The Science of Smart: How the Power of Intention Can Help You Learn Better

By Annie Murphy Paul

Intending to Learn
Listening and observing can be passive activities—in one ear and out the other, as our mothers used to say. Or they can be rich, active, intense experiences that lead to serious learning. The difference lies in our intention: the purpose and awareness with which we approach the occasion. Here’s how to make sure your intentions are good.

“Research on how we learn a second language demonstrates that effective listening involves more than simply hearing the words that float past our ears. Rather, it’s an active process of interpreting information and making meaning.”

Listening With Intention
Research on how we learn a second language demonstrates that effective listening involves more than simply hearing the words that float past our ears. Rather, it’s an active process of interpreting information and making meaning. Studies of skilled language learners have identified specific listening strategies that lead to superior comprehension. What’s more, research has shown that learners who deliberately adopt these strategies become better listeners.
In 2010, for example, University of Ottawa researcher Larry Vandergrift published his study of 106 undergraduates who were learning French as a second language. Half of the students were taught in a conventional fashion, listening to and practicing texts spoken aloud. The other half, possessing the same initial skill level and taught by the same teacher, were given explicit instruction on how to listen. In the journal Language Learning, Vandergrift reported the results: The second group “significantly outperformed” the first one on a test of comprehension. The improvement was especially pronounced among the less-fluent French speakers in the group.
So what are these listening strategies?
• Skilled learners go into a listening session with a sense of what they want to get out of it. They set a goal for their listening, and they generate predictions about what the speaker will say. Before the talking begins, they mentally review what they already know about the subject, and form an intention to “listen out for” what’s important or relevant.
• Once they begin listening, these learners maintain their focus; if their attention wanders, they bring it back to the words being spoken. They don’t allow themselves to be thrown off by confusing or unfamiliar details. Instead, they take note of what they don’t understand and make inferences about what those things might mean, based on other clues available to them: their previous knowledge of the subject, the context of the talk, the identity of the speaker, and so on. They’re “listening for gist,” and not getting caught up in fine-grained analysis.
• All the while, skilled learners are evaluating what they’re hearing and their own understanding of it. They’re checking their inferences to see if they’re correct, and identifying the questions they still have so they can pursue the answers later.
Such strategies are all about metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and they yield a variety of benefits. Research indicates that learners who engage in metacognition are better at processing and storing new information, better at finding the best ways to practice and better at reinforcing what they have learned. In a 2006 study by researchers from Singapore, Chinese speakers who were learning English as a second language reported increased motivation and confidence after they were taught metacognitive strategies.
Observing With Intention
You’ve heard it before, and it’s true: we learn by doing. But we also learn by watching. Whether it’s a salsa teacher running through a dance sequence, a tennis coach demonstrating proper serving technique or a science professor conducting a dissection in front of the class, observing an expert at work is an opportunity to hone our own skills.
This is especially true in the case of motor movements, and research in neuroscience is beginning to show why: when we watch someone else’s motions, the parts of the brain that direct our own physical movements are activated. Observation accelerates the learning process because our brains are able to map others’ actions onto our own mental representations, making them more detailed and more accurate. Using brain scans, scientists are figuring out how this process works—and how we can make the most of what we see.
Scott Grafton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has employed studies of dancers to investigate the operation of what he calls the “action observation network,” a circuit in the brain that is stimulated whenever we observe a movement, imagine performing it or actually engage in it ourselves. In a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex in 2009, Grafton and his co-authors asked participants to rehearse a dance sequence set to a music video.
For five days they practiced the routine; on each day they also watched a different dance sequence without trying it out for themselves. The subjects’ brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after the five-day period.
The second round of scans revealed that the dancers’ action observation networks showed similar patterns of activation as they watched both videos—the one with a dance sequence they had practiced, and the one with a dance sequence they had simply watched. “Human motor skills can be acquired by observation without the benefit of immediate physical practice,” Grafton and his colleagues concluded.
We derive the most benefit from observation when have in mind the conscious intention to carry out the action ourselves. In a 2006 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, psychologist Scott Frey of the University of Oregon scanned the brains of participants as they watched videos of someone putting together and taking apart a toy made of several parts. One group of subjects simply watched the demonstration; another group was aware that they would be asked to reproduce the actions they viewed on the video.
Although members of both groups were lying completely still inside an fMRI machine, the brains of the second group showed activation in a region involved in motor learning. Simply knowing that we will be expected to carry out the motions we observe seems to prime the brain to learn better.
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!

Parental Involvement is Overrated

The Great Divide

Parental Involvement Is Overrated

By KEITH ROBINSON and ANGEL L. HARRIS

April 12, 2014, 2:32 pm

Most people, asked whether parental involvement benefits children academically, would say, “of course it does.” But evidence from our research suggests otherwise. In fact, most forms of parental involvement, like observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it.

Over the past few years, we conducted an extensive study of whether the depth of parental engagement in children’s academic lives improved their test scores and grades. We pursued this question because we noticed that while policy makers were convinced that parental involvement positively affected children’s schooling outcomes, academic studies were much more inconclusive.

Despite this, increasing parental involvement has been one of the focal points of both President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and President Obama’s Race to the Top. Both programs promote parental engagement as one remedy for persistent socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps.

We analyzed longitudinal surveys of American families that spanned three decades (from the 1980s to the 2000s) and obtained demographic information on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, the academic outcomes of children in elementary, middle and high school, as well as information about the level of parental engagement in 63 different forms.

What did we find? One group of parents, including blacks and Hispanics, as well as some Asians (like Cambodians, Vietnamese and Pacific Islanders), appeared quite similar to a second group, made up of white parents and other Asians (like Chinese, Koreans and Indians) in the frequency of their involvement. A common reason given for why the children of the first group performed worse academically on average was that their parents did not value education to the same extent. But our research shows that these parents tried to help their children in school just as much as the parents in the second group.

