What Doesn’t Work

Change management experts will tell you that sometimes it’s more important to stop doing what doesn’t work than starting anything that might. Our present K-12 educational system would be wise to take the change management experts’ advice.

Recently, Edutopia online published an article titled “5 Popular Education Beliefs That Aren’t Backed by Research.” Here are five practices, popular with today’s classroom teachers, that don’t work:

“Doodling Improves Focus and Learning – When we write about the power of drawing to learn, we often hear from readers who feel compelled to defend an old habit: ‘See, I told you that when I was doodling, I was still paying attention!’ But doodling – which is commonly defined as ‘an aimless or casual scribble or sketch’ and often consists of marginalia like cartoon characters, geometric patterns, or pastoral scenes – is distinct from what researchers call ‘task-related drawing.’ And doodling, in this sense, is not associated with improvements in focus or academic outcomes.”

“In fact, both cognitive load theory and experimental studies are generally downbeat on doodling. Students who sketch complicated scenes or designs as they try to process a lesson on plate tectonics, according to the first theory, are engaging in competitive cognitive tasks and will generally underperform on both. Doodling, like all drawing, is cognitively intensive, involving complex feedback loops between visual, sensorimotor, attentional, and planning regions of the brain and body. Because our ability to process information is finite, drawing and learning about different things at the same time is a simple question to too much.”

“Research confirms the theory. A 2019 study [Comparing the influence of doodling, drawing, and writing at encoding on memory] pitted off-task doodling against typical learning activities like ‘task-related drawing’ and writing. In three separate but related experiments, task-related drawing and writing beat out doodling in terms of recall – by margins as large as 300 percent.”

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“Reading Aloud in Turn Improves Fluency – Often called round robin reading (RRR), I resorted to it when I taught years ago – and it appears that it’s still frequently used, judging form a 2019 blog by literacy expert Timothy Shanahan and comments on a 2022 Cult of Pedagogy post on the topic.”

“Teachers deploy RRR – during which the whole class follows a text while students read sections consecutively – for good reasons: Arguably, the practice encourages student engagement, gives teachers the opportunity to gauge oral reading fluency, and has a built-in classroom management benefit as well. Students are generally silent and (superficially) attentive when a peer is reading.”

“But according to Shanahan, and the literacy professors Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones, the practice has long been frowned upon. In an influential 2012 review of relevant literature, Hilden and Jones cut straight to the point: ‘We know of no research evidence that supports the claim that RRR actually contributes to students becoming better readers either in terms of their fluency or comprehension.’”

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“Talent Beats Persistence – It’s a common trap. Observers tend to rate people who appear to be naturally gifted at something more highly than those who admit they’ve worked hard to achieve success. Researchers call this the naturalness bias, and it shows up everywhere, from teachers evaluating students to bosses evaluating employees.”

“In reality, the opposite is more often true. ‘Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made,’ writes psychologist and widely cited researcher or human potential K. Anders Ericsson for the Harvard Business Review. ‘Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching.”

“Experimental studies extend the point to academics: An influential 2019 study led by psychologists Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth, for example, found that high school GPA is a better predictor than the SAT of how likely students are to complete college on time. That’s because ‘grades are a very good index of your self-regulation – your ability to stick with things, your ability to delay gratification and work hard instead of goofing off,’ said Duckworth in a 2020 interview with Edutopia.”

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“Background Music (Always) Undermines Learning – It’s a fascinating and complex question: Can students successfully learn while background music is playing?”

“In some cases, it appears, background music can be neutral to positive influence; in other scenarios, it’s clearly distracting. There are several factors at play in determining the outcomes.”

“A 2021 study [Do You Listen to Music While Studying…?] clarifies that because music and language use some of the same neural circuitry – a finding that appears as early as infancy – ‘listening to lyrics of a familiar language may rely on the same cognitive resources as vocabulary learning,’ and that can ‘lead to an overload of processing capacity and thus to an interference effect.’ Other features of the music probably matter, too: Dramatic changes in a song’s rhythm, for example, or transitions from one song to the next often force the learning brain to reckon with irrelevant information. A 2018 research review confirms the general finding: Across 65 studies, background music consistently had a ‘small but reliably detrimental effect’ on reading comprehension.”

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“Grades Are Motivating – Teachers are well aware that grading, as a system, has many flaws – but at least grades motivate students to try their hardest, right? Unfortunately, the research suggests that that’s largely not the case.”

“’Despite the conventional wisdom in education, grades don’t motivate students to do their best work, nor do they lead to better learning or performance,’ write motivation researcher Chris Hulleman and science teacher Ian Kelleher in an article for Edutopia. A 2019 research review [A Meta-Analysis on the Impact of Grades and Comments on Academic Motivation and Achievement…], meanwhile, revealed that when confronted by grades, written feedback, or nothing at all – students preferred the latter two to grades, suggesting that A-F rankings might actually have a net negative impact on motivation.”

So, if we are paying attention to research, here are some suggestions if you want to make kids smarter and stronger:

Don’t doodle.

Stop round robin reading.

Hard work pays off better than smart brains.

Stop listening to background music.

Stop giving letter grades.

Now I wonder how many traditional classroom teachers will employ these five practices tomorrow and onward?

Why don’t we “do” what we “know” is “the right thing to do?”

Til tomorrow. SVB