Fomo, stress and sleeplessness: are smartphones bad for students?

Phones can have nasty side effects, but there are ways to minimise their impact on students.

As with all technology, mobile phones can have their pros and cons,depending on how they are used. At their best, they can be useful tools for staying in touch, finding out new information and co-ordinating social activities. At worst, they can negatively affect concentration, communication and sleep, or increase fear of missing out, procrastination and stress.

These potential negative consequences are especially important to consider for teenagers. Their brains work differently to those of adults: they are more susceptible to peer pressure and have less self-control.

The dangers

Reduced concentration

A study on the science of distraction found that each time an office worker was distracted (say from a text message or email), it took them up to an average of 25 minutes to refocus on the original task at hand. That’s what makes students doing their homework with their mobile phone nearby so problematic. It is a myth that most people can multitask. In truth, it takes up a lot of time, energy, effort and focus to switch between two tasks.

Students don’t even have to be on their mobile phone for it to distract them. For tasks that require attention and cognitive demands (ie homework), researchers have found that the mere presence of a mobile phone may be sufficiently distracting to damage attention.

Reduced face-to face, quality communication

In a fascinating study, researchers asked strangers to talk to each other for 10 minutes. Half the participants had the conversation with their mobile phones on the table; the other half had a notebook instead. The results? Those who chatted in sight of their mobile phone said they were less likely to be friends with their partner and reported feeling less close to them.

What was particularly interesting was that the participants were not aware of the effect that having their mobile phone out had on them. Mobile phones can affect the quality of face-to-face communication even if you don’t consciously know it.

When do children show evidence of self-esteem? Earlier than you might think

 The belief in being good at certain concrete skills could be different from a more general sense of self-worth or what scientists call “positive self-esteem.” For example, at early ages, children can report “I’m good at running” or “I’m good with letters.” But preschoolers might not be able to answer questions about their overall sense of self-worth.

So, when do kids develop a sense of self-esteem and how can we measure it?

Our research has developed new ways to study what kids think about themselves. Parents, make a note: our results show that most kids develop a sense of self-esteem – feeling good or bad about oneself – as early as age five, before they even enter kindergarten.

Measuring self-esteem in young children

Measuring children’s self-esteem can be challenging because it seems to require a certain level of introspection and verbal abilities. We found a way of getting around this by measuring children’s deeper and more implicit sense of self-esteem, something that did not require answering verbal questions.

For example, in adults, self-esteem is often measured by asking people to rate their agreement with statements such as, “I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others,” or “I take a positive attitude toward myself.”

But preschoolers have difficulty answering such verbal questions. Cognitive and verbal skills required for such answers do not develop before age eight.

Laughter and Learning: Humor Boosts Retention

E.B. White famously quipped, "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process." At the risk of committing some sort of "humor-cide," a type of scientific dissection must take place if teachers are to consider harnessing the powerful effects of humor, not only to increase joy and enhance the classroom environment, but also to improve learner outcomes.

The Funny Bone Is Connected to the Sense of Wonder

Teachers understand that humor is inherently social. How many times have you heard that same "Orange who?" knock-knock joke spread through your classroom? The contagious nature of humor naturally builds a sense of community (PDF, 731KB) by lowering defenses and bringing individuals together. If the brain is faced with an inconsistency, then laughter is the response when it is resolved in an unexpected way. This sentence, "Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense," may make us smile as our brains resolve its inconsistency.

Essentially, humor activates our sense of wonder, which is where learning begins, so it seems logical that humor could enhance retention. A Pew Research poll showed that viewers of humorous news shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report exhibited higher retention of news facts than those who got their news from newspapers, CNN, Fox News, or network stations. When Stephen Colbert demands, "If we don't cut expensive things like Head Start, child nutrition programs, and teachers, what sort of future are we leaving for our children?", viewers laugh and also retain the knowledge of that specific budget issue.