Even the notion that kids do better in school when their parents are involved does not stack up. After comparing the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing.

In fact, there were more instances in which children had higher levels of achievement when their parents were less involved than there were among those whose parents were more involved. Even more counterintuitively: When involvement does seem to matter, the consequences for children’s achievement are more often negative than positive.

When involvement did benefit kids academically, it depended on which behavior parents were engaging in, which academic outcome was examined, the grade level of the child, the racial and ethnic background of the family and its socioeconomic standing. For example, regularly discussing school experiences with your child seems to positively affect the reading and math test scores of Hispanic children, to negatively affect test scores in reading for black children, and to negatively affect test scores in both reading and math for white children (but only during elementary school). Regularly reading to elementary school children appears to benefit reading achievement for white and Hispanic children but it is associated with lower reading achievement for black children. Policy makers should not advocate a one-size-fits-all model of parental involvement.

What about when parents work directly with their children on learning activities at home? When we examined whether regular help with homework had a positive impact on children’s academic performance, we were quite startled by what we found. Regardless of a family’s social class, racial or ethnic background, or a child’s grade level, consistent homework help almost never improved test scores or grades. Most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children with homework. Even more surprising to us was that when parents regularly helped with homework, kids usually performed worse. One interesting exception: The group of Asians that included Chinese, Korean and Indian children appeared to benefit from regular help with homework, but this benefit was limited to the grades they got during adolescence; it did not affect their test scores.

Our findings also suggest that the idea that parental involvement will address one of the most salient and intractable issues in education, racial and ethnic achievement gaps, is not supported by the evidence. This is because our analyses show that most parental behavior has no benefit on academic performance. While there are some forms of parental involvement that do appear to have a positive impact on children academically, we find at least as many instances in which more frequent involvement is related to lower academic performance.

As it turns out, the list of what generally works is short: expecting your child to go to college, discussing activities children engage in at school (despite the complications we mentioned above), and requesting a particular teacher for your child.

Do our findings suggest that parents are not important for children’s academic success? Our answer is no. We believe that parents are critical for how well children perform in school, just not in the conventional ways that our society has been promoting. The essential ingredient is for parents to communicate the value of schooling, a message that parents should be sending early in their children’s lives and that needs to be reinforced over time. But this message does not need to be communicated through conventional behavior, like attending PTA meetings or checking in with teachers.

When the federal government issues mandates on the implementation of programs that increase parental involvement, schools often encourage parents to spend more time volunteering, to attend school events, to help their children with homework and so forth. There is a strong sentiment in this country that parents matter in every respect relating to their children’s academic success, but we need to let go of this sentiment and begin to pay attention to what the evidence is telling us.

Conventional wisdom holds that since there is no harm in having an involved parent, why shouldn’t we suggest as many ways as possible for parents to participate in school? This conventional wisdom is flawed. Schools should move away from giving the blanket message to parents that they need to be more involved and begin to focus instead on helping parents find specific, creative ways to communicate the value of schooling, tailored to a child’s age. Future research should investigate how parental involvement can be made more effective, but until then, parents who have been less involved or who feel uncertain about how they should be involved should not be stigmatized.

What should parents do? They should set the stage and then leave it.

Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney

By RON SUSKIND MARCH 7, 2014

A 12-year-old Owen at Walt Disney World. Credit From the Suskind family

In our first year in Washington, our son disappeared.

Just shy of his 3rd birthday, an engaged, chatty child, full of typical speech — “I love you,” “Where are my Ninja Turtles?” “Let’s get ice cream!” — fell silent. He cried, inconsolably. Didn’t sleep. Wouldn’t make eye contact. His only word was “juice.”

I had just started a job as The Wall Street Journal’s national affairs reporter. My wife, Cornelia, a former journalist, was home with him — a new story every day, a new horror. He could barely use a sippy cup, though he’d long ago graduated to a big-boy cup. He wove about like someone walking with his eyes shut. “It doesn’t make sense,” I’d say at night. “You don’t grow backward.” Had he been injured somehow when he was out of our sight, banged his head, swallowed something poisonous? It was like searching for clues to a kidnapping.

After visits to several doctors, we first heard the word “autism.” Later, it would be fine-tuned to “regressive autism,” now affecting roughly a third of children with the disorder. Unlike the kids born with it, this group seems typical until somewhere between 18 and 36 months — then they vanish. Some never get their speech back. Families stop watching those early videos, their child waving to the camera. Too painful. That child’s gone.

In the year since his diagnosis, Owen’s only activity with his brother, Walt, is something they did before the autism struck: watching Disney movies. “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” — it was a boom time for Disney — and also the old classics: “Dumbo,” “Fantasia,” “Pinocchio,” “Bambi.” They watch on a television bracketed to the wall in a high corner of our smallish bedroom in Georgetown. It is hard to know all the things going through the mind of our 6-year-old, Walt, about how his little brother, now nearly 4, is changing. They pile up pillows on our bed and sit close, Walt often with his arm around Owen’s shoulders, trying to hold him — and the shifting world — in place.

Owen at 18 months, before signs of autism. Credit From the Suskind family

Then Walt slips out to play with friends, and Owen keeps watching. Movie after movie. Certain parts he rewinds and rewatches. Lots of rewinding. But he seems content, focused.

We ask our growing team of developmental specialists, doctors and therapists about it. We were never big fans of plopping our kids in front of Disney videos, but now the question seemed more urgent: Is this good for him? They shrug. Is he relaxed? Yes. Does it seem joyful? Definitely. Keep it limited, they say. But if it does all that for him, there’s no reason to stop it.

So we join him upstairs, all of us, on a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon in November 1994. Owen is already on the bed, oblivious to our arrival, murmuring gibberish. . . . “Juicervose, juicervose.” It is something we’ve been hearing for the past few weeks. Cornelia thinks maybe he wants more juice; but no, he refuses the sippy cup. “The Little Mermaid” is playing as we settle in, propping up pillows. We’ve all seen it at least a dozen times, but it’s at one of the best parts: where Ursula the sea witch, an acerbic diva, sings her song of villainy, “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” to the selfish mermaid, Ariel, setting up the part in which Ursula will turn Ariel into a human, allowing her to seek out the handsome prince, in exchange for her voice.

