What Does The Marshmallow Experiment Tell Us About Self-Control?

• January 24, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

What is the mark of a good student? Is it innate intelligence? Is it attention span? Is it drive? Studies show that a major contributor to success might be as simple as having self-control. Take, for example, the marshmallow experiment.

Place a single marshmallow in front of a four-year old. Tell them they can eat it now or wait 15 minutes and have it along with a second marshmallow.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Walter Mischel of Stanford University performed this very experiment with over 500 nursery school children. What percentage do you think was able to control their impulses and hold out for marshmallow number two? In the end, fewer than one in three children were able to wait it out for the two marshmallows. At four years old, they simply had not developed the ability to delay gratification required for the challenge.

Paired with recent follow-up studies with 155 of the same individuals, the marshmallow experiment has come to shed fascinating insights on the inner workings of motivation and gratification, and how the two contribute to future success in school and life.

In the end, these studies have shown that children who were able to resist that first marshmallow were also more likely to be able to “avoid substance abuse, maintain a healthy body weight, and even perform better on the SAT than peers who couldn’t resist temptation.” In another study by Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, self-control was a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

Self-control: Innate or teachable?

Given the proven connection between self-control and life success, the question arises: Is it possible to develop tools that help people enhance self-control?

As it turns out, self-control is the result of processes in two parts of the brain. Our rational thoughts, such as “If I wait, I get the second sweet,” take place in the pre-frontal cortex. More urgent decisions take place in the more primitive ventral striatum. Decisions like these that connect to deeper desire and reward depend on the environment around us. In this second case, the thought process might be, “Gee, that marshmallow sure looks soft, sweet and yummy, and I really want it. Right now.”  Research has shown that the rational thoughts can often be derailed by the primitive limbic system; this is no surprise, given the importance of these systems to the survival of our species over the eons.

So, can we strengthen the ability of the rational side to win out over the impulsive side? One solution might just lie in helping young people change how they focus on the environment around them, such as helping them differentiate between “hot” and “cool” cues.  The limbic system deals with “hot” cues, activating emotions like impulse, anger, sadness, happiness and satisfaction. On the other hand, “cool” cues are processed in the frontal lobe and activate cognitive systems that control functions like planning, problem solving, working memory and reasoning. Returning to a variant of our marshmallow experiment, studies have shown that students who were coached to focus on “cool” attributes like color or shape were better able to resist temptation than those who focused on “hot” cues like taste.

Toward impulse-control interventions

Research is now underway to figure out how educators can better harness some of these insights into the power of impulse- and self-control to help students better achieve success. At the KIPP Academy School in New York, the marshmallow experiment has been used as a way to initiate discussions about self-control with 6th graders and help them make better, more rational decisions.

Ultimately, the ability to produce concrete strategies and tools that help students learn to control their impulses will depend upon the results of investigations that are still in the works. But eventually, if we are taking the research to heart, success will likely follow.

For now, if your students seem a bit impulsive from time to time, a chat about marshmallows might be just the thing to get them thinking.

Further Reading:

Study Reveals Biology Behind Self-Control

Related Reading:

Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

Building Your Child's Self-Confidence

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Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, decision making, early learning, emotions in learning, Innate abilities, toddler

The Question Formulation Technique: 6 Steps to Help Students Ask Better Questions

• November 29, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

The ability to ask questions is the genesis – the “big bang” – where learning really starts. It is that moment where information that has entered the brain mixes with other ideas and begins to synthesize new ideas. Questions demonstrate curiosity. Questions represent the beginning of discovery and innovation. The first step of the scientific method itself is the careful formulation of a question.

But how often do we focus on teaching our students how to formulate good, well-considered questions? Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana have focused their work on exactly this skill, developing an approach they call the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). The two are co-directors of The Right Question Institute (RQI), a non-profit organization that focuses on helping people learn to better advocate for themselves and participate more in decision-making processes by teaching them how to ask questions. While the RQI applies their techniques across health care, community service, public agencies and community-based organizations, their ideas represent an excellent tool that we can use in our classrooms every day.

