Author Archives: Rose Hendricks

A Google image search for “stress” makes our culture’s attitude about the concept immediately clear. There are pictures of people pulling their hair, eyes wide and mouth gaping, a word cloud filled with words like “worry” and “depression,” and even a woman intensely biting her laptop.

In short, we hate stress.

Although it is often an unpleasant feeling and is linked to a host of health problems from headaches to Alzheimer’s Disease, stress is not all bad. In some forms, it can motivate and push us to excel. We can reap these benefits by keeping stress under control, but another, less obvious way to harness stress productively is to reframe the way we think about it.

Although it might be easy to imagine children’s lives as carefree, students of all ages face stress. Whether from standardized testing¹, non-ideal home situations like poverty², or even being around others who are stressed³, children’s minds and bodies can become acquainted with stress and anxiety from a young age. When we become stressed, our brain becomes doused in norepinephrine, and our body receives a rush of adrenaline⁴. This sympathetic nervous system response is often referred to as our body’s fight-or-flight mode because the arousal it triggers will allow us to react quickly (by doing things like fighting or fleeing) in the face of immediate danger. The amygdala plays a crucial role in stimulating this often automatic physiological response to a threatening situation.⁵

This can be a beneficial response, for example, if we need to save a child from drowning or hammer our a paper right before a deadline. In these cases, stress is often referred to as eustress, because it positively affects our performance in the moment. It can also become a deleterious response if it becomes a lasting state, making our body feel like we may need to save a drowning child at any second, when in reality we are simply sitting in traffic on the highway. This is the type of stress we often think of – referred to as distress for its negative impacts on our mental wellbeing.

Stress in the Classroom

Prolonged stress compromises classroom performance. It produces dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain necessary for high-level cognitive tasks like reasoning, decision-making, and memory. As such, long-term stress hurts a person’s working memory capacity⁶, a trait that is linked to different features of intelligence⁷. Although this working memory impairment is likely to be evident in the classroom, chronic childhood stress resulting from poverty or other adverse situations predicts working memory deficits as a young adult⁸.

Children and teenagers whose minds are preoccupied by stressful circumstances — whether in the of excessive pressure to perform, discord at home, or bullies at school — are less able to focus on their academic work. Since much of what we learn in school is cumulative, building on previous concepts that teachers assume that students have learned, we can see how the effects of stress on educational performance can quickly snowball into a situation that adds even more stress for the student.

Fortunately, there are many ways of coping with stress. One antidote that continues to gain traction is to cultivate mindfulness, an enhanced awareness of one’s surroundings and stressors. In particular, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven effective for reducing both physical and psychological consequences of stress⁹. As previously discussed on Learning & the Brain, children can and should be taught to incorporate mindfulness and meditation into their lives.

Changing the Way We See Stress

Another effective method for dealing with stress that has received less popular attention than MBSR is reframing our mindset. Through a process known as reappraisal, we can alter the way we feel about a situation by altering the way we think about it.¹⁰ Focusing on the positive features of stress — for example, its ability to encourage the development of initiative, mental toughness, and a sense of mastery — can influence not only our subjective experiences of stress, but our body’s physical responses to it as well¹¹. If the idea of stress stresses us out, it can become an endless feedback loop. If we can come to terms with the time and place for stress in our lives, it may actually be easier to keep under control.

In one study by Alia Crum and colleagues, employees of a large company were exposed to three different 3-minute long videos over the course of a week. The three videos were different, but for each employee, all three either presented stress as an enhancing or debilitating force. By the end of the week, a questionnaire revealed that people changed their mindsets about stress. Those who saw the debilitating videos began to think of stress as more negative, while those who saw the enhancing videos began to think of it more positively. Further, people in the enhancing group reported better psychological symptoms and work performance after the week, which did not happen for the debilitating group. These findings suggest that changing the way people think of stress can have important downstream consequences for their mental well-being and performance.

A follow up study investigated the effect of stress mindsets in undergraduates. At the beginning of the semester, students completed a personality assessment, and later in the semester, they provided saliva samples. During a subsequent class, they were asked to rate themselves on dimensions including confidence, emotional intelligence, persuasion, and presence/authenticity, and to prepare a speech in ten minutes that they could deliver to the class. They were told that 5 students would be randomly selected to deliver their speeches, and their classmates would rate them on their charisma. This setup created a realistic stressful situation for the students, and saliva samples were again collected to compare to the baseline samples taken earlier. The students also learned that those who were chosen would have the opportunity to receive feedback from professionals, and those who weren’t chosen could also receive feedback on their speeches at a later time. All students rated their desire for feedback. Students whose personality assessments revealed that they had a “stress is enhancing” mindset were more likely to desire feedback than those who thought of stress as debilitating. The students who believed stress could be enhancing also showed more adaptive cortisol profiles in their saliva.

Implications for the Classroom

Believing that stress could be positive encouraged students to put themselves in a position to grow by expressing more willingness to receive feedback. Beyond influencing behavior, this mindset also affected students’ physiological responses to a stressful situation, allowing them to be less reactive than students who held the “stress is debilitating” mindset. Together with the previous study, these results demonstrate first that our mindsets about stress are malleable, and can be shaped simply by watching a few short movies. They also show us that students who took on a more positive mindset about stress reacted less to acute stress and put themselves in a situation to receive valuable feedback and grow from their experience. These are exactly the traits most educators would like to see more of in their students.

What steps can we take to help more students achieve these positive results?

