EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Assignment Instructions The candidate will write an 8-page, excluding title and reference pages, research-based paper in current APA format that focuses on the topic
EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Assignment Instructions The candidate will write an 8-page, excluding title and reference pages, research-based paper in current APA format that focuses on the topic of curriculum design and development. The topic must address at least two prominent curriculum theorists’ positions and the candidate’s stance for or against the curriculum models. In addition, the candidate will need to integrate his or her own biblical worldview and its place within curriculum design and development. The paper must include at least six references in addition to the Brown et al. (2014) and Lalor (2017) course textbooks and the Bible. The paper must be formatted in current APA format and follow the specific guidelines described below. Be sure to review the grading rubric to improve the quality of your paper. From the list below, choose two or more prominent theorists you would like to discuss and analyze (you may select other theorists outside this list). You must use your course materials and the Jerry Falwell Library: Education Research Guide to research and provide content on your theorists: John Dewey Franklin Bobbitt Werret Charters William Kilpatrick Harold Rugg Hollis Caswell Ralph Tyler Hilda Taba David Tripp Ivor Goodson Lynn Erickson Carol Ann Tomlinson Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe A Curriculum Resesarch Paper Template has been provided to assist you with this assignment. Follow these guidelines in your paper: Organize your writing by theorist using the following headings: Theorist (discuss background information) Theory/Design Principles (name of theory/design, what it involves, and why it was developed) Contribution (how did this theory/design add to or change curriculum at that time) Impact (how did this change the field of education) Analysis (what is your position concerning this curriculum model and how would a Christian educator approach it) Format the paper in current APA style and follow scholarly writing standards. Do not use first-person perspective. Use double-spacing in the paper. You do not need to include an abstract. Use internal citations. (Any in-text citations must have corresponding references in the reference list.) Include a properly cited reference list. Some reminders: Cite references from the various materials from the course (and any other references) that support your choice of principles. Do not use underlining or hyperlinks. The words in the titles of a journal article or a book are not capitalized (except for the first word, proper nouns, and the first word following a colon). References must have corresponding in-text citations. Do not write less than 8 pages. Page limit does not include the title page or references. Quality, not volume, is required. Thoroughly edit your paper for correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, clear sentence structure, and precise word choice. Curriculum Research Paper Resource https://libguides.liberty.edu/c.php?g=564096 Page 1 of 2
EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Assignment Instructions The candidate will write an 8-page, excluding title and reference pages, research-based paper in current APA format that focuses on the topic
EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Grading Rubric Criteria Levels of Achievement Content Advanced Proficient Developing Not present Theorist &Theory/DesignPrinciples 47 to 50 points Background information regarding the theorist(s) is accurate and descriptive. The theory and/or design principles are well researched and provide enough information to inform the reader of its main purpose(s). 44 to 46 points Background information regarding the theorist(s) is accurate but not descriptive. The theory and/or design principles are researched and provide some information to inform the reader of its main purpose(s). 1 to 43 points Background information regarding the theorist(s) is not accurate or descriptive. The theory and/or design principles are not well researched and provide little information to inform the reader of its main purpose(s). 0 points Contributions & Impact 47 to 50 points Major contributions of the theorist(s)/theory are addressed and how they impacted curriculum at that time. The impact of the theorist(s)/theory on the field of education is discussed. 44 to 46 points Some of the contributions of the theorist(s)/theory are addressed and how they impacted curriculum at that time. Some of the impact of the theorist(s)/theory on the field of education is discussed. 1 to 43 points Major contributions of the theorist(s)/theory are addressed and how they impacted curriculum at that time are missing. The impact of the theorist(s)/theory on the field of education is discussed but important aspects are missing. 0 points Analysis 24 to 25 points A position is taken, either for or against, the curriculum theorist(s) and their theory and/or design principle with justification for this stance. A biblical worldview analyzing the theory and/or design principle from the standpoint of a Christian educator is discussed through scripture. 22 to 23 points A position is taken, either for or against, the curriculum theorist(s) and their theory and/or design principle but does not provide strong justification for this stance. A biblical worldview analyzing the theory and/or design principle from the standpoint of a Christian educator is discussed but does not include scripture. 1 to 21 points A position is not clearly taken, either for or against, the curriculum theorist(s) and their theory and/or design principle and does not provide a justification for this stance. A biblical worldview analyzing the theory and/or design principle from the standpoint of a Christian educator is either missing or does not include scripture. 0 points Structure Advanced Proficient Developing Not present Writing Style and Page Length 24 to 25 points The paragraphs are well-developed with clear topic sentences and supporting sentences; thorough editing is evident through the use of precise language and sentence structure; overall, paper is appropriate for a graduate writing level. The paper is at least 8 pages. 22 to 23 points The paragraphs are developed with clear topic sentences and supporting sentences; thorough editing is evident through the use of precise language and sentence structure; overall, paper is appropriate for a graduate writing level. The paper is less than 8 pages. 1 to 21 points The paragraphs are developed with topic sentences and supporting sentences; editing is evident through the use of precise language and sentence structure; overall, paper is appropriate for a graduate writing level. The paper is less than 8 pages. 0 points Format and Mechanics 24 to 25 points The title page, at least 6 in-text citations (in addition to the course textbooks and the Bible), and reference page demonstrate flawless and current APA format; the paper is double-spaced; consistent third person perspective is used throughout the paper. The paper is free of grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation errors. 22 to 23 points The title page, at least 4 in-text citations (in addition to the course textbooks and the Bible), and reference page demonstrate current APA format; the paper is double-spaced; consistent third person perspective is used throughout the paper. The paper has 1 grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation errors. 1 to 21 points The title page, less than 3 in-text citations, and reference page demonstrate mostly APA format; the paper is double-spaced; some third person perspective is used throughout the paper. The paper has 2 or more grammar, spelling, and/or punctuation errors. 0 points Page 3 of 3
EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Assignment Instructions The candidate will write an 8-page, excluding title and reference pages, research-based paper in current APA format that focuses on the topic
CURRICULUM RESEARCH 5 Curriculum Research Paper School of Education, Liberty University Author Note I have no known conflict of interest to disclose. “” Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Email: Curriculum Research Paper Provide an introduction to your paper here. Each paragraph should contain 3-5 sentences. Theorist 1 Name This section should describe the background of theorist. Describe the life of the theorist. Do not include any information about his/her theory here. Support with in-text citations. NO DIRECT QUOTES IN THIS PAPER. Theorist 1 Name and Theory This section will describe the theory. Include the name of the theory/design, what it involves, and why it was developed. What are the components? How does one implement it? Address all points noted in this template for maximum points. Support with in-text citations. Theorist 1 Name Contribution   Explain how this theory/design added to or changed curriculum at that time. How was curriculum before the theory? How was curriculum after the theory.? Give examples of specific changes. Support with in-text citations. You must describe how curriculum was before and after the theory to score well here. Needs to be explicitly stated. Remember, curriculum describes what is being taught. It also includes goals, standards, assessment, content, and resources. Theorist 1 Name Impact Explain how the theory changed the field of education. How was education before the theory? How was education after the theory? Give specific examples. Support with in-text citations. You must describe how education was before and after the theory to score well here. Needs to be explicitly stated. This could focus on practice, instruction, specific lessons, thinking in education, etc. Theorist 1 Analysis What is your position concerning this curriculum model? Your first sentence should state your stance on the theory. “The x theory is a great addition to x because of x. Explain why you have this stance. Do not use any personal pronouns (I, me, us, our, etc). Support with examples. How would a Christian educator approach it? Support with Scripture. Be sure to include properly formatted biblical in-text citations. Theorist 2 Name This section should describe the background of theorist. Describe the life of the theorist. Do not include any information about his/her theory here. Support with in-text citations.  Theorist 2 Name and Theory This section will describe the theory. Include the name of the theory/design, what it involves, and why it was developed. What are the components? How does one implement it? Address all points noted in this template for maximum points. Support with in-text citations. Theorist 2 Name Contribution Explain how this theory/design added to or changed curriculum at that time. How was curriculum before the theory? How was curriculum after the theory? Give examples of specific changes. Support with in-text citations. You must describe how curriculum was before and after the theory to score well here. Needs to be explicitly stated. Remember, curriculum describes what is being taught. It also includes goals, standards, assessment, content, and resources. Theorist 2 Name Impact Explain how the theory changed the field of education. How was education before the theory? How was education after the theory? Give specific examples. Support with in-text citations. You must describe how education was before and after the theory to score well here. Needs to be explicitly stated. This could focus on practice, instruction, specific lessons, thinking in education, etc. Theorist 2 Analysis What is your position concerning this curriculum model? Your first sentence should state your stance on the theory. “The x theory is a great addition to x because of x. Explain why you have this stance. Do not use any personal pronouns (I, me, us, our, etc). Support with examples. How would a Christian educator approach it? Support with Scripture. Be sure to include properly formatted biblical in-text citations here. References All sources should be alphabetized and formatted per current APA standards. Be sure there is an in-text citation for every source listed here. Include clickable working hyperlinks. The Bible is to be one of the references listed.
EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Assignment Instructions The candidate will write an 8-page, excluding title and reference pages, research-based paper in current APA format that focuses on the topic
136 7 CONSIDERATION 7 Resources That Support Instruction “The Harry Potter unit,” “the DNA lab,” “the Twitter project,” “the I Have a Dream activity”—teachers have often referred to units or other chunks of curriculum through the names of the resources they use, illustrating the excitement they have for sharing their favorite books, technology, and materials with their students. The passion teachers have for these resources shows how much they truly care about what they teach. Their enthusiasm transfers to their students and creates an energy of learning in the classroom. Although we would like to believe these feelings occur solely because of the resource itself, that is probably not the only reason why students feel more engaged. It is more likely because of what the teachers ask stu- dents to do with the resource. Creating that match between what students do and the resources they use is the focus of this chapter. In a quality cur- riculum, learning experiences integrate quality texts, technology, and other materials in engaging yet purposeful ways. Texts Students read text for many reasons, including to • Examine organizational structure. • Determine the author’s purpose. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 136EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 136 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 3 7 • Examine word choice and meaning. • Evaluate an argument. • Determine relationships between ideas. • Gather information. • Challenge their own thinking. • Practice reading skills. • Explore diff erent genres, styles, authors, and cultures. Each reason may require a diff erent type of text, so it is possible for stu- dents to be reading multiple texts at the same time but for diff erent pur- poses. Often the reasons are clearly established in the standards chosen for the unit. Let’s look at some examples that illustrate how standards indicate purpose and how the purpose infl uences the choice of text and how it is used in a learning experience. Example 1 Standard: RI.2.10 By the end of the year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, in the grades 2–3 text complexity band profi – ciently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. Type of Text: Complex text as determined by • Qualitative measures such as level of meaning, structure, lan- guage, and knowledge demand. • Quantitative measures such as Lexile scores that determine such factors as number of words and sentence length. • The match between reader and task based on factors such as cognitive capabilities, reading skills, motivation and engage- ment, prior knowledge and experience, and content and themes. Learning Experiences: Students • Preview From Seed to Plant, by Gail Gibbons, by placing small sticky notes next to the title, headings, and subheadings. • Turn the heading or subheading of each section into a question and write it on the sticky note to guide the reading of the text. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 137EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 137 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 138 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum • Underline/highlight information in order to answer the ques- tion created from the heading/subheading. Example 2 Standard: RL.11–12.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concern- ing how to structure specifi c parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact. Type of Text: Text selected needs to have a unique structure, such as an unusual beginning or ending or a comedic or tragic resolution. Learning Experiences: Students read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler. As they read, they • Track their thinking (reactions, understanding of characters and events, shifts in thinking) as the story unfolds, on sticky notes or in a journal. • Share their reactions to the author’s choice to start the book in the middle of the story, and the impact that decision had on the story itself, in small-group discussions. Example 3 Standard: W.7.1 Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence. Type of Text: Text that illustrates an argument and how a claim is supported by reasons and evidence. Learning Experiences: Students read the book George Bellows: Painter with a Punch, by Robert Burleigh. The students • Read and discuss the story to develop an appreciation of George Bellows and his artwork. • Identify the characteristics of the text that identify it as an argument and contribute to a class list, focusing on the inclu- sion and evaluation of an opposing point of view. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 138EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 138 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 3 9 • Reread the text, and use different-colored sticky strips to iden- tify the different points of view. • Use their strips to write sentences showing the connection between opposing viewpoints (e.g., Some people think _____, but _____). Example 4 Standard: Colorado Career and Technical Education (CTE), Archi- tecture and Construction Cluster, Design and Pre-Construction Pathway DPCP 01. Technical Skills: Use the technical knowledge and skills required to pursue the targeted careers for all pathways in the career cluster, including knowledge of design, operation, and maintenance of technologi- cal systems critical to the career cluster. DPCP.01.01 Read, interpret, and use technical drawings, docu- ments, and specifi cations to plan a project. DPCP.01.01a Interpret drawings in project plans. Type of Text: Floor plans of a wide range of quality Learning Experiences: Students work in small groups to interpret a fl oor plan that they fi nd on the Internet. They • Identify the key elements of a fl oor plan by creating a list of what they notice about the plan. • Share their list to construct a class checklist of a quality plan. • Use the checklist to write an evaluation of the plan, identifying how it incorporates the criteria and how it could be improved. In each of the examples, the characteristics of the text were identifi ed from the standard and then the text was chosen because it exhibited those characteristics. Specifi cally, • From Seed to Plant was selected because it exhibits the attributes of text complexity. • We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: A Novel, by Karen Joy Fowler, was selected because of its unusual structure. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 139EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 139 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 140 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum • George Bellows: Painter with a Punch, by Robert Burleigh, was selected because it presents an argument. • Floor plans were selected because they include specifi cations for planning a project. Although these choices seem straightforward, we can learn a lot about choice of text through these examples, including how to address common misconceptions that often infl uence and limit the texts teachers use in their classrooms. In the 2nd grade example, teachers chose the text From Seed to Plant, by Gail Gibbons, because it met the criteria for text complexity. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards or similar standards has led to some confusion as to what “text complexity” actually means and when students should read complex text. Unfortunately, text complexity has often been translated to mean a Lexile or other qualitative score. As shown in the description of the characteristics of the text, text complexity also includes qualitative features and meeting the demands of the reader and the task. In addition to the Lexile level, From Seed to Plant includes text features that students can use as a strategy for understanding the text. The text therefore meets not just one of the criteria for text complexity but also the other two because it has structural characteristics that can be used to meet the demands of the task. Many quality texts have been pushed aside because they are not of the “correct” Lexile score. Yet these texts, because of qualitative measures or how they are being used, may actually be com- plex text and more worthwhile to read. In some cases concern over text complexity has also incorrectly led to the use of complex texts instead of varied levels of text, even though we know that students improve as readers when they have plenty of oppor- tunities to read text at their own level. Before asking students to read From Seeds to Plant, teachers could have them practice the reading strat- egy of using text features to comprehend nonfi ction texts with a text at their reading level. Once students had plenty of practice with text at their EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 140EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 140 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 4 1 reading level, they then could apply their reading strategies to more diffi – cult texts. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was chosen because of its unique structure: it begins in the middle. However, many other con- temporary as well as classical works of literature also have an unusual beginning or ending, or a comedic or tragic resolution that would meet this criterion; examples include Defending Jacob by William Landay, My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. With such diverse choices, a text cannot be chosen based solely on structure. In this case, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves sits in a unit with the following organizing center: Unit Title: Humanity Essential Question: What does it mean to be human? Big Idea: Students understand that the parameters of what it means to be human are not defi ned by all in the same way. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is serving two purposes: it meets the criterion of unusual structure, and it explores the ethical debate of ani- mal rights in a unique way. In many units, teachers choose a text because it can serve two purposes. It can be read for enjoyment and still be analyzed for the author’s use of language; it can be read to learn specifi c content and still be used to analyze the author’s use of evidence in making a claim. This concept of two purposes is particularly important in content areas where teachers feel there simply isn’t enough time to cover the content and read an outside text. For example, using a chapter from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot in a high school sci- ence class allows students the opportunity to use their scientifi c knowl- edge of cells as they read about and engage in the bioethical debate about cell ownership. In a high school social studies classroom, students can read an excerpt from The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and compare it to other secondary and primary sources that capture the times EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 141EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 141 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 142 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum and experiences of African Americans who moved north and west during the Great Migration from the South. In addition to illustrating how a specifi c text can be used, a quality curriculum also recommends alternative texts that will allow students to arrive at the end goal. For example, although George Bellows: Painter with a Punch is a good model for argumentative writing, a number of alter- natives can serve as mentor text. These texts should be included in the curriculum so that teachers have quality options that they can choose from when thinking about the interests, needs, and learning styles of their students. This idea of choice is in direct opposition to a common practice that asserts that all students in a given grade level or classroom should read the same text. Although this approach is helpful at times, many new oppor- tunities emerge when students read diff erent texts for the same purpose or reread a text in a diff erent class or grade level for a new purpose. For example, teachers could use George Bellows: Painter with a Punch in any class—not only an ELA class—where students are writing arguments. An art teacher could also use it for examining George Bellows’s artistic style or as a model for writing critiques. Confi ning a book to a specifi c grade level or class limits its use; rereading for diff erent purposes promotes greater comprehension. Clearly identifying texts within the curriculum resources will promote this practice of multiple readings for diff erent purposes by allowing all stakeholders access to information regarding what students are reading and why. There are also times when it is best to describe the type of text but allow for a wide variety of quality, as seen in the learning experiences for architectural design. Here the goal was for students to access and evaluate fl oor plans for quality. In the real world, architects are not always handed a quality plan but rather need to know what to look for and what questions to ask in order to ultimately create a design plan. Although it would be advantageous to the students to have an exemplar to refer to while design- ing their own fl oor plan, the exemplar should not be their only model or necessarily the fi rst plan they look at. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 142EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 142 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 4 3 Technology Examine these three standards and try to determine the grade level and content area to which they apply: 1. Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information. 2. Students integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words. 3. Students read, view, and listen for information presented in any format (e.g., textual, visual, media, digital) in order to make inferences and gather meaning. These standards come from diff erent documents; the fi rst is an ISTE stan- dard, the second is a Common Core State Anchor Standard, and the third is from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). Although each addresses the use of technology in slightly diff erent ways, they all require that students use text, visual, media, and digital resources. These standards refl ect the fact that, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center (Anderson, 2015; Perrin & Duggan, 2015), 87 percent of adult Amer- icans use the Internet, 68 percent of Americans own smartphones, 45 per- cent own tablets, and 73 percent own a laptop or desktop computer, making it diffi cult to ignore the need to address technology in the curriculum. I use the term technology here in the broadest sense of the word, to include the devices—computers, tablets, smartphones—that students use to access information, collaborate, and share what they have learned. Lap- top computers and tablets are increasingly common, and schools vary in their policies regarding cell phone use and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) measures. The goal here is not to debate the merits and disadvantages of the devices or the related policies but rather to focus on what to include in the curriculum that will make the use of technology benefi cial to students. The general guiding principle around technology in the curriculum is to focus on how technology is a medium for learning rather than an end in itself (Pahomov, 2014). With that in mind, let’s look at examples that EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 143EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 143 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 144 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum illustrate the most common purposes that technology serves in the class- room: accessing information, collaborating and interacting, and present- ing and publishing. Accessing Information We live in a world where we have immediate access to large amounts of information via the Internet, so the question in the classroom is not whether we should use the Internet to access information but rather how much information to include in the curriculum; in other words, do we tell students where to fi nd information or do we let them fi nd it on their own? The answer lies in how involved students are in the process of getting the information. The less involved they are, the more information needs to be included in the curriculum. The more involved they are, the less informa- tion needs to be included. Let’s look at two examples to see exactly what this means. Example 1 Students examine how speakers convey powerful messages by • Watching the video Be the Punchline (Bass, Powers, & Michael Jr., 2014) and working in small groups to complete a graphic organizer identifying the message, details, and structure used by Michael Jr. to make his point. • Watching Sam Berns’s My Philosophy for a Happy Life and identifying his message, the details he uses to convey his mes- sage, and the structure used to support his point on the same graphic organizer. • Analyzing their graphic organizer to create criteria for effective ways speakers use details and structure to make a point. In this example, the students have a passive role in accessing infor- mation. The media have been preselected so the students can focus on analyzing the examples. Although students can fi nd their own examples, it would be best for them to do so after establishing criteria for how speak- ers use details and structure to make a point. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 144EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 144 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 4 5 The purpose for including these specifi c presentations is to identify examples of presentations and speeches students can view in order to analyze how a speaker uses structure and details to convey a message. Certainly other presentations and speeches could be used, and some teachers may opt to select their own; but—like some students—not all teachers will know how or where to look. Including this information in the learning experience gives teachers a starting point and gives students models to examine. In cases such as this one, including a specifi c website is particularly helpful in learning experiences in which students are being introduced to an idea or concept, practicing a specifi c skill, or evaluating an example. Students are most involved in accessing information when conducting research on a topic of their choice. When students are choosing a topic, it is not feasible to off er all of the possible sources of information. What will be helpful to students are learning experiences that teach them to analyze the credibility of the sources they are examining, as well as learning expe- riences that show them how to use tools to organize, retrieve, and anno- tate their sources. Example 2 illustrates learning experiences focused on the process of collecting and organizing materials. In this case, students are collecting resources they will use for individual performance tasks that explore leadership. Example 2 Students • Explore the online tool Diigo by watching an introductory video and browsing the site, taking note of what is easy to use and what is diffi cult; they work in small groups to address the areas that were diffi cult. • Read 2–3 articles from an open collection of resources they are interested in; identify the relationship between the articles and the tags used to organize the articles. • Contribute to a class list of tags that could be used in identify- ing articles about leadership. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 145EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 145 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 146 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum • Research and subscribe to RSS feeds or SmartBriefs that have the potential to include articles on leadership. • Identify and tag articles to include in the class Diigo library. Collaborating and Interacting Another important role of technology in the classroom is that it allows students to collaborate and interact with each other, the teacher, and the general public in many diff erent ways. In general, the choice of platform will depend on such factors as how many students will work together and the role the teacher will play in the interaction. The curriculum will need to identify appropriate platforms for interaction while the teacher identi- fi es the collaborative groups or pairs and actively participates in feedback or discussions with her students, as shown in the following examples. Example 1: Students use Storybird to create and illustrate origi- nal narratives. In this example, Storybird is a specifi c platform that students can use to write and illustrate narratives. The decision to include this specifi c resource in the curriculum was based on several factors—namely, Storybird • Is conducive to narrative writing because of its booklike structure. • Includes a wide range of pictures that students can select from to refl ect the storyline of their narrative. • Can be confi gured as a closed network, allowing students to work together and receive feedback from their peers and teacher. • Can be used for both process (the writing of the story) and publi- cation (sharing the fi nished product). Example 2: Students work in peer-editing groups using Google Drive to provide each other with feedback. In this case, Google Drive is included as the tool of choice primarily because the school district has purchased Chromebooks that operate using Google programs. However, in addition to its availability, Google EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 146EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 146 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 4 7 Drive is a simple tool for the students and teacher to use for collaborating, documenting, and saving changes to work on a closed network. In both of these examples, the tools are chosen based on their avail- ability, ease of use, and appropriateness for the task. When students use collaborative or interactive tools for their own research, the description of a tool should be more open-ended, as in this example: Example 3: Students use an online tool such as SurveyMonkey or Twitter to conduct qualitative research for their inquiry project around the question Is technology always good? In this case, the curriculum provides suggestions, but students are not limited to those choices. Students are expected to choose the interactive tool that they will use based on what they want to accomplish. They will need to set up their own network to collaborate with other members of their group and invite the teacher to participate or provide feedback. These three examples illustrate only a small fraction of the technol- ogy that is available to facilitate student interaction. The possibilities are endless and continually changing, allowing students to survey, record, play, and create in new and exciting ways. To prevent getting lost in the myriad of choices and creating tasks that focus on the novelty of the tool, it is necessary to ask, How is this tool or platform going to make the pro- cess more streamlined and make it easier for the students and teacher to work together? Presenting and Publishing Like tools for collaboration, publication tools are numerous. In some cases, the collaboration tool is the same one that will be used for publica- tion. The Storybird example is one such case; once the students complete their book, they can use Storybird to publish it for others to see. Not all tools, however, will lead directly to publication. One platform may be needed for collaborating and a second for sharing the fi nished product. In these cases, the curriculum will either need to identify a tool for publication or leave it to student choice. Once again, the purpose will EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 147EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 147 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 148 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum determine when a task should contain a specifi c tool or when the choice should be left open-ended. Let’s look at two examples to determine what should be considered when making this decision. Example 1: Students choose one of the global issues featured on the United Nations website, http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/. After conducting research on the issue as a whole and focusing on a case study of how the issue affects a specifi c community, students write and submit a proposal for an awareness cam- paign. The class chooses one of the proposals and carries out the plan using the appropriate media and technology to reach their target audience. In this performance assessment, the use of technology and appropri- ate tools is contingent on many factors. Limiting student choice would change the entire assessment. In this case, students would benefi t from a series of learning experiences that feature the analysis of diff erent media used for awareness campaigns, and the tools available for creating them. Example 2: Students create a LinkedIn page to establish an online professional presence. In this task, the tool for publication is identifi ed. Although other social media sites can be used for business networking, LinkedIn is the largest in the world. If the intention of the teacher is to provide graduating seniors with the opportunity to learn how LinkedIn works, it does not make sense for the choice of tool to be open-ended or for a diff erent tool to be used. If the task were diff erent—for example, create an online portfolio showcas- ing your accomplishments over the last four years—students could deter- mine the specifi c platform to use. They could use video, photography, and graphics on a variety of diff erent platforms, depending on the message and materials they wished to share. Selecting technology for a curriculum should be done with full under- standing of the terms of agreement, including matters related to security, privacy, and ownership. For example, Twitter requires an e-mail address, and LinkedIn has an age limit. Although both are public forums, they can EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 148EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 148 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 4 9 be limited to select viewers. Research into diff erent tools should be done before inclusion in the curriculum, so teachers can use the tool with con- fi dence that it complies with school regulations and are clear about what steps need to be taken so students can use the tool safely. Materials This fi nal category includes graphic organizers, models and exemplars, student checklists, primary sources, common templates, protocols, and other materials that support the learning experiences for the unit. The number of potential materials could be overwhelming and result in an unwieldy document if not properly managed, so the policy of “less is more” should defi nitely be applied when determining what to include. Here are some questions to consider when selecting or evaluating resources: • Is the resource an integral part of a learning experience? If a learning experience refers to a specifi c protocol, organizer, photograph, or other resource, the resource should be included in the curriculum. For example, consider this learning experience: Students examine the painting Harvest Time by Grandma Moses and describe life in a rural community. Because this learning experience references a specifi c painting, the paint- ing should be readily available for teachers to use with their students. If the learning experience simply referenced the artwork of Grandma Moses—for example, “Students examine the paintings of Grandma Moses and describe life in a rural community”—it would be suffi cient to include a website where the paintings could be found. • Does this resource include a process that will be repeated in subsequent units? Processes that are likely to be repeated throughout the year as a regular routine include discussion protocols, procedures for lab experiments, steps for analyzing primary sources, and checklists for group work. In such cases, the guidelines and other supporting tools, such as rubrics, checklists, and refl ection sheets, should be included in the unit where the process is introduced and then, depending on EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 149EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 149 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 150 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum frequency of use, in subsequent units. For example, in this learning expe- rience, students are introduced to a discussion protocol: Students participate in a Socratic seminar in which they discuss the essential question What is more constant than change? If students engage in a Socratic seminar on a regular basis, in every unit, it is suffi cient to include the protocol once. If the seminar occurs sporad- ically, it would be benefi cial to include the protocol whenever it is used. In either case, because a specifi c protocol has been identifi ed, it would be helpful to have the steps outlined in an easily accessible document. • Does this tool support school values? Throughout this book, I have discussed ways to align curriculum to standards that refl ect the dis- trict’s or school’s values. If a particular resource exemplifi es these values, it should be consistently referenced and used throughout the curricu- lum. For example, if a district has decided to focus on fostering student thinking, they may be working with Thinking Maps (Hyerle, 2009). Thinking Maps consist of eight visual tools that are used for diff erent cognitive functions. A teacher may choose to use a frame of reference circle map so that students can identify what they know about the causes of the Civil War, what has infl uenced their understanding, and the ques- tions they have. The frame of reference circle map has been specifi cally chosen for this diagnostic task so the teacher can determine not only what students know, but also how reliable that information is, based on where it came from. Because fostering student thinking is a districtwide focus, the frame of reference circle map will appear in multiple curricula and will be used throughout the year; however, it should still appear in the curriculum the fi rst time it is used, for easy accessibility. Although purpose underlies the selection of texts, technology, and materials, it is important to also demonstrate cultural competency when selecting these resources. Cultural competency is the ability of a system to work eff ectively in cross-cultural situations (Goode & Dunne, 2004). As it relates to the choice of resources, cultural competency means being culturally aware of the students you work with and ensuring that the resources are representative of who they are or will expose them to cultures diff erent from their own. A culturally aware curriculum will EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 150EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 150 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 5 1 include resources that address, in an unbiased way, the religions, races, and cultural practices of the students, as well as those who are diff erent from them. Implications for Evaluating, Creating, and Revising Curriculum A wealth of resources is available to teachers through the Internet and through programs purchased for schools, so whether evaluating a curric- ulum to determine if it should be purchased or revised or creating a new curriculum, the challenge is not only what should be included but also how to limit what is included. The common theme throughout this chapter for determining what to include is purpose: what purpose will the text, technology, or resource serve in the curriculum? The identifi cation of appropriate resources can occur simultaneously as learning experiences are being evaluated or cre- ated, as described in Chapter 6. A quality curriculum includes learning experiences that identify what the students will do, why they will do it, and the evidence of student learning. The purpose for choosing a particular resource is identifi ed in the descrip- tion of why students will complete a task, making it simple to identify the necessary resources at the same time. Consider the following examples: Example 1: Students examine photographs from the New York Times photo essay Poverty’s Palette and write a description of what life was like in the South during the Great Depression. In this example, the images provide background information on what life was like in the South during the Great Depression. The pictures have a very specifi c purpose and should be easily accessible to the teachers who wish to use them; therefore, they should be included in the curriculum. Example 2: Students read the article “Alabama Pardons 3 ‘Scotts- boro Boys’ After 80 Years” by Alan Blinder (2013) and use key details from the article to write a summary of the events that occurred and their implications for today. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 151EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 151 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 152 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum In this learning experience, the purpose of the account is twofold: to pro- vide information to students and to have students use key details to write a summary. The article selected needs to meet these criteria. A primary source document that focuses on reaction to the trial’s outcome could not be used for these purposes. Although it may be appropriate for the next learning experience, a narrative account of someone’s feelings might not be the best for determining what happened at the trial and its implica- tions 80 years later. Example 3: Students complete a double-bubble map to compare the Scottsboro trial with the trial of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. In this example, the double-bubble map is used for comparison. This Thinking Map is included as part of the learning experience because it is structured to be used for mirrored analysis. Although a Venn diagram might be an alternative for some and can certainly be used for mirror anal- ysis, it is a tool better suited for math and science. Because the double- bubble map is specifi cally identifi ed in the learning experience and has a specifi c purpose, it would need to be included as a resource. Using purpose to determine what should be included in the curriculum will help simplify the process of choosing resources. It may also reveal a resource better suited for another purpose within the curriculum. It is conceivable that teachers might use a portion of a classroom textbook or anthology in a way other than the one prescribed by the publisher. In addition to determining what to incorporate in the curriculum, it is just as important to identify a way to limit and manage the resources included. This eff ort becomes particularly challenging when the curric- ulum is being implemented, for this is when teachers will adjust existing resources and fi nd additional resources that they wish to include. It is important to have a system in place for managing these resources. One suggestion is to put in place a vetting process for reviewing resources before including them in the curriculum. The system can include a per- son or group responsible for reviewing materials based on an established EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 152EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 152 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. Resources That Support Instruction 1 5 3 set of criteria. This process will help to ensure the inclusion of quality materials with distinct purposes and help to eliminate resources that do not fully meet the purposes of the learning experiences or that duplicate existing materials. A second way to manage additional resources is by cre- ating a folder or site on the district’s network where teachers can upload and tag materials that others may use, similar to teacherspayteachers.com or other sharing sites. Because this approach allows for the inclusion of more materials, the folder or site would also need to be managed so that it does not become overwhelming. Summary: Resources Texts should be chosen for the curriculum based on the purpose or pur- poses they serve. This could mean that the same text is read for multiple reasons or that students read multiple texts at the same time because the purpose for reading is diff erent. In some cases, it is not necessary to spe- cifi cally identify a text. The curriculum can off er a selection of texts that meet the same criteria or describe criteria so students can select their own. The guiding principle for determining what technology to include in the curriculum is to focus on the result and not the device itself. In gen- eral, technology is used to access information, to collaborate or interact with others, and to publish or share. The need to identify specifi c websites and platforms depends on the level of student involvement in the task. The more open-ended the task and the more involved the students are in the task—as when students engage in a self-selected, inquiry-based per- formance assessment—the less information needs to be included in the curriculum. Specifi city is necessary when specifi c models, exemplars, websites, and tools are shared to introduce an idea or concept, used to practice a specifi c skill, or evaluated as models. Materials include tangible products such as graphic organizers, mod- els and exemplars, student checklists, primary sources, common tem- plates, and protocols that are needed to engage in the unit’s learning experiences. As learning experiences clearly communicate why students EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 153EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 153 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. 154 Ensuring High-Quality Curriculum are completing a specifi c task, materials are selected because students will need them to accomplish the task. A quality curriculum includes not only a process for the careful selec- tion of quality resources but also a procedure for ensuring access to addi- tional quality resources as the curriculum is being implemented. Tools and Activities for Evaluation, Design, and Revision • Example Analysis: Analyzing Standards for Text Features— These examples ( beginning on page 137) can be used as models for choosing texts to meet a specifi c purpose. The text purpose and features are fi rst extracted from the standard, and then appropriate texts are identifi ed that address the purpose and features. • Example Analysis: Technology Integration—This activity involves evaluating sample learning experiences. The fi rst step is to iden- tify the purpose of the learning experiences as described by why students will engage in the task. The second step is to determine how technology is used to achieve the purpose identifi ed in the learning experience. • Guiding Questions to Analyze Resources—The following three questions can be used to guide the review of resources when con- sidering whether they should be included in the curriculum: – Is the resource an integral part of a learning experience? – Does this resource include a process that will be repeated in subsequent units? – Does this tool support school values? Checklist for Evaluation, Design, and Revision Texts, technology, and resources have been chosen because they meet a specifi c purpose as set out in the standards and learning experiences for the unit. Processes are in place for both the selection and limitation of texts, technology, and resources to include in the curriculum. EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 154EnsuringHighQualityCurr.indd 154 10/4/16 2:46 PM10/4/16 2:46 PMLalor, A. D. M. (2016). Ensuring high-quality curriculum : How to design, revise, or adopt curriculum aligned to student success. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:11:50. Copyright © 2016. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. All rights reserved.