Owen at age 3, just after symptoms developed. Credit From the Suskind family

When the song is over, Owen lifts the remote. Hits rewind.

“Come on, Owen, just let it play!” Walt moans. But Owen goes back just 20 seconds or so, to the song’s next-to-last stanza, with Ursula shouting:

Go ahead — make your choice!

I’m a very busy woman, and I haven’t got all day.

It won’t cost much, just your voice!

He does it again. Stop. Rewind. Play. And one more time. On the fourth pass, Cornelia whispers, “It’s not ‘juice.’ ” I barely hear her. “What?” “It’s not ‘juice.’ It’s ‘just’ . . . ‘just your voice’!”

I grab Owen by the shoulders. “Just your voice! Is that what you’re saying?!”

He looks right at me, our first real eye contact in a year. “Juicervose! Juicervose! Juicervose!”

Walt starts to shout, “Owen’s talking again!” A mermaid lost her voice in a moment of transformation. So did this silent boy. “Juicervose! Juicervose! Juicervose!” Owen keeps saying it, watching us shout and cheer. And then we’re up, all of us, bouncing on the bed. Owen, too, singing it over and over — “Juicervose!” — as Cornelia, tears beginning to fall, whispers softly, “Thank God, he’s in there.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/reaching-my-autistic-son-through-disney.html?ref=education

Making the Most of Time

‘At the Same Moment Around the World’ and ‘It’s About Time’

APRIL 16, 2014

Credit From "At the Same Moment Around the World"

Children’s Books

By SARAH HARRISON SMITH

Time works so differently for children. While harried adults flutter about getting ready for this or that, children tend to get lost in their books, their Lego metropolises, their imaginary games. And when it’s suddenly time to go to school, or to soccer practice or, heaven forfend, to bed, they’re astonished. Where did the time go?

Understanding time is not the same as being aware of its passing, but two new picture books, “At the Same Moment Around the World,” by Clotilde Perrin, and “It’s About Time: Untangling Everything You Need to Know About Time,” by Pascale Estellon, present facts about time in thoughtful and sometimes poetic ways.

Of the two, Perrin’s “At the Same Moment Around the World,” originally published in France in 2011, is the more beautiful. In a book as tall and narrow as an accountant’s ledger, each page depicts a moment from a child’s day in a different part of the world. The first is set in the early morning, as a boy and his father unload fish from a net on an abalone-pink beach in Senegal. Brightly painted boats line up on the shore behind them, and Perrin’s intensely colored pencil drawings show a glimpse of a city in the background, with small houses, electrical wires, high-rises and palm trees. It’s a mysterious scene, in which the rosy dawn creeps gradually across the page from the east toward the sea, where the night stars still shine down.

That idea of simultaneous difference is Perrin’s theme throughout the book. In Paris, an urban child under a typically Parisian mansard roof drinks hot chocolate as he prepares for school. On the adjacent page, a little boy in a wooded setting in Bulgaria chases after the school bus. As Perrin’s focus moves gradually around the globe, the hour grows later, and children in Uzbekistan, China, Japan, Australia, Peru — in total, 24 locations — are shown doing what they might do in their different time zones. As day turns to night, a girl peeks out the window of a house in Greenland where the northern lights play across the sky; in Brazil, a boy sleeps soundly in an outdoor hammock.

At the back of the book, a pull-out map and serious facts about Sir Sandford Fleming’s invention of time zones in the 1880s and the difference between Greenwich Mean Time and Coordinate Universal Time may make “At the Same Moment Around the World” valuable in schools. But a casual at-home reader will take from this book less specific but pertinent information about the differences in landscapes and culture around the world; the names, perhaps new, of distant places, and perhaps most important, a sense of awe at the variety of life going on at exactly the same time.

Estellon’s “It’s About Time” (also translated from French) is a more straightforward book that conveys, quite imaginatively, different ways of thinking about time — and by extension, clocks, calendars, cardinal and ordinal numbers, seasons and even centuries. That’s a lot to cover. “You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell it, but you can count it,” Estellon begins, and starts her exploration of time with the shortest increment a child is likely to understand — a second. Helping children to grasp its duration, she shows a series of loops drawn in crayon: Drawing the loops takes just about a second. Later, she provides a recipe for baking a delicious-sounding pound cake, which takes an hour to make from start to finish. This kind of broad, visual assistance continues throughout the book, engaging readers who might otherwise shy away.

Two central characters, Lily and Jacob, painted in opaque, gouache-like colors, with big heads and occasionally puzzled expressions, lead readers through, sometimes enacting the different activities of a typical day, sometimes dressing up appropriately for the changing seasons. As representatives of the child reader, they don’t always look as if they’re having fun. There is, however, a great deal of cleverly, efficiently presented material in “It’s About Time,” and if there’s one thing that everyone — from poets like Robert Herrick to more pragmatic observers — says about time, it’s that we all should make the most of it. It’s never too early to begin, and either of these books would be a good place to start.

AT THE SAME MOMENT AROUND THE WORLD

Written and illustrated by Clotilde Perrin

36 pp. Chronicle Books. $17.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 8)

IT’S ABOUT TIME

Untangling Everything You Need to Know About Time

Written and illustrated by Pascale Estellon

48 pp. Owlkids Books. $18.95. (Picture book; ages 5 to 8)

Raising a Moral Child

By ADAM GRANT APRIL 11, 2014

What does it take to be a good parent? We know some of the tricks for teaching kids to become high achievers. For example, research suggests that when parents praise effort rather than ability, children develop a stronger work ethic and become more motivated.

