This piece originally appeared at RealClearEducation.com on March 18, 2014

Because I teach in higher education but spend a lot of time thinking about K-12 education, the differences between the two naturally stand out to me. Perhaps most striking is the extent to which college students are responsible for their own education. Not only do they pick their classes and major (with few restrictions), they are fully responsible for regulating their own study time, and for showing up to class. At most colleges no one is aware that a student is experiencing academic trouble until things get pretty bad.

Students arrive at college with different levels of preparation to handle these responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, family background makes a difference. Students who are the first in their families to attend college (first-generation students) earn lower grades and drop out at higher rates than students with at least one parent who attended college (continuing-generation students), controlling for high school GPA (Pascarella et al 2004). (Otherwise-successful charter schools are struggling with this social-class achievement gap.)

What fuels the gap? Partly the access that continuing-generation students have to advice from parents on how best to navigate college—access that first-generation students obviously lack. Colleges try to make up for this difference by offering programs to aid first-generation students; programs that offer advice on how to select a major, how to manage one’s time, and so on.

But first-generation students don’t take colleges up on their offers of help. They are less likely to take advantage of college services than continuing-generation students.

That may be because first-generation students are unsure whether or not they really belong at college, whether they can succeed.

Taking a cue from similar studies examining race (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2011) a new study Stephens et al, in press) sought to change how freshmen students thought about their family backgrounds by exposing them to stories of successful upper-class students, who described how their family backgrounds could be a source of challenges and of strength.

First-generation (N=66) and continuing-generation (N=81) freshman students attended a panel discussion by college seniors on college adjustment.

For half of the freshman, the panelists’ answers were linked to their family backgrounds. For example, a first-generation panelist pointed out that his parents couldn’t provide much advice about selecting classes, so he learned that he had to rely on his advisor more than other students. The continuing-generation students highlighted that they faced challenges as well: a panelist mentioned that she had attended a small private school that offered a lot of one-on-one attention, and that she felt lost in large lecture classes.

The other half of the freshman served as the control condition: they attended a different panel discussion in which challenges of college life and how to address them were discussed, but the answers were not directly linked to family background.

At the end of the year, this brief, one-time intervention had significantly reduced the social-class gap, as measured by cumulative GPA.

End-of-year surveys also indicated that the intervention had reduced student anxiety and led to better adjustment to college life. (Note: these outcomes were observed for both first-generation and continuing-generation students.)

Anytime you hear about a one-hour intervention that has such a profound and long-lasting effect, it’s natural to be suspicious. Certainly, we’d like to see this effect replicated, but there is at least a plausible explanation for the profound effect; the intervention provides a new way for students to think about difficulties. Instead of evidence that they don’t really belong at college, set-backs become a normal part of college life, and one that can be addressed.

References

Pascarella, E., Pierson, C., Wolniak, G., & Terenzini, P. (2004).  First-generation college students: Additional evidence  on college experiences and outcomes. Journal of Higher  Education, 75, 249–284.

Stephens, N. M., Hamedani, M. G., & Destin, M. (in press). Closing the Social-Class Achievement Gap A Difference-Education Intervention Improves First-Generation Students’ Academic Performance and All Students’ College Transition. Psychological science.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331, 1447-1451.

One of the controversies of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) concerns the difficulty of the content, especially for early elementary grades. Some critics have suggested that the standards are too difficult; first grade children are simply not ready to learn about Mesopotamian civilizations, for example. But a new experiment shows that first graders can understand a scientific topic usually reserved for older grades--natural selection.

Even before the CCSS, key ideas from some content areas were left to later grades, presumably because students wouldn’t understand them earlier. For example, evolution has usually been taught in high school, even though it’s a foundational idea biology that, if students had under their belts, would likely make learning other concepts easier. The latest standards from Achieve, the National Research Council, and AAAS all take that tack.

It may seem foolish to suggest that students could tackle evolutionary ideas earlier, given that they frequently don’t understand them now. High schoolers usually understand the general idea of adaptation, but they focus on individuals, rather than populations. For example, they think that an individual’s efforts over a lifetime are influential in shaping its fitness, rather than random variation making some animals more fit, and thus more likely to survive and reproduce.

But the history of developmental psychology shows that the age at which children can reach cognitive milestones depends in no small part on the cleverness of the methods used to measure their ability. Perhaps younger students could understand evolution under the right circumstances. A new study (Kelemen et al, 2014) indicates that’s so.

Researchers tested children aged 5 through 8. Kids heard a story about pilosas, fictional animals whose survival was threatened when their food source, insects, started to live below ground in deep, narrow tunnels. Pilosas have trunks which might be wide or narrow. The story went on to explain that in successive generations, trunks became less variable, as pilosas with narrow trunks survived and had young, whereas pilosas with wide trunks could not get enough to eat and did not reproduce.

