Read With Your Children, Not to Them

 Research has found that reading with young children and engaging them can make a positive impact on the child's future and their family.

Bradford Wiles is an Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in early childhood development at Kansas State University. For most of his career, Wiles' research has focused around building resilience in vulnerable families.
His current research is focused on emergent literacy and the effect of parents reading with their children ages 3 to 5 years old.
"Children start learning to read long before they can ever say words or form sentences," said Wiles. "My focus is on helping parents read with their children and extending what happens when you read with them and they become engaged in the story."
The developmental process, known as emergent literacy, begins at birth and continues through the preschool and kindergarten years. This time in children's lives is critical for learning important preliteracy skills.
Although his research mainly focuses on 3-5 year olds, Wiles encourages anyone with young children to read with them as a family at anytime during the day, not just before going to bed. He also believes that it is okay to read one book over and over again, because the child can learn new things every time.
"There are always opportunities for you both to learn," said Wiles, "and it creates a family connection. Learning is unbelievably powerful in early childhood development."
It goes deeper than just reading to them, as parents are encouraged to read with their children. Engaging children is how they become active in the story and build literacy skills.
"There is nothing more powerful than your voice, your tone, and the way you say the words," said Wiles. "When I was a child, my dad read to me and while that was helpful and I enjoyed it, what we are finding is that when parents read with their children instead of to them, the children are becoming more engaged and excited to read."
Engaging the child means figuring out what the child is thinking and getting them to think beyond the words written on the page. While reading with them, anticipate what children are thinking. Then ask questions, offer instruction, provide examples and give them some feedback about what they are thinking.
"One of the things that I really hope for, and have found, is that these things spill over into other areas," said Wiles. "So you start out reading, asking open-ended questions, offering instruction and explaining when all of the sudden you aren't reading at all and they start to recognize those things they have seen in the books. And that's really powerful."
Wiles explains it in a scenario where a mother reads a book with her 4 year old about a garden. Then they go to the supermarket and the 4 year old is pointing and saying, "look there's a zucchini." The child cannot read the sign that says zucchini but knows what that is because they read the book about gardens.
During this time called the nominal stage, the developmental stage where children are naming things, a child's vocabulary can jump from a few hundred words to a few thousand words. The more exposure they've had through books and print materials, the more they can name things and understand. It's the emergent literacy skills that can set the stage for other elements.
The school of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University is producing lesson plans to help families learn how to read with young children. These lesson plans are research-based but they have been condensed into usable and applicable lessons for families.

The importance of over learning

“The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems the task has been learned,” says Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.” In other words: You’re getting better and better, even when you can’t tell you’re improving—a thought to keep you going through those long hours of practice.

Being a Lifelong Bookworm May Keep You Sharp in Old Age

To keep their bodies running at peak performance, people often hit the gym, pounding away at the treadmill to strengthen muscles and build endurance. This dedication has enormous benefits—being in shape now means warding off a host of diseases when you get older. But does the brain work in the same way? That is, can doing mental exercises help your mind stay just as sharp in old age?

Experts say it’s possible. As a corollary to working out, people have begun joining brain gyms to flex their mental muscles. For a monthly fee of around $15, websites like Lumosity.com and MyBrainTrainer.com promise to enhance memory, attention and other mental processes through a series of games and brain teasers. Such ready-made mind exercises are an alluring route for people who worry about their ticking clock. But there’s no need to slap down the money right away—new research suggests the secret to preserving mental agility may lie in simply cracking open a book.

The findings, published online today in Neurology, suggest that reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not.

Researchers used an array of tests to measure 294 people’s memory and thinking every year for six years years. Participants also answered a questionnaire about their reading and writing habits, from childhood to adulthood to advanced age. Following the participants’ deaths at an average age of 89, researchers examined their brains for evidence of the physical signs of dementia, such as lesions, plaques and tangles. Such brain abnormalities are most common in older people, causing them to experience memory lapses. They proliferate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, leading to memory and thinking impairments that can severely affect victims’ daily lives.

Using information from the questionnaire and autopsy results, the researchers found that any reading and writing is better than none at all. Remaining a bookworm into old age reduced the rate of memory decline by 32 percent compared to engaging in average mental activity. Those who didn’t read or write often later in life did even worse: their memory decline was 48 percent faster than people who spent an average amount of time on these activities.

The researchers found that mental activity accounted for nearly 15 percent of the difference in memory decline, beyond what could be explained by the presence of plaque buildup. “Based on this, we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of everyday activities, such as reading and writing, on our children, ourselves and our parents or grandparents,” says study author Robert S. Wilson, a neuropsychologist at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, in a statement.

Reading gives our brains a workout because comprehending text requires more mental energy than, for example, processing an image on a television screen. Reading exercises our working memory, which actively processes and stores new information as it comes. Eventually, that information gets transferred into long-term memory, where our understanding of any given material deepens. Writing can be likened to practice: the more we rehearse the perfect squat, the better our form becomes, tightening all the right muscles. Writing helps us consolidate new information for the times we may need to recall it, which boosts our memory skills.

