Lessons in Working Memory Challenges

Last week, I got an unplanned lesson in the challenges of working memory overload.  

The instructor for the weight lifting class my friend and I regularly take was out of town, and the substitute he had that night is not my cup of tea.  We decided that, instead of taking a class, we would work out on side by side treadmills.  She's training for a marathon, so she would be able to run while I walked and experimented with inclines.

Now, the Y has some fancy treadmills with fans and touchscreens that allow you to access Netflix, TV, even Facebook and Twitter.  Then, I noticed you could play Solitaire.  I thought, "that might make for an interesting distraction."  

Well, I was right, it was a distraction.  It was also the most difficult game of Solitaire I have ever played.  I said to my friend, "This is like a cognitive test where they put you under some kind of stress and see if you can still complete a task."  The combination of pain in my glutes from the incline, difficulty keeping pace from a constant elevated speed, and leaning in to move the cards on the screen made for a working memory overload like I haven't experienced in quite some time.

Then end result was that I didn't do either the workout or the game very well.  While I was quite sore the next day, it wouldn't make for a very efficient workout on a regular basis.  And the game, well, I wasn't going to be winning any championships there either.  

This got me thinking about teachers I have seen (and been) trying to get kids to do two things at the same time.  It may seem like playing a video while kids work on a paper will be helpful, but the reality is that they won't get much out of the video, and they won't give you their best work on a paper.  I have found that students working on a paper in a quiet study hall still don't get much done because there people next to them for a task that really requires focused alone time.  

One of the things that was most difficult for me during the hybrid year of the pandemic was working memory overload. In the beginning, I would reach cognitive load by 8AM because of the multitude of unfamiliar procedures in using technology to both broadcast my classroom to those at home and show what needed to be shown to those in the room.  While that got easier with time and practice, I was still dividing my working memory between those on the screen and those physically in front of me.  It's why this model, while needed at the time, was unsustainable for future years.  You just cannot maintain a split focus and do either thing particularly well.  

As the great Ron Swanson said to Leslie Knope, "Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing."

This week, I got two more lessons, this time from in tests.  I was helping out in a room where kids with accommodations take their exams.  Some of them are not required to fill in the scan card, so the adults in the room transfer their answers from the test to the card.  As I was doing that, I encountered a matching section with 10 options.  You may know that the scancard only has A through E, so there were also choices labeled AA (which is not possible to bubble on a scan card), AB, AC, AD, and AE.  

This was hard for me to fill in, and all I was doing was transferring their answers.  I was not a kid under stress, attempting to go back and forth between the test and the card while making sure to fill in both A and C on the same line.  I kept thinking, "How hard would it have been to have two matching sections with A through E on both of them?"  

The answer is that it wouldn't have been hard.  This teacher just didn't think of that.  

Another exam was made using College Board questions for an AP test, and this is not the fault of the teacher.  When a teacher chooses questions from AP Classroom, the formatting is preset and unalterable.  This results in images that take up a full page.  While that might sound nice, it means that the question the student is answer is on a different page than the source they must reference to answer it.  It also often meant having a question on the bottom of the page with the answer choices on the top of the next page (and depending on how it was printed, the student might have to flip the page over to get to the choices.  Again, I was having difficulty, and all I was asked to do was transfer the answers from the test to the scan sheet.  

College Board, it is almost 2025, and you make gajillions of dollars!  How about investing some of it in giving the teacher edit ability over their tests rather than dumping it all into AI grading?  It will cost less, give teachers more agency, and not result in a working memory nightmare for students.  (Not to mention it would slow the progression of AI making us less human, which we will regret but refuse to see because convenience is our national religion.  Okay, anti AI rant over for the moment.)

When we start approaching students with working memory in mind, we do things differently.  

• We intentionally stop talking when we want them to concentrate on solving a problem.  
• We don't put something on the screen while we are saying the same thing out loud. We put them up separately.
• We don't expect them to remember multi-step instructions and carry them out simultaneously. We put the instructions on the board or on a paper handout.
• We don't put an un-needed image on our slides just to have an image (or gifs that repeatedly take up space in their brains).  We do put helpful images that make our point clearer.
• We do give appropriate wait time between asking a question an expecting an answer.
• We format tests (when we have the ability to) in such a way that the student doesn't have to switch his focus back and forth between question, choices, and resources.
• And we, in the name of all that is holy, do not put more than 5 options in a matching section when they are expected to fill out a 5 space scantron.

If you have been guilty of this (and Lord knows, I HAVE BEEN), a new semester is upon you.  This isn't about shame.  You know better now, so you can do better now.  Put the past behind you and forge ahead with working memory challenges in mind.

Say to yourself, "I will not ask my students to walk quickly up a hill while playing a game of solitaire."

Exam Study and Retrieval Practice

Depending on your school's semester structure, you are either right on top of exam time or will be shortly after Christmas (so I probably should have written this last week).  For those in content knowledge based classes, the best thing you can give your students is the chance to retrieve information from their brains.  

Why?  Because that's how we cement the knowledge in our brains.

It's a technique known as retrieval practice.  It isn't new; it has worked for hundreds of years. But the science revealing how powerful a strategy it is has only been published in the last decade. According to the website retrievalpractice.org, “Retrieval practice is a strategy of deliberately bringing information to mind,” and it is a powerful tool for memory and fluency.

While we typically think of flashcards and whiteboards for retrieval, there are many other methods that we can employ in the classroom.  Using a variety of methods, from brain bombs and summary sheets to Socrative, Quizlet, and clickers to think-pair-share, you can engage students in retrieval practice while preventing boredom.  In my BodyPump classes, Matt will sometimes stop and watch us cary out a movement without his cues. I’ve certainly never been bored when he engages us in this type of retrieval.  On the contrary, I feel empowered to succeed on my own.

Why does it work? Here's where I'll examine just a little bit of neurology.

Your brain cells are surrounded by a layer of fat, called myelin. It serves two purposes:

1. Insulating the nerve to prevent electrical signals from traveling to the wrong place. You wouldn't want a signal intended to contract your heart muscle to go to your bicep instead.
2. Enabling fast, efficient communication of signals. The denser the myelin, the quicker the signal travels.

When practicing a new skill or rehearsing information, the myelin layer around the neuron thickens (myelination), enabling faster communication the next time that pathway is activated.  In physical skills, we call it muscle memory, but muscles don’t remember things as they are just meat.  This thing we call muscle memory is simply a well-myelinated pathway, made of multiple neurons.  According to Stanislas Dehaene, the physical changes in a neuron when memorizing and practicing, strengthen the interconnections between them, “making it more likely that this set of neurons will fire in the future.” 

