I've moved!

Whilst it's been great here, I'm moving on. Find me at my new place here.

That's not quite right... Video games cause violence

*This post has moved and can be read at my new (and better) blog here*

Collection of criticisms of Adam Perkins' 'The Welfare Trait'

*This post has moved and can be read at my new (and better) blog here*

That's not quite right... Stereotype threat

*This post has moved and can be read at my new (and better) blog here*

How biased are you? The role of intelligence in protecting you from thinking biases.

*This post has moved and can be read at my new (and better) blog here*

That's not quite right... The benefits of single-sex schooling

*This post has moved and can be read at my new (and better) blog here*

How views about willpower affect you and your grades

*This post has moved and can be read at my new (and better) blog here*

So what are the best learning techniques?

*This post has moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

Active Retrieval

*This post has moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

Summarising

*This post has been moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

Distributed practice

*This post has moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

Self explanation

Self-explanation is the technique of explaining to another person (or yourself) what you are doing whilst you work and why e.g. precisely detailing why you are times the numerator by 7 and the denominator by 2 or what happens in a synapse when it fires to transfer a signal from one neuron to the next.

This can be put in to practice by asking yourself or another person to explain exactly what it is they mean when they are writing an essay or what they are doing when solving a maths problem. The prompt questions you can use can be either "content-free" or "content-specific"; they can include no information about the question at hand (e.g. "Explain what the sentence means to you. That is, what new information does the sentence provide for you? And how does it relate to what you already know?") or they can contain relevant information to the question (e.g. "Why do you calculate the total acceptable outcomes by multiplying?").

There have been many different studies examining the efficacy of self explanation and the circumstances in which it works best. Bielaczyc et al. (1995) conducted an experiment on 24 students (a very low number of participants) embarking on a programming course and divided them into two groups; those who received explicit instructions on how to effectively use self explanation and those who just received written instructions. They found (unsurprisingly) that those who were given explicit instructions used self explanation more and this increased use of self explanation was associated with greater performance gains. However this positive result should be taken with a pinch of salt as both conditions were actually told to use self explanation (with the experimental group actually being shown how to do it and the control group just receiving written instructions) and the fact it has a very small number of participants.

Aleven & Koedinger (2002) found that 15 and 16 year old children taking a geometry class scored higher in a subsequent test after using self explanation than the children who (during practice) just provided the correct answer. During practice, the students used a Cognitive Tutor (an interactive computer program that helped students) across all conditions e.g. participants in the self explanation condition explained each step they took and got feedback from the program as to whether it was correct. Whilst they found a positive effect for self explanation, this study also suffered from a low number of participants (41 participants, only 24 of whom actually completed the experiment).

Rittle-Johnson (2006) looked whether self explanation helped students with maths problems they had not encountered yet. There were two variables; instruction vs no instruction and self explanation vs no self explanation. She found that students who were given instructions on how to get the correct answer and those who (after getting the answer) had to explain why one answer was correct and another was incorrect, had greater procedural knowledge (the steps they had to do in order to get the correct answer). There was no interaction between instruction and self explanation. This study had enough participants per condition to have sufficient power (so you can be more confident that the finding isn't a false-positive; Simons, Nelson & Simonsohn, 2011). This study also tested the students after a two week delay and found that participants who used self explanation scored the highest. However the participants were tested immediately after the intervention so practice testing may have had some effect on understading (Dunlowsky et al., 2013)

However, it should be noted that the utility of self explanation is massively diminished when students are provided with explanations of the answer; presumably because students put in little effort before looking at the answers (Schworm & Renkl, 2006, as cited in Dunlowsky et al., 2013).

Overall it would seem  that self explanation can be effective for learning, but more research needs to be done to determine how much of an effect it has and how long its effects last.

