Quite consistently, this post has been among the most searched for and most popular on the blog.
Teachers and administrators REALLY want to know: What is the optimal amount of time for our students to meet? What’s the very best schedule?
Here’s the best answer I have:
I met yesterday with several thoughtful teachers who had resonant questions about education research.
How do we balance factual learning and deep thinking?
What’s “the right amount of stress” during a test?
How can we promote collaboration while honoring individual differences?
And:
What’s the optimal class length?
This question comes up often. Should we have lots of short classes, so every subject meets every day? Should we have a few longer classes, so that we can dig deeply into a particular topic without interruption?
Debates sometimes fall along disciplinary lines. Foreign language and math teachers often want frequent class meetings; English and History teachers typically like bigger chunks of time for discussions.
Science teachers just gotta have 80 minutes to run a lab well.
But: what does research show?
Class Length: What Research Tells Us
As far as I know, we just don’t have a clear answer to that question.
Over at the Education Endowment Fund, for example, they’ve investigated the benefits of block scheduling: that is, a few long periods rather than several short ones.
The finding: we can’t really say. Or, to quote EEF: “There is no consistent pattern in the evidence.”
More precisely:
The evidence suggests that how teachers use the time they are allocated is more important than the length of lesson or the schedule of lessons, and hence that the introduction of block scheduling is unlikely to raise attainment by itself.
By implication, a change away from block scheduling shouldn’t raise attainment either.
The point is not how long we teach but how well we teach with the time we’ve got.
For this reason, I often counsel schools and teachers: before you change your schedule, study human attention systems.
Once teachers know how attention works — and, it’s A LOT more complicated that we might have thought — we’ll be much better at helping students learn. (If you have the chance to attend a Learning and the Brain session about attention: RUN, don’t walk.)
Class Length: What Research Can’t Tell Us
Research doesn’t answer this question, I think, because it can’t. There’s no one correct answer.
If you teach 2nd graders or 7th graders or 11th graders, you’ll probably find that different lengths of time work better.
If you teach in cultures that inculcate patience and concentration, longer classes will work better than in cultures with a more get-up-and-go kind of pace.
The number of students in the class might matter.
The experience of the teacher almost certainly matters.
When your school starts investigating schedules, therefore, I suggest you start with these essentials:
First: study human attention.
Second: don’t design “the optimal schedule.” Design the optimal schedule for your school and your students. It might not work at anyone else’s school, but it doesn’t need to.
A schedule that works for you and your students is the closest to optimal that you can get.
We’ve got lots of advice for the students in our lives:
How to study: retrieval practice
When to study: spacing effect
Why study: so many answers
Where to study: …um, hold please, your call is very important to us…
As can happen, research provides a counter-intuitive — and sometimes contradictory — answers to that last question.
I grew up hearing the confident proclamation that we should create a perfect study environment in one place, and always study there. (The word “library” was spoken in reverent tones.)
As I think about the research I’ve seen in the last ten years, my own recommendations to students have been evolving.
Classic Beginnings
In a deservedly famous study, Smith, Glenberg and Bjork (1978) tried to measure the effect on environment on memory.
They found that, in the short run, I associate the words that I learn in this roomwith the room itself. That is: if I learn words in room 27, I’ll do better on a test of those words in room 27 than in room 52.
One way to interpret those findings is that we should teach in the place where students will be tested.
If the final exam, inevitably, is in the gym, I should teach my students in the gym. And they should study in the gym. This approach ensures that they’ll associate their new knowledge with the place they have to demonstrate that knowledge.
In this theory, students should learn and study in the place they’ll ultimately be tested.
Priority Fix #1
This interpretation of Smith’s work makes sense if — and only if — the goal of learning is to do well on tests.
Of course, that’s not my goal. I don’t want my students to think carefully about literature for the test; I want them to think carefully about literature for life.
I want them to have excellent writing skills now, and whenever in the future they need to write effectively and clearly.
We might reasonably worry that a strong association between the room and the content would limit transfer. That is: if I connect the material I’ve learned so strongly with room 27, or the gym, I might struggle to remember or use it anywhere else.
Smith worried about that too. And, sure enough, when he tested that hypothesis, his research supported it.
In other words, he found that students who study material in different locations can use it more flexibly elsewhere. Students who study material in only one location can’t transfer their learning so easily. (By the way: Smith’s research has been replicated. You can read about this in Benedict Carey’s How We Learn. Check out chapter 3.)