In the class I take with Matt at the Y, the routine is changed every six weeks or so.  When we first start a new routine, we are an absolute mess.  Hardly anyone in the class is doing the same thing as our instructor, Matt, in spite of the fact that he is cueing it well.  Two weeks later, most of us are getting it mostly right most of the time because we now have pathways that connect one move to the next due to myelination.  The same is true of academic learning.  As we retrieve the memory, we grow the myelin, allowing us to retrieve it more efficiently the next time we need it.  Thus, the old adage, “If you don’t use it, you lose it” is true because when we don’t practice something, we lose myelin or don’t myelinate the neuron in the first place.

I'm not suggesting that we use rote memorization alone.  The learning is obviously "stickier" if we connect the information to meaning.  But that can be done during retrieval.  Encourage students to go through their flashcards more slowly than they usually do, pausing to ask, "Why is this the answer?" or "Why isn't it a different answer?" As Kevin Washburn says in The Architecture of Learning, “Data not processed is short-lived.”  He makes the point that knowledge and thinking cannot be separated from each other if there is meaning to the content, which is why we often talk to ourselves (even if it is only internally) while attempting to learn something new. In How We Learn, neuroscientist and author Stanislas Dehaene describes how brain imaging reveals this “processing depth effect,” explaining that deeper processing activities activate areas of the prefrontal cortex that form loops with the hippocampus.  He does not advise one preferred method of deep processing but says that “all solutions that force students to give up the comfort of passivity are effective.”

It became trendy a few years ago to downplay retrieval and knowledge. People called it "drill and kill" because, for some reason, we believe things more if they rhyme.  As an experienced teacher, you know it works. Research from both neurology and psychology demonstrate that it works. Use it early, often, and without shame.

Since people Maybe we should start calling it "drill for skill."

The Motivation Success Cycle

Everywhere you look, there are resources for improving motivation.  Books, news articles, research studies.  You can have a whole career in motivational speaking.  Why, because we know that without motivation, there can be no success.  That doesn't necessarily mean all motivated people are successful because some are delusional about their abilities (think of those people in the first few episodes of American Idol who truly believe that the judges will regret their decision to not send them to Hollywood). But success and opportunity knock; they don't break into your house.  So, there is a lot of money to be made in helping people become more motivated.

But here's the thing . . .

Success breeds motivation.

We all know that motivated students are more successful.  But we often fail to appreciate that successful students are more motivated.  It's a happy little circle.  

It's probably not going to surprise you that I am about to use an example from the Y.  I have been having some motivation issues since October.  Not with going; I am always motivated to go.  I have struggled to push myself harder in my classes.  For over a year, I had been setting goals and improving, and then I hit a bit of a wall.  I just couldn't get any better.  When I went home and wrote my numbers in the tracking grid I had on the refrigerator, I was far from motivated.  In fact, I was demotivated.  

I didn't go out an buy a self help book or look up exercise motivational speeches on YouTube.  That may work for some, but I felt it was unlikely to help me get past this wall.  

I decided to take some time to appreciate exactly where I was.  I stopped tracking numbers for a while, knowing that just going and doing the workout was good for me.  I gave myself until Thanksgiving to just let things be what they were and not worry about it.  

This week, I started in my efforts to improve again.  I haven't yet sat down with a goal sheet or a grid, but in each class, I have said, "I want to increase my squat weight today" or "I want to average at least 16mph on the bike."  Is this back up where I was in the spring and summer - no.  Setting an unrealistic goal will no motivate because it will not lead to success.  These numbers are above where I was two weeks ago.  It may take a little time to get back up to where I was at my peak, but achieving these small successes will motivate me to get there.

How does this connect to education.  When students who have traditionally made good grades slip a little, they feel a sense of failure at a more profound level than your students who fail regularly.  They aren't used to it, and their instinct (as well as that of their parents) is to get them back up to where they were quickly.  Depending on the cause of the slip, that may or may not be possible.  If it resulted from night when they didn't sleep well or they had a cold on the day they took a test, then quick recovery is possible.  But, if they have slipped due to chronic illness, a long term absence, or an unidentifiable sense of demotivation, it will likely take time.  

That were the teacher comes in.  Give them a realistic sense of what is possible and help them set a goal.  "I'd like to make an A on my next test" will be demotivating if that isn't doable for them right now.  However, "I'd like to aim for 5 points higher on this test than I got on my last test" might be.  Perhaps they can get one excellent paragraph of an essay written or do four projectile problems in physics.  

Don't set the goal so easy that it results in meaningless success because that's not motivating either.  No one says, "Yeah for me because I walked to the mailbox today" (unless that was something they hadn't been able to do for a while).  But there is a sweet spot where it is motivating.  Just before an endurance song, I tell my cycle classes to set a goal that is "challenging but doable."  Succeeding at that kind of challenge improves what we view as "doable" and allows us to set bigger goals.

To sum up, if you want your students motivated in your class (especially those who don't think they "are good at it," you gotta get a few wins under their belts early on.  During the first week of class, set a challenge that they have to reach for but isn't out of their reach.  Then (and this is important from a growth mindset standpoint), don't just say, "Hey, look, it turns out you are good at this."  Instead, ask them what they did that enabled their success.  Encourage those actions for the future.  Point out each time they have a success, no matter how small it is, that it was the result of the work they did.

It's also helpful to remind them that growth is not a linear process.  There are twists and turns and ups and downs on your way to a long term goal.  While it may feel unpleasant, it is perfectly normal and part of what makes life so interesting.

Thanksgiving Post 2 - Students and Gratitute

In case you haven't noticed, anxiety is on the rise.  The data shows that the upward swing for adolescents began after cell phones became ubiquitous.  While they had access to social media before that, it was mostly something they did on their home computer, and that was back when wise parents kept the computer in a public space in their home.  Carrying their computers in their pockets and the invention of infinite scroll meant constant access throughout the day.  The pandemic increased the slope of the upward trend, to be sure, but it did not start it.  

We know that the more time a person spends on social media, the more prone they are to anxiety.  That's just numbers.  But numbers only show you a trend; they don't explain why a trend is true.  Cards on the table; I am not a psychologist.  But in my 25 year teaching career, I've seen enough to know a few things.  One of those things is that envy steals joy in everyone, but especially in adolescents.  Kids who grew up in the Great Depression were less prone to anxiety than modern students who live in relevant affluence.  Why?  I've heard multiple elderly people say, "We were poor, but we didn't know we were poor because everyone was."  They weren't comparing their lives to those above them.  But social media means we see the peak moments in the lives of others, from our friends to celebrities to random strangers.  We see the expensive things people buy and how often they get their nails done; we see their vacation photos and their accomplishments.  And, if they have something we don't have, especially if it is something we might be prone to want, we develop envy.  Adults have minimal ability to place this in perspective and remember that we are comparing our low points to their high points: adolescents have even less ability to do that.

