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.

In 1993 when Zell Miller signed the HOPE scholarship into law, the lottery revenues were more than adequate to cover the costs of tuition, mandatory fees and a book allowance for the HOPE scholarship winners.  Each year, the number of recipients grew as did the size of the awards. In 1994-1995, 98,399 students received an average award of $851.  In 2002, 212,631 students received an average award of $1,701.  In 2010-2011, 238,907 students received an average award of $2,862.  (See Hope data here).  The cost of HOPE kept rising, but the gambling revenues were not keeping pace.

For 2010-2011, the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which oversees funding of the HOPE scholarship, forecasted a $243 million program deficit, to be followed by a $317 million shortfall in 2012.  Emergency meetings were held at the Capitol this summer, and just last week, Governor Nathan Deal signed a new law limiting HOPE and raising the academic bar for the top award winners. These changes begin with the high school graduating class of 2011.

What are the changes to HOPE?

The program will no longer cover books or the mandatory fees, which have been making up an increasingly significant portion of the overall cost of college. Maintaining a high school 3.0 GPA will now allow a student to forego 90% of tuition costs, but any increases in tuition subsequent to freshman year will be passed on to the student. There is no minimum SAT or ACT score requirement to be eligible for this level of the HOPE Scholarship.

To qualify for the 100% tuition waiver and become a “Zell Miller Scholar,” a student will need to maintain a 3.7 GPA and achieve a composite score of 26 on the ACT or a combined Math and Critical Reading score of 1200 on a single administration of the SAT.

Home-schooled students aspiring for the Zell Miller Scholarship must meet the same HS GPA and score requirements as well attain a college GPA of 3.5 or higher during freshman year. Having proven their academic merit outside of a home-schooled environment, these students will then be eligible to receive the scholarship retroactively at the conclusion of their freshman year.

What impact will this have on our students?

First and foremost the 3.7 cutoff will put more pressure on students to earn those A’s.  This may actually drive grade inflation, as highly involved parents push for those 89s to become 90s.  Additionally, tying the HOPE to SAT and ACT scores will drive more students to prepare for the college assessments.

Adding in the SAT/ACT component may have the unintended consequence of shifting the racial demographics of HOPE recipients.  In Georgia, the performance gap between white and black students on the SAT and ACT is significant.  In 2010 white students posted average scores of 22.9 on the ACT and combined Math and Critical Reading scores of 1044 on the SAT.  In contrast, black students posted average scores of 17.4 on the ACT and 853 on the SAT.

Asians, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on average scored 1086 on the SAT, 23.6 on the ACT.  While Hispanics saw an average SAT score of 956 (a weighted average of the Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Other Hispanic, Latino or Latin American categories reported) and a 20.1 on the ACT (See SAT State Report, ACT State Report).

Whenever you tie financial awards to SAT/ACT scores you ultimately enter the shadowy area of privileging particular racial/ethnic groups at the expense of others.

Final thoughts

In spite of the changes, the HOPE scholarship will remain a tremendous value to hundreds of thousands of Georgia families each year.  Since its inception HOPE has funded scholarships and grants for 1,345,248 students, and the program has been one of the most successful in the country.  Even in its diminished form, HOPE will make college more affordable for nearly a quarter of a million students each year and will continue to keep talented students in-state and drive the quality of our educational institutions higher still.

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.

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.

According to Evan and David, the key to creating an application that will stand out from the pack is to craft an application that is genuine, that comes from a place of honesty, passion, and vulnerability. The authors give dozens of examples of students who take the right kind of risks with their essays and allow the admissions readers to get glimpses of their character, their fears, their dreams. Essays like these are innately inspiring, and they simply ring true. Authenticity is powerful!

I have personally broken out my copy of The MBA Reality Check on multiple occasions to illustrate to students what it looks like to take the right risks in their applications. The book beautifully lays out “before” and “after” examples from a wide variety of students with greatly diverse life experiences. This is incredibly instructive. Here’s the “play it safe” version, and here’s the “dive in, take the risk” version. I use this book to inspire my students: Take the risk! Put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid of letting people in to see your wounds or your loftiest aspirations.

Good essays cut through the marketing and self-promotion that students feel they must engage in when applying to college or graduate school.  This focus on “looking good” will ruin an otherwise strong college or graduate-school essay.  Take the risk of being authentic, owning your shortcomings, honestly portraying your passions, claiming your victories.

In MBA Reality Check, the applicants move beyond the realm of “looking good.”  One woman writes of her greatest personal accomplishment: learning to swim.  One man writes of his failure to confront racism in his workplace and what he learned from the experience.  One applicant wrote of his passion for fighting fires, another of his life-long dream to reinvigorate the World Wrestling Entertainment Corporation.

These applicants learned that the most powerful way to recruit others, engage them, and bring them to your cause, is to be authentic.  Honesty draws people in. It’s a mammal thing.  Neuroscientists call it limbic resonance, this connection between our respective mammalian brains.  These connections helped our species survive for millennia and continue to serve us today.  As members of the human team, it’s a good strategy to enroll others in our causes and approach them from a place of honesty.  We can generally sniff out pretense and posturing.  But, we are attracted to authenticity.

As the season of college applications is rapidly approaching, the time to write authentically and powerfully is upon us.  When you sit down to write your college essays, remember to drop the pretense of giving the admissions committee what you think they might want to read.  Everybody writes those essays. Write the essays that are true for you.  Allow the reader of your application to learn about your values, passions and vulnerabilities.  Make the human connection and you will be on your way to gaining an advocate on the admissions committee.

If you are looking for a few other ideas, check out an article I put together in 2008 on the topic of writing strong essays.  It’s a good idea to start this process early and give yourself plenty of time to let the creativity flow.  Your college essays will take a significant amount of time and will require you to write in a novel way.  This can be a process of introspection and self-discovery, and at the minimum it can be a valuable exercise in authentic self-expression.

