5 a month. That way, I could have the minimum $2 for spending flow and keep another $1 for separate savings each month, still having enough to buy that jacket by November 1st and impress at holiday parties. But that’s my practice. What’s yours? ☺).

 

References & Further Reading 

1. Rempel, Kim. (2012). Mindfulness for Children and Youth: A Review of the Literature with an Argument for School-Based Implementation.Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, 46(3), 201-220. [Article]
2. Mendelson, T., Greenberg, M., Dariotis, T., Gould, J., Rhoades, K., & Leaf, L. (2010). Feasibility and Preliminary Outcomes of a School-Based Mindfulness Intervention for Urban Youth.Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 38(7), 985-994. [Article]
3. Andersen, S., & Teicher, M. (2009). Desperately driven and no brakes: Developmental stress exposure and subsequent risk for substance abuse. Neuroscience And Biobehavioral Reviews,33(4), 516-524. [Article]
4. Schonert-Reichl, K. A., Oberle, E., Lawlor, M.S., Abbott, D., Thomson, K., Oberlander, T.F., & Diamond, A. (2015). Enhancing cognitive and social-emotional development through a simple-to-administer mindfulness-based school program for elementary school children: A randomized controlled trial. Developmental Psychology, 51(1), 52-66. doi: 10.1037/a0038454 [Article]
5. Brown, L., & Roloff, M. (2011). Extra-Role Time, Burnout, and Commitment. Business Communication Quarterly,74(4), 450-474. [Article]
6. NCTAF Policy Brief. (2007). [Brief]
7. Garland, E., Gaylord, L., & Fredrickson, S. (2011). Positive Reappraisal Mediates the Stress-Reductive Effects of Mindfulness: An Upward Spiral Process.Mindfulness, 2(1), 59-67. [Article]
8. Modinos, G., Ormel, J., & Aleman, A. (2010). Individual differences in dispositional mindfulness and brain activity involved in reappraisal of emotion. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, 369–377. [Article]
9. Hölzel, B., Lazar, S., Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D., & Ott, U. (2011). How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective.Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 537-559. [Article]
10. Frank, J., Reibel, L., Broderick, D., Cantrell, P., & Metz, T. (2015). The Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on Educator Stress and Well-Being: Results from a Pilot Study.Mindfulness,6(2), 208-216. [Article]

Want to help kids learn? Ask them to explain what they are learning in their own words!

New research¹ has found that when children are asked to come up with explanations (even just to themselves) while learning, they are able to connect new ideas with prior cause-and-effect knowledge better than those who are not encouraged to explore and explain. By forming their own generalizations, children can more efficiently understand new information.

Children begin to develop cause-and-effect thinking skills as early as eight months of age². Cause-and-effect thinking, or causality, allows us to make inferences and reason about things that happen around us. Causality helps us understand things as simple as “If I don’t water the plants they’ll die” to things more complicated such as other people’s intentions and behaviors. When children understand cause and effect, they also begin to understand the operation of mechanisms, which allows them to understand causal relationships. When a child asks “why” for the first time, this question more than likely coincides with their first attempt to explain something. Asking “why” helps children fill in the blanks (so to speak), allowing them to fully understand both the cause and effects and mechanisms of the new situation or information they’ve been presented with³.

Educational research has found that self-explaining (explaining to oneself or to another person) can be more effective for learning than other activities – such as repeatedly reading over materials or thinking aloud^4,5. While most of the research on self-explanation has focused primarily on older children and adults, there are some studies on younger children that have shown the positive effects it can have. For example, research with elementary school children has shown that in comparison to other learning activities, such as solving practice problems, self-explanation was shown to enhance children’s conceptual and procedural knowledge about a given task or concept⁶.

Why is it important to focus on younger children?

Research has shown that self-explanation is really only beneficial when we are presented with new concepts that we aren’t well informed of⁷. Because young children are just beginning to experience the world, they stand to benefit most from self-explanation.

In order to examine the benefits of explanation-based learning further, Christine Legare and Tania Lombrozo implemented two studies. In each study, they presented preschoolers (age 3 to 6) with a mechanical toy made up of colorful, interlocking gears that had a propeller on one end and a crank on the other. After a researcher showed the children how the toy worked, each child was given an opportunity to take the machine apart and to put it back together again. Children were then asked to either observe or explain the mechanisms of the toy (in study one) or were asked to describe or explain the machine to the researcher (in study two).

