Not long ago, a friend told me he was going across country to visit his friend who had lost his wife six months previously. He mentioned that he had not gone to the funeral. “I don’t get that much time off so I can only go once. Everyone’s at the funeral. Somebody needs to be there six months later.”

It’s important to keep this perspective in mind as we continue to process the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Just as my friend knew that losing your spouse is not resolved in six months, we might guess that the trauma associated with attending a high school where murder took place would have long term consequences.

In fact, Louis-Philippe Beland and Dongwoo Kim have examined the educational consequences for survivors. Using the Report on School Associated Violent Deaths from the National School Safety Center, they identified 104 shootings categorized as homicidal and 53 as suicidal. (Shootings took place on the property of a public or private US school, or while a person was attending or on their way to or from a school-sponsored event.)

School performance data were obtained from each state’s Department of Education website. The researchers used other schools in the same district for comparisons, on the reasoning they would be roughly matched for demographics. (I wonder about the soundness of this assumption.) The researchers examined three main outcomes.

​First, they examined whether enrollment in a school would go down after a shooting. (Note: all of the effects described apply to homicidal shootings. There were no effects of suicidal shootings on any of the outcomes.) They found that it did decrease, presumably as parents who could selected other schools. This effect was only observed in 9th grade enrollments, however. Perhaps families with children already attending a school felt more committed to that school. 

Second, they tested whether deadly shootings lowered test scores in later years. They found that it did. (Click for larger image.)

Based on the first, result, it could be that lower scores are a consequence of the opt-out; maybe it’s the most capable 9th graders students who choose not to attend the school where the shooting took place. To test the possibility the researchers examined a subset of the data from California schools, where they could access student-level data. The effect replicated. In other words, it’s not due to changes in the population. When researchers examine test scores of individual students year to year, those scores dropped after the shooting.

Third, the researchers examined behavioral outcomes including graduation rates, attendances, and suspensions. They observed no effects.

On the one hand, it may seem unsurprising that school shootings affect academic outcomes three years later. On the other hand, there is a rich research literature showing that we often overestimate how long we’ll feel distressed in the face of a negative event. But in this case predictions of negative consequences are accurate. Attending a high school where a homicide takes place prompts trauma, and that impacts students school experience and achievement.

​The needs of the students who remain at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School may be deemed less urgent that those of the immediate families of the slain. That’s a fair assessment. But the needs of the survivors are real, and we must ask how we can address them. And we must not forget the students who attend these schools where murder took place within the last three years:

• Marshall County High School
• Aztec High School
• Rancho Tehama Elementary School
• Freeman High School
• North Park Elementary School
• Townville Elementary School
• Alpine High School
• Jeremiah Burke High School
• Antigo High School
• Independence High School
• Mojave High School.

It's one of the most familiar (and frustrating) problems teachers encounter. Students learn something new (say, a standard solution technique for a standard mathematical problem) but then fail to recognize the problem type when they encounter it again. For example, students may learn the idea of a "common factor" in equation form in an algebra class and fail to see that the same idea can be applied in a word problem. 

This is usually called the problem of transfer, and a classic laboratory problem was devised by Mary Gick & Keith Holyoak. 

It's a difficult problem, and most people are unable to solve it. If I tell you that this story may provide some inspiration, you'll probably get it. 

The interesting finding re: transfer is that if you simply ask people to read the military story and then to try to solve the radiation problem, most people don't see the analogy. They have no problem seeing it when told to look. But they don't spontaneously see it. And of course there's usually not someone around to give you a gentle elbow in the ribs, and drop a hint. You have to think of it on your own. 

This problem has proven very difficult to solve. One promising solution is to give subjects something to do that forces them to focus on the underlying structure of the problem. The underlying structure in the example above is "to avoid collateral damage, disperse your forces and converge at the point of attack." The underlying structure is expressed with tumors and rays in the problem and via a fortress and armies in the story. 

Dedre Gentner and her collaborators have tried (with some success) to improve transfer by asking people to compare problems. When you compare problems with the same deep structure, that obviously focuses attention on that deep structure and so you'll remember it better later.

A disadvantage of comparison is that the instructor must provide parallel versions for all problems. Ricardo Minervino and his colleagues sought a technique that would provide similar benefits, but might be more applicable to classroom situations.