So the key to keeping our brains sharp for the long haul does have something in common with physical exercise: we have to stick with it. And it’s best to start early. In 2009, a seven-year study of 2,000 healthy individuals aged 18 to 60 found that mental agility peaks at 22. By 27, mental processes like reasoning, spatial visualization and speed of thought began to decline.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/07/being-a-lifelong-bookworm-may-keep-you-sharp-in-old-age/#ixzz2ZX2O9qji 
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The Science of Smart: Eight Ways Of Looking At Intelligence

In “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird,” poet Wallace Stevens takes something familiar—an ordinary black bird—and by looking at it from many different perspectives, makes us think about it in new ways.

With apologies to Stevens, I’d like to present eight ways of looking at intelligence—eight perspectives provided by the science of learning. A few words, first, about that term: The science of learning is a relatively new discipline born of an agglomeration of fields: cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience. Its project is to apply the methods of science to human endeavors—teaching and learning—that have for centuries been mostly treated as an art.
Different perspectives on intelligence may inspire us to rethink our learning process.As with anything to do with our idiosyncratic and unpredictable species, there is still a lot of art involved in teaching and learning. But the science of learning can offer some surprising and useful perspectives on how we educate young people and how we guide our own learning. And so: Eight Ways Of Looking At Intelligence.

The first way of looking at intelligence: Situations can make us smarter. The science of learning has demonstrated that we are powerfully shaped by the situations that we find ourselves in: situations that can either evoke or suppress our intelligence.

What are “situations”? Situations can be internal or external. They can be brief and transitory, or persistent and long-lasting. They can be as varied as the conditions under which we learn, the conditions that prevail in the classroom or the workplace, the conditions exerted by a peer group. They can be the physical conditions that learners experience by way of how much stress they’re under and how much sleep and exercise they get, and the mental conditions learners create for themselves by the levels of expertise and attention and motivation they’re able to achieve.

Situational intelligence, in other words, is the only kind of intelligence there is—because we are always doing our thinking in a particular situation, with a particular brain in a particular body.

On one level this is obvious, but on another it is quite radical. Radical, because, since its earliest beginnings, the study of intelligence has emphasized its inherent and fixed qualities. Intelligence has been conceptualized as an innate characteristic of the individual, invariant across time and place, determined mostly by genes (or before that, what was called “heredity”).

This was the view of Francis Galton, the Victorian gentleman who is the father of psychometric testing. He used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to show that it ran in the blood of England’s most eminent families. This was the view of Lewis Terman, the creator of the modern intelligence test. The father of psychometric testing.He used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to identify and cultivate children who were ‘gifted.’ And this was the view of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, authors of the notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve. They used the notion of inherent, fixed intelligence to argue that America’s class structure was the inevitable product of theIQ levels of various racial and social groups. 

So to assert that intelligence is in large part a product of the situations we find ourselves in is a departure, not only from the way science has traditionally thought about ability, but from the way many of us think about ability today.

On to the second way of looking at intelligence: Beliefs can make us smarter. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck distinguishes two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset, or the belief that ability is fixed and unchanging, and the growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be developed through learning and practice.

These beliefs matter because they influence how think about our own abilities, how we perceive the world around us, and how we act when faced with a challenge or with adversity. The psychologist David Yeager, also of Stanford, notes that our mindset effectively creates the “psychological world” in which we live. Our beliefs, whether they’re oriented around limits or around growth, constitute one of these internal situations that either suppresses or evokes intelligence.

The third way of looking at intelligence: Expertise can make us smarter.One very robust line of research within the science of learning is concerned with the psychology of expertise: what goes on in the mind of an expert. What researchers have found is that experts don’t just know more, they know differently, in ways that allow them to think and act especially intelligently within their domain of expertise.

An expert’s knowledge is deep, not shallow or superficial; it is well-organized, around a core of central principles; it is automatic, meaning that it has been streamlined into mental programs that run with very little conscious effort; it is flexible and transferable to new situations; it is self-aware, meaning that an expert can think well about his or her own thinking. Expertise takes a long time to develop, of course, but it’s never too early—or too late—go deep in a subject area that interests us.

The fourth way of looking at intelligence: Attention can make us smarter. You’ve probably heard about the “marshmallow test,” a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Mischel found that children who could resist eating a marshmallow in return for the promise of two marshmallows later on did better in school and in their careers.

Well, there’s a new marshmallow test that is faced every day, almost every minute by young people, and by the rest of us, too: it’s the ability to resist the urge to check one’s email, to respond to a text, to see what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter. We’ve all heard that ‘digital natives’ grew up multitasking and therefore excel at it, but the fact is that there are information-processing bottlenecks in the brain—everybody’s brain—that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time. The state of focused attention is a very important internal situation that we must cultivate in order to fully express our intelligence.

The fifth way of looking at intelligence: Emotions can make us smarter.We sometimes give short shrift to emotions when we’re talking about academic success, but the science of learning is demonstrating that our emotional state represents a crucial internal situation that influences how intelligently we think and act.

When we’re in a positive mood, for example, we tend to think more expansively and creatively. When we feel anxious—for instance, when we’re about to take a dreaded math test—that anxiety uses up some of the working memory capacity we need to solve problems, leaving us, literally, with less intelligence to apply to the exam.

