I’ve worked with a number of students who labor under the onerous pressure of successful older siblings, extremely high personal expectations, parent expectations, or even peer expectations. Often, when students feel they are falling short of expectations, they find ways to rationalize (or explain away) their poor performance. Phrases like “I’m just not a math person” and “I’ll never be a good test-taker” are examples of self-talk that can be very damaging. Imagine if while you were driving, you continuously said to yourself, “I can’t stay in my lane, traffic is dangerous, an accident at this speed could be fatal, what if my brakes fail.” Eventually, this negative self-talk might begin to decrease your effectiveness on the road. The same effect often happens to students who continually reinforce destructive self-assessments.

Although there are a number of other factors that influence performance, such as content mastery, problem-solving-method mastery, innate ability, prior education and others, my main focus is on the damaging effects of negative self-assessment. The most disappointing phrases I ever hear students say are those that make it sound as if the student has no ability to ever improve. When a student says “I’m just not a math person” what he or she probably means is, “I don’t think I will ever have any success in math.” This is more than likely based on prior experiences of unfavorable outcomes on math tests, quizzes or in class instruction.

When a student reaches a conclusion about his or her own ability, it is usually based on a mixture of prior experience and reflection. However, students often leave out some important ingredients of the discussion. I have a few questions for them. What if math ability and test-taking effectiveness are coachable skills? What if their existing approach to math and/or test-taking could benefit from some adjusting and fine-tuning? What if they don’t have to be permanently banished into the invisible realm of “bad test-taker”?

One highly efficacious way to overcome a prior negative experience with math or test-taking is to replace that negative experience with a positive one. For this to happen, a student must first realize that math and test-taking abilities are acquirable skills for all as well as intrinsic abilities for some. I’ve been able to convince students that these skills are attainable by working with them to create mastery experiences in terms of applying new problem solving strategies. Once students see that the hardest problems on the most intimidating tests are less complicated than they initially appear, a sense of dread can often be replaced with a new sense that “maybe I can do this after all”.

In a recent tutoring session, one of my students was shocked to see that the exact same “careless” errors she made at home she repeated with great consistency in our session.  In one geometry problem she “carelessly” solved for the diameter rather than the radius of a circle, both at home and in the tutoring office.  In another problem dealing with the coordinate plane, she “carelessly” flipped the X for the Y value of a point, both at home and again in our session.  Later she mistakenly solved for the 7th rather the 8th value in a sequence problem, at home and in session. All in all, my student repeated the exact same “careless” errors on five distinct problems on a single practice test, leading to a loss of 60 points on the SAT.

My student was stunned to discover something that many tenured tutors know: at the core, most careless errors are not random.  There is no internal dice that rolls, leading to a random moment of carelessness, at least, not for the majority of students.  Typically these errors are systematic errors or “processing” errors: the same mental processes which lead to “careless” errors at home remain active in our sessions.  The gaps in my student’s process were fairly consistent.  Only through repeating the same problems in multiple contexts and seeing the same errors repeat, did she become aware of the pattern.

The key to solving for “carelessness” is actually to identify the gaps in the mental processes of the student.  If we fix her mental procedures/protocols for handling certain types of problems, we would solve for the recurring “carelessness.”  We achieve this by giving the student fixed rules to bring to novel problems.  We must help them embed these rules and strategies into long-term memory through repetition and variation.  We call her attention to these rules again and again, using brief mantras that are stickier in long-term memory. By locking these rules into the memory of the student, and forcing her to recall the rules through practice, we make carelessness much less likely.

I gave my math student some simple math rules to help her solve for her “carelessness”:

• Write everything down.
• Label everything: every term, every element of a graph or chart, every X,Y value.
• Break things down one piece at a time and immediately translate every mathematical term into your own work before reading further.  This was a major relearning for my student to stop reading mid-sentence and write the math down, before returning to the rest of the sentence.
• Always circle what you are solving for.
• Never carry things mentally from the SAT problem over to the scratch area.  That’s too far!  So many errors occur as you are holding the math in your working memory before you get to the scratch area.  The key is no mental carrying!  Put everything down and work immediately below the phrases you’ve written down.  When it’s all written cleanly, in an organized fashion, you don’t have to hold anything in your head: it’s all on the page.
• Use your calculator every chance you get.
• Transfer your answers to the Scantron one page at a time

Any students who are struggling with “carelessness” would benefit from becoming more curious about the instances in which carelessness occurs for them.  If you study your errors enough, a pattern will usually emerge: either a deficit in a particular content area or a deficit in a mental process leading to systematic errors.  We can solve for the content area deficits by focused review and study; we can solve for the processing errors by teaching the student to attend more closely to their problem solving process, to watch their mind at work, and learn strategies for structuring their own thinking.  Students who study their minds at work and learn better problem solving processes will ultimately do better on high stakes tests as well as perform more effectively in numerous academic domains.