How do we help?  Do we take the action Australia has just taken, banning social media for kids under 16?  While I imagine it would help, I don't see that happening in America.  And, I don't know how they are going to enforce it anyway as it is not hard to lie about your age online.  (I am, however, for parents delaying their child having an internet enabled cell phone for as long as possible.)  

Let's take one step back and remember that social media is the tool, but that tool is delivering the problem rather than being the problem.  

The problem is envy.  There's a reason envy is listed among the seven deadly sins and that coveting anything is forbidden by the Ten Commandments.  The problem with using social media to compare ourselves to others is that it makes us want what other people have rather than being grateful for what we already have.  And, it is never enough.  Even the wealthiest person you know likely still wants to obtain more wealth because they see what someone else has.  

As always, CS Lewis says it well:  "Envy is insatiable. The more you concede to it, the more it will demand."

So, if envy is the problem, what is the solution?  What is the opposite of envy?

It is gratitude.  Teaching our kids to be grateful will do more to help with everyday anxiety than anything else.  (Note:  I am using the phrase "everyday anxiety" because I am not talking about diagnosable anxiety disorders. Those are complex medical issues with layered solutions, and while gratitude will certainly benefit them, I am not trivializing those disorders.)

We should work thankfulness into our lived curriculum.  They should hear us expressing gratitude for what we have and for the people in our lives.  We should thank them for things, and we should be specific about it.  We should remind them of the things they have to be thankful for.  We should ask them what they feel positive about, especially because our minds don't have a natural tendency to dwell on positives.  

This isn't optimism or "toxic positivity." Those tend to ignore real problems that need real solutions.  This is the recognition that, even when there are negatives, there are also blessings.  Philippians 4:8, which reminds us to dwell on things that are "right, pure, lovely, and admirable" was written by a man who regularly reprimanded the churches to whom he was writing; so he wasn't telling them to ignore important issues but to spend time thinking about the good and thanking God for them.  

Sometimes, it is an issue of perspective.  During the Occupy Wall Street protests, it was common to see signs that read, "We are the 99%."  They wanted to draw attention to the fact that most Americans aren't CEOs of major companies that make millions of dollars.  While true, it only applies inside this country.  If those people camping out in city parks had taken a broader view, a world wide view, they would have recognized that they were, in fact, the 1% globally.  Our students see celebrity Instagram accounts and TikTok influencers and believe that is a standard way of living.  We have to help them take the wider view and recognize that others would envy what they have.

Will this take care of all the anxiety issues in our culture.  No.  Will it dramatically help.  Absolutely.

Thanksgiving Post - Learning and the Brain

It was 2018 when a humble flyer appeared in my school mailbox.  I was prepared to throw it away as I do with all uninvited mail, but I am so glad the tiny photo of a keynote speaker caught my attention because that little flyer has changed my life.  

Every Thanksgiving, I write a post of gratitude for someone or some group that has influenced my educational life.  I've written about teachers, administrators, group fitness instructors, and even the school supply cabinet (find those links at the bottom of this post).  This year, I'd like to express my gratitude for an organization that first changed my classroom, the influenced my colleagues, and finally changed my career.  This year, I am incredibly thankful for Learning and the Brain.

 

When I got that flyer in 2018, I knew this was something special.  From the fact that every presenter was a heavyweight to the extra event that you could attend at the MIT brain scan lab as part of the conference, I was amazed.  When I asked my administration to send me, I was in full-scale begging mode.  And since I usually didn't want to go anywhere for PD, they knew this conference must be special too.  That year, I learned from a variety of researchers and psychologists and educators about creativity, talent, innovation, and the role of neurodivergence.  I ate it up and presented once or twice in GRACE faculty meetings about what I had learned.  

That year was my gateway drug, but my addiction to the science of learning started in 2019.  I can't pinpoint exactly why that year was special. Perhaps the theme or the combination of keynote speakers or the flow of the session choices I made played a role, 

. . . but I suspect it was because that year I first met John Almarode.  

If you don't know John Almarode's work, please stop reading right now and put his name into YouTube.  Come back after you get a sense of this delightful, passionate, and energetic man.  Just reading his books won't do it; you have to see him in his bow tie, watch him bounce around a stage, and hear his lovely Virginia drawl to get the full picture.  I quickly developed a non-romantic crush and then found him on Twitter and badgered him into becoming my friend.  Every year at the conference, he knows what things I will find amusing and turns to make eye contact with me at just the right moments.  He is a treasure and someone I reach out to for advice and prayer and encouragement.  I could not be more grateful for his kindness.

Speaking of Twitter, Learning and the Brain has a presence there.  When a colleague asked me a question I didn't know the answer to, I sometimes asked @learningandtheb if "it" knew of any research on the subject.  Once, I asked something complicated on behalf of a former student and got the reply, "That's too long of answer for Twitter. I'll send you my email address."  This is when I got connected with Andrew Watson, who moderates their social media accounts, among the dozens of other things he does.  (If you don't know Andrew's work, please allow me to highly recommend all three of his books, but especially the one called Learning Begins.  It did more to change my lesson planning than any book I've read in the last decade because understanding how working memory overload impacts learning made me look at my practice very differently.)  When he replied to my email, he didn't just send me an answer; he sent links to all of the relevant research on my question.  He offered more help whenever I needed it.  We finally met, masked and distanced though we were, at the 2021 conference.  Since then, he has been a source of wisdom and encouragement and has walked with me through the process of applying to and presenting at conferences.  He even spent an hour on a zoom call with one of my 1st grade teacher friends when I couldn't help her with a big problem she was having post pandemic.  I could not be more grateful for his generosity.

David Daniel will likely not see this post as he spends little time online and none on social media.  Until last year's conference, I had only known him from a distance, seeing him introduce people and giving a keynote address as well as a couple of emails after I sent him a thank you note.  When I went to introduce myself to him last year, he stopped me and said, "I know who you are."  We had a nice chat.  After an email thread with John and Andrew, David said he wanted to call and give me some advice.  (This was, by the way, the first phone call I ever got on a cell phone, so he'll always be special for that.)  We talked about the direction of my changing career, and he gave me excellent things to think about.  When I saw him a few months ago, he said, "John will give you the practical details.  I was speaking to your soul."  That's how he talks, and that's how he is.  David is fun and quirky, but he takes the work of education very seriously.  Give him a few minutes, and he will cut right to the heart of a conversation and change the way you view it.  I could not be more grateful for his wisdom.

Kelly Williams chooses the speakers for Learning and the Brain conferences.  I have met him only once, but when I decided I wanted to apply, this was the man I contacted.  We had a lovely phone conversation, in which he asked me to send him a proposal for a session.  When he accepted it, I cried and then texted my friends and posted about it on Facebook. Everyone knew this was "the big one" and celebrated with me.  I could not be more grateful for his willingness to take a chance on me.

Thank you to everyone in the world of Learning and the Brain, especially the unnamed person who mailed the flyer to my school mailbox.  You have changed me as a teacher, as a learner, and as a person.  