• Emphasize that stress can enhance performance. Help students learn to cope with distress while promoting the beneficial effects of eustress.
• Provide students with opportunities to thrive under stress. Creating situations that are moderately stressful, such as delivering a speech to the class, will show students that they can thrive under stress, thus solidifying that stress can truly enhance performance.
• Practice what you preach. Students often learn from example, so they will internalize their educators’ stress mindsets, whether those mindsets are made explicit to them or not. As such, it is important for teachers to also adapt a “stress is enhancing” mindset.
• Make metacognition a part of your classroom culture – or encouraging your students to think about their own thinking. Be honest with your students about what stress is, what it’s for, and when it becomes dangerous. Sometimes having an understanding of how we work can provide us with the tools to better control and reappraise our experiences and emotions. Provide resources for students who feel distress, as well as strategies for them to practice reframing.

Although all people will undoubtedly face some negative stress throughout their lives, being mindful to the way we react to all stress, physically and mentally, will help us cultivate more positive mindsets. Mindsets are often self-fulfilling prophecies, and the key to thriving under stress may simply lie in believing that we can do so.

References & Further Reading

1. Fleege, P.O., Charlesworth, R., Burts, D.C. & Hart, C.H. (1992). Stress begins in kindergarten: A look at behavior during standardized testing. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 7(1), 20-26. [Paper]
2. Curry, A. (2015). Why living in a poor neighborhood can make you fat. Nautilus, 31. [Web Article]
3. Scully, S.M. (2015). You can “catch” stress through a TV screen. Nautilus, 31. [Web Article]
4. Tennant, V. (2015). The powerful impact of stress. New Horizons for Learning. [Web Article]
5. LeDoux, J. (2015). The amygdala is not the brain’s fear center. The Huffington Post, [Web Article]
6. Mizoguchi, K., Yuzurihara, M., Ishige, A., Sasaki, H., Chui, D & Tabira, T. (2000). Chronic stress induces impairment of spatial working memory because of prefrontal dopaminergic dysfunction. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(4), 1568-1574. [Paper]
7. Oberauer, K., Sϋß, H., Wilhelm, O. & Wittmann, W. (2010). Which working memory functions predict intelligence? Intelligence, 36(6), 641-652. [Paper]
8. Evans, G.W. & Schamberg, M.A. (2009). Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory. PNAS, 106(16), 6545-6549. [Paper]
9. Chiesa, A. & Serretti, A. Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15(5), 593-600. [Paper]
10. Ochsner, K. N., Silvers, J. A. & Buhle, J. T. (2012). Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: A synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251, E1-E24. [Paper]
11. Crum, A.J, Salovey, P. & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733. [Paper]

Whether you want to learn to tie a tie or you want to learn about galaxies and cosmology, the Internet can be a gateway to knowledge. This is exciting, but comes with a huge caveat: most of the world does not have Internet access¹. This problem fuels the nonprofit Learning Equality², whose focus is on “bringing the online learning revolution offline.” In order to do this, they’ve created a platform called KA Lite³, an offline version of material from Khan Academy that is downloaded onto tablets.

The goals of KA Lite and Learning Equality more generally extend beyond increasing access to existing resources. Although at first glance it may seem that they make teachers less relevant, they in fact include functionality that facilitate teachers and help them to become even more effective. Although many teachers may want to give thorough feedback on students’ work as often as necessary, their time is limited. Resources like Khan Academy and KA Lite alleviate some of this difficulty by giving students immediate feedback, as well as relaying this information to teachers who can use it to identify each students’ progress much more efficiently.

Another pervasive struggle not only with online educational content but also with in-person content is maintaining students’ motivation to learn. By implementing a points system, in particular a system that is both consistent and includes elements of randomness, learning takes on a game-like quality. In effect, the point system allows students to become engaged in a “game” tailored to their level. If doing math problems for the sake of improving math skills feels tedious to many students, doing the problems in order to advance in a game is likely to be much less so.

I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Tibbles, a fellow grad student in UC San Diego’s Cognitive Science department and a cofounder of Learning Equality. We discussed KA Lite, the organization’s offline version of Khan Academy, which has been downloaded onto tablets and distributed throughout the world. Throughout our conversation, I learned what KA Lite offers students, how it capitalizes on what we know about human users and learners, and the organization’s goals for continuing to bridge the global digital divide.

After speaking with Richard, I felt optimistic about the future of global education, as Learning Equality (and many others) increase access to high-quality materials and improve our understanding of how to best teach – both at home and around the world. I hope this piece similarly inspires you!

Check out the interview below:

 

References & Further Reading

1. Rodriguez, S. (2014). 60% of the world’s population still won’t have Internet by the end of 2014. The Los Angeles Times. [Article]

2. Learning Equality [Organization]

3. KA Lite [Initiative]

• Wang, D. (2015). Beyond the edge of the internet: Learning equality crowdsources funding for offline education. UC San Diego News Center. [Article]

It is no secret that American students’ math and science standardized test scores don’t break any records^1,2. In 2012, the US scored below average for developed countries in math and close to average in science. We also know that many of the most pressing problems facing us today and in the future, from halting climate change to combatting terrorism, require science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) mastery and innovation. For this reason, educators and policymakers continue to increase their emphasis on STEM education.

Students’ time in school is finite, so spending more time learning to program or construct electrical circuits often means spending less time reading literature and engaging in arts, as these activities are often considered less practical. This STEM myopia can also be problematic, as those “less practical” fields may impart critical thinking and creativity³, perseverance, teamwork, and commitment⁴ in ways that STEM fields may not.

This understanding has prompted the STEAM movement, dedicated to incorporating the arts into a STEM educational framework.