Yet although some parents live vicariously through their children’s accomplishments, success is not the No. 1 priority for most parents. We’re much more concerned about our children becoming kind, compassionate and helpful. Surveys reveal that in the United States, parents from European, Asian, Hispanic and African ethnic groups all place far greater importance on caring than achievement. These patterns hold around the world: When people in 50 countries were asked to report their guiding principles in life, the value that mattered most was not achievement, but caring.

Despite the significance that it holds in our lives, teaching children to care about others is no simple task. In an Israeli study of nearly 600 families, parents who valued kindness and compassion frequently failed to raise children who shared those values.

Are some children simply good-natured — or not? For the past decade, I’ve been studying the surprising success of people who frequently help others without any strings attached. As the father of two daughters and a son, I’ve become increasingly curious about how these generous tendencies develop.

Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate children flies in the face of what many of even the most well-intentioned parents do in praising good behavior, responding to bad behavior, and communicating their values.

By age 2, children experience some moral emotions — feelings triggered by right and wrong. To reinforce caring as the right behavior, research indicates, praise is more effective than rewards. Rewards run the risk of leading children to be kind only when a carrot is offered, whereas praise communicates that sharing is intrinsically worthwhile for its own sake. But what kind of praise should we give when our children show early signs of generosity?

Many parents believe it’s important to compliment the behavior, not the child — that way, the child learns to repeat the behavior. Indeed, I know one couple who are careful to say, “That was such a helpful thing to do,” instead of, “You’re a helpful person.”

But is that the right approach? In a clever experiment, the researchers Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler set out to investigate what happens when we commend generous behavior versus generous character. After 7- and 8-year-olds won marbles and donated some to poor children, the experimenter remarked, “Gee, you shared quite a bit.”

The researchers randomly assigned the children to receive different types of praise. For some of the children, they praised the action: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” For others, they praised the character behind the action: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.”

A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person. This dovetails with new research led by the psychologist Christopher J. Bryan, who finds that for moral behaviors, nouns work better than verbs. To get 3- to 6-year-olds to help with a task, rather than inviting them “to help,” it was 22 to 29 percent more effective to encourage them to “be a helper.” Cheating was cut in half when instead of, “Please don’t cheat,” participants were told, “Please don’t be a cheater.” When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.

When our actions become a reflection of our character, we lean more heavily toward the moral and generous choices. Over time it can become part of us.

Praise appears to be particularly influential in the critical periods when children develop a stronger sense of identity. When the researchers Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler praised the character of 5-year-olds, any benefits that may have emerged didn’t have a lasting impact: They may have been too young to internalize moral character as part of a stable sense of self. And by the time children turned 10, the differences between praising character and praising actions vanished: Both were effective. Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around age 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.

Praise in response to good behavior may be half the battle, but our responses to bad behavior have consequences, too. When children cause harm, they typically feel one of two moral emotions: shame or guilt. Despite the common belief that these emotions are interchangeable, research led by the psychologist June Price Tangney reveals that they have very different causes and consequences.

Shame is the feeling that I am a bad person, whereas guilt is the feeling that I have done a bad thing. Shame is a negative judgment about the core self, which is devastating: Shame makes children feel small and worthless, and they respond either by lashing out at the target or escaping the situation altogether. In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behavior. When children feel guilt, they tend to experience remorse and regret, empathize with the person they have harmed, and aim to make it right.

In one study spearheaded by the psychologist Karen Caplovitz Barrett, parents rated their toddlers’ tendencies to experience shame and guilt at home. The toddlers received a rag doll, and the leg fell off while they were playing with it alone. The shame-prone toddlers avoided the researcher and did not volunteer that they broke the doll. The guilt-prone toddlers were more likely to fix the doll, approach the experimenter, and explain what happened. The ashamed toddlers were avoiders; the guilty toddlers were amenders.

If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave. In a review of research on emotions and moral development, the psychologist Nancy Eisenberg suggests that shame emerges when parents express anger, withdraw their love, or try to assert their power through threats of punishment: Children may begin to believe that they are bad people. Fearing this effect, some parents fail to exercise discipline at all, which can hinder the development of strong moral standards.

The most effective response to bad behavior is to express disappointment. According to independent reviews by Professor Eisenberg and David R. Shaffer, parents raise caring children by expressing disappointment and explaining why the behavior was wrong, how it affected others, and how they can rectify the situation. This enables children to develop standards for judging their actions, feelings of empathy and responsibility for others, and a sense of moral identity, which are conducive to becoming a helpful person. The beauty of expressing disappointment is that it communicates disapproval of the bad behavior, coupled with high expectations and the potential for improvement: “You’re a good person, even if you did a bad thing, and I know you can do better.”

As powerful as it is to criticize bad behavior and praise good character, raising a generous child involves more than waiting for opportunities to react to the actions of our children. As parents, we want to be proactive in communicating our values to our children. Yet many of us do this the wrong way.

In a classic experiment, the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton gave 140 elementary- and middle-school-age children tokens for winning a game, which they could keep entirely or donate some to a child in poverty. They first watched a teacher figure play the game either selfishly or generously, and then preach to them the value of taking, giving or neither. The adult’s influence was significant: Actions spoke louder than words. When the adult behaved selfishly, children followed suit. The words didn’t make much difference — children gave fewer tokens after observing the adult’s selfish actions, regardless of whether the adult verbally advocated selfishness or generosity. When the adult acted generously, students gave the same amount whether generosity was preached or not — they donated 85 percent more than the norm in both cases. When the adult preached selfishness, even after the adult acted generously, the students still gave 49 percent more than the norm. Children learn generosity not by listening to what their role models say, but by observing what they do.

To test whether these role-modeling effects persisted over time, two months later researchers observed the children playing the game again. Would the modeling or the preaching influence whether the children gave — and would they even remember it from two months earlier?

The most generous children were those who watched the teacher give but not say anything. Two months later, these children were 31 percent more generous than those who observed the same behavior but also heard it preached. The message from this research is loud and clear: If you don’t model generosity, preaching it may not help in the short run, and in the long run, preaching is less effective than giving while saying nothing at all.

