Better Mood, Better Learning

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Marcel

A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests, unsurprisingly, that people in a happier mood (after listening to peppy music or watching a funny video of a baby) perform better on tests that asked them to classify stimuli from rule-described categories. Positive moods also had a beneficial effect on strategy selection. According to the journalist take on the study, creativity is enhanced by watching viral videos, which may be why workers are so prone to dash off to YouTube land so regularly while at work… The researchers actually made use of YouTube videos for the study, but I think the implications of this go much deeper. Interest (Hidi & Ainley, 2008) and mood are important for learning. They are important for motivation and they seem to have an effect on cognitive processing. The results of this research may point to one of the reasons that people rate their learning higher in entertaining classrooms.

This paper was a product of the Catagorization Lab (Mindalab) at my old alma mater the University of Western Ontario. Some of their other interesting papers can be found here.

January 4th 2011 update: Another paper mentioned in the year-end issue of the Economist, showed similar effects. Oswald, Proto and Sgroi (2010) (available online via Andrew Oswald’s page) showed both the positive effects of positive affect and the negative effects of being sad or depressed. The positive affect boost to productivity was 12%.

March 2013 update: More and more I keep running across articles on positive affect and learning. Here is a nice one I saw recently that not only explains why it is important, but gives some practical advice for creating a better, more positive community in the classroom. The four essentials that Ms. Alber lists are well worth putting into practice.

Another March 2013 update: Here is a nice blog post titled Emotions and Humor in Learning and Memory. It does a nice job explaining why some learners really benefit from increased use of humor and affect in lessons, and it links to lots of resources.

Nadler, R.T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J.P. (2010). Better mood and better performance: learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21 (12).

Motivational Effects that Defy 2: The Pygmalion Effect

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Marcel

This is the second in a series of posts on motivational effects that have proven both enduring and contentious. The first post looked at the Hawthorne effect.

But before we get into the second effect, let’s try a little thought experiment. A student, let’s call him Sue, has a mother who complains all the time that teachers just don’t challenge little Sue enough. It’s their low expectations that have caused him to be the perpetual underachiever that he is. Sue’s mother is convinced of this because the teacher seems to lavish praise and attention on Darla who gets perfects on tests, loves to volunteer answers in class, and will no doubt one day be valedictorian. Ready for the experiment? Quick, design an experiment that might prove or disprove that the teacher’s attention and expectations are in any way responsible for the performance of the two students.

And there we come to the problems with the Pygmalion effect, the notion that when greater expectations are placed on learners, they perform at higher levels. It seems so intuitively true. At the same time, however, it is really really difficult to isolate the variables and demonstrate it objectively. Can we really prove causation? And does the effect compound over years with different teachers? If not, is it lasting? The effect is also sometimes known as the Rosenthal effect after Robert Rosenthal whose early experiments helped to get the effect recognized. His book, first published in 1968 and then updated in 1992 certainly helped to popularize the term and link it with the effect. Other names often heard are self-fulfilling prophecies or expectancy effects, the plural being significant here in order to include the effects of both positive and negative expectations. Rosenthal’s work seems to be a good place to begin, but first let’s consider the origin of the name.

Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a sculpture he made. According to the myth, recounted by Ovid, he is so in love with the statue that Venus eventually takes pity on him and sends Cupid to bring her, Galatea, to life. Pygmalion and Galatea get married, have a son and live pretty happily ever after. This story is the source of countless poems, stories, plays, and movies, most famously Pygmalion by Shaw (later adapted as My Fair Lady for Broadway and film). The main point here is that the teacher is a creator and the more he–let’s stay with the gender of the story–puts his heart into his work and the higher his expectations are for his charges, the more they accomplish, be it love, life, happiness, or a 27.4 IQ point gain.

The Oak School studies by Rosenthal and Jacobson showed that teacher expectations matter, especially for younger or newer learners (when the teacher has not yet had a chance to form an opinion of expectation). Basically, teachers were told fabricated results of students on a standardized achievement test. After a year, the students who had reportedly scored really high on that test were doing better in their classes, thanks to the higher expectations of the teacher. Rosenthal and Jacobson measured IQ gains and there are reasons to be suspect of their methodology and findings, but Rosenthal is adamant about the existence of a Pygmalion effect. The findings of this study and several others by Rosenthal, as well as their implications for teachers and administrators, are nicely covered in this short article.

In a more recent overview of 35 years of Pygmalion studies by Jussim and Harber (2005) a more sober view of the research into self-fulfilling prophecies can be found. The findings are summarized as follows:

“(1) Self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom do occur, but these effects are typically small, they do not accumulate greatly across perceivers or over time, and they may be more likely to dissipate than accumulate; (2) powerful self-fulfilling prophecies may selectively occur among students from stigmatized social groups; (3) whether self-fulfilling prophecies affect intelligence, and whether they in general do more harm than good, remains unclear; (4) teacher expectations may predict student outcomes more because these expectations are accurate than because they are self-fulfilling.” (pg. 131)

It seems that recent research seems to be focusing on race, gender, and social stigmatization and the role of teachers in perpetuating social discrepancies (see work by Rhona Weinstein, for example). But what about individual learners? Is the effect of teacher expectations really “unclear” or “small”? Work by Dweck (Mindset, 2006: click here for my review) seems to suggest that what and how a teacher does in the classroom can make a big, clear difference. Praising effort rather than accomplishments can lead to considerably more future effort and eventually much greater success. So it seems likely that expectations (of effort, of success) have some bearing on that. I for one would not be so quick to dismiss the findings of Mr. Rosenthal just for procedural reasons. But the interaction between teachers and students is complicated and dynamic and it may be difficult to draw actionable conclusions. In any case, it would seen prudent to always expect more from learners. Of course, one has to believe that improvements are always possible. For me, research into brain plasticity and how people become experts has helped me to strongly believe in the potential of each learner. I also try to get my learners to understand that talent is not necessarily something they are born with, which takes some doing usually because the belief in innate talent is really pervasive.