I had the opportunity to talk with Nan Renner, a researcher at UC San Diego’s Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence (CREATE). Nan’s work is focused on how we learn by interacting with the world – using language, objects, environments, and other people. With an initiative called the Art of Science Learning, she directed an Incubator for Innovation in San Diego to bring community members together to seek creative solutions for the water crisis in the region. She also teaches undergraduate courses in Cognitive Science. One course is called Distributed Cognition, a class that expands how we think about thinking to include our bodies and social and cultural contexts. Another is Cognitive Ethnography, a project-based research course that encourages students to understand human cognition through observing and analyzing behaviors. Collectively, her work is an exemplar for STEAM proponents, demonstrating not only a seamless integration of sciences and arts, but also working towards making STEAM a natural part of education.

What is STEAM, really?

Defining STEAM as simply the integration of arts with STEM fields is an oversimplification, especially for those of us who have been raised on the distinctions between the subjects. Traditionally, students learn science in science class and art in art class.

How could these very different subjects be combined?

There are some obvious ways to integrate them: students can use physical materials like clay or styrofoam to make models of cells or the solar system, and they can learn songs about concepts like Avogadro’s number. But Nan pointed out that we should think more broadly about what arts really are when trying to make education more “STEAM-y.” Instead of always incorporating art per se, we can incorporate an artistic spirit into STEM lessons. Art encourages and requires exploration, an emotional engagement and sense of ownership, and flexibility, all of which are key ingredients for success in science. For this reason, these same attributes should be components of STEM education.

Factor 1: Exploration

When we take a paintbrush to a canvas, a bow to a violin, or our eye to a camera lens, we are exploring. We explore the world around us, our bodies, and the media that we’re using to create the art. At an abstract level, it is this exploration that STEAM advocates promote for science classrooms. The goal of science is to predict and explain phenomena in the world, and that can’t happen without exploration.

To illustrate the value of exploration, Renner told me about the Hands On Lab, a mini science course for high school students held by CREATE at UCSD. Students learned about molecular self-assembly by creating and exploring bubbles and observing how dish soap alone could move boats across water. They also used microscopes to examine cells from fruits and vegetables, comparing and contrasting cells from the tougher outsides to the fleshier insides. By getting their hands dirty (or wet), students were able to explore the scientific principles in an unstructured way, freely experimenting with contrasts and causality. These activities create a foundation that students can build on once they learn more structured scientific terms and processes for explaining those phenomena.

Factor 2: Emotional Engagement & Ownership

Another key feature of art is that someone (or some people) created it. Regardless of whether the piece of art is a knitted scarf, a Broadway musical, a digitally rendered graphic, or a gourmet meal, the artist becomes emotionally invested in the project, leading to a strong feeling of ownership. Children especially are often rightfully proud of their artwork. These feelings of engagement and ownership are crucial to science as well, and they were central to a series of workshops also held at UCSD called Informath. Educators who participated in Informath gathered for workshops with the goal of creating professional development programs that brought art and math together to enhance learning. They received materials like paper strips, straws, and pipe cleaners, and after “playing” for a little while, had arrived at intriguing ways to teach concepts like fractals, recursive relationships, and geometric proofs.

Using the materials to make their models meant that those sculptures were now theirs – not only did the educators own the finished products, but they also owned the processes they had taken to arrive at them. As in the Hands On Lab, the lessons that the teachers created at Informath fostered ownership and engagement through a personal exploration process.

Extensive research on Self Determination Theory has focused on uncovering the social-contextual conditions that enhance individuals’ motivation and development⁵. One of these conditions is autonomy, which can be facilitated by granting students choices so that they have ownership over their exploration processes and means for expressing what they have learned⁶. Science lessons that revolve around art and exploration will introduce ownership into the classroom, instilling motivation, curiosity, and deeper understandings.

Factor 3: Flexibility

Flexibility is yet another hallmark of art. When you’re in a musical ensemble or a theater troupe, for example, you need to be constantly aware of the whole, and adapt so that you fit in. Likewise, scientific exploration requires this constant awareness of how new pieces of information fit into existing knowledge frameworks and the willingness to alter hypotheses or procedures as new information is accounted for.

These traits are central to the Incubator for Innovation, a project that Nan was involved with through the Art of Science Learning. In San Diego, the incubator’s focus was on the mismatch between supply and demand for water, a challenge chosen by public vote. The Incubator participants included scientists, artists, educators, and students who were invested in the problem. The teams learned arts-based techniques that they used to continuously come up with ideas, test them, and communicate about them. Iteration was a crucial component of the incubator: as teams tested their ideas and continued to learn about what did and did not work, they continually improved their innovations.

Similar incubators took place to address problems of access to fair and equitable nutrition (in Chicago) and new transportation solutions (in Worcester, MA). In 2016, a traveling exhibit will showcase the projects that came out of all 3 incubators and emphasize the importance of bringing creativity to science and innovation. Collaborating, iterating, and incorporating new information into prototypes are all crucial components of the incubator that drive home the importance of flexibility for innovation and success.

Creating a STEAM-ier classroom

A few times during our conversation, we circled back to a resounding theme: The most crucial part of STEAM is integration. Nan pointed out that “when we engage in real-world problem-solving, the disciplinary boundaries fade into the background. We blend and merge creative and critical thinking, representing ideas with words, metaphors, numbers, images, forms. We can be inquisitive and thoughtful about what these different modalities offer, in education and the workplace, and expand our collective repertoire for identifying and solving big challenges.”

How can we accomplish this in our STEAM lessons?

• Keep the goals of exploration, emotional engagement, and flexibility at the forefront when designing STEM lessons and incorporate hands-on lessons whenever appropriate.

• De-emphasize curricular boxes – although there will inevitably be certain topics and lessons that fall within our definition of science or math more than others, help students to be holistic thinkers by encouraging them to answer questions using whatever knowledge and tools they have available, as opposed to sticking to the confines of one traditional subject.

• Try metaphorming – a form of brainstorming that involves making multi-dimensional, freeform, symbolic models and can lead to deeper insights and more creativity.

