Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
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Training working memory *might* make you smarter

4/20/2012

 
The New York Times Magazine has an article on working memory training and the possibility that it boosts on type of intelligence.

I think the article is a bit--but only a bit--too optimistic in its presentation.

The article correctly points out that a number of labs have replicated the basic finding: training with one or another working memory task leads to increases in standard measures of fluid intelligence, most notably, Raven's Progressive Matrices.
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Working memory is often trained with a N-back task, shown in the figure at left from the NY Times article. You're presented with a series of stimuli, e.g. you're hearing letters. You press a button if a stimulus is the same as the one before (N=1) or the time before last (N=2) or. the time before that (N=3). You start with N=1 and N increases if you are successful. (Larger N makes the task harder.) To make it much harder, researchers can add a second stream of stimuli (e.g., the colored squares shown at left) and ask you to monitor BOTH streams of stimuli in an N-back task.

That is the training task that you are to practice. (And although the figure calls it a "game" it's missing one usual feature of a game; it's no fun at all.)

There are two categories of outcome measures taken after training. In a near-transfer task, subjects are given some other measure of working memory
to see if their capacity has increased. In a far-transfer task, a task is administered that isn't itself a test of working memory, but of a process that we think depends on working memory capacity.

All the excitement has been about far-transfer measures, namely that this training boosts intelligence, about which more in a moment. But it's actually pretty surprising and interesting that labs are reporting near-transfer. That's a novel finding, and contradicts a lot of work that's come before, showing that working memory training tends to benefit only the particular working memory task used during training, and doesn't even transfer to other working memory tasks.

The far-transfer claim has been that the working memory training boosts fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is one's ability to reason, see patterns, and think logically, independent of specific experience. Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is stuff that you know, knowledge that comes from prior experience. You can see why working memory capacity might lead to more fluid intelligence--you've got a greater workspace in which to manipulate ideas.

A standard measure of fluid intelligence is the Ravens Progressive Matrices task, in which you see a pattern of figures, and you are to say which of a several choices would complete the pattern, as shown below.

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So, is this finding legit? Should you buy an N-back training program for your kids?

I'd say the jury is still out.

The Times quotes Randy Engle--a highly regarded working memory researcher--on the subject, and he can hardly conceal his scorn:  “May I remind you of ‘cold fusion’?”

Engle--who is not one of those scientists who has made a career out of criticizing others--has a lengthy review of the working memory training literature which you can read here.

Another recent review (which was invited for the journal Brain & Cognition) concluded "Sparse evidence coupled with lack of scientific rigor, however,  leaves claims concerning the impact and duration of such brain training  largely unsubstantiated. On the other hand, at least some scientific findings seem to support the effectiveness and sustainability of training for higher  brain functions such as attention and working memory."

My own take is pretty close to that conclusion.

There are enough replications of this basic effect that it seems probable that something is going on. The most telling criticism of this literature is that the outcome measure is often a single task.

You can't use a single task like the Ravens and then declare that fluid intelligence has increased because NO task is a pure measure of fluid intelligence. There are always going to be other factors that contribute to task performance.

The best measure of an abstract construct like "fluid intelligence" is one that uses several measures of what look to be quite different tasks, but which you have reason to think all call on fluid intelligence. Then you use statistical methods to look for shared variance among the tasks.

So what we'd really like to see is better performance after working memory training on a few tasks.

The fact is that in many of these studies, researchers have tried to show transfer to more than one task, and the training transfers to one, but not the other.

Here's a table from a 2010 review by Torkel Klingberg showing this pattern. (Click the image to see a larger version.)
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This work is really just getting going, and the inconsistency of the findings means one of two things. Either the training regimens need to be refined, whereupon we'll see the transfer effects more consistently, OR the benefits we've seen thus far were mostly artifactual, a consequence of uninteresting quirks in the designs of studies or the tasks

My guess is that the truth lies somewhere between these two--there's something here, but less than many people are hoping. But it's too early to say with much confidence.

Teaching students about plagiarism reduces plagiarism.

4/16/2012

 
Most colleges have strict polices about student plagiarism, often including stringent penalties for those who violate the rules. (At the University of Virginia, where I teach, the penalty is expulsion.) Yet infractions occur. Why?

