Think-Thank-Thunk

Into educational research about motivation? The following 15 annotations may be of interest to you. I used this literature to do action research related to gender and motivation. The following annotated bibliography is related to motivation only though–not gender. If your interested at all in motivation, it’s an interesting start.
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You’d better believe it.

Of course this raises all kinds of concerns. But I like it. Not so much because of the reward (I actually very much dislike the extrinsic reward–can you say bribe?). Talk about throwing money at a problem.

But maybe this program will get people talking about the real challenges related to motivating students.

“A smile is often the most essential thing. One is repaid by a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. One is animated by a smile.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupry

I’m sure everybody, at one time or another, has wondered what would happen if you combined the geek-like qualities of a psychology professor with the computer nerdiness of a video game creator.

Well wonder no more. Introducing MindHabits: Great Games from Serious Science.

You can read all the juicy details about how the games work at their website, MindHabits.com, but their basic premise is this:

You can read all the juicy details about how the games work at their website, but their basic premise is this:

• Find and click on the friendly smiling face as quickly as you can racking up points as you go.
• Ignore all the frowning faces.
• Reprogram your mind to ignore negativity throughout your day.

The game was developed by psychology professor Mark Baldwin in an effort to determine whether or not a video game can actually change the way you see and even think about the world around you.

“We started with the idea that just as playing the game Tetris over and over for hours can start to shape the way you look at the world (even in your dreams!), playing a specially-designed computer game might also help to improve your thoughts and feelings about yourself.”

And if you think about it, from a brain-based perspective, it makes sense. Everybody’s brain comes equipped with a filter called the Reticular Activating System Reticular Activating System (RAS for short), responsible for filtering significant information from the glut of sensory input we are constantly bombarded with. Without the RAS, every little distraction, noise, tactile stimuli, scent and motion would get through to our conscious awareness and we’d go berserk. Every tick of the clock, every car that passed by, the feeling of every elastic band.

Anyway, my point is that the RAS filters stuff, and for many of us, it is allowing way too much negative information to get through. We get a short response from our boss and we think, “Is she mad at me? Did I do something wrong?” We notice a colleague with a serious face and we worry, “I wonder what he’s upset about. Hope it wasn’t something I did.”

All this because we first noticed, and considered significant, someone’s body language. Obviously, this is stressful. On the other hand, how much better do you feel when you’re greeted with a friendly smile and hello? Tons! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply ignore the negative and sanction only the positive? But alas, for many of us these are habits entrenched and reinforced by unending cycles of fear and supported by feedback loops of insecurity.

These are exactly the brain-ruts MindHabits video games claim to break. The following is taken from MindHabits explanation of how the games work.

Not surprisingly, such habits of mind can play a huge role in how we deal with the stresses of modern life . . . Decades of research have shown that people who feel adequately supported by and connected to others, as opposed to being isolated or rejected, are actually physically healthier and cope better with stress.

Recent research . . . indicates that these mental habits can be learned. . . learning to function well and feel confident in the social world requires the development of an impressive collection of psychological abilities.

We all develop our own set of mental habits in the course of growing up . . .but almost everyone could benefit from additional training much as a professional golfer spends hours on the putting green refining an effective stroke. Computer games, with their unique form of interactivity, provide an excellent opportunity to practice helpful habits of mind.

Being developed by science geeks, they didn’t only base their game on theory. They went out and tested it.

“We needed to find a group that was very stressed and, you know, I always hang up on telemarketers frankly, personally, so they’re dealing with a lot of rejection all day long,” said Baldwin in a recent interview. “But after playing the game five minutes a day for a week, something incredible happened. The level of cortisol, or the stress hormone, in their bodies had dropped by 17 percent. Even more remarkable is the employees playing the game were rated as more self-confident and then moreover, they actually made more sales.”

So, what the heck. If you have a spare minute, go check it out. There are a number of different versions and a few different free games you can play even without downloading anything. I played the “click-the-face” game a bit, but I’m certainly not the guy you want to go to for a video game critique. I thought it was sort of fun in a mindless-can-I-beat-the-timer-or-my-best-score sort of way.

But don’t take my word for it. MindHabits recently beat out 69 other games in the Great Canadian Video Game Competition. So it can’t be all bad. Along with more credibility, that also meant an award of (I am not making this up) $1.3 million.

The way I figure–you don’t give 1.3 mill to a crappy game. If it boosts your self-esteem, and you were just going to blow that 10 minutes surfing the web anyway, I say you might as well give it a shot.

