Teach handwriting in schools!

I have begun this blogpost many times. I have erased it many times. That is because the subject of today – handwriting – is very sensitive for me. Most of what I wrote and subsequently erased was a rant: angry at rimes, full of profanity at other times. The rest were paragraphs that can be easily categorized as pleading, bargaining, imploring to teach handwriting in American schools. Or, if they already do, to do it less chaotically, more seriously, more consistently, with a LOT more practice and hopefully before the child hits puberty.

Because, contrary to most educators’ beliefs, handwriting is not the same as typing. Nor is printing / manuscript writing the same as cursive writing, but that’s another kettle.

Somehow, sometime, a huge disjointment happened between scholarly researchers and educators. In medicine, the findings of researchers tend to take 10-15 years until they start to be believed and implemented in medical practice. In education… it seems that even findings cemented by Nobel prizes 100 years ago are alien to the ranks of educators. It didn’t used to be like that. I don’t know when educators became distrustful of data and science. When exactly did they start to substitute evidence with “feels right” and “it’s our school’s philosophy”. When did they start using “research shows… ” every other sentence without being able to produce a single item, name, citation, paper, anything of said research. When did the educators become so… uneducated. I could write (and rant!) a lot about the subject of handwriting or about what exactly a Masters in Education teaches the educators. But I’m so tired of it before I even begun because I’m doing it for a while now and it’s exhausting. It takes an incredible amount of effort, at least for me, to bring the matter of writing so genteelly, tactfully, and non-threateningly to the attention of the fragile ego of the powers that be in charge of the education of the next generation. Yes, yes, there must be rarae aves among the educators who actually teach and do listen to or read papers on education from peer-reviewed journals; but I didn’t find them. I wonder who the research in education is for, if neither the educators nor policy makers have any clue about it…

Here is another piece of education research which will probably go unremarked by the ones it is intended for, i.e. educators and policy makers. Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) took a closer look at the note-taking habits of 65 Princeton and 260 UCLA students. The students were instructed to take notes in their usual classroom style from 5 x >15 min long TED talks, which were “interesting but not common knowledge” (p. 1160). Afterwards, the subjects completed a hard working-memory task and answered factual and conceptual questions about the content of the “lectures”.

The students who took notes in writing (I’ll call them longhanders) performed significantly better at conceptual questions about the lecture content that the ones who typed on laptops (typers). The researchers noticed that the typers tend to write verbatim what it’s being said, whereas the longhanders don’t do that, which corresponds directly with their performance. In their words,

“laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.” (Abstract).

Because typing is faster than writing, the typers can afford to not think of what they type and be in a full scribe mode with the brain elsewhere and not listening to a single word of the lecture (believe me, I know, both as a student and as a University professor). Contrary to that, the longhanders cannot write verbatim and must process the information to extract what’s relevant. In the words of cognitive psychologists everywhere and present in every cognitive psychology textbook written over the last 70 years: depth of processing facilitates learning. Maybe that could be taught in a Masters of Education…

Pet peeves aside, the next step in the today’s paper was to see if you force the typers to forgo the verbatim note-taking and do some information processing might improve learning. It did not, presumably because “the instruction to not take verbatim notes was completely ineffective at reducing verbatim content (p = .97)” (p. 1163).

The laptop typers did take more notes though, by word count. So in the next study, the researchers asked the question “If allowed to study their notes, will the typers benefit from their more voluminous notes and show better performance?” This time the researchers made 4 x 7-min long lectures on bats, bread, vaccines, and respiration and tested them 1 week alter. The results? The longhanders who studied performed the best. The verbatim typers performed the worst, particularly on conceptual versus factual questions, despite having more notes.

For the sake of truth and in the spirit of the overall objectivity of this blog, I should note that the paper is not very well done. It has many errors, some of which were statistical and corrected in a Corrigendum, some of which are methodological and can be addressed by a bigger study with more carefully parsed out controls and more controlled conditions, or at least using the same stimuli across studies. Nevertheless, at least one finding is robust as it was replicated across all their studies:

“In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand” (Abstract)

Teachers, teach handwriting! No more “Of course we teach writing, just…, just not now, not today, not this year, not so soon, perhaps not until the child is a teenager, not this grade, not my responsibility, not required, not me…”.

REFERENCE: Mueller, PA & Oppenheimer, DM (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25(6): 1159–1168. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581. ARTICLE | FULLTEXT PDF | NPR cover

By Neuronicus, 1 Sept. 2019

P. S. Some of my followers pointed me to a new preregistered study that failed to replicate this paper (thanks, followers!). Urry et al. (2019) found that the typers have more words and take notes verbatim, just as Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) found, but this did not benefit the typers, as there wasn’t any difference between conditions when it came to learning without study.

The authors did not address the notion that “depth of processing facilitates learning” though, a notion which is now theory because it has been replicated ad nauseam in hundreds of thousands of papers. Perhaps both papers can be reconciled if a third study were to parse out the attention component of the experiments by, perhaps, introspection questionnaires. What I mean is that the typers can do mindless transcription and there is no depth of processing, resulting in the Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) observation or they can actually pay attention to what they type and then there is depth of processing, in which case we have Urry et al. (2019) findings. But the longhanders have no choice but to pay attention because they cannot write verbatim, so we’re back to square one, in my mind, that longhanders will do better overall. Handwriting your notes is the safer bet for retention then, because your attention component is not voluntary, but required for the task, as it were, at hand.

