Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
When turtles cry, butterflies swarm. From the sea turtle to the yellow-spotted river turtle of the Amazon rain forest, turtles shed tears. Their tears are not of sadness or joy but tears of cleansing and strength. While the biological reason turtles cry is to remove excess salt from their body, their tears are used by butterflies for sustenance. Butterflies drink the tears of turtles. The tears provide salt in sodium scarce regions where butterflies live. Nature has a beautiful way of weaving compassion into the fabric of life and we could learn a lesson or two from such beauty.
When we see another suffering, we should swarm to help. Helping others helps strengthen your community and even yourself in ways that science is just revealing. In terms of community building, Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy concluded in “The Science of Paying It Forward” that “the next time you stop to help a stranger, you may be helping not only this one particular individual but potentially many others downstream…We conclude that observing an act of kindness is likely to play an important role in setting a cascade of generosity in motion.” Research by scholars such as Shawn Achor, Jonathan Haidt, Dacher Keltner and Paul Zak shows that when we help others we release hormones such as oxytocin that increase our own happiness while decreasing stress and anxiety.
A dear friend of mine with whom I work closely with, Scarlett Lewis, has turned her tears for her youngest son, Jesse, into strength for tens of thousands of people. Instead of cocooning herself from the world after she lost her 6 year old Jesse in the Sandy Hook tragedy, Scarlett initiated and is leading a movement to weave “nurturing, healing and love” into schools and businesses across the country (her foundation of which I am a member of the board of directors is called the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation). From school children in Hawaii to prisoners in Massachusetts and teachers in Connecticut, I’ve watched Scarlett provide hope to people who had fallen into the compassion and empathy gaps of our world. Her struggle through loss has nourished resiliency in others. Her tears are symbols of strength to many who have become the butterflies of her life’s work.
We’ve all known about butterfly kisses and their symbolism for tender love, but turtle tears (new to many of us) are symbols of strength when sadness appears and resiliency seems scarce. Learning about the butterfly’s dependence upon the tears of a turtle leads me to wonder: would there be any butterfly kisses without turtle tears? Our tears in life can always be turned into streams of strength and beauty if we choose to follow the turtle.
Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage (New York: Crown Business, 2010).
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds.), The Compassionate Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010).
Douglas Main, “Must-See: Amazonian Butterflies Drink Turtle Tears,” LiveScience (September 11, 2013).
Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy, “The Science of Paying It Forward,” The New York Times (March 14, 2014).
Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works (New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2012).
Who wants to make education more efficient at being ineffective? Although I sincerely believe that no one does, many education leaders on America’s local, state and national levels are establishing policies that are walking our schools down a path of efficient ineffectiveness. A central reason we are on such a path is that policymakers seem to be following the misguided belief that efficiency and effectiveness inevitably go hand-in-hand. I wish they always did go hand-in-hand but while authoritarian dictatorships may be politically efficient, for instance, I certainly wouldn’t call them effective. Enron was efficient at making money but how effective would you rate it? Efficiency and effectiveness do not always go together and sometimes we tip the scale toward one at the cost of the other. We are tipping the scale toward efficiency at the cost of effectiveness in American education.
If we should err in education, and to err is human, we should always err on the side of effectiveness rather than efficiency. However, possibly because of confusion over what the two words mean, we have Mayors and Boards of Finance in cities and towns throughout this country so focused on efficiency that they are making our schools less effective. They think that they can find effectiveness through efficiency in education and “the cart before the horse” analogy doesn’t even begin to describe the problem with that type of thinking.
Effectiveness is about achieving the desired result and efficiency is about the process of doing things in an optimal way such as doing it the fastest or in the least expensive way. Effectiveness is about achieving the right goals (i.e., learning) and efficiency is about doing something optimally (i.e., standardized tests), which can be right or wrong. If you do something wrong but you do it optimally, you still are efficient—just efficiently wrong. A real world example of this on the local level is when a policymaker argues that a city or town can be more efficient in technology by combining the job of the information technology (IT) officer at city/town hall with the IT officer for the school district, thereby converting two jobs into one (efficient). The problem is that the city/town software expertise is very different than what is needed and required for having an effective education technology officer. It is the same faulty logic for arguing that a patent attorney will be just as effective as a criminal defense attorney in defending you at a criminal trial because they are both lawyers.