A substantial body of research explains why we remember things that make us laugh, such as our favorite, hilarious high school moment or the details of that funny movie we saw last weekend. Neuroscience research reveals that humor systematically activates the brain's dopamine reward system, and cognitive studies show that dopamine is important for both goal-oriented motivation and long-term memory, while educational research indicates that correctly-used humor can be an effective intervention to improve retention in students from kindergarten through college.

Foolishness as a Tool

What does "correctly used" mean? Let’s take a closer look at some of the classroom research to find out. In one study, researchers asked nearly 400 college students to document their teachers' appropriate or inappropriate use of humor, their effectiveness as teachers, and how students perceived the humor. The results of this study showed that related, appropriate humor resulted in increased retention, while inappropriate, cruel, or unrelated humor did not. The study also discovered that humor can be perceived and appreciated without improving retention -- essentially, the student can think a teacher is "funny" but not show an improvement in retention. So, just being silly may get your students' attention, but may not lead to better retention. These researchers concluded that for improved retention, appropriate, topic-related instructional humor is most effective.

Asian Countries Take the U.S. to School

A closer look reveals key differences in how they educate their students and offers valuable practical lessons in getting all children to achieve.

Closing the achievement gap between the United States’ disadvantaged students and the rest of our students has been the major focus of federal education policy since 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. Compared to the countries with more successful education systems in the world, how is the U.S. doing? The answer is not very well.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a very revealing report on low-performing students in the countries that participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment survey. In places like Hong Kong, Shanghai, South Korea, and Vietnam, fewer than 5 percent of 15-year-old students performed below the basic-proficiency level in reading, mathematics and science. But, in the United States, 12 percent—half a million students—fell below the same level in all three subjects. The performance of the average student in the U.S. falls below the OECD average for all 64 countries in its survey, and far below the average for the major industrial countries. The proportion of our students who score below the OECD basic score is also well above the average for the major industrial countries. Equally troubling, the proportion of our students who score in the upper ranges of the OECD spectrum is also well below the average.

Some argue that the U.S.’s lagging behind has nothing to do with our schools: The U.S. has a much higher proportion of disadvantaged poor and minority students than higher-performing countries. But the data show that 37 countries outperform the U.S. in the degree to which socioeconomic status predicts low achievement. Both Vietnam and Latvia have far smaller percentages of low-performing students than the U.S. If it is poverty that accounts for the U.S.’s high proportion of low-performing students, it is hard to explain how these two countries are doing better than the United States. Vietnam’s average income,adjusted for purchasing power, stands at just one-tenth of the U.S. average, Latvia’s at less than one half.

The OECD also tracks the proportion of low-income and minority students who score at high levels on their assessment. This metric shows that the U.S. has a smaller proportion of low-income high achievers than all but a few of the countries studied.

It turns out that a number of East Asian countries, which account for the majority of nations with high-average performance, also have the lowest percentage of low-performing students. Indeed, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea all rank in the global top ten in terms of achievement as measured by OECD’s PISA, and each of these jurisdictions has less than 10 percent of its students scoring at the lowest levels. That makes it clear that improving the performance of the low performers does not require a country to sacrifice the performance of the average or top performers.

How to Learn to Love to Practice

Is there a secret to staying in the zone?

In interviews, famous people often say that the key to becoming both happy and successful is to “do what you love.” But mastering a skill, even one that you deeply love, requires a huge amount of drudgery. Any challenging activity—from computer programming to playing a musical instrument to athletics—requires focused and concentrated practice. A perfect golf swing or flawless butterfly stroke takes untold hours of practice (actually around 10,000 hours, according to Malcolm Gladwell) and countless repetitions to perfect.

Anyone who wants to master a skill must run through the cycle of practice, critical feedback, modification, and incremental improvement again, again, and again. Some people seem able to concentrate on practicing an activity like this for years and take pleasure in their gradual improvement. Yet others find this kind of focused, time-intensive work to be frustrating or boring. Why?

