The federal review of Carnegie Learning’s flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had “no discernible effects” on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor, “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.

So much large-scale education research ends with "no discernable effects." I mean, like almost all of it. Seriously.

The linked article examines some of the research claims made about Cognitive Tutor, made and distributed by Carnegie Learning. I'm familiar with this software, and it is probably the best of what is out there in terms of educational software. The content is solid and the system is adaptive to the students. But the research results are mixed, depending on who you talk to.

Looking at the research, one could come to the conclusion that all educational interventions are crap. After all, if an intervention doesn't stand up to the rigor of scientific investigation, we probably shouldn't use it, right?

Well, another way to look at this is that maybe the "gold standards" of scientific rigor are not appropriate for educational contexts. Large-scale, randomized trials make sense for medical trails, but not for educational interventions. Why? Because educational systems are complex and have multiple inputs. But wait, isn't your body a complex system too.

Dr. David Agus was the guest on The Daily Show last night (2 Feb 2012) and suggested that medical thinking has been stunted ever since the discovery of pathogens. They make us think that all diseases have a cause and a cure. Dr. Agus suggests that diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's are different. They don't have a single cause; the body has to be treated as a whole.

Similarly, if we expect to improve educational outcomes for all students, we aren't going to do it by giving the same treatment to all students. These educational treatments need to be delivered at the right time, to the right student, by a trained professional (or computer that can aid a teacher).

The frustrating thing is, who's going to get on board with a program that doesn't meet rigor, especially when the bar might be unattainable?

I'd rank "Figuring out Teacher Evaluation" as a Top 3 education problem.

Interesting approach to science teacher ed. AMNH does some good professional development, so I hope their master's program follows in that success.

An interesting approach to educational reform: "money with a catch" (or two or three).

In one way, I like this approach - it allows the school leadership to take a multi-faceted approach to improving eduction. We know that teachers, curriculum, technology, infrastructure, and food (among a multitude of other things) are all important for school outcomes. So, money can be put in different baskets, as opposed to one.

A problem that may arise is that freedom to choose how to spend the money also means freedom to choose incorrectly. There probably isn't a "right" and "wrong" way to spend $1.6 million, but a lot of it could go to waste.

I guess this is the sense in which this is a multimillion dollar "bet." The bet is on whether local school leaders can figure out how to spend their money in the best possible way - something that we currently have more questions than answers about.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think". Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, and they are followed by a set of public lectures by the winners at MIT.

The Academic Observer

Twelve Tips for Reviewers

An occasional column by Henry L. Roediger, III

Many critical skills needed for becoming a successful academic are typically not taught in graduate school, at least not in any formal way. One of these is how to review journal articles. Few students coming out of graduate school have much experience reviewing papers, and yet, at least for those students continuing on in research, reviewing is a skill that will be increasingly critical as their careers develop. In fact, being a good reviewer can greatly help a career. If a young psychologist becomes known as an excellent reviewer, he or she may be selected as consulting editor, then associate editor, and then perhaps the primary editor of a journal.

How do people learn to review? I suspect most newly minted PhDs learn to review papers in the same way that the children in Albert Bandura’s famous 1960s studies learned aggressive responses, which is to say, by imitation. Just as children who watched one boy smack a BoBo doll with a bat (and received praise for doing so) would tend to do the same when it was their turn, so do young academics learn to review. Unfortunately, the analogy with the BoBo doll experiment is apt in another way: Because reviews are often highly negative, the new researcher implicitly learns from the negative reviews received on his or her own submitted papers that reviews are supposed to be negative. It is as if the implicit message is: “A reviewer’s job is to criticize the manuscript. Find any faults in the logic, method, results, and conclusions that the paper might have and then communicate these to the editor.” Hence, the cycle of negative reviews is perpetuated across academic generations.

