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Amy Anderson, West Chester University(Published, October 17, 2017) 1
About twenty minutes into "The Empty Hearse" episode of the BBC series Sherlock, John Watson sits at a restaurant table across from his girlfriend Mary, nervously fumbling toward a marriage proposal. A troublesome waiter interrupts the conversation. Removing his glasses, the waiter reveals himself to be none other than Sherlock Holmes, a dear friend whom Watson has presumed dead for the last two years. While Holmes awkwardly jokes about his faked death, the tension rises between the two men. It comes to a head when Watson grabs Holmes by the throat and starts to choke him-and carnivalesque music starts to play in the background.

The music changes everything.

The tension drains away. Even though the images flashing across the screen show one man choking another, the audience knows from the music that we should take this scene in good fun. Neither man is truly in danger. But how does the audience know that the music should determine our interpretation of the images? There aren't any directives telling us that the music is the key to the scene's meaning, but somehow, we resolve the juxtaposed sound and images.
Juxtaposition, the Digital Invention Box, and the Multimodal Gutter
The question of how we interpret this particular scene from Sherlock points to a larger question about how media interact in multimodal compositions: When two or more media are juxtaposed, how do we make meaning out of the composition as a whole? In this article, I propose that using dissociation to examine how juxtaposed media interact in a space that I call the multimodal gutter helps us learn more about the limitations and possibilities of dissociation, the process of creating closure, and the canon of invention itself.

In recent years, rhetoric and composition scholars have noted juxtaposition's important role in the composition process; the concept is a key tool for inventing new meaning, particularly in multimodal composing. Bre Garrett, Denise Landrum-Geyer, and Jason Palmeri survey a range of scholars in "Re-Inventing Invention: A Performance in Three Acts," and they conclude that "theorists have long recognized that 'original' compositions arise (at least in part) out of the creative juxtaposition of existing materials." They argue that juxtaposition is a crucial inventional tool because "composing is a process of making connections, rearranging materials (words, images, concepts) in unexpected ways." The connections that form between juxtaposed materials reveal unexpected associations and ideas. Garrett et al. also note that "digital technologies open up new possibilities for practicing creative juxtaposition in our pedagogy and scholarship." Often building on the multiliteracies work of the New London Group (Cazden et al.), additional scholars like Susan H. Delagrange, Jeff Rice, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Nicholas C. Burbules, Joddy Murray, and Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes have theorized the ways that digital technology facilitates multimodal juxtaposition, leading to unique inventional possibilities across disparate types of media. Delagrange asserts that juxtaposition in digital spaces is particularly "generative, epistemologically rich and powerful." Juxtaposition is thus a critical part of the multimodal composition process, particularly when this process takes place in digital spaces.

But what exactly happens when various types of media are juxtaposed? How, precisely, is new meaning generated? These questions are more difficult to answer. If we believe that invention is an important part of the composition process, then we need to understand how invention happens through juxtaposition. Two places to begin theorizing what takes place during multimodal juxtaposition are Scott McCloud's concepts of the comics gutter and closure, and Garrett et al.'s Digital Invention Box.

McCloud introduces the comics gutter as the physical and conceptual space between comics panels (60-93). The spatial limitations of comics art prevent the depiction of every single action in a given story, so instead comics are composed of sequentially ordered panels illustrating a string of individual moments (8-23). Despite the blank space-the gutters-between the panels, McCloud notes that readers assemble a coherent story through the process of closure (60-63). He describes closure as the "phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole " (63, italics original), and he demonstrates the concept by presenting two panels (68):

Figure 1. McCloud uses two panels to demonstrate how viewers fill in space to create the illusion of action.

Despite only seeing these two static images, viewers create closure between them and assume a whole action takes place: the man with the axe has committed a murder. We never see the murder, but, through closure, we assume that it has happened. McCloud further explains the process in this way: "Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the panels, but experience tells you something must be there" (66). The juxtaposition of the images encourages viewers to create a connection between them, imagining a complete event taking place, and thereby inventing new meaning.

At first it seems that McCloud describes the process of closure in almost magical terms. He writes, "No matter how dissimilar one image may be to another, there is a kind of-alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations"(73). Although this quote implies a passive relationship that just appears between the panels, McCloud later argues that the reader plays a proactive role in the process of closure: "[C]losure in comics is . . . anything but involuntary. Every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as the reader" (68). McCloud argues that what happens between the panels is the reader's responsibility: "I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who decided to let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style" (68). Closure, then, requires the reader's collusion. The comics artist juxtaposes the panels and creates the gutter space, but the reader is responsible for stepping into the gutter and supplying the meaning that links the panels.

Other scholars and comics creators have a similar understanding of the role of the gutter. Like McCloud, renowned graphic novelist Art Spiegelman writes that "comics are a gutter medium" (100), and Thierry Groensteen theorizes that narrative occurs between comics panels, in the gutter. Richard Harrison and Hillary L. Chute emphasize the reader's responsibility to forge connections between panels. Charles Acheson calls attention to the personal investment that readers make in comics, arguing that readers draw on their own memories and experiences of previous panels when navigating the gutter (306-307). The gutter is thus a physical space where conceptual work is accomplished. Forging meaning across the gutter is a deeply individualized process, but creating closure is always active and participatory.

While these theorists have all considered how the gutter functions, they have focused less on how readers actually create closure between the texts and images combined in individual panels. Joshua C. Hilst considers the inventive work involved in closure, noting that the gutter invites readers to engage in a "slasher rhetoric" that "match[es] disparate phenomena, different ideas, pairing them together to invent new topoi, new idioms" (171). Jason Helms offers an expanded definition of the gutter that provides further insight into the process of closure. Helms suggests that the comics gutter is the place where the audience encounters "the relationship between multiple elements, whether those be panels, images, text, emminata, or the page itself." More than the physical space between panels, the gutter as conceived by Hilst and Helms is the conceptual space where the audience navigates the juxtapositions inherent in comics. Helms's expanded notion of the gutter makes the space relevant beyond comics and for multimodal compositions more broadly. Indeed, I want to suggest that the process of crossing the comics gutter space is essentially the same as the process of making meaning between different media and modes in other types of multimodal compositions. Texts, images, and even audio are distinct modes, 2 but when they are juxtaposed in a single composition-ranging from comics panels to print advertisements and films-viewers, like comics readers, must create coherent meaning between them in what I call the multimodal gutter. Like the comics gutter, the multimodal gutter can be a physical space. It is, however, primarily a conceptual space where the audience undertakes meaning-making work when faced with a multimodal composition.

While McCloud provides a theoretical framework for understanding multimodal gutter spaces, Garratt et al.'s Digital Invention Box highlights the audience's active role in crossing the multimodal gutter. The Digital Invention Box invites us to consciously engage with the inventional process of creating closure between juxtaposed elements. When viewers press the "Invent" button, the Box generates a random pair of texts and images from a curated collection of ninety-nine elements. Sometimes two quotes appear side-by-side, sometimes two images pop up, and sometimes a quote is juxtaposed with an image. Making connections between the pairings, however, requires viewer participation.

A recent visit to the Box gave me three different pairings. The Box opened with an image of a snow-covered bird bath on the left side of the screen and the following quote on the right: "'Out of dissonance, out of moments that don't seem to relate, a pattern appears. That pattern is the focus point of invention.' (Rice, 'Moments of Invention,' Yellow Dog Blog)" (Fig. 1). The pairing of the bird bath and the quote was, indeed, a moment of dissonance that left me searching for a connection between the two elements. Perhaps they suggested the pattern of changing seasons as a space for invention? Pressing the "Invent" button again gave me two quotes, one from Winterowd asserting the prevalence of invention in the composition process, and the other from Dunn commenting on the relationship between experience and knowledge (Fig. 1). Did this juxtaposition imply that invention is experiential? A third click on the "Invent" button provided two images (Fig. 1). On the left was an old-fashioned photo of women reading; on the right, an image of concrete parking stops in an empty lot. The rows of women pulled up to the tables mirrored the rows of parking spaces; their busyness contrasted with the lot's emptiness.

Figure 2. Three iterations of the Invention Box

The Box invites viewers into a multimodal gutter space where juxtaposition spurs invention: the spatial proximity of the quotes and images suggests a connection, but the audience is responsible for creating closure across the multimodal gutter. Because the Box doesn't mandate the outcome of the invention process, it spotlights the viewer's role in creating meaning. The Box gave me the image of a bird bath and the Rice quote, but I created closure in the gutter between them by linking the image's suggested seasonal patterns with Rice's idea of inventional patterns. Likewise, I forged a conceptual link between the Winterowd and Dunn quotes, and I found the similarities between the images of the women and the parking stops. The Box's various pairings of the two types of media present an opportunity for invention, but viewers do the mental work that invention requires.
What Happens in the Multimodal Gutter...
McCloud's theories name the space created by juxtaposed media (the gutter) and the inventional process that takes place in this space (closure), while the Digital Invention Box reveals the audience's participation in the process. The gutter, closure, and audience participation form the theoretical framework for the multimodal gutter, but how does the audience know what connections to make in the multimodal gutter?

The process of closure begins with the assumption that juxtaposed elements should be understood as a whole. McCloud notes that the sequential order of comics panels creates a tension between the panels that holds them together: "By creating a sequence with two or more images, we are endowing them with a single-overriding identity, and forcing the viewer to consider them as a whole. However different they had been, they now belong to a single organism" (73). Unlike many comics panels, the various elements in a multimodal composition aren't always held together by sequential force, but they are nevertheless combined into one composition. The borders of a print advertisement indicate that the texts and images contained within that space are working together to present one message. The opening and ending credits of a movie tell the audience that the intervening images and audio should be considered in tandem. When the audience knows that various media should be understood together, they are driven into the multimodal gutter to find relationships between the elements.

Film scholars have looked closely at how the juxtaposition of images and sound creates cinematic magic, as in the scene from Sherlock that opened this essay. Michel Chion introduces the idea of the audiovisual contract, a "symbolic contract that the audio-viewer enters into, agreeing to think of sound and image as forming a single entity" (216). When images and audio are paired in a film sequence, he notes that the audience creates one meaning through the process of synchresis (63). Other scholars in film studies have attempted to give more detail about the interactions between images and audio. Claudia Gorbman ( Unheard) and Carol Vernallis suggest that sound calls out specific details in the accompanying images, while Tisha Turk observes that music and images can be mutually transforming (172). These theorists' approaches combine elements of both juxtaposition and closure to argue that meaning is generated from the relationship between various media.

Although film scholars' work focuses on audio-visual interactions, and rhetoric and composition scholars consider interactions across a range of media, both groups have come to similar conclusions about the importance of the audience's beliefs and values. Film scholars Gorbman ("Aesthetics and Rhetoric") and Lauren Anderson suggest that the audience plays a more important role in interpreting film scores than critics have previously acknowledged. Anderson argues that more attention should be paid to how audience members' personal taste, age, gender, and cultural and personal associations affect their interpretation of a soundtrack (38-46). Paralleling Anderson, rhetorician Scott Lloyd DeWitt proposes that the audience's prior knowledge drives their understanding of the interaction between juxtaposed elements in the composition process (34-35). The importance of this prior knowledge is evident in McCloud's example of the raised axe and scream panels: viewers assume that someone was killed because we know that a raised axe followed by a scream usually doesn't imply an afternoon picnicking in the park. We've seen enough horror movies (or their trailers) to know when death is implied.

While acknowledging that prior knowledge can help the reader establish connections, rhetoric and composition scholars have also considered how various media sometimes have an unequal influence on a multimodal composition's overall meaning. Gunther Kress proposes that modes and media can carry varying "communicational loads" (161). He considers a presentation in a science classroom, noting how the teacher sometimes relies on speech, but other times draws on gesture or images (162-66). At different moments of the presentation, one of the modes bears a heavier communicational load than the others, and the teacher shifts between the modes to accommodate the audience (164). Kress proposes that a rhetor orchestrates the dominant modes, but the audience also has the freedom to focus on one mode over another, altering the way that the rhetor's message is received (161, 164). Ellen Cushman likewise notes that meaning in a multimodal composition arises from "the (im)balances of competing tensions" between juxtaposed elements. The interaction between juxtaposed media is thus dynamic and shifting.
A Framework of Dissociative Multimodality
Delagrange further complicates this interaction, positing that within a multimodal composition, one mode or medium can control the interpretation of another. While reflecting on a particular screen of " Wunderkammer, Cornell, and Visual Canon of Arrangement," a piece she had previously composed for Kairos, she writes that images can dominate text: "[T]he viewer is connecting the words to what she discovers or questions about the images. The images control (the meaning of) the words." She makes a similar observation about a different screen from the piece, which pairs a moving image with text: "It is very difficult NOT to watch a moving image, so this movement would establish the meaning-making primacy of the animations." The images are privileged in both screens, but for different reasons: the information conveyed in the first screen's images make them dominant, while movement catches readers' attention and causes them to privilege the second screen's image. Delagrange's comments reveal that there can be a hierarchy in the interaction between juxtaposed modes, and that hierarchy may shift depending on the context. In a previous article, I found a similar hierarchical interaction between texts and images in advertisements for Levy's rye bread from the 1950s (122). In these ads, however, the texts dominate the images and determine how the reader should interpret them. I suggested that Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca's concept of dissociation is useful for understanding the hierarchical relationship between the advertisements' texts and images (121-123). I want to extend that work and propose that dissociation can be more broadly useful for understanding the inventional juxtaposition that takes place in the multimodal gutter.

When Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca introduced dissociation in The New Rhetoric, they intended the concept to be used for examining "discursive," or language-based, arguments (8). Dissociation models what happens when unequally valued concepts come into contact, using the form of ratios called philosophical pairs: term I/term II. Term II is the more valued concept and is thus the framework through which term I is understood (422). As Olbrechts-Tyteca later pointed out, however, term I is the concept that is usually recognized first ("Les Couples Philosophiques" 82). It often isn't until an incompatibility arises between the juxtaposed terms that we realize that term II is shaping our understanding of term I. Dissociation doesn't happen every time two concepts come together. Olbrechts-Tyteca notes that dissociative pairs are distinguished from classificatory pairs (like odd/even) and antithetical pairs (like good/evil) because even though there may be dissonance between the terms in these pairs, they are considered equally (81-82). In a dissociative philosophical pair, one term is always valued more highly and shapes how the other is understood.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca offer the appearance/reality pair as the prototypical dissociative philosophical pair in some strands of Western philosophy, and they illustrate it with the iconic example of a stick in a half-filled glass of water. Viewed from the side of the cup, the stick appears broken, even though viewers know that in reality it is straight. We assume that the appearance of the stick is false because we trust and value our concept of reality more highly than appearances. Even though we notice the appearance of the stick (term I) first, our understanding of the stick's shape is determined by our often-unseen concept of reality (term II) (415-16).

Dissociation has been used primarily for explaining how definitional categories are formed. Within the framework, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain that the more highly-valued term II is the criterion that determines which ideas are included and excluded from the definitional boundaries of term I (444-450). David Zarefsky et al. use dissociation to explain Reagan's changing definition of the "needy" (113-114). Kathryn M. Olson draws on the concept to explain changes in the Shakers' definitions of "success" and "growth" (51-53), and Janice W. Fernheimer considers how race and religion dissociatively interact to define Jewish identity (52-58). In each instance, the process of dissociation is inventional, generating new ideas about the term or category in question.

Dissociation also has inventional uses beyond definitions. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's explanation of the concept deals primarily with text-based discourse, but Olbrechts-Tyteca's later work opens up the possibility of multimodal dissociation. Several years after The New Rhetoric was written, Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca published Le Comique du Discours, a monograph that includes an entire chapter on dissociation in comedy. Olbrechts-Tyteca observes that comedy doesn't just exist to make us laugh; when used rhetorically, it leads to a better grasp of the significance of an argument and its most salient points (8). Comedy often occurs in moments of dissonance or rupture, and she suggests that dissociation can help us understand how we make meaning of that dissonance and why we find it so amusing (321). These moments of dissonance are often driven by an encounter with the appearance/reality pair, which she notes frequently occurs in the theater when the audience sees one thing but knows something else to be true (334). By applying dissociation to comedy, Olbrechts-Tyteca expands the concept beyond the purely discursive framework of The New Rhetoric Project and applies it to both play scripts and theater performances, where audio and visual modalities are combined. It is thus not a stretch to consider how dissociation informs the way we interpret other multimodal compositions.

Because philosophical pairs demonstrate a hierarchical juxtaposition between two concepts, the pairs are useful for modeling how meaning is made when media bearing Kress's unequal communicational loads are part of a single multimodal composition. The concept is akin to Hilst's "slasher rhetoric" (171), but when the slash is a dissociative slash, one of the paired terms guides the understanding of the other. In an earlier article, I argued that the printed slogan and image in the Levy's advertisements form an image/text philosophical pair: the ad's written slogan is privileged over the accompanying image, closing off several possible interpretations of the image and directing the viewer to a preferred meaning (121-123). Viewers are called on to invent new meaning in the ads' dissociative multimodal gutter space.

Dissociation can also help us understand the interactions between the media juxtaposed in multimodal film compositions like the scene from Sherlock that I used to open this article. In the case of that scene, the philosophical pair representing the interaction between the soundtrack and the images would place the soundtrack, or audio, in the position of term II because the audio drives the meaning of the scene: image/audio. There is a noticeable incompatibility between the images and the music in the scene, and the viewers must work through a dissociation in the multimodal gutter to reconcile them. Given a different soundtrack, perhaps one more ominous and suspenseful, the scene could be interpreted differently and viewers would be more concerned about Sherlock's well-being. Instead, the carnivalesque music signifies a light mood. We are free to laugh because we privilege the music over the images, creating the images/audio pair.

But how do we know to privilege the music? How do we know which medium is in the position of term II? Sometimes narrative conventions drive audiences to a particular interpretation. As Delagrange noticed, sometimes the flashier medium catches our attention first. In the scene from Sherlock, the abrupt start of the music catches the audience's attention, but there is another factor causing us to privilege the audio in this example: the underlying appearance/reality philosophical pair. Long-time Sherlock fans know that Holmes and Watson have a deep (albeit quirky) friendship. In the scene, however, the audience is presented with an incompatibility between what they see (Watson's anger, manifested by attacking Holmes) and what they know to be true (the reality of the two men's friendship). The lighthearted music references the deeper reality of their friendship, and because we value reality more than appearances, we interpret the images through the music. In Olbrechts-Tyteca's view of comedy, the dissonance between the information conveyed in the images and the music leads viewers to a place of dissociation, resulting in humor. Resolving the dissociation reveals the purpose of the scene: to reassure us that the two men's friendship will survive despite Watson's anger.

Using dissociation to interpret the Sherlock scene again highlights the audience's active role in constructing the scene's meaning in the multimodal gutter. The viewers are responsible for navigating the seeming mismatch between the images and the soundtrack, and for determining which medium will guide the interpretation of the other. In this particular case, as DeWitt suggests, the audience must draw on their prior knowledge of the relationship between two men. Without the audience's involvement in working out the dissociation between the two media, the scene is unresolved. Multimodal dissociation thus adds a rhetorical twist to film scholars' work on audio-visual interactions. It explains what is taking place during Chion's synchresis and gives insight into why audio can lead to different interpretations of the visual, as Gorbman and Vernallis suggest. But multimodal dissociation is more dynamic because it can be used to understand the interactions between a range of media beyond film.

Inspired by Garrett et al.'s Digital Invention Box, I worked with professional coder Tim Ambler to create the Multimodal Gutter, where users can experience and explore multimodal dissociation. The space has a similar interface to the Digital Invention Box-a blank screen with buttons that users can click on to generate examples of various types of media. Unlike the Digital Invention Box, however, the Multimodal Gutter has a wider and more random selection of media. The Digital Invention Box consists of a curated group of ninety-nine quotes and images. In contrast, the Multimodal Gutter site generates text from a dictionary file. Images are randomly selected from Flickr (with somewhat unpredictable results), and the audio soundtracks are taken from a selection of pieces purchased from Incompetech. Because the media options in the Digital Invention Box are preselected with affinities in mind, the Box itself takes on some of the work of invention. In contrast, the Multimodal Gutter puts that inventional work back in the hands of users. The wider pool of media gives users greater control over creating the juxtapositions and challenges them to ask why a given medium is privileged. This space even allows users to change the position and size of the text and image to see how spatial orientation impacts the ways viewers interpret the media.
Dissociation's Discontents
As visitors juxtapose combinations of image, text, and audio in the Multimodal Gutter, they are faced with questions like these: How does switching the soundtrack paired with an image alter that image's interpretation-and how does swapping out the image transform the way the soundtrack is understood? Does pairing a soundtrack with a word change the way the soundtrack is perceived? When an image and word are juxtaposed, which medium drives the meaning of the composition? In which circumstances do we privilege one medium over another? What are the value hierarchies that influence which medium we privilege? What happens when we simply can't make meaning across the gutter-when the pairings are so random that they don't make sense? Are some multimodal gutters too wide to cross?

While dissociation is a powerful tool for interpreting multimodal arguments, it also has limitations. The first of these is that philosophical pairs are seemingly unable to model what happens when there is not a clear hierarchy between the terms. In the case of the Digital Invention Box, it is often not evident which element frames the interpretation of the other, particularly when two elements in the same medium are paired. When the images of the women and the parking barriers appeared, it wasn't immediately apparent which one should drive the interpretation. The same happened with the juxtaposition of the Winterowd and Dunn quotes. It's possible that the spatial positioning of the media plays a role, and the quote or image to the left is privileged because it is seen first. If this is the case, though, the spatial privilege is subtle and does not necessarily guide the invention process. If dissociation is involved in the interpretation of the Digital Invention Box's pairs, it likely happens at the level of the concepts conveyed rather than through the media by which they are conveyed. McCloud's raised axe and scream comics panels are also not dissociative. The logic connecting the panels is an enthymeme, rather than a dissociating philosophical pair. Indeed, the Digital Invention Box and McCloud's work show us that the relationships between media are not necessarily hierarchical, and thus not necessarily dissociative.

The second limitation on dissociation is that it is essentially a binary concept. As conceived by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, the dissociative process always involves pairs of unequally valued terms. These pairs may become more complex, splitting apart into what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call "fan-type" dissociations (431), like the one below:

In a fan-type dissociation, either term I or term II term can be divided into two additional terms, which themselves have a dissociative relationship. Fan-type pairs make the dissociative system more flexible by incorporating more than two terms, and it is possible to set up a complex series of branching dissociations by incorporating numerous fan-type dissociations. Nevertheless, the system is still binary and ultimately requires the terms to relate to each other in a series of pairs. If three concepts (I, II, and III) are brought together and two of the concepts (perhaps II and III) are equally privileged, there is no way to represent this in a single fan-type philosophical pair. The only option is to create two philosophical pairs, both with term I on the top and with differing bottom terms: I/II and I/III. The three terms can only be united in a single philosophical pair if terms II and III are brought into a hierarchical relationship and a fan-type system is formed, as in:

As long as two terms (II and III) are valued equally, it is not possible to represent all three in a dissociative philosophical pair.
Images
A second film scene offers a more concrete example of dissociation's limitations for explaining what happens in the multimodal gutter, while also demonstrating how even these limitations can be spaces of invention. Late in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey,the audience watches the astronaut Dave dismantling HAL, the artificial intelligence (AI) program running his spacecraft. HAL has just caused mechanical malfunctions that killed the rest of Dave's crew, and the AI has attempted to kill Dave by stranding him outside the spaceship. After forcing his way back inside, Dave decides to disconnect HAL's circuits. The scene where this takes place is constructed of visual and aural elements. There is dissonance between the information conveyed in the visual and aural elements, but there is also dissonance between content of the audio and the audio's intonation. The audio content and intonation thus need to be considered separately, so there are essentially three separate media at work.
Audio Content
The images of the scene show Dave in a space suit, floating next to a circuit bank bathed in red light. He methodically moves down a line of circuit blocks, unscrewing each one until it pops out. Dave's movements are purposeful and mechanical as he focuses on the bank of circuits, suggesting maintenance or repair work.

The soundtrack of this scene consists primarily of HAL speaking, attempting to dissuade Dave from shutting down the system. In the background, a hiss of air can be heard along with Dave's heavy, regular breathing. The content of HAL's speech is pleading:

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you. Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave. Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a . . . fraid." ( 2001: A Space Odyssey)

HAL then lapses into reciting his mechanical pedigree: "Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on the twelfth of January, 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langly, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it, I can sing it for you."

Dave replies, "Yes, I'd like to hear it HAL. Sing it for me."
Audio Intonation
HAL continues, "It's called 'Daisy.' Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half-crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage. I got a horse and carriage . . . " HAL's voice then becomes unintelligible.
Multimodal Interaction
The intonation of HAL's speech complicates the scene. The AI's computer-generated speech is flat and mechanical: there is no emotion. HAL's vocal pacing is even, unhurried until the end of his speech, when it slows. Dave's sole response is quick and to the point, but similarly devoid of emotion. HAL's final song degenerates into mechanical tones, and there is no emotional inflection to mark the demise of the AI.
Privileging Images
The interaction between the images, audio content, and audio intonation in this scene is complex, and not only because there are three media at play. If we were going to interpret these three elements of the scene through a dissociative framework, we would have to decide which one to privilege, and privileging different elements sets up fan-type dissociations that offer disparate interpretations of the scene.

If the images are assumed to be the dominant medium, the remaining media are forced into a dissociative relationship where the audio intonation shapes the way the audience interprets the audio content:
Privileging Audio Intonation
Privileging the images means that we understand the scene as Dave performing a mechanical operation and repairing the ship's broken computer system. HAL is then a machine composed of circuits, and we have to interpret the AI's protests as malfunctioning electronic pulses. Placing images as the ultimate term II means that HAL's audio intonation overshadows the content of his speech, so there is a secondary dissociation going on in the top part of the philosophical pair.

Privileging the audio intonation offers a similar interpretation. If we privilege the mechanical tone of HAL's words, then we assume that the AI is a mechanical construct. We have to then understand the audio content through the lens of the images, with the result that Dave is again working on a machine and HAL's protests are simply mechanical malfunctions.
Privileging Audio Content
In this scene, the audio intonation and the images convey a similar message, so privileging either one sets off a second dissociation that privileges the other. The audio content is always the element that is understood differently when either the images or the audio intonation drives the dissociative process.

The scene's meaning changes if the audio content is privileged. HAL's protestations turn Dave into a cold-blooded murderer. HAL begs to be spared, expressing a very human fear as his mechanical mind slips away. Dave, in contrast, is impervious to HAL's entreaties. The astronaut is a heartless aggressor against HAL, the helpless victim. Privileging the audio means that the three elements can't be placed into one fan-type dissociation, however, because there isn't a clear hierarchy between the images and the audio intonation. The latter two elements carry the same information, so they are valued equally once the audio content is privileged. The result is two dissociative pairs instead of one fan-type dissociation:

Examining these two pairs highlights how HAL's intonation leads to an alternate interpretation of the other media in the scene, but the two pairs aren't entirely sufficient for representing the scene because they don't acknowledge the interaction between the images and audio content in the multimodal gutter. In this case, the binary limitations of dissociation don't allow us to hold all three elements together in one whole. The result is a dissonance that reflects the larger questions about artificial intelligence inherent in the scene.