1) What role does confidence play in test taking?

Confidence is one of the most fundamental components of successful test taking. Students who believe in their ability to perform well ultimately achieve better outcomes. Students who lack confidence may experience heightened anxiety, which impairs working memory, focus and performance. Lack of confidence frequently becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The most direct way to increase student confidence is through the provision of mastery experiences via practice tests. With each successful practice test, a student’s sense of self-efficacy and confidence will grow, ultimately increasing the likelihood of a stronger performance on the actual assessments.

2) What defines a good test prep company?

• Consistency. A good company has consistent and effective quality control. It invests more in the training and oversight of its tutors.
• Retention of staff. The ability to retain qualified, experienced tutors is the hallmark of a good test prep company. Many companies pay poorly and/or mistreat their tutors, which leads to a turnover rate of 50% or higher each year (standard for this industry). This high turnover wipes out institutional learning. A good test prep company retains its best tutors who continue to develop and innovate.
• Integrity. Good test prep companies don’t make false promises. They are transparent. They keep their families and students in the loop, thereby eliminating most undesired surprises.
• Value. Good companies charge a fair price for their services: they do not encourage more prep than is necessary.

3) SAT versus ACT: how does your approach differ?

The ACT generally involves a shorter regimen of studying. When I prep students for the ACT, I spend more time on science, which is frequently the most foreign and challenging section for students. I sit there with a stop watch, and we do timing drill after timing drill, building speed and accuracy. I’m a sprinting coach when I’m teaching the ACT.

When I teach the SAT, my job is to help deconstruct and decode the test, to teach my students the language of the SAT and the tricks and techniques that work for each section. Critical reading frequently takes up the lion’s share of my time and energy on the SAT. No matter which test they are prepping for, students need to do practice tests for both the SAT and ACT.

4) What is the darker side of test prep?

There are certainly companies operating with little to no integrity in the marketplace. I’ve come across companies who conduct numerous shady practices:

• Sending out tutors who have high scores but are ill-prepared to teach. Some shops grossly under-train their tutors. They conduct brief interviews with high scoring candidates, send them a training manual and then ship them out to work with students. The trouble is, high scores alone do not a good tutor make. Often the highest scoring individuals, who have an intuitive grasp of math or reading, may be challenged to articulate their processes or transfer their skills to others. Without proper training, these brilliant test-takers may be ineffective tutors.
  
• Some test prep companies propose much more tutoring than is necessary. Many parents unfamiliar with this process do not know how to calibrate the right “dosage” of prep. We worked with a student who came to us with a 1460 CR+M baseline. A competing shop proposed 70 hours of prep; we sold her eight hours of tutoring and she achieved the gains she needed.
• Some companies have guarantees that are meaningless or even deceptive. Whenever you see anyone guaranteeing 300-400 points: run for the hills. That’s a racket. Every company has students who pick up 400-500+ points. However no company can guarantee that level of increase. Read the fine print. Perhaps the company will let your student repeat the 40-hour course that was ineffective the first time. How many students will be willing to start back at the beginning and invest another 40 hours? And what are the requirements to get the guarantee? Find out before you sign.
• Some companies create an artificial sense of exclusivity. In the end, we are all working with the same official materials provided by the test writers. Some tutors force students to sign non-disclosure contracts and charge obscene fees to justify their “trade secrets.” Again, this is a racket.
• Some companies manipulate their baseline scores to inflate perceived gains. It’s an old trick. Give students exceptionally hard baseline tests to deflate their intro scores. After the course is done and the students take a test of average difficulty, they will achieve significant gains from their bogus baseline. This is all artifice. Companies that do not use official tests for their baselines are walking a slippery slope.

5) Does test prep advantage those who need it least?

Not necessarily. I’ve worked with students who came from privileged backgrounds who had incredibly low scores, many suffering from significant learning disabilities. These kids absolutely needed help to be on par with their peers. Without a doubt, there are subsets of the population that are being underserved. The question of access and fairness is a real one. There are certainly haves and have-nots in our society, and those who have resources will use them to give their children every advantage: from private school to test prep to private universities. The question of fairness is a larger societal question and is certainly valid.

6) Is there anything a school can learn about itself, about its pedagogy, about its role in preparing students for college by looking at a class’s standardized test results?

I believe so. Certain schools have asked us to run analysis on their student body to identify gaps in their students’ learning. Sometimes students are missing a disproportionate number of abstract algebra problems, or a whole grade is weaker on certain grammar rules. We can see trends from school to school.

There is a bigger question regarding who is ultimately responsible for getting the students ready for the college assessments. The same questions arise regarding preparation for the AP tests. Is it the school’s job to teach to the tests? Most schools focus on the content but not the process of taking standardized tests. Schools can certainly teach students the process side of test-taking: how to identify wrong answers, how to deconstruct questions, how to prioritize time, how to work backwards and optimize all the information provided by the tests. By teaching students Algebra, a school is not necessarily preparing students for the SAT. By specifically drilling and deconstructing SAT Algebra questions, a school is preparing its students for the SAT. Schools must decide at a philosophical level if they are willing to play in this space.

7) a. Is there such a thing as beginning test prep too early?

There is definitely such a thing as prepping too early. The summer before junior year is the earliest I ever want to touch any SAT prep with a student. There are obviously exceptions to every rule—once I prepared a student for the sophomore PSAT to help him gain placement into a higher track English class. But that was an unusual case. Students starting SAT prep in middle school are on the wrong path. Until you’ve covered the actual content in your high school classes, it is wildly inefficient to prep. We want to review Algebra 2 in our sessions, not teach it for the first time.

b. What is the ideal timing for prep?

