Questions about math and anxiety have been on the uptick recently.
Over at Filling the Pail, Greg Ashman offers his typically direct analysis. You might disagree with his opinion, but he’s always worth a mental debate.
By the way, a casual aside in his post deserves attention of its own. Here’s how Ashman frames his tests: “I’m just checking in to see how well I’ve taught you.”
That simple sentence accomplishes many useful goals — it’s one I might use myself. It’s hard to imagine an easier way to reduce test stress…
Teachers worry a lot about stress. For that reason, this blog regularly scans research updates for useful news about stress and stress reduction techniques.
One of our favorite studies offers a surprisingly simple approach to stress reduction: writing about it.
We like this study so much, we’ve posted about it twice: here and here.
So here’s an important question: do we actually know that the strategy works?
Put in a different way: how do psychologists and neuroscientists know what they claim to know?
Replication, Replication Crisis
To answer this question, we can describe research methodology. The ritual of science publication, in fact, requires almost gruesomely soporific descriptions of EXACTLY what the scientists did.
(What computer model did they use? What software version did they use? What size was the font? How far away from the computer did the participants sit? You get the idea…)
Here’s another answer: to be sure we know what we know, we double check. When one group of researchers arrives at a conclusion — especially an exciting or novel conclusion — other researchers see if they get the same result.
To be fancy, we can say they try to “replicate” the original result. As we get more replications, we feel more confident that we know.
Here’s the problem: psychology is facing a replication crisis.
A Case in Point: Writing About Stress
In recent years, more and more psychology studies just don’t replicate. We thought we knew, but now we’re not so sure.
For example: that study we love? The one about “reducing stress by writing about it?” A new replication crisis project tried to replicate it, and got no results.
In this replication, the benefits of writing about stress were…nada.
In fact, this group of researchers tried to replicate all 21 studies published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Depending on how you count, 13 of them replicated. That means that eight of them did not replicate.
YIKES.
What’s a Teacher to Do?
This news might seem like a disaster. If so much research doesn’t replicate, we might be tempted to stop relying on science in our teaching.
Although understandable, this dis-spirited conclusion goes too far. Instead, the replication crisis should remind us of two essential points:
First: teachers should adopt teaching ideas that have lots of research support.
If you see one study suggesting that (say) chewing gum helps students convert fractions to decimals, DO NOT adopt that technique. At a minimum, you should look to see if other researchers have replicated that finding.
In fact, you’d like several researchers to have explored this idea — preferably in different grades and schools, with different research paradigms.
(You should also weigh the other pluses and minuses. All that gum chewing might be really distracting.)
Second: we should be ready to change our minds. If a wave of research points one direction, we might adopt a particular strategy.
However, if better research over longer periods of time discounts those findings, then we have to be willing to try something else.
The best-known example of this problem: “learning styles.” Early research suggested that they might exist, but the vast weight of evidence shows clearly that they don’t.
In brief: we should adopt evidence-based theories only if we’re willing to let go of them as further evidence dictates.
Final Thoughts
But what about that stress-reduction technique? Do we have to give it up, now that it didn’t replicate?
That’s a surprisingly complicated question.
True enough: this attempt at replication failed.
However, in the original study, researchers Ramirez and Beilock tried their technique twice — just to be sure they had it right.
In fact, they tried it twice in the psychology lab and twice more in a local high school.
If you’re like most people, the answer is: “not very.”
We’ve got lots of research showing that people change their beliefs when they hear good news. However, they don’t change their views much when they hear bad news.
For example: I might ask you, “what are the odds that — in your lifetime — your house will be burgled?”
You answer “40%.”
Later on, I inform you that the real number is 30%. Given your initial estimate, I just gave you good news! You’re safer than you thought.
When I ask you the same question later, you’re likely to update your answer. You might guess 32%. That number is still high, but much more accurate than it was.
However, if you initially guessed “20%,” then the real number “30%” is bad news. You’re in more danger than you thought!
When I ask you the same question later, you probably won’t update your answer much. You’re likely to say “21%.”
To find out, they invited people to their lab and stressed out half of them.
