Andrew began his classroom life as a high-school English teacher in 1988, and has been working in or near schools ever since. In 2008, Andrew began exploring the practical application of psychology and neuroscience in his classroom. In 2011, he earned his M. Ed. from the “Mind, Brain, Education” program at Harvard University. As President of “Translate the Brain,” Andrew now works with teachers, students, administrators, and parents to make learning easier and teaching more effective. He has presented at schools and workshops across the country; he also serves as an adviser to several organizations, including “The People’s Science.”
Andrew is the author of "Learning Begins: The Science of Working Memory and Attention for the Classroom Teacher."
A recent study suggests that 3- and 4-year old children understand as much, and learn as much vocabulary from, digital books as from read-alouds with adults.
This study hasn’t been published–it was presented at a recent conference–so we can’t look at all the details with the specificity that we usually do. (And, skeptics will rightly be concerned that the research was funded by Amazon: a company that might well profit from its conclusions.)
At the same time, the description I’ve linked to sounds plausible and responsible, so I’m not inclined to dismiss this finding out of hand.
The authors’ conclusions conflict with some other findings in related fields. You may remember a recent blog post discussing Daniel Willingham’s conclusion that, on the whole, students learn more from books than from e-readers.
I’ve also been interested in a study by Ackerman and Goldsmith showing that students regulate their learning better with books than e-readers.
But the current study isn’t about college students trying to learn from books; it’s about pre-readers trying to follow a story that’s being read to them. In this one paradigm, the researchers have found that the right kind of e-book can do the job as well as the right kind of adult.
In this 20 minute video, James Kaufman explains how researchers define creativity, and how they measure it.
He also discusses the limitations on both the definitions and the measurements.
(Note, too, the dexterous water-bottle management.)
Although he title of this video is “What Can Neuroscience Offer the Study of Creativity?”, the presentation focuses entirely on psychology: that is, the behavior of the creative mind, not the physical make-up of the creating brain. I’m hoping that subsequent videos explore neuroscience in greater depth.
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.
How can we encourage young women to pursue STEM fields?
In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, school leaders tried a substantial reform: they increased the math requirement during the final two years of high school. Instead of taking math three days a week, all students had to take math four days a week.
What were the results of increasing the math requirement by 1/3 for 2 years? (That sentence sounds like a word problem, no?)
A mixed bag.
The good news: this reform reduced the gap between male and female achievement scores in math. On the surface, in other words, it seems young women learned more.
This result should be very exciting. However…
The so-so news: this additional math work did very little to increase women’s participation in STEM fields in college. Instead, it increased the STEM interest of male college students–the enrollment gap remained about the same.
And, the bad news: although the women learned more math, they felt worse about their own math abilities.
The reason for this last result isn’t clear — the author’s hypothesis honestly sounds a little convoluted to me.
But, given the size of the data pool behind this study, the conclusion seems clear: requiring more math may boost math learning, but — for women — it’s not sufficient to boost math confidence and interest in STEM fields.
At a minimum, the study suggests that we should think not only about how much math students learn, but how they learn it.
A further point: I don’t know how the math curriculum in a typical Baden-Württemberg high school compares to that of a school in the US. Before we try this intervention, we should (again) think not only about how much math students learn, but what math they learn.
Some days I wonder if I have linked to too many articles debunking claims about “brain training games.” Invariably, as soon as this thought crosses my mind, I hear another advertisement for Lumosity, and I realize that I haven’t linked to debunking articles often enough.
So, as my public service for today, here’s another study that makes this point:
People who practiced games that were supposed to improve working memory got better at the games, but they didn’t get better at other working memory tasks.
Put another way: you might decide to spend $15 a month for the fun of playing such games. But, don’t do so because you think they’ll help your cognitive functioning. So far, we just don’t have good evidence that they do.
(Just as a reminder: Lumosity was fined $ 2,000,000 for deceptive advertising.)
Many teachers I know are baffled by the attraction of video games; some are heartily disgusted by them. (A few play them on the sly, but…ahem…no identities revealed here.)
Even if you don’t have much patience with video games yourself, you can still ask yourself this question: could they help us understand how our students learn?
After all, the many hours (and hours) that people devote to online gaming create vast quantities of data. Researchers can use those data to understand the habits that lead to the greatest improvement for the most number of people.
Well: researchers at Brown University have done just that. By studying two online games–Halo Reach and StarCraft 2–Jeff Huang and his intrepid crew have reached two quite helpful conclusions about this particular kind of learning.
It’s All in the Timing
If we want our students to learn a complex process, clearly practicing helps. And, presumably, more practice is better than less. No?
