More Learning With Fewer Teachers

State budget deficits are causing schools all across the nation to cut expenses, often including cutting teaching staff. Colleges are increasingly under fire for rising tuition and professors who don't teach enough classes. What all this boils down to is the pressing need to "do more with less." But how? Schools already have too many problems. Schools should not get distracted from the fundamentals of teaching and learning.

A recent study from University of Washington professors compared two approaches for teaching large introductory biology classes: 1) traditional lecture method, and 2) “active learning” without lecture. Eliminating lecture does not in itself improve teacher-student ratios. Indeed, some have said it doesn’t matter whether one lectures to 20 students or a thousand.

What is important is to address the question of what happens to educational quality if you reduce the number of teachers. There is certainly no evidence that increasing the number of students in a lecture hall will improve teaching effectiveness, and in fact the opposite is likely. Statistically, increasing class sizes in lecture courses has a disproportionate deleterious effect on socio-economically disadvantaged students. So, as number of teachers decreases in response to economic necessity, we can expect the educational gap to grow between advantaged and disadvantaged.

So, how should educators respond to having more students and fewer teachers? The educational literature has been building for decades toward the  conclusion that lecturing is a poor way to teach. We teachers know about many alternative “active learning” strategies, but just don’t use them much, because lecturing seems so intuitive and for most of us, it has become a habit. And lecturing is the environment in which most of us were trained.

In the U. Washington study, the professors compared grade performance in classes based on lectures with classes based on active learning. The type of active learning they used included pre-class reading quizzes, daily multiple-choice “clicker” questions, a peer group instruction format that included so-called “constructivist” learning exercises, and weekly practice exams. Also, they adjusted learning requirements to require more creative and critical thinking, since most college students have little experience with higher cognitive tasks of synthesizing and  applying learned material in new contexts (as specified in Bloom’s taxonomy of learning). The learning activities went beyond the lower levels of learning vocabulary and understanding of concepts.

Large student populations were involved for both comparison groups, and the classes studied spanned several semesters. Student performance was measured in terms of difference from the predicted performance based on college grades prior to entering this biology class and SAT scores (which are highly reliable predictors, based their previous analysis of five year’s of class data). This analysis also revealed a reliable prediction that disadvantaged students were twice as likely to fail this course  than non-disadvantaged students.

Not surprising (to me at least) was the consistent result of better final grades in the classes that had active learning instead of lectures. The benefit was especially noticeable on exam questions that demanded higher-level thinking. Moreover, the disadvantaged students improved disproportionately.

The authors did not examine possible explanations for why active learning yielded better results than lecturing. I think the explanation is obvious, based on what I know about mechanisms of learning and memory. First, learning from lectures requires sustained paying attention, but a whole generation of multitasking students has emerged who are not very adept at sustained attentiveness. Accordingly, the short attention spans of these students make it difficult for them to be engaged with the lecture content. Engagement lies at the heart of effective learning.

Secondly, active learning requires more engagement because the students have to “do something” instead of just listen. They have to find, assimilate, and use information to solve problems — all of which enhance understanding and are effective memory rehearsal strategies. The social dynamic of student learning teams facilitates these activities. It is much harder to drift off task, daydream, or sleep in class when a student has to interact socially with peers to perform a learning activity.

These ideas have been advocated for several decades. But now, it seems imperative for teachers to use these approaches in an age where there will be fewer teachers and where more students are unable to benefit from lecturing. This requires for many teachers a sea-change in teaching attitude and strategy. It is no longer suffices for a teacher to be a source and dispenser of information. Information already exists in many places, text books, Web sites, and videos, often in better presentation form than a typical teacher can produce. Even the expected role of teachers in explaining everything is problematic. Students remember much better that which they have to figure out. Working in groups makes it easier to figure out difficult material. Students can often explain things to each better than teachers can because teachers have more difficulty in knowing why students are having a comprehension problem.

The teacher must become a manager of learning activities. This means structuring in-class time so that students work collaboratively on learning activities. Students also need homework that gets beyond “busy work.” And, as I have been advocating for some time now, students will benefit from more frequent testing, especially under lower-stakes conditions.

Effective managers are those who can “scale up” to manage more and more people. We can’t wait for a new generation of teachers and professors. We need professional development programs now that emphasize management of student learning.

Source:

Haak, D. C., et al. 2011. Increased structure and active learning reduce the achievement gap in introductory biology.  Science. 332: 12131-1216.

  

Learning: No Pain, No Gain

The “best” teachers are the one’s who make learning easy. At least that is what the poorer students say. They may be wrong. The popular belief that it is easier to learn things that are easy rather than harder is also probably wrong. Easy material may not elicit enough attention and engagement to produce lasting learning. So, educators may need to re-think the whole notion of what makes a teacher effective. Making learning easier makes the teacher more popular, but that does not necessarily translate to real student achievement.

