sitters

Susan Cain's op-ed in today's Times reminds me of Katharine's book:

But shyness and introversion share an undervalued status in a world that prizes extroversion. Children’s classroom desks are now often arranged in pods, because group participation supposedly leads to better learning; in one school I visited, a sign announcing “Rules for Group Work” included, “You can’t ask a teacher for help unless everyone in your group has the same question.” Many adults work for organizations that now assign work in teams, in offices without walls, for supervisors who value “people skills” above all. As a society, we prefer action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. Studies show that we rank fast and frequent talkers as more competent, likable and even smarter than slow ones. As the psychologists William Hart and Dolores Albarracin point out, phrases like “get active,” “get moving,” “do something” and similar calls to action surface repeatedly in recent books.

Yet shy and introverted people have been part of our species for a very long time, often in leadership positions. We find them in the Bible (“Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?" asked Moses, whom the Book of Numbers describes as “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.”) We find them in recent history, in figures like Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust and Albert Einstein, and, in contemporary times: think of Google’s Larry Page, or Harry Potter’s creator, J. K. Rowling.

In the science journalist Winifred Gallagher’s words: “The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor ‘Paradise Lost’ was dashed off by a party animal.”

We even find “introverts” in the animal kingdom, where 15 percent to 20 percent of many species are watchful, slow-to-warm-up types who stick to the sidelines (sometimes called “sitters”) while the other 80 percent are “rovers” who sally forth without paying much attention to their surroundings. Sitters and rovers favor different survival strategies, which could be summed up as the sitter’s “Look before you leap” versus the rover’s inclination to “Just do it!” Each strategy reaps different rewards.

IN an illustrative experiment, David Sloan Wilson, a Binghamton evolutionary biologist, dropped metal traps into a pond of pumpkinseed sunfish. The “rover” fish couldn’t help but investigate — and were immediately caught. But the “sitter” fish stayed back, making it impossible for Professor Wilson to capture them.

[snip]

Next, Professor Wilson used fishing nets to catch both types of fish; when he carried them back to his lab, he noted that the rovers quickly acclimated to their new environment and started eating a full five days earlier than their sitter brethren. In this situation, the rovers were the likely survivors. “There is no single best ... [animal] personality,” Professor Wilson concludes in his book, “Evolution for Everyone,” “but rather a diversity of personalities maintained by natural selection.”

[snip]

...sitter children are careful and astute, and tend to learn by observing instead of by acting. They notice scary things more than other children do, but they also notice more things in general. Studies dating all the way back to the 1960’s by the psychologists Jerome Kagan and Ellen Siegelman found that cautious, solitary children playing matching games spent more time considering all the alternatives than impulsive children did, actually using more eye movements to make decisions. Recent studies by a group of scientists at Stony Brook University and at Chinese universities using functional M.R.I. technology echoed this research, finding that adults with sitter-like temperaments looked longer at pairs of photos with subtle differences and showed more activity in brain regions that make associations between the photos and other stored information in the brain.
Once they reach school age, many sitter children use such traits to great effect. Introverts, who tend to digest information thoroughly, stay on task, and work accurately, earn disproportionate numbers of National Merit Scholarship finalist positions and Phi Beta Kappa keys, according to the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, a research arm for the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator — even though their I.Q. scores are no higher than those of extroverts. Another study, by the psychologists Eric Rolfhus and Philip Ackerman, tested 141 college students’ knowledge of 20 different subjects, from art to astronomy to statistics, and found that the introverts knew more than the extroverts about 19 subjects — presumably, the researchers concluded, because the more time people spend socializing, the less time they have for learning.

THE psychologist Gregory Feist found that many of the most creative people in a range of fields are introverts who are comfortable working in solitary conditions in which they can focus attention inward. Steve Wozniak, the engineer who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, is a prime example: Mr. Wozniak describes his creative process as an exercise in solitude. “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me,” he writes in “iWoz,” his autobiography. “They’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone ... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?
By SUSAN CAIN
Published: June 25, 2011

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking




Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School

Susan Cain's blog

cumulative practice

I've been meaning to get a post up about this article for years now. I think it's incredibly important (relates to Direct Instruction, too).

