Education Final

"Locus of control" in US education

Decentralized (unique to US): we do not have a national education system, public schools are mostly a local and state responsibility

State oversight of school (funding)

Most states provide substantial aid to schools to supplement local tax revenue (especially for schools that have less funds from property tax) -- still, some states have much more money than others

The US...

ranks just lower than the international average in math performance

Empirical examples overall cont'd (how CVS was tested)

- "Balls down the ramp": in each experiment, participant asked to investigate specific question (ie does surface impact roll?) - 4 variables: surface texture, length of run, steepness of ramp, type of ball - Best case scenario: conduct unconfounded comparisons by contrasting rough and smooth surfaces with holding all other variables constant (if wanted to see impact of surface texture, for examples) - Competence in CVS is reflected in children's: ability to generate unconfounded experiments, identify and correct confounded experiments, and make appropriate inferences from experimental outcomes

edTPA assessment

- "Bar exam for teaching": same type of career-entry assessment requirement as those for aspiring lawyers, doctors, architects, professionals in many fields - Portfolio including unedited video of teaching - Concerns: costs more ($300 more), takes more time to assess, requires teachers-in-training to do more work (specifically deters low-income and minority teacher candidates); teacher pipeline 2020 (# of white teacher candidates is triple that of all other racial and ethnic groups combined, meanwhile, more minority students in US than white)

Statistical significance

- 'P-value': probability that the pattern of findings were due to chance - Threshold of p<.05 (there is only a 5% chance that these results would have occurred by chance) - Ex. What would doodling do? (RCT), p<0.01, so there is only a 1% chance that doodlers would recall more than non-doodlers if doodling didn't actually matter (so there is real effect)

Effect size

- 'd' value': the size of the difference between groups, on standardized scale - Practical significance - p: is there a difference (statistical significance) - does it work? - d: how big is the difference (practical significance) - how well does it work?

Empirical example 2 of how background knowledge allows for chunking

- 1/2 participants read one passage, 1/2 participants read passage with its title ("washing laundry") - First group: recall poor, ~95% made errors - Second group: Recall excellent, ~5% made errors Take away: when background knowledge is cued, you can chunk information

Perry Preschool Project (pre-k)

- 1962 longitudinal study (follow kids year after year) - "High risk" sample: 123 4-year-old African American children of low SES, low IQ - Randomly assigned to Perry Program or no program (control) - Perry Program: M-F 2.5 hrs/day for 2 years, home visit 1.5 hrs/wk, parents participated in monthly small group program - Had annual follow ups and analyzed differences between groups - controlled for age, SES, gender, father absence, parental education, family size, household density, birth order

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)

- 1965 LBJ War on Poverty - expanded federal funding in education - Title I schools (serving low income students) eligible for funds if 40% low income - Title III have dedicated funding for ELLs (English Language Learners) - Gov't has reauthorized act every 5 years but now in jeopardy

Basic emotions

- Joy, sadness, disgust, fear, anger (other emotions are combo) - Basic emotional responses are rapid and instinctive, and easy to read because they are clearly expressed in gestures and faces

Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA)

- 1975 - funding to states so "all children with disabilities receive free, appropriate education" - IEP (individual education plan) - Students placed in least restrictive environment (LRE), whether mainstreamed or not - Widespread support but growing concern as costs grow rapidly (to ensure that IEPs are met and support is given)

No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

- 2002 law: Bush reauthorizes ESEA with additions - Standards based education reform (goal to set high standards, establish measurable goals, improve outcomes) - Plan: Give assessments aligned with state content standards (reading/math assessed in 3-8 and once in hs), data publicly recorded and grouped by income, disability, minority, gifted, all others - Schools now responsible for increasing equality within subcategories (previously only measured median student performance - leaves outliers) - Process: State sets 2 year attainment goals so all students proficient in reading/math by 2012 (annual yearly progress)

Study/results of Head Start

- 2005 Impact Study: compare 3-4 year olds that attend Head Start with control group - Entering K: better prepared on every measure (language, literacy, math) - Entering first grade: gains lost ("fadeout" effect), only gain in parent relationships - WHY: poor K, Head Start kids get less attention because they seem more intelligent (?) - Despite test score fadeout, smaller studies show Head Start children complete more years of school, earn more, healthier

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

- 2015 reauthorization of ESEA, overturned NCLB: preserves spirit of NCLB but shifts away from negative consequences and swings some control of consequences from federal to state - more decentralized - Effectiveness - TBD

Study in support of learning styles (Sternberg and colleagues 1999)

- 324 gifted high school students given aptitude test (rating of analytic, creative, and practical aptitude) - Selected the 112 for whom one was much higher than other two (high-analytic, high-creative, high-practical) - Took summer psych course at Yale, randomly assigned to a class that emphasized one of 3 instruction types - Matched subjects did better in course than mismatched - Provides support for learning styles theory, but a few criticisms: only 1/3 of subjects assigned, so not representative of all students; even of those, outliers removed for unspecified reasons; they didn't report mean score on each final assessment; maybe learning style meshing does work for these 3 groups? - Overall: they did still find significant differences

Development of self-esteem

- 4-7 yr olds have inflated self esteem: rate themselves positively in all domains, many think they can't distinguish b/w reality and their desire to be good at things - 8 years-adolescence: self-evaluations fairly accurate (match outsiders' evaluations); at this age, self-appraisals depend on way other people perceive and react to your behavior ("looking glass self") and the values you place on each competency

Disability population studies (dyscalculia)

- About 5% of normal IQ kids present a specific difficulty with math (both exact calculation and approximation) - Indeed, their IPS and prefrontal regions show structural and functional differences - Functional: largest difference in bi-lateral IPS - math (down part), some differences in frontal region - Structural: have smaller IPS

Overall importance of science

- According to international standardized tests (of 34 countries), US ranks 17th in science - And when broken down by age, we fall further and further behind - Not because we're not spending (US spends the most per year per student for each student to get one point on PISA) - 69% of hs seniors fail to meet college readiness benchmarks in science - US science curriculum covers more content/topics than any other country at every single grade level (if conceptual change takes time, we cannot possibly be allowing for conceptual change if we need to cover all of the content) - US also makes fewest links b/w topics than any other country

Big picture of US achievement gap

- Achievement gap is larger than ever: present early, have not determined a formula to address it - Internationally, US does worse than projections would predict (may be in large part because we educate more children living in poverty)

Science study 1 (results)

- Across grade levels, CVS competency improved most for those in explicit instruction condition - Debate over if learning should be more discovery or more instructional --> This study supports more instructional (since learning via explicit instruction ends up aiding learning)

Findings of study 2

- Activation widespread - Academic vs monetary different: in academic conditions, no cortical differences b/w exp and control, but in monetary, more bi-lateral frontal in exp than control (we tend to respond to different types of rewards in different ways at neural level - cumulative matters for one but not other) - In academic condition, level of motivation to learn positively correlated w/ bi-lateral putamen activity (more motivated a person is, more neural change when doing challenging academic tasks); in monetary condition, also bi-lateral putamen activity, but no correlation b/w level of motivation and amount of activity

Kornell and Bjork study 1 (2008)

- Adults view numerous paintings by each of 12 artists with similar styles - Viewed as blocked or interleaved - Test: shown unseen paintings by previously seen artists and asked to identify artist - Result: interleaving had best performance (if you were shown artists all mixed up and then identify, you are better than if you see one artist at a time) - Explanation: interleaving helps induction (learning to discriminate between patterns)

Advantages/disadvantages of IDEA and mainstreaming

- Advantages: high academic achievement, higher self esteem, better social skills; benefits students without disabilities (contact theory) - Disadvantages: cost (average cost is double but federal gov pays), tradeoff w/ non-disabled students education - time/attention taken away, social issues (students can feel socially rejected)

Development of brain (pruning)

- After synaptogenesis, connections are reduced through pruning, allowing brain circuits to be more efficient - Early years more active period of synaptogenesis, but new connections can form throughout life and unused connections pruned throughout life - Result: impossible to determine what % of the brain develops by certain age - More importantly: connections that form early provide either a strong or weak foundation for later connections - Experience determines which connections can be strengthened/pruned (genes provide blueprint for the formation of brain circuits, but the circuits are reinforced by repeated use)

Results of Perry-Preschool Project

- Age 9: small gains, so disappointing in general, BUT - Age 14: enormous gains (higher test scores, less special education, more motivated, more homework, better behavior) - Age 27: achievement and behavioral gains in so many fields (arrests, drugs, public assistance, earnings, home ownership, higher education) -- cost benefit gains - Early intervention makes a very significant long term difference

Science study 1 (aim and setup)

- Aim: Can knowledge acquired in one domain transfer to another domain? - 87 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders randomly assigned to one of three instructional method conditions: learning via discovery (hands on experiments), learning via probing (hands on experiments and asked what they had learned), learning via explicit instruction (hands on experiments and asked what they had learned plus explicit instructions) - Three physical apparatuses used: balls and ramp, springs and weights, sinking objects (all had same deep structure features, 4 bi-level variables) - Three transfer types tested in each of 3 conditions: very near (same physical apparatus, but diff focal point), near (7 days later and new physical apparatus), remote (7 months later and paper and pencil evaluation of good vs. bad experiments across variety of domains)

Science study 2

- Aim: Can this be used in real classrooms? - 77 4th graders from 4 classrooms, real classroom science teachers used instead - Other changes came as a result --> student to teacher ration went from 1:1 to 20:1, collaborative learning occurred because kids had to share apparatus - Results: Again, explicit instruction more effective and to the same degree - For explicit instruction: % of kids successfully using CVS went from 5% on pretest to 95% on post test for very near transfer

Science study 4 (aim and setup)

- Aim: Do the findings hold if given more authentic transfer tasks? - Perhaps they underestimated discovery learning because they lacked difficult, authentic transfer tasks - 112 3rd and 4th graders randomly assigned into 2 conditions (designed to compare students who discover CVS on their own and those who are told CVS by instructor) - Discover learning (students provided with goal and then experimented with physical materials), direct instruction (provided with goal, then direct instruction of CVS before and during experimentation) - Then, both groups given post-test and authentic transfer test - Post test: pass (design at least 3/4 unconfounded experiments), fail (design less than 3/4 unconfounded experiments) - Authentic transfer task - evaluating science fair posters (participants had to make suggestions to make a poster "good enough for state-level science fair" - asked to comment on experimental design, data analysis, measurements, explanations, and conclusions)

Science study 5

- Aim: Do these findings extend to lower achieving kids? - Results: Yes, explicit instruction as defined by this study worked best for students attending lower achieving schools as well (although it did not transfer to standardized testing, one version of transfer (although this is likely due to other factors))

Science study 3 (aim and setup)

- Aim: To what extent is the efficacy of learning via explicit instruction dependent on hands-on experience? Since explicit instruction = hands on experiments + asked what they had learned + explicit instruction - Took most effective form of CVS training (explicit instruction) using springs and weights apparatus and developed a virtual version (computer interface) - 93 4th and 5th graders - Randomly assigned to physical or virtual condition (pretest, posttest, transfer - design experiment using physical "balls down the ramp")

