Lack of Reading Today

This week’s article summary is called Fewer Kids Are Frequent Readers from the Boston Globe.

Not surprisingly the culprit for kids today is access to technology and how it takes up so much of a child’s free time.

I would guess that the same holds true for a decline in physical activity and free, imaginative play for kids. 

I would also guess that the same holds true for us adults. As we spend more time online, we spend less time on other activities that used to consume the lion share of our downtime.

The culprit of my youth was television—The Boob Tube. (I can't even calculate the amount of hours I watched reruns of I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, The Flintstones, F Troop!) Fortunately, though, these shows were only on in the late afternoon and early evening—the only TV option in the early afternoon back then was soap operas—might as well go outside ride my bike. Video options for kids today extend beyond network or cable TV to YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

Read the article below and have a good weekend—and, if you have kids, read to them, and, if you don't, do yourself a favor, pick up a “real" book and enjoy it!

Joe

---
Books can be a hard sell as kids get older and spend more time texting, on YouTube, or playing games on their phones.

A new report by children’s publishing company Scholastic shows how reading habits change through childhood, and offers hints for parents looking to get their kids to read more.

The number of kids ages 6-17 who frequently read books for fun (i.e., 5-7 days a week) is lower than it was four years ago — 31% versus 37%. While more than half (53%) of kids ages 6-8 are frequent readers, that figure falls to just 14% for kids ages 15-17. (Interestingly, the percentage of parents with kids ages 6-17 who read frequently is also down, from 28% in 2010 to 21% in 2014.)

It isn’t because people see reading as less important than in the past. Both parents and kids surveyed say reading is among the most important skills for kids to have, outranking math, computer, and social skills.

Yet as kids get older, they spend more time with screens. Nearly 60% of kids ages 12-14 play games or apps on electronic devices 5-7 days a week, while 51% of kids in the same age group go online using a smartphone or other hand-held device 5-7 days a week.

Depending how it’s used, screen time can complement books to build kids’ reading skills.

Searching the Web and being online still give kids practice reading — they’re part of a broader scope of reading. Reading a variety of material — literature, textbooks, even social media posts — is important for kids to learn how to compare and use information from different sources.

The report also offered insights into what kids look for in books and what makes them frequent readers.

Kids across age groups agreed that their favorite books — and the ones they’re most likely to finish — are ones they picked out themselves. The quality kids look for most in books is that they make them laugh.

Not surprisingly, kids who read frequently are more likely to have parents who are avid readers. Among kids ages 6-11, heavy readers are also more likely to have been read aloud to 5-7 days a week before kindergarten, and to still be read aloud to. They also go online less often in their spare time.

Among kids ages 12-17, having opportunities to read independently during the school day was associated with more frequent reading, as was having parents who build reading into kids’ daily routine and put limits on screen time.

How the Brain Best Learns

This week’s article summary is Six Important Things to Know About How Your Brain Works. While the article is meant to help us better understand how our brains best learns, there are obvious classroom implications for teachers.

As I read the article, I thought of various times in my life when I did (or didn’t) utilize the techniques explained, e.g., I am definitely a whole-to-part and a visual learner—both of which aid greatly in the learning process. 

As most of you know, sleep and learning are closely connected. I am fascinated by the importance of sleep. I especially wonder how sleep fits into evolution: we're vulnerable when we sleep yet all animals need ample sleep to survive. Scientists still grapple with the evolutionary benefits of sleep: some speculate it is because sleep slows down metabolism (a benefit when food was scarce and hard to find), that it keeps us safe and quiet during times when we were vulnerable to predators, that mammalian brains are so much more sophisticated than reptilian one and need downtime to categorize what has been experienced and learned. I've often thought that perhaps the reason some of us are morning people (I am) and some are night owls (I'm definitely not) is because having our prehistoric ancestors be awake at different times would have helped ensure the protection of the tribe—and those beneficial traits were passed down to us in our DNA. (In another life, I might have been an evolutionary biologist.)

Clearly while there has been much learned about the brain in the past twenty years, there will be much more learned in the upcoming years, particularly in how to optimize learning—and the implications for education are obvious.

Joe

-------

Whether you want to learn a new language, learn to cook, take up a musical instrument, or just get more out of the books you read, it helps to know how your brain learns.

While everyone learns slightly differently, we do have similarities in the way our brains take in new information, and knowing how this works can help us choose the most efficient strategies for learning new things.

Here are six things you should know about the brain’s learning systems.