This finding leads to a wholly different piece of advice. Don’t do what my teachers told me to do when I was a student. Instead, study material in as many different places as reasonably possible. That breadth of study will spread learning associations as widely as possible, and benefit transfer.
That’s what I’ve been telling students for the last several years.
Voila. Generations of teaching advice overturned by research!
Priority Fix #2
Frequent readers have heard me say: “Researchers work by isolating variables. Schools work by combining variables.”
The longer I do this work, the longer I think that this “where to study” advice makes sense only if I focus exclusively on that one variable.
If I start adding in other variables, well, maybe not so much.
True enough, research shows that I’ll remember a topic better if I study it in different places … as long as all other variables being held constant. But, in life, other variables aren’t constant.
Specifically, some study locations are noisier than others. Starbucks is louder than the library: it just is. And, some locations are visuallybusier than others.
So, a more honest set of guidelines for students goes like this:
You should review material in different places. But, you want each of those places to be quiet. And, you don’t want them to have much by way of visual distraction.
You know what that sounds like to me? The library.
I suppose it’s possible for students to come up with several different study locations that are equally quiet and visually bland. Speaking as a high school teacher, I think it’s unlikely they’ll actually do that.
So, unless they’ve got the bandwidth to manage all those demands even before they sit down to study, then I think the traditional advice (“library!”) is as good as anything.
Final Thoughts
People occasionally ask me where I am in the “traditional vs. progressive” education debate.
The honest answer is: I’m indifferent to it. I (try to) focus on practical interpretations of pertinent psychology and neuroscience research.
If that research leads to a seemingly innovative suggestion (“study in many locations!”), that’s fine. If it leads to a traditional position (“library”), that’s equally fine.
I think that, for the most part, having teams in education (prog vs. trad) doesn’t help. If we measure results as best we can, and think humbly and open-mindedly about the teaching implications, we’ll serve our students best.
Imagine that you ask a neuro-expert: “What’s the most important brain information for teachers to know?”
The answer you get will depend on the expertise of the person you ask.
If you ask Stanislas Dehaene, well, you’ll get LOTS of answers — because he has so many areas of brain expertise.
He is, for example, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France; and Director of the NeuroSpin Center, where they’re building the largest MRI gizmo in the world. (Yup, you read that right. IN THE WORLD.)
He has in fact written several books on neuroscience: neuroscience and reading, neuroscience and math, even neuroscience and human consciousness.
He’s also President of a newly established council to ensure that teacher education in all of France has scientific backing: the Scientific Council for Education. (If the United States had such a committee, we could expunge Learning Styles myths from teacher training overnight.)
If that’s not enough, Dehaene is interested in artificial intelligence. And statistics. And evolution.
So, when he writes a book called How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better than Any Machine…for Now, you know you’re going to get all sorts of wise advice.
Practical Teaching Advice
Dehaene wants teachers to think about “four pillars” central to the learning process.
Pillar 1: Attention
Pillar 2: Active engagement
Pillar 3: Error feedback
Pillar 4: Consolidation
As you can see, this blueprint offers practical and flexible guidance for our work. If we know how to help students pay attention (#1), how to help them engage substantively with the ideas under discussion (#2), how to offer the right kind of feedback at the right time (#3), and how to shape practice that fosters consolidation (#4), we’ll have masterful classrooms indeed.
Learning, of course, begins with Attention: we can’t learn about things we don’t pay attention to. Following Michael Posner’s framework, Dehaene sees attention not as one cognitive process, but as a combination of three distinct cognitive processes.
Helpfully, he simplifies these processes into three intuitive steps. Students have to know:
when to pay attention
what to pay attention to, and
how to pay attention.
Once teachers start thinking about attention this way, we can see all sorts of new possibilities for our craft. Happily, he has suggestions.
Like other writers, Dehaene wants teachers to focus on active engagement (pillar #2). More than other writers, he emphasizes that “active” doesn’t necessarily mean moving. In other words, active engagement requires not physical engagement but cognitive engagement.
This misunderstanding has led to many needlessly chaotic classroom strategies, all in the name of “active learning.” So, Dehaene’s emphasis here is particularly helpful and important.
What’s the best way to create cognitive (not physical) engagement?