Kent State psychology professors have just reported a study of this matter with college students. They find that when students think something is easy to learn they may have only a superficial level of learning that does not last much beyond the next test. Just staring repeatedly at learning material is not nearly as effective as forcing retrieval of the information. Moreover, students can develop an easy-learning attitude that leads to bad study habits and an ineffective learning style.

Other research that I have summarized elsewhere shows that students likely do not know material as well as they think they do. That is, if they perceive they have “got it  in the bag,” they may find out they are sadly mistaken at test time. Likewise, students tend to quit study too soon, thinking the material was easy and they have learned it. In fact, repeatedly studying material you assume you know makes it more likely that you really do know it.

Easy learning, as in a single cramming session, is deceptive. It is not nearly as effective as the harder learning of spreading out the study over many days and weeks. The self-testing under the delayed conditions is much more effective precisely because it is harder to recall material learned days ago .

In the Kent State studies, college-aged students were asked to study for a week a pack of 48  flashcards that paired Swahili vocabulary words with their English translations. The students were divided into two groups and in both groups, students asked  to use a mediator — word, phrase or concept — link both words of a pair. Students in one group were given practice quizzes where they were shown a word and asked to name the other member of the pair. An examination at the end of the week revealed that the practice-quiz group performed much better on the final exam, especially if they were asked to recall the mediator.

In a study recently reported at an American Educational Research Association  meeting in by Katherine Rawsom at Williams College, students studied 35 Swahili-English word pairs on flash cards. The students were asked to practice until they got the vocabulary correct using either the entire stack or five stacks of seven cards each. Researchers instructed students to study the flashcards until they had gotten each translation correct either once, five, or 10 times, before taking a final quiz a week later. Getting the stack correct five times was three times more effective for the final quiz than the stack was correct only once. Also, study of one big stack was better than five little ones.

Students had predicted just the opposite. They expected studying smaller groups of flashcards would be more helpful than studying the big stack, and they expected no real benefit from studying cards more than once. They remembered about as many words as they expected to recall when studying the entire pack, 43 percent to 46 percent. Yet those who had studied the small stacks expected to remember nearly 60 percent of words yet recalled only 17 percent. In general, students were incorrect in two ways: 1) they give too little value to learning strategies that are difficult (using multiple sessions on the big stack), and 2) they give too much credence to strategies that were later documented to be less effective.

The deceptiveness of ease of learning was reinforced in a study reported in Psychological Science by Nate Kornell and collaborators at three other universities. Participants  were asked to predict how easily they would remember vocabulary words after studying them once or multiple times. Some of the words were presented in the standard font size on the person’s computer screen, while others were presented four times larger —something that makes the text feel easier to process but prior research shows does not improve memory. In addition, for some words, participants were told they would be allowed to study more than once.

The participants uniformly predicted that studying the words in larger font would help them remember more than studying the words multiple times. In fact, increased font size did nothing to help them, but studying even once more improved their recall of the new words.

Some school authorities have it all backwards. They want teachers to make the material as easy to learn as possible. I don’t mean to excuse teachers whose instruction is disorganized and confusing. But teachers who challenge students with difficult material and assignments, as well as frequent testing, are actually doing their students a favor. They are just the opposite of the accusation of being “bad” teachers.

This also relates to “dumbing down” the curriculum, which may actually interfere with learning. If we raised standards, we would find that students have to get more engaged. Better learning is  predictable. I think that when learning is difficult, learners are obliged to be more engaged. And it is the engagement that achieves lasting learning. Of course this only works for students who are motivated to learn.

Sources:

Cavallos, M. (2011) How testing improves memory. Science News. November 6th, 2010; Vol.178 #10

Kornell, N., Rhodes, M. G., Castel, A. D., & Tauber, S. K. (2011). The ease of processing heuristic and the stability bias: Dissociating memory, memory beliefs, and memory judgments. Psychological Science. 22(6) 787 –794

Sparks, Sarah D. (2011). Studies find “desirable difficulties” help students learn. Education Week, April 26.

U. S. Students Memorize Too Much?

Making kids memorize too much is the problem with U.S. schools, according to a new movie documentary, "Race to  Nowhere." This movie, produced by a housewife and first-time film maker, is being embraced all across the country by teachers and parents. It is a hot item, especially in New Jersey, where the teacher's union has locked horns with Governor Christi over cost cutting of teacher benefits. Wall Street Journal assistant editor, James Freeman, has done us all a favor by exposing this clap-trap propaganda. Yet this movie is called "a must-see" by the New York Times, an endorsement source that may tell you all you need to know about the movie. Schools, especially in New Jersey, are helping to arrange public showings. Parents, teachers, and educational policy makers are urged to join this propaganda campaign and shown how to do so on the  movie's web site.

But let us examine the premise. Are  students really stressed out by too much memorization? I am not a uninformed housewife. I  have worked with middle-school teachers and their schools for 10 years in developing and deploying science curriculum. I think students are asked to memorize too little, not too much. The movie contends that students don't know much because they are overwhelmed with more material than their little brains can handle. B.S.! I know what state standards require. Trust me, students are not asked to learn too much.