In 2002, Robert Sternberg wrote a column in the Observer titled “On civility in reviewing,” decrying the often hostile nature of reviews in psychology. This led him to edit a collection of essays on different types of reviewing and how to go about them. The book Reviewing Scientific Works in Psychology (American Psychological Association, 2006) is excellent, and I urge readers to purchase it (although for truth-in-advertising purposes, I should note that I wrote one of the chapters, on reviewing chapters in edited books). The purpose of this column is not to replace that book but simply to provide some guidelines for reviewing papers that may be helpful to some, especially younger, readers. Abraham Tesser and Leonard Martin have a fine chapter in Sternberg’s book that provides further thoughts on reviewing articles for journals.

1. Know your mission. A reviewer’s job is to evaluate a submitted article, not (necessarily) to criticize it and certainly not to trash it. The editor is seeking your advice on whether or not to publish the paper, so you should point out both strengths and weaknesses of the paper and come to some balanced conclusion. Keep the big picture in mind: Is the problem addressed an important one in the context of the field? Does the current paper push knowledge forward in a substantive way? The question at issue is not “does this paper answer all the questions about this particular problem?” because the answer to that question is always “no.” The critical issue is whether the paper under review advances knowledge on the issue under consideration enough to be published. Yes, this requires human judgment, a notoriously fallible quality, but that is why there are two or three reviewers plus an editor. (Sometimes there are even more reviewers — too many, in fact — but I’ll save that problem for another column.) Always keep in mind that, as a reviewer, you are just one piece in the puzzle. You offer advice to the editor, and the editor decides on the publishability of the paper.

2. Be speedy. Your reviews should be timely. Don’t wait until the last minute to begin the review (or worse, after you get a reminder that it is overdue). If you want to establish a reputation as a good reviewer, be prompt and get your review in ahead of schedule. When I was editing the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, I tried a young reviewer just out of graduate school. To my surprise, he returned the review in five days and it was excellent — fair, balanced, pithy, and wise. Just then, I had another paper that a reviewer had returned after holding it for a few weeks, pleading lack of time. I sent it to the same young reviewer and got another immediate turnaround (and this was in the days before e-mail made delivery of papers and the return of reviews instantaneous). I quickly added the person to the editorial board, having suddenly discovered that I couldn’t live without him. When you are young and new to the field, you might not be asked to review much. However, if you are a good reviewer, you may be discovered and suddenly you will have an overflowing reviewing pile. Don’t agree to review a paper unless you think you can do so in a timely fashion.

3. Read carefully. Yes, you need to be speedy, but not at the expense of accuracy. Read the paper carefully, and go back over parts that are not clear. This advice should go without saying, but I am amazed at how often reviewers will raise a point that is based on a misreading of the paper or, worse yet, raise a point as if it were new when, in fact, the point was addressed and rebutted in the paper. I confess to having made this mistake myself on occasion, and having the mistakes pointed out by the editor or other reviewers has made me more careful.

4. Say positive things in your review. Many reviews I read (both those of my papers and those of others’ papers when I am one of the companion reviewers) have nary a kind word. Rather, the review consists of an unrelenting series of criticisms that might leave the author ready to hang him- or herself by the end of the review. (Sometimes I will even see editors apologize in the action letter for the tone of a review.) Usually, even the worst paper has some redeeming features — the issue addressed is interesting, the literature review is excellent, or whatever. (Don’t push the compliments, though. No need to comment on the excellent choice of typography — “one hardly ever sees Franklin Gothic used in a manuscript” — if that is the only good thing you can think to say.) In short, even if you are recommending that the paper not be published for one reason or another, try to include some kind words.

5. Don’t exhibit hostility or mean-spiritedness in your review. The field suffers from too many hostile reviews, as Sternberg has noted in his essays on this topic. If there is a confounding that undermines the research in question, point it out directly but without being rude about it. You can say, “Unfortunately, I believe the authors’ conclusions may be limited by the fact that Factor X covaried with the critical Factor Y,” rather than “The authors obviously were poorly trained, as evidenced by their blunder of confounding Factor X with Factor Y, so this entire line of research was a waste of time.” (I have seen much worse statements than this one.)