Importance of sleep

- All related to academic outcomes: sleep time, consistency of sleep/wake schedules, sleep quality - One mechanism: lack of sleep impairs connection between prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which is responsible for emotional regulation - Statistically significant diminished cognitive performance in children when sleep restricted by as little as 1 hour per night

Relationship between IQ and WM Study

- Alloway (2009) shows that WM predicts subsequent learning - Purpose: build on previous work - Students with poor WM struggle in the classroom (can't process a lot at once: long instructions, details of what they're doing, etc.) - High positive correlation b/w IQ and WM (IQ often used to predict academic success) → Are IQ and WM the same thing or different? - Goal: determine if IQ and WM can be distinguished in terms of their predictive power in children with learning disabilities

Connectivity (b/w orthography and phonology)

- Alphabet principle: there is a connection between the letters on a page and the sounds of a spoken language - This connectivity is different in English, b/c it has a "deep orthography" (mappings b/w letter and sound are not one to one) - Learning to read and spell in languages with "deep orthography" is hard (which is why we see invented spelling in illiterate children)

Cut scores' impact on time

- Analysis of 2 midsize urban school districts in grades with high stakes testing - Spent 20-50 years per year taking tests - 60-100 hours per year in test prep

Memory for visual information vs verbal

- As humans, we have a remarkable memory for visual information (better than verbal) - College students: took 600 pics, 6 sec/picture, then given picture pairs and asked which they saw - Did with 98% accuracy, but when done with words, only 88% accuracy - Memory for meaningful pictures shows little decline over a 4 month period

Assessment and CCSS (how assessments were used)

- As part of Race to the Top, states got points if adopted CCSS and assessments, so most states did - SBAC and PARCC: computer based (creates resources problem), adaptive, intended to be more difficult (goal is to have more variability so can use as a predictor for success after K-12, but no one is looking at this), taken in spring (so cannot be formative), alignment with pre-existing state assessments varies significantly (assessments may be similar to previous states tests or totally different), long testing times

Attributions in development

- Before school age: children are unrealistic optimists; internal, stable attributions to success and external, unstable for failures - But then schools kicks in, and different children exhibit different patterns

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

- Between what student can and cannot do alone - Scaffolding: teachers should teach within ZPD then gradually remove support

Study about ability (2)

- Blackwell et al 2007: RTC study w/ low achieving math students - 1/2 experimental (8 weeks, during study hall get lessons about incremental view of intelligence: "you can grow your intelligence, learning makes you smarter") - 1/2 control (8 weeks, during study hall, got lessons about study strategies and improving memory) - Result: Measured math performance pre and post - Throughout intervention, experimental group's grades improved drastically, while control group continued to fall (stayed on same downward trajectory, while experimental group reversed)

Neuromyths - critical periods

- Brain is only plastic during 'critical periods' (first three years) - Why does it exist?: animal work - Lorenz examined imprinting in birds (saw that baby birds imprint to prominent moving object, typically mother, but only hours after hatching - 1960s Wiesel and Hubel at Harvard covered eye of newborn kitten, after 3 months, kitten had severe deterioration of neural connections in visual areas of covered eye, since brain received no stimulation, cat remained blind; but when done to adult cats, they were not impacted - First understanding of printing came from moneys in first 3 years of life (are we monkeys?) - OVERGENERALIZED

Pathway 2 of processing stream

- Dorsal pathway: deals with the "where," continues up through parietal lobe - Readers eyes move across page in complicated series of fixations (periods when eyes are still - longer to briefer as people age) and saccades (jumps across text) - Beginning readers have longer fixations, shorter saccades - Also, more regressions/movements from right to left (in English) - Dorsal path is involved in controlling eye movements (control of fixations getting shorter and saccades getting longer as kids learn to read) - Atypical dorsal activity related to reading difficulties: fMRI studies - dyslexics show less activation in dorsal regions when reading compared to typical readers - Learning readers and teachers are actually changing the brain by building the ventral and dorsal paths

Self-regulation associated with school performance

- Broken down into self-assessment (can I do it?) and self-monitoring (am I doing it?) -- directly related to student performance - Duckworth and Seligman (2005): Longitudinal study of 8th graders, self-regulation measured in fall (parents, hr teachers, self-report) through surveys, with host of other variables (gave surveys early on then throughout school yeah) - Results: self-regulation predicted academic performance in spring and which students would improve grades over year - Self-regulation accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in... final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching TV, and time of day students began homework (self-regulation can predict these outcomes far better than IQ) - Suggests: a major reason students fall short of intellectual potential is their failure to exercise self-discipline

Testing effects in simulated classroom

- Butler and Rodegier (2007): wanted to make study that was more realistic - 3 art history lectures presented as video (3 days, one 30-minute lecture each day) - Each lecture: 30 target images showing different artists' art - After lecture, took: SA, MC, focused read/review of video, or nothing - Given feedback on 1/2 of the times - 30 days later given final test (SA for all) - Results: SA tests produced best performance on final test, MC and focused read produced about equivalent performance, and all three were better than nothing

Fernand study 2 (difference in vocabulary children use)

- By 24 months the disparities equivalent to 6 month gap (looked at total vocabulary) - As they age, gap increases

Stats on inequalities in vocabulary

- By age 3, 90% of a child's vocabulary consists of words in caregivers vocabulary - Middle-high income families: kindergarteners hear about 11 million words per year - Low-income families: kindergarteners hear about 3 million words per year - Also differences in the complexity of words and number of unique words they hear

Assessment and CCSS (creation of assessment)

- CCSS adopted by many, college and career ready standards - Next step: need assessments created, so Obama put out an RFP for $350 million to create such assessments that are "high quality," measure critical thinking and problem solving, and aligned with CCSS, had 4 years to create - Two groups won: Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)

Long term memory characteristics

- Capacity: unlimited (the more info stored, easier it becomes to store new info) - Duration: unclear (it seems to be indefinitely long) but still unknown if info in LTM is permanent/if forgetting is just a retrieval issue or if info decays/disappears

Theoretical parts of WM

- Central executive (processing) - Phonological loop (maintain verbal/auditory info) - Visuospatial Sketchpad (maintain visual and spatial info) - Episodic buffer (maintains multi-modal info)

Effectiveness of charter schools v traditional public

- Charter have more reading gains, math similar - Quality of charter is uneven across states/schools, difficult to assess because 'alternative'

Study 1 on notetaking

- Classroom setting - 1/2 take notes with laptop (with distractions removed) - 1/2 take notes by hand - Given immediate test on content - Result: Laptop notetakers took more notes, but by-hand note takers had stronger conceptual understanding, application, and integration ability on immediate test - Why?: Analysis of notes showed laptop notetakers engage in more verbatim notetaking, and the more verbatim the notes, the worse the students did on the test - Assumption is by-hand notetakers are forced to digest and summarize as they listen, which aids in learning

Why VAM is not entirely reliable

- Clear technical requirements must be met for use of VAM, few of which are actually satisfied (so inaccurate assumptions from data) - Studies show that VAM is 1) widely used and 2) almost never in ways that meet all or even most of the technical requirements - Hundreds of schools, most serving low income communities, use VAM scores to retain or fire teachers every years -- jobs are lost based on something that is not statistically valid

Solid empirical test against learning styles (Kratzig and Arbuthnott 2006)

- College kids: assess own learning preference (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) - Take objective measures of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic aptitude - No support for learning preference impacting aptitude (same finding as Massa and Mayer)

Why does this neuromyth exist

- Commercial success, profit - Spinning research on hemispheric lateralization, extreme hydration, benefits of exercise, learning difficulties can arise from inefficient integration of visual, auditory, and motor skills

Measurement of self-regulation

- Common to measure delay of gratification to measure more mature forms of self-regulation (only one of many methods): marshmallow task - Emotional self-regulation associated with activity in prefrontal cortex - Therefore, capacity to self-regulate is dependent upon the development of the prefrontal cortex (so we don't see this until later)

Short-term consequences of rejection (neural processing)

- Computerized version of ball toss - cyberball (uses fMRI) - Within subject design: each participant had 3 scans -- Control (just observe 2 others play), Inclusion (play with 2 others), Exclusion (play with 2 others, after 7 throws no longer thrown to) - Result: Anterior cingulate cortex more active during exclusion than inclusion conditions - Areas of anterior cingulate cortex also parts of brain associated with regulating physical pain (suggests exclusion may be painful in more than emotional ways)

Solid empirical test against learning styles (Mayer and Massa 1)

- Conducted to determine whether visual and verbal preference and aptitude caused people to learn better from visual vs verbal learning materials - Created computer based lesson on electronics for college students - Randomly assigned to 'help screen' groups: visual help screen (supplementary diagrams and illustrations), verbal help screen (supplementary printed text) - Then, post test on electronics learned - Given 8 measures to asses verbal-visual learning preference (students rate agreement to statements) - 3 tests measured visual learning aptitude (card rotations test, etc) - 3 tests measured verbal learning aptitude (SAT verbal, vocab test) - Results: All (both visual and verbal aptitude and preference) benefited more from visual help than verbal help - Take away: visual vs. verbal learning preference not related to actual visual vs. verbal learning aptitude

Two features that characterize scientific thinking

- Content: domain specific topics (physics, biology, etc) and domain general topics (equilibrium, feedback, causality, etc) - Process: formulation of hypotheses, designs of experiments, and observations, and evaluation of evidence

Tension between two features

- Controversy over which feature is more important to focus on in schools and if focus should change with age - So much controversy that CCSS do not include science (which leads to a ton of negative effects)

Summary of emotion, self-regulation, self-esteem

- Core emotions are fairly instinctive - Academic emotions are defined across 3 dimensions - Self-regulation develops with age, can be taught, very related in causal way with positive long-term outcomes in life and academic performance - Self-esteem associated with long-term outcomes but not necessarily in causal way with school performance - Lipsett's story of Abagia --> Self-regulation of emotion and social adeptness are essential in that they can prohibit or enhance learning (we can't ignore issues with self-regulation and self-esteem if they aren't able to learn) - Should they be taught explicitly in schools? Or should they come to school with this?

