Child Development

Preschool counts: Building a strong foundation in math

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 14 May 2025 21:11:19 +0000

Preschool counts: Building a strong foundation in math Olivia Peterkin Wed, 05/14/2025 - 14:11

In this episode of School’s In, Professor Emerita Deborah Stipek discusses why developing math skills is important for young children, and fun ways to engage them in the learning process.

May 29, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

Only 39% of fourth grade students and 28% of eighth graders in the United States are proficient in math, according to 2024 data from the Nation’s Report Card, which provides national data about student academic achievement and learning experiences.

Consistently low levels of proficiency from state to state have parents and educators concerned about ways to improve math skill development, and when to get started. For Deborah Stipek, chair of the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) Network at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), math should be woven into children’s lives from the start.

“We've learned through research that little kids actually can learn a lot of math, and develop that strong foundation,” said Deborah Stipek, who is also a professor emerita and former dean at the GSE. “There's also evidence that engaging in math activities teaches children other basic cognitive skills. So they end up developing memory skills and attention skills, and that sort of thing, that are valuable in whatever academic, or even social, endeavor.”

Stipek joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss early math’s influence on academic achievement, and how to overcome barriers to make math fun.

“You don't want to make this feel like work for them, so I would let your child be the guide, and engage in the kind of activities that your child seems to enjoy,” Stipek said. “Math is something that kids love to do, and we should give them an opportunity to do it,” said Stipek.

They also discuss research from the DREME Network on teacher preparation in early math, as well as early math resources for parents and educators.

“We have developed many, many activities for teachers and for parents, some of which are in Spanish, that they can implement in their classrooms, in their home childcare settings, (and) in their homes with kids,” Stipek said. “We (also) created a website that has a ton of resources, including lots of video clips and handouts, for the people who teach teachers.”

Transcript

Deborah Stipek (00:00):

Math is something that kids love to do, and we should give them an opportunity to do it.

Denise Pope (00:09):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education, and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:32):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:42):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:53):

Hey, Denise. Good to see you. Hear you.

Denise Pope (00:56):

Good to hear and see you.

Dan Schwartz (00:57):

Well, thank you. So I have two questions for you?

Denise Pope (01:00):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (01:01):

In the first two years, how many synapses does an infant grow per second?

Denise Pope (01:09):

Oh, my gosh. Okay. How many synapses does an infant grow per second? My answer is, I have no idea. But I know it's a ton, because I know that synapses grow faster in the time before you're five, than any other time in your life. Something like that. Is that right?

Dan Schwartz (01:29):

That wasn't answering the question, but yes. So the answer, it's a million a second.

Denise Pope (01:34):

Wow.

Dan Schwartz (01:35):

That's the estimate, which is crazy. So it seems like early childhood's going to be important for the rest of your life, right? If that much is going on?

Denise Pope (01:44):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (01:44):

So you're going to take responsibility for that, Denise?

Denise Pope (01:48):

Me personally?

Dan Schwartz (01:49):

Yes. You need to get all the parents to bring math to their children, their very young children. How would you do it?

Denise Pope (01:59):

All the parents in the whole world?

Dan Schwartz (02:02):

Uh, we can be less ambitious-

Denise Pope (02:03):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (02:03):

... let's just say California.

Denise Pope (02:05):

All right. All the parents in California. Okay, here's my id- You're going to mock me, but this is my idea, okay. Remember when we wanted to have every baby sleep on its back, and not sleep on its stomach? I don't know if you remember this, but there was a huge ad campaign? So that even though we were telling people and maybe pediatricians were telling people, there was a huge ad campaign, "Baby on Back."

(02:28):

So I want a huge ad campaign like, "Math Before Five." Or something like that. Or, "Bedtime Math," or something like that, that really gets people, you know, like, "Your Brain on Drugs," was an ad campaign, a lot of people remember that of a certain age. So I want a huge ad campaign, for math for young kids in California. How about that?

Dan Schwartz (02:48):

I love it. That was my answer too, except mine was more humble. It was just like take out one ad during the Superbowl, but uh-

Denise Pope (02:55):

Oh. Well, okay. We're on the same page. I like that.

Dan Schwartz (02:59):

No, no, that was good. So we're lucky today, we have one of the world's experts on very young children learning math. And her name is Deborah Stipek. She was a professor at the Graduate School of Education, she's emerita now. So welcome, Deborah.

Denise Pope (03:14):

Deborah, I'm going to kick us off. You have spent many years encouraging teachers and parents to help young kids learn math. So why is math so important for little kids? Help us out.

Deborah Stipek (03:26):

Well, you're asking me now after you've already launched your ad campaign?

Denise Pope (03:29):

Yeah. Well, I was trusting that it was important. Now I want to know why?

Deborah Stipek (03:35):

Well, I think the first answer from my perspective, is that little kids love math. They love doing math, once they start learning to count, they're going to count everything. So my four-year-old grandson, when he asks for chocolate chips or crackers, the first thing he says when I say yes is, "How many?"

(03:53):

And if I say, "Five, because you're five," he says, "but Dale gets seven, so I want two more." And then he dutifully counts them out.

Denise Pope (04:03):

Okay. He's like a math genius. What have you done?

Deborah Stipek (04:05):

No. But no, he's not, that's the point. Is that once he got into counting, he loves counting, but he's not a particular genius. Kids love to count. You give a four-year-old a bunch of different colored beads, the first thing they do, I'd almost put my bank account on it is, categorize them either by color or size, or by both. It's just like there's this natural thing to do. Actually, the same thing happens when you give them to a group of teachers in a professional development. They start categorizing them by color.

(04:39):

So math is something that kids love to do, and we should give them an opportunity to do it. The other thing is, in early childhood, we're laying the foundation for future math learning. We want them to have a basic understanding of number, a basic concept of shapes and what makes shapes, and what the critical qualities of shapes are. So if they don't, then we're building house of cards in their future math. And what we find is that kids, as they move along their math trajectory, or get into more demanding math as it starts falling apart, and they start having a lot of difficulty, because that foundation is not there. We also have kindergarten standards now, which are much more rigorous than they used to be.

Denise Pope (05:23):

Ah.

Deborah Stipek (05:23):

And the reason they're more rigorous is, we've learned through research that little kids actually can learn a lot of math, and develop that strong foundation. There's also evidence that engaging in math activities, teaches children other basic cognitive skills. So they end up developing memory skills and attention skills, and that sort of thing, that are valuable in whatever academic, or even social endeavor.

(05:50):

And finally, we've learned through research recently, that the math that children know and their skill levels when they enter kindergarten, is very highly predictive of their math skills as late as 8th grade. It's even predictive of whether they finish high school, or go to college.

Denise Pope (06:06):

Whoa.

Deborah Stipek (06:06):

And that, I think, that particular finding is what pushed a lot of interest in math, among folks. And there is a huge gap between low income kids and middle class and more affluent kids, in their math skills at kindergarten entry. So it's also an equity issue.

Denise Pope (06:24):

I'm totally convinced. Dan?

Dan Schwartz (06:30):

I like it. I sort of want to know if this certain experience I had over a holiday with my niece, with the reaction to this. So she has, I think he's about a three-year-old. And there's candies out on the table and he starts spontaneously counting, and he counts all the way up to 17 correctly, in order.

Deborah Stipek (06:49):

How old?

Dan Schwartz (06:50):

Three.

Deborah Stipek (06:51):

Yep.

Dan Schwartz (06:52):

He counts all the way up to 17 correctly, I thought. And the mother says, "No, you're incorrect. You counted this one twice."

Deborah Stipek (06:59):

Mmm.

Denise Pope (07:00):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (07:01):

Should the mother have done this? I mean, this was a amazing performance by this child.

Denise Pope (07:06):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (07:06):

And fortunately, my niece will never listen to this podcast. So you can be honest.

Denise Pope (07:10):

You can slam her to the ground, Deborah.

Deborah Stipek (07:12):

Yeah, yeah. You know, a little bit depends on how she said it, and what her relationship is with the child. But what I would recommend, is that instead of saying, "No, you're wrong," to say, "let's count that again," or maybe, "let's count it together." Often if children count a second time, they figure out their mistake very quickly, especially if you say, "Let's count it more slowly." One of the reasons so many people don't like math, is that they learned that math was something where you had a lot of rules.

(07:46):

You had to apply them correctly, and it was bad to get things wrong. And if you get them wrong, you feel bad. And if you get math problems wrong a lot, which a lot of kids do, because of the way we teach it, you start to develop a sense of yourself as being not good at math. So rather than right or wrong, I think we need to emphasize, and this is supported by research, the child's engaging again with the activity, maybe with a little scaffolding.

Dan Schwartz (08:17):

Hey, Denise, is Deborah right?

Denise Pope (08:21):

Yes. It was like-

Dan Schwartz (08:21):

Is this your math story?

Denise Pope (08:22):

Yes. It hit really close to home, Deborah, because I- I'm telling you, I just did not have that. I had exactly what you just said, Deborah. I learned math in a very formulaic way, there's a right or wrong answer, I got it wrong a lot. And all of a sudden, "Oh, I'm not a math person."

(08:37):

And it's carried on to this day. And we talk about it on the show a lot, it's like I start to kind of get heart palpitations if someone gives me a math problem to do. Which Dan does a lot.

Dan Schwartz (08:52):

Uh Deborah, so is there a critical window here? So like in language they often talk about there's a window for gaining accents, and things like that?

Deborah Stipek (09:01):

Mm-hmm.

Dan Schwartz (09:02):

Is there a critical period, or is the reason you want to bring it younger is just to get them started? The sooner they start the better? As opposed to, "If you don't do it when they're four, you can't do it when they're five?"

Deborah Stipek (09:14):

No, there's no evidence that that is true. But I think doing it when they're four or even three, is capturing their interest. They're eager to learn counting and things like that. And when they're five or six or seven, they may not have that same level of interest and eagerness.

Denise Pope (09:34):

Yeah. Well, because it's already been drummed out of you from how you got taught it in school. I think preschool teachers then are gonna to be the heroes, the math heroes, right? But is it taught to preschool teachers, is this a basic part of preschool training?

Deborah Stipek (09:46):

So math has not gotten very much attention in preschool, or in childcare. Even in kindergarten, you'll see much less math and you'll see literacy. Literacy is really predominated, and there's a lot of things, if you don't read by 3rd grade, you're doomed for the rest of your life. We don't have those same sorts of concerns with math. It's not true of reading either, by the way. You can still learn to read even if you're in 7th grade if you haven't learned. But it's harder, partly because you've developed all these attitudes and beliefs about yourself, as not being able to learn.

(10:19):

Preschool teachers typically will not describe themselves as math people. Very few of them were math majors. They love children, they don't necessarily love math, because of the way they were taught it, just as you've described. So one thing with preschool teachers, is just getting over their own anxiety about math, because then they're not really eager to teach it.

