Students learn better when they think they're going to have to teach the material

Researchers say they've uncovered a simple technique that improves students' memory for passages of text. All that's required is to tell the students that they're going to have to teach the material to someone else.

Fifty-six undergrads were split into two groups. One group were told that they had 10 minutes to study a 1500-word passage about fictional depictions of The Charge of The Light Brigade, and that they would be tested on it afterwards. The other group were similarly given 10 minutes to study the text, but they were told that afterwards they would have to teach the content to another student. Neither group was allowed to take notes.

In fact, 25 minutes after the study period was over, both groups were tested on the passage. Specifically they had to recall as much information as possible from the article, and then they faced specific questions about the content. The students who thought they were going to teach the material recalled more facts from the text, and they did so more quickly. They showed a specific advantage for the main points in the text, and their recall was also better organised, tending to reflect the structure of the original text.

A second study was similar but this time two groups of students studied an article about neurobiology and the test that followed took the form of "fill in the blank" questions based on verbatim quotes from the article. This time the students who thought they were going to have to teach the article showed a slight advantage for recalling the main points, although they didn't recall more information overall.

John Nestojko and his colleagues acknowledge that more research is needed to confirm and expand on these results (especially given the more equivocal second study), but they said their findings hint at a simple strategy for improving students' learning. They think that cultivating in learners the expectation of having to teach the material leads them to adopt strategies "such as organising and weighing the importance of different concepts in the to-be-taught material, focusing on main points, and thinking about how information fits together" that are known to boost memory performance.

In a school situation it probably wouldn't be practical for every student to go through the process of teaching learned material, but the expectation of having to teach the material could easily be fostered by announcing that one or more randomly chosen students will play the teaching role. "We hope the present findings encourage future researchers to discover other such potentially easy-to-implement ways of leading students to adopt more effective learning strategies," the researchers said.

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Nestojko JF, Bui DC, Kornell N, & Bjork EL (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & cognition, 42 (7), 1038-48 PMID: 24845756

--Further reading--
Evidence-backed ways to help you study.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Can this simple strategy reduce children's anxiety about school tests?

The sad thing about children's exam nerves is that their fears often become self-fulfilling. Too much anxiety and they can end up under-performing relative to their abilities.

A team of psychologists led by Fred Paas and colleagues has taken a cognitive psychology approach to this situation. Children have a certain amount of "working memory" capacity, they say, and it's either used up by the task at hand, or by external pressures, such as intrusive, worrying thoughts.
Paas and his team have explored the benefits of a simple strategy that's designed to help children focus more on the school test, and less on worrying.

Over 100 children (aged 11-12) at three Greek primary schools sat a maths test. Stress was ratcheted up with a timer (three minutes per question) and a prize for the best performer in each class. Crucially, the researchers gave half the students one minute at the test start to skim through all 10 of the maths problems - this was the simple intervention. The researchers said this should reduce anxiety and boost confidence by "activating the relevant schemas for solving the test problems". The remaining students acted as controls and had an extra minute to answer the first problem.

The good news is that the children who took a minute to skim through the questions performed better on average than the control students, and this was true regardless of their tendency to experience test-related anxiety. Because the students' self-reported levels of mental exertion didn't vary across the control and intervention conditions, the researchers said this shows the skimming ahead strategy boosted performance by aiding the children's efficiency, helping them focus more on the task, and less on worry.

The problem with this interpretation is that the intervention helped all children, not just the anxious, and what's more, the children's self-reported anxiety levels were no different in the intervention condition versus the control condition. From a practical perspective, if our aim is to help anxious children overcome their disadvantage relative to the non-anxious, this intervention won't help. So, the skimming ahead strategy certainly seems like a simple method for boosting children's test performance, but it's not clear that this is specifically a way to reduce test anxiety.

The researchers disagree. They concluded: "Although further studies need to be conducted to show whether the strategy generalises to other topics, such as language, or that a longer period to look ahead will have a greater impact on anxiety and performance, the strategy seems very promising in enabling students to perform up to their maximum potential."

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Mavilidi, M., Hoogerheide, V., & Paas, F. (2014). A Quick and Easy Strategy to Reduce Test Anxiety and Enhance Test Performance Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28 (5), 720-726 DOI: 10.1002/acp.3058

--further reading--
Simple psychological intervention boosts school performance of ethnic minority students

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Pupils benefit from praise, but should teachers give it to them publicly or privately?

There's a best practice guide for teachers, produced by the Association of School Psychologists in the US, that states praise is best given to pupils in private. This advice is not based on experimental research - there hasn't been any - but on surveys of student preferences, and on the rationale that pupils could be embarrassed by receiving praise in public.

Now, in the first study of its kind, John Blaze and his colleagues have systematically compared the effect of public and private praise (also known as "loud" and "quiet" praise) on classroom behaviour. They found that praise had a dramatic beneficial effect on pupils' behaviour, and it didn't matter whether the praise was private or public.

