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"disqusTitle": "42 Ways to Boost Learning by Applying Our Bodies, Surroundings and Relationships",
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"content": "\u003cp>Our education system is dominated by a \u003cem>neurocentric\u003c/em> model of thinking: we assume that students’ mental activity is contained inside their heads. But we open up a world of new possibilities when we encourage students to think \u003cem>outside\u003c/em> the brain: that is, to use external resources to enhance their mental processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such outside-the-head resources include the sensations and movements of students’ bodies; the physical spaces in which students learn and play; and the social interactions students engage in with others. My new book, \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy/dp/0544947665/\">The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\"\u003c/em> offers an array of practical strategies for engaging these mental “extensions”; here, is a selection especially for teachers and parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Gesture\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Gesture isn’t mere hand-waving; it’s an essential part of a cognitive loop in which our hand motions influence our thoughts and vice versa. Becoming more aware of gesture, and using it more intentionally, can help teachers and students think more cogently, speak more fluently, and understand others more deeply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Explicitly encourage gesture:\u003c/strong> When you see a student struggling to generate an explanation or solve a problem, offer a simple suggestion: “Could you try \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182093/\">moving your hands\u003c/a> as you say that?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Listen to gesture:\u003c/strong> Pay \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010027786900533\">close attention\u003c/a> to the hand motions of learners, especially at moments when what their hands are “saying” is different from the message conveyed by their words. This mismatched state indicates they are ready to learn and receptive to instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Supply “visual artifacts”:\u003c/strong> Students are more likely to gesture (and in so doing acquire a deeper understanding) when there are \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543071003365\">relevant objects\u003c/a> nearby to gesture \u003cem>at\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Put students on the spot:\u003c/strong> Improvising a description or an explanation is hard mental work, so students \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871187115300134\">automatically offload\u003c/a> some of it onto their hands. The increased rate of gesture prompted by the act of improvisation can help them develop a deeper understanding of the material they’re talking about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>For every word, a gesture:\u003c/strong> Pair each new vocabulary word to be learned with a gesture in order to reinforce memory. When students \u003ca href=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01467/full\">add a hand motion\u003c/a> to the actions of reading or speaking aloud a word, they’re sinking another “hook” into the material that will allow them to reel it in later.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Natural Spaces\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Over eons of evolution, our perceptual faculties were “tuned” to the kind of sensory information present in nature. While spending time in built interiors and urban settings drains students’ attentional resources, spending time outside refills the tank, restoring their ability to focus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Think in terms of “environmental self-regulation”:\u003c/strong> Instead of asking students to get a grip on their thoughts and feelings from the inside, use exposure to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494489800386\">outside world\u003c/a>—especially nature—to help them restore their equilibrium and refresh their attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students practice “soft gazing”:\u003c/strong> When in nature, encourage students to relinquish the sharp-edged focus that is required by schoolwork. This involves allowing their gaze to become \u003ca href=\"https://edrl.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Morgan.Abrahamson.2018JOCI.workshop-report.pdf?utm_source=Brilliant%3A+The+New+Science+of+Smart+Newsletter&utm_campaign=adefa6f6e5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_6-7-2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c734401c1-adefa6f6e5-311867093\">relaxed and diffuse\u003c/a>, drawn here and there by whatever attracts it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Direct students to seek out “micro-restorative opportunities”:\u003c/strong> Research shows that looking at a scene of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494415000328\">natural greenery\u003c/a>—even through a window—for as little as 40 seconds offers mental benefits, including improved concentration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bring nature inside:\u003c/strong> Natural light, potted plants, and even images and motifs borrowed from nature help students enter a state of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494410001027\">relaxed alertness\u003c/a>. During a break in learning, try showing students a nature video.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with the Space of Ideas\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>We all tend to do too much “in our heads.” Students can think more effectively and more efficiently when they find ways to offload their mental contents onto physical space—whether it be the space of a whiteboard, a physical model, or a bunch of Post-It Notes. They can then interact with their ideas as if they were physical objects or a 3-D landscape, applying the spatial and navigational capacities that come so naturally to human beings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students create a “concept map”:\u003c/strong> The brain treats abstract ideas like a landscape through which it must navigate. A \u003ca href=\"https://ctl.byu.edu/tip/concept-mapping\">concept map\u003c/a> makes this mental terrain visible, allowing us to recognize patterns and make new connections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Direct students to write it down:\u003c/strong> Our culture values “doing things in your head,” but research shows that writing down our thoughts carries benefits for memory, problem-solving, and creativity. Ask students to keep a \u003ca href=\"https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057579\">field notebook\u003c/a>, for example, in which they regularly record and review their observations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Instruct students to sketch it out:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-016-0031-6\">Drawing the concept\u003c/a> they’re thinking about has benefits for students above and beyond writing about it in words. It doesn’t matter if students say they “can’t draw”—simply attempting to capture a concept in visual terms will deepen their understanding and reinforce your memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Make it physical:\u003c/strong> The human brain evolved to manipulate physical objects, not to contemplate abstract ideas. Whenever possible, have students create a concrete model or representation of the concept they’re thinking about, and then encourage them to use their whole bodies to \u003ca href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2442106.2442109\">interact with it\u003c/a>—moving around it so that they see it from different perspectives, manipulating its elements and trying out new combinations.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Interoception \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“Interoception” is the capacity to sense our internal signals. Students who learn how to tune into these inner cues can use them to make better decisions, to muster more mental resilience, and to exhibit greater emotional intelligence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lead students through a body scan:\u003c/strong> The \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28955213/\">body scan\u003c/a> is meditative exercise in which non-judgmental attention is directed to each part of the body in turn. Practicing this exercise regularly will improve students’ ability to perceive interoceptive sensations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Suggest that students label their internal sensations:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21534661/\">Affect labeling\u003c/a> is an activity in which each interoceptive sensation is noted and named as it is experienced. Research shows that engaging in affective labeling immediately reduces anxiety and distress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Encourage students to engage in “cognitive reappraisal”:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20161454/\">Cognitive reappraisal\u003c/a> is an exercise in which the basic building blocks of interoceptive sensations are re-appraised as representing a \u003cem>positive\u003c/em> emotion—for example, excitement instead of nervousness. Engaging in cognitive appraisal reduces negative affect and improves performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ask students to fill in a body map:\u003c/strong> A \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/646\">body map\u003c/a> is an outline of the human body on which users note what they’re feeling and where in the body the feeling makes itself known. Completing a body map can help students become more aware of their internal signals and where in the body they are arising.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Movement\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Humans didn’t evolve to think while sitting still. Moving the body in specific ways while engaging in mental work can help students to think more effectively, more efficiently, and more creatively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Allow students to play with fidget objects:\u003c/strong> Playing with \u003ca href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2971485.2971557\">fidget objects\u003c/a> can help students sharpen their focus, improve their mood, and boost their creativity. Different kinds of objects may generate usefully different mental states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students sweat before they sit:\u003c/strong> Trying asking students to take a periodic “\u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16376711/\">movement break\u003c/a>\u003cu>.\u003c/u>” Engaging in brisk physical activity just before sitting down to think will boost students’ mental acuity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Direct students to act out the abstract:\u003c/strong> In order to commit knowledge more firmly to memory, ask students to \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-00111-009\">act it out\u003c/a> with whole-body movements. Research on the “enactment effect” shows that we remember what we \u003cem>do\u003c/em> much better than what we read or hear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Teach to students’ bodies:\u003c/strong> When learning about abstract concepts (say, “vector” or “torque” in physics), provide students with a \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797615569355\">physical experience\u003c/a> of the concept that can be drawn upon when thinking about it later. The brain apprehends the abstract much more readily when it is “grounded” in bodily experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Instruct students to move as if \u003cem>they\u003c/em> are \u003cem>it\u003c/em>:\u003c/strong> In order to understand an entity from the inside, or to make discoveries about that entity, students benefit from \u003ca href=\"https://ccl.northwestern.edu/2012/youre-it.pdf\">embodying it\u003c/a>—moving as if they themselves are the thing they are learning and thinking about.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Built Spaces\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>We spend more than 90 percent of our time indoors, yet many of the spaces we occupy are not well-designed for extending the mind. We can take intentional steps to rearrange learning spaces so that they support intelligent thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Use space to implement “sensory reduction”:\u003c/strong> Allow students to work on challenging tasks in a quiet room free of distractions. Imposing such \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09658211.2017.1282519?journalCode=pmem20\">sensory reduction\u003c/a> generates a state of “stimuli hunger”, in which weakly-activated internal knowledge (barely-remembered facts, elusive imaginative notions) becomes more readily accessible. (Students can achieve a similar effect by briefly closing their eyes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Give students a space of their own:\u003c/strong> Thinking and learning in a space over which students feel \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20191407/\">ownership and control\u003c/a> gives them a feeling of empowerment, which in turn enhances their performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Offer students some privacy:\u003c/strong> Feeling “on display” all the time consumes mental bandwidth that could otherwise be applied to thinking. When students are able to \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0001839212453028\">shield themselves\u003c/a> from the gaze of others, their cognitive load is reduced and they feel more free to experiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fill learning spaces with “evocative objects”:\u003c/strong> Visual reminders of students’ \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-18500-005\">academic identity\u003c/a>—who they are, and what they’re doing in that space—can put them in an optimal frame of mind for thinking. Objects representing their deepest values and ideals may be especially effective when hidden from others and visible only to the students themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Appoint learning spaces with cues of belonging:\u003c/strong> Inspect your learning space for cues that signal exclusion; these should be removed and replaced with cues that \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19968418/\">signal belonging\u003c/a>. Students think and work best in a space in which they feel that they are welcomed and included.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Experts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Our system of education is based on experts teaching novices—but we experts often fail to convey all that we know, because our knowledge is so well-practiced as to become “automatized.” Research is revealing more effective ways of transferring expertise from one mind to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Let students know that imitation is acceptable:\u003c/strong> Our culture values innovation and originality, but often the most \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2010/04/defend-your-research-imitation-is-more-valuable-than-innovation\">efficient and effective\u003c/a> approach to solving a problem is to copy what someone else has already done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Encourage close observation:\u003c/strong> Children in other cultures commonly learn by observing and imitating their elders. Research has found that American children are not so adept at this practice—but that these capacities can be \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19413421/\">deliberately cultivated\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Exhibit model work:\u003c/strong> We expect students to produce excellent work without first showing them what excellence looks like. Displaying \u003ca href=\"https://www.edutopia.org/blog/deeper-learning-student-work-ron-berger\">model examples\u003c/a> need not threaten students’ self-esteem or quash their creativity; it can inspire them to do their own best work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Break it down:\u003c/strong> Experts tend to organize their knowledge into “chunks”—agglomerated masses of information that can seem impenetrable to novices. We can help learners begin to acquire mastery by \u003ca href=\"https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-better-way-to-teach-math/\">breaking down\u003c/a> our knowledge into smaller steps, and then smaller steps still—even “micro-steps.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Employ the “caricature advantage”:\u003c/strong> For experts like us, the most important aspects of a given scenario “pop out” at first glance. For novices, that same scenario is an undifferentiated mass of information. We can help by deliberately \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028587900168\">exaggerating and distorting\u003c/a>—caricaturing—the aspects of a scenario that we want novices to notice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Peers\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Our notion of how to engage in challenging academic work usually involves sitting alone and thinking hard—but in fact, students think best when they think \u003cem>socially\u003c/em>. Social activities they engage in with peers, like storytelling, debating, and teaching, activate cognitive processes that remain dormant when students think by themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Take advantage of the “protégé effect”:\u003c/strong> The act of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0361476X13000209\">teaching someone else\u003c/a> leads the \u003cem>teacher\u003c/em> to learn—even more than the student. As highly social creatures, we’re more motivated by the goal of conveying information to others than by the goal of simply studying for its own sake. Even struggling learners can benefit, by teaching younger students or by teaching their family members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ask students to create an instructional video:\u003c/strong> Teaching-for-learning can produce benefits for the teacher even when there are no “students” present. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959475219301161\">Recording a video\u003c/a> generates feelings of “social presence”—the feeling that others are watching—leading many of the same factors involved in face-to-face teaching to kick in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Promote students’ sense of “productive agency”:\u003c/strong> Create opportunities for student-teachers to enjoy the \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-27120-003\">fruits of their labors\u003c/a>: it’s motivating for people to see their pupils exhibiting and applying the knowledge they have been taught.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Set up a “cascading mentorship”:\u003c/strong> A senior group can teach a more junior group, who can in turn instruct a still-less-experienced group, thereby \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23887013/\">multiplying the benefits\u003c/a> of teaching-to-learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Find the underlying dispute:\u003c/strong> Much of what we learn in educational settings is boring and forgettable because it’s been drained of all conflict, presented as settled wisdom. But almost every topic can be reinvigorated by casting it in terms of a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00091380009602706\">constructive controversy\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Groups\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The days of the lone genius are over; in our era, the sheer abundance of information and the increasing specialization of knowledge mean that we and our students have to trade our habits of individual thinking for new practices that activate the powerful “group mind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students move in sync:\u003c/strong> Engaging in \u003ca href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00450.x\">coordinated physical movement\u003c/a> leads people to like others more, identify with them more closely, and cooperate with them more effectively. This can even take the form of a shared stroll: Research shows that when people walk together, they automatically and unconsciously match up their bodily movements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Engage in group rituals:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53485734e4b0fffc0dcc64c2/t/54735002e4b087a17999499e/1416843266236/legare-wen-ISSBD-2014.pdf?utm_source=Brilliant%3A+The+New+Science+of+Smart+Newsletter&utm_campaign=adefa6f6e5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_6-7-2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c734401c1-adefa6f6e5-311867093\">Ritual activities\u003c/a> in which people do the same thing at the same time—even if it’s simply sharing a meal together—promote a sense of belonging and mutual trust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Create “shared artifacts”:\u003c/strong> Group work is facilitated by the production of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ics.uci.edu/~corps/phaseii/OlsonOlson-DistanceMatters-HCIJ.pdf\">such artifacts\u003c/a>, which should be \u003cem>large\u003c/em>, \u003cem>complex\u003c/em>, \u003cem>persistent\u003c/em>, and \u003cem>revisable\u003c/em>. Bonus: when such artifacts are available, people tend to gesture at them—enhancing their own understanding and that of their team members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Implement the “jigsaw classroom”:\u003c/strong> This \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014616727900500405\">instructional technique\u003c/a>, invented in the midst of the desegregation battles of the early 1970s, has been shown to increase cooperation and teamwork even as it boosts learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Generate a sense of “shared fate”:\u003c/strong> A sense of \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2015/06/get-rid-of-unhealthy-competition-on-your-team\">group motivation\u003c/a> arises when the fates of each individual are bound up with one another—when they rise or fall together. Adjust the incentives and rewards offered to group members such that the outcome, good or bad, is experienced the same way by all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Annie Murphy Paul is a science writer and author of \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy/dp/0544947665/\">The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain\u003c/a>,\" and \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Months-Before-Birth-Shape/dp/074329663X\">Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.\u003c/a>\"\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "So much of thinking is expected to happen sitting at a desk with just our brains, but we can learn a lot more by using our bodies, depending on our peers and seeking environments conducive to learning. ",