In their experiment, subjects first read the fortress-army story (along with two other stories). At transfer, everyone was asked to solve the tumor-rays problem, but one group was also first asked to invent an analogous problem. Examples of the problems subjects invented appear below:

Subjects who invented an analogous problem were more likely to successfully solve the radiation problem compared to subjects not asked to invent a problem, 25% vs 10%. Independent raters judged the quality of the invented problems as analogous to the target problem, and further analysis showed that the better the analogy they created, the more likely they were to solve the target.

The experimenters also showed that it wasn't just the deeper thought required by the problem creation that made those subjects more likely to get the problem right. Another control group was given the tumor-rays problem and were asked to create an analogous problem before solving it, but they did not read the fortress-army story beforehand. Just 10% of these subjects solved the radiation problem.

In terms of the psychological mechanism behind this effect, it's not a huge surprise. Again, it's a technique that prompts people to focus attention on the deep structure, just as comparison does. What's nice about this technique is that, as the authors note, it removes the burden from the instructor to devise parallel problems. But that also gives students the freedom to create an "analogous" problem that isn't really analogous. So the instructor needs to check up on the problems students create.

Still, it's useful to know about the consequences when students create a new problem, and teachers may find it useful in some contexts

Maybe it's just on social media, but I often read this proffered solution to improve children's reading: "just get 'em reading" or "just surround them with books."

Certainly, there's some logic to the idea. We might hope that children's desire to learn about their world is natural, innate. That might mean that most of the problem is one of access. If we provide easy access to books, children will happily read. That's the idea behind book floods: flood a classroom with books, and kids will read, and will end up with better attitudes toward reading and greater motivation to read in the future.

​In a recent study, researcher Susan Neuman found that a book flood, even with a great deal of support, is not a guaranteed success.

​Neuman focused on information books in childcare centers for 3-4 year olds. They ensured there was a comfortable room with at least 500 books, child-size furniture, and a few puzzles and games. Even better, they had preschool specialists who read information books to the children, they made the books available to take home, and they had an outreach program for parents.

There was also a 20-hour per week librarian who used carefully planned sessions to draw kids in to book topics. Here's a description from the paper: "The librarian would begin with songs and rhymes, then read
three information-related books to the children, pointing out new words (e.g., considered essential to story understanding), asking questions, getting children to predict events, and holding a brief discussion following the general mnemonic of the INQUIRE model, described below. Children were then encouraged to check out a book after the reading (e.g., open choice) for the week."

At the end of the year-long intervention, compared to children in a control group, the intervention kids showed no improvement in receptive or expressive vocabulary, word naming, or knowledge of information text. Nothing.

What are we to make of these null results? 

Neuman has done book flood studies before that have shown positive effects, as have others...but there is at least one other null effect published. What might have made the difference here? 

As Neuman notes, there are several possibilities. She speculates that, although they tried to engage the children with read-alouds and other activities, perhaps more needed to be done, especially from a psychological point of view. She notes that the specialists doing the read-alouds were not the children's classroom teachers, and so didn't know the kids well, and might have had a harder time connecting with them. Neuman aptly contrasts physical proximity of books (which they provided) to psychological proximity of literacy (which they might not have provided).

That observation makes sense, and brings to mind Jimmy Kim's work on providing children with books for summer reading. Kim reports these programs don't do much good unless you ensure that kids discuss the books with their parents, or in some way interact with them. 

Taking this "it's not quite so simple" still further, it calls to mind Freddy Hiebert's observation that, for children to learn vocabulary for text, the to-be-learned word must be repeated. That's unlikely to happen by chance, and so requires some planning in the reading program. 

The same applies for background knowledge. As Marilyn Jaeger Adams has pointed out, even if you succeed with the "just get 'em reading" plan students are unlikely to bump into all the knowledge you hope they will (given that background knowledge is a key contributor to reading comprehension). What they need to read to gain the knowledge needs to be planned in a curriculum. 

There message here, I think, is that we should not underestimate the challenge of what we're trying to do. If we aim to raise children who love to read and who read well, we are taking on a significant challenge. It may look easier than it really is, because when it happens in families, we don't see most of the interactions that matter. And of course parents have many advantages over teachers in getting their children to love reading and to excel as readers. That should make us redouble our determination and our effort.