Wednesday, March 4, 2009

RECENT NEWS: LEARNING FROM SUCCESS

This is a piece I did last year for The Reading Clinic's newsletter. I decided to post it on my blog as it directly connects to a recent post at lars4learning.com.

It seems obvious that success motivates children. However, most of us have been frustrated by a child who does not learn from her mistakes. If only she tried to understand, we say. Can't she see she just made the same mistake a minute ago?

A recent study at Leiden University in the Netherlands offers an intriguing glimpse into young children's seeming inability to learn from mistakes. The study, summarized in Science Daily, used fMRIs to see how the brains of eight-year-olds, twelve-year-olds and adults responded to positive and negative feedback when learning a computer task. Surprisingly, there were great differences. Eight-year-olds reacted far more strongly to positive feedback, adults to negative feedback, while twelve-year-olds reacted to both types of feedback.

Why? While not ready to list definite causes, Dr. Eveline Crone, the developmental psychologist leading the study, had an intriguing hypothesis:

"The information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the information that you have done something well. Learning from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself what precisely went wrong and how it was possible."

If children have not reached a developmental stage where they learn from their mistakes, we have to question error handling that repeatedly points out those mistakes. We have to learn to be more positive in our approach. Here are a few techniques I use.

Look for what is right, not what is wrong.
For example, if a child is reading the word "foul," and says "fool," you could tell him that he was right about the first and last sounds in the word, and then ask what the middle sound would be. If you look hard enough, you can find something that a student is doing correctly.

Analyze success.
Because we care so much about kids, we want to help them see why they are not doing well. But we often forget to examine what's happening when they are doing well. When a child writes a great paragraph or aces a science test, help her to figure out and talk about how she did it. When you praise her work, be concrete and specific, and let her know exactly what was good.

Measure progress, not mastery.
We should keep long-range goals in mind, but we should show children when they advance toward that goal. Charting progress on a bar graph for the number of pages read daily (or any area where you think a child can make advances) is a good way to do this. We have children chart their reading rate, and even reluctant readers like the activity. Encourage children to compete against themselves instead of others. Reward improvement rather than excellence. Everyone can do better.

Using positive reinforcement is a strategy that teachers and parents already employ, and that educators like Rick Lavoie endorse, because they know it works. Now the Leiden University study provides scientific evidence that this strategy is developmentally appropriate for younger children.

RECENT NEWS: READING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

A story from January 31 in Science News concerning American research into the possible negative effects of digital technology on critical thinking and analysis piggybacks nicely onto my last Recent News piece on a Norwegian study that reached nearly the same conclusions.

In Norway, Anne Mangen, a psychologist at the Center for Reading Research at the University of Stavanger, said "there is generally little reflection around digital teaching material" and that, "The whole field is characterized by an easy acceptance...."

Discussing work done in our country, Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, states, "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning."

Both of these experts are quick to emphasize that they are not proscribing the use of digital media. "By using more visual media, students will process information better," Greenfield notes.

A study at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee confirms this. When a Psych 101 course replaced traditional lecture format with an on-line curriculum, student achievement improved.

What both Mangen and Greenfield are advocating is more encouragement of what we might call "analog" reading, and recognition of the advantages and disadvantages of different media.

"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia," Mangen notes, "are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else."

As someone who spends way too much time on the internet, I can identify.

Greenfield points out that "visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination." Furthermore, she says, "Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary. Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Children, it appears, need text on the printed page as well as the screen. A three-year-old can recognize the difference between the two and draw a different sort of pleasure from a book than from the family computer.

This is an issue that Maryanne Wolf addresses in her fabulous and very readable book, Proust and the Squid. Wolf will be speaking about this very subject at an International Dyslexia Association event in Palo Alto on March 14. Her lecture is titled "The Evolving Reading Brain and the Digital Age: A Tale of Caution and Optimism for Parents and Teachers."