No. (Or, not exactly…)
Huang’s team found that the people who played the most Halo weren’t the people who improved the fastest. Instead, the players who took some time off — playing roughly once every other day, rather than every day or multiple times a day — raised their score most quickly.
If you’ve spent any time in Learning and the Brain world, you have heard about the spacing effect: practice spread out over time produces greater learning that lots of practice done all at once. (For just one example, see this article.)
Huang’s research in video games falls nicely into this pattern, but gives it an extra twist.
The spacing effect suggests that, if you’re going to play Halo 20 hours this week, you’ll improve faster if you spread those hours out than if you play them all in a row.
Huang’s research suggests that, if you want to improve quickly, you’re better off playing fewer hours with breaks in between sessions than more hours all at once.
In the classroom, this finding suggests that my students are better off practicing problems using the inscribed angle theorem with fewer, well-spaced problems than with more, rapid-fire problems.
It’s Also in the Warm Up
When the researchers turned their attention to StarCraft 2, they asked different questions and got usefully different answers.
In StarCraft (I’ve never played, so I’m taking the authors’ word for this), a player must control many units at the same time–sometimes issuing up to 200 commands per minute to execute effective strategy.
To simplify these demands, players can assign ‘hotkeys’ and thereby command many units with one button.
Huang’s team found that the best players used hotkeys more than others. And, even more interesting, they “warmed up” using hotkeys at the beginning of the game when they didn’t yet have many units to command.
In other words: even when they didn’t have complex cognitive work right in front of them, they were already stretching the necessary cognitive musculature to have it ready when it was needed.
This “cognitive warm up” behavior strikes me as a potentially very useful. When students do very simple problems–like the early StarCraft game without many units–they can already push themselves to think about these problems in complex ways.
If it’s easy to spell the word “meet,” you might encourage your students to think of other words that have a similar sound but are spelled differently: “heat,” “wheat,” “cheat.”
If it’s easy to find the verb in a sentence (“The porcupine painted the tuba a fetching shade of puce”), students might ask themselves if that sentence has an indirect object.
In each of these cases, students can use a relatively simple cognitive task as an opportunity to warm up more complex mental operations that will be coming soon.
The Bigger Picture
While I hope these specific teaching strategies might be useful to you, I also think there’s a broader point to make:
Teaching is fantastically complicated because learning is fantastically complicated–at least, much of school learning is. For that reason, teachers can use all the wise guidance we can get–from psychologists, from neuroscientists, and…yes…from video-game players.
Here’s the statement from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine:
During adolescence, internal circadian rhythms and biological sleep drive change to result in later sleep and wake times. As a result of these changes, early middle school and high school start times curtail sleep, hamper a student’s preparedness to learn, negatively impact physical and mental health, and impair driving safety. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence shows that delaying school start times positively impacts student achievement, health, and safety. Public awareness of the hazards of early school start times and the benefits of later start times are largely unappreciated. As a result, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is calling on communities, school boards, and educational institutions to implement start times of 8:30 AM or later for middle schools and high schools to ensure that every student arrives at school healthy, awake, alert, and ready to learn.
Of course, schools have many reasons not to make this change: bus schedules, sports schedules, parent schedules, perhaps lunar eclipse schedules.
But in the face of the mounting evidence, all these reasons sound like excuses. Schools exist to help students learn; at many schools, our daily schedule inhibits their learning. We can, and should, solve this problem.
L&tB bloggers frequently write about working memory — and with good reason. This cognitive capacity, which allows students to reorganize and combine pieces information into some new conceptual structure, is vital to all academic learning.
And: we don’t have very much of it.
For example: our grade school students may know the letters C, A, and T. But, putting letters together to form the word “cat” can be a challenge for new readers. After all, that new combination is a working memory task.
Putting those letters together with another letter to make the word “catch” — well, that cognitive effort can bring the whole mental exercise to a halt. (Psychologists speak of “catastrophic failure,” an apt and vivid phrase.)
When teachers learn about the importance of working memory and the limitations of working memory, we often ask an obvious question: what can we do to make working memory bigger?
How to Embiggen Working Memory
This simple question has a surprisingly complicated set of answers.
The first thing to do: wait. Our students’ working memory is getting bigger as they age. We don’t need to do anything special. (Here is a study by Susan Gathercole showing how working memory increases from ages 4-15.)
The second thing to do: watch researchers argue.
Some scholars believe that working memory training does increase its capacity; some companies sell products that claim to do just that.
For the most part, however, the field is quite skeptical. A recent meta-analysis (here) and several classroom studies (here and here) find that working memory training just doesn’t have the effect we’d like it to. And, of course, that ineffective training takes up valuable time and scarce money.