References:
Aleven, V. & Koedinger, K. (2002). An effective metacognitive strategy: learning by doing and explaining with a computer-based Cognitive Tutor. Cognitive Science. 26 (1), 147–179.
Bielaczyc, K.; Pirolli, P. & Brown, A.. (1995). Training in Self-Explanation and Self-Regulation Strategies: Investigating the Effects of Knowledge Acquisition Activities on Problem Solving. Cognition and Instruction. 13 (2), 221-252.
Dunlosky, J.; Rawson, K.; Marsh, E.; Nathan, M. & Willingham, D. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 14 (1), 4-58.
Rittle-Johnson, B.. (2006). Promoting Transfer: Effects of Self-Explanation and Direct Instruction. Child Development. 77 (1), 1-15.
Simons, J.; Nelson, L. & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant. Psychological Science. 22 (11), 1359–1366. 
Schworm, S. & Renkl, A. (2006). Computer-supported example based learning: When instructional explanations reduce selfexplanations. Computers & Education, 46 (1), 426–445.

Rereading

*This post has moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

Highlighting

Highlighting is one of the most popular learning techniques practiced by students (just look at a second-hand textbook and chances are it will be filled with highlighted or underlined text). It's easy to see why; it requires almost no effort (beyond reading the text itself) and it makes one feel like you are actively learning (e.g. you choose what to highlight). But is there any evidence to support its efficacy?

Unfortunately for students, not really. Cashen & Leitch (1970) found weak evidence that active highlighting aids memory in relation to answering exam questions about the highlighted material. This was replicated in another study by Leitch & Cashen (1972) but the effect was weaker still.

There have been several studies that found highlighting had no effect on subsequent test scores for children (Rickards & Denner, 1979), students with learning disabilities (Nist & Hogrebe, 1987) and typical students (Todd & Kessler, 1971).

Highlighting may even be detrimental to one's learning as students are prone to over-highlighting so the key information is lost in a sea of highlighting and is less distinctive (so therefore is less likely to be remembered, Lorch, Lorch & Klusewitz; 1995). It may also stop students from engaging in genuinely useful learning activities as they feel like they are effectively learning and so do not need to engage in other forms of testing.

The weight of evidence suggests that highlighting has a minimal (at best) effect on learning and in fact may have a detrimental effect overall.

References:
Cashen, V.M. & Leitch, K.L. (1970). Role of the isolation effect in a formal educational setting. Journal of Educational Neuroscience, 61 (6), 484-486.
Dunlosky, J.; Rawson, K.A.; Marsh, E.J.; Nathan, M.J. & Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14 (1), 4-58.
Leitch, K.L. & Cashen, V.M. (1972). Type of Highlighted Material and Examination Performance. Journal of Educational Neuroscience, 65 (7), 315-316.
Lorch, R.F.; Lorch, E.P.L. & Klusewitz, M.A. (1995). Effects of Typographical Cues on Reading and Recall of Text. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 20 (1), 51-64.
Nist, S.L. & Hogrebe, M.C. (1987). The Role of Underlining and Annotating in Remembering Textual Information. Reading Research and Instruction, 27 (1), 12-25.
 Rickards, J.P. & Denner, P.R. (1979). Depressive effects of underlining and adjunct questions on children's recall of text. Instructional Science, 8 (1), 81-90.
Todd, W.B. & Clemm, C.C. (1971). Influences of response mode, sex, reading ability, and level of difficulty on four measures of recall of meaningful written material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 62 (3), 229-234.

A series on... Learning techniques

I'm going to write a series on various learning techniques where I will present the evidence for their efficacy and judge how useful they are for students. The first post will be on active retrieval.

Overcoming stereotype threat

Stereotype threat is the experience of anxiety when you could potentially confirm a negative stereotype about your social group e.g. women are inferior to men at maths, black people are less intelligent than white people. Steele (1997) found that negative stereotypes can negatively impact a person's ability on specific tests (if they belong to the negatively stereotyped group) as they become worried about fulfilling the stereotype and this anxiety impinges their score. But how can this effect be overcome? There have been a variety of methods which have sought to negate this effect, and I will detail some of them here (successful intervention techniques underlined).

Ambady et al. (2004) either primed the participants gender before they answered a set of questions in the study (by flashing words that were linked to being female e.g. "aunt", "girl") or primed them with neutral stimuli. They were then asked to either individuate themselves by listing positive and negative aspects of themselves and provide examples of these personality traits manifesting themselves or answer comparably formatted questions about lions. They found that the gender primed individuated participants performed as well as the non gender primed participants and better than the gender primed non-individuated participants.

