Zen and the art of succeeding in school

 

by Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

The setting is innocuous — a middle school classroom in San Francisco — but the scene is wildly disturbing. Disorder reigns as boys and girls talk loudly, roughhouse, and launch paper missiles, oblivious to the teacher at the front of the room. The teacher, in turn, seems oblivious to the mayhem: he toils through his lesson, doggedly changing slides on an overhead projector, even though none of his students are paying attention. 

Later we see the same teacher, Tom Ehnie, sitting with a boy named Omar. As Ehnie tries to persuade Omar to do his work, the boy silently turns his back on his teacher, his expression both stony and resigned. 

Involved parents, indifferent kids

The school is Marina Middle School, a low-income school that has one of the highest suspension rates in San Francisco. Many of the students at Marina “don’t do school,” according to the school's vice principal, and these are the kids who show up in Mr. Ehnie’s 7th grade classroom, and in Room to Breathe, a new documentary about mindfulness meditation and its impact on learning.

The film, written by Gail Mallimson and directed by Russell Long, introduces us to a group of students who don’t think school can make a difference in their lives. Along with Omar we meet Gerardo, a bright and articulate Latino boy who frequently skips school; Jacqueline, a quintessential “mean girl,” and her gentler friend Lesly, who is more interested in teen dramas than doing her homework. We also meet the kids' families, and they counter the comfortable assumption that kids go adrift because their parents aren’t involved. These parents all care and want their kids to achieve; they’re as baffled by their indifference to school as the teachers are.

Dangerous Minds

Enter Megan Cowan, co-founder and executive director of programs at Mindful Schools, who introduces the kids to mindfulness mediation. If this sounds like an unlikely plot — Dangerous Minds meets the Dali Lama — I hope it won’t be a spoiler to say that it works and the results are astonishing.

At first the kids in the class are skeptical; some refuse to cooperate at all. ”It’s boring and stupid,” one student tells Cowan. “You’ve got to make stuff entertaining!” another chides. But over time — and after a few of the most disruptive kids are asked to leave the class — the students slowly learn to meditate, and even, over time, to enjoy it some.

Research shows that mindfulness training eases stress, boosts focus, and increases impulse control — all of which can enhance learning, and at the end of Room to Breathe we learn that many of the kids in Mr. Ehnie's classroom are doing better in school. Check out these testimonials to see  how students say mindfulness training has helped them — from improving their school performance to reducing shyness. "I do feel like I'm a stronger person now with mindfulness," says Linh, a seventh grader.

Room to Breathe

By providing a close up look at a troubled school, Room to Breathe reminds us of what many kids are up against — not just at Marina Middle School but at similar schools around the country. Omar, for example, is only in 7th grade, but he’s already lost a brother and a close friend to gun violence. Marina’s classrooms are crowded, its teachers beleaguered, 79 percent of its kids qualify for free or reduced lunch, and 29 percent are English language learners.

Mindfulness training isn’t the solution to the many challenges these kids face, but, as Room to Breathe shows, it can make a small but powerful difference — in school and out. Mindfullness meditation, observes one of the students, “Is like something in your backpack. You can always pull it out and use it.”

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Driven to distraction

Driven to distraction

By Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

My kids claim they can multitask. No problem, they say, they can successfully do their homework while listening to music, replying to texts, eating a snack, checking Instagram, cuddling the cat, and squabbling with a sibling.

But a recent article by Annie Murphy Paul on Slate indicates that they’re probably getting less homework done — and doing it a lot more sloppily — than they think.

Murphy Paul cites research by Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, that measured how much multitasking students engage in, including texting, talking on the phone, watching TV, surfing the web, going on Facebook, and instant messaging.

For the study, the student-subjects, who were in middle school, high school and college, were instructed to engage in serious work, and knew they were being observed. Rosen was surprised by his findings. “We were amazed at how frequently [students] multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices.” He confesses: “It was kind of scary, actually.”