(10:39):

What we've learned is that actually helping them develop skills in teaching math to little kids, helps them get over their own anxiety about math. They develop their own self-confidence, and they also see that it's fun. It's like, "Oh, these games are really fun."

Denise Pope (10:57):

Wow.

Deborah Stipek (10:58):

Math's not so bad after all.

Dan Schwartz (10:59):

So there was a study, and you would know this better, if it's been followed up. Where the finding was, if it's a female teacher and preschool kids, and/or kindergartners, and they have math anxiety, it gets communicated to the young girls.

(11:17):

So it was very much modeling the anxiety and it came across. You know, I assume if it was a male teacher had math anxiety, it would've gone to the boys. It just so happened they only studied the women.

Denise Pope (11:28):

I'm surprised it doesn't go to both. I mean, if you have anxiety about a subject-

Dan Schwartz (11:32):

Yeah. It was an interesting finding, but the fact that the attitude of the teacher got communicated like that, I thought was quite interesting.

Deborah Stipek (11:38):

Well, most teachers are women. And I didn't realize, there've been several studies that show that adults who interact with kids around math, their anxiety does somehow get subtly transferred to children. Not all children and not- It depends on what they're doing, it depends on a lot of things.

(11:57):

But there is a risk that if you are highly anxious, just the way you talk about math, the way you engage in it, your anxiety about getting the right answer, or about them getting the right answer? So if, for example, your niece, if the child counted wrong and she goes, "Oh, no. You missed one, that's terrible."

Denise Pope (12:16):

Or like, "Eh."

Deborah Stipek (12:17):

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you gently say, "I think you got the wrong answer. Do you want to try that again?" There are ways of communicating your anxiety. Sometimes fairly subtly.

Denise Pope (12:29):

Parent to kid, not just teacher to kid. I mean, my mom definitely had math anxiety and I mean, I am not throwing my mom under the bus, but it was sort of a gendered thing. "Oh, you want help with your math problem? You got to go to dad."

Deborah Stipek (12:43):

We did a study years ago, where we asked kids how good they were in math. We asked the parents how good their child was in math, and we asked the teachers how good this child was in math. And we followed children, kindergarten through 5th grade. And what we found is that there were no gender differences in children's rating of their math skills, until 3rd grade. And then girls started rating their math skills lower. But interestingly, their parents, typically the mother, were also rating the girls' math skills lower than they were rating the boys' math skills.

Denise Pope (13:22):

Whoa.

Deborah Stipek (13:22):

But the teachers were not. So the girls were picking up, "I'm not good at math," from home, not necessarily from school. So we know that these things can be transmitted. But I just want to be very careful that we don't conclude then, the parent shouldn't engage in math activities with their kids. Because there are lots of ways to do it in a very productive and fun way with kids.

Denise Pope (13:45):

Well, this is great for our listeners to hear. What are some ways that parents can do this, to really kind of complement what's going on at the preschool and kindergarten level?

Deborah Stipek (13:54):

Yeah. There's so many games. I mean, if you play shoots and ladders, or any game that has counting?

Denise Pope (14:00):

Like a board game, just a typical board game?

Deborah Stipek (14:02):

Board game. Board game.

Denise Pope (14:02):

Where you count, where you roll the dice and you move five spots?

Deborah Stipek (14:07):

Dominoes. You map to the five, to the five. The three to the three-

Denise Pope (14:10):

Oh.

Deborah Stipek (14:10):

... that's a great game. There are lots of card games, and one of my favorites is unfortunately called War.

Denise Pope (14:15):

Oh.

Deborah Stipek (14:15):

But basically two people play it. You've probably heard of this? Two people play it, they each have half the deck, they put a card down, each put a card down and whichever person has the highest number, gets to keep the cards. And you keep playing until one person has all the cards.

(14:31):

But one of the things I like about this is, you can make it easier or more difficult. So if your child's still working on one through five, then you take out all the cards above five.

Denise Pope (14:40):

Oh, smart.

Deborah Stipek (14:41):

So they only have to be comparing a three and a five, or a two and a four, or a one and a five. When they get better, you can put in the numbers up until 10. When they get really good, then each of you can put down two cards, so they have to add the two cards together and decide which one is more. Kids love this game.

Denise Pope (14:58):

Okay. I want to just point out, I played War, growing up. I did. I played it in this way. I think putting the two cards would've really helped, because then would've forced additions. But I played War and I still had some issues, but I think the two card thing is brilliant.

Deborah Stipek (15:12):

Yeah. Or you can do multiplication with it-

Denise Pope (15:15):

Yes.

Deborah Stipek (15:15):

... it's the kind of thing that can be- But the other thing are, there's a lot of ways to engage children in math, just in everyday routines. So when you're setting the table, say, "Can you get a fork for everyone?" Or you can engage them in conversation, "What if grandma and grandpa was coming for dinner? How many more forks would you need? How many forks would we need altogether then?"

(15:33):

Or when you go to the grocery store, "Can you count six apples into the bag?" Or, "Can you figure out which line has the fewest people?" So let's count how many are in each line. I mean, there's just so many ways you can embed math into- If you go on a walk, you can look for shapes and signs. But the important thing is to not make it school.

Denise Pope (15:57):

Yeah. To not make it feel like, "Oh, my gosh. We have to do math problems again."

Deborah Stipek (16:00):

Yeah. No, it's just a game. It's fun, it's not serious.

Denise Pope (16:04):

Love it. Hey, Dan?

Dan Schwartz (16:12):

Yes?

Denise Pope (16:13):

I have a question for you. I want you to think way back here, did you do anything special to help your son learn math, when he was little? Because you're such a math person, I can see you doing stuff. What did you do?

Dan Schwartz (16:29):

Well, yes, Denise, I did. Friday nights I buy him a pizza and put them in front of Ninja Turtles, and there were three Ninja Turtles. So that if you get a good anchoring in three, everything's set-

Denise Pope (16:42):

Wait-

Dan Schwartz (16:42):

... into the future.

Denise Pope (16:42):

... are you being serious? You weren't really trying to teach him math by putting him in front of Ninja?

Dan Schwartz (16:48):

And it was a pizza with pieces, six pieces. No, I was not. I did not.

Denise Pope (16:54):

Did you do anything? No?

Dan Schwartz (16:56):

I don't know, I'm sure I counted stuff. But I don't remember doing a lot of explicit things with him. Probably less counting, more grouping, separating things into piles perhaps. I made him do the laundry. So make three piles of clothes for me. Yeah.

Denise Pope (17:13):

That's good. Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (17:14):

And you?

Denise Pope (17:14):

I have vivid memories of Sesame Street. So not necessarily Ninja Turtles, but you know, Sesame Street has a letter of the day, they have a number of the day, they have the count who's like "one, two, three", and Cookie Monster is counting cookies. And the baker, "How many pies can the baker hold, and go down the hall?" And you are shaking your head like... Nothing? This is not bringing back any memories?

Dan Schwartz (17:38):

Zero. So my kid did not like Sesame Street.

Denise Pope (17:41):

Oh no.

Dan Schwartz (17:43):

So what do you do? We watch Ninja Turtles.

Denise Pope (17:46):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (17:46):

But you know, he did turn out as a Certified Public Accountant.

Denise Pope (17:50):

Wow.

Dan Schwartz (17:51):

So before you start hating on those cartoons, you know, look at what it did for him?

Denise Pope (17:55):

All right. I think we have a little problem with cause and effect, but still, impressive the math skills needed for a CPA. Impressive. Good job, Dan. Good job.

Dan Schwartz (18:04):

Thank you. Thank you. Deborah, so there's a big movement for a transitional kindergarten, as you know.

Denise Pope (18:14):

Do you want to say what that is, Dan? For people who don't know what that means?

Dan Schwartz (18:17):

It's for four-year-old. How's that? Your public school is providing pre-kindergarten, is that correct, Deborah?

Deborah Stipek (18:25):

It's basically California's version of Universal Pre-K. So it's providing public free preschool, to all children, but in the context of elementary school.

Denise Pope (18:37):

Awesome.

Dan Schwartz (18:38):

Yeah. So I'm trying to get my image of math in a TK classroom. Are they getting worksheets, right, is it just pure academic?

Denise Pope (18:48):

They're handing out calculators, right?

Dan Schwartz (18:50):

Or is it play-based? How do you merge?

Deborah Stipek (18:56):

It's all of the above. It's funny, because principals will talk to me or superintendents, district folks will say, "Well, what do you do with TK?" It's like it's a whole new category of children or something. And I keep saying, "They're four-year-olds. They were four-year-olds when we called it preschool, they're four-year-olds in every other state, where they call it preschool, and their four-year-olds when they're in TK." And so whatever is developmentally appropriate and good for four-year-olds, is good in TK.

(19:23):

But I think the fact that it's in an elementary school, makes people feel more pressure to be more academic, and more focused on basic skills. The other thing that feeds that, is that the teachers who are teaching TK, right now have to have a multiple subject credential. Which is basically a credential to teach elementary school. So some of the teachers who are teaching four-year-olds, had taught 5th grade the year before. And so not all of them have a lot of experience teaching little kids. And although we talk a lot about the importance of play-based programs, where kids have a lot of opportunity to engage in activities and pretend play, and interact with peers, and things like that. I do see as I'm visiting TKs, more worksheets than I'd like to see.

(20:12):

There were a lot of people who were concerned that the sort of structured teacher-directed academic approach, would filter down into TK. In fact, there were a lot of people who were against TK being in elementary schools, because they were worried about that. Some of us hoped that there'd actually be push-up instead of push-down. That we'd see more, more attention to social-emotional skills, and playful learning, and that sort of thing in kindergarten, 1st, and even 2nd grade. But honestly, I have seen more push-down than push-up.

Denise Pope (20:45):

Okay. That is really depressing and somewhat scary to me. Because I feel like if you make it sound like it's a work thing, with worksheets, and you have to do your two plus twos, and all of that, we're going to turn more kids off to math. Is that a worry of yours?

Deborah Stipek (21:03):

It's a big worry. And I think what it tells me, is that we need to provide TK teachers with a lot of support. I mean, if you think of what it means, let's just say to teach math, let alone literacy and everything else that you need to teach. You need to be able to select activities that are playful, but have a real math learning goal. And I see a lot of activities that are playful, but you're not going to learn any math doing them.

Denise Pope (21:27):

Wait, give like a quick example of that? Because I think this is a key piece that people don't understand, not all play is created equal.

Deborah Stipek (21:34):

No. Well, first of all, there's some play where you actually develop some foundational math skills, just engaging in the activity, like playing with blocks. You develop some rudimentary understanding of proportions and size and shape, and even number, because you're building things, and spatial reasoning, and things like that. But if you really want to learn... You're going to learn a lot more if the teacher is guiding the activity, and engaging you in conversation about, "How many blocks you're going to need to build a tower, the same height as that one. What if you build them with bigger blocks?" Or just engaging the child in kind of a mathematical conversation.