REFERENCE: Urry, H. L. (2019, February 9). Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini-Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies. PsyArXiv. doi:10.31234/osf.io/vqyw6. FREE FULLTEXT PDF

By Neuronicus, 2 Sept. 2019

Education raises intelligence

Intelligence is a dubious concept in psychology and biology because it is difficult to define. In any science, something has a workable definition when it is described by unique testable operations or observations. But “intelligence” had eluded that workable definition, having gone through multiple transformations in the past hundred years or so, perhaps more than any other psychological construct (except “mind”). Despite Binet’s first claim more than a century ago that there is such a thing as IQ and he has a way to test for it, many psychologists and, to a lesser extent, neuroscientists are still trying to figure out what it is. Neuroscientists to a lesser extent because once the field as a whole could not agree upon a good definition, it moved on to the things that they can agree upon, i.e. executive functions.

Of course, I generalize trends to entire disciplines and I shouldn’t; not all psychology has a problem with operationalizations and replicability, just as not all neuroscientists are paragons of clarity and good science. In fact, the intelligence research seems to be rather vibrant, judging by the publications number. Who knows, maybe the psychologists have reached a consensus about what the thing is. I haven’t truly kept up with the IQ research, partly because I think the tests used for assessing it are flawed (therefore you don’t know what exactly you are measuring) and tailored for a small segment of the population (Western society, culturally embedded, English language conceptualizations etc.) and partly because the circularity of definitions (e.g. How do I know you are highly intelligent? You scored well at IQ tests. What is IQ? What the IQ tests measure).

But the final nail in the coffin of intelligence research for me was a very popular definition of Legg & Hutter in 2007: intelligence is “the ability to achieve goals”. So the poor, sick, and unlucky are just dumb? I find this definition incredibly insulting to the sheer diversity within the human species. Also, this definition is blatantly discriminatory, particularly towards the poor, whose lack of options, access to good education or to a plain healthy meal puts a serious brake on goal achievement. Alternately, there are people who want for nothing, having been born in opulence and fame but whose intellectual prowess seems to be lacking, to put it mildly, and owe their “goal achievement” to an accident of birth or circumstance. The fact that this definition is so accepted for human research soured me on the entire field. But I’m hopeful that the researchers will abandon this definition more suited for computer programs than for human beings; after all, paradigmatic shifts happen all the time.

In contrast, executive functions are more clearly defined. The one I like the most is that given by Banich (2009): “the set of abilities required to effortfully guide behavior toward a goal”. Not to achieve a goal, but to work toward a goal. With effort. Big difference.

So what are those abilities? As I said in the previous post, there are three core executive functions: inhibition/control (both behavioral and cognitive), working memory (the ability to temporarily hold information active), and cognitive flexibility (the ability to think about and switch between two different concepts simultaneously). From these three core executive functions, higher-order executive functions are built, such as reasoning (critical thinking), problem solving (decision-making) and planning.

Now I might have left you with the impression that intelligence = executive functioning and that wouldn’t be true. There is a clear correspondence between executive functioning and intelligence, but it is not a perfect correspondence and many a paper (and a book or two) have been written to parse out what is which. For me, the most compelling argument that executive functions and whatever it is that the IQ tests measure are at least partly distinct is that brain lesions that affect one may not affect the other. It is beyond the scope of this blogpost to analyze the differences and similarities between intelligence and executive functions. But to clear up just a bit of the confusion I will say this broad statement: executive functions are the foundation of intelligence.

There is another qualm I have with the psychological research into intelligence: a big number of psychologists believe intelligence is a fixed value. In other words, you are born with a certain amount of it and that’s it. It may vary a bit, depending on your life experiences, either increasing or decreasing the IQ, but by and large you’re in the same ball-park number. In contrast, most neuroscientists believe all executive functions can be drastically improved with training. All of them.

After this much semi-coherent rambling, here is the actual crux of the post: intelligence can be trained too. Or I should say the IQ can be raised with training. Ritchie & Tucker-Drob (2018) performed a meta-analysis looking at over 600,000 healthy participants’ IQ and their education. They confirmed a previously known observation that people who score higher at IQ tests complete more years of education. But why? Is it because highly intelligent people like to learn or because longer education increases IQ? After carefully and statistically analyzing 42 studies on the subject, the authors conclude that the more educated you are, the more intelligent you become. How much more? About 1 to 5 IQ points per 1 additional year of education, to be precise. Moreover, this effect persists for a lifetime; the gain in intelligence does not diminish with the passage of time or after exiting school.

This is a good paper, its conclusions are statistically robust and consistent. Anybody can check it out as this article is an open access paper, meaning that not only the text but its entire raw data, methods, everything about it is free for everybody.