As I read the field, more scholars are skeptics than believers.
Today’s Headline
All that information is important background for a headline I saw recently: “Buzzing the Brain with Electricity Can Boost Working Memory.” (Link here.)
According to this study, weak electrical stimulation to the middle frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule (not joking) temporarily synchronizes theta waves (obvi), and thereby enhances WM function.
Aha! At last! A solution!
When our students struggle with a working memory task, now we just give them a helpful little ZAP, and they’ll be reading like the Dickens. (Or: solving complex math problems. Or: analyzing Sethe’s motivation. Or: elucidating the parallels between US wars in Korea and Vietnam.)
In other words: all those skeptics can now become believers, as working memory problems become a thing of the past.
Beyond the Headline
Or, maybe not yet a thing of the past.
First, it’s always important to remember that science works incrementally. This study is only one study, offering initial testing of a hypothesis.
Second, it’s quite a small study. We’ll need to test this idea many, many more times with many, MANY more people.
Third–and this is my key point–the authors of the study do not even suggest that this technique has classroom uses. Instead, to quote from the Neuroscience News article, “[t]he hope is that the approach could one day be used to bypass damaged areas of the brain and relay signals in people with traumatic brain injury, stroke or epilepsy.”
In other words: the present hypothesis isn’t about helping students with typical working memory capacity to increase it. Instead, it’s about helping people with damaged working memory capacity to boost it — temporarily.
999 Steps to Go
Teachers can be tempted by flashy headlines–oversimplified as they must be–to pounce on scientific advances as practical classroom solutions.
If we’re going to be responsible, even critical consumers of psychology and neuroscience, however, we must learn to read this research in the spirit it is intended. In these scientific realms, the intended spirit is almost always “here’s an interesting incremental step. Let’s think about how to take one more.”
Classroom uses may be at the end of this journey of a thousand steps. Until then, we should keep our students–and our own–working memory limitations clearly in mind.
Greg Ashman is enthusiastic about research, and yet skeptical about innovation.
Ashman’s argument resonates with me in large measure because it helps explain the power of Mind, Brain, Education as an approach to teaching.
Of course, MBE does offer its own specific pedagogical suggestions. For example: if you’ve spent any time at Learning and the Brain conferences, you know the benefits of active recall. (Both Ian Kelleher and Scott MacClintic have blogged on this topic recently.)
The Bigger Picture
More broadly, MBE gives teachers a consistent rubric with which we can measure the value of many other pedagogical approaches. Here’s what I mean:
Is project based learning a good idea? How about flipped classrooms? Service learning? 1-to-1 laptop programs? Design thinking? Or, the new idea that will inevitably surface tomorrow?
If you’re being encouraged to try one of these approaches, it can be hard to know how to measure its effectiveness. All of them have research (of some kind or another) showing how beneficial they are. All of them have enthusiastic endorsements by earnest-seeming teachers. All of them have books and conferences and websites and … I don’t know … Ben & Jerry’s flavors named after them.
But: do they all work? How can they – some seem to conflict with each other.
The more you know about MBE, however, the more tools you have that allow you to make consistent comparisons.
Here’s what I mean…
The First Tool in the Toolbox
If you’ve learned about working memory at an LaTB conference, then you already know it is a short-term memory capacity that allows people to hold several pieces of information, and then reorganize and combine them into some new pattern.
For example: if I ask you to put the 6 New England states into alphabetical order, you have to hold all six names in your memory, and then reorganize them in a particular way. That’s working memory.
You may also know that working memory is very small; you can probably alphabetize 6 states, but you couldn’t do sixteen – at least, not without writing them down.
Once you understand even a few simple facts about working memory, then you can use that MBE knowledge to analyze all of the pedagogies listed above.
Is project-based learning a good idea? Well: what might it do to working memory?
Do 1-to-1 laptop programs increase or reduce working memory demands?
In other words: now you have a consistent criterion – one you can use to analyze all new proposals that come across your doorstep.
More Where That Came From
Michael Posner’s work on attention provides an equally useful yardstick. It might tell you, for example, whether flipped classrooms are likely to enhance or diffuse attention. (Or, more likely, both…)
So too Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, and Claude Steele’s work on stereotype threat. And Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang’s work on emotion.
And so: MBE allows you both to learn about specific psychology- and neuroscience-based teaching strategies and to develop a system for measuring all the other pedagogical proposals that crowd your inbox.
As Ashman implies: research helps us not only because it allows innovation, but also because allows consistent, skeptical analysis of innovation. Our students will benefit from both.
About Andrew Watson 