6. Keep it brief. The editor is a busy person. He or she wants your opinion, but does not want a stream-of-consciousness record of every pithy thought you had while reading the manuscript. Give your conclusion about the publishability of the paper and provide reasons for it, but don’t go on and on. Reviews in most fields of psychology seem to have grown longer over the years (that is my subjective impression, at any rate), although great individual differences exist among reviewers. During my times as editor, I would sometimes get reviews whose length would rival that of the paper. Some of my own have been too long as well, especially in the days when I dictated them. I now try to keep my reviews to one or two pages, which probably makes both the editor and the author happy. Remember, the editor has to read the paper and the several reviews received and then write an action letter. No one wants your logorrheic review to gum up the process.

7. Don’t nitpick. Don’t go through the paper searching for misspellings and grammatical infelicities. Keep to the main point, the big picture. God created copyeditors for a reason, so you needn’t do their job. If a paper is unusually well or poorly written, that might be worth pointing out; and if a passage or point is difficult to follow, it is fine to note that too. However, there is no reason to go through the paper line by line, as some reviewers do, saying that trail on page 16, line 4, should actually be trial. (Spellcheck cannot catch this type of error; though it does take away some of my favorites from the old days, when people would write about their “important resluts in Experiment 2.”)

8. Develop a good reviewing style. There is no universally agreed-upon reviewing style, so you must develop one that is comfortable for you. Some people begin with a summary of the paper. Personally, I think this is ok if the paper is confusing and if the editor might need a little help, but there is no need to provide a long summary for a paper that has a straightforward message. One typical style for reviews is to have an introductory paragraph stating the paper’s main point and the reviewer’s initial reaction. The reviewer might then make the case for publishing the paper, listing its strengths and discussing its importance. Next might come a section on the manuscript’s shortcomings and criticisms, as well as advice on how they might be overcome (if they can be). Finally, the review may conclude with a recommendation about the paper’s publishability, with the realization that this is advice for the editor (as discussed in Point 11). This schema is only a suggestion. Many other reviewing styles exist.

9. Be careful in recommending further experimentation. One of the easiest bad habits for reviewers to develop is to routinely recommend that further research be conducted before the paper is published. For most papers, you will be able to think of further experiments that might be done on the topic. However, if the author has provided several experiments already and made a coherent contribution, the critical question is not “can further experiments be done?” (the answer is “yes”), but “does the author need to do further experiments to support the conclusions being made?” (Of course, this question presupposes that one thinks that the conclusions are of interest to the field.) When I get back a review suggesting several further experiments I might do, I usually think “Those are fine experiments. Let the reviewer do them. I submitted the four experiments that (in my opinion) tell an interesting story on their own.” If you write about further research that might be done, use a high threshold and be sure to specify to the editor whether you think it is imperative for publication of the paper or rather just an idea for some future paper. Yes, sometimes a further study is absolutely required to clinch a point and make a paper publishable, but these cases are not as routine as some reviewers and editors make them out to be.

10. Watch for egocentrism. If you received a paper to review, chances are you yourself have published on that topic. Nearly every member of any scientific field is subject to the feeling of citation neglect — “The author should be citing my work more often.” Somehow, we feel compelled to remind the author that we made a similar point to hers, even if we embedded it on page 646 in footnote 2 of that article we published in an obscure journal in 1991. If you find yourself writing statements like that — which are read as “please cite me more” — you know you’ve stepped over the line. Yes, you know your own work better than anyone, and yes, you would like authors to cite it appropriately, but try to resist constant advice to cite your own work. Occasionally you might want to point out one of your papers that is overlooked by the current authors, but don’t make a habit of it.