In my book the ideal timing to begin prep is early junior year. I love having a student knock out the December and January tests while he has momentum, returning to take the June test if it is needed. If we can get everything done by the end of junior year, the student is free to focus on other important tasks as a senior.

c. How do you know when enough is enough?

I do not recommend taking the test more than 3 or 4 times. There is a real risk of burnout. After the third or fourth iteration, most students begin to flat-line and hit a point of diminishing returns.

8 ) Are there broad claims – generalizations – that you can make about different types of prep for standardized testing, such as one-on-one is the most effective, or only the highly organized and motivated student can successfully prep on his/her own?

One-on-one prep is my preference, and according to the research I’ve come across in my graduate work, one-on-one instruction always yields the strongest educational outcomes. It’s the most efficient means of teaching, but it is obviously also the most resource intensive: one student, one tutor. This is going to cost more. That’s where groups come into play.

Groups can be very effective for some students, but they are not for everyone. Keep the really high scoring kids or the kids with incredible spikes/deficits in certain subjects out of the groups. Keep students with LD, motivational deficits, or severe test anxiety out of the groups: those students will do much better in private prep. Groups are excellent for students in the middle to upper middle end of the score range who need a balanced review.

The highly organized, self-regulated students rarely seek out our services. Students who are great at self-regulation will frequently manage their own prep and can often get by simply with the aid of good materials. Students who hit perfect 2400s are rarely the ones who do test prep.

9) Are there certain types of students, a certain profile of students who are most likely to benefit from test prep?

The students who are going to have the biggest leaps are generally those most willing to put in the time and make the requisite sacrifices. Time on task is a major predictor of performance. That’s why the Asian Nationals are having such phenomenal outcomes. One of my former tutors has set up shop in Shanghai and he keeps me abreast of the incredible studying regimens of the Asian students. In many cases, they triple the “time on task” of their American counterparts, reviewing 30-40 official tests, putting in 200 hours of their own time (not 200 hours of tutoring, but 200 hours of self-study). That kind of time commitment is going to make a difference. Self-regulated learners who are driven to succeed have the best shot at tremendous score gains.

10) Are there certain types of students who will be less likely to benefit from test prep?

• Students who are extremely stubborn and unwilling to relinquish their old methods will derive less benefit from prep.
• Students who don’t have any desire to score higher on the SAT or ACT, but whose parents are insisting on prep, will rarely have strong outcomes. Some students we’ve seen have already been accepted to a college and are quite content to matriculate there, but their parents are holding out for higher scores and more selective colleges. This is not the best recipe for success.
• Students with real motivational deficits will struggle. We can teach the skill, but it’s hard to provide the will to our students.
• Students who have overwhelming anxiety or deeply entrenched negative self-beliefs will struggle.
• Some students with severe LD will struggle if they do not have the appropriate accommodations.

The concerns were many: the indiscriminate use of Fast Apps; disingenuous student search letters; the end of the “Holistic” Review; Moody’s credit ratings driving the behavior of admissions offices; hyper-selective colleges fueling scattershot applications via the Common Application. Counselors were frustrated. Their jobs have become more challenging, their ability to give strong guidance threatened. Several counselors admitted to growing disillusioned by the changes taking place.

The problem is a fairly simple one: there are too many students applying to too many of the same selective colleges and universities. The system, given its present level of resources, was not designed to handle the current volume of applications. Consequently, much has been sacrificed to the altar of expediency and efficiency to allow the schools, with their limited resources, to process the piles and piles of incoming apps.

What is driving the application frenzy?

One college counselor colorfully exclaimed, “We know the devil and it’s 3 faces: Moody’s, US News and World Report, and the Common Application.”

Moody’s

Moody’s, the first branch of the demonic trifecta, penalizes colleges and universities by degrading their bond ratings if their SATs, selectivity or yield drop. And bond ratings are nothing to sneeze at. When a university needs to borrow money for capital improvements or renovations, its bond rating determines the interest rate at which it can borrow funds. The Board of Trustees will put heavy pressure on an admissions office to maintain the institution’s AAA bond rating.

Private High Schools are locked into a similar set of rules determined by Moody’s. Their bond ratings are tied to their matriculation lists, SAT scores, National Merit and AP scores. To keep their boards happy, college counselors must attend to the selectivity of the colleges on their “matric” lists.

US News and World Report

By now, most of you are aware of Mephistopheles’ favorite publication, the US News and World Report. The US News annual rankings are responsible for narrowing the collective gaze of millions of high school students onto a handful of schools and rewarding these schools for rejecting as many students and being as “selective” as possible.

The Common Application

What started off as a movement towards greater accessibility has turned out to be something of a devil’s bargain. Many counselors in the room during the ACCIS breakout session once fought for and participated in the Common Application movement; today, they no longer rally to the cry of “greater access.” They are aware that the Common Application has yielded many negative, unintended consequences in the world of college admissions.

Though it does allow greater access, many would argue that the Common App. encourages students to apply to schools less discriminately. Press a button and instantly submit applications to 18 schools. This floods the system with more applications, necessitates many unnecessary “reads” by admissions officers, and adds a great deal of waste and inefficiency into an already strained system. As more students are haphazardly applying to more schools, these extra applications drive down the acceptance rates, making schools appear more “selective” in the parlance of US News. As schools become more “selective” (read desirable), students know that they have a slimmer chance of gaining a coveted admissions spot, so they feel compelled to apply to more of these selective schools out of hopes that one may take them. This in turn further drives down the acceptance rate. It’s a vicious cycle.

The pressure to drive in more applications

Because of the importance of selectivity, schools are strongly incented to drive in as many applications as possible. And the responsibility to bring in more applications falls on the marketing and the admissions departments. Many of the college counselors in the room, quite a few who have spent time “on the other side of the desk” understand the pressures admission officers feel to drive in more applications. In a year when Princeton increased its applications by 19%, Columbia’s increase of 2.9% looked paltry by comparison. Yale had the misfortune of falling 143 applications short of last year’s tally. These “failures” invoke institutional scrutiny and add pressure on the admissions officers.

