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 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 answering 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.