Cultural ADD

Kids from grade school through college are engaging in a staggering amount of technology-fueled multitasking, according to researchers like Rosen. One-third of kids from ages 8 through 18 said they engaged in other activities — like watching TV, listening to music, and texting — while they did their homework, according to a 2010 Kaiser report. In another study, 80 percent of college students surveyed said they texted during class time. Meanwhile, there is a growing body of evidence that kids who multitask while doing school work understand less, remember less, and have trouble transferring what they learn to a new context.  Of course, kids aren't the only multitaskers — plenty of adults are just as distracted at work and at home.  

Besides diminishing our effectiveness in school and on the job, what is this relentless storm of personal messages, random facts, frenetic stimulation, and constant interruption doing to our brains — and to our culture as a whole?  Nicolas Carr, author of The Shallows, suggests it's causing fundamental changes we're just beginning to understand. Writing in Harper's Magazine, teacher Garret Keizer cites the eye-popping rise in rates of  Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and points out: “Hearing someone say, ‘I’ve got ADD’ in a culture of such vast distractedness is a bit like having a fellow passenger on an ocean liner tell you that she feels afloat. Who doesn’t?”

Don’t eat that marshmallow!

Since technology is here to stay, kids need to learn to live with distractions – and, more importantly, to live without them when they have serious, sustained work to do. The ability to resist the lure of technological distractions  in school and on the job is likely to play an increasingly important role in determining an individual’s success. Murphy Paul draws a parallel with the famous marshmallow test. In that experiment, children were shown a marshmallow and told that if they put off eating it, they’d get a second marshmallow.  Researchers found that the children who were able to wait and not immediately gobble up their treat were more successful at school, and years later, on the job and in relationships.

So what can you do build up your kids’ marshmallow muscles when technology beckons? Here’s Murphy Paul’s advice: “Stop fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cell phones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.”

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You'll Never Learn!

Close that laptop in class!

Who gets the best teachers?

By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor

“I’m telling you, no one wants to teach 3rd grade in San Francisco.”

Around here, we discuss school a lot. So much that it seeps into our water cooler talk right alongside embarrassing stories and recaps of our collective favorite show, Parenthood.

This tidbit about San Francisco teachers avoiding 3rd grade comes from my colleague. It’s backed with the sort of word-of-mouth parent knowledge that, frankly, families tend to rely on. Though unproven, this eyebrow-raising nugget makes you stop and think — especially if you have an elementary schooler in the district. Her hypothesis: in San Francisco, 3rd graders (the oldest students subject to state-mandated smaller class sizes) tend to be relegated to the “trailer classrooms” that can only accommodate so many kids. They’re colder and less appealing, she says, making them unpopular among teachers who’d rather spend the year in a sunnier, larger classroom. This in turn had us all discussing our theories about why teachers ask for and avoid certain grade levels, classes, schools, districts — and how often teachers indeed get their pick.

Coincidentally, our talk comes on the heels of new research out of Stanford Graduate School of Education and the World Bank. The researchers set out to study the achievement gap — not only between different schools, but also between students at the same school. Turns out, student-teacher assignments may play a pretty big role in widening the gap.

The biggest take-away from the study is, to my dismay, at once shocking and (world-weary sigh) not: lower-achieving students often get the less-experienced teachers as well as ones who received their degrees from less-competitive colleges — and not just from school to school, but within the same school.

A PsyPost article about the Stanford research explains: “According to the researchers, teachers who have been at a school for a long time may be able to influence the assignment process in order to secure their preferred classes — for instance, classes with higher-achieving students. The study found that teachers with 10 or more years of experience, as well as teachers who have held leadership positions, are assigned higher-achieving students on average.”

The Stanford study focused on the country’s fourth-largest school district, Miami-Dade County Public Schools. While these findings may not apply to all schools nationwide (or even your child’s school), they just might. And if so, it may help explain the achievement gap — not only between schools in the same district, but between students at the same school. For example, the achievement gap within my high school, a GreatSchools 9, is revealed if you look at the rating by ethnicity: it’s a 10 for white kids but a 5 for African-American kids. At other schools you might see such a divide between kids of different socioeconomic statuses, for kids with and without disabilities, or based on their parents’ education level.

