A study was unveiled last week suggesting that reading and math skills at age seven accurately predict your socio-economic status at the age of 42. You can read about it here and here.

I’m not sure this is that big of a surprise to anybody, considering the impact of poverty on students and their families (not to mention growing income and wealth inequality that results in reduced upward mobility — Note: the study is based on students in the UK, but they certainly face many of the same challenges that we face in the U.S.).

What was surprising — and disappointing — to me was that in their commentary about the study (though not in the study itself) they emphasize that the possible cause for their finding is genetic.

How could they be so oblivious to poverty, wealth inequality, and possible racism?

I often write about research studies from various fields and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature:

Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages is from TIME Magazine. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.

Walk-to-burn-calorie menu ‘diet aid’ is from The BBC. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Nutrition & Food Safety.

Being Sad Makes You More Impatient comes from The Harvard Business Review. It shares a study that found people who felt sad had great problems with self-control. I’m adding this to The Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control.

Black Men’s College Success Depends on Grit, Not Just Grades, Study Finds is from Sarah Sparks at Education Week. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The Importance Of “Grit.”

Fostering A Culture Of Gratitude comes from The Harvard Business Review. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On “Gratitude.”

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I’ve written a lot about self-control (see The Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control and lesson plans in my books).

A year ago I wrote about a newer study suggesting the ability to resist texts was the new “marshmallow test (the famous one that you’ll read a lot about in previous paragraph’s links). I also included a brief comment about it in my new book, Self-Driven Learning.

Just in the past week, others have begun to pick-up on that study and new similar ones. Those articles provide much more substance to the idea, and I’ll certainly be incorporating them in a new supplemental lesson plan related to the marshmallow experiment.

Here are their links:

You’ll Never Learn! Students can’t resist multitasking, and it’s impairing their memory is by Annie Murphy Paul and appeared in Slate.

Brain, Interrupted appeared in The New York Times.

The evidence demonstrating the dangers of extrinsic rewards and the importance of helping people develop intrinsic motivation is pretty overwhelming at this point (see The Best Posts & Articles On “Motivating” Students).

The Harvard Business Review has just “piled it on” even more in a post titled Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research.

Though the focus of the article is on monetary compensation for work, it’s clearly applicable to motivation of all kinds, including grades, points, etc. in the classroom. The majority of the article is a recap, and a good one, of research that I’ve previously written about — either in this blog or in my books, Helping Students Motivate Themselves and Self-Driven Learning (and, of course, in Dan Pink’s book, Drive). Having it come with a Harvard pedigree, though, can certainly help bolster one’s case.

The last third of the article, however, highlights a newer study that came out just a few months ago. It analyzed data from 200,000 employees:

The results showed that employee engagement levels were three times more strongly related to intrinsic than extrinsic motives, but that both motives tend to cancel each other out. In other words, when employees have little interest in external rewards, their intrinsic motivation has a substantial positive effect on their engagement levels. However, when employees are focused on external rewards, the effects of intrinsic motives on engagement are significantly diminished. This means that employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money). Quite simply, you’re more likely to like your job if you focus on the work itself, and less likely to enjoy it if you’re focused on money.

The article goes on to discuss another study from a few years ago:

Intrinsic motivation is also a stronger predictor of job performance than extrinsic motivation — so it is feasible to expect higher financial rewards to inhibit not only intrinsic motivation, but also job performance. The more people focus on their salaries, the less they will focus on satisfying their intellectual curiosity, learning new skills, or having fun, and those are the very things that make people perform best.

The fact that there is little evidence to show that money motivates us, and a great deal of evidence to suggest that it actually demotivates us, supports the idea that that there may be hidden costs associated with rewards.

These excerpts certainly support what I, and others, have written about the importance of learning goals over performance goals (see “Learning Goals” versus “Performance Goals”).

I’m adding this post to The Best Posts & Articles On “Motivating” Students.

I’m also adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea.

I often write about research studies from various field and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature:

Teachers’ gestures boost math learning is from Eureka Alert. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Students Using Gestures & Physical Movement To Help With Learning.

Changing Teens’ Mindsets on Social Aggression is a useful Ed Week article. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Helping Our Students Develop A “Growth Mindset.”

Here are five new studies related to sleep that I’m adding to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep:

Sleep Reinforces Learning: Children’s Brains Transform Subconsciously Learned Material Into Active Knowledge is from Science Daily.

Less Sleep Leads to More Eating and More Weight Gain, According to New Study is from Science Daily.

Sleep Less, Eat More, Gain Weight is from NPR.

Lost Sleep Can Lead to Weight Gain is from The New York Times.

How much is enough? Help your kids get a good night’s sleep is from NBC.

I often write about research studies from various field and how they can be applied to the classroom. I write individual posts about ones that I think are especially significant, and will continue to do so. However, so many studies are published that it’s hard to keep up. So I’ve started writing a “round-up” of some of them each week or every other week as a regular feature:

Homework or Not? That is the (Research) Question is from District Administration. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Homework Issues.

Teenagers’ book choices ‘go for easier reads’ is a BBC story on a recent study. I’m adding it to My Best Posts On Books: Why They’re Important & How To Help Students Select, Read, Write & Discuss Them.

