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Is Teaching Golf Like Teaching Algebra?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April 30, 2023

Is Teaching Golf Like Teaching Algebra?

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My work in this field starts with a simple logical argument:

A: Learning happens in the brain and the mind.

B: Therefore, teachers might benefit from knowing more about the brain and the mind.

C: Therefore, we should hang out with people who study brains (neuroscientists) and who study minds (psychologists). We can learn from them, and they can learn from us.

So far, so good.

That seemingly simple logic, however, gets complicated quickly.

First — as I argue frequently — we benefit MUCH MORE from studying psychology than neuroscience.

Second — again, a refrain here on the blog — we need always to remember context and nuance.

For example:

Teaching 1st graders might require different skills and techniques than teaching 8th graders, or college students.

Sometimes neurotypical students benefit from different teaching strategies than non-neurotypical students.

Cultural differences shape classroom expectations, and might thus require or forbid various teaching strategies.

In other words, my simple idea — “improve my teaching by learning brainy stuff!!” — quickly requires all sorts of subtleties.

In fact, I’ve just stumbled across a new one. Let me try to explain.

To The Classroom, and Beyond

As an English teacher, I live in a wordy world.

We study poems and write essays and read Zora Neale Hurston and revel in grammar. (Well, I revel. My students graciously put up with me.)

As the Prince of Denmark once said: “Words, words, words.”

To teach these English-y topics, I’ve got lots of strategies:

Retrieval practice: “What’s the difference between a direct object and a predicate nominative…Sylvia?”

Managing alertness: “Alistair and Yazmeen, please write your answers on the board.”

Working memory load reduction: “What’s our acronym for the 4 key verbs?”

Research suggests all this wordiness will help my students learn.

HOWEVER, not everything that students learn boils down to words.

Yes, SOME knowledge is “declarative“: I can say it out loud.

Yet OTHER knowledge is “procedural“: something I do, not something I can say.

Imagine, then, that I’m teaching someone how to play golf. As they practice, should I use those same teaching strategies? Will my players benefit from translating their physical activity into words?

For instance:

Retrieval practice: “Describe the best stance for a putt…Sylvia.”

Working memory load reduction: “What’s our acronym for the ideal golf swing?”

Will words, words, words help golfers?

Plot Twist

Just this last week I’ve started finding research raising intriguing doubts.

The research suggests:

Some kinds of knowledge aren’t really verbal: say, for example, a golf swing.

Asking students to put not-verbal knowledge into words as they learn actually gets in the way of learning.

In other words, if I ask a golfer to describe her swing while learning, I’m asking her to cram procedural knowledge into declarative form.

Little boy blowing golf ball into hole.

That translation — put “not words” into “words” — makes learning harder.

I’ve been using golf as an example because the studies I’ve found focus on golf skills.

In this study, novice golfers learned less when asked to describe their golf strokes.

In this study, expert golfers improved less under similar circumstances.

But off the top of my head, I can think of all sorts of school topics that might (MIGHT!!) fit this category:

Pottery and painting and dancing

Handwriting

Manipulating microscopes or pipettes or other science-y tools

Shop

If the golf research applies to these procedural skills, then many of my word-based teaching strategies need a substantial rethink.

Not So Fast

In this highly speculative post, I should rush to include several cautions:

First: I haven’t yet found any research applying this idea to the school subjects I’ve mentioned. I’m extrapolating — always a perilous thing to do. (Most of the research, in fact, focuses on facial recognition.)

Second: this line of reasoning might lure some folks into “learning-styles” flavored teaching theories. Beware that siren song!

Third: I might be overstating the changes that flow from this possible conclusion. For example, my pottery students should still do retrieval practice — but they should respond to questions by showing me rather than telling me the answers.

As you can tell, I’m still working out these ideas in my head. If you have insights — or research suggestions — I hope you’ll share them with me.

By the way: this research topic is called the “verbal overshadowing effect.” That is: when I translate procedural knowledge into declarative terms, the mistranslation into words  (“verbal”) overshadows the actual content knowledge — which is at its root procedural.

Flegal, K. E., & Anderson, M. C. (2008). Overthinking skilled motor performance: Or why those who teach can’t do. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 927-932.

Chauvel, G., Maquestiaux, F., Ruthruff, E., Didierjean, A., & Hartley, A. A. (2013). Novice motor performance: Better not to verbalize. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 20, 177-183.

What (and Why) Should Students Memorize? Confidence and Fluency for the Win
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 23, 2021

What (and Why) Should Students Memorize? Confidence and Fluency for the Win

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In our profession, memorization has gotten a bad name.