EDUC 872 Curriculum Research Paper Assignment Instructions The candidate will write an 8-page, excluding title and reference pages, research-based paper in current APA format that focuses on the topic
162 In a famous study from the 1970s, a re- searcher showed nursery school children one at a time into a room with no distractions except for a marshmallow resting on a tray on a desk. As the researcher left the room, the child was told he could eat the marshmallow now, or, if he waited for fifteen minutes, he would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Walter Mischel and his graduate students observed through a mirror as the children faced their dilemma. Some popped the marshmallow into their mouths the moment the researcher left, but others were able to wait. T o help themselves hold back, these kids tried anything they could think of. They “covered their eyes with their hands, rested their heads on their arms,  .  .  . talked to themselves, sang, invented games with their hands and feet, and even tried to fall asleep,” to avert their eyes and divert themselves from the reward. 7 Increase Your Abilities Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 163 Of more than six hundred children who took part in the experiment, only one- third succeeded in resisting temptation long enough to get the second marshmallow. A series of follow- up studies, the most recent in 2011, found that the nursery school children who had been more successful in delaying gratifi cation in this exercise grew up to be more successful in school and in their careers. The marshmallow study is sublime in its simplicity and as a meta phor for life. We are born with the gift of our genes, but to a surprising degree our success is also determined by focus and self- discipline, which are the offspring of motiva- tion and one’s sense of personal empowerment. 1 Consider James Paterson, a spirited, thirty- something Welsh- man, and his unwitting seduction by the power of mnemonic devices and the world of memory competitions. The word “mnemonic” is from the Greek word for memory. Mnemonic devices are mental tools that can take many forms but gener- ally are used to help hold a large volume of new material in memory, cued for ready recall. James fi rst learned of mnemonics when one of his univer- sity instructors fl eetingly mentioned their utility during a lecture. He went straight home, searched the web, bought a book. If he could learn these techniques, he fi gured, he could memorize his classwork in short order and have a lot more time to hang out with friends. He started practicing memoriz- ing things: names and dates for his psychology classes and the textbook page numbers where they were cited. He also prac- ticed parlor tricks, like memorizing the sequence of playing cards in a shuffl ed deck or strings of random numbers read from lists made up by friends. He spent long hours honing his techniques, becoming adept and the life of the party among his social set. The year was 2006, and when he learned of a memory competition to be held in Cambridge, En gland, he Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 164 decided on a lark to enter it. There he surprised himself by taking fi rst place in the beginner category, a per for mance for which he pocketed a cool 1,000 euros. He was hooked. Figur- ing he had nothing to lose by taking a fl yer, he went on to com- pete in his fi rst World Memory Championships, in London, that same year. With mnemonics James had fi gured to pocket some easy facts to ace his exams without spending the time and effort to fully master the material, but he discovered something en- tirely different, as we will recount shortly. Memory athletes, as these competitors call themselves, all get their start in different ways. Nelson Dellis, the 2012 US Memory Champion, began after his grandmother died of Alz- heimer’s disease. Nelson watched her decline over time, with her ability to remember being the fi rst cognitive faculty to go. Although only in his twenties, Nelson wondered if he were destined for the same fate and what he could do about it. He discovered mind sports, hoping that if he could develop his memory to great capacity, then he might have reserves if the disease did strike him later in life. Nelson is another memory athlete on his way up, and he has started a Foundation, Climb for Memory, to raise awareness about and funds for research for this terrible disease. Nelson also climbs mountains (twice reaching near the summit of Mt. Everest), hence the name. We meet others in this chapter who, like Paterson and Dellis, have sought successfully to raise their cognitive abilities in one way or another. The brain is remarkably plastic, to use the term applied in neuroscience, even into old age for most people. In this chap- ter’s discussion of raising intellectual abilities, we review some of the questions science is trying to answer about the brain’s Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 165 ability to change itself throughout life and people’s ability to infl uence those changes and to raise their IQs. We then de- scribe three known cognitive strategies for getting more out of the mental horse power you’ve already got. In a sense the infant brain is like the infant nation. When John Fremont arrived with his expeditionary force at Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1846 in the US campaign to take western territory from Mexico, he had no way to report his progress to President James Polk in Washington except to send his scout, Kit Carson, across the continent on his mule— a round- trip of nearly six thousand miles over mountains, deserts, wil- derness and prairies. Fremont pressed Carson to whip himself into a lather, not even to stop to shoot game along the way but to sustain himself by eating the mules as they broke down and needed replacing. That such a journey would be required reveals the undeveloped state of the country. The fi ve- foot- four- inch, 140- pound Carson was the best we had for getting word from one coast to the other. Despite the continent’s boundless natural assets, the fl edgling nation had little in the way of capability. To become mighty, it would need cities, uni- versities, factories, farms and seaports, and the roads, trains, and telegraph lines to connect them. 2 It’s the same with a brain. We come into the world endowed with the raw material of our genes, but we become capable through the learning and development of mental models and neural pathways that enable us to reason, solve, and create. We have been raised to think that the brain is hardwired and our intellectual potential is more or less set from birth. We now know otherwise. Average IQs have risen over the past century with changes in living conditions. When people suffer brain damage from strokes or accidents, scientists have seen the brain somehow reassign duties so that adjacent networks of neurons take over the work of damaged areas, enabling Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 166 people to regain lost capacities. Competitions between “memory athletes” like James Paterson and Nelson Dellis have emerged as an international sport among people who have trained themselves to perform astonishing acts of recall. Ex- pert per for mance in medicine, science, music, chess, or sports has been shown to be the product not just of innate gifts, as had long been thought, but of skills laid down layer by layer, through thousands of hours of dedicated practice. In short, research and the modern record have shown that we and our brains are capable of much greater feats than scientists would have thought possible even a few de cades ago. Neuroplasticity All knowledge and memory are physiological phenomena, held in our neurons and neural pathways. The idea that the brain is not hardwired but plastic, mutable, something that reorganizes itself with each new task, is a recent revelation, and we are just at the frontiers of understanding what it means and how it works. In a helpful review of the neuroscience, John T. Bruer took on this question as it relates to the initial development and stabilization of the brain’s circuitry and our ability to bolster the intellectual ability of our children through early stimula- tion. We’re born with about 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons. A synapse is a connection between neurons, enabling them to pass signals. For a period shortly before and after birth, we undergo “an exuberant burst of synapse formation,” in which the brain wires itself: the neurons sprout micro- scopic branches, called axons, that reach out in search of tiny nubs on other neurons, called dendrites. When axon meets dendrite, a synapse is formed. In order for some axons to fi nd their target dendrites they must travel vast distances to com- Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 167 plete the connections that make up our neural circuitry (a journey of such daunting scale and precision that Bruer likens it to fi nding one’s way clear across the United States to a wait- ing partner on the opposite coast, not unlike Kit Carson’s mission to President Polk for General Fremont). It’s this cir- cuitry that enables our senses, cognition, and motor skills, in- cluding learning and memory, and it is this circuitry that forms the possibilities and the limits of one’s intellectual capacity.The number of synapses peaks at the age of one or two, at about 50 percent higher than the average number we possess as adults. A plateau period follows that lasts until around puberty, whereupon this overabundance begins to decline as the brain goes through a period of synaptic pruning. We arrive at our adult complement at around age sixteen with a stagger- ing number, thought to total about 150 trillion connections. We don’t know why the infant brain produces an over- abundance of connections or how it subsequently determines which ones to prune. Some neuroscientists believe that the connections we don’t use are the ones that fade and die away, a notion that would seem to manifest the “use it or lose it” principle and argue for the early stimulation of as many con- nections as possible in hopes of retaining them for life. An- other theory suggests the burgeoning and winnowing is deter- mined by ge ne tics and we have little or no infl uence over which synapses survive and which do not. “While children’s brains acquire a tremendous amount of information during the early years,” the neuroscientist Patri- cia Goldman- Rakic told the Education Commission of the States, most learning is acquired after synaptic formation sta- bilizes. “From the time a child enters fi rst grade, through high school, college, and beyond, there is little change in the num- ber of synapses. It is during the time when no, or little, syn- apse formation occurs that most learning takes place” and we Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 168 develop adult- level skills in language, mathematics, and logic. 3 And it is likely during this period more than during infancy, in the view of the neuroscientist Harry T. Chugani, that experi ence and environmental stimulation fi ne- tune one’s circuits and make one’s neuronal architecture unique. 4 In a 2011 article, a team of British academics in the fi elds of psychology and soci- ology reviewed the evidence from neuroscience and concluded that the architecture and gross structure of the brain appear to be substantially determined by genes but that the fi ne structure of neural networks appears to be shaped by experience and to be capable of substantial modifi cation. 5 That the brain is mutable has become evident on many fronts. Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain That Changes Itself, looks at compelling cases of patients who have overcome severe impairments with the assistance of neurologists whose research and practice are advancing the frontiers of our understanding of neuroplasticity. One of these was Paul Bach- y-Rita, who pioneered a device to help patients who have suffered damage to sensory organs. Bach- y-Rita’s device enables them to regain lost skills by teaching the brain to respond to stimulation of other parts of their bodies, substituting one sensory system for another, much as a blind person can learn to navigate through echolo- cation, learning to “see” her surroundings by interpreting the differing sounds from the tap of a cane, or can learn to read through the sense of touch using Braille. 6 One of Bach- y-Rita’s patients had suffered damage to her vestibular system (how the inner ear senses balance and spa- tial orientation) that had left her so unbalanced that she was unable to stand, walk, or maintain her in de pen dence. Bach- y-Rita rigged a helmet with carpenters’ levels attached to it Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 169 and wired them to send impulses to a postage- stamp- sized strip of tape containing 144 microelectrodes placed on the woman’s tongue. As she tilted her head, the electrodes spar- kled on her tongue like effervescence, but in distinctive pat- terns refl ecting the direction and angle of her head movements. Through practice wearing the device, the woman was gradu- ally able to retrain her brain and vestibular system, recovering her sense of balance for longer and longer periods following the training sessions. Another patient, a thirty- fi ve- year- old man who had lost his sight at age thirteen, was outfi tted with a small video camera mounted on a helmet and enabled to send pulses to the tongue. As Bach- y-Rita explained, the eyes are not what sees, the brain is. The eyes sense, and the brain interprets. The success of this device relies on the brain learning to interpret signals from the tongue as sight. The remarkable results were reported in the New York Times: The patient “found doorways, caught balls rolling toward him, and with his small daughter played a game of rock, paper and scissors for the fi rst time in twenty years. [He] said that, with practice, the substituted sense gets better, ‘as if the brain were rewiring itself.’ ” 7 In yet another application, interesting in light of our earlier discussions of metacognition, stimulators are being attached to the chests of pi lots to transmit cockpit instrument readings, helping the brain to sense changes in pitch and altitude that the pi lot’s vestibular system is unable to detect under certain fl ight conditions. Neural cell bodies make up most of the part of our brains that scientists call the gray matter. What they call the white matter is made up of the wiring: the axons that connect to dendrites of other neural cell bodies, and the waxy myelin sheaths in which Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 170 some axons are wrapped, like the plastic coating on a lamp cord. Both gray matter and white matter are the subject of intense scientifi c study, as we try to understand how the com- ponents that shape cognition and motor skills work and how they change through our lives, research that has been greatly advanced by recent leaps in brain imaging technology. One ambitious effort is the Human Connectome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to map the con- nections in the human brain. (The word “connectome” refers to the architecture of the human neurocircuitry in the same spirit that “genome” was coined for the map of the human ge ne tic code.) The websites of participating research institu- tions show striking images of the fi ber architecture of the brain, masses of wire- like human axons presented in neon colors to denote signal directions and bearing an uncanny re- semblance to the massive wiring harnesses inside 1970s super- computers. Early research fi ndings are intriguing. One study, at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared the syn- aptic architecture of identical twins, whose genes are alike, and fraternal twins, who share only some genes. This study showed what others have suggested, that the speed of our men- tal abilities is determined by the robustness of our neural con- nections; that this robustness, at the initial stages, is largely determined by our genes, but that our neural circuitry does not mature as early as our physical development and instead continues to change and grow through our forties, fi fties, and sixties. Part of the maturation of these connections is the gradual thickening of the myelin coating of the axons. My- elination generally starts at the backs of our brains and moves toward the front, reaching the frontal lobes as we grow into adulthood. The frontal lobes perform the executive functions of the brain and are the location of the pro cesses of high- level Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 171 reasoning and judgment, skills that are developed through experience.The thickness of the myelin coating correlates with ability, and research strongly suggests that increased practice builds greater myelin along the related pathways, improving the strength and speed of the electrical signals and, as a result, per for mance. Increases in piano practice, for example, have shown correlated increases in the myelination of nerve fi bers associated with fi nger movements and the cognitive pro cesses that are involved in making music, changes that do not ap- pear in nonmusicians. 8 The study of habit formation provides an interesting view into neuroplasticity. The neural circuits we use when we take conscious action toward a goal are not the same ones we use when our actions have become automatic, the result of habit. The actions we take by habit are directed from a region lo- cated deeper in the brain, the basal ganglia. When we engage in extended training and repetition of some kinds of learn- ing, notably motor skills and sequential tasks, our learning is thought to be recoded in this deeper region, the same area that controls subconscious actions such as eye movements. As a part of this pro cess of recoding, the brain is thought to chunk motor and cognitive action sequences together so that they can be performed as a single unit, that is, without requir- ing a series of conscious decisions, which would substantially slow our responses. These sequences become refl exive. That is, they may start as actions we teach ourselves to take in pur- suit of a goal, but they become automatic responses to stim- uli. Some researchers have used the word “macro” (a simple computer app) to describe how this chunking functions as a form of highly effi cient, consolidated learning. These theories about chunking as integral to the pro cess of habit formation Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 172 help explain the way in sports we develop the ability to re- spond to the rapid- fi re unfolding of events faster than we’re able to think them through, the way a musician’s fi nger move- ments can outpace his conscious thoughts, or the way a chess player can learn to foresee the countless possible moves and implications presented by different confi gurations of the board. Most of us display the same talent when we type. Another fundamental sign of the brain’s enduring mutability is the discovery that the hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons through- out life. This phenomenon, called neurogenesis, is thought to play a central role in the brain’s ability to recover from physi- cal injury and in humans’ lifelong ability to learn. The rela- tionship of neurogenesis to learning and memory is a new fi eld of inquiry, but already scientists have shown that the activity of associative learning (that is, of learning and remembering the relationship between unrelated items, such as names and faces) stimulates an increase in the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus. This rise in neurogenesis starts before the new learning activity is undertaken, suggesting the brain’s in- tention to learn, and continues for a period after the learn- ing activity, suggesting that neurogenesis plays a role in the consolidation of memory and the benefi cial effects that spaced and effortful retrieval practice have on long- term retention. 9 Of course, learning and memory are neural pro cesses. The fact that retrieval practice, spacing, rehearsal, rule learning, and the construction of mental models improve learning and memory is evidence of neuroplasticity and is consistent with scientists’ understanding of memory consolidation as an agent for increasing and strengthening the neural pathways by which one is later able to retrieve and apply learning. In the words Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 173 of Ann and Richard Barnet, human intellectual development is “a lifelong dialogue between inherited tendencies and our life history.” 10 The nature of that dialogue is the central ques- tion we explore in the rest of this chapter. Is IQ Mutable? IQ is a product of genes and environment. Compare it to height: it’s mostly inherited, but over the de cades as nutrition has improved, subsequent generations have grown taller. Likewise, IQs in every industrialized part of the world have shown a sustained rise since the start of standardized sam- pling in 1932, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect after the po liti cal scientist who fi rst brought it to wide attention. 11 In the United States, the average IQ has risen eigh teen points in the last sixty years. For any given age group, an IQ of 100 is the mean score of those taking the IQ tests, so the increase means that having an IQ of 100 today is the intelligence equivalent of those with an IQ 60 years ago of 118. It’s the mean that has risen, and there are several theories why this is so, the principal one being that schools, culture (e.g., tele vi- sion), and nutrition have changed substantially in ways that affect people’s verbal and math abilities as mea sured by the subtests that make up the IQ test. Richard Nisbett, in his book Intelligence and How to Get It, discusses the pervasiveness of stimuli in modern society that didn’t exist years ago, offering as one simple example a puzzle maze McDonald’s included in its Happy Meals a few years ago that was more diffi cult than the mazes included in an IQ test for gifted children. 12 Nisbett also writes about “en- vironmental multipliers,” suggesting that a tall kid who goes out for basketball develops a profi ciency in the sport that a shorter kid with the same aptitudes won’t develop, just as a Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 174 curious kid who goes for learning gets smarter than the equally bright but incurious kid who doesn’t. The options for learning have expanded exponentially. It may be a very small ge ne tic difference that makes one kid more curious than an- other, but the effect is multiplied in an environment where curiosity is easily piqued and readily satisfi ed. Another environmental factor that shapes IQ is socioeco- nomic status and the increased stimulation and nurturing that are more generally available in families who have more re- sources and education. On average, children from affl uent families test higher for IQ than children from impoverished families, and children from impoverished families who are adopted into affl uent families score higher on IQ tests than those who are not, regardless of whether the birth parents were of high or low socioeconomic status. The ability to raise IQ is fraught with controversy and the subject of countless studies refl ecting wide disparities of scien- tifi c rigor. A comprehensive review published in 2013 of the extant research into raising intelligence in young children sheds helpful light on the issue, in part because of the strict criteria the authors established for determining which studies would qualify for consideration. The eligible studies had to draw from a general, nonclinical population; have a random- ized, experimental design; consist of sustained interventions, not of one- shot treatments or simply of manipulations during the testing experience; and use a widely accepted, standard- ized mea sure of intelligence. The authors focused on experi- ments involving children from the prenatal period through age fi ve, and the studies meeting their requirements involved over 37,000 participants. What did they fi nd? Nutrition affects IQ. Providing dietary supplements of fatty acids to pregnant women, breast- feeding women, and infants had the effect of increasing IQ by any- Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 175 where from 3.5 to 6.5 points. Certain fatty acids provide building blocks for nerve cell development that the body can- not produce by itself, and the theory behind the results is that these supplements support the creation of new synapses. Stud- ies of other supplements, such as iron and B complex vitamins, strongly suggested benefi ts, but these need validation through further research before they can be considered defi nitive. In the realm of environmental effects, the authors found that enrolling poor children in early education raises IQ by more than four points, and by more than seven if the inter- vention is based in a center instead of in the home, where stimulation is less consistently sustained. (Early education was defi ned as environmental enrichment and structured learning prior to enrollment in preschool.) More affl uent children, who are presumed to have many of these benefi ts at home, might not show similar gains from enrolling in early educa- tion programs. In addition, no evidence supports the widely held notion that the younger children are when fi rst enrolled in these programs the better the results. Rather, the evidence suggests, as John Bruer argues, that the earliest few years of life are not narrow windows for development that soon close. Gains in IQ were found in several areas of cognitive train- ing. When mothers in low- income homes were given the means to provide their children with educational tools, books, and puzzles and trained how to help their children learn to speak and identify objects in the home, the children showed IQ gains. When mothers of three- year- olds in low- income fami- lies were trained to talk to their children frequently and at length and to draw out the children with many open- ended questions, the children’s IQs rose. Reading to a child age four or younger raises the child’s IQ, especially if the child is an active participant in the reading, encouraged by the parent to elaborate. After age four, reading to the child does not raise Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 176 IQ but continues to accelerate the child’s language develop- ment. Preschool boosts a child’s IQ by more than four points, and if the school includes language training, by more than seven points. Again, there is no body of evidence supporting the conclusion that early education, preschool, or language training would show IQ gains in children from better- off fami- lies, where they already benefi t from the advantages of a richer environment. 13 Brain Training? What about “brain training” games? We’ve seen a new kind of business emerge, pitching online games and videos promis- ing to exercise your brain like a muscle, building your cogni- tive ability. These products are largely founded on the fi nd- ings of one Swiss study, reported in 2008, which was very limited in scope and has not been replicated. 