Recently published in the Harvard Education Letter, their article “Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions,” describes the Question Formulation Technique, a way for educators to present material in ways that encourage students to take a more active ownership role in their learning. There are six steps to the technique, as follows:

1.      Find a focus - The “QFocus,” as it is called by Rothstein and Santana, is a prompt that serves to focus student questions so they can explore more expansive ideas. The authors offer an example presented by a teacher after covering the causes of the 1804 Haitian revolution: “Once we were slaves. Now we are free,” With a clear, direct thought like this to focus their thinking, the students begin formulating and posing questions around this idea.

2.      Brainstorm - Constrained by a few simple rules to help people stay focused, students formulate as many questions as possible. At this point, they are asked not to judge the quality of the questions, nor pursue any answers. This is much like the classic “brainstorming” process, where ideas are generated in a free, uninterrupted flow.

3.      Refine - The students work with the questions they have created, reformulating them as open- and closed-ended questions. They categorize them and make them clearer, more focused and more apt to yield the desired answers.

4.      Prioritize - Using lesson plans and teaching goals, the teacher helps students select their top three questions and use them to zero in on the most important aspects of the material.

5.      Determine next steps - Students and teachers together review the priority questions and make decisions about how best to use them for learning. The questions can be used to drive experimentation, further reading, research and/or discussion.

6.      Reflect - The teacher and students review their questions in the context of the six steps they have worked through to produce them. According to Rothstein and Santana, “Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings.”

Note the key word in that last sentence – internalize. Through this process, students add question formulation to their cognitive toolbox, making it a part of how they address information and problem-solving going forward. The authors note a number of benefits to the QFT, including increased group participation and better classroom management. But more importantly, they found that students were more apt to delve deeply into topics on their own, posing well-considered, critical questions that not only help direct their learning, but allow them to take more effective ownership of that learning as well.

As a “habit of mind,” the Question Formulation Technique demonstrates beautifully how the brain is built for pattern recognition. It also represents research that holds great promise for helping students form thinking patterns early on that will yield lifelong benefits.

Related Reading:

Teaching Creativity in the Classroom

Inspiring Students to Dream, Learn and Grow

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: cognitive skills, creativity, decision making, elementary school learning, how children learn, motivating students, science, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact

Of Rats and Men: How Stress Affects the Brain

• November 1, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

You have probably experienced that feeling of not being as mentally sharp as normal when you are under a lot of stress. Recent research has demonstrated that the human brain functions less well under stress, and we now know that stress causes actual physical changes in the brain, and those changes are directly associated with a decrease in brain function.

The original research in this area was first performed with rats as subjects. Later tests with human subjects generated similar results. Let’s take a quick look at each case:

Case #1: The Rats. Bruce McEwen and John Morrison at Mount Sinai Medical Center found that in the rat’s brain under stress, nerve cells of the prefrontal cortex shrink, resulting in slower performance on attention-shifting tasks. On the other hand, neurons in the orbital frontal cortex used response-reversal tasks actually grew larger. A response-reversal task is one where a subject is reinforced for giving response A to stimulus A and response B to stimulus B. Then, they are placed in a reversed situation where they must give response B to stimulus A and response A to stimulus B. The test measures how well they can “reverse” their responses. In the face of such tasks, the plastic brains of the rats adapted to the stress stimuli and physically changed to address the conditions.

Case #2: The Humans. Conor Liston and B. J. Casey of the Sackler Institute used brain imaging to study male medical students preparing for their board exams and compared them to healthy students who were not experiencing the stress of studying for exams. The students were asked to perform two different mental tasks while their brains were being scanned with MRI. The stressed students were less able to shift their attention from one task to another and showed changes in the prefrontal cortex. Interestingly, their ability to perform response-reversal tasks was not impaired by stress; subjects were still able to “change their minds” when presented with information that changed their responses to a certain situation.

