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When Facing Dramatic Blog Headlines, Ask For Evidence
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
September 07, 2019

When Facing Dramatic Blog Headlines, Ask For Evidence

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Over at the Blog on Learning and Development, they’ve penned a dramatic headline: Exams May Damage Teenagers’ Mental Health and Restrict Their Potential.

Damage mental health.

Restrict teenagers’ potential.

That’s got your attention.

Your response to such a headline might well depend on your current beliefs about exams.

If you already think that exams harm students, you might cry out a triumphant “I told you so!”  You might send a link to your principal, along with a proposal to cancel the lot of them.

If you already think that exams hold students (and teachers) beneficially accountable for the information and skills they ought to have mastered, you might dismiss the blog post as yet another refusal to maintain strict but helpful standards.

I have an alternate suggestion:

Don’t take sides.

Instead, ask yourself a reasonable and straightforward question:

What pertinent evidence does the blog post offer to support its claims?

After all, you’ve decided to join Learning and the Brain world because you want to go beyond opinions to arrive at research-informed opinions.

So, as you review the blog post beneath that dramatic headline, don’t look for statements you agree (or disagree) with. Instead, check out the quality of the evidence provided in support.

Which Door?

Let’s start by asking this question: which kind of evidence would you find most persuasive?

A survey of high school principals, focusing on student stress levels.

A study comparing the mental health of students who took exams to the health of those who didn’t.

An online poll of high school students and their parents, asking about the highs and lows of high school.

An opinion piece by a noted neuroscientist.

A survey of therapists who work with teens.

Presumably, given these choices, you’d prefer door #2: the research study.

In this hypothetical study, researchers would identify two similar groups of adolescent students. One group would take exams. The other wouldn’t.

When researchers evaluated these students later on, they would find higher rates of mental health diagnosis in the exam group than the no-exam group. (For a relevant parallel, check out this study on developing self-control.)

Such a study would indeed suggest–as the blog states–that “exams may damage teenagers’ mental health.”

The other methods would, of course, reveal opinions. Those opinions might well be informed by different kinds of experience: the students’ experience, their parents’, their teachers’, their therapists’.

But, even well-informed opinions can’t root out the biases that well-designed research seeks to minimize.

Let the Sleuthing Begin

As you begin reviewing this blog post, you’ll find several links to research studies. That’s a good sign.

However–and this is a big however–those cited studies don’t investigate the blog’s central claim. That is: they don’t explore the effects of exams on teens.

Instead, they offer evidence that adolescence is an important time for neuro-biological development. That’s true and important, but it’s not the blog post’s central claim.

Once the author has developed the (important and true) claim that brains change a lot in adolescence, the blog arrives at its core assertion: “GSCEs [exams] impose unnecessary stress on adolescents.”

To support that claim, it offers this link.

Credible Sources

This link reveals good news, and bad.

Good News: the argument that “exams might damage teens’ mental health” comes from a newspaper article covering a neuroscientist’s speech. That scientist–Sarah-Jayne Blakemore–has done lots of research in the world of adolescent brains. She does splendid work.

In fact her most recent book, Inventing Ourselves, has been enthusiastically reviewed on this blog. Twice.

Bad News: the concern that exams might damage mental health is Blakemore’s (very well informed) opinion–but it’s an opinion. She’s giving a speech, not describing a study.

The hypothetical study outlined above–the one that was your first choice for evidence–hasn’t been done. (More precisely: it’s not cited by the blog, or by Blakemore.)

More Bad News: when Blakemore says that “exams” might damage mental health, she means very specific exams: the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams–a kind of a mandatory SAT exam in Great Britain.

That is: Blakemore does not say that exams in general harm students. Despite the headline, nothing in this article even indirectly suggests that schools shouldn’t have final exams.

If you want to persuade your principal to cancel all exams, this article simply doesn’t help you make that case.

Back to the Beginning

Let’s return to the blog headline that got us started: Exams May Damage Teenagers’ Mental Health and Restrict Their Potential.

I think this headline sets up a reasonable expectation. I expect (and you should too) that researchers have done a relevant study, crunched some numbers, and arrived at that conclusion.

They don’t just have an opinion. They don’t just have relevant expertise. They’re not making a prediction.

Instead, they have gathered data, controlled for variables that might muddle their conclusion, done precise calculations, and arrived at a statistically significant finding.

In the absence of that study, it’s genuine surprising that a blog (for an organization that champions brain research) has made such an emphatic claim.

Important Notes

First: I don’t know if the blog-post’s author wrote the headline. Often those two jobs fall to different people. (In newspapers especially, that arrangement can lead to misunderstanding and exaggerated claims.)

While I’m at it, I should also acknowledge that I myself might be guilty of an occasional hyperbolic headline.

I try to stick to the facts. I try (very hard) to cite exactly relevant research. I try to limit my claims to the narrow findings of researchers.

If you catch me going beyond these guidelines, I hope you’ll let me know.

Second: You might reasonably want to know my own opinions about exams. Here goes:

I haven’t seen any research that persuades me one way or the other about their utility.

I suspect that, like so many things in education, they can be done very badly, or done quite well.

Can exams become hideous exercises in mere memorization, yielding lots of stress but no extra learning? Yes, I’m sure that happens.

Can exams be inspiring opportunities for students to show their deep mastery of complex material? Yes, I’m sure that happens.

As is so often the case, I think global conclusions (and alarming headlines) miss the point.

We should ask: what kind of learning we want our students to do? What kind of learning climate we want to create? And, we should ask what kind of exam–including, perhaps, no exam at all–produces that result for most of our students.

But Does It Work In The Classroom? (A Hint: YES!)
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 30, 2019

But Does It Work In The Classroom? (A Hint: YES!)

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Teachers who follow brain research have probably heard of “interleaving.”

This teaching strategy encourages us to mix up different kinds of practice problems, rather than sort them tidily into distinct bunches.

Imagine, for instance, that your math curriculum includes these four units:

A: graphing lines

B: calculating the area of circles

C: simplifying expressions

D: solving inequalities

I might be tempted to have have my students review graphing one night. The next night, they would focus on circles. The next, they would simplify expressions. And so forth. (Researchers call this “blocking.”)

Or, I could have them practice all four skills each night. (“Interleaving.”)

So, does blocking or interleaving help students learn better?

One Useful (but Incomplete) Answer

We have “known” the answer to this question for a long time.

The answer is: interleaving. By a lot.

When students interleave while practicing, they learn information more durably.

However, the verb “know” is in quotation marks above because we “know” that answer in a very particular setting.

The best-known research of interleaving took place in a college psychology lab.

Students learned formulas to calculate the volumes of irregular solids. Those who interleaved practice did better on a quiz two weeks later than those who blocked.

To be clear: this is a great study. (I always show it when I talk about interleaving with teachers. The graphs get gasps — really!)

But: does interleaving work for K-12 students? Does it work for anything other than irregular solids?

And, crucially: does it work beyond 2 weeks? We want our students to remember for months — even years. Two weeks is nice, but…we’re actually curious about much longer periods of time.

A Second (Much More Complete) Answer

Doug Rohrer’s team have just published a study looking at real-life interleaving in real-life classrooms.

They worked in five different schools, with fifteen different teachers, and almost 800 7th graders.

And, the test covered quite different topics — the four listed at the top of this post: graphing lines, calculating areas, simplifying expressions, solving inequalities.

And, get this: the study lasted for several MONTHS. From the first interleaved practice set to the final test was something like 145 days.

The results: the students who interleaved remembered more than those who blocked. By a lot.

(If you’re statsy, you’ll be impressed to know that the Cohen’s d averaged 0.68. For an intervention that costs basically nothing, that’s HUGE.)

In addition to these data, Rohrer &  Co. gathered information from an anonymous teacher survey.

They got lots of good news. For instance:

14 teachers agreed (or strongly agreed) that interleaving raises scores.

13 thought it helped low-achieving students. (15 thought it helped high-achieving students.)

11 said they could use interleaving without changing the way they usually teach.

12 said other teachers can do it with little or no instruction.

(Check out page 9 for further survey results.)

Why Does Interleaving Work?

Rohrer’s team offers two answers to this question.

First, interleaved practice automatically produces two other benefits: spacing and retrieval practice.

Second, think for a minute about blocking. If students do practice problems that all require the same strategy (aka, blocking), then they have to execute that strategy. But, as Rohrer points out:

“Interleaved practice requires students to choose a strategy and not merely execute a strategy.”

This additional level of desirable difficulty requires students to practice selecting strategies: an essential part of using learning in the real world.

In Sum:

Rohrer’s study concludes with a few caveats.

Interleaving probably takes (a little) more time than blocking.

It probably has less of an effect over shorter periods of time. That is: you’ll see bigger results on chapter tests and year-end assignments than on weekly quizzes.

Crucially: students probably need a little blocked practice early on to get hold of a topic or concept. We shouldn’t start interleaving while initially explaining an idea.

But, the headlines focus on great news.

Interleaving works with real students in real classrooms. It’s easy to add to our teaching habits. It costs almost nothing. And: it genuinely helps students learn.

 

 

 

Not All of Us Work Effectively in a “Memory Palace”
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 19, 2019

Not All of Us Work Effectively in a “Memory Palace”

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You’ve probably heard of the “method of loci,” or — more glamorously — the “memory palace.”

Here’s how the strategy works. If I want to remember several words, I visualize them along a path that I know well: say, the walk from my house to the square where I do all my shopping.

To recall the words, I simply walk along that path again in my mind. This combination of visuals — the more striking the better — will help me remember even a long list of unrelated words.

This method gets lots of love, most famously in Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein.

Surely we should teach it to our students, no?

Palace Boundaries

We always look for boundary conditions here on the blog. That is, even good teaching ideas have limits, and we want to know what’s outside those limits.

So, for the “method of loci,” one question goes like this: how often do you ask your students to memorize long lists of unrelated words?

If the answer is, “not often,” then I’m not sure how much they’ll benefit from building a memory palace.

Dr. Christopher Sanchez wondered about another limit.

The “method of loci” relies on visualization. Not everyone is equally good at that. Does “visuospatial aptitude” influence the usefulness of building a memory palace?

One Answer, Many Questions

The study to answer this question is quite straight-forward. Sanchez had several students memorize words. Some were instructed to use a memory palace; some not. All took tests of their visual aptitude.

Sure enough, as Sanchez predicted, students who used a memory palace remembered more words than those who didn’t.

And, crucially, palace builders with HIGH visualspatial aptitude recalled more words than those with LOW aptitude.

In fact, those with low aptitude said the memory-palace strategy made the memory task much harder.

This research finding offers a specific example of a general truth. Like all teaching strategies, memory palaces may help some students — but they don’t help all students equally.

This finding also leads to some important questions.

First: If a student has low visuospatial aptitude, how can we tell?

At this point, I don’t have an easy way to diagnose that condition. (I’ve asked around, but so far no luck.)

My best advice is: if a student says to you, “I tried that memory palace thing, but it just didn’t work for me. It’s so HARD!” believe the student.

Second: does this finding apply to other visualization strategies? More broadly, does it apply to dual coding theory?

Again, I think the answer is “probably yes.” Making information visual will help some students…but probably not all of them.

The Big Question (I Can’t Look…)

This next question alarms me a little; I hardly dare write it down. But, here goes…

As you know, learning styles theory has been soundly debunked.

However, might Sanchez’s research imply a kind of learning-anti-style?

