Passing on learning attitudes

Passing on learning attitudesI've written a lot on the Brilliant Blog about how relationships can enhance learning. We learn better when we "apprentice" ourselves to someone more knowledgeable, for example; when we ourselves teach others; and when we discuss and debate with our peers.

But there are also times when relationships suppress learning. This is the case when parents and teachers—figures of towering importance in the world of children—pass on negative views about particular academic subjects. This passing-on is not deliberate, of course. No parent or teacher would wish to impart feelings of anxiety or aversion regarding learning. And yet that’s often just what happens, according to Elizabeth Gunderson, a researcher at the University of Chicago.

Gunderson and her colleagues recently published an article in the journal Sex Roles that examined the “adult-to-child transmission” of attitudes about learning—in particular, how mothers’ unease with mathematics may be passed down to their daughters. Parents’ “own personal feelings about math are likely to influence the messages they convey about math to their children,” Gunderson notes—and kids will readily recognize if these feelings are negative. Becoming aware of our anxiety is the first step toward stopping such transmission in its tracks.

Previous studies have looked at how parents’ stereotypes (“boys are better at math, and girls are better at reading”) and expectations (for example, holding sons’ academic performance to a higher standard than daughters’) affect their children’s orientation toward learning. Gunderson takes a different tack, suggesting that parents may influence their offspring’s attitudes in two more subtle ways: through their own anxiety, and through their own belief that abilities are fixed and can’t be improved (expressed in commonly-heard comments like “I’ve never been good at science,” and “I can’t do math to save my life”).

Research shows that school-aged children are especially apt to emulate the attitudes and behaviors of the same-sex parent—a source of concern if we want to improve girls’ still-lagging performance in traditionally male-dominated fields like science and mathematics. If mom hates math, a young girl may reason, it’s O.K. for me to dislike it too.

Teachers aren’t immune to negative feelings about learning, either. In fact, studies show that undergraduates who study elementary education have the highest math anxiety of any college major. Instructors who are uncomfortable with mathematics feel less capable teaching the subject, research indicates, and are less motivated to try new and innovative teaching strategies. A study by cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in 2010, demonstrates how teachers’ unease with math can influence the students in their classrooms.

Beilock and her coauthors evaluated 52 boys and 65 girls enrolled in first and second grade and taught by 17 different teachers. At the beginning of the school year, there was no connection between the students’ math ability and their teachers’ math anxiety. By the end of the year, however, a dismaying relationship had emerged: the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely the girls in their classes were to endorse negative stereotypes about females’ math ability, and the more poorly these girls did on a test of math achievement.

Adults who want to avoid passing on pessimistic attitudes about learning can do more than simply watch their language (no more “I’m hopeless at math” when the dinner check arrives at the table). They can jump into the subject they once feared with both feet, using their children’s education as an opportunity to brush up on their own basic skills. Learn along with your kids, and you may find that math and science, or writing and spelling, are not so scary. And let kids know that it’s always possible to change and improve our abilities—you being a prime example.

Education Is for the (Angry) Birds

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inShWhat the world's most addictive video game will teach us next By Peter Vesterbacka

Many people believe that learning should feel like work. Often when families move to Finland from other countries and put their children in day care, they worry that the schools are not teaching them enough. They say, “The kids are not learning anything. They're just playing.” But that's the whole point: humans learn by playing, and that philosophy is built into the Finnish school system. My kids have a short school day and little homework, yet Finnish students earn some of the highest scores of any nation on international tests.
What can games really teach you? There is a well-known example in Finland. Researchers have noticed that Finnish boys speak better English than Finnish girls. The reason for that observation—which they documented in a number of studies—is that boys play more video games. Because the games are in English, players have built larger vocabularies. The point here is that the boys did not set out to learn English, but they learned it while having fun.
We have never seen ourselves as exclusively a games company, and now we are doing more and more with education. Last year we partnered with nasa on Angry Birds Space, which teaches kids about microgravity. We are also working with CERN to develop games and animations to teach the principles of quantum physics to children as young as four and six years old. Angry Birds already has physics: you learn about trajectories even without thinking much about it. We are taking the same kind of approach with CERN but taking it a bit further so you can get more deeply into math, physics and science in a fun way. Finally, we are branching out into languages, and we have developed an English-learning game for the Chinese market based on the Moon Festival, which has enormous cultural significance there.
I do not believe that the future of education is all digital. It is very important for kids to get to do real things, to work with objects that they can touch and feel. In a few years I believe that more than half of our business will be physical. Already we have a burgeoning publishing business: we have storybooks and activity books based on our video game characters, and we are working on a line of educational toys. What has been done so far to combine the physical and the virtual has been very limited, which is where I think the greatest opportunity lies. There will be tremendous innovation in that area in the years to come.