11. Make a recommendation about the paper, unless the instructions from the editor tell you not to. Most journal editors want to know what your bottom line is. Rather than just discussing features of the paper and letting the editor guess what your overall opinion is, state it at the end of the review. You may have listed positive and negative factors, but how do you weight them? Conclude with a statement such as “On balance, I do not think this paper should be published in its current form because of [reiterate the two main reasons],” or “I believe the current paper should be published if the author can address [two or three major criticisms].” Don’t be dogmatic about it, though, to give the editor leeway. Sometimes, editors permit you to write a review and then make a statement or recommendation for only the editor’s eyes. Although I have encouraged kinder reviews, you should never write a flattering review of the paper and then write the editor a note that says “I tried to be nice to the authors, but this paper is really terrible and should be rejected.” You put the editor in an untenable position with this practice, so make sure your recommendation is consistent with your review, especially if only the editor sees your recommendation.

12. Sign your review. Or, if you can’t bring yourself to do that, at least write your review as if the author will learn your identity and you wouldn’t be embarrassed. I sign all of my reviews and have done so for many years. I think if everyone did, most of the problems of nastiness in reviewing would disappear. As psychologists have repeatedly shown (e.g., Zimbardo’s prison experiment), human beings do not display their best behavior when they are cloaked behind the mask of anonymity. Signed reviews will usually be more polite and diplomatic, with much less tendency for brutal, unvarnished criticism. Of course, you still want to give your honest opinion, but (as discussed above) there are helpful and unhelpful ways of relating that opinion. Nonetheless, many discussions over the years have convinced me that people object to signing their reviews for all sorts of reasons. If you fall into this category, my advice is to still write the review as if you were going to sign it. This makes it more likely that you will follow the golden rule of “review unto others as you would have them review unto you.” You may still frequently need to criticize papers, but you can learn to do so in ways that are not blatantly offensive. Signed reviews may not win friends because often you are saying “don’t publish this paper,” but it’s the right course of action, at least for me. Be willing to stand behind your words, not snipe from behind the hills. Also, if you blow a point in your review, you can be sure that the author will let you know and you can be more careful in the future.

Peer review is critical to the scientific process. Although we do not teach courses on reviewing, we should all be mindful of ways to improve the process. For further reading, let me once more recommend Sternberg’s book on Reviewing Scientific Works in Psychology.

P.S. If you have a review of mine in which I broke one or more of the rules above, no need to send it to me. I know I haven’t always followed my own advice in the past, but I’m trying to reform.

Henry L. Roediger, III is James S. McDonnell Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. This column benefited from the advice of David A. Balota, Kathleen B. McDermott, Robert J. Sternberg, Endel Tulving, and John Wixted.

Search the Observer for more articles.

[via radiolab.org]

Story about research on a group of deaf children in Nicaragua that developed their own signing language that, in turn, appeared to change their thinking.

"There are so many bad brain imaging studies, it's hard to believe," says Nikos K. Logothetis, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. "Too many of these experiments are being done by people who, unfortunately, don't really understand what the technology can and cannot do."

Logothetis and others believe that much of the misuse stems from the visual nature of the data. One study, by researchers at Colorado State University, showed that simply giving neuroscience students images from an fMRI machine, even if the images were redundant or irrelevant, made the students significantly more likely to find the data credible. According to Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, this is because fMRI "has all the trappings of work with great lab-cred: big, expensive, and potentially dangerous machines, hospitals and medical centers, and a lot of people in white coats."

The data looks rigorous - it has the veneer of cutting-edge science - and people assume it's valid, even when the reasoning is shoddy.

"You can't just put people in a scanner and ask them whatever question you want," Logothetis says. "Many of these [fMRI] papers are such oversimplifications of what's happening in the brain as to be worthless."

A typical fMRI experiment goes like this: a subject is slipped into a tight space that's about the size of a coffin. The person is told to lie perfectly still, as even the slightest movement will muddy the results. At first, the subject does nothing. Then, he or she performs the experimental task, which might involve looking at a picture or making a decision.