People often believe that character causes action, but when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character. As the psychologist Karl Weick is fond of asking, “How can I know who I am until I see what I do? How can I know what I value until I see where I walk?”

Students Reading E-Books Are Losing Out, Study Suggests

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

April 10, 2014, 7:46 pm

Could e-books actually get in the way of reading?

That was the question explored in research presented last week by Heather Ruetschlin Schugar, an associate professor at West Chester University, and her spouse, Jordan T. Schugar, an instructor at the same institution. Speaking at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia, the Schugars reported the results of a study in which they asked middle school students to read either traditional printed books or e-books on iPads. The students’ reading comprehension, the researchers found, was higher when they read conventional books.

In a second study looking at students’ use of e-books created with Apple’s iBooks Author software, the Schugars discovered that the young readers often skipped over the text altogether, engaging instead with the books’ interactive visual features.

While their findings are suggestive, they are preliminary and based on small samples of students. More substance can be found in the Schugars’ previous work: for example, a paper they published last year with their colleague Carol A. Smith in the journal The Reading Teacher. In this study, the authors observed teachers and teachers-in-training as they used interactive e-books with children in kindergarten through sixth grade. (The e-books were mobile apps, downloadable from online stores like iTunes.)

While young readers find these digital products very appealing, their multitude of features may diffuse children’s attention, interfering with their comprehension of the text, Ms. Smith and the Schugars found. It seems that the very “richness” of the multimedia environment that e-books provide — heralded as their advantage over printed books — may overwhelm children’s limited working memory, leading them to lose the thread of the narrative or to process the meaning of the story less deeply.

This is especially true of what the authors call some e-books’ “gimmicks and distractions.” In the book “Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and the Really Big Adventure,” for example, children can touch “wiggly woos” to make the creatures emit noise and move around the screen. In another e-book, “Rocket Learns to Read,” a bird flutters and sounds play in the background.

Such flourishes can interrupt the fluency of children’s reading and cause their comprehension to fragment, the authors found. They can also lead children to spend less time reading over all: One study cited by Ms. Smith and the Schugars reported that children spent 43 percent of their e-book engagement time playing games embedded in the e-books rather than reading the text.

By contrast, the authors observed, some e-books offer multimedia features that enhance comprehension. In “Miss Spider’s Tea Party,” for example, children hear the sound of Miss Spider drinking as they read the words “Miss Spider sipped her tea.” In another e-book, “Wild About Books,” sounds of laughter ring out as the reader encounters the line “Hyenas shared jokes with the red-bellied snakes.”

The quality of e-books for children varies wildly, the authors said: “Because the app market allows for the distribution of materials without the rigorous review process that is typical of traditional children’s book publishing, more caution is necessary for choosing high-quality texts.”

They advise parents and teachers to look for e-books that enhance and extend interactions with the text, rather than those that offer only distractions; that promote interactions that are relatively brief rather than time-consuming; that provide supports for making text-based inferences or understanding difficult vocabulary; and that locate interactions on the same page as the text display, rather than on a separate screen. (E-books recommended by the authors are listed below.)

Once the e-books are selected, parents and teachers must also help children use them effectively, Ms. Smith and the Schugars said. This can include familiarizing children with the basics of the device. Although adults may assume that their little “digital natives” will figure out the gadgets themselves, the researchers have found that children often need adult guidance in operating e-readers.

Parents and teachers should also help children in transferring what they know about print reading to e-reading. Children may not automatically apply reading skills they have learned on traditional books to e-books, and these skills, such as identifying the main idea and setting aside unimportant details, are especially crucial when reading e-books because of the profusion of distractions they provide.

Lastly, adults should ensure that children are not overusing e-book features like the electronic dictionary or the “read-to-me” option. Young readers can often benefit from looking up the definition of a word with a click, but doing it too often will disrupt reading fluidity and comprehension. Even without connecting to the dictionary, children are able to glean the meaning of many words from context. Likewise, the read-to-me feature can be useful in decoding a difficult word, but when used too often it discourages children from sounding out words on their own.

Research shows that children often read e-books “with minimal adult involvement,” Ms. Smith and the Schugars said. While we may assume that interactive e-books can entertain children all by themselves, such products require more input from us than books on paper do.

Recommended E-Books

For beginning readers

“Blue Hat, Green Hat” by Sandra Boynton

“Go, Clifford, Go!” by Norman Bridwell

“Meet Biscuit” by Alyssa Satin Capucilli

“Nickelby Swift, Kitten Catastrophe” by Ben Hecht

“Miss Spider’s Tea Party” by David Kirk

“A Fine Musician” by Lucy Thomson

For fluent readers

“Slice of Bread Goes to the Beach” by Glenn Melenhorst

“Who Would Win? Killer Whale Vs. Great White Shark” by Jerry Pallotta

“Wild About Books” by Judy Sierra

“The Artifacts” by Lynley Stace and Dan Hare

As Peanut Allergies Rise, Trying to Determine a Cause

By JANE E. BRODY

February 3, 2014, 12:01 am

Personal Health

Jane Brody on health and aging.

Peanut allergy has become a nemesis for increasing numbers of children and parents in recent years, forcing them to maintain nut-free households and prompting many schools to ban a childhood staple, peanut butter, from the lunchroom.

When a child is allergic to peanuts, families must closely monitor everything the child eats both in and outside the home, because accidental consumption of peanuts could prove fatal. Many airlines no longer offer peanuts for fear that an allergic passenger might inhale peanut dust and suffer a life-threatening reaction at 30,000 feet.

The prevalence of peanut allergy among children in the United States has risen more than threefold, to 1.4 percent in 2010 from 0.4 percent in 1997, according to a study by food allergists at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Many people with an allergy to peanuts are also allergic to one or more tree nuts, like walnuts, pecans or almonds.