Nudging Girls Toward Computer Science

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

My It’s the Economy column on Sunday looks at why traditional economic incentives alone don’t seem to be enough to encourage more women (or men, for that matter) to go into highly lucrative computer science jobs, which can often provide great flexibility to boot.
Part of the issue, it seems, is exposure. Most people don’t come into contact with computer scientists or engineers in their daily lives, and don’t really understand what they do. American schools don’t do a great job of teaching computer science skills either.
Trying to remedy this are numerous nonprofit and educational organizations, among them Code.org, which lobbies to get more computer science classes in schools. Others try to provide computer science lessons outside of a traditional school setting. Girls Who Code, for example, has eight-week boot camps that teach middle and high school girls programming skills – in languages like Java, PHP, and Python – as well as algorithms, Web design, robotics, and mobile app development.
But access to coding lessons isn’t the only factor in improving the talent pipeline. Role models (real and fictional) are important, too. Take a guess, for instance, as to what career aspiration is named most frequently on applications to Girls Who Code.
Nope, not electrical engineer, software developer, or really anything directly related to computer science or coding. In fact, many of the applicants don’t even know these jobs exist, or what computer science is. (Typically they’re applying because a  teacher or family friend urged them to.)
The answer is forensic scientist. Not because any of the girls actually know forensic scientists, mind you, but because they’ve seen “C.S.I.” or maybe “Bones,” “NCIS,” “Crossing Jordan,” “Law & Order: S.V.U.,” or “Rizzoli and Isles,” or some other show with a cool chick in a white lab coat uses scientific know-how to save the day. These shows have been credited for helping turn forensic science from a primarily male occupation into a primarily female one.
The second most common career aspiration that the Girls Who Code applicants name is medicine. Doctors, unlike programmers, are people the girls have been exposed to and whose work even much younger children can understand. They’ve met doctors in their personal lives, and have also seen glamorous yet relatable female physicians on TV (think “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Saving Hope,” “The Mindy Project,” “Scrubs”).
There is also statistical evidence suggesting that role models encourage women’s interest and persistence in the sciences. Women’s enrollment and attrition rates in STEM college majors — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are infamously bad. The reasons often cited include feelings of isolation, lack of support, or maybe just caring too much about grades (there is typically less grade inflation in STEM fields than in the humanities or social sciences). One study found, though, that women who took math and science classes from female professors performed better, were more likely to take future math and science courses, and were more likely to graduate with a STEM degree.
Acting on this finding is challenging, of course, since the implied solution presents a Catch-22: How do you rapidly increase the number of female STEM professors if there are so few women in the STEM pipeline?
There are other efforts to pair up girls or young women with high-achieving technologists. Girls Who Code introduces its pupils to potential mentors who work at high-powered places like Google and Goldman Sachs. Similarly, one of the most important functions of the Anita Borg Institute’s annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, I’ve been told, is to expose women studying computer science to successful women in their field.
But still, these kinds of efforts are difficult to scale up. Which is one reason why so many in the industry are pinning their hopes on Hollywood to do some of the heavy lifting, just as it did to popularize forensic science. Pop culture, after all, is a much more scalable form of propaganda than one-on-one introductions at schools, conferences or summer programs.
Right now there’s very little representation of computer science or engineering occupations on TV or in movies, and even less representation of female characters in these fields. To be sure, over the years there have been isolated examples of female characters with sophisticated computing skills, including Chloe O’Brian on “24″; Skye in a new ABC series called “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” (which actually a reader alerted me to after I wrote the magazine column); Trinity in “The Matrix” movies; and the lead character in a recently announced MTV pilot called “Eye Candy.” But these heroines, or more often supporting characters, are still few and far between.
Creating a hit TV show with a science-minded heroine is easier said than done, of course. It’s hard to make a TV show popular, even harder to force audiences to care about a particular character on that show, and probably triply hard to get a very specific audience (that is, impressionable little girls) emotionally invested in that character on that popular TV show. (Lisbeth Salander from the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” may be the most famous female hacker character of recent years, but the books and films she appears in are probably not appropriate for the 12-year-old girls whose career paths the tech industry and women’s groups most want to influence.)
Cumulative media messages about career options matter all the same. Even if there is no one breakout programmer babe who adorns tweens’ bedroom walls, having little girls repeatedly see tech-savvy heroines save the day while simultaneously earning a decent paycheck — on TV, if not in their daily lives – can still help shape career trajectories.

Quality Preschool Is the ‘Most Cost-Effective’ Educational Intervention

By RANDYE HODER

A decade or so ago, when it was time to send my children to preschool, it never occurred to me to do anything else. For an upper-middle-class family like mine, enrolling my kids in a half-day nursery school program with all of its benefits (socialization and school readiness, among them) was a no-brainer.
Now, amid a highly contentious national debate about whether preschool should be made available to all children, a new study provides a mountain of evidence that my parental instincts were right on the money. Literally. High-quality preschool programs are “the most cost-effective educational interventions and are likely to be profitable investments for society as a whole,” concludes the study, financed by the Foundation for Child Development and produced in collaboration with the Society for Research in Child Development.
The report, written by an interdisciplinary group of 10 early-childhood experts, is actually a “research brief” — an overview of “the most recent rigorous research” on a hot-button issue. Among its key findings:

•Large-scale, high-quality public preschool programs can have substantial impacts on children’s early learning.
•Quality preschool education can benefit middle-class children as well as disadvantaged children, though children from low-income families benefit more.
•Quality preschool education is a profitable investment, with $3 to $7 saved for every $1 spent.