No time to write now, but here's the abstract:

THE EFFECTS OF CUMULATIVE PRACTICE ON MATHEMATICS PROBLEM SOLVING (pdf file)
KRISTIN H. MAYFIELD AND PHILIP N. CHASE
JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2002, 35, 105–123
NUMBER 2 (SUMMER 2002)

This study compared three different methods of teaching five basic algebra rules to college students. All methods used the same procedures to teach the rules and included four 50-question review sessions interspersed among the training of the individual rules. The differences among methods involved the kinds of practice provided during the four review sessions. Participants who received cumulative practice answered 50 questions covering a mix of the rules learned prior to each review session. Participants who received a simple review answered 50 questions on one previously trained rule. Participants who received extra practice answered 50 extra questions on the rule they had just learned. Tests administered after each review included new questions for applying each rule (application items) and problems that required novel combinations of the rules (problem-solving items). On the final test, the cumulative group outscored the other groups on application and problem-solving items. In addition, the cumulative group solved the problem-solving items significantly faster than the other groups. These results suggest that cumulative practice of component skills is an effective method of training problem solving.

Note: the effects of cumulative practice on problem solving.

Not "procedural fluency" or "automaticity" or "mastery" etc.

Problem solving.

The path to problem solving goes through a particular form of practice - cumulative practice - not through "do the problem 3 ways" (Trailblazers) or "explain how you got your answer."

Visible Learning

Dan Dempsey put me onto Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement by John Hattie, which I will be reading shortly thanks to Two-Day 1-Click.

Here's something I didn't know:

As Nuthall (2007) has shown, 80% of feedback a student receives about his or her work in elementary (primary) school is from other students. But 80% of this student-provided feedback is incorrect!
p. 4

80%.

wow.

It's always worse than you think.

So I guess we can safely assume the peer editing thing won't be working out.


The Hidden Lives of Learners by Graham Nuthall
review of Hidden Lives

visual learning

Late yesterday afternoon my Foldables rampage across the internet led to something good: I now possess a starter sense of "visual learning" and what its place in school may be. This is something I've puzzled over for ages, partly because of research Temple and I cited in Animals in Translation concerning verbal overshadowing. Verbal overshadowing is a conflict between visual and verbal representations in memory:

A series of laboratory studies found that memories for a mock criminal's face were much poorer among eyewitnesses who had described what the perpetrator looked like shortly after seeing him, compared with those who hadn't.
source:
Words Get in the Way
by Bruce Bower
Science News
Week of April 19, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 16, p. 250

Temple divides the world into visual and verbal thinkers and from one angle the verbal overshadowing studies seem to say she's right. (I have no doubt she's onto something - Temple really does think in pictures.)

At the same time, probably most of us have the sense that visual memory is more durable than verbal memory no matter what kind of thinkers we are, which is why Ms. Peacock tells her students to form a mental image of the word "vex." She's right: a mental image should allow all of them to remember the word the next time they see it, not just the "visual learners."

Which brings to mind a story. I once went to a friend's 40th birthday party where I didn't know a soul. At the time I'd just finished reading a book on memory so I formed mnemonic images of the names of every person to whom I was introduced -- and then I remembered every name. I was remembering names so accurately that it turned into a party trick; people were gathering 'round to watch me remember names. As well they should have. It was quite a feat.

So: verbal overshadowing on the one hand; mnemonic devices on the other.

I have no idea how these two ideas fit together. Perhaps visual images help memory for verbal material but verbal representations hurt memory for visual material? Don't know.

Don't know and am not going to spend today tracking down the people do know. Here's the post I wrote early yesterday evening:


Karen H pointed me to the Eide Neurloearning blog awhile back:

Several years ago, we experienced an epiphany while meeting with an obviously intelligent blind woman with a thirty-year history of diabetes. "There's probably nothing you can do," she started off saying, "but I still need to ask you if there's anything I can do about my memory. It's gotten so bad now that I'll forget what my daughter's telling me even before she's finished talking." Uh-oh, we thought, sounds bad. We had seen her brain scan before, and it had clearly shown diffuse damage from poorly controlled diabetes. Maybe there was nothing we could do.

We asked her to try to remember a list of numbers, and found to our dismay that she struggled to remember even 2 in a row. When asked to reverse them, she couldn't even keep the second number in mind. It looked pretty hopeless. Words of reassurance seemed empty.