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"description": "So much of thinking is expected to happen sitting at a desk with just our brains, but we can learn a lot more by using our bodies, depending on our peers and seeking environments conducive to learning.",
"title": "42 Ways to Boost Learning by Applying Our Bodies, Surroundings and Relationships - MindShift",
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"headline": "42 Ways to Boost Learning by Applying Our Bodies, Surroundings and Relationships",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Our education system is dominated by a \u003cem>neurocentric\u003c/em> model of thinking: we assume that students’ mental activity is contained inside their heads. But we open up a world of new possibilities when we encourage students to think \u003cem>outside\u003c/em> the brain: that is, to use external resources to enhance their mental processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such outside-the-head resources include the sensations and movements of students’ bodies; the physical spaces in which students learn and play; and the social interactions students engage in with others. My new book, \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy/dp/0544947665/\">The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\"\u003c/em> offers an array of practical strategies for engaging these mental “extensions”; here, is a selection especially for teachers and parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Gesture\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Gesture isn’t mere hand-waving; it’s an essential part of a cognitive loop in which our hand motions influence our thoughts and vice versa. Becoming more aware of gesture, and using it more intentionally, can help teachers and students think more cogently, speak more fluently, and understand others more deeply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Explicitly encourage gesture:\u003c/strong> When you see a student struggling to generate an explanation or solve a problem, offer a simple suggestion: “Could you try \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182093/\">moving your hands\u003c/a> as you say that?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Listen to gesture:\u003c/strong> Pay \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010027786900533\">close attention\u003c/a> to the hand motions of learners, especially at moments when what their hands are “saying” is different from the message conveyed by their words. This mismatched state indicates they are ready to learn and receptive to instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Supply “visual artifacts”:\u003c/strong> Students are more likely to gesture (and in so doing acquire a deeper understanding) when there are \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543071003365\">relevant objects\u003c/a> nearby to gesture \u003cem>at\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Put students on the spot:\u003c/strong> Improvising a description or an explanation is hard mental work, so students \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871187115300134\">automatically offload\u003c/a> some of it onto their hands. The increased rate of gesture prompted by the act of improvisation can help them develop a deeper understanding of the material they’re talking about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>For every word, a gesture:\u003c/strong> Pair each new vocabulary word to be learned with a gesture in order to reinforce memory. When students \u003ca href=\"https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01467/full\">add a hand motion\u003c/a> to the actions of reading or speaking aloud a word, they’re sinking another “hook” into the material that will allow them to reel it in later.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Natural Spaces\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Over eons of evolution, our perceptual faculties were “tuned” to the kind of sensory information present in nature. While spending time in built interiors and urban settings drains students’ attentional resources, spending time outside refills the tank, restoring their ability to focus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Think in terms of “environmental self-regulation”:\u003c/strong> Instead of asking students to get a grip on their thoughts and feelings from the inside, use exposure to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494489800386\">outside world\u003c/a>—especially nature—to help them restore their equilibrium and refresh their attention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students practice “soft gazing”:\u003c/strong> When in nature, encourage students to relinquish the sharp-edged focus that is required by schoolwork. This involves allowing their gaze to become \u003ca href=\"https://edrl.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Morgan.Abrahamson.2018JOCI.workshop-report.pdf?utm_source=Brilliant%3A+The+New+Science+of+Smart+Newsletter&utm_campaign=adefa6f6e5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_6-7-2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c734401c1-adefa6f6e5-311867093\">relaxed and diffuse\u003c/a>, drawn here and there by whatever attracts it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Direct students to seek out “micro-restorative opportunities”:\u003c/strong> Research shows that looking at a scene of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494415000328\">natural greenery\u003c/a>—even through a window—for as little as 40 seconds offers mental benefits, including improved concentration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bring nature inside:\u003c/strong> Natural light, potted plants, and even images and motifs borrowed from nature help students enter a state of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494410001027\">relaxed alertness\u003c/a>. During a break in learning, try showing students a nature video.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with the Space of Ideas\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>We all tend to do too much “in our heads.” Students can think more effectively and more efficiently when they find ways to offload their mental contents onto physical space—whether it be the space of a whiteboard, a physical model, or a bunch of Post-It Notes. They can then interact with their ideas as if they were physical objects or a 3-D landscape, applying the spatial and navigational capacities that come so naturally to human beings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students create a “concept map”:\u003c/strong> The brain treats abstract ideas like a landscape through which it must navigate. A \u003ca href=\"https://ctl.byu.edu/tip/concept-mapping\">concept map\u003c/a> makes this mental terrain visible, allowing us to recognize patterns and make new connections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Direct students to write it down:\u003c/strong> Our culture values “doing things in your head,” but research shows that writing down our thoughts carries benefits for memory, problem-solving, and creativity. Ask students to keep a \u003ca href=\"https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057579\">field notebook\u003c/a>, for example, in which they regularly record and review their observations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Instruct students to sketch it out:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-016-0031-6\">Drawing the concept\u003c/a> they’re thinking about has benefits for students above and beyond writing about it in words. It doesn’t matter if students say they “can’t draw”—simply attempting to capture a concept in visual terms will deepen their understanding and reinforce your memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Make it physical:\u003c/strong> The human brain evolved to manipulate physical objects, not to contemplate abstract ideas. Whenever possible, have students create a concrete model or representation of the concept they’re thinking about, and then encourage them to use their whole bodies to \u003ca href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2442106.2442109\">interact with it\u003c/a>—moving around it so that they see it from different perspectives, manipulating its elements and trying out new combinations.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Interoception \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“Interoception” is the capacity to sense our internal signals. Students who learn how to tune into these inner cues can use them to make better decisions, to muster more mental resilience, and to exhibit greater emotional intelligence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lead students through a body scan:\u003c/strong> The \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28955213/\">body scan\u003c/a> is meditative exercise in which non-judgmental attention is directed to each part of the body in turn. Practicing this exercise regularly will improve students’ ability to perceive interoceptive sensations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Suggest that students label their internal sensations:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21534661/\">Affect labeling\u003c/a> is an activity in which each interoceptive sensation is noted and named as it is experienced. Research shows that engaging in affective labeling immediately reduces anxiety and distress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Encourage students to engage in “cognitive reappraisal”:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20161454/\">Cognitive reappraisal\u003c/a> is an exercise in which the basic building blocks of interoceptive sensations are re-appraised as representing a \u003cem>positive\u003c/em> emotion—for example, excitement instead of nervousness. Engaging in cognitive appraisal reduces negative affect and improves performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ask students to fill in a body map:\u003c/strong> A \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/646\">body map\u003c/a> is an outline of the human body on which users note what they’re feeling and where in the body the feeling makes itself known. Completing a body map can help students become more aware of their internal signals and where in the body they are arising.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Movement\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Humans didn’t evolve to think while sitting still. Moving the body in specific ways while engaging in mental work can help students to think more effectively, more efficiently, and more creatively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Allow students to play with fidget objects:\u003c/strong> Playing with \u003ca href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2971485.2971557\">fidget objects\u003c/a> can help students sharpen their focus, improve their mood, and boost their creativity. Different kinds of objects may generate usefully different mental states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students sweat before they sit:\u003c/strong> Trying asking students to take a periodic “\u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16376711/\">movement break\u003c/a>\u003cu>.\u003c/u>” Engaging in brisk physical activity just before sitting down to think will boost students’ mental acuity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Direct students to act out the abstract:\u003c/strong> In order to commit knowledge more firmly to memory, ask students to \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-00111-009\">act it out\u003c/a> with whole-body movements. Research on the “enactment effect” shows that we remember what we \u003cem>do\u003c/em> much better than what we read or hear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Teach to students’ bodies:\u003c/strong> When learning about abstract concepts (say, “vector” or “torque” in physics), provide students with a \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797615569355\">physical experience\u003c/a> of the concept that can be drawn upon when thinking about it later. The brain apprehends the abstract much more readily when it is “grounded” in bodily experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Instruct students to move as if \u003cem>they\u003c/em> are \u003cem>it\u003c/em>:\u003c/strong> In order to understand an entity from the inside, or to make discoveries about that entity, students benefit from \u003ca href=\"https://ccl.northwestern.edu/2012/youre-it.pdf\">embodying it\u003c/a>—moving as if they themselves are the thing they are learning and thinking about.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Built Spaces\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>We spend more than 90 percent of our time indoors, yet many of the spaces we occupy are not well-designed for extending the mind. We can take intentional steps to rearrange learning spaces so that they support intelligent thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Use space to implement “sensory reduction”:\u003c/strong> Allow students to work on challenging tasks in a quiet room free of distractions. Imposing such \u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09658211.2017.1282519?journalCode=pmem20\">sensory reduction\u003c/a> generates a state of “stimuli hunger”, in which weakly-activated internal knowledge (barely-remembered facts, elusive imaginative notions) becomes more readily accessible. (Students can achieve a similar effect by briefly closing their eyes.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Give students a space of their own:\u003c/strong> Thinking and learning in a space over which students feel \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20191407/\">ownership and control\u003c/a> gives them a feeling of empowerment, which in turn enhances their performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Offer students some privacy:\u003c/strong> Feeling “on display” all the time consumes mental bandwidth that could otherwise be applied to thinking. When students are able to \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0001839212453028\">shield themselves\u003c/a> from the gaze of others, their cognitive load is reduced and they feel more free to experiment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Fill learning spaces with “evocative objects”:\u003c/strong> Visual reminders of students’ \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-18500-005\">academic identity\u003c/a>—who they are, and what they’re doing in that space—can put them in an optimal frame of mind for thinking. Objects representing their deepest values and ideals may be especially effective when hidden from others and visible only to the students themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Appoint learning spaces with cues of belonging:\u003c/strong> Inspect your learning space for cues that signal exclusion; these should be removed and replaced with cues that \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19968418/\">signal belonging\u003c/a>. Students think and work best in a space in which they feel that they are welcomed and included.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Experts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Our system of education is based on experts teaching novices—but we experts often fail to convey all that we know, because our knowledge is so well-practiced as to become “automatized.” Research is revealing more effective ways of transferring expertise from one mind to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Let students know that imitation is acceptable:\u003c/strong> Our culture values innovation and originality, but often the most \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2010/04/defend-your-research-imitation-is-more-valuable-than-innovation\">efficient and effective\u003c/a> approach to solving a problem is to copy what someone else has already done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Encourage close observation:\u003c/strong> Children in other cultures commonly learn by observing and imitating their elders. Research has found that American children are not so adept at this practice—but that these capacities can be \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19413421/\">deliberately cultivated\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Exhibit model work:\u003c/strong> We expect students to produce excellent work without first showing them what excellence looks like. Displaying \u003ca href=\"https://www.edutopia.org/blog/deeper-learning-student-work-ron-berger\">model examples\u003c/a> need not threaten students’ self-esteem or quash their creativity; it can inspire them to do their own best work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Break it down:\u003c/strong> Experts tend to organize their knowledge into “chunks”—agglomerated masses of information that can seem impenetrable to novices. We can help learners begin to acquire mastery by \u003ca href=\"https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-better-way-to-teach-math/\">breaking down\u003c/a> our knowledge into smaller steps, and then smaller steps still—even “micro-steps.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Employ the “caricature advantage”:\u003c/strong> For experts like us, the most important aspects of a given scenario “pop out” at first glance. For novices, that same scenario is an undifferentiated mass of information. We can help by deliberately \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028587900168\">exaggerating and distorting\u003c/a>—caricaturing—the aspects of a scenario that we want novices to notice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Peers\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Our notion of how to engage in challenging academic work usually involves sitting alone and thinking hard—but in fact, students think best when they think \u003cem>socially\u003c/em>. Social activities they engage in with peers, like storytelling, debating, and teaching, activate cognitive processes that remain dormant when students think by themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Take advantage of the “protégé effect”:\u003c/strong> The act of \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0361476X13000209\">teaching someone else\u003c/a> leads the \u003cem>teacher\u003c/em> to learn—even more than the student. As highly social creatures, we’re more motivated by the goal of conveying information to others than by the goal of simply studying for its own sake. Even struggling learners can benefit, by teaching younger students or by teaching their family members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ask students to create an instructional video:\u003c/strong> Teaching-for-learning can produce benefits for the teacher even when there are no “students” present. \u003ca href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959475219301161\">Recording a video\u003c/a> generates feelings of “social presence”—the feeling that others are watching—leading many of the same factors involved in face-to-face teaching to kick in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Promote students’ sense of “productive agency”:\u003c/strong> Create opportunities for student-teachers to enjoy the \u003ca href=\"https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-27120-003\">fruits of their labors\u003c/a>: it’s motivating for people to see their pupils exhibiting and applying the knowledge they have been taught.