Role of teachers (context)

- Creators of learning communities - Classroom culture: elements of teacher interactions that promote positive development (emotional support, classroom organization, responsive teaching (teachable moment), instructional support - Expectations

Assessment and ESSA (2015)

- Currently looking for "innovative" ideas - Pilot program: Innovative Assessment and Accountability Demonstration Authority - States can design new approaches to assessment: performance based, instructionally embedded, interim assessments (i.e. formative) that can be combined into summative

State variation in cut scores (study)

- Cut scores determined differently by different states (i.e. proficient in MA might be failing in CA) - Cut score study: Measurement of Academic Progress (MAP) - Goal: to compare how difficult it is to score proficient on different state tests - Created a computerized adaptive test that would then correspond a MAP score with all state scores (allowed to find basis for all states) - Result: 8th grade proficient cut scores had VERY different meaning across states (in Colorado - proficient put you at 14th percentile; S Carolina - proficient put you at 71st percentile) - A lot harder to do well and be proficient in Colorado

What types of social processing are ideal? - Study

- Decety and colleagues - Purpose: investigate neural basis of cooperation and competition in same individuals - Methods: fMRI while played computer game, 3 conditions (Cooperation - played with another, Competition - played against another, Independent - played alone) - Findings: Both cooperation and competition associated with set of neural regions distinct from independent playing (anterior insula - autonomic arousal); Compared cooperation and competition neural systems -- cooperation (more right orbitofrontal involvement, a reward system), competition (more mPFC, which may reflect additional ToM resources) - Conclusion: While cooperation and competition both rely on social processing and increase arousal, cooperation seems to be more socially rewarding at neural level - Research supports that competitive and cooperative learning both more effective than individual learning, but cooperative learning associated with best long-term retention of info - Distributed cognition: spread learning tasks across many minds and draw on multiple knowledge bases and ideas - benefit of cooperative learning

Role of language in math (exact calculation vs. approximation)

- Dehaene et al, 1999 examined if math is language based or visual based by looking at exact calculation and approximation - Did handful of studies that used Russian-English bilingual participants - Method: trained on exact and approximate sums of 2 two digit numbers in Russian or English - In exact condition, had to select from correct sum of two numerically close numbers (in Russian or English) - In approximation condition, had to estimate and select the closest numbers - Then tested on new problems in both languages

Role of teachers (content)

- Deliverers of content: school and state choose what is taught (must meet standards, CCSS), teacher choose how (lessons, units, methods, materials, assessments) - Start with end in mind: what should students know? How will I know if they know it? How will we support learners in coming to know it?

How has evidence-based education been treated historically?

- ESSA called for evidence-based education at two levels - USE existing evidence from research and literature across many disciplines (know how to find it, interpret it, determine relevance) - ESTABLISH sound research where existing evidence is lacking

Teaching (whole language vs. phonics)

- Educational and political battle between best way to teach reading - Phonics: "bottom up approach," teach phonetics - translating written symbols into sounds - Whole language: "top down approach," provide a literacy rich environment, emphasize meaning over sounds of letters, read "whole" word (skip and fill in meaning on words you know)

In-teaching practice of metacognition

- Embedded completely, more than most other professions - Danielson's Framework of Teaching - Video analysis, lesson planning, all focus heavily on reflection - Data suggests that teachers engage in and improve metacognitive abilities more than those in other professions - Good for both the profession and for the students to see modeled

Implication questions

- Even if the empirical evidence suggests that learning isn't improved by matching preference and/or aptitude to instructional style, is there still value in thinking about learning styles topic in general? - Students thinking about how they learn can develop self monitoring, awareness, regulation? - Help teachers appreciate, accept, and accommodate student differences?

Short-term consequences of rejection

- Even short-term rejection from strangers can have powerful effects: ball toss paradigm - People chosen at random to receive messages of social exclusion -- becomes more aggressive, willing to cheat, pursue short-term goals over long-term goals, less willing to help others

Importance of social learning - Implication for education?

- Evidence: social interaction benefits at least some types of early learning - Still need to determine if true for learning other than language acquisition - Meta-analyses have concluded that educational programs that 'emphasize social interaction' result in greater long-term improvement in academic achievement, social adjustment, and economic success compared to non-social approaches

National focus of science (Obama)

- Expected to improve STEM through 2025 through a number of initiatives (invested more than $100 million in science in 2015-16 to train high quality teachers) - Efforts to pay science teachers more, in an effort to recruit and retain quality teachers

Problems with structure of local funding/board of education

- Exposes inequalities between areas of different home values/socioeconomic backgrounds -- areas with lower income/home values have less money go to funding schools (ex. North v South Side Chicago, North Side has local businesses which pay more in property taxes) - Different areas have vastly different levels of educated community members that make up a local board of education

Actual evidence around brain gym

- Extreme dehydration, as defined by 1% weight loss, following extreme heat DOES show decreases in immediate cognitive function - Aerobic exercise improves selective aspects of brain function (both chronic and acute), but Brain Gym not aerobic in any way (improved blood flow to frontal parietal areas) - Various learning difficulties are related to insufficient integration of visual, auditory, and motor skills and neural activity

Failure attributions are impactful

- Failures due to lack of effort (internal, unstable): likely to try harder in future - Failures due to lack of ability (internal, stable): likely to give up more easily in future - Learned helplessness: failures (internal, stable); success (external, unstable - luck)

Characteristics of Native American Reservation Schools

- Federally funded (Bureau of Indian Education funds) - Focuses on modern skills and knowledge while also preserving Native American tradition and culture

Dehaene and Cohen study on brain damaged patients

- First and one of the more in-depth: Mr. M, who suffered large brain hemorrhage and lost function in left parietal lobe - Damage left him with many disabilities: unable to recognize numbers presented visually and incapable of performing simple sums if read to him - But, can name numbers if he counted from 1 up to the number and can approximate quantity (only time had difficulty approximating was when he was asked to compare close numbers) - Researchers concluded that left parietal damage had caused him to lose exact calculation ability, but had not harmed his ability to approximate/understand quantity (suggests processes to perform exact calculation are in left hemisphere) - Aligns with imaging study, which found that approximation was bi-lateral while exact calculation was more left hemisphere dominant

Structure of the brain

- Frontal lobe: reasoning, decision making, planning, self-regulation - Parietal lobe: somatosensory information (temperature, pressure, texture, pain) - Occipital lobe (vision) - Temporal lobe (auditory information, long term memory) - Cerebellum (balance) - Held together by corpus callosum, enables constant communication b/w two hemispheres

Characteristics of independent private schools

- Funded through tuition, charitable contributions, endowment - Board of Trustees is regulatory group - May be religiously affiliated, but cannot take money or governance - Teachers don't need to be certified and pay is less than public - Cost varies drastically

Results of KIPP

- Gains in K - 8th: doing better than kids in other public schools and state; smaller data in high school/college, but success compared to low-income average and US average - But we don't know what they're doing right other than longer class sizes

Summary of memory

- Getting things into LTM is in many ways the goal of education - To get things into LTM, must get into sensory register, be attended to, and get through limited WM system - Educators should consider this model when teaching to ensure optimal chances of content reaching LTM

Assessment and New Teachers

- Given how central assessment is to education, we're teaching new teachers about assessment, right? NO. - Greenberg and Walsh, 2012: surveyed 180 Teacher Education Programs about assessment - Assessment literacy (how to measure student performance using assessment): pretty positive - Analytic skills (how to analyze student performance data): virtually none, very, very limited - Instructional decision making (how to use student assessment data to plan instruction): virtually none, very very limited - Overall: not teaching teachers how to use assessment

Dual task method (how we figured out capacity of WM)

- Given primary and secondary task - If neither task influences the other, we infer that they are separate mental resources - If one always disrupts, presumably they are the same mental resource - If one sometimes disrupts, evidence of partial sharing of mental resources - Ex. Singing Twinkle Twinkle while doing jumping jacks (not disruptive) vs. singing Twinkle Twinkle while writing down parts of the brain (disruptive, evidence of shared mental resource)

Is learning optimized when it's social? - Language acquisition research

- Goal: teach infants phonetic discrimination between Chinese Mandarin sounds - Participants: American babies who grew up only hearing English - 3 Experimental conditions, 12 sessions: Live (read to by real, live speaker), TV (view video of same speaker reading), Audio (listened to same speaker reading), Control (babies listening to English) - Used head turn test (infants trained to turn head when they heard a change from a repeating background sound, gave kids sounds and test to see if they can turn their head) - Findings: live condition had significantly improved ability to distinguish sounds, while TV and audio conditions had no learning - Conclusion: social interaction is a critical factor for sound discrimination learning

"Fast failure" of SBAC and PARCC

- Growing opt-out among parents (often because of test length), so don't have reliable data - Many states have dropped CCSS and assessments (45 adopted in 2010, only 20 in 2016) - Primary contributors: testing before transition to CCSS is complete, so misalignment between curriculum and assessment (teachers had to change how they're teaching for CCSS, but tests came right away) - Scores for teacher evaluation with VAMs: VAMs hit education at the same time, so can avoid VAMs if avoid these assessments - Overall return to state-designated tests

Fernand study 1 (differences in vocabulary children know)

- High and low income toddlers: sit on mom's lap and look at pictures, instructed to "look at ball" - Measured eye movement (if they understand meaning, they will look at picture of ball more quickly) - 18 months: high-income toddlers identified correct object in 750 milliseconds, low income toddlers were 200 milliseconds slower - Both groups got faster w/ age, but at 24 months, low income children had just barely reached the processing speed that the high income kids had achieved at 18 months (see a 6 month gap in processing)

Inequalities in federal funding

- Higher earning areas have so much more money to spend per pupil (NY) - Poorest towns benefit the most from state/federal funding (ie. San Perlita, TX) - Most problematic are towns that are just above the threshold that benefits from state and federal aid

Attributions

- How we explain successes/failures, can be characterized by: - Locus: cause is internal or external to person - Stability: cause of outcome is or is not the same across time and in different situations (stable v unstable) - Ex. Internal-Stable: ability, internal-unstable: effort, external-stable: difficulty, external-unstable: luck

Role of math language on the brain

- IPS: intraparietal sulcus, part of the parietal lobe - Amount of increased bilateral activation in IPS is greater for approximation than exact calculation (still involved in exact calculation) - Similar results presented in Dehaene studies: greater bilateral activation for approximation, greater left hemisphere activation for exact calculation - makes sense, since language is on the left hemisphere (highlights language dependence) - So, while we know there is not one "math center," IPS seems particularly important, especially (bilaterally) for approximation)

Acronyms to know for spacing effect

- ISI: intersession interval (amount of time between studying) - RI: retention interval (time between when you last studied and before your exam)

Interleaving

- If multiple things need to be learned, in what order should they be learned? - If you want to learn skills A, B, C, then you could study: blocked (aaabbbcc) or interleaved (abcabcabc or abbcacabc)

Comparisons between types of goals

- In general, mastery oriented thought to be optimal and performance oriented detrimental - However, performance orientation can serve you well at times - And, we can engage in mastery and performance orientations at same time (research shows doing so is associated with strong study skills) - Biggest danger is performance avoidance goals (if students are not successful, performance approach goals likely turn into performance avoidance)

Rohrer and Pashler study (spacing effect)

- In general, the longer the intersession interval, the better, however, there seems to be a threshold point of how long is too long - How long is too long? - Used list learning - Exp 1: ISI varied from 5 mins to 14 days with RI of 10 days - Found that: ISI had a large effect on performance, with ISI of 1 day yielding best recall - Exp 2: ISI varied from 5 minutes to 6 months with RI of 1 year - Found that: ISI had a large effect on performance, with ISI of 1 month yielding best recall