In both cases, we see experiments producing similar results when it comes to attention-shifting tasks and response-reversal tasks. Not only that, tests showed that the physiological effects were temporary in the rats as well as the humans. When Liston and Casey repeated the brain scans in their med students one month after the board exams were over -- and the stress was gone from the equation -- they found that the attention shifting ability and the brain scans of the stressed students had returned to normal.

So we are able to conclude that while stress causes changes to the brain and decreases some brain functions, the brain is able to recover fairly quickly. Once again, the research demonstrates how the plastic neural network of the brain – whether rat or human -- is constantly changing to address the stimuli it experiences and function at optimal capacity for its given external environment.

Further research on the effects of stress on the brain may help us to better understand how people respond to stress and could help in the understanding and treatment of stress-associated psychiatric disorders.

References:

Stress disrupts human thinking, but the brain can bounce back. January 27, 2009.

Related Reading:

Separating Brain Fact from Brain Fiction: Debunking a Few Neuroscience Myths

Left vs. Right: What Your Brain Hemispheres Are Really Up To

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Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, brain plasticity, cognitive skills, decision making, health and well being, science

The Great Homework Debate: Is Homework Helpful or Harmful to Students?

• September 13, 2011 by Cory Armes

Sometimes, I feel as if I have been doing homework my entire life.  As a child growing up, I moved from worksheets, dioramas and book reports to essays, major projects and term papers.  When I began teaching, I had lessons to prepare and my students’ homework became my homework for grading.  (And, on occasion, it was quite obvious that I was putting a bit more effort into MY homework than they put into theirs!)  As my children reached school age, “Mom’s rules” on homework included:  homework comes first, don’t wait until the last minute on a project, etc.  But somehow their homework still bled over into my life…

So, how important is this icon of education?  Is homework helpful or harmful?  Is it something that, as many students claim, just eats up their time and energy for no real purpose?  Do we, as educators, need new practices that move away from homework or are we simply afraid to change, stuck on those famous eight words, “But, we’ve never done it that way before…”?

In support of the view of homework as helpful, many educators stress that specifically aligning homework to the learning task is part of the strategy for building understanding.  The website Focus on Effectiveness cites several studies showing that in elementary school, homework helps build learning and study habits (Cooper, 1989; Cooper, Lindsay, Nye, & Greathouse, 1998; Gorges & Elliot, 1999).  Also noted is the point that 30 minutes of daily homework in high school can increase a student’s GPA up to half a point (Keith 1992).  Many students need time and experience to develop the study habits that support learning, and homework can provide that as well as the ability to cope with mistakes and difficulty (Bempechat, 2004).  Those teachers who take the time to add instructive comments to their feedback to homework get the greatest return on their efforts in after-school work. (Walberg, 1999).

But what about the students who are doing it wrong and then have to “unlearn” incorrect information?  When considering the view that homework is harmful, author and speaker Alfie Kohn states that there is no real evidence showing homework to be beneficial to elementary students.  In an EdWeek article, he writes that he found no correlation between homework and improved standardized assessment scores.  Regarding secondary students, Kohn said that there is a slight correlation between homework and improved test scores and grades but there is no evidence that the improvement is because of homework rather than other activities.  Stating that there is no proof that homework benefits students in other ways such as good study habits, independence or self discipline, Kohn could find no disadvantage to reducing or even eliminating homework altogether but finds the homework trend continues to grow. 

So, what is the answer – is homework helpful or harmful?  Do we continue current practices or throw homework out altogether? 

A balanced perspective most likely is the best response.  Time spent on homework should align with the student’s age – a short time spent in elementary school, up to 90 minutes for middle school or junior high aged students and between 1½ and 2 ½ hours per night (not per subject!) in high school (Harris, 2006). Another suggestion is to multiply the student’s grade by ten to determine the appropriate number of minutes of homework per night (example – a fifth grader should have no more than 50 minutes of homework per night). If we want the best results, we’ll keep homework time within these time ranges with allowances made for individual needs of students and families. 