We have international test scores (i.e., Program for International Student Assessment) for over 10 years that demonstrate a problem with our education system’s effectiveness but our policymakers are seeking to make it more efficient rather than effective. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four,” according to President Abraham Lincoln, “sharpening the axe.” We have yet to sharpen the axe of education but policymakers want us (teachers at every level of schooling) to start swinging away with less resources and more standardized tests.
While I believe that the Common Core will make our education system more effective (see my previous blog titled “How I Learned to Eat the Core”), I think the emphasis on standardized testing will weaken it. The quest for efficiency has led to the implementation of annual standardized tests but do standardized test results provide an indication of effective education? The research literature on the science of learning (which education should be all about) has a clear and definitive answer: NO. Standardized tests may be an efficient way of measuring education levels but it is definitely not the most effective means of learning. Recent books on learning (i.e., Brown, Roediger and McDaniel’s Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning as well as Carey’s How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens) clearly show that the problem with standardized testing is that there is too much information being tested too infrequently for learning to “stick” in the brain. The most effective way of making information “stick” in a student’s mind, according to neuroscience research, is to institute a “regimen of regular low- or no-stakes” testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget—it is the counterintuitive notion of forgetting to learn and it is called spaced learning.
Arne Duncan (United States Secretary of Education), however, made headlines a few days ago by stating that the “Administration is Committed to Testing” (interesting note: the headline was changed three days later to “White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools”). No matter the headline, shouldn’t we be committed to learning rather than testing? We have created a very efficient form of education via standardized tests but the literature on the science of learning shows that they are the least effective means of educating students. The imbalance of efficiency over effectiveness in education is reflected in the overemphasis on words such as standardization and accountability in political speeches. As Jonathan Zimmerman wrote in the December 4, 2014 New York Review of Books article titled “Why is American Teaching So Bad?”:
“No Child Left Behind and its spin-offs are premised on the grim notion that teachers will work harder—and better—if we can somehow pinpoint their performance and connect it to rewards and punishments. But the fact is that the new measures adopted under Race to the Top—measures purporting to identify the effectiveness of each teacher based on students’ test scores—are notoriously imprecise…According to the logic of those at the top, these people just need a good kick in the pants and everything else will take care of itself…But ‘accountability’ makes our best teachers do their job worse, which is the ultimate indictment of contemporary education reform. The endless battery of standardized tests takes many weeks away from real instruction. So do the long cycles of preparing for the exams, during which thoughtful American teachers are forced to tailor their practice to the mindless demands of the system.”
Albert Einstein’s 1929 words on standardization are as true now as when he wrote them: “I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
The efficiency obsession in education is an offshoot from the business world where problems with an imbalance favoring efficiency over effectiveness have not only been experienced but researched and documented. As Stefanos Mouzas, a professor at Lancaster University’s School of Management, wrote in the conclusion of his article “Efficiency v. Effectiveness in Business Networks”: “Efficiency and effectiveness are central terms in assessing and measuring the performance of organisations or inter-organisational arrangements. It seems, however, that managers rarely understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and the exact meaning of these terms. The present article indicates that currently, in many companies, managers are obsessed with efficiency gains and that this propensity to efficiency is preventing them from achieving differentiation and sustainable growth of their business.” The efficiency versus effectiveness problems are much more acute in education than in business because we are working with human beings, not widgets.
While we all want an education that is efficient and effective, recent education policies and priorities are creating a system of educating that seeks efficiency at the cost of effectiveness. An emphasis on efficiency over effectiveness has taken root in the United States education system to such an extent that it is making the American way of educating become more efficient at being ineffective. An effective education, one resulting in learning, is not always efficient. It takes time to sharpen the axe of education. Shouldn’t every student be afforded the time to sharpen the axe before making their own path in the world?
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Stefanos, Mouzas, “Efficiency v. Effectiveness in Business Networks,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 59, no 10-11 (2006).
Motoko Rich, “White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools,” The New York Times (January 12, 2015).
Jonathan Zimmerman, “Why is American Teaching so Bad?” The New York Review of Books (December 4, 2014).