The research was conducted at four high-school public classrooms in rural south-eastern United States (the equivalent to state schools in the UK). The classes were mixed-sex, with a mixture of mostly Caucasian and African American pupils, with between 16 and 25 pupils in each class. The children were aged 14 to 16. Three of the teachers were teaching English, the other taught Transition to Algebra.

The teachers were given training in appropriate praise: it must be contingent on good behaviour; make clear to the pupil why they are being praised; immediate; and effort-based. During the test sessions of teaching, the teachers carried a buzzer on their belt that prompted them, once every two minutes, to deliver praise to one of their pupils, either loudly so the whole class could hear (in the loud condition) or discreetly, by a whisper in the ear or pat on the shoulder, so that hopefully only the child knew they were being praised (in the quiet condition). For comparison, there were also baseline teaching sessions in which the teachers simply carried out their teaching in their usual style.

Trained observers stationed for 20-minute sessions in the classrooms monitored the teachers' praise-giving and the behaviour of the pupils across the different conditions. They found that frequent praise increased pupils' on-task behaviours, such as reading or listening to the teacher, by 31 per cent compared with baseline, and this improvement didn't vary according to whether the praise was private or public. Frequent praise of either manner also reduced naughty behaviours by nearly 20 per cent.

Blaze and his team said that the debate over praise will likely continue, but they stated their results are clear: "both loud and quiet forms of praise are effective tools that can have dramatic effects at the secondary level." A weakness of the study is that the researchers didn't monitor the teachers' use of reprimands, which likely reduced as they spent more time delivering praise.

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Blaze JT, Olmi DJ, Mercer SH, Dufrene BA, & Tingstom DH (2014). Loud versus quiet praise: A direct behavioral comparison in secondary classrooms. Journal of school psychology, 52 (4), 349-60 PMID: 25107408

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

What is “Cultural IQ” training and does it really work?

IQ was once the only game in town. Now it rubs shoulders with a gaggle of human ability measures such as Emotional Intelligence, Empathy Quotient, and Rationality Quotient. The increasingly interconnected and diverse world of work has magnified interest in another newcomer: CQ, or cultural intelligence. With it come courses promising to prepare their students to work with colleagues, partners and customers who have different values and norms. A new paper investigates how effective this training really is.

The researchers, led by Jacob Eisenberg, investigated cultural awareness training that had a narrow, academic focus, predicting that its impact should be limited to the more intellectual aspects of CQ: cognitive CQ (spotting trends and gathering explicit knowledge on how cultures work), and metacognitive CQ (awareness of what you do and don’t know about other cultures). The training involved lectures and seminars led by professors in the manner of a traditional academic program; these cost-effective methods reflect those typically used in this educational industry.

The first study involved students (mostly Austrians) on a Study Abroad programme intended to increase their language knowledge, expose them to different cultures, and introduce them to different teaching methods. Students on this programme also completed a 3-day cultural management course. At the end of the course, the students rated themselves significantly improved at cognitive and meta-cognitive elements, but not at the other aspects of CQ, including motivational CQ (the amount of emotional resources put towards cultural sensitivity), and behavioural CQ (adopting behaviours such as appropriate tone of voice or recognising personal space).

This finding was replicated in a second study with a more diverse sample of students from 46 nationalities, who received short slots of training spread over several months as part of their International Management Masters.

Eisenberg’s team predicted that participants who had lived in more countries (with minimum stays of six months) should have higher CQ than their more sheltered peers, but that training should close this gap. This was partially borne out. In Study 1, residence history was more strongly correlated with pre-training than post-training levels of cognitive and metacognitive CQ. Meanwhile, the correlation between residence history and motivational CQ was unchanged by the training, strengthening the hypothesis that academic CQ training influences only cognitive aspects. In Study 2, which showed generally weaker effects (perhaps these more international students had less to gain from the training) these trends didn’t reach significance.

The second study also included a no-training control group, who failed to show the benefits enjoyed by the CQ training group. However, it’s a shame that the matching was poor - the controls were retested after three weeks, whereas for the training group eight weeks on average elapsed before retesting. Perhaps the CQ boost was only found in the training group because they spent five extra weeks on their Masters course, surrounded by students from diverse cultures, before they were finally tested?

Looking across the evidence, there’s a good case for claiming that cognitive elements of cultural intelligence can be selectively developed through academic training, including being conscious of how much you don’t yet know about other cultures. But such training doesn’t seem to help people to actually alter behaviour, nor to maintain an appetite for ambiguous cultural environments, arguably even more vital to adapting to a culture. Methods matter, and if you want people to feel or act differently, traditional teaching seems unlikely to be enough, however convenient it may be for the industry to provide.
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Eisenberg, J., Lee, H., Bruck, F., Brenner, B., Claes, M., Mironski, J., & Bell, R. (2013). Can Business Schools Make Students Culturally Competent? Effects of Cross-Cultural Management Courses on Cultural Intelligence Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12 (4), 603-621 DOI: 10.5465/amle.2012.0022

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

As soon as they can read, children trust text instructions over spoken information

As adults, we've learned that simple text-based instructions are usually trustworthy. Imagine - if a stranger tells us to turn next left for London, but we come upon a street sign that states the opposite, most of us would probably assume the stranger had made a mistake, and we'd follow the sign.