Key takeaways:

1. Remember the main purposes of homework:  to build rote memorization and automaticity; to provide time to deepen understanding though elaboration and to increase readiness for new information.
2. Assign homework that includes very few concepts so students can learn them on a deeper level (Healy, 1990).
3. Match homework to the learning goal for a more focused learning experience.
4. Provide appropriate and timely feedback.  Students need to know what was correct, what needs to be changed, etc., and they need this information sooner rather than later.  Waiting several days or even weeks to provide feedback limits or even eliminates the effectiveness of the assignment.
5. Parental involvement should be limited to facilitating the completion of homework – not teaching content or doing the work for a child.   Parents who get too involved in an assignment inhibit rather than enhance learning.

Homework and Practice. (n.d.) Retrieved September 7, 2011, from http://www.netc.org/focus/strategies/home.php

Cooper, H. (2006). Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? Retrieved September 7, 2011, from http://today.duke.edu/2006/09/homework_oped.html

Kohn, A. (2006). The Truth About Homework: Needless Assignments Persist Because of Widespread Misconceptions About Learning. Retrieved September 7, 2011, from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/homework.htm

Related Reading:

Ok, So You Made a Mistake. But Look What You Learned!

Building a Foundation for School Readiness for Low Income Children 

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: decision making, elementary school learning, how children learn, instructional reform, middle school learning

Separating Brain Fact from Brain Fiction: Debunking a Few Neuroscience Myths

• September 1, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

The brain is one of the most mysterious and misunderstood organs in the body. It represents the seat of our judgment, our senses, perceptions and our creativity.  More than any other aspect of our anatomy, the uniqueness of our brains is at the core of what makes us truly human.

While neuroscience advances every day, there are a number of myths about the brain that are accepted by many people as fact. As a scientist, I and my colleagues have worked to uncover the brain’s truths.  So what are some of these myths – and what are the true stories behind them to the best of our scientific knowledge?

Fiction: We use only a small percentage of our brains.

Fact: General thinking is that we use only about 10% of our brains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brain scans such as MRI and PET scans show that we regularly use all parts of our brains. Certainly, different areas of the brain are activated during different types of tasks, and some parts of the brain are less critical to support vital functions than others. But as even small brain injuries can show, every part of the brain performs essential functions in how we process, communicate with, and move through the world around us. Read more at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-we-really-use-only-10.

Fiction: The wrinkles on the surface of the brain appear and become more pronounced as we learn.

Fact: The ridges and crannies – more correctly, the gyri and sulci – on the surface of the brain actually all appear by the time a fetus is 40 weeks old. As the human brain evolved, gyri and sulci appeared as a result of the brain having to fold in upon itself as it grew larger to fit inside a correctly proportioned skull. While the gyri and sulci do not change as we learn, the brain itself – as we know from research in brain plasticity --  does continue to change throughout our lives.

Fiction: Brain damage is permanent.

This is an interesting myth, in that it is the result of ambiguous language. The brain is made up of a collection of neurons – brain cells – that are all networked together. When the brain suffers trauma and neurons are destroyed or damaged, those neurons cannot regenerate. In that sense, the damage to them is permanent. That said, those neurons are linked together at synapses to form complete networks. While a single neuron cannot be repaired, the pathways and connections throughout the brain can rewire themselves and form new pathways. If a connection is lost due to injury, we can reestablish that connection if the damage is not so acute that the entire network cannot be rewired. For a scholarly treatment of how the brain recovers from injury, see http://web.uvic.ca/~skelton/Teaching/General%20Readings/Robertson%20Murre%201999.pdf.

Fiction: A person is either “left-brained” or “right-brained.”

The theory goes that left-brained people are more logical and right-brained people are more creative. Certainly there are asymmetries associated with locations of certain brain functions. For example, mathematical computation and the grammar and vocabulary aspects of language seem to be controlled in most people in the left brain, while numerical approximation and comparison, along with interpretive aspects of language like prosody and intonation, appear to be controlled in the right.  These ideas date back to original research done in 1861 by French physician Pierre Paul Broca. Today, through MRI and PET imaging techniques, we have a much more complex view of the way the brain’s hemispheres control functions and interact with one another. The two perform a complex dance of information exchange that gives rise to our abilities. For a look at results of some of these MRI tests in children, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8780075.