The analysis will undoubtedly be greeted as good news by the Obama administration, given the president’s call to make federally funded, high-quality preschool “available to every single child in America.” Not that the critics can’t find fault. The research brief points to evaluations of early-childhood education programs in Tulsa, Okla., and Boston, which found large gains in math and reading among participants. But scholars at the Brookings Institution and elsewhere have attacked the Tulsa and Boston studies for their supposedly unreliable methodology.

More broadly, those who question the wisdom of extending early-childhood education cite research showing that third and fourth graders who are part of the federal government’s Head Start program and other such initiatives perform no better on standardized tests than do their peers who never attended preschool.
But the research brief released today, titled “Investing in Our Future,” makes clear that this is a narrow way to look at things. While the analysis fully acknowledges that there is little, if any, difference in test scores between those who go to preschool and those who don’t, it also found that there are “long-term effects on important societal outcomes such as years of education completed, earnings and reduced crime and teen pregnancy.”
At last count, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, 41 percent of 4-year-olds and 14 percent of 3-year-olds in the United States are enrolled in publicly funded state and federal pre-K programs. Millions of children, especially from lower-income homes, find themselves shut out due to a shortage of spaces. Lack of access, however, is only part of the story. As the research brief notes, “only a minority of preschool programs are observed to provide excellent quality, and levels of instructional support are especially low.”
This suggests that even low-performing preschool programs are better than none at all. Imagine the gains to children and to society if both access and quality were increased. The writers go on to assert that “the most important aspects of quality in preschool education are stimulating and supportive interactions between teachers and children and effective use of curricula.”
“Children benefit most when teachers engage in stimulating interactions that support learning and are emotionally supportive,” the report said. The best of these exchanges “help children acquire new knowledge and skills . . . and foster engagement in and enjoyment of learning.”
Of course, I didn’t really need a team of Ph.D.’s to confirm this last point. Any mom or dad whose kids have benefited from a good preschool program could have told you that.

Best Creative Apps

Your mobile device's screen is a magnet for little fingers, so why not channel their curiosity with your phone into a creative experience? These apps allow kids to color pictures, play around with photos, or just swirl around the screen making cool colors and shapes.

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Browse Best Creative Apps

all ages | Preschoolers (2-4) | Young kids (5-6) | Kids (7-8) | Preteens (9-11) | Teens (12-14)

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  Bord
  Nearly flawless chalkboard app with some clever surprises.
  
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  4
   
  Learning 2
  Platforms: Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  Drawing Pad
  Great drawing app is a window to self-expression.
  
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  4
   
  Platforms: Android, iPad, Kindle Fire
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  Faces iMake - Premium!
  Creativity blossoms in remarkably original art app.
  
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  4
   
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  Glow Doodle
  Drawing app is simple but fun for younger kids.
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  6
   
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  SpinArt
  Mess-free finger-painting for preschool to teens.
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  6
   
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  Toontastic
  Create amazing multi-scene cartoons with musical scores.
  
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  6
   
  Learning 5
  Platforms: iPad
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  Art Set
  Deluxe creative tool will wow artists young and old.
  
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  7
   
  Learning 3
  Platforms: iPad
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  Wreck This App
  Permission to be destructive can inspire creativity.
  
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  8
   
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  Brushes 3
  Painting app offers lots of options for creative expression.
  
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  9
   
  Learning 3
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  123D Sculpt
  Push, pull, and paint iPad clay to make fantastical images.
  
  AGE

  10
   
  Learning 3
  Platforms: iPad
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  ColorSplash
  Simple editing app lets kids create photo masterpieces.
  
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  10
   
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  ToonPAINT
  Budding cartoonists can upload a photo and paint.
  
  AGE

  10
   
  Platforms: Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
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  Graffiti Spray Can HD
  Lots of creative options, some ads, and an iffy link or two.
  
  AGE

  13
   
  Platforms: iPad
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  ArtStudio - Draw, Paint and Edit Photo
  Create amazing art with ease; some nudes in online gallery.
  
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  15
   
  Learning 4
  Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch

It's Not Easy Being Green

It’s Not Easy Being Green

‘Crankenstein’ and ‘Zombelina’

From "Zombelina"

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Published: October 16, 2013

For parents, the scariest thing about Halloween is the lurking question: When kids choose their Halloween costumes, are they choosing their alter egos — or revealing their true selves? In two new picture books, “Crankenstein,” written by Samantha Berger and illustrated by Dan Santat, and “Zombelina,” by Kristyn Crow with pictures by Molly Idle, kids really are monsters and zombies — and not just on Oct. 31.