------------------------------------------------

Links to prior Thanksgiving posts are listed below because I'm still thankful for those people too.

My many influences 

Mr. Sandberg

Mr. Watkins

Mr. Freeman

School Supply Cabinet

GRACE parents

GRACE administrators

The Alexander Family YMCA

My YMCA Instructors

My Colleagues

The Misleading Hierarchy of Numbering and Pyramids

This week, I took a training for the Y because I want to teach some of their adult health classes.  In this course, there was a section called "levels of awareness."  Level 1 was simply being aware of yourself.  Level 2 was focused on one other.  Level 3 was focused on the room you are in, and level 4 is global awareness.  

Let's set aside that there should probably be several levels between the room your are in and the whole world. The instructor asked what our level of awareness should be during group problem solving sessions.  One of the participants answered, "Ideally, anything level 2 or above."  I resisted slightly because if you are thinking globally in the moment, you will not be able to pay attention to the people in the room with you. There are times for thinking globally, but that time is not DURING class.  Part of the reason this woman initially answered the way she did is that we all accidentally misinterpreted level 2 to read "one another" instead of "one other," a problem easily solved by adding a word to the end of the sentence - person (or individual).   But the other reason is our strange interpretation of numbered hierarchies.  As soon as we attach numbers to something, we all want to race up to the highest levels.

Enter all of the educational books.  Whether it is Bloom's taxonomy or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or the SAMR model, you have seen diagrams of pyramids or rows with numbered levels and been told to aim for the highest levels on the list.  I don't know if this is a natural human trait or a cultural Western one, but as soon as we see rankings, we want to be at the top as quickly and as frequently as possible.  

The problem with that thinking is that we tend to think less.  What was meant to deepen or lessons makes them shallow because we stop thinking about what our class needs.  We stop planning for a solid foundation.  We stop being responsive to formative assessment.  Instead, we take the mental shortcut that the higher level of challenge must be good for them and that all struggle is "productive struggle."  

It is worthy to note that we don't do this in other areas.  When I began taking weight lifting classes, my instructor did not say, "Load up that bar and struggle through it."  Instead, he said, "Go light until you get the form." and "See how it feels. Perhaps, you add an XS next week."  When a parent is seeing their child take their first steps, they don't immediately jump to, "Now, honey, here is the proper form for running marathons."  That would be absurd.  

When you are doing your lesson plans, don't take out all of your pyramids and choose activities that are all at the top.  Take the time to ask yourself some questions.  "Do my students have the knowledge required to think deeply about this topic?"  If not, you need to teach an introductory lesson to equip them with that knowledge.  (You can also blend this during class with interactive direct instruction in which you teach them some facts and then ask them to analyze something with them.). Ask yourself "How am I going to require my students to use this knowledge?"  If it is going to be plug it into one equation, it is likely worth putting it on a list.  If it is going to be use for problem solving the rest of the semester, it is worth having them memorize it.  As we have seen with the recent reading controversies, students needed to understand how words work before we set them loose on reading books on their own.  

This requires more thought than the mental shortcut of getting them to the highest levels of the pyramids, but it provides for better learning because you are giving students what they actually need.

Notes from Research Ed Denver

I am at the Rocky Mountain Mind, Brain and Education conference put on by Research Ed in Denver.  These are my raw notes.  They may be mixed with my own thoughts, but they will not be in a coherent form until I have a chance to process them later.  Also, the 3:30 session will be missing because I am speaking during that session!  If you want notes for that, you can got my website, thelearninghawk.com and find them under the Presentation Resources tab. 

Keynote:  Dr. Jim Heal - Mental Models: Cognitive Keys to Effective Teaching

Book coming out in the spring of next year on this topic.

What do we mean by mental models? 

• A cognitive blueprint for how to do something 
• What does success at this thing look like
• What you draw upon when making decisions in the moment

Mental models are developed in real time and over time.  When a soccer player scans the field (average 150 per game - Messi 680 per game), he is putting together a picture of what the game looks like at that moment.

Teaching is complex - "The only time medicine ever approaches the complexity of an average day for a classroom teacher is an an emergency room during a natural disaster." - Lee Shulman

All techniques can be done at on a spectrum of fidelity.  Are you doing retrieval practice in a low resolution way or a high resolution way?  Low resolution is just carrying it out.  High resolution is knowing what you are doing, but also how and why you are doing it on a deep level.

Schema Theory - a network of interrelated concepts of ideas that we make more robust and useful over time.  Example: A four legged creature that is furry and goes woof approaches.  Your mind accesses your schema of things that fit into those categories and determine it has more dogginess than other things. Your schema then informs your response.  If your schema of dogs includes fear, you will run away.  If it includes love, you will pet the dog.  

Don't skip from the simple to the complex too quickly.

Students can't build a schema for something if they have no point of reference or background knowledge or if it is presented in a distracting way.  There is a difference between understanding the words and understanding what the words mean in a specific context.  You have to know enough to access what you need to access.  For example: if you didn't grow up watching baseball, it may feel like this.  With missing items in your schema, you are reading a redacted document, but because our minds are wired to make meaning, we fill in with guesses about what we think we are seeing.  This corrupts the schema for the future.  

The less a student knows, the harder it is to acquire more knowledge.  The new knowledge MUST fit meaningfully in what you already know.  

Chess board study - Three groups of people (Chess masters, quite good chess players, and chess novices) were shown a collection of chess boards in mid game and asked to remember the placement of the pieces.  The chess masters were able to remember significantly more than the other two groups.  Then, the boards were changed to a random arrangement, not like something that would happen in actual game play.  Then, all of the groups remembered the same low amount.  In the first scenario, people with more knowledge remembered because they weren't seeing pieces, they were seeing something with meaning.  Once it had no meaning, prior knowledge didn't help.

Even the stories we grow up with influence our schema.  A scenario was presented about a treasure hunter going into a cave with many branched tunnels who had nothing with him but a flashlight and a bag.  Students were asked to predict what was the best way for him to make sure he didn't get lost on the way out.  American students correctly answered 75% of the time (vs. 25% of Chinese students) because they had grown up with the story of Hansel and Gretel.  When a scenario was presented with a corresponding Chinese fairy tale, the numbers reversed.  

How do we expect students to think?    Do we expect them to have the parts of the knowledge they need to make meaningful and robust connections?  What do we do if they don't?  We can change the way a question is asked to reduce the cognitive load required to make meaningful connections (or have them memorize the fundamentals ahead of time).

If you want them to move from their current state to the desired state, you must given them the information so they can guess and check along the way.  Otherwise, you aren't teaching; you are giving them a riddle without hope of an answer.

How do we ensure they activate the right kinds of prior knowledge for the content we are teaching?  It's not guaranteed in your classroom, which is why you need a sophisticated mental model for teaching.