The one benefit you’ll have if you get caught playing at work is you can site some research to support the claim that at least playing this internet game can boost your productivity.

Like many, when I was younger I thought the world was my oyster—probably because it was something my teachers or parents told me. Today I understand that the world is nothing like a slimy mollusk. In academic circles we call this type of thing an “idiom.”

Still, we all want our children to have confidence. So, as a member of civilized society, I think convincing kids that the world is an oyster is good practice. Nothing bolsters the courage of developing children as much as confusing them with obscure idioms. Plus it’s fun to do with a grand sweep of the arm. Like this:

Civilized Parent: (sweeping arms dramatically), “Kid, the world is your oyster.”
Child: “My oyster?”
Civilized Parent: “Yep.”
Child: “Don’t you eat oysters?”
Civilized Parent: “Um . . . sometimes.”

Hint to Parents: At this point I’ve found that if you keep flailing your arms in an enthusiastically encouraging manner, kids will normally just take your word for it and move away—especially when with playmates. Which brings me to my next point.

Parent competition, or My kid is smarter than your kid

When my youngest daughter, Nora, who is five, gets together with her cousins, they always have a good time. But as an unbiased-impartial-civilized-parent-observer, I’m often struck by how different the kids are. Though very close in age, one of them seems strikingly more intelligent. She listens better to instruction, speaks more clearly and has a much greater vocabulary.

And since (again from totally unbiased perspective) the smarter kid belongs to me, I am drawn to this logical conclusion: I am obviously the better parent.

Recent scientific research, however, suggests that all this has much less to do with my parenting skills (and use of oyster idioms) than I thought. Nora and her cousins are the same age, but what I failed to realize is that in order to make a fair comparison, they also must be the of same species, and since Nora’s cousins are from Mars, obviously, they are not.

Nora’s cousins are boys.

Sure their anatomies are different, but their brains? C’mon.

The science (and thus teaching and parenting) of brain based gender differences is a very new field of study, but the research is piling up. Obviously, we all know that boys and girls are different, but we have only recently begun to discover just how very different they are. For years, schools (and parents) have been teaching boys and girls the same things in the same way, partially because we fear that to do otherwise would give one an unfair advantage in the battle of the sexes. We’ve been fooling ourselves.

Study after study has shown now, beyond a doubt, that boys’ and girls’ brains are very different. They use different areas for different tasks (language is just one example). They receive and interpret sensory input differently (girls hear certain tones a staggering 10 times better than boys). They develop and mature at different rates (brain scans of 5-year-old-boys look similar to those of 3.5-year-old girls). Their brains float (as it were) in different hormonal and chemical soups.

For 16 years Dr. Jay Geidd has been using advanced MRI imaging processes to map the development of kids brains.

“In general,” Geidd says, “we think the girls’ brains are maturing a bit faster than the boys’ brains.”

But not in all areas.

“Certain parts of the brain involved in mechanical skills or projectile estimations actually mature somewhat faster in boys,” Geidd says.

But What does this mean?

Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist and author of several books on the topic of gender differences agrees.

“Both boys and girls are being shortchanged as a result of the neglect of hard-wired gender differences,” says Sax. “By the age of 12, the geometry area of a girl’s brain looks like an eight-year-old boy’s brain. They’re four years behind. But the language area of a boy’s brain is three-to-four years behind the language areas of a girl’s brain.”

“Girls and boys differ profoundly in how they hear, how they see, how they respond to stress –and those differences are present at birth.”

said the night wind to the little lamb, “do you hear what I hear?”

To illustrate this point, Sax points to a study by Janel Caine at Florida State University that documents the benefits of music therapy for premature babies. What she found was that preemies who were played soft music in their hospital cribs grew faster, had fewer complications, and were allowed to go home sooner than those that were not played music.

But the most interesting part of that study comes to light only after you break the data down by gender. Do this and you find that baby girls who received music therapy in their cribs went home an average of nine and a half days earlier than those that did not. Boy babies, however, left not a single day sooner. Music therapy was great for girls, but did nothing for boys.

Similar studies have confirmed and clarified this information by documenting that for a 1,500 Hz tone (the range of sounds critical for understanding speech), the average baby girl has an acoustic brain response about 80 percent greater than the average boy. It’s no wonder girls seem to learn language skills sooner than boys!

“Patience. you have much yet to learn young grasshopper, er, I mean oyster.”

Yes, yes, I can hear you saying, but what does any of this have to do with oysters or idioms?