Not to blame teachers — with seniority there should be perks, especially in a challenging profession. And of course the teacher with a PhD in physics from Stanford is the obvious choice to teach AP Physics, just as the published fiction author is likely the best choice for your school’s most talented student writers.

But the sad truth at the heart of this study is that new teachers just starting a tough new career are more likely to get students who are already behind (which is what “lower-achieving students” tends to mean). It also stands to reason that when a teacher’s just starting out, an easier assignment may help her ease in while building her skills. But in a profession with such high turnover — about 12 percent of teachers are in the classroom for only three years — schools risk losing talented teachers before anyone ever got a chance to see them shine. 

(Read HuffPo’s “Top 5 reasons why teacher turnover is rising.”) 

Follow @JessicaKelmon

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Words of wisdom from my mom

By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor

In honor of Mother’s Day, GreatSchools staffers shared the advice, sayings, and rules to live by that we can still hear our moms saying – sometimes over and over. (It turns out, we were listening!) Thanks for shaping our minds, setting us straight, and helping us navigate the world, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day!

Carol’s mom: “The world rewards the bold.”

Jessica’s mom: “You can’t hate people, you can only greatly dislike them.”

Chris’ mom: "It's just money."

Kate’s mom: "Never trust a man who doesn't wear a watch, because he has nowhere he has to be." 

Mindy’s mom: “The only person who can make you feel guilty is you.”

Connie’s mom: “Treat ‘em mean and keep ‘em keen.”

Tajalli’s mom: “Treat others the way you want to be treated – especially your sisters!”   

Vicki’s mom: “There’s nothing wrong with being different.”

Colleen’s mom: "If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything."

Kim’s mom: “Travel the world, live in other countries, and explore before you settle down.”

Swami’s mom: "Stop taunting the bullies."

Kim’s mom: “Get a good education and keep your skills up to date. Never rely on anyone else to support you.”

Danielle’s mom: “The world is your oyster.”

Kelli’s mom: “You are young; you have all the time in the world, just do it.”

Leslie’s mom: “Get off the white carpet!”

Jim’s mom: "Don't waste your time worrying. I've wasted too much of mine worrying."

Leanna’s mom: "Of course you can. After all, if your mother could learn to fly a plane, you can learn to …"

Nzinga's mom: “Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

Alexandra's mom: “Never forget where you came from.”

Max's mom: “It is a simple task to make things complex but a complex task to make them simple.”

Jodi's mom: “Eat the crusts first.”

Karissa's mom: “All you have is your word. Always keep it.”

Pilar's mom: "Just focus on yourself, don't worry about everyone else."

Gretchen's mom: "You can always tell about someone by their shoes." But then, also, "Anyone who treats you badly because of what you wear or look like isn't worth worrying about."

Liana's mom: "Don't let anyone tell you you can't."

Vidya's mom: "Everything has a way of working out."

Jenn's mom: "I wish I had a magic wand to wave and make everything better."

What did your mom say that you’ll never forget?

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Want to protect your child from bullies? Then back off!

Dreading Mother's Day? You have good company.

Follow @JessicaKelmon

Want to protect your child from bullies? Then back off!

 By Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

Fiction tends to deal harshly with overprotected children. Veruca Salt, the pampered rich girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is attacked by squirrels and tossed down a garbage chute. Dudley Dursley, Harry Potter’s cousin, is worshipped by his parents despite his objectionable behavior — and winds up sprouting a pig’s tail that has to be surgically removed.

Reality parenting

We don’t need fiction to tell us it’s a bad idea to overprotect our children, but most parents I know struggle with exactly how much protection is too much.