(22:13):

Some of it can be child-initiated play, but actually really good math teaching what we promote, and what research supports, are planned teacher-guided activities that are fun. But you can't just give the child the activity. You need to be there and engage with them, give them some guidance in how to do the activity, listen to children's thinking and build on that. Because good teaching builds on where children are, and helps them go to the next step. You need to adjust the difficulty level to be appropriate for every child, even though they're all at very different skill levels.

(22:51):

And then you need to plan further activities that are based on what you learned, about their thinking and understanding. That takes a lot of skill, and we don't really provide teachers time to develop all of those skills. So we need to provide opportunities for them to learn.

Dan Schwartz (23:12):

Has someone written like a textbook for TK teachers to teach math? Has someone done that yet?

Denise Pope (23:19):

Idea for Deborah?

Dan Schwartz (23:20):

No, I'm already up to chapter five in my head. What would [inaudible 00:23:24].

Deborah Stipek (23:24):

No. Actually, since-

Dan Schwartz (23:26):

First, second-

Deborah Stipek (23:26):

Because-

Dan Schwartz (23:26):

... third and fourth.

Deborah Stipek (23:28):

Because California's a big state, publishers are scrambling to get TK textbooks out. Some of them just take their kindergarten textbook and stamp TK on it, or they change a couple of the activities. So yes and no. We run a website called the DREME website, and we have developed many, many activities for teachers and for parents, some of which are in Spanish. That they can implement in their classrooms, in their home childcare settings, in their homes with kids.

(24:00):

They're fun, they engage children. It still takes a certain level of skill to do them effectively. And sometimes people think, "Oh, teaching preschool's easy. I mean, you're just playing with the kids." You try, I want any of you, to sit down with 12, four-year-olds, and teach them basic number concepts, and then tell me after one day, that it's easy.

Denise Pope (24:27):

So does your- I love that you're offering this on your website. It's not just giving them the activities. You're also, I'm imagining, telling them the reasoning behind it, or some of the scaffolding that they will have to do, right? Don't like just, "Okay, set up these blocks in the block corner and have different shapes, blocks," or whatever. You're giving more than that? Yeah, Deborah?

Deborah Stipek (24:46):

Tons, tons of- We have a lot of one-pagers that describe what the math trajectory is, related to particular kinds of math learning skills. One of the things we did, because math was getting more attention, we knew that the people who train or prepare preschool teachers, weren't necessarily trained to teach math themselves. Because we weren't teaching math until the last decade or so.

(25:14):

So we created a website that has a ton of resources, including lots of video clips and handouts, and things like that, for the people who teach teachers. Whether they coach them in a school district, or teach them in a pre-service program, or provide in-service support for them. To give them a little support in taking on something that they hadn't- most of them hadn't done before, very much.

Dan Schwartz (25:40):

So a lot of the work that you've done, Deborah, is part of DREME, which stands for Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education. So this was a network of researchers who work in this space. And as I understand it, you had a sort of a 10 year convening where people were talking about sort of what happened, and what they've learned. So did anything stand out, like any discoveries or whether it's about teaching early math, or about the nature of early math, or the politics of early math? Like what showed up?

Deborah Stipek (26:15):

Well, it was 10 years, not just of discussing math, it was 10 years of working. So we did meet regularly, but it was basically doing projects. Most of the materials that are on the website were developed by that network of people. It was an unusual situation where we had funding that was stable across a long period of time, and also flexible. So when things weren't working one way, we could sort of make a turn and do it a slightly different way. It's a mixture of developing materials and resources, and then taking them out into the field and testing them. And then coming back, adjusting them, before they get on the website.

(26:56):

So it was really developing resources for parents, for parent educators, for teachers, and for teacher educators, that were based on a more systematic assessment of how they actually work. Whether it's in a classroom or in a home. There's a ton of stuff on the web, lots of math activities, but these are more tested, and they've gone through a more rigorous process, because it was all researchers who were working on this.

Denise Pope (27:26):

That's awesome.

Dan Schwartz (27:27):

Oh, that's exciting.

Denise Pope (27:29):

This is just something that went through my head as, if you're a parent listening, there's a little bit of a worry here. So I want my kid to have this math literacy. They play with blocks, they play with shapes, we're doing board games, but now I'm worried, I need to also have a script that I am talking to or helping with, to guide them in the right way. Is that just for the teachers, not the parents, or help us unravel this, Deborah?

Deborah Stipek (27:56):

Well, first of all, let your child be the guide. When they're little, you want to do things that they enjoy doing. So if they want to do a board game, great. But if you say, "Hey, let's play shoots and ladders," and they say, "no," say, "okay, what else would you like to do?"

(28:11):

So you really need to be- You don't want to make this feel like work for them. So I would let your child be the guide, and engage in the kind of activities that your child seems to enjoy.

Dan Schwartz (28:21):

I don't know if you remember Deborah, that Shelley Goldman, who's a professor, she made an app for the cell phone, for kids and their parents when they're in the car. And it would say things, I don't know exactly what it did, but it would sort of make it a game, in the car while you're driving. It would be like-

Denise Pope (28:39):

For math, specifically?

Dan Schwartz (28:41):

Yeah. It would be things like, "Find a sign that's in the shape of a square," and then somebody would do it. So I thought that was really kind of an interesting, a great place to get math. And what I don't know that the kids themselves are looking at the cell phone, right? So if I were going to do early math, I'd probably make technology for four-year-olds. I'd make a computer program and everybody's going to say, "Don't do that."

Deborah Stipek (29:09):

Oh, I wouldn't say that.

Dan Schwartz (29:11):

Oh, good.

Deborah Stipek (29:12):

Oh, no. I wouldn't say that. We want to limit the screen time, and I'm well aware of the challenge of that with my grandsons. But there's some great math activity, very interactive programs that kids have access to. And they're free, many of them are free. Like PBS KIDS, my grandsons really like PBS KIDS, and they have a lot of math activities.

Denise Pope (29:37):

There's people screaming right now, as they're listening to this, like, "No, we don't want to give technology that young to kids." There are two-year-olds that know how to swipe better than I know how to swipe, truly. So there's a big debate, right, going on about technology.

(29:53):

So the fact that you're both saying, "No, I think it's okay," but in moderation, right? And certainly better than just sending a video in the backseat for the long car ride. Maybe having something more interactive as an app, might be better.

Deborah Stipek (30:09):

Also limit it. So I have these for my grandson.

Dan Schwartz (30:13):

Deborah is holding up what looks to me to be two clock faces. One says Dale, one says Henry, and there are no hands on them.

Deborah Stipek (30:20):

No, because we have an hour a day rule. Combined screen time and TV. And we fill it in as we go through the day.

Dan Schwartz (30:31):

Of course, you make it a counting task?

Denise Pope (30:34):

Oh, but I love that the-

Dan Schwartz (30:34):

Of course you do.

Denise Pope (30:34):

No, I love that, because you can lose track.

Deborah Stipek (30:37):

They also have a visual representation. Four-year-olds, when you say only 10 more minutes, they don't know what that means. But if you can see that that clock is almost filled in, then they're much more strategic about when and what they're going to do.

Denise Pope (30:49):

That is a super, practical tip for parents everywhere, as really this whole episode has been, Deborah. So I just want to have us do some quick takeaways, like number one thing that you got out of this, Dan Schwartz, is?

Dan Schwartz (31:05):

Early math is good. Kids like it, throw in a little bit like "What's first, what's second?" You know, "Is this bigger, smaller, near or far?" You know, when you play with them in the counting games, add in some language, help them... And sounds great. I sort of want to go out and do it. I want to go find somebody's kid, and start counting with them.

Denise Pope (31:26):

Deborah's got two grandchildren that would you... Are you also going to babysit, throw that in too? No, and I agree. And I also think this idea of really training the teachers, and helping the teachers get over their own anxiety, because we definitely don't want to transmit that.

(31:43):

And same with the parents. That this can be fun, this can be easy, and this can make you like math better, and that's going to make your kid like math better. So Deborah, thank you so much.

Deborah Stipek (31:54):

My pleasure.

Denise Pope (31:55):

And thank all of you for joining this episode of Schools In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (32:05):

And I'm three, two, one, Dan. Counting backwards.

Podcast

split

GSE area

Faculty and Research

Faculty mentioned in this article: Deborah Stipek

Youth mental health: Teaching (and learning) empathy

Olivia Peterkin — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 18:05:06 +0000

Youth mental health: Teaching (and learning) empathy Olivia Peterkin Mon, 10/21/2024 - 11:05

Brain and Learning Sciences | Child Development | Students

Professor Jamil Zaki discusses the roles of empathy and compassion in bettering our relationships with ourselves and others.

October 24, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

For most young people, one of the most important things on their minds is how they’re perceived by their peers.

Though this focus can sometimes be seen as a negative distraction, �� psychology Professor Jamil Zaki says that the adults in their lives can use this preoccupation with the thoughts of others to help youth create a community centered around empathy, a skill that will in turn build their overall mental health.

“We find that social norms are a really powerful lever that we can pull if we want to encourage empathy, especially among young people,” said Zaki, who leads the �� Social Neuroscience Laboratory and is faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

A few years ago Zaki worked with middle school students in the Bay Area to ask them how they felt about empathy and its value in their lives. In private, students shared that it was useful and powerful — something they might not have said in public if they were unsure of how others felt.

“We then showed students’ responses to each other. And when students learned those social norms, compared to students who didn't, they were more motivated to empathize,” Zaki said. “And then when we came back to these classrooms a month later, those students who learned about the popularity of empathy were also more likely to be acting kindly towards their fellow seventh graders.”

Zaki joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss the power of empathy and how to cultivate it in young people. His research focuses on the neuroscience behind decision making, self regulation, social cognition, and perception, among other social and behavioral functions.

In the episode he also talks about self compassion, and how practicing it can have a positive effect on mental health and performance.

“In fact, we find at �� that when students are not self compassionate, they have a harder time bouncing back if they get a bad grade,” Zaki said. “So not only is it hard to be self compassionate. We have a backwards notion in our culture of what self compassion even means.

“It’s, in essence, extending the same grace and kindness to ourselves as we would to somebody else we care about.”

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Jamil Zaki (00:00):

If you want somebody else to listen to you, one of the best things that you can do is listen to them first.

Dan Schwartz (00:11):

Today, we're continuing our conversation around mental health that we've been having over the last few episodes. We know this is a big subject, and there's so much to unpack in this space for both students and educators.

Denise Pope (00:22):

That's right. We'll be focusing on empathy and how it can play such a large role in our ability to have healthy relationships with others and also, kind of interestingly, the role of empathy with ourselves.

Dan Schwartz (00:35):

Denise, I have this feeling that I may be the kind of student that our expert likes to teach because I think I'm something of a cynic.

Denise Pope (00:43):

Dan Schwartz, what? You a cynic? Please. Come on. Yeah Dan, I think that's right. Let's get into the episode and find out.