Fiction: There are five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch.

These five are simply the ones that we are most aware of in our conscious minds, but we perceive and sense the world in a great many other ways. For example, “proprioconception” describes how our bodies are oriented in the world. “Nociception” is how we perceive pain. We sense changes in temperature. We sense balance. We feel thirst and hunger. We sense the passage of time. For a quick and easy description of the senses – in humans as well as other species – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense.

As scientists continue our search for the facts, there is much we don’t know; we are expanding our knowledge of the brain’s truths every day. As new discoveries are made, it is natural for facts to become distorted and reinterpreted with each new telling.   As educators and scientists, we should take the time to explain the truths about the brain and rectify any misunderstandings we may hear others repeat. The brain is amazing, and communicating the truths about it will further society’s understanding as a whole.

Related Reading:

Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain development, brain training, cognitive skills, decision making, infant brain, Innate abilities, processing

Connecting the Dots Between Infant Temperament and Future Success

• August 18, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

What factors will ultimately determine a child’s ability to succeed in life? While measures like socioeconomic status might allow a child to start off on the right foot, current research is delving into the nature of temperament and how that affects a person’s ability to successfully navigate life’s many challenges.   If temperament is pre-determined, there’s not much a parent can do, but if nurture plays a role, then how can parents help their child have the best quality of life?

While temperament has long been thought of as something innate, recent research has demonstrated that only some aspects are genetic, while others are environmental.

On the genetic side, as any parent will agree, much of an individual’s personality manifests very early on in the infant’s life. Parents with more than one child often note that one of their children seems easygoing from day one, but another child is demanding. One child may be outgoing and social, while their sibling may be more shy or withdrawn.

As we consider how these seemingly innate traits develop, we cannot ignore the fact that the environment – from parental attention to nutrition – exerts a strong influence on a child’s personality development. Current research tells us that a pregnant mother’s iron levels can affect the disposition of her child. Emerging data gleaned from animal research indicates that the quality of maternal parenting styles, such as the way a mother nurses her infants or the amount of maternal grooming, affects the temperament of her offspring.

An interesting question arises: How do these early manifestations play out as the child matures? For example, will an infant who is able to self-calm herself in stressful situations by turning away from aversive stimuli or sucking her thumb, for example, continue to exhibit self-regulatory behaviors as she gets older?

Considering the interplay between innate versus cultivated aspects of temperament, what actions can a parent take to affect the development of a child’s personality to give that child the best chance at personal satisfaction, academic achievement and successful relationships later in life? As the above research – and our own parental gut instincts – suggest, we can set them up by providing:

• Excellent nutrition
• Logical, predictable rules for living with others
• Optimal environments and schedules for sleep
• Lots of interactive play with family and friends
• Less screen time
• Lots and lots of parental love and affection

 

With parents providing these positive factors for their children, every child – from shy to outgoing, from tense to easygoing – will have the best chance at developing a balanced temperament as they mature.

For further study, read: Child Temperament and Parenting, by Samuel Putnam (University of Oregon), Ann Sanson (University of Melbourne), Mary Rothbart (University of Oregon). 

References:

Feder, A; Nestler, EJ; Charney, DS.  Psychobiology and molecular genetics of resilience.  Nature Reviews  Neuroscience 10 (2009) 446 – 457

Related Reading:

Building a Foundation for School Readiness for Low Income Children

The Magical Combination of Love and Limits: Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, behavior, brain development, cognitive skills, decision making, early learning, how children learn, infant brain, Innate abilities, learning environment, learning through play, play

6 Ways to Empower Your Students as Contributors in the Classroom

• February 8, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

If you attended our Fall Brain Fitness Webinar by Alan November, Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning, you know what an inspiring thinker and speaker he is.  It should come as no surprise, then, that he’s an inspiring writer as well. 

