Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Students have nothing to fear (about math) but fear itself, according to a new study published in Cerebral Cortex. Math-anxious students who do well with math questions used a part of the brain associated with cognitive control, focus, and regulating negative emotions to control their stress. Anxious students can be taught to do this, researchers say.
Nine percent of school-age children in America have attention deficit disorder, according to a health professional. Why so many? Pediatrician Lawrence Diller blames a growing willingness to medicalize childhood misbehavior. Uncertain about discipline and worried too much about self-esteem, parents turn to professionals, who are quick to prescribe drugs for what may be “minor differences in children’s behavior or performance.”
Children are under more stress at school, Diller adds.
. . . more than 20 years ago kindergartners only had to sing the ABCs and play “ring around the rosie.” Now, they are expected to read and do simple math before the start of first grade.
When both parents are working, children spend a long day trying to meet the “behavioral demands” of structured preschool and after-school programs, he writes. “Parents are tired, too, when they finally get their kids at the end of the day.”
Via I Speak of Dreams.
South Korea is enforcing a cram-school curfew, writes Time’s Amanda Ripley, who embeds with government inspectors on a hagwon raid. Tutoring sessions are supposed to end by 10 pm.
South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity.
In 2010, 74 percent of students received private after-school instruction at an average cost of $2,600 per year. There are more tutors than teachers in South Korea.
South Korean students are the best in the world on international reading and math tests. (Mellow Finland does well too.)
But the country’s leaders worry that unless its rigid, hierarchical system starts to nurture more innovation, economic growth will stall – and fertility rates will continue to decline as families feel the pressure of paying for all that tutoring. “You Americans see a bright side of the Korean system,” Education Minister Lee Ju-ho tells me, “but Koreans are not happy with it.”
South Korean students are encouraged to stay up late studying and sleep in class, Ripley writes. “The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student.”
When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable.
Success in South Korea requires winning a spot in a top university. To reduce the incentives to cram, “500 admissions officers have been appointed to the country’s universities, to judge applicants not only on their test scores and grades but also other abilities,” Ripley writes.
Still hagwons are responding to the curfew by putting lessons online so students can study late at home. Other hagwons claim to be “self-study” libraries to evade the 10 pm curfew. Accompanying government inspectors, Ripley sees 40 teenagers sitting in carrels in “a warren of small study rooms with low ceilings and fluorescent lights.” The air is stale. “It is a disturbing scene, sort of like a sweatshop for children’s brains,” she writes.
I was a bit puzzled when I read the GothamSchools “remainder”: “Researchers in Houston are asking whether students can give teachers post-traumatic stress.” Post-traumatic stress? Is the study investigating whether teachers have bouts of depression, nightmares, etc. after they have stopped teaching?
I followed the link to the Edweek blog by Sarah Sparks, which bears the headline, “Can a Class of 7th Graders Give Teachers Post-traumatic Stress?” But the article itself made it seem as though this were a study of teacher stress, not post-traumatic stress. (Sometimes the headlines are written by someone other than the blog’s author.)
In diligent Internet-research style, I followed the Edweek link to the description of the study itself. There was no mention of post-traumatic stress at all, only stress.
So, what is this study about?
The study, to be conducted by researchers at the University of Houston, consists, at least in part, of a “prospective multi-method, multi-time scale investigation of the proposed mediational chain (i.e., stressors lead to teacher stress response which lead to teacher work and health stress outcomes which lead to teacher effectiveness which lead to student behavioral and academic outcomes).” It will follow 160 seventh- and eighth-grade math, science, or social studies teachers over three years.
The information gathered and analyzed during this project may be used “to guide future development of interventions to mitigate teacher stress and consequently improve teacher effectiveness and student behavior and learning.”