One line of investigation within the science of learning has to do with the feeling of hope. Research in this area has found that a feeling of hopefulness actually leads us to try harder and persist longer—but only if it is paired with practical plans for achieving our goals, and—this is the interesting part—specific, concrete actions we’ll take when and if (usually when) our original plans don’t work out as expected.

The sixth way of looking at intelligence: Technology can make us smarter.There’s a fascinating line of research in philosophy and cognitive science investigating what’s called the extended mind. This is the idea that the mind doesn’t stop at the skull—that it reaches out and loops in our bodies, our tools, even other people, to use in our thinking processes.

Brain-scanning studies have found that when we use a tool, say a rake we’re using to reach an object that’s out of our grasp, our brains actually designate neurons to represent the end of the rake—as if it were the tips of our own fingers. The human mind has evolved to make our tools—including our technological devices—into extensions of itself.

The problem is that our devices so often make us dumber instead of smarter. I’ve already alluded to the way in which technology can divide our attention, producing learning that is spottier, shallower, and less flexible than learning that occurs under conditions of full concentration. Technology can also make us dumber when we allow key skills to atrophy from disuse, or fail to develop those skills in the first place.

To give you a common example: The ready availability of technology has persuaded many people that they don’t need to learn facts anymore, because they can always “just Google it.” In fact, research from cognitive science shows that the so-called “21st century skills” that we’re always hearing about—critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity—can’t emerge in a content-free vacuum. They must develop in the context of a rich base of fact knowledge: knowledge that’s stored on the original hard drive, one’s own brain.

The original hard drive: our brains.

In order for tech to make ourselves smarter and not dumber, we need understand when to take full advantage of our devices, and when to put them away.

The seventh way of looking at intelligence: Our bodies can make us smarter. A line of inquiry related to the “extended mind” research mentioned earlier is the work now being done on what’s called “embodied cognition.”

Ever since the cognitive science revolution of the 1970s, the dominant metaphor for the brain has been the computer: a machine that processes abstract symbols. The science of learning is demonstrating that the computer metaphor is seriously flawed when it comes to describing the human brain. It might be more accurate, in fact, to compare the brain to the heart. All the things that make the heart work better—good nutrition, adequate sleep, regular exercise, moderate stress—make the brain work better too.

Take sleep, for example, since sleep is something so many of us are lacking. We often don’t recognize that sleep is actually a key part of the learning process. It’s during sleep that the brain consolidates the memories it formed during waking hours—meaning that it sorts through those memories, weakening the ones that are trivial, strengthening the ones that are important, and connecting up these new memories to the memory structures that already exist in the brain.

If we don’t get enough sleep after learning, or if that sleep is of low quality, the learning process is truncated, and we remember that information less well and less flexibly. That’s just one example of how the physical state of our bodies is a key condition under which our brain operates and under which our intelligence is evoked or suppressed.

Lastly, the eighth way of looking at intelligence: Relationships can make us smarter. I mentioned earlier that the human mind is very adept at looping in our bodies, our tools, and even other people to use as instruments of our own thinking.

You’ve experienced this if you have a spouse or significant other: it’s likely that one of you is “in charge” of remembering when the car needs to go in for inspection, while the other is “in charge” of remembering relatives’ birthdays. This is called transactive memory, and it’s just one of the ways that relationships with others can make us smarter than we would be on our own.

There’s another kind of relationship that matters to intelligence: the relationship that we have to the institutions and organizations within which we live and work. The science of learning has demonstrated that a feeling of belonging is critical to the full expression of our ability.

The science of learning suggests that we ought to imagine our roles—as parents, as professionals, as learners. We should aim to be situation-makers—creators of circumstances that evoke intelligence in ourselves and others.

Jobs got it right – how fast, intuitive thinking results in harmful behavior

Why good deeds don’t go unpunished
[Via Ars Technica]

From an early age, we are taught that cooperation, generosity, and altruism are generally things we should strive for. But altruistic acts aren’t always lauded, and researchers have found that generous individuals are sometimes punished for their behavior. Studies suggest that people often react negatively to large contributions, are suspicious of those who offer help, and want toexpel particularly charitable individuals from cooperative endeavors. These seemingly counterintuitive behaviors are called “antisocial punishment” and are more common than you might think. But why would people want to punish anyone who is particularly charitable?

The answer to that question would explain a puzzling human behavior, and it could have important ramifications for public policy. Tackling many of the major problems we currently face—from climate change to political stalemates—requires cooperation and collaboration. Understanding why people are sometimes willing to undermine joint efforts out of what appears to be nothing more than spite could go a long way to improve cooperation and discourse in many areas.

Sociologists Kyle Irwin and Christine Horne suggest that our inclination to punish do-gooders may stem from our adherence to social norms. Using a clever experimental design that allowed them to manipulate the level of conformity among group members, the researchers investigated the relationship between antisocial punishment and social norms.

[More]

Wait where did I hear that before?

(this is not the original ad. It is a draft one read by Jobs himself.)