Rock Climber Model - Prior knowledge is the foot hold.  New knowledge is the handhold.  Teachers bridge that gap.  When climbing, the handhold becomes the new foothold.  This is also true in learning.

1. Where do I want my students to end up?
1. Do this with precision by doing the activities you want them to do and see what is important about it.
2. Where are they starting from?
1. What can I reliably assume my students already know that is relevant?
3. How do I bridge the gap?
1. Make analogies or connections from what they already know to your objective.  What is the underlying structure you can reveal even if the surface features are different?  (Division vs. dealing cards equally). You aren't "meeting them where they are at" by making it cool or fun but by making an actual deep connection between something they know.  One is the outward illusion of relevance and the other is connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge.
4. How can I avoid pitfalls and slips along the way?
1. Make sure your connections are accurate and relevant.

The book will have multiple mental models.  The rock climber is just one of them.  

Session 1:  Andrew Watson - Thinking Creates Learning, The Essentials of Working Memory

Learning happens inside the human mind, so educators have a lot ot learn from those who study mental functions.

"Memory is the residue of thought." - Dan Willingham 

You cannot say, "Research says this, and therefore you must . . ."  What you can say is "Research found these principles. Use them to inform your decision making about your practice."

Working memory - A temporary system that selects, holds, reorganizes, and combines information from many sources.

Pulling from multiple streams of informations (alphabetizing the days of the week means pulling up the days, the order of the alphabet, and English spellings) requires a lot of working memory just to select and hold before you even get to reorganizing.

Students using working memory ALL of the time.  Very few things (only things that are firmly in long term memory with no other demand) don't require it.

Working memory is obvious crucial, but it is also limited and cannot be increased with training (the only thing that makes it bigger is aging from 4 to early 20s).  Play Lumosity games for enjoyment, but don't think it will increase your working memory; they were fine for false claims.  Teachers must be relentless about managing working memory demands.

Ask questions:

1. Can I predict working memory overload before it happens?  If so, I can prevent some.
2. Can I recognize working memory overload while it happens?  If so, I can address it in real time.

Session 2: Helen Reynolds - Three Research-informed Strategies that have been Game-changers in My Classroom

The Big Picture - The Brain and the Landscape

• Talking to students about their brains.  Help them to understand learning in a way they can apply.
• Advance organizers - Help students know where they are going.  Map out the terrain so the student can see it the way you see it.  Hang the "objectives" in the room, but not in the curriculum language - in language that helps them understand why they are doing what they are doing.

Breaking it Down - Explicit Instruction

• Explicit instruction is not lecturing because you are interacting with students and pausing to check for understanding all of the time.  Rosenshine and Sweller provide good research on why these work.
• Explicit instruction creates fewer working memory demands than other forms of instruction.
• Whiteboards for brain dumping, turn and talk, teacher organizes what they are producing on the board and asked them to consider why she organized it the way she did.
• Chunking into small steps
• I do/we do/you do guided practice
• Novices are NOT little experts
• Stop to ask questions

Building it Up - Spaced Retrieval Practice

• Retrieval practice - Pulling it out of your brain helps you to "cement it" in your brain.
• Shed Loads of Practice (SLOP)
• Weekly retrieval quizzes - low stakes (either don't grade it all or let them correct it for 100%) with questions that are spaced over time.

Be explicit about what you are doing, why you are doing it that way, what you are thinking while you are doing it.

Panel Discussion - Using the Science of Learning for Equity

First, we have to want to reach every single student.  We must design for the students at the margins.

The way you were taught is not necessarily the best way to teach.  Find out about the science of learning so you aren't perpetuating errors from the past.  (Personal note:  That doesn't mean you have to throw out things just because they are traditional.  It means do the work to find out why things work so you can choose from old and new thoughtfully.)

Start your lesson plans from the standpoint of those who need the most support rather than adding them on after your "normal" plan.

You have to show up and learn what works.  It's a moral imperative.  

If you are sharing research, you have to find digestible books and articles.  Not every researcher is a writer, and most people aren't trained in interpreting scientific studies.  Find authors that people will be wiling to read.  (I suggest Daniel Willingham, Andrew Watson, Barbara Oakley, John Almarode, Bradley Busch, and Peps McCrea.)

This should not be an initiative.  It should be the heart of what we do.

Invite policy makers into your schools and classrooms.  They need to see what works and what doesn't.  Amplify the stories of your students.  Advocate for what works publicly.  

Session 3: Mary Fran Park - Transforming Student Learning - Strategies from the book Making It Stick

You have to be careful what you assume they know.  Teach the essential basics at the beginning of the year.

Make It Stick:  The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDanil

Illusion of Knowing

• Memorizing, Rereading, highlighting the book, and rewriting notes are ineffective strategies.  They lead to the illusion of mastery, but it is a poor example of metacognition.
• Retrieval practice allows them to check their own knowledge and reinforces, moving things from short term to long term memory.
• Turn think, pair, share into write, pair, share.  If they start talking right away, they haven't taken time to think.
• Low or no stakes quizzes.  Call it something else if it helps, but you must have them retrieve.
• Shuffle your flashcards for spacing and interleaving
• Distribute practice to give time for myelenation.
• IF you don't allow for some forgetting, they won't move it into long term memory.
• One page summaries - Having them translate it into a picture form makes them have to analyze and summarize

Session 4:  Paige Jennings - Cognitive Load Theory: What Every Educator Should Know

Dylan William says Cognitive Load Theory is the single most important thing any classroom teacher can understand.

Tapping into the already existing schema (accessing prior knowledge) decereases cognitive load.

Cognitive Load Theory is an information processing model in three parts

1. Sensory memory - what we take in
2. Working Memory - holding onto what we are paying attention to in the moment
3. Long Term Memory - Encode, retrieve to strengthen encoding

When you start to forget, you go through retrieval practice and "interrupt the forgetting."

Recommended Making It Stick

Reduce Extraneous Load - Consider how many other things may be in a student's working memory than just your content.  This is extraneous load.  It can come from room decorations, hunger, anger, the crush one of your students has on another, or instructions with two many steps.

Intrinsic Load - These are things we can manage, not eliminate.  Explicit (direct) instruction puts less demand on working memory.  Worked examples, chunking, and graphic organizers can help if used well.

Germane Load - This is the load you want.  It is one connects to your learning.  It's in your long term memory and giving your working memory a break.  Retrieval, spacing, interleaving, elaborative interrogation, and problem solving will help make the content stick.

Feedback is Essential - for Everything

If you are around my age, you might remember getting assigned all of the odd problems in a math book.  Why odd?  Because, in the appendix, you would find the answers to the odd problems.  Not the solutions, mind you, just the final answers.  

And, that was better than nothing, but if you got the problem wrong, it didn't really help you much with knowing what you did wrong or how to do it better in the future.  It wasn't really feedback.