My own intuition has been that plagiarism is often due to oversight or panic. A student will fall behind and, with a deadline looming, get sloppy in the writing of a paper: a few sentences or even a paragraph makes its way into the student paper without attribution. In the rush to finish the student forgets about it, or decides it doesn't matter.

Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob had a different idea.

Some data (e.g., Power, 2009) indicate that even college students are not very knowledgeable about what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it, and so many instances of plagiarism may actually be accidental.

Given the stiff penalties, why don't students bone up on the rules? Dee & Jacob point out that this may be an instance of rational ignorance.  That is, it's logical for students not to try to obtain better information about plagiarism; the cost of learning this information is relatively high because the rules seem complex, and the payoff seems small because the odds of punishment for plagiarism are low.

Dee and Jacob's idea: reduce plagiarism by reducing the cost of learning about what constitutes plagiarism.

Their experiment included 1,256 papers written by 573 students in a total of 28 humanities and social-science courses during a semester a selective liberal arts college. Half of the students were required to complete a "short but detailed interactive tutorial on understanding and avoiding plagiarism."

The student papers were analyzed with plagiarism detection software. In the control group, plagiarism was observed in 3.3 percent of papers. (Almost every instance was a matter of using sentences without attribution.) Students who had completed the tutorial had a plagiarism rate of about 1.3% 

Thus, a relatively simple and quite inexpensive intervention may be highly effective in reducing at least one variety of plagiarism. Replicating this finding in other types of coursework--science and mathematics--would be important, as would replication at other institutions, including less selective colleges, and high schools. Even with those limitations, this is a promising start.

This paper was just published as:

Dee, T. S. & Jacob, B. A. (2012) Rational ignorance in education: A field experiment in student plagiarism. Journal of Human Resources, 47, 397-434.

(I've linked to the NBER publication above because it's freely downloadable.)

Power, L. G. (2009). University Students’ Perceptions of Plagiarism. Journal of Higher Education, 80, 643-662.

Should students meditate?

2/24/2012

 

I admit that until a few years ago, learning that a school asked their students to meditate prompted me to roll my eyes. It struck me as faddish and meant to appeal to parents rather than something meant to help students. But I’m not sneering anymore.

The last five or ten years has seen a burgeoning research literature on the cognitive benefits of mindfulness meditation—that style of meditation in which one focuses one’s thoughts on the present moment and emphasizes a open, non-judgmental attitude towards thoughts and sensations.

Most practitioners engage in mindfulness meditation for its effects on overall feelings of well-being. From a cognitive point of view, the daily practice in the management and control of attention might yield benefits for students. This sort of attentional control is positively associated with academic outcomes. (An article I wrote on the topic can be found here.)

What do the data on meditation and attentional control look like?

The truth is that it’s a bit early to tell. A recent review (Chiesa, Calati, & Serretti, 2011) concluded that meditation training did lead to improvements in controlled attention, but the authors warned that the effects were inconsistent.

The results might be inconsistent because the benefits to attention only accrue after significant practice--more practice then volunteers are willing to engage in for the sake of a study. But even when examining long-time meditators, the benefits to attention are inconsistent.

Another possibility is that meditation doesn’t make attentional control any more effective, but it does make it less taxing, which might be consistent with reports of improved well-being. There are electrophysiological data (e.g., Moore, Gruber, Derose & Malinowski, 2012) indicating that meditation training leads to changes in how the brain deals with attentional challenges, and that these changes reflect easier, smoother processing.

Most of the work has been done with adults, not kids.  There are at least a few studies that have used mindfulness mediation interventions with kids of middle-school age, and the authors of these studies claim these kids can learn the practice (e.g., Wall, 2005).

So at this point, the benefits of mindfulness mediation are not clear enough to make a claim that there is scientific backing for the practice in schools, if the hoped-for benefit is academic. But this is a research literature worth keeping on the radar.

Chiesa, A., Calati, R., & Serretti, A. (2011). Does mindfulness training improve cognitive abilities? A systematic review of neuropsychological findings. Clinical Psychology Review, 31, 449-464.

Moore, A., Gruber, T., Derose, J., & Malinowski, P. (2012). Regular, brief mindfulness meditation practice improves electrophysiological markers of attentional control. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 18.

Wall, R. B. (2005). Tai chi and mindfulness-based stress reduction in a Boston Public middle school. Journal of Pediatric Health Care. 19,  230-237.

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    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

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