Animal Attributes

Children’s Books

Animal Attributes

‘If You Were a Panda Bear,’ by Florence Minor, and More

From "If You Were a Panda Bear"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: June 26, 2013

Animals are useful in children’s books: they’re beautiful, colorful and both similar to and different enough from humans for children to view them with detached amusement — or sympathy. In three new books this month, writers structure their stories around the unusual characteristics of wombats, bears and sloths.

ONE VERY TIRED WOMBAT

Written and illustrated by Renée Treml

32 pp. Random House Australia. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 5)

IF YOU WERE A PANDA BEAR

By Florence Minor

Illustrated by Wendell Minor

32 pp. Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8)

LOST SLOTH

Written and illustrated by J. Otto Seibold

32 pp. McSweeney’s McMullens. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 6 to 8)

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From "One Very Tired Wombat"

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From "Lost Sloth"

Like little humans, Australian wombats need a lot of sleep. And as some babies seem to do, they sleep mostly during the day. In “One Very Tired Wombat,” Renée Treml, a Melbourne-based author and illustrator, tells the story of a very cute, very dozy wombat whose attempts to nap are continually interrupted by nine sets of birds, from kookaburras to fairy wrens, who want to use his sweetly rounded back as a perch, or in the case of a playful group of little blue penguins (did you know Australia had them?), as a slide.

In rhyming verse, Treml counts the wombat’s visitors as they coo, giggle, warble, chatter, squawk and sing. “Seven garish galahs — as noisy as a train! / Poor tired wombat, these birds are such a pain.” Finally the birds go a feather too far and the wombat sneezes, chasing them away, at least for the moment.

This is Treml’s first picture book. Her artwork is distinctive; she uses a penknife to scratch black ink off a clay-painted board or paper, then applies paint to the scratched surface. Her method renders feathers, and particularly fur, dense with detail and seemingly three-dimensional. Though the animals are shown in black and white, each page has a deep pastel background to add interest. The effect, combined with her funny narrative, is charming and instructive.

“If You Were a Panda Bear,” by the author Florence Minor and her husband, the illustrator Wendell Minor, isn’t all about pandas. In brilliant colored gouache, with soft, fuzzy, furry detail, the Minors, who live and work in rural Connecticut, depict 10 kinds of bears enjoying their natural environments. Seen with their cubs, hunting, napping or moongazing, these bears range from the familiar polar bears and black bears to sun bears, sloth bears and moon bears.

A simple narrative, again in rhyme, gives a few facts about each bear (“If you were a moon bear, / You’d stay out late at night, /And the mark on your chest / Would look just like a light”), supplemented by a list of more earnest “Bear Fun Facts” at the end of the story. All the bears, even the impressively tall grizzly, look friendly, and the 10th bear — shown in his home environment, among other toys in a cozy chair, is, like this beautiful book, clearly a good bedtime companion.

J. Otto Seibold uses the slow and sleepy ways of sloths to add fun to “Lost Sloth,” a wacky tale for young readers published by McMullens, the children’s book imprint from McSweeney’s. Seibold’s book has an animated, trendy feeling to it. His protagonist is first seen asleep in a lavender armchair, with a fuchsia guitar in his lap. Perhaps he is tired after a late-night set? The room’s striped wallpaper could have been designed by Paul Smith, and the carpet pattern is woven with the words “hotel carpet.”

When Sloth is woken by a call announcing that he’s got only a few hours to claim a shopping spree (“What’s a spree?” thinks the sloth) he manages to get an uncharacteristically speedy start by using a clothesline as a zip line. How the suburban backyard we see him flying through relates to that hotel carpet remains a mystery, but the reader begins to root for Sloth: “Hurry Sloth!” the text prompts, as he misses the bus, swings slowly through the trees and hitches a ride on an ice cream cart. Just as he seems to be hopelessly lost, “something extraordinary,” and again, inexplicable, happens, and he hang-glides safely off a bluff to the store where his spree awaits.

As with his earlier books, like “Olive, the Other Reindeer,” Seibold, who is from Oakland, Calif., has drawn the artwork in “Lost Sloth” with a stylus on a digital tablet, using Adobe Illustrator. His palette is remarkable: rich olives, storm-cloud blues, and slightly murky but appealing shades of raspberry and grape. The excitement of the colorful pages and the disjointed action of the narrative may not appeal to tradition-minded families, but for others, this book is certain to feel inventive and contemporary, an example, as in the animal kingdom, of the beauty that can be seen in adaptation to a changing environment.

Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

Published: July 15, 2013

A gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science.

The study looked at the professional success of people who, as 13-year-olds, had taken both the SAT, because they had been flagged as particularly gifted, as well as the Differential Aptitude Test. That exam measures spatial relations skills, the ability to visualize and manipulate two-and three-dimensional objects. While math and verbal scores proved to be an accurate predictor of the students’ later accomplishments, adding spatial ability scores significantly increased the accuracy.

The researchers, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said their findings make a strong case for rewriting standardized tests like the SAT and ACT to focus more on spatial ability, to help identify children who excel in this area and foster their talents.

“Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don’t capture with traditional measures used in educational selection,” said David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. “We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.”

Following up on a study from the 1970s, Dr. Lubinski and his colleagues tracked the professional progress of 563 students who had scored in the top 0.5 percent on the SAT 30 years ago, when they were 13. At the time, the students had also taken the Differential Aptitude Test.

Years later, the children who had scored exceptionally high on the SAT also tended to be high achievers — not surprisingly — measured in terms of the scholarly papers they had published and patents that they held. But there was an even higher correlation with success among those who had also scored highest on the spatial relations test, which the researchers judged to be a critical diagnostic for achievement in technology, engineering, math and science.

Cognitive psychologists have long suspected that spatial ability — sometimes referred to as the “orphan ability” for its tendency to go undetected — is key to success in technical fields. Earlier studies have shown that students with a high spatial aptitude are not only overrepresented in those fields, but may receive little guidance in high school and underachieve as a result. (Note to parents: Legos and chemistry sets are considered good gifts for the spatial relations set.)

The correlation has “been suspected, but not as well researched” as the predictive power of math skills, said David Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, who was not involved in the study, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The new research is significant, he said, for showing that “high levels of performance in STEM fields” — science, technology, engineering and math — “are not simply related to math abilities.”

Testing spatial aptitude is not particularly difficult, Dr. Geary added, but is simply not part of standardized testing because it is considered a cognitive function — the realm of I.Q. and intelligence tests — and is not typically a skill taught in school.

“It’s not like math or English, it’s not part of an academic curriculum,” he said. “It’s more of a basic competence. For that reason it just wasn’t on people’s minds when developing these tests.”