I recently discovered an article on his website outlining 6 ways to engage students as contributors in the classroom as a way of supporting their natural drive to participate in an active and meaningful way.  Here are the first 3:

1. 1. Engage students as tutorial designers to create supportive content for each other
   2. Assign official student scribes to take collaborative class notes
   3. Designate a student researcher to find the answers to classroom questions

This partial list is just the tip of the iceberg.  Be sure to read the full article, Students as Contributors: The Digital Learning Farm, on the November Learning website to discover 3 more ways that educators are empowering their students in the classroom right now, and find out what tools are available to bring these ideas into your own classroom or school.

Be sure to join us for our Spring Brain Fitness Webinar Series featuring Alan November (April 12) and Bill Daggett (March 18), thought-leaders in education that you don’t want to miss.  Subscribe to this blog to receive all the details about upcoming webinars in your inbox!

Related Reading:

How to Motivate Students: The Psychology of Success 

Using the Human Element to Make Science Fun and Approachable

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, Alan November, creativity, decision making, how children learn, middle school learning, motivating students, Scientific Learning events, technology in education

Considering the Consequences: The Development of Childhood Decision-Making

• January 27, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

One of the key lessons that children learn in school—as in life—is how to make good decisions. In so many ways, life is a sequence of decision-making moments, with every possible path bifurcating into new results, lessons and experiences.

But how does a child’s mind work in approaching and processing decisions? How does the difficulty of a decision—as well as the anticipated consequence of punishment or reward—affect future choices?

In the 2005 study, "Characterization of Children’s Decision Making: Sensitivity to Punishment Frequency, Not Task Complexity", Crone, Bunge, Latenstein and van der Molen researched and discussed this exact question.

Using a computerized variant of a standard task, the researchers studied how children of various ages approached decision-making moments. Here’s how it worked:

• The Task: Children were asked to perform two versions of a computerized decision-making task that varied in complexity.
• The Consequences: Researchers varied the frequency of how long the consequences of a decision (i.e., punishment) were delayed after each decision.
• The Results:
  • Sensitivity to consequences increased only when punishments were presented infrequently.
  • The complexity or difficulty of the task did not appear to have an effect on the child’s ability to perform it.
  • Generally boys outperformed girls by making better choices.
  • Overall, older children (ages 7-12) appear comparatively unconcerned about the future except for when the potential for future punishment is high.

Now, this is all very interesting scientifically-speaking, but what about the practical insights we can glean from this study?

In school, students face decision-making moments throughout the school day, in choosing right answers in the classroom, in selecting materials in the library, and in making activity choices on the playground. In each situation, their minds—in different ways at each developmental stage of childhood—are predicting consequences and weighing outcomes.

As educators, the more aware we are of their developmental abilities in how those decisions are made, the better we can help guide each individual child’s development and learning for success.

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, decision making, executive function

Learning Difficulties in Children

• December 28, 2010 by Terri Zezula

Today, you are nine years old and in the third grade. You enjoy playing on the monkey bars at recess and drawing pictures of your dog and your fish. You also like watermelon hard candies, mac and cheese, and, to your friends’ bewilderment, you have an affinity for tuna fish sandwiches, especially when your mom has mixed crunchy celery in with the tuna.

But also unlike your friends, you have often felt that school seems harder than it should be. For some inexplicable reason, you tend to make more mistakes than your classmates. You have a hard time grasping math concepts that they seem to get easily. You don’t remember geography facts as well as they do. And because of those difficulties, you feel different and separate from those around you. You feel incapable. You feel like a failure. And because of it, you feel angry, sad and alone.

While this is a simplistic snapshot of the thoughts typical of children with learning difficulties, such an exercise reminds us of two things: the magic of being young, and the loneliness and frustration of a youngster who lives with these challenges.

According to the Child Development Institute, six to ten percent of school-aged kids in the US are learning disabled. The causes of learning disabilities vary from genetics to nutrition to pre-birth and early childhood injury, and the challenges that children with learning difficulties experience tend to fall into five different areas: spoken language, written language, math, reasoning and memory. They may simply work slowly. They may have disorganized thinking. They may have difficulty in sequencing tasks. They may have poor impulse control. They many experience these difficulties in any number of combinations and groupings.