“There is no single miraculous method, but rather a whole range of approaches that force students to think for themselves, such as: practical activities, discussions in which everyone takes part, small group work, or teachers who interrupt their class to ask a difficult questions.”
Error Feedback (pillar #3) and Consolidation (#4) both get equally measured and helpful chapters. As with the first two, Dehaene works to dispel myths that have muddled our approaches to teaching, and to offer practical suggestions to guide our classroom practice.
Underneath the “Four Pillars”
These four groups of suggestions all rest on a sophisticated understanding of what used to be called the “nature/nurture” debate.
Dehaene digs deeply into both sides of the question to help teachers understand both brain’s adaptability (“nurture”) and the limits of that adaptability (“nature”).
To take but one example: research with babies makes it quite clear that brains are not “blank slates.” We come with pre-wired modules for processing language, numbers, faces, and all sorts of other things.
One example in particular surprised me: probability. Imagine that you put ten red marbles and ten green marbles in a bag. As you start drawing marbles back out of that bag, a 6-month-old will be surprised — and increasingly surprised — if you draw out green marble after green marble after green marble.
That is: the baby understands probability. They know it’s increasingly likely you’ll draw a red marble, and increasingly surprising that you don’t. Don’t believe me? Check out chapter 3: “Babies’ Invisible Knowledge.”
Of course, Dehaene has fascinating stories to tell about the brain’s plasticity as well. He describes several experiments — unknown to me — where traumatized rats were reconditioned to prefer the room where the traumatizing shock initially took place.
He also tells the amazing story of “neuronal recycling.” That is: the neural real-estate we train to read initially housed other (evolutionarily essential) cognitive functions.
Human Brains and Machine Learning
Dehaene opens his book by contemplating definitions of learning — and by contrasting humans and machines in their ability to do so.
By one set of measures, computers have us beat.
For instance, one computer was programmed with the rules of the game Go, and then trained to play against itself. In three hours, it became better at the game than the human Go champion. And, it got better from there.
However, Dehaene still thinks humans are the better learners. Unlike humans, machines can’t generalize their learning. In other words: that Go computer can’t play any other games. In fact, if you changed the size of the Go board even slightly, it would be utterly stumped.
And, unlike humans, it can’t explain its learning to anyone else.
And, humans need relatively little data to start learning. Machines do better than us when they can crank millions of calculations. But, when they calculate as slowly as we do, they don’t learn nearly as much as we do.
As his subtitle reassures us, brains learn better than any machine. (And, based on my conversation with him, it’s clear that “…for now” means “for the long foreseeable future.”)
Final Thoughts
At this point, you see what I mean when I wrote that Dehaene has an impressive list of brain interests, and therefore offers an impressive catalog of brain guidance.
You might, however, wonder if this much technical information ends up being a little dry.
The answer is: absolutely not.
Dehaene’s fascination with all things brain is indeed palpable in this book. And, his library of amazing studies and compelling anecdotes keeps the book fresh and easy-to-read. I simply lost track of the number of times I wrote “WOW” in the margin.
This has been a great year for brain books. Whether you’re new to the field, or looking to deepen your understanding, I recommend How We Learn enthusiastically.
Edu-Twitter loves a good battle, and one irrupted just this week.
A teacher posted a video of students reading while peddling exercise bikes.
Comments roared in thick and fast.
Several people responded with “AWESOME” or “<3 this” or some other emoji for upbeat enthusiasm. But — at least in my Twitter feed — the angry skeptics were as scathing as the early fans were enthusiastic. (The word “bonkers” showed up frequently.)
Twitter doesn’t allow space for nuance (one reason I still write thousand word blog posts). In this case, I think, the twitter “debate” would have been greatly improved by context. In fact, it really needed two distinct categories of context.
Context, Part I: The Teacher*
Skeptics who responded to this post — reasonably enough — worried that reading while exercising might interfere with the students’ ability to do either thing well. (I’ll explore this concern in the next section.)
However, I didn’t see any commentary that focused on this important fact: the teacher who created this initiative is a physical education teacher. That is: it’s his job to think about and promote his students’ physical health.
In fact, he has quite a history of trying out imaginative approaches to that goal.
He’s got students playing drums with glow-in-the-dark drumsticks. (And, yes: they’re playing drums in the dark.) He’s got them doing fun obstacle courses. He’s got them kicking field-goals in the gym…by projecting goal-posts on the gym’s upper wall! If nothing else, you know his students will enjoy his class.