It is also a competence more associated with men than women. In the current study, boys greatly outnumbered girls, 393 to 170, reflecting the original scores of the students in the ’70s. But the study found no difference in the levels of adult achievement, said Dr. Lubinski, though the women were more likely than the men to work in medicine and the social sciences.

Late nights 'sap children's brain power'

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By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online

 

Late nights and lax bedtime routines can blunt young children's minds, research suggests.

The findings on sleep patterns and brain power come from a UK study of more than 11,000 seven-year-olds.
Youngsters who had no regular bedtime or who went to bed later than 21:00 had lower scores for reading and maths.
Lack of sleep may disrupt natural body rhythms and impair how well the brain learns new information say the study authors.
They gathered data on the children at the ages of three, five and then seven to find out how well they were doing with their learning and whether this might be related to their sleeping habits.

“Start Quote

Establishing a good bedtime routine early in childhood is probably best, but it's never too late”

Study author Prof Sacker

Erratic bedtimes were most common at the age of three, when around one in five of the children went to bed at varying times.

By the age of seven, more than half the children had a regular bedtime of between 19:30 and 20:30.
Overall, children who had never had regular bedtimes tended to fare worse than their peers in terms of test scores for reading, maths and spatial awareness.
The impact was more obvious throughout early childhood in girls than in boys and appeared to be cumulative.
The researchers, led by Prof Amanda Sacker from University College London, said it was possible that inconsistent bedtimes were a reflection of chaotic family settings and it was this, rather than disrupted sleep, that had an impact on cognitive performance in children.
"We tried to take these things into account," said Prof Sacker.
The children with late and erratic bedtimes came from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds and were less likely to be read to each night and, generally, watched more TV - often on a set in their own bedroom.
After controlling for such factors, the link between poorer mental performance and lax bedtimes remained.
The findings are published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Prof Sacker said: "The take-home message is really that routines really do seem to be important for children.
"Establishing a good bedtime routine early in childhood is probably best, but it's never too late."
She said there was no evidence that putting children to bed much earlier than 19:30 added anything in terms of brain power.
Dr Robert Scott-Jupp of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said: "At first glance, this research might seem to suggest that less sleep makes children less intelligent, however, it is clearly more complicated than that.
"While it's likely that social and biological brain development factors are inter-related in a complex way, in my opinion, for schoolchildren to perform their best, they should all, whatever their background, get a good night's sleep."

To Help a Shy Child, Listen

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Joyce Hesselberth

18 and Under

Dr. Perri Klass on family health.

Toward the end of the summer, I was seeing a middle-school girl for a physical. The notes from a clinic visit last spring said she was a good student but didn’t talk enough in class. So I asked her: Is this still a problem for you?
I’m shy, she said. I’m just shy.
Should I have turned to her mother and suggested — a counselor? An academic evaluation? Should I have probed further? How do you feel in school, do you have some friends, is anybody bullying you?
Or should I have said: Lots of people are shy. It’s one of the healthy, normal styles of being human.
All of these responses, together, would have been correct. A child who is being bullied or bothered may be anxious about drawing attention to herself; a child who doesn’t ever talk in class may be holding back because some learning problem is getting in the way, making her self-conscious. So you do need to listen — especially to a child who talks less rather than more — and find ways to ask questions. Are you happy, anxious, afraid?
But shyness is also part of the great and glorious range of the human normal. Two years ago, Kathleen Merikangas, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health, and her colleagues published a study of 10,000 older children, ranging from 13 to 18 years old. “We found that about half of kids in America describe themselves as shy,” she told me.
Common though it may be, our schools — and our broader culture — do not always celebrate the reserved and retiring. “Children who are shy, who don’t raise their hand, who don’t talk in class, are really penalized in this society,” Dr. Merikangas said.
I have heard it said that temperament was invented by the first parent to have a second child — that’s when parents realize that children come wired with many of the determinants of disposition and personality. What worked with Baby 1 doesn’t necessarily work with Baby 2. The analysis of temperament has been a topic of discussion in pediatrics and psychology for decades.
“Temperament is the largely inborn set of behaviors that are the style with which a person functions, not to be confused with their motivation or their developmental status and abilities,” said Dr. William B. Carey, a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the author of “Understanding Your Child’s Temperament.”
Shyness reflects a child’s place on the temperamental continuum, the part of it that involves dealing with new and unfamiliar circumstances. And starting a new school year may be hard on those who find new situations more difficult and more full of anxiety. What most children need is time to settle in, support from parents and teachers, and sometimes help making connections and participating in class.
If a child is not more comfortable after a month or so, parents should look at whether more help is needed, said Anne Marie Albano, director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Treatment usually involves cognitive behavioral strategies to help the child cope with anxiety.
All ranges of temperament have their uncomfortable, or even pathological, outer zones. Just as there are children whose rambunctious eagerness to participate makes trouble for them in school or signals the presence of other problems, there are children whose silence is a shout for help.
I’m struck by the parallels between the ways we discuss shyness and the ways we discuss impulsivity and hyperactivity. In both cases, there is concern about the risk of “pathologizing” children who are well within the range of normal and worry that we are too likely to medicate outliers. By this thinking, children who would once have been considered shy and quiet too often get antidepressants, just as children who would once have been considered lively and rambunctious too often get A.D.H.D. medications.
But the most important question is whether children are in distress. Dr. Merikangas’s study distinguished between the common trait of shyness and the psychiatric diagnosis of social phobia. Over all, about 5 percent of the adolescents in the study were severely restricted by social anxiety; they included some who described themselves as shy and some who did not. The authors questioned whether the debate about the “medicalization” of shyness might be obscuring the detection of the distinct signs of social phobia.
For parents who simply want to help a shy child cope with, for example, a brand new classroom full of brand new people, consider rehearsing, scripting encounters and interactions. “The best thing they can do is do a role play and behavioral rehearsal ahead of time,” said Steven Kurtz, a senior clinician at the Child Mind Institute in Manhattan. Parents should “plan on rewarding the bravery.”
But don’t take over. “The danger point is rescuing too soon, too often, too much, so the kids don’t develop coping mechanisms,” said Dr. Kurtz.
Cognitive behavioral therapy relies on “successive approximations,” in which children slowly close in on the behaviors they are hoping to achieve. In that spirit, a parent might arrange to meet another parent on the way to school, so a shy child can walk with another and bond. A teacher might look for the right partner to pair up with a shy child for cooperative activities in the classroom.
“Probably the worst thing to do is to say, ‘Don’t be shy. Don’t be quiet,’ ” Dr. Merikangas told me. This is not about trying to change the child’s temperament. It’s about respecting and honoring temperament and variation, and helping children navigate the world with their own instruments.