Sacrificing Sleep Makes For Run-Down Teens — And Parents is an NPR report on some recent research. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Helping Teens Learn About The Importance Of Sleep.

Stress-Busting Smiles is from The Wall Street Journal. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Teens & Stress.

Wrapped up in a Book: The Role of Emotional Engagement in Reading is form PLOS blogs. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On “Becoming What We Read.”

SEDL often publishes very useful research briefings, but I wouldn’t put their new one on formative assessment into that category.

It does provide excellent research that any teacher can use to support his/her use of formative assessment in the classroom. However, it is surprisingly devoid of any practical hints on how to employ the practice.

Since it’s always nice to have back-up evidence, I’m still adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Formative Assessment. You’ll find lots of practical tips there.

Teen mentors inspire healthier choices in younger children is a report on a new study demonstrating the effectiveness of older students mentoring younger ones.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources On The Value & Practice Of Having Older Students Mentoring Younger Ones.

As regular readers know, I’m keenly interested in this topic because of what we’ll be doing next year. Instead of my teaching my usual double-block ninth-grade English class, I’ll instead be teaching two classes of twelfth-grade English. In addition to the regular twelfth-grade curriculum, several days each month my students will be teaching the life skills lessons found in my books to students in my colleague Katie Hull’s double-block ninth-grade class. They will also be serving as mentors to the ninth-graders.

You can read more about it in the previously mentioned “The Best…” list, and will be able to follow along with how it goes all next year in my blog entries….

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A few minutes ago I published a post that repeated my admiration for Carol Dweck’s work, one of numerous posts I’ve written sharing that perspective.

However, I did publish one a couple of years ago that was critical of an op ed piece she did in The New York Times questioning extensive research that found self-control to be a limited resource that needed to be replenished. Dr. Dweck suggested that operating under that belief was contrary to her rightfully admired perspective on having a growth-mindset. In other words, it only needs to be replenished if you believe it can be depleted.

As I wrote in that post:

I’m all for having a “growth mindset,” which is another concept that Professor Dweck is known for and which I use with my students. However, especially with adolescents, it seems to me that we need to recognize that our students are not Supermen or Superwomen, and it’s unlikely that many — if any — have an unlimited level of self-control. My students and I have found Professor Baumeister’s research very useful and I have often seen it work effectively.  The key, of course, is that we need to help our students develop effective strategies to replenish their capacity for self-control.

So why am I bringing this up now? Well, another researcher whom I admire, Heidi Grant Halvorson, has just written a widely-seen article with the title How You Can Benefit from All Your Stress. She makes an argument for stress similar to Dr. Dweck’s on self-control.

Comments on that piece make many of the same points I would make in a critique, though more eloquently than I would.

I believe that there are much more effective coping ways I can help students at our 100% free lunch (who also receive free breakfast and dinner) school to deal with stress than encouraging them to look at it as a way to grow (and an extensive lesson plan in my new book provides even more details).

I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that:

your mindset about stress may be the most important predictor of how it affects you.

We’re all familiar with the saying, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, than every problem looks like a nail.”

Photo Credit: Matthew via Compfight

Helping our students develop a growth mindset can be one of the most important life skills lessons we can teach. But let’s also recognize that it’s not the solution to everything.

As regular readers of this blog and my books now, I’m not a believer in regularly using rewards as a motivating tool. As a result, I’m always looking for research on the topic.

This week, the media has been awash with reports of a new Mayo Clinic study that supposedly shows that people can loose weight successfully by being paid to do so.

There have been lots of reprints of the original AP story on it. However, many, if not most, omitted some key lines from the original Associated Press article on the study:

Incentives are “not like training wheels where people learn healthy habits and then will continue them on their own” – you have to keep them up for them to work, said one study leader, Dr. Steve Driver of Mayo in Rochester, Minn.

“You have to prove these schemes work otherwise it’s just money down the drain,” said Eleni Mantzari, who studies financial incentives in health at King’s College London. People often revert to unhealthy habits once the financial motivation is gone, she said.

Both of these often omitted lines point out the commonly-agreed problem with incentives — once the rewards go away, so does the behavior.

One other  AP original line that appeared to be deleted by even more of outlets that reprinted it was the information that Dr. Driver, who, based on the above quote seems to understand the shortcomings of extrinsic motivators, nevertheless is a part owner and staffperson of a company that sells a SmartPhone app that…provides financial incentives for people to exercise.

Here’s news from Scientific American:

Learning a new language can grow one’s perspective. Now scientists find that learning languages grows parts of the brain.

Scientists studied the brains of students in the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, who are required to learn new languages at an alarmingly fast rate. Many must become fluent in Arabic, Russian and the Persian dialect Dari in just 13 months. The researchers compared the brains of these students to the brains of medical students who also have to learn a tremendous amount in a very short period of time, but without the focus on languages.

The brains of the language learners exhibited significant new growth in the hippocampus and in parts of the cerebral cortex. The medical students’ brains showed no observed growth.

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Showing Students That They Make Their Brain Stronger By Learning and to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.