14 The study focused on improving “fl uid intelligence”: the facility for ab- stract reasoning, grasping unfamiliar relationships, and solv- ing new kinds of problems. Fluid intelligence is one of two kinds of intelligence that make up IQ. The other is crystallized intelligence, the store house of knowledge we have accumu- lated through the years. It’s clear that we can increase our crys- tallized intelligence through effective learning and memory strategies, but what about our fl uid intelligence? A key determiner of fl uid intelligence is the capacity of a person’s working memory— the number of new ideas and re- lationships that a person can hold in mind while working through a problem (especially with some amount of distrac- tion). The focus of the Swiss study was to give participants tasks requiring increasingly diffi cult working memory chal- lenges, holding two different stimuli in mind for progressively longer periods of distraction. One stimulus was a sequence of Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 177 numerals. The other was a small square of light that appeared in varying locations on a screen. Both the numerals and the locations of the square changed every three seconds. The task was to decide— while viewing a sequence of changed numer- als and repositioned squares— for each combination of nu- meral and square, whether it matched a combination that had been presented n items back in the series. The number n in- creased during the trials, making the challenge to working memory progressively more arduous. All the participants were tested on fl uid intelligence tasks at the outset of the study. Then they were given these increas- ingly diffi cult exercises of their working memory over periods ranging up to nineteen days. At the end of the training, they were retested for fl uid intelligence. They all performed better than they had before the training, and those who had engaged in the training for the longest period showed the greatest im- provement. These results showed for the fi rst time that fl uid intelligence can be increased through training. What’s the criticism? The participants were few (only thirty- fi ve) and were all recruited from a similar, highly intelligent population. More- over, the study focused on only one training task, so it is un- clear to what extent it might apply to other working- memory training tasks, or whether the results are really about working memory rather than some peculiarity of the par tic u lar train- ing. Finally, the durability of the improved per for mance is unknown, and the results, as noted, have not been replicated by other studies. The ability to replicate empirical results is the bedrock of scientifi c theory. The website PsychFileDrawer .org keeps a list of the top twenty psychological research stud- ies that the site’s users would like to see replicated, and the Swiss study is the fi rst on the list. A recent attempt whose re- sults were published in 2013 failed to fi nd any improvements Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 178 to fl uid intelligence as a result of replicating the exercises in the Swiss study. Interestingly, participants in the study be- lieved that their mental capacities had been enhanced, a phe- nomenon the authors describe as illusory. However, the au- thors also acknowledge that an increased sense of self- effi cacy can lead to greater per sis tence in solving diffi cult problems, encouraged by the belief that training has improved one’s abilities. 15 The brain is not a muscle, so strengthening one skill does not automatically strengthen others. Learning and memory strategies such as retrieval practice and the building of mental models are effective for enhancing intellectual abilities in the material or skills practiced, but the benefi ts don’t extend to mastery of other material or skills. Studies of the brains of ex- perts show enhanced myelination of the axons related to the area of expertise but not elsewhere in the brain. Observed myelination changes in piano virtuosos are specifi c to piano virtuosity. But the ability to make practice a habit is general- izable. To the extent that “brain training” improves one’s ef- fi cacy and self- confi dence, as the purveyors claim, the benefi ts are more likely the fruits of better habits, such as learning how to focus attention and persist at practice. Richard Nisbett writes of environmental “multipliers” that can deliver a disproportionate effect from a small ge ne tic predisposition— the kid who is ge ne tically just a little bit more curious becomes signifi cantly smarter if she’s in an environ- ment that feeds curiosity. Now stand that notion on its head. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be raising my IQ anytime soon, are there strategies or behaviors that can serve as cognitive “multipli- ers” to amp up the per for mance of the intelligence I’ve already Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 179 got? Yes. Here are three: embracing a growth mindset, prac- ticing like an expert, and constructing memory cues. Growth Mindset Let’s return to the old saw “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” If turns out there is more truth here than wit. Attitude counts for a lot. The studies of the psychologist Carol Dweck have gotten huge attention for showing just how big an impact one simple conviction can have on learning and per for mance: the belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fi xed but rests to a large degree in your own hands. 16 Dweck and her colleagues have replicated and expanded on their results in many studies. In one of the early experi- ments, she ran a workshop for low- performing seventh grad- ers at a New York City ju nior high school, teaching them about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the group also received a pre sen ta tion on memory, but the other half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence but results from the new connections that are formed through effort and learning. After the workshop, both groups of kids fi ltered back into their classwork. Their teach- ers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded, those students adopted what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own control, and they went on to become much more aggressive Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 180 learners and higher achievers than students from the fi rst group, who continued to hold the conventional view, what Dweck calls a “fi xed mindset,” that their intellectual ability was set at birth by the natural talents they were born with. Dweck’s research had been triggered by her curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter chal- lenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort. She found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes failure: those who attribute failure to their own inability—“I’m not intelligent”— become helpless. Those who interpret failure as the result of insuffi cient effort or an in effec tive strategy dig deeper and try different approaches. Dweck came to see that some students aim at per for mance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the fi rst case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with per for mance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confi dent you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever- increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, ‘ability’ feels like something static that lies inside of you, whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dy- namic and malleable,” Dweck says. Learning goals trigger entirely different chains of thought and action from per for- mance goals. 17 Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 181 Paradoxically, a focus on per for mance trips up some star athletes. Praised for being “naturals,” they believe their per- for mance is a result of innate gifts. If they’re naturals, the idea goes, they shouldn’t have to work hard to excel, and in fact many simply avoid practicing, because a need to practice is public evidence that their natural gifts are not good enough to cut the mustard after all. A focus on per for mance instead of on learning and growing causes people to hold back from risk taking or exposing their self- image to ridicule by putting themselves into situations where they have to break a sweat to deliver the critical outcome. Dweck’s work has extended into the realm of praise and the power it has in shaping the way people respond to challenges. Here’s an example. A group of fi fth grade students are indi- vidually given a puzzle to solve. Some of the students who solve the puzzle are praised for being smart; other students who solve it are praised for having worked hard. The students are then invited to choose another puzzle: either one of similar diffi culty or one that’s harder but that they would learn from by making the effort to try solving. A majority of the students who are praised for their smarts pick the easier puzzle; 90 percent of the kids praised for effort pick the harder one. In a twist on this study, students get puzzles from two people, Tom and Bill. The puzzles Tom gives the students can be solved with effort, but the ones Bill gives them cannot be solved. Every student gets puzzles from both Tom and Bill. After working to solve the puzzles, some of the kids are praised for being smart, and some for their effort. In a second round, the kids get more puzzles from both Tom and Bill, and this time all the puzzles are solvable. Here’s the surprise: of the Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 182 students who were praised for being smart, few solved the puzzles they got from Bill, even though they were the same puzzles these students had solved earlier when they got them from Tom. For those who saw being considered smart as para- mount, their failure to solve Bill’s puzzles in the fi rst round in- stilled a sense of defeat and helplessness. When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.” 18 Paul Tough, in his recent book How Children Succeed, draws on Dweck’s work and others’ to make the case that our suc- cess is less dependent on IQ than on grit, curiosity, and per- sis tence. The essential ingredient is encountering adversity in  childhood and learning to overcome it. Tough writes that children in the lowest strata of society are so beset by chal- lenges and starved of resources that they don’t stand a chance of experiencing success. But, and here’s another paradox, kids at the top of the heap, who are raised in cosseted settings, praised for being smart, bailed out of predicaments by he li- cop ter parents, and never allowed to fail or overcome adver- sity on their own initiative, are also denied the character- building experiences essential for success later in life. 19 A kid who’s born on third base and grows up thinking she hit a tri- ple is unlikely to embrace the challenges that will enable her to discover her full potential. A focus on looking smart keeps a person from taking risks in life, the small ones that help people rise toward their aspirations, as well as the bold, vi- sionary moves that lead to greatness. Failure, as Carol Dweck Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 183 tells us, gives you useful information, and the opportunity to discover what you’re capable of doing when you really set your mind to it.The takeaway from Dweck, Tough, and their colleagues working in this fi eld is that more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and per sis tence needed for higher learning and success. “Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control. Deliberate Practice When you see stellar per for mances by an expert in any fi eld— a pianist, chess player, golfer— perhaps you marvel at what natural talent must underlie their abilities, but expert per for mance does not usually rise out of some ge ne tic predis- position or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice. If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, de- liberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of per for mance. What ever the fi eld, expert per for mance is thought to be garnered through the slow acqui- sition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, pat- terns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. Witness a champion chess player. In studying the positions on a board, he can contemplate many alternative moves and the countless dif- ferent directions each might precipitate. The striving, failure, problem solving, and renewed attempts that characterize Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 184 deliberate practice build the new knowledge, physiological adaptations, and complex mental models required to attain ever higher levels.When Michelangelo fi nally completed painting over 400 life size fi gures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is re- ported to have written, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all. ” What appeared to his admirers to have fl owed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication. 