Jobs described these people explicitly, the generous, the rule breakers, the deviants:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

And what this study shows is that in communities where there is little diversity of behavior, anyone who acts differently, even when those acts benefit everyone, is punished buy the community by removing those individuals.

Instad of everyone rising to the nail that stands higher, they remove that nail.

But Jobs, in his amazing fashion, flipped this behavior on its head, not only making those people seem normal but actually working to move social norms to embrace those people.He made us want to be those people.

He wanted us to all rise to that higher nail by using the tools of the new age.

That is a hallmark of this new society we are putting together. Not only Jobs recognized it. Most of those running 21st Century organizations kow this at some level.  But few put it into focus  so brutally or effectively.

Those groups that fail to embrace the rebels who change the world will lose. Those groups who do embrace the rebels can not help but win.

This is a fascinating study because it demonstrates this principle directly and the results speak for themselves. Groups that fail to embrace those with differnt approaches will actually harm themselves and others in the community in order to expel those who are outside the norm.

From the abstract:

A fourth study suggested that the target is seen by some as establishing an undesirable behavior standard and by others as a rule breaker. Individuals who formed either perception expressed a desire for the unselfish person to be removed from the group.

A rule breaker. An undesirable. A deviant.

At least that is what their intuition tells them. In groups with different norms, with a wider variation of behavior, the punishment is not so severe. 

That is, a more diverse group is  more accepting of those who help everyone. A less diverse group is less accepting and actually wants to rid the group of those who try to help everyone else.

And their punitive intuitive behavior actually works against the ability of any of them to win.

In this game, the overly generous person helps everyone else and hurts themselves, as just a few seconds of slow, deliberative thought reveals.

It is a competitive game, one where those with the most points wins. People put any amount of credits (each starts with 100) in a pot, the amount is doubled and then split amongst everyone. So if 5 people give 50  each (keeping 50 for themselves) and one gives 90 (keeping 10 for themselves), then after 1 round everyone has 163.3 except for the generous one. They only have 123.3

If everyone had put 50 in, then everyone would have 150 credits.

So the generous one actually made it easier for everyone else to win while hurting their own chances. They help everyone else win by losing.

Yet the conservative group wants to kick them out, wants to actually punish them even more.

If the participants had been engaged in more deliberative thinking, they would have realized they needed to keep the generous person around. They were more likely to win with such generosity.

But most people did not react that way. They simply stayed with their intuitive rules of thumb, punishing those who were actually helping them.

Sometimes rapid rules of thumb simply hurt, not help.

Because it is often these deviants, these rule breakers and troublemakers who do drive us forward. Jobs got it right, even as many groups punish them.

7 WAYS TO SHARPEN YOUR MEMORY

1. Be conscious of the limits of your working memory—the mental holding area that contains the facts and concepts you're thinking about at any one time. We can hang onto only about four facts or ideas at a time in working memory, but we can pack more information into those four slots by engaging in chunking: linking multiple pieces of information into a few meaningful groups.
2. We all remember from school that cramming the night before a test doesn't work too well, but many of us use the same approach in our working lives, hurriedly reviewing what we need to know on the way to a meeting or presentation. It's much more effective to expose yourself to the information in brief sessions spaced out over time. One easy way to do this is to use your email program to send yourself a weekly or biweekly message containing the material you need to review.
3. Despite its many proponents, there's little scientific evidence to support the idea that we have distinctive learning styles (visual, auditory, etc.). However, we do all learn and remember best when information is presented in multiple modalities—when we hear it, see it, act it out, and so on. If there's something you need to remember, try to absorb it through several senses: read the material out loud, watch a video lecture on YouTube.
4. Sleep is key to memory: it's during slumber that we consolidate and make permanent the knowledge we've gathered during the day. After you've been exposed to a lot of information (for example, when you've spent the day at a conference), make sure you get a good night's sleep. You can also try reviewing important information just before you go to bed at night—or following a study session with a daytime nap!
5. We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank, and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting—so quizzing yourself doesn’t just measure what you know, itchanges what you know. Put away your notes and try to recall the material from memory.
6. We remember new knowledge better when it connects to what we already know. Before heading into a situation in which you'll be absorbing a lot of new information, "activate" your prior knowledge by reflecting on what you currently understand of the topic, maybe jotting down a few notes. You'll be priming your mind to grab and hold onto the new material.
7. The "generation effect" is the term psychologists use to describe the following phenomenon: we remember material better when we've generated it ourselves. Rather than reading or repeating someone else's formulation, put the information to be learned into your own words: explain it to yourself, or talk about it to someone else. Research also shows that teaching someone else helps the teacher to remember the material better.

Developing Character, Courage & College Readiness

The high school day starts with Humane Letters, a two hour Socratic seminar where students read great books and the founding documents. They ask, what does it mean to be human? What is justice? Students apply two rules: textual evidence and reason in the common pursuit of truth. Seniors write a thesis and defend their work in front of a panel and their peers.

There is no reference to pop culture at Great Hearts--just the study of spirit, law, and philosophy. "Character is not an outcome--it is a state of being first," said Scoggin. "Character arises from forming habits of heart." Elementary students at Great Hearts focus on "comportment."