But then we thought of something. We had recently seen an fMRI study which had shown that 'visual imagination' (visually imagining reversing a checkerboard) had a very diffuse distribution in the brain - and thought maybe enough of it could be preserved in this woman so that visual imagery could be used bypass her memory impairments. To our surprise and to hers, when prompted to visually imagine the numbers we read to her, she could now remember 7 digits (the normal limit)! ... [S]he merely needed to be made aware that she should translate 'heard' information into visual images - to go from being totally incapacitated memory-wise to 'normal'.

The fact that public schools are preoccupied with visual learning however defined^* reminds me of Horace Mann deciding that hearing children should be taught to read the same way deaf children were taught. High school students have young, healthy brains; they don't need to assign a distinct visual image to each and every unfamiliar vocabulary word they encounter while reading a play by Shakespeare. Not unless they've got diffuse brain damage, which by the time they've spent 16 years playing video games at home and folding Foldables at school, they may have.

The fastest way to teach vocabulary -- I'm pretty sure I'm right about this -- would probably be to produce a "Saxon Math" for prose: a sequence of textbooks with interesting short passages offering distributed practice in the vocabulary to be learned each school year, including homework sets that require students to -- yes -- write sentences using the words.

Based in my own experience as an obsessive child reader, I can tell you that it's possible to acquire a large vocabulary from voracious reading alone. However, no school (or parent) can require students to read obsessively, nor would we want them to. So we need textbooks that go some ways toward distilling and duplicating the critical elements of the natural born bookworm's reading habits; we need quality reading over quantity.

I continue to think Vocabulary Workshop probably does this, by the way. Just wish we were getting through the books faster. C. has spent 2 years on the first book in the series -- Level A -- and still isn't finished. (We continue to plug away at Megawords; we're midway through Book 5 now, with 3 to go.)


visual learning - the books to read

Having poked around Eideneurolearning a bit on the same day that I went looking for a Jeffrey Zacks paper on event segmentation, I've gleaned the following nuggets & reading recommendations:

• a combination of text with images probably always produces better "retention" - i.e., we remember the material better later on (not sure whether the people who study these things also believe we understand the material better - I think they do)
  
• animations are probably a bad idea; stills are preferable
• the seminal book on the relationship between words and pictures is: Mental representations: a dual coding approach by Allan Paivio
  
• the best book on dual coding as it applies to education is Richard Mayer's Multi-Media Learning
  

I'm sorely tempted to buy both of these books, which can be previewed on Google Book Search, but first I'm going to read all of the Eide posts on visual learning.







^{*I've seen it defined as "prefers reading to listening"}


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

remembering foreign language vocabulary

Abstract—In a 9-year longitudinal investigation, 4 subjects learned and relearned 300 English-foreign language word pairs. Either 13 or 26 relearning sessions were administered at intervals of 14, 28, or 56 days. Retention was tested for 1, 2, 3, or 5 years after training terminated. The longer intersession intervals slowed down acquisition slightly, but this disadvantage during training was offset by substantially higher retention. Thirteen retraining sessions spaced at 56 days yielded retention comparable to 26 sessions spaced at 14 days. The retention benefit due to additional sessions was independent of the benefit due to spacing, and both variables facilitated retention of words regardless of difficulty level and of the consistency of retrieval during training. The benefits of spaced retrieval practice to long-term maintenance of access to academic knowledge areas are discussed.
source:
Maintenance of Foreign Language Vocabulary and the Spacing Effect
Harry P. Bahrick, Lorraine E. Bahrick, Audrey Bahrick, Phyllis E. Bahrick
Psychological Science, Vol 4, Issue 5, pp 316-321, September 1993

Assuming I'm reading this right (haven't looked at the article yet), you can swap repetition for spacing.

You can spend less time studying if you space that studying out over a substantial period of time -- and vice versa.

Maybe.



overlearning overrated?
how long does learning last?
shuffling math problems is good
Saxon rules
Ken's interval
same time, next year
remembering foreign language vocabulary

same time, next year

I just noticed Ken's use of the phrase "how the spiral should work."

This is our problem.

A spiral curriculum is by definition a form of spaced repetition. You learn topic X in first grade; then you "revisit" topic X in second grade; then you take another return trip again in 3rd grade.

The notion that the space between repetitions will be 12 months' time is simply built in to the proposition. It's unexamined.

And, of course, no effort is made to ensure or assess whether students have reached mastery before the class peddles on.