While these students started their studies well above average* with median scores of 693 in Critical Reading, 667 in Math and 667 in Writing, they were able to increase their scores an average of 215 points with our help. Their final score averages were 758 in Critical Reading, 734 in Math and 750 in Writing.

Grace’s mother, Amy Shea, credited Appelrouth’s flexibility to work around Grace’s hectic schedule and her tutor’s personal assessment with leading Grace to a “break through” moment that allowed for substantial gains.

We are proud of all our students and happy to have helped bring out the best in them. To learn more about North Atlanta’s STAR students and who they picked as their STAR teachers, read this article in the Buckhead Reporter.

*The national averages for 2011 are: Critical Reading—501, Math—516 and Writing—492.

Some psychologists at Kent State are examining how testing affects memory and memory strategies.

Testing, as we know, is not just to gauge student progress or inform our sessions.  Testing is a powerful tool to enhance learning.  Testing has a significant impact on retention and encoding information into long-term memory.  Study alone is not as robust. This is why we insist that students take practice tests.

Why does testing (AKA taking mocks) impact retention in a way that review and study (practice problems) do not?

The KSU researchers found that students need a chance to fail (retrieval failures) in order to strengthen or replace their memorization strategies.  You don’t know you need a new strategy until the one you are relying upon comes up short.  And when a strategy for memorization (a mantra, a heuristic) was successful in a testing situation, the researchers proposed that this strategy was consequently enhanced in long term memory.  After failure, students in this study went back (the test-restudy condition) and modified their memory strategies to find more effective ways to remember the content.

So students clearly learn from their experiences of success and failure in testing experiences, and the act of taking a practice test is actually one of the best ways to encode information deeper into long-term memory.

You can listen to the podcast that discusses Mary A. Pyc and Katherine A. Rawson’s study, Why Testing Improves Memory: Mediator Effectiveness Hypothesis, which was originally published 15 October 2010 in Science Magazine.

A college admissions committee spends on average 7 minutes with each application. Will your child stand out?

On Wednesday, November 17, Jed Appelrouth, MS, NCC and Steven Goodman, MS, JD and will be meeting to discuss the ins and outs of college admissions. You can attend the event in-person or watch it live online:

Attend Webinar Attend In-Person

(learn more…)

Updated: Last night I heard from DeKalb county teacher that the Race to the Top funds would be used to pay for PSATs. My Google search didn’t yield any new info, but if you know something I don’t, please share in the comments.

In May, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that budget cuts would limit public schools’ funding for the PSAT for sophomores.

Georgia had been paying for all 10th-graders to take the PSAT and for students to take two AP exams, but now will pay those costs only for students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches. The PSAT costs $13; each AP exam is $86.

Why does this matter to students? Well, studies have shown that repeated exposure to a test has a definite impact on students’ performance. The more a student practices a test the more comfortable he will be when he takes it for real Junior year. Not only is the PSAT good practice for the SAT, but a high score on it might lead to full scholarships at a number of colleges and universities.

Former State schools Superintendent Kathy Cox has long been a vocal supporter of the PSAT program, confident in its power to help students perform well on the SAT. It will be interesting to see how students continue to perform on the SAT, especially with the news that Georgia scores have already fallen.

I wanted to outline the main points in the article and add some commentary from my own research and experience.

1) Learning styles and teaching styles: the evidence is just not there

Although we love to talk about learning styles and insist that certain individuals are visual learners, while others are kinesthetic learners, there is no consistent and compelling empirical data to support the learning style theory.  Students who self-report that they are “visual learners” are expressing their aesthetic preference for learning using their visual cortex; this does not indicate that they are incapable of learning using other modalities. It turns out we are multi-faceted learners, and we can learn using a variety of styles, matched with a wide array of teaching styles. Our “styles” are merely preferences. These preferences, in my opinion are still valuable tools for the educator. When we are learning from a teacher who matches our learning preference, we will have a more positive experience. When we are studying in our preferred modality, this can enhance the experience and, I believe, impact motivation. Whenever I work with a student, I will adjust my approach to match their learning preferences. With some I am more visual, with others I make up mnemonics or songs; I will give them choices, empower them and attempt to make studying as pain-free as possible.