“I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am HAL 9000 computer.” A New Year’s Eve day Wall Street Journal article titled “The Tech to Rock Your 2015” caused me to have a flashback to the above quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey because of how much computers are expected to learn this coming year. A section of the article describes how virtual assistants such as Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana will become more intelligent and useful to us in 2015 by acquiring more information from you and me about what we like to do (via calendars), what we seek to study and learn (via Web searches), what music we enjoy listening to when we drive (via cars), where we go (via GPS location) and how we feel (via monitoring our bodies). Such learning about our likes, desires and feelings is called predictive intelligence and … in the words of HAL, “I’m afraid.” I’m not afraid that computers are learning predictive intelligence but I am afraid that our technology will spend more time learning about social and emotional well being than our children will in 2015. Our technology will be better but will we say the same for our schools and communities?
We need a Moore’s Law for humanity as there is for technology, especially with respect to social emotional learning (SEL). Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a computer doubles every two years, thereby doubling a computer’s processing speed/power every two years. Instead of having a Moore’s Law in social, emotional and cognitive development, we seem to be following (with some exceptions) a Less Law. While we devote less and less time in school to creative arts, recess, phys-ed and other activities that strengthen SEL as well as cognitive development (see the previous blog entry titled Playing for Academic Success), we have seen a 66% increase in ADHD diagnoses since 2000 according to Northwestern University and a 20.7% increase in reported bullying since 2003 (first year that bullying was statistically tracked) by the National Center for Education Statistics. While America has increased ADHD diagnoses and school bullying incidents, our test scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) have flat-lined during the same time period. If we can build technological systems that continually improve upon themselves, we can build an education system that does the same for ourselves.
Technology, despite flashbacks to HAL, can help. As Jeremy Howard discusses in his TEDxBrussels talk (“The Wonderful & Terrifying Implications of Computers that Can Learn”) and Nicholas Carr writes in The Wall Street Journal (“Automation Makes Us Dumb”), computers and humans have and can continue to work together to better humanity. However, we have used technology more to silo and weaken than to interconnect and strengthen ourselves. How many times have you seen a group of people face first into their smart technology when they could be face-to-face with smart people right around them? We have focused, in Carr’s terminology, too much on “technology-centered automation,” which “emphasizes the needs of technology over those of humans,” instead of on “human-centered automation,” which “guides progress onto a more humanistic path.” We are even coining words for when technology interferes with human interactions such as “textruption,” which is “an interruption of a conversation caused by a text message.” When technology is human-centered, however, the results can be life saving (i.e., nanotechnology is being used to help cancer and burn patients) and mind altering (i.e., read any neuroscience article on neuroplasticity). More simply, in classrooms where technology is gamified for learning, I’ve seen students who rarely participate in class use technology as a conduit for generating the courage needed to engage their peers in debates and discussions about difficult concepts.
We may know more about each other because of technology but we are not yet using it to better understand or care for each other in ways that make our communities stronger. In 2014, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education released a study finding that nearly 80% of middle and high school students rank their own achievement and happiness over caring for others. On a more local note, a regional paper in the Newtown, CT area reported on a district-wide school climate survey showing that “Despite the counseling and mental health resources made available after the Sandy Hook tragedy…concerns about physical, social and emotional security were still acute.” Meanwhile, one of the country’s leading newspapers reports that technology is becoming more advanced by learning about our social and emotional well being. If anyone or anything is keeping score of the social emotional learning tally between technology and humanity, we should probably keep the answer behind HAL’s closed “pod-bay doors” until we walk a more humanistic path with technology.
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use,” stated HAL (a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer created on 12 January 1992 in the movie), “which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” Can we say the same about ourselves in 2015? Maybe this is the year we learn something human from the technology we created.
Carr, Nicholas, “Automation Makes Us Dumb,” The Wall Street Journal (November 21, 2014).
Fowler, Geoffrey A. and Joanna Stern, “The Tech to Rock Your 2015,” The Wall Street Journal (December 30, 2014).
Howard, Jeremy, “The Wonderful and Terrifying Implications of Computers that Can Learn,” TEDxBrussels (December 2014).
Hutson, Nanci, “Newtown School Survey Suggests Concern for Social/Emotion Security” NewsTimes (September 24, 2014).
National Center for Education Statistics, “Student Reports of Bullying and Cyber-Bullying,” (August 2013).
Weissbound, Rick, Stephanie Jones, Trisha Ross Anderson, Jennifer Kahn and Mark Russell, “The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults are Sending about Values,” Making Caring Common Project (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2014).