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Set up a “cascading mentorship”:\u003c/strong> A senior group can teach a more junior group, who can in turn instruct a still-less-experienced group, thereby \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23887013/\">multiplying the benefits\u003c/a> of teaching-to-learn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Find the underlying dispute:\u003c/strong> Much of what we learn in educational settings is boring and forgettable because it’s been drained of all conflict, presented as settled wisdom. But almost every topic can be reinvigorated by casting it in terms of a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00091380009602706\">constructive controversy\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Thinking with Groups\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The days of the lone genius are over; in our era, the sheer abundance of information and the increasing specialization of knowledge mean that we and our students have to trade our habits of individual thinking for new practices that activate the powerful “group mind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Have students move in sync:\u003c/strong> Engaging in \u003ca href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00450.x\">coordinated physical movement\u003c/a> leads people to like others more, identify with them more closely, and cooperate with them more effectively. This can even take the form of a shared stroll: Research shows that when people walk together, they automatically and unconsciously match up their bodily movements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Engage in group rituals:\u003c/strong> \u003ca href=\"https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53485734e4b0fffc0dcc64c2/t/54735002e4b087a17999499e/1416843266236/legare-wen-ISSBD-2014.pdf?utm_source=Brilliant%3A+The+New+Science+of+Smart+Newsletter&utm_campaign=adefa6f6e5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_6-7-2021&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9c734401c1-adefa6f6e5-311867093\">Ritual activities\u003c/a> in which people do the same thing at the same time—even if it’s simply sharing a meal together—promote a sense of belonging and mutual trust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Create “shared artifacts”:\u003c/strong> Group work is facilitated by the production of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ics.uci.edu/~corps/phaseii/OlsonOlson-DistanceMatters-HCIJ.pdf\">such artifacts\u003c/a>, which should be \u003cem>large\u003c/em>, \u003cem>complex\u003c/em>, \u003cem>persistent\u003c/em>, and \u003cem>revisable\u003c/em>. Bonus: when such artifacts are available, people tend to gesture at them—enhancing their own understanding and that of their team members.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Implement the “jigsaw classroom”:\u003c/strong> This \u003ca href=\"https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/014616727900500405\">instructional technique\u003c/a>, invented in the midst of the desegregation battles of the early 1970s, has been shown to increase cooperation and teamwork even as it boosts learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Generate a sense of “shared fate”:\u003c/strong> A sense of \u003ca href=\"https://hbr.org/2015/06/get-rid-of-unhealthy-competition-on-your-team\">group motivation\u003c/a> arises when the fates of each individual are bound up with one another—when they rise or fall together. Adjust the incentives and rewards offered to group members such that the outcome, good or bad, is experienced the same way by all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Annie Murphy Paul is a science writer and author of \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy/dp/0544947665/\">The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain\u003c/a>,\" and \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Months-Before-Birth-Shape/dp/074329663X\">Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.\u003c/a>\"\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Discovering Better Ways to Learn as an Adult",
"title": "Discovering Better Ways to Learn as an Adult",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">If you’d met Ulrich Boser while he was still in school, you might not have tagged him as a guy who would one day write a book about learning. Early in his life, at least, learning was a struggle. “School was tough for me from the very start—I repeated kindergarten,” Boser tells me ruefully. All these years, he’s kept a piece of paper with him: the school psychologist’s report on his learning problems. He elaborates further in a new book: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“Different theories about the cause of my difficulties floated around, vague potential explanations. One account held that I was slow to learn because my immigrant parents spoke German at home. Others claimed that I had an auditory problem, that my brain wasn’t wired correctly when it came to listening. Still others believed I lacked intelligence, that almost magical ability to think through issues and solve problems.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Over time, however, Boser learned how to learn, and he began to excel academically. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington, D.C.—and the author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.rodalebooks.com/learn-better/\">\u003ci>Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. Boser was motivated to write the book by his own experience, and by an explosion in research in the learning sciences that has taken place over the last 20 years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“For a long time, people assumed that the ability to learn was the same thing as intelligence: If you’re smart, you can learn,” says Boser. “What we know now is that specific approaches and techniques can increase students’ success.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Over the past couple of decades, the science of learning “has gone from an obscure topic to a well-established field,” he writes. “Still, most of the research findings have remained buried in dusty academic journals and obscure government reports. Far too little has reached the public. Far too little has changed how people learn.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.rodalebooks.com/learn-better/\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48883\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2017/08/Learn-better-e1501700035986.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"383\">\u003c/a>In \u003ci>Learn Better\u003c/i>, Boser explores the research literature, interviews psychologists and cognitive scientists, and even tries out promising educational techniques on his two daughters, taking them to math classes employing the abacus, an ancient Chinese counting tool. He also adopts research-based approaches himself. Like all of us these days, Boser observes, he has “to learn new information all day, every day.” Persuaded by studies showing the importance of feedback, Boser began asking colleagues for critiques after he gave a presentation. Impressed with research on the cultivation of higher-order thinking, he began asking himself “metacognitive questions” as he worked on the book: \u003ci>Do I know this about learning? Why do I know this about learning? \u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">At times, he admits, Boser found himself reverting to old habits. “We know from decades of research that re-reading written material gives us a false sense of fluency—we feel like we know it, but we really don’t,” he says. “Much more effective is putting the material away and trying to recall it from memory. I know this—but I would still find myself re-reading my notes before a speech. I’d catch myself and wonder, \u003ci>Have I learned nothing?!\u003c/i>”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Actually, of course, Boser has learned quite a lot, and he conveys it in an accessible and enjoyable style in \u003cem>Learn Better.\u003c/em> He scrupulously reports the research of others, and shares the results of studies he led himself at the Center for American Progress—for example: “Working with some of the nation’s most respected learning experts, I recently conducted a survey to see what people knew about how to acquire a skill, and the results were remarkable. While an overwhelming percentage of Americans said that they knew the basics of effective teaching and learning, they harbored a lot of weak intuitions and false beliefs about how people learn.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">It’s more important than ever that we correct these misconceptions, replacing them with an evidence-based understanding of how learning actually works. Having overcome an inauspicious start to his educational career, Boser today holds the ability to learn above all others:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“We have to realize that in a world filled with data, when facts and figures flow as freely as water, when even cars are driving themselves, we have to be able to acquire new forms of expertise quickly and effectively,” he writes. “Learning to learn is what experts call the “ultimate survival tool,” one of the most important talents of the modern era, the skill that precedes all other skills. Because once you know how to learn, you can learn almost anything, and as a society, we need much richer forms of education, where information and knowledge work to foster the problem-solving skills that ultimately matter.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">If you’d met Ulrich Boser while he was still in school, you might not have tagged him as a guy who would one day write a book about learning. Early in his life, at least, learning was a struggle. “School was tough for me from the very start—I repeated kindergarten,” Boser tells me ruefully. All these years, he’s kept a piece of paper with him: the school psychologist’s report on his learning problems. He elaborates further in a new book: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“Different theories about the cause of my difficulties floated around, vague potential explanations. One account held that I was slow to learn because my immigrant parents spoke German at home. Others claimed that I had an auditory problem, that my brain wasn’t wired correctly when it came to listening. Still others believed I lacked intelligence, that almost magical ability to think through issues and solve problems.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Over time, however, Boser learned how to learn, and he began to excel academically. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington, D.C.—and the author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.rodalebooks.com/learn-better/\">\u003ci>Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything\u003c/i>\u003c/a>. Boser was motivated to write the book by his own experience, and by an explosion in research in the learning sciences that has taken place over the last 20 years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“For a long time, people assumed that the ability to learn was the same thing as intelligence: If you’re smart, you can learn,” says Boser. “What we know now is that specific approaches and techniques can increase students’ success.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Over the past couple of decades, the science of learning “has gone from an obscure topic to a well-established field,” he writes. “Still, most of the research findings have remained buried in dusty academic journals and obscure government reports. Far too little has reached the public. Far too little has changed how people learn.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.rodalebooks.com/learn-better/\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48883\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2017/08/Learn-better-e1501700035986.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"383\">\u003c/a>In \u003ci>Learn Better\u003c/i>, Boser explores the research literature, interviews psychologists and cognitive scientists, and even tries out promising educational techniques on his two daughters, taking them to math classes employing the abacus, an ancient Chinese counting tool. He also adopts research-based approaches himself. Like all of us these days, Boser observes, he has “to learn new information all day, every day.” Persuaded by studies showing the importance of feedback, Boser began asking colleagues for critiques after he gave a presentation. Impressed with research on the cultivation of higher-order thinking, he began asking himself “metacognitive questions” as he worked on the book: \u003ci>Do I know this about learning? Why do I know this about learning? \u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">At times, he admits, Boser found himself reverting to old habits. “We know from decades of research that re-reading written material gives us a false sense of fluency—we feel like we know it, but we really don’t,” he says. “Much more effective is putting the material away and trying to recall it from memory. I know this—but I would still find myself re-reading my notes before a speech. I’d catch myself and wonder, \u003ci>Have I learned nothing?!\u003c/i>”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Actually, of course, Boser has learned quite a lot, and he conveys it in an accessible and enjoyable style in \u003cem>Learn Better.\u003c/em> He scrupulously reports the research of others, and shares the results of studies he led himself at the Center for American Progress—for example: “Working with some of the nation’s most respected learning experts, I recently conducted a survey to see what people knew about how to acquire a skill, and the results were remarkable. While an overwhelming percentage of Americans said that they knew the basics of effective teaching and learning, they harbored a lot of weak intuitions and false beliefs about how people learn.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">It’s more important than ever that we correct these misconceptions, replacing them with an evidence-based understanding of how learning actually works. Having overcome an inauspicious start to his educational career, Boser today holds the ability to learn above all others:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“We have to realize that in a world filled with data, when facts and figures flow as freely as water, when even cars are driving themselves, we have to be able to acquire new forms of expertise quickly and effectively,” he writes. “Learning to learn is what experts call the “ultimate survival tool,” one of the most important talents of the modern era, the skill that precedes all other skills. Because once you know how to learn, you can learn almost anything, and as a society, we need much richer forms of education, where information and knowledge work to foster the problem-solving skills that ultimately matter.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Let's Move! How Body Movements Drive Learning Through Technology",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_36847\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-36847\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/07/Screen-Shot-2014-07-10-at-11.53.33-AM-300x167.png\" alt=\"Alien Health Game\" width=\"300\" height=\"167\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alien Health Game\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: it addresses itself only to the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture, dating to Descartes and before. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the most abstract mathematical or literary concepts, they maintain, are understood in terms of the experience of our senses and of moving ourselves through space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This perspective, known as “embodied cognition,” is now becoming a lens through which to look at educational technology. Work in the field shows promising signs that incorporating bodily movements—even subtle ones—can improve the learning that’s done on computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, Margaret Chan and John Black of Teachers College, Columbia University have \u003ca href=\"http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150044\">shown\u003c/a> that physically manipulating an animation of a roller coaster helps students understand the workings of gravity and energy better than static onscreen images and text. Interestingly, this embodied exercise becomes even more helpful as the challenge of understanding grows greater: when students are younger, or the problem posed is more difficult. In counter-intuitive domains like physics, bodily rooted learning allows the learner to develop a “feel” for the concept being described, a physical sense that is more comprehensible and compelling than a concept that remains an abstract mental entity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In similar \u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131511001412\">experiments\u003c/a>, led by Insook Han of Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea, students learn about the concept of force by using a joystick to move two gears shown on a computer screen. Han’s studies show that allowing users to physically manipulate the gears in this way improves their memory and problem-solving performance on force-related questions. The richer the perceptual experience provided by the computer program, the greater the students’ understanding and retention of the material.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">Physically acting out knowledge to be learned or problems to be solved makes the conceptual metaphors employed by our brains a literal reality.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>There are other reasons that involving the body improves learning. One is that bodily movements provide the memory with additional cues with which to represent and retrieve the knowledge learned. Taking action in response to information, in addition to simply seeing or hearing it, creates a richer memory trace and supplies alternative avenues for recalling the memory later on. Movement may also allow users to shed some of their “cognitive load”—the burden imposed by the need to keep track of information. Instead of trying to imagine what the gears would do if moved, a mentally-taxing activity, learners can allow their hands to do it and see what happens, freeing up mental resources to think more deeply about what’s happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, physical movements made in the course of learning complement the brain’s way of handling information. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed to help us solve problems in the real world, moving through space and manipulating actual objects. More abstract forms of thought, such as mathematics and written language, came later, and they repurposed older regions of the brain originally dedicated to processing input from the senses and from the motor system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This repurposing is apparent in the frequency with which we use physically grounded metaphors to express abstract ideas: counting is like moving through space (“the countdown is approaching zero”); accommodating two different principles is like “balancing” them on a scale. Bringing the body back into the equation can provide learners with a useful way station between concrete referents and all-out abstraction. Physically acting out knowledge to be learned or problems to be solved makes the conceptual metaphors employed by our brains a literal reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can see this principle at work in the research of Arthur Glenberg of Arizona State University. In a series of experiments carried out more than a decade ago, Glenberg \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ685001\">found\u003c/a> that children’s reading comprehension improved when they acted out a written text, using a set of representational toys (a miniature barn and horse, for example, accompanied a story about a farm). Glenberg then \u003ca href=\"http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11251-009-9096-7\">demonstrated\u003c/a> that the same procedure could work on a digital platform: in a 2011 experiment, he showed that having first- and second-grade students manipulate images of toys on a computer screen benefits their comprehension as much as physical manipulation of the toys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"3a57b7554b6428ff66e0c88384bb275d\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mina Johnson Glenberg (who is married to Arthur Glenberg and also works at Arizona State, as director of the university’s Embodied Games for Learning lab) is taking the embodied approach even further, designing educational games that engage learners’ entire bodies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"http://egl.lsi.asu.edu/alienhealth.html\">program\u003c/a> called The Alien Health Game, for example, presents students with this scenario: “You have just woken up to find an alien under your bed. It is hungry and it is your job to figure out what makes it healthy.” (A bonus: the game is so physically active that it measurably elevates users’ heart rates.