In a new paper, researchers led by Kathleen Corriveau have investigated young children's trust in instructions delivered orally, versus those originating in written text. Their finding is that as soon as children have rudimentary reading skills, they trust written text over spoken instruction.

The research involved a Y-shaped piece of apparatus: two differently coloured tubes leading to a cup beneath. One tube was always blocked. Dozens of boys and girls aged three to six had to decide in which tube to place a marble, in the hope it would reach the cup beneath, so that they'd earn a sticker.

To help them, the children received instructions from two puppets. On each trial, one puppet simply spoke their instruction (e.g. "I say blue. Choose the blue tube") whereas the other puppet opened an envelope in which was written the colour of the other tube (e.g. "This says red. Choose the red one"). The children didn't get feedback on their performance until the end of the study, so they couldn't use results to judge which puppet to trust.

Regardless of age, the children who couldn't yet read were indiscriminate in whether they chose to trust the purely oral advice, or whether to trust the puppet who read the text instruction. By contrast, the children with some reading ability showed a clear preference to trust the puppet who read from the envelope, choosing the tube they recommended over 75 per cent of the time.

Two further studies cleared up some ambiguities. For instance, it was found that young readers prefer to trust a puppet who reads the instruction from text, than oral advice from a puppet who gets their information from a whisper in the ear. In other words, the young readers weren't simply swayed by the fact the text puppet was drawing on a secondary source. Young readers also trusted instruction from written text over information conveyed in a coloured symbol. This shows they're specifically trusting of written text, not just any form of permanent, external information.

Corriveau's team said their results showed that once children learn to read, "they rapidly come to regard the written word as a particularly authoritative source of information about how to act in the world." They added that in some ways this result is difficult to explain. Young readers are exposed to a good deal of fantasy and fiction in written form, so why should they be so trusting of written instruction? Perhaps they are used to seeing adults act on the basis of written information - such as maps, menus, and recipes - but then again, pre-readers will also have had such experiences. This suggests there's something special about the process of learning to read that leads children to perceive written instruction as authoritative.

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Corriveau, K., Einav, S., Robinson, E., & Harris, P. (2014). To the letter: Early readers trust print-based over oral instructions to guide their actions British Journal of Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjdp.12046

--further reading--
Young children trust kindness over expertise

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Inflated praise for your children: an 'incredibly' bad idea?

When you’ve done something good, or performed a task well, it feels great to get some praise for it. And parents and teachers, especially in Western cultures, are encouraged to dole out praise to children in an increasingly generous manner. A drawing might not just be 'good', it might be 'incredible'. That song wasn’t just 'beautiful', it was 'epic'. Such praise is often given with the best intentions, particularly in the belief that positive feedback, especially for children who don’t have much faith in themselves, might help to raise their self-esteem. But does it work?

Recent research by Eddie Brummelman and colleagues has tried to shed light on this question. In three studies, they looked at how adults dish out praise to children in both an experimental and naturalistic setting, and how children with varying levels of self-esteem take it. Their results suggest that overly positive praise might not have the intended effect for children who have low self-esteem.

In the first experiment, Brummelman’s team asked a group of adults to read short descriptions of hypothetical children, described as either having high or low self-esteem. People were told about something that the child had done – say, solving a maths problem, or performing a song. After reading through the description, they were asked to write down any praise that they might give the child. Brummelman’s team found that about a quarter of the praise was overly positive (e.g. "that sounded magnificent!"), and that people were more likely to give more extremely positive praise to the children who had low self-esteem.

The researchers then tried to replicate these findings in a more naturalistic setting, by observing how parents interacted with their children when giving them a series of maths exercises at home. Brummelman and colleagues found a similar result to their laboratory experiment – about a quarter of the time, praise was overly inflated, and children who had lower self-esteem were given more inflated praise than those who had higher self-esteem.

'You made an incredibly beautiful painting!'

In order to figure out whether this actually mattered or not, in the final experiment Brummelman’s team looked at how being given praise impacted on one particular aspect of children’s behaviour – challenge seeking. Two hundred and forty children first completed a questionnaire to assess their level of self-esteem, and then were asked to draw a copy of van Gogh’s Wild Roses. The children were told that a professional painter would then assess their drawing, and tell them what he thought of it. In reality, the painter didn’t exist, and children were simply given inflated praise, non-inflated praise, or no praise at all. Afterwards, the children were shown four complex and four easy pictures, and asked to have a go at reproducing some of them. Critically, they were told that if they picked the difficult picture, they might make a lot of mistakes, but they might also learn lots. In other words, the number of difficult pictures the children chose to draw was taken as a measure of challenge seeking.