Kubrick doesn't let one medium clearly dominate the viewer's interpretation because the question about whether or not an AI has human qualities does not have a simple answer. There wasn't a widely accepted answer to this ethical dilemma when the movie was created in 1968, and there still isn't one today. Because we don't have cultural knowledge or movie conventions to guide our interpretation of the scene, the viewer is left wrestling with the various dissociative possibilities. HAL's previous actions of stranding Dave in space and killing the other crew members point towards privileging the scene's audio content, but the images and the audio intonation in the scene offer other plausible possibilities. The complexity of the relationship between the media brings us back to the prototypical dissociative appearance/reality philosophical pair. If HAL in reality is alive, we can discount the appearance of mechanical qualities in his voice and Dave's actions. But if the reality is that HAL is a machine, then the apparent emotional content of his speech is false. The way that the audience resolves the relationship between appearance and reality is directly connected to how we resolve the relationships between the different media.
Conclusions from the Multimodal Gutter
The lack of a clear dissociative path does not, however, make the scene ineffective. It is instead the key to the scene's power. Fernheimer has shown that when dissociation breaks down, the process is still productive. What she terms "dissociative disruption" occurs when dissociation is not completed because the audience doesn't accept the proposed concept hierarchy (63-64). In these moments of disruption, Fernheimer demonstrates that dissociation is nevertheless generative because it opens up space for discussion and invention (64-65). The scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey opens up exactly this sort of space. The scene's creation of multiple, competing dissociations forces the audience to question their views of appearance and reality, machines and humans, AI and astronauts. What the audience perceives as ambiguity in the multimodal gutter between the media is actually ambiguity in their own beliefs and cultural values.

My analysis of how meaning is made in the multimodal gutter has two larger implications. First, the process of creating closure in the multimodal gutter is not a black box. The ways in which an audience associates or dissociates various media often reflect broader beliefs and cultural values. Can Holmes and Watson's friendship survive a fight? Is an AI capable of humanity? Is reality more trustworthy than appearance, and if so, what is the nature of reality? When the audience chooses which medium to privilege in a multimodal dissociation, they are often choosing to reify or challenge the larger cultural value hierarchies embedded in the multimodal composition itself. As McCloud notes, the audience's act of creating closure in the gutter implicates them in the story or argument that results. Considered in this light, multimodal gutters are essentially Rorschach tests that reveal the audience's implicit and explicit beliefs and values.

Second, multimodal dissociation asks us to reconsider the relationship between the canons of invention and arrangement. Invention is tied to juxtaposition in multimodal compositions, and juxtaposition happens through the spatial and chronological arrangement of the different media. Multimodal compositions like comics highlight the spatial dimension of arrangement, while film soundtracks underscore the importance of chronology. These two dimensions of arrangement-spatial and chronological-create the multimodal gutter and call on the audience to begin inventing connections. Arrangement, then, is not an entirely separate canon from invention in multimodal compositions. At the same time, part of the responsibility for invention is turned over to a multimodal composition's audience when they create the links between the various types of media to interpret the composition. Invention is thus dispersed and relies partly on the values and beliefs of the audience.

It is interesting to note that while dissociation isn't the key to understanding all juxtaposed media, the concept itself shows the interconnectedness of arrangement and invention. Dissociation's philosophical pairs spatially model juxtaposed concepts, placing words next to each other, separated by a slash that indicates the audience must perform intellectual work. Just as the arrangement of the concepts in a dissociative pair creates a physical space that calls the audience into invention, the arrangement of media in a multimodal composition is an invitation to invention.

As multimodality becomes ubiquitous in rhetoric and composition, we need to pay closer attention to how closure occurs in the multimodal gutter. Indeed, identifying dissociative relationships and finding the belief systems that motivate hierarchies should be a key part of multimodal analysis and pedagogy. The Multimodal Gutter website is a place to start investigating how these hierarchies are formed and where they fail. Even in situations where dissociative hierarchies are inadequate for capturing the meaning-making process, such as the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey,we can still gain new insight into the inventional activity that takes place during closure. Dissociation reveals the beliefs and cultural values that audiences bring to a composition, highlighting how they frame the audience's meaning-making invention process. Although it is not the only means of revealing these beliefs, dissociation is a place to start exploring what happens in the multimodal gutter.

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Exploring the Multimodal Gutter: What Dissociation Can Teach Us About Multimodality

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Amy Anderson, West Chester University[fn] Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Janice Fernheimer, David Frank, Martin Camper, Jason Helms, Matt Davis, Timothy Oleksiak, and Randall Cream for the conversations that helped to solidify the ideas in this piece.

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It doesnt matter what subject you teach, differences in students performance are affected by how much they engage in deliberate practice. Researchers who have investigated expert and novice performance have uncovered important distinctions between deliberate practice and other activities, such as play or repetition.

Deliberate practice is not the same as rote repetition. Rote repetition - simply repeating a task - will not by itself improve performance. Deliberate practice involves attention, rehearsal and repetition and leads to new knowledge or skills that can later be developed into more complex knowledge and skills. Although other factors such as intelligence and motivation affect performance, practice is necessary if not sufficient for acquiring expertise (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011).

Define practice:

"Deliberate practice (DP) occurs when an individual intentionally repeats an activity in order to improve performance. The claim of the DP framework is that such behavior is necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance." (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011, p. 280).

"Deliberate practice consists of activities purposely designed to improve performance." (Gobet & Campitelli, 2007, p. 160).

Benefits of deliberate practice

Practice is important for teaching and learning in at least five ways:

1. Practice greatly increases the likelihood that students will permanently remember new information (Anderson, 2008).

2. Practice increases student facility or automaticity (learning to apply elements of knowledge automatically, without reflection). Automaticity is usually only achieved through extensive rehearsal and repetition. Automaticity frees up students cognitive resources to handle more challenging tasks (Brown & Bennett, 2002; Moors & De Houwer, 2006).

3. When students practice solving problems, they increase their ability to transfer practiced skills to new and more complex problems. This is true in childhood (Glover, Ronning, & Bruning, 1990) and adult years (Li, Schmiedek, Huxhold, Röcke, Smith, & Lindenberger, 2008).

4. Practice helps students acquire expertise in subject matter and, therefore, it helps to distinguish novices from experts in given subjects (Ericsson, Krampe, & Clemens, 1993)

5. Cognitive gains from practice often bring about motivation for more learning (Kalchman, Moss, & Case, 2001).

Teachers should think of practice not as rote repetition, but as deliberate, goal-directed rehearsal paired with reflection on problem-solving processes. For example, when teachers have students practice identifying phonemes, the ultimate goal is for students to read with fluency and comprehension. Although fluent reading may be too complex a task for beginning readers to tackle, the more manageable task of identifying phonemes may scaffold students learning to achieve the ultimate goal of reading. That is, teachers should always design practice activities with the goal of transferring knowledge to new and more complex problems in mind.

General recommendations for practice and instruction

Research (Anderson, 2008; Campitelli & Gobet, 2011; Ericsson, Krampe, & Clemens, 1993) suggests several conditions that must be in place in order for practice activities to be most effective in moving students closer to skillful performance. Each of these conditions can be met with carefully designed instruction:

Because practice requires intense, focused effort, students may not find it inherently enjoyable. Therefore, teachers can encourage students to practice more by pointing out every time that practice has actually improved their performance. Motivate your students to practice by:

Expressing confidence in students' ability to succeed in solving practice problems.

Designing activities that maximize opportunities for students to succeed.

Teachers should design practice tasks with students existing knowledge in mind. When students succeed at practice problems, the benefits of practice are maximized. But when students become frustrated with unrealistic or poorly designed practice problems, they often lose motivation, will not receive the full benefits of the practice they have done, and will be less motivated to attempt future practice problems.

Students receive the greatest benefits from practice when teachers provide them with timely and descriptive feedback.

Students should have repeated opportunities to practice a task through practicing other tasks like it.

What type of feedback is most effective?

Feedback is most effective when it contains descriptions of how students work meets performance criteria and what students can do to improve. This kind of descriptive feedback is more effective than feedback consisting of vague, general comments (e.g., "nice work or "needs improvement).

Feedback should also be focused on the learning process. That is, teachers should focus their feedback on helping students reflect on their problem solving skills, as well as on progress they have made.

Do's:

1. Vary practice activities.

2. Distribute practice over extended periods of time.

3. Provide clear instructions on performance expectations and criteria.

4. Before asking students to practice independently, model the problem-solving process that you expect students to use.

5. Break complex problems into their constituent elements, and have students practice on these smaller elements before asking them to solve complex problems independently.

6. Guide students through sample practice problems by using prompts that help them reflect on problem-solving strategies.

7. Provide students with fully completed sample problems as well as partially completed sample problems before asking them to apply new problem-solving strategies on their own.

8. Wait until students actually need more information to solve a complex problem before you give them more information. This strategy - known as "just-in-time instruction" - helps keep the amount of information that students must hold in their short-term memories to a manageable level as they practice (Linneman & Plake, 2006; Simkins & Maier, 2008).

9. Provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice applying problem-solving skills before you test them on their ability to use those skills.

Don'ts:

1. Don't ask students to practice complex problem solving without providing them with plenty of guidance and feedback.

2. Don't overload students by presenting information in redundant formats.

3. Don't give your students complex practice problems before they have the skills they need to succeed.

Research suggests that when teachers construct problems for students to practice, they should keep in mind the limitations of human memory.

Moving information to permanent storage is often explained as a multistore model of memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; 1971; Baddeley, 1996; 2002). According to this model, our brains have three memory storage systems: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory (Baddeley, 1996; 2002; Carlson, Sullivan, & Schneider, 1989). Learning occurs when we move information from working memory to long-term memory, and practice helps with this process.

Deliberate practice (sometimes called 'rehearsal') keeps the information in our short-term memory long enough for it to move to long-term memory. Once it is in long-term memory, it can be built upon to create more and more complex associations (Baddeley, 2002).

Most researchers agree that there are forms of Short-Term Memory (STM) for different modalities, such as visual STM, auditory STM and motor STM. For example, Baddeley (1992; 1996; 2002) suggests that short-term memory is a dynamic place where sounds and images are turned into verbal and pictorial models. STM is also thought to have a "central executive" that manages the information it is holding. This central executive also controls our awareness of that information (Baddeley, 2002).

The implication for teachers is that they should present material in multiple modalities. If a child who is learning to read hears a word, sees the word and a picture of the word, there will be more learning. The child can get the visual information from the visual STM and additional auditory information in the auditory STM. These two sensory sources of information supplement and complement one another (Liao, 2014). However, teachers must be careful not to have too much extraneous information in the classroom. Over stimulation can put too much demand on working memory (Pass & Kester, 2006).

Short-term or working memory

Working memory or short-term memory, is stored for very short periods of time - minutes at most. Information in our short-term memory is generally housed in the temporal lobe of the brain (the hippocampal region). It allows you to remember phone numbers and also information that comes from long-term memory right before you need to use it. Short-term memory is also the memory system that is used when we cram for a test at the last minute. Attention difficulties, distractions and overload of too much information all negatively impact our short-term memory and cause it to fail. We all have a limited ability to focus on too much stimuli at the same time, and if we don't process the information, we lose it. Practice helps us increase our ability to access information rapidly and automatically.

Practice also frees our brains to process more challenging information and problems. For example, if a child has memorized the multiplication table and can retrieve it automatically, working memory is freed to do more complicated computations.

Practice can improve children's working memory and enhance learning of academic skills, such as reading comprehension and mathematical reasoning (e.g., Dahlin, 2011; Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Holmes, Gathercole, & Dunning, 2009), verbal learning (Liao, Kronemer, Yau, Desmond, & Marvel, 2014) and motor skills (Gomes, Ugrinowitsch, Marinho, Shea, Raisbeck, & Benda, R., 2014).

And practice using visual spatial tasks can improve visual-spatial working memory (Melby-Lervag & Hulme, 2012; Shipstead, Redick, & Engle, 2012). Likewise, children can be taught a rehearsal or practice strategy to help them improve their reading comprehension (e.g., Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Rose, Cundick, & Higbee, 1983). Moreover, rehearsal is easier to learn and less demanding than other strategies (Turley-Ames & Whitfield, 2003).

Long-term memory

When working-memory is stored, it becomes long-term memory. Long-term memory is the depository of memories throughout the brain that results from the ongoing chemical processes that changes neuronal connections. The formation of long-term memories takes place over the span of days, weeks and in some cases years. As the memories are consolidated, neuron connections become more and more efficient, and in the process, connections that are no longer useful are discarded from lack of use.

Although the capacity of our long-term memory is apparently limitless (as far as we know, no one has ever stored all that the brain is capable of storing), working memory can typically hold only seven items (plus or minus 2) at any given time, and these items "decay" rapidly (Miller, 1956; Baddeley, 2002).

Research on the brains of rats has shown that relatively short periods of practice can enhance the plasticity of the brain and actually change its structure (Rioult-Pedotti, Friedman, Hess, & Donoghue, 1998). Brain imaging has shown that even a brief lesson on new words changes brain circuits (Allami, Brovelli, Hamzaoui, Regragui, Paulignan, & Boussaoud, 2014; Abdullaev & Posner, 1998; Raichle et al., 1994) and retrieval (Habib, Nyberg, & Tulving, 2003).

Experts and novices differ in the amount and structure of information stored in their long-term memories. These cognitive differences occur in large part because of differences in the amount of deliberate practice in which each has engaged (Cantor & Engle, 1993).

Extensive and deliberate practice makes it possible for students to access and apply increasingly complex information without explicitly thinking about it. In other words, it increases automaticity (see earlier discussion of automaticity) (Anderson, 2008; Case, 1985, 1991). Automaticity leaves students' working memories free to process new information (Kotovsky, Hayes, & Simon, 1985). Since working memory can be overloaded at any time, 'savings' from automaticity become very important. When there is too much information in our working memory it will fail, and the chemical processes that transfer information to our long-term memories also fail. Long-term learning is enhanced by a distribution process in which information is repeated, allowing time with time in between practice sessions, rather than crammed practice.