20 Deliberate practice usually isn’t enjoyable, and for most learn- ers it requires a coach or trainer who can help identify areas of per for mance that need to be improved, help focus atten- tion on specifi c aspects, and provide feedback to keep percep- tion and judgment accurate. The effort and per sis tence of deliberate practice remodel the brain and physiology to ac- commodate higher per for mance, but achieving expertise in any fi eld is par tic u lar to the fi eld. It does not confer some kind of advantage or head start toward gaining expertise in an- other domain. A simple example of practice remodeling the brain is the treatment of focal hand dystonia, a syndrome af- fecting some guitarists and pianists whose repetitive playing has rewired their brains to think that two fi ngers have been fused into one. Through a series of challenging exercises, they can be helped gradually to retrain their fi ngers to move separately. One reason that experts are sometimes perceived to pos- sess an uncanny talent is that some can observe a complex per for mance in their fi eld and later reconstruct from memory every aspect of that per for mance, in granular detail. Mozart was famous for being able to reconstruct complex musical scores after a single hearing. But this skill, Ericsson says, rises Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 185 not out of some sixth sense but from an expert’s superior per- ception and memory within his domain, which are the result of years of acquired skill and knowledge in that domain. Most people who achieve expertise in a fi eld are destined to remain average performers in the other realms of life.Ten thousand hours or ten years of practice was the aver- age time the people Ericsson studied had invested to become expert in their fi elds, and the best among them had spent the larger percentage of those hours in solitary, deliberate prac- tice. The central idea here is that expert per for mance is a product of the quantity and the quality of practice, not of ge- ne tic predisposition, and that becoming expert is not beyond the reach of normally gifted people who have the motivation, time, and discipline to pursue it. Memory Cues Mnemonic devices, as we mentioned, are mental tools to help hold material in memory, cued for ready recall. (Mnemosyne, one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology, was the goddess of memory.) Some examples of simple mnemonic devices are acronyms, like “ROY G BIV” for the colors of the rainbow, and reverse acronyms, as in “I Value Xylophones Like Cows Dig Milk” for the ascending value of Roman numerals from 1 to 1000 (e.g., V = 5; D = 500). A memory palace is a more complex type of mnemonic device that is useful for or ga niz ing and holding larger vol- umes of material in memory. It’s based on the method of loci, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and involves associat- ing mental images with a series of physical locations to help cue memories. For example, you imagine yourself within a space that is very familiar to you, like your home, and then you associate prominent features of the space, like your easy Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 186 chair, with a visual image of something you want to remember. (When you think of your easy chair you may picture a limber yogi sitting there, to remind you to renew your yoga lessons.) The features of your home can be associated with a countless number of visual cues for retrieving memories later, when you simply take an imaginary walk through the house. If it’s impor- tant to recall the material in a certain order, the cues can be se- quenced along the route through your house. (The method of loci is also used to associate cues with features you encounter along a very familiar journey, like your walk to the corner store.)As we write this passage, a group of students in Oxford, En gland, are constructing memory palaces to prepare for their A-level exams in psychology. Every week for six weeks, they and their instructor have visited a different café in town, where they have relaxed over coffee, familiarized themselves with the layout of the place, and discussed how they might imagine it occupied with vivid characters who will cue from memory important aspects of psychology that they will need to write about at exam time. We’ll come back to these students, but fi rst a few more words about this technique, which is surprisingly effective and derives from the way imagery serves to contribute vivid- ness and connective links to memory. Humans remember pictures more easily than words. (For example, the image of an elephant is easier to recall than the word “elephant.”) So it stands to reason that associating vivid mental images with verbal or abstract material makes that material easier to re- trieve from memory. A strong mental image can prove as se- cure and bountiful as a loaded stringer of fi sh. Tug on it, and a whole day’s catch comes to the surface. When a friend is reminding you of a conversation with somebody the two of you met on a trip, you struggle to recall it. She tells you where Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 187 the discussion happened, and you picture the place. Ah, yes, it all comes fl ooding back. Images cue memories. 21 Mark Twain wrote about his personal experiences with this phenomenon in an article published by Harper’s. In his days on the speaking circuit, Twain used a list of partial sentences to prompt himself through the different phases of his remarks, but he found the system unsatisfactory— when you glance at snippets of text, they all look alike. He experimented with al- ternatives, fi nally hitting on the idea of outlining his speech in a series of crude pencil sketches. The sketches did the job. A haystack with a snake under it told him where to start his story about his adventures in Nevada’s Carson Valley. An um- brella tilted against a stiff wind took him to the next part of his story, the fi erce winds that blew down out of the Sierras at about two o’clock every afternoon. And so on. The power of these sketches to evoke memory impressed Twain and gave rise one day to an idea for helping his children, who were still struggling to learn the kings and queens of En gland, despite long hours invested by their nanny in trying to hammer the names and dates into them through brute repetition. It dawned on Twain to try visualizing the successive reigns. We were at the farm then. From the house porch the grounds sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right to the high ground where my small work den stood. A carriage road wound through the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the En glish monarchs, beginning with [Wil- liam] the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to Victoria, then in the forty- sixth year of her reign— EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS of En glish history under your eye at once! . . . Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 188 I mea sured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three- foot white- pine stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it. Twain and the children sketched icons for each of the mon- archs: a whale for William the Conqueror, because both names begin with W and because “it is the biggest fi sh that swims, and William is the most conspicuous fi gure in En glish history”; a hen for Henry I, and so forth. We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exer- cise, too. We trotted the course from the Conqueror to the study, the children calling out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the stakes. . . . The children were encour- aged to stop locating things as being “over by the arbor,” or “in the oak [copse],” or “up at the stone steps,” and say instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in George III. They got the habit without trouble. To have the long road mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not previously been able to defi nitely name the place, and so had often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the children. 22 Rhyme schemes can also serve as mnemonic tools. The peg method is a rhyme scheme for remembering lists. Each num- ber from 1 to 20 is paired with a rhyming, concrete image: 1 is bun, 2 is shoe, 3 is tree, 4 is store, 5 is hive, 6 is tricks, 7 is heaven, 8 is gate, 9 is twine, 10 is pen. (After 10 you add penny- one and start over with three- syllable cue words: 11 is penny- one, setting sun; 12 is penny- two, airplane glue; 13 is Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 189 penny- three, bumble bee; and so on up to 20.) You use the rhyming concrete images as “pegs” on which to “hang” items you want to remember, such as the tasks you want to get done today. These twenty images stay with you, always at the ready whenever you need help to remember a list of things. So when you’re running errands: bun gives you the image of a hairstyle and reminds you to buy a hat for your ski trip; shoe reminds you of being well dressed, prompting you to pick up the dry cleaning; tree reminds you of family tree, cuing that birthday card for your cousin. The rhyming images stay the same, while the associations they evoke change each time you need to hold a new list in mind. A song that you know well can provide a mnemonic structure, linking the lyrics in each musical phrase to an im- age that will cue retrieval of the desired memory. According to the anthropologist Jack Weatherford, the preeminent his- torian of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, traditional poems and songs seem to have been used as mnemonic de- vices for sending messages accurately over vast distances, from China at one end of the empire to Eu rope at the other end. The military were forbidden from sending written mes- sages, and how they communicated remains a secret, but Weatherford thinks mnemonic devices were a likely method. He notes that the Mongol song known as the Long Song, for example, which describes the movement of a horse, can be sung in varying tones and trills so as to communicate move- ment through a par tic u lar location, like a crossing of the steppe or of the low mountains. The versatility of mnemonic devices is almost endless. What they hold in common is a structure of some kind— number scheme, travel route, fl oor plan, song, poem, aphorism, acronym— that is deeply familiar and whose elements can be easily linked to the target information to be remembered. 23 Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 190 To return to the psychology students preparing for their A-level exams: In a classroom at Bellerbys College in Oxford, a dark- haired eighteen- year- old whom we’ll call Marlys sits down to write her A2 exams in psychology. She will be asked to write fi ve essays over the course of two testing sessions to- taling three and a half hours. A-level courses are the British equivalent of Advanced Placement courses in the United States and are prerequisites for going on to university. Marlys is under a lot of pressure. For one thing, her exam scores will make the difference in whether or not she gets into the university of her choice— she has applied to the London School of Economics. To be assured a spot in a top university in the United Kingdom, students are required to take A-levels in three subjects, and the grades they must earn are published in advance by the universities. It’s not at all unusual that they are required to earn an A grade in each subject. If they earn less than the required grade, they must compete in a diffi cult clear- ing pro cess by which the universities fi ll up their remaining spaces, a pro cess that bears a lot in common with a lottery. If that weren’t stress-inducing enough, the scope of the material for which Marlys must be prepared to show mastery in the next hour and a half is enormous. She and her fellow psychology students have studied six major topics in their second year of A-level preparations: eating behavior, aggres- sion, relationships, schizo phre nia, anomalistic psychology, and the methods of psychological research. Within each of the fi rst fi ve topics she must be prepared to write essays on seven different questions. Each essay must illuminate the answer in twelve short paragraphs that describe, for instance, the thesis or condition, the extant research and its signifi cance, the coun- tervailing opinions, any biological treatments (say, for schizo- phre nia), and how these relate to the foundational concepts of psychology that she mastered for her fi rst- year A-levels. So Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 191 she faces: Five major topics, times seven essay questions for each topic, with a dozen succinct, well- argued paragraphs in each essay to show mastery of the subject. In other words, the universe of different essays she must master going into exams is a total of thirty- fi ve—plus a series of short answers to ques- tions on psychological research methods. Marlys knows which of the main topics will be the subject of today’s exam, but she has no idea which essay questions will be assigned, so she’s had to prepare herself to write on all of them. Many students who reach this point simply freeze. Despite being well grounded in their material, the stakes at play can make their minds go blank the moment they confront the empty exam booklet and the proctor’s ticking clock. That’s where having taken the time to construct a memory palace proves as good as gold. It’s not important that you understand the intricacies of British A-levels, just that they are diffi cult and highly consequential, which is why mnemonic devices are such a welcome tool at exam time. Today, the three test topics turn out to be evolutionary ex- planations of human aggression, the psychological and bio- logical treatments for schizo phre nia, and the success and failure of dieting. Okay. For aggression, Marlys has got the she- wolf with her hungry pups at the window of the Krispy Kreme shop on Castle Street. For schizo phre nia, she’s got the over- caffeinated barista at the Starbucks on High Street. For dieting, that would be the extremely large and aggressive pot- ted plant inside the café Pret- a-Manger on Cornmarket Street. Excellent. She settles in her seat, sure of her knowledge and her ability to call it up. She tackles the dieting essay fi rst. Pret- a-Manger is Marlys’s memory palace for the safekeeping of what she has learned about the success and failure of dieting. Through a prior visit there, she has become thoroughly famil- iar with its spaces and furnishings and populated them with Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 192 characters that are very familiar and vivid in her imagination. The names and actions of the characters now serve as cues to the dozen key points of her essay.She enters the shop in her mind. La Fern (the man- eating plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” one of her favorite movies) is holding Marlys’s friend Herman captive, her vines wrapped tightly around him, restraining him from a large dish of mac and cheese that sits just beyond his reach. Marlys opens her exam book and begins to write. “ Herman and Mack’s restraint theory suggests that attempting not to overeat may actually increase the probability of overeating. That is, in restrained eaters, it is the disinhibition (loss of control) that is the cause of overeating. . . .” In this manner Marlys works her way through the café and the essay. Herman breaks free of his restraints with a mighty roar and makes a bee line for the plate, practically inhaling the pasta to the point of bursting. “Restraint theory received support in studies by Wardle and Beale, which found that obese women who restrained their eating actually ate more [inhaled the pasta] than obese women who took up exercise, and more than those who made no changes to their diet or lifestyle. However, Ogden argues . . .” and so on. Marlys moves mentally through the café clockwise, encountering her cues for the boundary model of hunger and satiety, biases arising from cultural inclinations to obesity, the problems with diet data based on anecdotal evidence, metabolic differences related to high levels of lipoprotein lipase levels (“little pink lemons”), and the rest. From Pret- a-Manger she moves on to the Krispy Kreme shop, where a mental walk through the interior cues images that in turn cue what she’s learned about the evolutionary explanations of aggression. Then on to Starbucks, where the crazed barista and the shop’s fl oorplan and clientele cue her Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 193 through twelve paragraphs on the biological treatments of schizo phre nia. Marlys’s psychology teacher at Bellerbys College is none other than James Paterson, the boyish- looking Welshman who just happens to be a rising fi gure in world memory competitions. 