That is, no one is a “visual learner.” But, perhaps some people don’t learn well from visual cues, and rely more on other ways of taking in information?

In other words: some students might have a diagnosed learning difference. Others might not have a serious enough difference to merit a diagnosis — but nonetheless struggle meaningfully to process information a particular way.

Those students, like Sanchez’s students with low visuospatial aptitude, don’t process information one way, and prefer to use alternate means.

So, again, that’s not so much a “learning style” as a “learning anti-style”: “I prefer anything but visual, please…”

I haven’t seen this question asked, much less investigated. I’ll let you know what I find as I explore it further.

The Best Teaching Book to Read This Summer: Powerful Teaching
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
May 17, 2019

The Best Teaching Book to Read This Summer: Powerful Teaching

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Let’s describe a perfect book for a Learning and the Brain conference goer:

First: it should begin with solid science. Teachers don’t want advice based on hunches or upbeat guesswork. We’d like real research.

Second: it should include lots of classroom specifics. While research advice can offer us general guidance, we’d like some suggestions on adapting it to our classroom particulars.

Third: it should welcome teachers as equal players in this field. While lots of people tell teachers to “do what research tells us to do” – that is, to stop trusting our instincts – we’d like a book that values us for our experience. And, yes, for our instincts.

And, while I’m making this list of hopes for an impossibly perfect book, I’ll add one more.

Fourth: it should be conspicuously well-written. We’d like a lively writing voice: one that gets the science right, but sounds more like a conversation than a lecture.

Clearly, such a book can’t exist.

Except that it does. And: you can get it soon.

Memory researcher Pooja Agarwal and teacher Patrice Bain have written Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. Let’s see how their book stacks up against our (impossible) criteria:

First: Begins with Research

If you attend Learning and the Brain conferences, you prioritize brain research.

We’re not here for the fads. We’re here for the best ideas that can be supported by psychology and neuroscience.

Happily, Powerful Teaching draws its classroom guidance from extensive research.

Citing dozens of studies done over multiple decades, Agarwal and Bain champion four teaching strategies: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and metacognition.

(As frequent blog readers, you’ve read lots about these topics.)

Agarwal herself did much of the research cited here. In fact, (researcher) Agarwal did much of the on-the-ground research in (teacher) Bain’s classrooms.

And Agarwal studied and worked with many of the best-know memory researchers in the field: “Roddy” Roediger, Mark McDaniel, and Kathleen McDermott, among others.

(BTW: McDaniel will be speaking at the LatB conference this fall in Boston.)

In short: if you read a recommendation in Powerful Teaching, you can be confident that LOTS of quality research supports that conclusion.

Second: Offers Classroom Specifics

Powerful Teaching is written by two teachers. Bain taught 6-8 grade for decades. And Agarwal is currently a psychology professor.

For this reason, their book BOTH offers research-based teaching advice AND gives dozens of specific classroom examples.

What does retrieval practice look like in the classroom? No worries: they’ve got you covered.

This strength merits particular attention, because it helps solve a common problem in our field.

Teachers often hear researchers say, “I studied this technique, and got a good result.” We infer that we should try that same technique.

But, most research takes place in college classrooms. And, the technique that works with that age group just might not work with our students.

How should we translate these research principles to our classrooms? Over and over again — with specific, practical, and imaginative examples — Bain and Agarwal show us how.

Third: Welcomes Teachers

Increasingly in recent months, I’ve seen scholars argue that teacherly instincts should not be trusted. We should just do what research tells us to do.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think this argument does lots of damage—because we HAVE to use our instincts.

How exactly do research-based principles of instruction work in thousands of different classrooms? Teachers have to adapt those principles, and we’ll need our experience —and our instincts—to do so.

Powerful Teaching makes exactly this point. As Bain and Agarwal write:

You can use Power Tools your way, in your classroom. From preschool through medical school, and biology to sign language, these strategies increase learning for diverse students, grade levels, and subject areas. There are multiple ways to use these strategies to boost students’ learning, making them flexible in your classroom, not just any classroom.