(The stressed-out half heard they would have to give an impromptu speech in front of judges. And, they were given challenging math problems to solve.)
The researchers then asked them several questions like the one above: “how likely is it that your house will be burgled?”
How honestly did these participants process the correct information they got?
As before, the un-stressed participants learned from the good news, but not from the bad.
However, the research team found that stress helps. That is: the participants who worried about their upcoming public speaking gig processed the bad news as well as the good.
Next Steps
The research team double checked their results with fire fighters in Colorado. They got the same results. That’s helpful news.
However, all of this research focuses on adults. The average age in the first study was about 25 years. In the second study, 43 years.
We know that adolescents and children process emotions quite differently. So: we should cross our fingers and hope that the researchers try out their idea with school-aged children.
The more we understand the benefits as well as the detriments of stress, the better we can help our students navigate the appropriate challenges that school provides.
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For further thoughts on stress in schools, check out this earlier blog article by Rose Hendricks.
And, for fun, here’s a video of the lead researcher talking about some of his earlier work:
Here’s a counter-intuitive suggestion: perhaps we might reduce stress by writing about failure.
Truthfully, that seems like an odd idea.
After all, it seems logical to think we could reduce stress by writing about puppies, or our favorite grandparent, or a happy holiday memory.
But: writing about failure? Wouldn’t that just add to the stress?
Take 1: Writing Reduces Stress
Earlier research has shown that we can reduce stress by writing.
For example, Ramirez and Beilock placed students in a high pressure academic situation. Each student had to take a difficult math test. Even more stressful, another student’s reward depended on their score.
That is: if I perform badly, I don’t get a reward AND someone else doesn’t get a reward.
(Talk about pressure.)
Half of these students had ten minutes to sit quietly. The other half used their ten minutes “to write as openly as possible about their thoughts and feelings regarding the math problems.”
You might think that this writing exercise would ramp up the students’ anxiety levels. However, it had the opposite effect. Students who had the opportunity to write about their anxiety then felt less anxious.
In fact, when Rabirez and Beilock tested this method with 9th graders taking a biology exam, they found it improved their final scores. (This effect held for the more anxious students, but not the less anxious ones.)
DiMenichi’s team asked some students to write for ten minutes about a “difficult time in which they did not succeed.” (Students in the control group spent ten minutes summarizing the plot of a recent movie they had seen.)
They then asked these students to talk extemporaneously in a mock interview for their dream job; they were told they’d be evaluated by a “speech expert” while they spoke. To add to this devilish stress test, they then had to solve math problems in their head. (When they made mistakes, they had to start over at the beginning of the sequence.)
Sure enough, as they predicted, DiMenichi & Co. found that students who wrote about a prior failure were less stressed as a result of this exercise than the students who had summarized a movie.
That’s right: writing about a prior failure reduced stress.
Did that reduced stress benefit these students?
Well, researchers then asked all the students to try an attention test. They saw letters flash on a computer screen, and had to press the space bar when they saw a consonant. However, when they saw a vowel, they did NOT press the space bar.
As you can imagine, this test requires both attention and inhibition. Once I’ve gotten used to pressing that space bar, I’ve got to restrain myself when I see a vowel.
The students’ stress levels made a big difference.
Students who had written about failure–and who therefore felt less stress–averaged roughly 7.75 mistakes on this test.
Students who summarized the movie–and who therefore felt more stress–averaged 13.5 mistakes.
That’s almost twice as many! (For stats lovers, the d value is 1.17.)
Classroom Implications
We all know students who need some stress reduction in their lives. And, we’ve all heard different ways to get that job done.
These studies, and others like them, suggest that this counter-intuitive strategy might well be helpful to the anxious students in our classrooms. If students can off-load their stress onto paper, they’ll feel less anxious, and be more successful in their schoolwork.
The best way to make the strategy work will depend on the specifics of your situation: the age of your students, the school where you teach, the personality you bring to the classroom.
I myself would be sure to explain why I wanted my high-school students to do this assignment before I asked them to give it a try.
If you attempt to use this approach, send me an email and let me know how it goes: [email protected].
(By the way: if you’re interested in the science of good stress, click here.)