2) Vary the location of studying

Though I have never personally followed this advice, I can see how this could help students. From high school to graduate school, I have always found a few sacred studying places and particular studying soundtracks to keep me focused and distraction free. In my experience with students, when I help them better regulate their study environments, good changes frequently take place. And once they’ve found the winning formula, why change a good thing? For other students who have yet to find their study niche, I can see the utility of studying the same material in several, ideally distraction-free, environments. The brain is always encoding information. Every new neural trace reinforces previous traces that are similar. You meet someone new at a party and learn their name for the first time. You see them again at a restaurant, and you reinforce their name and face in the new context. See them a third time, and there’s a good chance you’ll remember their name, pulling memories from 2 different contexts. The same could certainly apply to studying.

3) Change up the material and use mixed problem sets

Long study marathons are generally inefficient. Shake it up: vary the content. I like students to switch gears every hour and a half, even when studying for exams. Regularly changing gears keeps the mind more alert and the students more engaged. And when students will be assessed on material from several content areas, it is important that they prepare for this experience. It’s a fundamental learning strategy to study in the manner in which you will be assessed. When we are prepping for the SAT or ACT, for instance, we use officially released tests, and the students must bounce back and forth between algebra I, algebra II, arithmetic and geometry.

4) Cramming leads to poor retention

How many of us can identify with the students who see material, post cramming, and have almost zero recall whatsoever? Cramming can certainly help you pack in a lot of material and achieve a higher grade, but harbor no illusions about this material encoding in long-term memory. Cramming is a grade-focused strategy, appropriate for particular situations. Anyone who will need recall or deeper understanding at a later date would be remiss to rely on cramming. Med students be advised! Baccalaureate students be forewarned! Stick with deeper encoding strategies.

5) Using assessments, spaced study intervals and forced retrieval practice

Assessments and forced retrieval practices are essential to solidify learning! When you are forced to call up information from memory, the neural trace is strengthened. This is why it’s so smart to review your notes within 24 hours of writing them down. Reinforce those memory traces and they will endure. See my 2009 article on the forgetting curve which gives more background on the benefits of forced retrieval and spaced studying.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that ACT, Inc. released a report indicating that across the country this year’s Spring ACT scores fell from those in 2009.  ”Last spring’s high-school seniors averaged a composite score of 21.0 on the test’s scale of 1 to 36, down slightly from 21.1 last year and the lowest score of the last five years. ”

Apparently it wasn’t all bad news. Even though scores are falling, the report indicates that 24 percent of test-takers “met or all four of the test’s benchmarks measuring their preparedness for college English, reading, math and science.” If 24 percent seems like a low number, take heart. It is up from 23 percent last year.

While the report shows a rise in the number of students prepared for college-level biology (21 to 24 percent in five years), the number of students prepared for college English has dropped from 69 percent to 66. Perhaps even more upsetting is that 28 percent of students met NONE of the four college readiness benchmarks.

Regardless of the dip in scores, more and more students are opting to take the  ACT either instead of or in addition to the SAT.The gap has been whittled down to under 50,000, and the ACT has been gaining an average of 59,000 + students per year over the last 3 years.  A record 47 percent of high school graduates, 1.57 million students, took the ACT this year. The momentum is impressive.  The current trends predict that the ACT will be on top at the end of 2010, or at the very least, within several thousand students of surpassing the old patriarch.

On a brighter local note, Georgia’s ACT scores are inching up. The 44 percent of Georgia seniors who took the ACT this year bumped Georgia up from 40th to 34th in the national rankings. While the state’s average composite score of 20.7 is still below the national average at 21.0, it is up from 20.6 last year.

Each one of us, in some form or fashion, has studied motivation. We are our own case studies. There are things that each of us needs to do, for our own good, that we frequently resist. I can better relate to the struggles of my students when I think of the areas in my life where motivation does not come so easily: completing my rehab exercises for an old ankle injury, maintaining the yard, keeping Quicken up-to-date, finishing my research proposal for the PhD. I understand well the great expanse between setting an intention and completing an action: somewhere along the way, motivation can fail. Or rather, motivation to complete one task may give way to motivation for another.

I’ve searched far and wide to better understand the complexities of motivation: the self-help section of the local bookstore, Youtube, Netflix, graduate school, national research conferences. Motivation is a hot topic! And there are a lot of good ideas out there. This summer I gleaned some insights at the Learning and the Brain Conference in Washington DC, where educational researchers and neuroscientists gathered to share their findings. Their insights may help make our job as tutors, and your job as parents, just a little easier.

It’s more effective to set short term goals for students

The ultimate goal of our work is to get our students into college and set them up for a great experience there, which will hopefully lead to greater opportunities and a satisfying and fulfilling life. However, for students who are counting down the days to impending life events, it’s not so useful to set our sights 20 years out. When rewards are placed too far into the future, their psychological value is greatly diminished. Nueroscientist Dr. Daniel T. Willingham, explored this phenomenon of “time discounting.”