(00:56):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. Each episode, we dive into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at �� Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success. And I'm with my co-host, Dan Schwartz, Dean of the �� GSE and faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Dan Schwartz (01:23):

It's my pleasure to introduce Jamil Zaki. He's a researcher, author, teacher, professor, working to understand how people connect with each other and how we can learn to connect better. I've been learning the wrong direction, I think. And his research focuses on how empathy works, how it helps people in situations that make empathy harder. People like me. He is the author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, and he has a new book called Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. I got it. That's why I'm a cynic. I've been waiting my whole life to hear the truth of this.

Denise Pope (01:58):

Hope for Cynics is ... It has Dan Schwartz written all over it. I'm excited to talk. Good. Good. Welcome, Jamil.

Jamil Zaki (02:04):

Thanks for having me.

Dan Schwartz (02:07):

Just as a starter, empathy, sympathy ... Can I be empathetic for myself? What..? Help.

Jamil Zaki (02:14):

Big questions. Empathy is the word that we probably associate the most with the science on this subject. Researchers think of empathy as an umbrella term that describes at least three ways that we connect with each other's emotions.

(02:28):

One, Dan, is that sense of feeling what other people feel. Taking on their emotions. The thing that would make a mind reader go absolutely haywire if they were around a lot of people hearing their voices and feeling their emotions.

(02:41):

A second type of empathy, which we all often call cognitive empathy, is our ability to travel into the perspectives of others and understand how their version of the world might be different from ours.

(02:54):

And then a third piece of empathy, empathic concern or compassion, is our desire to help other people thrive. And it's the piece of empathy most connected with things like volunteering and donating to charity.

(03:07):

You asked about sympathy. Sympathy is a word with a much muddier scientific status. Back in the day, philosophers like Adam Smith used sympathy to describe what we would now call emotional empathy. But since the early 20th century, that idea was sort of market corrected by the rise of empathy as a notion. And so, we don't really use sympathy that much in the science anymore.

(03:32):

Your last question, can you have empathy for yourself? Absolutely. And there's this whole science of self-compassion, and oftentimes we think of being empathic towards ourselves as selfish or self-indulgent or lazy, but it actually turns out that being compassionate for ourselves helps us be resilient, bounce back from failures, and to be there for other people more effectively.

Dan Schwartz (03:56):

I'm having a little trouble with that. It feels very recursive. I'm empathetic for me. I'm empathetic for the me who's being empathetic for me. Does this stop? Do I reach some higher level of empathetic consciousness?

Jamil Zaki (04:12):

Compassion is a response to suffering, and every living being suffers, and that includes ourselves. The idea that we have to only feel compassion for others actually is not recursive, but it's strange in that it almost treats you as an exception to the human race. And I think a lot of times we try to do that. People in leadership. People in healthcare. Teachers. We often think that we're supposed to be kind to others, but we act as though we are not human beings who ourselves require kindness. And I think that, actually, being compassionate towards ourselves is less recursive than it is human. It's an acknowledgement that we are human beings too.

Denise Pope (04:52):

I love that. I love that. And I also know that it plays a role really in terms of mental health. In our work with teens, there's a lot of self-berating, beating themselves up, "Why didn't I do this better? Oh, my gosh. I'm stupid. I'm an idiot," and they start to internalize what they think other people are thinking about them. And I think your notion of self-compassion, then, and being empathetic to yourself goes a long way.

Jamil Zaki (05:18):

And it's really hard, especially in high-achieving settings. I teach a class on empathy and kindness here at ��, and I ask students to practice different things. Reach out to somebody you disagree with and listen better. Try to help somebody in need, and students love to do all this stuff.

(05:34):

But then when I say, "Try to be there for yourselves," they hesitate. They think that the way that they've achieved so much is by being really hard on themselves and beating themselves up.

(05:44):

In fact, we find at �� that when students are not self-compassionate, they have a harder time, for instance, bouncing back if they get a bad grade. Not only is it hard to be self-compassionate. We have a backwards notion in our culture of what self-compassion even means. We think it's a form of weakness, and actually it's more like a strength.

Dan Schwartz (06:05):

I'm kind of a procedural guy. Give me some tips about how to have self-compassion. Generally, I say, "Dan, you screwed that one up. We'll go get it next time." That's sort of as far as I get.

Jamil Zaki (06:21):

Well, that's not terrible. I mean, that's actually a good start.

Denise Pope (06:24):

You're okay, Dan. You're okay.

Dan Schwartz (06:27):

Thank you Denise.

Jamil Zaki (06:28):

I think the first thing is to, I guess, reflect on what we're talking about here. In our research, we find that when we teach people that self-compassion is adaptive, can help them do a better job in the future, they're more willing to try it out. The first is to kind of lay the groundwork by changing people's beliefs about self-compassion.

(06:48):

The way that Kristin Neff, who's the, I guess, the scientific guru of self-compassion in my field ... The way that she suggests practicing this is through three steps. The first is mindful awareness. Simply saying, "Wow, this is hard. I'm suffering." Sort of, Dan, like what you just said. "I screwed this up." Just naming the problem and naming that it's actually causing us some suffering.

(07:11):

The second step, which I've been alluding to already, is called common humanity, and that's the understanding that our suffering and our failures don't make us different or worse than other people. That, in fact, one of the only things that every single person does is to suffer. The fact that we are hurting just makes us like other people.

(07:30):

And the third is what we could call goodwill. It's, in essence, extending the same grace and kindness to ourselves as we would to somebody else we care about. One thing that I often tell people to do is try to reverse the golden rule. The golden rule. Treat others as you'd like to be treated, but lots of us actually treat other people really well and treat ourselves really poorly. I often ask folks, "Hey, if you're suffering, try to think about what you would say to a really close friend or family member who is suffering in the same way, who had failed in the same way that you just have." And oftentimes, people can generate really kind, understanding, and open-minded things that they would say to somebody else, but they've never even thought about being that kind to themselves. That's one trick, one procedure, that you can try to practice self-compassion.

Dan Schwartz (08:21):

What do you think, Denise?

Denise Pope (08:23):

Well, I like it. I know we use that with teens. I mean, one thing that we talk about often is, who do you talk the most to in your life? And it's really yourself, right? People don't realize that, but your inner voice. And so, we do that same flip, which, Jamil, is, how would you talk to yourself like you would talk to your friend? And I love that. I love that. We talked about how to teach self-compassion.

(08:44):

How would you teach what you're calling cognitive empathy? What are some lessons?

Jamil Zaki (08:50):

Cognitive empathy - the ability to understand others. There are two big routes that we take to it. The most famous is perspective taking. This is the idea of walking a mile in somebody else's shoes. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that phrase. And it's a well-intentioned notion that by imagining how I would feel in your position, I can better understand you.

(09:14):

The problem is that perspective taking often fails. If I understand or try to understand how I would feel in your position, I often end up understanding how I would feel in your position, not how you actually feel in your position.

(09:29):

In fact, I think walking a mile in somebody else's shoes is a perfect analogy for perspective taking. If I wanted to know, Dan, how comfortable your shoes are, the last thing I would ever imagine doing is taking them from you and putting them on myself. First of all, it's kind of gross. And second, your shoes probably don't fit me and neither does your experience.

(09:50):

And so, a better alternative, and the way that I try to train cognitive empathy, is through what I call perspective getting. That is directly inquiring in a careful way with other people about their experiences and practicing active listening as they answer. And I know that sounds almost trivial in its simplicity. If you want to know how people feel, just ask them. But asking good questions and listening well, I think, are more complex than people realize.

Denise Pope (10:18):

Can you give just two or three quick examples of some really good questions?

Jamil Zaki (10:22):

I mean, I think that it's not so much the initial question. It's how we follow up. One of the techniques from psychology and actually that people like journalists and detectives and good physicians also use is called looping to understand. You ask someone a question. For instance, tell me about your best moments over the long Memorial Day weekend. And they tell you. And instead of just saying, "Okay, I've understood your answer. We are perfectly aligned now," you follow up. You say, "Okay, what I heard is," and then you paraphrase to the best of your ability what the gist of what they've shared is. And then you ask. You say, "What am I missing? What else is there?" Right? And you iterate until both people agree on one person's experience, right? Until you and I both agree about what you've been through, what your experience is like. That technique of iterating and paraphrasing can get us much closer to true cognitive empathy than just assuming that somebody else would experience something the same way that we would.

Dan Schwartz (11:26):

When you go to a movie that has a sad moment, do you cry? Like Steel Magnolias. I don't know if people remember that movie. It's basically designed to make you cry the whole time.

Denise Pope (11:42):

First of all, you're dating yourself, Dan, but I have seen Steel Magnolias. This is what you should know about me. And people probably already do. Listeners probably do. I cry at everything. I cry at commercials that are sappy. I cry at sad books. I cry when I ... I just cried, we were saying goodbye to a board member at Challenge Success, and I broke down. I am a sap. True sap.

Dan Schwartz (12:04):

Do you go to movies where you get to cry? Do you seek it out?

Denise Pope (12:08):

Well, I mean, it's kind of... There's a nice release. I will purposely read Holocaust fiction because I know it's going to be sad and intense. And I'll be on a beach reading Holocaust fiction, and my family thinks that's the weirdest thing, right? But I like to get it out sometimes, a really good cry, very cathartic, but I just also can't help myself. I mean, literally, I can't help myself.

Dan Schwartz (12:32):

Do you think this is something you learned? Your parents somehow trained you to be teary-eyed and empathetic?

Denise Pope (12:40):

I think I come from a long line of criers. My grandfather. I feel like there's might be a genetic component, but I don't know. How about you? Are you a crier?

Dan Schwartz (12:54):

No. No, not really. I was born so empathetic, Denise. I was just so empathetic that I learned to actively suppress it.

Denise Pope (13:05):

Wait, Dan, first of all-

Dan Schwartz (13:07):

No, I'm serious.

Denise Pope (13:09):

You're being serious?

Dan Schwartz (13:10):

If I didn't suppress my empathy, I'd be like that vision of the poor mind reader walking down the street, hearing the voices of everybody on the street, and going crazy.

Denise Pope (13:19):

Oh, my God.

Dan Schwartz (13:19):

If I freed up my empathy, I'd be overwhelmed. Just looking at you, I'm feeling a little teary-eyed. I've got to suppress-

Denise Pope (13:27):

Flaclench. Flip flaclench is the word. Oh, my gosh. Well, Dan, I ...

Dan Schwartz (13:32):

Put it another way. I could never give people bad news if I didn't suppress my empathy because I don't want to feel their pain.

Denise Pope (13:41):

You seriously have done some thinking about this and trained yourself not to empathize in order to give someone bad news?

Dan Schwartz (13:49):

Or to get a little abstract about my empathy. To switch over to sympathy.

Denise Pope (13:52):

We're throwing around some words here.

Dan Schwartz (13:54):

We have so many questions.

Denise Pope (13:54):

Yes. Yes.

Dan Schwartz (13:56):

Is it possible that I didn't learn to be empathetic? I learned to shut it down. I just made up this theory.

(14:08):

We got to get to the cynic book because-

Denise Pope (14:11):

Can you tell already, Jamil, that we need to get to the cynic book?

Dan Schwartz (14:15):

I imagine this conversation where ... I've had this conversation. How did that make you feel? And then I sort of say, "Oh, it was sort of like this." I'm trying to make the bid to hone in on it. The answer is, "No, you just don't understand me." Then they say something else, and I go, "Oh, it's kind of like this." "Gosh-

Denise Pope (14:32):

Dan, what you're basically saying-

Dan Schwartz (14:33):

... you just don't understand me."

Denise Pope (14:33):

... is you need to take Jamil's class. You need extra practice.

Dan Schwartz (14:40):

No, I'm thinking I need eight-hours-a-day therapy for four months.

Jamil Zaki (14:46):

Four months is a pretty fast track, actually.

Dan Schwartz (14:48):

Is that right?

Jamil Zaki (14:49):

I mean, I would say, Dan, that you're right. A perspective getting ... Trying to understand people is an art. It's really hard work as well. And I think that your experience is really common. It can be really frustrating when you're trying your absolute best, and you still aren't getting through. This is why I think that oftentimes we can ask people to help us.

(15:11):

Empathy often seems like it's supposed to mean having the right answers, but it can actually mean having better questions. Instead of saying, "Oh, so you felt this," which sort of sounds like you're suggesting that you already know the answer, you say, "It sounds like you are feeling this. Can you help me, though? What am I missing here? How could I understand this a little bit better?" Collaborating with people to understand them can be a powerful technique.

Denise Pope (15:36):

You could see that tone is really different from what you said, Dan-

Dan Schwartz (15:44):

No, it's good. It's good.

Denise Pope (15:44):

That's good.

Dan Schwartz (15:44):

okay so it's six months. No, that was good. That was good.

Denise Pope (15:45):

You mentioned that it was really around perspective getting and perspective taking. In your class, you work with students to reach out to someone who they disagree with, and I can only imagine, given the state of the world right now, just how important this concept is. Talk to us. What's your take on why this is such a crucial time for empathy?

Jamil Zaki (16:08):

Well, let me first say that I think every time is a crucial time for empathy. Empathy is simply one of our fundamental human skills. And if you think about our species, the special thing about us is not what a single human being can do. It's what we do together. And empathy is one of the psychological foundations that allows us to collaborate, cooperate, to treat each other kindly. It's related to all sorts of metrics of personal and social wellbeing. Everything from mental health, happiness, strong relationships, to strong communities.

(16:45):

I think, right now and in a polarized and divided time, empathy is perhaps even more crucial than ever. I'm often laughed at when I say that empathy can be a powerful tool in a polarized setting because it seems like, gosh, division is so toxic. Empathy is bringing cotton candy to a gunfight or something, but it turns out that actually being empathic is an immensely powerful tool in the face of difference and division.

(17:16):

In our lab, we find that when people believe that empathy is a strength, they communicate with people they disagree with much more effectively. They don't pretend they don't have opinions. They represent their own view just as strongly, but they appeal to common values, and they communicate compassionately in a way that makes the other person, the person who disagrees with them, feel more understood, more connected, and, get this, more convinced.

(17:45):

Actually, if you want somebody else to listen to you, one of the best things that you can do is listen to them first. That's a scarce resource in our current moment, but I think a precious one.

Denise Pope (17:55):

Can we send you to the Senate? Can we send you to different places? All the red and blue states all over the place. Just more empathy, people. We need it. We need it.

(18:06):

I can also see how this would play a role in schools right now. I mean, we're hearing division in schools and teachers and kids not seeing eye to eye, parents and teachers not seeing eye to eye, but also just in general how to get along well. Talk to us. I know that you've worked with schools.

Jamil Zaki (18:26):

I think that there are lots of ways to encourage empathy among communities. One that we found that's especially powerful in schools and among adolescents, in particular, is using social norms. What do 12 and 13-year-olds care about more than anything on Earth?

Denise Pope (18:43):

Themselves. Being popular. Being popular?

Jamil Zaki (18:48):

Yes. Yes. Thank you, Denise. Other 12 and 13-year-olds. What other kids think.

(18:54):

And so, we worked with a few middle schools in the Bay Area a couple of years ago, and we asked students, "How do you feel about empathy? Why do you value it?" And students, first of all, when answering in private, love empathy. They talk all about how useful it is and how powerful it is and how much they want to have an empathic community, but they might not say that in public if they don't know that's what other people feel.

(19:20):

What we then did is we showed students' responses to each other. There are no lies here. We're presenting students with each other's actual opinions and beliefs. The social norm in these schools was invisible but powerful. People wanted empathy. And when students learned those social norms compared to students who didn't, they were more motivated to empathize. And then when we came back to these classrooms a month later, those students who learned about the popularity of empathy were also more likely to be acting kindly towards their fellow seventh graders, in this case.

(19:56):

We find that social norms are really a powerful lever that we can pull if we want to encourage empathy, especially among young people.

Denise Pope (20:05):

It's a teachable skill is what you're saying? I mean, even just hearing that, I think, gives me hope. I know we're moving into Hope for Cynics, the name of your book, but the fact that it's a teachable skill ... I think some people think, "Oh, she's a really empathetic person, and he's not," or whatever. It's a born thing. It's a trait.

Jamil Zaki (20:26):

Well, it is absolutely both. People are born more or less empathic. Empathy is heritable, meaning that it passes down from generation to generation, but it's also extraordinarily malleable. People can change and do change over the course of their lives. Specific events in our lives can cause our empathy to go up or down, but also the right practices and habits can help us cultivate empathy on purpose. Yes, it is a skill.

(20:57):

And my sense from the last 20 years of research that I've done in this space is that it's a skill that we can build, but one of the hardest things is not helping people practice it. It's getting people to want to practice it, right? Basketball is a skill as well, but I'm never going to make it to the NBA. I've tried, and it's just not in the cards for me. I don't practice my jump shot because there's nothing in it for me. One of the important things to do is not just teach people how to empathize but teach people why to empathize. Give them motives to understand how this can be a powerful tool in their lives, and then they're more likely to practice it and to learn it.

Dan Schwartz (21:39):

Back to me. Tell me about-

Denise Pope (21:42):

Someone who needs practice.

Dan Schwartz (21:43):

Well, no, tell me about Hope for the Cynic.

Jamil Zaki (21:45):

Well, I've studied empathy forever. And more recently, I've become interested in a big massive social trend around the world, which is that people have lost faith in each other and in virtually every institution you can imagine. People around the world believe less in science, education, the media, government, industry, everything than they did before. I've become really curious as to why that's happening, what it's doing to us, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

(22:22):

And one of the big messages that I discovered in going through decades of evidence on this is that cynicism often feels a lot smarter than it is. We have this stereotype that if you are hopeful and optimistic, you're a gullible rube. And if you think people are awful, then you're probably real wise. It turns out that that's almost exactly the opposite of the truth. Cynics perform less well on cognitive tests than hopeful people. They tend to be worse at understanding who's a liar and who's telling the truth. And it turns out that cynicism, in many cases, reflects not wisdom but bias. A bias to see the worst in others.

(23:03):

That's bad news, but the good news is that if we pay closer attention to the data around us, and I don't just mean scientific data but the everyday data of how people really act, there are pleasant surprises everywhere. People tend to be a lot better than we think they are.

Dan Schwartz (23:20):

What is the test that you give to see how cynical people are? I need to start studying.

Denise Pope (23:24):

I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming. Dan does not like to do poorly on tests. On any test. He's already worried. He's already worried, Jamil.

Jamil Zaki (23:33):

There's something ... The original cynicism test was developed by educators, actually, to measure whether teachers would get along with their students. Cook and Medley, these two psychologists in the 1950s, developed this test. And it has questions in it like, "People are only honest because they're worried about getting caught," for instance. And so, there's 50 statements, and the extent that you agree with them reflects how cynical you are. And again, Cook and Medley designed this for teachers, but it turned out that this cynical hostility, which is what it's now called, predicted all sorts of outcomes for all sorts of people. If you're high in this, you're not just a great time at parties. You also tend to, for instance, be more prone to loneliness, depression, divorce, alcoholism, and even heart disease.

Dan Schwartz (24:25):

You're imputing negative intent is sort of the-

Jamil Zaki (24:27):

Yes. That's right. That's right.

Denise Pope (24:30):

And it's bad for your health. I mean, this is ... I love that point. I could see that. I can see how a cynic just is more and more blah, right?

Jamil Zaki (24:39):

I mean, one of the best things that protects our health and well-being is our connection to other people. And cynics, by imputing, Dan, as you're saying, ill intent from folks all around them, including their friends and family, deprive themselves of the benefits of connection. They live this sort of ... There's this internal split between themselves and the rest of the world, and that turns out to harm them in basically every way you can measure.

Dan Schwartz (25:06):

That sounds lousy. Be walking around suspicious of everybody. It's kind of a cynicism meets paranoia. Denise, I'm not a cynic. I'm an ironist.

Denise Pope (25:16):

Care to define?

Dan Schwartz (25:19):

I enjoy the contradictions in existence.

Jamil Zaki (25:23):

Dan, can I offer something?

Dan Schwartz (25:25):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (25:25):

Yes.

Jamil Zaki (25:26):

I think you might be neither a cynic nor an ironist, although I've never heard that term, so I can't say conclusively. I think you might be a skeptic. And oftentimes people confuse cynicism and skepticism, but they're really quite different.

(25:40):

Cynicism is basically having this bias against people and, often, assuming that you're right in the absence of any evidence. Skepticism is thinking like a scientist, not willing to rest on your assumptions but looking for evidence, even pugilisticly demanding evidence from people for their own claims.

(25:59):

What I argue in the book that we should aim for is not to replace mud-colored glasses with rose-colored glasses, to replace cynicism with blind or naive gullibility and trust, but rather to replace it with what I call hopeful skepticism. That is taking a data-driven view on our lives and relationships and people and also understanding, this is the hopeful part, that our assumptions are often worse than reality. Understanding that people are probably better than we think. Using that as a starting point and then thinking like a scientist.

Dan Schwartz (26:36):

I'm buying 50 copies. I'm doing it now.

Denise Pope (26:40):

I know. First of all, look at that. Right? You just made Dan so happy. Tips. Tips. You say there's hopes for the cynics, and I love the distinction here. I think it's really important.

(26:50):

What are some quick tips for folks to try out?

Jamil Zaki (26:55):

A bunch come to mind. The first is to be skeptical of your own cynicism. Remember, when you start to draw sweeping conclusions about people, that you might be biased against them. That this is the way that our minds work. We pay so much attention to negative versus positive information.

(27:14):

A second tip would be to collect more data. If you feel, for instance, that people at your job are all lousy and selfish, ask a few folks for a favor. If nobody helps, then maybe you're right. But if anybody helps, which they probably will, maybe it's time to start questioning your assumptions.

(27:33):

And the third, I guess, would be to remember that we have much more influence on others than we realize. When we treat people like they are awful and selfish, they actually often end up becoming more awful and selfish around us, making us decide that we were right all along. When we instead trust people, they often step up to meet our expectations. This is something that economists call earned trust. One thing you can do, if you want to treat your life like an experiment in small ways, is to take leaps of faith on people to purposefully put your faith in them as a sort of, again, as a little study of your own and see what comes back. And notice the positive effect that your trust and faith have on others.

Denise Pope (28:18):

I mean, can you imagine teachers and parents take that leap of faith, put the trust in it, right? Approach with curiosity, approach with good feelings, like this is going to work. And how different schools would be. How different the parenting is when you're doing that as opposed to rules, rules, rules, rules. If you break them, that's it. Boom. Right? It's a real different feel. I love it. I love it.

(28:43):

Jamil, thank you so much for joining us. We have learned a lot. Dan Schwartz has now learned that he is neither a cynic nor an ironist, but ... Right, Dan? You're happy.

Dan Schwartz (28:57):

I am a scientific skeptic about my own emotions.

Denise Pope (29:05):

Oh, my gosh, Dan. That is perfect. Jamil, well done. We figured it out. Yay.

Dan Schwartz (29:12):

Thank you, Jamil, for sharing everything with us today. It was great. I learned a lot. I think I learned a lot about myself, which makes it even better. Thank you.

(29:21):

Denise, I think it's your turn. What did we take away from this?

Denise Pope (29:25):

Well, I think the biggest takeaway is really just the importance of why we need to empathize with others. That we cannot make it through this world alone, right? We're much stronger as a community when we show up with empathy.

Dan Schwartz (29:40):

I agree, and I like the point that it's not just about the questions you ask, but also about how you respond to those answers. Be curious. Ask, why is that important? How did that happen? Follow up if you need more information about how someone is feeling, and it's okay to keep asking people and be truly interested and gain a deeper understanding. Just that shift alone can have a huge impact.

Denise Pope (30:05):

I agree. And what was also really interesting to me was this idea of how to do this internally. Hold experiments in your own day-to-day life. Who does that? That could be really helpful, right? Challenge your cynicism with some hope, Dan Schwartz, right? Really treat yourself how you would treat others. I think that's really hard for people to do, and not enough people do it.

(30:27):

And then for school settings, this idea of social norms, I think, is so important. To show kids, "Hey, most of you really do want to show up with empathy." And if you show kids that this is what most people want, then it kind of draws them in, right? It's the cool thing to do.

Dan Schwartz (30:44):

Well said.

Denise Pope (30:46):

Jamil, thank you. Look what you've done for Dan alone. And thank you, really, for being here and informing us today. And thank all of you for joining us on this episode of School's In.

(30:56):

Remember to subscribe to our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (31:03):

And I am Daniel Lewis Schwartz.

Denise Pope (31:05):

Is Lewis your middle name?

Dan Schwartz (31:16):

Yes, it is.

Denise Pope (31:17):

My God. I don't think I knew that.

Podcast

GSE area

podcast

Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz , Denise Pope

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Carrie Spector — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 20:27:20 +0000

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Carrie Spector Fri, 09/27/2024 - 13:27

A child in Bangladesh is given tasks to assess executive function skills, which strongly predict the ability to thrive in school and beyond. (Photo: Ishita Ahmed)

Child Development | Early Childhood | International Education

A global network led by �� education professor Jelena Obradović works to help promote executive function skills in children around the world.

September 30, 2024

By Carrie Spector

Certain skills are essential for many demands of everyday life, helping us to focus, control impulses, manipulate information in our minds, and shift from one task to another. These skills, known as executive functions (EFs), begin developing in early childhood and are linked to behaviors that serve well into adulthood, from learning to relationship-building.

These skills are considered universal across cultures. But what about the way they’re measured?

Tests used to track children’s development of these skills are often based on assumptions that don’t match cultural norms, producing inaccurate information and making it harder to support kids properly, researchers say. Young people around the world may be identified as having poor EF skills just because they were not familiar with certain parts of the testing protocol.

GSE Professor Jelena Obradović spoke about the importance of EFs at a conference at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Sept. 26. (Photo: Arthur de Tassigny)

“EFs strongly predict how kids thrive in school, and there are many ways to intervene and help them improve these skills,” said Jelena Obradović, a professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning. “But to understand where help is needed, we need to know that we’re measuring the right thing. We need assessments that align with their cultural context and everyday experiences.”

Obradović, a developmental psychologist and director of the �� Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids (SPARK), recently set out to fill that need. A longtime researcher studying EFs in children around the world, she reached out to fellow experts in the field and established the Global Executive Function Initiative (GEFI) at ��, a network of scholars working to promote EF development and assessment across cultures.

On Sept. 26, at an international conference on brain sciences, early childhood care, and education held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Obradović presented on a panel about the importance of EFs and introduced new guidelines developed by GEFI for adapting assessments to better capture EF skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe.

“These are foundational skills that support any kind of goal-directed behaviors, and they’re going to be important for lifelong learning,” said Obradović. “If we can measure them well, we can promote and improve them.”

Skills for lifelong learning

Executive functioning generally involves three core skills: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Inhibitory control includes not only resisting an impulse or habit, but also being able to suppress distractions and focus on a task. Working memory refers to the ability to keep information in mind and use it in various circumstances, such as following instructions. Cognitive flexibility involves the ability to shift attention between various tasks or demands, especially in response to feedback or changes in the environment.

To assess a child’s EF skills, there are two basic approaches: observing children’s actions in everyday settings, where teachers and parents report on behaviors linked to the skills; and direct testing, where children are given a battery of tasks designed to measure different components of EF skills. Both approaches have advantages, Obradović said, but they can also both be tainted by cultural biases.

For starters, measures that work in one culture might not apply to another. A classic way to test children’s ability to control impulses is the marshmallow test, where children are left alone in a room with a marshmallow for a period of time and told they’ll be rewarded if they wait to eat the snack. Researchers are aiming to measure a universal skill – but the way children respond to this specific challenge depends on their culture.

“If you come from a place where waiting for a snack is culturally socialized, where it’s the default, there’s no impulse to inhibit,” Obradović said.

In a 2022 study to measure children’s ability to delay gratification, led by GEFI network member Yuko Munakata, U.S. and Japanese children were asked to wait before eating and before opening a gift. The Japanese children waited three times longer for food than for gifts, while U.S. children waited nearly four times longer for gifts than for food.

Cultural conventions account for the discrepancy, Obradović said. In Japan, children are socialized to wait to eat until everyone is served, a habit less prevalent in U.S. children’s daily life. And in the United States, gift-giving often takes place on special occasions like birthdays and holidays, so kids are accustomed to waiting to receive them – whereas in Japan, children receive gifts regularly throughout the year, with no tradition of waiting.

A child in Côte d'Ivoire is given a battery of tasks designed to measure different components of EF skills. (Photo: Michael Sulik)

Biases embedded in testing

Direct testing through tasks, often administered on a computer or tablet, is generally considered a reliable way to measure children’s EF skills, Obradović said. But many assessments have been developed in high-income, western countries like the United States, with cultural biases embedded in the test itself or how it’s administered.

A child’s ability to maintain eye contact when given instructions for a task might indicate their ability to focus, but in some cultures, children may not be socialized to make direct eye contact with authority figures. And “gamifying” tasks is a popular way to engage children and standardize tasks, but it can lead to distorted results.

“Gamelike tasks are a lot more relevant for kids who are schooled or for kids who are from a western context, because they engage in these kinds of one-on-one, game-like educational activities all the time,” Obradović said.

Even interacting one-on-one with an assessor might be an unfamiliar experience in some settings. Young children in low- and middle-income countries especially tend to be inhibited in testing situations and hesitant to interact with strangers, and this reluctance could affect the measurement of their EF skills.

EF tasks sometimes use talking puppets to motivate kids to participate, because U.S. children have been socialized to see puppets as approachable and fun. But doing research in rural Pakistan, Obradović found that preschoolers refused to take instructions from a puppet because the scenario was so unfamiliar.

“These tasks work really well in many places,” Obradović said. “But we’re encouraging researchers to use local expertise and pilot testing to see what will work in their setting. We’re helping them think through the questions to ask and giving them ideas about how to adapt the tests.”

An assessor works with a child in Bangladesh. New guidelines developed by the Global Executive Function Initiative at �� provide recommendations to better capture EF skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe. (Photo: Ishita Ahmed)

Scaling up guidance

The guidelines developed by Obradović and her GEFI colleagues grew, in part, from seeing a need to scale up and standardize the ad hoc guidance she’s extended over the years.

Obradović has worked for more than a decade in the Global South, adapting standard EF tasks to the culture of the populations she studies. “Periodically I’ll get emails from researchers asking, ‘Can you send me your tasks?’ or ‘How would you modify this?’ ” Obradović said. “I’m glad to share with anyone, and I’ve always kept everything open-source. But at the end of the day, a lot of these decisions come down to a judgment call, and I wanted to widen the circle of people making those calls, to pool our knowledge and experience.”

In addition to recommendations for making standard EF tasks culturally meaningful, the new guidelines from GEFI include considerations for working with children of different ages and in various spaces, strategies for training assessors, and procedures for processing and analyzing the data. More standardization and transparency in how data is processed will also advance scientific understanding. “We also offer cautionary notes for how not to misinterpret findings,” says Obradović.

Obradović and her colleagues also recently launched a major survey of educators, parents, and researchers around the world, seeking out examples of everyday experiences linked to EF skills – common activities that require children to do things like wait their turn, pay attention, remember lengthy instructions, or work on a project with others. In the United States, for instance, a typical children’s household task that requires focus and persistence could be folding laundry or putting away groceries; in Bangladesh, tying up bundles of rice paddy as part of farm work might be more familiar, or in Malawi, walking to collect water.

GEFI has begun piloting its tools in more than a dozen countries in the Global South, and GSE doctoral students are among the researchers involved in developing and evaluating the resources, including Kavindya Thennakoon working in Sri Lanka, Mateus Mazzaferro in Brazil, and Ishita Ahmed in Bangladesh.

“In rural Bangladesh, children are constantly learning from their parents and using EF skills while they work on the farm or at a local business,” said Ahmed, whose doctoral research is focused on developing culturally relevant measures of learning, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. “Measuring these skills is important, to shed light on how policy is effective. But I’m not going in with assumptions about what the measure should look like. Measures should represent local experiences.”

By advancing research into ways to measure these skills in different cultural settings, Obradović hopes that GEFI’s work will help identify programs and policies to support EF development worldwide.

“We need rigorous, open-source, scalable assessments to understand all children’s learning capacities and needs – not just those in Western, high-income countries,” she said. “There’s much more work in this space to be done.”

The Global Executive Function Initiative at �� has been supported by funding from the Jacobs Foundation.