'Growth Mindset' Gaining Traction as School Improvement Strategy

By Sarah D. Sparks 

 

New Orleans

It's one thing to say all students can learn, but making them believe it—and do it—can require a 180-degree shift in students' and teachers' sense of themselves and of one another.
While expressions like the "soft bigotry of low expectations" underscore the effects of teachers' and students' mindsets on academic success, it has proved difficult to pin down whether and how it's possible to change those attitudes once established.
Nonetheless, attempts to change that dynamic, from targeted interventions to restructured schools, are gaining traction as many states overhaul their curricula to match the Common Core State Standards and incorporate student-growth measures into accountability systems.
Three decades have passed since the Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck and others first linked students' motivation to the way they perceived intelligence. Students who believe intelligence or skill can be improved by effort and experimentation—what Ms. Dweck calls a "growth mindset"—seek challenges, learn from mistakes, and keep faith in themselves in the face of failure.
By contrast, those who believe intelligence and skill are traits you are born with—a "fixed mindset"—can be discouraged by failure and reluctant to challenge themselves.

Instead of calling on the first student to raise a hand, chemistry teacher Anthony McElligott waits for all his students to do so at SciAcademy in New Orleans. Such approaches put the focus on the process of learning rather than the race to the correct answer.

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

Those mindsets are self-reinforcing, and Ms. Dweck, her colleagues, and other researchers have found in dozens of studies that students with a growth mindset improve more in academics and other skills, and can even be less aggressive and more socially engaged.
"When we understand that we can build our intelligence, rather than it being fixed, we take risks; we are interested in learning from mistakes rather than focusing on how people see us and wanting to do things perfectly and quickly," said Eduardo Briceño, a co-founder and the CEO of Mindset Works, a company based on the research by Ms. Dweck and Lisa S. Blackwell, the program's co-founders.

'Brainology' Approach

Mindset Works, based in San Carlos, Calif., won a small-business-innovation grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences to scale up its "Brainology" curriculum, which provides six to 12 hours of online and in-person instruction and activities over five to 12 weeks.
The software targets grades 5-9, though the program as a whole can be implemented schoolwide. Lessons include brain development and learning, fixed-vs.-growth mindsets, and different strategies students can use when they hit difficulty in a particular subject or problem.
The program is being used in about 600 schools nationwide, and the District of Columbia school system is rolling it out this fall in middle school advisory classes.

'It's Not a Right or Wrong Answer'

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

At SciAcademy in New Orleans, chemistry teacher Anthony McElligott talks his sophomore class through their first experiment of the year. As the students predict ink dispersion patterns, listen to the way Mr. McElligott frames his focus on the process of science, rather than chasing a "right" answer.

It's also been integrated into Scholastic Inc.'s Math 180 curriculum this fall, so that students in grades 6-12 begin math instruction with two weeks of lessons explaining mindsets and neuroplasticity—the concept that the brain changes with experience—followed by periodic refreshers during the year, according to Tyler Reed, the corporate-communications director for the New York City-based publisher.
"The thing is, kids don't mind failing," said David Dockterman, Scholastic's chief architect of learning sciences and an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When kids play video games, they fail 80 percent of the time. They look at failure there as an opportunity to learn."
However, students can find school mistakes humiliating, he said.
"How you set it up for kids matters; they hear you. There's a lot of implicit meaning for kids," Mr. Dockterman told 600 middle and high school math teachers at a professional-development seminar in the Baltimore County, Md., school district last month.
For example, a teacher setting out a problem from a new unit might say, "Let's start with an easy one," which can discourage students who struggle or get the problem wrong; but a teacher might set students more at ease by introducing the same problem with, "This might take a few tries."

Focus in New Orleans

At the SciAcademy Charter School here in New Orleans, Anthony McElligott's sophomore chemistry class is learning to pose hypotheses about the dispersion patterns of two drops of identical ink in two identical beakers of water. Strolling around the class, the teacher points to one furiously scribbling student: "Chris' paper has 'because,' which shows he's supporting his answers with evidence. If you think you are done, add more evidence, give an example."
After demonstrating the experiment, Mr. McElligott finds about half the class correctly predicted the ink would have different dispersion patterns even though the water and beakers were the same and the ink was dropped in the center of each beaker. When those who answered incorrectly mutter in frustration, he smiles: "We're going to see in this class really great scientists who were wrong again and again."

The Stockdale Paradox

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

What can a Vietnam War prisoner teach sophomores about personal growth? Listen in as English teacher Katie Bubalo of SciAcademy in New Orleans launches a discussion in her sophomore class with a quote from former POW U.S. Admiral Jim Stockdale.

The three-school Collegiate Academies charter network, of which SciAcademy was the first, sees cultivating growth mindsets as its first and most important mission. Founder Ben A. Marcovitz launched SciAcademy six years ago as one of the first charter high schools to open after Hurricane Katrina.
SciAcademy, the neighboring George Washington Carver Collegiate Academy, and George Washington Carver Preparatory Academy high schools, hire teachers based on multiple classroom observations, not just interviews.
Typically, Mr. Marcovitz estimates, 60 percent of interviewees don't stick around for the classroom observations, in which they teach a lesson, receive feedback, and teach again a few weeks later.
"But the 40 percent who do have already made a commitment to growth," he said. "[The hiring process] allows us to weed out people evincing growth mindset who haven't internalized it."
That's common, Mr. Briceño of Mindset Works said. In professional-development sessions, he has found about a third of teachers have heard the terms "fixed" and "growth" mindsets, "but might not know exactly what it is."
Teachers often confuse "teaching a growth mindset and exhorting kids to try hard," Ms. Dweck said. "You can't just tell a child to try hard without giving them strategies and supporting their efforts."
As part of an ongoing series of studies of growth-mindset teaching practices, Ms. Dweck and other researchers tracked more than 250,000 students learning fractions via the online Khan Academy program. Minor changes to student feedback—such as providing improvement-related praise vs. general encouragement—improved student persistence and math achievement, they found.
Praising students' strategies, focus, effort, persistence, and improvement "takes the spotlight off fixed ability and puts it on the process of learning," Ms. Dweck said.
At SciAcademy, the approach means students' learning problems are discussed privately, after class, while improvements are always called out in public, and in detail—even for a student moving from a 62 percent on the last test to a 65 percent on the next.
"Students of the week" are not only recognized during Friday gatherings, but also are asked to describe the steps they used to reach the goal.