And, he cites lots o’ research showing the benefits of aerobic exercise for long-term memory formation. (Again, I’ll talk about this research below.)
So: we might quite reasonably worry that this biking-while-reading initiative won’t have the effect that the PE teacher wants it to. At the same time, any teacher who experiments as frequently as this teacher does will, no doubt, try some things that don’t work along the way.
But, heaven knows, I try plenty of things that don’t work in my teaching — that’s simply the price of being committed to trying new things.
And — again — this guy teaches PE. In my view, he SHOULD be trying to find ways to get more physical activity into his students’ daily schedules. Even if exercise bikes aren’t exactly the right answer, he’s questing in the right direction.
Context, Part II: The Research on Exercise and Learning
So, what does research say about exercise and learning?
In the first place, we can state with real confidence that physical fitness improves learning. We can measure this effect in many ways. But, for instance, if I increase my fitness — trust me, I’m trying! — research strongly suggests I’ll improve several cognitive functions: attention, reaction time, and so forth.
We also know a lot about the neuro-biological mechanisms. For instance: exercise boosts production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). And, BDNF does lots of splendid things to improve synapse formation.
To explore this general pool of research, you can start with John Ratey’s book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. It’s more than a decade old now, but still a great introduction to this field.
If you’d like to watch a super-upbeat neuroscience+exercise Ted Talk, click here.
Research on Exercise DURING Learning
But, in the second place, can we conclude that exercise during learning provides benefits, above and beyond the exercise itself? I asked Dr. Steve Most, whose lab has done some really interesting work on exercise and cognition. (You can follow him on Twitter: @SBMost.)
Here’s part of an email Dr. Most sent me:
Most of the research cited [by the teacher who posted the video] seems to do with links between general exercise/fitness and cognition. I think that’s a pretty well established link, but most of it doesn’t say anything about exercise during learning…
I’m not really convinced. One could even imagine that the scenario in the clip entails divided attention (depending on how much attention kids pay to the exercise itself), in which case it could be counter-productive.
I am aware of a study here and there that suggests that mild exercise during study can increase memory, but I don’t think the findings rise to the level of a consistent body of evidence (there may even be findings here and there of the opposite effect).
Like many Twitter objectors, Dr. Most worries that the bike riding might distract from attention to the reading.
At the same time, he added an important caveat. The hypothesis that bicycle exercise during reading harms learning is plausible but also insufficiently tested.
That is, when I speculated to him that the exercise bikes would most likely divide the students’ attention and interfere with their learning, I was speculating as much as the teacher who hoped it would improve their learning.
My speculation was reasonable, given evidence on the fragility of attention. But so too were the PE teacher’s hopes, given evidence about physical fitness and learning.
And, to be clear, we don’t have lots of research on this precise question, but we do have some. This study and this study both found that moderate-to-vigorous exercise during lessons improved learning.
There are important differences between those research paradigms and the exercise bikes used in the video. (The exercises themselves reinforced the concepts being learned.) And, some of the research cited by the teacher is conspicuously light-weight. (No, “crossing the three mid-lines” doesn’t do anything special for your brain. It really doesn’t.)
But to me, at least, the tentative evidence we have suggest that the teacher’s hopes were far from “bonkers.”
I am, to be clear, skeptical myself. But I do think the idea worthy of study, for a number of reasons.
To Sum Up
First: we know quite confidently that exercise and fitness generally improve learning.
Second: we don’t have much research on the more specific question of exercise during learning. And, the research we do have doesn’t provide a consistent pattern of results.
That is: reading while riding an exercise bike might improve understanding, or impede it, or have no effect. We just don’t have enough research to say with Twitterable confidence.
Third: that being true, I think we should encourage teachers — especially PE teachers — to try plausible (if unproven) hypotheses in their classrooms. If they have plans in place to gather data, they can offer us real insight into new teaching possibilities.
Fourth: Twitter battles — especially those that devolve to emojis and insults — benefit from context. If you see a hot debate, look beyond it for research to guide your understanding.
*At the time that I’m writing this post (January 9), the teacher who posted the video has taken it down from twitter. I’m assuming (but I do not know) that the strong negative reaction prompted him to do so.