Support that fusiform gyrus is our "word area"

- In scanner, participants read real words, made up words, unpronounceable strings of letters, and strings of letter-like symbols - Fusiform gyrus showed largest levels of increased activation for words and made up words (legitimately "word like" because followed rules of English) - Therefore, seems to be a "word area" in fusiform gyrus - Not surprisingly, when patients have this portion of their brain removed, they can no longer read

Long-term consequences of rejection

- In school, rejected show higher rates of aggression, inattentive, immature, or impulsive behavior, social anxiety - Lowest rates of prosocial behavior (helping, sharing, taking turns) and self-esteem - Almost all rejected children show lower academic achievement than non-rejected age-mates - Why?: Buhs and Ladd study, wanted to determine what mediates peer rejection and academic achievement -- short longitudinal study (during Kindergarten) - was there a pre-established relationship b/w peer rejection and poor academic achievement? - What is peer rejection related to?: Report loneliness, express desire to avoid school, receive negative peer treatment (leads to less participation, poor academic achievement)

Cut scores' impact on students (graduation)

- In some states, students must pass state test to graduate high school, and can take the test as many times as you want (pass vs fail is an arbitrary cut score) - 2017 MA study: low income urban students who barely fail are 8% less likely to graduate than those who barely pass, a one question difference (note: low income urban students just as likely to retake test as matched suburban students, but have much less success - less resources and opportunity to learn, school in certain areas are more willing to help) - Low income urban students who barely pass are actually more likely to graduate than those who pass more easily (seems to be motivating factor)

Ability (two basic perceptions)

- Incremental view: "growth mindset," assume ability is unstable and controllable (by hard work, knowledge can be increased, improving ability) - Entity view: "fixed mindset," assume ability is stable and uncontrollable and cannot change - Elementary aged children tend to have an incremental view, while middle school and on tend to develop an entity view - But there are many, many individual differences

Neural formation of long term memory

- Initial knowledge encoded throughout brain - Hippocampus: internal structure, lays down and accesses knowledge - Each element is stored in the same part that originally encoded that fragment (note: each time you recall something, you're actually recalling last time you recalled it, not original memory) - Synchronous firing makes neurons more inclined to fire again in the future (potentiation): means that when you learn something for the first time, new subset of neurons will fire (makes them more likely to fire in future) - If fire together often, eventually becomes permanently sensitized to each other, so if one fires, other fires (long term potentiation) - "Neurons that fire together, wire together"

Motivation

- Instrinsic: motivation associated with activities that are their own reward (i.e study for an exam for the love of calculus) - Extrinsic: motivation created by external factors, such as rewards or punishments - Not a dichotomy, two ways we now think about it: a continuum from fully intrinsic to fully extrinsic, or two independent possibilities but at any given time - Teaching should aim to foster intrinsic motivation, but must accept it won't work all the time

Choices in Education Act

- Introduced in 2017, current situation - Repeals ESEA of 1965: limits the federal authority to only award block grands -- states must establish a voucher program where per pupil funding given to "child" rather than school, "child" can bring to whatever school they want (private/home/public school) - Sends children away from schools that are failing and increases demand for other schools (doesn't solve problems) - Evidence of smaller scale voucher programs show mixed results, never meant to be large sale

Examples of how knowledge base influences strategy use and effectiveness (three types)

- Item-specific effects: knowledge increases accessibility of specific items (ask kids to recall set of unrelated items, find that recall improves with age, and it can't be organization that's helping since words aren't related; therefore, thought is that individual items are each more richly represented in LTM of older children than younger) - Nonstrategic organization: background knowledge allows for retrieval of one item to automatically activate retrieval of related items (long term potentiation) -- in turn, the more one knows, the more one remembers (if you recall one item, activates related items, more points to connect); one exception: although background knowledge is typically positively correlated w/ accuracy of memory performance, sometimes is not (DRM paradigm - given list of words, then have to recall - children less likely to make fake responses than adults, since adults have more background knowledge) - Background knowledge allows for chunking

Empirical example 1 of how background knowledge allows for chunking

- Junior high school students, 1/2 good readers, 1/2 poor (according to standardized test) - 1/2 of each group knew a lot about baseball, 1/2 did not - Process: researchers asked them to read a story that described an inning of a baseball game, and as read, asked to stop and show understanding using a model of field and players - Later given a recall test - Result: Knowledge of baseball determined how much they could remember of the story on the later test, not if they were "good" or "poor" readers - Take away: background knowledge base allows for chunking (background knowledge trumps difference in reading level)

Testing effects in the lab (study 2)

- Kang, McDaniel, Pashler (2011): wanted to see if testing effects extended beyond "content" learning - Looked at mathematical function learning (more conceptual) - Identical process as study 1 - Main take home: Yes, testing effects improve learning of mathematical functions, participants in testing conditions also transferred their knowledge better than those in 'just study' (re-reading) condition

Testing effects in the lab (study 1)

- Kang, McDermott, Roediger (2007) - Took college students and had them read short article from scientific journal - Afterwards, randomly assigned: take SA test, take MC test, re-read short excerpts from article, or nothing - Information contained in questions/rereading identical across conditions - Immediate feedback provided on tests - 3 days later, final test (same for all, combo of MC and SA) - Result: Having taken initial SA test led to best retention 3 days later, initial MC test showed benefit, but smaller - Also ran identical follow up without giving feedback about incorrect answers: pattern was the same, but performance after 3 days suffered (suggests corrective feedback aids learning)

Factors that influence strategy use and effectiveness of metacognition

- Knowledge base: what you already have in your long term memory impacts your ability to learn, the more that you know, the easier it becomes to learn new things - Metacognition: awareness of own learning and cognitive processes (thinking about thinking); ability to use prior knowledge to plan a strategy, take necessary steps to problem solve, reflect on and evaluate results, and modify approach as needed, associated with "success" on many measures

KIPP (K-12)

- Knowledge is Power Program (work hard, be nice) - Charter schools in under-resourced communities (currently about 200), focus on college preparation - 95% African American or Latino - Process: long days (7:30-5 M-F, 8:30-1:30 every other Sat, 2-3 weeks summer school) - 60% more in-class time than peers - KIPP "paycheck" at end of the week based on performance - KIPP promise signed by parents and student

Issues around misconception in science

- Learners come with misconceptions in science more than any other subject - Not just lacking correct knowledge, but actually holding erroneous concepts about science or information that is inconsistent with the truth - Leads to disruptions in learning process

Spacing effect

- Learning is powerfully affected by temporal distribution of study time (spacing/timing of study session) - In general, distributed is better than massed, regardless of retention interval (spacing things out over time is better than cramming)

Effects of science not being in CCSS

- Led to states developing "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS), released in April 2013 but still no assessments - Instead of being created by educators and policy makers, consulted with career scientists - Still controversial among career scientists - In the end, NGSS focus mostly on process, not content - Note: this is in opposition to most other countries, that have national content standards

Is data on interleaving generalizable?

- Less clear: most studies are just on visual discrimination and math, does not play out consistently with younger children - Ex. Interleaving fractions with 5th graders with no prior knowledge showed no benefit: could be age or could be lack of prior knowledge, not clear - Yet, there are some straightforward educational implications: textbooks - vast majority of math texts, for example, present practice problems in blocked fashion, fairly easy to reorder problems

Criticisms of NCLB

- Limit gifted and talented "creative" programs, because schools need their high scores (transfers these students to "all other students" category) - Conflicts with IDEA which focuses on groups of students; IEPs call for varied assessments, NCLB only relies on 1 w/ many accommodations not met - Teaching to the test: strict focus on reading and math, less on other subjects (social studies, science, art, recess) - Restructuring fails: can't find new teachers, spend all summer hiring so can do no planning, no additional money to open school longer, union won't let firing occur, terrible for morale

Data on how cut scores impact dropout/graduation rates

- Longitudinal data suggests high stakes testing associated with dropout rates - From 1996 until 2002 (when NCLB signed), 68 of 100 largest districts experienced rising graduation rates (24 of them achieved double digit increases, while only 4 saw double digit drops) - From 2002-2006 (post NCLB), 73 of the largest districts experienced a decline in graduation rates (17 were a double digit drop, only 2 were a double digit increase) - Only correlational (not causal), but does seem suspicious that high stakes tests are associated with change in graduation rates

Consequences of high self-regulation

- Longitudinal follow up studies show that kids that can "delay gratification" in the marshmallow tasks compared to those who cannot... - Perceived (by parents) as more competent, 10 years later - Have higher SAT scores - Make more money as adults - Less likely to do drugs

Brain regions - damage population studies

- Look at what can and cannot do and what parts of the brain are damaged, can associate what they can't do with the part of the brain that's damaged - Some brain damaged patients show a deficit in processing of individual 'number words' (ie can't read digits) - Others show a problem in conceptual understanding of quantity (don't confused individual words, but confused base numbers) - Some say existence of these two types of patients suggests there is one region specialized for number words and another for the understanding of quantity

Vlach and Sandhofer study (2012)

- Looked at spacing effect in terms of school learning/kids (5-7 year olds) - Presented science lessons (food chains) that included simple and complex concepts in 3 schedules: - Massed (4 lessons back to back), Clumped (2 lessons one day, 2 lessons next day), Spaced (1 lesson/day for 4 days) - All tested one week later (RI=1) - Result: Spaced resulted in better performance for both simple and complex concepts on a post test - Generalizable: across other studies, children as young as 3, college kids, elderly benefit across many disciplines - Implications: don't cram, weekly vocab or spelling may be better learned in long term if spread out more, intense courses may prevent ideal spacing

Working memory characteristics

- Maintains information for short period of time and processes it (we "work" on it) - Identifies info in sensory register that warrants attention - Pulls in associated LTM to connect to new info - Capacity: limited (7 +/- 2 units), develops with age - We can process large amounts of sensory register and LTM, but not WM (WM is "bottleneck of the system"), results in us chunking info to overcome bottleneck

Factors influencing attributions (gender)

- Males: more likely to attribute successes to ability and failures to lack of effort - Females: more likely to attribute successes to effort and failures to ability

Evidence of learning styles

- Many people use learning preferences, aptitudes, and the idea of learning styles meshing hypotheses interchangeably, but they are extinct - Pashler and colleagues set out to determine if learning styles meshing hypothesis is valid: - Credible evidence needs to show crossover interaction between learning style preference and instructional method - Instructional method that optimizes test scores of one preference group must be different than instructional methods that optimize test scores of another preference group - Findings that would not hypothetically validate learning styles theory: if same instructional method optimizes learning for both preference groups - Watch graphs closely: don't just look for an x, this would not be enough to validate a learning styles meshing hypothesis

Gender differences in math

- Many studies show gender differences, but not biological - Variation in size and effect between cultures: ex) Boys outperform girls in China and USA, but girls in China perform better than boys in USA - So could it be a biological difference between Chinese and Americans? No - when Chinese girls are taught in US their math declines to levels of American girls - Differences grow with age - Gender gap has been reduced by half in last 30 years: clear indication that gender differences are at least partially socially induced - In UK in past few years, girls generally outperform boys on national math tests at age 16 and 18 - Also important to understand there is a greater degree of overlap than difference between boys and girls (many girls do better than many boys)

Initial warnings around learning and teaching math

- Math studies are still ongoing/we don't know everything - Fundamental question: How do we process mathematical info? Visually or written?

