Psychological Trends, Play, and Schooling

I've mentioned psych-prof (and author) Peter Gray both recently (School and Mental Health) and further back (Rethinking School Motivations). Here's a 16-minute talk he gave in June about "the decline of play and rise of mental disorders" in children and young adults, over the past 60 years.

And he says that children and young adults are more depressed than in the Great Depression, more anxious than during the Cold War (with its elementary-school air-raid drills). Narcissism scores (as far back as we have them) trend upwards with later generations, empathy scores trend down. The effects are substantial, and they don't correlate well with economics or wars -- the trends are roughly linear. Here he's thinking of research like Twenge's Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938–2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI - Twenge et al (2010) [10-page PDF], summarized at USA Today, and Twenge's own Psychology Today summary of narcissism research at How Dare You Say Narcissism Is Increasing?

The research findings fall into 5 main areas: 1) narcissism, 2) positive self-views and other traits related to narcissism, 3) cultural products such as language use, 4) positive trends connected to individualism, and 5) the validity of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)....

It's not a cataclysm (yet?) but it's not a pretty picture, and of course Gray has an explanation. He's an evolutionary-psychology guy and he studies play in animals and in hunter-gatherer societies, and he notes that if you want to create high-anxiety depressed rats or monkeys with poor social skills and poor emotional balance, it's easy: just raise them without the opportunity to play. He believes that some or all of the negative trends he sees are due to the fact that self-directed play has been declining throughout those decades. Supervised "play" of the sort we see in gym class or in AYSO games is not a substitute. Well, I suppose that's obvious, or should be. We are raising our kids as if we want them to be emotionally crippled; it's surprising that the effect is not even greater than what we see.

Educational Video on Educational Videos

Derek Muller "completed a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney in 2008. His thesis, Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education, was the subject of his TEDxSydney talk in 2012..."

And the talk (6 minutes) is here:
The principal result seems to be that, at least for his subject (simple physics, e.g. of a tossed basketball) and his subjects (introductory university physics students), it can worse than useless to provide a simple, clear, comprehensible demo of what you're trying to explain, and then test them on it. Their answers will not improve, but their confidence in those answers will rise. Why? They will actually remember statements that definitely weren't in the short video they just saw, statements that accord with their existing misconceptions, and those misconceptions will be reinforced...

Huh? Does that even make sense? Sure: they report low engagement on the clear, comprehensible demo... They're not really listening as long as they think they understand the events (and annotations) in the video, so it just reinforces what they think they already know.

How to fix this? Muller's answer: cover the misconceptions first, and use dialogue. Yes, you will annoy people who think you're actively trying to make them feel dumb, but if you don't cover the misconceptions they will not engage.

Ok, it's interesting, and it could be crucial for almost all kinds of education of almost all kinds of students, too. Start With The Misconceptions. Have A Dialogue Character Representing the Teachably Wrong Point of View. Yeah. But for some reason I'm thinking of a dialogue that started with the misconceptions, started with a character named Simplicio, Galileo Galilei's

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII, thus alienating not only the Pope but also the Jesuits...

It is not always wise to clarify misconceptions, at least not from the perspective of wishing to avoid arrest.

Or then again, maybe it's worth it. 

Studying Studies of Studying

I like reading about the Latest (and greatest) Education Research...but it's worth remembering that a large fraction of all research is wrong, and even if it's right it probably doesn't mean what it seems to mean, and even if it means what it seems to mean, it still probably doesn't have the sort of practical application we'd like to see. So it goes...here's an article about how to look at the data, even assuming that the research wasn't wrong to begin with, at How to Read Education Data Without Jumping to Conclusions (Jessica Lahey & Tim Lahey) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

1. Does the study prove the right point? It’s remarkable how often far-reaching education policy is shaped by studies that don’t really prove the benefit of the policy being implemented. ...[A study might show that "doing X works in situation Y" but then we commit to doing X in all situations]... A key step in interpreting a new study is to avoid extrapolating too much from a single study, even a well-conducted one like STAR.

2. Could the finding be a fluke? Small studies are notoriously fluky, and should be read skeptically. Recently Carnegie Mellon researchers looked at 24 kindergarteners and showed that those taking a science test in austere classrooms performed 13 percent better than those in a “highly decorated” setting....

3. Does the study have enough scale and power? Sometimes education studies get press when they find nothing. For instance, Robinson and Harris recently suggested that parental help with homework does not boost academic performance in kids. ... For example, ...if some parents who help their kids with homework actually do the kids’ homework for them while others give their kids flawed advice that leads them astray, then parental help with homework might appear to have no benefit because the good work of parents who help effectively is cancelled out by other parents’ missteps.