The difference may turn on the ability to enter into a state of “flow,” the feeling of being completely involved in what you are doing. Whether you call it being “in the zone,” “in a groove,” or something else, a flow state is a special experience. Since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of flow in the 1970s, it has been a mainstay of positive-psychology research. Flow states can happen in the course of any activity, and they are most common when a task has well-defined goals and is at an appropriate skill level, and where the individual is able to adjust their performance to clear and immediate feedback.

Flow states turn the drudgery of practice into an autotelic activity—that is, one that can be enjoyed for its own sake, rather than as a means to an end or for attaining some external reward. That raises the question of how we can turn this to our advantage: How can we get into a flow state for an activity that we want to master, so that we enjoy both the process of improving skills and the rewards that come with being a master?

No fairy tale: Origins of some famous stories go back thousands of years

Statistical analysis of language evolution helps estimate storytelling dates.

“Beauty and the Beast” is practically “a tale as old as time.” So are a few other folktales, new research shows.

Statistical ties between a set of folktales and languages from parts of Europe and Asia have helped researchers date the origins of some stories to thousands of years ago. The roots of the oldest one — a folktale called “The Smith and the Devil” — stretch back to the Bronze Age. The findings, reported January 20 in Royal Society Open Science, may dispel the thought that some well-known folktales such as “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Beauty and the Beast” are recent inventions.

“These stories are far older than the first literary evidence for them,” says coauthor Jamie Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in England. 

When linguists study a language’s evolution, they trace grammatical and phonetical structure through time. “What we were interested in doing is seeing if you could do that for other elements of culture,” Tehrani says.

Tehrani and Sara Graça da Silva of the New University of Lisbon in Portugal studied 275 magic-based stories from a database of more than 2,000 types of folktales. Magic stories include beings or objects with supernatural powers and are the largest folktale group. Statistical analyses of the relationship between the folktales and language, as well as between the folktales and how they may have been shared by neighboring peoples, left the team with 76 stories that they thought were strong candidates for accurately estimating folktale age. Family trees, or phylogenies, of Indo-European languages throughout Asia and Europe helped the researchers investigate how the region’s language history related to these folktales.

Five easy ways urban schools can experiment with outdoor learning

Outdoor learning isn't just the preserve of urban schools. These simple ideas will help you incorporate outdoor learning in a concrete jungle.

Whether it’s hunting for minibeasts in the playing fields or reading a book under a tree, the positive impact of outdoor learning on young people’s achievement and development is widely acknowledged.

But what do you do if your school isn’t blessed with acres of green space? From making the most of your playground to venturing further afield, we’ve gathered five tips to help urban schools feel the benefits of taking learning outside.

Embrace your school grounds

It might sound simple but the first thing to do is get outside. As Ian Tokelove from London Wildlife Trust says: “Ask yourself if a game or activity could work outside. If it could, then go for it.”

It could be as simple as asking students to close their eyes and tune into the sounds of the urban world.

Games such as follow-my-leader or hide and seek are good for familiarising students with their outdoor space. Older pupils could map the school grounds, identifying their favourite areas and explaining their choices.

Nicole Daw, a National Trust ranger at Leigh Woods, Bristol, finds a colour-matching activity works well. She says: “Using some paint charts from your local DIY shop, ask pupils to go outside and find colours that match the charts. Green is a great place to start, but it is incredible how many colours are out there once you really start looking.”

At what age is it easiest to learn a second language?

If you want to learn a foreign language, should you begin before a certain age in order to fully master it? Popular opinion holds that young children find it easier than adults because childhood is a “critical period” for language learning.

It has been difficult to prove this, but new research published by my colleagues and me, using brainscans and innovative statistical methods, does indeed suggest that our capacity to learn a language diminishes gradually over our lives.

The familiar mantra that children immersed in a language “soak it up like a sponge”, while adults apparently do not, is not in itself proof of the existence of a critical period for language learning. But it is both easier and more important for children to quickly become good in a second language they hear spoken around them.