Taylor Hagans, a sophomore, listens to a lesson by chemistry teacher Anthony McElligott at SciAcademy in New Orleans, where teachers emphasize the importance of process, rather than speed, in learning.

—Jennifer Zdon for Education Week

It's important for teachers to go into detail when citing a student's correct answer, Mr. Dockterman said.
"If you talk about what the kid did [to get the right answer], other students can model it," he said. "If you just say, 'You're so smart,' they can't learn anything from that."
SciAcademy went so far as to ban the word "smart" on campus.
"That sounds like it has a weird 1984 connotation but it's really important," said Spencer Sherman, the 12th grade dean and environmental science teacher. "You get in the habit of saying 'smart,' and you find yourself saying it to kids, and you give kids the expectation that [intelligence] is fixed. We'll call each other out on it, because adult culture very quickly becomes scholar culture."

'Designed to Fail'

It can be particularly challenging to focus on effort with students who do excel easily. While teachers often notice struggling students who think they are "no good" in a subject, it's easier for high-achieving students to slip under the radar, Mr. Dockterman said.
"You think you are good at math and so it comes easy for you, but you stick to the things that are easy, and if you get to something hard, you shut down," he added.
SciAcademy found that out the hard way.
The school initially enrolled students in Advanced Placement classes on the basis of their having received top grades in similar subjects, Mr. Sherman explained. Many previously high-achieving students who "hit the wall" in the harder classes grew demoralized and reluctant to tackle other challenging work.
In response, the school opened Advanced Placement to anyone, but pitched the courses differently—"This will be the hardest class, with the most homework, but you'll learn more," Mr. Sherman said—and required an entry essay based on text difficult for even advanced students."It is a task you're designed to fail, because we want students to figure out how to respond to that," he said. "We're trying to weed out for fixed mindset. Now the students in AP don't think they got there by being smarter than everyone else, but because they worked really hard for it."

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Collegiate Academies staff see a growth mindset as a necessity for their campuses, which are made up of interlocking trailers, and located in a post-Katrina neighborhood still dotted with abandoned houses and shopping centers.
"We have to believe that a student who comes to us reading at a 2nd grade level can go to college in four years," said Margo Bouchie, Collegiate Academies' chief academic officer. "You can't come to work everyday if you don't believe that, and we have to be very honest with the scholars about where they are."
School leaders acknowledge there can be a fine line between realistic and pie-in-the-sky growth. But SciAcademy students like junior Eugene Thomas provide some support for optimism: He entered high school reading on a 5th grade level, and moved up to a 10th grade level by the end of the year.
Mr. Thomas said teachers noticed every time he read slightly better and pushed him harder, urging him to read 30 minutes every day on his own time. "It's not really difficult; you just have to work hard," he said.

Music Can Help You Remember

Music Can Help You Remember

Monday, September 16, 2013

The best way to remember facts might be to set them to music. Medical students, for example, have long used rhymes and songs to help them master vast quantities of information, and we’ve just gotten fresh evidence of how effective this strategy can be. A young British doctor, Tapas Mukherjee of Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, was distressed by a survey showing that 55 percent of nurses and doctors at Glenfield were not following hospital guidelines on the management of asthma; 38 percent were not even aware that the guidelines existed.
Using his cell phone, Mukherjee recorded a video of himself singing immortal lines like “Aim for 94 percent to 98 percent sats now” (that’s a reference to the asthma patient’s blood oxygen level). He posted the video to YouTube and it went viral among hospital staff. Two months after he released the video, Glenside conducted another survey, finding that 100 percent of doctors and nurses were now aware of the asthma treatment guidelines, and that compliance with the guidelines had increased markedly. Mukherjee reported the results at meeting of the European Respiratory Society last week.
Although Mukherjee’s methods are modern, his approach shares in a long tradition of oral storytelling—one that shaped itself over thousands of years to the particular proclivities of the human brain. Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they’re passed on, they’re changed beyond recognition—as psychologists’ investigations of how rumors evolve have shown.
In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, “Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person’s memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations . . . Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.”
What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. One of Rubin’s own experiments showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics—memory aids that people developed over time “to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory,” as Rubin puts it.
Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang the words instead of spoke them. Even great literature is susceptible to this treatment. Book Tunes, a collaboration between educational entrepreneur Jonathan Sauer and hip-hop artist Andy Bernstein (he performs under the name Abdominal), turns long, wordy books into compact, catchy raps, spoken over an insistent beat.
The duo’s latest offering: a rap version of The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (“Hester’s story is set in the Puritan settlement/that was 17th century Boston where she’s being led/ from the town prison holding her baby daughter Pearl with an A on her chest/ for the world to see which we quickly learn stands for adulterer ‘cause turns out/ H is married . . . “). Book Tunes’s take on the tale of Hester Prynne is being offered jointly with SparkNotes, the study aid provider owned by Barnes & Noble, which is said to be interested in raps of other classics, such as the plays of William Shakespeare.
Purists aghast at the notion may need to be reminded that many of the world’s greatest works of literature, such as The Odyssey and The Iliad, began as oral chants. Humans have been remembering through rhyme and song for ages: how can you update the tradition?

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Librado Romero/The New York Times Students exercise during physical education class at P.S. 457 in the Bronx.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.
Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.
More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.
To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.
Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned.
Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzed while memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.
In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them.
In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorized.
A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ regions.
The results, published last week in PLoS One, show that, over all, the children performed similarly when they were asked to recall names for the map when their memorization was reinforced by testing.
But when the recall involved the more difficult type of learning — memorizing without intermittent testing — the children who were in better aerobic condition significantly outperformed the less-fit group, remembering about 40 percent of the regions’ names accurately, compared with barely 25 percent accuracy for the out-of-shape kids.
This finding suggests that “higher levels of fitness have their greatest impact in the most challenging situations” that children face intellectually, the study’s authors write. The more difficult something is to learn, the more physical fitness may aid children in learning it.
Of course, this study did not focus specifically on the kind of active exercise typical of recess, but on longer-term, overall physical fitness in young children. But in doing so, it subtly reinforces the importance of recess and similar physical activity programs in schools, its authors believe.
If children are to develop and maintain the kind of aerobic fitness that amplifies their ability to learn, said co-author Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and a fellow at the university’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, they should engage in “at least an hour a day” of vigorous physical activity. Schools, where children spend so many of their waking hours, provide the most logical and logistically plausible place for them to get such exercise, he said.
Or as he and his co-authors dryly note in the study: “Reducing or eliminating physical education in schools, as is often done in tight financial times, may not be the best way to ensure educational success among our young people.”

