How should we manage working memory limitations in the classroom?
Furtheredogogy has a handy post about Cognitive Load Theory, which is basically a fancy way of saying “taking care of our students’ working memory capacity.”
Notice, btw, that the author suggests worked examples as a working-memory friendly alternative to project-based learning–which can all to often overwhelm students’ cognitive resources.
You think grades interfere with learning? You’d like to do away with them? And yet, you’d like some consistent way to measure students’ academic development? And to communicate that development to others?
You’re not alone.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium seeks to accomplish these very goals.
The plan itself is layered and intricate; if you’re interested, it’s worth your time to read this article from Inside Higher Ed.
At present, the plan is in its very early stages: no schools currently use it, because it doesn’t yet exist. But, having just gotten a $2 million dollar grant to develop it, the consortium is hopeful that they have launched a movement that can reshape the educational landscape.
[Full disclosure: this plan has been developed by Scott Looney, head of Hawken School outside Cleveland, OH. I myself was a lifer at Hawken, and have spoken with Mr. Looney about his plans. Although I have done some consulting work with Hawken faculty, parents, and students, I am not involved in the Mastery Transcript project.]
A friend recently referred me to this online article (at bigthink.com) about this research study: the eye-catching phrase in both headlines being “Teaching Critical Thinking.”
(The online article is even more emphatic: “Study: There Are Instructions for Teaching Critical Thinking.”)
This headline sounds like great news. We can do it! Just follow the instructions!
We should, of course, be delighted to learn that we can teach critical thinking. So often, especially in upper grades, schools emphasize teaching “not what to think, but how to think.”
Every time we say that, we are—in effect—claiming to be teaching critical thinking.
The author of the BigThink article summarizes the societal importance of critical thinking this way:
We live in an age with unprecedented access to information. Whether you are contributing to an entry on Wikipedia or reading a meme that has no sources cited (do they ever?), your ability to comprehend what you are reading and weigh it is a constant and consistent need. That is why it is so imperative that we have sharp critical-thinking skills.
Clearly, students need such skills. Clearly we should teach them.
It Can Be Taught!
The study itself, authored by N. G. Holmes and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, follows students in a college physics course. The course explicitly introduced its students to a process for thinking critically about scientific data; it emphasized the importance of this process by grading students on their early attempts to use it.
For example (this excerpt, although complex, is worth reading closely):
“students were shown weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data to models and then were given a decision tree for interpreting the outcome. If students obtain a low χ2, they would decide whether it means their data are in good agreement with the model or whether it means they have overestimated their uncertainties.”
Early in the course, the instructors often reminded the students to use this process. By term’s end, however, those instructions had been faded, so the students who continued to use it did so on their own.
The results?
Many students who had been taught this analytical process continued to use it. In fact, many of them continued to use it the following year in another course taught by a different professor.
In other words: they had been taught critical thinking skills, and they learned critical thinking skills.
Success!
It Can Be Taught?
Sadly, this exciting news looks less and less promising the more we consider it.
In the first place, despite the title of his article, Holmes doesn’t even claim to be teaching critical thinking. He claims to be teaching “quantitative critical thinking,” or the ability “to think critically about scientific data and models [my emphasis].”
Doubtless our students need this valuable subset of critical thinking skills. And yet, our students think about many topics that defy easy quantification.
If we want our students to think critically about a Phillis Wheatley poem, or about the development of the Silk Road, or about the use of gerundives, we will quickly recognize they need a meaningfully different set of critical thinking skills.
How, for example, would a student use “weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data” to compare the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution of the United States?
To return to the examples offered in BigThink’s enthusiastic paragraph: despite this author’s enthusiasm, it’s not at all certain this procedure for analyzing “scientific data and models” will help us update a Wikipedia entry, or critique an unsourced meme.
(It might, but—unless we’re editing a very particular kind of Wikipedia entry, or reading a very statistical meme—it probably won’t.)
In brief: ironically, the headlines implying that we can “teach critical thinking” generally do not stand up to critical thought.
The Bigger Picture
Cognitive scientists, in fact, regularly doubt the possibility of teaching a general set of critical thinking skills. And here’s one big reason why:
Different disciplines require different kinds of critical thought.
Critical thinking in evolutionary biology requires different skills than critical thinking in comparative theology.
The field I’m in uses psychology and neuroscience research to inform teaching; hard experience has taught me that the fields of psychology and neuroscience demand very different critical thinking skills from their practitioners.