The word conjures up alarming images: Dickensian brutes wielding rulers, insisting on “facts, facts, facts!”

In a world when students “can look up anything on the interwebs,” why do we ask students to memorize at all?

One answer from cognitive science: we think better with information we know well.

Even when we can find information on the internet, we don’t use that information very effectively. (Why? Working memory limitations muddle our processing of external information.)

A second answer appears in intriguing recent research.

Reasonable Plans, Unstated Assumptions

As a classroom teacher, I might operate on this reasonable plan:

Step one: we discuss ideas and information in class.

Step two: students write down the important parts.

And, step three: when students need that information later, they look at their notes.

This plan — the core of most high school classes I know — relies on unstated assumptions:

Assumption one: students’ notes are largely correct.

Assumption two: if students write down information INcorrectly, they’ll recognize that mistake. After all, we discussed the correct information in class.

But what if that second assumption isn’t true?

What if students trust external information (their notes) more than internal information (their memories)?

Assumptions Thwarted

In 2019, Risko, Kelly, & Gaspar studied one version of this question.

They had students listen to word lists, and type them into a storable file. After distraction, students got to review their lists. They then were tested on those words.

On the final list, however, these scholars did a sneaky thing: they added a word to the stored list. Sure enough, 100% of their students wrote down the additional word, even though it hadn’t in fact been on the initial word list.

Students trusted their written document (external “memory”) more than their own actual memory. When tested even later, students still included the additional word, even though it wasn’t a part of their initial learning.

In other words: the “reasonable plan” that teachers often rely on includes an assumption that — at least in this research — isn’t true.

Ugh.

Classroom Implications

This research, I think, reminds us that the right kind of memorization has great value for students.

We want students to know certain bedrock facts and processes with absolute certainty. We want them, for instance, to define key terms and ideas fluently. Crucially, we want them to reject — with confidence borne of certain knowledge — inaccurate claims.

For instance:

I just completed a unit on tragedy. My sophomores read August Wilson’s Fences and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

 

On the very first day of the term, I went over a four-part definition of “tragedy.” (It’s a quirky definition, I admit, but it works really well.)

 

We reviewed that definition almost daily, increasingly relying on retrieval practice. For instance, I might give them this handout to fill in. Or we might do that work together on the board.

Over time, I started including inaccurate prompts in my questions: “So, tragedy ends in death or marriage, right?”

By this point, my students knew the definition so well that they confidently rejected my falsehoods: “No, you’re trying to trick us! Tragedy ends in death or banishment!”

For an even trickier approach, I encouraged students to correct one another’s (non-existent) mistakes:

Me: “T: what does comedy represent, and why?”

T: “The marriage (and implied birth) at the end of a comedy implies the continuity of society, and in that way contrasts tragedy’s death and banishment, which represent the end of society.”

Me: “M: what did T get wrong.”

M [confidently]: “Nothing. That was exactly right.”

Me [faking exasperation]: “S, help me out here. What did T and M miss?”

S [not fooled]: “Nothing. I agree with them both.”

Me: “Congrats to T for getting the answer just right. And congrats to M and S for not letting me fool you. It’s GREAT that you’re all so confident about this complex idea.”

Because these students knew this complex definition cold — because they had memorized it — they could stand firm when questioned skeptically. As a result, they did a great job when asked to apply that definition at the end of the term:

“How does Wilson’s Fences fit the definition of tragedy AND of comedy?”

To Sum Up

Despite all the bad press, the right kind of memorization can enhance learning.

When students know foundational information and processes by heart, they

BOTH process questions more fluently

AND resist misleading information from “external memory” sources.

Greater cognitive fluency + greater confidence in their knowledge = enduring learning.

Two New Ways of Thinking About Memory
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December 01, 2020

Two New Ways of Thinking About Memory

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In our classroom work, we teachers focus on learning; in their research, psychologists and neuroscientists often focus on memory. We have, in other words, different frameworks for talking about the same topic.

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

When I find one review article that provides TWO fresh ways to understand memory and learning, well, that’s worth sharing.

Humans have MANY memory systems with many daunting (and overlapping) names: working memory, declarative memory, semantic memory, and so forth.

In our day-to-day lives, we often focus on episodic memory. As the name suggests, this memory strand acquires vividly detailed pictures of specific events:

My birthday party (I can describe the cinnamon in the chocolate cake, and why my brother was looking so grouchy).

The time you found a stranger’s wallet (You can remember the chilly, opaque puddle from which you plucked the wallet, and the stranger’s shocked gratitude when you sleuthed down his phone number to return it).

The day the principal literally dropped the mic (Students still talk about the hollow bang and the agonizing reverb when the mic hit the stage floor in the gym).

