“Ninth-grade classrooms are often filled
with students of the same chronological age,
but who possess very different levels of maturity.”

Eccles & Wigfield 1997

If you’ve ever wondered why one student quickly grasps the point of an assignment, breaks it down, and steadily completes the work while another expresses confusion and barely scrapes by, differences in maturity may just be your answer. This disparity can lead to unnecessary frustration, worry or guilt by teachers, students and parents.

Additionally, “Ninth-grade students report concerns related to academic, organizational, and social issues during the transition to ninth-grade. Dealing with a larger, more competitive, and grade-oriented environment than the middle school contributes to the stress (Eccles et al., 1984).”

“Every human being goes through many stages of cognitive, moral, social, physical, and emotional development (Craig & Baucum, 2002; Wood, 2007). Many students have little difficulty with these changes and have few problems adjusting to the different levels of schooling (Craig & Baucum, 2002). However, other students struggle with the developmental process and need extra support.”

So, the next time your child brings home a low grade while his friend, who sat through the same lectures and completed the same assignments, gets an A, consider that the two friends may share many common qualities, just not academic maturity. In time, with positive encouragement and extra academic support, the differences will likely become less noticeable and eventually disappear altogether.

If you’ve ever wondered how your child can spend hours on the computer, but only minutes on algebra, a newly released study may have the answer. It appears that those who are “chronically uninterested in achievement” are not operating out of a desire to do badly (or secretly put family members over the top), but may simply have different goals. Ones that involve FUN.

University of Illinois psychology professor Dolores Albarracín (photo), who conducted the “chronic achievement motivation” research with William Hart, of the University of Florida, discovered that those who value excellence and hard work generally do better than others on specific tasks when they are reminded of those values. But when a task is presented as fun, the same individuals often do worse than those who say they are less motivated to achieve.

For students, these findings suggest that how a teacher or parent encourages them to strive for excellence may spur on one person to try harder, while another could become less motivated.

“Those less motivated to achieve will excel on tasks seen as fun.”

The study, presented in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that those who are motivated to achieve will perform worse when achievement messages are combined with the concept of fun. The same cues, however, seem to enhance the desire – and ability – of people who lack achievement motivation. “It’s not that those with high achievement motivation always perform better,” Albarracín said. “You can also get the low achievement motivation folks to perform better than the highs when you present a task as enjoyable and fun.”

So, the next time you gear up to give your child a pep talk on good grades, keep in mind that people who are highly motivated to achieve differ dramatically from those who aren’t in their response to messages meant to inspire them to excel.

“The competitive mindset, the achievement mindset becomes a huge de-motivator for those who don’t necessarily value excellence as much as they value their well-being,” Albarracín said. “Perhaps the reason they don’t care to do well is because they want to do something else; they want to enjoy themselves – which is not a bad goal.”

A new book “shows how schools can, and must, develop expertise in ‘learning variation’ and apply this knowledge to classroom instruction in order to address the chronic learning challenges and achievement gap faced by millions of students. Schools for All Kinds of Minds: Boosting Student Success by Embracing Learning Variation puts the focus on discovering kids’ learning strengths (not just deficits) that can lead to academic success even for struggling students.”

According to book reviewer and Great Schools president, Bill Jackson, “When students don’t ‘get it,’ teachers (and parents) need a better answer than, ‘Try harder!’ This book gets teachers pointed in the right direction by asking and answering the questions: ‘What is the underlying brain process that needs to be strengthened to help a particular student progress?’ and ‘How can I do that?’”

One cloud hanging over the All Kinds of Minds program is strong data vs. anecdotal evidence based on case studies. Independent research firms hired by All Kinds of Minds found that teachers rated the organization’s strategies as useful, but were unable to provide statistical evidence for a clear impact on either special education or overall academic achievement. What was cited as meaningful was how the program enhanced teacher understanding of, and therefore ability to address, students’ learning differences.

Where in the past a teacher might have labeled a student lazy or unmotivated, once both student and teacher were able to identify the student’s strengths and weaknesses, teachers were better prepared to help struggling students succeed (Chapter 4: Consider how gaining a deeper understanding of your students can help you avoid faulty assumptions, misinterpretations, and unwarranted labels). As better understanding between students and teachers is fostered, teachers found they had more empathy and sympathy for struggling students and were therefore better able meet their needs.

“Prior knowledge affects how a student organizes new information,” reports Marilla Svinicki in her article, What They Don’t Know Can Hurt Them: The Role of Prior Knowledge in Learning. “Remember that a goal of learning is to incorporate new information into the existing organization of memory.”

