This week in the science of learning, April 28, 2024
Boaler’s new math, more college homework, student journalism and more— April 28, 2024
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Research pieces: Bite-sized for the weekend
* My holy what? piece of research for the week is from Matt Yglesias’ “Slow Boring” newsletter, where he highlights several studies showing that many college students—mostly ones not in STEM fields—spend less than three hours per week on schoolwork. Student grades have been inflated beyond recognition, too. Yglesias theorizes that it’s market forces pushing for easier university classes, but I see similar threads in some parts of k-12, too.
“Lack of learning is associated with lack of time spent on schoolwork, and Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have shown that over the decades, students have been spending less and less time on studying — “full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week,” he wrote.
And this:
“People pay to attend group exercise classes where the whole purpose is for the instructor to challenge the students and push them to work harder than they normally would. Students would learn more if they worked harder, and they would work harder if the grading were tougher, and ‘I would like my child to learn a lot in school’ isn’t a particularly outlandish idea.”
Yglesias should maybe spend some time in k-12!
* For a variety of reasons, a lot of education’s hottest debates simply don’t have enough research to support either “side,” Hechinger research reporter Jill Barshay writes this week in this very good review of Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler’s new book, Math-ish—but that doesn’t stop a lot of education gurus from doing it.
“From my perch as a journalist who covers education research, I see that Boaler has a tendency to overstate the implications of a narrow study. Sometimes she cites a theory that’s been written about in an academic journal but hasn’t been proven and labels it research. While technically true – most academic writing falls under the broad category of research – that’s not the same as evidence from a well-designed classroom experiment. And she tends not to factor in evidence that runs counter to her views or adjust her views as new studies arise. Some of her numerical claims seem grandiose. For example, she says one of her 18-lesson summer courses raised achievement by 2.8 years,” Barshay wrote.
And…
“The citation controversy reflects bigger issues with the state of education research. It’s often not as precise as the hard sciences or even social sciences like economics. Academic experts are prone to make wide, sweeping statements. And there are too few studies in real classrooms or randomized controlled trials that could settle some of the big debates… More replication studies could improve the quality of evidence for math instruction. We can’t know which teaching methods are most effective unless the method can be reproduced in different settings with different students.”
Makes it hard for reporters trying to cover these studies, too—which is why Barshay told me recently that parents, for example, should pay attention to research findings supported by a lot of studies, where conclusions are all headed in the same direction. There’s also a great podcast with education researcher Ben Solomon on how to identify experimental studies where methods were tested on actual kids versus observational or theoretical studies. He also explains how to identify “red flags” in research—it’s really worth a listen.
Culture talk:
* I don’t know if this is politically correct but I listened to a Huberman Lab podcast this week featuring productivity bro Cal Newport, because my sister, Annie, alerted me that Newport spent quite a few minutes talking about the science of learning—specifically, how he became a mathematician who gets As back in the 90s (when classes were harder, presumably!).
It’s worth a listen, even if to hear about a book he wrote way back in 2007 called How to Become a Straught-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less.
I bought a copy of the book—I couldn’t help myself—which contains ideas on how to manage your time and how to set goals, but also a *lot* of we would now call “evidence-based practices” for studying, like using flashcards for retrieval practice—even though he says all he did to get this information was just interview the most successful students at a bunch of colleges—not from research studies—which I thought was interesting. One thing that keeps coming up in the book is how these techniques may feel counterintuitive, which is something others, like Dan Willingham, have also highlighted. Learners are often unsure of the situations where they learn the most, etc.
(Find the science of learning out in the culture? Drop me a line and I’ll include it here!)
This week at The Bell Ringer:
* The rest of the story: This week I spoke with journalist and Kidizenship founder Amanda Little about her quest to make student journalism more popular and accessible. We talked about how the skills of journalism, like asking questions and listening, researching and building background knowledge—not to mention learning how to write simply and succinctly—are important academic *and* civic skills that we don’t seem to talk too much about.
But the interview for the Friday newsletter was too long! So here’s an extra piece for you to enjoy this Sunday—about how actively making the news fosters critical media literacy skills. I’d love to see some research on how student journalists fare on media literacy tests:
The Bell Ringer: I wrote a little book on civics, about how to teach it and what research says about teaching civics—I wrote an entire chapter on misinformation, and there's all this research and curriculum designed to help kids spot misinformation—and I just can't help but think that doing journalism and making the news would be the best curriculum to teach about misinformation. Because as you're reporting your story, you're faced with all these questions. Like you were saying before, you have to ask yourself, what is the truth?
Amanda Little: Is there any better way to learn about misinformation and media literacy then by just learning what it takes to tell stories responsibly? To research and fact-check and learn why that's difficult, and what are primary sources? What is the process of confirming those facts, and what are reliable sources and unreliable sources? It’s very hard to learn in textbook form, it's much easier to learn by doing.
The Bell Ringer: Should journalism be a part of English class? What if every student had to do a little journalism, go out and do a little reporting? Because it's going to teach you several things at once.
Amanda Little: That's exactly right. And it's funny you say that, because I am in the English department at Vanderbilt, and I am a very unusual faculty member. Vanderbilt does not have a journalism program, though we do have journalism courses scattered across a number of different departments. Even in high schools, a number of the faculty advisors, one who is on our board and who I work with very closely, he teaches journalism, he teaches AP English and he runs their journalism program. But a number of the faculty advisors come from AP history, or teach government and civics. It's not always the English teachers who are doing this work of advising journalists.
To my mind, journalism is really important to develop writing skills, but it's also important for learning about political science and socio-emotional development. So where does this live? What's the right home for student journalism? And I think a lot of schools are trying to figure that out.
One thing I do know is that most of the schools that I have researched, where I have spoken with the faculty advisors, it's treated as an elective. And there's just not a lot of academic incentive to take the course. There's not a lot of innovation in the programming, either.
Kids don't understand the power of journalism, they don't understand why it matters. And there's no social cachet. I do think that if we positioned it more clearly, in, let's say English and writing curricula as a really important form of Applied Learning, right?
And understanding media literacy, for example. Or, for that matter, understanding local and national politics and writing, you know, coherently about it. What better way to understand our political landscape, or what's happening in the Supreme Court right now, than writing an explainer on the power and purpose of the Supreme Court? That is a great way to learn.