Op-Ed Contributor

How to Fall in Love With Math

By MANIL SURI

Published: September 15, 2013 360 Comments

BALTIMORE — EACH time I hear someone say, “Do the math,” I grit my teeth. Invariably a reference to something mundane like addition or multiplication, the phrase reinforces how little awareness there is about the breadth and scope of the subject, how so many people identify mathematics with just one element: arithmetic. Imagine, if you will, using, “Do the lit” as an exhortation to spell correctly.

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Adam Maida

As a mathematician, I can attest that my field is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the way infinity is harnessed to deal with the finite, in everything from fractals to calculus. Just reflect on the infinite range of decimal numbers — a wonder product offered by mathematics to satisfy any measurement need, down to an arbitrary number of digits.

Despite what most people suppose, many profound mathematical ideas don’t require advanced skills to appreciate. One can develop a fairly good understanding of the power and elegance of calculus, say, without actually being able to use it to solve scientific or engineering problems.

Think of it this way: you can appreciate art without acquiring the ability to paint, or enjoy a symphony without being able to read music. Math also deserves to be enjoyed for its own sake, without being constantly subjected to the question, “When will I use this?”

Sadly, few avenues exist in our society to expose us to mathematical beauty. In schools, as I’ve heard several teachers lament, the opportunity to immerse students in interesting mathematical ideas is usually jettisoned to make more time for testing and arithmetic drills. The subject rarely appears in the news media or the cultural arena. Often, when math shows up in a novel or a movie, I am reminded of Chekhov’s proverbial gun: make sure the mathematician goes crazy if you put one in. Hanging thickly over everything is the gloom of math anxiety.

And yet, I keep encountering people who want to learn more about mathematics. Not only those who enjoyed it in school and have had no opportunity to pursue it once they began their careers, but also many who performed poorly in school and view it as a lingering challenge. As the Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin argues in his book “The Math Gene,” human beings are wired for mathematics. At some level, perhaps we all crave it.

So what math ideas can be appreciated without calculation or formulas? One candidate that I’ve found intrigues people is the origin of numbers. Think of it as a magic trick: harnessing emptiness to create the number zero, then demonstrating how from any whole number, one can create its successor. One from zero, two from one, three from two — a chain reaction of numbers erupting into existence. I still remember when I first experienced this Big Bang of numbers. The walls of my Bombay classroom seemed to blow away, as nascent cardinals streaked through space. Creatio ex nihilo, as compelling as any offered by physics or religion.

For a more contemplative example, gaze at a sequence of regular polygons: a hexagon, an octagon, a decagon and so on. I can almost imagine a yoga instructor asking a class to meditate on what would happen if the number of sides kept increasing indefinitely. Eventually, the sides shrink so much that the kinks start flattening out and the perimeter begins to appear curved. And then you see it: what will emerge is a circle, while at the same time the polygon can never actually become one. The realization is exhilarating — it lights up pleasure centers in your brain. This underlying concept of a limit is one upon which all of calculus is built.

The more deeply you engage with such ideas, the more rewarding the experience is. For instance, enjoying the eye candy of fractal images — those black, amoebalike splotches surrounded by bands of psychedelic colors — hardly qualifies as making a math connection. But suppose you knew that such an image (for example, the Julia Set) depicts a mathematical rule that plucks every point from its spot in the plane and moves it to another location. Imagine this rule applied over and over again, so that every point hops from location to location. Then the “amoeba” comprises those well-behaved points that remain hopping around within this black region, while the colored points are more adventurous and all lope off toward infinity. Not only does the picture acquire more richness and meaning with this knowledge, it suddenly churns with drama, with activity.

Would you be intrigued enough to find out more — for instance, what the different shades of color signified? Would the Big Bang example make you wonder where negative numbers came from, or fractions or irrationals? Could the thrill of recognizing the circle as a limit of polygons lure you into visualizing the sphere as a stack of its circular cross sections, as Archimedes did over 2,000 years ago to calculate its volume?

If the answer is yes, then math appreciation may provide more than just casual enjoyment: it could also help change negative attitudes toward the subject that are passed on from generation to generation. Students have a better chance of succeeding in a subject perceived as playful and stimulating, rather than one with a disastrous P.R. image.

Fortunately, today’s online world, with its advances in video and animation, offers several underused opportunities for the informal dissemination of mathematical ideas. Perhaps the most essential message to get across is that with math you can reach not just for the sky or the stars or the edges of the universe, but for timeless constellations of ideas that lie beyond.

Manil Suri is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author, most recently, of the novel “The City of Devi.”

Disruptions: Minecraft, an Obsession and an Educational Tool

By NICK BILTON

Michael Citrone Luca Citrone, 8, and his sister Willow play Minecraft before they go to bed.