Any of you who have spent much time with young children will understand this well! Consequences or rewards placed too far in the future have very little impact. “If you put your toys away right now, you can have ice-cream in a month;” that’s not going to pack as much punch as the promise of an immediate reward such as “ice cream after lunch.” Likewise, when working with teenagers, it is better to set smaller goals, even daily targets to maximize motivation. In the realm of tutoring, I constantly break down the final goal into measurable, discrete steps. With each successful step along the path, a student’s sense of self-efficacy and mastery grows.

Having choices increases motivation

Autonomy plays a major role in motivation. When students feel they have more freedom to select activities or challenges for themselves, this will generally enhance their level of commitment and investment. I have seen this all too frequently in the domain of tutoring. When students are dragged to tutoring against their will, the outcomes will rarely be positive. Students who have a sense of agency and autonomy, “I’m choosing to be here, of my own volition,” these are the students who experience better results.

Dr. Allan Wigfield, a leading motivation researcher at the University of Maryland, has spent decades studying academic motivation. Wigfield has found that motivation varies from subject to subject, and academic motivation, measured as a global construct, decreases fairly consistently from kindergarten to high school. Our students start school with enthusiasm and energy, but year after year, their motivation decreases. Wigfield and fellow researchers have developed the Concept Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) program to explore motivation for reading and see if they could reverse this trend.

The CORI program focuses on collaboration between students and teachers; creating a supportive environment, characterized by dialogue and positive reinforcement and providing texts at all levels so students have greater choices of what they read. When students have more choices, they exercise their autonomy, read more and consistently show a greater motivation for reading. Supporting student autonomy is fundamental to CORI: Wigfield wants to give every student some control, not just the honors kids. CORI’s research reveals that in this environment of autonomy, dialogue and support, students’ motivation for reading has been turned around in a single academic year.

Believing that we can get smarter increases motivation

Through his CORI project, Wigfield also encourages students to focus on the malleability of their intelligence, the ability of students to enhance and develop their intelligence. Wigfield leans heavily on the research of Carol Dweck, preeminent researcher at Stanford, who found that students’ beliefs about the fixed or variable nature of intelligence informed their behaviors in the classroom.

Resilience, persistence, and creative problem solving are informed by student beliefs regarding whether intelligence is something you develop or something you are born with. Students can either believe “I’m as smart as I’m going to be” or “I can get smarter.” Students who believe they can get smarter over time feel more comfortable taking risks, making mistakes and learning from them. They are not so concerned about revealing their limitations, which are permanent and enduring for those who fall into the fixed intelligence camp.

Throughout the Learning and the Brain conference, neuroscientists touted the most cutting-edge research revealing the malleability of human intelligence. Our brains can change; we can get smarter! Neurogenesis (the ability to generate new neurons) and neuroplasticity (the ability for the brain to change and adapt) are real. The neuroscientists have spoken. We can rewire our brains and make them operate more effectively. This is inspiring! This is motivating! Tell your students and your children!

Motivation looks different for every individual

Dr. Richard Lavoie, author of the Motivation Breakthrough, believes that every human behavior is motivated. Lavoie pointed out that adolescents are caught in a “365 24/7 battle to not be embarrassed. I hope I’m not embarrassed today” is the secret fear. Everyone is trying to keep the spotlight off of himself and keep it on someone else. It’s important to keep this in mind when working with young people.

Lavoie is big on autonomy and believes that reward systems don’t work. He had some great ideas about motivation:

• Punish, reward, manipulate: these are NOT effective strategies to motivate.
• Taking away the one thing a kid likes is a bad idea.
• The only one motivated by competition is the person who thinks he can win.
• We do our best work when we compete against ourselves.
• “If he would only try harder, he’d do better” is incorrect. If he’d have some success, some mastery experiences, then he’d try harder.

I really responded to his focus on giving students experiences of mastery and competing with yourself, rather than with others.

Lavoie believes our motivation doesn’t change with age. We all have different motivational profiles that are fairly consistent. Lavoie feels that when an educator understands the motivational profile of a particular student, that teacher will have a much greater likelihood of being able to motivate that student. They will be speaking the same motivational language. The motivational profile of an individual, per Lavoie, is based on “Secondary Needs.” Our personalities are determined by the degree to which we are motivated by these:

1. Status: need to know how our self-conception is influenced by the opinions of other people
2. Inquisitiveness: need to know and to learn
3. Affiliation: need to associate with something larger
4. Power: need for control, power, influence and authority
5. Aggression: need to be contentious
6. Autonomy: need to be independent
7. Achievement: need for recognition and acknowledgement
8. Gregariousness: need to belong

A tutor, teacher, or parent looking to motivate a student would do well to understand the currency the student values. Is the student motivated by the need for recognition? The need to connect with another? The need to deeply understand? The need to guide/control the session? If we work with the motivational profiles of our students, we will be more effective with them.