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other \u003ca href=\"http://www.smallablearning.com/\">work\u003c/a>, Johnson Glenberg employs Xbox Kinect-like technology to capture students’ movements as they interact with images projected onto a whiteboard. The interface is being used to teach subjects like physics and chemistry in half a dozen American schools, including Quest to Learn in New York City and ChicagoQuest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>PROMISING EARLY RESEARCH\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s early days for these real-world applications. But the research behind them can help teachers, parents and students better evaluate and use educational technology products that are already widely available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An awareness of embodied cognition, for example, might lead users to prefer touch-sensitive devices like the iPad, which respond directly to the movement of users’ fingers on the screen, over computers that interpose a keyboard between screen and user. \u003ca href=\"http://pocketknowledge.tc.columbia.edu/home.php/viewfile/102926\">According\u003c/a> to John Black of Teachers College, Columbia University, technology that evokes movements that complement the concepts to be learned is also likely to be effective from an embodied point of view: for example, an application in which counting is expressed by tapping on a mouse (discrete movements that complement the discrete nature of counting) will better promote learning than a program that asks users to make a sliding movement as they count (a continuous action at odds with the discrete nature of counting).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parents and educators can also treat the virtual “movements” involved in many educational programs and games as preparation for more traditional learning. For example, John Black and Jessica Hammer, also of Teachers College, Columbia University, \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ829875\">showed\u003c/a> that moving through the virtual spaces of the history game \u003cem>Civilization\u003c/em> made players much better at learning history from a conventional textbook than players of the game \u003cem>The Sims\u003c/em>. Even though \u003cem>Civilization\u003c/em> players possessed no greater knowledge of history when they opened the textbook, their virtually-embodied experience of the era under study made them better prepared to absorb the lessons of the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators and parents can also help students incorporate bodily movements of their own into the use of educational technology, an approach that Black has applied to the programming language Scratch. Asking students to act out the motions they intend for the program’s virtual “agent” using their own bodies, and then programming the agents to make the same moves, has shown itself to be “a particularly effective learning approach,” Black \u003ca href=\"http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-5716-0_3\">writes\u003c/a>. Even when they’re learning on computers, it’s wise to remember that students are more than mental machines. \u003cem>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article originally appeared on the \u003ca href=\"http://hechingerreport.org/content/body-next-breakthrough-education-tech_16629/\" target=\"_blank\">Hechinger Report\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/07/educational_technology_s_next_move_tools_to_help_kids_learn_with_their_bodies.html\" target=\"_blank\">Slate\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_36847\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-36847\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/07/Screen-Shot-2014-07-10-at-11.53.33-AM-300x167.png\" alt=\"Alien Health Game\" width=\"300\" height=\"167\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alien Health Game\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: it addresses itself only to the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture, dating to Descartes and before. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the most abstract mathematical or literary concepts, they maintain, are understood in terms of the experience of our senses and of moving ourselves through space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This perspective, known as “embodied cognition,” is now becoming a lens through which to look at educational technology. Work in the field shows promising signs that incorporating bodily movements—even subtle ones—can improve the learning that’s done on computers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, Margaret Chan and John Black of Teachers College, Columbia University have \u003ca href=\"http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150044\">shown\u003c/a> that physically manipulating an animation of a roller coaster helps students understand the workings of gravity and energy better than static onscreen images and text. Interestingly, this embodied exercise becomes even more helpful as the challenge of understanding grows greater: when students are younger, or the problem posed is more difficult. In counter-intuitive domains like physics, bodily rooted learning allows the learner to develop a “feel” for the concept being described, a physical sense that is more comprehensible and compelling than a concept that remains an abstract mental entity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In similar \u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131511001412\">experiments\u003c/a>, led by Insook Han of Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea, students learn about the concept of force by using a joystick to move two gears shown on a computer screen. Han’s studies show that allowing users to physically manipulate the gears in this way improves their memory and problem-solving performance on force-related questions. The richer the perceptual experience provided by the computer program, the greater the students’ understanding and retention of the material.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">Physically acting out knowledge to be learned or problems to be solved makes the conceptual metaphors employed by our brains a literal reality.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>There are other reasons that involving the body improves learning. One is that bodily movements provide the memory with additional cues with which to represent and retrieve the knowledge learned. Taking action in response to information, in addition to simply seeing or hearing it, creates a richer memory trace and supplies alternative avenues for recalling the memory later on. Movement may also allow users to shed some of their “cognitive load”—the burden imposed by the need to keep track of information. Instead of trying to imagine what the gears would do if moved, a mentally-taxing activity, learners can allow their hands to do it and see what happens, freeing up mental resources to think more deeply about what’s happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, physical movements made in the course of learning complement the brain’s way of handling information. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed to help us solve problems in the real world, moving through space and manipulating actual objects. More abstract forms of thought, such as mathematics and written language, came later, and they repurposed older regions of the brain originally dedicated to processing input from the senses and from the motor system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This repurposing is apparent in the frequency with which we use physically grounded metaphors to express abstract ideas: counting is like moving through space (“the countdown is approaching zero”); accommodating two different principles is like “balancing” them on a scale. Bringing the body back into the equation can provide learners with a useful way station between concrete referents and all-out abstraction. Physically acting out knowledge to be learned or problems to be solved makes the conceptual metaphors employed by our brains a literal reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can see this principle at work in the research of Arthur Glenberg of Arizona State University. In a series of experiments carried out more than a decade ago, Glenberg \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ685001\">found\u003c/a> that children’s reading comprehension improved when they acted out a written text, using a set of representational toys (a miniature barn and horse, for example, accompanied a story about a farm). Glenberg then \u003ca href=\"http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11251-009-9096-7\">demonstrated\u003c/a> that the same procedure could work on a digital platform: in a 2011 experiment, he showed that having first- and second-grade students manipulate images of toys on a computer screen benefits their comprehension as much as physical manipulation of the toys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mina Johnson Glenberg (who is married to Arthur Glenberg and also works at Arizona State, as director of the university’s Embodied Games for Learning lab) is taking the embodied approach even further, designing educational games that engage learners’ entire bodies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"http://egl.lsi.asu.edu/alienhealth.html\">program\u003c/a> called The Alien Health Game, for example, presents students with this scenario: “You have just woken up to find an alien under your bed. It is hungry and it is your job to figure out what makes it healthy.” (A bonus: the game is so physically active that it measurably elevates users’ heart rates.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other \u003ca href=\"http://www.smallablearning.com/\">work\u003c/a>, Johnson Glenberg employs Xbox Kinect-like technology to capture students’ movements as they interact with images projected onto a whiteboard. The interface is being used to teach subjects like physics and chemistry in half a dozen American schools, including Quest to Learn in New York City and ChicagoQuest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>PROMISING EARLY RESEARCH\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s early days for these real-world applications. But the research behind them can help teachers, parents and students better evaluate and use educational technology products that are already widely available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An awareness of embodied cognition, for example, might lead users to prefer touch-sensitive devices like the iPad, which respond directly to the movement of users’ fingers on the screen, over computers that interpose a keyboard between screen and user. \u003ca href=\"http://pocketknowledge.tc.columbia.edu/home.php/viewfile/102926\">According\u003c/a> to John Black of Teachers College, Columbia University, technology that evokes movements that complement the concepts to be learned is also likely to be effective from an embodied point of view: for example, an application in which counting is expressed by tapping on a mouse (discrete movements that complement the discrete nature of counting) will better promote learning than a program that asks users to make a sliding movement as they count (a continuous action at odds with the discrete nature of counting).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parents and educators can also treat the virtual “movements” involved in many educational programs and games as preparation for more traditional learning. For example, John Black and Jessica Hammer, also of Teachers College, Columbia University, \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ829875\">showed\u003c/a> that moving through the virtual spaces of the history game \u003cem>Civilization\u003c/em> made players much better at learning history from a conventional textbook than players of the game \u003cem>The Sims\u003c/em>. Even though \u003cem>Civilization\u003c/em> players possessed no greater knowledge of history when they opened the textbook, their virtually-embodied experience of the era under study made them better prepared to absorb the lessons of the text.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators and parents can also help students incorporate bodily movements of their own into the use of educational technology, an approach that Black has applied to the programming language Scratch. Asking students to act out the motions they intend for the program’s virtual “agent” using their own bodies, and then programming the agents to make the same moves, has shown itself to be “a particularly effective learning approach,” Black \u003ca href=\"http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-5716-0_3\">writes\u003c/a>. Even when they’re learning on computers, it’s wise to remember that students are more than mental machines. \u003cem>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article originally appeared on the \u003ca href=\"http://hechingerreport.org/content/body-next-breakthrough-education-tech_16629/\" target=\"_blank\">Hechinger Report\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/07/educational_technology_s_next_move_tools_to_help_kids_learn_with_their_bodies.html\" target=\"_blank\">Slate\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_36538\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-36538\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap.jpg\" alt=\"(Tina Barseghian)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Tina Barseghian)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The local name for the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington is “the Badlands,” and with good reason. Pockmarked with empty lots and burned-out row houses, the area has an unemployment rate of 29 percent and a poverty rate of 90 percent. Just a few miles to the northwest, the genteel neighborhood of Chestnut Hill seems to belong to a different universe. Here, educated professionals shop the boutiques along Germantown Avenue and return home to gracious stone and brick houses, the average price of which hovers above $400,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Within these very different communities, however, are two places remarkably similar in the resources they provide: the local public libraries. Each has been retooled with banks of new computers, the latest software and speedy Internet access. Susan B. Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy education at New York University, and Donna C. Celano, an assistant professor of communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, spent hundreds of hours in the Chestnut Hill and Badlands libraries, watching how patrons used the books and computers on offer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"9a8fc50cb7bffbee8608b4f676bc63d7\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two were especially interested in how the introduction of computers might “level the playing field” for the neighborhoods’ young people, children of “concentrated affluence” and “concentrated poverty.” They undertook their observations in a hopeful frame of mind: “Given the wizardry of these machines and their ability to support children’s self-teaching,” they wondered, “might we begin to see a closing of the opportunity gap?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many hours of observation and analysis later, Neuman and Celanano were forced to acknowledge a radically different outcome: “The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it,” they wrote in a \u003ca href=\"http://store.tcpress.com/0807753580.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">2012 book based on their Philadelphia library study\u003c/a>. With the spread of educational technology, they predicted, “the not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get even larger.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neuman and Celano are not the only researchers to reach this surprising and distressing conclusion. While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: it is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not a story of the familiar “digital divide” — a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. This has to do, rather, with a phenomenon Neuman and Celano observed again and again in the two libraries: granted access to technology, affluent kids and poor kids use tech differently. They select different programs and features, engage in different types of mental activity, and come away with different kinds of knowledge and experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The un-leveling impact of technology also has to do with a phenomenon known as the “Matthew Effect”: the tendency for early advantages to multiply over time. Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term in 1968, making reference to a line in the gospel of Matthew (“for whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"pull-quote half right\">\"The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it. The not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get even larger.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://eric.ed.gov./?id=EJ343639\" target=\"_blank\">paper published in 1986\u003c/a>, psychologists Keith E. Stanovich and Anne E. Cunningham applied the Matthew Effect to reading. They showed that children who get off to a strong early start with reading acquire more vocabulary words and more background knowledge, which in turn makes reading easier and more enjoyable, leading them to read still more: a virtuous cycle of achievement. Children who struggle early on with reading fail to acquire vocabulary and knowledge, find reading even more difficult as a result, and consequently do it less: a dispiriting downward spiral.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now researchers are beginning to document a digital Matthew Effect, in which the already advantaged gain more from technology than do the less fortunate. As with books and reading, the most knowledgeable, most experienced, and most supported students are those best positioned to use computers to leap further ahead. For example: In Texas’s \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED536296\" target=\"_blank\">Technology Immersion Pilot\u003c/a>, a $20 million project carried out there beginning in 2003, laptops were randomly assigned to public middle school students. The benefit of owning one of these computers, researchers later determined, was significantly greater for those students whose test scores were high to begin with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This may stem in part from the influence of adults on children’s computer activities, as Susan Neuman and Donna Celano observed in the libraries they monitored. At the Chestnut Hill library, they found, young visitors to the computer area were almost always accompanied by a parent or grandparent. Adults positioned themselves close to the children and close to the screen, offering a stream of questions and suggestions. Kids were steered away from games and toward educational programs emphasizing letters, numbers and shapes. When the children became confused or frustrated, the grownups guided them to a solution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Badlands library boasted computers and software identical to Chestnut Hill’s, but here, children manipulated the computers on their own, while accompanying adults watched silently or remained in other areas of the library altogether. Lacking the “scaffolding” provided by the Chestnut Hill parents, the Badlands kids clicked around frenetically, rarely staying with one program for long. Older children figured out how to use the programs as games; younger children became discouraged and banged on the keyboard or wandered away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These different patterns of use had quantifiable effects on the children’s learning, Neuman and Celano showed. Chestnut Hill preschoolers encountered twice as many written words on computer screens as did Badlands children; the more affluent toddlers received 17 times as much adult attention while using the library’s computers as did their less privileged counterparts. The researchers documented differences among older kids as well: Chestnut Hill “tweens,” or 10- to 13-year-olds, spent five times as long reading informational text on computers as did Badlands tweens, who tended to gravitate toward online games and entertainment. When Badlands tweens did seek out information on the web, it was related to their homework only 9 percent of the time, while 39 percent of the Chestnut Hill tweens’ information searches were homework-related.