1. We take in information better when it’s visual

The brain uses 50 percent of its resources on vision. Think about that for a minute. Half of your brainpower goes to your eyes and the processes in your brain that turn what you see into information. The other half has to be split up among all the other functions your body has. Vision is not only a power-hungry sense, but it trumps our other senses when it comes to taking in information.
A perfect example of this is an experiment where 54 wine aficionados were asked to taste wine samples. The experimenters dropped odorless, tasteless red dye into white wines to see whether the wine tasters would still know they were white based on the taste and smell. They didn’t. Vision is such a big part of how we interpret the world that it can overwhelm our other senses.
Another surprising finding about vision is that we treat text as images. As you read this paragraph, your brain is interpreting each letter as an image. This makes reading incredibly inefficient when compared to how quickly and easily we can take in information from a picture.
More than just static visuals, we pay special attention to anything we see that’s moving. So pictures and animations are your best friends when it comes to learning.
Action: Find or make flash cards with images on them. Add doodles, photos, or pictures from magazines and newspapers to your notes. Use colors and diagrams to illustrate new concepts you learn.

2. We remember the big picture better than the details

When you’re learning lots of new concepts, it’s easy to get lost in the barrage of information. One way to avoid being overwhelmed is to keep referring back to the big picture. This is probably where you’ll start with something new, so coming back to explore how the new concept you just learned fits into that big picture can be helpful. In fact, our brains tend to hang onto the gist of what we’re learning better than the details, so we might as well play into our brains’ natural tendencies. When the brain takes in new information, it hangs onto it better if it already has some information to relate it to. This is where starting with the gist of an idea can be helpful: it gives you something to hang each detail on as you learn it.
I read a metaphor about this concept once that I loved: imagine your brain is like a closet full of shelves: as you add more clothes they fill up more of the shelves and you start categorizing them. If you add a black sweater (a new piece of information) it can go on the sweater shelf, the black clothes shelf, the winter clothes shelf, or the wool shelf. In real life you can’t put your sweater on more than one shelf, but in your brain that new piece of information gets linked to each of those existing ideas. You’ll more easily remember that information later because when you learned it you related it to various other things you already knew.
Action: Keep a large diagram or page of notes handy that explains the big picture of what you’re learning and add to it each major concept you learn along the way.

3. Sleep largely affects learning and memory

Studies have shown that a night of sleep in-between learning something new and being tested on it can significantly improve performance. In a study of motor skills, participants who were tested 12 hours after learning a new skill with a night of sleep in-between improved by 20.5 percent, compared to just 3.9 percent improvement for participants who were tested at 4-hour intervals during waking hours.
Naps can improve learning just like a full night of sleep can. A study from the University of California found that participants who napped after completing a challenging task performed better when completing the task again later, compared to participants who stayed awake in-between tests.
Sleeping before you learn can also be beneficial. Sleep prepares the brain like a dry sponge, ready to soak up new information.
Action: Try practicing your new skill—or reading about it—before going to bed or taking a nap. When you wake up, write some notes on what you remember from your last study session.

4. Sleep deprivation significantly reduces your ability to learn new information

Sleep deprivation is a scary thing. Because we don’t fully understand sleep and its purpose yet we don’t always respect our need for sleep. But although we can’t say definitively what sleep does for us, we know what happens if you don’t get enough. Sleep deprivation makes us play it safe by avoiding risks and leaning on old habits. It also increases our likelihood of being physically injured, since our bodies don’t perform as well when we’re tired. Most importantly for learning: sleep deprivation can cut your brain’s ability to take in new information by almost 40 percent. Compared to getting a good night’s sleep and waking up refreshed and ready to learn, an all-nighter doesn’t seem worth the effort.
A Harvard Medical School study found that the first 30 hours after learning something are critical, and sleep deprivation during this time can cancel out any learning benefits of getting a full night’s sleep after those 30 hours are up.
Action: Forget all-nighters. Save practice and study sessions for days when you’re alert and well-rested. And definitely avoid sleep deprivation right after learning something new.

5. We learn best by teaching others

When we expect to have to teach other people what we’re learning, we take in new information better. We organize it better in our minds, remember it more correctly, and we’re better at remembering the most important parts of what we’ve learned.
One study told half the participants they would be tested on the information they were learning, and told the other half they would have to teach someone else what they learned. Both sets of participants were tested on the information and didn’t have to teach anyone else, but the subjects who thought they’d be teaching others performed better on the test. Though we don’t realize it, learning with the idea that we’ll have to teach this information later tends to invoke better methods for learning subconsciously. For instance, we focus on the most important pieces of information, the relationships between different concepts, and we carefully organize the information in our minds.
Action: Keep a notebook or blog where you write about what you’ve learned. Write about each new concept you learn as if it’s a lesson for others.