CRANKENSTEIN

By Samantha Berger

Illustrated by Dan Santat

40 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 6)

ZOMBELINA

By Kristyn Crow

Illustrated by Molly Idle

32 pp. Walker/Bloomsbury. $14.99. (Picture book; ages 2 to 6)

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From "Crankenstein"

Crankenstein is the grumpiest kid ever. “Have you seen Crankenstein?” Berger writes. “Oh, you would totally know if you had. You would say, Good morning!! How are you? Crankenstein would say, MEHHRRRR!” The text of this book is simple but effective: Crankenstein, who is green and none too pretty, but distinctly boy-like, never says a proper English word, but responds to all cheerful questions with loud monster-speak noises. Berger, a former vice president of animated shorts at Nickelodeon and the author of many children’s books, including “Martha Doesn’t Share!,” has a well-honed sense of comic timing that little kids find hilarious, and “Crankenstein,” with its many exclamation marks, growls and grumbles should unleash the actor in any adult kind enough to read it aloud.

Santat created the animated television series “The Replacements” for Disney; you may recognize his style from his earlier picture books, which include the recent “Picture Day Perfection,” written by Deborah Diesen. To convey Crankenstein’s crabby mood, Santat uses a lot of sickly brown and green. But just when the reader has had about enough of that putrid palette, Crankenstein meets another monster, and like two negative numbers, they come together to make something positive. As temperaments brighten, so too do Santat’s scenes, which are suddenly sunny. For the sake of Crankenstein’s poor parents, let’s hope the weather holds!

The little girl zombie whose story Crow tells in “Zombelina,” though just as green as Crankenstein, is an altogether more cheerful character. She’s the child of a witchy family who live in a very creaky old house on Twisted Tree Lane. Zombelina is clearly unusual — and it’s not just her coloring: her limbs are sewn on with big stitches, and she can remove them. This comes in handy at ballet class. Illustrated by Idle (“Tea Rex” and “Flora and the Flamingo”) in sweetly pink-hued scenes, Zombelina can extend her legs farther than any of the human girls in class — because she’s completely disconnected at the hip.

Her instructor, Madame Maladroit, delights in Zombelina’s dancing, but when it comes time for the girls to perform for their assembled parents, Zombelina is struck by a dreadful case of stage fright. Though the resolution of this problem doesn’t quite make sense, the book ends with a happy scene of Madame Maladroit celebrating with Zombelina’s family in their kooky haunted house. Crow (the author of “Cool Daddy Rat” and “Skeleton Cat,” among others) composes rhyming, pun-filled couplets that add to the fanciful, magical feeling of this appealing story. Though not a bit scary, the cast of characters in “Zombelina” makes it ghoulishly appropriate for the season.

The Key to Smarter Kids: Talking to Them the Right Way

The Brilliant Report

 The Key To Smarter Kids: Talking To Them The Right Way

by Annie Murphy Paul

Monday, September 30, 2013

When it comes to children’s learning, are we focusing too much on schools—and not enough on parents?
“There is, quite rightly, a cacophonous debate on how to reform schools, open up colleges, and widen access to pre-K learning,” notes a new article, “Parenting, Politics, and Social Mobility,” published by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “But too little attention is paid to another divide affecting social mobility—the parenting gap.”
Given all the roiling debates about how America’s children should be taught, it may come as a surprise to learn that students spend less than 15% of their time in school. While there’s no doubt that school is important, a clutch of recent studies reminds us that parents are even more so. A study by researchers at North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California-Irvine, for example, finds that parental involvement—checking homework, attending school meetings and events, discussing school activities at home—has a more powerful influence on students’ academic performance than anything about the school the students attend.
Another study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, reports that the effort put forth by parents (reading stories aloud, meeting with teachers) has a bigger impact on their children’s educational achievement than the effort expended by either teachers or the students themselves. And a third study concludes that schools would have to increase their spending by more than $1,000 per pupil in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement (not likely in this stretched economic era).
So parents matter—a point made clear by decades of research showing that a major part of the academic advantage held by children from affluent families comes from the “concerted cultivation of children” as compared to the more laissez-faire style of parenting common in working-class families. But this research also reveals something else: that parents, of all backgrounds, don’t need to buy expensive educational toys or digital devices for their kids in order to give them an edge. They don’t need to chauffeur their offspring to enrichment classes or test-prep courses. What they need to do with their children is much simpler: talk.
But not just any talk. Although well-known research by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley has shown that professional parents talk more to their children than less-affluent parents—a lot more, resulting in a 30 million “word gap” by the time children reach age three—more recent research is refining our sense of exactly what kinds of talk at home foster children’s success at school. For example, a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA School of Public Health and published in the journal Pediatrics found that two-way adult-child conversations were six times as potent in promoting language development as interludes in which the adult did all the talking. Engaging in this reciprocal back-and-forth gives children a chance to try out language for themselves, and also gives them the sense that their thoughts and opinions matter. As they grow older, this feeling helps middle- and upper-class kids develop into assertive advocates for their own interests, while working-class students tend to avoid asking for help or arguing their own case with teachers, according to research presented at American Sociological Association conference last year.
The content of parents’ conversations with kids matters, too. Children who hear talk about counting and numbers at home start school with much more extensive mathematical knowledge, report researchers from the University of Chicago—knowledge that predicts future achievement in the subject. Psychologist Susan Levine, who led the study on number words, has also found that the amount of talk young children hear about the spatial properties of the physical world—how big or small or round or sharp objects are—predicts kids’ problem-solving abilities as they prepare to enter kindergarten.
While the conversations parents have with their children change as kids grow older, the effect of these exchanges on academic achievement remains strong. And again, the way mothers and fathers talk to their middle-school students makes a difference. Research by Nancy Hill, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, finds that parents play an important role in what Hill calls “academic socialization”—setting expectations and making connections between current behavior and future goals (going to college, getting a good job).
Engaging in these sorts of conversations, Hill reports, has a greater impact on educational accomplishment than volunteering at a child’s school or going to PTA meetings, or even taking children to libraries and museums. When it comes to fostering students’ success, it seems, it’s not so much what parents do as what they say.