Since feedback is valuable, we should define it.  Like a lot of educational terms, it sort of depends on who you ask.  Let's look at a few.

• "Feedback is a game plan for getting better.” - Todd Zakrajsek, book The New Science of Learning,
• "Feedback answers the questions Where am I going? How am I going? What do I do next?" - John Hattie and Helen Timperley, article “The Power of Feedback,” in the Review of Educational Research
• "Feedback and adjustment means additional tries increase accuracy.” - Kevin Washburn, Uprise

There are other definitions, but they all have one thing in common: Feedback isn't just telling you what you did wrong. It's tell you how to improve.

Feedback is cyclical and builds into a whole that is greater than the sum its parts. Think about feedback from a microphone and speaker that are improperly positioned. Sound coming out of a speaker enters the microphone, comes out of a speaker combined with additional sounds, and goes back into the microphone again. That combination produces the awful sound we have all heard in a conference, concert, or church service. In education, we should get a more pleasant result, but the effect is still a combination of input and output building on each other for a different result.

Think about non-academic forms of learning - sports, weightlifting, doing chores, trade jobs, etc. A basketball coach explicitly teaches his players how to properly shoot a free throw, assesses their performance while they practice it multiple times, and provides feedback for improvement.  Personal trainers show their client proper squat form or how to execute an effective hammer curl and then stand by and provide feedback while they do it.  An apprentice mechanic is carefully taught and monitored by a mentor who provides feedback along the way, so he doesn't destroy someone's car.  Students of cosmetology are first taught principles and then practice on wigs with detailed feedback before being allowed to apply a pair of scissors to the hair of a human client; and even then, they are closely watched by an instructor and provided with feedback throughout the process. 

Teachers, this means "grading" homework. I don't mean it has to actually have a score in the gradebook, but it means they can't just get credit for doing it. You may not be able to do that with every problem, so you might need to select a couple of critical ones from each assignment. It might mean providing the key and allowing them to check it themselves or going over it in a full class. It will mean doing more than putting a line through a wrong answer on a quiz. That may look different for you than it does for me, but it has to be more than "this is wrong;" it must include a way to be right in the future.

I can hear you saying, "But that takes a lot of time." Yes, it does. And I know the pressures of trying to fit everything in by the end of the year. But the heart of teaching is student learning and improvement, so it is worth eliminating something else to fit in proper feedback. After all, it doesn't matter how much of the curriculum you "cover" if they aren't getting what you are covering. We all have something we could probably leave out if we have to. Effective feedback is worth making that decision for.

If you want to know more about doing feedback well, this website has some good advice.

You may not be a school teacher, but if you are teaching anyone anything, take the time to give feedback to show them how to improve.

Strength or Weakness - Depends on Context

Whether in school are workplace performance evaluations, there is much focus on strengths and weaknesses.  You might work in a place that does verbal gymnastics to prevent using words like "weakness," so they might call it something else, like "opportunities for improvement."  Whatever the verbiage, it's the same thing.  There is a list of things you appear to excel at and a list of thing that you don't, at least not yet.

A few years ago, at a Learning and the Brain conference, Dr. David Rose came into deliver a keynote address, pitch hitting at the last minute for someone who was ill.  While I would love to see the person who was slated to speak someday, Dr. Rose's speech was amazing.  He had worked as a very young man for B.F. Skinner during the famous pigeon experiments.  While I learned a lot from that portion, it wasn't the main thrust of his speech.  Mostly, he discussed what it meant to have a disability and whether or not something that might be a disability in one situation could be a strength in another.  He explained that he was tone-deaf.  This might not be considered a disability, but most would likely think of it, at least, as a weakness.  After all, it interferes with one's ability to identify voices and enjoy music.  

Or does it?  It turns out that there might be a situation in which it helps.  He was attending a church in which the organ had fallen out of tune.  The discordant tones were driving everyone else crazy, but he was happily singing along as he always had because his tone deafness prevented him from knowing the difference between an organ that was properly tuned and one that was not.  This weakness turned out to be a strength in that context.  

Conversely, I have had students with "perfect pitch," a seeming strength for aspiring musicians.  But, I have watched them cringe at tones being even slightly less than perfect - even when it was just a group of people singing "Happy Birthday."  They do not enjoy much of the music they listen to because most music doesn't rise to the level of perfection.  What we would identify as a strength becomes a weakness in those situations.

I'm not a fan of most personality type testing because there is little to no science behind any of them. They only tell you what you already know about yourself because you are the one answering the questions.  However, in the training I do for camp, we are divided into four personality types (and I am less than shocked to find out that I am a planner).  The reason I am okay with our doing this, despite my skepticism of the tests, is that it leads to a discussion about the need we have for every type of person at camp.  

If there weren't planners, we would arrive at camp, ready to have fun, but there would be no food, no activities packed on the truck, and no program.  It would be total chaos.  Planning is an obvious need and strength.  However, if ONLY planners showed up at camp, we would be on time for every well planned event with no one to provide the energy.  Camp wouldn't be any fun.  If all the staff were super focused on relationships, the kids would bond well, but rules would go out the window, and that could make things dangerous (at this camp, especially, the rules protect everyone).  The point is that we need each type of strength to be present, or those strengths would make a very weak camp.

For 18 years, I was a yearbook advisor.  I had quite a mix of students with a variety of strengths.  Some had an incredible knack for visual balance and creative ideas about how to represent events.  Some had the ability to write with concision. Some understood how to include every member of a team on a page without it making the page appear overcrowded.  Some were super critical.

You don't think criticism is a strength?  Then, you have never needed an editor.  A yearbook editor needs to see what is wrong with a page and be able to fix it.  The gentle optimist is generally not suited for the job.  My first editor was incredibly self-aware, and it led to a practice I'm glad we established early.  She emailed me and said, "I don't think I can tell her what I think of her page without making her cry.  Why don't I send my thoughts to you and you tell it to her in a nicer way than I can?"  The lack of tact that accompanied her strength of criticism would have been a weakness if she hadn't also been able to criticize herself.  For the next 17 years, that was the process, saving everyone a lot of heartache and making for a better creative environment.

My point is this.  Instead of telling students or employees what their strengths and weakness are, we should talk about the contexts in which all characteristics could be best used.  It's easy to think a weakness should be eliminated if you don't recognize that there could be a situation in which it is a strength. Suggest to a student that they might be good at . . . because of that trait that they have previously been told to eliminate.  

Research Ed Notes - Saturday October 19

These are raw, unfiltered notes.  More intelligent processing to come later.

Professor Pamela Snow - Reading Instruction and Professional Accountability: Challenges and Opportunities for Classroom Teachers

Reading is important for individuals and for society.