Perhaps a more disturbing possibility that we can take away from all this is the one that Japanese learners of English belong to a group that is stigmatized, that is, expected to fail when it comes to English, if I may extrapolate a little from finding (2) in Jussim & Harber. It has often struck me as strange that students who cannot string three words together in English by high school are not considered unusual, but a student who, say, cannot multiply 8 by 9 in junior high school would cause a major freak-out. There are different standards for different subjects. The (particularly communicative) expectations for English learners in Japan are painfully low and that needs to change. If work by Weinstein is any indication, it will require considerable time and effort to effect such change.

Jussim, L. and Harber, K. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, 131-155

Motivational Effects that Defy: The Hawthorne Effect

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Marcel

“And you think you’re so smart.” I can still hear the words, repeated for comic effect by a teacher of mine in grad school. He was, if I remember correctly –and that is a fairly sizable “if” given the years and changes in teaching methodology beliefs that I have hopped from and to in the interim–referring to grammar and how it is often a slipperier system than the iron-clad set of facts that the authoritative reference tomes and logically-organized structural syllabuses of courses, programs, and student textbooks gave lie to.

But it is in the nature of the modern person–and by modern I mean living, thinking, now…and by now I mean, like at the moment you are reading this–to show a strong favoritism for the knowledge currently believed to be true. We sneer at the fallacious beliefs of past generations, mostly confident that we live in a time when the truth has been uncovered, and academia, science, whatever, has finally gotten it right. If there is a problem, it is not that it is not understood by someone somewhere, but rather that the correct knowledge has not disseminated properly (or perhaps because evil, ignorant agents have introduced false ideas and muddied the waters, but that’s another story). We may quote Hamlet’s rebuke to Horatio about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our blah blah blah, but the illusion of knowledge is strong and we are susceptible.

But all that modern certainty won’t always help us in the world of teaching. Teaching is one of those undertakings that seems to defy logical thinking at times. There are several motivational effects, for example, that are surrounded by a bit of mystery, that have moved in and out of fashion in the last decades, and that have proven slipperier than imagined. These are effects where “…performance or other significant objective effects come from (non-objective) causes of humans simply expecting something,” as Steve Draper writes on a web page of his. He also lists up several of them: the Hawthorne effect, the Pygmalion effect, and the Placebo effect. This latter one being the item of search that brought me to Mr. Draper’s web page. In a couple of posts I’d like to explore these ideas a little, beginning with the Hawthorne effect. I’d like to consider what they are and whether they may be exploitable by teachers, even though they are not well understood.

The first of these is the Hawthorne effect, named after the factory in Chicago where several classic studies were performed over the period from 1924 to 1932. In the studies, several changes were made in the working environment to see what effect they would have on productivity. In a nutshell, all changes that were made–somehow, and against reasonable expectations–led to increases in productivity. In poking around the web for more information, one gets the impression that the Hawthorne studies are something like one of Harry Potter’s bogarts in that each person sees something different in them. From glowing nostalgic essays to a New York Times article that goes as far as calling it an urban myth in a 1998, it seems the Hawthorne studies and the Hawthorne effect produce different cognitive and emotional effects in different people.

It is perhaps not surprising that business people look back on the seminal series of on-site experiments that saw workers as complex social beings. They were ground-breaking in that they were some of the first empirical field-based studies and introduced the idea of human relations in management, states Harvard Librarian Laura Linard on the BBC Mind Changers podcast devoted to the Hawthorne effect (try here if the audio isn’t working).

But the Hawthorne effect is probably most famous as a caution to experiment designers to be careful what effect they cause by just observing people. The simple act of running an experiment and observing people will possibly cause them to change their behavior. Framed another way, “people who are subject to intervention have their own goals and motives and respond accordingly and that is an important fact in research” (Lee Ross, in the BBC podcast). This sometimes over-simplified causal relationship is one of the reasons the effect has become academically contentious, in addition to some procedural flaws and sloppiness that is. Some people seem to have extrapolated that ANY intervention can effect improvements in performance, which is just wishful thinking, states Mecca Chiesa (again in the BBC podcast). Chiesa and Hobbs (2008) after a long overview study of the use of the term Hawthorne effect suggest that the term is applied to too many phenomena (internal cognitive functions, environmental factors, social effects, and sometimes a combination of these) to be considered useful anymore. They actually suggest retiring it.

So beyond the cautionary lesson for experiment designers, if we try to read into the Hawthorne effect more to see if there is something we can use for our classes, we get into rather unscientific territory. But maybe we can say this: intervention has power. Intervention provides a message that is at the heart of education: I care about your performance, I want to help you improve it; and I’m trying something in my power to do so. Intervention quite possibly has the power to influence the impression learners have of an educational setting. Interventions can possibly make learners aware that they are contributing to the advancement of teaching and learning; and improve the social cohesion in the group; and perhaps induce a more positive opinion of the instructor and even the slightest desire to make that instructor a little happier or at least indulge them a little. And if that is indeed true, well then I would think that improved performance is highly likely. A Hawthorne effect? No, more likely a host of other inter-playing psychological effects, but I am not one to sneer at improved performance, just like the managers of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works were not likely to sneer at the better performance and higher profits they were after.

To learn more, try this site maintained by the Harvard Business School, or the resources provided by the producers of Mind Changers, the BBC radio documentary series.

Chiesa, M. and Hobbs, S. (2008), Making sense of social research: how useful is the Hawthorne Effect?. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38: 67–74. doi: 10.1002