Make Yourself Smarter?

An article in the New York Times on the weekend called Can You Make Yourself Smarter?, mentioned the double n-back training that is being done to increase working memory (formerly known as short-term memory–Susan Gathercole can fill you in if you need an update on working memory). It’s a little long, but quite interesting, and a little controversial, too, it seems, as I found when I visited Larry Ferlazzo’s ESL/EFL Website of the Day blog, where he had posted his comments on this article (which he didn’t like) and another on exercise and the brain (which he did like–link below). I had stumbled across the double n-back a few months ago when I was doing a little research into working memory and the phonological loop, even trying the online version, which I recommend before you read the Times article or Larry Ferlazzo’s critique of it, or even before you read any further into this post.

Here it is, at a site somewhat appropriately labelled Soak Your Head. Go ahead, give it a try. I’ll wait……….

The Times article is more balanced than Mr Ferlazzo’s comments lead you to believe. The author, Dan Hurley (currently writing a book on intelligence, BTW), reports mostly on the finding of Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now at the University of Maryland, in a paper from 2008. They used the double n-back system to train people to improve their working memory and found improvements in their fluid intelligence as well. The claim that you can improve performance on a specific memory task doing it 25 minutes a day for between 12 to 17 weeks is not controversial. The claim that you can improve general working memory across the board is somewhat controversial. The claim that you can improve intelligence–reasoning, abstract thought, problem-solving intelligence–well, that causes a lot of controversy (see Randall Engle’s Attention and Working Memory Lab site for a truckload of blowback).

Many people agree that working memory capacity, especially phonological loop capacity, is critical to good performance at school, particularly for foreign language learning (see some of the many articles by Gathercole). But whether sitting at a computer screen for 25 minutes a day for what amounts to a semester of colored square and audio letter memory practice in increasing levels of difficulty (remember the last one; remember the one before the last one; remember the one 3 stimuli back) can help you, is questionable. It might help your working memory, but it is without doubt the closest thing to torture that I have ever seen in education. A person might elect to do it themselves, but I would not want to be responsible for imposing it on people, particularly at this time when researchers are finding different things.

But in Chicago they are doing it in a school system. And Torkel Klingberg, who invented the technique that  later modified and did their experiments with, well, he formed a learning company and later sold it to Pearson Education. And all sorts of other researchers are moving ahead with similar projects to stretch working memory and improve intelligence. A lot of people apparently see something there… A lot of people also like the work done by Jaeggi and Buschkuehl, according to the article. They just seem to want to move in a slower and less grandiose way forward I guess.

One researcher mentioned in the article, Adrian Owen, is quoted as saying the following after his attempts to replicate J and B’s study:

No evidence was found for transfer to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related”

Yup, it’s the transfer problem again. You learn what you do in the way that you do it. I can think of a lot of other things I would rather my students be doing for 25 intensely focused minutes per day for 17 weeks. But I have to admit, I really wouldn’t mind if they went home and instead of playing Temple Run for two hours, they played for one and a half hours after they spent half and hour “exercising” their working memories. Or better yet, do aerobics for half and hour, stretch working memory with the double n-back for half an hour, and then run in the game like a madman for the last hour, with malignant demonic monkeys forever hot on your heels.

Jan. 2014 Update: Here is a Guardian article on the same topic. It covers some of the same ground (gaming, computer-based brain training), but also electrical stimulation of the brain, specifically the Fo.us headset. The article ends with advice to take Andrea Kuszewski’s advice and just try to challenge yourself more.

June 2017 Update: This study found no effect when training adults. Here is the reference: Clark CM, Lawlor-Savage L, Goghari VM (2017) Working memory training in healthy young adults: Support for the null from a randomized comparison to active and passive control groups. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0177707. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177707

 

 

Where is the Joy?

 

 

We have been trying to come up with a checklist we can use in teacher observations ( for HS teachers of English in Japan). It’s been harder than I imagined. We want to help teachers and their students. But any list of criteria always reflects the preferences of its creators. It reflects an assessment. It reflects an agenda.