6. We learn new information better when it’s interleaved

A common learning approach is ‘block practice’. When you practice or focus on learning one particular thing over and over, that’s block practice. For instance, you might study history for a few hours in a row, or practice just your serve in a tennis lesson. Brain experts recommend a different approach to learning called ‘interleaving’, which mixes up the information or skills you practice.
One research experiment supporting this technique involved teaching participants about artistic styles by showing them a series of images on a screen. Some of the participants were exposed to block practice of artistic styles (all 6 examples of a painter’s style are shown before moving on to another painter’s style), while others have their images interleaved (examples of different painter’s styles are mixed in together). When the two groups were tested afterwards on how well they recognized a painter’s style in a painting they hadn’t seen before, the interleaving group scored around 60 percent, while the block group scored around 30 percent. Yet, surprisingly, around 70 percent of the participants in this experiment said they think the block practice was most effective in helping them learn. Clearly we have some work to do to understand what helps us learn best. ‘Interleaving’ works better because it plays into our natural abilities to recognize patterns and outliers. When applied in the real world it also provides an opportunity for us to review information regularly, as we interleave what we already know with new information.
Some examples for interleaving could be cycling through three different subjects you need to study before exams, practicing speaking, listening, and writing skills of a foreign language in tandem rather than in blocks, or practicing your forehand, backhand, and serves in a single tennis lesson rather than setting aside one lesson for each.
Action: When you’re learning or practicing a new technique, practice it interleaved with other techniques. For instance, if you’re practicing a particular golf swing, practice other swings at the same time to mix it up.If you’re learning new information, mix in information you already know—old vocabulary words and new when you’re learning a foreign language, for instance.

Education in America and in Other Countries

This week’s article summary is 5 Myths About American Education.

While the article’s myths pertain more to public schools and the public financing of schools (keep in mind that only 1% of kids in America attend independent schools like Trinity), there are some interesting and surprising facts below: See Myth 2: Would you like to teach in Chile? See Myth 3: How much more private dollars support American colleges and universities. See Myth 5: Surprising % of those with a college degree in America.

Joe

--

A recent international report demolishes several deeply held myths about America’s educational system. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report compared the educational systems of over 30 developed nations.

Myth 1: Our educational system provides more upward mobility than any other in the world: It’s practically a sacred oath to proclaim that we lead the world in upward mobility. America, we are told, is the best country for a poor person to improve his/her station in life. You might struggle for one generation or so, but your kids can make it up the ladder faster here than any place else. And the reason, of course, is because we provide the best educational opportunities for all young people, rich and poor. Not true, says the OECD report. The odds that a young person in the U.S. will be in higher education if his/her parents do not have an upper secondary education are just 29% — one of the lowest levels among OECD countries. Just how low is our ranking? Of the 28 countries listed, we’re third from the bottom.

Myth 2: Our teachers work less and get paid more: It’s open season on public employees, especially teachers and their unions. They get paid too much. Their benefits are too high. They get tenure while the rest of us fear layoffs. And they get the entire summer off! If there’s educational decline, then teachers must be the cause. Wrong! says the OECD report, especially when it comes to hours worked: Teachers in the U.S. spend between 1050 and 1100 hours a year teaching – much more than in almost every country. Of the 38 countries surveyed only two countries had teachers who worked more hours – Argentina and Chile. And when it comes to the hours worked per years by our primary school teachers, we’re number one! But surely, aren’t these unionized teachers making too much money? Not according to the OECD report: Despite high overall levels of spending on education, teacher salaries in the U.S. compare poorly. While in most OECD countries teacher salaries tend be lower, on average, than the salaries earned by other workers with higher education, in the U.S. the difference is large, especially for teachers with minimum qualifications.

Myth 3: Big government (via our tax dollars) funds higher education: We almost lead the world in overall spending on higher education, both in absolute dollars and as a percent of GDP. Unfortunately, we place more of the burden on students and their families than just about any other developed nation: In the U.S., 38% of higher education expenditures come from public sources, and 62% are from private sources. Across all OECD countries, 70% of expenditures on higher education come from public sources, and 30% are from private sources.