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research is finding other differences in how economically disadvantaged children use technology. Some evidence suggests, for example, that schools in low-income neighborhoods are more apt to employ computers for drill and practice sessions than for creative or innovative projects. Poor children also bring less knowledge to their encounters with computers. Crucially, the comparatively rich background knowledge possessed by high-income students is not only about technology itself, but about everything in the wide world beyond one’s neighborhood. Not only are affluent kids more likely to know how to Google; they’re more likely to know what to Google for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Slogans like “one laptop per child” and “one-to-one computing” evoke an appealingly egalitarian vision: If every child has a computer, every child is starting off on equal footing. But though the sameness of the hardware may feel satisfyingly fair, it is superficial. A computer in the hands of a disadvantaged child is in an important sense not the same thing as a computer in the hands of a child of privilege.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The focus of educators, politicians, and philanthropists on differences in access to technology has obscured another problem: what some call “the second digital divide,” or differences in the use of technology. Access to adequate equipment and reliable high-speed connections remains a concern, of course. But improving the way that technology is employed in learning is an even bigger and more important issue. Addressing it would require a focus on people: training teachers, librarians, parents and children themselves to use computers effectively. It would require a focus on practices: what one researcher has called the dynamic “social envelope” that surrounds the hunks of plastic and silicon on our desks. And it would require a focus on knowledge: background knowledge that is both broad and deep. (The Common Core Standards, which do not so much as mention technology, may be education’s most significant contribution to true computer literacy.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would take all this to begin to “level the playing field” for America’s students—far more than a bank of computers in a library, or even one laptop per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article originally appeared on the \u003ca href=\"http://hechingerreport.org/content/educational-technology-isnt-leveling-playing-field_16499/\" target=\"_blank\">Hechinger Report\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/neuman_celano_library_study_educational_technology_worsens_achievement_gaps.html\" target=\"_blank\">Slate\u003c/a>.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The way kids interact with computers and software -- and the support they get from adults -- is more important to improve learning outcomes than merely having access to the technology, study finds.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_36538\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-36538\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap.jpg\" alt=\"(Tina Barseghian)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/opportunity-gap-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Tina Barseghian)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The local name for the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington is “the Badlands,” and with good reason. Pockmarked with empty lots and burned-out row houses, the area has an unemployment rate of 29 percent and a poverty rate of 90 percent. Just a few miles to the northwest, the genteel neighborhood of Chestnut Hill seems to belong to a different universe. Here, educated professionals shop the boutiques along Germantown Avenue and return home to gracious stone and brick houses, the average price of which hovers above $400,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Within these very different communities, however, are two places remarkably similar in the resources they provide: the local public libraries. Each has been retooled with banks of new computers, the latest software and speedy Internet access. Susan B. Neuman, a professor of early childhood and literacy education at New York University, and Donna C. Celano, an assistant professor of communication at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, spent hundreds of hours in the Chestnut Hill and Badlands libraries, watching how patrons used the books and computers on offer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two were especially interested in how the introduction of computers might “level the playing field” for the neighborhoods’ young people, children of “concentrated affluence” and “concentrated poverty.” They undertook their observations in a hopeful frame of mind: “Given the wizardry of these machines and their ability to support children’s self-teaching,” they wondered, “might we begin to see a closing of the opportunity gap?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many hours of observation and analysis later, Neuman and Celanano were forced to acknowledge a radically different outcome: “The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it,” they wrote in a \u003ca href=\"http://store.tcpress.com/0807753580.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">2012 book based on their Philadelphia library study\u003c/a>. With the spread of educational technology, they predicted, “the not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get even larger.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Neuman and Celano are not the only researchers to reach this surprising and distressing conclusion. While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: it is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is not a story of the familiar “digital divide” — a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. This has to do, rather, with a phenomenon Neuman and Celano observed again and again in the two libraries: granted access to technology, affluent kids and poor kids use tech differently. They select different programs and features, engage in different types of mental activity, and come away with different kinds of knowledge and experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The un-leveling impact of technology also has to do with a phenomenon known as the “Matthew Effect”: the tendency for early advantages to multiply over time. Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term in 1968, making reference to a line in the gospel of Matthew (“for whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"pull-quote half right\">\"The very tool designed to level the playing field is, in fact, un-leveling it. The not-so-small disparities in skills for children of affluence and children of poverty are about to get even larger.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://eric.ed.gov./?id=EJ343639\" target=\"_blank\">paper published in 1986\u003c/a>, psychologists Keith E. Stanovich and Anne E. Cunningham applied the Matthew Effect to reading. They showed that children who get off to a strong early start with reading acquire more vocabulary words and more background knowledge, which in turn makes reading easier and more enjoyable, leading them to read still more: a virtuous cycle of achievement. Children who struggle early on with reading fail to acquire vocabulary and knowledge, find reading even more difficult as a result, and consequently do it less: a dispiriting downward spiral.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now researchers are beginning to document a digital Matthew Effect, in which the already advantaged gain more from technology than do the less fortunate. As with books and reading, the most knowledgeable, most experienced, and most supported students are those best positioned to use computers to leap further ahead. For example: In Texas’s \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED536296\" target=\"_blank\">Technology Immersion Pilot\u003c/a>, a $20 million project carried out there beginning in 2003, laptops were randomly assigned to public middle school students. The benefit of owning one of these computers, researchers later determined, was significantly greater for those students whose test scores were high to begin with.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This may stem in part from the influence of adults on children’s computer activities, as Susan Neuman and Donna Celano observed in the libraries they monitored. At the Chestnut Hill library, they found, young visitors to the computer area were almost always accompanied by a parent or grandparent. Adults positioned themselves close to the children and close to the screen, offering a stream of questions and suggestions. Kids were steered away from games and toward educational programs emphasizing letters, numbers and shapes. When the children became confused or frustrated, the grownups guided them to a solution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Badlands library boasted computers and software identical to Chestnut Hill’s, but here, children manipulated the computers on their own, while accompanying adults watched silently or remained in other areas of the library altogether. Lacking the “scaffolding” provided by the Chestnut Hill parents, the Badlands kids clicked around frenetically, rarely staying with one program for long. Older children figured out how to use the programs as games; younger children became discouraged and banged on the keyboard or wandered away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These different patterns of use had quantifiable effects on the children’s learning, Neuman and Celano showed. Chestnut Hill preschoolers encountered twice as many written words on computer screens as did Badlands children; the more affluent toddlers received 17 times as much adult attention while using the library’s computers as did their less privileged counterparts. The researchers documented differences among older kids as well: Chestnut Hill “tweens,” or 10- to 13-year-olds, spent five times as long reading informational text on computers as did Badlands tweens, who tended to gravitate toward online games and entertainment. When Badlands tweens did seek out information on the web, it was related to their homework only 9 percent of the time, while 39 percent of the Chestnut Hill tweens’ information searches were homework-related.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research is finding other differences in how economically disadvantaged children use technology. Some evidence suggests, for example, that schools in low-income neighborhoods are more apt to employ computers for drill and practice sessions than for creative or innovative projects. Poor children also bring less knowledge to their encounters with computers. Crucially, the comparatively rich background knowledge possessed by high-income students is not only about technology itself, but about everything in the wide world beyond one’s neighborhood. Not only are affluent kids more likely to know how to Google; they’re more likely to know what to Google for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Slogans like “one laptop per child” and “one-to-one computing” evoke an appealingly egalitarian vision: If every child has a computer, every child is starting off on equal footing. But though the sameness of the hardware may feel satisfyingly fair, it is superficial. A computer in the hands of a disadvantaged child is in an important sense not the same thing as a computer in the hands of a child of privilege.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The focus of educators, politicians, and philanthropists on differences in access to technology has obscured another problem: what some call “the second digital divide,” or differences in the use of technology. Access to adequate equipment and reliable high-speed connections remains a concern, of course. But improving the way that technology is employed in learning is an even bigger and more important issue. Addressing it would require a focus on people: training teachers, librarians, parents and children themselves to use computers effectively. It would require a focus on practices: what one researcher has called the dynamic “social envelope” that surrounds the hunks of plastic and silicon on our desks. And it would require a focus on knowledge: background knowledge that is both broad and deep. (The Common Core Standards, which do not so much as mention technology, may be education’s most significant contribution to true computer literacy.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would take all this to begin to “level the playing field” for America’s students—far more than a bank of computers in a library, or even one laptop per child.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article originally appeared on the \u003ca href=\"http://hechingerreport.org/content/educational-technology-isnt-leveling-playing-field_16499/\" target=\"_blank\">Hechinger Report\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/neuman_celano_library_study_educational_technology_worsens_achievement_gaps.html\" target=\"_blank\">Slate\u003c/a>.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_36053\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618.jpg\" alt=\"USDOE\" width=\"640\" height=\"329\" class=\"size-full wp-image-36053\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618-400x206.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618-320x165.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">USDOE\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">When we think and talk about learning, the metaphors we use matter. The language we employ when we describe how learning works can illuminate the process, allowing us to make accurate judgments and predictions—or it can lead us astray, setting up false expectations and giving us a misleading impression of what’s going on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the most common analogies we apply to education is that of a staircase. As we learn, this model assumes, we steadily ascend in our knowledge and skills, leaving more elementary approaches behind. A child learning math, for example, will replace a simple strategy like counting on fingers with a more sophisticated strategy like retrieving math facts from memory. Under the long-lasting influence of psychologist Jean Piaget, staircase-like “stage theories” continue to dominate our mental images of how learning operates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in important ways, the staircase metaphor fails to capture the way cognitive change actually works. Research shows that children (and adults!) employ a variety of strategies to solve problems, not only the one “typical” of their stage of development. Around the time that learners begin to adopt a more advanced approach, they may return to earlier, more primitive approaches for a while.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20130219_091810.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-5249\" title=\"20130219_091810\" src=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20130219_091810-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\">\u003c/a>This is not an orderly ascension up an ever-rising set of steps. It’s something more like waves on a beach, where one wave overtakes another and then pulls back, overtaken in turn by another advancing and then receding wave. “Overlapping waves” is, in fact, the name of a theory of intellectual development proposed by Robert Siegler, a professor of cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here is Siegler writing about traditional notions of learning in his \u003ca href=\"http://global.oup.com/academic/product/emerging-minds-9780195126631;jsessionid=5962270C962AFA2B729C7642ECF04833?cc=us&lang=en&\" target=\"_blank\">book\u003c/a> \u003cem>Emerging Minds\u003c/em>: “Children are depicted as thinking in a given way for an extended period of time (a tread on the staircase); then their thinking undergoes a sudden, vertical shift (a riser on the staircase); then they think in a different, higher way for another extended period of time (the next tread), and so on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And here is Siegler writing about another, more apt image: “Rather than development being seen as stepping up from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3, it is envisioned as a gradual ebbing and flowing of the frequencies of alternative ways of thinking, with new approaches being added and old ones being eliminated as well. To capture this perspective in a visual metaphor, think of a series of overlapping waves, with each wave corresponding to a different rule, strategy, theory, or way of thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research by Siegler and others shows that the overlapping waves model applies to learners of all ages, in all manner of subjects. Its image of a series of surging and receding waves is not only a more accurate view of learning than the staircase image; it’s also a more humane and forgiving one. How many of us have felt distressed to see our children, or ourselves, “slipping back” into ways of thinking and acting we thought we had outgrown? What a difference it makes to see such episodes not as a failure to ascend to the next stage, but as part of the natural movement, the ebb and flow, of learning. “Slipping back” isn’t a shameful retreat from our goal—it’s part of the process of getting there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2016/04/Podcast-Square-e1463002696628.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1078765985\">Subscribe in iTunes\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Don't miss an episode of \u003cem>Stories Teachers Share\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also available via \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/category/stories-teachers-share/feed/\">RSS\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "When we think and talk about learning, the metaphors we use matter. The language we employ when we describe how learning works can illuminate the process, allowing us to make accurate judgments and predictions—or it can lead us astray, setting up false expectations and giving us a misleading impression of what’s going on.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_36053\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618.jpg\" alt=\"USDOE\" width=\"640\" height=\"329\" class=\"size-full wp-image-36053\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618-400x206.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/06/9610022352_e056e19c70_z-e1401809360618-320x165.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">USDOE\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">When we think and talk about learning, the metaphors we use matter. The language we employ when we describe how learning works can illuminate the process, allowing us to make accurate judgments and predictions—or it can lead us astray, setting up false expectations and giving us a misleading impression of what’s going on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the most common analogies we apply to education is that of a staircase. As we learn, this model assumes, we steadily ascend in our knowledge and skills, leaving more elementary approaches behind. A child learning math, for example, will replace a simple strategy like counting on fingers with a more sophisticated strategy like retrieving math facts from memory. Under the long-lasting influence of psychologist Jean Piaget, staircase-like “stage theories” continue to dominate our mental images of how learning operates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in important ways, the staircase metaphor fails to capture the way cognitive change actually works. Research shows that children (and adults!) employ a variety of strategies to solve problems, not only the one “typical” of their stage of development. Around the time that learners begin to adopt a more advanced approach, they may return to earlier, more primitive approaches for a while.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20130219_091810.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-5249\" title=\"20130219_091810\" src=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/20130219_091810-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\">\u003c/a>This is not an orderly ascension up an ever-rising set of steps. It’s something more like waves on a beach, where one wave overtakes another and then pulls back, overtaken in turn by another advancing and then receding wave. “Overlapping waves” is, in fact, the name of a theory of intellectual development proposed by Robert Siegler, a professor of cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here is Siegler writing about traditional notions of learning in his \u003ca href=\"http://global.oup.com/academic/product/emerging-minds-9780195126631;jsessionid=5962270C962AFA2B729C7642ECF04833?cc=us&lang=en&\" target=\"_blank\">book\u003c/a> \u003cem>Emerging Minds\u003c/em>: “Children are depicted as thinking in a given way for an extended period of time (a tread on the staircase); then their thinking undergoes a sudden, vertical shift (a riser on the staircase); then they think in a different, higher way for another extended period of time (the next tread), and so on.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And here is Siegler writing about another, more apt image: “Rather than development being seen as stepping up from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3, it is envisioned as a gradual ebbing and flowing of the frequencies of alternative ways of thinking, with new approaches being added and old ones being eliminated as well. To capture this perspective in a visual metaphor, think of a series of overlapping waves, with each wave corresponding to a different rule, strategy, theory, or way of thinking.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research by Siegler and others shows that the overlapping waves model applies to learners of all ages, in all manner of subjects. Its image of a series of surging and receding waves is not only a more accurate view of learning than the staircase image; it’s also a more humane and forgiving one. How many of us have felt distressed to see our children, or ourselves, “slipping back” into ways of thinking and acting we thought we had outgrown? What a difference it makes to see such episodes not as a failure to ascend to the next stage, but as part of the natural movement, the ebb and flow, of learning. “Slipping back” isn’t a shameful retreat from our goal—it’s part of the process of getting there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2016/04/Podcast-Square-e1463002696628.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1078765985\">Subscribe in iTunes\u003c/a>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Don't miss an episode of \u003cem>Stories Teachers Share\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also available via \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/category/stories-teachers-share/feed/\">RSS\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Why Kids Should Be Allowed to Act Out (Scenes) In Class",