To help protect such people from inadvertent exposure to nuts, labels on packaged foods often voluntarily state whether they were prepared in a facility that also processes nuts.

Some cities have nut-free bakeries that now sell products safe for allergic children, who can bring their own special, albeit expensive, cake or cupcake to a party.

While experts doubt the necessity of some extreme measures taken to prevent indirect exposure to peanuts, the danger to someone with a peanut allergy who eats them is unquestioned.

The potentially fatal reaction, called anaphylaxis, can occur with a child’s first exposure to peanuts: itchiness, swelling of the tongue and throat, constriction of the airway, a precipitous drop in blood pressure, rapid heart rate, fainting, nausea and vomiting.

Unless the reaction is stopped by an injection of epinephrine (adrenaline), anaphylaxis can kill. In one infamous instance in 1986, Katherine Brodsky, 18, a freshman at Brown University with a known nut allergy, died after eating chili that a restaurant had thickened with peanut butter.

There is no cure for nut allergies, although several preliminary studies suggest that it may be possible to temper a reaction to peanuts with immunotherapy. Like shots given for pollen allergies, the approach starts with exposure under the tongue to a minuscule amount of the offending peanut protein, followed by exposure to gradually increasing amounts under strict medical supervision.

The latest study, conducted in Cambridge, England, and published in The Lancet last week, found that after six months of oral immunotherapy, up to 91 percent of children aged 7 to 16 could safely ingest about five peanuts a day, far more than they could before the treatment. About one-fifth of treated children reacted to ingested peanuts, but most reactions were mild, usually an itchy mouth. Only one child of the 99 studied had a serious reaction.

When immunotherapy works, the research suggests, the severity of the allergy is lessened, enabling an allergic person to safely ingest small amounts of the offending protein. It is not known how long protection lasts without continued immunotherapy, however, and the researchers warned that no one should try it on his own. Further study is needed before the treatment can be used clinically, probably years from now.

Meanwhile, everyone with a peanut allergy is advised to carry an EpiPen for emergency treatment.

Ideally, allergists would like to prevent the development of peanut allergy in the first place. Experts had thought that one way would be to keep fetuses and breast-fed babies from exposure to peanut protein by restricting consumption by pregnant and nursing women.

Various studies had suggested that early exposure to peanut protein by infants with allergic tendencies could sensitize them and lead to a serious peanut allergy. In 2000, pregnant and nursing women were advised to avoid eating peanuts, especially if allergies ran in the family. And new mothers were told not to give babies peanuts before age 3, when digestive systems are more fully developed.

But this advice did nothing to curb the steady climb in peanut allergies, and it was abandoned in 2008.

Today, the thinking is exactly the opposite. Instead of restricting exposure to peanut protein by unborn or nursing babies, the tiny amounts that may enter the baby’s circulation when a pregnant or nursing woman eats peanuts might actually induce tolerance, not sensitization.

In a recent study of 8,205 children, 140 of whom had allergies to nuts, researchers found that children whose nonallergic mothers had the highest consumption of peanuts or tree nuts, or both, during pregnancy had the lowest risk of developing a nut allergy. The risk was most reduced among the children of mothers who ate nuts five or more times a month.

The researchers, led by Dr. A. Lindsay Frazier of Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, wrote: “Our study supports the hypothesis that early allergen exposure increases the likelihood of tolerance and thereby lowers the risk of childhood food allergy.” They added that their data “support the recent decisions to rescind recommendations that all mothers avoid peanuts/total nuts during pregnancy and breast-feeding.”

The study was supported by Food Allergy Research and Education, a nonprofit, and published in December in JAMA Pediatrics.

According to an accompanying editorial by Dr. Ruchi Gupta, an associate professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University, “some studies actually showed that avoiding peanuts during pregnancy increased the risk of a child developing peanut sensitization.”

Further support comes from studies of other common food allergens. In an Israeli study of 13,019 infants, those who were exposed to cow’s milk protein as a breast-milk supplement in the first two weeks of life were less likely to become sensitive to it than infants first given cow’s milk much later.

An Australian study of 2,589 babies found that those first introduced to egg at or near 1 year of age were more likely to develop an allergy to egg protein than those first given egg at 4 to 6 months of age.

In her editorial, Dr. Gupta emphasized that further research was needed to understand how maternal diet affects the development of food allergies and “why more and more children are developing food allergy and how we can prevent it.”

But for now, she said, “pregnant women should not eliminate nuts from their diet, as peanuts are a good source of protein and also provide folic acid,” which can help prevent neural tube defects.

Tale of Magical Squirrel Takes Newbery Medal

By JULIE BOSMANJAN. 27, 2014

Kate DiCamillo, the national ambassador for young people’s literature, in her home in Minneapolis. Credit Ben Garvin for The New York Times

Kate DiCamillo, who was recently named the national ambassador for young people’s literature, received another one of the field’s highest honors on Monday: The John Newbery Medal went to her book “Flora and Ulysses” (Candlewick Press), the story of a girl who befriends a squirrel with magical powers.

“Locomotive” (Simon & Schuster), a richly drawn book by the writer and illustrator Brian Floca about the beginnings of the transcontinental railroad in the United States, was awarded the Randolph Caldecott Medal. The prizes were announced on Monday at the American Library Association’s annual midwinter meeting in Philadelphia.

The award for “Flora and Ulysses,” illustrated by K. G. Campbell, is the second Newbery for Ms. DiCamillo, 49, who won in 2004 for “The Tale of Despereaux.” Each prize bestows a children’s book with prestige, publicity and a shiny metallic sticker that proclaims its status in bookstores.

In a telephone interview, Ms. DiCamillo said she received a call at 5:30 a.m. from members of the Newbery committee at her home in Minneapolis. Although she had won before, she was even more surprised this time, she said. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “As soon as I hung up, I wondered if I had dreamed the whole thing.”

