Teachers ask. Parents ask.
"Why don't students like school?"
Many students ask that question, too, as they struggle to stay attentive in class, while waiting for the bell to ring so they can pay attention to the things that really interest them.
"If you ask 100 high school students if they like to learn new things, almost all of them will tell you they like to learn," said Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist. "But if you ask those same students if they like school, many of them will tell you they don't."
He addresses these issues in a new book, "Why Don't Students like School?," in which he explains how the mind works - and what it means for the classroom.
"The mind is actually designed to avoid thinking," Willingham said. "Thinking is a slow process; it's effortful and even uncertain. People naturally want to avoid that process, and instead rely on memory, the things we already know how to do and are successful at."
Willingham uses cooking as an example.
"If you want to make spaghetti sauce, you could go onto the Internet and search out new recipes. You could go through all your cookbooks. And if you are really into cooking, you might do exactly that. But most people will just make the sauce the way they always make it, because they already know how. And so it's a lot easier that way."
Which is one of the reasons students don't like school. They are forced to think, to accept new challenges, to learn new things, and therefore do the thing their mind most wants to avoid - thinking.
But this is true only up to a point. People also are curious.
"People actually enjoy thinking - when it is at a level that is not too simple, and not excessively difficult," Willingham said. "People like to be challenged. That's why we play games, it's why we read books, why we do many of the things we do. So there's a sweet spot, a level where learning is neither too simplistic to be interesting, nor too difficult to be enjoyable. This is the spot that teachers are always trying to find for their students in the classroom."
This is where creative teaching comes in, using a combination of storytelling that evokes emotion and thought, and exercises that put lessons into context and that build upon previous learning. It's also sustained hard work, Willingham said, that creates thinking skills dependent upon factual knowledge.
"We want to create learning experiences that last," he said.
Willingham spent about 15 years of his career as a research cognitive scientist, conducting studies under laboratory conditions. Then he started talking to teachers' groups and discovered that what he and other researchers had discovered in the lab was of great interest to teachers in the field.
In 2002 he began writing a column, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist," for American Educator, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Teachers have been asking ever since.
Willingham also writes a blog for teachers, and now has authored his book, specifically for teachers and parents of home-schooled children.
One question teachers keep asking is how to work with students' different "learning styles." They don't really exist, Willingham said.
"There are different abilities, but really, we all learn the same way," he said. "It's not left brain versus right brain, or visual or auditory or kinesthetic. We learn using a combination of skills, and we are all more similar in our learning styles than different."
And students naturally learn better in the areas or disciplines where their abilities lie. The key for teachers, and for students, is to find that "sweet spot," where learning is the wonderful challenge that inspires us to do more than simply make sauce the same way we've always made it.
Understanding Why Students Don't Like School
Why Students Don't Like School
"Why don't students like school?"
Many students ask that question, too, as they struggle to stay attentive in class, while waiting for the bell to ring so they can pay attention to the things that really interest them.
"If you ask 100 high school students if they like to learn new things, almost all of them will tell you they like to learn," said Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist. "But if you ask those same students if they like school, many of them will tell you they don't."
He addresses these issues in a new book, "Why Don't Students like School?," in which he explains how the mind works - and what it means for the classroom.
"The mind is actually designed to avoid thinking," Willingham said. "Thinking is a slow process; it's effortful and even uncertain. People naturally want to avoid that process, and instead rely on memory, the things we already know how to do and are successful at."
Willingham uses cooking as an example.
"If you want to make spaghetti sauce, you could go onto the Internet and search out new recipes. You could go through all your cookbooks. And if you are really into cooking, you might do exactly that. But most people will just make the sauce the way they always make it, because they already know how. And so it's a lot easier that way."
Which is one of the reasons students don't like school. They are forced to think, to accept new challenges, to learn new things, and therefore do the thing their mind most wants to avoid - thinking.
But this is true only up to a point. People also are curious.
"People actually enjoy thinking - when it is at a level that is not too simple, and not excessively difficult," Willingham said. "People like to be challenged. That's why we play games, it's why we read books, why we do many of the things we do. So there's a sweet spot, a level where learning is neither too simplistic to be interesting, nor too difficult to be enjoyable. This is the spot that teachers are always trying to find for their students in the classroom."
This is where creative teaching comes in, using a combination of storytelling that evokes emotion and thought, and exercises that put lessons into context and that build upon previous learning. It's also sustained hard work, Willingham said, that creates thinking skills dependent upon factual knowledge.
"We want to create learning experiences that last," he said.
Willingham spent about 15 years of his career as a research cognitive scientist, conducting studies under laboratory conditions. Then he started talking to teachers' groups and discovered that what he and other researchers had discovered in the lab was of great interest to teachers in the field.
In 2002 he began writing a column, "Ask the Cognitive Scientist," for American Educator, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Teachers have been asking ever since.
Willingham also writes a blog for teachers, and now has authored his book, specifically for teachers and parents of home-schooled children.
One question teachers keep asking is how to work with students' different "learning styles." They don't really exist, Willingham said.
