A Bitter Pill at “The Science of How We Learn”

Neuroscience conference highlights school’s side effects

The dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education opened with a charge against the unintended side effects of education. He intrigued me, but deflated the educators filling the room who had come to hear solutions they could deliver back home. Having fought for the funds to attend, they were learning that school-inspired heuristics can harm more than help. At the end of each day, it was hard to find notes on cognitive-science-approved classroom solutions. They slept with a sigh.

According to the keynotes, including Stanford’s Dean Schwartz, the seemingly efficient process of telling information to a student rather than encouraging its discovery often worsens retention when it is simpler for a student to wait for an answer to be given than to think it up. It’s quicker for everyone if students go with their first design for a project and it’s easier to seek and give praise than critique. In these cases, quicker, easier, and simpler stunt cognition. Teachers pinched for time and money understandably reach for solutions that check the boxes, but at the expense of creating adults who lack learning health. They are not prepared to digest hard problems on their own. They cannot process the raw, fibrous data of our complex world. I feel the potential impact of “learning how to learn” can hardly be overstated in any terms.

Luckily, Dr. Yong Zhao, author of World Class Learners, held the crowd like a comedian. He read an imaginary warning label, “Your kid will learn to read but they may hate reading forever.”

Dr. Zhao spoofed our desire to try to treat education needs with a mnemonic. “Educators have four C’s: collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking.” Then they made 6 C’s: collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, connectivity, culture… He demanded [sic], “How much four C’s should we have?”

His case is against one-size-fits-all education and its desired outcome of homogeneous skills. How can this be productive in a global market of increasingly diverse demands? Referring to decades of standardized testing data and Dean Schwartz’s “unintended side effects”, he exclaimed, “American education is not in decline, it is not getting worse, it has always been bad!” Our international rankings in test scores never had a golden age. And using test scores as the #1 metric is a blinkered, damning prescription. The conference criticized efficiency and standardization, suggesting that each academic concept may require a unique learning solution for each stage of the learning. From surface learning to deep learning, the methodologies used must change as the learner advances. At this point, some people had to be at their wit’s end. These are people with tight budgets, low pay, changing requirements, and crowded classrooms. “Personalized learning” has been buzzing around for years already, asking for instruction for each pupil at the pupil’s level, whether beyond or behind the curriculum. You can imagine how good it sounds to change the methodologies used depending on whether math or English is the subject and the level at which that subject is being taught.

Implications for Higher Ed

Most attendees were primary and secondary school teachers. They seemed intrigued but fatigued, looking for ways to apply the new research to their bureaucratic realities. The takeaways, despite requests, were not generously given. Reviewing a bundle of conference notes, I was stymied by the contradictions between the studies — which can be expected in a gathering of international researchers. Here are the pieces I gathered to form a healthier solution.

• Homework is not very useful without immediate feedback (Ericsson). This is a big one, and not a new finding. Online homework, which I’d say students at my university tend to like (unpublished research) can give immediate feedback, though it’s limited by its AI, unable to reward the effort of good mistakes like teachers can.
• Students could “learn how to learn” by leveling up one skill to mastery during the course of their schooling. A good example is martial arts, which communicates clearly where you stand and when you’ve reached a level of mastery. It can provide an overview of the whole learning process and develop those meta skills. It also can provide the confidence to look at the enormity of a new discipline as a novice and not be discouraged — to keep moving forward. These are potentially more important benefits than the skill being acquired (Ericsson).
• It’s worth trying to introduce controversy and debate to increase our attention spans for dull topics (Ostroff).
• Instructors can increase students’ curiosity before delivering material to improve learning outcomes (Ostroff). For example, playing a news-clip of a relevant story and pausing before the end.
• The college student brain is still very flexible. This means it is able to let parts of itself die when any association is unlearned (found to be false or not useful) (Wilbrecht). My conclusion — students should be encouraged to change their minds, experiment, and pivot with less penalties, because doing so later in life is neurologically more challenging. This could take the form of allowing more course auditing (sitting in and even participating in a course for no credit) and more sampling of different disciplines in the general education stage. In this area, my encouragement would differentiate US education even more from the european model of choosing a track, such as economics or languages, around the high school age level. This method could also improve the diversity of disciplines chosen by students, something Zhao predicts will be healthy for the world economy.
• Changing student behavior can be most effective when a peer or respected adult advocate leads the change (Galvan). This is true for teens due to the heightened dopamine reward teens feel for peer interaction. This approach was effective for a healthy-eating and a separate anti-bullying campaign. And by respected adult, we could be talking about celebrity endorsement. This would be my bet for college students as well.
• Impulsivity and sensation-seeking are distinct. The maligned teenage trait of taking stupid, life-threatening risks is a separate trait from seeking stimuli. Both are elevated in teens, with sensation-seeking replacing impulsivity with age (Dahl). Sensation-seeking is extremely useful for learning. I conclude sensation-seeking can be used at college to improve engagement. This probably means a class with more novelty and intensity will be more effective for college-age students than drier approaches. We should include healthy risk-taking to improve the ability to identify good risks from bad ones. Examples could be class tournaments with betting on outcomes, courses in which you pick which assignments to do and to skip (which are weighted by points), and more public presentations.

These are my interpretations of the research. Teachers need and deserve not just more support but a seriously different environment to execute on these ideas, remembering Dean Schwartz’s words,

“When you teach you create conditions for learning.”

Cited speakers, all at Learning and the Brain; the Science of How We Learn, San Francisco, CA, February 2017:

Schwartz, D. L. ABC’s of How we Learn: From A is for Analogy to Z is for Sleep.

Ericsson, K. A. Secrets from the New Science of Expertise: Implications for Education and Life-Long Learning.

Ostroff, W. L. Cultivating Curiosity in the K-12 Classroom:
How to Foster Engagement, Exploration and Experimentation for Deeper Learning.

Dahl, R. E. Rebels Love a Cause: Harnessing the Motivational Effects of Pubertal Testosterone on the Adolescent Brain.

Galvan, G. A. How Peers Influence Neural Correlates of Cognitive Control in Adolescents.

Wilbrecht, L. E. How Experience Shapes the Neural Circuitry of the Frontal Cortex During Childhood/Adolescence.

Zhao, Y. Counting What Counts: Why Curiosity, Creativity and Student-Centered Learning Matter.