Though the counselors understand the plight of the admissions officers, they do not have sympathy for those admissions officers who turn recruiting into a competition. Some admissions officers from the most selective schools in the country have even been known to brag about their successes in generating double digit increases in applications from year to year. This peeves the ACCIS counselors who want to know: “When are you going to have enough?” Other counselors chimed in: “Why are you recruiting so hard when you’ve already attained a 5% admission rate?” Where do we go from here? A 3.5% admission rate? Then what?”

Who could answer for the crimes of the admissions officers? One man appeared to defend his profession: Peter Johnson, the longstanding Director of Admissions at Columbia University. However, once the collective venting began, Johnson, the lone cowboy, knew he was in trouble. This would be his Alamo. In a comic gesture, he drew a bull’s-eye on a piece of notebook paper and solemnly held it up to his chest. And the arrows soon followed.

Manufacturing demand, how colleges are complicit in driving up the number of numbers

1) Use of The Common Application

Why was Johnson holding up the paper target? For starters, Columbia (along with Michigan and several other top profile schools) recently made the announcement that it was moving to the nefarious Common Application for 2010. You could almost smell the sulfur and brimstone. Columbia University currently has an acceptance rate of 8.3%; moving to the Common Application will only bring in more applications. Johnson defended the decision to switch over to the Common Application, “Who is Columbia not to give access to more students? Who are we not to be accessible?” But the counselors did not seem moved by this rationale.

2) Misuse of Student Search Letters

A counselor from a highly selective Northeastern prep school complained about the misuse of student search letters in the recruitment process. One of his students received student search letters from Harvard and Yale. His student approached him and said, “Hey, I’m getting encouragement from Harvard and Yale.” But this counselor had to break the sad truth to his student. This was not about the student’s merits, this was about keeping Harvard’s admit rate under 7% and Yale’s under 9%. When this counselor brought the student’s portfolio to NACAC to check things out with the Harvard Admissions Officer, his response was telling. “This looks a little light for us” (read: this kid doesn’t have a shot). The counselor then slammed down the search letter bearing Harvard’s insignia: “Then why the hell are you sending my kid this letter?!” The Harvard Admissions officer had no answer.

According to official propaganda, the colleges and universities are aggressively recruiting to stay ahead of the impending pop of the demographic bubble, the end of the echo boom. But this event remains years away. Other officers claim they must cast an ever- wider net to attract good minority applicants. The counselors at ACCIS did not seem convinced.

3) Beefing up International Recruiting Efforts

Several counselors also questioned colleges’ and universities’ increasingly aggressive efforts to recruit internationally. Columbia used to have 1 officer to handle international apps; now it has 4 dedicated international officers. But other counselors challenged how anyone could blame Columbia for recruiting internationally? There is a potential goldmine of full pay students abroad. China has its one-child policy, but often there are “6 wallets supporting that one child.” One counselor referred to China as “a well you could tap forever.” Colleges are hardly ignoring this reality.

4) Misuse of Fast Apps

Numerous counselors complained about the misuse of fast applications (fast apps) to expedite the application process for selected students. The counselors were concerned that these fast apps were encouraging students to apply to schools they’re not seriously interested in attending. One counselor lamented, “when every college sends out a fast-app, all kids will become a number.”

What is the impact of all of these applications on the admissions process?

As colleges and universities systematically drive up the number of applications, the admissions offices rarely receive commensurate increases in their budgets to process the additional applications. An admissions office may be budgeted for 25,000 applications, receive 32,000 applications and gets its budget cut. One counselor spoke of the resource challenges of the Duke admissions department. The Duke admissions department was built to handle 12,000 apps; In 2010 it received 26,694 apps. Duke’s system worked fine with 12,000 applications: multiple readers for each application, preliminary rating of each application, committee then final decision. However, when Duke is trying to use the same resources and the same system to process an additional 14,694 apps, it places a lot of stress on the system. Something has to give. And two things have been sacrificed:

1) The relationships between College Counselors and Admissions Officers

The first casualty was the strength of the relationship between the college counselors and the admissions officers. College counselors used to play a more active role in negotiating for the admission of their students. In the old days, the “counselor calls” were a key part of the process. It was a collegial interaction. Counselors and Admissions Officers discussed the merits of their applicants and the counselors could advocate for particular students and influence their chances of being accepted. According to the ACCIS group, the counselor calls for the most selective schools have been all but eliminated. The admissions officers no longer have time for the calls.

Without the calls to the admissions office, counselors have less leverage than ever before in this process. More than this, counselors can no longer tell students where they are likely to gain an offer for admission. Counselors are frequently at a loss regarding what will happen to their students’ applications. It’s too random. There are too many good candidates for each spot. As one counselor lamented: “We cannot guide them. The colleges have become too selective.”

2) Death of the Holistic Review

The second casualty in this process was the death of the holistic review of a student’s application. Dozens of counselors chimed in to address this particular concern. “The holistic review begins once we cross the 3.9 bar and the 750+ bar.” “Holistic Reading. Really?” “And what does “holistic” mean for the average unhooked prep school kid?” The consensus was that the holistic review begins once you’ve passed the academic litmus test. If you pass the academic review (GPA couched in schedule strength and test scores AKA the academic index), then you move on to the holistic review process.

Many believe that there is no holistic review at all without a hook. “Are we moving to the British Model where numbers become everything without the pretense of a holistic review?” Another counselor put things in context: “In the old days a private school student with no hook, high 600s and a 3.3 had a chance at Tufts or Wesleyan. Those days are over. It’s not so elastic anymore. Fewer chances are being offered to these kids. If you don’t have the 700 and the 3.5 it will be a challenge.” And college counselors understand: ” Why would you bother to look at the 3.4 pool when you can get everything you need from the 3.7 pool?”