• Promote the arts – students who learn to play as part of an orchestra, who gain confidence in ballet class, or who become comfortable getting their hands dirty with a pottery wheel will take those lessons and mindsets with them to the science classroom.

• As a teacher, take some creative liberties when planning science lessons. Students will learn best by observing a role model who incorporates arts and science (for inspiration, check out the #sciart hashtag on Twitter).

One intuition might be that the key to improving STEM education is to focus students’ time more on STEM subjects and less on the arts. However, we have solid evidence suggesting that STEM and arts aren’t incompatible ends of a spectrum, but instead can – and should – be integrated. When we integrate arts, and more broadly, an artistic mindset, into science lessons, we open the door for exploration, emotional engagement and ownership, and flexibility; indispensible skills for success in science and in life more generally.

The STEAM movement suggests that arts and sciences may have a synergistic relationship – even better when combined than each in isolation. The movement reminds us that when it comes to treasured school subjects – arts and sciences – we can have our cake and eat it too.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Chappell, B. (2013). U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science. NPR. [Article]
2. Desilver, D. (2015). U.S. students improving – slowly – in math and science, but still lagging internationally. Pew Research Center. [Article]
3. Zakaria, F. (2015). Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous. The Washington Post. [Article]
4. Williams, Y. (2014). Rhythm and bruise: How cuts to music and the arts hurt kids and communities. Huffington Post Education. [Article]
5. Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. [Paper]
6. Stefanou, C.R., Perencevich, K.C., DiCintio, M., & Turner, J.C. (2004). Supporting autonomy in the classroom: Ways teachers encourage student decision making and ownership. Educational psychologist, 39(2), 97-110. [Paper]

• Beilock, S. (2015). How the body knows its mind: The surprising power of the physical environment to influence how you think and feel. [Book]
• STEAM to STEAM [Organization]

Education is intended to be a great equalizer, one that provides everyone with the resources that they need to be successful. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that it might not be as equalizing as many would like. There are still academic achievement gaps, for example between men and women and between European Americans and African Americans^1,2. These performance gaps can’t be entirely explained by differences in background experience. Instead, the stereotypes that students have internalized likely play a significant role.

One pivotal study by Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn¹⁰, for example, found that simply telling women that men do better on a particular math test results in worse performance, a phenomenon referred to as “stereotype threat”. Another study found that just telling a black athlete that a golf task was a test of “sports intelligence” significantly decreased his performance¹¹. Countless studies since have replicated these findings for everything from working memory capacity to test anxiety to high blood pressure. When people expect that they should have some flaw or difficulty, the expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Studies have also found that teacher expectations can have a significant impact on student performance. For example, a series of influential studies from the 1960’s showed that after teachers were told that randomly selected students were about to experience an “intellectual boom,” those students experienced major improvements in their performance, even though nothing had changed aside from their teacher’s opinion of them¹². Subtle features of the environment can shape students’ behavior and self-perception, so it’s essential that we identify ways to minimize stereotype threat in the classroom.

The Power of Values Affirmation

Combating deep-rooted stereotypes is no light task, but research has shown that there are subtle interventions that may at least begin to do this. They’re often called values affirmation interventions because they encourage students to reflect on their personal values. The most common implementation of values affirmation involves writing about one’s values, but the crucial ingredient is that students are conscious of the things that are important to them personally. In one study, half of the males and half of the females in a college physics class participated in a values affirmation activity at the beginning of the semester, while the others did not¹. By the end of the semester, there was a marked difference in the two groups. In the control group (students who did no special intervention), males significantly outperformed females. In the affirmation group, however, this gap was eliminated. This suggests that simply being mindful of one’s values can combat stereotypes that may otherwise hamper girls’ performance.

A similar study examined the effects of a values affirmation intervention in African Americans and European Americans². This study looked at change in GPA over the course of two school years. While the intervention didn’t affect European Americans — there was no difference in GPA change in the affirmation group compared to the group who did not do the affirmation — the GPAs of the African Americans who participated in the intervention increased by .24 points by the end of the two years.

The intervention was especially effective for low-performing African Americans, who experienced a GPA increase of 0.41 points on average and whose chances of repeating a grade or being placed in a remedial class were slashed from 18% to 5%.

Why do these value-affirming interventions work?

They are incredibly simple, involving only a short writing activity that is sometimes repeated a few times, but sometimes only done once. Yet the simplicity might be a key to the success of values affirmation interventions. The authors of the study investigating their effects for African Americans point out that there is often a recursive process at work: students have initial mental states or stereotypes that are compounded over time. The intervention, though small, seems to alter that recursive trajectory, leading to substantial long-term consequences².

Values Affirmation & the Brain

Work by Lisa Legault and colleagues suggests that effects of self affirmation can be seen at the neural level³. The brain’s electrical patterns can be recorded through electroencephalography (EEG), and different cognitive processes have different signature patterns. One well-known pattern is called the Error-Related Negativity (ERN). Just 100ms after people make an error on a task, there is a negative electrical spike, as their dopaminergic neurons (those that encourage us to keep doing more of what we’re doing) stop firing. They hypothesized that when we feel affirmed, we are more sensitive to our errors (in order to learn from them), and therefore that people who had undergone a self-affirmation measure should show an increased ERN response to making errors and an improved performance on a task. On the flip side, people whose self-affirmation was undermined might show a blunted ERN response and a decreased task performance.

All participants received a list of 6 values and rated them in terms of their importance to themselves. Those in the affirmation condition then wrote about their top value, while those in the non-affirmation condition wrote about their lowest one. They then performed a straightforward task: when they saw an M on the screen, they had to quickly press a response button; when they saw a W on the screen, they were to do nothing. This type of task is often called a go/no-go task. They did indeed find that participants who completed the values affirmation task had both increased performance and “neuroaffective sensitivity to task errors” compared to those in the non-affirmation group.