Reviews and tests are forms of practice that can improve learning. Tests (or quizzes) that are given immediately after a learning exercise give children opportunities to practice. Because learning is recent, students tend to do well on these tests. However, their success does not ensure long-term retention. Teachers can provide time during class to give students additional practice in taking tests. Some tests, such as tests with open-ended answers have been shown to enhance learning because they involve students in the "retrieval" of information from long-term memory. Tests are more effective when they are given at spaced intervals and when they are given frequently (Cull, 2000; Dempster; 1991; Rodriguez, Michael, 2004;Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Chunking information, or combining small bits together in short-term memory, is another strategy that students can use to increase their STM holding capacity. Although chunking gives a student more capacity in their STM, its usefulness depends on how much knowledge a person already has. The more knowledge one has on a topic, the more likely that one can "chunk" incoming information into larger and more meaningful chunks. This is why knowledge itself adds to one's ability to solve complex problems. Children who use chunking are more likely to be strategic about their learning. Teachers can help children become more strategic by explicitly teaching them strategies like chunking.

Example of chunking information

The following digits can be seen as a random list of numbers: 14921776. Random or meaningless information taxes the limited capacity of short-term memory (STM). However, if a student "chunks" the information into two dates (1492: Columbus discovered America; and 1776: the year the Declaration of Independence was signed) it is learned as 1492 1776. This leaves room in the short-term memory for more information.

Chunking allows several units of information to be compressed into a single meaningful unit or chunk (e.g., whereas a random number string above represents 8 discrete units to be stored in short-term memory (near its maximum capacity), the two meaningful dates represent only two chunks of information to be stored. This leaves space in the STM for more information to be held. And when more information is held in STM, there is more information available for transfer to long-term memory where it can be permanently stored (Gobet et al., 2001).

Chunking can develop experts' schema. Information stored in the brain in larger chunks of integrated concepts are known as "schemas." For example, a novice chess player who does not yet have complex schemas for chess playing has to devote his or her limited working memory to processing large amounts of information while playing (Anderson, 1996).

An expert, on the other hand, can easily access schemas from long-term memory (deGroot, 1966; Cantor & Engle, 1993). With practice, a novice player can construct chess-playing schemas and therefore increase the amount of information stored in long-term memory. In this way, practice accessing and applying knowledge helps one to transfer that knowledge into a "permastore" of long-term memory so that he or she can more efficiently utilize space available in the working memory (Elo, 1978; Kotovsky & Fallside, 1989).

Theories explaining expert performance

1. Many researchers (e.g., Ericsson et al., 1993; Baddeley, 2002) argue that differences in the amount of practice account for the majority of performance differences between individuals, resulting from differences in the amount and structure of knowledge stored in long-term memory.

2. Other researchers emphasize innate, genetic differences or talent as the main factor accounting for differences between expert and novice performance (Mosing, et.al., 2014; Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & Rutter, 1997).

3. More recently, researchers have emphasized an interaction between innate and behavioral factors in accounting for differences in performance levels (Gobet & Campitelli, 2007).

Overall, the research supports the view that deliberate practice plays a role in performance differences and can reduce performance differences between individuals who are thought to possess talent and those who do not (Chase & Ericsson, 1981). See Gobet and Campitelli (2007), Mosing, et.al., (2014) and Macnamara, et.al., (2014) for a comprehensive review of this debate.

What can a teacher do to maximize the positive effect of practice?

When teachers assign students to complete practice problems that are structurally similar but different in surface features, it helps them discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information in a given problem. This outcome makes it more likely that students will be able to transfer knowledge gained from practice to new and more complex problems (Paas, 1992). As with all scaffolds, they should be diminished gradually as learners become increasingly more independent.

Students' problem-solving skills also increase when teachers distribute practice over time rather than "cramming" practice into short periods (Bahrick & Hall, 2005). Assignments involving practice are more effective when they are shorter, more frequent and distributed over longer periods of time (Cooper, 2007; Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006; Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2010). This distributive effect is particularly important because it also makes it more likely that students will recall information over longer periods of time. Therefore, distributed practice helps students transfer information into their long-term memory.

Teachers should also have students begin homework during class. By doing so, teachers can monitor students to ensure they understand and can solve practice problems correctly before they practice independently. If teachers are unable to monitor this initial practice, they should explain to their students where they can obtain the information (textbooks, web sites, handouts, etc.) they need to complete the assigned practice problems correctly.

Reviews and tests are a form of practice that can improve learning. Tests provide opportunities for practice that enhance learning. Open-ended test questions also provide practice in retrieving information. Both reviews and tests are most effective when they are well spaced and frequent (Dempster, 1991).

Teachers can train students to reflect on their thinking when solving problems by providing them with lists of questions. This kind of "strategy instruction" helps students to construct schemas more efficiently by facilitating a metacognitive awareness of the problem-solving process. That is, students learn more about how they learn and this helps them with new learning.

Teachers can increase students' abilities to transfer existing problem-solving knowledge to new problems when they prompt students to deliberately reflect on problem-solving strategies they have used before. (Renkl, Stark, Gruber, & Mandl, 1998; Rosenshine & Meister, 1992; Stark, Mandl, Gruber, & Renkl., 2002).

Is homework always effective practice?

There is no question that homework can provide students with opportunities for practice but there are more and less effective homework assignments. Research on homework (Cooper, 2001, 2006; Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2010) suggests that the relationship between time spent on homework and students' academic achievement varies with grade level. When parental involvement is well structured it can also enhance the effectiveness of homework on learning (Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2010; Marzano & Pickering, 2007).

How much time should be spent on homework?

Although high school students appear to benefit from at least two hours of homework per night, there is little or no relationship between time spent on homework and academic achievement for young (grades 1-3) students (Marzano, & Pickering, 2007). Younger students may benefit more from supervised in-school practice than from homework. Middle school students may benefit from one to two hours of homework per night (Cooper, 2007).

Will practice activities negatively affect students' motivation? Aren't practice activities the same as "drill and kill" instruction?

Although deliberate practice is often confused with rote learning, researchers emphasize that there is a difference between mere repetition and deliberate practice. For practice to be effective, appropriate instruction, guided practice, as well as descriptive and timely feedback must all be present.

Does practice with "authentic" problems increase learning?

Due to their relevance, "authentic" problems or "real-life" problems may motivate students. However, the positive effect of practice is only realized when teachers provide instructional supports that address the limitations of students' working memories (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996, 2000; Sweller, van Merrienboer, & Paas, 1998; van Merrienboer, Kirschner, & Kester, 2003). If there is cognitive overload and the working memory is taxed beyond its capacity, students will lose motivation even if a problem is highly relevant to them.

Although "authentic" practice problems sound like they would motivate students with their real-world context; they may also include too many variables at the same time. Students' working memories are thus required to manage too many bits of information, and many of these bits may not be directly involved with the construction of the desired schema (Sweller & Chandler, 1994).

Is there such a thing as too much practice?

Merely repeating a task will not automatically improve performance. Deliberate practice is most effective when it involves intense concentration, rehearsal and reflection. For that reason, students are more likely to benefit from frequent, short practice sessions than from long "cramming" sessions. Teachers can foster this meta-cognitive learning process by providing students with frequent opportunities to discuss their problem-solving strategies (National Research Council, 2005).

Even in early grades when students are acquiring foundational knowledge, practice should not be confused with rote learning. For example, phonics instruction is most effective when it is practiced alongside more complex skills like identifying main ideas in stories (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

Does practice work for all academic subjects?

Practice is correlated with student achievement across all developmental levels and across all subjects. NICHD's (2000) analysis of strategies for reading instruction suggests that several kinds of practice activities are beneficial to students. Phonemic awareness practice, phonics practice and read-aloud practice all showed significant positive effects on student achievement in the early grades. Teachers should always keep long-term goals in mind when they are designing practice activities. The ultimate purpose of phonics instruction is not for students to identify phonemes, but rather, to improve their reading comprehension. The goal of practice is to transfer acquired skills to new and more complex problems. Therefore, practice activities should always be designed with that transfer process in mind.

Studies in mathematics education show that practice is effective when teachers design appropriate practice problems, distribute them over time, and provide students with sufficient feedback. Practice is ineffective when it is not appropriately designed, not well distributed, and when adequate feedback is not provided.

Deliberate practice is also effective in learning complex skills from musical fluency to athletic expertise.

When does the strategy work?

All students benefit from well-designed, developmentally-appropriate deliberate practice activities. A meta-analysis (Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014) showed that the effects of deliberate practice are robust for games, music and sports, and modestly effective in education.

Deliberate practice can also provide a bridge over the gaps that exist between different achievement levels. Achievement gaps often exist because of unequal opportunities for students to engage in appropriate deliberate practice rather than unequal learning abilities. As children grow older, they become better able to benefit from instruction on appropriate strategies like rehearsal, reflection and "chunking" information.

Special populations benefit from practice activities that are designed to meet their needs (Chapman, & Mudar, 2014; Nunes, Barros, Evans, & Burman, 2014; Rose, Cundick, & Higbee, 1983). For example, research on children with language processing problems suggests that their difficulties are due to sensory perception rather than an inability to learn. One reason that language-learning impaired students have difficulty learning to read is that their phonemic recognition and spatial discrimination perceptions are impaired. Appropriate practice activities have been shown to help these students compensate for their difficulties (Merzenich et al., 1996). Cooper's (2001) examination of homework practice suggests that students with learning disabilities benefit most from short, skill-reinforcing activities that are carefully monitored (see also Marzano & Pickering, 2007).

Description of research on the use of practice activities with children with learning disabilities

An extensive meta-analysis of interventions for students with learning disabilities found that practice-drill-review instructional strategies were generally effective across academic subjects (Swanson, Hoskyn, & Lee, 1999). Another meta-analysis of inclusion settings found that time-on-task correlated with student achievement across subject areas (Brophy & Good, 1986). Therefore, practice activities appear to be a key factor in student achievement across grade levels, skill levels and academic domains.

In summary, well-designed practice activities result from careful planning where teachers:

Model problem-solving processes.

Design partially-completed examples on which students can practice.

Sequence activities logically.

Space practice activities appropriately.

Monitor student practice providing guidance and feedback.

Is practice effective across the age span?

Children grow more strategic as they get older. Younger children are less strategic - are less likely to rehearse, practice, or chunk spontaneously or to know how to do these things well. They are also less likely to monitor their own knowledge or to use metacognitive strategies. Younger children are less likely than older children to know what they need to rehearse or practice more. Therefore, teachers of younger children should introduce them to strategies such as rehearsal and practice, and in this way can help students improve their learning.

Deliberate practice is effective across all school age levels. Fundamental practice skills are more appropriate for earlier grades than it is for later grades. Teachers can focus younger students on the skills they will need later when they tackle more complex tasks. For example, phonemic awareness instruction is more effective for preschool students than for older elementary school students (NICHD, 2000), but it remains a skill that is very useful in later grades.

Teachers should design developmentally appropriate practice problems for students. Students' memories and attention spans develop with age (Gomez-Perez & Ostrosky-Solis, 2006; Lechuga, Moreno, Pelegrina, Gomez-Ariza, & Bajo, 2006). In general, older students have greater attention spans and greater memory capacity than younger students. This may account for developmental differences seen in the benefits of homework (Cooper, 2001; Muhlenbrook, Cooper, Nye, & Lindsay, 1999) and age differences in the amount of practice that learners engage in outside the classroom (Ericsson et al., 1993). Teachers should plan the type and amount of practice students are expected to do with these developmental differences in mind.

Research on expert performance shows that experts increase the amount of deliberate practice they engage in over time. For example, research by Ericsson and colleagues (1993) on expert violinists revealed that in early childhood they practiced no more than five hours per week. However, by their early twenties, they practiced around thirty hours per week. Because deliberate practice is so taxing, it should be balanced with sufficient periods of rest. Younger learners tire more quickly and lose their motivation to persist if they are not allowed sufficient rest (Ericsson et al., 1993; NICHD, 2000).

Elementary

Early elementary students benefit little or not at all from homework (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011; Cooper, 2001; Halford, Maybery, & Bain, 1986).

Expert violinists practiced fewer than 5 hours per week at the early childhood stage (Ericsson et al., 1993; Macnamara et al., 2014).

Research supports the idea that practice can help elementary students overcome processing deficits (Merzenich et al., 1996).

Practice with phonemic awareness has been shown to have a positive effect on reading outcomes in elementary readers through 6th grade. Effects were not as strong for disabled readers as they were for at-risk and normally progressing readers. The effects of phonemic-awareness instruction were strongest when it was provided in earlier grades (especially pre-K and kindergarten), in small group settings, in shorter training programs and to English-speaking students (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that systematic phonics instruction helps students learning to read. The effects of systematic phonics instruction were greater when it was provided in earlier grades (especially kindergarten and 1st grade) (Dahlin, 2011; Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; NICHD, 2000).

A meta-analysis of intervention strategies for students with learning disabilities found that phonics instruction positively affects development of vocabulary, although the results on comprehension were unclear (Swanson et al., 1999). (The mean age for the study participants was 11; 78% of the studies targeted 9-14 year age range.).

Research suggests that repeated and guided-repeated oral reading strategies have a positive effect on reading performance through grade four, especially for non-impaired readers (Dahlin, 2011; Gersten, et al., 2001; Rose et al., 1983).

Swanson et al.'s (1999) meta-analysis suggests that "the teaching of whole language without due attention to decoding places LD children at greater risk than the use of more traditional programs" (p. 254).