The trick for parents and teachers is this: Resist the urge to compare. If we are to have half a chance of convincing our children that the world is their oyster, we have to understand that each child has his or her own unique strengths. These strengths will develop in their own time. Because we love our children and want the best for them, sometimes this schedule may not match up with our developmental expectations. This is often disturbing or irritating. The answer, I think is to remember what oysters do with irritants—they create pearls.

Teasing: The stress

I came home from work tonight to learn that my eight-year-old daughter has been keeping something from us.

She’s getting teased.

Thankfully it only started yesterday. But that’s two days now she’s had to endure it. I feel bad for the kid–kind of. Because tonight, after some discussion and role-playing, I think we gave her some tools that should help.

Now I kind of feel sorry for those who are going to tease her.

And actually I’m thankful this happened because the whole experience could really set a firm cornerstone in her personal development.

Here’s the story. A couple of days ago, Emma (7 years old and in 3rd grade) told a friend that she liked a boy. Now, obviously, I wasn’t there so I didn’t hear the context, but from what I know of “the boy,”— heck, I like him too.

He’s even been over to our house a couple of times. He’s nice, he’s funny, he’s polite and he’s fun. He might even be a little cute. Bottom line: he’s a good kid, and I’m glad that he and Emma are friends.

Anyway, so now kids are making kissy faces, singing “Emma loves J_____”, drawing hearts on her back with their fingers and whispering his name in her ear.

This morning, in the silence following the pledge of allegiance, some boy shouts out, “EMMA LOVES J_____!” for the whole elementary school to hear. ‘Course, it’s all over after that. Kids are joking and whispering in the halls. Poking fun at the boy. The way Emma tells it, now everybody, 1-4 is totally whipped up.

And Emma’s completely humiliated.

Apparently it got so bad that Emma’s teacher had to lecture the class about the how inappropriate all this is.

Understandably, Emma hasn’t had a great last two days.

Then tonight—we had to put our dog to sleep.

Teasing: the shame

And to top it all off she’s had trouble telling us about the teasing. I think she even started doubting herself and her feelings. Were they bad feelings? Did she do or think something wrong?

In the past, as parents, we’ve joked around the topic of “boys.” Nothing big (in my mind), but apparently big enough for Emma to cause her to hesitate.

Not good.

Talk about a kid under stress.

Teasing: getting to the truth

After she let it all out to her mom, Lisa did a smart thing. In order to get a clear picture, she asked Emma (as non-threateningly, non-judgmentally as she could) about her feelings. Did she want to hold hands? Kiss?

The answer?

“No. I just like him. You know—he’s funny.”

(WHEW! Right all you dads? You know what I’m talking about.)

Teasing: the answer (at least in this case)

Great, fine—so now about this teasing. They turned to me.

“Dad,” they asked. “What can Emma do or say to make the other kids stop teasing?”

To be honest, nothing really great came to mind. I had to think for a good while. Because really, I don’t think I’ve ever thought too much about an effective countermeasure. You can try to ignore it and hope it blows over. You could tell them to “shut-up” or “grow-up” but let’s be honest—shyah . . .like that’s gonna work!

Children are, well—childish. They’re going to keep on as long as it’s interesting and fun. So I started thinking—what was so fun about it?

Well, it’s about something mysterious: “Young Love.” Something they really have no idea about but want to appear to have the upper hand in. And then it hit me. Emma had to face it head on—without the shame, or guilt or fear that is assumed to be there.

“Emma,” I said. “These kids are teasing you because they don’t know something, and that ’something’ is a little bit scary to them. But one of the coolest things in the world is a kid (especially a young girl) with unshakable confidence. So what if you just tell them that ‘Yes, you like J___ . So what?’ What would happen?”

“Well, I did say ‘So . . .’ once to a boy that was teasing me.” She said with the hint of a smile.

. . .teasers are like dogs that chase you because you’re running.

“What happened.”

“He just stopped. He didn’t know what to say.”

“That’s right,” I said, “because teasers are like dogs that chase you because you’re running. Or better yet, like a dog that barks but backs up at while he’s doing it.”

Then Lisa came up with the best comeback yet.

“Next time a boy says, ‘Emma Loves J____,’ look him square in the face and say, ‘That’s right. I love a lot of people. And you’d better watch out because you might be next.’”

I wish you could have seen the smile spread across her face. I wish you could have heard her giggling. I hope someday you can feel the relief and joy I felt when Emma said to me, as she was brushing her teeth, “I wish I would have told you guys sooner.”

(image credit)