Raphael's painting School of Athens (1510) adorns the lobby of all Great Hearts schools--placing the Aristotle-Socrates dialectic center stage. There's no BYOD here, Scoggins thinks "Kids need a place away from technology to relax and think big thoughts."

Scoggins uses unusual language to describe aims: the lifelong pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. He's happy to list what they love: 1) moral intellectual and physical virtue, 2) western tradition, 3) human dignity and freedom, 4) philosophical realism, 5) conversation and community, and 6) humility. The school culture is "about service and love."

To Help Children Learn Deeply, Ask Them To Explain

Children are quick to ask “why?” and “how?” when it comes to new things, but research suggests elementary and preschool students learn more when teachers (and, presumably, parents) turn the questions back on them, writes Sarah Sparks in Education Week.

Sparks reports on a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological Science research meeting held late last month, where panelists discussed how and when asking students for explanations can best enhance their learning:

“’Often students are able to say facts, but not able to understand the underlying mathematics concept, or transfer a problem in math to a similar problem in chemistry,’ said Joseph Jay Williams, a cognitive science and online education researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

For example, a student asked to explain why 2 x 3 = 6 cannot simply memorize and parrot the answer, but must understand the underlying relationship between multiplication and addition, Williams said. Students who can verbally explain why they arrived at a particular answer have proved in prior studies to be more able to catch their own incorrect assumptions and generalize what they learn to other subjects.

‘We know generating explanations leads to better educational outcomes generally. When children explain events, they learn more than when just getting feedback about the accuracy of their predictions,’ said Cristine H. Legare, an assistant psychology professor and the director of the Cognition, Culture, and Development Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.

In forthcoming research with UC-Berkeley, Ms. Legare brought in 96 children ages 3 to 5 and set before them a complex toy made up of colorful, interlocking gears with a crank on one end and a propeller on the other.

With half the children, the researchers asked each one, ‘Can you explain this to me?’ With the other half, they simply said, ‘Oh look, isn’t this interesting?’

The two groups of children focused on different things, researchers found. Children who were asked to observe noticed the colors of the toy, while those asked to explain focused on the chain of gears working on each other to eventually turn the propeller when the child turned the crank at the other end.

Children who had explained the toy were better at re-creating it and not being distracted by ornamental gears, and they were better able to transfer what they had learned about how gears work to new tasks.

The children who had observed the toy outperformed the children in the explanation group on a memory task focused on the toy’s colors.” (Read more here.)

Fascinating: asking children to explain rather than observe leads them to focus differently, act differently, and ultimately learn differently. Of course, there are situations in which observing is the skill we want to cultivate—but this research is a good reminder that being asked to explain (as opposed to listening to someone else’s explanation) is often a great way to promote deep learning.

Deep Reading v/s Internet Reading

Recent research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that deep reading—slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity—is a distinctive experience, different in kind from the mere decoding of words. Although deep reading does not, strictly speaking, require a conventional book, the built-in limits of the printed page are uniquely conducive to the deep reading experience. A book’s lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions—Should I click on this link or not?—allowing her to remain fully immersed in the narrative.

That immersion is supported by the way the brain handles language rich in detail, allusion and metaphor: by creating a mental representation that draws on the same brain regions that would be active if the scene were unfolding in real life. The emotional situations and moral dilemmas that are the stuff of literature are also vigorous exercise for the brain, propelling us inside the heads of fictional characters and even, studies suggest, increasing our real-life capacity for empathy.

None of this is likely to happen when we’re scrolling through TMZ.com. Although we call the activity by the same name, the deep reading of books and the information-driven reading we do on the web are very different, both in the experience they produce and in the capacities they develop. A growing body of evidence suggests that online reading may be less engaging and less satisfying, even for the “digital natives” for whom it is so familiar. Last month, for example, Britain’s National Literacy Trust released the results of a study of 34,910 young people aged eight to sixteen. Researchers reported that 39% of children and teens read daily using electronic devices, but only 28% read printed materials every day. Those who read only onscreen were three times less likely to say they enjoy reading very much, and a third less likely to have a favorite book. The study also found that young people who read daily only onscreen were nearly two times less likely to be above-average readers than those who read daily in print or both in print and onscreen.

To understand why we should be concerned about how young people read, and not just whether they’re reading at all, it helps to know something about the way the ability to read evolved. “Human beings were never born to read,” notes Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Unlike the ability to understand and produce spoken language, which under normal circumstances will unfold according to a program dictated by our genes, the ability to read must be painstakingly acquired by each individual. The “reading circuits” we construct are recruited from structures in the brain that evolved for other purposes—and these circuits can be feeble or they can be robust, depending on how often and how vigorously we use them.

The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love. 

This is not reading as many young people are coming to know it. Their reading is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what literary critic Frank Kermode calls “carnal reading” and “spiritual reading.” If we allow our offspring to believe that carnal reading is all there is—if we don’t open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline and practice—we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience they would not otherwise encounter. And we will have deprived them of an elevating and enlightening experience that will enlarge them as people. Observing young people’s attachment to digital devices, some progressive educators and permissive parents talk about needing to "meet kids where they are,” molding instruction around their onscreen habits. This is mistaken. We need, rather, to show them someplace they've never been, a place only deep reading can take them.