"title": "Why Kids Should Be Allowed to Act Out (Scenes) In Class",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_35153\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-35153\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568.jpg\" alt=\"5350633605_3088f877b6_z\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Physically acting out a written text—as an actor would walk himself through the gestures and emotions of a soliloquy during rehearsal—is an effective way to \u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/2014/01/how-to-use-your-memory-the-way-actors-do/\" target=\"_blank\">commit that text to memory\u003c/a>. For adults, this process of enactment imbues abstract words with concrete meaning, fixing them more firmly in our minds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For children, acting out words on the page can also yield benefits. Especially for beginning readers, physically moving objects or one’s own body can provide a crucial bridge between real-life people, things, and actions, and the printed words meant to represent them. Fluent readers take this correspondence for granted, but many children find it difficult to grasp.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In everyday life, after all, the words “dog” or “cup” are usually encountered when there’s an actual dog or cup around. But inside the pages of a book, words must be understood in the absence of such real-world “referents.” The research of Arthur Glenberg, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, has demonstrated that when children are given the opportunity to act out a written text, their reading comprehension can actually \u003cem>double\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2004-18154-002\" target=\"_blank\">one\u003c/a> of his studies, Glenberg asked first- and second-graders to read stories about life on a farm. The children were also given farm-related toys, such as a miniature barn, tractor and cow. Half of the kids were directed to simply read the stories a second time. The other half were instructed to use the toys to act out what they were reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After reading the sentence “The farmer drove the tractor to the barn,” for example, the child would move the toy tractor over to the toy barn. Youngsters who acted out the sentences were better able to make inferences about the text, and they later remembered much more about the stories than those who merely reread them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other \u003ca href=\"http://www.edweek.org/media/improvingreading-36read.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">studies\u003c/a>, Glenberg has found that the acting-out technique can help children solve word problems in math, too: elementary-school mathematics students who act out the text in word problems are more accurate in their calculations and more likely to reach the right answer. (In one such investigation, for example, students were asked to act out a zookeeper’s distribution of food to his animals while figuring out how many fish the hippos and alligators need.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In these experiments, it seems that enacting the “story” told within the math problem helps students identify the information important for its solution: enacting made them 35 percent less likely to be distracted by irrelevant numbers or other details included in the problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually, fluent readers become capable of “enacting” these scenarios in their heads (our brains appear always to be \u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/2014/04/what-happens-in-our-brains-as-we-read/\" target=\"_blank\">drawing on our experiences of bodily sensations and movements \u003c/a>as we read, creating mental simulations of the stories on the page). But while they’re still learning, less adept readers can benefit from seeing and feeling those printed words come to life under their hands.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_35153\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-35153\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568.jpg\" alt=\"5350633605_3088f877b6_z\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/04/5350633605_3088f877b6_z-e1398095831568-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Physically acting out a written text—as an actor would walk himself through the gestures and emotions of a soliloquy during rehearsal—is an effective way to \u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/2014/01/how-to-use-your-memory-the-way-actors-do/\" target=\"_blank\">commit that text to memory\u003c/a>. For adults, this process of enactment imbues abstract words with concrete meaning, fixing them more firmly in our minds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For children, acting out words on the page can also yield benefits. Especially for beginning readers, physically moving objects or one’s own body can provide a crucial bridge between real-life people, things, and actions, and the printed words meant to represent them. Fluent readers take this correspondence for granted, but many children find it difficult to grasp.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In everyday life, after all, the words “dog” or “cup” are usually encountered when there’s an actual dog or cup around. But inside the pages of a book, words must be understood in the absence of such real-world “referents.” The research of Arthur Glenberg, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, has demonstrated that when children are given the opportunity to act out a written text, their reading comprehension can actually \u003cem>double\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2004-18154-002\" target=\"_blank\">one\u003c/a> of his studies, Glenberg asked first- and second-graders to read stories about life on a farm. The children were also given farm-related toys, such as a miniature barn, tractor and cow. Half of the kids were directed to simply read the stories a second time. The other half were instructed to use the toys to act out what they were reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After reading the sentence “The farmer drove the tractor to the barn,” for example, the child would move the toy tractor over to the toy barn. Youngsters who acted out the sentences were better able to make inferences about the text, and they later remembered much more about the stories than those who merely reread them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other \u003ca href=\"http://www.edweek.org/media/improvingreading-36read.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">studies\u003c/a>, Glenberg has found that the acting-out technique can help children solve word problems in math, too: elementary-school mathematics students who act out the text in word problems are more accurate in their calculations and more likely to reach the right answer. (In one such investigation, for example, students were asked to act out a zookeeper’s distribution of food to his animals while figuring out how many fish the hippos and alligators need.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In these experiments, it seems that enacting the “story” told within the math problem helps students identify the information important for its solution: enacting made them 35 percent less likely to be distracted by irrelevant numbers or other details included in the problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually, fluent readers become capable of “enacting” these scenarios in their heads (our brains appear always to be \u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/2014/04/what-happens-in-our-brains-as-we-read/\" target=\"_blank\">drawing on our experiences of bodily sensations and movements \u003c/a>as we read, creating mental simulations of the stories on the page). But while they’re still learning, less adept readers can benefit from seeing and feeling those printed words come to life under their hands.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_34758\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-34758\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/03/478464141-e1395867640318-640x336.jpg\" alt=\"478464141\" width=\"640\" height=\"336\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The following is the transcript of the closing keynote speach at Sandbox Summit, a fantastic annual \u003ca href=\"http://sandboxsummit.org/home/\" target=\"_blank\">conference\u003c/a> that brings together all kinds of people interested in kids, technology and learning.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap\">I want to talk today about how we build bridges between old ideas and new ideas, between concepts that are close to home intellectually and those that are far afield. Because it is these bridges, these connections, that produce innovation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a popular notion that innovation arrives like a bolt out of the blue, as a radical departure from previous knowledge—when really, most new ideas are extensions, twists, variations on what’s come before. The skill of generating innovations is largely the skill of putting old things together in a new way, or looking at a familiar idea from a novel perspective, or using what we know already to understand something new.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I say “skill” because we don’t have to leave these encounters up to chance. We don’t have wait for lightning to strike. We can, right now, hone our ability to deploy \u003cem>analogies\u003c/em>. Analogies—comparing one entity to another, apparently different entity—is one of the most powerful tools humans have for understanding our world and for generating new knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In their \u003ca href=\"https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mental-leaps\" target=\"_blank\">book\u003c/a> \u003cem>Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought\u003c/em>, cognitive scientists Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard point out how many intellectual advances through the ages have been built upon analogies:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first-century Roman architect Vitruvius compared the sound of actors’ voices in an amphitheater to the movement of water in a pool, the first of many thinkers to compare sound waves to water waves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The seventeenth-century scientist William Gilbert compared the earth to a magnet, advancing knowledge of the earth’s gravitational force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eighteenth-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier compared respiration to combustion, clarifying how breathing turns oxygen into carbon dioxide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the great nineteenth-century biologist, Charles Darwin, built his theory of evolution on an analogy between \u003cem>artificial\u003c/em> selection—the deliberate mating of animals by breeders—to the natural selection that goes on in the wild.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">If we know that X does Y when Z, is it possible that \u003cem>A\u003c/em> does Y when Z, too? That’s often how innovations get their start, in the lab and elsewhere: by taking a familiar starting point and using it as a launch pad to explore new territory.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Analogies are still frequently used by scientists working today, as University of Maryland professor Kevin Dunbar discovered when he observed firsthand scientists working in four microbiology labs. Dunbar \u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397399000507\">found\u003c/a> that the scientists used as many as fifteen analogies in a one-hour laboratory meeting, and that the more successful labs employed more analogies in discussing their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let’s look more closely at what is happening, conceptually, when we make an analogy. “The essential requirement for analogical thinking,” Holyoak and Thagard write, “is the ability to look at specific situations and pull out abstract patterns that may also be found in superficially different situations.” That’s important, so I’ll say it again in a slightly different way: A useful analogy reveals the deep \u003cem>commonalities\u003c/em> beneath superficial \u003cem>differences\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can think of analogies as having two parts: the base and the target. The base is the thing you know about. The target is the thing that’s new. Analogies are created by elaborating the similarities and the differences between the base and the target. When we use an analogy, we take what we know about the base and move some of it over to the target. Northwestern University psychologist Dedre Genter \u003ca href=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21564235\">calls\u003c/a> this process “bootstrapping the mind”—elevating ourselves into the realm of new knowledge, using the knowledge we have already to pull ourselves up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What does this allow us to do? The scientists Kevin Dunbar studied used analogies, first, to formulate hypotheses that they could then test. Their thought process went something like this: If we know that X does Y when Z, is it possible that \u003cem>A\u003c/em> does Y when Z, too? Let’s find out. That’s often how innovations get their start, in the lab and elsewhere: by taking a familiar starting point and using it as a launch pad to explore new territory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Psychologist and author Steven Pinker, who has composed many an illuminating analogy himself, \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=3DocCGB0cRkC&dq=pinker+the+stuff+of+thought&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uUcyU_HCM6XB0gGzwoDQAw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAQ\">notes\u003c/a> that “carefully interpreted, analogies are not just alluring frames but actual theories, which make testable predictions and can prompt new discoveries.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dunbar’s scientists found analogies useful on another kind of occasion as well, employing them as sense-making tools when they encountered anomalies or unexpected findings in the course of their work. This was also the case for another group of scientists whose use of analogy became the subject of study: scientists working on the Mars Rover mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A team led by University of Pittsburgh professor Christian Schunn \u003ca href=\"http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13421-012-0227-z\">analyzed\u003c/a> transcripts of the discussions the Mars Rover scientists carried on while the mission was underway. Schunn and his colleagues found that the Mars Rover scientists used analogies more frequently when they felt confused or unsure. The appearance in the transcript of words indicating uncertainty, such as “maybe,” “I don’t know,” and “I don’t understand,” was often followed by an attempt to draw an analogy—to compare the ambiguous situation to a situation with which the scientists were familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At such moments, the scientists were employing analogies as different sort of bridge—a conceptual catwalk that provides just enough space to move forward and keep searching for solutions. As Schunn writes: “Scientists and engineers do not always seek to completely eliminate uncertainty (and indeed, sometimes it is not possible to do so) but often drive problem solving with the aim of converting it into approximate ranges sufficient to continue problem solving.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ve now seen two good reasons to employ analogies: They can provide us with new theories to test, and they can help us make sense of unanticipated results so that we can keep moving forward. So: how do we go about generating a useful analogy?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first step is to choose the base and the target carefully. They should be similar enough to offer the possibility of building a serviceable bridge. If the target is too wildly different from the base, there won’t be any productive similarities to draw. In addition, these similarities must be deep and not merely superficial. Giovanni Gavetti and Jan Rivkin, both Harvard Business School professors, have \u003ca href=\"http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=30815\">found\u003c/a> that management teams can easily be seduced by an analogy with similarities on the surface but differences at a deeper level (the opposite of what innovators should be looking for).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the base and a target have to be different enough to offer a revealing insight. In a \u003ca href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1990-27494-001\">study\u003c/a> led by researcher Diane Halpern of the University of Louisville, students who compared the movement of lymphatic fluid through the lymph system to the movement of blood through veins gained little from the comparison. The target and base were too close, and the analogy didn’t shed much light. Comparing the lymph system to the movement of water through spaces in a sponge, however, was a bigger mental leap, and it produced more learning in the students Halpern studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To aid in finding just the right analogy, it helps to have a deep pool of potential targets. The Boston Strategy Group, a consulting firm, has created an online \u003ca href=\"http://www.bcg.com/about_bcg/institutes/strategy_institute/modalities_thinking/metaphorical.aspx\">gallery\u003c/a> of sources of analogical inspiration for its consultants and their clients to use. We can do this, too—bookmarking or pinning websites that inspire connections, keeping a folder of ripped-out articles or pictures from newspapers and magazines. A class or a workplace team can create a shared repository of analogical targets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second step in using an analogy is to thoroughly draw out the similarities between base and target. Just posing the comparison isn’t enough; we need to think carefully about how and why the base and target are alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Third, we must define what \u003cem>doesn’t\u003c/em> carry over from base to target—the places where the analogy “breaks down.” This is important, because it’s easy for us to allow prominent similarities to overshadow real differences. For example, education professor Rand Spiro of Michigan State University \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED301873\">found\u003c/a> that medical students—and even doctors—were sometimes misled by the common comparison of blood flowing through blood vessels to water flowing through pipes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students and physicians erred by attending to the similarities between blood vessels and pipes while failing to factor in the differences: the flow in blood vessels is affected not only by the diameter of the blood vessel, but also by the flexible contractions of the vessel and by the heart’s beating. It’s not that the medical students thought that blood vessels actually were rigid, like pipes. It’s that, focused on the similarities in their analogy, they weren’t even thinking about the differences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fourth and final step is to draw insight from the analogy—and then to put it aside. This can be hard to do. Harvard’s Gavetti and Rivkin note that business students often become attached to the details of the case studies they examine, instead of abstracting from them the more general patterns that the case studies share. The best use of an analogy, as we’ve seen, is as as a bridge—and once we’ve crossed over the bridge, we can leave it behind.