It’s pretty well known that teaching middle school is highly challenging, if not stressful from a medical perspective. (Granted, this depends a great deal on the school.) Moreover, it’s well known that certain kinds or levels of stress can affect the health. (A degree of stress can be a good thing.) So, what will the study uncover that is not well known or obvious? It seems that the researchers are most interested in the possible link between teacher stress and student outcomes (behavior and performance).
Because, you see, if teacher stress were bringing student performance down, then of course something would have to be done about that, and funds might appear. If teacher stress were not showing adverse effects on student performance, then it would be harder to convince funders and policymakers that any sort of intervention was needed.
My suspicion is that the findings will be mixed. Sometimes the teachers with the brightest outer face are the ones with the most stress. They may be delivering wonderful lessons and bringing their students to great heights–but they put intense pressure on themselves not to show their fatigue and bad moods in the classroom. Until they up and quit, they may seem to be doing fine.
Other teachers may let off a lot of steam in the classroom. They may seem to be under more stress than the others, but a medical test might show otherwise.
What if the study could not demonstrate a link between teacher stress and student outcomes? Or what if it correlated positively with student achievement? Or what if it were impossible to separate correlation from causation?
Stress (beyond a certain point) is a serious enough problem that it should be tackled for its own sake. A link between teacher stress and student outcomes may exist, but my guess is that it will be weak. We shall see.
I do hope that the study will consider curriculum, because it is much more stressful to teach without a curriculum (or with a bad one) than to teach with a good one. Some middle schools are curricular wastelands. I hope that it will also look at the schools’ discipline practices (not just policies). In other words, I hope it will look into the reasons for teacher stress in middle schools. Not all of this is inevitable, and not all of it is due to the kids’ ages.
Asian-American students’ grades slide in their first year of college — unless they live at home — concludes a study at University of California at Irvine, where Asian-American students outnumber whites. White students’ grades dropped slightly, compared to their 12th-grade GPA, while Asians’ grades fell dramatically in both natural and social sciences, according to University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva. From Miller McCune:
. . . when Esther Chang studied 120 white and 395 Asian-American undergraduates at a large public university in California, she found that while the white students’ GPAs averaged 3.21, all the Asian-American groups’ GPAs were significantly lower — 3.04 for East Asian, 2.99 for Southeast Asians and 2.94 for Filipinos.
The Asian-American students studied less, went to the library and to class less than the white students, says Chang. She and Dmitrieva speculate that Asian-American parents’ involvement in their children’s out-of-school activities leaves the kids unprepared to manage their time in college. Dmitrieva’s study supports that hypothesis, since the grades of that Asian-American freshman who still lived at home, or scored well on a test measuring academic perseverance and diligence, didn’t drop any more than those of the white students.
Dorothy Chin, associate research psychologist at UCLA’S Semel Institute, believes further research will show Asian-American students “find a way to self-regulate and bounce back” by senior year. Graduation rates are strong for Asian-American students.
Also on Miller McCune:
What looks like pushy, high-pressure parenting to Westerners is seen as loving by Asian-American children, says Ruth Chao, a University of California, Riverside, psychologist.
Studies have found that parental behavior that feels controlling to North American and German children feels warm and accepting to Japanese and Korean children.
. . . Western cultures value individuality and independence highly, so Western teenagers feel rejected when their parents exert a great deal of control, explains Gisela Tromssdorff of the Technical University in Aachen, Germany. On the other hand, she writes, “Japanese adolescents … feel rejected by their parents when they experience only little control.”
Asian-American children don’t report more stress, anxiety or depression than white children — until they reach college. Asian-American college students have the highest suicide rate of any ethnicity.
I wonder if that’s also true for Asian-American college students who live at home.
Teachers at at a low-performing Rhode Island high school were fired last year, then rehired when they agreed to reforms designed to turn Central Falls High around. But teacher absenteeism is high at the “turnaround” high school, reports the Providence Journal. “More than half of the high school’s 840 students didn’t receive a grade in one or more classes for the first quarter” because they missed so much instruction, reports the Journal.