There’s another reason to work to save deep reading: the preservation of a cultural treasure. Like information on floppy disks and cassette tapes that may soon be lost because the equipment to play it no longer exists, properly-educated people are the only "equipment," the only beings, who can unlock the wealth of insight and wisdom that lie in our culture's novels and poems. When the library of Alexandria was lost to fire, the scarce resource was books themselves. Today, with billions of books in print and stored online, the endangered breed is not books but readers. Unless we train the younger generation to engage in deep reading, we will find ourselves with our culture’s riches locked away in a vault: books everywhere and no one truly able to read them.

2 Important Strategies for Effective Studying

Every college student and high school student believes he or she has honed a set of highly effective, useful study skills. I used re-reading, lots of summarizing, note-taking (and outlining), and taking the little tests you would often find at the end of a chapter to help me remember the material I just read.
Nobody taught me how to study this way. It was just something I did through trial and error in trying and discarding multiple techniques. For instance, I tried highlighting, but it did little for me.
Of course, psychologists and other scientists have been testing effective study techniques now for decades. Being far more clever than I, they’ve actually run such techniques through the research ringer, and have come out with some effective study strategies.
Just last month, another group of researchers decided to take a look at all of that research, and boil down what we know about the most effective methods for studying. Here’s what they found.

Researchers led by John Dunlosky (et al. 2013) from Kent State University decided to take a critical look at the 10 most common learning techniques available to students and see whether they had strong or little backing in the research literature. The study methods examined were:

1. Elaborative interrogation — Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true
2. Self-explanation — Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving
3. Summarization — Writing summaries of to-be-learned texts
4. Highlighting/underlining — Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
5. Keyword mnemonic — Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
6. Imagery for text — Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening
7. Rereading — Restudying text material again after an initial reading
8. Practice testing – Self-testing or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material 
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9. Distributed practice – Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time
10. Interleaved practice — Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session.

So unbeknownst to me at the time, I was engaging in a combination of the above learning techniques while in school — summarization, rereading, and practice testing. I also tried to distribute my studying over time, and not try and cram right before a test (although I probably was only marginally successful in adhering to that desire).¹
At least one of my techniques was deemed effective by the researchers — practice testing. The other technique that received across-the-board high grades was distributed practice.

According to the researchers, both techniques have been shown to boost students’ performance across many different kinds of tests, and their effectiveness has been repeatedly demonstrated for students of all ages.

Some common study techniques used by most students didn’t receive such high marks for effectiveness:

In contrast, five of the techniques received a low rating from the researchers. Interestingly, these techniques are some of the most common learning strategies used by students. Such ineffective strategies include: summarization, highlighting and underlining, and rereading.
“I was shocked that some strategies that students use a lot — such as rereading and highlighting — seem to provide minimal benefits to their learning and performance,” Dunlosky said. “By just replacing rereading with delayed retrieval practice, students would benefit.”

Indeed, students probably relay on tasks like highlighting and rereading because they are the easiest to do while actively studying. It’s so easy to whip out a highlighter and believe that by actively marking a passage, it’s somehow seeping into your brain cavities like syrup does into those little waffle compartments.
Sadly, that’s not the case. You might as well just sniff the highlighter for all the good highlighting does in helping you study.
Other techniques that got mixed but generally positive reviews include interleaved practice, self-explanation and elaborative interrogation. Mnemonics are likely helpful for some key concepts (you can’t get through medical school without them), but not as a general study technique.
And rereading (which 65 percent of college students admit to using) can’t hurt you if the material is dense and difficult and you didn’t quite get it the first time around. But don’t kid yourself into believing that rereading is as good as taking a practice test or spreading studying over time. (And generally, you only need to re-read a text passage once; multiple rereading efforts don’t usually help with comprehension.)
So there you have it — focus on practice testing and studying evenly over the course of the entire semester. Those techniques are going to be the most time-effective and the best use of your brain cells.

Read the full article: What Study Strategies Make the Grade?

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Nine Characteristics of a Great Teacher

1. A great teacher respects students. In a great teacher’s classroom, each person’s ideas and opinions are valued. Students feel safe to express their feelings and learn to respect and listen to others. This teacher creates a welcoming learning environment for all students.

2. A great teacher creates a sense of community and belonging in the classroom. The mutual respect in this teacher’s classroom provides a supportive, collaborative environment. In this small community, there are rules to follow and jobs to be done and each student is aware that he or she is an important, integral part of the group. A great teacher lets students know that they can depend not only on her, but also on the entire class.

3. A great teacher is warm, accessible, enthusiastic and caring. This person is approachable, not only to students, but to everyone on campus. This is the teacher to whom students know they can go with any problems or concerns or even to share a funny story. Great teachers possess good listening skills and take time out of their way-too-busy schedules for anyone who needs them. If this teacher is having a bad day, no one ever knows—the teacher leaves personal baggage outside the school doors.

4. A great teacher sets high expectations for all students. This teacher realizes that the expectations she has for her students greatly affect their achievement; she knows that students generally give to teachers as much or as little as is expected of them.