MORE T/K


overlearning overrated?
how long does learning last?
shuffling math problems is good
Saxon rules
Ken's interval
same time, next year
remembering foreign language vocabulary

Ken's interval

re: study time and retention intervals

I would think it is even more efficient to systematically fade both the amount of problem and the interval between problem sets for each new problem type.

For example after a new problem type is learned via massed practice, subsequent practice sets might go something like this:

day 2: problems 10
day 3: problems 10
day 4: problems 8
day 5: problems 8
day 6: problems 6
day 7: problems 6
day 9: problems 6
day 11: problems 6
day 13: problems 6
day 16: problems 5
day 20: problems 5
day 25: problems 5
day 30: problems 5
day 40: problems 4
day 50: problems 4
day 60: problems 4
day 80: problems 3
day 100: problems 3

That's how the the spiral should work. As the student better learns the material, it gets refreshed at increasingly larger before the knowledge has a chance to fade from memory.

This is how Engelmann does it in all the DI programs. The only exception is when a subskill gets subsumed into a more complicated skill (once it has been mastered), then only the more complicated skill gets the distributed practice.

Saxon is interesting in this respect, because Saxon books give you practically no massed practice at all once you move to algebra. Prior to that kids to "Fast Facts" sheets every day.

In the high school books students do, at most, 4 or perhaps 5 problems in the new skill or concept covered in the lesson. Usually you do only 2.

I assume he does this because by the time you get to algebra you're constantly doing problems built out of well-learned embedded skills, but I don't know.


overlearning overrated?
how long does learning last?
shuffling math problems is good
Saxon rules
Ken's interval
same time, next year
remembering foreign language vocabulary

the shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning

Haven't read yet, but here's the abstract.

Abstract In most mathematics textbooks, each set of practice problems is comprised almost entirely of problems corresponding to the immediately previous lesson. By contrast, in a small number of textbooks, the practice problems are systematically shuffled so that each practice set includes a variety of problems drawn from many previous lessons. The standard and shuffled formats differ in two critical ways, and each was the focus of an experiment reported here. In Experiment 1, college students learned to solve one kind of problem, and subsequent practice problems were either massed in a single session (as in the standard format) or spaced across multiple sessions (as in the shuffled format). When tested 1 week later, performance was much greater after spaced practice. In Experiment 2, students first learned to solve multiple types of problems, and practice problems were either blocked by type (as in the standard format) or randomly mixed (as in the shuffled format). When tested 1 week later, performance was vastly superior after mixed practice. Thus, the results of both experiments favored the shuffled format over the standard format.

source:
Instructional Science ($)
published online April 19, 2007

the Saxon shuffle

[A] very small number of mathematics textbooks use what we call a shuffled format (e.g., Saxon, 1997). A textbook with a shuffled format may have lessons identical to those in the standard format, and moreover, the two formats need not differ in either the number of practice sets within the text or the number of practice problems per practice set. But, with the shuffled format, the practice problems are systematically arranged so that practice problems are both distributed and mixed. For example, after a lesson on the quadratic formula, the immediately following practice set would include no more than a few quadratic formula problems, with other quadratic formula problems appearing in subsequent practice sets with decreasing frequency. Thus, the practice problems of a given type are systematically spaced throughout the textbook. This spacing intrinsically ensures that the problems within each practice set include a mixture of different types, as there are no more than one or two practice problems of each kind within each practice set. In order to achieve such variety in the early portion of the textbook, the first several practice sets can include problems relating to topics covered in previous years.

[snip]

Perhaps the most well known example of the shuffled format is the Saxon line of mathematics textbooks (e.g., Saxon, 1997). In these textbooks, no more than two or three problems within each practice set are drawn from the immediately preceding lesson, and the remaining one or two dozen problems are drawn from many different lessons. We are not aware of any published, controlled experiments comparing a Saxon and non-Saxon textbook, but such an experiment may not be particularly informative because it would be confounded by the numerous differences between any two such texts. That is, regardless of the outcome of an experimental comparison of a shuffled textbook and a standard textbook, any observed differences in, say, final exam performance might reflect differences in the lessons rather than practice format.