Testing effects in the classroom

- McDaniel et al (2008): "Brain and Behavior" course at U of New Mexico - Workload: approx. 40 pages of textbook reading per week - Students randomly assigned to 3 "exposure" conditions: "exposed" to 10 facts each week via MC quiz, SA quiz, presentation of 10 facts to just read - Feedback given in form of correct answer (for presentation condition, simply reread the statement to control for amount of times exposed to information) - 10 other facts "not exposed" in all conditions, as well - After 3 weeks, given test of "exposed" and "not exposed" information - Just like lab settings, testing effects evident: both SA and MC quizzes augmented performance on final exam relative to when content not quizzed (i.e. "exposed) - On the other hand, focused reading did not boost exam performance (not statistically significant) - Then, also went back at end of term 40 days later: found that MC boost no longer remained, but SA did

fMRI

- Measures changes in blood flow - Uses MRI machine (big, powerful magnet) - When neurons in an area are active, they need oxygen; so, extra oxygen-containing blood gets pumped to that area - Oxygenated blood has different magnetic properties than deoxygenated blood - MRI machine records these changes in magnetic properties of that blood (when neurons fire, MRI signal increases) - Known as BOLD imaging (blood oxygenation level dependent imaging) - B/c fMRI measures changes in blood flow, it captures both increases and decreases. So, fMRI signal can mean + or - in neural activity in an area (often misread)

Metacognition and the brain (stress)

- Metacognition is negatively impacted by stress - Typically, short term stress can promote learning and engagement: increases physiological arousal, cortisol release makes brain function more efficiently, especially PFC, benefits performance on simple more than difficult tasks - But there is a threshold effect for difficult tasks: a lot of stress (too much cortisol) floods brain and negatively impacts performance on difficult tasks (and this is where metacognition lies)

Sensory register study (Sperling 1960)

- Method to detect duration information lasts in sensory register - Flashes 3x4 grid of letters and numbers, then asterisks replace some of those numbers, asked to recall which numbers/letters were in their place - Findings: single row (76% accurate, 3-4 symbols in each row for total of ~9), entire set (36% accurate, 3-4 symbols) - Explanation: most symbols stored in sensory register, but fade before we have chance to write them down - Visual information lasts less than 1 second, auditory information lasts 2 to 4 seconds

How can we explain the discrepancy in the Rohrer and Pashler study?

- Optimal ISI varies with RI - Implication: the amount of time you spent between study sessions/drilling information should vary based on when you need to recall the information - In general, studies show that very brief gaps cause poorer performance than very long gaps

Neural basis (study 2)

- Mizuno et al (2008): what is the neural basis of the motivation to learn? Called this 'academic motivation' - 14 college students took motivation scale (24 motivation questions, score 0-72, low-high motivation), and took challenging cognitive task (n-back) - 2 types of rewards: academic/monetary - Academic experimental: set to induce sense of competence and cumulative achievement (under each number: 30x30 lattice, more pixels turn blue for every correct; no change for incorrect) - Academic control: every correct, different pixels turned blue, but ratio never increases (incorrect - no change) - Monetary experimental: under each number, amount of $ earned (every correct: 200 more, red font; incorrect: no change, blue font) - Monetary control (every correct: 000 always, red font; incorrect: 000 always, blue font)

Why positive self-esteem matters in education

- Modest positive correlations with school performance - Does not indicate high self-esteem leads to good performance, could be it is partly the result of good performance (that leads to good self-esteem) - Efforts to boost self-esteem in students not shown to improve academic performance - Should teachers and school administrators worry (centrally) about student self-esteem? -- fairly debated, causal effect on learning/academic achievement unclear - Loops back to question - what is the purpose of school?

Why is VAK model so popular?

- Money maker - Human nature to watch to classify people into types - Reflects idea that teachers should treat students as individuals - Can blame teacher, instead of learners

Characteristics of standard public schools

- Must admit all students within district/zone - Teachers must be state certified - Receive local, state, and federal funding - Must adhere to state testing regulations

Role of attention and influences on attention

- Must pay attention as info goes from sensory register to working memory - Influences: motion, size, intensity, novelty, incongruity, emotion, personal significance, social cues - Attention is a limited processing capacity (we can only attend to a few things in the sensory register at a time)

Cut scores' impact on schools (cheating)

- NCLB led to schools having to satisfy AYP (cut scores) if they didn't want to close, so this led to cheating - Anonymous survey suggests 40% of low income schools cheat - Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal (2011): report found that 44 of 56 APS schools cheated, 30+ educators went to prison for changing test answers (accused of conspiring in order to get bonuses tied to high test scores), 11 charged with racketeering

Self-regulation (development)

- Newborns: none - First yr: develop some basic (turn away, suck thumb); 6 month boys less able to regulate than 6 month girls (cultural differences - American babies taught to display positive emotion, tribes of Central Africa learn to restrain both + and - emotions (hushing)) - 1-2 yrs: rock self, chew on objects, move away from people/events that upset them; family conversations about emotions associated with self-regulatory development - 3-5 yrs: learn society's 'emotional display rules' and how to both suppress inappropriate feelings and behave properly; can accurately tell whether a person is happy, angry, or sad from facial/body expression - Elementary school: become much more adept, girls follow emotional display rules more closely (could be more socialized to do so) - Adolescence: 14-19 year olds self-perception of emotional regulation impacts social life (those who believe they are good at managing emotional expression in public are more prosocial, able to resist peer pressure, empathetic w/ peers)

Science study 3 (results)

- No difference between physical and virtual conditions - Take home: explicit instruction not dependent on physical materials - "Hands on" may be less essential than "minds on" - Note: it was a particularly well thought through virtual experience

Race to the Top

- Obama grant program: $4 billion to spur local and state K-12 reforms (reward as opposed to NCLB's punishment) - States get points by satisfying 3 policies: CCSS (nationwide "college and career ready standards" - more depth in math, more evidence support in reading, standardized assessments), evaluating teachers and principals (mandatory), build data systems to measure success (standardized test scores or other things -- really failed to do this previously) - Inconclusive: effectiveness unknown due to overturn of political office

Science empirical example overall (Klahr and Li 2005)

- On cognitive research and elementary science instruction from the lab, to the classroom, and back - Focused on a set of studies to determine some properties about teaching, learning, transfer of scientific processes, specifically CVS (control of variables strategy: method of designing unconfounded experiments by changing only one variable at a time)

Neural basis experiment findings

- On correct trials: - Picture-picture: verbal preference participants showed additional activity activity in supramarginal gyrus (associated with verbal processing) during visual tasks - Word-word: visual preference participants showed additional activity in fusiform gyrus (associated with visual processing) during verbal tasks - Visual preference people recruit visual cortex when processing verbal information - Verbal preference people recruit verbal cortex when processing visual information - Take away: so, even though learning styles meshing hypothesis isn't supported, there are neural difference between how people of difference preferences process information (just doesn't seem to impact performance)

Neural basis

- Only pretty recent - Background knowledge: no "reward center" in the brain - Dopamine neurons originate in putamen and project axons throughout the brain through various pathways - We know there are 2 ways to respond to a reward: increase in number of neurons firing, and each neuron releases more dopamine

How do these areas work together?

- Orthography: ventral (fusiform gyrus - word area), dorsal - Phonology: STS - Connectivity of the two: left angular gyrus - Research suggests that all of these areas are important - There is synchronous blood flow to these very brain areas when typically developing people engage in reading tasks - "Uncoordinated" processing in these areas has been found to be related to poor reading scores

Info about US income-achievement gap today

- Overall gap b/w children from high and low income families is roughly 40% larger now than it was 25 years ago - Gap grown partly because of an increase in association between family income and children's academic achievement for families above median income level (higher income people are spending more on academic enrichment) - Gap is present before K - gap in reading/math is already 3 months ahead, which persists through high school (shows importance of first 5 years)

Effects of NCLB

- Overall: 80% of Title I schools do not meet AYP, more than 4k in restructuring stage - Tests became so high stake that leaders just wrote super easy tests (why states like MS and KS have low numbers in restructuring) - Most schools chose "other" category in restructuring to rework the system

Characteristics of parochial schools

- Owned and operated by religious group (typically Catholic or Hebrew) - Teachers do not need certification, may be clergy - Tend to be less expensive than independent private schools, mostly get money from religious organization

What part of the brain is involved in spatial representation?

- Parietal lobe: increased activation when pick up objects, guide ourselves around, remember where anything is, pay attention to particular parts of our environment - Not surprisingly, spatial representation is highly associated with math ability (numerous studies show very high positive correlations between spatial and math ability) - But we are left with many questions: Do these people have particularly well developed parietal cortex? Were there differences in your parietal cortices at birth? Are there differences in your parietal cortices linked to specific experiences?

Is learning optimized when it's social? - Other study

- Participants: high school and college students learning second language - Method: 2 language "conversation" condition: face-to-face interaction vs. video recording for anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months - Results: face-to-face interaction learners significantly more fluent on post-test fluency measures

Passive vs active learning

- Passive: teacher "sage on the state;" teacher the pitcher, students the container - Active: teacher "guide on the side;" together teacher and students construct knowledge, interact, facilitate inquiry - Good learning and teaching can involve both combined

Are the benefits of distributed cognition and social processing the same for everyone?

- Peer status: measure of person's likability in eyes of peers (measured using 'sociometrics,' student questionnaire scored by teacher) - Different than 'friendship' - Peer status categories: Popular (liked by many peers, disliked by few), rejected (disliked by many peers, liked by few), neglected (few nominations as liked or disliked), controversial (liked and disliked by many)

Metacognitive illusion (experiment)

- People of lower ability fail to realize own incompetence because of poor metacognition - Classic experiment, replicated many times: took psych students who just took exam, asked to estimate performance and mastery of course material - Findings: students who did really well on exam have pretty accurate assumptions on own perception of how they did, but as you move down to students who didn't do well, they are unaware of how poorly they did - People who did badly are unaware that they didn't do well, lack awareness of their own thinking/progress during exam, which leads to the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dunning-Kruger Effect

- People with lower ability mistake their cognitive ability as greater than it is and are much more confident about how great it is - People who do the worst actually have highest confidence, even though they are the most inaccurate in perceptions, then loops down and back up - "Poor performers are doubly cursed: their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them."