5. A great teacher has his own love of learning and inspires students with his passion for education and for the course material. He constantly renews himself as a professional on his quest to provide students with the highest quality of education possible. This teacher has no fear of learning new teaching strategies or incorporating new technologies into lessons, and always seems to be the one who is willing to share what he’s learned with colleagues.

6. A great teacher is a skilled leader. Different from administrative leaders, effective teachers focus on shared decision-making and teamwork, as well as on community building. This great teacher conveys this sense of leadership to students by providing opportunities for each of them to assume leadership roles.

7. A great teacher can “shift-gears” and is flexible when a lesson isn’t working. This teacher assesses his teaching throughout the lessons and finds new ways to present material to make sure that every student understands the key concepts.

8. A great teacher collaborates with colleagues on an ongoing basis. Rather than thinking of herself as weak because she asks for suggestions or help, this teacher views collaboration as a way to learn from a fellow professional. A great teacher uses constructive criticism and advice as an opportunity to grow as an educator.

9. A great teacher maintains professionalism in all areas—from personal appearance to organizational skills and preparedness for each day. Her communication skills are exemplary, whether she is speaking with an administrator, one of her students or a colleague. The respect that the great teacher receives because of her professional manner is obvious to those around her.

Musical Training Boosts Verbal Memory

Before cutting any more of the arts curriculum from schools, take a look at the results of a study that came out this month in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Kids who took music lessons developed better memories for words than kids who took an extra science class or had no extra lessons.This study followed 73 seven-year olds in Germany for a year and a half, starting at the beginning of second grade. 25 were placed in a weekly 45-minute class that taught the kids how to play an instrument, another 25 spent the same amount of time in a science class and the rest received no additional instruction.
All students’ memories were tested three times, first at the beginning of second grade, before training began, and then again at the beginning and end of third grade. For visual memory, the students saw a sequence of dots on a grid and tried to remember the order they saw the dots, similar to Simon. For verbal memory, students heard a list of 15 words and tried to recall as many as they could.
The groups differed on key variables that might affect memory. The group receiving music lessons started with IQ scores about 13 points higher than the science group and 7 points higher than the control group. They were also slightly younger, just a few months past their seventh birthday, whereas the science group was almost 7 and a half. Despite the age and IQ differences, the groups were equal on verbal and visual memory tests when second grade began.
A year later, at the beginning of third grade, the groups were still equivalent in visual memory. However, the group receiving music lessons had improved their verbal memory more than the other groups. By the last test at the end of third grade, they had extended their advantage in verbal memory and now scored significantly better than the other groups. Music training seemed to cause an improvement in verbal memory that could not be explained by spending more time learning, because the music group scored higher than the science group. The improvement was specific to music lessons.

Music training has been linked to greater volume in the planum temporale, a part of the auditory cortex. Prior to this study, It was unclear if that enhanced volume was the result of music training or if people with more developed planum temporales were more likely to pick up an instrument. Although this study didn’t assess brain size, it assessed a trait—verbal memory—linked to volume of the planum temporale. The time spent focusing on melodies may lead to auditory cortex growth. These added brain cells might benefit recollection of all auditory information, like the name of someone you’ve just met at a party.This study provides good evidence that if you want your second grader to beef up her verbal memory, you should enroll her in a violin class.
This may also explain why guys on dating sites pictured holding a guitar are three times more likely to receive flirtatious responses after messaging single ladies. If girls want a guy who can listen, who better than a musician to pay attention to her words and win her heart?
Image credit: Sarah Bjork
Study:
Roden I, Kreutz G and Bongard S (2012) Effects of a school-based instrumental music program on verbal and visual memory in primary school children: a longitudinal study. Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Science.

Why A Sense Of Belonging Is Essential To Learning

Learning is inherently social. The level of comfort we feel in another person’s presence can powerfully influence how intelligent we feel, and in some sense, how intelligent we actually are, at least in that moment. Now multiply that one-on-one interaction by tens or hundreds, and you start to get a sense of how important a sense of belonging to a learning community can be.
Early on in school, some children get the sense that, academically speaking, they don’t belong—that they’re not one of the ‘smart kids.’ The same thing can happen when young people start middle school, or high school, or college: they take a look around and think, ‘I don’t belong here.’ In our work lives, too, we may form an assumption that we’re not quick or sharp enough, not sufficiently creative or innovative, to belong at the top of our fields.
Social psychologists have documented how corrosive this self-doubt can be: sapping our motivation, lowering our expectations, even using up mental resources that we could otherwise apply to absorbing knowledge or solving problems. The feeling of not belonging becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By contrast, a solid sense that we’re among our peers, that we’re where we ought to be, can elevate our aspirations and buoy us in the face of setbacks.

Kids need non-cognitive skill development as well to succeed

 

Thanks to the success of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, the conversation in education circles has turned to so-called “non-cognitive” skills, such as perseverance, self-monitoring, and flexibility. As much as or more than the cognitive, the argument goes, these are the qualities that account for success in school and life, and we need to promote them through some form of “character education.”