New research shows that, when it comes to bullying, overprotecting your child may make him a target. In a study published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect, researchers at the University of Warwick reviewed 70 studies of 200,000 children and found that children  “exposed to negative parenting" are more likely to be bullied. If this seems exasperatingly obvious, here’s the rub: researchers include being overprotective right alongside being abusive and neglectful in their definition of “negative parenting behavior.”

Bad parent

It may seem unfair to put overprotective parents in the same “bad parent” category as those who abuse and neglect their kids, but this research indicates that too much sheltering can put a child at significant bullying risk. Most of us know parents who jump in on their child’s side, no matter what the circumstances, at the slightest hint of conflict or distress. In my experience, these kids often have problems with their peers. As the new research suggests, if kids don’t have the opportunity to manage social situations themselves, they may not develop the skills they'll need when a bully comes along.

Tears and targets

As the University of Warwick’s Dieter Wolke, the lead author of the study, told the BBC, bullies tend to go after the kids they perceive as vulnerable, for example, the child who runs away or crumbles into tears the first time she's bullied. That initial reaction establishes the child as a good target, and triggers a pattern of repeated torment.

Sharing these findings doesn't mean we should let bullies off the hook, blame the victims, or undermine the need for strong antibullying programs in our schools. The study shows how important it is for parents to help their kids develop communication and negotiation skills — which means letting your child practice with siblings and peers — without adult intervention. Of course, you shouldn't let your kids whale on each other and hope for the best. But it's important to let kids resolve minor conflicts without adult meddling. After the fact, you can discuss the situation with your child, talk about what worked and what didn’t, and brainstorm ways to do it better next time.

Get out of the way

It’s a lesson that many parents, myself included, need to learn over and over: sometimes the best parenting means simply getting out of the way — and letting kids figure it out for themselves.

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Technology: One parent's love/hate story

Where's the app for old-fashioned grit?

By Carol Lloyd, Executive Editor

                                                                                                       Photo: Flickr_whiteafrican

My third grader – an alternately sassy, shy, ferocious, giant-hearted empath – harkens from the new generation of digital natives. Armed with technology and passion, she believes there’s no problem, idea or fact too big (or too obscure) to resist the magic of her fingertips dancing across a touch screen.

She was first in our family – at age six! – to figure out that almost anything you might want to know could be coaxed from the Google’s mysterious algorithms: Does the giant anteater’s tongue feel sticky or wet? Where did Laura Ingalls Wilder go to the bathroom? She’s also the one who found a review site with a listing for Playworks, the nonprofit that provides recess supervision at her school, and wrote a not-so-flattering review. (Restaurant reviews, I knew about, but recess programs?) She navigated her way to a self-study of African American women’s history – pouring over scholarly web sites, YouTube postings, Netflix movies, and some very un-technological library books to create projects about Ruby Bridges, Wilma Rudolf, and Harriet Tubman.  That in turn spawned the idea to create a children’s book called Brave Girls, or a web site, hey no, why not a documentary?

Digital rascals

In a way that has never before been true, we live in the age of kid power. Thanks to the breathtaking speed of technology and the infectious power of awwww, the internet is a crackle with tales of ambitious and creative kids afire with insane feats of ingenuity.

The little Scottish girl whose blog “Never Seconds” spawned a school lunch revolution and raised 129,000 pounds to build a kitchen and feed kids at a Malawi school for years. Or the 6-year-old boy who wrote a picture book, Chocolate Bar to help raise money to fund research for the rare liver condition his best friend suffers with – racking up $200,000 and counting towards his 1 million dollar goal.  Then there’s the trio of 14-year-old Nigerian girls who invented a generator that can run six hours on a liter of urine. Or Sylvia’s Super Awesome Mini Maker Show, a 11-year-old’s diy own web TV show filmed and narrated with impeccable kid candor.  Or all those TedYouth Talks, with those brilliant children threading the needle on the universe one power point slide at a time.

We know how natural it is for kids to want to solve society’s problems. Now some of them have the tools and the acumen to actually do it.