All children have problems. They all experience challenges with school and in social relationships. But when these problems begin to appear in combinations and clusters, or if they persist for long periods, we as educators must take a close look and ask ourselves whether the student’s challenges fall within normal ranges, or whether they should be evaluated in more detail.

If an evaluation comes back with an indication that a student has a learning difficulty, it is absolutely essential for educators and parents to team up and support that student in every way possible. If an IEP (individualized education plan) is in order, everyone needs to be informed and on board to support the student’s new path.

What exactly can we do for these children to boost their self-esteem? Writing for the Learning Disabilities Association of Illinois, clinical psychologist Aoife Lyons offers a number of recommendations:

1. 1. Help children understand what the label means. This gives them a degree of ownership and control that they did not have before.
   2. Help them recognize their areas of strength as well as their areas of difficulty.
   3. Help them feel special and appreciated.
   4. Help them develop problem-solving and decision-making skills.

The good news is that, for the student who has experienced years of frustration and difficulty and loneliness, a positive diagnosis can be freeing. It gives them a clear explanation for why they have been experiencing all these feelings and difficulties. It allows them to once again be proud of who they are and see their differences in a new light. And, given the research, expertise and research based interventions available, it gives these students a clearer path forward to define--and achieve--their own success.

For further reading, check out:

1. 1. Self-Esteem and Learning Disabilities, Aofe Lyons, Ph.D.
   2. How Can Parents Foster Self-Esteem in Their Children? Dr. Robert Brooks, Ph.D.
   3. About Learning Disabilities, Child Development Institute

 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Reading & Learning, Special Education

Tags: academic problems, academic success, cognitive skills, decision making, learning disabilities, math, memory, self-esteem, sequencing, struggling students

Data Driven Decisions: A GPS Approach

• November 2, 2010 by Corey Fitzgerald

Technology offers us so many useful tools and strategies; it’s a wonder how we ever got along without them.  Let’s consider the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver and its remarkable ability to pinpoint our location anywhere on earth.  Accurate to within one meter, a long step for most adults, and capable of tracking your route across any terrain, they rely on a continuous feed of real-time data that is accurate and reliable.  As educators, can we apply concepts like these to the classroom to make better, faster and more accurate decisions about the learning landscape?   

It’s a rhetorical question, and the resounding answer is Yes. However, there is room to argue that our current system leaves us falling perpetually short as educators are forced to wait weeks or months for standardized assessment results to flow back into their hands.  The resonating concern is that this periodic data limits the ability to accurately address the underlying causes of failure in-step with the ongoing instruction.  Corrective action must ensue, and initiatives to support a more timely return on the data must be put into place through a process with strategies to track the day to day activities and progress monitoring for all students. 

Thankfully, some of these efforts are already underway, reflected in the nation’s focus to implement state-wide reform, with a priority being placed on Assessment and Standards.  However, a paradigm still exists, in that benchmarking is limited to designated grade levels and the “in between years” are somewhat neglected, leaving variability and non-standardization to chance.  So how does your state stack up?  Visit the USDOE Institute of Education Sciences website, National Center for Education Statistics, and query the collection of data and reports to learn more: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/

Next steps: Plotting a course to data utopia. 

Using cutting edge technology underpinned with neuroscience principles on how the brain learns, Scientific Learning has pioneered software that accelerates the acquisition of language and reading skills, yielding years of gain in a matter of weeks.  Like a GPS, a continuous stream of real-time data provides accurate and reliable measures of student performance daily, plotting an ideal course of learning that eliminates the lag time of data collection and analysis.  Furthermore, educators can weave this information back into the classroom immediately, and focus intently on the specific areas of need.  In keeping sights set high on the destination—achievement for all students—there’s a proven way to deliver success where getting lost is not an option.

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Categories: Education Trends, Progress Tracker

Tags: assessments, decision making, teacher effectiveness, technology in education