Is Music the Key to Success?

By JOANNE LIPMAN

Published: October 12, 2013

CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.

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Anna Parini

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.

The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.

Will your school music program turn your kid into a Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft (guitar)? Or a Woody Allen (clarinet)? Probably not. These are singular achievers. But the way these and other visionaries I spoke to process music is intriguing. As is the way many of them apply music’s lessons of focus and discipline into new ways of thinking and communicating — even problem solving.

Look carefully and you’ll find musicians at the top of almost any industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music scholarships; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional violinist. Both Microsoft’s Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played cello at Carnegie Hall.

“It’s not a coincidence,” says Mr. Greenspan, who gave up jazz clarinet but still dabbles at the baby grand in his living room. “I can tell you as a statistician, the probability that that is mere chance is extremely small.” The cautious former Fed chief adds, “That’s all that you can judge about the facts. The crucial question is: why does that connection exist?”

Paul Allen offers an answer. He says music “reinforces your confidence in the ability to create.” Mr. Allen began playing the violin at age 7 and switched to the guitar as a teenager. Even in the early days of Microsoft, he would pick up his guitar at the end of marathon days of programming. The music was the emotional analog to his day job, with each channeling a different type of creative impulse. In both, he says, “something is pushing you to look beyond what currently exists and express yourself in a new way.”

Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and competition and what he calls the “drive for perfection.” The veteran advertising executive Steve Hayden credits his background as a cellist for his most famous work, the Apple “1984” commercial depicting rebellion against a dictator. “I was thinking of Stravinsky when I came up with that idea,” he says. He adds that his cello performance background helps him work collaboratively: “Ensemble playing trains you, quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and when to follow.”

For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a “hidden language,” as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello), which helped him understand “the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet.”

Next Page »

Health Apps as Parenting Aids

By SOPHIE EGAN

Three new apps provide evidence-based healthy hints for raising children ages 1 to 5. For example: “Don’t forget it’s time for your child’s 1-year checkup! The doctor will talk to you about how your child is growing and what to expect this year.”
The winners of the Apps4TotsHealth Challenge were announced on Monday in Washington at Health Datapalooza IV, an annual conference sponsored by the Health Data Consortium, a mix of government and private groups, which focuses on using publicly available data to improve health.
All three apps make use of a resource newly available to the public: the TXT4Tots message library developed with the American Academy of Pediatrics. The message library is a bank of tested tips on healthy eating and physical activity, downloadable as a spreadsheet — not an easy thing to integrate into daily life.
Enter the three winning apps, all free.

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Dave Vockell

myfamily, by LyfeChannel, based in San Francisco. Available now on iPhone, and soon in Spanish and on Android.
This mobile app encourages parents to manage family health with customized recommendations based on each family member’s profile.
Last month, the app incorporated preventive care recommendations from the United States Preventive Services Task Force and others, and it now includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pediatric vaccine calendar and the TXT4Tots nutrition and physical activity messages. Users receive text messages as often as every day, in the form of a graphically engaging tip on parenting, nutrition or exercise, or a reminder about a doctor’s visit. Some messages include links to additional information, like healthfinder.gov content related to the well-child visits.

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TotBytes, by Dan Lee, based in Chicago. Available now on iPhone, and later this year in Spanish and on Android.

Dan Lee

“It’s like GPS for parenting,” says Dan Lee, creator of TotBytes and founder of Breakpoint Health. The mobile app provides the TXT4Tots nutrition and physical activity content as well as the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations for nutrient intake.
TotBytes includes personalized tools and a community of parents to interact with around best recipes, shared challenges and Food and Drug Administration recalls. Users can select items from a pantry, generate age-appropriate meal plans and receive notices about when and what to feed their children, as well as warnings of what not to feed them.
With the personalized reporting tool, parents and caregivers can then record what children eat and evaluate how well they are balancing meal composition and providing nutrients on a given day or week.
As a “mobile dad” himself, Mr. Lee says not only that parents are “at their most cognitively challenged (tired, in a new situation)” during a child’s first few years, but that those years are a critical window for obesity prevention.
“This is really our effort to tackle the problem at the root cause,” Mr. Lee says.