I wrote a book recently, Blame Game, How to Win It (available at Amazon), that focuses on the damaging consequences of misplaced blame. I point out that people make excuses for problems to avoid confronting the pain of dealing with the real causes. The book is not oriented around schools, but it certainly could have been, because schools are prime examples of misplaced blame.

For example, the movie places blame on George Bush for the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law. Many, perhaps most, teachers share in this perverse belief that standards and accountability testing are the cause of poor schools. Nobody wants to remember that schools were just as bad during Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton eras when there was no NCLB. SAT scores, for example, were just as low then as they are now. The real problem with NCLB is "No Child Pushed Forward." The emphasis in schools I know about is on the lowest common denominator of getting the lowest performing students to meet standards. Students who really care about learning and those who have talent are being cheated by NCLB. We have to rely on the U. S. Army to inspire our kids to "be all they can be."

Progressives also falsely blame insufficient funding for education. The evidence is abundantly clear that there is no correlation between spending per pupil and academic achievement. Time magazine, not noted for conservatism, points out in an article last December that spending on public schools more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1970 and 2007. Moreover, up to 44% of school expenditures today are kept "off budget," so the real expenditures are grossly under reported

Few people, especially teachers,  blame the teachers. And few parents or teachers blame the kids. Kids are considered victims of an over-demanding education establishment. Nobody seems to admit that kids might be spoiled with indulgences of all sorts, which includes having their poor performance blamed on anything but them. Anybody who thinks there are not large numbers of lazy, unmotivated kids who are uninterested in learning hasn't been in a classroom lately. Dedicated teachers knock themselves out trying to get such kids up to standard. The problem is not the standards or NCLB.

A lot of kids think they are smarter than they really are. They get this inflated view reinforced from doting parents and anybody over 50 gushing over how smart kids are to multi-task with all their electronic gizmos. I have explained before in earlier posts  that experts have shown multi-tasking to be educationally destructive. Other studies show that kids over-estimate what they know for upcoming tests and undervalue added study.

Here's a paradox. Nobody blinks or complains when school athletic coaches get in the kids' faces to upbraid them when they are being lazy, unmotivated, and under performing. But let a teacher do that and he/she would likely be fired on the spot. Teachers can make excuses for their students. But coaches know that excuse-making won't cut it on the playing field. Why should classrooms be any different?

To return to the point of progressives that school is too hard, I have examined state science standards in great detail because I write middle-school science curriculum. The standards do not demand too much emorization. They don't demand enough, especially the kind of memorization where students have to know how to use knowledge in their thinking. I think that the low-level of memorization required of students today is a main reason why so many students have  under-developed thinking skills. Too many of them mouth platitudes and parrot what others have said. They can't think on their own because they don't know enough to generate original and rigorous thought. Yet, too many educators dismiss the importance of memorization, assuming falsely that kids can think with an empty head. Educators tried that a few years back with "new math," which failed miserably. Now, it appears the same ill-begotten beliefs are re-surfacing in the context of state standards and accountability testing.

Critical and  creative thinking skills are best honed when students are expected to think for themselves, have opinions they can defend with facts and reason, and can persuade others to recognize flaws in their knowledge and thinking. But public schools have a politically correct culture where conformity is valued and individuality is suspect and anti-social. Conformity and tolerance of ignorance and irrationality are considered the virtues to seek, because all belief systems and views are typically considered equivalent (unless they are conservative). Unequal outcomes are just not fair. So standards have to be set low enough so everybody can master them. We therefore don't expect much and we don't get much.

Those who are bent on placing blame on public schools are often looking in the wrong places.Their blame game should target real causes, such as:

• misguided education professionals
• dumbed-down curricula and lowered expectations of students
• teachers who make excuses
• students and  parents who make excuses
• political correctness and the philosophy that unequal outcomes are unacceptably unfair
• devalued memorization. 

Don't hold your breath waiting for any this getting corrected soon. In the meanwhile, urge the kids in your life to read my e-book on learning how to learn: Better Grades, Less Effort, available at Smashwords or Amazon.

A New Way to Fix Ailing Schools

Most people may be tired of hearing about failing schools, because it has been so frustrating trying to get our schools fixed. It’s hard to find any good news about U.S. public schools. Public schools in the U.S. should embarrass us. As arguably the most advanced nation in the world, the U.S. ranks near the bottom of first-world nations in the education of its children.

Examples of student ignorance include survey results showing that two thirds of American teens can’t begin to identify when the Civil War occurred. A poll I read the other day stated that  40% of young adults didn’t know who the U.S. fought in the Revolutionary War! Unbelievably, 20% of students don’t know who the enemies of the U.S. were in World War II. A third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion. Just half know that The Federalist Papers were written to encourage ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The percentage of 17-year-olds who report reading for fun daily declined from one in three in 1984 to one in five in 2004. The middle-school teachers I work with say that most of their students are below grade level in reading.