Research Stories

split

GSE area

normal

Faculty mentioned in this article: Jelena Obradović

��-led study links school environment to brain development

Carrie Spector — Sun, 19 May 2024 21:45:29 +0000

��-led study links school environment to brain development

Carrie Spector Sun, 05/19/2024 - 14:45

A new study finds that children who attend higher-performing schools show greater year-by-year advances in brain development, even those coming from a wide range of socioeconomic environments. (Photo: Allison Shelley for EDUimages)

Brain and Learning Sciences | Child Development | Learning Differences

Researchers found increased white matter development in children from higher-performing schools.

May 21, 2024

By Rebecca Beyer

For decades, researchers have linked differences in school-age children’s brain development to their out-of-school environment, using indirect socioeconomic factors such as parental income and neighborhood characteristics.

In a new paper, researchers from �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) demonstrate for the first time that, even when controlling for those other factors, there is a direct link between a child’s school environment and the development of their white matter, or the network of nerve fibers that allows different parts of the brain to communicate.

In other words, schools that do better than average at promoting learning are showing greater year-by-year advances in brain development, even for students coming from a wide range of socioeconomic environments.

For their study, the authors, including GSE doctoral candidate Ethan Roy, Professor Bruce McCandliss, and Associate Professor Jason Yeatman, leveraged data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, and the �� Education Data Archive (SEDA), a national database of academic performance developed by the Educational Opportunity Project at �� University.

Their findings show that children who attend higher-performing schools have accelerated white matter development, including in an area of the brain closely associated with reading skills.

Roy said the results, published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience on April 26, were “striking.”

“What jumped off the page for us is that, even when controlling for things like parental income, parental education, neighborhood context, and household conflict levels, we were still able to observe a significant relationship between the school environment of an individual and growth properties of their brain,” he said.

Filling a gap in learning science research

Yeatman, who along with McCandliss serves as an advisor to Roy, said the study is the first to show how variation in the educational opportunities afforded to children is related to brain development.

“Essentially, two children from similar families who are born on two sides of a school boundary have measurable differences in how their brains wire together,” said Yeatman, who holds a joint faculty appointment at the GSE and �� Medicine, is a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning, and directs the Brain Development & Education Lab and Rapid Online Assessment of Reading.

The study looked at fractional anisotropy, a measure of how water moves through brain tissue and an indication of how insulated, or myelinated, a neuron’s axons are (higher myelination increases the speed of transmission between neurons and is associated with improved learning). The observational results show that fractional anisotropy is directly linked to a school’s national grade equivalence score, or a measure of how third graders from that school perform compared with the national average.

The paper fills a gap in learning science research. Although past studies have linked socioeconomic status to white matter development, they have not been able to focus in on specific attributes of a child’s development, such as the school they attend. Other research — including from Yeatman’s lab — has shown that educational interventions can lead to changes in white matter, but those have been relatively small-scale studies with participants who are not representative of the broader population.

“This is one of the first cases where we can measure the thing we actually care about at the population level,” Yeatman said.

The authors also trained a deep learning model to conduct a global analysis of white matter, finding that children who attend schools with higher SEDA scores had brains that appeared developmentally “more mature” than their chronological age.

A measurable impact

The implications are “potentially game-changing,” said McCandliss, who directs the �� Educational Neuroscience Initiative (SENSI) and is a faculty affiliate of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

“National discussions of the importance of elementary school quality have never before been framed in terms of having a measurable impact on physical brain development of our young children,” he said. “I think this changes the frame of the discussion and decision-making around the impact of inequity.”

The study was only possible because of the comprehensive data included in the ABCD Study and SEDA, the researchers said. McCandliss, an investigator in the ABCD Study, first approached the ABCD team leaders about linking the SEDA data with the ABCD data in 2018, and his SENSI team spent about two years creating the resulting “crosswalk.”

McCandliss called the ABCD study a “dream come true,” and the linked data a way to “finally” answer “elusive questions about how inequities in educational opportunities may actually be changing the course of physical and functional brain development during the vulnerable elementary school years across the nation.”

To analyze the brain white matter from the MRI data included in the ABCD study, the authors used pyAFQ, an open-source software developed by Yeatman’s lab. “It was a really fruitful collaboration across both labs,” Roy said.

The authors hope their methods and the newly linked ABCD and SEDA data, which is now freely available to a community of registered researchers around the world, will allow other scholars to pursue their own ideas and hypotheses at the intersection of education and neuroscience.

Yeatman said the methods and data used in the study will allow researchers to be more precise about environmental factors linked to brain development and the mechanisms behind those connections.

“The environment influences brain development,” he said. “That’s obvious. But what about the environment influences brain development? This is the first step in actually unraveling that specificity.”

Research Stories

daps

ships

split

GSE area

normal

DAPS

SHIPS

Faculty mentioned in this article: Bruce McCandliss , Jason Yeatman

Looking back to find meaning

Carrie Spector — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:22:53 +0000

Looking back to find meaning

Carrie Spector Mon, 09/27/2021 - 07:22

Image: Shutterstock

Child Development | Social and Emotional Learning

�� Professor William Damon talks about the value of reviewing your past in order to move forward with purpose.

September 27, 2021

No matter where you are in your life’s journey, reflection can help you grow. That’s why �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor William Damon recommends undertaking a “life review” — as he did.

“The past matters,” said Damon. “The way you think about your history of successes and failures in life makes a big difference to how you think about your future.”

On this episode of School’s In, Damon joined GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about the value and process of reflecting on your life to move forward with a sense of meaning and purpose.

A startling discovery spurred Damon’s own life review. For most of his adulthood, he rejected all opportunities to find his father, who had abandoned the family when Damon was young. That changed when Damon was in his 60s, when his daughter found their half-family. He embarked on a five-year research project to get to know his late, lost father.

That experience culminated in his new book, A Round of Golf with My Father, which uses his own journey to teach the life review method of self-analysis: “thinking about your past in a systematic, intentional way that can give you a hopeful and purposeful future,” he said.

Along with self-analysis, Damon recommends talking to people from your past and getting hold of school records.

“Even as you get older, you have a future,” Damon said. “And it’s very important to think about your past in the right way because it does affect how you think about who you are and what you want to do.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

Podcast

split

GSE area

podcast

Faculty mentioned in this article: William Damon

Difficult conversations

Carrie Spector — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:40:45 +0000

Difficult conversations

Carrie Spector Mon, 06/29/2020 - 09:40

retrorocket / iStockPhoto

Child Development | Parenting | Social and Emotional Learning

Psychiatrist Sujata Patel shares strategies for talking with kids about uncomfortable topics.

May 25, 2020

What are some common mistakes adults make when discussing uncomfortable issues with young people? Should the adult initiate a difficult conversation or wait for the child to bring it up? And under what circumstances is it considered a good thing if a teenager stomps off angrily at the end of a hard talk?

On this episode of School’s In, psychiatrist Sujata Patel joins �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about strategies for parents and teachers as they take on difficult conversations with young people.

“The feelings are the most important part of the conversation,” says Patel, a psychiatrist at Vaden Health Center, which provides health services to students at ��. “Getting to resolution is not as important. If each person leaves the discussion feeling heard and understood and validated, that is a successful conversation.”

Taking a child’s perspective into consideration is key to reaching that outcome, she says. In a disagreement about whether to let a teenager go to a party, for instance, parents may be thinking about the child’s safety, healthy boundaries and a gradual increase in the child’s freedom. The child, meanwhile, may be focused on feelings of missing out and not being trusted.

“If you look at it from their perspective, it’s easier to get to a middle ground,” says Patel.

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

Podcast

split

GSE area

podcast

The reading wars, explained

Carrie Spector — Fri, 17 May 2019 19:03:00 +0000

The reading wars, explained

Carrie Spector Fri, 05/17/2019 - 12:03

syntika/Getty Images

Child Development | Language and Literacy | Teaching

�� GSE professor Rebecca Silverman talks about the ongoing debate over how to teach children to read.

May 13, 2019

When it comes to teaching kids to read, what’s more effective: putting together vocabulary lists or immersing them in a world of language?

“You would think that for something like reading, which has been studied for a very long time, we would have the answers,” said Rebecca Silverman, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education, who studies literacy and reading development among pre-K and elementary school children. “But there’s a lot of disagreement about it.”

On this episode of “School’s In,” Silverman joins GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about the so-called “reading wars”— different camps of opinion regarding the best way to teach kids how to read.

Many debates around reading hinge on a larger controversy, Silverman said: How do we define literacy? “Is it being able read words on a page? Is it being able to comprehend what we’re reading? Is it being able to use it socially for important functions in life?”

Various perspectives on literacy lead to different instructional practices, said Silverman, who explores these questions and shares advice for parents in this episode.

You can listen to “School’s In” on SiriusXM Insight channel 121, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

Podcast

split

GSE area

podcast

Faculty mentioned in this article: Rebecca Silverman

Losing sleep

Dylan Conn — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 23:03:17 +0000

Losing sleep

Dylan Conn Mon, 04/22/2019 - 16:03

Child Development | Parenting | Students

Rafael Pelayo talks about why teenagers become night owls, the risks of sleep deprivation and the controversy over later school start times.

April 13, 2019

Animals have evolved to adapt to their environment in many ways, but one thing hasn’t changed: They all need sleep to survive, says Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the �� Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine.

“Anything that has a brain needs to sleep,” Pelayo says. Some animals, like dolphins and migrating birds, stay in motion with one half of their brain asleep while the other half stays alert. But the restorative function of sleep is essential. “You can go longer without food or water than you can without sleep.”

On this episode of School’s In, Pelayo joined �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about sleep—including adolescents’ biological tendency to stay up late (it’s not TV or technology), the risks they face from sleep deprivation, and why efforts to get schools to start later in the morning are so controversial.

“People say that if school starts later, kids will just stay up later,” he said. But even a minor shift in the start time makes a difference for sleep-deprived adolescents, he said, citing research showing that when schools delayed their start time by an hour, students slept 40 minutes more at night. “This has been replicated over and over again,” he said. “We’ve got to put the cynicism aside.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

Podcast

split

GSE area

podcast

New ��-led study identifies factors that could promote resilience in children facing extreme adversity

Carrie Spector — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 19:52:22 +0000

New ��-led study identifies factors that could promote resilience in children facing extreme adversity

Carrie Spector Wed, 02/27/2019 - 11:52

STAR Project (Collaboration with Aga Khan, �� and Harvard universities)

Child Development | International Education | Poverty and Inequality

Research led by Jelena Obradović singles out characteristics associated with stronger executive function skills in highly disadvantaged preschoolers.

February 27, 2019

By Carrie Spector

Preschoolers’ ability to regulate their attention, behavior and emotions has been linked with their capacity to cope with difficult situations and thrive in the classroom. But most research into how children develop these skills—known as “executive functions”—has taken place in high-income countries like the United States.

A new study led by �� Graduate School of Education Professor Jelena Obradović identifies several factors that appear to promote these skills in children from parts of the world with high rates of poverty, malnutrition and infectious disease.