The missing ingredient

But honestly, not many of them.  And I don’t mean the millions of kids who don’t have access to technology or basic education.  I mean another skill that’s lacking in our kids – one that’s gotten a lot of educational expert gasoline of late.  (From this Ted Talk no less, with the founder of the Grit theory and GreatSchools former COO Angie Duckworth).

The willingness to wrestle with the beasts of disappointment and frustration and keep trying. Call it old-fashioned grit.

According to a new field of research, grit is one of those character strengths that are more important than IQ and a host of other determinants in long-term success.  And yet, it’s one that I don't see our culture teaching. 

If anything, our school system’s generally low expectations, not terribly creative approach to education collides with the clickier-than-thou technology in a perfect storm of distraction and low-commitment behaviors.

Bracing against the byte storm

So I’ve been thinking about what it would take for my daughter to bring one of her bright ideas to fruition? She’s got passion. She’s got the ability to learn. But by the time she gets interested in one thing, there seem to be a hundred more that are battling for her attention. The sad (and happy) fact is that as she surfs the wide world of digital information, there’s always something more entertaining and, let’s face it, easier to captivate her attention.

It’s not that I want to be a hard-ass or push her to be the next winner of an Intel Science award. I know that would be a recipe for disaster. But I think it’s up to me to make sure she learns how to dig in – and stick with something. Not only does she need the courage of her convictions, but the persistence to make them a reality.  After all, what’s the use of growing up in the kid power generation, if all you do is videotape the cat?

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By Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

Check out this new social media trend: “confessions pages,” where students anonymously post their deepest secrets — for all the world to see. 

Many colleges now have such pages, which are started by students and have no official college affiliation, and they’ve become hugely popular. Now, they’re popping up for high schools, too. Students anonymously reveal crushes, vent frustrations, and share random musings. Some of the posts are spill-it-all gossip; many are raunchy and in bad taste. Others are personal and, ultimately, a little boring.  Here are a few PG-rated examples:

“Chem major guy that works at the Junction, stop being so cute! You make me want to spend all of my money on smoothies just so I can see your face all the time!”  -San Francisco State University Confessions

“Before college, I had no idea what I was doing with my life. Now, I'm for certain that I have no idea what I'm doing with my life.” - Yale University Confessions

"I don't really want to live anymore. I don't see the point. We're all dying. What does life have to offer to entice me to extend my relationship with it?" - UC Berkeley Confessions

Seen in the best possible light, confessions pages give kids a chance to express themselves and get support. A Colorado University student who posted on his school’s page told the Huffington Post: "The fact is, whether big or small, every single one of us has or is currently facing some kind of hardship, and we don't always have someone or know who to talk to.” Posting, he said, helped relieve some of his stress, and he told HuffPo he hoped the pages would encourage “more people to open up about their problems in real life.”

Cyberbullying 2.0

Seen in less favorable light, confessions pages can quickly become forums for bullying.

In her book, Sticks and Stones, journalist Emily Bazelon calls out a new type of bully that she calls the “Facebook thug.” These kids are quiet and meek in person, but adopt brash, threatening online personas. As one student told Bazelon, “Everything starts on Facebook because it’s easier to talk junk to someone. People get keyboard happy.”

Confessions pages are the perfect environment for Facebook thugs because they can be as cruel as they like under cover of anonymity.  Bullying is common on high school confessions pages  from El Paso, TX, to Newton, MA. 

According to one Montana news report,  posts on several high school confessions pages included sexually explicit comments about other students, as well as nasty remarks about  kids’ weight, appearance, and the sexual orientation of various teachers.

The trend has gone global:  Facebook confessions pages have surfaced in Mumbai, India  and at top high schools in Karachi, Pakistan.  One student told the Express Tribune (a Pakistani newspaper affiliated with the International Herald Tribune), “[The Confessions pages] degrade people and make them feel unnecessarily bad about themselves.”