For that reason, I am not identifying him in this post, and am not linking to his account. Basically, I’m inferring a request for some degree of peace and privacy in his decision to take the video down.
I have reached out to the teacher to get his perspective on a) the goals of the initiative, and b) his students’ response to it. If I hear from him, I’ll write a follow-up post.
Schools help students learn specific skills and facts: long division, and the preamble to the US Constitution, and glorious mysteries of the sonnet.
Wouldn’t it be great if schools could improve general cognitive capabilities?
For instance, it would be AWESOME if we could artificially increase working memory capacity. (Alas, we can’t. Really.)
It would be great if we could teach general critical thinking skills. (Alas: although we can teach those skills in discrete disciplinary topics, we probably can’t teach critical thinking generally.)
I would be super helpful if we could improve our students’ ability to pay attention…wait a minute: maybe we can.
We know that musicians must concentrate intensely to accomplish their marvelous work. To focus on the sheet music, ignore myriad distractions, accomplish nimble finger skills—all these require impressive degrees of attention.
Does all that attending help musicians both play music better and pay attention better? In other words: can they use those attention skills in other parts of their life?
Defining Attention
To answer that question, we have to start by defining the concept of “attention.”
Surprisingly, psychologists and neuroscientists don’t see attention as one unified thing. Instead, the see it as a behavior that takes place when three other things are happening.
First, they measure alertness. That’s a basic biological readiness: are the students awake enough? Or, so wildly overstimulated that they can’t focus? Those questions examine alertness. (Notice: they don’t directly examine attention—alertness is one small part of that bigger picture.)
Second, they measure orienting. When we ask about orienting, we consider the stimuli that the student is consciously perceiving.
So, for instance, at this moment I’m orienting to the letters on the screen as I type, to the mug of tea to my right, and to my cat Pippin who keeps nudging my arm. I’m not orienting to—say—the comfy chair in the corner, or the color of paint on the ceiling, or the gentle thump of the laundry machine downstairs.
I know all that stuff is there, but I’m not consciously processing it. (Well, I suppose, now that I’m writing about it, I must be processing it. But, I wasn’t orienting to it until I tried to identify stimuli that I wasn’t orienting to…)
Finally, to define the third part of attention, we consider executive attention. That segment takes much more time to describe and define, and overlaps a lot with working memory. It also includes our ability to ignore unimportant stimuli. We deliberately decide to focus on this topic here, notthat one there.
So, when we ask the question “does music training improve attention,” we’re really asking three questions:
“Does music training improve alertness?”
“Does music training improve orienting?”
“Does music training improve executive attention?”
With these three questions in mind, we know what to do next.
Musician Inhibition
To test attention, researchers often use the Attention Network Test (ANT) to measure all three sub-segments of our attentional processes.
In this study, scholars in Chile worked with about 40 adults. Half were “professional pianists,” with an average of more than 12 years of music training. The other half had never taken music lessons, and couldn’t read sheet music.
Did the musicians outperform the non-musicians on the ANT?
No, no, and yes.
That is: musicians and non-musicians did equally well at the first two parts of attention: alertness and orienting.
But, musicians scored higher on the executive attention part of the test than the non-musicians did.
Basically, they ignored irrelevant stimuli better than their age-matched peers.
What Does This Research Mean in the Classroom?
You can probably anticipate all the reasons we shouldn’t over-react to this study.
It’s quite small: fewer than 40 people participated.
It doesn’t necessarily show cause and effect. It’s entirely possible that people who start with better executive attention are more likely to become professional musicians than people with lower executive attention.
The professional musicians had YEARS of musical experience: more than twelve, on average. So: even if music training does improve executive attention, it’s not a quick fix.
At the same time, this study does suggest something important: at least in this one case, we might be able to train a general cognitive capability.
That is: we can’t speed up our students’ working memory development. We can’t train a general critical thinking skill. We can’t improve processing speed.
But, maybe, we can find ways to strengthen executive attention.
Given how important attention is in the classroom, that’s potentially great news indeed.
A friend recently sent me this link to a video story in the Wall Street Journal.
The 6 minute video discusses a program in China that uses a…welll…gizmo to measure students’ attention levels during class.
Everything I know about this particular program comes from the video, so it’s possible I’m missing important information. But, based on the video, I render this temporary verdict:
THIS IS BONKERS.
Electroencephalography simply doesn’t work this way. That is: the gizmo is far too crude (and subject to irrelevant stimuli) to produce meaningful measurements.