Or, more succinctly:

The better you understand the research behind the strategies, the more effectively you can adapt them in your classroom – and you know your classroom best.

By including so many teachers’ experiences and suggestions, Agarwal and Bain put teacherly insight at the center of their thinking. They don’t need to argue that teachers should have a role; they simply show us that it’s true.

Fourth: Lively Voice

Scientific research offers teachers lots of splendid guidance … but if you’ve tried to read the research, you know it can be dry. Parched, even.

Happily, both Bain and Agarwal have lively writing voices. Powerful Teaching doesn’t feel like a dry lecture, but a friendly conversation.

For example:

Learning is complex and messy, it’s not something we can touch, and it’s really hard to define. You might even say that the learning process looks more like a blob than a flowchart.

Having tried to draw many learning flowcharts, only to end up with blobs, I appreciate this honest and accurate advice.

What’s Not to Love?

As a reviewer, I really should offer at least some criticism of Power Tools. Alas, I really don’t have much – at least not much substantive.

Once or twice, I thought that the research behind a particular finding is more muddled that PT lets on. For example, as I’ve written about before, we’ve got contradictory evidence about the benefits of retrieval practice for unstudied material.

But, as noted above, Agarwal is an important researcher in this field, and so I’m inclined to trust her judgment.

Mostly, I think you should put Powerful Teaching at the top of your summer reading list. You might sign up for the summer book club. Keep on eye on the website for updates.

The Best-Known Neural Model of Learning Might be Substantially Wrong
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
April 22, 2019

The Best-Known Neural Model of Learning Might be Substantially Wrong

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You read that right.

All those diagrams of synapses and neurotransmitters might be factually correct, but misinterpreted to explain memory formation.

Basically, some researchers argue that we’re thinking about learning in the wrong place. In the old model, we focused on many, many interactions at the very tips of the dendrites.

In a new model, the researchers propose we focus on a few changes at the root of the dendrites — much closer to the place where they connect to the neuron’s main body.

This summary explains the headlines. (The original article itself can be found here.)

Both these links include helpful visuals to understand the difference between these two models.

The details are fantastically complicated. But the possibility of a new model is…technically speaking…awesome sauce.

What Should Teachers Do With This New Knowledge?

Believe it or not, not much.

In the first place, we should remember that for teachers: neuroscience is fascinating, but psychology is helpful.

That is, we don’t really need to know exactly what changes in the brain when students learn. (Although, of course, it’s SO INTERESTING.)

But, we DO really need to know what teaching practices create those neural changes — whatever they might be.

We need to manage working memory load.

We need to help students manage their alertness levels.

And, we need to use retrieval practice.

And so forth.

In every case, psychology research tells us what teaching strategies do and don’t help. If — as might be true in this case — our neuro-biological understanding changes, that change almost certainly doesn’t matter to our teaching.

We still need to manage working memory and alertness.

We still need to use retrieval practice.

And so forth.

We might think differently about the neurons and synapses and dentrites, but we will keep using the most effective teaching practices.

In the Second Place…

Let this news remind us of Kurt Fischer’s famous saying: “when it comes to the brain, we’re all still in first grade.” That is: modern neuroscience is still a young discipline, and we’ve got LOTS more to learn.

So, we can indeed be thrilled by all the neuroscience information we glean at Learning and the Brain conferences. But, we shouldn’t latch onto it too firmly. Instead, we should expect that, as the years go by, our neuro-biological models will need several fresh revisions.

I have, in fact, waited over a year since this article was first published to see what traction it has gotten in the field. So far, I have heard almost nothing about it.

Simply put: I don’t know whether the new model is more accurate than the old. Perhaps, ten years from now, the old model will be seen as an embarrassing relic. Perhaps, instead, the new proposal will have been forgotten.