Schmiel et al. (2004) made students focus on their (self-rated) most important characteristics  e.g. being a musician, athlete etc. They were then exposed to the different conditions. In the intrinsic self-affirmation condition, the participants were asked to say why those aspects of their nature made them feel good regardless of socially imposed standards and performance contingencies e.g. "Being a         makes me feel           ". Participants in the extrinsic self-esteem condition were made to think about the contingent nature of their most-valued features (the worth of those traits being dependent on other people's judgement) e.g. "When I am a successful         I receive        ". They found that female participants who affirmed the intrinsic worth of their characteristics performed better than extrinsic self-esteem condition females on a mathematical problem solving task.

Martens et al. (2006) found that female participants who affirmed a valued attribute (by describing how these characteristics were personally important and an instance when they had displayed this trait) performed better than female participants who had not (though the sample of this study was very small).

Good et al. (2008) presented final year calculus students (at a prestigious university) a standardised maths test which was preceded by a paragraph that either emphasised this tests' ability to measure maths proficiency (stereotype threat condition) or one that highlighted that there were no gender differences in score for this test (non-threat condition). They found that female participants in the non-threat condition scored higher than stereotype threat females (they had higher accuracy and answered more questions) and males in both conditions. They found that removing the gender bias before starting a maths test reduced stereotype threat in female participants (though this analysis was only found for Anglo-American participants).

McGlone & Aronson (2006) administering a spatial reasoning test to male and female college students. Prior to this, the researchers presented the participants with one of 3 questionnaires: one that primed gender (by asking questions that made them think about their gender), another that primed the fact they were at a private school (by asking them questions to do with the fact they had earned admittance to a private school), and the third primed the fact they were residents of the Northeastern United States (control group). They found that the the female students who had been primed with the idea they had earned their place at a private school (their "achieved" identities were made salient) performed better than those whose gender had been primed (though this effect wasn't very large).

References:
Ambady, N.; Paik, S.K.; Steele, J.; Owen-Smith, A. & Mitchell, J.P. (2003). Deflecting negative self-relevant stereotype activation: The effects of individuation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 401-408.
Good, C.; Aronson, J. & Harder, J.A. (2008). Problems in the pipeline: Stereotype threat and women's achievement in high-level maths courses. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29 (1), 17-29.
Martens, A.; Johns, M.; Greenberg, J. & Schimel, J. (2006). Combating stereotype threat: The effect of self-affirmation on women's intellectual performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42 (2), 236-243.
McGlone, M.S. & Aronson, J. (2006). Stereotype threat, identity salience, and spatial reasoning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 27 (5), 486-493.
Schmiel, J.; Arndt, J.; Banko, K.M. & Cook, A. (2004). Not all self-affirmations were created equal: The cognitive and social benefits of affirming the intrinsic (versus extrinsic) self. Social Cognition, 22 (1), 75-99.
Steele, C.M. (1997). A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance. American Psychologist, 52 (6), 613-629.

That's not quite right... Learning styles

*This post has moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

That's not quite right... The seductive allure of neuroscience scans

*This article has moved and can be found at my new (and better) blog here*

Myths about the brain no. 7: You can train your brain via games to increase overall intelligence

This is another huge money-making industry based on dubious science. You will probably have seen them advertised ("Luminosity" on various YouTube videos is the one that springs to mind for me) or have at least heard about them. They are generally based on the principle that improving your ability to complete various tasks (usually basic maths problems or spatial navigation tasks) will result in you becoming more intelligent, improving your thinking speed or reasoning ability or any other suitably vague statement. Many of these companies claim to improve working memory, which is a cognitive system that relates to a persons ability to reason with new information and direct your attention towards the goal-relevant information contained in it (Shipstead et al., 2012). It's also been defined as your mental area where you concurrently sort and process information. Working memory has been the focus of many of these companies because of the central role working memory plays in general cognition.