This research adds to our understanding of why values affirmation improves performance in groups facing stereotype threats. It seems to reduce depletion by improving our detection of and sensitivity to errors, reduce defensiveness, and motivate people to succeed.

A values affirmation intervention has also been effective for attaining weight loss goals⁴, demonstrating that the mechanism through which it works affects motivation and empowerment beyond the classroom. Another research group investigated neural activity while people were exposed to messages about ways to improve their health by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)⁵. Participants who had completed a values affirmation exercise before hearing the mentions showed more activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a region of the brain associated with self-related processing and positive valuation) than those who did not reflect on their values before receiving the same message.

Together, these studies suggest that after reflecting on our values, our brains may process incoming information differently, allowing us to make the best of constructive feedback and motivating us to improve our performance the task or goal we’re focused on.

Facebook as an Unexpected Tool for Self-Affirmation

Are there other ways to tap into the benefits of self affirmation? Recent work suggests that Facebook may provide one way of doing so⁶. College undergraduates were placed in one of four groups: (1) the Facebook self-affirming group had 5 minutes to explore any aspect of their own Facebook profile they chose; (2) the Facebook non-affirming group had 5 minutes to explore someone else’s profile; (3) the values affirmation group wrote for five minutes about something they valued; and (4) the values control group wrote about something they valued very little. After doing the associated task, participants received feedback on a speech they had done at the very beginning of the experiment. Everyone received the same generic negative feedback, and they were then asked to rate different aspects of that feedback, like how useful it was and how competent the person who gave it to them was. If participants were self-affirmed before receiving their feedback, they should be more accepting of the negative feedback they received. This was exactly what the researchers found, regardless of whether the affirmation came in the form of the traditional writing intervention or by looking at their own Facebook profile. In fact, both forms of affirmation were equally effective. This study still leaves the mechanistic question unanswered; that is, why does viewing our own profile encourage us to reflect on our values? Is it only important that we focus our thoughts on ourselves, or is there something about a Facebook profile that reminds us of what we believe in and value?

In a second experiment, these same researchers asked whether people actually seek out Facebook’s self-affirming abilities after a negative experience. Again, they performed a speech and received generic feedback. This time, half of the participants received negative feedback, while the other half received neutral feedback. They were then invited to take place in a second experiment online and could choose which experiment they wanted to take place in: one that involved Facebook, YouTube, music, news, or games online. Those who received the negative feedback chose to go to Facebook significantly more often than those who received the neutral feedback, suggesting that Facebook is one outlet that people seek out to affirm themselves after an injury to their ego.

While students can certainly use Facebook to engage in many activities that are not affirming (some of which may in fact be the disaffirming), current research suggests that we may not want to dismiss the platform as solely a hindrance to education. Instead, we may want to entertain the counterintuitive possibility that it may be affirming for students, especially when looking at their own profiles.

Incorporating Affirmation in Education

Fortunately, values affirmation activities take little time and no money to implement. They help those who are most likely to be battling stereotypes without hurting others. So far, they seem to be a win-win. But there are still lots of aspects of affirming interventions that need to be better understood. Is an intervention as effective if students are aware of its intentions as if they are unaware? Is more affirmation always better? What other ways can it be implemented – perhaps by looking at photos, listening to music with positive messages, or engaging in an activity that one is good at?

Until more of these questions are addressed, teachers who want to reduce the role of harmful stereotypes in their classrooms can consider one of the forms of affirmation that we know to be beneficial. Whether students are affirmed through Facebook, writing about values, or other unknown sources, keeping the power of self-affirmation in mind may help us bring education closer to the great equalizer it was intended to be.

 

References & Further Reading

1. Miyake, A., Kost-Smith, L.E., Finkelstein, N.D., Pollock, S.J, Cohen, G.L, & Ito, T.A. (2010). Reducing the gender achievement gap in college science: A classroom study of values affirmation, Science, doi: 10.1126/science.1195996. [Paper]
2. Cohen, G.L., Garcia, J., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Apfel, N., & Brzustoski, P. (2009). Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap. Science, doi: 10.1126/science.1170769. [Paper]
3. Legault, L., Al-Khindi, T., & Inzlicht, M. (2012). Preserving integrity in the face of performance threat: Self-affirmation enhances neurophysiological responsiveness to errors. Psychological Science, doi: 1177/0956797612448483. [Paper]
4. Logel, C. & Cohen. G.L. (2011). The role of the self in physical health: Testing the effect of a values-affirmation intervention on weight loss. Psychological Science, doi: 10.1177/0956797611421936. [Paper]
5. Falk, E.B., Brook O’Donnell, M., Cascio, C.N., Tinney, F., Kang, Y., Lieberman, M.D., Taylor, S.E., An, L., Resnicow, K., & Strecher, V.J. (2014). Self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messages and subsequent behavior change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1500247112. [Paper]
6. Toma, C.L. & Hancock, J.T. (2013). Self-affirmation underlies Facebook use. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, doi: 10.1177/0146167212474694. [Paper]
7. Gonzales, A.L. & Hancock, J.T. (2010). Mirror, mirror on my Facebook wall: Effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, doi: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0411. [Paper]
8. The Value of “Values Affirmation”: Stanford Graduate School of Business [Article]
9. Pedersen, T. (2013). Facebook profile often used for self-affirmation. Psych Central. [Article]
10. Spencer, S.J., Steele, C.M., Quinn, D.M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35, 4-28. [Paper]
11. Stone, J., Lynch, C.I., Sjomelin, M., Darley, J.M. (1999). Stereotype threat effects on black and white athletic performance. Journal of Personality and Psychology, 77(6), 1213-1227. [Paper]
12. Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers’ expectancies: Determinants of pupils’ IQ gains. Psychological Reports, 19, 115-118. [Paper]

At first glance, metaphor and science might seem to inhabit opposite ends of the things-we-learn-in-school continuum. We usually learn about metaphor through lessons on works like Langston Hughes’s Life ain’t been no crystal stair, and we associate science with topics like crystallization, the process of transferring a liquid to a solid. But metaphor is a mischief that doesn’t like to stay confined to the language arts classroom. It lurks in political discourse (the wealth gap), in music (you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog), and – you guessed it – in education.