For me, the conclusion is inescapable: if you think that we, as a society, or you, as an individual, would benefit from having more intelligent people around you, then you should support free access to good education. Not exactly where you thought I was going with this, eh ;)?

REFERENCE: Ritchie SJ & Tucker-Drob EM. (Aug, 2018, Epub 18 Jun 2018). How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Science, 29(8):1358-1369. PMID: 29911926, PMCID: PMC6088505, DOI: 10.1177/0956797618774253. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF | SUPPLEMENTAL DATA  | Data, codebooks, scripts (Mplus and R), outputs

Nota bene: I’d been asked what that “1 additional year” of education means. Is it with every year of education you gain up to 5 IQ points? No, not quite. Assuming I started as normal IQ, then I’d be… 26 years of education (not counting postdoc) multiplied by let’s say 3 IQ points, makes me 178. Not bad, not bad at all. :))). No, what the authors mean is that they had access to, among other datasets, a huge cohort dataset from Norway from the moment when they increased the compulsory education by 2 years. So the researchers could look at the IQ tests of the people before and after the policy change, which were administered to all males at the same age when they entered compulsory military service. They saw the increase in 1 to 5 IQ points per each extra 1 year of education.

By Neuronicus, 14 July 2019

Play-based or academic-intensive?

The title of today’s post wouldn’t make any sense for anybody who isn’t a preschooler’s parent or teacher in the USA. You see, on the west side of the Atlantic there is a debate on whether a play-based curriculum for a preschool is more advantageous than a more academic-based one. Preschool age is 3 to 4 years;  kindergarten starts at 5.

So what does academia even looks like for someone who hasn’t mastered yet the wiping their own behind skill? I’m glad you asked. Roughly, an academic preschool program is one that emphasizes math concepts and early literacy, whereas a play-based program focuses less or not at all on these activities; instead, the children are allowed to play together in big or small groups or separately. The first kind of program has been linked with stronger cognitive benefits, while the latter with nurturing social development. The supporters of one program are accusing the other one of neglecting one or the other aspect of the child’s development, namely cognitive or social.

The paper that I am covering today says that it “does not speak to the wider debate over learning-through-play or the direct instruction of young children. We do directly test whether greater classroom time spent on academic-oriented activities yield gains in both developmental domains” (Fuller et al., 2017, p. 2). I’ll let you be the judge.

Fuller et al. (2017) assessed the cognitive and social benefits of different programs in an impressive cohort of over 6,000 preschoolers. The authors looked at many variables:

• children who attended any form of preschool and children who stayed home;
• children who received more (high dosage defined as >20 hours/week) and less preschool education (low dosage defined as <20 hour per week);
• children who attended academic-oriented preschools (spent at least 3 – 4 times a week on each of the following tasks: letter names, writing, phonics and counting manipulatives) and non-academic preschools.

The authors employed a battery of tests to assess the children’s preliteracy skills, math skills and social emotional status (i.e. the independent variables). And then they conducted a lot of statistical analyses in the true spirit of well-trained psychologists.

The main findings were:

1) “Preschool exposure [of any form] has a significant positive effect on children’s math and preliteracy scores” (p. 6).

2) The earlier the child entered preschool, the stronger the cognitive benefits.

3) Children attending high-dose academic-oriented preschools displayed greater cognitive proficiencies than all the other children (for the actual numbers, see Table 7, pg. 9).

4) “Academic-oriented preschool yields benefits that persist into the kindergarten year, and at notably higher magnitudes than previously detected” (p. 10).

5) Children attending academic-oriented preschools displayed no social development disadvantages than children that attended low or non-academic preschool programs. Nor did the non-academic oriented preschools show an improvement in social development (except for Latino children).

Now do you think that Fuller et al. (2017) gave you any more information in the debate play vs. academic, given that their “findings show that greater time spent on academic content – focused on oral language, preliteracy skills, and math concepts – contributes to the early learning of the average child at magnitudes higher than previously estimated” (p. 10)? And remember that they did not find any significant social advantages or disadvantages for any type of preschool.

I realize (or hope, rather) that most pre-k teachers are not the Draconian thou-shall-not-play-do-worksheets type, nor are they the let-kids-play-for-three-hours-while-the-adults-gossip-in-a-corner types. Most are probably combining elements of learning-through-play and directed-instruction in their programs. Nevertheless, there are (still) programs and pre-k teachers that clearly state that they employ play-based or academic-based programs, emphasizing the benefits of one while vilifying the other. But – surprise, surprise! – you can do both. And, it turns out, a little academia goes a long way.

So, next time you choose a preschool for your kid, go with the data, not what your mommy/daddy gut instinct says and certainly be very wary of preschool officials who, when you ask them for data to support their curriculum choice, tell you that that’s their ‘philosophy’, they don’t need data. Because, boy oh boy, I know what philosophy means and it ain’t that.

By Neuronicus, 12 October 2017

Reference: Fuller B, Bein E, Bridges M, Kim, Y, & Rabe-Hesketh, S. (Sept. 2017). Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 52: 1-11, doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2017.05.001. ARTICLE | New York Times cover | Reading Rockets cover (offers a fulltext pdf) | Good cover and interview with the first author on qz.com