"There are different abilities, but really, we all learn the same way," he said. "It's not left brain versus right brain, or visual or auditory or kinesthetic. We learn using a combination of skills, and we are all more similar in our learning styles than different."
And students naturally learn better in the areas or disciplines where their abilities lie. The key for teachers, and for students, is to find that "sweet spot," where learning is the wonderful challenge that inspires us to do more than simply make sauce the same way we've always made it.
Free Teaching Guides on Media Literacy
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and curriculum specialists Young Minds Inspired have distributed "Media Literacy: Reading between the Frames," a free teaching resource guide to more than 18,500 high schools across the United States. Reaching approximately 2.4 million students, the guide was inspired by the Academy's Media Literacy Program, which twice a year brings up to 400 Los Angeles Unified School District high school students to the Samuel Goldwyn Theater for a three-day seminar. This is the 10th consecutive year the Academy has produced a teaching guide.
Geared for students in English, language arts, visual arts and communication classes, the guide is designed to encourage critical thinking, expand knowledge of filmmaking and increase overall interest in film and its cultural influence.
The teaching guide features a special supplemental DVD hosted by Jason Reitman, the Academy Award(r)-nominated director of "Juno." The DVD includes selected scenes from such feature films as "Rebel without a Cause," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Philadelphia," "The Fast and the Furious" and "Real Women Have Curves." Students are asked to contemplate numerous questions as they watch the DVD, including "What is the director showing us in each shot?," "How are the shots edited together and why?" and "How is time being manipulated and why?" The DVD is produced by the Academy and Acme Filmworks.
Each teaching guide also includes a teacher's guide, activity worksheets in English and Spanish, resource lists and take-home activities.
The Academy will bring the "Media Literacy" guides to life for LAUSD students from Chatsworth, El Camino, Grant, Roosevelt and Westchester high schools on Thursday, April 23. Students will watch "Role Models" (2008) and join in a post-screening panel discussion featuring the some of the film's cast and crew (subject to availability). This will be the final day of the spring seminar (the first two days were held in March).
For additional information about the program and to download about previous years' teaching guides (animation, art direction, cinematography, documentaries, film editing, makeup, screenwriting, sound and music, visual effects) visit the Academy's Web site at http://www.oscars.org/education-outreach.
Study Suggests Link Between Health Literacy, Happiness
A new University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study published in the advanced online edition of the journal Social Indicators Research suggests a link between the ease with which older adults can access and understand health information and their happiness.
In the study, researchers surveyed 383 older adults in Alabama ages 50 and up who were under the care of primary care physicians. Those surveyed were asked if they could read and answer questions on medical forms unassisted and to rate their level of happiness.
The study found that those with lower levels of health literacy - those who reported having the most problems reading and understanding medical forms - were more than twice as likely to report being unhappy regardless of health and socioeconomic status.
The study suggests that improving older patients' ability to obtain health information might be an important element in programs aimed at improving wellness and well-being among older adult patients, say the study's lead author, UAB Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Economics Erik Angner, Ph.D., and the principal investigator, UAB Professor Jeroan J. Allison, M.D., of the Division of Preventative Medicine.
Health literacy is the degree to which a person can find and understand basic health information or access health services. About half of all Americans, some 90 million, have problems understanding and using health information, according to a 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine, "Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion." Poor health literacy makes it harder for patients to follow directions on medications or provide accurate medical histories.
An explanation for the study results may have to do with a sense of control, said Angner. That sense, which has been found to be associated with higher happiness scores in other studies, might be undermined by inadequate health literacy.
The study was funded in part by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics cooperative agreement.
About UAB
The UAB School of Arts and Humanities offers degrees in philosophy, foreign languages, communication studies and English. Its Department of Philosophy prepares students for careers in health care, law, counseling and many other fields. The UAB Division of Preventative Medicine is dedicated to medicine and the health of the public through research, teaching and the dissemination and translation of knowledge for improved health outcomes.
Simple Writing Assignment Improves Minority Student Grades
In a follow-up to a 2006 study, a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher and his colleagues found that an in-class writing assignment designed to reinforce students' sense of identity and personal integrity increased the grade-point averages of African-American middle school students over a two-year period, and reduced the rate at which these students were held back or placed in remediation.
The results suggest that targeted psychological interventions on a wider scale could help narrow the racial achievement gap among U.S. students, one of the most pressing and persistent domestic issues in our country, according to Associate Professor Geoffrey Cohen of CU-Boulder's psychology department and his fellow principal investigators Julio Garcia and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns of Columbia University.
The follow-up study appears in the April 16 issue of the journal Science. Nancy Apfel and Patricia Brzustoski of Yale University were co-authors on the study.
"In our original study we uncovered evidence that this self-affirming intervention improved the performance of African-Americans in a single academic term," Cohen said. "Now we have evidence that its effects persist over the two years of children's tenure in middle school."
The study also suggests that "intervening" early in students' middle school years can have long-lasting benefits by undermining a recurring cycle of increasingly poor performance in school.