• But it has long been contested.
• Whole Language sold us a story in more ways than one and had a hidden curriculum.  It relationship with evidence was problematic (as much of education has been - but is slowly changing).

Preservice teachers have been exposed to wrong information, leading to poor knowledge translation and the creation of echo chambers.  This leads to poor academic outcomes and pervasive harm, not only to students, but also to the professional standing of teachers.

Kenneth Goodman's teachings were about whole language but had an impact on teacher professionalism.  He said things like, "teachers know what they are doing because they are professionals" and shouldn't be beholden to "academic gurus." Teacher agency was valued above evidence or outcomes.

Teacher Knowledge - You as a teacher cannot give what you don't have (the Peter Effect), so if a teacher doesn't have knowledge of language constructs, it will be difficult for them to teach students to read. Yet, there is an inverse relationship between knowledge and confidence.  Do elementary school teachers have an understanding of the history of the English language?  If not, they won't understand the tiers of vocabulary.

"Teachers, not programs, teach children to read." - Dr. Louisa Moats

But HOW should teachers teach?  Unlike the general atmosphere of "guide on the side," the evidence supports explicit instruction. 

Professionalism means:

• high accountability.
• ethical commitment to practice according to the best available evidence and adapt as the evidence changes.
• respect children's time.
• using high quality materials rather than making our own and hoping they'll be good.

In other professions, we expect accountability and sanction when professional standards are violated.  Reading instruction is key because reading is the way students access every other part of the curriculum.

The science of reading is not a pedagogy; it is an evolving body of knowledge that needs to be thoughtfully and carefully applied.

Just as the tallest trees in a forest flourish because they receive the most light while those below don't get resources, teachers and students often get less exposure to evidence because school leaders, policy makers, and education academics are not sharing.

David Daniel - Usable or Just Interesting: How Relevant is "The Rearch" to Those Who Actually Educate?

Teachers under attack. They are called indoctrinators, liberals with an agenda. How do we defend ourselves?  We paint ourselves as saints and martyrs.

We need a way to generate evidence of our own practice.

It is often difficult to translate the research evidence into the classroom. We need to generate evidence rather than just consume it.

It's all hypothesis until YOU put it into practice.  Everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere.  "Let's try it in my classroom."

Studies that were working to generate data didn't work once the researcher left.  There is a difference between evidence inspired and evidence produced in the classroom.

The idea of skin to skin contact being critical to bonding was 100% taken from goats.  This did harm to women whose babies had to be taken to the NICU or were adopted.  It's still taught even though we now know it is not true (unless the mother believes it because she changes her behavior based on that belief).

Research needs to be done "in the classroom."  Applying the principles of cognitive science is harder than knowing them.  When learning them, put on a critical thinking hat that makes you ask how it could be applied realistically in your classroom.  Create a science of teaching rather than just a science of learning.

We need a better model for moving promising findings from research into actual practice in the wild.

What if you developed your own experiments from hypothesis to data collection?  It needs to be natural and fluid within the practice.  If it comes from the outside, it will make teaching more difficult.

Other professions have agreed upon processes that take promising findings to ubiquitous practice.  Education doesn't have one.  Without a system of proof, it's not a profession; it's a faith-based calling.

Look up "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning."

A statistic is not significant if it isn't relevant to your practice.

Sometimes side effects are more damaging than the problem you were trying to solve.

Research is clean and uncomplicated; teaching and learning is messy and complex.

The comparison of "team based learning" to lecture is only significant if you choose a bad lecture.  If you have a typical or excellent lecture, you have two things that work.

Solutions can come from a lot of places.  It doesn't have to be from the primary literature.  But the literature could inspire ideas for things you want to try and test.  It takes the pressure off of trying to "be right" of the time because you are "trying to find out."

Steve Hare - Pullting Themsevles Up: Self Remediation in the Math Classroom

Story about a boy with a number of strikes against him.  How he worked slowly and self-motivated at home.  His aid was reassigned because he didn't need her anymore.  He learned that "slow and right beats fast and wrong."  He learned he loved math.  He found out later that he had accelerated in subsequent years.

Putting examples frequently throughout the practice problems (rather than a couple at the beginning) allowed him to cover all potential sticking points, nuances, and exceptions.  Got emails from students and parents saying that they had work they could actually learn from.  (And they were doing it during lockdown, when there was little incentive to do things and little penalty for no doing them.)

Self paced activity sequences with frequent worked examples allowed each kid to self-remediate.  Using pre-worked examples make the activity self explanatory.  (You will likely have to make them yourself.)

You Teach You has many self paced math activities.

It is self-differentiating, and there is no shame because no one knows what anyone else is working on.

Don't underestimate how much work students will do when they know it isn't pointless.

M-J Mercanti-Anthony - Combatting Skepticism and Finding Entry Points for the Science of Learning

The Bronx broke up giant schools.  A large building that used to be one school is now three different schools that share only a cafeteria.  Students can't get lost, falling through the cracks large numbers create.

Causes of Skepticism:

• Initiative Churn - Too many new fads require too much time and attention to implement.  This may just seem like another one.
• Unfamiliarity - If your training involved other things, you may not know about the research findings.  Most teachers are still holding onto educational myths (learning styles, left brain/ right brain, etc.) because it was in their college courses.
• The Sincerity Problem - Trying to make everyone happy, promising a particular outcome, and not addressing people's fear of direct instruction can make them question the sincerity of the presenter.  The Faux Inquiry process results in confirmation bias.

Possible Entry Points:

• Give a scenario and ask a question to prompt conversation about the answer before presenting the concept.
• Just ask, "How do people learn?"

Three Tools to Support

        Having a strong professional environment allows teachers to grow.  It must be peer-led, trust-based, 

        slow and deliberate, and simple enough to respect teachers' existing work.

• Small group modeling - Weekly meetings in which teachers are presented with new techniques and encouraged to try it and report back.  It's low risk; we're just sharing.
• Lesson study protocol - Teacher shares a plan for a future lesson to implement a strategy and gets feedback from others in the meeting.  She then reports back after doing it in the classroom.  Everybody hates protocols because they are unnatural, but they work.  Medium risk because you are opening yourself up to criticism.
• Intervisitation - People come and watch a teacher implement a strategy.  Then, there is a debrief on the visit with positive and negative feedback.  Highest risk

Cynthia Nebel - Creating Learning Equity with the Science of Learning

Host of the Learning Scientists podcast

To get to long term memory, new information must pass through working memory.  Working memory is finite in both space and time.

For students with high anxiety, low working memory demand problems are fine.  They do not perform well on those problems that require high working memory.

Applying cognitive psychology to instruction is about building teaching and learning strategies that harness attention, memory, and perception.