College students are not impressing either. Less than half of college seniors know that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%.

If you are still sanguine about U.S. student competence, you should read Frederick Hess’ book, “Still at Risk. What Students Don’t Know, Even Now.”

So  what’s the fix? Politicians and teacher unions say we don’t spend enough money. They ignore the many formal studies showing there is no correlation between how much money a school district spends and the academic achievement of its students. Nor can money explain this: the  Washington, D.C. school district spends more per student than any district in America, yet its students rank at the bottom. Still not convinced that we spend enough of education? Explain this: cost per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled between 1975 and 2005, while test scores remained flat.

There is a new way that is actually the old fashioned way of restoring the pre-eminent role that memorization has in academic success.

I recently read Josh Foer’s provocative new book on memory, “Moonwalking With Einstein.” Foer is a journalist, who once had the same fallible memory as the rest of us until he discovered memorization techniques. He got interested in memory improvement while covering the U.S. Memory tournament. He learned the tricks used by “memory athletes,” and within one year of training, he became the U.S. Champion.

The techniques he learned were not new. They were actually perfected by the poet Simonides and others back in 5th Century B.C. Greece when everything had to be memorized because there were no written places to look up information. These techniques allow “memory athletes” to do such astonishing feats as memorize the precise order of 1,528 random digits in less than an hour  or memorize the sequential order of two decks of cards in less than five minutes. A memory champion from Malaysia memorized the entire 56,000 word, 1,774 page Chinese-English dictionary. Foer himself learned how to memorize the sequence of playing cards in one minute and 40 seconds, setting a U.S. competition record. Foer spent many days visiting with, as well as competing against, these memory athletes. What he learned was that he and the other memory athletes had just average memories when they didn’t use their special techniques.

Memory training can have major impact on school systems.  Foer cites the example of Raemon Matthews, an award-winning teacher in a minority-enrollment vocational high school in South Bronx. His students come from a neighborhood where nine out of ten are below average in reading and math, four out of five live in poverty, and nearly half don’t graduate from high school. Students and visitors entering the building must pass through a metal detector and their bags inspected by a policeman.

Matthews teaches memory techniques. His students stay after school for an extracurricular class in memory. Every class begins with a three-minute memorized recitation. Students memorize every important fact, date and concept in his history class. He requires every essay to contain at least two memorized quotations. A group of his African-American students competes every year in the adult U.S. Memory championships. His corps of elite, all-minority, students have all passed the New York state academic skills test each of the last four years, and 85% of them had a grade of 90 or higher.

Memory techniques obviously increase one’s knowledge. Perhaps even more important, memorization promotes mental  discipline. Kids could use a lot more of both knowledge and mental discipline.

So why don’t we teach memory techniques to school children in every school? Of course, you will say there is no practical reason to  remember long strings of numbers or card sequences like they do in memory tournaments. Even in Vegas, they know how to neutralize card counters. But the principles of memory techniques have great practical value for learning history, math equations, geography, science — anything academic. I had pretty good success academically using these techniques when I was in school, finishing as valedictorian and making A in every class every year since the 6th grade, despite having an IQ only slightly above average. One teacher snorted that I had no right to make such good grades: I was just an over-achiever. This was some 60 years ago when teachers didn’t give away grades to stroke student self-esteem or to avoid whining over grades. The techniques I used in school, plus others I didn’t know about then, are shared in my current e-Book for students, “Better Grades. Less Effort.”

At numerous science teacher meetings over the past four years, I have given presentations on memory principles and techniques in the hope that teachers will teach memorization skills to their students.  But I don’t think I am getting through. Teachers don’t seem to show much interest and the number of e-Book sales is miniscule, despite being priced at a very affordable $2.49 in any format.

I scratch my head in astonishment. I jumped all over these ideas when I was a student. Why don’t others do it?

It could be a combination  of things. For one, we have a progressive educational  culture that regards memorization as old fashioned and out-dated. After all, we can just Google what we want to know.  Nobody seems to believe or understand that a good memory contributes to IQ and thinking productivity. Memory is critical to thinking. You think with what you know and you can’t think in an information vacuum. I doubt that many teachers know that a good memory enhances thinking ability (I have an earlier post on that).  Teacher Matthews is quoted as reminding  us that “You can’t have higher-level learning — you can’t analyze — without retrieving [memorized] information.” He adds, “You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.”

The educational establishment dismisses Matthews’ philosophy, which they regard as  a conservative throwback to the days when it was standard practice for students to memorize things like the Gettysburg Address, the Bill of Rights, famous poems, and other classics of our cultural heritage. Today, unfortunately, at all levels of the educational system, the role of memory in learning is under appreciated, and even disparaged.

In science teaching, in particular, it is common for teachers to actively disparage memorization. Part of the reason is the long tradition of old-fashioned science teaching in which pointless memorization was demanded of students. I was subjected to a lot of that in my student days: memorizing all the bumps on bones, classification details of plant species, biochemical pathways, and so on. Too much of this still goes on in the college science courses that pre-service science teachers have to take. No wonder so many college students steer away from science. No wonder so many science teachers hate memorization.