While this is happening, noisy magnets whir overhead, as the machine detects the slightly different magnetic properties of blood with and without oxygen. The underlying assumption is that more active neurons require more oxygenated blood. Follow the oxygen, and you can construct precise maps of the brain at work.

Last year, the New York Times published an op-ed that used fMRI to investigate the brains of swing voters as they stared at photos and videos of presidential candidates. For instance, the scientists found that pictures of Mitt Romney led to activity in the amygdala, while pictures of Hillary Clinton activated the anterior cingulate. (Interestingly, the only two candidates who inspired "little activity in areas of the brain associated with thought or feeling" were Barack Obama and John McCain.)

Within days, 17 prominent cognitive neuroscientists signed a letter criticizing the study. "We are distressed," the scientists wrote, "by the publication of research . . . that uses flawed reasoning to draw unfounded conclusions about topics as important as the presidential election." The critics pointed out that a specific brain area, such as the amygdala, can be involved in the production of a wide variety of emotions, from fear to pleasure. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to decipher the hidden feelings of people based on brain scans alone.

This 2008 article from Jonah Lehrer, one of my favorite science journalists, gives a nice commentary on the problems associated with fMRI. For you non-science geeks, this is a technique used to ostensibly take pictures of your brain while you do stuff, like make decisions or view images. It sounds cool, right? Well, that may also be the problem.

I experienced a range of emotions while reading this article...

(1) Anger at the people that do this for a living, on both sides. I work hard to write papers and am proud of my work. The fact that others are getting away with this and earning degrees potentially takes away from the credibility of my work and others that are actually trying to be scholars.

(2) Sympathy for Ed Dante, the pseudonym for the shadow writer in this story. Like him, I've burned the candle at both ends to get a paper done on a deadline, fueled by caffeine and sleep-deprivation-induced "almost-out-of-body experience."

(3) Sadness at the sheer number of people, particularly in nursing and education, that get away with this. At the very least, this warrants that all educators re-evaluate how they evaluate students.

(4) Respect for my international graduate student colleagues that don't succumb to the pressure by cheating, and instead learn to write at an advanced level in their non-native language. They have to work harder than I do to produce the same level of work here in the US, and I have a lot of respect for that.

Richfield School District is opening a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) focused elementary school, and it's drawing loads of interest among parents.

While the focus of the article is about its popularity, this shows another trend in elementary education - teacher specialization at lower grade levels. I'm totally for this movement, especially when it comes to science education. Teachers should know how to design instructional experiences for young children that can serve later learning of more complex science concepts. I would hypothesize that kids that have more experiences with "strange" or "magical" science demonstrations (and appropriate instruction) will have an easier time overcoming their intuitive conceptions that often block scientific understanding.

St. Cate's is apparently responsible for the professional development (on-going over the year). I am interested to see how they are doing a year or two down the road. Anyone know the people there working on this?

Here's cute little piece about multitasking and the executive system. There are a few ideas that get mixed around in this article, so let me try to tease them out...

1) The executive system is the theorized cognitive system that performs executive tasks such as planning, goal-maintenance, and switching. The article does a pretty good job of giving examples of these types of tasks (the short-order cook is a particularly good example), however it should be noted that while these functions are grouped together under the umbrella of "executive function", there are some distinctions among these tasks.

2) The executive system is thought to "reside" in the prefrontal regions of the brain (above your eyebrows). While lesion / brain damage and fMRI studies provide evidence for this, researchers are still figuring out how this part of the brain is capable of conducting these processes. We can't assume that other parts of the brain aren't also involved.

3) People tend to talk about the executive system in terms of a "humonculus" - the little human inside the brain. People in philosophy and psychology will tell you that this type of argument is always fallacious because it does not provide an adequate theory of mind; that is, if you use a little mind to explain a big mind, how do you explain the little mind?

I bring this up for two reasons. First, I just saw Inception (and you should too, if you want a way meta experience). Second, because the NPR piece uses an analogy of a cartoon conductor to describe the executive system. It may be a good analogy for the layperson, but it's not good science.