White, Erin, “Diagnosis of ADHD on the Rise,” Northwestern University News Center (March 19, 2012).
Zimmer, Ben, “You Heard ‘Em Here First: Words of 2015,” The Wall Street Journal (January 2, 2015).
‘Work hard, play hard’ and ‘work hard or go home’ are bumper sticker slogans that may help achieve success on the field but not in the classroom. Recent research and books on learning suggest editing the first slogan to ‘work hard, play harder’ if we want to create academic environments that help students succeed. In America’s education system, however, we have focused exclusively on work to such an extent that play is being excluded from school. Most American school districts have either reduced or eliminated recess, phys-ed and other playtime to allocate more time for work focused on studying and taking standardized tests.
The importance of play in successful learning has been highlighted and demonstrated by ancient scholars (i.e., Plato), modern neuroscientists (i.e., William Klemm) and the top test scoring countries in the world (i.e., Finland). American education leaders have ignored the evidence for the play-learning nexus by placing their heads in the proverbial sand when they should be building more sandboxes for students at all academic levels. Learning sandboxes range from wooden sandboxes at recess time for elementary schoolchildren to Makerspaces for middle and high school students to virtual online sandboxes for college students. “Play,” according to Diane Ackerman (the public science writer of The Human Age and 23 other books), “is our brain’s favorite way of learning.”
Our brain’s favorite way of learning is being removed from American schools. “When I was in elementary school,” states Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Live), “in the 1950s, we had six-hour school days: two hours of outdoors playing per day, half hour in the morning, half hour during lunch, and a full hour in the afternoon.” Today, the national average is twenty-six minutes of recess and Connecticut, my home state, only “recommends” 20 minutes (in addition, my three boys—ages 7, 9 & 11—are given less than 20 minutes for lunch each school day). There are less than a handful of states that even require daily recess. In contrast, Finland—always at the top or near the top of international test scores—provides a 15-minute break every 45 minutes for students during the school day.
The demise of play in American schools has been linked by Peter Gray and others to a decline in cognitive and social skills as well as an increase in mental disorders. William Klemm, professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, recently summarized several studies on the importance of play writing that “When members of a play-oriented species [such as humans] are denied access to juvenile play, they can become dysfunctional adults…Juvenile play sculpts the brain to be more adaptable later in life. In modern human society, juvenile play is often obstructed by such externals as over-scheduling, too much adult supervision, and too many restrictions…In this respect, the ‘good old days’ really were the good old days.” Elementary school students need their play for cognitive and social-emotional learning and we, as a society, need to provide them with the playtime necessary for their development into functional adults. Increasing time for recess is not only healthy for our children but our communities.
“Do not,” Plato said, “keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.” Yes, even Plato knew about the importance of play in education. One of the most creative ways to “keep children to their studies by play” is to build time into middle and high school curricula for using a Makerspace (a.k.a. Hackerspace). A Makerspace is an area where students learn through experimental play with technology and ideas under the guidance of teachers and other experts in the community. It is a space where students play with concepts learned in the classroom for the purpose of bringing their ideas to life via a 3D printer, software code, plasma cutter and other tools. In the words of the Makerspace Playbook: “Making is innovative and resourceful. Makers build off the idea of others and choose the best tools for the job…They identify their own challenges and solve new problems. Making provides ample opportunities to deeply understand difficult concepts. Makers seek out STEM content to improve their projects, and they cross disciplines to achieve their goals, rather than staying within one specialty.” A Makerspace is where Einstein’s idea of combinatory play is figuratively and literally brought to life.
If a community or school district does not have the resources to immediately setup a Makerspace, a relatively inexpensive way of incorporating play into the curriculum is by gamifying parts of classes. Game-based learning occurs through low-tech ways such as the collaborative geography game called Galactic Mappers (seen in the video via Edutopia noted below) to high-tech options such as Statecraft.sim, which I used in my International Relations course this past semester. Assessing student learning is not only more enjoyable for the students as compared to standardized tests but my experience shows that their learning is deeper and more enduring.
The U.S. education system is using sand exclusively for building sand timers (for tests) rather than using it to build imaginations and engage students in learning. The system is focused on turning over sand timers rather than turning on students to learning. Since I’m at the tail end of the argument, let’s go back to one of the bumper sticker slogans I started with to sum it all up: ‘go hard or go home.’ School leaders will have to ‘go’ a little harder to work play into their curricula or send their students ‘home’ knowing that they are less cognitively, emotionally and socially prepared for the real world than they could and should be.
Cordell, Sigrid Anderson, “Nixing Recess: The Silly, Alarmingly Popular Way to Punish Kids,” The Atlantic (October, 2013).
Edutopia, “Building Formative Assessment into Game-Based Learning,” YouTube (May 13, 2014).
Klemm, William, “The Neuroscience of Why Children Play,” Psychology Today blog, Memory Medic (December 12, 2014).
Klemm, W.R., Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Korbey, Holly, “Despite Benefits, Recess fro Many Students is Restricted,” MindShift, KQED blog (July 26, 2013).
Makerspace Playbook: School Edition (Spring 2013).
Solomon, Andrew, “Go Play Outside,” New York Times Book Review of A Country Called Childhood by Jay Griffiths (December 14, 2014): p 26-27.
Cartoon © Phil Watson. Used with permission.
An all-or-nothing person; you know the type. Everything is black-or-white and it’s their way or the highway. As coaches, they may rack up a few W’s in the win column but as educators and leaders, they lose sight of how effective learning happens. The all-or-nothing believers and debaters in education are blind to what works in learning because they refuse to see the different shades of gray between their black-or-white ways of thinking. Education is all about the gray matter. The science of learning is in their blind spot. Two of the biggest blind spots in education are testing and memorization.
The two all-or-nothing education camps on testing that garner the most attention in social and traditional media are those who believe standardized tests are important for academic achievement as well as accountability and should be administered every year (i.e., the No Child Left Behind advocates) and those who believe there should be no tests (i.e., the Free School movement). Recent studies on testing, however, demonstrate that frequent low-stakes testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget is the most effective way of making information “stick” in their minds (it is called spaced learning). It is not one big test to prepare for every year and it is not zero testing that help students learn but the counterintuitive idea of “forgetting to learn” with frequently spaced quizzing that advances academic achievement. It is the blind spot in our educational policy debates that can help us paradoxically see the most effective learning strategies for our children, if we would only turn around or turn a few research pages to see them.
When it comes to memorization or knowing facts, the blind spot of the all-or-nothing schools of thought should be called the Goldilocks Effect: it is not all memorizing and it is not zero memorizing but ‘just’ the right mixture of memorizing and recitation that helps a student learn. Several new books on the science of learning recommend splitting a student’s time for acquiring new facts into thirds where one-third of the time should be devoted to memorizing and two-thirds to reciting the knowledge. A common theme in many of the books echo neuroscientist W.R. Klemm’s Mental Biology mantra: “the more you know, the more you can know.” As Ian Leslie points out in Curious:
“Learning skills grow organically out of specific knowledge of specific domains—that is to say, facts…The wider your knowledge, the more widely your intelligence can range and the more purchase it gets on new information. This is why the argument that schools ought to prioritize learning skills over knowledge makes no sense; the very foundation for such skills is memorized knowledge. The more we know, the better we are at thinking.”
Knowing facts and learning go hand-in-hand and are mutually supportive. The all-or-nothing types are fostering a false dichotomy between knowledge and learning.
The science of learning is showing education leaders and policymakers where to look but they are implementing education policies as though they are, in the words of a Thomas Dolby’s 1980s song, blinded by science. If education is about learning (as it should be), then the science of learning should be informing policy. The fields of neuroscience and education have combined to form the emerging field (26 years old) of neuroeducation (a.k.a. educational neuroscience) that is not only revealing the blind spots of our educational system but is also providing ideas of how we should address them. The all-or-nothing schools of thought can only overcome the science of learning by ignoring it. The all-or-nothing crowd might want to try all-for-one and one-for-all.
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Amy Adams, “Stanford Researchers Bridge Education and Neuroscience to Strengthen the Growing Field of Educational Neuroscience,” Stanford Report (November 21, 2014).
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Benedict Carey, “Studying for the Test by Taking It,” The New York Times (November 22, 2014).
Paul A. Howard-Jones, “Neuroscience and Education: Myths and Messages,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience (October 15, 2014).