The buzz word in science teaching these days is “inquiry.” When I try to tell teachers how important it is to teach kids how to memorize, they look at me as if I don’t understand real science. Pardon me, lady/sir, your ignorance is showing, I AM a scientist. Trust me when I say understanding and knowledge are fundamental pre-requisites to meaningful inquiry. And without knowledge, the results of research are just data.

No, today, we must be progressive, not old-fashioned. Modern educational theory gained traction from the  dominant educational philosopher, John Dewey, who challenged the value of memory, asserting that what is important in education is not knowledge but experience. Currently, mainstream educational theory embraces such attributes as insight, creativity, inquiry learning, and self expression. But these emphases, laudable as they are, lead to a bias against the role of memory in learning.

The bias against memorization may be even worse at the college level. A  faculty colleague chastised me for my emphasis on memorization. This colleague thinks education should be all about understanding and using knowledge to solve problems. We need, he says, to teach students how to think. This colleague is like so many teachers these days who emphasize insight, creativity, inquiry learning, communication skills, and the like without appreciating the role of memory.

I agree wholeheartedly with these higher aims of education. But in the process of educational reform, the progressives discount the importance of memory. Paradoxically, increasing emphasis is being placed on end-of-year high stakes testing, and successful student performance depends heavily on how much they remember from instruction earlier in the year. The teachers I know all complain about having to repeat the same material over and over. They think “one-try” learning is not possible.

My dealings have been with science teachers. They confront another new problem of the fad of “inquiry learning.” Science seems to progressive educators as the natural home for the Dewey’s experiential philosophy. As a successful scientist for over 50 years I can tell you that Dewey certainly did not fully understand science (nor do many teachers today). Science is all about creativity and discovery, but that does not spring from an untutored mind. Creativity comes from a mind that knows, and remembers, a lot.

Consider how Darwin constructed the theory of evolution. He amassed, and remembered, volumes of factual observations over decades, and using this information he was able to put together a coherent theory that had baffled scholars dating back to St. Augustine and earlier. This point is not realized by many science teachers, many of whom teach Creationism instead of the scientific evidence for the origin of species.

In biological sciences, it is no accident many biologists make their most important contributions when they are older, after they have learned a lot. Do you think I could have written this book when I was performing public memory stunts at 16? I may have known the memory  techniques, but did not yet have the knowledge.

Scientific illiterate educators like to point to Einstein who many believe was a poor student. What they apparently don’t know is that when Einstein worked on his research, he was a master learner and memorizer. He read and learned virtually everything written by Newton, Galileo, Bohr, Planck, Doppler, Reimann, Boltzman, Faraday, Maxwell, Poincare, Lorentz, dePretto, Bose, and numerous other scientists over the centuries. He learned Minkowski’s mathematics and curved geometry. He even knew Ben Franklin’s electricity research and cited one of his papers. In short, Einstein’s was so creative because he remembered and built upon the knowledge of numerous predecessors and contemporaries. If he were going to school in 21st century America, the 22nd century world would never hear of Albert Einstein.

Mastering the classical memorization techniques requires creativity. Foer’s book shows how he used creativity to become a memory champion. My book gives other examples of how I used creativity to succeed in school. The ability to be creative requires a “proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on,” as Foer puts it. The Einstein example above is a classic illustration of the point.

  Another possible explanation for neglect of memory skills is that many people, teachers and students alike, think their memory ability is fixed and can’t be improved. This view is false. Formal studies reveal that people can even increase their working-memory span and in the process increase IQ. Other studies show that students preparing for exams erroneously believe that their performance on the test will not be improved by further study beyond what they think is the best they can do. Also, students know less than they think they know and therefore stop studying for an exam too soon.

Underperforming students have an understandable lack of faith in their academic ability. They don’t try to succeed, because past efforts have failed. They come to believe they are stupid, with mediocrity as their destiny. There is a psychological term for this: learned helplessness.

Teachers need convincing that the more students know, the more they can know. Teacher Matthews makes the point, “Even if facts don’t by themselves lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts.”

Educational fads come and go, yet nothing seems to do much good. Why not try what used to work in education: old fashioned memorization? By the way, the best memorization techniques require learners to think.

B vitamins and Brain Shrinkage

Did you realize that after age 70, the average person’s brain shrinks more than 1% a year? At this rate, serious mental deterioration can become evident by age 80. Scientists have few clues about why this shrinkage occurs, nor why it is less in some Seniors than in others.

One of the few leads involve B vitamins. Certain B vitamins can reduce brain shrinkage and memory loss in people over 70, according to a randomized, double-blind clinical trial study in Britain of the effect of the B vitamins folic acid, B6 and B12.