Over the two years of the 2006-08 study, the grade-point average of African-Americans was, on average, raised by .24 grade points. Low-achieving African Americans benefited most from the intervention, with their GPAs increasing by an average of .41 points on a four-point scale. The assignment had no impact on white students' grades.
"Our intervention is based on the idea that ethnic minority students experience, on average, higher levels of stress in the classroom because they are concerned that if they perform poorly on a test or in a class this will confirm, in the eyes of others, the negative stereotype about their group's intelligence ability," Cohen said.
Past research has found that school settings in general are stressful to many students regardless of race. However, many African-American students may experience chronic stress in school stemming from negative stereotypes portraying them as less intelligent than their peers, according to Cohen. This in turn leads to decreased academic performance.
The study involved three experiments in which seventh graders from middle-class and lower middle-class families were given a series of structured writing assignments throughout the year. They were asked to choose one or two values that were important to them and then write about why they cherished the values. A control group was asked to write about values that others might hold or other neutral topics. A total of 416 students participated, divided in roughly equal numbers by race.
"This exercise, called a self-affirmation, allows a student to reaffirm that he or she is a good and competent person," Cohen said. "This helps reduce stress by allowing the student to think about all the things that matter to them, for example their family or their religion. It makes the possibility of failure less dire."
The study also suggests that how students perform during the school year is strongly correlated to how they perform during the first few weeks of that year. If a student starts off the year feeling more stress due to negative stereotypes, and then performs poorly during the first few weeks of school, this can establish a downward cycle of increasing stress and poor performance that is hard to break, said Cohen.
"Our study shows that early intervention seems to interrupt this downward trend in academic performance," he said.
Cohen and his co-authors also measured the students' sense of success at the beginning of the school year and again at the end. They found that for low-performing African-American students there is a drop in their sense of adequacy in school over the course of the school year, but for students who participated in the exercise, and for white students, their sense of success remained constant over time.
"This suggests that early failure can have a disproportionate effect on the negatively stereotyped group," Cohen said. "The first few weeks of middle school can have a negative effect on a child's self-concept that seems surprisingly persistent. We found that if you can buffer people against this you can potentially have long-term benefits."
Cohen said he plans to continue studying similar psychological interventions on other groups of students to see if similar positive results can be generated and to zero in on the mechanisms underlying these effects.
"In a society where economic success depends heavily on scholastic achievement, even a slight narrowing of the achievement gap would be consequential," Cohen said. "This is especially true for low-achieving students, given the societal, institutional and personal costs of academic failure."
Source: University of Colorado at Boulder
$5,000 for You and Your Library
Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and a leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses, invites library fans to create a one-minute video segment to promote their library and explain how it brings "power to the users" in their community or school as part of its third annual YouTube video contest launched in April. Entries are due on June 1, 2009.
$5,000 for You and Your Library
The winning entry will be awarded $2,500 and an additional $2,500 will be presented to the winner's favorite library. Results will be announced at this year's American Library Association's Annual Conference in Chicago, July 9 -15, 2009. Finalist videos will be available for viewing at Gale's booth.
This year's contest, "Power to the User" Ad Madness, runs from April 12th to June 1, 2009. A panel of judges will determine the top five finalists and the winner based on the creativity of the video, the originality of the sentiment and its connection to the "Power to the User" theme. The videos will be featured on www.gale.com/librareo . Video entries should be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer than 60 seconds in length. Entrants must load their videos to the Librareo group on YouTube (www.youtube.com/group/LIBRAREO) before midnight EST on June 1, 2009. Participants may submit as many videos as desired, provided each entry is entirely original. All entries must comply with the complete contest rules which can be viewed, along with video samples, at www.gale.com/librareo.
Kids Count: Teaching Children about Money
In today's economic environment teaching kids about money, financial management and financial literacy has never been more important. More people will file for bankruptcy this year than will graduate college and U.S. consumers owe more than $970 billion in total debt and almost $9,000 per household in credit card debt.
A national survey of U.S. teens found that only 35 percent reported learning money management in school and more than 40 percent of parents believe that schools should be doing more to educate kids about money. Research conducted by Networks Financial Institute at Indiana State University indicates that 80 percent of K-12 teachers think it is important to teach financial literacy.
To help teach children about money and financial management, Networks Financial Institute at Indiana State University has developed the Kids Count curriculum to provide teachers with online access to lesson plans mapped to standards in all 50 states for grades three thru five. Teachers simply enter the appropriate grade level and the state they teach in. The My Money Counts board game provides additional opportunities for teachers to integrate financial literacy into the classroom.
Kids Count provides financial management and financial literacy activities that relate to the age and experiences of third through fifth-grade students. The curriculum offers teachers a time-saving resource that combines reading, social studies and economics with money management skills delivered in an integrated curriculum. The Kids Count curriculum allows students to evaluate, create analyze and apply each lesson.
To learn more about the Kids Count curriculum from Networks Financial Institute at Indiana State University watch this accompanying video: http://www.yourupdate.tv/moneyandfinance/kids_count.html or go to: http://www.nfikidscount.org/