Implications for teaching

- Perhaps ways we teach exact calculation should be different than estimation/quantity - Or, at the very least, consider these as two different "maths" - Currently, some exact calculations are being taught with more "estimating" methods

Phonology

- Phonemes: sounds of a language - Understanding that words break apart into little pieces of sound is key to learning to read - Phonological awareness can be taught in many ways (rhymes: rhyming abilities seem to develop early, 6 year olds have same neural response to rhymes as adults)

Stability of peer status categories

- Popular, neglected, and average: moderately stable, tend to retain status - Controversial: not that well studied, do not seem incredibly stable - Rejected: most stable of the categories and gets more and more stable over time (peers tend to attribute rejected peers' antisocial conduct to stable traits and prosocial conduct to unstable causes)

Science study 4 (results)

- Post test: direct instruction - 77% passed; discovery learning - 23% passed - Authentic transfer tasks: took "masters" from direct instruction and discovery learning (77% and 23%) to see how they evaluate science fair posters, found no statistical differences - Multiple ways to read this result: 1. Focus on discovery learning (- we should expect discovery learning to have a benefit and it did not, + on authentic tasks discovery learning is just as good) 2. Focus on direct instruction (+ direct instruction holds up even on authentic transfer tasks, - the gain seen from direct instruction is lost on more authentic tasks)

Factors influencing attributions (direct messages and actions from others)

- Praise: when teacher uses internal, unstable praise ("you worked hard"), it increases motivation, but when teacher uses internal, stable praise ("you're smart"), decreases motivation - Empirical example: Kindergarteners: given several tasks they could succeed on (puzzles, blocks, legos), 1/2 told person praise (internal, stable) "you're really good at this", 1/2 told process praise (internal, unstable) "you tried really hard" - Then kids given two more tasks and experienced "failure" (told mistakes had been made) - Then asked kids a bunch of questions - Result: process-based kids evaluated themselves more favorably (smarter, better at the task), process kids felt more positive about their successes - Process kids had stronger tendency to choose to work again at a task they had failed (process-based 2x more likely) -- a way to measure persistency

Generalized testing effects

- Preschoolers, elementary, middle, high school, college, medical school, middle aged adults - Content and concept testing

Neuromyths - products to enhance cognitive function (brain gym)

- Prescribes series of body movement "to integrate all areas of the brain to enhance learning" - enables students to access areas of the brain previously unavailable to them - Claims "improvements in learning... are often immediate" - thinking cap brain buttons, cross walk, stay hydrated

Process and findings of Alloway study

- Process: 7-11 year olds w/ learning disabilities: STM, WM, IQ, reading and math tests, then reading and math tests again 2 years later - Findings: reading and math predicted later reading and math, WM capacity predicted reading and math (even when controlling for IQ) - But IQ did not predict reading and math when controlling for WM - Take home: WM and IQ are different, WM is an important predictor of academic success

Actual evidence behind critical periods

- Pruning in human frontal lobe doesn't begin until adolescence (generally, pruning in humans goes back to front) - Plasticity in humans is life-long, but the degree of plasticity does change with age (over time, ability to change decreases and amount of effort to change increases, but doesn't 0 out) - We now refer to humans having sensitive periods as opposed to critical periods

Characteristics of charter schools

- Public but "alternative" (ie looping K-12, all girls/boys, arts) - Students choose to attend (lottery if oversubscribed) - Funding from local and state, sponsoring group - Adhere to state testing regulations (can kick out students; shut down if don't show student gains) - Free of other regulations (may/may not comply w/ teacher regulations)

Characteristics of magnet schools

- Public, launched in 70s with goal of diversity (encouraged students to attend schools outside of their neighborhood - hence magnet) - Federal, state, local funding - Highly selective, rigorous application process - Known for special program and facilities (must find funding, though) - Higher academic standards and performance (but can kick students out)

Cut scores' impact on teachers (value-added - VAM)

- Push to evaluate teachers with value-added model: based on test scores, what did the specific teacher contribute (what value did she/he add to the score?) - Derived from the aggregate of test score changes of students in class - Issues arise when previous year's teachers are super successful, leads to current teacher not likely seeing huge added value - Note: principals' evaluation often an aggregate of teachers' aggregate of students' scores

Cut scores' impact on schools (pushing students out)

- Pushes low-performing students out of schools to boost test scores: zero tolerance policy (school discipline) sees huge increase when high stakes testing is put in place - Policy in school: when student participates in criminal act, they will be arrested and go to juvie (only way to get them out of public school so that they no longer have test scores associated with school) - School can either call local police and have them handle crime outside of school, OR can use zero tolerance policy and have local police work through school and go to juvie (use zero tolerance policy to get these students out before standardized testing) - Ex. In PA, # of school-based arrests tripled in 7 years after high stakes tests were implemented (after being stable for 40 years)

Importance of expectations in teaching

- Pygmalion effect: students randomly selected to be 'poised to bloom' and they did: because teachers give more challenging work (materials and questions), useful feedback, close and supportive relationships, time and attention (we act, unconsciously, according to expectations) - Gershenson et al. 2016: Nationally representative sample of 10th grade math and reading teachers, 10th grade students -- 2 teachers reported on expectations for students' ultimate educational attainment, collected race data - Found that: non-black teachers of black students had significantly lower academic expectations than black teachers had of the same black students (concerning considering the Pygmalion effect)

Study about ability (1)

- Quasi-experimental: 6th graders with same average math achievement test scores (1/2 incremental view, 1/2 entity) - Incremental students earn higher math grades in 7th grade than entity, and grades of incremental students continued to improve (unlike entity)

Study 2 on notetaking (based on study 1)

- Question: Is this the same for long-term retention and understanding? - Same experimental design, but participants allowed to study their notes before a test that was given 1 week later - Same results: Laptop notetakers took more notes, but by-hand notetakers had stronger conceptual understanding, application, and integration ability on long-term retention test

Solid empirical test against learning styles (Mayer and Massa 3)

- Randomly assigned verbal preference and visual preference college kids to... - Condition 1: receive both visual and verbal help screens Condition 2: receive no help - Hypothesis: Condition 1 - exploratory, Condition 2 - verbalizers would outperform visualizers in the no help condition (because lesson is largely verbal) - Findings: - Condition 1: verbal preference people did choose verbal screens first and visual preference people did choose visual screens first (supports idea that learning preferences impact what you choose to do) - Condition 2: verbal preference and visual preference did not differ on post test (no support for learning styles mesh hypothesis)

Best way to make sure all kids hear language...

- Read to them! - Young children that are read regularly have better phonological and orthographic awareness, better at decoding, larger vocabulary - And these all predict reading ability which predicts time spent reading which predicts reading ability (and the cycle continues)

Semantics (meaning) and its importance

- Reading is more than "decoding," must understand meaning to really get anything out of it - So how do children gain semantics? They hear language, from being talked to or read to, the more they hear, the more they understand: which leads to enormous differences in language of children in lower and higher income households

EEG

- Recording of electrical activity along scalp caused by neurons firing - We analyze the ERPs (event related potentials): tell us about timing, not location of electrical change, the average across all points (not about specific point) - Average electrical changes together to determine nature of electrical activity across population of neurons as relates to an event (negative @ 100 ms or positive @ 200 ms change)

Why positive self-esteem matters

- Related to a host of favorable developmental outcomes: - Less likely to have mental health disorders - Less likely to engage in substance abuse as adults (not experimentation) - Higher rates of happiness and life satisfaction (based on shared variance, likely causal)

Reliability vs. validity

- Reliability: consistency, repeatability - Validity: must accurately measure the characteristics that the research claims to measure (internal - degree to which conditions internal to design of study permit an accurate test of hypothesis; external - degree to which findings generalize to settings and participants outside the original study)

Alternative teaching programs (Teach for America, Residency Programs)

- Research suggests: retention rates far lower for TFA (after two years, only 60% still teach), after 5 years, only 28% still teaching (only 14% at same school) - Retention matters: revolving door effect, schools incur substantial costs - Novices fill vacancies, so students taught by streamline of new teachers (less effective) - Schools lose investment in professional development - Harder to build relationships with parents and community - Summers spent hiring

Study 2 take home points/limitations

- Response to academic motivation is different than monetary motivation - More "motivated" a person, more neural change w/ academic motivation (can assume more dopamine release) - There are limitations to what this study can tell us due to internal validity (i.e. monetary condition was intended to represent extrinsic motivation, and academic intrinsic)

Self-esteem study

- Robbins and Trzesniewski (2005): study of global self-esteem based on 300,000+ participants of all ages -- find that boys fare better than girls and the gap grows during early adolescence - Dips during adolescence then slowly rises until 65, then decreases again due to cognitive decline

Summary of math

- Role of language: exact calculation (language dependent, more prominent in left hemisphere) vs. approximation (not language dependent, more bilateral) - Role of language aligns with brain regions - Gender differences seems to be socially constructed - Cultural differences: socially constructed, may be related in the way that language is used

Sally-Anne Task (ToM)

- Sally puts marble in basket, Anne picks it up and puts it in box while Sally is gone, Sally comes back - where is she going to look? - Result: 3 year olds (0% correct), 5 year olds (57% correct), 7 year olds (86% correct) - Conclusion: ToM develops through social interactions: more social interaction = greater ability to answer question

Solid empirical test against learning styles (Mayer and Massa 2)

- Same thing as experiment 1 but with non-educated adults (to determine if findings generalized beyond undergrad college population) - Same results

Neural basis (study 1)

- Schultz (2007): observed phasic responses to dopamine neurons when an unexpected reward was presented - First: huge release of dopamine when child is rewarded - Over time, child now has small burst of dopamine when doing problem, then more w/ reward - Over more time, dopamine releases in larger rates when they're doing problem itself, less when they get reward - Finally, only get spike of dopamine during activity itself, not when getting reward - Eventually, extrinsic reward becomes intrinsic - But what happens when you take reward away?: dopamine neurons also encode prediction error - Depress (decrease in base-line dopamine) when expected reward is omitted, called "reward prediction error" - Overall: yes, we can use rewards to hook intrinsic motivation at neural level, BUT we always remain dependent on actual tangible reward

Cut scores

- Score at lower bound of 'proficient' category - Continuous into categorical - Not based on science/math, rather arbitrary (Ex. college: 65 is passing, but 64.5 is failing; MCAS (Mass State Test): 220 was cut, but 219 certainly not statistically significant different in knowledge)

Short term vs working memory

- Short term memory is a part of working memory - STM: ability to maintain info for a brief amount of time - WM: ability to maintain and process information for a brief amount of time

Sensory register

- Sights and sounds are represented directly and stored briefly - Unlimited in capacity (sensing things all the time in unlimited way, just not always directing our attention to it) - Measuring exact duration is difficult: by the time asked to report, info already moved onto WM

Importance of sleep in terms of income achievement gap

- Sleep plays a role in academic achievement - Differences in sleep for groups differing by SES (sleep patterns as well as disorders) - Longitudinal studies have shown that insufficient sleep in low SES children negatively affects their academic performance to a greater degree than high SES children - Consistent with idea that when multiple health disparities associated with low SES are present, any single additional stressor has a greater effect

Can we learn from social experiences? - Experiment

- Social Learning Theorists: Can we learn by observing and imitating others? - Bandura's Bobo doll experiment - kids came into lab, sat by glass partition to look into another room and watched woman play with toys aggressively - Kids randomly assigned to three groups: Model rewarded (R), no consequence (N), Model punished (P) - Gave the kids two tests: performance test (behavior kids engage in on own), learning test (behavior kids engage in when offered prizes to display what they saw) - Result: we can learn from just observing social situations, even if you don't exhibit the behavior - Performance test: punishment causes kids to not engage in that activity; learning test: everyone could engage in aggressive behaviors

Characteristics of preschool

- Some sort of educational curriculum - No mandatory public pre-k in US, but growing number of states have state or federally funded pre-k (Head Start - federal program)

Types of schools

- Standard Public Schools - Charter Schools - Magnet Schools - Independent Private Schools - Parochial Schools - Native American Reservation Schools - Preschool

Head Start (pre-k)

- Started in 1965 and has grown extensively as soon as Perry Preschool data comes out - Today: budget close to $8 bil, serving 1 mil, but only 40% of eligible children - Eligibility: family earns less than 130% federal poverty line - Program: education, health services, social services

How can strength of affiliation with a social group impact cognitive processing?