Perhaps your own teaching experience reveals the same pattern:
The English department where I taught included some of the sharpest minds I know: people who can parse a sonnet or map a literary genre with giddy dexterity. Their critical thinking skills in the world of English literature can’t be questioned.
And yet, many of these same people have told me quite emphatically that they are hopeless at, say, math. Or, chemistry. Or, doing their taxes. Being good critical thinkers in one discipline has not made them successful at critical thought in others.
Chapter 2 of Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School explores this argument at greater length.
The Smaller Picture
There’s a second reason that it’s hard to teach general critical thinking skills: knowledge of details.
To think critically about any topic, we need to know a very substantial amount of discipline-specific factual information. Finding those facts on the interwebs isn’t enough; we need to know them cold—have them comfortably housed in long-term memory.
For example: to use Holmes’s critical thinking technique, you would need to know what “weighted χ2 calculations for least squares fitting of data” actually are.
Even more: you’d need to know how to calculate them.
If you don’t have that very specific kind of detailed knowledge, you’re just out of luck. You can’t think critically in his world.
Another example. Much chess expertise comes from playing lots and lots of chess. As Chase and Simon’s famous study has shown, chess experts literally see chess boards differently than do chess novices.
You really can’t think like a chess expert (that is, you can’t engage in critical chess thinking) until you can see like a chess expert; and, seeing like a chess expert takes years. You need to accumulate substantial amounts of specific information—the Loomis gambit, the Concord defense—to make sense of the chessboard world.
Your own teaching experience almost certainly underlines this conclusion. Let me explain:
How often does it happen that someone learns you’re a teacher, and promptly offers you some heartfelt advice on teaching your students more effectively? (“I saw this AMAZING video on Facebook about the most INSPIRING teacher…”) How often is that advice, in fact, even remotely useful?
And yet, here’s the surprise: the person offering you this well-meaning advice is almost certainly an expect in her field. She’s an accomplished doctor, or financial adviser, or geologist, or jurist. In her field, she could out-critical-think you with most of her prefrontal cortex tied behind her occipital lobe.
Unfortunately, her critical thinking skills in that field don’t transfer to our field, because critical thinking in our field requires a vast amount of very specific teaching knowledge.
(By the way: twice now this post has assumed you’re a teacher. If you’re not, insert the name of your profession or expertise in the place of “teacher.” The point will almost certainly hold.)
Wishing and Thinking, not Wishful Thinking
As so often happens, I feel a bit like a grinch as I write this article. Once again, I find myself reading news I ought to find so very exciting, and instead finding it unsupported by research.
Truthfully, I wish we could teach critical thinking skills in general. If you’ve got a system for doing so, I genuinely hope you’ll let me know. (Inbox me: [email protected])
Even better: if you’ve got research that shows it works, I’ll dance a jig through Somerville.
But the goal of this organization—and the goal of Mind, Brain, and Education—is to improve psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy by having these disciplines talk with each other deeply and knowledgeably.
And with that deep knowledge—with critical thinking skills honed by scientific research—we know that critical thinking skills must be taught discipline by discipline; and, they must be honed through extensive and specific practice.
This task might sound less grand than “teaching critical thinking skills.” And yet, by focusing not on lofty impossibilities, but on very realistic goals, we can indeed accomplish them—one discipline at a time.
I’m reviewing the vocabulary I learned in today’s Spanish class. The last time I went through my flashcard deck, I got all of those new words right. Should I keep studying? Or, is it time to move on to my Algebra?
In a recently published paper, Shibata and colleagues argue that overlearning benefits long-term memory formation. That is: I should keep studying, because that extra level of work — above and beyond what’s required to get all my flashcards correct — protects these new memories from later interference.
(If you want the neurotransmitter details, Shibata finds that overlearning, which he calls “hyperstabilization[,] is associated with an abrupt shift from glutamate-dominant excitatory to GABA-dominant inhibitory processing in early visual areas. Hyperstabilization contrasts with passive and slower stabilization, which is associated with a mere reduction of excitatory dominance to baseline levels” p. 470. Got that?)
And yet, there’s a reason I put that question mark in the title of this article. Earlier researchers have found that overlearning just doesn’t work. (Doug Rohrer and Hal Pashler have published on this topic here and here.)
For the time being, I’m inclined to believe Rohrer and Pashler. Why? Because Shibata’s research paradigm showed a change in neuotransmitters after 2 days. Rohrer and Pashler’s paradigm showed no benefits for learning after 1 month.