So these companies advertise themselves as being able to help improve your intelligence by improving working memory (via specific tasks, usually a dual n-back test, which is simply where the user has to monitor two streams of info, one visual and one auditory and each time one or both of the streams emits a pre-established target e.g. a bird, then you have to press a button). Now there's no doubt that practicing a task will result in you getting better at it. However, the idea that practicing specific tasks will result in an improvement in a host of other mental faculties has not been shown (as detailed here, here, here and here). There has also been a study detailing why transference doesn't occur. There's also the problem that the study all this research has been based on has some serious methodological flaws in e.g. participants received training on a regular basis (whereas the controls simply went home and did whatever) so the experimental group may have had higher motivation to do well in the study, you can't measure fluid intelligence with one test. Also, when researchers tried to recreate the effect they found no significant effect as a result of training (Redick et al., 2012 and Chooi et al., 2012) which is not good news for the validity of the original study. And to cap it off, a large scale meta-analysis of studies that examined whether training working memory could result in transference of skills found no effect (Melby-Lervag et al., 2013)

So whilst it's nice to think you can increase your intelligence by performing a few tasks for a couple of weeks, it seems very unlikely that this is the case. 

References:
Berkman, E.T.; Kahn, L.E.; & Merchant, J.S. (2014). Training-Induced Changes in Inhibitory Control Network Activity. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34 (1), 149-157.
Chooi, W.T. & Thompson, L.E. (2012). Working memory training does not improve intelligence in healthy young adults. Intelligence, 40 (6), 531-542.
Jaeggi, S.M.; Buschkuehl, M.; Jonides, J.; & Perrig, W.J. (2008). Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105 (19), 6829-6833.
Melby-Lervag, M. & Hulme, C. (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental Psychology, 49 (2), 270-291.
Moody, D.E. (2009). Can intelligence be increased by training on a task of working memory? Intelligence, 37 (4), 327-328.
Redick, T.S.; Shipstead, Z.; Fried, D.E.; Hambrick, D.Z.; Kane, M.J.; & Engle, R.W. (2012). No Evidence of Intelligence Improvement After Working Memory Training: A Randomised, Placebo-Controlled Study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142 (2), 359-379.
Shipstead, Z.; Hicks, K.L.; & Engle, R.W. (2012). Cogmed working memory training: Does the evidence support the claims? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 1, 185-193.
Shipstead, Z.; Redick, T.S.; & Engle, R.W. (2010). Does Working Memory Training Generalise? Psychologica Belgica, 50 (3-4), 245-276.
Shipstead, Z.; Redick, T.S.; & Engle, R.W. (2012). Is Working Memory Training Effective? Psychological Bulletin, 138 (4), 628-654.

Myths about the brain no. 6: Listening to Mozart will make you smarter.

The idea of increasing your IQ by doing the simple act of listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been around since the 1950’s and has grown into a full blow industry, with endless books, CD’s and DVD’s. Despite it being highly lucrative and popular, there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest it is true (surprise surprise).

The scientific genesis of this myth comes from a study in the 1990’s, which found that subjects who had listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata scored higher than those who didn’t. (The study had a very small number of participants and was between subjects, so they can’t even be certain the higher reported scores weren’t due to the “Mozart hearing” group just being more intelligent). This story was taken by the media and blown up to create the idea that listening to Mozart will make you smarter over the long-term. However, the initial study didn’t even test overall intelligence, it only tested participants on a few spatial-temporal tasks, and the effect wore off after 15 minutes. There’s also the small problem that the effect hasn’t been replicated under more controlled conditions (a key tenet of science is being able to replicate an effect under the same or similar circumstances). Several follow-up studies have found that listening to Mozart can temporarily increase cognitive skills whilst many more studies found no significant effect.

So it seems extremely unlikely that listening to Mozart will result in any long-term increase in your cognitive faculties. Learning to play an instrument however, has been shown to improve vocabulary, reading performance and a whole host of other skills. 

References:
Hallam, S. (2010). The power of music: It's impact on the intellectual, social, and personal development of children and young people. International Journal of Music Education, 28, 3, 269-289.
Lamb, S.J. & Gregory, A.H. (1993). The Relationship between Music and Reading in Beginning Readers. Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, 13, 1, 19-27.
Piro, J.M. & Ortiz, C. (2009). The effect of piano lessons on the vocabulary and verbal sequencing skills primary grade students. Psychology of Music, doi: 10.1177/0305735608097248