What happens to those students without good college guidance?

The ACCIS counselors benefitted from low counselor/student ratios in their schools: in some cases one counselor oversees as few as 30 or 35 students. What happens to those students attending public schools with a counselor/student ratio of 300/1? Who will be there to tell them about the inauthenticity of the student search letters or counsel them away from applying to a list of schools exclusively comprised of the US News’ top 25? Students, left to their own devices, without proper guidance, may take the scattershot approach to college admissions. They may use the Common App and apply to as many schools as possible. As college guidance grows scarce in many of the budget-crunched public schools, this will only exacerbate the situation and add more applications to the ever-growing pile.

Counselor Solidarity and Closing Thoughts

This session was not a call to arms for the college counselors. It was more of a reflection upon a struggling system, which is often the first step towards any kind of meaningful, organized action. One counselor questioned whether there was a way out of this admissions “arms race:” “Is there any power that we have? Is resignation the answer?” One of his colleagues responded: “Secondary schools: we are 11% of the population who provide 40% of the students for selective institutions.” The problem is that “we tend to focus on “the 20” schools. We spend 90% of our time thinking about the 20. We should flip it.”

This made a lot of sense to me. There are more than 20 colleges in the admissions landscape: there are several thousand. As we soften our gaze, and embrace a larger pool of potential schools for our students, many of these competitive pressures subside and the frenzy of selective admissions abates.

It doesn’t look like Moody’s is going away anytime soon, the US News rankings are as powerful as ever, and the Common App continues to gain momentum. These competitive forces are going to drive the acceptance rates at the top schools to never before seen lows: 5% 3% maybe even 2%. It’s certainly possible. It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be returning to the old relationship-based model of admissions; Admissions officers will continue to be asked to do more with less, and they will need to find a way to handle the growing stacks of applications.

For students reaching for the gold ring, there’s nothing wrong with applying to the top schools, those blessed by the writers of US News. It’s also healthy for us to expand our view beyond the scope of those uber-selective schools to include more options and a wider array of possibilities. I’m a fan of anything that gives our students a chance for some peace of mind, and a chance for them to define success on their own terms, rather than on the terms set for them by others.

Joseph Soares

Soares’ primary argument was that the tests assess social factors, rather than academic ones. By emphasizing the SAT and ACT, colleges are selecting students who are on the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum. They are selecting for money, rather than for merit. Soares calls this Social Darwinism.

He also challenged the College Board’s claims that using the SAT in the admissions equation helps a school like Wake Forest select a more academically robust class. According to Soares’ data, by adding the SAT to the admissions algorithm, WFU picked up a mere 3% bump in predictive strength (the ability to select who will succeed academically). As a result of his findings, Soares pushed hard for Wake Forest to go test optional, and his voice was heard in 2009. He continues to play a vocal role on the national stage and exhorts other schools to follow Wake Forest’s lead.

Bob Shaeffer

Schaeffer has a long history with the SAT. Already working with FairTest for more than a decade, by the late 1990′s it was Schaeffer’s turn to go through the admissions gauntlet as a father. Because he “knew that good coaching programs could significantly boost SAT performance and that higher scores could lead to “merit” scholarships,” Schaeffer enrolled his own son in a test prep course. Following the $695 prep course, his son picked up over 100 points on the SAT and was offered merit scholarships to the tune of $3,000/year. Spend $700. Get $12,000. Who in their right mind would pass up this deal? But the fact that money could buy points and eventually acceptances and scholarships vexed Schaeffer. How was this fair to those who lacked the means and the money and the opportunity to prep? Even after his son’s experience, the concerned Schaeffer continued to invest his energies and talents in FairTest to see if he could change this system.

Schaeffer’s primary message to the counselors was that change is coming, but it will continue to come gradually. Each year new schools are jumping on the test-flexible and test-optional bandwagon. Marist College recently became the 844^th 4-year college to join the ranks of George Mason, Wake Forest, Suwannee, Smith, Rollins and other test-optional schools. According to FairTest, one third of all 4-year colleges are SAT optional. Of the most selective 110 schools, 35 are test optional. As WFU has demonstrated, schools that go test-optional ratchet up applications and attract more minority students. Colleges and universities concerned about their application numbers or campus diversity may be eyeing test optional as a means to address these issues.

In addition to test-optional admissions, Schaeffer spent a good deal of time exploring the latest trend in testing: test choice or test flexible admissions. Colleges and universities are now offering students a menu of testing options: a smorgasbord of testing.

Test Choice

Colorado College is following this trend. Its admissions office requires 1 quantitative test score (from the SAT or ACT); 1 verbal test score (SAT or ACT) and 1 subject score (SAT subject/ACT/ or AP). You can check out the menu online.

Georgia Tech also offers students the possibility to super-super score their tests, taking the highest math section score from any SAT or ACT, the highest writing section score from any SAT or ACT, and the highest English score from the ACT or the highest reading score from the SAT.

Other schools like American University are exploring the test optional continuum. In 2009 American University was test optional exclusively for early decision applicants. In 2010, American changed its policy and will now accept test optional admissions for any students who apply before November 1^st . Schaeffer cites this as progress and feels that as schools dip their toes into the test-optional pool, they will be encouraged to eventually take the full plunge.

The Future of Testing

The testing landscape will continue to change from year to year, and more schools will hop on the test- flexible-test-optional bandwagon. Schaeffer noted the “echo effect” among schools. When a selective college or university goes test optional or test flexible, it puts pressure on the schools in its competitive set to do the same. More flexibility in testing will ultimately help our students. There will be less rigidity and more opportunities for them to succeed. Will testing go away completely? Schaeffer doesn’t think so, and certainly not in the near term. But he challenges the misuse and abuse of testing and will continue to fight for an admissions landscape that is not myopically focused on testing.

Today there are more attentional demands made on us than at any previous time in our history. More and more messages bombard us from every direction, competing for our attention. At Hampton University’s commencement address President Obama cited the incessant flow of information and messaging as a potential diversion, a distraction. Messages are already coming to us more quickly, and in smaller packages. Paper letters have given way to e-mails and then finally to text messages. Everything is being reduced to sound-bytes. Is everyone ADHD these days? LOL

If Jason Watson and David Strayer, psychology researchers at the University of Utah, are right, then my little brother was not demonstrating his superior processing abilities and evolutionary advantage: he was simply processing multiple conversations in a shallow, superficial fashion, sequentially jumping from one conversation to the next, depriving each conversation of depth, clarity or cohesion of thought. Their research made me feel better and slightly more adequate in the face of the rising wave of technology.

According to Watson and Strayer, true multi-tasking is incredibly rare. The Supertaskers who can carry out multiple cognitive demands and experience no loss in efficiency make up a measly 2.5% of the population. The other 97.5% of us, sadly, cannot multi-task, and likely will never be able to. We can play mental ping-pong, and learn to speed up our transition times between tasks, but we’ll never be able to truly parallel process like those cape-wearing supertaskers. We’ll have to wait for evolution to catch up with the current environmental conditions. Maybe our grandchildren will be supertaskers? We can only hope.

Last month I travelled to Washington DC to attend a conference dedicated primarily to the art and science of paying attention. Learning and the Brain has two conferences per year, and the topic for the spring conference was: Focused minds: enhancing student attention, memory and motivation. For three days I listened to neuroscientists, MDs, psychologists and educational researchers explore the connections between the brain and attention, memory and motivation. Many of their ideas have application to our work with students and shed some light on what’s happening inside the brains of our students as they struggle to learn and master new concepts.

Selection and Prediction: Turning Up the Dopamine!

Dr. Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist, middle school teacher, and presenter at Learning and the Brain, loves dopamine. She just can’t get enough of the stuff! And she knows that her students are dopamine junkies as well. Dopamine is one of the most important neurotransmitters in the realm of attention, inhibition and focus. Whatever stimulus gives our brain a splash of dopamine, our attention will surely go there.

Dr. Willis makes the point that attention is a process of selection. Before anything can be learned, it has to be selected by the brain. She showed her audience a really fun video to demonstrate the power of attention and selection. I found similar videos posted online.

Dr. Willis showed off her neurology chops and outlined the brain structures that are involved in attending. The primary player is the Reticular Activating System (RAS) which plays an essential role in arousal and awareness and helps regulate the cortex, the center of rational thought. The RAS, which has a limited capacity to process information, is on the lookout for several things. First and foremost, the RAS is highly alert to novel inputs, thereby allowing us to identify threats. If you’re on a hike, you may attend to a series of inputs: tree, tree, tree, tree, bear. Bear!!!! Novel input!! Pay attention!!!

Clearly, this can come in handy. If no threatening stimuli are present, the RAS will then select inputs based on curiosity, pleasure or the promise of something good. “Hmmm, this might be worth pursuing,” says the RAS. If there is nothing threatening and nothing stimulating, the RAS will begin to look inside for stimulation in order to keep itself occupied. If you are giving a lecture to a bunch of students who don’t seem tuned in to you, know that the “students are attending to sensory input, just not yours.”

One of Willis’ most interesting ideas has to do with the power of predictions to keep the RAS tuned in and turned on. Willis argues that making predictions is one of the most powerful ways to maintain students’ attention and help them encode material into long-term memory.

Why are predictions so powerful and stimulating? It has to do with the dopamine circuitry. When you make a prediction, and it is correct, dopamine (the main neurotransmitter of the executive functioning system) is released from the nucleus accumbens, (a big ole’ sack of dopamine AKA the pleasure center) which finds its way up to the prefrontal cortex. Correct predictions jack up the dopamine levels, (more pleasure!), and incorrect predictions decrease the dopamine levels. This encourages the system to rewire the neural pathways to make better predictions the next time. Making correct predictions leads to learning, changes in the neural networks (neuroplasticity!) and the strengthening of those new connections.

So what does this mean? You need to get your students guessing and predicting. Put them in situations where they have to take some risks and stake out a position: get them to put their egos on the line. This makes intuitive sense. Are there any gamblers out there? Have you ever made a prediction, made a bet, and then found yourself disinterested by the outcome? Unlikely. More likely you were jacked up on dopamine after you placed the bet and eagerly anticipating the outcome.

I can relate this to my recent experience of our March Madness office pool. Normally I’m the farthest thing from a sports fan. For the sake of office camaraderie, I agreed to plunk down my $2 for the office pool and fill out a bracket. Holy cow! What a difference that made! The sheer power of filling out a bracket, making a prediction and a tiny wager: suddenly my dopamine system was plugged in. Last year, I didn’t watch a single game. This year I watched numerous games, checked the scores and my ESPN bracket daily, trash-talked on our ESPN office pool page, and even followed score updates on my iPhone, getting the play-by-play. Making a simple prediction turned me into an avid sports-fan, if only for three weeks.

It seems that when you can get the dopamine flowing, many good things follow. Researchers have found that increasing dopamine levels leads to heightened pleasure, curiosity, inspiration, motivation, persistence, perseverance, and creative imagination.

Dr. Willis mentioned other ways, in addition to using predictions, to keep the novelty and the dopamine flowing in the classroom. Engage the students’ senses: use photos and other visual images; write with different colored pens to communicate a hierarchy of informational importance; make videos online, make puzzles, show your kids fun images. She has more tools online at her website.