Researchers tested comprehension of the story and children’s ability to generalize the biological principle to a new case. They were tested immediately and after three months. Each test included ten questions in all (five open, five closed) which probed understanding of different aspects of natural selection such as differential survival, differential reproduction, and the passing on of traits between generations.

7 and 8 year-old children showed good comprehension of the story, with nearly half showing an understanding of the natural selection in one generation and 91% showing at least a partial understanding. Remarkably, 3 months later, this knowledge transferred more or less intact to a story about a new species.

A second experiment replicated the first AND added the idea of trait constancy within an individual; what you’re born with, you retain. This extra detail seemed to help, with still higher percentages of children showing complete understanding and transfer to a new case.

No one would claim that these children have a complete understanding of natural selection. But they got much farther along in their understanding than I think most would have guessed.

The authors speculate that children did so well because the explanation capitalized “on young children’s drive for coherent explanation, factual knowledge, and interest in trait function, along with their affinity for picture storybooks.”

They further speculate that explaining natural selection at a younger age may have worked out so well because they were not old enough to have developed naïve theories of species change; ideas that would become entrenched and potentially make it more difficult to understand natural selection properly.

The practical implication of this result is obvious; students may be ready to learn concepts of evolution much earlier than most have thought. It also invites the question of whether we do students a disservice if we are too quick to dismiss content as “developmentally inappropriate.”

Reference:

Kelemen, D., Emmons, N. A., Schillaci, R. S., Ganea, P. A., Lillard, A., Rottman, J., & Smith, H. Young (in press). Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using A Picture Storybook Intervention. Psychological Science.

Dear blog readers
I will now be blogging at RealClearEducation.com.

RealClearEducation is an offshoot of RealClearPolitics, which has earned a good reputation as a clearinghouse for thoughtful commentary without partisan invective.

We need such a clearinghouse in education.

The fact that Andy Rotherham is heading RealClearEducation as Executive Editor gives me confidence that there is a steady hand at the wheel. I have great respect for Andy as someone who is able to make his political views plain, but actually listen to differing opinions, and to change his views when it makes sense.

I hope that you'll continue to be interested in what I write about science and how it applies to education, and that you'll find RealClearEducation a valuable site.

Here's my first post at RealClearEducation: Do We Underestimate our Youngest Learners?

~Dan Willingham

Researchers emphasize there are very few circumstances in which you can do two things at once without cost (relative to doing each on its own). Yet some drivers sneak a look at their phone while on the road, and some students have the television playing while they complete an assignment.

Why? One possibility is that they don't understand the cost of multi-tasking very well. A new study (Finley, Benjamin, and McCarley, 2014) investigated that possibility.

Subjects initially practiced a tracking task: a small target moved erratically on a computer screen and the subject was to try to keep a mouse cursor atop it.

Interleaved with practice on the tracking task, subjects practiced a standard auditory N-back task: they heard a series of digits (one every 2.4 seconds) and were asked to say whether the digits matched the one spoken 2 digits earlier (or in other versions of the task, 1 digit or 3 digits earlier).

After a total of 3 phases of practice for each task, subjects were told that they would try to do both tasks at the same time. They were told to prioritize the tracking task; just as a driver must keep the car in the lane, they should do their best to keep the cursor near the target, but they should do their best on the N-back task.

Then subjects got feedback on their performance on the three phases of tracking task (expressed as percent time they had the cursor on the target) and they were asked to predict their performance on the tracking task when simultaneously doing the N-back task.

The results showed a significant drop in tracking performance when subjects had to do the N-back task at the same time. What did subjects predict?

Subjects did predict a decrement. What they could not do was predict the size.

The graph shows the correlation between the predicted decrement in tracking performance and the actual decrement.

Subjects were not just wildly guessing. Their predicted performance in the dual task situation was related to their performance in the single-task situation, as shown here:

So to make the judgment "how much will it hurt my tracking performance to add a second task?" subjects take their single-task tracking performance and subtract something. . . but the "something" is not accurate.

The analogy to typical dual-task situations is not that great. In this case, I have never performed the two tasks simultaneously and am asked to guess at performance when I do. When a student decides to watch television while completing an assignment, he very likely has completed those tasks in a dual-task situation.

This means he has two ways of predicting his performance: one would be guessing at the dual-task cost, and this experiment shows that although subjects know there is some cost, they are terrible at predicting its size.

The second way students could predict what will happen if they multitask while working is based on their memory of similar situations. But the feedback students get in this situation is unclear. First, the feedback is significantly delayed, relative to when the work is completed. Second, every assignment varies (and so do tv programs) so the student might attribute bad performance to one of those variables (although I don't know of any study showing no cost to background television).

But there is another interpretation of students' choice to multitask.  They know their performance will suffer, they know they don't know how much it will suffer, and they don't care.


Reference:
Finley, J. R., Benjamin, A. S., & McCarley, J. S. (2014). Metacognition of multitasking: How well do we predict the costs of divided attention? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, in press.