- Stereotype threat: concern you may be judged to have traits associated with negative social stereotypes about a group you belong to - Leads to lower cognitive performance - Difficult verbal task given to African Americans and white students -- 1/2 told testing problems for researchers (no threat) and 1/2 told interested in seeing how different racial groups perform (threat) - whites did better in threat condition - See same patterns even when stereotype is not explicitly brought up - Ex. Girls in math, Asian Americans see benefit in math

How is SEL integrated into schools?

- Strong Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Programs focus on... self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision making - Strong SEL programs shown to... improve achievement by average of 11 percentile points, increase prosocial behavior (kindness, sharing, empathy), improve student attitude towards school, reduce depression - Yet, CCSS do not include explicitly SEL objective (Title I schools less likely to have SEL)

Research on phonics vs. whole language

- Strongly supports phonics over whole language (far superior, learn to read quickly, better readers down the road) - Relationship b/w phonological awareness and learning to read and later reading comprehension has been shown many, many times in many, many languages - Example of the research to practice gap (since many schools do not use phonics based approach) - This is really only a debate in the field of teaching - In truth (as is usually the case) a balance is best: unfortunately, that is rarely reflected in our schools today

Ability and goals

- Students with an entity (unchangeable) view of ability set performance avoidance goals to avoid looking bad - Teachers with an entity view of ability: quicker to form judgements about students, slower to modify their opinions when confronted w/ contradictory evidence - Teachers w/ incremental view of ability: set mastery goals for students; failure is not devastating, just means more work needs to be done

Importance of explicit instruction

- Studies collectively say that explicit instruction is really important and beneficial (telling kids what they need to learn works) - Authors claim findings prompt a re-examination of the long standing claim that there are limitations of explicit instruction (note: "explicit instruction" used differently in this study than in most classrooms -- never isolating actual explicit instruction)

General population studies in math

- Studies show teaching numbers lines (spatial representation) helps approximation - Siegler and Ramani, 2009: Low income preschoolers randomly assigned to a game for one hour - Linear board game and circular board game - After just one hour of game play, linear game board participants did better on a number magnitude comparison task and number line estimation task

Academic emotions

- Subset of emotions linked to academic learning and achievement (defined along 3 dimensions) - Valence: positive or negative - Activation: physiologically activating (heart speeds) or deactivating (heart slows) - Object focus: what you're having response to (activity related, prospective outcome related, or retrospective outcome related)

Massa and Mayer Take Homes

- Supports that learning preferences exist and that they impact what you choose to do - Supports that learning aptitudes exist (but there is no relationship between learning aptitude and preference) - No support for learning styles meshing hypothesis (matching instruction with preference does not improve performance, matching instruction with aptitude does not improve performance)

Neural basis of learning styles (Kraemer at al, 2009)

- Take visual and verbal preferences and visual and verbal aptitude tests (IQ) - Take visual and verbal similarity judgement task (using fMRI) - Each target item was either an image or set of three words - First viewed target item, then two probes; had to press button to tell which probe was more similar to target (more similar probe had 2 of 3 target features, less similar had 1 of 3) - Important point: with this task, you can encode the information verbally or visually

Kornell and Bjork study 2 (2008)

- Teach college kids how to calculate volumes of four obscure geometric solids (wedge, spheroid, spherical, and half cone), randomly assigned to: - Interleaved (given all 4 tutorials and then completed 16 practice problems that were mixed) - Blocked (given one tutorial, then 4 practice problems, another tutorial, then 4 more problems, etc) - Test given to all one week later - Results: interleaved did worse on practice problems than blocked, but did better on test problems (long term retention better)

Traditional teaching certification

- Teacher training programs at colleges: undergrad or graduate, accredited by state or national (state can matter - reciprocity, salary), degree/coursework and practicum (classroom experiences) requirements - important - Testing requirements (vary by state): Pearson's Foundations of Reading, Praxis (phasing out); edTPA (phasing in)

Importance of teaching certification

- Teachers with this training are more confident and successful - 5 year programs (undergrad training + 1 year of grad) associated with most effectiveness

NCLB vs. ESSA

- Testing: same schedule and subgroup reporting, but ESSA must use CCSS or other national test (SAT/ACT) - ESSA must measure growth using other factors (test scores, graduation rates, other) - ESSA eliminates requirement that test scores be used to evaluate teacher performance - ESSA has states set consequences: federal gov notes which schools do not meet goals, but state/local decide what schools must do

Purposes of assessment (3)

- Tests for learning: formative (during learning, what are students learning? -- think-pair-share, exist slips, quick reflections, discussion) - Testing of learning: summative (after learning, what have students learned?) - Accountability: students, teachers, schools, states, countries (could be high stakes testing -- holding accountable for what you've learned, how teachers are doing, how regions are doing) - Accountability is intended to be used in formative ways, but tends not to be (main issue is timing: teachers can't use scores to improve teaching if they get the score back in the summer)

Issues that arise from states in charge of approving curriculum and materials

- Textbook selection: publishers want to make $, so do not want to create a separate textbook for each state and their standards, since CA and TX have largest school systems, their thoughts/ideologies influence textbook content - Mismatch between reading level and content: majority of students don't read at their grade level, so it is hard to align standardized content

What cognitive processes are involved in social processing?

- Theory of Mind (ToM): used in social processing and interactions, associated with activity in STS and medial PFC, develops at ages 3-5 and may continue to develop - Ability to understand that other people have mental states, beliefs, and desires that might be different than your own (and might be incorrect) and impact their behavior - Critical for successful social interactions - Typically develops at 3-5 years - Numerous fMRI studies: STS (superior temporal sulcus) and medial PFC (prefrontal cortex - develops later)

Function of brain

- There are about 80 billion neurons in brain that transmit electrical impulses to each other - Neurons: made of cell body, axon, dendrites (axon sends electrical impulses to other neurons over synapses, dendrites receive electrical impulses from other neurons) - Electrical change in neuron: action potential - Action potentials trigger release of neurotransmitters, which travel across synapses to dendrite of next neuron (each dendrite selectively recognizes particular neurotransmitters, which generates response)

Overview of learning styles

- There are many, many different schemes based on the meshing hypothesis: learning is optimized when learning style is matched to instructional style - Dunn and Dunn: we each have a unique combination of preferences, some preferences strong, other moderate, others no preference (among different categories) - You learn best if learning context is matched to preference

Randomized control trials (RCT)

- Tier 1 in ESSA - Randomly assign to groups; often pre-test, post-test - Allows for cause and effect assumptions - Problems: confounding variables

Quasi-experimental

- Tier 2 in ESSA - Not randomly assigned to groups, uses pre-existing groups but groups matched as closely as possible (i.e. Head Start studies) - Often pre-test, post-test - Problems: confounding variables, experimental and control group not equal

Correlational stats

- Tier 3 in ESSA - Relationships between characteristics - Increase/decrease in one variable associated with increase/decrease in another - Problems: no causation, confounding variables; much of developmental and educational research (ethics - cannot assign kids to grow up in poor families, cannot make teachers teach well or poorly)

Cultural differences in math

- To what extent does culture lead to changes in brain activation for math processing? - Native English and Chinese speakers show different activation patterns during simple addition and comparison tasks - Native English: recruit more left language regions - Native Chinese: recruit more bilateral premotor cortex during same tasks (schooling effect? related to language differences?)

Blakemore study (ToM)

- ToM may continue to develop after ages 3-5 - Tests 7-27 year olds with "shelves test" - Method: view a set of shelves containing objects; "director" can see some, but not all of the objects; director tells you to more some of the objects, FT and accuracy recorded - Result: adolescents make more errors and take longer than adults, suggesting ToM continues to develop with age

Solid empirical test against learning styles (Constantinidou and Baker 2002)

- Took verbal vs. visual preference participants - Gave a free recall task with auditory (verbal), drawings (visual), or both verbal and visual - No interactions: everyone did better on visual or both - Take home: no relationship between learning preference and aptitude, but does support human visual strength

Ultimate goal of teaching

- Transfer! - Goal not to learn content and excel in each class (acquisition of content is a means to an end) - Goal is to use learning in other settings (transfer) -- remember (especially in college) sometimes future application is not predictable - Near transfer vs. far transfer

National focus (Trump/Biden)

- Trump: not clear, had "March for Science" spring 2017, which was not only about science but included advocacy for improved K-12 science education - Biden: not clear, advocate for "science" and "evidence based decision making" in general, but not much said specifically about K-12 education - Science not yet part of CCSS, NGSS created, not fully adopted, so no assessments... will they be created?

Things to keep in mind w/ PISA

- US was never #1 (or close) so it's not as if our place is reflexive of recent policy, rather long historical approaches to education - China and India don't participate, so lack of top 10 ranking does not mean they would not rank there, just no data - Shanghai's performance not related to how China might score (only 24% go to college)

Difference b/w formative and summative assessment

- Unlear - Main difference is the question: How will you use the data? - Can use summative assessments in formative ways

Long-term stress becomes "toxic"

- Unrelenting "flooding" of cortisol impacts structure and function of PFC and system becomes deregulated (ex. poverty, neglect, abuse) - Good news: recent works hows that parent behavior buffers effect (discipline differences) - Train teachers for this?

Learning preferences

- Valid - People will tell you that they have a preference - And these preferences are correlated with what people choose to do (Massa and Mayer 2006)

Learning aptitudes

- Valid - Thurstone was first to test these (1938) and found 8 learning aptitudes (underlying cognitive processes that drive what we do): - Verbal comprehension, word fluency, number facility, spatial visualization, associative memory, perceptual speed, reasoning - They are somewhat correlated (support for g) but do show a moderate level of independence (g - underlying intelligence)

What do high performing countries do that is different?