And, attention is far too complex a cognitive process to be measured by three contact points with the skull. (Not joking. THREE.)
If I gave you a stethoscope and said, “Here. Please measure that’s person mental health,” I suspect you’d refuse.
You’d say something like this: “I can gather data, and then pretend that those data say something meaningful about a really complex network of mental functions. But you and I both know that this tool simply can’t do what you’re asking it to do.”
You’d be right.
One More Point
Of course, there’s LOTS to say about the social policy implications of using this gizmo. This isn’t a blog about social policy, so I’ll leave that to other analysts.
I’m answering the very basic technical question: “can we really do that?” The answer, as far as I know, is “certainly not.”
Classrooms should do more than simply house our students. We want them to welcome students. To set an encouraging and academic tone. To reflect the values our schools champion.
That’s a lot of work for one classroom to do.
As a result, our rooms sometimes end up looking like the nearby image: a busy tumult of color and stuff.
Does this level of decoration have the desired result? Does it make students feel welcome, valued, and academic? Realistically, might it also distract them?
Two researchers in Portugal wanted to find out.
Today’s Research
Several people have studied the effect of classroom decoration on learning. (In perhaps the best-know study, Fisher, Godwin and Seltman showed that kindergarteners learned less in a highly decorated classroom.)
Rodrigues and Pandeirada wanted to know exactly which mental functions were disrupted by all that decoration. Their study design couldn’t be simpler.
These researchers created two study environments.
The first looks basically like a library carrel with a dull white finish.
The second added lots of lively, upbeat photos to that carrel.
The result isn’t as garish as the photo above, but it’s certainly quite busy. (You can see photographs of these two environments on page 9 if you click the link above.)
Rodrigues and Pandeirada then had 8-12 year-olds try tests of visual attention and memory.
For instance: students had to tap blocks in a certain order. (Like the game Simon from when I was a kid.) Or, they had to recreate a complex drawing.
Crucially, these 8-12 year-olds did these tasks in both environments. Researchers wanted to know: did the visual environment make a difference in their performance?
It certainly did. On all four tests — both visual attention and memory — students did worse.
In short: when the visual environment is too busy, thinking gets harder. (By the way, visual distraction is not a “desirable difficulty.” It results in less learning.)
Two Sensible Questions
When I discuss this kind of research with teachers, they often have two very reasonable questions.
Question #1: how much is “too much”? More specifically, is my classroom “too much”?
Here’s my suggestion. Invite a non-teacher friend into your classroom. Don’t explain why. Notice their reaction.
If you get comments on the decoration — even polite comments — then it’s probably over-decorated.
“What a wonderfully colorful room!” sounds like a compliment. But, if your students see a “wonderfully colorful room” every day, they might be more distracted than energized.
Question #2: Won’t students get used to the busy decoration? My classroom might look over-decorated now, but once you’ve been here for a while, it will feel like home.
This question has not, as far as I know, been studied directly. But, the short answer is “probably not.”
The Fisher et al. study cited above lasted two weeks. Even with that much time to “get used to the decoration,” students still did worse in the highly-decorated classroom.
More broadly, Barrett et al. looked at data for 150+ classrooms in 27 schools. They arrived at several conclusions. The pertinent headline here is: moderate levels of decoration (“complexity”) resulted in the most learning.
In other words: students might get used to visual complexity. But: the research in the field isn’t (as far as I know) giving us reason to think so.
Summer Thoughts
Here’s the key take-away from Rodrigues and Pandeirada’s research: we should take some time this summer to think realistically about our classroom’s decoration.
We want our spaces to be welcoming and informative. And, we want them to promote — not distract from — learning.
Research can point us in the right direction. We teachers will figure out how best to apply that research to our classrooms, for our students.
A final note: I’ve chatted by email with the study’s authors. They are, appropriately, hesitant to extrapolate too much from their library-carrel to real classrooms.
They show, persuasively, that visual distractions can interfere with attention and memory. But: they didn’t measure what happens in a classroom with other students, and teachers, and so forth.
I think the conclusions above are reasonable applications of these research findings; but, they are my own, and not part of the study itself.
To answer this important and practical question, Blasiman’s team first had students watch an online lecture undistracted. They took a test on that lecture, to see how much they typically learn online with undivided attention.