She said the concept for her book began to emerge in early 2009. Her mother had recently died and left a beloved vacuum cleaner stored in Ms. DiCamillo’s garage. Every time Ms. DiCamillo saw it, she recalled, she was faced with a small reminder of her mother’s death.

Around the same time, Ms. DiCamillo found a sick squirrel on her front step, “draped across there in a ‘this is the end of my life’ kind of way,” she said. The squirrel’s predicament reminded her of E. B. White’s 1948 essay “Death of a Pig,” an account of his efforts to save an ailing pig that is thought to have inspired “Charlotte’s Web.”

“I started to think about ways to save this very interesting squirrel’s life,” Ms. DiCamillo said.

Mr. Floca said in an interview from his studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that he spent four years researching, writing and illustrating “Locomotive.” At one point, he drove a real steam locomotive in Essex, Conn., that is a popular tourist attraction, and he traveled to Utah to climb on replicas of trains.

“It’s a whole system designed for getting people across the country,” said Mr. Floca, 45. “Then you start getting into the history of the West. So the research actually felt bottomless at times.”

The association also announced that Marcus Sedgwick, author of “Midwinter Blood,” had been awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for the year’s best book written for young adults.

Markus Zusak, author of “The Book Thief,” received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.”

Giving girls the code to a life in computing and engineering

Date: January 21, 2014

Matthew Hall

Women Engineering Videos

Reshma Saujani, founder and chief executive officer of Girls Who Code.

An organisation encouraging young girls to develop an interest in computer science and engineering aims to bridge the gap in the number of women and men employed in computing fields, whether as engineers or developers.
Girls Who Code is a New York-based non-profit with the aim of providing an education in computer science to 1 million young women by 2020.
That target is driven by figures suggesting just 0.8 per cent of women graduating from American colleges received a degree in computer science and another claim that even fewer girls of high school age in the US are interested in studying computer science in college.

Girls learn to code as part of Girls Who Code.

The numbers are alarming when the demand for engineers and code-savvy graduates is taken into consideration - it is estimated over 1.4 million computer science jobs will be created in the US in the next five years.

"Those numbers are abysmal, they are very low," said Reshma Saujani, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Girls Who Code.
"I want the CEOs of the future to be women and the only way we are going to do that is to create a pipeline and train that next generation to not be afraid of the technology.
"Women can't simply be consumers of technology - we have to be creators of it."
Saujani, a former lawyer who ran for US Congress in 2010 on a platform promoting policies boosting innovation and jobs, points to the female employment revolution in medical and legal fields as an example to provoke change within the technology industry.
"In the 1970s, 10 per cent of doctors and lawyers were women and in less than 40 years that number is now almost at 40 per cent," she said.
"Eleven year olds are enthusiastic but in teen years that motivation is often lost. It is culture. They are watching TV, they are not seeing role models that look like them, they are getting messages from parents and teachers that they 'will go into the humanities'.
"There are all these messages that computer science is not for them. High school boys all want to be hackers and it is a cool thing to do. The same thing is not happening with women."
Girls Who Code receives funding from within technology and associated industries - Twitter, GE, Google, Goldman Sachs, eBay, Intel, and Craigslist are among several financial backers - but the challenge is engaging government, according to Saujani.
"Private companies see what is happening," she said. "That should be an example to government. [Private companies] know they have a supply issue and they want to fix it."
Rebecca Collins, an 11-year-old from Brooklyn who attended a school field trip sponsored by GWC to Facebook’s New York City office, said the visit demonstrated real world examples of how her own fast-developing coding skills can be applied.
"If girls want to code and they are interested in coding they should absolutely go into that area," said Collins.
"We should try to work [computer science] into the curriculum more so that people who are interested in it get a chance to see what it is like."
Collins said her class of 30 students included 10 girls but wasn't yet aware of any gender divide.
"My class is really nerdy so the boys and the girls are all interested in the same thing."
The bigger current challenge? A keyboard.
"Typing when you are 11 is hard and really tiring," she said.

EchoAge and Other Better Ways to Do Birthday Presents

The Opposite of Spoiled

EchoAge and Other Better Ways to Do Birthday Presents

By RON LIEBER

March 20, 2014, 11:53 am

KJ Dell’Antonia

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve long felt a little empty inside when I see the giant pile of presents awaiting children at birthday parties they host for their friends.

The wrapping (and the waste). The books they already have. The stuff they didn’t want or that they use only once before it ends up in the garbage or a giveaway box somewhere. Parents spend time and money picking these things out, but our efforts may not amount to much even with the best of intentions.

So I was thrilled when I first stumbled on EchoAge, an invitation service that handles the gifts too. Parents of invited guests hand over some money online, and EchoAge divides the accumulated pile in half. After the company takes a 4.9 percent cut, the birthday kid gets half the money to spend on a meaningful gift and picks a charity to receive the other half.

As someone who defines my newspaper beat as beating the system, EchoAge’s promise pushes every one of my pleasure buttons. Parents avoid shopping for dozens of parties each year and may get a tax deduction for the charitable portion of the gift. Birthday boys and girls get a decent-sized present that they truly covet. Birthday parents can lead a meaningful family discussion about charitable causes that are important to the child. And the recycling bin doesn’t overflow with wrapping paper. Everybody wins, right?

I finally got to test the answer to that question recently when my daughter turned 8 and was game to put the service through its paces as part of her slumber party. She was in the middle of a sea creatures curriculum at school, so she chose to give money to the World Society for the Protection of Animals. The remaining money went toward her first-ever iTunes purchases and the repainting of her room, which she’s covering herself since it’s a “want” and not a “need.”

I found the invitation-generating software to be at least as intuitive as other services I’ve used in the past, so I had no problem there. And the notifications and movement of money were glitch-free.

Two things gave me pause, though. First, I was surprised to discover that I could see how much the guests’ parents had contributed. This wasn’t information I wanted to know, and it made me feel a little funny to look.