4. Is it causation, or just correlation? It turns out that the most important way for parents to raise successful children is to buy bookcases....

But none of these are about studies which generate results which simply aren't replicable even when we try to do just what the original authors did. Science Daily recently reported on an analysis of "the complete publication history of the current 100 education journals with the highest five-year `impact factor' (an indicator of how often a given journal's articles are cited in other scholarly work)" at Study details shortage of replication in education research

Replication studies that were conducted by completely new research teams were found to be successful 54 percent of the time. When replications were conducted by the original authors in the same publication as the original findings, 88.7 percent were successful. When replications were in a new publication, but at least one author was on both the original and replicating studies, 70.6 percent of replications were successful.

So when the original authors try to repeat, they report success about two-thirds of the time. Not great, but not really relevant if we want to base policy for other people on the techniques tested...when new people try to do whatever it was that worked for the original people, it works about half the time. And then we can start asking the four questions above.

So, is there a bottom line here? Yes, I think so. The bottom line is "Proceed With Caution."

Interesting Math in Boring Math Classes

Almost all kids find math class to be boring. That included me, even though I was a completely weird kid who loved math and read math books for fun, and when I doodled in math class it was quite likely to produce a snowflake curve, as in Doodling in math: Triangle party | Doodling in math | Khan Academy. That's by Khan Academy's Recreational Mathemusician, Vi Hart, and you'll notice you can use the Khan Academy sidebar to explore her cool mathy videos which I would have loved until I grew up (irony filter applies here -- I do love them, and in my 60s it's probably too late to grow up at all.) She also maintains two YouTube channels, vihart for intricate fun and music, and vihartvihart for strange randomness. (Have you ever counted down with your microwave? I have.)

Today I happened to notice the "math class is boring" theme at 5:20 in an interview with her.
Of course math class is boring, and that is a starting point for her work, but she says it's only administrators who object to the way she's being "insulting to teachers"; she does get lots of feedback from teachers, of course, but teachers know what the problem is, and it's not them.

And what is the problem? Well, it has to do with the standards and the standardized tests...

Hand Sanitizers

In the spirit of complete randomness, Hand sanitizers in classrooms do not reduce school absences in children -- ScienceDaily

All children received a 30-minute in-class hand hygiene education session. In those schools randomly assigned to the intervention group, alcohol-based hand sanitizer dispensers were installed in the classrooms over two winter terms and the children were asked to use the dispensers after coughing or sneezing and on the way out of the classroom for morning break or lunch.

... the length of illness and length of absence from school, or the number of episodes in which at least one other family member became ill. When using school attendance records from all children in the participating schools, the number of absences for any reason and length of absence episode did not differ between the intervention and control schools.

Okay, I'm surprised.

(When you learn something that surprises you, you're being educated. Yay!)

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Yong Zhao keeps explaining that the crucial skills we're not teaching are those of entrepreneurs...Well, here's a single MOOC course that tries to be the capstone of the program we're not providing, at Udacity Blog: How to Build a Startup Available With Certificates, Coaching & Project

Taught by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who founded eight startups, with four that have gone public, this class teaches you the key steps necessary to bring your product from concept to market. With the full course experience, you will talk to customers, build a Business Model Canvas, prototype your product, and pitch to coaches.

After completing a final project, you’ll also earn a certificate verifying your new entrepreneurship skills. Don’t let that next million dollar idea get away.

I don't believe that this has college-course prerequisites; I wonder if it would be a good idea to use its ideas as an implied critique of a high-school curriculum.

Reasons to send kids outside

Sometimes the best technology is the kind that's been growing since before there were humans to appreciate it. This spring, Business Insider noted 11 Reasons You Should Go Outside, with links to research papers supporting each reason:

1. Improved short-term memory

In one study, University of Michigan students were given a brief memory test, then divided into two groups.

One group took a walk around an arboretum, and the other half took a walk down a city street....those who had walked among trees did almost 20% percent better than the first time. The ones who had taken in city sights instead did not consistently improve.... ...

5. Better vision

At least in children, a fairly large body of research has found that outdoor activity may have a protective effect on the eyes, reducing the risk of developing nearsightedness (myopia)....

6. Improved concentration

... ...kids with ADHD ... have been found to concentrate better after just 20 minutes in a park. "'Doses of nature' might serve as a safe, inexpensive, widely accessible new tool ... for managing ADHD symptoms," researchers wrote.

... 7. Sharper thinking and creativity

"Imagine a therapy that had no known side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost." That's the dramatic opening to a 2008 paper describing the promise of so-called "nature therapy" — or, as a non-academic might call it, "time outside." ...