Since the school year started Sept. 1, there has not been a single day when all of the 88 teachers at Central Falls High School have shown up for work.
On that first day, two teachers called in sick and a third took a personal day.
In addition, several teachers resigned after the start of the school year. Administrators have struggled to hire replacements and substitutes.
Bitterness remains over the mass firing of all the school’s teachers in February, jobs that were eventually won back through a compromise agreement in May. In exchange for their jobs, the teachers agreed to a list of changes administrators said were necessary to turn around the school, which has among the lowest test scores and graduation rates in the state.
Some teachers resent the new requirements, which include tutoring and eating lunch with students each week, attending after-school training sessions and being observed by third-party evaluators.
Fourteen teachers were judged “unsatisfactory” by outside evaluators out of 71 who were observed.
Student absenteeism also is a problem at Central Falls High. Students and teachers complain that the school is disorderly and dangerous.
Officials blame the union contract, which gives teachers 15 paid sick days and two personal days a year: Teachers can accumulate up to 185 sick days. Teachers with six years on the job are “entitled to 40 days of extended sick leave at full pay,” which goes up to 50 days after 15 years of service. Six veteran teachers are out on stress-related medical leave; they’ve been replaced by long-term substitutes.
Teacher absenteeism has gotten worse each month, reports the Journal. In recent weeks, an average of 19 teachers a day out of 88 positions have been absent.
Nationwide, 5.3 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, writes Walt Gardner in his Ed Week blog. Stress pushes up the absentee rate.
Race To Nowhere, a new movie on stressed students, is a hit with affluent parents, reports the New York Times.
The film portrays the pressures when schools pile on hours of homework and coaches turn sports into year-round obligations. Left somewhat unexamined is the role of parents whose high expectations contribute the most pressure of all.
“Everyone expects us to be superheroes,” one high school senior in the film says.
. . . Vicki Abeles, the middle-aged mother and first-time filmmaker who made “Race to Nowhere,” picked up a camera when a doctor said that her then-12-year-old daughter’s stomachaches were being caused by stress from school.
Stress is a problem for the minority of students who want to qualify for highly selective colleges. They’re not racing to nowhere. They’re racing to the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. They’re told they need high grades in honors and Advanced Placement classes and high test scores and extracurriculars and community service to get into their dream college. And, often, that’s true.
But who’s pushing students to aspire to very competitive colleges? Who’s paying for private-school tuition or a mortgage in a suburb with high-scoring schools? Who’d yell bloody murder if their children’s school eased off on homework and tests, canceled Advanced Placement classes and trimmed extracurriculars and sports teams? Mom and Dad, look in the mirror.
Frequent tests are no big deal for young children in China, writes Elizabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times. Her children felt challenged, not stressed, by tests when they were in elementary school at the International School of Beijing.
No Child Left Behind required end-of-the year tests to hold schools accountable for students’ achievement. Race to the Top encourages a stream of “formative” tests to help students and their teachers track their progress throughout the year.
Some education experts hail the change as a step forward from the ideological dark ages. “Research has long shown that more frequent testing is beneficial to kids, but educators have resisted this finding,” said Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tests should be age appropriate and should not determine a student’s future based on performance on a single day, like China’s high-stakes, high-stress university entrance exams.
But Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he said. “Kids don’t get self-esteem by people just telling them they are wonderful.”
In Beijing, her children struggled in some subjects and grades.
But let’s face it, life is filled with all kinds of tests — some you ace and some you flunk — so at some point you have to get used to it.
. . . When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge. It is a testament to the International School of Beijing — or to the malleability of childhood memory — that Andrew now says he did not realize that he was being tested.
When the family moved back to New York City, her children, then 9 and 11, “started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical.” They missed the feedback.
Primed with Beijing test-taking experience, they each soon tested into New York City’s academic public schools — where they have had tests aplenty and (probably not surprisingly) a high proportion of Asian classmates.