But of course I looked, and once I did, I was surprised at the generosity. People were contributing more than we typically would spend on a party gift. Was this because it was a small party and these were parents of our daughter’s closest friends, so they were inclined to do a bit more? Or did they feel guilted into giving more money by the charitable angle and didn’t want to feel like they were shortchanging our daughter either?

On the transparency front, it turns out there’s a box I could have unchecked while setting up the party that would have blocked the individual amounts. (The guests never see what others are giving.) I never saw that box, and the company co-founder, Debbie Zinman, said that she would see about making it more prominent. She added, however, that many parents have a different response entirely. “They want to see what everyone gave so they know what to give themselves,” she said.

As for the guilt, Alison Smith, the other co-founder, doesn’t see it that way. “Some people give what they give, and that’s what they do,” she said. “And then those who are touched by the idea of a child choosing a charity that means something to them — that’s a good reason to potentially give more.” She added that with this service, she and Ms. Zinman had actually hoped to level the playing field, so that kids weren’t arriving with gifts of different sizes.

All of this has worked well enough that over 15,000 parties have been held via EchoAge since its launch in 2008. The founders heard from enough jealous parents that they’re now opening the platform to any sort of party, including 40th birthdays to which children are not invited. It will also be possible to push 100 percent of the gift money to charity.

We would use the service again without hesitation now that we know which boxes to check and uncheck, though when I ran the EchoAge concept by the people in my Facebook community, there was more of a mixed reaction. It is awfully pecuniary, after all, though to me that’s a good thing as children begin to learn what things cost and how to make tradeoffs. The charity component need not be outsourced either; a child could ask for books or canned food to give away in lieu of (or in addition to) gifts.

Some families also go the your-presence-is-our-present route. My experience with that, however, has generally been that somebody always forgets and brings a gift anyway or ignores the instructions altogether. Awkwardness ensues.

On Mobile Devices, Narrowing Choices for Your Child

Review: Ways to Keep Your Devices Safe for Children

By MOLLY WOODMARCH 19, 2014

TABLETS and phones are increasingly the new television and entertainment devices for our children. But they don’t have to be a free-for-all of screen time, app downloading or inappropriate content discovery.

It is not that difficult to lock down your tablet or phone. Both Apple and Google have gotten in trouble over it being too easy for children to buy songs, videos and apps, and now there are new restrictions built into iOS and Android.

Simply requiring a password for downloading new apps will thwart most younger children, and this is easily enabled in the App Store on Apple or the Google Play store on Android.

If your child knows your password, iOS 7 lets you establish parental restrictions with a new code. Go to General > Settings > Restrictions. Enable restrictions, set up a passcode, and you can turn off specific options that include app purchases and in-app purchases as separate categories.

This is also where you can enable content restrictions, like disabling Safari, the camera, the iTunes Store, the ability to use Siri, AirDrop and so on. You can also set ratings for music and podcasts and specify ratings for iTunes-downloaded content, ranging from G to NC-17. Under Settings > General > Accessibility, you can turn on Guided Access, which limits usage to a single app. This is good if you want to make sure a child is using only an educational app, or for young children who often quit apps accidentally.

The Disney Infinity: Action app for tablets and mobile phones lets younger children make movies with their favorite Disney and Pixar characters, but in-app purchase prompts abound.

Android has far fewer built-in options. To restrict app downloads, go to the Google Play store and click Settings. Here, you can check the box next to Password, to require a password for purchases. You’ll also be able to restrict apps by rating, from “everyone” to “high maturity.”

For more specific controls, you’ll have to turn to third-party apps, but there are many more of those for Android than there are for Apple’s products. I particularly like Kids Place, which prevents app-buying, stops calling and messaging, shows custom home screens and has a timeout function to lock the device after a certain amount of time.

There’s no timer built into Apple’s restrictions, but the best one I’ve found is Parental TimeLock, for $2 — it’s easy to set up and simply locks the device when screen time is over.

Once you have that figured out, think about the best apps for children.

The Nick app shows clips, short original videos and games, and Viacom recently announced a Nick Jr. app.

TOP PICK FOR TV: NETFLIX Netflix (free for iOS and Android) is an obvious pick for most ages, but it’s so much better for parents since the introduction of multiple user profiles last August. You can specify whether the profile is for someone under 12, and then whenever the child logs in, the Netflix “kids” area is shown.

RUNNER-UP: NICK Nickelodeon introduced its app (rated age 4 and up) last year, with clips, short original videos and games. Full episodes are available, but you have to authenticate with your cable network (the same is true with Watch Cartoon Network, another good option). And Viacom just announced a long-overdue Nick Jr. app that will offer similar short original content and cable-authenticated full episodes of shows like “Dora the Explorer” for the even younger set.

TOP GAME: MINECRAFT POCKET EDITION Children can get started on Minecraft as early as 4 or 5 years old, especially if they’re using the mobile version (rated age 4 and up). The touch screen is easier to manipulate than a computer mouse, and it’s cheaper than the computer version as well — just $7. It has fewer features than the PC edition, but that’s almost better for younger children. They won’t get overwhelmed and they can simply build and explore to their hearts’ content.

RUNNER-UP: DISNEY INFINITY TOY BOX Forget the figurines, hex cards and base stations of the full Disney Infinity game universe. Just download the free Disney Infinity Toy Box app for iPad or Windows 8 tablets (rated age 9 and up) or Disney Infinity: Action for tablets or mobile phones. This is plenty for younger children, who can create miniature virtual worlds in Toy Box or make movies with their favorite Disney and Pixar characters in Action. But beware: In-app purchase prompts abound.

Other favorites include Despicable Me: Minion Rush (4 and up), Subway Surfers (9 and up), The Simpsons: Tapped Out (for iOS and Android, 12 and up), FIFA 14 (4 and up), the entire Angry Birds pantheon (4 and up), Cut the Rope (4 and up), and for the youngest, Endless Alphabet (age 5 and under).