Svinicki, Professor Department of Educational Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, explains, “Instructors can use this prior knowledge of structure to their advantage when they use analogies…. For example, in trying to explain how a gland works, an instructor might say that the gland is like a thermostat.” Since most students know a thermostat monitors heat, they can easily transfer the meaning. On the other hand, if you try to describe buoyant force with the example of a hot air balloon, the lesson will lose it’s meaning unless the student first knows how burners inside the balloon work.

In his paper, Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience, Jeremy Roschelle, Director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, writes, “Educators often focus on the ideas that they want their audience to have. But research has shown that a learner’s prior knowledge often confounds an educator’s best efforts to deliver ideas accurately. A large body of findings shows that learning proceeds primarily from prior knowledge, and only secondarily from the presented materials.”

Parents and teachers may also want to take prior knowledge into account when evaluating a child’s reading comprehension.

“Familiarity fools our minds into
thinking we know more than we do.”

If you have ever been surprised by a poor test result, you are not alone. “Very often, students will think they understand a body of material. Believing that they know it, they stop trying to learn more. But, come test time, it turns out they really don’t know the material.” Dr. Daniel Willingham [pdf] is referring to a common challenge for many students; the ability to distinguish between familiarity and recollection.

The recollection myth

TeamUP! Tutors gets requests for help with all subjects, from algebra and geometry to essay writing and chemistry. Regardless of the subject, we hear frequently laments that the student did the homework, studied the material, but then bombed the test. So what’s going on?

Willingham explains that a student may think he knows more than he actually does because, following a homework assignment or class lecture, he feels confident in his knowledge. What is missing is putting this belief to the test… before the actual test. Does the student really know the material well enough to recollect the content or is he simply familiar with it?

Know the target information

Students who say they know the material, but perform poorly on the test have likely overestimated their true level of understanding or misidentified the target information. By building strong study skills, students can help themselves learn what they need to know:

• Complete all assignments to get the big picture
• Eliminate distractions and avoid multitasking
• Study one section at a time, starting days before the test
• Use flashcards, study guides, notes, quizzes, etc
• Exchange homemade exams with a friend
• Ask a parent or classmate to quiz you on the material
• Revisit difficult concepts until you have them down

Finally, avoid tricking yourself into believing you know more than you really do. Try asking, “Do I understand this material well enough to teach it to someone unfamiliar with the subject?” Then, double check how well you know the critical information by explaining to someone else.

For example, prior to a test on the history of Hinduism, a student may recall that Hindus have four goals in life, “pleasure and success, dharma, moksha, and reincarnation.” This may lead her to believe she is ready for the test even if she has not mastered the target information. In order to teach someone else, she must also be prepared to define the meaning of each goal, explain why Hindus strive to meet these goals, and give examples of how these goals helped to shape Indian society.

So the next time you think, “That test was so unfair” or “I just don’t test well,” consider whether you invested the time necessary to recall specific details or if you, in fact, entered the test with only a cursory understanding of the material. Then decide what you will do differently to ace the next one.

“To do two things at once is to do neither.”
Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.

We’ve all heard the woes of students who start their homework after dinner and are still going strong at midnight. But are they truly working nonstop or are they getting distracted along the way? Does the computer that was switched on for research also display instant messages? Email? Facebook? If so, two hours of work can easily stretch into six.

While many people brag about their ability to multi-task or switch-task, it turns out that none of us, kids included, perform well when interrupted. That’s because our brains can only focus on one item at a time. In this age of tweets, texting, and social networking, the interruptions fly nonstop. We may be able to walk and talk at the same time, but when it comes to paying attention, our brains have limits.

But what about those who insist they’re wired for multitasking? Stanford researchers decided to find out what gives these folks their edge. What gift do they have that the rest of us inefficient, single-taskers are missing? “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn’t find it,” said Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead author. In fact, they found that multitaskers pay a mental price, and in some cases perform worse than non-multitaskers, People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.