There are many reasons for this. Children can spend more time and effort on learning than adults who have many competing demands; the motivation for children to fit in is much higher, and the habits of pronunciation and grammar of their first language are less deeply ingrained and thus easier to overcome. And, of course, all learning gets harder with age.

None of these factors have anything to do with a specific critical period for learning languages, but all of them do make younger learners of a new language eventually outperform older ones.

Grammar gripes

In addition to this overall and gradual advantage for younger learners, there is one notable qualitative difference: even very good older language learners differ from younger ones when it comes to using grammar correctly and consistently. Every time I mark a run of scripts from my adult students, most of whom are from non-English-speaking backgrounds, I find that while they are amazingly good at using a wide range of vocabulary, appropriate style and complex grammar, they often struggle with some simple grammatical rules.

Four scientific ways teachers can cope with stress

From basic mediation exercises to learning to say ‘no’, there are many simple changes teachers can make to improve their physical and mental health.

The pressures of teaching can be difficult to manage and it can sometimes feel like you have no time to switch off. So if you ended last year feeling overwhelmed and anxious then the start of the new year is a good time to make some changes. 

But learning to cope better with stress does not happen overnight and takes some effort on your part. Here is a list of some simple, scientifically-proven practices to help you unwind and improve your mental health.

Learn the power of your breath

It may seem intuitive, but so many of us end up holding our breath, especially when we’re stressed. Breathing exercises work with the cardiac muscle to shift our vagal tone toward a parasympathetic balance. In other words, breathing deeply takes our body from a fight-or-flight state towards a calm and balanced one. Being aware of your breath for a few minutes every day, right before your class begins, or even with the students, can have amazing benefits for your health.

Try following the exercise below or if you want a deeper practice, try Pranayama, the art of yoga breathing.

• Breathe into the diaphragm through the back of the throat for four seconds.
• Hold for four seconds.
• Breathe out slowly through the back of the throat for six seconds.
• Hold empty breath for two or more seconds, then repeat.

Sleep better

Getting more hours of shut-eye is critical for our physical and mental health. Research by the University of Pennsylvania, for example, found that subjects who were limited to just 4.5 hours of sleep a night for one week felt more mentally exhausted and stressed. Their mood improved greatly when their sleep pattern resumed to normal.

Gravity waves detected at last!

Scientists finally discover gravitational waves that were predicted a century ago.

A very special burst of waves from deep space has forever changed the way we look at the universe. These aren’t water waves or waves of light. They are gravity waves, tiny ripples produced by massive objects moving very quickly.

Two black holes produced the newly reported waves when they collided at some point roughly 1.3 billion years ago. Black holes are massive objects that trap light because their gravity is so strong.

Scientists announced the long-awaited discovery of these waves on February 11. That was a century after the famous physicist Albert Einstein first predicted gravity waves would exist. They are also describing their data in a paper published February 11 in Physical Review Letters. 

"It's the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves," LIGO laboratory executive director David Reitze said at a press conference February 11. "As we open a new window on astronomy, we may see things we never saw before."

Their discovery now gives scientists a new tool for studying the universe. Astronomers need these tools because not everything in the universe can be seen through a telescope. Stars, galaxies and other bright objects emit light that travels to Earth. But black holes are truly black. They don’t emit light, so telescopes can’t see them.

“Gravitational waves allow us to look at the universe not just with light but with gravity,” says Shane Larson. He’s an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

The discovery immediately becomes a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize. And that's not just because it ties a neat bow around decades of evidence supporting a major prediction by Einstein. In 1916, he came up with the idea for gravitational waves, also called gravity waves. He had just introduced his famous theory of general relativity. That theory says that objects with mass will curve space, similar to how a person standing on a trampoline will bend the fabric. The bending of space changes the motion of nearby objects. For example, the sun’s mass forces Earth to orbit the star in an ellipse, not just move in a straight line.