Analogies link two topics in order to bring attention to some of their commonalities, and metaphors are one way of using analogy in language. In most cases, metaphors describe a more novel target, an abstract concept that we can’t see, touch, or experience physically, by linking it to a familiar source concept, something more concrete that we do have experience with. For that reason, it might not be surprising that we often draw on real-world experiences to describe complex scientific concepts. The domain we’re drawing from is often called the source, while the domain we’re trying to explain or understand is the target. We describe molecules as excited when they have a lot of energy, and we learn that when they’re attracted to other molecules, they often form bonds. Whether these descriptions were intentionally metaphorical or not, our language to describe electron dynamics borrows heavily from the language we use to talk about human interactions, a context we’re much more familiar with than subatomic particle behavior. Once you start paying attention, metaphors seem to be everywhere: People who have diabetes are often told that insulin is the key that unlocks their cell doors. And the ozone layer is often described as a blanket that protects the earth. And DNA is often referred to as a blueprint or a recipe. Are these just convenient ways of talking? Or do the linguistic metaphors we use shape the way we think about the complex topics they describe?

Metaphor shapes thought
A growing body of research suggests that we don’t just use metaphors to talk; we use them to think as well. In a series of experiments by Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky¹, people read either that crime is a “wild beast preying on” or “virus infecting” the city of Addison (a fictional city). They then read some fake statistics, like “In 2004, there were 330 murders in the city, in 2007, there were over 500,” and they were asked what they thought Addison should do about the crime. People’s proposed solutions differed systematically depending on the metaphor they read earlier to describe the crime. Those who read that crime was a beast tended to make suggestions related to containing it and enforcing penalties, things people would probably suggest if an actual beast were loose in the town. The virus readers, on the other hand, were more likely than the beast readers to suggest that the city find the root causes of the crime problem and remedy those, in line with how they would likely eliminate a literal virus. People were still swayed by the metaphor even when they were given options to choose from instead of generating their own solutions. This work shows that the metaphor people encounter for a topic as complex as crime can influence the way they reason about it.

Metaphors in the classroom
How might metaphors affect students learning about complex topics? Since metaphors usually describe intangible ideas or processes by referring to things we actually have experience with, teachers often feel that they are an effective way to teach. In 1983, Dedre and Donald Gentner investigated this intuition more closely². They noticed that there are two common analogies for teaching electricity. The first is the water-flow analogy: just as water flows through pipes, electricity flows through the wires of an electrical system. The second is a moving-crowds analogy: the flow of electricity through the wires can be seen as similar to a crowd of mice running along an enclosed track.

Although both analogies demonstrate the gist of electricity flow, there are other features of electricity that they make less obvious. For example, what happens when multiple resistors are introduced in an electrical circuit? If it’s a series circuit (meaning that each component is connected in a series), the result will be different than if it’s a parallel circuit (meaning that the current divides in at least two paths before completing the circuit). The image below gives an example of each type of circuit.

If a student is thinking about the circuit as similar to water pipes, every blockage (created by a resistor) might seem to affect the circuit in the same way since all blockages slow flowing water down. However, this is not the case with electricity; in the case of a parallel circuit, more resistors actually create more current. Consistent with this idea, people who used the water-flow model to think about electricity were less likely to understand resistors than those who thought about electricity as moving crowds. The moving-crowds analogy was not a conceptual panacea, however: people using that mental metaphor had more trouble with questions about the effects of including multiple batteries in the circuit. This is likely because it’s not clear what the batteries in the circuit are analogous to in the moving mice model. In the water model, however, the battery’s analog is much clearer – it corresponds to a reservoir. This work shows that the metaphors used to teach complex concepts have consequences, both helpful and misleading, for how students understand the phenomena they describe.

Metaphor abounds in education about the brain as well. Because we can’t see or touch the brain and definitely can’t see or touch the many dynamic processes occurring within it, metaphors make neuroscience more tangible. The brain is frequently compared to a computer when we want to emphasize its ability to take in information from the world, “process” it, and behave accordingly. It’s a muscle when we want to emphasize our ability to change what we know and how we think. Metaphors are used to talk about the different parts of the brain, too. Neurons are often described and diagrammed as tree-like (which is the meaning of the Greek root in dendrite!), and neurons’ dynamics are almost inevitably talked about in terms of human communication. Neurons are seen as messengers that send and receive the messages underlying all cognition. And once those messages arrive at the frontal lobe – the area most known for its involvement in higher-level thinking like decision-making, inhibition, and rational thinking – we often say that they have reached the brain’s control center. In many cases, these metaphors shed light on the complexities of the brain that are far from our direct experience, but it’s important that we also keep in mind the hidden inferences each might contain about how the brain really works.

Effective metaphor use
Although metaphors can open doors to many useful insights, they can also encourage misunderstandings if students make unintended links between the source and target domains. The solution for avoiding these misleading inferences is not to abolish metaphor from the classroom completely. Not only would that be nearly impossible, but it would also bar us from the helpful insights that metaphors do foster. In addition, some research shows that metaphors can evoke more emotional responses in the brain (specifically, more amygdala and anterior hippocampus activation) than literal sentences containing the same content³. Since emotional stimuli tend to be remembered better than unemotional stimuli⁴, it’s an open question as to whether metaphor can help students learn by tapping into emotional cognitive resources.