Episodic memories fill our scrapbooks and dinner-table stories.

Over time, episodic memories gradually turn into semantic memories: general knowledge of abstract facts.

For instance:

At one point, probably in school, you learned that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. That evening, you had an episodic memory of learning that truth. You could say which teacher told you; you might wince at the sound of squeaking chalk as s/he wrote on the board.

Over time, however, that detailed episodic memory has become semantic memory. You know the abstract fact (Booth killed Lincoln), but not the rich details of when you learned it.

You no longer remember — episodically — when you learned that fact, but you remember the fact itself — semantically.

In psychology language, your brain semanticized this episodic memory.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Truthfully, we want our students to semanticize most of their learning.

For instance: I don’t want them to know that 3 + 4 = 7 at this specific moment.

I want them to abstract a general, semantic rule: three of something, combined with four more of the somethings, add up to seven somethings. (Unless those somethings are rumors, in which case they add up to a billion.)

I want them to know that the pen is mightier than the sword is an example of metonymy. But I don’t want them to limit their knowledge to that one example.

Instead, I want them to recognize other metonyms — which they can do if they semanticize that example.

At times, however, students can abstract too far.

If they conclude that a roundish number (like 3) plus a pointy number (like 4) add up to seven, then they might conclude that a roundish 8 plus a sharpish 1 add up to seven. In this case, they over-generalized: that is, over-semanticized.

If they conclude that the words pen and sword are always metonyms — that they never mean literally “pen” and “sword” — then they have gone too far.

When learning to speak, children pick up the abstract rule that “-ed” makes words past tense in English. But, they over-semanticize when they say “goed” instead of “went.”

As teachers, we want students to get the balance just right. We want them to translate individual examples into abstract rules.

But: we don’t want them to over-apply those abstract rules to inappropriate situations.

Teaching Implications?

At this point, you might worry: gosh, ANOTHER set of teaching techniques I have to master.

This research team has good news for you: the techniques you’ve heard of at Learning and the Brain conferences help students get this balance right.

That is: retrieval practice helps students get the episodic/semantic balance right.

So do spacing and interleaving.

So does sleep, and (probably) mindfulness and mindful rest.

This episodic/semantic balance is a new way of thinking about old teaching techniques, not a call for new teaching techniques.

Second “New Way”

Authors van Kesteren and Meeter also offer a neuroscientific account of long-term memory formation.

The (very) brief summary goes like this.

We know that both the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the hippocampus participate in new learning.

In their framework, the PFC helps connect new information with pre-existing mental models (often called schema). And the hippocampus helps organize new information that doesn’t align with a pre-existing mental model/schema.

That is: the brain’s response to new information depends on our current knowledge of it.

If we know something, the PFC does lots of the memory work.

If we know very little, the hippocampus does lots of the memory work.

As always, this neurobiological account wildly oversimplifies a hugely complicated series of events. (This is a blog, after all.)

And, it doesn’t provide new teaching strategies. We don’t “teach the PFC this way, and teach the hippocampus this other way.” (If you hear someone say that, be SUPER skeptical.)

However, it does offer a fascinating theory about the brain activity underlying our amazing mental abilities.

Putting It Together

This post’s title offered “two new ways to think about memory.”

First, teachers can think about converting episodic memories into semantic memories (without going too far).

Second, we can think about the PFC’s role in adding to existing schema, and the hippocampus’s role in developing new schema.

Neither new framework changes your teaching — assuming you’re already using the strategies that you hear about at LatB conferences so frequently. But, both offer us new ways to view our teaching from new perspectives — that is, to use both our PFCs and our hippocampi at the same time.

For earlier thoughts on episodic (also called “autobiographical”) memory vs. semantic memory, click here. And here for Clare Sealy’s discussion of the topic.

“How to Study Less and Learn More”: Explaining Learning Strategies to our Students
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
June 16, 2020

“How to Study Less and Learn More”: Explaining Learning Strategies to our Students

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Because cognitive science gives us such good guidance about learning, we want to share that information with our students.

“Study THIS WAY!” we cry. “Research says so!”

Alas, all too often, students don’t follow our advice.

A key part of the problem: the research that supports our advice is — ahem — really complicated and abstract. We might find it convincing, but our students’ eyes glaze over when we try to explain.

Because I talk frequently talk with students about brain research, I’m always on the lookout for research that…

… is methodologically sound,

… supports useful studying advice, and

… is easy to explain.

I’ve found such a study [updated link], and I think we can explain it to our students quite easily.

Two Are Better Than One

We all know the research showing that sleep helps consolidate long-term memory formation (fun studies here).