Classroom tests are very different from high-stakes, end-of-the year testing, responds Robert Pondiscio on Core Knowledge blog.
Likewise there is a difference between studying and mastering a body of material for, say, a biology or geometry test, and a state reading test. There is no body of knowledge to study with a reading test. Test-taking skills and reading strategies that might provide a short-term boost are deleterious in the long run. Countless hours of test prep and strategy sessions are educationally unproductive. And it would be naive in the extreme to suggest high-stakes tests are not materially different than a workaday math quiz in the anxiety they produce.
Virtually all teachers assess students, formally and informally, all the time, Pondiscio writes. Many children enjoy the competition of things like “mad minute” math drills. Even for those who don’t, “classroom tests focus the mind and efforts of students to master material.”
Unfortunately, none of these things are true of high stakes reading and math tests. They don’t drive instruction because months go by before you get the results. No bragging rights or competitive juices are fired by them. And reading tests are impossible to study for since they are constructed on a mistaken notion of reading as a transferable skill. It’s possible to be a firm believer in testing – even high stakes testing – yet have misgivings about their impact on education.
Asians think test scores reflect effort, while Americans believe scores show ability, notes Heidi Grant Halvorson on Psychology Today.
If we want our children to see tests as informative and challenging, we need to emphasize the importance of effort, persistence, and strategy use over ability. We need to explain to them how tests can help them see what they need to improve, and express confidence that they will improve if they don’t give up.
The anti-testing ethos is expressed in a new movie, Race to Nowhere, which argues students are under too much pressure to perform.
What everyone knows about learning ain’t necessarily so, reports the New York Times.
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
Much advice on study habits is wrong, researchers say. For example, studying in the same place every day is less effective than studying the same material in different environments. “Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.”
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work.
Cramming can help students pass a test, but students remember much more when they space their study periods.
It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.
Testing is a “tool of learning” cognitive scientists say. Retrieving an idea “seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.” Students who study the material once and take a practice test remember much more than students who studied the material in two sessions.
If the test is stressful, that’s all the better. “The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget.”
Kindergarten is the new first grade, says an education professor quoted by the Chicago Trib.
Kindergarten is the new second grade, writes Richard Whitmire on Why Boys Fail.
Let’s just say kindergartners are doing more reading, writing and ‘rithmetic than in the past. Some argue children will learn more if they spend more time in free play.
Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Alliance for Childhood, points to a pivotal — and seemingly counterintuitive — German study that found that kids who had attended play-based kindergartens actually did better in reading and math at age 10 than kids who had attended academic kindergartens.
“I think the child’s innate interest in learning things gets suppressed and basically atrophies” in academic kindergarten, Miller said.
“It starts this process of burnout where they don’t learn to love learning and they don’t really enjoy school. School becomes a chore.”
Disadvantaged children need more than playtime, others say.
“If you want children to know how to read, you don’t work on their social skills” in a play-based kindergarten, said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C.
“That’s not the most effective way,” Loveless said. “The most effective way is to teach them reading-related cognitive tasks like identifying letters, knowing sounds, basic vocabulary. I think even an advantaged child who attends a play-based kindergarten pays some sort of price because that is a portion of the day that could be going for cognitive development but isn’t.”
According to Loveless, much of the research that supports play-based kindergarten is methodologically “weak,” relying on researchers’ potentially biased impressions (“The children appear more engaged.”) as opposed to more specific observations.
He also questions the idea that play and academics are at odds: “That’s a false dichotomy,” he said. Learning can remain playful, he said, even for kids who attend kindergartens with high academic standards.
A public school teacher in a high-poverty area of Chicago, Lake Bailey says some kindergarten students enjoy learning to read, while others aren’t ready.
A “combination of boys being unready to absorb those skills — and schools failing to adjust teaching methods to help them keep up — is creating the gender gaps we see building in college graduation rates,” Whitmire argues.
Is it impossible to enable children to learn at their own pace?
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