After observing many classes last year, I came away with a few depressing impressions, one of which–sorry–was that I am so glad I am not a student in any of those classes. OK, not all, but many…um, no…most. The classes that were pleasant experiences generally achieved this through the power of the performance personality of the teacher. It was the teacher’s jokes, movement in the classroom, and energy that drove the lessons. The same syllabus taught by another teacher would probably have resulted in another snoozer.  I know it is difficult to separate  teachers from their lesson plans, but if we do that and stand back, some rather distinct features emerge.

  •  Teachers don’t have enough confidence in their own English; and/or have great difficulty effectively using English in the classroom even when their English skills are extremely good (more on this in a future post…)
  • There is a clear preference for efficiency at the expense of process (that is, activities are tweaked to make them faster, smoother, and more efficient to set up and conduct in the classroom, to get all learners to move quickly at the same pace)
  • Control is always with the teacher (it is full-frontal presentation and explanation-based instruction)
  • Learners are not given opportunities to experiment with the language (meaning-focused output-based activities are extremely rare; there are always clear correct answers in activities)
  • And there is very little joy in the classes (with many sleeping or distracted students and very low levels of student energy or participation); emotions are rare ( rarely are textbook stories milked for their emotional resonance); and only briefly did I get any sense of the shared journey of learning the class was making
In a single sentence, there is a preference for teacher-centered cognitively efficient classes. So when we tried to make our observation checklist (dripping with our own preferences and agenda, and functionally short), these are the categories we went with:
  1. Viscerally Engaging?
  2. Cognitively Engaging?
  3. Communicative?
  4. Pedagogically Sound?
  5. Creative?
  6. Secure?
You might disagree with some of the items or the weighting of some concepts, but this list represents a view that classes should be more interesting and fun and communicative. Some of the sections are very general, to be sure. Each one would really take a book or a course or two to understand. And feedback is not addressed. So, yes, it is still a work in progress.
There is more and more recognition of the role of affect in education. There is also greater recognition that learning should be a joyful experience. A recent article in the Mind/Shift blog looked at some recent research from Finland. The authors of a study described in the article (Rantala and Määttä) tried to identify what produces joy in the classroom:

No doubt many pupils would agree with this example of their findings: “The joy of learning does not include listening to prolonged speeches.” Such teacher-centric lessons are much less likely to generate joy than are lessons focused on the student, the authors report. The latter kind of learning involves active, engaged effort on the part of the child; joy arrives when the child surmounts a series of difficulties to achieve a goal.

They also mention there is greater joy when learners are allowed to work at their own level and when they are allowed to play more (the study looked at elementary school students).

This is hard to do. It is hard to set up an activity that is a doable challenge for learners and then let them experience achieved success. It is especially hard when probably no one in the room–teacher or student–has ever experienced this kind of lesson before. It also hard to let learners work at their own pace when exam periods are fixed. And making things playful or game-like is also more difficult than just assigning points and keeping score (as Stephen Anderson makes clear in this presentation or his book, Seductive Interaction Design).

For a more scholarly approach to the topic of emotions, google Antonio Damasio, Helen Immordino-Yang, or Kurt Fischer to get a wide variety of articles, or look at any of the neuroscience and learning initiatives that have come online recently). There is also  this article on Cognition Affect and Learning by Barry Kort. It looks at stories and emotions among other things. And here is a link from the Eide Neurolearning blog that gives a nice summary of humor and affect in learning and links to several other resources.

Changing from an approach that focuses on cognitive efficiency to one that focuses on greater learner control of the process of learning will not be easy. But the increasing number of studies  coming out that highlight the need for greater consideration of emotions and the social nature of learning are pointing to a shift in pedagogy. Adding humor to lessons is much easier to do right away. Taking inspiration from Apple’s slogan: Think quirky, think playful.

 

 

Harnessing the Wave: BJ Fogg on Motivation

This audio and slide presentation from a recent keynote extends BJ Fogg’s work on motivation and habits. If you are unfamiliar with his ideas and resources, take a look at his group’s website, particularly the resources page (and particularly the Behavior Model and Behavior Grid).

The talk here focuses on leveraging periods of higher motivation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have seen graphs showing the motivation of students learning English in Japan. There are peaks and there are troughs (mostly one big peak at the beginning, followed by one long depressing trough. If BJ Fogg is right, then it means that teachers should be doing some very important things at the beginning of term, especially with first year students. I wonder how many make the “mistake” of putting off instituting new behaviors and actions that will facilitate future behaviors in the those first precious weeks of April.