All 168 volunteer participants were over age 70 and all had mild memory problems. Half of the subjects received daily a placebo, and the other half got a tablet containing 0.8 mg folic acid, 20 mg pyridoxine HCl (B6), and 0.5 mg cyanocobalamin (B12).

Brain shrinkage was measured by MRI scans. The mean rate of brain atrophy per year was 0.76%  in the active treatment group and 1.08% in the control subjects who took placebo pills 

The investigators also measured mental function, and the highest test scores occurred in the subjects that had the least brain shrinkage.

The mechanism of the beneficial effect is not known, but these vitamins are known to reduce blood levels of homocysteine, which has been correlated with the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. Of course, that is not proof that homocysteine causes the disease or that these vitamins will help prevent it. Homocysteine is an amino acid, but is not found in food. It is a metabolite of the amino acid, methionine, which does occur in food.  We do know that deficiency of folic acid, B6, an B12 causes increase in homocysteine, so it is possible that older people are deficient in these vitamins. But while we await further research, it seems prudent for Seniors to  take these B vitamins daily.

Source:

Smith, A. D. et al. 2010. Homocysteine-lowering by B vitamins slows the rate of accelerated brain atrophy in mild cognitive impairment: a randomized controlled trial. PLoSOne.  5(9): e12244. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012244.

 

How Sleep Helps Memory

 There is no longer any doubt. Sleep does improve the gelling or consolidation of memory for recently encoded information. Research is now focusing on how this happens and what other factors interact with the sleep effect. At least two processes seem to be at work: 1) sleep protects new memories  from disruption by the interfering experiences that are inevitable during wakefulness, and 2) sleep consolidates memories according to their relative importance and the learner’s expectations for remembering.

A good illustration of reducing interference comes from a study of napping at the University of Lübeck in Germany. The researchers knew about the extensive evidence that in wakefulness, new situations and stimuli can readily prevent new memories from consolidating. This is even true when learned material is recalled, because at that point the memory has to be reconsolidated and is therefore again vulnerable. The authors assumed that similar interference with memory formation could occur even after a sleep interlude.

To test the idea, they asked 24 volunteers to memorize  the two-dimensional location of 15 pairs of cards with pictures of animals and everyday objects. During the study time, they were also exposed continuously to a slightly unpleasant odor, which was intended to be an associational cue.

Forty minutes later, the volunteers were asked to learn a second, slightly different set of card pairs. This second task was to act as an interfering disruptor of the initial learning. The difference is that after the first memorization session, half of the group stayed awake and the other half took a nap. For 20 minutes during the break after the first study session, the odor cue was presented with the intent of helping to reactivate the memory of the first session. The awake group got the odor cue for 20 minutes just before starting the second learning session, while the sleep group got the odor cue during the last 20 minutes of the nap (dreaming did not occur, because it normally requires more than 40 minutes of sleep to start appearing).

When both groups were tested for recall of the first set of cards, the sleep group remembered much better (85% correct versus 60% for the awake group). The explanation begins with the knowledge that when temporary memories (as for the first card set) are recalled, they are vulnerable to being destroyed by new mental activity (as with the second card set). In this study, memory was reactivated in both wakefulness and sleep by the odor cue. Yet, the memorization processes that apparently persisted during sleep made the original memories more resistant to disruption. By the time of the second interfering task some 40 minutes later, much of the initial learning had gelled during sleep, but less so during wakefulness.

These authors also performed brain imaging that showed that the nap group had mostly completed a shift in activity from the temporary processing area (in the hippocampus) to storage areas in the cortex. This was not true for the awake group. You might say that sleep  enabled the information to be “uploaded from RAM to the hard drive” better than in the constant awake condition. Of course this computer metaphor breaks down in other respects. Biological memory is dynamic, readily degraded over time or changed by new experience. Also, recall of biological memory launches a reconstructive process whereby the memory can be reinforced or drastically altered.

        The practical application, as I see it, is to take a short nap as soon as possible after trying to memorize something really important. For example, during a study session for a school exam, take a nap right away so that it has a better chance to consolidate than if you stayed awake and got exposed to many new interfering situations and stimuli.

       Two new studies shed some light on prioritization of memory formation during sleep. We all have had the experience of improved memory if we know others expect us to  remember. I guess such improvement occurs because we work harder at it, using more intensive rehearsal and perhaps using deliberate association strategies..But we now find out from a recent study that the sleep effect on improving memory formation benefits from the relevance of the learned information. Since sleep usually occurs significantly later than the learning and original encoding, this effect must arise from the consolidation  process during sleep.

      A recent study from this same German research lab has revealed that sleep helps memory formation the most if you know you will need the information later. That is, it seems that the brain prioritizes its consolidation operations during sleep to favor consolidation of information that is most important. The study tested 193 volunteers for recall of a variety of memory tasks. Some subjects were exposed to the learning material early in the day, when there would be no sleep involved. The others were exposed to the same material late, just before the night’s sleep. When subjects were told they would be tested later, they were more likely to remember if they had slept immediately after the learning. This was true for both procedural tasks (like finger-tapping sequences) or declarative tasks such as word matching or stating card-pair locations. Moreover, subjects who were told they would be tested later spent more total time in the deepest stage of Sleep (Stage IV) than did comparable subjects who were not told they would be tested later. Presumably, the brain is using Stage IV to accomplish this differential consolidation process.