Another study found that people immersed in nature for four days ... boosted their performance on a creative problem-solving test by 50%.

They also note other kinds of reasons which are real, but not what this blog is about. Speaking very loosely, it looks like trees are better (for your kids' brains) than grass which is better than pavement which is better than indoor activity which is better than sitting down. (Maybe for your brains, too.)

Income and expectations

A few weeks ago, the NYT reported on an international survey of principals, asking if their schools had lots of low-income students. Conclusion? Principals in U.S. Are More Likely to Consider Their Students Poor - NYTimes.com

This much is clear: American students from low-income backgrounds are more likely to struggle in school than low-income students in many other countries .... And American principals are much more likely to describe their students as disadvantaged than principals in many other countries — including some countries that are significantly poorer than the United States. Neither fact qualifies as good news.

It's actually a pretty dramatic effect; consider the graph:

It's put more bluntly at Idiosyncratic Whisk: Regulatory Predestination and the Right to Exit:

In short, we have school districts that are compulsory institutions, school leaders who attribute student failures to poverty, and school leaders who overstate the level of poverty in their schools. Is there a bit of constructed fatalism here?

He's not claiming that the "school leaders" are consciously dishonest. He is obviously thinking that many of the student failures being attributed to poverty must have some other cause, plausibly a cause within the school system, and that all of us have a pretty strong incentive for finding/believing explanations of failure that don't cast blame on us.

Computers Bad? Sometimes...

I meant to post on this a while ago, after seeing articles like Why you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop - Vox. I often post things about how technology can make things better,[update: fixed typo] but technology is all about providing options and sometimes those options aren't good. Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension - Association for Psychological Science

The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”

“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.

Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.

I posted a couple of years ago about Cornell Notes, which is probably as good as any among the handwritten note-taking systems. I wonder if it works to do the Cornell Notes "step three" (writing later summaries) on a computer. Or if a "step four" involving flash cards generated from the notes might help. Could be.

Or then again, maybe not.

School and Mental Health

The Connecticut Children's Medical Center reports on psychiatric emergencies, and psych prof Peter Gray adds up the data by month in The Danger of Back to School | Psychology Today

Just as I predicted, July and August are the months with, by far, the fewest children’s psychiatric ER visits. In fact, the average number of visits for those two months combined (70 per month) is less than half of the average during the full school months (142 visits per month for the nine months excluding June, July and August). June, which has some school days (a number that varies depending on the number of snow days to be made up), is also low, but not as low as July and August. Interestingly, and not predicted by my hypothesis, September is also relatively low, equivalent to June. It seems plausible that September is a relatively relaxed warm-up month in school; serious tests, heavy assignments, and report cards are yet to come. It may take a few weeks back in school before the stress really kicks in.

I would note that I'm not sure how much of the stress of school is from the sources he describes, i.e. interactions with adults. He has elsewhere written that kids in same-age groups seem to have a lot more negative interactions than kids in multi-age groups. It may also take a few weeks back in school before cliques have a chance to build up to full-strength mutual nastiness.

Or then again, maybe not.

Knowledge Maps and Custom Courses

Take a quick look at the Khan Academy Knowledge Map and then think about The Chronicle of Higher Education asking Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead

People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?

That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations.

“The very notion of a ‘class’ may be outdated,” the report argues.

Indeed; a course is an administrative tactic, and we may be moving beyond it. At every level. I posted about the idea a couple of years ago, in Open-Source Learning. Perhaps it's getting somewhere.

Or then again, maybe not. Comments at Slashdot

Games and Cognitive Skills

I've posted before about educational computer games, at Math Games Research, about games from Quizlet sets and the related "Purpose Games", and about more idiosyncratic augmented reality games.

Today I see that an Oxford study reports that video-game playing for less than an hour a day is linked with better-adjusted children, study finds; it's better to play than not, but moderation is good. So what can you do with an hour a day? Go back in the literature and see Video game 'exercise' for an hour a day may enhance certain cognitive skills

Non-gamer participants played five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week for one month. Each participant was assigned one game. Some played games like Bejeweled where participants matched three identical objects or an agent-based virtual life simulation like The Sims, while others played action games or had to find hidden objects, as in Hidden Expedition.

After this month of 'training', the researchers found that people who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks. Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, the authors state that this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and show that different skills can be improved by playing different games.

You may be imagining an hour a day spent sitting, and I suppose this can be done on a bus, but actually, I'm imagining an hour a day on a treadmill.

Or then again, maybe not.