We all know the research showing that spreading practice out is better than doing it all at once (fascinating research here).

How about doing both? How about doing two study sessions, and sleeping in between them?

If we could convince our students to adopt those two strategies, that would be GREAT.

And, the research necessary to test that advice is — conceptually, at least — easy to do.

Students learned a topic: French-Swahili word pairs. (This research was done in France.)

Half of them did that at 9 am, and then tested themselves 12 hours later, at 9 pm. (Note: they did not sleep between these two sessions.)

How many times did these non-sleepers have to go through their flashcards to get all the answers right?

On average, they reviewed flashcards 5.8 times to get all those word pairs right. (For the sake of simplicity, let’s just call that 6.)

The other half learned the French-Swahili word pairs at 9 pm. They then got a good night’s sleep, and tested themselves 12 hours later, at 9 am.

How many times did the sleepers go through flashcards to get all the word pairs right? On average, they got them all right on the third attempt.

That’s right: instead of 6 review sessions, they needed 3.

Can We Do Better?

Okay, so far this study is easy to explain and shows real promise. Because they spread practice out AND slept, they cut study time IN HALF to get all the answers right.

But, so far this research measures learning 12 hours later. That’s not really learning. What happens if we test them later?

Specifically, what happens if we test them 6 months later?

Hold onto your hat.

When the researchers retested these students, the non-sleepers remembered 4 of those word pairs. The sleepers remembered 8 pairs.

So: HALF as much review resulted in TWICE as much learning 6 MONTHS later.

The Headline Please

When I talk with students about brain research, I start with this question: “Would you like to study less and learn more?”

I have yet to meet the student who doesn’t get behind that goal.

This easy-to-explain study shows students that half as much review leads to twice as much memory formation — if they both spread practice out over time and sleep between review sessions.

I think we have a winner.

Music and Memory: A Learning Strategy?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 15, 2020

Music and Memory: A Learning Strategy?

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Ever since the “Mozart Effect” was debunked, teachers have wanted to understand the relationship between music and learning.

If simply listening to music doesn’t “make us smarter” in some abstract way, can we use music strategically to help us learn specific subjects or topics?

A group of researchers at Baylor University wondered if the key is sleep.

That is: if students learn a topic while listening to (quiet) music, and then listen to that same music while they sleep, will it cause the brain to replay the academic content associated with the music? And, will that replay help students learn?

Intriguing, no?

This technique — called “targeted memory reactivation” — has been studied before. But, most of that research uses odors to reactivate memories.

That is: students learn X with the scent of roses in the background. That night while they sleep, the scent of roses is piped into the room. When they’re tested the next day — voila! — they remember more X than the students who didn’t get the “targeted memory reactivation” at night.

Of course, using odors for such reactivation is interesting in sleep labs. But it might not be very practical for the rest of us. So, researchers wondered if music would also reactivate memories.

The Research

Chenlu Gao, Paul Fillmore, Michael K. Scullin asked students to watch a 30-minute interactive video lecture on economics. During that lecture, classical music played quietly in the background. (The sound level was “soft background noise in a library.”)

So: students’ brains associated the music — Beethoven, Vivaldi, Chopin — with the topic — economics.

That night, while they slept, half of the students heard that same music played again. The other half heard white noise instead. The music/white noise started once students entered a particular phase of sleep, called “slow wave sleep.” (In this case, slow wave sleep began about 35 minutes after they fell asleep.)

Gao, Fillmore, and Scullin wanted to know:

Compared to students who heard white noise while sleeping, would the students who heard the music remember the lecture better?

Would they be able to apply its principles better?

Might there be a gender difference in those results?

So: what effect did Beethoven have?

The Results

Sure enough, targeted memory reactivation had interesting and measurable effects.

First: the next morning, students who heard music at night were likelier to “pass” a quiz (by scoring 70%) than those who didn’t.

Second: those differences came largely in two categories. The music helped women (but not men). And the music helped students answer application questions (but not factual questions).

Third: researchers measured students’ brain activity during sleep. In brief, students who heard music had different brain wave patterns than those who heard the white noise. And, those who did better on the quizzes had different patterns than those who didn’t.

These results get SUPER technical. But the headline is: we can quite plausibly connect mental behaviors (answers to quizzes) to neurobiological behaviors (“theta power”).

Fourth (This is really important): Researchers found NO DIFFERENCES when they tested the students nine months later. So, this targeted memory reactivation (with music) produced a short-term difference, but not a long-term one.

Implications for Teaching and Learning

This musical version of targeted memory reactivation feels temptingly practical. But: trying it out in real life requires some extrapolation and some technology.