In either case, we can think more effectively about brains (and about teaching ad learning) if we keep our mental models flexible enough to allow for fresh discoveries.

The Better Choice: Open- or Closed-Book Quizzes
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 25, 2019

The Better Choice: Open- or Closed-Book Quizzes

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Psychology research offers lots of big ideas for improving student learning: self-determination theory, or the spacing effect, or cognitive load theory.

Once we make sense of that research, we teachers work to translate those big idea to practical classroom strategies.

In some cases, we can simply do what the researcher did. In most cases, however, we have to adapt their test paradigm to our specific classroom world.

So, for example, Nate Kornell explored the spacing effect with flashcards. He found that 1 deck of 20 cards produced more learning 4 decks of 5 cards. Why: a deck with 20 cards spaces practice out more than a deck with five cards.

That “big idea” gives teachers a direction to go.

But: we should not conclude that 20 is always the right number. Instead, we should adapt the concept to our circumstances. 20 flashcards might be WAY TOO MANY for 1st graders. Or, if the concepts on the cards are quite simple, that might be too few for college students studing vocabulary.

Translating Retrieval Practice

We know from many (many) studies that retrieval practice boosts learning.

In brief, as summarized by researcher Pooja Agarwal, we want students to pull ideas out of their brains, not put them back in.

So, students who study by rereading their notes don’t learn much; that’s putting ideas back in. Instead, they should quiz themselves on their notes; that’s pulling ideas out.

This big idea makes lots of sense. But, what exactly does that look like in our classrooms?

Over the years, teachers and researchers have developed lots of suggestions. (You can check out Dr. Agarwal’s site here for ideas.)

Thinking about retrieval practice, researchers in Germany asked a helpful question. In theory, closed-book quizzes ought to generate more learning than open-book quizzes.

After all: if my book is closed, I have to pull the information out of my brain. That’s retrieval practice.

If my book is open, I’m much likelier simply to look around until I find the right answer. That’s not retrieval practice.

These researchers wanted to know: does this sensible prediction come true?

The Results Please

Sure enough, closed-book quizzes do produce more learning. This research team retested students on information twice: one week after, and eight weeks after, they heard information in a lecture.

Sure enough, the students who took closed-book quizzes did substantially better than those who took open-book quizzes. (The cohen’s d values were above 0.80.)

In brief: we now have one more research-supported strategy for creating retrieval practice.

As always, I think we should be careful to think about limits on such research.

In the first place, this study took place with college students. If you teach younger students, and your experience tells you that an open-book strategy will work better under particular circumstances, you might ask a trusted colleague for a second opinion. Research like this gives us excellent guidance, but it can’t answer all questions.

In the second place, other variables might come strongly into play. For instance: stress. If your school culture has always allowed open-book quizzes, your students might freak out at the prospect of a closed-book alternative. If so, the benefits of retrieval practice might be lost to anxiety overload.

In this case, you’ll need to take the time to explain your reasoning, and to ease your students into new learning habits.

In any case, we can be increasingly confident that many varieties of retrieval practice produce the desirable difficulties that help students learn. (For a fun exception to this rule, click here.)

 

A Handy Summary of Memory Definitions, for Teachers and Students
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March 09, 2019

A Handy Summary of Memory Definitions, for Teachers and Students

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Here‘s a quick summary of information about memory: sensory memory, working memory, long-term memory, and (crucially!) forgetting.

Author Steven Turner presents this brisk overview to combat “buzzword wasteland.” He fears the education-world habit of coming up with fancy new terms every six months or so. Rather than scamper after every new fad, he’d like us to focus on the enduring basics.

Like: memory.

I myself think of “sensory memory” as a part of our attentional systems. As long as teachers remember the key point — students have VERY little perceptual capacity for incoming sensory information — it doesn’t really matter what we call it.

The information on this page might all be review. However, as we know well, spaced repetition helps learning. A chance to rethink these topics right now will be beneficial to our understanding.