Myth 4: We provide excellent early childhood education: The rest of the world invests much more in their young people, especially the very young: On average across OECD countries, 84% of pupils in early childhood education attend programs in public schools or government-dependent private institutions, while in the U.S., 55% of early childhood pupils attend programs in public schools, and 45% attend independent private programs. In the U.S. the typical starting age for early childhood education is 4 years old, while in 21 other OECD countries, it is 3 years old or younger. So where are we ranked?

·      3-year-olds (in early childhood education): 25th of 36 countries

·      4-year-olds (in early childhood education and primary education): 28th of 38 countries

·      5- to 14-year-olds (all levels): 29th of 39 countries

Myth 5: We have the highest percentage of college grads in the world: OK, we may have some issues with early childhood education, who pays for college, upward mobility and public support for higher education. But we have the best universities and the most college graduates. While it’s difficult to compare global colleges and universities (and while we do have some of the very best elite institutions), it is possible to compare the number college graduates among developed nations. The U.S. ranks 14th in the world in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds with higher education (42%).

The Teaching of Math

This week’s article summary is Speed Drills Teach Kids to Hate Math.

The article relies heavily on the research and work of Stanford professor Jo Boaler—a number of Trinity students and faculty have taken her online course on how to better approach and study math.

To Boaler, the danger of speed/memorization tests is they often lead to math anxiety and loss of confidence in math.

It’s important to note that Boaler is not against the eventual automaticity of math facts; it’s that she opposes our traditional manner of getting there.

Boaler contrasts how we have traditionally taught math with how we teach children how to read and write--through application and often with no time limit: in fact, the longer you take to write, the better.

My guess is that Boaler would say that schools need to--as Trinity is doing—give as much attention to the pedagogy of math as the content of math.

Joe

--

Timed math drills and rote memorization won’t make kids better at math. Students learn math best when they approach the subject as something they enjoy.

“There is a common and damaging misconception in mathematics—the idea that strong math students are fast math students,” says Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor of mathematics education. Fortunately, adds Boaler, the new national curriculum standards known as the Common Core Standards for K-12 schools de-emphasize the rote memorization of math facts. Still, the expectation of rote memorization continues in classrooms and households across the United States.

Number sense: While research shows that knowledge of math facts is important, Boaler says the best way for students to know math facts is by using them regularly and developing understanding of numerical relations. Memorization, speed, and test pressure can be damaging, she says. On the other hand, people with “number sense” are those who can use numbers flexibly. For example, when asked to solve the problem of 7 x 8, someone with number sense may have memorized 56, but they would also be able to use a strategy such as working out 10 x 7 and subtracting two 7s (70-14). In fact, in one research project found that high-achieving students use number sense, rather than rote memory, and low-achieving students do not. The conclusion was that the low achievers are often low achievers not because they know less but because they don’t use numbers flexibly. “They have been set on the wrong path, often from an early age, of trying to memorize methods instead of interacting with numbers flexibly,” she writes. Number sense is the foundation for all higher-level mathematics, she noted.

Math anxiety: Boaler says that some students will be slower when memorizing, but still possess exceptional mathematics potential. “Math facts are a very small part of mathematics, but unfortunately students who don’t memorize math facts well often come to believe that they can never be successful with math and turn away from the subject.” Prior research found that students who memorized more easily were not higher achieving. Using an MRI scanner, the only brain differences researchers have found are in a brain region called the hippocampus, which is the area in the brain responsible for memorizing facts—the working memory section. According to Boaler, when students are stressed—such as when they are solving math questions under time pressure—the working memory becomes blocked and the students cannot as easily recall the math facts they had previously studied. Some estimates suggest that at least a third of students experience extreme stress or “math anxiety” when they take a timed test, no matter their level of achievement. “When we put students through this anxiety-provoking experience, we lose students from mathematics.” Boaler contrasts the common approach to teaching math with that of teaching English. In English, a student reads and understands novels or poetry, without needing to memorize the meanings of words through testing. They learn words by using them in many different situations—talking, reading, and writing. “No English student would say or think that learning about English is about the fast memorization and fast recall of words,” she adds.

Strategies, activities: In her paper, “Fluency without Fear,” Boaler provides activities for teachers and parents that help students learn math facts at the same time as developing number sense. These include number talks, addition and multiplication activities, and math cards. Importantly, she says, these activities include a focus on the visual representation of number facts. When students connect visual and symbolic representations of numbers, they are using different pathways in the brain, which deepens their learning, as shown by recent brain research. “Math fluency” is often misinterpreted, with an over-emphasis on speed and memorization, she says.