Both studies found that the children (regardless of age) who were asked to explain the toy outperformed the other children in understanding the cause and effect operations of the toy. For example, if a part was unknowingly removed from the toy by the researcher, the children in the explain condition were able to figure out and understand why this was happening more so than children in the other groups.

The children who were asked to explain were also better at rebuilding the toy and were able to transfer this new knowledge to other learning tasks presented to them. However, they found that explaining does not improve memory for details: children who were asked to explain were often mistaken when asked to recall the toy’s size, shapes, and colors.

Why did the children who were asked to explain excel in understanding the toy’s functionality, but fail when it came to remembering its details? Legare suggest that the process of explaining causes the child to focus more on understanding the cause-and-effect mechanisms rather than the physical details. Self-explanation may help kids learn by forcing their minds to grapple with the underlying concepts, causing them to discover connections that they may have otherwise overlooked.

Previous research by Legare and colleagues^{8, 9} has found that preschoolers are especially prone to attempt self-explanation when they encounter new information that contradicts their worldview. When children are presented with inconsistent outcomes, it prompts them to think about all possibilities (even unseen and hidden mechanisms). The explanations they come up with then inspire them to want to actively test their hypotheses. These results were observed in children as young as two years old¹⁰.

While much is still unknown about the role of explanation in early childhood learning, it’s clear that explaining may be valuable because it makes us aware of what we don’t yet understand. These studies have also shown that self-explanation engages young learners in ways that other cognitive process do not (such as observing and describing).

“Understanding the ways in which explanation does — and does not — improve learning speaks not only to questions about the development of cause-and-effect knowledge, but also to questions about how to most effectively harness explanation for use in educational interventions,” Legare says.

When teachers and parents ask children to explain “why” and “how” something works, they are giving the child the opportunity to think like scientists.

This process is effective both in the classroom and at home. By allowing children to gather evidence through exploration and understand it through explanation, it provides them with insights into the development of scientific reasoning – allowing them to harness their potential for scientific reasoning and improve their critical thinking skills⁸. Additionally, because children may explore more when asked for explanations regularly, informal learning environments like children’s museums are a great place for children to hone in on these abilities.

So the next time your child or student asks you to explain “why” or “how” when learning something new – ask them! You’ll be helping them more than you (or they) realize.

 

References 

1. Legare C.H. and Lombrozo T. (2014). Selective effects of explanation on learning during early childhood. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 126: 198-212. [Article]
2. Sobel, D. M., & Kirkham, N. Z. (2006). Blickets and babies: The development of causal reasoning in toddlers and infants. Developmental Psychology, 42, 1103-1115. [Article]
3. Keil, F. C. (2012). Running on empty? How folk science gets by with less. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21, 329-334. [Article]
4. Fonseca, B. & Chi, M. T. (2011). The self-explanation effect: A constructive learning activity. In Mayer, R. & Alexander, P. (Eds.), The Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction (pp. 296-321). New York, NY: Routledge Press. [Book]
5. Lombrozo, T. (2012). Explanation and abductive inference. J. Holyoak and R. G. Morrison (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (pp. 260-276). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [Article]
6. McEldoon, K., Durkin, K., & Rittle-Johnson, B. (2012). Is self-explanation worth the time? A comparison to additional practice. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 615- 632 [Article]
7. Rittle-Johnson, B., Saylor, M., and Swygert, K.E. (2008). Learning from explaining: does it matter if mom is listening? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 100(3): 215-24. [Article]
8. Legare CH, Gelman SA, and Wellman HM. (2010). Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning. Child Development, 81(3): 929-44. [Article]
9. Legare C. 2012. Exploring explanation: explaining inconsistent evidence informs exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior in young children. Child Development, 83(1): 173-85. [Article]
10. Legare, C. H. (2014), The Contributions of Explanation and Exploration to Children’s Scientific Reasoning. Child Development Perspectives, 8: 101–106. [Article]

 

Further Reading

• Grotzer, T. (2003). Learning to Understand the Forms of Causality Implicit in Scientifically Accepted Explanations. Studies in Science Education, 39(1), 1-74 [Article]
• Grotzer, T. (2012). Learning Causality in a Complex World: Understandings of Consequence. [Book]