I briefly corresponded with the lead researcher, Michael Scullin, about translating this technique from the sleep lab to everyday life. Here’s a quick overview of key points:

PROBLEM: In this study, students heard the music as they first learned the material. But, it’s REALLY unlikely that teachers/professors will play music while they teach. So, how can we apply use targeted memory reactivation in a more typical learning situation?

SOLUTION: The technique just might work if students play the right kind of music while they study, and then replay that music while they sleep. In this case, “the right kind of music” means instrumental, not distracting, relatively quiet.

However, this approach probably won’t work if students are otherwise distracted — by cellphones or video games, say — while they study.

PROBLEM: Presumably I can’t use the same piece of music to reactivate all memories of all the academic topics I want to learn. Does that mean I have to build some huge library of music cues: this Beethoven piece to recall the Battle of Bunker Hill, that Chopin piece to practice balancing chemical equations?

SOLUTION: Alas, it’s true: each piece of music would be distinctively paired with a particular topic. (This conclusion hasn’t been tested, but is likely true.)

So, the best compromise is probably this: choose the topics that are most difficult to understand or remember, and use the technique sparingly for that subset of academic information.

PROBLEM: Won’t playing music at night keep students awake, or wake them up?

SOLUTION: That’s an important technical question. Ideally, the music would play quietly.  And, as we saw in the research described above, it would start only after slow wave sleep started.

So, whatever technology the students have, they should program it to start the music at very low levels — ideally starting about 30 minutes after they fall asleep.

QUESTION: The technique helped in the short term, but not nine months later. Can we use targeted memory reactivation to consolidate learning over the long term?

ANSWER: We haven’t tested that yet. It seems plausible (even likely?) that repeating the music over time would help. That is: listening to that music once a fortnight for a few months might really firm up memories.

But, again, that approach hasn’t been tested. I (Andrew Watson, not Michael Scullin) am speculating that it might work. But we don’t know.

In Sum…

This research — contrary to lots of earlier work — suggests that we might be able to learn while we sleep.

But, the specifics are very much in the early days. Targeted memory reactivation clearly produces benefits in the sleep lab. Its application to everyday teaching and learning needs to be explored, practiced, and refined.

I wrote about another one of Scullin’s studies a year ago. If you’d like some advice on how to fall asleep faster, click here.

Dangerous Fluency: Performance Isn’t Always Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
December 12, 2019

Dangerous Fluency: Performance Isn’t Always Learning

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How often do you have this experience?

Your students obviously understood yesterday’s topic. You know this because, say, their exit tickets revealed a high level of progress.

And yet, when you begin class today, they have seemingly forgotten everything you discussed, and everything they learned. Or, “learned.”

Teachers experience this frustration all the time: short-term performance doesn’t necessarily translate into long-term learning. (I’ve written before about Nick Soderstrom’s AWESOME review article considering this tension.)

A Telling Example

Last year, Glass and Kang published an important study about the effect of technology use during college lectures.

G&K let students use technology–laptops and cellphones–during 1/2 of the lectures in a psychology class, and forbade them during the other half.

In fact, they taught two identical sections of the same course, and enforced this ban in each class on alternating days. So: they could compare students to themselves in the ban- vs. no-ban classes.

The result headlines go like this:

This tech ban had NO EFFECT on immediate quizzes: students scored equally well on average in the ban- and the no-ban classes.

And yet, it had a SUBSTANTIAL effect on the term-end exam. Students averaged 7 points lower on material they had learned when tech was allowed than when it was forbidden.

And, crucially, students scored lower in no-ban classes even if they didn’t use technology themselves. Presumably, their classmates’ technology use distracted them.

This study suggests several conclusions. (I’ll mention a particularly counter-intuitive one at the end of this post.)

Most People Don’t Judge Their Own Learning Well

Because we’re teachers, we are–relatively speaking–experts on learning. Especially if you’re reading this blog (and attending Learning and the Brain conferences), you probably know a lot more about the complexities of learning than most people do.

And, you know more about learning than your students do.

That’s a (surprisingly) controversial statement. But, consider the students’ perspective in Glass and Kang’s psychology lecture.

They might reasonably say:

“Look: I scored equally well on the daily quizzes whether or not I was using technology. Clearly I understand material just fine when I’m texting my friends.

Have a little faith in me as a learner. I know when the professor is saying important things, and I focus then. And, I know when she’s gone off on a cute-but-unessential anecdote, and I use that time to check in with my people.”

Everything in that hypothetical statement is accurate, or at least plausible.

However, it lacks the long-term perspective. Their performance on short-term quizzes does not predict their long-term learning and understanding.