"Ms. Liberatore is ridiculously horrible”

Kids aren’t the only target. California teacher Alison Liberatore felt the sting when a student described her as “ridiculously horrible,” on a teacher rating site, as she relates in a recent KQED Perspectives commentary. The put down rattled her for weeks, Liberatore says, and made her wonder about the long-term damage that confessions page comments have on the fragile teen psyche: “Adolescents by nature are cloaked in uncertainty and insecurity, and these kinds of public comments can easily lead to anxiety, depression, isolation and suicide… There is a time and a place for anonymity, but public, permanent, anonymous forums that give people license to be mean-spirited just for the sake of it have no place where teenagers are the likely targets.”

Liberatore pleads to Facebook: “Please hear me…”

I just hope someone there is listening.

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What’s important for college: prestige or price tag?

By Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

 In case you missed it, there was a debate in the New York Times recently about the importance (or not) of sending your child to a prestigious college.

Writer Hope Perlman believes –despite herself – that “an Ivy League degree is a magic ticket” to a secure and prosperous future. She writes:

“The problem is that I hold two wishes in my heart that I fear are contradictory. One is for my children to grow up to be well-rounded, humane, engaged, happy people with lives full of meaning and loving connections to others. The other is for them to achieve: top of their classes, admission to top colleges and therefore (this is my fantasy) assured jobs and material success. I want them to follow their interests and passions, but I want those interests and passions to be potentially lucrative and prestigious. So they can afford health care and clean water when society collapses.”

Making the cost of college worthwhile

Motherlode columnist K.J. Dell’Antonia is less worried about where her kids go to college than why:  

“I went to Kansas State University, and I’m proud of my school and the education I received there. Among the many things I learned was this: where you get your education matters far less than how determined you are to do something with it. When I think about my children growing up and applying to college, I have yet to worry about where they’ll apply, let alone where they’ll go. What I do worry about is making sure they have the interest and gumption to apply somewhere, to do it themselves and to make the cost of college worthwhile.”

I agree with Dell’Antonia, but I appreciate Perlman’s honesty — and share her feverish worries about societal collapse! But as the parent of three high school students, the first headed to college next year, I confess that I find their debate slightly precious. Both Dell'Antonia and Perlman have younger kids, and admit to being theoretical about decisions they won't have to make for a few years. But when you’re slammed up against the cold hard numbers, you tend to be less concerned about the cachet of your child’s college than how you’re going to pay for it.

Higher education sticker shock

A reality check for those of you who haven’t checked college costs lately:  tuition plus room and board at Yale next year:  $57,500!  Oberlin: $59,474! Dartmouth: $58,000 plus! And while public universities  are considerably cheaper, they still have a hefty price tag — room and board at the University of California costs about $32,000 for in-state students, for example — and are often more stingy than private colleges when it comes to financial aid.

It's no surprise that many low-income and even middle class families are finding they can’t afford college at all — or are incurring massive debt to pay for it. (Some of the country's top-tier colleges offer financial aid for high-performing students, but many very able low-income and middle-class students don’t have the grades or test scores to compete for these institutions’ few coveted spots.)

If you think I’m being a Cassandra, check out this New York Times series on student loan debt. According to this report, if college costs continue to increase at current rates, by 2016 they will have doubled in 15 years. College debt has kept pace: in 2011, the average college debt was $23,000, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000. The report points out the slick  language college marketing firms use to persuade families to focus on the value of education versus the cost — and underscores the fallout: families struggling under six-figure debt, and recent graduates working two and three jobs and living at home to pay back eye-popping student loans.  

College cost tipping point?

I don't have answers to the college-cost dilemma — unfortunately, our political leaders don't seem to, either.  Staggering tuition costs are the result in part of exuberant facilities expansion at many colleges and universities, as well as by falling state and federal support for higher education — circumstances that don’t seem likely to change any time soon. But some experts believe that college costs have reached a tipping point — that is, they are too high for many families to pay, and this is leading to declining college enrollment.