24 When teachers at Bellerbys fi ll out the paperwork to take students on fi eld trips, it’s typically to a lecture at the Saïd Business School, or perhaps to the Ashmolean Museum or Bodleian Library in Oxford. Not so with James. His paper- work will more likely seek approval to take students to any of half a dozen different cafés around town, comfortable settings where they can tap into their imaginations and construct their mnemonic schemes. In order for the students to nail all thirty- fi ve essays securely in memory, they divide the topics into several groupings. For one group they build memory palaces in cafés and at familiar locations around the Bellerbys cam- pus. For another group they use the peg method. Still other groups they link to imagery in favorite songs and movies. We should make one important point, though. Before Pat- erson takes students on their mnemonic outings to construct memory palaces, he has already thoroughly covered the mate- rial in class so that they understand it. Among Paterson’s former students who have graduated from Bellerbys and gone on to use the technique at university is Michela Seong- Hyun Kim, who described for us how she prepares for her university- level exams in psychology. First, she pulls together all her material from lecture slides, her out- side reading, and her notes. She reduces this material to key ideas— not whole sentences. These form the plan for her es- say. Next she selects the site for her memory palace. She ties each key idea to a location in the palace that she can visualize Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 194 in her mind’s eye. Then she populates each location with something crazy that will link her to one of the key ideas. When she sits in the exam hall and fi nds out the essay topics, she takes ten minutes to mentally walk through the relevant memory palaces and list the key ideas for each essay. If she’s forgotten a point, she moves on to the next one and fi lls in the blank later. Once the plan is sketched out, she sets to work, free of the stressful anxiety that she won’t remember what she’s learned under the pressure of getting it right. 25 What she does is not so different from what Mark Twain did when he used sketches to remember his speeches. Michela says that the idea of skipping a bullet point that she cannot remember but will fi ll in later would have been completely alien to her before learning to use mnemonics, but the techniques have given her the confi dence to do this, knowing that the content will come to mind momentarily. The memory palace serves not as a learning tool but as a method to or ga nize what’s already been learned so as to be readily retrievable at essay time. This is a key point and helps to over- come the typical criticism that mnemonics are only useful in rote memorization. To the contrary, when used properly, mne- monics can help or ga nize large bodies of knowledge to permit their ready retrieval. Michela’s confi dence that she can pull up what she knows when she needs it is a huge stress buster and a time saver, James says. It’s worth acknowledging that Krispy Kreme and Starbuck’s shops are not often called palaces, but the mind is capable of wondrous things. At Paterson’s fi rst World Memory Championships, that rookie year of 2006, he acquitted himself well by placing twelfth, narrowly edging out the American Joshua Foer, who later Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 195 published an account of his experiences with mnemonics in the book Moonwalking with Einstein. Paterson can memorize the sequence of playing cards in a shuffl ed deck in less than two minutes, hand you the deck, and then recite them back to you with his eyes closed. Give him an hour, and he will mem- orize ten or twelve decks and recite them back without error. Top champs can memorize a single deck in thirty seconds or less and upward of twenty- fi ve decks in an hour, so Paterson has a ways to go, but he’s a dedicated competitor and coming on strong, building his skills and memory tools. For example, just as the peg method involves memorizing an image for the digits 1 through 10 (1 is bun, 2 is shoe, etc.), in order to re- member much longer strings of digits, Paterson has commit- ted to memory a unique image for every numeral from 0 to 1,000. This kind of achievement takes long hours of practice and intense focus— the kind of solitary striving that Anders Ericsson tells us characterizes the acquisition of expertise. The thousand images locked into memory took Paterson a year to master, fi tted in between the other demands of family, work, and friends. We caught up with Paterson in a school offi ce and asked if he’d mind giving us a quick memory demonstration, to which he readily agreed. We recited, once, the random number string 615392611333517. Paterson listened closely and then said, “Okay. We’ll use this space.” He looked around at the fi xtures. “I see this water cooler here becoming the space shuttle, which is taking off just as an underground train comes shooting out the bottom of the cooler. In the bookshelves there behind the cooler, I see the rapper Eminem having a gunfi ght with Leslie Nielsen from Naked Gun, while Lieutenant Columbo looks down on them.” 26 How to make sense of this? He remembers digits in groups of three. Every three- digit number is a distinct image. For Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 196 example, the number 615 is always a space shuttle, 392 is al- ways the Embankment tube station in London, 611 is Leslie Nielsen, 333 is Eminem, and 517 is Lieutenant Columbo. To make sense of these images, you need to understand another, underlying mnemonic: for each numeral 0 through 9, James has associated a sound of speech. The numeral 6 is always a Sheh or Jeh sound, the 1 is always a Tu h or Duh sound, and 5 is an L sound. So the image for the number 615 is Sheh Tuh L , or shuttle. Virtually every three- digit number from 000 to 999 lives in Paterson’s mind as a unique image that is an embodiment of these sounds. For our spontaneous quiz, for example, he drew on these images in addition to the space shuttle: 392 3 = m, 9 = b, 2 = n embankment 611 6 = sh, 1 = t, 1 = t shootout 333 3 = m, 3 = m, 3 = m Eminem 517 5 = l, 1 = t, 7 = c Lt Columbo In the memory championship event of spoken numbers, which are read aloud to contestants at the rate of one per second, Paterson can memorize and recite back seventy- four without error, and, with much practice, he’s raising that count. (“My wife calls herself a memory widow.”) Without mne- monic tools, the maximum number of digits most people can hold in working memory is about seven. That is why local telephone numbers were designed to be no more than seven digits long. By the way, at the time of this writing the world record in spoken digits—what psychologists call memory span—is 364 digits (held by Johannes Mallow of Germany). James is quick to acknowledge that he was fi rst drawn to mnemonics as a shortcut for his studies. “Not the best of mo- Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 197 tives,” he admits. He taught himself the techniques and became a bit of a slacker, walking into exams knowing he had all the names, dates, and related facts readily at hand.What he didn’t have, he discovered, was mastery of the concepts, relationships, and underlying principles. He had the mountaintops but not the mountain range, valleys, rivers, or the fl ora and fauna that compose the fi lled- in picture that con- stitutes knowledge. Mnemonic devices are sometimes discounted as tricks of memory, not tools that fundamentally add to learning, and in a sense this is correct. The value of mnemonics to raise intel- lectual abilities comes after mastery of new material, as the students at Bellerbys are using them: as handy mental pockets for fi ling what they’ve learned, and linking the main ideas in each pocket to vivid memory cues so that they can readily bring them to mind and retrieve the associated concepts and details, in depth, at the unexpected moments that the need arises. When Matt Brown, the jet pi lot, describes his hours on the fl ight deck of a simulator drilling on the rhythm of the different hand movements required by potential emergencies, he reenacts distinct patterns he’s memorized for different con- tingencies, choreographies of eye and hand, where the correct and complete sequence of instruments and switches is para- mount. Each different choreography is a mnemonic for a cor- rective maneuver. Karen Kim is a virtuoso violinist. When we spoke with her, Kim was second violin in the world- renowned string ensem- ble Parker Quartet, who play much of their material from memory, a rarity in classical music. Second violin is often largely accompanimental, and the mnemonic for memorizing the harmonies is the main melodic theme. “You sing the mel- ody in your head,” Kim says, “and you know that when the Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Make It Stick ê 198 melody goes to this place, you change harmony.” 27 The har- monies of some works, like fugues, with up to four themes that pass around the group in intricate ways, are especially challenging to memorize. “You need to know that while I’m playing the second theme, you’re playing the fi rst. Memoriz- ing the fugues is very diffi cult. I need to learn everybody else’s part better. Then I start to recognize patterns that I maybe knew intellectually before, but I wasn’t listening out for them. Memorizing the harmonies is a big part of knowing the archi- tecture of the piece, the map of it.” When the quartet is mas- tering a new piece, they spend a lot of time playing through things slowly without the sheet music, and then gradually speeding it up. Think Vince Dooley gradually synchronizing the different positions on the Georgia Bulldogs football team as they tailor their plays to take on a new Saturday night op- ponent. Or the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold, examining a gunshot victim in the emergency room and methodically re- hearsing what he’s likely to encounter in a brain surgery that he’s about to perform. Seeing the pattern of physical movements as a kind of cho- reography, visualizing a complex melody as it is handed off like a football from one player to another, “seeing the map of it”: all are mnemonic cues to memory and per for mance. With continued retrieval, complex material can become second nature to a person and the mnemonic cues are no lon- ger needed: you consolidate concepts like Newton’s 3 laws of motion into mental models that you use as a kind of short- hand. Through repeated use, your brain encodes and “chunks” sequences of motor and cognitive actions, and your ability to recall and apply them becomes as automatic as habit. Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Increase Your Abilities ê 199 The Takeaway It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability. This single fact— that our intellectual abilities are not fi xed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape— is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us “Why bother?” We make the effort be- cause the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do. To embrace this principle and reap its benefi ts is to be sustained through life by a growth mindset.And it comes down to the simple fact that the path to complex mastery or expert per for mance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self- discipline, grit, and per sis tence; with these qualities in healthy mea sure, if you want to become an expert, you prob- ably can. And what ever you are striving to master, whether it’s a poem you wrote for a friend’s birthday, the concept of classical conditioning in psychology, or the second violin part in Hayden’s Fifth Symphony, conscious mnemonic de- vices can help to or ga nize and cue the learning for ready re- trieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that char- acterize expert per for mance. Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick : The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press. Created from liberty on 2021-12-12 04:18:48. Copyright © 2014. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved.