MindShift

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When parents and teachers consider how children learn, it’s usually the intellectual aspects of the activity they have in mind. Sidney D’Mello would like to change that. The University of Notre Dame psychologist has been studying the role of feelings in learning for close to a decade, and he has concluded that complex learning is almost inevitably “an emotionally charged experience,” as he wrote in a paper published in the journal Learning and Instruction earlier this year.

During the learning experiments described in his paper, he notes, the participating students reported being in a neutral state only about a quarter of the time. The rest of the time, they were were experiencing lots of feelings: surprise, delight, engagement, confusion, boredom, frustration.

Another counter-intuitive contention made by D’Mello is that even negative emotions can play a productive role in learning. In this latest study, he and his coauthor Art Graesser examined the effects of confusion. They asked their subjects to interact with a computer program featuring

animated agents discussing scientific case studies. The characters sometimes disagreed with each other, and sometimes conveyed information that was contradictory or just wrong. The students were then required to decide which agent’s opinion was correct. Subjects who reported feeling confused by the exercise actually scored higher on a test following the computer interaction, and when presented with new case studies, they were better able to spot the studies’ logical flaws.

Confusion, D’Mello explains, is a state of “cognitive disequilbrium”; we are mentally thrown off balance when we encounter information that doesn’t make sense. This uneasy feeling motivates us to restore our equilibrium through thought, reflection, and problem solving, and deeper learning is the result. According to D’Mello, engaged learners repeatedly experience “two-step episodes Continue reading →

All of us, children included, live in a three-dimensional universe—but too often parents and teachers act as if the physical world is as flat as a worksheet or the page of a book. We call kids’ attention to numbers and letters, but we neglect to remark upon the spatial properties of the objects around us: how tall or short they are, how round or pointy, how close or far. Growing evidence suggests that a focus on these characteristics of the material world can help children hone their spatial thinking skills—and that such skills, in turn, support achievement in subjects like science and math.

In a study published this month in the journal Developmental Psychology, for example, scientists from the University of Chicago reported that young children who understand how shapes fit together are better able to use a number line and to solve computation problems. Researcher Elizabeth Gunderson and her coauthors asked students in first and second grade to select the single shape from among four choices that would correctly complete a square. The kids who spotted the right shape also showed the most growth in their number-line knowledge over the following school year, and scored highest on a measure of mathematics ability at age eight.

How do children acquire spatial-thinking skills in the first place? Research shows that playing with blocks and puzzles helps. What’s really important, however, are the conversations that adults and children have as they interact with these toys, and as they observe the world around them. In a study published last year in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education, for example, Temple University Continue reading →

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Parents, do you know how to read? More precisely, do you know how to read to kids?

Almost every adult who cares for young children knows that sharing books with them is an important way to promote their reading skills. But research shows that subtle features of the way adults act during story-time make a big difference in children’s literacy—and that most grownups aren’t using these simple but effective techniques.

The first step to becoming a better reader to children is to understand where our young audience is looking when we read. While we might assume that they’re viewing the words, just as we are, eye-tracking experiments—which use special equipment to identify where subjects’ gaze is

directed—reveal that preschool children are focusing on print only five to six percent of the time. Instead, they’re mostly looking at the pictures, or looking up at our faces. Few of their questions or comments are about the words themselves, either; their interjections have to do with the illustrations, or with the content of the story. Yet studies have shown that it’s “print knowledge,” and not just general experience with books, that advances children’s reading ability.

“Print knowledge” is an awareness of the mechanics of the reading process, like the fact that English is read from left to right and that written words map on to spoken ones. Adults often take this knowledge for granted, but research demonstrates that children benefit when these aspects of print are explicitly pointed out. In a study published in the May-June issue of the journal Child Continue reading →