Vocabulary instruction (both explicit and implicit) has a positive effect on vocabulary acquisition. Research indicates that students should be exposed to vocabulary repeatedly and in multiple contexts (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that reading comprehension strategy instruction (e.g., cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies) has a positive effect on reading comprehension and memory in grades 3-6. The effects were greater when strategy instruction was more intensive and when students were instructed in multiple strategies (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that "drill-repetition-practice" instructional strategies are beneficial to students with learning disabilities across all age groups and across all subjects (Swanson et al., 1999).

Middle School

Middle school students may benefit from one to two hours of homework per night (Cooper, 2001; Campitelli & Gobet, 2011).

Research suggests that partial-task practice problems are more effective than whole-task practice problems for some 13 year-old math students. Partial-task practice lowered the processing demands on working memory for all students, but it only increased learning for students with low prior knowledge. Students with high prior knowledge benefited more from whole-task practice (Ayres, 2006).

Research suggests that when modeling problem-solving strategies, the use of worked examples is beneficial for middle school students' writing performance. As with Ayres' (2006) study, however, the positive effects were limited to low-performing students. The results suggested that "low-level" writers benefited from worked-example practice problems, while "high-level" writers benefited from "goal-free" practice problems.

Research suggests that the use of repeated and guided-repeated oral reading strategies positively affect students' reading performance. This is especially true for students with reading problems (NICHD, 2000).

Programs aimed at encouraging students to read more (e.g., self-selected, silent reading) yielded no significant positive effects on reading achievement (NICHD, 2000).

Swanson et al.'s (1999) meta-analysis suggests that "the teaching of whole language without due attention to decoding places LD children at greater risk than the use of more traditional programs" (p. 254).

Results that support the positive effects of vocabulary instruction (both explicit and implicit) on vocabulary acquisition indicate that students should be exposed to vocabulary repeatedly and in multiple contexts (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that reading-comprehension-strategy instruction (e.g., cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies) has a positive effect on reading comprehension and memory in grades 3-6. The effects were greater when strategy instruction was more intensive and when students were instructed on multiple strategies (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that "drill-repetition-practice" instructional strategies are beneficial to students with learning disabilities across all age groups and across all subjects (Swanson et al., 1999).

High School

High school students appear to benefit from at least two hours of homework per night, (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011; Cooper, 2001).

Students may benefit from more practice with the transfer of component skills than from practicing whole-task transfer (Pollock, Chandler, & Sweller, 2002). Examples worked out in advance for students were more effective for algebra problem solving transfer than were conventional problems for 9th and 11th grade students (Sweller & Cooper, 1985).

Repeated and guided-repeated oral reading strategies positively affect reading performance. This is especially true for high school students with reading problems (NICHD, 2000).

Programs aimed at encouraging students to read more (e.g., self-selected, silent reading) yielded no significant positive effects on reading achievement (NICHD, 2000).

Although research supports a positive effect of vocabulary instruction (both explicit and implicit) on vocabulary acquisition in grades 9-11, few studies have been conducted at that level. Results that do exist suggest that students should be exposed to vocabulary repeatedly and in multiple contexts (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that "drill-repetition-practice" instructional strategies are beneficial to students with learning disabilities across all age groups and across all subjects (Swanson et al., 1999).

Where can teachers get more information?

Anderson, J. R. (1996). ACT: A simple theory of complex cognition. American Psychologist, 51(4), 355-368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.4.355

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. ISBN 0-309-07036-8

Carver, S. M. & Klahr, D. (Eds.). (2001). Cognition and instruction: Twenty-five years of progress. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Practice for knowledge acquisition (not drill and kill)

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It doesnt matter what subject you teach, differences in students performance are affected by how much they engage in deliberate practice. Researchers who have investigated expert and novice performance have uncovered important distinctions between deliberate practice and other activities, such as play or repetition. Deliberate practice is not the same as rote repetition.

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It doesnt matter what subject you teach, differences in students performance are affected by how much they engage in deliberate practice. Researchers who have investigated expert and novice performance have uncovered important distinctions between deliberate practice and other activities, such as play or repetition.

Deliberate practice is not the same as rote repetition. Rote repetition - simply repeating a task - will not by itself improve performance. Deliberate practice involves attention, rehearsal and repetition and leads to new knowledge or skills that can later be developed into more complex knowledge and skills. Although other factors such as intelligence and motivation affect performance, practice is necessary if not sufficient for acquiring expertise (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011).

Define practice:

"Deliberate practice (DP) occurs when an individual intentionally repeats an activity in order to improve performance. The claim of the DP framework is that such behavior is necessary to achieve high levels of expert performance." (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011, p. 280).

"Deliberate practice consists of activities purposely designed to improve performance." (Gobet & Campitelli, 2007, p. 160).

Benefits of deliberate practice

Practice is important for teaching and learning in at least five ways:

1. Practice greatly increases the likelihood that students will permanently remember new information (Anderson, 2008).

2. Practice increases student facility or automaticity (learning to apply elements of knowledge automatically, without reflection). Automaticity is usually only achieved through extensive rehearsal and repetition. Automaticity frees up students cognitive resources to handle more challenging tasks (Brown & Bennett, 2002; Moors & De Houwer, 2006).

3. When students practice solving problems, they increase their ability to transfer practiced skills to new and more complex problems. This is true in childhood (Glover, Ronning, & Bruning, 1990) and adult years (Li, Schmiedek, Huxhold, Röcke, Smith, & Lindenberger, 2008).

4. Practice helps students acquire expertise in subject matter and, therefore, it helps to distinguish novices from experts in given subjects (Ericsson, Krampe, & Clemens, 1993)

5. Cognitive gains from practice often bring about motivation for more learning (Kalchman, Moss, & Case, 2001).

Teachers should think of practice not as rote repetition, but as deliberate, goal-directed rehearsal paired with reflection on problem-solving processes. For example, when teachers have students practice identifying phonemes, the ultimate goal is for students to read with fluency and comprehension. Although fluent reading may be too complex a task for beginning readers to tackle, the more manageable task of identifying phonemes may scaffold students learning to achieve the ultimate goal of reading. That is, teachers should always design practice activities with the goal of transferring knowledge to new and more complex problems in mind.

General recommendations for practice and instruction

Research (Anderson, 2008; Campitelli & Gobet, 2011; Ericsson, Krampe, & Clemens, 1993) suggests several conditions that must be in place in order for practice activities to be most effective in moving students closer to skillful performance. Each of these conditions can be met with carefully designed instruction:

Because practice requires intense, focused effort, students may not find it inherently enjoyable. Therefore, teachers can encourage students to practice more by pointing out every time that practice has actually improved their performance. Motivate your students to practice by:

Expressing confidence in students' ability to succeed in solving practice problems.

Designing activities that maximize opportunities for students to succeed.

Teachers should design practice tasks with students existing knowledge in mind. When students succeed at practice problems, the benefits of practice are maximized. But when students become frustrated with unrealistic or poorly designed practice problems, they often lose motivation, will not receive the full benefits of the practice they have done, and will be less motivated to attempt future practice problems.

Students receive the greatest benefits from practice when teachers provide them with timely and descriptive feedback.

Students should have repeated opportunities to practice a task through practicing other tasks like it.

What type of feedback is most effective?

Feedback is most effective when it contains descriptions of how students work meets performance criteria and what students can do to improve. This kind of descriptive feedback is more effective than feedback consisting of vague, general comments (e.g., "nice work or "needs improvement).

Feedback should also be focused on the learning process. That is, teachers should focus their feedback on helping students reflect on their problem solving skills, as well as on progress they have made.

Do's:

1. Vary practice activities.

2. Distribute practice over extended periods of time.

3. Provide clear instructions on performance expectations and criteria.

4. Before asking students to practice independently, model the problem-solving process that you expect students to use.

5. Break complex problems into their constituent elements, and have students practice on these smaller elements before asking them to solve complex problems independently.

6. Guide students through sample practice problems by using prompts that help them reflect on problem-solving strategies.

7. Provide students with fully completed sample problems as well as partially completed sample problems before asking them to apply new problem-solving strategies on their own.

8. Wait until students actually need more information to solve a complex problem before you give them more information. This strategy - known as "just-in-time instruction" - helps keep the amount of information that students must hold in their short-term memories to a manageable level as they practice (Linneman & Plake, 2006; Simkins & Maier, 2008).

9. Provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice applying problem-solving skills before you test them on their ability to use those skills.

Don'ts:

1. Don't ask students to practice complex problem solving without providing them with plenty of guidance and feedback.

2. Don't overload students by presenting information in redundant formats.

3. Don't give your students complex practice problems before they have the skills they need to succeed.

Research suggests that when teachers construct problems for students to practice, they should keep in mind the limitations of human memory.

Moving information to permanent storage is often explained as a multistore model of memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; 1971; Baddeley, 1996; 2002). According to this model, our brains have three memory storage systems: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory (Baddeley, 1996; 2002; Carlson, Sullivan, & Schneider, 1989). Learning occurs when we move information from working memory to long-term memory, and practice helps with this process.

Deliberate practice (sometimes called 'rehearsal') keeps the information in our short-term memory long enough for it to move to long-term memory. Once it is in long-term memory, it can be built upon to create more and more complex associations (Baddeley, 2002).

Most researchers agree that there are forms of Short-Term Memory (STM) for different modalities, such as visual STM, auditory STM and motor STM. For example, Baddeley (1992; 1996; 2002) suggests that short-term memory is a dynamic place where sounds and images are turned into verbal and pictorial models. STM is also thought to have a "central executive" that manages the information it is holding. This central executive also controls our awareness of that information (Baddeley, 2002).

The implication for teachers is that they should present material in multiple modalities. If a child who is learning to read hears a word, sees the word and a picture of the word, there will be more learning. The child can get the visual information from the visual STM and additional auditory information in the auditory STM. These two sensory sources of information supplement and complement one another (Liao, 2014). However, teachers must be careful not to have too much extraneous information in the classroom. Over stimulation can put too much demand on working memory (Pass & Kester, 2006).

Short-term or working memory

Working memory or short-term memory, is stored for very short periods of time - minutes at most. Information in our short-term memory is generally housed in the temporal lobe of the brain (the hippocampal region). It allows you to remember phone numbers and also information that comes from long-term memory right before you need to use it. Short-term memory is also the memory system that is used when we cram for a test at the last minute. Attention difficulties, distractions and overload of too much information all negatively impact our short-term memory and cause it to fail. We all have a limited ability to focus on too much stimuli at the same time, and if we don't process the information, we lose it. Practice helps us increase our ability to access information rapidly and automatically.

Practice also frees our brains to process more challenging information and problems. For example, if a child has memorized the multiplication table and can retrieve it automatically, working memory is freed to do more complicated computations.

Practice can improve children's working memory and enhance learning of academic skills, such as reading comprehension and mathematical reasoning (e.g., Dahlin, 2011; Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Holmes, Gathercole, & Dunning, 2009), verbal learning (Liao, Kronemer, Yau, Desmond, & Marvel, 2014) and motor skills (Gomes, Ugrinowitsch, Marinho, Shea, Raisbeck, & Benda, R., 2014).

And practice using visual spatial tasks can improve visual-spatial working memory (Melby-Lervag & Hulme, 2012; Shipstead, Redick, & Engle, 2012). Likewise, children can be taught a rehearsal or practice strategy to help them improve their reading comprehension (e.g., Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Rose, Cundick, & Higbee, 1983). Moreover, rehearsal is easier to learn and less demanding than other strategies (Turley-Ames & Whitfield, 2003).

Long-term memory

When working-memory is stored, it becomes long-term memory. Long-term memory is the depository of memories throughout the brain that results from the ongoing chemical processes that changes neuronal connections. The formation of long-term memories takes place over the span of days, weeks and in some cases years. As the memories are consolidated, neuron connections become more and more efficient, and in the process, connections that are no longer useful are discarded from lack of use.

Although the capacity of our long-term memory is apparently limitless (as far as we know, no one has ever stored all that the brain is capable of storing), working memory can typically hold only seven items (plus or minus 2) at any given time, and these items "decay" rapidly (Miller, 1956; Baddeley, 2002).

Research on the brains of rats has shown that relatively short periods of practice can enhance the plasticity of the brain and actually change its structure (Rioult-Pedotti, Friedman, Hess, & Donoghue, 1998). Brain imaging has shown that even a brief lesson on new words changes brain circuits (Allami, Brovelli, Hamzaoui, Regragui, Paulignan, & Boussaoud, 2014; Abdullaev & Posner, 1998; Raichle et al., 1994) and retrieval (Habib, Nyberg, & Tulving, 2003).

Experts and novices differ in the amount and structure of information stored in their long-term memories. These cognitive differences occur in large part because of differences in the amount of deliberate practice in which each has engaged (Cantor & Engle, 1993).

Extensive and deliberate practice makes it possible for students to access and apply increasingly complex information without explicitly thinking about it. In other words, it increases automaticity (see earlier discussion of automaticity) (Anderson, 2008; Case, 1985, 1991). Automaticity leaves students' working memories free to process new information (Kotovsky, Hayes, & Simon, 1985). Since working memory can be overloaded at any time, 'savings' from automaticity become very important. When there is too much information in our working memory it will fail, and the chemical processes that transfer information to our long-term memories also fail. Long-term learning is enhanced by a distribution process in which information is repeated, allowing time with time in between practice sessions, rather than crammed practice.

Reviews and tests are forms of practice that can improve learning. Tests (or quizzes) that are given immediately after a learning exercise give children opportunities to practice. Because learning is recent, students tend to do well on these tests. However, their success does not ensure long-term retention. Teachers can provide time during class to give students additional practice in taking tests. Some tests, such as tests with open-ended answers have been shown to enhance learning because they involve students in the "retrieval" of information from long-term memory. Tests are more effective when they are given at spaced intervals and when they are given frequently (Cull, 2000; Dempster; 1991; Rodriguez, Michael, 2004;Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Chunking information, or combining small bits together in short-term memory, is another strategy that students can use to increase their STM holding capacity. Although chunking gives a student more capacity in their STM, its usefulness depends on how much knowledge a person already has. The more knowledge one has on a topic, the more likely that one can "chunk" incoming information into larger and more meaningful chunks. This is why knowledge itself adds to one's ability to solve complex problems. Children who use chunking are more likely to be strategic about their learning. Teachers can help children become more strategic by explicitly teaching them strategies like chunking.