      In a recent study from a French group, the study focus was on sleep’s apparent ability to prioritize memory formation based on prior instructions to remember or forget items in a learning task. In the learning task, volunteers were shown 100 French words, one at a time. Fifty of these had accompanying instruction “to be remembered” and the other 50 “to be forgotten,” presented in a pseudorandom sequence that prevented more than three words of the same type being presented consecutively. After the training session, subjects were divided into two groups, one which was sent home to continue their normal activities and to sleep on their usual schedule for the  next three nights. The other group was denied the first night’s sleep after training, where they stayed up all that night watching movies or playing games.  Otherwise, this group was treated the same. On the fourth day, both groups were tested for recall with presentation the 100 of the original words and 100 new ones to serve as distracters. The task was to identify which words were in the original list.

      Questionnaires revealed any strategies the subjects used in trying to remember “to be remembered” words and trying to ignore “to be forgotten” words. No subject intensively rehearsed the original items during the three-day interval, but of course casual rehearsal was going on. Generally, subjects made associations of “to be remembered” words with memories of personal events or with short stories or sentences. Mental images were much less used. Of course, no such rehearsals occurred with “to be forgotten” words.

      Upon testing, both groups had about the same degree of correct recall for “to be remembered” words. But the sleep-deprived groups remembered more of the words they were not supposed “to be forgotten.” Thus, it would seem that during sleep, the brain preserved its ability to remember words that were expected to be remembered and discriminated against remembering words that were unimportant. Recall that the instructions to remember or forget were given at the  time of initial encoding. Thus, the brain must have preserved these instructions and followed them in the consolidation process during sleep. Though the authors did not mention it, the poor ability of sleep-deprived subjects to discriminate between the two categories of words could have arisen because being awake for a whole day after learning interfered with remembering and following instructions at the time of encoding.

Don’t forget, if you have students in your life, have them check out my new eBook, “Better Grades, Less Effort.”

Sources:

Diekelmann, S., Büchel, Born, J., and Rasch, Björn. 2011. Labile or stable: opposing consequences for memory when reactivated during wakefulness and sleep. Nature Neuroscience. Jan. 23. doi: 10.1038/nn.2744

Rauchs, G. et al. 2011. Sleep contributes to the strengthening of some memories over others, depending on hippocampal activity at learning. J. Neuroscience.  31 (7): 2563-2568.

Wilhelm, I. et al. 2011. Sleep selectively enhances memory expected to be of future relevance. J. Neuroscience. 31 (5): 1563-1569.

Memory Image-mapping Technique for One-try Learning

Are you as smart as a rat? A rat can learn a lot of things with just the first attempt. For example, in the old days, exterminators used to use poisons such as strychnine. What they discovered was that some rats who ate the bait were never killed. If they survived the seizures of the first exposure, they learned not to eat that particular bait again. It’s called “bait shyness.” As a result, exterminators now use a different poison, Warfarin, that does not kill right away. The rat slowly bleeds to death over many days and does not realize any connection between eating that bait and getting sick. The explanation for the difference is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.  One-try learning by rats being fed poison. In the top example, using strychnine, the rat gets sick soon after eating the bait. If it survives, it remembers an association between eating that particular kind of food and getting very sick, and it won’t eat the poison ever again. If, however, it takes a while to become sick, as with the anti-coagulant Warfarin, the rat is unable to make a connection between being sick and eating the bait. So, it keeps eating the bait every time it gets hungry.

Similar one-try learning has been demonstrated in two common types of experiments. In one type, the test apparatus is a large box, the floor of which is an electrified grid. In the middle of the floor, there is a safe-island platform that is not electrified. When an untrained rat is placed on this platform, it immediately runs to the walls, because rats feel vulnerable out in open spaces. But of course, the rat gets a learning experience of having its feet shocked. If you take the rat out, put it back in the home cage and re-test it the next day, the rat stays on the safe platform. Despite its natural inclination, it stays on the platform because it learned —in just one try —not to step off that platform.

Another example is a water maze. Put a rat or mouse in a tub of water and it swims desperately about hoping to find some escape. If there is a platform at one end it can climb up on, the rat, once it sees it, swims immediately to the platform and climbs up on it. If there is some kind of indicator of where the platform is, such as a light above it, and you fill the tub with a milky liquid where the platform cannot be seen, an untrained rat swims around until it accidentally finds the platform. Take the rat out, put it in the home cage, and re-test the next day, and the rat swims immediately to where the light and the safe platform is. Learning has occurred in just one try.