ADHD: It’s All About Inhibition

Like Dr. Willis, Dr. Martha B. Denckla is a dopamine fan, but her primary focus is on inhibition. She feels ADHD is more appropriately conceptualized as Attention Allocation Disorder, recognizing that there’s certainly no deficit in attention for students with ADHD; the attention is simply misallocated. When students are engaging in intrinsically rewarding activities, it is much easier for them to allocate and sustain attention. When students experience mastery over tasks, dopamine levels rise.

The challenge for ADHD students is inhibition. Inhibition tends to develop with age. Young children have a much harder time inhibiting their bodies, just as they have a harder time inhibiting their attention.

Below is a hilarious video of children struggling to inhibit themselves, which replicates Walter Mischel’s now celebrated Marshmallow Study (one marshmallow now, or two in 15 minutes). Self-regulation and the ability to inhibit are not inborn, but they develop over time.

Denckla provided other examples to illustrate her point about the stage development of inhibition. For example, when children are starting to write, they often move their tongues, echoing the movement of their hands. When children are asked to walk on their heels or on the outside edges of their feet, they will also hold their hands in a way to echo the movements of their feet.

I tried two of Denckla’s experiments with my 30-month old nephew, Elliott. I asked him to touch his thumb and index finger together, and he was unable to inhibit the other 3 fingers from moving. I also asked him to lift his left hand and touch his thumb and index finger together, then his thumb and his middle finger, then his thumb and his ring finger and so on, simulating counting on one hand. And like clockwork, as he did this “counting task” with his left hand, his right hand unconsciously echoed the movements.

Over time, Elliott will (hopefully) be able to inhibit these motor impulses and be more specific in his motor movements, just as he will eventually be able to inhibit his attention and gain more mastery over his cognitions. But for children with ADHD, the ability to inhibit motor reflexes and attention is greatly delayed. The inability to inhibit, which first manifests physically, especially in boys, will later manifest in impulsivity in other areas, including cognitive areas. For those kids who struggle with inhibitory tasks, it will take nearly all of their cognitive resources just to sit still. According to Denckla, if you let them wiggle and jiggle, move and fidget, they will no longer have to inhibit their motor control and will be able to better focus their cognitive energies.

Denckla outlined the development cycle for our various brain systems, which have a great deal of overlap and interaction. Motor control lives next to cognitive control, which lives next to emotional display control. These systems come to maturity sequentially. Motor control tops out at 15 years +/- 2 years. Cognitive control tops out at 25 +/- 2 years. Emotional Control tops at 32 +-/2. By the time you are 34, you should be humming along, with all systems fully mature: at least according to the brain researchers.

When it comes to the quality of attention experienced by students with ADHD, they have more of a “radar sweeping” or scanning kind of attention than do most other children. Thom Hartmann, offered the hypothesis that this scanning kind of attention may have been highly adaptive when we humans were in our hunter/gatherer mode. But in a classroom, a different kind of attention is required: the ability to narrow and focus your attention like a spotlight. Students with ADHD can certainly narrow their attention on a target that is intrinsically interesting or rewarding. However, if the target is not inherently interesting, these students will seem quite distractible. Denckla argues that if we give these students gratifying mastery experiences and choose intrinsically motivating topics whenever possible, we will have a greater success in activating their dopamine systems and engaging their full attention.

ADHD: It’s Not Just For the Boys!

Dr. Patricia O. Quinn, the current director of the Center for Girls and Women with ADHD in Washington, DC, encouraged the conference members to reassess their gendered views about ADHD. During the ‘80s and ‘90s, the primary model for ADHD focused on white hyperactive males in elementary school. I remember well my hyperactive white male friends who acted as if they were “driven by a motor” before popping their daily doses of Ritalin. I always liked hanging out with those kids! Man did they have energy! And researchers focused their own energy on these “energizer bunny-esque” boys, the low-hanging fruit of the ADHD landscape. Accordingly, of the 1500+ studies conducted on ADHD before the year 2000, only 20 studies specifically studied girls with ADHD.

The reason girls were so frequently overlooked in early ADHD research, according to Dr. Quinn, is twofold. First, the inattentive type of ADHD is more difficult to recognize than the hyperactive type, which is more common among boys. Second, girls tend to compensate better than boys. Generally girls are better than boys at getting help and recruiting social support to compensate for their attentional deficits. And even if it takes them more time, girls will do the work necessary to maintain their grades: sleep and social fulfillment will frequently be sacrificed to the altar of academic performance. I have had many moms tell me how their daughters work until the wee hours of the night, and still cannot finish their assignments. These girls feel a strong desire to please their teachers and their parents, and this frequently leads to feelings of pressure and anxiety to perform.

For girls with ADHD, impulsivity, inattentiveness and executive function deficits may persist and become problematic. Overwhelmed by demands for organization, planning and time management, many girls with ADHD will begin to struggle in middle school, feel overwhelmed in high school, and no longer be able to compensate for their ADHD by the time they reach college. Anxiety and internal distress may result from their inability to keep up with the increasing demands placed on them. This may lead to decreased feelings of self-esteem, isolation, and even depression. According to Dr. Quinn, 60% of the anxiety and depressive symptoms experienced by these girls are reduced significantly when their ADHD is treated.

ADHD For Everyone!

So ADHD is not just for the boys. And it’s not just for the girls. It turns out it may be for us adults too! The drug companies have been aggressively pushing adults to consider if they too might benefit from an ADHD medication. I remember in 2005 when a professional colleague and friend in his late 30s told me he had recently been diagnosed with ADHD and was given a prescription for one of the stimulant medications. He hoped that the meds would help him function better at work and in his social life.

I was taken aback. How exactly are we defining high functioning? And what constitutes the diagnostic criteria: “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning?” Are we putting too much trust in the pharmaceutical companies who are marketing their products aggressively to an uninformed public? Has the medical community cast its net too wide with its diagnostic criteria for ADHD? Are doctors too eager to prescribe the meds and insurance companies too eager to reimburse for this diagnosis? Or are we creating more diagnoses by simply demanding more of our children and ourselves?