Because we have G&K’s research, and see the longer perspective, we know that their texting had a subtle, harmful effect on retention. However well they did right away, students just didn’t learn that information deeply.

For this reason–among many others–I think teachers should be confident in claiming our expertise. When our students say “I know I learn better this way,” we can use our best judgment in evaluating that claim.

At times–especially if they have a particular diagnosis–they might well be right.

At other times–especially if they want to watch YouTube while doing homework, or claim that their learning style requires that they do X instead of Y–you can offer strong guidance based on cognitive science research.

Counter-Intuitive Conclusion

I promised above I’d offer a surprising interpretation of Glass and Kang’s study. Here goes:

Because students did worse in the no-ban classes whether or not they used technology, the obvious conclusion is that we should utterly ban technology from our classrooms.

However, that conclusion misses an essential part of G&K’s methodology. They didn’t exactly ban technology use. In fact, they required technology use.

You read that right.

Those “immediate quizzes” you’ve been reading about? Students had to take them on some kind of electronic device: a laptop or a cell phone.

So, the study does NOT compare performance in a ban vs. a no-ban condition. It DOES compare performance in classes where technology was required at times (to take quizzes), and where it was used however students liked (as well as taking quizzes).

In other words: the problem wasn’t USE of technology. It was MISUSE of technology.

Here again, I think this insight brings us back to teacher judgment.

Should you ban technology from your classroom?

If the topic you’re covering doesn’t benefit from technology, then you have plenty of reasons to do so.

But, if you’ve got some great way to enhance instruction with technology–and you can monitor their technology use as G&K did–then you might get the same benefits that Glass and Kang’s students did when they took those quizzes on laptops.

Research guidance can shape our thinking. And, we should always blend it with our own experience and classroom skill.

Default Image
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 25, 2019

More about Macbeth and Memory

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Earlier this month, I wrote about the distinction between autobiographical memory and semantic memory.

Both kinds help us live meaningful lives.

But, schools focus on semantic memory: we want our students to know facts and skills over the long term.

We don’t really need them to remember the class or the exercise (or even the teacher) who taught them those facts and skills. That’s autobiographical memory.

That blog post was inspired by Clare Sealy’s recent essay ironically entitled “Memorable Experiences Are the Best Way to Help Children Remember Things.”

Happily, Sealy is the guest on a recent EdNext podcast: you can hear her in-depth explanation.

Equally happy, that podcast includes Sealy’s essay itself.

To understand Sealy’s argument, and its full implications, you can both have a look and have a listen.

Getting the Timing Right: Critical Thinking Online
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 17, 2019

Getting the Timing Right: Critical Thinking Online

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If we want students to remember what we teach–and, what teacher doesn’t?–we’ve got a vital strategy: spread practice out over time.

We’ve got scads of research showing that the same number of practice problems results in a lot more learning if those problems are spread out over days and weeks, compared to being done all at once.

We call this the spacing effect, and it’s as solid a finding as we’ve got in the field of educational psychology.

As teachers interested in psychology research, we should always be asking: “yes, but does that work in my specific context.”

For instance: if research shows that college students learn stoichiometry better in a flipped-classroom model, that doesn’t necessarily mean that my 3rd graders will learn spelling better that way.

In the language of psychology research, we’re looking for “boundary conditions.” What are the limits of any particular technique?

The Spacing Effect Meets Critical Thinking

Researchers in Canada wanted to know: does the spacing effect apply to the teaching of critical thinking?

Of course, we want our students to be effective critical thinkers. But, there’s heated debate about the best way to teach this skill.

Lots of people doubt that critical thinking can be taught as a free-standing skill. Instead, they believe it should be nested in a specific curriculum.

That is: we can be critical thinkers about sonnets, or about football play-calling strategy, or about the design of bridges. But, we can’t learn to think critically in an abstract way.

The Canadian researchers start with that perspective, and so they teach critical thinking about a specific topic: the reliability of websites. And, they go further to ask: will the spacing effect help students be better critical thinkers?

In other words: if we spread out practice in critical thinking, will students ultimately practice their critical craft more effectively?

The Research; The Results

To answer this question, researchers used a 3-lesson curriculum exploring the credibility of websites. This curriculum asked 17 questions within 4 categories: the authority of the website’s authors, the quality of the content, the professionalism of the design, and so forth.

Half of the 4th-6th graders in this study learned this curriculum over 3 days. The other half learned it over 3 weeks.

Did this spacing matter? Were those who spread their practice out more proficient critical website thinkers than those who bunched their practice together?

In a word: yup.

When tested a month later, students who spread practice out were much likelier to use all four categories when analyzing websites’ reliability. And, they used more of the 17 questions to explore those four categories.