In my view, teachers ought to be more interested in learning than in GABA and glutamate; and we ought to be less impressed by results obtained after 48 hours than by results obtained after 4 weeks.
(To be clear: I am interested in neurotransmitters. But, as a teacher, I’m MUCH more interested in demonstrated learning.)
So, for the time being, I’m will continue to recommend that students and teachers not emphasize overlearning. However, I will add an asterisk to that advice: as of today, our understanding of the neural results of overlearning is far from complete.
I am a veteran teacher, and yet sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all that I am supposed to be doing in my 21st century classroom.
The “wave of the future,” instructional technology—with its one-to-one initiatives, and Google platforms—offers many benefits: for example, individualized instruction, or applications that promote problem-solving skills. I have had students demonstrate their learning by creating electronic posters and comic strips. I have even sent them on a virtual archaeological dig!
But, there are days where classroom 102 becomes a battleground; and my enemy appears to be technology. As a Theology teacher I am supposed to love my enemy, but I need the best help I can get.
Enter — brain science!
Technology Problems: Working Memory and Attention
Psychology researchers are working diligently to understand how we get information “in and out” of our brains, and working memory is now understood as an essential gateway for learning. We also know that working memory is both precious and limited. [1]
Part of our challenge in the classroom is to avoid overloading a student’s working memory, thereby causing a catastrophic failure…those glazed looks and blank stares that send a chill through the fiber of any teacher’s being!
So, teachers can employ proactive strategies to reduce the strain on working memory to facilitate learning. For example: lots of new information, or too many instructions, can create working memory burdens for overtaxed students.
And yet, paradoxically, classroom technology can sometimes require students to master new material, and to follow all sorts of instructions.
Just as it might overwhelm working memory, technology can also distract students’ attention.
For example: I often project images from my iPad to help my students focus. And yet, when the projector times out and kicks over to a screen saver, the swirling colors and images can disorient the very students whom I was helping focus.
These kinds of problems intensify all my questions about use of technology in the classroom:
While I hope that I am creating brilliantly engaging lessons to minimize such distractions, I have my limits.
Enter — “the conundrum!.”
Technology Possibilities
One of the boasts of technology in the classroom has been that students can use their devices for efficient note taking, yet the well-known Mueller and Oppenheimer study [2] suggests that laptops make note-taking too easy. Counter-intuitively, this ease reduces cognitive processing, and thereby reduces learning. Between the risk of distraction and the reduction to learning I hear the cry go forth from teachers everywhere: Victory! Ban technological devices in the classroom!
While tempting, this is not the best response. (Remember, I am trying to love my enemy!)
I have seen kids take amazing notes on a laptop. Often, they work quite thoughtfully with information, creating their own visual representations and mind maps as they go. I do not want to take this beneficial tool away from them.
So, my task is to teach appropriate use of technological devices, build note-taking skills and…oh, by the way…teach content: all without overwhelming my students’ working memory.
I wanted to know: how can I make technology my ally in the classroom to accomplish all these objectives? I have found an option that may help teachers to reduce strain on working memory in class, and facilitate cognitive processing both in class and at home.
Enter — the Rocketbook.
Paper, Improved?
The Rocketbook is a notebook, made from acid free fine grain paper with a dot grid pattern , that combines the benefits of handwriting and technology.
Because the Rocketbook has QR codes built into its pages, students can take handwritten notes in class, and then use a cell phone app to upload notes into the cloud. (Rocketbook supports Google Drive and Evernote, for example.)
Symbols on each page can be assigned to different destination folders, and so students can upload work for multiple disciplines to distinct places in the cloud. Once their notes are uploaded, students can re-work them into a mind map or graphic organizer.
From a teacher’s perspective, Rocketbook’s combination of paper and technology provides many benefits:
Of course, all innovations include some downsides; in this case, I sacrifice teaching my students about appropriate use of their devices in the classroom.
(A unique feature of the Rocketbook is that when the notebook is full, you can zap it in the microwave; the ink disappears and you start all over!)
Choices, Choices
While I have used the Rocketbook myself and find it both functional and cost effective (under $40.00 for pens and notebook!), there are some other interesting options available that teachers and students could use in a similar fashion. (My thanks to Learning and the Brain tech guru Scott MacClintic for these suggestions.)
First, there is the LiveScribe Echo Pen by Anoto. There are several versions of this product and the functions increase with the price tag. (Average setup cost comes in around $200.00.) The premise here is that as you write your notes, the pen records what is being said in class. This recording allows students to sync notes with the audio, review what was said and expand, revise and reorganize material from class.