- Value of academic achievement: pay teachers higher salaries, teaching is actually respected - Emphasis on effort: Asian parents most likely to believe children can master school if they work hard, US parents more likely to believe academic achievement level is native skill - Similar education for all (no tracking, national curriculum) - More time in school (Asian countries attend school 50 more days each year, teachers spend less time per day teaching but more time over the course of a year)

Metacognition and teaching

- Vast majority of studies show that we can teach metacognition via explicit instruction, modeling, and practice - Plan: What am I supposed to learn? How much time will I need? What should I do first? - Monitor: Am I on the right track? Should I move in a different direction? What's important to remember? What am I doing if I don't understand? - Evaluation: What did I learn? Is there anything I don't understand? How can I apply what I learned to what I already know or to future learning?

Pathway 1 of processing stream

- Ventral pathway: deals with the "what," then continues down through temporal lobes - Detailed features that characterize letters and strings of letters (makes sense, this system also used to characterize other patterns, forms, and details) - Detailed features processed within 150 milliseconds of presentation (very fast and eventually automatic) - "Letter area": letters appear to be processed as letters in this pathway - "Word area": words also appear to be processed as words in the fusiform gyrus of this pathway

Fleming's VAK model of learning styles

- Visual learners: learn best through seeing (pictures, visual aids) - Auditory learners: learn best through listening (lectures, discussions, recordings) - Kinesthetic learning: learn best through experience (moving, touching, doing)

Orthography overview

- Visual processing: to read, you must first make sense of how marks on a page look - Recognizing orthographic symbols of a language, which isn't easy, since many symbols are very similar and uppercase and lowercase letters may or may not be the same (traditional Roman alphabet... terrible!) - Visual processing of letters and sets of letters (words) occurs in occipital lobes - From occipital lobe, processing stream splits

Importance of rehearsal in WM

- Way to use WM to protect information from decay - When we cannot rehearse, delay occurs in WM - Rehearsing is more common in older children and adults than in young children

Dual Code Hypothesis

- We remember best when presented in both verbal and visual forms - Helps explain why we remember concrete items more easily than abstract (because we can encode into memory with verbal and visual attributes)

Information processing model

- We store memory in 3 parts: sensory register, working memory, long term memory - Input from environment goes into sensory register → working memory → could be input into long term memory (then can go back to working memory to create a response)

Original concept of working memory (short term memory)

- Weak in some ways (i.e. can't account for mental rotation) - People take longer to answer as rotation increases - how does this map onto short term and long term memory?

Continuation of math study

- What about complex math? - New group of bilinguals taught two complex tasks in one language - Exact calculation: large numbers, addition as well as other operations - Approximation: cube roots, logarithms - Result: when tested on new problems in both languages, see same results: exact calculation tasks showed costs for language switching (increased response time), but approximation did not

Background on learning and teaching reading

- When do we learn to read? - Birth-K: identify letters in alphabet, 1st: sound out letters and words (major point), 2nd and 3rd: retrieving whole words, 4th-8th: shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn," high school and beyond: implied meaning behind text, learn to read new text types - Reading, unlike speaking, is not natural (our brain is simply not designed to read) - You will not learn to read unless explicitly taught - We "borrow" from multiple neural systems with their own specializations - Reading is dependent on the functioning of each system and the connections b/w systems (to read, we borrow from systems specialized for orthography, phonology, connectivity of the two, and semantics)

Why process of learning varies contingent on whether students hold misconceptions

- When students have misconceptions, learning is more difficult - With misconceptions, learning is a matter of conceptual change or accommodation (current knowledge must undergo radical reorganization or replacement - much harder) - Conceptual growth (current knowledge is simply increased or added to, current knowledge is consistent with new inputs so current knowledge is either embellished or new knowledge is established) - Because conceptual change is harder, we need more time to teach science

Factors influencing attributions (indirect messages and actions from others)

- When teacher assumes child failure is due to internal, stable reasons, tends to respond with sympathy: avoid giving punishment, leads to student thinking failure is due to internal, stable reasons - When teacher assumes child failure is due to internal, unstable reasons: tends to respond w/ anger/disappointment and gives punishment -- far more effective in getting students to learn

Results of Dehaene study

- When tested on new exact problems: faster in the "trained" language than "untrained" languages (suggests knowledge acquired during training of exact problems was stored in a language specific format and showed a language switching cost due to translation aka language involved in exact calculation) - When tested on new approximation problems: speed was same for both "trained" and "untrained" language (suggests knowledge acquired during training was language-dependent aka language was not involved in approximation)

Importance of sleep for LTM

- When you sleep after learning something new, neural consolidation occurs, mainly during nonrapid eye movement sleep (NREM) - Neural blueprint reactivated and strengthened (helps lead to long-term potentiation) - Importance: getting info into LTM is main goal of teaching and education

Neuromyths - 10% brain use

- Why does it exist?: Experts said so - Lashley electrically stimulated parts of brain, found no cognitive delays in some regions -- but this is b/c other parts temporarily take over function, not that parts are not used - Truth: the brain does contain many more supporting cells (glia) than it does neurons, but glia cells are not 'electrically' active (glia cells clean up brain debris and 'eat' dead neurons, bring nutrients to neurons, holds them in place, digest parts of dead neurons - No actual evidence (would be in vegetative state if true) -- entire brain is always active

Summary of social and emotional learning

- Yes, we can learn from social experiences - It seems that some learning is optimized when social, which means it involves ToM (mPFC) which is more involved in competition than cooperation, but cooperation seems to be more socially rewarding and involves distributed cognition - Learning varies for children based on their peer social status and those of stereotypical groups - Unfortunately, even though SEL has been shown to cause learning gains, it's not formally integrated into schools

Where does this mapping happen? - fMRI studies

- fMRI as participants silently read high frequency words, low frequency words, and made up words - Hypothesis: reading high frequency words would not require effortful "mapping," but low frequency and made up words would - High frequency words: increased activation in posterior (back) systems - Other words: increased activation in anterior (front) system - Suggests posterior system is involved in automatic mapping and anterior system is involved in more effortful mapping - Not surprisingly, more anterior involvement in young children than adults since children are learning to read and must put in a lot of effort - Along with that, see relationship b/w lack of activity in left angular gyrus and reading disabilities having to do w/ connectivity of two systems (understanding orthography and mapping on phonetics)

Phonological awareness associated with superior temporal sulcus (STS)

- fMRI studies show even 3 month and 5 year olds show activation in this area for speech -- so how is this related to reading? - Seems to be specialized for phonology, which is used in both spoken language (speech) and written language processing (reading) - Phonological awareness when reading uses and changes these speech circuits: illiterate and literate women asked to repeat made up and real words in fMRI - No brain activation differences b/w the women when repeating real words - Differences when repeating made up words: literate women saw increase in activation in STS during repetition of made up words, illiterate women did not - Repeating made up words requires remembering and articulating a sequence of phonemes never heard before - Study suggests learning to read develops phonological processing systems in a way that changes how one analyzes speech - Take home: Once you learn how to read, language is never the same

Action potential vs. event related potential

Action potential is change of electrical charge in one neuron, whereas event-related potential is change in electric charge across the entire population of neurons in the brain

Part of brain that cooperation and competition both use

Anterior insula

Federal involvement in school funding

Attempt to even out distribution across districts in a state (helps some, but does not equalize) -- only 9% of total funding, 91% from local/state

Two methods in which the brain is measured

EEG (electroencephalography) and fMRI

Summary of Educational Acts

ESEA (w/ IDEA) → NCLB (added Race to the Top) → ESSA (got rid of Race to the Top) → Choices in Ed Act

Capacity of WM

Each subsystem has its own independent maintenance capacity, but if a subsystem is given a task that requires processing, it pulls resources from the one shared central executive

Local board of education

Elected community members evaluate school metrics (test scores, finances) and oversee superintendent, principals, teachers

Educational implications of critical period myth?

Emphasizes need for pre-k education, but doesn't do it in right way

What we need to consider when "optimizing" learning

Genes, brain, cultural environment, physical environment, social environment, development, perception, motivation, emotion (and how all of these interact)

Notetaking

Is there an ideal way to take notes? Laptop or by hand?

Two best predictors of reading achievement in elementary school

Letter identification (orthography - ventral and dorsal pathways) and sounds (phonology - STS), large part of brain used just to read!

Types of (achievement) goals

Mastery oriented (intention to improve abilities and learn) - Mastery approach goal: want to master task/material - Mastery avoidance goal: do not want to not be able to master task (driven by anxiety rather than interest) Performance oriented (intention to seem competent to others) - Performance-approach: want to look good and receive favorable judgement - Performance-avoidance: do not want to look bad and receive unfavorable judgement

Self-esteem

One's evaluation of one's worth as a person based on an assessment of qualities (scholastic, social, athletic, physical, behavior)

What are the 3 studies/programs for low-income students in the US?

Perry Preschool Project (pre-k), Head Start (pre-k), KIPP (K-12)

Development of brain (synaptogenesis)

Physically, brains are built over time: at birth, 1/4 size of adulthood; in year 1, more than 1 million new neural connections form every second (synaptogenesis); by 3, brain about 3/4 size of adulthood

International Comparisons (PISA)

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan are top performers in reading, math, and science, while US falls at or below international average (shows how US puts so much into education but less returns

Best way to teach "conceptual change" (aka reverse effects of misconception)

Research suggests solution is to give students ample time to explore and explain their current (incorrect) knowledge and then battle through conflicting ideas

Consequences of not using evidence-based education

Research-to-practice gap and neuromyths

Local funding in education

Schools receive bulk of funding from local property taxes (public education is largest expenditure in every US town)

State oversight of schools (content)

State "Secretary of Education" or "Board of Ed Superintendent" oversees districts by... - Setting content standards (determines what students learn in grade, varies state by state -- issues arise when moving) - Setting teacher qualification standards (varies state by state) - Approving curriculum and materials

Effects of testing on students

Tests are often thought of as assessment tools, but they actually directly strengthen memory representation of tested information (testing helps you learn)

Self-regulation

The process of adjusting one's emotions by managing feelings, associated physiological reactions, cognition, and behavior to appropriate levels of intensity in order to accomplish goals

NCLB - consequences if state doesn't meet AYP

Title I schools had clear consequences... - 2 consecutive years: identified as needing improvement, school officials develop 2 year plan to turn around school, students offered option of transferring to another school not identified as needing improvement (problem - usually either all schools in district meet expectations or none do) - 3 years of NI: must supplement educational services - 4 years: corrective action (replace certain staff, fully implement a new curriculum, extend school day - not given funds) - 5 years: restructuring (replace all or most staff, reopen as charter school, extend school day/year, close school entirely, or "other")

Overall strategies for strengthening learning and teaching

To study: test yourself (with SA preferably), space it out, interleave, take notes by hand, and sleep.

What is the goal of science education?

To teach content? To teach thinking in a scientific manner? To teach "curiosity," and if so, how? Should we shift to informal science education?

Studies suggests that one of the more important underlying impacts the Perry Preschool Project had on children was improved...

motivation by age 14