To Sum Up

This research leads us to two encouraging, and practical, conclusions.

First: we can help our students be better critical thinkers when they analyze websites. (Heaven knows that will be a useful skill throughout their lives.)

Second: we can improve their ability by relying on the spacing effect. As with so many kinds of learning, we get better at critical thinking when we practice over relatively long periods of time.

Tea and Macbeth: Autobiographical vs. Semantic Memory
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
November 06, 2019

Tea and Macbeth: Autobiographical vs. Semantic Memory

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A few years ago, a former student named Jeremy invited me out for coffee. (I haven’t changed his name, because I can’t think of any reason to do so.)

We were reminiscing about the good old days–in particular, the very fun group of students in the sophomore class with him.

At one point he said: “You know what I remember most vividly about your class?”

I waited.

“Instead of using a spoon, you’d wrap your teabag string around your pen to wring it out into the mug. That always AMAZED me.”

In my early days as a teacher, I would have been horrified by this comment.

We had done such good work  in this class! We analyzed the heck out of Macbeth. Jeremy had become a splendid writer–he could subordinate a quotation in an appositive like a pro. We had inspiring conversations about Their Eyes Were Watching God.

And all he remembered was the way I wrung out a tea bag?

The Hidden Compliment

Jeremy’s comment might seem like terrible news, but I think it’s good news. Here’s why:

The goal of sophomore English is for Jeremy to learn particular skills, facts, and habits of mind.

That is: he should remember–say–how to write a topic sentence with parallel abstract nouns.

However, he need not remember the specific tasks he undertook to learn that skill.

For example, when he wrote his essay about Grapes of Wrath, he got better at writing essays. Whether or not he remembers the argument he made in that paper, he honed his analytical habits and writing skills. (How do I know? His next paper was better. And the next.)

He doesn’t remember the day he learned how to do those things. But, he definitely learned how to do them.

Many Memories

When psychologists first began studying memory, they quickly realized that “memory” isn’t one thing. We’ve got lots of different kinds of memory.

Those distinct memory systems remember different kinds of things. They store those memories in different places.

For instance: I’ve written a lot about working memory. That essential cognitive system works in a very particular way, with very important strengths and limitations.

But, say procedural memory works very differently. Procedural memory helps us remember how to do things: like, say, ride a bike, or form the past tense of an irregular verb.

These distinctions help me understand Jeremy’s memories of my class.

Jeremy had a strong autobiographical memory: my wringing out a teabag with my pen.

As the name suggests, autobiographical memories are rich with details about the events and people and circumstances.

You have countless such memories:

The time you poured coffee on your boss’s desk;

The first time you met your current partner;

The time you forgot your lines on stage.

You can call up vivid specifics with delicious–or agonizing–precision.

At the same time, Jeremy has lots of semantic memories from our class. As Clare Sealy describes them, semantic memories are “context free.” They “have been liberated from the emotional and spatiotemporal context in which they were first acquired.”

For instance:

Jeremy knows the difference between a direct object and a subject complement.

Having read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, he knows how to analyze love triangles in literature.

Knowing how we define the word “romance” in English, he can explain the (many) bizarrenesses of The Scarlet Letter.

However, those semantic memories have an entirely feel from autobiographical memories. They lack the vivid specifics.

Jeremy knows that a subject complement “renames or describes” the subject. But he can’t tell you the tie I was wearing when I first explained that. He can’t tell you the (probably gruesome) example I used to make the distinction clear.

If he could, they would be autobiographical memories as well as semantic memories.

Why The Distinction Matters

As teachers, we’re tempted–often encouraged–to make our classes dramatically memorable. We want our students to remember the time that we…

Surprisingly, that approach has a hidden downside.

As Clare Sealy explains in a recent essay, we can easily use information in semantic memory in a variety of circumstances. That is: transfer is relatively easy with semantic memory.

However, that’s not true for autobiographical memory. Because autobiographical memory is bound up with the vivid specifics of that very moment on that very day (in that very room with those very people), students can struggle to shift the underlying insight to new circumstances.

In other words: the vivid freshness of autobiographical memory impedes transfer.

Sealy explains this so nimbly that I want to quote her at length:

Emotional and sensory cues are triggered when we try to retrieve an autobiographical memory. The problem is that sometime they remember the contextual tags but not the actual learning.

Autobiographical memory is so tied up with context, it is no good for remembering things once that context is no longer present.

This means that it has serious limitations in terms of its usefulness as the main strategy for educating children, since whatever is remembered is so bound up with the context in which it was taught. This does not make for flexible, transferable learning that can be brought to bear in different contexts and circumstances.