For many American parents, sending their children to college is an essential feature of the American dream. But rising tuition costs, on top of the anemic economy and stagnant wages, are putting that dream out of reach for an alarming number of families — or forcing them to mortgage the future to make it a reality. It's a trend that should concern us all.

 Are we reaching a college-cost tipping point? Let me know what you think. Follow @CMMatthiessen

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Move over IQ, these learning strategies trump smarts for success

By Jessica Kelmon, Associate Editor

We’ve got a national obsession with intelligence – especially outstanding examples like prodigies and geniuses. One of my favorite quips on the satirical site “Stuff White People Like” is #16: “White people love 'gifted' children, do you know why? Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted! Isn’t that amazing?” 

Are we obsessed with IQ?

There’s something so tantalizing about the concept of a high IQ. IQ testing’s been around since the early 1900s, and scientists have studied it ever since looking for sources (genetics, breastfeeding, etc.) and benefits (academic, economic, etc.) of having a high IQ.

Researchers have found a high IQ is predictive of many laudable outcomes. In his 2011 Scientific American article “Why is average IQ higher in some places?,” Christopher Eppig writes: “Higher IQ predicts a wide range of important factors, including better grades in school, a higher level of education, better health, better job performance, higher wages, and reduced risk of obesity.”

Score one for hard work

But ongoing research into what really helps a student succeed academically has yielded some surprising insight that makes the interplay of intelligence, hard work, and achievement considerably more nuanced. According to a new blog in Scientific American, certain learning strategies are more predictive of academic success than IQ. Score one for effort.

The entire blog “Learning strategies outperform IQ in predicting achievement” is worth reading to better understand the relevant research. (And if you really want to get down and nerdy, you can read the study.) But for parents and teachers trying to teach students solid study habits, here are the learning strategies that research shows can really help kids do well.

Skip the highlighter… these are the best learning strategies

Practice testing – Not to be mistaken for high-stakes standardized testing, taking practice tests and quizzing yourself is a highly effective study tool that improves learning. We’re not talking graded exams; instead, think flash cards, doing practice problems at the end of the chapter, and even asking yourself quick recall questions after reading a passage. More is more here, so practice testing with open-ended questions that require more than a simple fill-in-the-blank answer are even better, but both types of practice test are effective – and the strategy is good for students of all ages.

Distributed practice – Pretty much the opposite of cramming (which is better than no study at all, researchers note for cramming fans), distributive  practice spreads learning over time and it applies both to single and multiple study sessions, though the latter is most effective. This strategy isn’t about how students review the material (rereading notes, asking themselves questions, etc.), it’s about going back over things they’ve learned, and it’s effective for kids of all ages.

Elaborative interrogation – Basically, this approach amounts to asking, “Why?” and coming up with an explanation. It’s especially effective for learning sets of facts. Good for students in upper elementary grades and higher.

Self-explanation – No wonder teachers are always harping on students to show their work – it’s a highly effective learning strategy for kids of all ages, and it’s not just for math and logic games, though it’s great for those. The point is to help students not only think about the new material, but also to think about exactly how it relates to what they already know and to point out what new information they’re learning. One example from the study is to ask, “Explain what the sentence means to you. That is, what new information does the sentence provide for you? And how does it relate to what you already know?” Another example is showing your work in math in a way that explains all the steps involved in problem solving.

Interleaved practice – Sounds complicated, but essentially this is a mix-it-up approach to studying. Instead of doing all your fractions, then division, then area problems, research shows that doing a little of each in the same study period can be an effective way to learn. In the very short term, the blocked approach (all fractions, then all division, then all area) seems better because answers readily come from working memory, but research shows that students’ recall is better over time when they’ve studied a few concepts together because problem solving skills have to be retrieved from long-term memory. Though there’s some indication this strategy can work in other subjects, it’s best for math.