Brummelman’s team found that if children with lower self-esteem were given overly-inflated praise, they were less inclined to seek a challenge in the second task – they would go for easy drawings over the harder ones, and therefore miss out on the chance for a new learning experience. On the other hand, children with high self-esteem were more likely to seek a challenge after being given inflated praise. Interestingly, the only difference between the inflated and non-inflated praise was a single word – incredible (“you made an incredibly beautiful drawing!” versus “you made a beautiful drawing!”).

What the study doesn’t tell us is why children with low-esteem might avoid challenges in these circumstances. The authors suggest that inflated praise might set the bar very high for children in the future, and so inadvertently activates a self-protection mechanism in those with low self-esteem – although they acknowledge that they didn’t actually measure this in the study.

At any rate, the finding builds on a number of experiments conducted in recent years showing that positive praise isn’t necessarily good for all children in all circumstances. For children with low self-esteem, although we might feel the need to shower them in adulation, this might end up having precisely the opposite effect. Even words like incredible can end up having a huge unintended impact – so when you’re telling children they’ve done a great job, choose your words wisely.

- Post written by guest host Dr Pete Etchells, Lecturer in Psychology at Bath Spa University and Science Blog Co-ordinator for The Guardian.

Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Orobio de Castro, B., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B. (2014). "That's Not Just Beautiful--That's Incredibly Beautiful!": The Adverse Impact of Inflated Praise on Children With Low Self-Esteem Psychological Science, 25 (3), 728-735 DOI: 10.1177/0956797613514251

How children's understanding of gravity changes as they grow older

What happens if you drop a ball in a falling elevator and why? Your answer will of course depend on the sophistication of your understanding of the laws of physics. Psychologists in France and the Netherlands have used similar questions to test the understanding of 144 children and teenagers aged 5 to 18 years. The results show how children's naive understanding of gravity matures through different stages as a result of their first-hand experience and exposure to formal teaching and cultural explanations.

Soren Frappart and her colleagues tested the children's understanding in six contexts using cartoons, pictures and models. The young participants were asked to say what would happen if Billy dropped a stone on earth; in a lift in free fall; in a spaceship orbiting the earth; on the moon; on a planet with no air; and on a planet with air. Specifically, in each case, the children and teens had to indicate whether the stone would go down, float, or go up, and then explain why*.

The children's answers fell into three distinguishable levels of understanding, with each tending to be reached at different ages. A significant proportion (23 per cent) of the 5-year-olds said that the stone falls in all six contexts, and their explanations were mostly intuitive (e.g. "a stone can only fall"), or they gave no explanation at all. Presumably their answers were based largely on their first-hand experience that things fall.

Starting from age 7 and up to age 15, the children's and teens' answers were more sophisticated, but still reflected a far from complete understanding of gravitational laws. Around half of them were consistent in that they stated that the stone falls on earth and other planets with air; floats in a spaceship, on the moon and on a planet with no air; and goes up in a free-falling lift (although they were less consistent here). The fact that this response style kicked in at age 7 probably reflects the children's exposure to cultural concepts, such as the image of astronauts floating in space.

Scientific justifications for the stone's movement on earth began to emerge at age 12 (likely reflecting the introduction of relevant lessons in school), but scientific justifications for the stone's movement in other contexts didn't emerge until age 18.

Also at age 18, a new consistent pattern of responding emerged, one even more scientifically accurate than the younger age groups - that is, 27 per cent of 18-year-olds said the stone would go down on earth, on a planet with or without air, and on the moon. They said it would float in the spaceship orbiting the earth. They were inconsistent in their answers about the free-falling lift, although most said the stone would go up.

As well as providing the most comprehensive study to date of how children's understanding of gravity develops with age, this new research also informs a debate in psychology about whether children's naive, changing understanding about the world is incoherent and inconsistent, or if instead it is based on a succession of discrete mental models - each one akin to a flawed but coherent scientific theory. At least in the narrow context of gravitational laws examined here, these new results are consistent with the idea that children gradually acquire a series of largely coherent mental models of how the world works.

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Frappart S, Raijmakers M, & Frède V (2014). What do children know and understand about universal gravitation? Structural and developmental aspects. Journal of experimental child psychology, 120, 17-38 PMID: 24361806

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

*Unfortunately, for those adult readers with a poor understanding of physics (including me), this journal paper did not provide the correct answers to the questions! I believe that the correct answers are as follows, but please correct me if I'm wrong: on earth, on the moon, and on a planet with or without air, Billy is stable with his feet on the ground, but when he drops the stone it is pulled downwards by gravity. In an orbiting spaceship and in a free-falling lift, the stone appears to float when dropped because Billy, the spaceship/lift are also falling and subject to the same gravitational forces as the dropped stone. 