By the way, in the preceding passage, I’ve used the phrase “autobiographical memory” when Sealy wrote “episodic memory.” The two terms mean the same thing; I think that “autobiographical memory” is a more intuitive label.

To Sum Up

Of course we want our students to remember us and our class: the fun events, the dramatic personalities, the meaningful milestones.

And, we also want them to remember the topics and ideas and processes they learned.

Crucially, the word “remember” means something different in those two sentences; the first is autobiographical memory, the second is semantic.

Teaching strategies that emphasize remembering events might (sadly) make it harder to remember ideas and processes.

So, we should use teaching strategies that foster the creation of semantic memories.

Happily, the autobiographical memories will take care of themselves.

Clare Sealy’s essay appears in The researchED Guide to Education Myths: An Evidence-Informed Guide for Teachers. The (ironic) title is ” Memorable Experiences Are the Best Way to Help Children Remember Things.”

Faster Learners Remember Better (Perhaps)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
October 25, 2019

Faster Learners Remember Better (Perhaps)

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As a society, we often conflate speed with cognitive skill. People who learn faster seem smarter, somehow.

As a teacher, it took me years to get past that belief. (The short version of the story: I had a student who got 100% extra time on tests because her processing speed percentile was in the single digits. When I read her first essay I thought: you could have given any of my other students 100% extra time–they never would have come up with this analysis. She wasn’t fast, but good heavens she was insightful.)

I’ve recently found research suggesting NOT that speed = smarts, but that speedy learning  = better memory.

Here’s the story.

The Study

Researchers had adults learn 45 pairs of English and Lithuanian nouns. (Relatively few people speak Lithuanian, and so it’s a good test language.)

Basically, they used computer-based flashcards to study the word pairs. Then, they went through the pairs and tried to fill in blanks correctly.

If the adults got the right answer, the card was dropped from the deck. If they got it wrong, they could study the correct answer, so they could get it right the next time.

Researchers wanted to know, first, how long did it take them to get all the words in the deck right? That is: how many times did they cycle through the deck before they finished the task?

In other words: how quickly did they learn?

And, second, how well did they do on a test of those word pairs the following day?

In other words: how well did they learn?

The Findings

As you can see in the graph, the fast learners remembered better. Check out the bottom half of the image below.

Zerr, C. L., Berg, J. J., Nelson, S. M., Fishell, A. K., Savalia, N. K., & McDermott, K. B. (2018). Learning efficiency: Identifying individual differences in learning rate and retention in healthy adults. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1436-1450.

The top 25% learned the words in about 7 cycles through the deck. And, the next day, they remember about 89% of the word pairs. (I’m eyeballing these numbers from the graph.)

The bottom 25% learned the words in about 16 cycles. And, they next day, they remembered about 56%.

If you want to predict how well these adults would remember the word pairs the next day, the best question you could ask would be: “how quickly did they learn those word pairs today?”

And, here’s the crazy part:

4 of these researchers had used the Lithuanian word-pair method in a different study about 3 years before.

They recontacted those participants, and many of them agreed to be retested.

Sure enough, the people who learned relatively quickly (and remembered well) 3 years ago still did so. The people who learned relatively slowly (and didn’t remember so well) 3 years ago showed the same pattern again.

In other words: this is a relatively stable finding. It lasts not from day to day, but over months and years.

Big Questions

First, of course, we’d like to know why this is true? The study’s authors speculate that the fast learners might be better at attentional control. Or, they might have higher working memory capacity. Or, they might come up with better memory strategies.

At present, we just don’t know.

Second, would this finding hold true for other kinds of learning? After all, we rarely want our students to learn foreign-language word pairs relatively quickly. (Even foreign language teachers let students learn vocabulary over time.)

So: do people who learn letters quickly remember them better? Do people who learn science formulas quickly remember them better?

Does this finding matter for other kinds of learning?

We don’t know.

Third, is this true if we test students’ memories more than a day later. In both halves of this research, participants learned words one day, and the final test was the next day.

What would we find if the final test was two weeks later?

Once again: we just don’t know.

What Should Teachers Do?

For the time being, I don’t think this research creates emphatic teaching guidelines. We simply have too many important questions to let our practice change much based on this study.

We should, of course, keep our eyes out for further exploration of this topic.

If anything, I’d suggest this strategy. If you have a student or two who take an unusually long time to learn something, you might check in with them the next day to see how well those memories have consolidated.

They just might need an extra boost.

This suggestion is, of course, speculation; I’m not insisting that all readers adopt it. However, it seems to me the most plausible application of potentially important research.

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