Two Swings, Two Misses: The New York Times on Education
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 30, 2019

Two Swings, Two Misses: The New York Times on Education

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Two recent articles in the New York Times have gotten lots of teacherly attention.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

The first, an op-ed by David Brooks, announces that “students learn from people they love.”

Brooks’s piece includes some heart-warming anecdotes, and name checks some important researchers: Antonio Damasio, for instance, and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

(Everyone admires Immordino-Yang’s work. An interview with her appeared on the blog just six weeks ago.)

The hyperbole of the headline, however, strikes me as profoundly unhelpful. “Love” just isn’t a useful word for considering the research that Brooks cites.

Said differently: lots of people learn all sorts of things from people they don’t love.

Students learn better when they have strong positive relationships with their teachers.

They learn better when they feel safe and taken care of.

They learn better with appropriate levels of stress. (Not “lots and lots,” but not “none” either.)

By all means, teachers should keep emotions in mind when we teach. But if “love” isn’t central to your teaching, don’t let Brooks worry you.

(Honestly: too much talk about “love” makes me worry about professional boundaries. We should respect and care about our students. Let’s keep it at that.)

Strike Two

The Times also offers an article about memory training techniques.

I often hear from teachers about Moonwalking with Einstein-like strategies for learning list of words and numbers.

(Another favorite: the method of loci — associating words with a string of familiar places.)

While I don’t doubt these strategies help people memorize random collections of names or digits, I have to ask: how often do teachers want our students to do that?

Most teachers answer that question: “almost never.”

As an English teacher, I want my students to understand the meanings of words, or to know how to subordinate a quotation in a participial phrase, or to explain the concept of “group protagonist” in Grapes of Wrath.

I simply can’t think of a long list of random stuff I want them to memorize.

(A student recently told me she’d been required to memorize information about 60 chemical elements. The method of loci might have helped her.

However: a) I’ve yet to find a chemistry teacher who thinks that this homework assignment was a good idea, and b) how much time would it take to learn those memory techniques in the first place?

Oh, and, c) I’m not sure that assignment really happened in the first place. It’s just possible that student exaggerated a smidge.)

In Sum…

Read the Times (or don’t) for its political coverage. Subscribe (or not) for the crosswords.

But: if you see education advice, check with a friendly MBE professional before you make changes in your classroom.

 

Does Drawing a Simple Picture Benefit Memory?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 22, 2019

Does Drawing a Simple Picture Benefit Memory?

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If a picture is worth 1000 words, how many words is drawing a picture worth?

drawing benefits memory

More specifically, Jeffrey Wammes & Co. have been exploring this question: is it true that drawing benefits memory? If I draw a picture of a word, will I remember it better than if I simply wrote that word down several times?

To explore this question, Wammes and his team have run a series of studies over the last several years. Basically, they’re trying to disprove their own hypothesis. If they can’t disprove it…well, it’s increasingly likely to be true.

The basic studies took a fairly simple form. Students saw a word and then spent 40 seconds drawing a picture of it. Or, they saw a word and spent 40 seconds writing it down several times.

Which words did they remember better? Yup: the words that they had drawn.

This effect held up not only in a psychology lab, but also in a college lecture hall.

Drawing Benefits Memory: More Advanced Studies

This hypothesis makes a kind of rough-and ready sense, for a number of reasons.

For instance, it just seems plausible that drawing benefits memory because visuals aide memory. Or, because drawing requires a greater degree of cognitive processing than simply writing.

So: perhaps drawing is but one example of these other effects.

Wammes and Co. wanted to see if that’s true. (Remember: they’re trying to disprove their hypothesis.)

So, they repeated the study several more times. In some cases, students drew pictures for some words and looked at pictures of other words.

Or, in another study, they drew pictures of some words and wrote down key features of other words. (Writing down key features requires higher levels of processing.)