This particular study looked at 10 learning strategies. While the five above are effective, the other five are considered less so. Since some are well known and widely used, they’re worth mentioning here: highlighting, re-reading, summarizing, using keyword mnemonics, and using imagery for text learning. That’s not to say you should tell students to dump a strategy that’s working for them – or that these strategies offer no academic boost at all, but this study shows even the geniuses and prodigies (and almost certainly gifted children) among us can perhaps take a hiatus from the highlighting and give these learning strategies a try.

Follow @JessicaKelmon

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Technology: One parent's love/hate story

By Connie Matthiessen, Associate Editor

Like so many parents, I have an ambivalent relationship with digital technology.  For myself, I think it’s wonderful:  I love the clean, quiet, wizardry of my computer, and the instant access it gives me to everything from the latest brain research to the definition of the word “balneology” to my niece's photos of her twin boys. My cell phone is always nearby, keeping me closely connected to family and friends, and giving me, whenever I need it, information, music, and the audiobooks that save me during sleepless nights.

When it comes to technology and my kids, however, that's another story! I appreciate how agile they are with all its forms, the way their fingers fly over the keys as they effortlessly create a power point presentation, collaborate on a movie, or shoot text photos to friends. But since they’ve been small, I’ve tried to keep screens from taking over the household.  Some of my rules are more effective than others; suffice it to say that my three teens consider me a Luddite and a control freak.

Your phone vs. your heart

But trying to keep screens at bay feels like a losing battle, and, now that they’re older and increasingly the masters of their own fates, I wonder exactly what I’m afraid of. My fears seem overwrought when I actually articulate them: I’m afraid that screens will turn my children’s brains to mush and replace real experiences with virtual ones.

I also worry that too many people now substitute digital contact for genuine human relationships.  A recent New York Times article titled "Your phone vs. your heart" expresses precisely this concern. Psychologist and author Barbara L. Fredrickson warns that our growing obsession with technology may be damaging our capacity for human connection. Her research demonstrates the long-term positive effects of becoming more attuned to others, and points out that these effects are cumulative: the more experience you have relating to others, the greater your capacity for friendship and empathy. Conversely, if you have only weak or intermittent connections with other people, your ability to form meaningful relationships withers over time. Fredrickson admonishes parents to get off their cell phones – and to make sure their children do, too. She writes, “So the next time you see a friend, or a child, spending too much of their day facing a screen, extend a hand and invite him back to the world of real social encounters. You’ll not only build up his health and empathic skills, but yours as well. Friends don’t let friends lose their capacity for humanity.”

Touch-screen generation

It was a relief, then, to read Hanna Rosin’s recent article in The Atlantic, "The touch-screen generation." In exploring the effects of digital technology on child development, Rosin raises as many questions as answers. The fact is that we don’t know how digital technology is affecting our kids. Rosin writes, “...as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them.”

But instead of bewailing the prevalence of digital technology — as I am often guilty of doing, phone in one hand, laptop in the other — Rosin takes a less fevered approach, and tries to weigh both benefits and risks. She quotes writer Marc Prensky who argues: “We live in a screen age, and to say to a kid, ‘I’d love for you to look at a book but I hate it when you look at the screen’ is just bizarre. It reflects our own prejudices and comfort zone. It’s nothing but fear of change, of being left out.”

Prensky’s comment hit home, because of course I take for granted that reading time is superior to screen time – even though books can also be a form of escape and don’t necessarily promote human interaction.  As Rosin points out: “Are books always, in every situation, inherently better than screens? My daughter, after all, often uses books as a way to avoid social interaction, while my son uses the Wii to bond with friends.”

The fact is, technology is now an indelible fixture in our lives and our children need to develop a healthy relationship with it. I’ve likely spent too much time trying to keep it at bay, instead of helping my kids understand and negotiate this ever-changing, sometimes hazardous, landscape. But my kids have refused to hang back with me, and instead are venturing out themselves, finding their way on their own.

What’s your relationship with technology? I’d love to hear your family’s story.

Follow @CMMatthiessen

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