While the Echo Pen’s marketing is often directed to LD students, their tagline “write less, listen more” speaks to all learners. If students are coached on how best to use the tool, hearing class again combined with re-working the material could reap cognitive processing benefits.
Equil’s Smartpen 2, (coming in around $160.00) does not offer the audio feature, but it does not require special ink or paper either. When students take notes with a special Bluetooth-enabled pen, those notes appear both on the paper where they write and on a Bluetooth-linked tablet. Like the Rocketbook, in other words, it converts pen-and-paper notes into a laptop version—eliminating potential distractions from websites, advertisements, and Facebook.
In Sum…
While technology offers both challenges and benefits to students and teachers, it is clear to me that there are no magic bullet solutions with technology alone. Teachers cannot abdicate their role to technology. To use it effectively, we need to know how it affects learning and the brain. We must be all the more deliberate in our lesson planning, classroom management, and relationship building with our students.
We equally must inform the art of teaching with the science of the brain. When we start integrating instructional technology, brain science and good pedagogical practice, as teachers we provide truly great opportunities for student learning!
[Editor’s note: Scott’s post is in response to this earlier article.]
Most times when I get asked about the e-reader debate, it is usually not a sincere question from a person who does not already hold a strong opinion on the matter. In these moments I am reminded of the expression “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!”
No matter how many studies I mention or which side of the issue I am trying to argue on behalf of, as soon as I provide a brief pause, I am confronted with “yeah, but…” and then the person proceeds to tell me why his/her long-held belief is the final word on the subject.
As for where I come down on the issue, I tend to defer to people who are way smarter than me on the subject — such as Daniel Willingham.
As Willingham concludes in his review of some of the literature on the subject, If the choice is read on a device or read on paper, I believe that the paper is still slightly in the lead if you are looking at straight up comprehension. The problem I have is that this shift to digital is really only a lateral move or a substitution situation, and perhaps not a wise one if you want improved student comprehension!
As a teacher, I choose to incorporate technology in the design of my lessons if I believe it is going to result in noticeable and definable modification or redefinition of the learning tasks and outcomes (SAMR model). The question I ask is “what will the use of this technology allow me or my students to do that previously could not have been accomplished?” If the answer is a “not much” then I do not bother to use the technology. The technology itself should not be the focus of the lesson; student learning must be front and center.
So…”to e-reader or not to e-reader” is actually not the question that we should be asking; rather, we should be asking “does this technology add transformative value to the learning experience for my students?” If we want to go even further, we should ask “How might I measure this value and know that my students are benefiting?”
The invaluable Daniel Willingham briefly reviews the literature, and concludes that — for the time being — students understand more when they read on paper than when they use e-readers.
Willingham acknowledges that his review isn’t comprehensive. However, he’s recently written a book about reading instruction, and so I suspect he’s more up-to-date than most in this field.
If he’s right, this conclusion should give pause to the many (MANY) schools that are switching to e-textbooks. I know they have advantages; they’re less expensive, more portable, easier to modify to suit a specific teacher’s or student’s needs.
And yet, if students learn less when reading them, none of those advantages matters!
Willingham is hopeful that the quality of e-readers will improve enough to eliminate this discrepancy. Until that happens, and until we have good research showing that students can learn well from e-readers, old-fashioned books seem like the best technology we have.
(Scott MacClintic, this blog’s tech guru, will have some thoughts on this topic soon…)
Here’s the magic question: how can teachers help motivate students?
After all, most of our students don’t lack the cognitive capacity to learn the material; instead, all too often, they lack the desire to do so.
Frankly, those of us who work in the classroom would LOVE some help from the world of psychology and neuroscience to understand what gets our kids energized…
Trinsic: In- or Ex-
For well over a decade, the field of Mind, Brain, Education has been guided and informed by the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
When I curl up with a crossword puzzle, for example, I do so for the crisp pleasure of problem solving. I don’t get anything from these puzzles, other than the joy of doing them. That’s intrinsic motivation.
Often, however, we undertake a particular activity to get something else from it. Perhaps I take a class in research methodology not because I’m fascinated by it, but because I know I need that credit to get my psychology degree. Or, I take it because my parents have made it a condition of helping with my college tuition. (Quirky parents, I know.)
In these cases, I’m driven by extrinsic motivation.