Other task-switching research shows that doing more really means doing less. Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, explains that the part of our brain responsible for switching activities, what he calls the “attentional spotlight,” works as a sequential processor. This means, it can only focus on one task at a time. He claims that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to complete a task and makes 50% more errors. He shared the following anecdote, which may hit a little too close to home for many of today’s parents:

“Recently, I agreed to help the high-school son of a friend of mine with some homework, and I don’t think I will ever forget the experience. Eric had been working for about a half-hour on his laptop when I was ushered to his room. An iPod was dangling from his neck, the earbuds cranking out Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Green Day as his left hand reflexively tapped the backbeat. The laptop had at least 11 windows open, including two IM screens carrying simultaneous conversations with MySpace friends. Another window was busy downloading an image from Google. The window behind it had the results of some graphic he was altering for MySpace friend No. 2, and the one behind that held an old Pong game paused mid-ping. Buried in the middle of this activity was a word-processing program holding the contents of the paper for which I was to provide assistance. ‘The music helps me concentrate,’ Eric declared, taking a call on his cell phone.”

The task-switching problem is not limited to students. Workplace studies indicate that performing several duties at once reduces employee productivity. University of Michigan researcher David Meyer, Ph.D. [pdf], explains that in work settings, 20-40 percent of potential efficiency is lost due to task switching by workers “who are banging away on word processors at the same time they have to answer phones and talk to their co-workers or bosses.” Researchers at the University of California at Irvine found that workers returning to a task took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from interruptions and displayed significantly higher levels of stress, frustration, and mental effort.

Multitasking has also been shown to adversely affect how people learn. An article in The New Atlantis points to Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who found “that even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” Poldrack’s research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information.

The solution for students who want to learn the lost art of paying attention is to focus on the task at hand. Turn off the distractions, make a plan, and concentrate on one activity at a time. Then reward yourself by powering back up. When done well, you’ll spend less overall time on your work, learn more, and have plenty of time leftover for fun.

Applicants will focus on participatory learning experiences that incorporate the principles of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Participatory learning, as defined by the competition, is a form of learning connected to individual interests and passions, inherently social in nature, and occurring during hands-on, creative activities.

“Lifting American students from the middle to the top of the pack in STEM achievement over the next decade will not be attained by government alone,” said President Obama. “I applaud the substantial commitments made today by the leaders of companies, universities, foundations, non-profits and organizations representing millions of scientists, engineers, and teachers from across the country.”

The competition is open to designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and others interested in building digital media experiences that help young people interact and explore in new and innovative ways.

Information about past winners and the current competition is available at www.dmlcompetition.net.

I found countless static websites to help students make sense of the classics, identify themes, or gain historical insight, but nothing interactive until I stumbled across Dr. Roger Travis. This Associate Professor in the Modern and Classical Languages department at the University of Connecticut uses online gaming as a course requirement when teaching the classics.

Dr. Travis, who first noticed a connection between modern video games and the classics while teaching Virgil’s Aeneid, suggests that the bards’ audiences were interactive with epic poems in much the same way that today’s video gamers interact with a software-generated adventure tale.

He has gone so far as to turn his course, “Classics in Ancient Mediterranian Studies” into an online class he affectionately refers to as, “gaming Homer.” Students are assigned to read Homer as well as secondary sources about Homer’s improvisational tradition. They then play video games to grasp that myth is not just something from 2,500 years ago.

“Like today’s gamers, the bards’ audiences didn’t know what was going to happen next, so they were immersed in the story and were interactive with it in a very real way,” Travis says. “The popular notion that video games are unique in their interactivity overlooks a tradition well over 2,000 years old.” Video games “bring back to life an essential part of the sort of storytelling to be found in the epic tradition of the Homeric bards.”

Fortunately, the flip side is also true, “If the teacher has a good relationship with the pupils then their interest for the subject taught is greater, and if the teacher exerts a large influence on what happens in class, the pupils learn more.”

According to a new study, it is difficult, if not impossible, for a teacher to fundamentally change a disrupted relationship with students once it occurs. It is therefore best for teachers to build a good relationship based on a large degree of influence (teacher dominance versus submissiveness) and proximity (teacher cooperation versus opposition) with a class right from day one.

A joint report by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and Utrecht University concludes, “The relationship between a teacher and class is important for the learning achievement of pupils and their pleasure in learning.” Dutch researcher Tim Mainhard discovered, “Teacher-class relationships are very stable over the course of a school year. Consequently if teachers get off to a bad start, it is almost impossible to put things right.” If, however, a single poor lesson occurs when the relationship is good, the situation often returns to normal over the course of a week.

While many students have heard it before, these tips based on the TeensHealth.org article, Staying Focused on Schoolwork, serve as good reminders about how focusing not only helps get the job done, but gets it done well. As we like to say around our house (while hoping we’re not wasting our breath), “You’re going to do it anyway, so you might as well do it right.”