Although it is difficult to provide advice for metaphors that will hold for all students, subjects, and topics, Benjamin Jee and colleagues have articulated some general guidelines that educators can follow to ensure that their analogies are as effective as possible⁵:

● Make sure that students can explicitly map the features of the analogy (a blueprint, for example) to the new concept (DNA). Instructors may first need to explicitly point out the mappings in order for the students to make the connections
● Acknowledge the incorrect inferences that students might make. Point out the ways in which DNA is not like a blueprint, in addition to the ways that it is.
● Keep the metaphorical source available. While explaining the ways that the analogy extends from one domain to another, keeping the source present helps students focus their mental energy on connecting the topics, instead of working to recall the example at hand.
● Introduce more similar source-target pairs before expanding to metaphors that have fewer surface similarities. The more similar the features are of the two concepts being compared, the easier it will be for students to extrapolate the conceptual similarities that the metaphor aims to highlight.

Instead, we might be better off adopting an everything in moderation mentality, a mentality that we strive to apply to many of the great things in our lives. When we indulge in a piece of chocolate cake, we savor it as something rich and satisfying. But we know that a diet consisting only, or even primarily, of chocolate cake would be harmful, so we try to balance our cake consumption with other foods. We can think of our metaphors in the same way: they’re worth savoring, but if consumed with reckless abandon, they may clog up our figurative arteries and prevent us from deep understandings.

References

1. Thibodeau PH, Boroditsky L (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016782 [Paper]
2. Gentner, D. & Gentner, D. (1983). Flowing waters or teeming crowds: Mental models of electricity. In D. Gentner & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (pp. 99-129). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Chapter]
3. Citron, F.M. & Goldberg, A.E. (2014). Metaphorical sentences are more emotionally engaging than their literal counterparts. J Cogn Neurosci, 26(11), 2585-95. [Paper]
4. Hamann, S. (2001). Cognitive and neural mechanisms of emotional memory. TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 5(9), 394-400. [Paper]
5. Jee, B. D., Uttal, D. H., Gentner, D., Manduca, C., Shipley, T., Sageman, B., Ormand, C. J., & Tikoff, B. (2010). Analogical thinking in geoscience education. Journal of Geoscience Education, 58 (1), 2-13. [Paper]

Further reading:

1. Richland, LE, Zur, O., & Holyoak, KJ. (2007). Cognitive supports for analogies in the mathematics classroom. Science, 316(5828), 1128-1129. DOI:10.1126/science.1142103. [Paper]
2. Hendricks, R. (2015) A metaphorical tour of the brain. [Article]

We’re told that a picture is worth a thousand words, but this adage robs words of much-deserved credit. When you’re an infant with a rapidly developing brain, words are one of the most valuable things you can receive. They’re so valuable that a new initiative in Georgia called “Talk With Me Baby” promotes the importance of “language nutrition”. When it comes to language, infants are sponges: essentially every baby growing up in a normal environment masters the complex language system he or she’s exposed to. It helps that the adults around them hold up objects and emphatically enunciate their names, saying something like “ba-na-na” while waving the fruit in the child’s face, but that’s not the only way babies learn. Infants are constantly immersed in linguistic environments that are full of people expressing real and complicated thoughts through varied sentence structures. This provides the rich experience that children need to rapidly become fluent speakers. If you’ve ever tried to learn a new language in your teens or later, you know that this sponge-like capacity doesn’t last forever. Talk With Me Baby makes no bones about why they want to increase the amount of language that babies are exposed to: hearing more words in infancy promotes stronger language skills, which in turn form a foundation for academic and other successes throughout life.

Why are words so crucial during infancy?

The idea that there’s a sacred window of time in which language can be learned – referred to as a critical period – was first articulated in 1959¹, but it’s still a widely researched and debated topic. There isn’t yet a consensus on whether attempting to learn (a first) language after the critical period is futile or just more difficult than learning it earlier, and if there is a critical period, researchers still debate about exactly when that period is. Since intentionally raising a child without linguistic input (exposure to language) would be unethical, much of the support for the critical period hypothesis comes from tragic cases of children who grew up in abnormal environments that lacked language. Genie is a classic example of a girl who spent her entire childhood locked in a room without any stimulation or proper nourishment until she was discovered at 13 years old. At that time, researchers tried to provide her with therapy for her physical and cognitive abnormalities. Although she seemed able to learn a limited vocabulary, most scholars claim that Genie never truly learned language: she could not use grammar to put words together in a meaningful way. Although her case suggests the importance of receiving linguistic input during the critical period, it’s unclear whether Genie was disadvantaged from the start – her father claimed that he locked her up because she was cognitively disabled – and there are many other aspects of Genie’s deprived childhood that could have contributed to her inability to learn language at 13.

There are a few characteristics of the developing brain that speak to why we might be better at absorbing language as babies than as adults. For one, a critical period is not unique to language. Other biological processes also have their own critical periods². Some of these periods have been demonstrated most clearly in animals deprived of specific sensory stimuli. For example, Hubel and Wiesel studied a cat whose eye was sewn closed as a kitten. When they removed the stitches, the cat was still unable to see out of the previously deprived eye. During the deprivation period, the visual cortex became dominated by the normal, unobstructed eye, which hijacked the brain space typically devoted to the second eye.