Such confounds would be avoided, however, if two groups of students were presented with the same lessons and different practice sets. For example, each group of students could receive a packet that includes the lessons from a traditional textbook, and these lessons would appear in the same order for both groups. Both groups would also see the same practice problems, but the problems would be arranged in either a standard format or shuffled format. By way of disclosure, neither author has an affiliation with a publishing company or mathematics textbook, although the first author is a former mathematics teacher who has taught with textbooks from many different publishers, including Saxon.

There is no doubt in my mind -- none -- that shuffled problems produce better retention than massed problems.


overlearning overrated?
how long does learning last?
shuffling math problems is good
Saxon rules
Ken's interval
same time, next year
remembering foreign language vocabulary

Saxon rules

Just caught the last paragraph of the long-term memory study Concerned posted:

All these experiments involved rote learning, but Rohrer and Pashler have also found similar effects with more abstract learning, like math. This is particularly troubling, the psychologists say, because most mathematics textbooks today are organized to encourage both overlearning and massing. So students end up working 20 problems on the same concept (which they learned earlier that day) when they should be working 20 problems drawn from different lessons learned since the beginning of the school year. In brief, students are wasting a lot of precious learning time.

That's Saxon.

30 problems a day, no more than 2 on the same skill or procedure.

Day in, day out.

Extreme mixed review.

Which reminded me to get out my mixed review books:

Middle-Grade Math Minutes: One Hundred Minutes to Better Basic Skills
Doug Stoffel Creative Teaching Press 2000
www.creativeteaching.com

Mixed Skills in Math
ISBN: 1-56822-861-9

These are both for middle school, but you can find mixed-review books for all grade levels.


overlearning overrated?
how long does learning last?
shuffling math problems is good
Saxon rules
Ken's interval
same time, next year
remembering foreign language vocabulary

how long does new knowledge last?

Unfortunately, this isn't directly relevant to Concerned's post, but it's interesting:

Translated into practice, the spiral curriculum is a series of different, unrelated topics that parade past the kids year after year. Kids dabble in measurement for a while before moving on to the next unit, which may be geometry, which is followed by whole-number operations, which is followed by fractions, ... and so forth. Typically, about 60 school days pass before any topic is revisited. Stated differently, the spiral curriculum is exposure, not teaching. You don't "teach" something and then put it on the shelf for 60 days. It doesn't have a shelf-life of more than a few days. It would be outrageous enough to do that with one topic--let alone all of them.

Bruner's endorsement of the spiral curriculum suggests the extent to which cognitivists lack a comprehensive schema of a kid's brain. Don't they know that if something is just taught, it will atrophy the fast way if it is not reinforced, kindled, and used? Don't they know that the suggested "revisiting of topics" requires putting stuff that had been recently taught on the shelf where it will shrivel up? Don't they know that the constant "reteaching" and "relearning" of topics that have gone stale from three months of disuse is so inefficient and impractical that it will lead not to learning but to mere exposure? And don't they know that when the "teaching" becomes reduced to exposure, kids will understandably figure out that they are not expected to learn and that they'll develop adaptive attitudes like, "We're doing that ugly geometry again, but don't worry. It'll soon go away and we won't see it for a long time"? Apparently not, even though it would take very little time working in a classroom to document all of the above.

War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse by Siegfried Engelmann, p. 108

Early in the book he has this to say about practice:

In addition to having a good program, we have a great deal of knowledge about how kids learn and how to teach well. We know how much practice it takes for the kids to master the various details of our sequence. Oddly enough, the amount of practice that we've had to provide to meet our goal is possibly five times the amount provided in other published programs that teach the same subject. We have also learned thast kids tend to "lose" information if we don't keep it "alive" in the program." This observation had led us to activities that require kids to use all the important skills and concepts they've been taught.

War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse by Siegfried Engelmann, p. 17

Saxon Math is built on this principle. At the end of the year students are still practicing skills and procedures they learned at the beginning of the year.

Saxon gets content into long-term memory.

I've decided to use a variant of the Saxon "recursive" structure with C. & Singapore Math.^*

We're going straight through the Primary Mathematics textbook & workbook starting with 3A. But I'm going to assign daily problems from the Intensive Practice book out of sequence, making them last throughout the entire year.


^* The principal in Linda Perlstein's new book Tested describes Saxon this way (will post the passage at some point). I like it.


overlearning overrated?
how long does learning last?
shuffling math problems is good
Saxon rules
Ken's interval
same time, next year
remembering foreign language vocabulary