In my line of work I get to work with many students who have received an ADHD diagnosis. Though the DSM IV TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; fourth edition, text-revisited) notes the prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder at 3-7% of school-age children, of the students I’ve worked with since 2001, I’d estimate 20% of my students have come to me with an ADHD diagnosis. One of my tutors mentioned that every student she has worked with this year has been diagnosed with ADHD. Some of my students resist the ADHD label and want no accommodations for their “disorder” while others heartily identify with it. I remember as a camp counselor and unit-head, hearing my campers competing with each other, comparing their dosages of Adderall, Concerta and Ritalin. Who’s the king of the ADHD? Who wants the title?

The Wrap-up

However we conceptualize attention deficits, and no matter our political stance towards the increasing diagnosis of ADHD, as educators, we must find ways to serve all of our students—male and female, attentionally endowed and attentionally challenged—and help them improve their own academic outcomes.

For those students who are struggling with attentional issues (and for some students this is very real, and can even be debilitating) we must help them find strategies to self-regulate their focus and attention. If we explain to children how their brain systems function—how their attention, memory, and motivation systems actually operate—I feel like we can set these students up with information that will help them help themselves. And as educators, let’s work to stimulate as much dopamine as possible in the classroom through engaging lesson plans, intrinsically motivating tasks, more choice, more challenge, more predictions and more stimulation for our students. Now that we know more about how the brain works, let’s use that information to better serve our students and help them become better learners.

Because the motor systems and the cognitive systems overlap in the brain, learning to train our bodies and perfect motor movements–using attention, concentration, inhibition–has a profound impact on our cognitive systems. Additionally, sustained exercise gives our brains a fabulous chemical cocktail–serotonin, endogenous morphine, dopamine–known to diminish anxiety and depression and heighten feelings of general well-being. For those looking to heighten their focus, regulate their stress and anxiety levels and improve emotional regulation, there are few activities as valuable as rigorous aerobic exercise.

As schools struggle with increasing academic demands and shrinking resources, many are tempted to cut PE programs, which seem to have no bearing on CRCT scores or Regent’s exam scores, the metrics against which they are evaluated. However, in cutting out PE and consigning students to 7 hours behind a desk, they are doing a great disservice to their students and undermining their own educational objectives.

One school district west of Chicago, the Naperville School District, rather than cutting its PE program, completely reinvigorated it, implementing a program of rigorous aerobic activity for its 19,000 students. Each morning the students participated in 40 minutes of aerobic exercise and, for 10 minutes, kept their heart rates elevated between 145-185 beats per minute. The vigorous exercise yielded positive physical outcomes: the obesity rate plummeted to 3%, compared to the 30% rate experienced by surrounding communities. Possibly more surprising is the effect the program had on the students’ brains. Math and science scores subsequently increased, and behavioral problems decreased. For those students diagnosed with ADHD, the benefits were significant: focus increased and emotional regulation improved. All of the findings are outlined in Harvard Professor, John Ratey’s book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. The research provides a compelling argument for keeping physical activity at the forefront of education. Take care of the body, and you consequently take care of the brain.

Dr. William Stixrud, a researcher interested in the mind-body educational connection explored in the Naperville study, was one of the most entertaining keynote speakers at the Learning and the Brain conference.  He jumpstarted his lecture, “Why Movement and Meditation Are Important For Attention, Motivation and Learning,” by asking the audience to stand up and engage in a series of exercises, designed to activate both our brains and our bodies.  He promised us that if we did his exercises and risked looking silly, we’d all stay fully engaged and awake during his presentation.  For 60 seconds we did the Brain Gym^TM “cross-crawl,” touching our right elbows to our left knees and then our left elbows to our right knees and then repeating. It was fun, and, for what it’s worth, I did stay awake and interested during his entire presentation.

Dr. Stixrud spoke of the challenges facing today’s high school students and their impact on students’ cognitive abilities. High school students are expected to take on more and more college level courses, and the level of competition in school is rising to new levels. Consequently, students are paying the price. For today’s adolescents, base cortisol (stress hormone) levels are up, and, for many, sleep deprivation is becoming the norm.  The combination of increased stress and fatigue leads to a lower level of mental efficiency to handle the heightened course load required of most high school students.

By the time students arrive at college, many have reached a state of near exhaustion. In College of the Overwhelmed, the chief of Mental Health services at Harvard, Dr. Richard D. Kadison, and health and science author, Theresa Foy DiGeronimo, M.Ed, paint a bleak picture of the mental health of our college-aged students. Kadison and DiGeronimo’s research reveals that during their college careers 50% of students will become seriously depressed, and 10% will consider suicide. Students will use a variety of coping strategies to handle the stress levels, from substance abuse to self- mutilation (cutting, which has reached proportions as high as 20% at universities such as Princeton according to a 2006 study.)

In order to counter the stresses that high school and college level students face and give students the best chance to succeed, Dr. Stixrud advocates recruiting the body to help the mind regulate. For some students the control and focus acquired through dance will help stimulate executive functioning. For others, vigorous aerobic exercise will yield many positive outcomes, as outlined in the Naperville research. For those willing to try something completely different, mindfulness and transcendental meditation will allow students to quiet and reorient their minds in a more coherent, organized way. Dr. Stixrud and his colleagues have found the use of meditation decreases anxiety disorders and depression, facilitates stress regulation, and decreases symptoms of ADHD.

As the frontiers of science are revealing to us, our bodies can both nourish and regulate our minds. If we seek to achieve a greater degree of mastery over our neurochemistry, our mood, our ability to self-regulate, we would be wise to ally ourselves with our bodies. For students who are looking for an academic advantage, and a little inner-peace to boot, they may need to look no further than the running shoes or the yoga mats in their closets.