In every case, they found that drawing produces even greater benefits than each sub-strategy. Students remembered more words that they had drawn than words they had processed in all those other ways.

Classroom Implications

What should classroom teachers do with this information?

In the first place, keep in mind that we’re still in early days of testing this technique. Much of this research has focused on nouns that are relatively easy to draw: say, “apple.”

At the same time, Wammes ran one study where students either drew or copied verbatim definitions of words. For instance, “stratoscopes” are “airborne telescopes that are mounted on high altitude balloons.” Once again, drawing led to better memory than simple copying.

Wammes’s team is currently exploring drawings of more abstract words: I hope to see those results published soon.

With these caveats in mind, I think we can plausibly use this approach in our classrooms. If you think a word, definition, concept, or process can plausibly be drawn, give your students a change to “review by drawing.”

Or, if you’ve built in a moment for retrieval practice, encourage students to include a drawing as part of their retrieval.

You might conclude that a particular topic doesn’t lend itself to drawing. An an English teacher, I’m not immediately sure how to draw “ode” or “concatenation” or “litotes.”

But, if a word or concept seems drawable to you, you might give students a chance to try out this mnemonic aide.

A Final Note

I emailed Dr. Wammes with a few questions about his research. In his reply, he included this quite wonderful sentence:

“There certainly will be situations where it [drawing] doesn’t work, I just unfortunately haven’t found them yet.”

Too often, teachers can take research findings as absolute injunctions. When we learn about the 10 minute rule, we think: “okay, I have to change it up every ten minutes!”

But, that’s just not true.

Psychology findings will benefits some of our classroom situations, some of our students, some of our lesson plans, some of our schools.

But, almost no research finding always applies. We have to translate and adapt and tinker.

The field of Mind, Brain, Education is a partnership: teachers learn from researchers, and researchers learn from teachers.

So, when you try this technique in your classroom, keep track of your results. If you pass them on to me, I’ll let the researchers know.

 

 

Research Summary: The Best and Worst Highlighting Strategies
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
January 13, 2019

Research Summary: The Best and Worst Highlighting Strategies

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Does highlighting help students learn?

As is so often the case, the answer is: it depends.

highlighting

The right kind of highlighting can help. But, the wrong kind doesn’t help. (And, might hurt.)

And, most students do the wrong kind.

Today’s Research Summary

Over at Three Star Learning Experiences, Tim Surma & Co. offer a helpful overview of highlighting research.

The headlines: highlighting helps students if the highlight the right amount of the right information.

Right amount: students tend to highlight too much. This habit reduces the benefit of highlighting, for several reasons.

Highlighting can help if the result is that information “pops out.” If students highlight too much, then nothing pops out. After all, it’s all highlighted.

Highlighting can help when it prompts students to think more about the reading. When they say “this part is more important than that part,” this extra level of processing promotes learning. Too much highlighting means not enough selective processing.

Sometimes students think that highlighting itself is studying. Instead, the review of highlighted material produces the benefits. (Along with the decision making before-hand.)

Right information.

Unsurprisingly, students often don’t know what to highlight. This problem shows up most often for a) younger students, and b) novices to a topic.

Suggestions and Solutions

Surma & Co. include several suggestions to help students highlight more effectively.

For instance, they suggest that students not highlight anything until they’ve read everything. This strategy helps them know what’s important.

(I myself use this technique, although I tend to highlight once I’ve read a substantive section. I don’t wait for a full chapter.)

And, of course, teachers who teach highlighting strategies explicitly, and who model those strategies, will likely see better results.

Surma’s post does a great job summarizing and organizing all this research; I encourage you to read the whole thing.

You might also check out John Dunlosky’s awesome review of study strategies. He and his co-authors devote lots of attention to highlighting, starting on page 18. They’re quite skeptical about its benefits, and have lots to contribute to the debate.

For other suggestions about highlighting, especially as a form of retrieval practice, click here.

 

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