In all such learning situations there is one huge caveat. That deals with what happens immediately after the one-try learning. If some new learning situation occurs at that time, the learning will be disrupted and not formed into a lasting memory. For example, the memory will not form if in the foot shock or swim maze case immediately after the learning the investigator  puts the rat in another learning situation or even just some distracting situation, such as putting the rat into a cage with strange rats rather than returning it to the home cage. Re-testing the next day will indicate that the rat never learned. Actually, it just forgot, because new stimuli immediately after learning interfere with forming a lasting memory.

This is the most common explanation of failure for humans to remember new learned events. After all learning events, a certain amount of uninterrupted time is needed to “consolidate” the short-term memory into a more lasting one.

Now consider how the rats might learn these things in one try. They have no language. The must surely rely on what they see. That is they must be making an association with something they see out in space: a certain kind of food that made them sick, a grid of bars that shocked their feet, a light cue showing where a safe platform was located. So, objects and where they are in space are powerful memory aids.

Memory gimmicks often use some kind of mapping technique, such as associating what you want to remember with location of objects in a room. I have discussed these in my book, Thank You Brain for All You Remember. Now I have a new and better image-mapping technique for one-try learning. I include it free in a revision of my e-book for students, Better Grades, Less Effort. The technique can be applied to most anything, is easy to use, and the maps are adjustable for any number of objects or ideas to be remembered. Moreover, sequential ordering is built-in. You can get the ebook for only $2.49 in all formats from Smashwords.com (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623). 

Attention Deficit Returns As You Get Older

"PAY ATTENTION!" is a phrase teachers have to repeat again and again to youngsters. Whether or not attention deficit is of clinical magnitude, most kids have to learn how to pay attention. What you may not know is that this problem returns for most people as they become Senior Citizens.

Does any of this sound familiar: “Where did I put those keys?” “What was it I wanted when I opened the frig door?” "What was that phone number I just looked up?” These memory problems happen because you get distracted and lose attention.

A brain-scan study at the University of Toronto found that older people, compared to young adults, have decreased brain activity in brain areas that enable concentration This means that older brains can’t focus well, because the parts of the brain that enable concentration don’t get active enough.

To compound the problem, older people show increased activity in parts of the brain that don’t normally get activated during memory tasks in younger people. The explanation for this is that the brains of older people need to assign the attentiveness and memory work to more parts of brain. That is, they have to recruit more circuitry to do the same job young brains can do with fewer brain resources.  However, you look at it, the findings document an age-related decline in the brain's ability to focus its neural resources on memory tasks. What may be most worrisome is that the brain shows such signs of decline around age 40.

 Another study at the University of Illinois examined age-related increase in distractibility. Researchers recorded brain electrical responses in young adults and old subjects (65-78) who were listening to distracting bursts of sound. In young people, brain responses to repeated, irrelevant tones were quickly suppressed but responses to distracting sound were more persistent in older adults.              
Yet another study, this one from the U. California at San Francisco, confirmed that older people tend to have difficulty in ignoring distractions and irrelevant stimuli. Subjects performed a memory task of ignoring a previous stimulus that was still in working memory. In other words, the subject had to suppress the memory of irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that older individuals could focus on pertinent information but had difficulty in ignoring irrelevant or distracting information that was contained in working memory. However, about half of the older adults did not have this problem. So let us not come away with the conclusion that memory deficits in the elderly are inevitable.

Enough already! What you would really like to know is what to do about attention deficit if you have it.

One general approach is to keep your brain working hard as you age. Good examples include chess or learning a new language or a musical instrument. Think of it like exercise for the brain, which strengthens the neural circuits in those parts of the brain that have to do the memory work and distinguish irrelevant from relevant information.

Another general strategy is to reduce the distractions in our life, at least distractions that are present when we are trying to remember something. Multi-tasking is hard enough to do when you are young. On those occasions when I forget why I opened the refrigerator door, it is always because I let myself get distracted between the time I decided what I wanted and the time when I opened the door.

          Focus, focus, focus. We older people need to work at paying attention. Here are some tips on how to do that:

·   Assign importance to paying attention and remembering. If you don’t think something is important, your brain won’t commit enough circuitry to handle the information.

·   Expect and demand of yourself successful remembering. Make forgetting unacceptable.

·   Work with small chunks of information at any one time. By lowering the memory load, the brain’s limited resources can deal with it more effectively.

·   Be interested in what you are trying to remember. Don’t let it be boring. Boring is a state of mind that you can do something about.

·   Get engaged with the information. Ask yourself or others questions about it. Think about it in different ways.

·   Try to stay rested, alert, and sharp. Nobody focuses well when they are tired.

   

To summarize, the best way to pay attention is through force of will. To remember, you have to want to remember and accordingly force yourself to pay attention.

Copyright 2010, W. R. Klemm

 

Here is a note you might want to know about if you have children or grandchildren in school. I just published an e-book, Better Grades. Less Effort. It is priced so all kids can afford it. There are now three reviews, and all vigorously endorse the book.  See my Web, thankyoubrain.com for the reviews and more information.