Example of chunking information

The following digits can be seen as a random list of numbers: 14921776. Random or meaningless information taxes the limited capacity of short-term memory (STM). However, if a student "chunks" the information into two dates (1492: Columbus discovered America; and 1776: the year the Declaration of Independence was signed) it is learned as 1492 1776. This leaves room in the short-term memory for more information.

Chunking allows several units of information to be compressed into a single meaningful unit or chunk (e.g., whereas a random number string above represents 8 discrete units to be stored in short-term memory (near its maximum capacity), the two meaningful dates represent only two chunks of information to be stored. This leaves space in the STM for more information to be held. And when more information is held in STM, there is more information available for transfer to long-term memory where it can be permanently stored (Gobet et al., 2001).

Chunking can develop experts' schema. Information stored in the brain in larger chunks of integrated concepts are known as "schemas." For example, a novice chess player who does not yet have complex schemas for chess playing has to devote his or her limited working memory to processing large amounts of information while playing (Anderson, 1996).

An expert, on the other hand, can easily access schemas from long-term memory (deGroot, 1966; Cantor & Engle, 1993). With practice, a novice player can construct chess-playing schemas and therefore increase the amount of information stored in long-term memory. In this way, practice accessing and applying knowledge helps one to transfer that knowledge into a "permastore" of long-term memory so that he or she can more efficiently utilize space available in the working memory (Elo, 1978; Kotovsky & Fallside, 1989).

Theories explaining expert performance

1. Many researchers (e.g., Ericsson et al., 1993; Baddeley, 2002) argue that differences in the amount of practice account for the majority of performance differences between individuals, resulting from differences in the amount and structure of knowledge stored in long-term memory.

2. Other researchers emphasize innate, genetic differences or talent as the main factor accounting for differences between expert and novice performance (Mosing, et.al., 2014; Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & Rutter, 1997).

3. More recently, researchers have emphasized an interaction between innate and behavioral factors in accounting for differences in performance levels (Gobet & Campitelli, 2007).

Overall, the research supports the view that deliberate practice plays a role in performance differences and can reduce performance differences between individuals who are thought to possess talent and those who do not (Chase & Ericsson, 1981). See Gobet and Campitelli (2007), Mosing, et.al., (2014) and Macnamara, et.al., (2014) for a comprehensive review of this debate.

What can a teacher do to maximize the positive effect of practice?

When teachers assign students to complete practice problems that are structurally similar but different in surface features, it helps them discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information in a given problem. This outcome makes it more likely that students will be able to transfer knowledge gained from practice to new and more complex problems (Paas, 1992). As with all scaffolds, they should be diminished gradually as learners become increasingly more independent.

Students' problem-solving skills also increase when teachers distribute practice over time rather than "cramming" practice into short periods (Bahrick & Hall, 2005). Assignments involving practice are more effective when they are shorter, more frequent and distributed over longer periods of time (Cooper, 2007; Cooper, Robinson, & Patall, 2006; Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2010). This distributive effect is particularly important because it also makes it more likely that students will recall information over longer periods of time. Therefore, distributed practice helps students transfer information into their long-term memory.

Teachers should also have students begin homework during class. By doing so, teachers can monitor students to ensure they understand and can solve practice problems correctly before they practice independently. If teachers are unable to monitor this initial practice, they should explain to their students where they can obtain the information (textbooks, web sites, handouts, etc.) they need to complete the assigned practice problems correctly.

Reviews and tests are a form of practice that can improve learning. Tests provide opportunities for practice that enhance learning. Open-ended test questions also provide practice in retrieving information. Both reviews and tests are most effective when they are well spaced and frequent (Dempster, 1991).

Teachers can train students to reflect on their thinking when solving problems by providing them with lists of questions. This kind of "strategy instruction" helps students to construct schemas more efficiently by facilitating a metacognitive awareness of the problem-solving process. That is, students learn more about how they learn and this helps them with new learning.

Teachers can increase students' abilities to transfer existing problem-solving knowledge to new problems when they prompt students to deliberately reflect on problem-solving strategies they have used before. (Renkl, Stark, Gruber, & Mandl, 1998; Rosenshine & Meister, 1992; Stark, Mandl, Gruber, & Renkl., 2002).

Is homework always effective practice?

There is no question that homework can provide students with opportunities for practice but there are more and less effective homework assignments. Research on homework (Cooper, 2001, 2006; Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2010) suggests that the relationship between time spent on homework and students' academic achievement varies with grade level. When parental involvement is well structured it can also enhance the effectiveness of homework on learning (Epstein & Van Voorhis, 2010; Marzano & Pickering, 2007).

How much time should be spent on homework?

Although high school students appear to benefit from at least two hours of homework per night, there is little or no relationship between time spent on homework and academic achievement for young (grades 1-3) students (Marzano, & Pickering, 2007). Younger students may benefit more from supervised in-school practice than from homework. Middle school students may benefit from one to two hours of homework per night (Cooper, 2007).

Will practice activities negatively affect students' motivation? Aren't practice activities the same as "drill and kill" instruction?

Although deliberate practice is often confused with rote learning, researchers emphasize that there is a difference between mere repetition and deliberate practice. For practice to be effective, appropriate instruction, guided practice, as well as descriptive and timely feedback must all be present.

Does practice with "authentic" problems increase learning?

Due to their relevance, "authentic" problems or "real-life" problems may motivate students. However, the positive effect of practice is only realized when teachers provide instructional supports that address the limitations of students' working memories (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996, 2000; Sweller, van Merrienboer, & Paas, 1998; van Merrienboer, Kirschner, & Kester, 2003). If there is cognitive overload and the working memory is taxed beyond its capacity, students will lose motivation even if a problem is highly relevant to them.

Although "authentic" practice problems sound like they would motivate students with their real-world context; they may also include too many variables at the same time. Students' working memories are thus required to manage too many bits of information, and many of these bits may not be directly involved with the construction of the desired schema (Sweller & Chandler, 1994).

Is there such a thing as too much practice?

Merely repeating a task will not automatically improve performance. Deliberate practice is most effective when it involves intense concentration, rehearsal and reflection. For that reason, students are more likely to benefit from frequent, short practice sessions than from long "cramming" sessions. Teachers can foster this meta-cognitive learning process by providing students with frequent opportunities to discuss their problem-solving strategies (National Research Council, 2005).

Even in early grades when students are acquiring foundational knowledge, practice should not be confused with rote learning. For example, phonics instruction is most effective when it is practiced alongside more complex skills like identifying main ideas in stories (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

Does practice work for all academic subjects?

Practice is correlated with student achievement across all developmental levels and across all subjects. NICHD's (2000) analysis of strategies for reading instruction suggests that several kinds of practice activities are beneficial to students. Phonemic awareness practice, phonics practice and read-aloud practice all showed significant positive effects on student achievement in the early grades. Teachers should always keep long-term goals in mind when they are designing practice activities. The ultimate purpose of phonics instruction is not for students to identify phonemes, but rather, to improve their reading comprehension. The goal of practice is to transfer acquired skills to new and more complex problems. Therefore, practice activities should always be designed with that transfer process in mind.

Studies in mathematics education show that practice is effective when teachers design appropriate practice problems, distribute them over time, and provide students with sufficient feedback. Practice is ineffective when it is not appropriately designed, not well distributed, and when adequate feedback is not provided.

Deliberate practice is also effective in learning complex skills from musical fluency to athletic expertise.

When does the strategy work?

All students benefit from well-designed, developmentally-appropriate deliberate practice activities. A meta-analysis (Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014) showed that the effects of deliberate practice are robust for games, music and sports, and modestly effective in education.

Deliberate practice can also provide a bridge over the gaps that exist between different achievement levels. Achievement gaps often exist because of unequal opportunities for students to engage in appropriate deliberate practice rather than unequal learning abilities. As children grow older, they become better able to benefit from instruction on appropriate strategies like rehearsal, reflection and "chunking" information.

Special populations benefit from practice activities that are designed to meet their needs (Chapman, & Mudar, 2014; Nunes, Barros, Evans, & Burman, 2014; Rose, Cundick, & Higbee, 1983). For example, research on children with language processing problems suggests that their difficulties are due to sensory perception rather than an inability to learn. One reason that language-learning impaired students have difficulty learning to read is that their phonemic recognition and spatial discrimination perceptions are impaired. Appropriate practice activities have been shown to help these students compensate for their difficulties (Merzenich et al., 1996). Cooper's (2001) examination of homework practice suggests that students with learning disabilities benefit most from short, skill-reinforcing activities that are carefully monitored (see also Marzano & Pickering, 2007).

Description of research on the use of practice activities with children with learning disabilities

An extensive meta-analysis of interventions for students with learning disabilities found that practice-drill-review instructional strategies were generally effective across academic subjects (Swanson, Hoskyn, & Lee, 1999). Another meta-analysis of inclusion settings found that time-on-task correlated with student achievement across subject areas (Brophy & Good, 1986). Therefore, practice activities appear to be a key factor in student achievement across grade levels, skill levels and academic domains.

In summary, well-designed practice activities result from careful planning where teachers:

Model problem-solving processes.

Design partially-completed examples on which students can practice.

Sequence activities logically.

Space practice activities appropriately.

Monitor student practice providing guidance and feedback.

Is practice effective across the age span?

Children grow more strategic as they get older. Younger children are less strategic - are less likely to rehearse, practice, or chunk spontaneously or to know how to do these things well. They are also less likely to monitor their own knowledge or to use metacognitive strategies. Younger children are less likely than older children to know what they need to rehearse or practice more. Therefore, teachers of younger children should introduce them to strategies such as rehearsal and practice, and in this way can help students improve their learning.

Deliberate practice is effective across all school age levels. Fundamental practice skills are more appropriate for earlier grades than it is for later grades. Teachers can focus younger students on the skills they will need later when they tackle more complex tasks. For example, phonemic awareness instruction is more effective for preschool students than for older elementary school students (NICHD, 2000), but it remains a skill that is very useful in later grades.

Teachers should design developmentally appropriate practice problems for students. Students' memories and attention spans develop with age (Gomez-Perez & Ostrosky-Solis, 2006; Lechuga, Moreno, Pelegrina, Gomez-Ariza, & Bajo, 2006). In general, older students have greater attention spans and greater memory capacity than younger students. This may account for developmental differences seen in the benefits of homework (Cooper, 2001; Muhlenbrook, Cooper, Nye, & Lindsay, 1999) and age differences in the amount of practice that learners engage in outside the classroom (Ericsson et al., 1993). Teachers should plan the type and amount of practice students are expected to do with these developmental differences in mind.

Research on expert performance shows that experts increase the amount of deliberate practice they engage in over time. For example, research by Ericsson and colleagues (1993) on expert violinists revealed that in early childhood they practiced no more than five hours per week. However, by their early twenties, they practiced around thirty hours per week. Because deliberate practice is so taxing, it should be balanced with sufficient periods of rest. Younger learners tire more quickly and lose their motivation to persist if they are not allowed sufficient rest (Ericsson et al., 1993; NICHD, 2000).

Elementary

Early elementary students benefit little or not at all from homework (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011; Cooper, 2001; Halford, Maybery, & Bain, 1986).

Expert violinists practiced fewer than 5 hours per week at the early childhood stage (Ericsson et al., 1993; Macnamara et al., 2014).

Research supports the idea that practice can help elementary students overcome processing deficits (Merzenich et al., 1996).

Practice with phonemic awareness has been shown to have a positive effect on reading outcomes in elementary readers through 6th grade. Effects were not as strong for disabled readers as they were for at-risk and normally progressing readers. The effects of phonemic-awareness instruction were strongest when it was provided in earlier grades (especially pre-K and kindergarten), in small group settings, in shorter training programs and to English-speaking students (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that systematic phonics instruction helps students learning to read. The effects of systematic phonics instruction were greater when it was provided in earlier grades (especially kindergarten and 1st grade) (Dahlin, 2011; Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; NICHD, 2000).

A meta-analysis of intervention strategies for students with learning disabilities found that phonics instruction positively affects development of vocabulary, although the results on comprehension were unclear (Swanson et al., 1999). (The mean age for the study participants was 11; 78% of the studies targeted 9-14 year age range.).

Research suggests that repeated and guided-repeated oral reading strategies have a positive effect on reading performance through grade four, especially for non-impaired readers (Dahlin, 2011; Gersten, et al., 2001; Rose et al., 1983).

Swanson et al.'s (1999) meta-analysis suggests that "the teaching of whole language without due attention to decoding places LD children at greater risk than the use of more traditional programs" (p. 254).

Vocabulary instruction (both explicit and implicit) has a positive effect on vocabulary acquisition. Research indicates that students should be exposed to vocabulary repeatedly and in multiple contexts (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that reading comprehension strategy instruction (e.g., cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies) has a positive effect on reading comprehension and memory in grades 3-6. The effects were greater when strategy instruction was more intensive and when students were instructed in multiple strategies (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that "drill-repetition-practice" instructional strategies are beneficial to students with learning disabilities across all age groups and across all subjects (Swanson et al., 1999).

Middle School

Middle school students may benefit from one to two hours of homework per night (Cooper, 2001; Campitelli & Gobet, 2011).

Research suggests that partial-task practice problems are more effective than whole-task practice problems for some 13 year-old math students. Partial-task practice lowered the processing demands on working memory for all students, but it only increased learning for students with low prior knowledge. Students with high prior knowledge benefited more from whole-task practice (Ayres, 2006).