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_34758\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-34758\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/03/478464141-e1395867640318-640x336.jpg\" alt=\"478464141\" width=\"640\" height=\"336\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The following is the transcript of the closing keynote speach at Sandbox Summit, a fantastic annual \u003ca href=\"http://sandboxsummit.org/home/\" target=\"_blank\">conference\u003c/a> that brings together all kinds of people interested in kids, technology and learning.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap\">I want to talk today about how we build bridges between old ideas and new ideas, between concepts that are close to home intellectually and those that are far afield. Because it is these bridges, these connections, that produce innovation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a popular notion that innovation arrives like a bolt out of the blue, as a radical departure from previous knowledge—when really, most new ideas are extensions, twists, variations on what’s come before. The skill of generating innovations is largely the skill of putting old things together in a new way, or looking at a familiar idea from a novel perspective, or using what we know already to understand something new.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I say “skill” because we don’t have to leave these encounters up to chance. We don’t have wait for lightning to strike. We can, right now, hone our ability to deploy \u003cem>analogies\u003c/em>. Analogies—comparing one entity to another, apparently different entity—is one of the most powerful tools humans have for understanding our world and for generating new knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In their \u003ca href=\"https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mental-leaps\" target=\"_blank\">book\u003c/a> \u003cem>Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought\u003c/em>, cognitive scientists Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard point out how many intellectual advances through the ages have been built upon analogies:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first-century Roman architect Vitruvius compared the sound of actors’ voices in an amphitheater to the movement of water in a pool, the first of many thinkers to compare sound waves to water waves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The seventeenth-century scientist William Gilbert compared the earth to a magnet, advancing knowledge of the earth’s gravitational force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The eighteenth-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier compared respiration to combustion, clarifying how breathing turns oxygen into carbon dioxide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even the great nineteenth-century biologist, Charles Darwin, built his theory of evolution on an analogy between \u003cem>artificial\u003c/em> selection—the deliberate mating of animals by breeders—to the natural selection that goes on in the wild.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">If we know that X does Y when Z, is it possible that \u003cem>A\u003c/em> does Y when Z, too? That’s often how innovations get their start, in the lab and elsewhere: by taking a familiar starting point and using it as a launch pad to explore new territory.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Analogies are still frequently used by scientists working today, as University of Maryland professor Kevin Dunbar discovered when he observed firsthand scientists working in four microbiology labs. Dunbar \u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397399000507\">found\u003c/a> that the scientists used as many as fifteen analogies in a one-hour laboratory meeting, and that the more successful labs employed more analogies in discussing their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let’s look more closely at what is happening, conceptually, when we make an analogy. “The essential requirement for analogical thinking,” Holyoak and Thagard write, “is the ability to look at specific situations and pull out abstract patterns that may also be found in superficially different situations.” That’s important, so I’ll say it again in a slightly different way: A useful analogy reveals the deep \u003cem>commonalities\u003c/em> beneath superficial \u003cem>differences\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can think of analogies as having two parts: the base and the target. The base is the thing you know about. The target is the thing that’s new. Analogies are created by elaborating the similarities and the differences between the base and the target. When we use an analogy, we take what we know about the base and move some of it over to the target. Northwestern University psychologist Dedre Genter \u003ca href=\"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21564235\">calls\u003c/a> this process “bootstrapping the mind”—elevating ourselves into the realm of new knowledge, using the knowledge we have already to pull ourselves up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What does this allow us to do? The scientists Kevin Dunbar studied used analogies, first, to formulate hypotheses that they could then test. Their thought process went something like this: If we know that X does Y when Z, is it possible that \u003cem>A\u003c/em> does Y when Z, too? Let’s find out. That’s often how innovations get their start, in the lab and elsewhere: by taking a familiar starting point and using it as a launch pad to explore new territory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Psychologist and author Steven Pinker, who has composed many an illuminating analogy himself, \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=3DocCGB0cRkC&dq=pinker+the+stuff+of+thought&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uUcyU_HCM6XB0gGzwoDQAw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAQ\">notes\u003c/a> that “carefully interpreted, analogies are not just alluring frames but actual theories, which make testable predictions and can prompt new discoveries.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dunbar’s scientists found analogies useful on another kind of occasion as well, employing them as sense-making tools when they encountered anomalies or unexpected findings in the course of their work. This was also the case for another group of scientists whose use of analogy became the subject of study: scientists working on the Mars Rover mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A team led by University of Pittsburgh professor Christian Schunn \u003ca href=\"http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13421-012-0227-z\">analyzed\u003c/a> transcripts of the discussions the Mars Rover scientists carried on while the mission was underway. Schunn and his colleagues found that the Mars Rover scientists used analogies more frequently when they felt confused or unsure. The appearance in the transcript of words indicating uncertainty, such as “maybe,” “I don’t know,” and “I don’t understand,” was often followed by an attempt to draw an analogy—to compare the ambiguous situation to a situation with which the scientists were familiar.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At such moments, the scientists were employing analogies as different sort of bridge—a conceptual catwalk that provides just enough space to move forward and keep searching for solutions. As Schunn writes: “Scientists and engineers do not always seek to completely eliminate uncertainty (and indeed, sometimes it is not possible to do so) but often drive problem solving with the aim of converting it into approximate ranges sufficient to continue problem solving.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ve now seen two good reasons to employ analogies: They can provide us with new theories to test, and they can help us make sense of unanticipated results so that we can keep moving forward. So: how do we go about generating a useful analogy?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first step is to choose the base and the target carefully. They should be similar enough to offer the possibility of building a serviceable bridge. If the target is too wildly different from the base, there won’t be any productive similarities to draw. In addition, these similarities must be deep and not merely superficial. Giovanni Gavetti and Jan Rivkin, both Harvard Business School professors, have \u003ca href=\"http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=30815\">found\u003c/a> that management teams can easily be seduced by an analogy with similarities on the surface but differences at a deeper level (the opposite of what innovators should be looking for).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the base and a target have to be different enough to offer a revealing insight. In a \u003ca href=\"http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1990-27494-001\">study\u003c/a> led by researcher Diane Halpern of the University of Louisville, students who compared the movement of lymphatic fluid through the lymph system to the movement of blood through veins gained little from the comparison. The target and base were too close, and the analogy didn’t shed much light. Comparing the lymph system to the movement of water through spaces in a sponge, however, was a bigger mental leap, and it produced more learning in the students Halpern studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To aid in finding just the right analogy, it helps to have a deep pool of potential targets. The Boston Strategy Group, a consulting firm, has created an online \u003ca href=\"http://www.bcg.com/about_bcg/institutes/strategy_institute/modalities_thinking/metaphorical.aspx\">gallery\u003c/a> of sources of analogical inspiration for its consultants and their clients to use. We can do this, too—bookmarking or pinning websites that inspire connections, keeping a folder of ripped-out articles or pictures from newspapers and magazines. A class or a workplace team can create a shared repository of analogical targets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second step in using an analogy is to thoroughly draw out the similarities between base and target. Just posing the comparison isn’t enough; we need to think carefully about how and why the base and target are alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Third, we must define what \u003cem>doesn’t\u003c/em> carry over from base to target—the places where the analogy “breaks down.” This is important, because it’s easy for us to allow prominent similarities to overshadow real differences. For example, education professor Rand Spiro of Michigan State University \u003ca href=\"http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED301873\">found\u003c/a> that medical students—and even doctors—were sometimes misled by the common comparison of blood flowing through blood vessels to water flowing through pipes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students and physicians erred by attending to the similarities between blood vessels and pipes while failing to factor in the differences: the flow in blood vessels is affected not only by the diameter of the blood vessel, but also by the flexible contractions of the vessel and by the heart’s beating. It’s not that the medical students thought that blood vessels actually were rigid, like pipes. It’s that, focused on the similarities in their analogy, they weren’t even thinking about the differences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fourth and final step is to draw insight from the analogy—and then to put it aside. This can be hard to do. Harvard’s Gavetti and Rivkin note that business students often become attached to the details of the case studies they examine, instead of abstracting from them the more general patterns that the case studies share. The best use of an analogy, as we’ve seen, is as as a bridge—and once we’ve crossed over the bridge, we can leave it behind.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "What's the 'Sweet Spot' of Difficulty For Learning?",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_32567\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-32567\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360.jpg\" alt=\"doing-homework360\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">In an NPR \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/can-focus-on-grit-work-in-school-cultures-that-reward-grades/\" target=\"_blank\">story\u003c/a> earlier this week, Tovia Smith reported on the growing number of schools that are trying to instill “grit”— perseverance in the face of adversity — in their students. Smith focused on one such school:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Tom Hoerr leads the New City School, a private elementary school in St. Louis, Mo., that has been working on grit. ‘One of the sayings that you hear around here a great deal is, “If our kids have graduated from here with nothing but success, then we have failed them, because they haven’t learned how to respond to frustration and failure,”‘ says Hoerr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After years of focusing on the theory known as 'multiple intelligences' and trying to teach kids in their own style, Hoerr says he’s now pulling kids out of their comfort zones intentionally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>‘The message is that life isn’t always easy,’ Hoerr says. His goal is to make sure ‘that no matter how talented [students are], they hit the wall, so they can learn to pick themselves up, hit the wall again and pick themselves up again, and ultimately persevere and succeed.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is a major adjustment for everyone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of the adjustment involved seems to be the whiplash associated with following one set of educational trends (“multiple intelligences” and “learning styles”), then shifting gears to follow another set (“grit” and the “growth mindset”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grit, an idea developed by Penn professor Angela Duckworth, and the growth mindset, a concept researched by Stanford professor Carol Dweck, have more empirical support than the appealing-sounding but unproven theories of multiple intelligences and learning styles. (For more about the learning styles theory, click \u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/10/forget-about-learning-styles-heres-something-better/\">here\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\"> \"Once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her 'sweet spot' of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring.\" \u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>But even putting the question of educational trends aside, the experience of principal Tom Hoerr as documented in the NPR segment brings up a question that parents and teachers wrestle with all the time: Should we be making learning easier for kids—or harder?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The answer, according to research in cognitive science and psychology, is \u003cem>both\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First, let’s think about how and why we might make learning easier. This has to do with what psychologists call “cognitive load”— the amount of information we have to keep in mind as we solve a problem. Decades of research has shown that this capacity is quite limited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard psychologist George Miller famously said that we could keep seven pieces of information in our minds at a time (he called it “the magic number seven”), but he was looking at studies that used numbers or letters or simple symbols. When the pieces of information are more complex, like concepts or facts, the number of them that we can keep in mind goes down, to about four. And if we are actively manipulating or combining those pieces of information, as we do in most kinds of real-life problem-solving, the number of things our minds can hang on to drops even further, to maybe two or three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is that many tasks we ask students to do impose too great a cognitive load. They lose track of what they’re doing, they make mistakes, they get lost and give up. Even if they hang on long enough to solve the problem, they don’t have enough mental capacity left over to reflect on what they’ve done — and reflection is where learning really happens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"26ed3a2f0dde0acdbf016792e68e1a24\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So: the way in which we should make learning easier is to reduce cognitive load, especially when we are introducing new or complicated materials. (Parents and teachers, who are already experts at this stuff, often don’t realize how much cognitive load they’re imposing on kids and other novices.) Slow it down. Break complicated ideas into smaller pieces, taking them one at a time. Offer lots of opportunities for practice with feedback. Avoid using jargon and other technical terms. Eliminate extraneous or distracting information and focus only on what the learner needs to know at this moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MAKING IT HARDER\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Makes sense. But what about making learning harder? Is there ever a reason to do that? Yes, and the reason is twofold. The first reason to make learning harder is to make it interesting. Learning something new and complicated is hard in itself, as we saw above. Lightening the learner’s cognitive load will allow her to learn more effectively without becoming frustrated or confused.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her “sweet spot” of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring. This is also the place where learners can practice encountering adversity and challenge and overcoming them, a key experience in the development of grit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second reason to make learning harder is that it makes learning work better. UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork has developed the idea of “desirable difficulties”—difficulties that we actually \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to introduce into students’ learning to make it more effective. Bjork notes that many of the learning activities that make students feel competent and successful—like reading over a textbook passage several times so that it feels familiar—actually do very little to help them learn. What they should do instead is something like this: close that textbook and ask themselves to recall from memory what they’ve just read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It won’t feel as good. They’ll struggle to remember the words that were just in front of their eyes. But this activity, known as retrieval practice (or simply self-testing) is an example of a desirable difficulty that will dramatically increase students’ learning. You can read more about desirable difficulties \u003ca href=\"http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2006/march-06/the-science-of-learning-and-the-learning-of-science.html\">here\u003c/a>, in an article by Bjork himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike learning styles, cognitive load theory and the theory of desirable difficulties have lots of research support. You won’t have to worry that another fad will come along to displace them in a few years. And in the meantime, you’ll have a good answer to the question of whether we should be making learning easier or harder. Remember: it’s both.