Mike Rose, a professor of education at UCLA, takes issue with the way we’re framing the issue in this commentary in Education Week:

“The importance of traits like perseverance and flexibility is indisputable, but what concerns me is that the advocates for character education seem to accept without question [a limited view of what "cognition" is]. If cognition is represented by scores on ability or achievement tests, then anything not captured in those scores (like the desired qualities of character) is, de facto, noncognitive. We’re now left with a pinched notion of cognition and a reductive dichotomy to boot.

This downplaying of the cognitive and the simplistic construction of the cognitive vs. noncognitive could have some troubling implications for education, especially the education of the children of the poor.

To begin with, the labeling of character qualities as ‘noncognitive’ misrepresents them, particularly if you use a truer, richer notion of cognition. Self-monitoring, for example, has to involve a consideration and analysis of one’s performance and mental state, which is a demanding cognitive activity. Flexibility requires a weighing of options and decisionmaking. The issue of labels is not just a problem of terminology, for if we don’t have an accurate description of something, how can we help people develop it, especially if we want to scale up our efforts?

Furthermore, these desired qualities are developed over time in settings and through relationships that are meaningful to students, which most likely means that the settings and relationships involve significant cognitive tasks. Two classic preschool programs—the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian projects—have provided a research basis for the character advocates. Serving children from disadvantaged backgrounds, these programs were cognitively rich in imaginative play, language use, and activities that required thought and cooperation.

A very different example comes from a study I just completed observing community college occupational programs as varied as fashion and diesel technology. As students developed competence, they also became more committed to doing a job well, were better able to monitor and correct their performance, and improved their ability to communicate what they were doing, and help others. You could be, by inclination, the most dogged or communicative person in the world, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with a garment or an engine, your tendencies won’t be realized in a meaningful way in the classroom or the workshop.” (Read more here.)

Really important stuff here—I especially appreciate Rose’s final point, that “character” strengths often grow in tandem with knowledge and skill.

Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques

In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that most of us don’t use the learning techniques that science has proved most effective. Worse, research finds that learning strategies we do commonly employ, like rereading and highlighting, are among the least effective.

The scientific literature evaluating these techniques stretches back decades and across thousands of articles. It’s far too extensive and complex for the average parent, teacher or employer to sift through. Fortunately, a team of five leading psychologists have now done the job for us. In a comprehensive report released on Jan. 9 by the Association for Psychological Science, the authors, led by Kent State University professor John Dunlosky, closely examine 10 learning tactics and rate each from high to low utility on the basis of the evidence they’ve amassed. Here is a quick guide to the report’s conclusions:
The Worst
Highlighting and underlining led the authors’ list of ineffective learning strategies. Although they are common practices, studies show they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicates that highlighting can get in the way of learning; because it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences. Nearly as bad is the practice of rereading, a common exercise that is much less effective than some of the better techniques you can use. Lastly, summarizing, or writing down the main points contained in a text, can be helpful for those who are skilled at it, but again, there are far better ways to spend your study time. Highlighting, underlining, rereading and summarizing were all rated by the authors as being of “low utility.”
The Best
In contrast to familiar practices like highlighting and rereading, the learning strategies with the most evidence to support them aren’t well known outside the psych lab. Take distributed practice, for example. This tactic involves spreading out your study sessions, rather than engaging in one marathon. Cramming information at the last minute may allow you to get through that test or meeting, but the material will quickly disappear from memory. It’s much more effective to dip into the material at intervals over time. And the longer you want to remember the information, whether it’s two weeks or two years, the longer the intervals should be.
(MORE: ‘Implicit Learning’: How to Remember More Without Trying)
The second learning strategy that is highly recommended by the report’s authors is practice testing. Yes, more tests — but these are not for a grade. Research shows that the mere act of calling information to mind strengthens that knowledge and aids in future retrieval. While practice testing is not a common strategy — despite the robust evidence supporting it — there is one familiar approach that captures its benefits: using flash cards. And now flash cards can be presented in digital form, via apps like Quizlet, StudyBlue and FlashCardMachine. Both spaced-out learning, or distributed practice, and practice tests were rated as having “high utility” by the authors.
The Rest
The remainder of the techniques evaluated by Dunlosky and his colleagues fell into the middle ground — not useless, but not especially effective either. These include mental imagery, or coming up with pictures that help you remember text (which is time-consuming and only works with text that lends itself to images); elaborative interrogation, or asking yourself “why” as you read (which is kind of annoying, like having a 4-year-old tugging at your sleeve); self-explanation, or forcing yourself to explain the text in detail instead of passively reading it over (its effectiveness depends on how complete and accurate your explanations are); interleaved practice, or mixing up different types of problems (there is not much evidence to show that this is helpful, outside of learning motor tasks); and lastly the keyword mnemonic, or associating new vocabulary words, usually in a foreign language, with an English word that sounds similar — so, for example, learning the French word for key, la clef, by imagining a key on top of a cliff (which is a lot of work to remember a single word).
All these techniques were rated of “moderate” to “low” utility by Dunlosky et al because either there isn’t enough evidence yet to be able to recommend them or they’re just not a very good use of your time. Much better, say the authors, to spread out your learning, ditch your highlighter and get busy with your flash cards.