Community

Lest it be thought that this blog is only about tech, here's a thought on community-building, specifically Breaking Down the Natural Isolation and Insulation of High School Teachers | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

If you wanted to isolate teachers from one another, no better way is to organize the school by grades, have departments, and a daily schedule that leaves little time for teachers before, during, and after classes to work together in a community focused on better teaching and student learning. These structures left unattended insulate and isolate teachers from one another. The dilemma is plain: How to create a community of teachers working toward common goals within a structure and culture dedicated to keeping teachers apart from one another?

Here is a veteran teacher in the sunset of his career with “school smarts” and wisdom gained from decades of experience in a high school who knows that building community begins with knowing who sits next to you.

So every now and then groups of people (teachers, students, both) should have meals together where somebody gets a turn for a few minutes to do a self-introduction, covering specific things that might be a basis for future collaboration or simply friendship. Not complicated, not technical, but something for schools to keep in mind.
Or then again, maybe not.

Chromebooks in education

Gadgets come and gadgets go. A few years ago I thought netbooks would become standard courseware; then tablets; now chromebooks? From a couple of weeks ago: Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools - Slashdot

Apple thrilled investors earlier this week when they revealed that they had sold 13 million iPads to schools and claimed 85% of the educational tablet market, but that wasn't the whole story. It turns out that Apple has only sold 5 million iPads to schools since February 2013, or an average of less than a million tablets a quarter over 6 quarters. It turns out that instead of buying iPads, schools are buying Chromebooks. Google reported that a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter, well over half of the 1.8 million units sold in the second quarter. With Android tablets getting better, Apple is losing market share in the consumer tablet market, and now it looks Apple is also losing the educational market to Google.

So, for people who haven't been following this development...I'd already heard people claiming Chromebooks and education: A perfect match | ZDNet

Chromebooks, in general, are good choices for schools. They're lightweight, durable, inexpensive, secure, and fun to use....

He makes a good point about Chromebook having "the most secure operating system," and I knew about Google's own Chrome for Education and Chromebooks for Education Overview - YouTube pages, and "Manage 10 or 10,000 Chromebooks with ease"... Also about collections like Free Technology for Teachers: 30 Ideas for Using Chromebooks in Education. However, I hadn't noticed Private school’s Chromebook program explains why Google’s laptops have captured nearly 20% of the educational market - TechRepublic:

So, the school began throwing things out there to see what would stick. They got some iPads, Android tablets, Lenovo tablets, and Chromebooks. The wow factor was high with the iPads, and the school was convinced they were going to be an iPad school, until the kids started trying to produce content on them. At this point the focus shifted to entirely to the Chromebook and Google Apps, where content was easy to produce and collaboration came naturally.

In public schools, Google In Education: Chromebooks A 'Right Time Technology' For Passaic, New Jersey School District

Google‘s Chromebook — and by extension Chrome OS — is being adopted by our education system at a brisk pace. As of February 2013 more than 2000 districts in the United States have deployed Chromebooks to their students and faculty. I’ve reported on Chromebooks before, but I wanted to take a deeper dive and explore the benefits as perceived by superintendents and IT directors.

And I also hadn't realized how well you can Use your Chromebook offline - Chromebook Help. It really does look good. So maybe we're actually moving towards the One True Technology which won't be forgotten five years from now.

Or on the other hand, maybe not.

Independent (online) learning

A freshman survey from UCLA found High School Students Not Waiting For Schools To Go Online

"Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning."

So, never mind what the school does -- make sure your kids check out Coursera and Khan Academy and CrashCourse - YouTube (with the individual "courses" like Biology (That's Why Carbon Is A Tramp: Crash Course Biology #1) and World History and so on), not to mention random excellence like SciShow Space and MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth, individual user channels like Vi Hart (a recreational mathemusician who works for Khan Academy) and SmarterEveryDay, and ...
There's a lot of cool stuff out there. Learning it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with grades. On the other hand, learning it helps a lot with later "academic success and lifelong learning."

Fractions

Every now and then, when we consider where education should go, it behooves us to pause and reflect on where we're coming from. The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: Why the Third Pounder hamburger failed

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, ... the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. ... instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
--Elizabeth Green, NYT Magazine, on losing money by overestimating the American public's intelligence

Her source for the story is mentioned by Kevin Drum in The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff. I'm skeptical of the moral drawn by Green -- in fact I've tried to teach computer science to bright Colgate students who had major difficulty with fractions or even with "You know how many feet and inches tall you are; you know how many inches there are in a foot; what is your total height in inches?" I ended up attributing this to "Math Anxiety" as described by the books of Sheila Tobias, and I don't think that's what Green is talking about counteracting... Still it's a good story, and it might very well be true.