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Scott Lininger

Super Mommy’O, by Scott Lininger, based in Boulder, Colo. Available at supermommyo.com, only with Google Chrome.
If the name didn’t give it away, this is Super Mario for child rearing. The retro-looking game is currently a Web app only, as it evolved out of a side project the developer originally created for his young daughter. Now it is a fun way for parents to learn the TXT4Tots content.
“You play a mommy who has a 1-year-old kiddo, and you jump around, but instead of picking up coins, you pick up healthy foods and make healthy decisions for your kids,” Mr. Lininger says.
But, he warns, “You’ve got to dodge the doughnuts.” Doughnuts shot by robots, no less.

My Kids Are Obsessed With Technology, and It’s All My Fault

Illustration by Tom Gauld

By STEVE ALMOND

A few months ago, I attended my daughter Josie’s kindergarten open house, the highlight of which was a video slide show featuring our moppets using iPads to practice their penmanship. Parental cooing ensued.

I happened to be sitting next to the teacher, and I asked her about the rumor I’d heard: that next year, every elementary-school kid in town would be provided his or her own iPad. She said this pilot program was being introduced only at the newly constructed school three blocks from our house, which Josie will attend next year. “You’re lucky,” she observed wistfully.

This seemed to be the consensus around the school-bus stop. The iPads are coming! Not only were our kids going to love learning, they were also going to do so on the cutting edge of innovation. Why, in the face of this giddy chatter, was I filled with dread?

It’s not because I’m a cranky Luddite. I swear. I recognize that iPads, if introduced with a clear plan, and properly supervised, can improve learning and allow students to work at their own pace. Those are big ifs in an era of overcrowded classrooms. But my hunch is that our school will do a fine job. We live in a town filled with talented educators and concerned parents.

Frankly, I find it more disturbing that a brand-name product is being elevated to the status of mandatory school supply. I also worry that iPads might transform the classroom from a social environment into an educational subway car, each student fixated on his or her personalized educational gadget.

But beneath this fretting is a more fundamental beef: the school system, without meaning to, is subverting my parenting, in particular my fitful efforts to regulate my children’s exposure to screens. These efforts arise directly from my own tortured history as a digital pioneer, and the war still raging within me between harnessing the dazzling gifts of technology versus fighting to preserve the slower, less convenient pleasures of the analog world.

What I’m experiencing is, in essence, a generational reckoning, that queasy moment when those of us whose impatient desires drove the tech revolution must face the inheritors of this enthusiasm: our children.

It will probably come as no surprise that I’m one of those annoying people fond of boasting that I don’t own a TV. It makes me feel noble to mention this — I am feeling noble right now! — as if I’m taking a brave stand against the vulgar superficiality of the age. What I mention less frequently is the reason I don’t own a TV: because I would watch it constantly.

My brothers and I were so devoted to television as kids that we created an entire lexicon around it. The brother who turned on the TV, and thus controlled the channel being watched, was said to “emanate.” I didn’t even know what “emanate” meant. It just sounded like the right verb.

This was back in the ’70s. We were latchkey kids living on the brink of a brave new world. In a few short years, we’d hurtled from the miraculous calculator (turn it over to spell out “boobs”!) to arcades filled with strobing amusements. I was one of those guys who spent every spare quarter mastering Asteroids and Defender, who found in video games a reliable short-term cure for the loneliness and competitive anxiety that plagued me. By the time I graduated from college, the era of personal computers had dawned. I used mine to become a closet Freecell Solitaire addict.

Midway through my 20s I underwent a reformation. I began reading, then writing, literary fiction. It quickly became apparent that the quality of my work rose in direct proportion to my ability filter out distractions. I’ve spent the past two decades struggling to resist the endless pixelated enticements intended to capture and monetize every spare second of human attention.

Has this campaign succeeded? Not really. I’ve just been a bit slower on the uptake than my contemporaries. But even without a TV or smartphones, our household can feel dominated by computers, especially because I and my wife (also a writer) work at home. We stare into our screens for hours at a stretch, working and just as often distracting ourselves from work.

Our children not only pick up on this fraught dynamic; they re-enact it. We ostensibly limit Josie (age 6) and Judah (age 4) to 45 minutes of screen time per day. But they find ways to get more: hunkering down with the videos Josie takes on her camera, sweet-talking the grandparents and so on. The temptations have only multiplied as they move out into a world saturated by technology.

Consider an incident that has come to be known in my household as the Leapster Imbroglio. For those unfamiliar with the Leapster, it is a “learning game system” aimed at 4-to-9-year-olds. Josie has wanted one for more than a year. “My two best friends have a Leapster and I don’t,” she sobbed to her mother recently. “I feel like a loser!”

My wife was practically in tears as she related this episode to me. It struck me as terribly sad that an electronic device had become, in our daughter’s mind, such a powerful talisman of personal worth. But even sadder was the fact that I knew, deep down, exactly how she felt.

This is the moment we live in, the one our childhoods foretold. When I see Josie clutching her grandmother’s Kindle to play Angry Birds for the 10th straight time, or I watch my son stuporously soaking up a cartoon, I’m really seeing myself as a kid — anxious, needy for love but willing to settle for electronic distraction to soothe my nerves or hold tedium at bay.

And if experiencing this blast from the past weren’t troubling enough, I also get to confront my current failings as a parent. After all, we park the kiddos in front of SpongeBob because it’s convenient for us, not good for them. (“Quiet time,” we call it. Let’s please not dwell on how sad and perverse this phrase is.) We make this bargain every day, even though our kids are often restless and irritable afterward.