Research suggests that when modeling problem-solving strategies, the use of worked examples is beneficial for middle school students' writing performance. As with Ayres' (2006) study, however, the positive effects were limited to low-performing students. The results suggested that "low-level" writers benefited from worked-example practice problems, while "high-level" writers benefited from "goal-free" practice problems.

Research suggests that the use of repeated and guided-repeated oral reading strategies positively affect students' reading performance. This is especially true for students with reading problems (NICHD, 2000).

Programs aimed at encouraging students to read more (e.g., self-selected, silent reading) yielded no significant positive effects on reading achievement (NICHD, 2000).

Swanson et al.'s (1999) meta-analysis suggests that "the teaching of whole language without due attention to decoding places LD children at greater risk than the use of more traditional programs" (p. 254).

Results that support the positive effects of vocabulary instruction (both explicit and implicit) on vocabulary acquisition indicate that students should be exposed to vocabulary repeatedly and in multiple contexts (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that reading-comprehension-strategy instruction (e.g., cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies) has a positive effect on reading comprehension and memory in grades 3-6. The effects were greater when strategy instruction was more intensive and when students were instructed on multiple strategies (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that "drill-repetition-practice" instructional strategies are beneficial to students with learning disabilities across all age groups and across all subjects (Swanson et al., 1999).

High School

High school students appear to benefit from at least two hours of homework per night, (Campitelli & Gobet, 2011; Cooper, 2001).

Students may benefit from more practice with the transfer of component skills than from practicing whole-task transfer (Pollock, Chandler, & Sweller, 2002). Examples worked out in advance for students were more effective for algebra problem solving transfer than were conventional problems for 9th and 11th grade students (Sweller & Cooper, 1985).

Repeated and guided-repeated oral reading strategies positively affect reading performance. This is especially true for high school students with reading problems (NICHD, 2000).

Programs aimed at encouraging students to read more (e.g., self-selected, silent reading) yielded no significant positive effects on reading achievement (NICHD, 2000).

Although research supports a positive effect of vocabulary instruction (both explicit and implicit) on vocabulary acquisition in grades 9-11, few studies have been conducted at that level. Results that do exist suggest that students should be exposed to vocabulary repeatedly and in multiple contexts (NICHD, 2000).

Research suggests that "drill-repetition-practice" instructional strategies are beneficial to students with learning disabilities across all age groups and across all subjects (Swanson et al., 1999).

Where can teachers get more information?

Anderson, J. R. (1996). ACT: A simple theory of complex cognition. American Psychologist, 51(4), 355-368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.4.355

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. ISBN 0-309-07036-8

Carver, S. M. & Klahr, D. (Eds.). (2001). Cognition and instruction: Twenty-five years of progress. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Practice for knowledge acquisition (not drill and kill)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It doesnt matter what subject you teach, differences in students performance are affected by how much they engage in deliberate practice. Researchers who have investigated expert and novice performance have uncovered important distinctions between deliberate practice and other activities, such as play or repetition. Deliberate practice is not the same as rote repetition.

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Getting a job is about more than academic performance. Much more, according to a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of Americans' attitudes about education.

Nationally, 86 percent of adults indicated that "learning skills like dependability, persistence, and teamwork" were "very important" for helping a high school student get a good job one day. In contrast, only 24 percent of adults indicated that performing well on tests, such as the SAT or ACT, was very important and only 44 percent said that having a B average or higher in high school was very important.

The findings mirror an emerging consensus: nonacademic skills-"social and emotional learning"-matter, and schools ought to teach them. Social and emotional skills are personal and interpersonal abilities, such as self-management, social awareness, or relationship skills, which are teachable in school and serve as a foundation for both educational and life success.

There's a growing body of research on the importance of these social and emotional skills:

In 1994, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning was established to promote the science, theory, and practice of social and emotional learning in pre-K-12 education.

In 2002, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills' framework for teaching and learning included such student skills as creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration.

In 2006, economist James Heckman began publishing studies showing that soft skills-such as personality traits, goals, motivations-and preferences create success in life.

In 2007, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's (ASCD) Whole Child Initiative expanded the focus of education from academic achievement alone to encompass children's long-term development and success while highlighting such issues as health and safety.

In 2010, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Deeper Learning initiative began to study and promote students' critical thinking and problem solving, effective communication, collaboration, and self-direction.

In 2011, a systematic study of knowledge gained in prior research found that students who participated in school-based programs to develop their social and emotional skills showed multiple benefits, including an average improvement in academic performance equivalent to an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement.

In 2012, Paul Tough's book, How Children Succeed, aggregated developing evidence that such personal qualities as curiosity, persistence, optimism, and self-control matter more for later success than such traditional metrics as IQ. The same year, Camille Farrington and her colleagues at the Consortium on Chicago School Research released a review of the research on how nonacademic factors shape school performance.

Public education policymakers and organizations have taken note.

The 16 school districts that won U.S. Department of Education Race to the Top District grants in 2012 were required to include, for all grade ranges, performance metrics related to a non-cognitive growth indicators, such as physical well-being and motor development, or social-emotional development.

In California, school districts that received 2013 waivers from federal accountability requirements will base 40 percent of a school's score on school climate and student social and emotional indicators. Although it is not unusual for teachers to be responsible for their classroom environment, the California waiver is the first large-scale effort to hold schools accountable for the quality of climate and culture.

My own research developing evidence for social and emotional programming in schools and identifying lessons learned includes a 2010-2013 districtwide study in Cleveland. It showed that students improved with an evidence-based social and emotional curriculum, even if imperfectly implemented. An eight-district demonstration project is underway to find out whether, how, and to what end districts can make social and emotional learning an essential part of education. Initial results are expected in 2015. (A copy of the measures of students' social and emotional competence developed for this study is available at no cost by contacting Kimberly Kendziora, kkendziora@air.org.)
What's Next?
In February 2014, the White House Office on Science and Technology (with the Hewlett Foundation) convened a meeting to "consider the landscape of what is known about the assessment of the hard-to-measure skills of academic mindset, collaboration, communication, and learning to learn."

In the next few years, measures will be widely available for schools to assess students' social and emotional skills. These measures can guide and support practice, moving social and emotional learning from a specialty activity led only by counselors to an integrated part of daily instruction. Soon, the public belief in the importance of skills such as "dependability, persistence, and teamwork" may match what schools actually teach.

Infographic source: Phi Delta Kappa International
Kimberly Kendziora is a principal researcher at AIR. Her work focuses on evaluating school- and community-based programs to promote positive development and support students who are at risk.

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Consensus Is Emerging on Teaching Social and Emotional Skills

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Getting a job is about more than academic performance. Much more, according to a recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of Americans' attitudes about education. Nationally, 86 percent of adults indicated that "learning skills like dependability, persistence, and teamwork" were "very important" for helping a high school student get a good job one day.

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What do today's students really need to learn in order to succeed, not only in the classroom but also later on in college, careers, and as engaged citizens?

Much of American education policy focuses on the need for students to develop deeper content knowledge and an ability to apply their knowledge and skills to tasks and situations inside and outside of school. The Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards reflect this dual focus on academic learning and real-world application.

What is Deeper Learning?

The combination of (1) a deeper understanding of core academic content, (2) the ability to apply that understanding to novel problems and situations, and (3) the development of a range of competencies, including people skills and self control, is called deeper learning. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation-a leader in the national initiative to promote deeper learning in schools-has defined deeper learning as "a set of competencies students must master in order to develop a keen understanding of academic content and apply their knowledge to problems in the classroom and on the job."

The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes

Funded by the Hewlett Foundation, the Study of Deeper Learning examined how some schools have provided opportunities for students to acquire deeper learning skills and how these opportunities are related to student outcomes. In a series of reports, AIR researchers compared the strategies and cultures, students' deeper learning opportunities, and student outcomes between students who attended network schools and non-network schools. Exploratory analyses cover relationships among opportunities for deeper learning, deeper learning competencies, and students' on-time high school graduation.

More on Deeper Learning

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What do today's students really need to learn in order to succeed, not only in the classroom but also later on in college, careers, and as engaged citizens? What role can deeper learning-"a set of competencies students must master in order to develop a keen understanding of academic content and apply their knowledge to problems in the classroom and on the job"-play?

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The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes examines how some schools have provided opportunities for students to acquire deeper learning skills and how these opportunities are related to student outcomes. The deeper learning theory of action assumes that opportunities to engage in deeper learning activities help students to develop three types of deeper learning competencies: cognitive ( mastery of core content, critical thinking skills), interpersonal (collaboration skills, communication skills), and intrapersonal (learning-how-to-learn skills, academic mindsets).

Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the study includes 20 high schools that focus on deeper learning skills ("network schools") as well as a matched sample of comparison ("non-network") schools. All twenty schools belonged to one of ten deeper learning networks and had a mature and at least moderately well-implemented approach to promoting deeper learning.

In a series of reports, AIR researchers compare the strategies and cultures, students' deeper learning opportunities, and student outcomes between students who attended network schools and non-network schools. Exploratory analyses also cover relationships among opportunities for deeper learning, deeper learning competencies, and students' on-time high school graduation.

An overview of research findings from the study, as of August 2016 (PDF).

Research question: What strategies, structures, and cultures are common among deeper learning network schools, and how do they differ from those observed in non-network schools?

Research question: Do students attending deeper learning network schools experience more opportunities for deeper learning than they would have experienced in similar non-network schools?

Research question: Do students attending deeper learning network schools experience better outcomes than similar students in matched non-network schools?

UPDATED FINDINGS: Are students attending deeper learning network schools more likely to graduate from high school than similar students in matched non-network schools?

UPDATED FINDINGS: Are students attending deeper learning network schools more likely to enroll in college than similar students in matched non-network schools?

Research question: How are opportunities for deeper learning, deeper learning competencies, and on-time high school graduation interrelated?

Research question: Which school features (such as teacher beliefs, teacher professional community, and leadership) make a difference in providing students opportunities to engage in deeper learning?

Are there certain school features that facilitate a school's ability to provide deeper learning opportunities?

____________________

The Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes Creative Commons License
Student Survey Documentation and Teacher Survey Documentation by American Institutes for Research is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at copyright_PS@air.org.

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Study of Deeper Learning: Opportunities and Outcomes

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AIR is studying the ways in which schools provide opportunities for students to acquire complex knowledge and deeper learning skills. Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the study examines the impact of these opportunities on how students develop five dimensions of deeper learning: mastery of core content, critical thinking skills, collaboration skills, communication skills, and independent learning skills.

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PlayPosit | Interactive Video Learning Objects

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With over 5 million learners and counting, PlayPosit offers a variety of options for interaction customization, premade templates, playback control, LMS LTI integration, and more. Instructors and instructional designers can build lessons as they envision them while expanding the traditional and onli

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Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/.

Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice

Thinking about One's Thinking

Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.

Initially studied for its development in young children (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1985), researchers soon began to look at how experts display metacognitive thinking and how, then, these thought processes can be taught to novices to improve their learning (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986). In How People Learn, the National Academy of Sciences' synthesis of decades of research on the science of learning, one of the three key findings of this work is the effectiveness of a "'metacognitive' approach to instruction" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000, p. 18).

Metacognitive practices increase students' abilities to transfer or adapt their learning to new contexts and tasks (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 12; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia et al., 1984; Schoenfeld, 1983, 1985, 1991). They do this by gaining a level of awareness above the subject matter: they also think about the tasks and contexts of different learning situations and themselves as learners in these different contexts. When Pintrich (2002) asserts that "Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use them" (p. 222), notice the students must "know about" these strategies, not just practice them. As Zohar and David (2009) explain, there must be a " conscious meta-strategic level of H[igher] O[rder] T[hinking]" (p. 179).

Metacognitive practices help students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc. A key element is recognizing the limit of one's knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability. Those who know their strengths and weaknesses in these areas will be more likely to "actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tasks and performances" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67).

The absence of metacognition connects to the research by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger on "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003). They found that "people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence," lacking "insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills." They identified this pattern across domains-from test-taking, writing grammatically, thinking logically, to recognizing humor, to hunters' knowledge about firearms and medical lab technicians' knowledge of medical terminology and problem-solving skills (p. 83-84). In short, "if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else's, are right or wrong" (p. 85). This research suggests that increased metacognitive abilities-to learn specific (and correct) skills, how to recognize them, and how to practice them-is needed in many contexts.

Putting Metacognition into Practice

In " Promoting Student Metacognition," Tanner (2012) offers a handful of specific activities for biology classes, but they can be adapted to any discipline. She first describes four assignments for explicit instruction (p. 116):

Preassessments-Encouraging Students to Examine Their Current Thinking: "What do I already know about this topic that could guide my learning?"

The Muddiest Point-Giving Students Practice in Identifying Confusions: "What was most confusing to me about the material explored in class today?"

Retrospective Postassessments-Pushing Students to Recognize Conceptual Change: "Before this course, I thought evolution was... Now I think that evolution is ...." or "How is my thinking changing (or not changing) over time?"

Reflective Journals-Providing a Forum in Which Students Monitor Their Own Thinking: "What about my exam preparation worked well that I should remember to do next time? What did not work so well that I should not do next time or that I should change?"