Intrinsic motivation and Self-Determination Theory

Edward L. Deci is one of the giants in the field of motivation, and he has investigated human motivation for four decades. (I’ve cited his research in nearly every paper I’ve written during my graduate studies.) He is currently the director of the Human Motivation Program at the University of Rochester.

At the Learning and the Brain conference, Deci expounded on the two primary types of motivation: intrinsic (motivation from within) and extrinsic (motivation from without). With intrinsic motivation, you do something because it’s interesting and pleasurable. The activity is the reward, or, rather, the reward is inherent in the activity. Students who are engaged in the joy of exploration, discovery, mastery, learning and development are experiencing intrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, involves doing an activity explicitly to get some external reward such as money or a grade. The activity is not the reward, but it leads to the reward. The initiation is external.

Deci was one of the earliest researchers to discover that extrinsic rewards can actually undermine intrinsic motivation. When you add a reward to a system, it changes people’s relationship to an activity. The activity is initially interesting, but when the reward is introduced, the focus shifts to obtaining the reward. Intrinsic flips to extrinsic. And when the extrinsic motivator is extinguished, the intrinsic has diminished. Deci insists that using reward systems creates a real risk that motivation and learning will decrease.

Why does this occur?

Deci believes people have a fundamental need to be autonomous rather than controlled. He believes there’s something negative about a reward: chasing the carrot undermines one’s sense of autonomy.

So what can we do to increase motivation?

1) Offering individuals choice
As Whigfield found, Deci also believes that it’s good to give students choices in what, when, and how they do something. It doesn’t have to be full choice; even partial choice is motivating. When people have an opportunity to make choices, they are more engaged and more interested.

2) Acknowledge your student’s feelings
Many activities are intrinsically boring. Acknowledge this and let it be. Saying “I understand you” to some extent conveys a sense of respect by acknowledging the validity of an individual’s own inner experience.

3) Provide positive feedback (AKA verbal rewards)
We all have a psychological need to be and to feel competent. Rewards can be given in an informational way, as a means to recognize, rather than control another.

Deci’s research reveals that when students experience a greater sense of autonomy, this generally leads to a greater degree of global self-confidence in addition to increased:

• conceptual understanding
• feelings of competence
• creativity
• grades
• psychosocial health
• effective coping

When placed in less autonomous, more controlling environments, students can achieve rote memorization; however, there are limits to their learning. Their knowledge gains will be characterized by poor maintenance (the knowledge fades quickly) and transfer (it can’t be easily applied to other domains). Additionally, conceptual learning will be lower and intrinsic motivation will be diminished in more controlling learning environments.

Deci and his colleagues have crafted a theory to explain how motivation functions: Self-Determination Theory (SDT). The three pillars of this theory are Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. We want to feel our sense of agency (Autonomy) in the world; we want to feel that we are effective in dealing with the world (Competence); we want to be connected to and related to others (Relatedness).

Rather than using controlling extrinsic rewards, Deci has found that using verbal praise and positive feedback increases intrinsic motivation. Positive feedback is not controlling and allows students to maintain a sense of autonomy.

How do you motivate students under the SDT framework?

According to Deci and colleagues, if you want to motivate a student, there are several things you should do:

1. Encourage your students’ self-initiation and exploration.
2. Offer your students relevant choices in a session.
3. Collaborate with your students and create challenges for them.
4. Give your students meaningful feedback and provide a rationale for requested behavior.
5. Help your students understand how information can help them and how it’s meaningful.
6. Minimize the use of controlling language in a session. “Should, must, have to, ought” these become controls, demands. It’s better to try to understand your students and see their points of view.

Summary

The big takeaway for me is that to motivate students, you need to understand them and respect them, rather than control or manipulate them. Focus on positive reinforcement and use informational rewards whenever possible. When students are moving closer to mastery, let them know, let them feel competent. Whenever possible, give your students meaningful choices: choices in their approach to problem solving, choices in what we will focus on during a session. Continually reinforce the notion that intelligence is malleable. Let students understand the sheer potential that they have; their ability to rewire their brains and shed old limitations. Just because they’ve struggled with timing, or reading, or structuring in the past, doesn’t mean they are destined to continually repeat their old patterns. Our job is to inspire, to encourage autonomy, and to keep the focus on possibility rather than on limitations.