Do children learn more from self-explanation than extra practice?

Explaining a rule or concept to yourself forces you to think deeply about it. Plenty of studies have shown this has benefits, both in terms of improving the understanding of relevant concepts and aiding the skill or process in question. Unfortunately, as Katherine McEldoon and her colleagues argue in their new paper, most of these studies are flawed because they failed to control for the extra time spent on self-explanation. So a typical study has compared, say, 30 minutes practice against 30 minutes practice plus time spent on self-explanation. This means any apparent benefit of self-explanation could just be due to extra time spent on studying.

McEldoon's team attempted to avoid this shortcoming. Sixty-nine children, average age 8.8 years, were split into three groups. All had previously struggled with the focus of the study - mathematical equivalence. One baseline group received 50 minutes instruction and practice on solving mathematical equivalence problems (e.g. 6 + 3 + 4 = 6 + _). Another group received the 50 minutes instruction and practice, but they were also prompted to explain why answers to the questions were right or wrong. A final "additional practice" group acted as controls - they received the 50 minutes instruction and practice, and they spent extra time on solving more equations to control for the time taken by the second group on self-explanation. Right after this, and again two weeks later, all the children completed a test of their conceptual understanding and skill at mathematical equivalence problems.

The children in the self-explanation condition showed superior conceptual knowledge compared with the other children, in terms of their knowledge of equation structures (tested with questions like "“Is 8=3+5 true or false?”) but not their understanding of the equals symbol. Their advantage over the additional practice group didn't actually reach statistical significance, though power calculations suggested this could be due to the small sample sizes.

In terms of actual problem solving skill on mathematical equivalence items, the self-explanation group did not differ significantly from the other two conditions. The highest scores were actually achieved by the additional practice group.

Lastly the researchers looked at what's known as "procedural transfer" - the ability of the children to apply themselves to new versions of the mathematical equivalence problems that involved subtraction and the blank being in different position. Here the researchers said the self-explanation group "performed somewhat better" than the other two groups. That is, their scores were higher, but the difference did not reach statistical significance - again possibly due to the samples being too small.

Unfortunately, these results just aren't clear cut enough to provide any solid take-out messages for teachers or parents. More research with larger samples is needed. McEldoon and her colleagues concluded that their findings suggest "self-explanation prompts have some small unique learning benefits, but that greater attention needs to be paid to how much self-explanation offers advantages over other uses of time."

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McEldoon KL, Durkin KL, and Rittle-Johnson B (2013). Is self-explanation worth the time? A comparison to additional practice. The British journal of educational psychology, 83 (4), 615-32 PMID: 24175685

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Reading literary (but not pop) fiction boosts our understanding of other people's minds

Literary fiction takes the reader on a journey into other worlds, other lives, other minds. A new study shows that this has an immediate effect on the reader's powers of empathy, as judged by simple lab tests. The same benefit was not found for popular fiction.

"Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretative resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters," said the researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School for Social Research. "That is, they must engage Theory of Mind processes [ToM refers to our ability to represent and understand other people's thoughts and feelings]."

Across five experiments, involving hundreds of volunteers online, the researchers showed that reading a few pages of literary fiction (including works by Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munroe and Dagoberto Gilb) boosted participants' immediate ability to discern people's emotions from pictures of their eyes or faces. In some cases, the benefit extended to superior performance on a Theory of Mind picture test that involved using visual or verbal cues to identify what a person was thinking or desiring. No such effects were found after reading non-fiction or pop fiction, including passages from Danielle Steele, Rosamunde Pilcher and Gillian Flynn.

The apparent benefits of reading literary fiction held even after controlling for a raft of other variables, including participants' education, gender, age and mood.

This isn't the first study to associate reading fiction with increased empathy. For example, a 2006 paper found that people who knew the names of more novelists (taken as a sign that they read more) tended to excel on lab tests of social awareness and empathy. However, such findings were possibly explained by people with greater empathy choosing to read more. By adopting an experimental design this new study avoids that problem. It also extends previous research by suggesting there is something special about literary fiction.

That the beneficial effects of reading were limited to literary fiction also poses a conundrum since the classification of fiction as literary is not entirely objective. For the present purposes the researchers drew on works that have been awarded or short-listed for literary prizes. The question remains - what is it about literary fiction, but not pop fiction, that improves readers' ability to recognise other people's thoughts and feelings? Comparison of the superficial linguistic characteristics of literary and pop fiction largely drew a blank, with the exception of frequency of negative emotion words.

The researchers' belief is that the active ingredient of literary fiction is the way such books "engage their readers creatively as writers ... The absence of a single authorial perspective prompts readers to enter a vibrant discourse with the author and her characters." However, they conceded that their findings "are only preliminary and much research is needed."

