All that arguing with your teenager is, basically, teaching them how to argue. You yell, they learn to yell. You listen, and make your rationalargumentsrespectfully, and they learn to do the same — both with you and with others; so much so that it inoculates against peer-pressure.
Patti Neighmond has a nice story about the benefits of parent-teenager arguments, on NPR’s All Things Considered. One particularly interesting is that adolescents who learn to argue well are much less susceptible to peer-pressure.
Teachers are, I believe, human too. So it should not be surprising that more motivated teachers perform better. Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez and Peter Dolton highlight an OECD report that shows the benefits of increasing teacher pay.
Image from Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez (2011).
What’s most interesting though is their explanation of the data. It’s not necessarily that if you pay an individual teacher more they work that much harder, but that if you pay more you increase the status of the profession and so you attract more potential teachers and are able to select better teachers:
… improving teachers’ pay improves their standing in a country’s income distribution and hence the national status of teaching as a profession. As a result of this higher status, more young people will want to become teachers. This in turn makes teaching a more selective profession and hence facilitates the recruitment of more able individuals.
Higher status and higher pay are invariably linked but the two can provide separate driving forces to engineer better recruits to the profession. The key hypothesis is that better pay for teachers will attract higher quality graduates into the profession and that this will improve pupil performance.
So the actual pay is secondary to the status conferred by the job. I would further speculate that teachers motivated more by status rather than pay are more likely to want to excel at their work, since the quality of their work is tied more on their self-worth.
If there’s anyone for whom sarcasm is a primary language, it’s probably adolescents. It can be used to bully or put down, but, according to Richard Chin (2011), is more often used among friends; a bit like positive aspects of teasing.
Boys tend to be better at math. That’s been the stereotype, but a new study (Kane and Mertz, 2011) published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society provides evidence that, at all levels, it’s only because society and culture tend to support, and advance the stereotype.
… we conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. … It is fully consistent with socioeconomic status of the home environment being a primary determinant for success of children in school.
Kane and Mertz compared math achievement in a number of countries. If there were some genetic reason for different math abilities then boys should be better than girls everywhere. This is not the case. In more wealthy countries where there is more equality between the genders, the mathematics performance gap disappears.
In poorer countries like Tunisia boys tend to do better at math, while in rich ones like Barhrain girls do better. However, in places with greater equity between the genders, like the Czeck Republic, boys and girls do equally well. Figure from Kane and Mertz (2011).
… people learn a visual task better when it’s accompanied by sound, for instance — even when they are later tested using only vision.
— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired sensesin The Boston Globe.
What I think this means, is that there is now scientific evidence to support the widespread use of sound effects in lectures/presentations. Woohoo!
For the educator, the interaction between sound and vision is one of the fascinating findings of recent research on how our senses interact (see also the work of the Visual & Multisensory Perception Lab). It seems to add some support to the arguments for multimodal learning; rather than just targeting specific learning styles — auditory vs visual vs kinetic etc.– to specific people, including multiple styles of information should help everyone learn better.
But beyond just education a better understanding of how the senses interact has a lot of implications.
… what people saw affected what they heard; that certain types of music or background noise affected how food tasted; and that smells could influence how a texture felt to the touch.
This research is already affecting how things are marketed and presented to us.
A study published this year showed that people thought a strawberry mousse tasted sweeter, more intense, and better when they ate it off a white plate rather than a black plate.
This research is also pertinent to the issue of Sensory Integration Disorder, which, by some estimates, affects somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 20 children.
I let my students bring in one page of handwritten notes, a “cheat sheet” if you will, into their last Physics exam. I’d expected to see some very tiny writing, but some of the notes needed scientific-grade magnification equipment to be read. Seen from a distance, the dense writing did have a certain aesthetic appeal.
Of course the primary reason for letting students bring in the cheat sheets into the exam was to get them to practice taking notes. At one extreme, the students who already take good notes benefit from having to condense them. At the other extreme, the students who don’t take notes at all get a strong incentive to practice. The very act of preparing cheat sheets is a good way to study for exams.
And it worked. As they hand in their papers I usually ask them how the test went, and, this time, I also asked a few student if they found their page of notes useful. One student in particular responded, Well I didn’t need to use it after making it.
Cheat sheets laid out according to note-taking style. Two extremes of note taking styles are highlighted. Equations and diagrams to the left, and text-only to the right.
It was also very interesting to see the different styles of note taking: the strategic use of color; densely packed text; equations; diagrams; columnar organization. What all this means, I’m not sure. I’m particularly interested in how their note taking style relates to students’ preferred learning style.
Indeed, it would be interesting to see if the note taking style co-relates in any way with students’ performance on the test. One could hypothesize that, since we know that students learn better when they encounter material from multiple perspectives, then students whose notes have the greatest mix of styles — diagrams, equations, text etc. — should have learned more (and perhaps perform better on the test).
It’s a pretty simple and crude hypothesis, since there are likely many other factors that affect test performance, but it would still be interesting to look at.
Alison Gopnik points out the people first start to learn by exploration (the same way scientists do), and then learn to do things well by apprenticeship.
When we actually start to look at the fundamentals, it seems children learn by exploring—by experimenting, playing, drawing inferences …. that kind of exploratory learning isn’t just the purview of scientists but seems to be very, very basic. …The other kind of learning that we see, not so much in preschoolers but in school-age children, is what I call guided apprenticeship learning, where you’re not just exploring and finding out new things but learning to perform a skill particularly well.
Kate Fillion’s great interview with Gopnik, a cognitive scientist, is worth the read.
The traditional way of thinking about learning at a university is: there’s somebody who’s a teacher, who actually has some amount of knowledge, and their job is figuring out a way of communicating that knowledge. That’s literally a medieval model; it comes from the days when there weren’t a lot of printed books around, so someone read the book and explained it to everybody else. That’s our model for what university education, and for that matter high school education, ought to be like. It’s not a model that anybody’s ever found any independent evidence for. [my emphasis]
When students are able to recognize mistakes and analyze them, they will learn faster and deeper. Jonah Lehrer summarizes a new study that shows that people learn faster when they spend the effort to learn from their mistakes.
When people notice that they’ve made an error, they have an instinctive negative reaction. Then we have the choice to either ignore the error or spend some time considering it – and learning from it. Guess who learn faster?
This research is based on Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, which shows that it’s better to praise effort rather than intelligence. A willingness to work hard (grit) is a much better attitude for learners. It turns failures into learning experiences, while focusing on intelligence actually discourages people from trying things at which they might fail.
… people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