W. R. Klemm, Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
To stir a crowd is to get them excited about something and to stir a drink, such as the perfect glass of chocolate milk, is to blend seamlessly (where there is no chocolate at the bottom of the glass but the taste of chocolate in every sip). Two recent books on learning stir in both ways; they get the reader excited about learning and they clearly show that the basis of learning is blending knowledge with understanding. While one book is more scientifically centered (Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning) and the other is more story-based (How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens), they reinforce each other’s messages in complementary styles. The trouble with both books is that while their ideas are scientifically sound, clearly explained and need to be implemented in schoolrooms as well as boardrooms, the books are not assigned reading for policymakers, teachers and leaders: anyone who cares about and/or whose job is centered around learning needs to read these books. Each book STIRS the reader to actions that are sometimes counterintuitive but always effective for successful learning. (STIRS is an acronym I created to highlight the important factors that both books focus on for building an education that generates successful learning: Spaced, Transfer, Interleaving, Recitation & Sleep.)
Spaced—Spaced learning or the “Forget to Learn Theory” is one of the most effective ways to educate. It is based on the counterintuitive idea that if you want to know something so well that you can easily retrieve the knowledge whenever you want (i.e., your brain as Google), you should separate the learning of that knowledge by gaps of time where you begin to forget the knowledge. This spaced practice of building knowledge embeds learning in long-term memory because when you try to remember something you think you forgot, you activate complex networks in the brain that makes learning more robust and durable. “Forgetting enables and deepens learning,” according to Benedict Carey in How We Learn, “by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally. Those are the basic principles that emerge from brain biology and cognitive science (p. 41).” A method to avoid any robust learning is to do what too many traditional teachers recommend (and what Rudy Giuliani famously called for in the 2012 presidential election): “drill baby drill” or what is known in the science of learning lingo as massed practice. Constant drilling and cramming may work for short-term memory goals but it simply does not work for embedding knowledge in long-term memory or, in other words, for any durable learning purpose.
Transfer—The more difficult and effortful we find learning something, the more durable and transferable the learning is to different settings. Both books use Robert and Elizabeth Bjork’s research on “desirable difficulties” as a foundational concept for outlining how learning can be robust and applicable in other contexts. In the words of Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, “the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it…The retrieval difficulties posed by spacing [and other practices] are overcome by invoking the same mental processes that will be needed later in applying the learning in everyday settings” (p. 82 & 85). We learn deeper and with wider applicability when learning is effortful.
Interleaving—An effortful and desirably difficult method for learning is interleaving (spacing is another kind of desirable difficulty). Interleaving is the practice of mixing two or more subjects or skills in one learning session. It usually involves weaving new ideas with older material. Make it Stick points-out that “learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense the difference…As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels sluggish. Students find it confusing…But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it” (p. 50). The mixed practice of interleaving, in short, makes the brain work harder, which makes learning stronger.
Recitation—If you want to remember a written passage or anything else you should spend more time rehearsing or restating it rather than studying or memorizing it. Amazingly, reciting a passage increases your memorization of it better than memorizing it by itself. As Carey writes in How We Learn, you should “spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory” (p. 85). In another section of the book, Carey explains how the best way to learn something is to teach it and he calls that “the high-octane kind” of studying (p. 102-103); a recitation with an exclamation.
Sleep—While How We Learn devotes an entire chapter to the importance of sleep to learning (chapter ten), Make it Stick weaves sleep into sections of the book highlighting its importance for consolidating learning. The books, for me, reinforced the ideas and arguments made in the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement this past August for delaying the time schools start each day all for the purpose of improving health and academic success. Another study on delaying school start times by the University of Minnesota in St. Paul (February 2014) “found improved grades and standardized test scores, and a 65 to 70 percent reduction in teen car accidents.” Scores up and accidents down sounds like a type of balanced learning that is good for the students and their communities.
“How we learn” is really about “making it stick” in our brain and the combination of the two books provides scientific and pedagogical clarity for how robust and durable learning can and should occur. Reading the books together was like stirring the perfect glass of chocolate milk made to toast learning. I enjoyed every sip … I learned from every chapter.
American Academy of Pediatrics, “School Start Times for Adolescents: Policy Statement” (Pediatrics: August 25, 2014)
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press: April, 2014)
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (Random House: September, 2014).
Andy Coghlan, “Open Schools Later so Teens can Lie In, Say US Doctors” (New Scientist: August 25, 2014)
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