Team Blasiman then had students watch 2 more online lectures, each one with a distractor present.
Some students had a casual conversation while watching. Others played a simple video game. And, yes, others watched a fencing scene from Princess Bride.
Did these distractions influence their ability to learn?
On average, these distractions lowered test scores by 25%.
That is: undistracted students averaged an 87% on post-video quizzes. Distracted students averaged a 62%.
Conversation and The Princess Bride were most distracting (they lowered scores by ~30%). The nature video was least distracting — but still lowered scores by 15%.
In case you’re wondering: men and women were equally muddled by these distractions.
Teaching Implications
In this case, knowledge may well help us win the battle.
Blasiman & Co. sensibly recommend that teachers share this study with their students, to emphasize the importance of working in a distraction-free environment.
And, they encourage students to make concrete plans to create — and to work in — those environments.
(This post, on “implementation intentions,” offers highly effective ways to encourage students to do so.)
I also think it’s helpful to think about this study in reverse. The BAD news is that distractions clearly hinder learning.
The GOOD news: in a distraction-free environment, students can indeed start to learn a good deal of information.
(Researchers didn’t measure how much they remembered a week or a month later, so we don’t know for sure. But: we’ve got confidence they had some initial success in encoding information.)
In other words: online classes might not be a panacea. But, under the right conditions, they might indeed benefit students who would not otherwise have an opportunity to learn.
I’ve just learned that both of Dr. Blasiman’s co-authors on this study were undergraduates at the time they did the work. That’s quite unusual in research world, and very admirable! [6-11-19]
Here‘s a quick summary of information about memory: sensory memory, working memory, long-term memory, and (crucially!) forgetting.
Author Steven Turner presents this brisk overview to combat “buzzword wasteland.” He fears the education-world habit of coming up with fancy new terms every six months or so. Rather than scamper after every new fad, he’d like us to focus on the enduring basics.
Like: memory.
I myself think of “sensory memory” as a part of our attentional systems. As long as teachers remember the key point — students have VERY little perceptual capacity for incoming sensory information — it doesn’t really matter what we call it.
The information on this page might all be review. However, as we know well, spaced repetition helps learning. A chance to rethink these topics right now will be beneficial to our understanding.
We often post about the unreliability of “brain training.”
Heck, even though I live in Boston and am a Patriots fan, I made fun of Tom Brady’s website claiming to “increase brain speed” and other such nonsense. (I don’t even know what “increase brain speed” might mean.)
So, you think I’d be especially wary of these claims. But, even I can fall into such traps — at least temporarily. Last week, it happened TWICE.
Fool Me Once
Many researchers have claimed to be able to increase working memory capacity.
(It would be great if we could do so, because working memory is so important for all classroom learning.)
Alas, very consistently, we find that such programs don’t really work. (For instance, here and here.)
And so, I was very excited to see a new approach to the problem.
We have long known that the cerebellum helps control motor function. More recently, scientists have discovered that it also supports working memory performance.
Perhaps, we could strengthen cerebellar function, and that way enhance WM. Worth a try, no?
Although this explanation makes good sense, and the accompanying graphs looked impressive, I was drawn up short by a serious problem: the researchers didn’t measure working memory.
You read that right. Instead of a WM test, they gave participants a short-term memory test.
So, this research shows that cerebellar training might increase STM. But, it shows nothing about WM.
Brain training hopes dashed…
Fool Me Twice
Unlike WM training, we have had some luck with attention training.
For instance, Green and Bavalier have shown that playing certain computer games can increase various kinds of visual attention.
A recent study claimed that a specially designed iPad game could enhance sustained visual attention. I was gearing up to review the research so I could write about it here, when…
In other words: participants might have gotten better because they (basically) practiced the test, not because their sustained attention improved.
To measure such progress, researchers would need a test that wasn’t similar to the game participants played.
Brain training hopes re-dashed…
The Big Take Away for Teachers
I’m basically an optimistic person, and I really don’t like being a grinch.
But, sometimes my job requires me to be grinchy.
At this point, I’ve been inspired by “brain training” claims so many times, only to be disappointed by an analysis of the research underlying those claims.
So, from now on, I’m just going to assume that new claims are highly likely to be false.
If brain training claims are subsequently replicated by many research teams; if the methodologies are scrutinized and approved by several scholars in the field; well, if that happens, I’ll relent.
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