One weakness of the research is that the effects of reading literary fiction on the cognitive component of Theory of Mind (understanding/identifying another person's thoughts) were inconsistent and sometimes elusive. No benefits were found for the so-called "false belief" test, which the researchers suggested was due to the task being too easy, such that readers in all conditions excelled. On the other hand, benefits of literary fiction were found for only the easy version of the Yoni task (participants must identify one or more people's thoughts based on visual and verbal clues). The harder Yoni trials "may require a set of more advanced cognitive skills ... that are less easily influenced," the researchers said.

Another potential problem with the study is the way the texts were presented. It's not clear if the identity of the passages was hidden or guessed, and related to that, we don't know if participants developed expectations that their empathy skills would be improved after reading a piece of literary prose. Such expectations could have played a role in the observed effects.

Nonetheless, if replicated and elucidated in further research, there could be important educational and cultural implications to arise from these new findings, especially at a time when many policy-makers are calling for less emphasis on fiction in secondary education. For now however we're a long way from knowing exactly what aspects of Theory of Mind benefit from reading literary fiction and why. It's also not yet established how long the benefits last, and whether the effects of reading short passages (as in this study) is any different from the experience of reading an entire novel.

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David Comer Kidd, and Emanuele Castano (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind Science express. 

--Further reading--
Reading novels linked with increased empathy

The mind’s flight simulator - Keith Oatley for The Psychologist shows that fiction is not just entertainment.


Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Seven-year-olds' beliefs about ability are associated with the way they were praised as toddlers

Laboratory research pioneered by psychologist Carol Dweck has shown the short-term benefits of praising children for their efforts rather than their inherent traits. Doing so leads children to adopt a so-called "incremental mindset" - seeing ability as malleable and challenges as an opportunity to learn.

Now a new study co-authored by Dweck and led by Elizabeth Gunderson has made the first ever attempt to monitor how parents praise their young children in real-life situations, and to see how their style of praise is related to the children's mindset five years later.

The researchers observed and recorded 53 individual parents interacting with their children in the home for 90 minutes, whether playing, having a meal or whatever. They did this when the children were aged 14, 26 and 38 months. Five years later, the researchers caught up with the kids and asked them questions about their attitudes and mindset towards ability, challenges and moral goodness.

The key finding was the more parents tended to praise their pre-school age children for effort (known as process praise, as in "good job"), the more likely it was that those children had a "incremental attitude" towards intelligence and morality when they were aged seven to eight. This mindset was revealed by their seeing intelligence and moral attributes as malleable. For example, such children tended to agree that people can get smarter if they try harder, and disagree with the idea that a naughty child with always be naughty.

This association held even after the researchers controlled for a raft of other variables such as the families' socioeconomic status, the parents' own mindset towards ability, and total amount of parental praise.

"We present the first results indicating that the process praise children hear naturalistically bears a relation to their motivational frameworks that parallels the relation between process praise and motivational frameworks found experimentally," the researchers said.

Unlike parents' early use of process praise, there was no link between parents' early tendency to praise children for their traits (known as person praise, as in "you're so smart") and children's later ability mindset. This could be because the researchers actually observed very little person praise - it accounted for less than 10 per cent of praise-related utterances.

Although Gunderson and her colleagues acknowledged the limitations of their study - including the fact that it was observational and does not prove a causal link between parents' praise style and the children's later mindset - they said the results had important real-life implications. "In particular," they said, "praise that emphasises children's effort, actions, and strategies may not only predict but also impact and shape the development of children's motivational frameworks in the cognitive and social domains."

There were some other intriguing details. Parents who themselves held an incremental mindset towards ability actually tended to use more person praise with their children - perhaps, the researchers surmised, because they believed in the need to boost their children's self-esteem as a way to increase their ability.

Also, it was noteworthy that lab research in this area has tended to use praise that is explicitly process focused, as in "you must have tried hard." However, the researchers didn't uncover a single use of that phrase, and all forms of explicit process praise were hard to come by. This goes to show just how important it is to conduct observational research in real-life settings, to make sure that lab research is realistic.

Finally, the study revealed that parents tend to use more person praise with girls and more process praise with boys, echoing similar results in earlier research. In turn, later on, boys tended to express an incremental mindset more often than girls. This tallies with the picture painted in the developmental literature that girls more than boys attribute failure to lack of ability, especially in maths and science. This study raises the possibility that this could be due in part to the way they are praised at an early age.