“Executive function skills are really important for children at risk, but exposure to stressors undermines the development of these skills,” said Obradović. “If we can show what supports the development of these skills in a rural, disadvantaged context, we can better design interventions to compensate for those stressors.”

The study, which looked at preschoolers in rural Pakistan, found that a child’s height for his or her age, the number of older siblings, and an early parenting intervention all emerged as significant predictors of executive function skills in this population.

An important set of skills

The study, which was published on February 17 by the journal Developmental Science, grew out of a research collaboration that Obradović formed with Professor Aisha Yousafzai at Harvard University and researchers at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.

“We chose to study executive functions because they’re an important set of skills that promote adaptation and resilience,” said Obradović, who directs the SPARK Lab at ��, a project researching the impact of adversity on children’s learning and well-being. “They’ve become a good marker for children’ capacities.”

Executive function (EF) skills enable children to control impulses, ignore distractions, remember relevant information and shift between competing rules or demands for their attention. Studies in high-income countries have linked strong EFs in children to lower levels of behavioral and emotional problems, greater engagement in school and stronger academic skills.

But “there really wasn’t any research assessing EFs in preschoolers from a very disadvantaged setting where children face extreme, chronic adversity,” Obradović said. “EF skills support successful school transition and engagement. If we can measure them well, we can start to identify what in this environment can promote them.”

Designing tasks carefully

She and her team measured executive functioning in 1,144 at-risk preschoolers in rural Pakistan, using a battery of play-based tasks adapted specifically for this population. They spent months working with local experts to develop tasks that were relevant and useful.

“To conduct the kind of research that’s typically done in a high-income country in the Western world, you need to be careful and thoughtful in ensuring the tasks are culturally and developmentally appropriate,” Obradović said.

Standard tasks that require sorting objects by color or shape are problematic for children who don’t know names for colors (for example, researchers used the term “mango-colored” instead of “red”) or don’t recognize items (like sailboats or certain animals) that are more familiar to children in a higher-income or less rural setting.

“You don’t know if you’re measuring their knowledge of colors and objects or if you’re measuring their executive function skills,” Obradović said. “You need to make sure you’re getting at the underlying capacity.”

Young children in low- and middle-income countries also tend to be inhibited in testing situations and hesitant to interact with strangers, reluctance that could be confounded with EF skills if not considered and addressed by the tasks and by those administering the assessments.

Obradović and her team measured executive functioning in 1,144 at-risk preschoolers in rural Pakistan, using a battery of play-based tasks adapted specifically for this population. (Photo: STAR Project / Collaboration with Aga Khan, �� and Harvard universities)

“For the longest time, most attention was focused on infant and maternal mortality. Now that those numbers are going down, there’s a lot more discussion about how to ensure that these children are reaching their potential.”

— Jelena Obradović, professor at �� Graduate School of Education

A unique contribution

The study built on findings from earlier research by Yousafzai and her team at Aga Khan University involving an intervention that took place from the preschoolers’ birth until age 2. Government health workers had provided some of the mothers with instruction and support for more sensitive and engaged parenting, beyond their usual health services, during monthly home visits.

That intervention proved to be a predictor for the development of both EFs and general cognitive skills (measured through an IQ test). The alignment of the two sets of skills wasn’t surprising, since they’re related and share a similar basis in the brain. But the finding prompted Obradović and her team to dig deeper into what, if anything, promoted EFs in this setting apart from IQ.

“IQ is a strong predictor of executive functioning,” said Obradović. “But there were no studies out there, in disadvantaged global settings, looking at predictors of EFs once IQ had been accounted for.”

The researchers identified three independent predictors. One was the early parenting intervention provided by government health workers. Another was the child’s physical growth status at age two. “Nutrition in those first two years of life was critically important,” Obradović said. “We’ve known it is related to brain development and that it’s an important predictor of children’s IQ, but this study shows that it also uniquely contributes to developing these self-regulatory capacities.”

Third—and this came as a surprise to the researchers—was the number of older siblings.

“In our society we tend to think of having a large family, more than four children, as a risk factor, because there are fewer resources to go around—there’s less time, less money, crowding,” said Obradović. But for these preschoolers, having older siblings was consistently a positive predictor of their executive functioning.

“That suggests there may be other things in this cultural setting that are relevant for promoting self-regulation,” Obradović said. “It could be that we’re missing out by focusing so much on parents as caregivers in our high-income-country paradigm. It could be that these children get more caregiving from siblings, or it could be that they have to learn to regulate their behavior on their own because they have less attention paid to them. We can just speculate, but it’s a strong predictor for these children. Siblings matter.”

Parenting skills and IQ both matter

The researchers also looked at whether mothers’ parenting behaviors (for instance, providing verbal support, information and problem-solving strategies) promoted the children’s executive functioning regardless of the mother’s IQ. Both maternal behavior and maternal cognitive skills mattered independently, they found.

“There’s a new line of research around two-generation interventions, targeting both the caregivers and their children,” Obradović said. “In this context, we’re doing mothers a disservice if we only support their parenting skills. We can also promote EFs in children by providing opportunities for mothers to grow their own cognitive skills, especially given that two-thirds of mothers never attended school.”

In a setting where children face tremendous adversity with limited access to educational opportunities, identifying factors that promote resilience beyond IQ can be significant.

“For the longest time, most attention was focused on infant and maternal mortality,” said Obradović. “Now that those numbers are going down, there’s a lot more discussion about how to ensure that these children are reaching their potential.”

Research Stories

ice

split

GSE area

normal

GCE

Faculty mentioned in this article: Jelena Obradović

What role should genetics research play in education?

Carrie Spector — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:05:07 +0000

What role should genetics research play in education?

Carrie Spector Wed, 02/20/2019 - 12:05

Dane_mark/Getty Images

Child Development | Education Policy | Learning Differences

GSE scholars say genetics provide valuable insight into human behavior but urge open conversations to ensure ethical and equitable research design.

February 20, 2019

By Melissa De Witte

As researchers learn more about the genes that shape a child’s development – including traits of interest to parents and educators – these discoveries must not distract from the essential need for well-crafted policy and determined teachers in the collective task of educating the next generation, say scholars from �� Graduate School of Education.

In a new paper entitled Genetics and Education: Recent Developments in the Context of an Ugly History and an Uncertain Future, published Feb. 20 in AERA Open, Benjamin Domingue and Sam Trejo of the GSE discuss what recent developments in genetics research will mean for parents, educators and policymakers. They say that while genetics can provide valuable insight into human development and behavior – research might one day offer information about ADHD, dyslexia and other learning differences – environments also have immense effects for how a child grows, independent of their genetic makeup. This, they urge, must not be ignored.

Benjamin Domingue, left, and Sam Trejo of �� GSE study recent developments in genetics and what they may mean for parents and educators. (Photo: Hiep Ho)

Here, Domingue, an assistant professor at the GSE and a faculty fellow at the �� Center for Population Health Sciences, and Trejo, a graduate student whose focus is on education, health, genetics and social policy, talk about genetics research and education.

Why do you think it is important for educators to consider the impact of genetics research now?

Domingue: We believe that all of society is about to be impacted by genetics research. In the last decade, millions of people have contributed genotypes to corporate and scientific databases. This information may be used to advance our understanding of human disease and development. Genetic scores for traits such as height, BMI, cardiovascular disease and educational attainment are becoming increasingly predictive. Whether we are ready for it or not, genetics are going to play an increasing role in a variety of human endeavors.

As genetics research expands into education, what ethical considerations and practical problems do you see arising?

Trejo: I think the most practical issue for educators is likely to be related to learning disabilities. Research on human genetics might offer new information about developmental pathways for traits like ADHD and dyslexia. In the short term, such information may offer insight into strategies for intervention. In the long run, it may even be useful for individual-level risk prediction. However, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that virtually all children cannot thrive given the appropriate environmental setting. Providing an environment rich with educational possibilities for all kids should still be a top priority; nothing we’re learning from studies of human genetics seems likely to change that.

You argue that it is important to understand the historical context of genetics in education research. What do you want people to know about this history?

Domingue: Historically, arguments about genetics in education were largely targeted at explaining group differences – for example, arguments of the form “group X performs better at some task than group Y due to genetic differences between X and Y.” As we discuss in the paper, we think arguments of this kind are largely an intellectual dead end. Such arguments tend to minimize both crucially important environmental differences experienced by various groups and the extent to which human ancestral history and the genome are intertwined. Because of these two facts, it is incredibly challenging to construct valid arguments along those lines from genetic data outside of traits that have fairly simple genetic architectures.

We contend that, in contrast, genetics are a useful mechanism for understanding why people from relatively similar backgrounds end up different. Such information is valuable as it stands to offer a great deal of insight about the design of certain educational and policy interventions studied by social scientists. But genetics is a poor tool for understanding why people from manifestly different starting points don’t end up the same. If our paper can help reframe people’s thinking on this point, that would be a hugely important shift.

What are your recommendations to researchers interested in examining the intersection of genetics and education?

Domingue: Given the unique nature of the human genome – it speaks to both our own unique personal histories as well as the broader history of our species – policymakers and researchers need to be especially sensitive when conducting and disseminating research in this area. In particular, acknowledgment of the historical weight of this research may be one way in which we can attempt to avoid past missteps. Even skeptical researchers may be able to help channel genetic research into productive directions by embracing adversarial collaborative efforts. Such efforts will ensure that the concerns of many regarding genetic studies are heard and will also enable more appropriate downstream communication of results to multiple research communities.

Trejo: Genetic influences don’t undermine the need for well-crafted social policy. For example, suppose a common eye problem was entirely due to genetic causes. That might be valuable information in terms of understanding the development of the underlying disease, but it wouldn’t change the short-term relevance of eyeglasses as a viable policy solution to this problem. Genetic predisposition is not destiny. Indeed, helping those students most at risk of health or sociobehavioral problems is one of the most pressing demands in education.

Domingue and Trejo’s paper, Genetics and Education: Recent Developments in the Context of an Ugly History and an Uncertain Future, was published Feb. 20 in AERA Open. Daphne Martschenko of the University of Cambridge is also a co-author. The research was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences.

Research Stories

banner

GSE area

normal

Faculty mentioned in this article: Benjamin Domingue

Child Development

Preschool counts: Building a strong foundation in math

Youth mental health: Teaching (and learning) empathy

New ������������ initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

Skills for lifelong learning

Biases embedded in testing

Scaling up guidance

������������-led study links school environment to brain development

Filling a gap in learning science research

A measurable impact

Looking back to find meaning

Difficult conversations

The reading wars, explained

Losing sleep

New ������������-led study identifies factors that could promote resilience in children facing extreme adversity

What role should genetics research play in education?

New �� initiative aims to close a culture gap in measuring kids’ foundational skills

��-led study links school environment to brain development

New ��-led study identifies factors that could promote resilience in children facing extreme adversity