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_32567\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-32567\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360.jpg\" alt=\"doing-homework360\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/11/doing-homework360-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">In an NPR \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/03/can-focus-on-grit-work-in-school-cultures-that-reward-grades/\" target=\"_blank\">story\u003c/a> earlier this week, Tovia Smith reported on the growing number of schools that are trying to instill “grit”— perseverance in the face of adversity — in their students. Smith focused on one such school:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Tom Hoerr leads the New City School, a private elementary school in St. Louis, Mo., that has been working on grit. ‘One of the sayings that you hear around here a great deal is, “If our kids have graduated from here with nothing but success, then we have failed them, because they haven’t learned how to respond to frustration and failure,”‘ says Hoerr.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After years of focusing on the theory known as 'multiple intelligences' and trying to teach kids in their own style, Hoerr says he’s now pulling kids out of their comfort zones intentionally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>‘The message is that life isn’t always easy,’ Hoerr says. His goal is to make sure ‘that no matter how talented [students are], they hit the wall, so they can learn to pick themselves up, hit the wall again and pick themselves up again, and ultimately persevere and succeed.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is a major adjustment for everyone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of the adjustment involved seems to be the whiplash associated with following one set of educational trends (“multiple intelligences” and “learning styles”), then shifting gears to follow another set (“grit” and the “growth mindset”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grit, an idea developed by Penn professor Angela Duckworth, and the growth mindset, a concept researched by Stanford professor Carol Dweck, have more empirical support than the appealing-sounding but unproven theories of multiple intelligences and learning styles. (For more about the learning styles theory, click \u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/10/forget-about-learning-styles-heres-something-better/\">here\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\"> \"Once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her 'sweet spot' of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring.\" \u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>But even putting the question of educational trends aside, the experience of principal Tom Hoerr as documented in the NPR segment brings up a question that parents and teachers wrestle with all the time: Should we be making learning easier for kids—or harder?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The answer, according to research in cognitive science and psychology, is \u003cem>both\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First, let’s think about how and why we might make learning easier. This has to do with what psychologists call “cognitive load”— the amount of information we have to keep in mind as we solve a problem. Decades of research has shown that this capacity is quite limited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harvard psychologist George Miller famously said that we could keep seven pieces of information in our minds at a time (he called it “the magic number seven”), but he was looking at studies that used numbers or letters or simple symbols. When the pieces of information are more complex, like concepts or facts, the number of them that we can keep in mind goes down, to about four. And if we are actively manipulating or combining those pieces of information, as we do in most kinds of real-life problem-solving, the number of things our minds can hang on to drops even further, to maybe two or three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is that many tasks we ask students to do impose too great a cognitive load. They lose track of what they’re doing, they make mistakes, they get lost and give up. Even if they hang on long enough to solve the problem, they don’t have enough mental capacity left over to reflect on what they’ve done — and reflection is where learning really happens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So: the way in which we should make learning easier is to reduce cognitive load, especially when we are introducing new or complicated materials. (Parents and teachers, who are already experts at this stuff, often don’t realize how much cognitive load they’re imposing on kids and other novices.) Slow it down. Break complicated ideas into smaller pieces, taking them one at a time. Offer lots of opportunities for practice with feedback. Avoid using jargon and other technical terms. Eliminate extraneous or distracting information and focus only on what the learner needs to know at this moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MAKING IT HARDER\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Makes sense. But what about making learning harder? Is there ever a reason to do that? Yes, and the reason is twofold. The first reason to make learning harder is to make it interesting. Learning something new and complicated is hard in itself, as we saw above. Lightening the learner’s cognitive load will allow her to learn more effectively without becoming frustrated or confused.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her “sweet spot” of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring. This is also the place where learners can practice encountering adversity and challenge and overcoming them, a key experience in the development of grit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second reason to make learning harder is that it makes learning work better. UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork has developed the idea of “desirable difficulties”—difficulties that we actually \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to introduce into students’ learning to make it more effective. Bjork notes that many of the learning activities that make students feel competent and successful—like reading over a textbook passage several times so that it feels familiar—actually do very little to help them learn. What they should do instead is something like this: close that textbook and ask themselves to recall from memory what they’ve just read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It won’t feel as good. They’ll struggle to remember the words that were just in front of their eyes. But this activity, known as retrieval practice (or simply self-testing) is an example of a desirable difficulty that will dramatically increase students’ learning. You can read more about desirable difficulties \u003ca href=\"http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2006/march-06/the-science-of-learning-and-the-learning-of-science.html\">here\u003c/a>, in an article by Bjork himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike learning styles, cognitive load theory and the theory of desirable difficulties have lots of research support. You won’t have to worry that another fad will come along to displace them in a few years. And in the meantime, you’ll have a good answer to the question of whether we should be making learning easier or harder. Remember: it’s both.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "College Students of Color Reject Rosy Pictures of Diversity",
"title": "College Students of Color Reject Rosy Pictures of Diversity",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The most diverse place on campus is a shiny, happy spot that exists in two dimensions: the brochures, viewbooks and annual reports that colleges and universities produce for public consumption. Glance through these glossy publications and you’ll see smiling out at you a plethora of minority member faces. Such images are meant to convey these institutions’ warm embrace of diversity to prospective students, employees and supporters. But research suggests that when the images don’t line up with reality, the use of minority member photographs can backfire, generating an effect exactly opposite of the one intended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an \u003ca href=\"http://gpi.sagepub.com/content/17/2/161\" target=\"_self\">article\u003c/a> published this month in the journal \u003cem>Group Processes & Intergroup Relations\u003c/em>, researchers investigated the reactions produced by the “overrepresentation” of minority images in a flyer advertising a local university. The study, led by Jennifer Spoor of La Trobe University in Australia, found that white students felt more positively about a flyer that overrepresented the proportion of Asian students on their campus than about a flyer with more accurate depictions.\u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shabazz_custom-70b65a3700c720a7bf3f6efed01a8eac2eb3b9e9-s2-c85.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright\" title=\"shabazz_custom-70b65a3700c720a7bf3f6efed01a8eac2eb3b9e9-s2-c85\" src=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shabazz_custom-70b65a3700c720a7bf3f6efed01a8eac2eb3b9e9-s2-c85-236x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"236\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, students of Asian ethnicity (a stigmatized minority group in Australia) felt \u003cem>less\u003c/em> favorable towards the advertisement that showed many Asian faces than toward a flyer that showed a more realistic number. “Minority group members may be frustrated by the fact that overrepresentation gives an overly rosy picture of majority-minority relations,” Spoor theorized, while members of the majority group may feel only a gratifying glow upon seeing their university portrayed as diverse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Images that present a misleading vision of diversity are common in college publications, finds Timothy Pippert, an associate professor of sociology at Augsburg College in Minnesota. In a \u003ca href=\"http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08841241.2013.867920#preview\" target=\"_self\">study\u003c/a> published last year in the \u003cem>Journal of Marketing for Higher Education\u003c/em>, Pippert and his colleagues analyzed more than 10,000 photographs found in the recruitment materials of 165 four-year educational institutions in the U.S. The majority of schools, Pippert reports, “provided images of diversity” that were “significantly different than the actual student body.” In fact, the whiter the student body at a college, the more often images of minorities were featured in its publications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At times, this misrepresentation of reality has verged on the fraudulent. Both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Idaho have been caught digitally pasting minority faces onto photographs of white students used in marketing materials. Diallo Shabazz, an African-American student whose face was Photoshopped onto the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2013/12/29/257765543/a-campus-more-colorful-than-reality-beware-that-college-brochure\" target=\"_self\">cover\u003c/a> of UW’s admissions brochure in 2000, sued the university and \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=DXF8_DbKmy4C&pg=PT37&lpg=PT37&dq=Diallo+Shabazz+recruitment&source=bl&ots=3BHr8_UglO&sig=Y3k4LOReHcB86SPpM9rAGy9D4nc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=M7wdU9u_HYOa1AHvrIH4Aw&ved=0CGIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=Diallo%20Shabazz%20recruitment&f=false\" target=\"_self\">received\u003c/a> what he called a “budgetary apology”: the university earmarked $10 million for the recruitment of minority students and the implementation of diversity initiatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a good thing that our colleges and universities are no longer treating minorities as if they were invisible, at least in the marketing sphere. And to the extent that brochures and viewbooks are aspirational documents, the inclusion of minorities’ images may tell a hopeful story of what institutions wish to become, even if they’re not there yet. But making sure that minority group members feel a genuine sense of belonging on campus will take far more than a handful of photos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This fact is represented with painful clarity by a new \u003ca href=\"http://itooamharvard.tumblr.com/\" target=\"_self\">project\u003c/a>, “I, Too, Am Harvard,” a photo campaign in which students of color attending Harvard University make public their own images of life at that august institution. These photographs, in which students stare straight into the camera, are nothing like the beaming images found in admissions brochures. In the portraits, students hold signs expressing some element of their experience at the university—a day-to-day reality that is very different from the multicultural fiesta featured in the university’s marketing materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tumblr_n1s2karXUK1tucgl1o1_1280.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignleft\" title=\"tumblr_n1s2karXUK1tucgl1o1_1280\" src=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tumblr_n1s2karXUK1tucgl1o1_1280-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\">\u003c/a>In these students’ silent telling, their race is more apt to be negated than celebrated. “You don’t sound black . . . You sound smart,” reads the sign board held by one student. “I don’t even think of you as black,” reads another. “You’re the whitest black person I know,” reads a third (evidently somebody’s idea of a compliment). And held by one young woman, wearing an expression both challenging and vulnerable, is a sign bearing someone else’s comment, and her own question: “’I don’t see color.’ Does that mean you don’t see me?”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Glossy images of diverse student bodies at universities are meant to convey these institutions’ warm embrace of prospective students, employees and supporters. But research suggests that when the images don’t line up with reality, the use of minority member photographs can backfire, generating an effect exactly opposite of the one intended.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The most diverse place on campus is a shiny, happy spot that exists in two dimensions: the brochures, viewbooks and annual reports that colleges and universities produce for public consumption. Glance through these glossy publications and you’ll see smiling out at you a plethora of minority member faces. Such images are meant to convey these institutions’ warm embrace of diversity to prospective students, employees and supporters. But research suggests that when the images don’t line up with reality, the use of minority member photographs can backfire, generating an effect exactly opposite of the one intended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an \u003ca href=\"http://gpi.sagepub.com/content/17/2/161\" target=\"_self\">article\u003c/a> published this month in the journal \u003cem>Group Processes & Intergroup Relations\u003c/em>, researchers investigated the reactions produced by the “overrepresentation” of minority images in a flyer advertising a local university. The study, led by Jennifer Spoor of La Trobe University in Australia, found that white students felt more positively about a flyer that overrepresented the proportion of Asian students on their campus than about a flyer with more accurate depictions.\u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shabazz_custom-70b65a3700c720a7bf3f6efed01a8eac2eb3b9e9-s2-c85.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignright\" title=\"shabazz_custom-70b65a3700c720a7bf3f6efed01a8eac2eb3b9e9-s2-c85\" src=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shabazz_custom-70b65a3700c720a7bf3f6efed01a8eac2eb3b9e9-s2-c85-236x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"236\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, students of Asian ethnicity (a stigmatized minority group in Australia) felt \u003cem>less\u003c/em> favorable towards the advertisement that showed many Asian faces than toward a flyer that showed a more realistic number. “Minority group members may be frustrated by the fact that overrepresentation gives an overly rosy picture of majority-minority relations,” Spoor theorized, while members of the majority group may feel only a gratifying glow upon seeing their university portrayed as diverse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Images that present a misleading vision of diversity are common in college publications, finds Timothy Pippert, an associate professor of sociology at Augsburg College in Minnesota. In a \u003ca href=\"http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08841241.2013.867920#preview\" target=\"_self\">study\u003c/a> published last year in the \u003cem>Journal of Marketing for Higher Education\u003c/em>, Pippert and his colleagues analyzed more than 10,000 photographs found in the recruitment materials of 165 four-year educational institutions in the U.S. The majority of schools, Pippert reports, “provided images of diversity” that were “significantly different than the actual student body.” In fact, the whiter the student body at a college, the more often images of minorities were featured in its publications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At times, this misrepresentation of reality has verged on the fraudulent. Both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Idaho have been caught digitally pasting minority faces onto photographs of white students used in marketing materials. Diallo Shabazz, an African-American student whose face was Photoshopped onto the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2013/12/29/257765543/a-campus-more-colorful-than-reality-beware-that-college-brochure\" target=\"_self\">cover\u003c/a> of UW’s admissions brochure in 2000, sued the university and \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=DXF8_DbKmy4C&pg=PT37&lpg=PT37&dq=Diallo+Shabazz+recruitment&source=bl&ots=3BHr8_UglO&sig=Y3k4LOReHcB86SPpM9rAGy9D4nc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=M7wdU9u_HYOa1AHvrIH4Aw&ved=0CGIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=Diallo%20Shabazz%20recruitment&f=false\" target=\"_self\">received\u003c/a> what he called a “budgetary apology”: the university earmarked $10 million for the recruitment of minority students and the implementation of diversity initiatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a good thing that our colleges and universities are no longer treating minorities as if they were invisible, at least in the marketing sphere. And to the extent that brochures and viewbooks are aspirational documents, the inclusion of minorities’ images may tell a hopeful story of what institutions wish to become, even if they’re not there yet. But making sure that minority group members feel a genuine sense of belonging on campus will take far more than a handful of photos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This fact is represented with painful clarity by a new \u003ca href=\"http://itooamharvard.tumblr.com/\" target=\"_self\">project\u003c/a>, “I, Too, Am Harvard,” a photo campaign in which students of color attending Harvard University make public their own images of life at that august institution. These photographs, in which students stare straight into the camera, are nothing like the beaming images found in admissions brochures. In the portraits, students hold signs expressing some element of their experience at the university—a day-to-day reality that is very different from the multicultural fiesta featured in the university’s marketing materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tumblr_n1s2karXUK1tucgl1o1_1280.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"alignleft\" title=\"tumblr_n1s2karXUK1tucgl1o1_1280\" src=\"http://anniemurphypaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/tumblr_n1s2karXUK1tucgl1o1_1280-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\">\u003c/a>In these students’ silent telling, their race is more apt to be negated than celebrated. “You don’t sound black . . . You sound smart,” reads the sign board held by one student. “I don’t even think of you as black,” reads another. “You’re the whitest black person I know,” reads a third (evidently somebody’s idea of a compliment). And held by one young woman, wearing an expression both challenging and vulnerable, is a sign bearing someone else’s comment, and her own question: “’I don’t see color.’ Does that mean you don’t see me?”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"possible": {
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"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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},
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"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
"reveal": {
"id": "reveal",
"title": "Reveal",
"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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