Back in the day, when my folks snapped off the TV and exhorted us to pick up a book or go outside and play, they did so with a certain cultural credibility. Everyone knew you couldn’t experience the “real world” by sitting in front of a screen. It was an escape. Today, screens are the real world, or at least the accepted means of making us feel a part of that world. And they can no longer be written off as mind-rotting piffle. “The iPad is an educational tool, Papa!” Josie declared last month, after hearing me grouse about Apple’s efforts to target the preschool demographic.

Her own experience learning to read is a case in point. We spent a year coaxing her to try beginner books. Even with the promise of our company and encouragement, it was a tough sell. Then her teacher sent home a note about a Web site that allows kids to listen to stories, with some rudimentary animation, before reading them and taking a quiz to earn points. She has since plowed through more than 50 books.

Josie never fails to remind me that “the reading” is her least favorite part of this activity. And when she does, I feel (once again) that I’m face to face with myself as a kid: more interested in racking up points than embracing the joys of reading. What I’m lamenting isn’t that she prefers to read off a screen but that the screen alters and dilutes the imaginative experience.

It is unfair, not to mention foolish, for me to expect my 6-year-old to seek redemption in the same way I did, only at age 25. Her job is to make the same sometimes-impulsive decisions I made as a kid (and teenager and young adult). And my job is to let her learn her own lessons rather than imposing mine on her.

Still, I can’t be the only parent feeling whiplashed by the pace of technological changes, the manner in which every conceivable wonder — not just the diversions but also the curriculums and cures, the assembled beauty and wisdom of the ages — has migrated inside our portable machines. Is it really possible to hand kids these magical devices without somehow dimming their sense of wonder at the world beyond the screen?

In the course of mulling this question, I stumbled across an odd trove of videos (on YouTube, naturally) in which parents proudly record their babies operating iPads. One girl is 9 months old. Her ability to manipulate the touch screen is astonishing. But the clip is profoundly eerie. The child’s face glows like an alien as she scrolls from app to app. It’s like watching some bizarre inverse of Skinner’s box, in which the child subject is overrun by choices and stimuli. She seems agitated in the same way my kids are after “quiet time” — excited without being engaged.

As I watched her in action, I found myself wondering how a malleable brain like hers might be shaped by this odd experience of being the lord of a tiny two-dimensional universe. And whether a child exposed to such an experience routinely might later struggle to contend with the necessary frustrations and mysteries of the actual world.

I realize the human brain is a supple organ. My daughter may learn to use technology in ways I never have: to focus her attention, to stimulate her imagination, to expand her sense of possibility. And I know too that most folks view their devices as relatively harmless paths to greater efficiency and connectivity.

But I remain skeptical.

Because aren’t we just kidding ourselves? When we whip out our smartphones in line at the bank, 9 times out of 10 it’s because we’re jonesing for a microhit of stimulation, or that feeling of power that comes with holding a tiny universe in our fist.

The reason people turn to screens hasn’t changed much over the years. They remain mirrors that reflect a species in retreat from the burdens of modern consciousness, from boredom and isolation and helplessness.

It’s natural for children to seek out a powerful tool to banish these feelings. But the only reliable antidote to such burdens, based on my own experience, is not immersion in brighter and mightier screens but the capacity to slow our minds and pay sustained attention to the world around us. This is how all of us — whether artists or scientists or kindergartners — find beauty and meaning in the unceasing rush of experience. It’s how we develop empathy for other people, and the humility to accept our failures and keep struggling. It’s what grants my daughter the patience to wait for the cardinal who has taken to visiting the compost bin on our back porch.

I imagine the iPad Josie receives at school next year will have access to a vast archive of information and videos about cardinals, ones she’ll be able to call up and peruse instantly. But no flick of the thumb will ever make her suck in her breath as she does when, after five excruciating minutes, an actual cardinal appears on the porch railing in a flash of impossible red. I hope Josie remembers that all her life. I hope we both do.

Overscheduled Children: How Big a Problem?

Aleks Sennwald

By BRUCE FEILER

Published: October 11, 2013

Now that the school year is under way, my wife and I are busy managing our children’s after-school schedules, mixing sports practices, music lessons, homework and play dates. It can be a complicated balancing act for our elementary-age daughters, as some days end up overstuffed, some logistically impossible, some wide open. Still, compared to when we were children, the opportunities they get to sample on a weekly basis is mind-blowing.

There’s only one problem: To absorb the conventional wisdom in parenting circles these days, what we’re doing to our children is cruel, overbearing and destructive to their long-term well-being. For years now, a consensus has been emerging that a subset of hard-driving, Ivy-longing parents is burdening their children with too many soccer tournaments, violin lessons and cooking classes. A small library of books has been published with names like “The Over-Scheduled Child,” “The Pressured Child,” “Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids” and so on.