I'm working on some research that investigates how executive processes relate to science concept learning in order to better understand why some concepts are hard for kids (and even adults) to learn, as well as how instruction can be designed to overcome these difficulties. More to come...

Here's a great resource that I can see science teachers using as warm-up activities or "hooks" for introducing new material.

Also, be sure to check out other Science Reference Services. For example, Science Tracer Bullet series provide summaries and lists of references for getting acquainted with science topics.

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Study Finds NAEP Scores Rise When Students Are Paid

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A new study has hit on one possible way to improve 12th graders' dismal scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress: Pay them to take the test.

Of all the grades that are regularly tested as part of the congressionally mandated NAEP program, the 12th grade results have long been the most disappointing. That has led some experts to wonder whether the problem stemmed from poor quality instruction in high schools or whether the older and more-savvy high school seniors just weren't trying as hard as the younger test-takers.

Though the testing program is considered a national barometer of student achievement, there really isn't much of an incentive, after all, for students to do well. Scores from NAEP assessments don't show up on a report card or count toward graduation requirements. Likewise, colleges never see NAEP scores when students apply for admission.

To explore what might happen if students had a little incentive to try harder, a trio of researchers focused on a sample of 2,600 students from 59 schools in seven states who were taking NAEP tests in reading. Within each school, the students were randomly assigned to one of three test-taking conditions. Under the first condition, the seniors were paid $20 at the start of the test-taking session. Another group was offered $5 in advance and $30 at the end of the session if they correctly answered two randomly chosen questions on the test. The control group received no special incentives.

The results of the experiment were posted today in the online version of Teachers College Record. The authors are Boston College's Henry Braun and Irwin Kirsch and Kentaro Yamamoto of the Educational Testing Service.

In the end, the study found, both of the monetary incentives spurred students to do better than they might have otherwise, although the second condition, in which part of the payout hinged on the students getting answers correct, proved to be the stronger incentive. Under both conditions, though, scores for both male and female students were, on average, at least 5 points higher than the scores for the no-incentive group.

Researchers said that's a sizeable and significant gain. For instance, it's one quarter of the difference between 8th graders' and 12th graders' average scores on the tests.

Students who knew they were being paid also were more likely to report, in survey questions, that they were trying hard on the tests and that it was important to them to do well.

"There is now credible evidence that NAEP may ... underestimate the reading abilities of students enrolled in 12th grade," the authors write. On the other hand, the black-white achievement gap was larger when monetary incentives were offered, according to the study.

Does that mean the U.S. Department of Education ought to start paying high school seniors to take NAEP tests?

Not according to these researchers. They say that would be prohibitively expensive. But they write that it does suggest there might be other, less costly, strategies test-givers could use to motivate students and maximize results at the 12th grade level.

If only we knew what they were...

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Categories:

• National Assessment of Educational Progress,
• motivation

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The approach involves comparisons of streams of data known as time series, such as fluctuations in the stock market index and changes in employment levels. Because they consist of many pictures of the rise and fall of a value taken at regular time intervals, time series are comparable to movies. Given two movies, the comparison starts with frames from each of the movies taken at the same point in time. The second movie is then backed up one frame or more. Changes in those earlier frames in the second movie may predict changes that show up in a later frame of the first movie. Granger causality helps determine whether this link is coincidence or results from one process influencing another process.

Now this is what I think of as "interdisciplinary" - using ideas and methods from one domain of research to inform another.

I've never come across a paper that uses Granger causality to make causal claims about neural mechanisms, but I expect that this will prove to be a fruitful line of inquiry in neuroscience in the future.

Currently, nearly all neuroscience research that employs brain imaging (such as EEG or fMRI) is limited to reporting what parts of the brain "light up" during cognitive processes. While this information has given us interesting results, I'm not yet convinced that this is anything more than high-tech phrenology. The ability to reveal causal chains in brain imaging data is a big leap in cognitive neuroscience.