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Gunderson EA, Gripshover SJ, Romero C, Dweck CS, Goldin-Meadow S, and Levine SC (2013). Parent Praise to 1- to 3-Year-Olds Predicts Children's Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later. Child development, 84 (5), 1526-41 PMID: 23397904

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The Digest guide to ... studying

10 years of the Research Digest

This month is the tenth anniversary of the launch of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest (as an email newsletter back in 2003). To mark the anniversary, this week I'm going to delve into the archive and publish a series of six "self-help" posts, all based on past Digest items that have practical lessons for real life, starting today with evidence-backed tips on studying:

Adopt a growth mindset. Students who believe that intelligence and academic ability are fixed tend to stumble at the first hurdle. By contrast, those with a "growth mindset", who see intelligence as malleable, usually react to adversity by working harder and trying out new strategies. These findings come from research by Carol Dweck, a psychologist based at Stanford University. Her research also suggests lecturers and teachers should offer praise in a way that fosters in students a growth mindset – avoid comments on innate ability and emphasise instead what students did well to achieve their success.

Get handouts prior to the lecture. Students given Powerpoint slide handouts before a lecture made fewer notes but performed the same or better in a later test of the lecture material than students who weren’t given the handouts until the lecture was over. That’s according to a study by Elizabeth Marsh and Holli Sink, reported by the Research Digest, which involved dozens of undergrads watching video clips of real-life lectures. The researchers warned their results are only preliminary but they concluded that "in situations where students’ notes are likely to reiterate the content of the slides, there is no harm from releasing students from note-taking."

Forgive yourself for procrastinating. Everyone procrastinates at some time or another – it’s part of human nature. The secret to recovering from a bout of procrastination, according to a 2010 study covered by the Digest, is to forgive yourself. Michael Wohl and colleagues followed 134 first year undergrads through their first two sessions of mid-term exams. Those who had forgiven themselves for procrastination prior to the initial mid-terms were less likely to procrastinate prior to the second lot of exams and tended to do better as a result.

Test yourself. A powerful finding in laboratory studies of learning is the ‘testing effect’ whereby time spent answering quiz questions (including feedback of correct answers) is more beneficial than the same time spent merely re-studying that same material. In a guest post for the Research Digest, Nate Kornell of UCLA explained that testing "creates powerful memories that are not easily forgotten" and it allows you to diagnose your learning. Kornell also had a warning: "self-testing when information is still fresh in your memory, immediately after studying, doesn’t work. It does not create lasting memories, and it creates overconfidence."

Pace yourself. The secret to remembering material long-term is to review it periodically, rather than trying to cram. In a 2007 study covered by the Digest, Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler showed that the optimal time to leave material before reviewing it is 10 to 30 per cent of the period you want to remember it for. So, if you were to be tested eleven days after first studying some material, the ideal time to revisit it would be a day later. If it’s seven months from your initial study of the material to an exam, then reviewing the material after a month is optimal.

It's okay to study short texts on an e-book. Some people feel that their comprehension is adversely affected when reading on a digital device. A study we reported on earlier this year tested students' understanding of factual biographies they'd read either in print, on a computer screen or with a Kindle. Their performance was stable at around 75 per cent regardless of the way they'd consumed the text. The study only involved short passages of text so we need more research to establish if the same result would apply with longer texts.

Don't be lulled into overconfidence by an engaging lecturer. The most skilled teachers are able to present complex material in an entertaining fashion. This is good news in many ways, but be careful that you don't mistake the ease with which you understood a fun lecture as a sign that you've mastered the material. A study published this year found that student participants were overconfident in their knowledge after watching a more polished lecturer.

Time your learning according to the type of material. Research published in 2012 found that "procedural learning" - the kind that you use when learning a skill like dancing or a musical instrument - is best performed in the evening, nearer to bedtime. By contrast, learning factual material was found to be optimal in the afternoon (although the evidence for this was less robust). The researchers weren't sure why this difference exists but they think it has to do with time until sleeping and the way sleep consolidates different kinds of memories. Other research shows the importance for learning of getting a good night's sleep.

Believe in yourself. Self-belief affects problem-solving abilities even when the influence of background knowledge is taken into account. Bobby Hoffman and Alexandru Spatariu showed this in 2008 in the context of 81 undergrad students solving mental multiplication problems. The students’ belief in their own ability, called ‘self-efficacy’, and their general ability both made unique contributions to their performance. "In learning situations,‘ the researchers concluded, ‘there is a natural tendency to build basic skills, but that is only part of the formula. Instructors that focus on building the confidence of students, providing strategic instruction, and giving relevant feedback can enhance performance outcomes."
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This is the first in a series of six self-help posts drawing on the Digest archive to mark the tenth anniversary of its launch in Sept 2003. Compiled by editor Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer).

Students assume psychology is less scientific/important than the natural sciences, says study with scientific limitations

Students see test tubes as more scientific than questionnaires

Despite over 130 years passing since the opening of its first laboratory, psychology still struggles to be taken seriously as a science. A new paper by psychologists in the USA suggests this is due in part to superficial assumptions made about the subject matter and methods of behavioural science.