In recent years there’s been some backlash to this view. With scholars releasing studies showing the benefits of extracurricular activities, whether paid for out of school budgets or parents’ pockets, a smattering of articles began to appear with names like “The Overscheduled Child Myth.” Still, the more common headline reads: “10 Signs Your Kid Is Too Busy.”

I found myself frustrated by this message. First, my wife and I work, so we don’t have the luxury of supervising our daughters’ free time around the clock. These activities, while sometimes costly, give us some peace of mind. Second, it’s easy to say children need to wander unsupervised in the neighborhood inventing their own activities, but we live in the 21st century, not a Beverly Cleary novel. Finally, when we do leave our kids on their own for long stretches, they end up wrestling on the floor, finding their way into a fight or demanding screen time.

As a work-at-home dad, this means I’m often dragged into the fray, making me long for even more lacrosse practices or, better yet, etiquette classes, where at least they’ll learn something and get to hang with friends. After-school activities as enrichment? Sometimes we view them as baby-sitting with a snack.

So what’s a confused parent to do? I reached out to some of the leading voices in the children-are-overburdened chorus and sought some advice.

Michael Thompson, a clinical psychologist and the author of “The Pressured Child,” tried to put me at ease.

“As a general principle, there is a line between a highly enriched, interesting, growth-promoting childhood and an overscheduled childhood,” he said. “And nobody knows where that line is.”

The real problem, he said, lies with parents, especially highly successful ones who have a high degree of control over their own lives and who try to take similar control over their children’s lives. This leads them to make choices about after-school activities out of anxiety instead of interest in their child’s well-being.

“When I was growing up it was clean your plate because they’re starving in China,” he said. “Now it’s go practice your instrument because kids in China are learning violin.”

Especially with elementary- and middle-school children, he said, parents should be less fearful that their kids aren’t getting ahead and more worried about their overall quality of life.

“Is the child getting enough sleep?” he asked. “Does the child have enough time to do his or her homework?”

Alvin Rosenfeld, a clinical psychologist and an author of “The Over-Scheduled Child,” also distanced himself from the notion that extracurricular activities are bad.

“Enrichment activities are perfect,” he said. “They add a lot to kids’ lives. The problem is, we’ve lost the ability to balance them with down time, boring time.”

So where did I get this idea that play dates and sports practices are too stressful? Dr. Rosenfeld answered: “Where did I get misquoted so often? If you read everything I’ve written, the basic idea is that it’s great to have a computer, it’s great to have software, but if you overload a computer with software it breaks down.” 

Read more ... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/fashion/over-scheduled-children-how-big-a-problem.html

Smart Strategies That Help Students Learn How to Learn

Annie Murphy Paul | October 7, 2013 |

Bruce Guenter

What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather riddle-like answer: It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know.

To put it in more straightforward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself—the “metacognitive” aspects of learning—is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.
In our schools, “the emphasis is on what students need to learn, whereas little emphasis—if any—is placed on training students how they should go about learning the content and what skills will promote efficient studying to support robust learning,” writes John Dunlosky, professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, in an article just published in American Educator. However, he continues, “teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content, because acquiring both the right learning strategies and background knowledge is important—if not essential—for promoting lifelong learning.”

“Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content.”

Research has found that students vary widely in what they know about how to learn, according to a team of educational researchers from Australia writing last year in the journal Instructional Science. Most striking, low-achieving students show “substantial deficits” in their awareness of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to effective learning—suggesting that these students’ struggles may be due in part to a gap in their knowledge about how learning works.
Teaching students good learning strategies would ensure that they know how to acquire new knowledge, which leads to improved learning outcomes, writes lead author Helen Askell-Williams of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. And studies bear this out. Askell-Williams cites as one example a recent finding by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, which administers academic proficiency tests to students around the globe, and place American students in the mediocre middle. “Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform at least 73 points higher in the PISA assessment—that is, one full proficiency level or nearly two full school years—than students who use these strategies the least,” the PISA report reads.

In their own study, Askell-Williams and her coauthors took as their subjects 1,388 Australian high school students. They first administered an assessment to find out how much the students knew about cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies—and found that their familiarity with these tactics was “less than optimal.”
Students can assess their own awareness by asking themselves which of the following learning strategies they regularly use (the response to each item is ideally “yes”):
• I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand this subject.
• I make up questions that I try to answer about this subject.
• When I am learning something new in this subject, I think back to what I already know about it.
• I discuss what I am doing in this subject with others.
• I practice things over and over until I know them well in this subject.
• I think about my thinking, to check if I understand the ideas in this subject.
• When I don’t understand something in this subject I go back over it again.
• I make a note of things that I don’t understand very well in this subject, so that I can follow them up.
• When I have finished an activity in this subject I look back to see how well I did.
• I organize my time to manage my learning in this subject.
• I make plans for how to do the activities in this subject.
Askell-Williams and her colleagues found that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. For the second part of their study, they designed a series of proactive questions for teachers to drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most. These questions, too, can be adopted by any parent or educator to make sure that children know not just what is to be learned, but how.
• What is the topic for today’s lesson?
• What will be important ideas in today’s lesson?
• What do you already know about this topic?
• What can you relate this to?
• What will you do to remember the key ideas?
• Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?