Reduce working memory requirements for any given task

• Spaced practice:  Instead of reviewing things all at once in a short period of time, space that out over time. (Study 1 hour for 5 nights rather than 5 hours in 1 night.)
• Forgetting is essential for learning.  If you try the same problem again too quickly, you will believe you got better and faster at solving it.  Really, you just haven't lost it from your working memory yet, so you don't know if it is in your long term memory.  If you test immediately, everyone will do well.  BUT that is not learning.  
• If you can't remember it later, you didn't learn it.
• Spacing helps with vocab, facts, texts, problem solving, motor skills, surgical skills, etc.
• Spacing is usually coupled with retrieval practice, but it doesn't have to be.  It can also be spaced presentation.
• Retrieval practice - bringing information to mind
• Retrieval provides opportunity for feedback and reteaching.  It also has an impact on motivation and a direct impact on long term learning.

Background knowledge is one of the most important aspects of reducing working memory demand.  While a good reader will always get more out of passage than a poor reader, a person with more background knowledge on the passage's topic will get more out of it than a good reader with low or no background knowledge on the topic.

Reduce cognitive load associated with anxiety

• Allowing students to write about their anxiety before a test allows their brain to offload it from their working memory long enough to reduce its impact on their assessment.
• Taking away stereotypical environmental factors can reduce working memory load as well.  (Computer science study - remove the nerdy stuff from the room, and women are more interested)

Andrew Watson - The Surprising Science of Classroom Attention

We want to move things from the outside world into a student's long term memory, but it turns out that is a really complicated process.

Research cannot tell you what you must do.  It can only inform how you make decisions.

"Don't do this thing; think this way."

Why do students have a hard time paying attention?  (This is not a hard question to answer.)

We fundamentally misunderstand what attention really is.  Once we get that right, the solutions are easier.

Attention isn't a thing.  Attention is a set of behaviors that students exhibit when three other mental processes are present.

• Alertness - Too much alertness is equally problematic as too little alertness.
• Orienting - There are a lot of stimuli in the environment.  Orienting is choosing which one to attend to.
• Executive Attention - Effortful control of cognitive processes (Example: Showed words and asking us to say what color the font was.  The word RED was in blue, so it required us to control our mental processes.)

Getting a question wrong is different than thinking about a question the wrong way.

If you say, "Pay attention," you aren't telling the student which of the three things they need to fix.

Alterness solutions

• Create or allow movement
• Create visual novelty

Orienting solutions

• Address the bug in the room or firetruck driving by or weather at the window
• Don't over decorate your classroom
• Use technology judiciously
• Address the immediate usefulness of the content - have them do something with it now.

Executive Attention solutions

• Assume working memory overload and reduce cognitive load

Kristen Simmers - Adaptive Expertise in the Science and Art of Teaching

Teaching is a scientifically substantiated art.

What is Mind Brain Education (MBE)?

• The interaction between multiple fields (neurology, psychology, health, etc.) and classroom practice
• The bridge between education and our understand of the brain has often had gaps.  It's getting better, but it still has a way to go.
• MBE enhances your lens on what is happening in your classroom.  It gives a better understanding of the complexities of your situation and helps fill out your toolkit.

What is Adaptive Expertise?

Master teachers make it look seamless.  They are constantly noticing, assessing, changing, pivoting, and adapting in subtle ways based on their experience and expertise in both their content and pedagogy.  

They have a deep enough knowledge to flexibly address new and unforeseen challenges.

Routine expertise is like conducting and orchestra - everything has a specific place and role and everyone does what they are meant to.  Adaptive expertise is like playing jazz.  You understand the goals and can improvise with them.

"All new knowledge passes through the filter of prior knowledge.: - Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

Neuroplasticity

When you learn something new, your brain grows new connections.  New connections are typically weak, so purposeful repetition and practice are needed to strengthens it.  Your brain won't waste metabolic resources on connections you don't use, so it prunes the connection by weakening the synapse (forgetting).

Emotion and Cognition

"It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don't care about." - Drl Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Emotion and cognition are all interconnected in ways we didn't understand before.  Nothing works in isolation.

An emotion is never inherently positive or negative.  How it impacts learning and action is context dependent.

Practical Advice for Your Student - Part 3 - Test Taking

In spite of the grade controversies you might see on Twitter, tests are an important part of learning.  It is important for a teacher to know if students have knowledge or can perform a skill on their own without teacher support.  They also provide an opportunity for retrieval practice, and important part of solidying memories.  

That's not to say they cannot be improved.  It would take too long to grade and give feedback for every question to be free response, especially for those teachers who have classes of up to 35 students.  So we are left with things like matching, multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc. for the sake of efficiency.  Much of the test taking advice you see online (like choose C because it is the most common right answer - which isn't even true anymore) are for those who don't have a clue about the right answer.  If you have studied, it is unlikely that you don't know anything at all.  So the advice in this post is for the conscientious student who prepared for the test.

Multiple Choice Questions

When I met with students, I asked them if they were the kind of person who quickly picked an answer and moved on or if the kind who talked themselves into every answer.  For both, I first offer this advice.  Bring a blank index card (you can also use a cover sheet if provided or even your hand) to cover the choices.  Read the question first and think of the answer in your mind.  Then, go look for the right answer.  The only type of question this won't work for are those where "all of the above" is the right answer, but there are usually only 1 or 2 of those on any given test.  For those who tend to talk themselves into the other choices, they don't even have to look at the others (maybe jump down to quickly to make sure "all of the above" isn't a choice).  For those who choose answers quickly, they will at least be more likely to be committing themselves to the right answer.

If, when you thought of then answer, you had some doubts, you can then go to look at the choices.  My next best advice is to cross out those you know to be wrong.  Then, go on to another question.  When you return to the one you had doubts about, you may find that your mind has continued in diffuse mode, allowing you to be confident about one of the answers you have left.

Short Answer Questions

It is easy to write something without really thinking about it.  I can't tell you how many times I have written next to an answer, "Read this out loud.  You'll hear that it doesn't make sense."  That's not me being mean; it's just easy to write without checking to see if it says what you meant.  You obviously can read your answers out loud during a test with other students around.  However, you can do two things.  First, you can do what I call "Reading out loud in your head." What I mean by that is rather than passively taking the words into your eyes, be intentional about "pronouncing" the words in your mind.  I think it is called "self talk," and it helps.  The other thing you can try is to ask the teacher if you can step into the hall and actually read the answer out loud so you can hear it.  I wouldn't do it a lot, but it could help if you are really stuck on a question.

The Order of the Test

Because we number the questions, students assume they must start with question 1 and go in order.  The problem with that is that the most challenging questions are often on the last page.  Because of the benefits of moving from focused node to diffuse mode, the best advice is to start with the hardest ones. Recognize when it is time to pause and go on to some easier questions, so you can return to them after your brain has had time for active recovery.  The other benefits to doing it this way are that you are able to time your pace better when the easier ones are the ones that are left and you don't already have an exhausted brain when your reach the free response section.