Of course, these motivations differ from person to person. I might go to an art museum because I love the works of Archibald Motley, Jr. (intrinsic), or because I want my boss to see me at the exhibit (extrinsic). You might go camping because the great outdoors refreshes your soul (intrinsic), or because a certain special someone might also be joining the group (extrinsic).
So, too, some of our students solve math problems because they are genuinely fascinated to discover the area under a curve; whereas others want to impress a classmate, or get a good grade, or earn admission to MIT.
The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts?
What, then, do teachers do with this information? How does it help us to distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation?
At the very first Learning and the Brain conference I attended, Edward L. Deci offered one answer to that question. His answer is, in fact, the one you hear most often.
What happens, Deci wanted to know, when you add extrinsic and intrinsic motivation together? For example: if a student loves learning to spell new words for the pure pleasure of doing so (that’s intrinsic), what happens if I also give him a sticker for every ten new words he learns (that’s extrinsic)?
When Deci started exploring this question, no one had thought much about it. He remembers there was a vague sense that adding two kinds of motivation together should—common sense tells us—create even greater levels of motivation. But no one new how much, or precisely why.
Deci’s research, however, led to a surprising conclusion: extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation. That is: my enthusiastic speller will feel less enthusiastic once I start rewarding him. In Deci’s research, he is less likely to break out the dictionary on his own, and more likely to wait until I break out the sticker packs again.
How did Deci find this out?
In one well-known study [1], he had college students solve a particularly intriguing kind of puzzle—sort of an early Rubik’s cube. He then offered half of them a reward for solving more puzzles, while simply instructing the other half to do so. Third, he gave both groups some free time—and watched whether they continued to solve puzzles, or instead read magazines that he provided.
The result: the students who had been rewarded were less likely than the unrewarded group to continue solving puzzles.
That is: the extrinsic reward sapped intrinsic enthusiasm.
Classroom Implications
Deci’s remarkable finding provides a direct challenge to one of education’s most enduring traditions: grades.
When school folk try to justify grades as a useful incentive—they motivate our students!—Deci’s team can argue right back: yes, but at such a cost!
Even if grades do motivate (and, do they?), they undermine the love of learning that we want to instill. Students who once spent their free time obsessing about Civil War battlefields will now do so only for the promise of extra credit. What kind of motivation is that?
Deci and his frequent co-author Richard Ryan have an explanation for this effect. They argue that people are motivated by a desire for—among other things—autonomy. When you give me a grade for something that I already want to do, I feel that you’re trying to control me: that is, trying to reduce my autonomy.
In other words: your extrinsic rewards reduce my intrinsic drives by taking away my independence.
January 2017: Revolution
This account of motivation—and the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—has been common in the field of MBE for at least a decade. But in January, a new study came out which challenges this whole logical chain [2].
Two scholars at the University of Chicago—Goswami and Urminsky—ask this question: what if extrinsic motivation only seems to reduce intrinsic motivation because we’ve been measuring the wrong way? The problem is not in the motivation, but in our research paradigms?
Here’s their argument: when Deci gave those students another chance to solve puzzles, he measured their motivation immediately after they had completed the reward round. If their intrinsic motivation was only temporarily reduced, this research paradigm would have no way of capturing that result. After all, their desire to draw might bounce back. It might even come back more strongly than before.
To test this hypothesis, Goswami and Urminsky developed a new research method: one that gave participants multiple chances to demonstrate intrinsic desire to do something—before, during, and after a reward.
Participants in their study chose between solving a fun math puzzle (a problem that involved a little cognitive effort) and watching a short video (which involved no cognitive effort). In either case, this particular activity took only half a minute. They made this choice not a few times times (as in Deci’s study), but 30 times.
The first eight times, participants simply chose between solving a math problem and watching a video. Because the math problems were—in fact—fun to do, participants chose them almost 70% of the time.
During the next section of the study—ten more trials—half of the participants were given a small reward for choosing to do the math problem. (That is: an extrinsic reward was added to their obvious intrinsic interest.) Unsurprisingly, they now chose the math problems almost 90% of the time.
In the third round of the study—twelve more trials—the reward was removed. If, as Deci and Ryan predict, extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation, we would expect to see a persistent change. Participants should now prefer the video to the math problem, perhaps by a considerable margin.
What did Goswami and Urminsky find?
Round 3, Trial #4
Consistent with Deci’s study of college puzzle solvers, participants initially turned away from the math problems. Whereas 90% had chosen them during the reward round, only 50% did so during the next trial, and only 55-60% during the two trials after that.
