Stand up to pay attention

One of many possible small improvements (or maybe it won't be confirmed; let's say one of many items worthy of exploration).. We think better on our feet, literally -- ScienceDaily

A study from the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health finds students with standing desks are more attentive than their seated counterparts. In fact, preliminary results show 12 percent greater on-task engagement in classrooms with standing desks, which equates to an extra seven minutes per hour of engaged instruction time.

I'm not sure how far to go with that "seven minutes per hour", simply adding on 12%, but if you can then it's a substantial increase to the school year....certainly my school years could have been stretched quite a bit with extra attentiveness, and maybe a standing desk -- like the one I'm typing this on -- would have helped with attentiveness as well as health. It's hard to say.

Standing desks in elementary school

I'm typing this at a standing desk...maybe schools should use them too. Standing desks are good for school-age children too : TreeHugger

The research was conducted at three central-Texas elementary schools, and 374 students from different grades participated in the study.

Students who used the standing desks were found to burn 15 percent more calories than those using traditional desks. Younger students were found to be more willing to stand than older ones.

Researcher Mark Benden told Fast Company that teachers also reported that students concentrated better when using standing desks. However this variable wasn’t measured by the study—but came from follow-up interviews.

It might be worth a try.

Start School Later

I don't seem to have any posts on the Start School Later movement

The Start School Later movement refers to a series of efforts in the U.S.A. by health care professionals, sleep scientists, educators, economists, legislators, parents, students, and other concerned citizens to restore a later start to the school day, based on a growing body of evidence that starting middle and high schools too early in the morning is unhealthy, counterproductive, and incompatible with adolescent sleep needs and patterns.

Yesterday's Science Daily adds the (possibly) latest: Secret to raising well behaved teens? Maximize their zzzzz's

Recently published in the journal of Learning, Media and Technology, this interesting paper exposes the negative consequences of sleep deprivation caused by early school bells, and shows that altering education times not only perks up teens' mood, but also enhances learning and health.
...in puberty, shifts in our body clocks push optimal sleep later into the evening, making it extremely difficult for most teenagers to fall asleep before 11.00pm. This, coupled with early school starts in the morning, results in chronically sleep-deprived and cranky teens as well as plummeting grades and health problems.
There is a body of evidence showing the benefits of synchronizing education times with teens' body clocks; interestingly, while 'studies of later start times have consistently reported benefits to adolescent sleep health and learning, there [is no evidence] showing early starts have a positive impact on such things', add the researchers...

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.

Schools, Teens, Sleep, Research, Politics

One of the more important/interesting educator's blogs is Larry Cuban's; usually it's about research, or about his career as teacher and superintendent. Recently, though, he blogged on the way that research takes a subordinate (but still essential?) role in the school-district political process, using the story of "17-year-old Jilly Dos Santos" as the center. BTW, I hope everybody knows that we could (with pretty high confidence) improve high school learning outcomes by starting the day later. If not, read the links. And we don't do that because...well, mostly because it's not convenient. Cuban's point is about research within politics....he doesn't go all that far, but it's something to think of. Often.

Politics, Research, and School Reform: Letting Teens Sleep in

Santos created a Facebook page and Twitter account telling hundreds of fellow  students that the school board was going to start school at 7:20 AM. She contacted a non-profit group about sleep that gave her the scientific studies about how teenagers needed more, not less, sleep. She emailed all teachers in the district and started an online petition. She brought other students together and they made posters. She tweeted everyone that “If you are going to be attending the board meeting tomorrow we recommend you dress up.”

You guessed it. The school board turned down the earlier start time. A few months later, the coalition that Santos had pulled together worked successfully to get the school board to start high school at 9 AM. The superintendent said after the board voted 6-1 in favor of the later time: “Jilly kicked it over the edge for us.”

Who said that schools are apolitical institutions?...

Without the political muscle of the coalition Santos and others mobilized, ho-hum responses from the school board would have occurred.

Well, maybe nobody said schools are apolitical institutions.

(And if so, nobody was wrong. At least about that.)

K-12 Education and Life Expectancy

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones points out that Not Everyone is Living Longer

Longer life spans, it turns out, really do depend on just how privileged you are.

He's referring to a MacArthur Foundation Research Network report that Differences In Life Expectancy Due To Race And Educational Differences Are Widening, And Many May Not Catch Up :

Drop in life expectancy for least educated whites, slight increase for least educated blacks. It is important to note that the size of the least educated subgroup of the U.S. population has been shrinking in recent decades (down to about 8% for whites).

Their graph summarizes:

So the data is compatible with what Drum claims: it appears that life expectancy has dropped for the less educated. In the course of 18 years, a randomly selected white female dropout has lost 5 years of life expectancy while a randomly selected white male dropout has lost 3 years...but that's not the only interpretation. The white female dropout population of 1990 (WFD90) has different people in it than the white female dropout population of 2008 (WFD08).
Imagine that we could rank people in some combined ordering that combined intelligence with emotional factors including "grit"; think about perseverance, focus on a plan, supportive family, all kinds of factors that make it easier to finish an education and that also make it easier to do well in life, not only getting and keeping a job but seeking and following medical advice from stop-smoking and stop-eating-so-much to recognizing the symptoms of a heart attack and taking the pills you've been prescribed. In my understanding of the world, these factors very often (not always) go together.
Now, think of WFD08 as being an exact copy of WFD90 except that we've pushed education harder, so that the dropout population is a smaller part of the population (hey, it is). Some of the top dropouts in WFD90 have gone into the high-school graduate population instead, but perhaps some or all of their other life-factors are no different. In that case, part of what we're doing is simply lowering the margin below those who were the top of the bottom group: it could be that every individual of 2008 is better off than an identical individual of 1990 would have been, but we'll see that the average lifespan of a dropout is less. Finishing high school may have helped the graduates live longer, or it may have made no difference at all -- the data is compatible with either.
A lot of research has this kind of ambiguity; a set of international-comparison studies that were much discussed this week led economist Arnold Kling to write Good News: School Doesn’t Matter!

In my view, the policy implication is that we should spend a lot less on classroom education and instead spend more on better research, including randomized controlled trials, to find out what, if anything, makes a difference. For now, I see no evidence that the money we spend on education is anything other than an enormous waste.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do think it would be a better world if people were more careful with their inferences.
Or then again, maybe not.