If you were to walk into my sister’s house in Los Angeles, you’d hear a bit of yelling from time to time. “Luca! Get off Minecraft! Luca, are you on Minecraft again? Luca! Enough with the Minecraft!”
Luca is my 8-year-old nephew. Like millions of other children his age, Luca is obsessed with the video game Minecraft. Actually, obsessed might be an understated way to explain a child’s idée fixe with the game. And my sister, whom you’ve probably guessed is the person doing all that yelling, is a typical parent of a typical Minecraft-playing child: she’s worried it might be rotting his brain.
For those who have never played Minecraft, it’s relatively simple. The game looks a bit crude because it doesn’t have realistic graphics. Instead, it’s built in 16-bit, a computer term that means the graphics look blocky, like giant, digital Lego pieces.
Unlike other video games, there are few if any instructions in Minecraft. Instead, like the name suggests, the goal of the game is to craft, or build, structures in these 16-bit worlds, and figuring things out on your own is a big part of it. And parents, it’s not terribly violent. Sure, you can kill a few zombies while playing in the game’s “survival mode.” But in its “creative mode,” Minecraft is about building, exploration, creativity and even collaboration.
The game was first demonstrated by Markus Persson, a Swedish video game programmer and designer known as Notch, in 2009 and released to the public in November 2011. Today, the game runs on various devices, including desktop computers, Google Android smartphones, Apple iOS and the Microsoft Xbox. There are thousands of mods, or modifications, for the game, that allow people to play in prebuilt worlds, like a replica of Paris (Eiffel Tower included) or an ancient Mayan civilization.
While parents — my sister included — might worry that all these pixels and the occasional zombie might be bad for children, a lot of experts say they shouldn’t fret.
Earlier this year, for example, a school in Stockholm made Minecraft compulsory for 13-year-old students. “They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future,” said Monica Ekman, a teacher at the Viktor Rydberg school.
Around the world, Minecraft is being used to educate children on everything from science to city planning to speaking a new language, said Joel Levin, co-founder and education director at the company TeacherGaming. TeacherGaming runs MinecraftEdu, which is intended to help teachers use the game with students.
A history teacher in Australia set up “quest missions” where students can wander through and explore ancient worlds. An English-language teacher in Denmark told children they could play Minecraft collectively in the classroom but with one caveat: they were allowed to communicate both orally and through text only in English. A science teacher in California has set up experiments in Minecraft to teach students about gravity.
Mr. Levin said that in addition to classroom exercises, children were learning the digital skills they would need as they got older.
“Kids are getting into middle school and high school and having some ugly experiences on Facebook and other social networks without an understanding of how to interact with people online,” he said. “With Minecraft, they are developing that understanding at a very early age.”
While there are no known neuroscience studies of Minecraft’s effect on children’s brains, research has shown video games can have a positive impact on children.
A study by S.R.I. International, a Silicon Valley research group that specializes in technology, found that game-based play could raise cognitive learning for students by as much as 12 percent and improve hand-eye coordination, problem-solving ability and memory.
Games like Minecraft also encourage what researchers call “parallel play,” where children are engrossed in their game but are still connected through a server or are sharing the same screen. And children who play games could even become better doctors. No joke. Neuroscientists performed a study at Iowa State University that found that surgeons performed better, and were more accurate on the operating table, when they regularly played video games.
“Minecraft extends kids’ spatial reasoning skills, construction skills and understanding of planning,” said Eric Klopfer, a professor and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program. “In many ways, it’s like a digital version of Lego.”
Professor Klopfer suggested that if parents were worried about the game, they should simply play it with their children. He said he set up a server in his house so his children’s friends could play together and he could monitor their behavior and then explain that some actions, even in virtual worlds, are unethical — like destroying someone’s Minecraft house, or calling them a bad name.
But Professor Klopfer warned that, as with anything, there was — probably to my nephew’s chagrin — such as thing as too much Minecraft.
“While the game is clearly good for kids, it doesn’t mean there should be no limits,” he said. “As with anything, I don’t want my kids to do any one thing for overly extended periods of time. Whether Legos or Minecraft; having limits is an important part their learning.”
Many children would happily ignore that little warning if their parents let them.
Last weekend, my sister saw Luca on his computer with what appeared to be Minecraft on the screen. “Luca, I told you, you can’t play Minecraft anymore,” she said.
“I’m not playing Minecraft, mama,” he replied. “I’m watching videos on YouTube of other people playing Minecraft.”

A Sense of Place

A Sense of Place

‘This Is Our House’ and ‘Once Upon a Northern Night’

From "This Is Our House"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: July 31, 2013

“What would it be like to stay in one place — to have your own bed, to ride your own bicycle?” a little girl named Anna wonders in Maxine Trottier’s 2011 picture book, “Migrant.” “Now that would be something.” Anna’s parents, who are migrant workers, move from one temporary home to another, and Anna imagines herself as a rabbit, living in abandoned burrows, or a bee, flitting from flower to flower. She is effectively homeless, and longs to live a settled life, “like a tree with roots sunk deeply into the earth.”

THIS IS OUR HOUSE

Written and illustrated by Hyewon Yum

40 pp. Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)

ONCE UPON A NORTHERN NIGHT

By Jean E. Pendziwol

Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault

32 pp. Groundwood Books. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 7)

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• Times Topic: Children's Books Reviews

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From "Once Upon a Northern Night"

Home is also at the heart of two new picture books, “This Is Our House,” written and illustrated by Hyewon Yum, and “Once Upon a Northern Night,” written by Jean E. Pendziwol and illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault (whose artwork for Trottier’s “Migrant” earned a New York Times Best Illustrated award). Yum, originally from South Korea but now living in Brooklyn, sets her story in a city that could very well be New York, among a family of recent immigrants whose country of origin is never specified; Pendziwol and Arsenault, both Canadian, describe a cozy home in a wintry rural landscape.

On the title page of “This Is Our House,” a watercolor illustration shows a photograph of a little girl peeking her head around a front door, as if to welcome the reader inside. On the next, a framed black and white photograph — again painted in watercolor — shows the house as it looked when her grandparents “arrived from far away with just two suitcases in hand.” In a pattern Yum continues throughout the book, the photo of the house is faced by a full-page scene. Here, the girl’s grandparents talk to each other as they stand outside their new home for the first time. The grandmother looks as if she is either shyly pleased, or hesitant. What is certain is her husband’s encouraging smile.

The photos reveal the public story, Yum seems to suggest, but there’s more to be told. And sure enough, the full-page scenes are intimate rather than posed: moments of action, and sometimes of crossness and tears; a little quarrel over the painting of the baby’s room on one side of the spread, a photo of the delighted expectant mother posing in a fully decorated room on the other. Mostly, the three generations who come to live in the house together display smiles and kind concern for one another.

Yum uses a springlike palette of yellow, pinks and greens, even when there’s snow on the sidewalk, and the little girl’s dark braids perfectly set off the fresh, happy colors. With time, the once-bare facade of the house comes to life with window boxes, flowering hedges and potted plants of the front stoop. The seasons cycle though the pictures as the family grows, including, at the end, a baby brother for the little narrator. She gives a slight twist to the book’s title in her final summary: “This is our home where my family lives.”

If family is central to Yum’s sense of home, Pendziwol and Arsenault enlarge that sense of a precious place to encompass a natural setting. “Once Upon a Northern Night” is spoken in a voice that could be that of an artist, a parent or even a deity. While a fair-haired boy sleeps “wrapped in a downy blanket,” the voice describes a scene in which wild animals roam across snowy fields as the northern lights play across the sky. Of the lights, the narrator says, “I tried to capture them but they were much too nimble, and only their rhythm reached you, deep in slumber, rising and falling with each sweet peaceful breath.”

Arsenault’s nighttime landscapes, created with gouache, ink, pencil and watercolor, add dramatic emphasis to the text; the wings of an owl with bright yellow and black eyes can scarcely fit on two pages; the russet tail and hind legs of a fox are lit by the moon while the rest of his body can be seen only faintly, in the shadows. Black and white dominate with occasional flashes of color — red apples on the bare branches of a tree, spiky green pine needles. The boy’s house appears only twice, but the overwhelming sense of the home is as a secure haven from which to view, or imagine, a mysterious and beautiful world. Older children may resist the slight sentimentality of Pendziwol’s text, but on a dark night a younger child is likely to revel in this book’s mixture of magic, wildlife and deep comfort.

Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

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  Holly Andres for The New York Times

Students from Leataata Floyd Elementary, in Sacramento, and Prospect Sierra, in El Cerrito, Calif., demonstrate various emotional states. Above, Jason Perez, 10; Yamiah Lockhart, 7.

By JENNIFER KAHN

Published: September 11, 2013 445 Comments

One day last spring, James Wade sat cross-legged on the carpet and called his kindergarten class to order. Lanky and soft-spoken, Wade has a gentle charisma well suited to his role as a teacher of small children: steady, rather than exuberant. When a child performs a requested task, like closing the door after recess, he will often acknowledge the moment by murmuring, “Thank you, sweet pea,” in a mild Texas drawl.

As the children formed a circle, Wade asked the 5-year-olds to think about “anything happening at home, or at school, that’s a problem, that you want to share.” He repeated his invitation twice, in a lulling voice, until a small, round-faced boy in a white shirt and blue cardigan raised his hand. Blinking back tears, he whispered, “My mom does not like me.” The problem, he said, was that he played too much on his mother’s iPhone. “She screams me out every day,” he added, sounding wretched.

Wade let that sink in, then turned to the class and asked, “Have any of your mommies or daddies ever yelled at you?” When half the children raised their hands, Wade nodded encouragingly. “Then maybe we can help.” Turning to a tiny girl in a pink T-shirt, he asked what she felt like when she was yelled at.

“Sad,” the girl said, looking down.

“And what did you do? What words did you use?”

“I said, ‘Mommy, I don’t like to hear you scream at me.’ ”

Wade nodded slowly, then looked around the room. “What do you think? Does that sound like a good thing to say?” When the kids nodded vigorously, Wade clapped his hands once. “O.K., let’s practice. Play like I’m your mommy.” Scooting into the center of the circle, he gave the boy, Reedhom, a small toy bear to stand in for the iPhone, then began to berate him in a ridiculous booming voice. “Lalalala!” Wade hollered, looming overhead in a goofy parody of parental frustration. “Why are you doing that, Reedhom? Reedhom, why?” In the circle, the other kids rocked back and forth in delight. One or two impulsively begin to crawl in Reedhom’s direction, as if joining a game.

Still slightly teary, Reedhom began to giggle. Abruptly, Wade held up a finger. “Now, we talked about this. What can Reedhom do?” Recollecting himself, Reedhom sat up straight. “Mommy, I don’t like it when you scream at me,” he announced firmly.

“Good,” Wade said. “And maybe your mommy will say: ‘I’m sorry, Reedhom. I had to go somewhere in a hurry, and I got a little mad. I’m sorry.’ ”

Reedhom solemnly accepted the apology — then beamed as he shook Wade’s hand.

Holly Andres for The New York Times

Jamal McBride, 8.

Wade’s approach — used schoolwide at Garfield Elementary, in Oakland, Calif. — is part of a strategy known as social-emotional learning, which is based on the idea that emotional skills are crucial to academic performance.

“Something we now know, from doing dozens of studies, is that emotions can either enhance or hinder your ability to learn,” Marc Brackett, a senior research scientist in psychology at Yale University, told a crowd of educators at a conference last June. “They affect our attention and our memory. If you’re very anxious about something, or agitated, how well can you focus on what’s being taught?”

Once a small corner of education theory, S.E.L. has gained traction in recent years, driven in part by concerns over school violence, bullying and teen suicide. But while prevention programs tend to focus on a single problem, the goal of social-emotional learning is grander: to instill a deep psychological intelligence that will help children regulate their emotions.

For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never develop those crucial skills. “It’s like saying that a child doesn’t need to study English because she talks with her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you calm down when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to manage those feelings?”

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Why Guessing Is Undervalued

Being able to estimate may be more important than doing quadratic equations

By Annie Murphy Paul @anniemurphypaulNov. 23, 2011Add a Comment

Robert Deutschman / Getty Images

Quick, take a guess: About how many feet high is an eight-story building? Approximately how many tons does the average pickup truck weigh? About how many oranges must be squeezed to yield a gallon of juice?
Maybe you gave these your best shot — or maybe you skimmed right over them, certain that such empty conjecture isn’t worth your time. If you fall into the second group, you may want to reconsider. The science of learning is demonstrating that the ability to make accurate estimates is closely tied to the ability to understand and solve problems. Estimation, this research shows, is not an act of wild speculation but a highly sophisticated and valuable skill that, some experts say, is often given short shrift in the curriculum. “Too much mathematical rigor teaches rigor mortis,” says Sanjoy Mahajan, an associate professor of applied science and engineering at Olin College. Many math textbooks, he notes, “teach how to solve exactly stated problems exactly, whereas life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions.”
(MORE: Is English Making Us Dyslexic?)
Everyone, even people without formal mathematical training, possesses a basic capacity to estimate. This aptitude appears astonishingly early in life: babies are already able to discriminate between different-sized sets of objects at six months of age. But it’s also the case that there are pronounced individual differences in the ability to estimate, and that these differences are linked to a more general facility with arithmetic. Especially in children, it appears that one leads to the other: strong estimation skills lay a solid foundation for learning more math as students grow older. In a 2004 article published in the journal Child Development, for example, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon University reported the results of an experiment in which they showed a group of elementary-school pupils a line with a 0 at one end and a 100 at the other. The researchers asked the children to indicate where they thought various numbers would fall on the line. The more accurately a child estimated, the higher was that child’s score on a math achievement exam.
Other researchers have examined the strategies used by people who are skilled at estimating and explored how such techniques could be taught to all. Their first finding: good estimators possess a clear mental number line — one in which numbers are evenly spaced, or linear, rather than a logarithmic one in which numbers crowd closer together as they get bigger. Most schoolchildren start out with the latter understanding, shedding it as they grow more experienced with numbers. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to give kids such experience is to play board games with them. Flicking the spinner or rolling the dice in a game like Chutes and Ladders, then counting out the number of spaces to move their tokens, gives them helpful cues as they construct the number line that they carry around in their heads. And, in fact, an intervention program employing board games, led by professor of education Sharon Griffin of Clark University in Massachusetts, produced large and lasting improvements in children’s math performance.
(MORE: The Secret Code of Learning)
Another strategy used by good estimators is to compare an unfamiliar quantity to one they know well: a football field is the length of 60 Dads, stretched out head to foot. Parents and teachers can help kids acquire a large and flexible store of mental benchmarks by remarking on the dimensions they encounter in everyday life: how many miles from home to school, how many pounds a basket of apples. Children benefit, too, from hearing the range of others’ estimates — so try having each member of the family guess how long it will take to get to Grandma’s house, or having each student estimate how many inches of rain fell last month. This open-ended approach will give kids a familiarity with the way math works in the real world — and tools to help solve real-world problems. How often does life hand us such problems? Professor Barbara Reys, co-director of the Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum at the University of Missouri, puts the proportion of mathematical applications that call for approximation, rather than exact computation, at 80%. Of course, that’s an estimate — but it sounds to me like a pretty good guess.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/23/why-guessing-is-undervalued/#ixzz2fFTF6oyQ