Get organized. Organization makes everything you do easier, focuses your efforts on what’s important, and keeps you from dropping the ball. Expect to try various techniques before finding find a system that works for you.

Plan ahead. Setting and enforcing your own deadlines helps you manage your time and makes it easier to stay focused on the task at hand.

Claim your workspace. A quiet, orderly environment is essential for focusing on schoolwork. Find ways to escape all distractions to get your work finished faster.

Don’t even think about multi-tasking! Studies show that all of us perform poorly on tasks when we try to squeeze-in additional activities such as talking on the phone, listening to music, checking email, texting, and IMing. If you want to absorb knowledge and retain information, do whatever it takes to avoid these temptations. Then give them 100% of your focus when the work is done.

If the hassle of getting organized, planning, and concentrating doesn’t seem worth the effort, it might help to know that students who train themselves to stay focused 1) perform better in school and 2) have more free time than those who allow disorganization and interruption to derail their work.

• A study at the University of Washington comparing human and electronic teaching methods demonstrates young children learn best through social interaction and finds that the “social aspects of learning are very important at all ages.”
• Early childhood test scores and self-control dramatically improve for children who participate in Tools of the Mind, a program that enables children to learn on their own.
• Research at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology found that, “Behavioral and brain measures identify infants and young children at risk for dyslexia, and preventive intervention is often effective.”
• The gap between students who fail, yet remain determined to master new challenges, and those who simply give up, can be closed using a simple technique developed by Stanford University’s Carol Dweck.

Parents and teachers can get bombarded by fascinating educational studies with great potential to improve learning. Unfortunately, very few have the spare time it takes to read, analyze, and, if results turn out to be valid, apply breakthrough findings to their homes or classrooms.

“Insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices,” reports Andrew Metzoff, co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

Rather than test new trends by turning students into classroom guinea pigs, neuroscientists are teaming with education researchers to measure brain activity while robiticists join forces with psychologists in efforts to blend technology with social instruction.

This emerging “Science of Learning” field holds the promise of a huge boon to educators and students. But only if scientists first sift through and agree on the most valuable findings, systematically share key principles with those on the front lines of teaching, and provide the training needed to put best known methods into practice.

Daniel Willingham also cautions that in order to bridge information from neuroscience to behavior, researchers need to build-in supporting information about anatomic structure, cognitive process, and children’s minds. In other words, be wary of “get-smart-quick” programs that lack a strong foundation.

When the bridge from neuroscience to behavior is strong, children can safely and easily skip across. “Our brains have evolved to learn and adapt to new environments; if we can create the right environment for a child, magic happens” says Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Terrence J. Sejnowski. For studies that meet the criteria of scientists, including skeptics like Willingham, the next step is to find a way to disseminate information so that children everywhere can experience the magic.

In the meantime, TeamUP! Tutors will continue to search high and low to bring our readers the latest and greatest educational findings.

“Learning is broader than schooling, and informal science environments and experiences play a crucial role,” said Philip Bell, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, and associate professor of learning sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. “These experiences can kick-start and sustain long-term interests that involve sophisticated learning. Think of the child who sees dinosaur skeletons for the first time on a family trip to a natural history museum, and then goes on to buy dinosaur models and books, do Web searches about dinosaurs, write school reports on the subject, and on and on.”

The report outlines six “strands” of science learning that can happen in informal settings, and these strands help refine evaluations of how well people are learning in these environments. For example, learners can experience excitement and motivation to learn about phenomena in the natural and physical world. They can come to understand and use concepts and facts related to science. They can learn how scientists actually conduct their work using specialized tools and equipment. And they can develop an identity as someone who knows about, uses, and sometimes contributes to science.

A study led by Jennifer Kaminski, research scientist at The Ohio State University’s Center for Cognitive Science, found that abstract math concepts do not become more relevant or easier to learn when educators incorporate examples from the real world. In fact, such examples may hinder student understanding.

“College students who learned a mathematical concept with concrete examples couldn’t apply that knowledge to new situations,” says Kaminski. Getting back to the train example, “The danger [is] that many students only learn how to solve the problem with the trains. If students are later given a problem using the same mathematical principles, but about rising water levels instead of trains, that knowledge just doesn’t seem to transfer.”

Concrete examples can still be used to help test that math concepts were learned. However, results from the Ohio State study demonstrate that students are best prepared to apply math concepts to a variety of situations when abstract symbols, such as variables, are presented instead.