Douglas Krull and David Silvera asked 73 college students (49 women) to rate various topics and pieces of equipment on a 9-point scale in terms of how scientific they thought they were. On average, the students consistently rated topics from the natural sciences (e.g. brain, solar flares), and natural science equipment (e.g. microscope, magnetic resonance imaging) as more scientific than behavioural science topics and equipment (e.g. attitudes and questionnaires) - the average ratings were 7.86, 5.06, 7 and 4.34, respectively.

A follow-up study involving 71 more college students was similar but this time students rated the scientific status of 20 brief scenarios. These varied according to whether the topic was natural or behavioural science and whether the equipment used was natural or behavioural (e.g. "Dr Thompson studies cancer. To do this research, Dr Thompson uses interviews" is an example of a natural science topic using behavioural science methods.) Natural science topics and equipment were again rated as more scientific than their behavioural science counterparts. And this was additive, so that natural science topics studied with natural science methods were assumed to be the most scientific of all.

A third and final study was almost identical but this time the 94 college students revealed their belief that the natural sciences are more important than the behavioural sciences. "Even though the scientific enterprise is defined by its method, people seem to be influenced by the content of the research," Krull and Silvera concluded. They added that this could have serious adverse consequences including students interested in science not going into psychology; psychology findings not being taken seriously; and funding being diverted from psychology to other sciences. "Misperceptions of science have the potential to hinder research and applications of research that could otherwise produce positive changes in society," they said.

Unfortunately for a paper on the reputation of psychological science, the paper contains a series of serious scientific limitations. For instance, not only are all three samples restricted to college students, we're also told nothing about the background of these students; not even whether they were humanities or science students. There is also no detail on how the students construed the meaning of "scientific". If students assume the meaning of scientific has more to do with subject matter than with method then the findings from the first two studies are simply tautological.

Apart from a couple of exceptions, we are also given no information on how the researchers categorised their list of topics and equipment as belonging either to natural or behavioural science. Sometimes it's obvious, but not always. For instance, how was "computer programmes" categorised? Where the categorisation is revealed it doesn't always seem justified. Is "the brain" exclusively a natural science topic and not a behavioural science topic? In truth psychologists often make inferences about the brain based on behavioural data. Obviously carving up scientific disciplines is a tricky business, but the issue is not really addressed by Krull and Silvera. In terms of terminology, their paper starts off distinguishing between natural and behavioural science, with psychology given as an example of a behavioural science. Their discussion then focuses largely on psychology.

Lastly, it's unfortunate that Krull and Silvera more than once refer to the seductive allure of brain scans as an example of the way that people are swayed by the superficial merit of natural science. Presumably they wrote their paper before the seductive allure of brain scans was thoroughly debunked earlier this year. They can't be blamed for not seeing into the future, but it was perhaps scientifically naive to place so much faith in a single study.

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Douglas S. Krull and David H. Silvera (2013). The stereotyping of science: superficial details influence perceptions of what is scientific. Journal of Applied Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/jasp.12118

--Further reading--
Child's play! The developmental roots of the misconception that psychology is easy
From The Psychologist magazine news archive: A US psychologist has urged the psychological community to do more to challenge the public's scepticism of our science.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Reading comprehension just as good using a Kindle as with paper

A significant milestone was passed last August when Amazon announced that sales of books on its Kindle e-reader platform outstripped print sales for the first time. There's no question that e-readers are convenient - you can load a single device with thousands of titles. But some commentators have started to question whether digital reading has adverse effects on memory and comprehension compared with reading from print.

In 2010, a reassuring study in fact found no difference in recall after reading material electronically versus paper. Now Sara Margolin and her colleagues have looked at reading comprehension and again found no deficits in understanding of material consumed on a Kindle or a computer versus paper.

Margolin's team invited 90 student participants (average age 19 years) to read ten short passages of text.  One third of them read on paper (A4 size, Times New Roman font), 30 of them read on a second gen. Kindle (6 inch screen), and the remainder read via a pdf reader on a computer monitor. Five of the passages were factual (biographies) and five were excerpts from literary fiction. After each passage, the students answered five to six multiple-choice comprehension questions. They could take as long as they wanted to read each passage, but there was no going back to the text once they started answering the questions.

Overall accuracy was at around 75 per cent and, crucially, there was no difference in comprehension performance across the three conditions. This was true whether reading factual or narrative passages of text. "From an educational and classroom perspective, these results are comforting," the researchers concluded. "While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students' comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text."

Unfortunately the study didn't look at the participants' familiarity with e-reader devices. It remains to be seen whether the same results would hold with an older sample and/or with readers who may be less experienced with digital devices. Also the text passages were only around 500 words long. Future research needs to examine comprehension for entire chapters and books. Devices like iPads, which are back-lit and have more potentially distracting functionality, also need to be tested.

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Margolin, S., Driscoll, C., Toland, M., and Kegler, J. (2013). E-readers, Computer Screens, or Paper: Does Reading Comprehension Change Across Media Platforms? Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2930

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.