But then, something remarkable happened.
Participants returned to the math. In fact, in trial #4 of the third round, more people chose math problems than those in the control group—who had never been offered a reward. In fact, for the remainder of the study—7 more trials—the participants who had been offered rewards chose math problems more often than the control group even though the reward was no longer available.
In other words: in this study, extrinsic motivation did not reduce intrinsic motivation. Instead, it (very slightly) increased intrinsic motivation.
To be sure of their results—and to test some other predictions as well—Goswami and Urminsky repeated versions of this study 4 more times, and consistently got the same answer.
Boom. Revolution.
Where Do We Go from Here? (Round 1)
Goswami and Urminsky’s study has quite literally just been published. Because their conclusions upend such widely known research, they will doubtless be debated, challenged, explored, perhaps contradicted.
In the meantime, what’s a teacher to do?
First: we can, I think, no longer say with such confidence that “extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation.” (Of course, it might—after all, lots of research suggests that conclusion.)
However, Goswami and Urminsky propose a new way of exploring this question, and I think we should admit the reasonableness of their critique and the usefulness of their methodology. We’ve got a chance to learn more, and we should take it.
For now, that means we should look frankly and honestly at the value of grades, prizes, and rewards. They might be beneficial, or harmful, or both; but we can’t be sure that their extrinsic motivation is harmful. (If you’d like some guidance in these discussions, you might look at Timothy Quinn’s book, On Grades and Grading.)
As a simple example: I’m married to someone whose interest in school was based ENTIRELY on grades, prizes, and competition. In at least this one case, grades provided an immensely useful extrinsic motivation that made up for a real lack of intrinsic motivation.
Where Do We Go from Here? (Round 2)
This research revolution might also inspire us to return to Deci and Ryan with fresh eyes and clearer understanding. Here’s what I mean:
In my experience, teachers who read up on this research often infer that students will naturally become intrinsically motivated to pursue schoolwork if we don’t get in their way. Because extrinsic motivation interferes with intrinsic motivation, the absence of extrinsic motivation will naturally produce intrinsic motivation.
But Deci and Ryan don’t say that [3]. In fact, they say quite the opposite: “it is critical to remember that intrinsic motivation will occur only for activities that hold intrinsic interest for an individual—those that have the appeal of novelty, challenge, or aesthetic value for that individual” (p. 59-60); as they say elsewhere, it is “catalyzed (rather than caused)” (p. 58).
Instead, Deci and Ryan accept that students simply aren’t intrinsically motivated to do many of the things that school asks them to do. It is not our job to cause them to be intrinsically motivated—because we can’t.
Instead, it is the teacher’s job to find healthy extrinsic motivators rather than unhealthy ones: “because many of the tasks that educators want their students to perform are not inherently interesting or enjoyable, knowing how to promote more active and volitional (versus passive and controlling) forms of extrinsic motivation becomes an essential strategy for successful teaching” (p. 55).
When they champion classrooms that foster autonomy, relatedness, and competence, Deci and Ryan are partly trying to allow intrinsic motivation to flourish. But, more often, they are trying to promote good kinds of extrinsic motivation—in which students recognize the value of the work that they are doing, and take it on willingly to benefit themselves and their world.
After all: I might not have taken that research methodology class with intrinsic enthusiasm, but the extrinsic motivation that got me through has been a great boon to my understanding of science.
A recent meta-analysis of 100 years of research (you read that right — 100 years) suggests that both ability grouping and appropriate grade acceleration benefit students.
Interestingly, the authors argue that ability grouping benefits students across the academic spectrum: “Overall, high-, medium-, and low-ability students benefited equally from ability grouping” (p. 889).
The authors of this study focus on academic benefits, and don’t look at studies that focus solely on social-emotional results. When it comes to grade acceleration, however, they do see a trend: “Numerous studies have investigated the peer dimension of acceleration and generally reported not only no harm but also small to moderate social–emotional benefits of academic acceleration” (p. 853).
For these acceleration programs, selection criteria make a real difference. At least one of the studies they review finds “socio-affective benefits for students selected on the basis of academic readiness and social and emotional maturity, but also cautions that these programs may be harmful to individual students who are arbitrarily selected on the basis of IQ” (p. 892-3).
In other words: we can’t rely solely on cognitive tests to make such placement decisions.
Given the passion surrounding this debate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see zealous push-back in upcoming weeks.