Very Young Programmers

By LISA GUERNSEY

Published: September 2, 2013

Ten years ago, a computer programming language called Scratch emerged from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using colorful stackable icons to represent the sequencing and logic of computer code, Scratch was designed to make programming easy for children 8 and older. Today the free program is used in more than 150 countries and thousands of schools, with more than 1,500 animations and games uploaded to the online Scratch community each day. Even third and fourth graders call themselves coders.

But who says that 8 is the youngest you can teach children how to program? Now there is Scratch Jr. for children still learning to read and tie their shoes.

Designed for children in kindergarten through second grade, Scratch Jr. is not yet available to the public, though its founders are preparing for an iPad version in 2014. This school year, they are evaluating how it works in a handful of classrooms in Massachusetts. The project is led by Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor in the department of child development at Tufts University, and Mitchel Resnick, Scratch’s founder at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Last year, kindergartners at the Jewish Community Day School in Boston used Scratch Jr. once a week to display collages and play animations about what they learned. In one case, they created an online project about the biblical plague of the locusts, programming computers to show the insects landing on a tree’s leafy branches, which suddenly went bare.

Dr. Bers calls programming “a language of expression,” making it a natural fit for the early years when children are learning how to express themselves. Her work started with wooden blocks covered in bar-coded stickers that could be “read” by a computer. Her team at Tufts has also been testing a robotic prototype called KIWI (Kids Invent With Imagination) and a programming language called Cherp (Creative Hybrid Environment for Robotic Programming) in the Boston Public Schools.

Boosting computer science in public education is now the subject of a national campaign, with celebrities like will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas and the actor Ashton Kutcher championing the importance of learning to program.

A petition on the Web site for Code.org, an advocacy group, stating that every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code, has attracted around 780,000 digital signatures.

Most of the support for student coding on Code.org is from advocates focusing on middle and high school students, yet “the earlier you catch them, the better off they are,” said Claire Caine, an information technology instructor at the Jewish Community Day School. Before age 8 or 9, she said, children are less likely to be swayed by stereotypes. “The idea that they might not be good at something hasn’t entered their mind yet,” Ms. Caine said.

“But,” Dr. Bers said, “you have to get the interface right.” For example, in Scratch Jr., children can code scenes in which characters utter words in cartoonlike thought bubbles — and that may entice children to try to read them — but programming the computer to advance the scene’s action does not require that children know how to read.

She has also seen signs that at or before age 5, the concepts of sequencing — the “if, then” language of coding — take time for children to grasp. Her team is now building a curriculum — Click it. Solve it. Make it. — with steps for teaching Scratch Jr.

In some circles, teaching young children to code raises eyebrows. When she started, Dr. Bers said, “people were like, why do you want kids in front of the computer?”

That is changing. People stopped objecting, she said, when they saw that it was developmentally appropriate in that “the work was collaborative or coming from the kids’ imagination.” Now she has a different problem: “Everyone wants to be our tester.”

Don't just learn -- overlearn

In this week's issue of The Brilliant Report: Why we should push past mere learning, all the way to overlearning—plus a Brilliant Quote from Pepperdine University professor Louis Cozolino, about the stress of new learning and the relationships that can help us deal with it.

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Don't just learn—overlearn"Why do I have to keep practicing? I know it already!” That’s the familiar wail of a child seated at the piano or in front of the multiplication table (or, for that matter, of an adult taking a tennis lesson). Cognitive science has a persuasive retort: We don’t just need to learn a task in order to perform it well; we need to overlearn it. Decades of research have shown that superior performance requires practicing beyond the point of mastery. The perfect execution of a piano sonata or a tennis serve doesn’t mark the end of practice; it signals that the crucial part of the session is just getting underway. Evidence of why this is so was provided by a study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience. Assistant professor Alaa Ahmed and two of her colleagues in the integrative physiology department at the University of Colorado-Boulder asked study subjects to move a cursor on a screen by manipulating a robotic arm. As they did so, the researchers measured the participants’ energy expenditure by analyzing how much oxygen they inhaled and how much carbon dioxide they breathed out. When the subjects first tackled the exercise, they used up a lot of metabolic power, but this decreased as their skill improved. By the end of the learning process, the amount of effort they expended to carry out the task had declined about 20 percent from when they started. Whenever we learn to make a new movement, Ahmed explains, we form and then update an internal model—a “sensorimotor map”—which our nervous system uses to predict our muscles’ motions and the resistance they will encounter. As that internal model is refined over time, we’re able to cut down on unnecessary movements and eliminate wasted energy. Over the course of a practice session, the subjects in Ahmed’s study were becoming more efficient in their muscle activity. But that wasn’t the whole story. Energy expenditures continued to decrease even after the decline in muscle activity had stabilized. In fact, Ahmed and her coauthors report, this is when the greatest reductions in metabolic power were observed—during the very time when it looks to an observer, and to the participant herself, as if “nothing is happening.” What’s going on here? Ahmed theorizes that even after participants had fine-tuned their muscle movements, the neural processes controlling the movements continued to grow more efficient. The brain uses up energy, too, and through overlearning it can get by on less. These gains in mental efficiency free up resources for other tasks: infusing the music you’re playing with greater emotion and passion, for example, or keeping closer track of your opponent’s moves on the other side of the tennis court. Less effort in one domain means more energy available to others. While Ahmed’s paper didn’t address the application of overlearning to the classroom or the workplace, other studies have demonstrated that for a wide range of academic and professional activities, overlearning reduces the amount of mental effort required, leading to better performance—especially under high-stakes conditions. In fact, research on the "audience effect" shows that once we've overlearned a complex task, we actually perform it better when other people are watching. When we haven't achieved the reduction of mental effort that comes with overlearning, however, the additional stress of an audience makes stumbles more likely. “The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems the task has been learned,” says Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.” In other words: You’re getting better and better, even when you can’t tell you’re improving—a thought to keep you going through those long hours of practice. I love to hear from readers. Please email me at annie@anniemurphypaul.com. You can also visit my website, follow me on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!