The cat’s visual cortex demonstrates a crucial feature of the brain: its plasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize itself based on the inputs it receives. Our brains are constantly reorganizing themselves (that is how we learn anything), but infants’ brains are especially plastic³. Developing brains are highly sensitive to incoming information and experiences, allowing them to learn massive amounts of information rapidly.

Perhaps counter intuitively, another explanation for why immature brains are ripe for language learning is that their prefrontal cortex (PFC) – the area of the brain most associated with higher-level and rational thinking – is undeveloped⁴. A paper by Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar, and Evangelina Chrysikou gives an example of watching a football game to highlight how adults’ and toddlers’ pattern-learning strategies differ. In the example game, you notice that the team passes the ball 75% of the time and runs with it the other 25%. Your task is to predict what the team will do in subsequent plays. As an adult, you’re likely to match probabilities: 75% of the time you’ll guess that the team will pass, and the other 25% you’ll guess that it’ll run. You’ve taken the less frequent event (the run plays) into account. However, since you don’t know when those rare events will occur, the optimal strategy would actually be to always guess that the team will pass. That’s precisely what a toddler would do. Toddlers ignore irregularities and grasp conventions quickly, at least partially thanks to their undeveloped PFCs. Thompson-Schill and colleagues argue that toddlers’ tendency to ignore inconsistencies might be ideal for learning the foundations of language, especially the syntactic patterns that govern our grammar. Toddlers eventually discover and master their language’s irregularities, moving from forms like “drinked” to “drank” as their PFCs develop and help them filter exceptions to rules.

Infants’ and toddlers’ brains are ready and waiting for linguistic input. This input allows their brains to develop new neural pathways in response to the language conventions they’re exposed to. As they get older and continue to use language more (whether they’re listening, speaking, reading, or writing), these pathways continue to strengthen. Talk With Me Baby asserts that “early language exposure is the single strongest predictor of third grade reading proficiency,” and that third grade reading proficiency, in turn, predicts further academic and economic successes. This is because third grade is when most kids transition from learning to read to reading to learn. In this way, linguistic exposure as an infant has cascade effects that last long after infancy. Just as proper nutrition promotes physical growth and is crucial for babies’ future health, proper linguistic nutrition promotes the mental growth necessary for future success.

The 30 Million Word Gap

It’s almost impossible for a baby to grow up without any exposure to language, but many children still grow up in environments that lack sufficient language exposure. In one seminal study, researchers found that the number of words addressed to children differed dramatically across families of different socioeconomic statuses (SES)⁵. SES is a measure that combines income, occupation, and education to reflect a family’s economic and social position in society. Children from families in the highest SES category heard an average of 2,153 words per hour, while those is the lowest SES group only heard 613 words per hour. From these numbers, the researchers calculated that by 4 years old, the average child from a higher-income family hears a total of about 45 million words, while the average child from the low-income family hears a measly 13 million words. The authors referred to this disparity as the 30 Million Word Gap. The gap may result, at least in part, from the fact that parents who are struggling financially are often unable to devote the same amount of focused time to their children that parents with fewer financial struggles can⁶. Reduced linguistic input is one consequence of the quality-time deficit that lower-SES kids often experience.

If a child from a low-income family enters school at age 4 after hearing 30,000,000 fewer words than his or her other classmates have, this child will immediately have an immense disadvantage. Because learning is sequential, in the sense that that many concepts build on each other, the child on the disadvantaged side of the word gap will have difficulty learning new information that requires an understanding of language. As a result of missing out on valuable linguistic input as a baby, this student may never catch up.

Talk With Me Baby

The state of Georgia has launched an effort to close the 30 Million Word Gap⁷, acknowledging that “a lack of early language exposure has lifelong consequences,” like dropping out of high school, incarceration, becoming a teen parent, involvement in violence, unemployment, and poverty⁸. Their initiative, Talk With Me Baby, is being implemented mainly by spreading awareness. Because the word gap can have future physical health consequences and because almost all babies are seen in hospitals, nurses in particular are helping spread the message that babies are listening, even before they’re born. They’re absorbing what they hear, so they should hear as much language as possible. The website for Talk With Me Baby also advertises an app that parents will soon be able to download with features like topics to talk about, milestones to look for, reminders to talk, and resources.

Raising a child is complicated. It can be hard to know what to feed your child, when to do it, and even how to afford the ideal nutrition. Luckily, providing babies with proper linguistic nutrition is fairly straightforward and accessible to all. What words should you feed your child? As many as you can! When should you feed your child his or her words? Whenever you can! Ideally, babies should hear not only as many different words as possible, but they should also hear as many different sentence structures as possible. Long sentences are the linguistic equivalent of milk: consuming them helps children’s cognitive foundations get strong enough to support all of the lessons and skills that they’ll learn in school. Perhaps best of all, words are free and we can all make them, which means closing the 30 Million Word Gap is within our reach.

References & Further Reading

1. Penfield, W., & Roberts, L. (1959). Speech and brain-mechanisms. Princeton, N.J: Princeton Univ. Press. [Book]
2. Sengpiel, F. (2007). The critical period. Current Biology, 17(17), R742-R743. [Paper]
3. Mundkur, N. (2005). Neuroplasticity in children. Indian Journal of Pediatrics, 72(10), 855-857. [Paper]
4. Thompson-Schill, S., Ramscar, M., & Chrysikou, E. (2009). Cognition without control. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(5), 259-263. [Paper]
5. Hart, B. & Risley, T. (2003). The early catastrophe: 30 Million word gap by age 3. American Educator, Spring 2003, 4-9. [Paper]
6. National Journal. (2015). 30-million word gap divides rich and poor kids. [Web Article]
7. Deruy, E. (2015). Why boosting poor children’s vocabulary is important for public health. Atlantic Magazine. [Web Article]
8. Talk with Me Baby [Educational Initiative]