Two Articles on Innovation: The Blue School and Sony

Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society.

The above quote comes from Wikipedia. It came up as I checked the spelling of “innovation”. What sent me looking for the spelling of innovation was an encounter with two articles from the New York Times, one from April 13 called At the Blue School (from which I also borrowed the image above), and the other from a day later called How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By. Both of these articles are very interesting and worth a few minutes of your time if you are interested in education and Japan. And both are focused on topics getting a lot of coverage recently.

Articles on neuroscience appear almost daily in the news, and several groups/sites/schools/programs have come into existence in the last few years. There’s the Neuro Education Initiative at John Hopkins University (mentioned in the article), The NeuroLeadership Institute (associated with author and Blue School board member David Rock, and also mentioned in the article), USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute,  Harvard’s Mind / Brain / Behavior initiative, and an Annenberg Learner Resource called Neuroscience and the Classroom, to name some that I’ve come across in the last half  year or so.

Sony has also been in the news, partly for the transfer of power to a new CEO (from Howard Stringer to Kazuo Hirai), and partly for making a record loss ($6.4 holy smoke billion!). The Times article focuses on Sony’s problems, the subject of so many books (here and here in Japanese), TV spots, and articles that there are probably families who discuss it at the dinner table regularly. Well, maybe not dinner table, but certainly it is present at the heart of the debate about what is “wrong” with Japan economically and what can/should be done about Japan, Inc., the economic model many people grew up with.

Seeing these two articles on the same day got me thinking, wondering if there is any connection we can make between a school that tries a new initiative, garnering both academic praise (my neuroscience Twitter gallery went quadruple post on that link) and serious parental acceptance (it costs more than $30,000 a year to send your young elementary-age child to the Blue School), and a company that seems to have forgotten how to innovate. It is tempting to make the leap that schools in Japan, like their business compatriots, are resistant to change and are struggling to find their way in the face of a changing global environment (blah they can’t lose money but they can certainly waste it on ineffective English language lessons blah blah). It is tempting, but probably a gross (as in icky) generalization, and mostly incorrect. It is tempting because in my job as a teacher trainer for a local government in Japan, lack of innovation is something I see quite a lot of. It is tempting because the Sony article makes the following claim that seems to hook the two articles together:

Sony’s woes mirror a wider decline in Japanese electronics. Though executives here are quick to blame a strong yen, which hurts exports, a deeper issue is that once-innovative companies seem to have run out of ideas. And when a nation can no longer compete on abundant labor or cheap capital, ideas and innovation are paramount.

It is probably incorrect to make these connections too quickly because a single boutique school does not represent a nation, and while applying neuroscience findings to classroom settings is something I am obsessing about myself recently, I’m not sure a) people have completely figured out how to do so effectively yet, and b) good teachers probably do a lot of what neurofanatics say teachers should be doing anyway. Compare the Blue School classroom depicted in the article with this elementary school classroom in Kanazawa, for example. It may very well be true that the focus on creativity and the process of learning practiced at the Blue School may be exactly what more Japanese need educationally to get out of the past and into the global future. Certainly I would like to see more of that, more application of skills and less rote learning, in language classes in Japan. And I think we can say that adding more fun, personalization, emphasis on affect, and the collaborative, social side of learning, would make lessons more bearable for a lot of learners. But how well these things can be instituted, and how effective they can be when they are instituted, is still not certain.

When I read the definition from Wikipedia, that last part really stood out: “…that are accepted by markets, governments, and society.” I copied it and pasted it here because it raised a few questions, both inward and outward. Like most people (I think anyway…) I had always sort of assumed that innovation was all about creativity and newness. But acceptance is a crucial part of innovation, not necessarily at first, but at some point, or else it is not innovation. Innovation is the process of  social acceptance of creative initiatives. That makes me feel better about my job (where I do face  rejections of my initiatives). Change is a process, not an event (a quote I found attributed to Barbara Johnson, but repeated often). Yup. What the Blue School and Sony have in common is they have to go through the same process. Size, culture, structure, personalities, and the power of the idea behind the initiative all impact on this process.