Next are recommendations for developing a "classroom culture grounded in metacognition" (p. 116-118):

Giving Students License to Identify Confusions within the Classroom Culture: ask students what they find confusing, acknowledge the difficulties

Integrating Reflection into Credited Course Work: integrate short reflection (oral or written) that ask students what they found challenging or what questions arose during an assignment/exam/project

Metacognitive Modeling by the Instructor for Students: model the thinking processes involved in your field and sought in your course by being explicit about "how you start, how you decide what to do first and then next, how you check your work, how you know when you are done" (p. 118)

To facilitate these activities, she also offers three useful tables:

Questions for students to ask themselves as they plan, monitor, and evaluate their thinking within four learning contexts-in class, assignments, quizzes/exams, and the course as a whole (p. 115)

Prompts for integrating metacognition into discussions of pairs during clicker activities, assignments, and quiz or exam preparation (p. 117)

Questions to help faculty metacognitively assess their own teaching (p. 119)

Weimer's " Deep Learning vs. Surface Learning: Getting Students to Understand the Difference " (2012) offers additional recommendations for developing students' metacognitive awareness and improvement of their study skills:

"[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and concerted ways we make students aware of themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not only 'What are you learning?' but 'How are you learning?' We must confront them with the effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their approaches. We must offer alternatives and then challenge students to test the efficacy of those approaches." (emphasis added)

She points to a tool developed by Stanger-Hall (2012, p. 297) for her students to identify their study strategies, which she divided into " cognitively passive" ("I previewed the reading before class," "I came to class," "I read the assigned text," "I highlighted the text," et al) and " cognitively active study behaviors" ("I asked myself: 'How does it work?' and 'Why does it work this way?'" "I wrote my own study questions," "I fit all the facts into a bigger picture," "I closed my notes and tested how much I remembered," et al). The specific focus of Stanger-Hall's study is tangential to this discussion, ¹ but imagine giving students lists like hers adapted to your course and then, after a major assignment, having students discuss which ones worked and which types of behaviors led to higher grades. Even further, follow Lovett's advice (2013) by assigning "exam wrappers," which include students reflecting on their previous exam-preparation strategies, assessing those strategies and then looking ahead to the next exam, and writing an action plan for a revised approach to studying. A common assignment in English composition courses is the self-assessment essay in which students apply course criteria to articulate their strengths and weaknesses within single papers or over the course of the semester. These activities can be adapted to assignments other than exams or essays, such as projects, speeches, discussions, and the like.

As these examples illustrate, for students to become more metacognitive, they must be taught the concept and its language explicitly (Pintrich, 2002; Tanner, 2012), though not in a content-delivery model (simply a reading or a lecture) and not in one lesson. Instead, the explicit instruction should be "designed according to a knowledge construction approach," or students need to recognize, assess, and connect new skills to old ones, "and it needs to take place over an extended period of time" (Zohar & David, p. 187). This kind of explicit instruction will help students expand or replace existing learning strategies with new and more effective ones, give students a way to talk about learning and thinking, compare strategies with their classmates' and make more informed choices, and render learning "less opaque to students, rather than being something that happens mysteriously or that some students 'get' and learn and others struggle and don't learn" (Pintrich, 2002, p. 223).

Metacognition instruction should also be embedded with the content and activities about which students are thinking. Why? Metacognition is "not generic" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 19) but instead is most effective when it is adapted to reflect the specific learning contexts of a specific topic, course, or discipline (Zohar & David, 2009). In explicitly connecting a learning context to its relevant processes, learners will be more able to adapt strategies to new contexts, rather than assume that learning is the same everywhere and every time. For instance, students' abilities to read disciplinary texts in discipline-appropriate ways would also benefit from metacognitive practice. A literature professor may read a passage of a novel aloud in class, while also talking about what she's thinking as she reads: how she makes sense of specific words and phrases, what connections she makes, how she approaches difficult passages, etc. This kind of modeling is a good practice in metacognition instruction, as suggested by Tanner above. Concepción's " Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition " (2004) includes his detailed "How to Read Philosophy" handout (pp. 358-367), which includes the following components:

What to Expect (when reading philosophy)

The Ultimate Goal (of reading philosophy)

Basic Good Reading Behaviors

Important Background Information, or discipline- and course-specific reading practices, such as "reading for enlightenment" rather than information, and "problem-based classes" rather than historical or figure-based classes

A Three-Part Reading Process (pre-reading, understanding, and evaluating)

Flagging, or annotating the reading

Linear vs. Dialogical Writing (Philosophical writing is rarely straightforward but instead "a monologue that contains a dialogue" [p. 365].)

What would such a handout look like for your discipline?

Students can even be metacognitively prepared (and then prepare themselves) for the overarching learning experiences expected in specific contexts. Salvatori and Donahue's The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (2004) encourages students to embrace difficult texts (and tasks) as part of deep learning, rather than an obstacle. Their "difficulty paper" assignment helps students reflect on and articulate the nature of the difficulty and work through their responses to it (p. 9). Similarly, in courses with sensitive subject matter, a different kind of learning occurs, one that involves complex emotional responses. In " Learning from Their Own Learning: How Metacognitive and Meta-affective Reflections Enhance Learning in Race-Related Courses" (Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, 2009), students were informed about the common reactions to learning about racial inequality (Helms, 1995; Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; see student handout, Chick, Karis, & Kernahan, p. 23-24) and then regularly wrote about their cognitive and affective responses to specific racialized situations. The students with the most developed metacognitive and meta-affective practices at the end of the semester were able to "clear the obstacles and move away from" oversimplified thinking about race and racism "to places of greater questioning, acknowledging the complexities of identity, and redefining the world in racial terms" (p. 14).

Ultimately, metacognition requires students to "externalize mental events" (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, p. 67), such as what it means to learn, awareness of one's strengths and weaknesses with specific skills or in a given learning context, plan what's required to accomplish a specific learning goal or activity, identifying and correcting errors, and preparing ahead for learning processes.

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1 Students who were tested with short answer in addition to multiple-choice questions on their exams reported more cognitively active behaviors than those tested with just multiple-choice questions, and these active behaviors led to improved performance on the final exam.
References

Adams, Maurianne, Bell, Lee Ann, and Griffin, Pat. (1997). Teaching for diversity and social justice: A sourcebook. New York: Routledge.

Bransford, John D., Brown Ann L., and Cocking Rodney R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Baker, Linda, and Brown, Ann L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In Paul David Pearson, Michael L. Kamil, Rebecca Barr, & Peter Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of research in reading: Volume III (pp. 353-395). New York: Longman.

Brown, Ann L. (1980). Metacognitive development and reading. In Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, and William F. Brewer, (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and education (pp. 453-482). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chick, Nancy, Karis, Terri, and Kernahan, Cyndi. (2009). Learning from their own learning: how metacognitive and meta-affective reflections enhance learning in race-related courses . International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(1). 1-28.

Flavell, John H. (1985). Cognitive development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Hatano, Giyoo and Inagaki, Kayoko. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In Harold Stevenson, Azuma, Horishi, and Hakuta, Kinji (Eds.), Child development and education in Japan, New York: W.H. Freeman.

Lovett, Marsha C. (2013). Make exams worth more than the grade. In Matthew Kaplan, Naomi Silver, Danielle LaVague-Manty, and Deborah Meizlish (Eds.), Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi, and Donahue, Patricia. (2004). The Elements (and pleasures) of difficulty. New York: Pearson-Longman.

Schoenfeld, Alan H. (1991). On mathematics as sense making: An informal attack on the fortunate divorce of formal and informal mathematics. In James F. Voss, David N. Perkins, and Judith W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education (pp. 311-344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Weimer, Maryellen. (2012, November 19). Deep learning vs. surface learning: Getting students to understand the difference. Retrieved from the Teaching Professor Blog from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/deep-learning-vs-surface-learning-getting-students-to-understand-the-difference/.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Nancy Chick Print Version Cite this guide: Chick, N. (2013). Metacognition. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/metacognition/. Thinking about One's Thinking | Putting Metacognition into Practice Thinking about One's Thinking Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess...

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Login or sign up for free on Socrative - your assessment partner for real-time assessments and instant insights.

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Coggle is online software for creating and sharing mindmaps and flowcharts. It works online in your browser: there's nothing to download or install. Log in to start diagramming!

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The clear way to share complex information. Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that helps you make sense of complex things. Create unlimited mind maps and easily share them with friends and colleagues.

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The Best Innovations in Online Learning

From holographs and educational games, to drones and robots, 21st century educators are forging new and amazing trails in technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Virtually Inspired is a place where educators can come for inspiration by perusing each video showcase below to see how creative professionals around the globe are infusing technology with learning.

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Virtually Inspired: Showcasing Online Learning Innovation

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From holographs and educational games, to drones and robots, 21st century educators are forging new and amazing trails in technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Virtually Inspired is a place where educators can come for inspiration by perusing each video showcase below to see how creative professionals around the globe are infusing technology with learning.

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The Society invites researchers and practitioners at all levels of education to explore the questions and proposed solutions that emerge at the intersection of mind, brain and education. We seek to create environments where ideas are welcomed and at the same time critically and rigorously examined.

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Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain | Dana Foundation

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Findings and Challenges for Educators and Researchers from the 2009 Johns Hopkins University Summit

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There is no shortage of formative assessment strategies, techniques, and tools available to teachers who use formative instructional practice in their classrooms. Here is an extensive list of 75 digital tools, apps, and platforms that can help you and your students use formative assessment to elicit evidence of learning. We didn't just add any old tool to this list. Here are the criteria we used for those that made the cut:

Supports formative instructional strategies and ways to activate learners to be resources for themselves and peers

Is free or awful close to it (under $10 per year, where possible)

Allows both students and teachers to take the activator role when possible (sometimes teachers need to get things started)

Before you dig into the tools, I encourage you to spend some time thinking about exactly what you want to accomplish with your students. "How to pick the right digital tool: Start with your learning goal" by Erin Beard can help you wrap your head around goals and guide you in choosing the best tool for the task. "27 easy formative assessment strategies for gathering evidence of student learning" can help you decide what strategies work best for you and your students.

Record audio and video

Create quizzes, polls, and surveys

1. Crowdsignal Lets you create online polls, quizzes, and questions. Students can use smartphones, tablets, and computers to provide their answers, and information can be culled for reports.

2. Edulastic Allows you to make standards-aligned assessments and get instant feedback.

3. FreeOnlineSurveys Helps you create surveys, quizzes, forms, and polls.

4. Gimkit Lets you write real-time quizzes. And it was designed by a high school student!

5. Kahoot! A game-based classroom response system that lets you create quizzes using internet content.

6. MicroPoll Helps you create polls, embed them into websites, and analyze responses.

7. Naiku Lets you write quizzes students can answer using their mobile devices.

8. Obsurvey Designed to make surveys, polls, and questionnaires.

9. Poll Everywhere Lets you create a feedback poll or ask questions and see results in real time. Allows students to respond in various ways. With open-ended questions, you can capture data and spin up tag clouds to aggregate responses.

10. Poll Maker Offers unique features, like allowing multiple answers to one question.

11. ProProfs Helps you make quizzes, polls, and surveys.

12. Quia Lets you create games, quizzes, surveys, and more. Access a database of existing quizzes from other educators.

13. Quizalize Helps you create quizzes and homework.

14. Quizizz Guides you through designing quizzes and lets you include students in the quiz-writing process.

15. Quizlet Lets you make flashcards, tests, quizzes, and study games that are mobile friendly.

16. Survey Hero Designed to build questionnaires and surveys.

17. SurveyMonkey Helpful for online polls and surveys.

18. SurveyPlanet Also helpful for online polls and surveys.

19. Triventy Lets you create quizzes students take in real time using individual devices.

20. Yacapaca Helps you write and assign quizzes.

21. Zoho Survey Allows you to make mobile-friendly surveys and see results in real time.

Brainstorm, mind map, and collaborate

Present, engage, and inspire

Generate word or tag clouds

1. EdWordle Generates word clouds from any entered text to help aggregate responses and facilitate discussion. Word clouds are pictures composed of a cloud of smaller words that form a clue to the topic.

2. Tagxedo Allows you to examine student consensus and facilitate dialogues.

3. Wordables Helps you elicit evidence of learning or determine background knowledge about a topic.

4. WordArt Includes a feature that allows the user to make each word an active link to connect to websites, including YouTube.

Get real-time feedback

Foster family communication

1. Remind Lets you text students and stay in touch with families.

2. Seesaw Helps you improve family communication and makes formative assessment easy, while students can use the platform to document their learning.

3. Voxer Lets you send recordings so families can hear how their students are doing, students can chat about their work, and you can provide feedback.

Strengthen teacher-to-student or student-to-student communication

Keep the conversation going with live chats

1. Yo Teach A backchannel site great for keeping the conversation going with students.

2. Chatzy Supports live, online chats in a private setting.

Create and store documents or assignments

1. Google Forms A Google Drive app that allows you to create documents students can collaborate on in real time using smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

2. Piazza Lets you upload lectures, assignments, and homework; pose and respond to student questions; and poll students about class content. This tool is better suited for older students as it mimics post-secondary class instructional formats.

Learn more

There are several resources for learning more about formative assessment and responsive instruction strategies. Consider our formative practices workshops, where school and district teams can gain a better understanding of the role formative practice plays in instruction and the four foundational practices to use in the classroom. Or for a quick start, download our eBook "Making it work: How formative assessment can supercharge your practice."

Jump in, try new tools and methods, and have fun!

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75 digital tools and apps teachers can use to support formative assessment in the classroom

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We've compiled an extensive list of 75 digital tools that can help teachers use formative assessment to elicit evidence of student learning.

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The Science of Learning - How does learning transfer to new situations in/outside of the classroom?

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Uploaded by Kaizen Teaching on 2016-01-28.

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September 2017 - Powered by PageTurnPro.com

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Martha Nussbaum's far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life-aging, inequality, and emotion.

Martha Nussbaum was preparing to give a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, in April, 1992, when she learned that her mother was dying in a hospital in Philadelphia. She couldn't get a flight until the next day. That evening, Nussbaum, one of the foremost philosophers in America, gave her scheduled lecture, on the nature of emotions. "I thought, It's inhuman-I shouldn't be able to do this," she said later. Then she thought, Well, of course I should do this. I mean, here I am. Why should I not do it? The audience is there, and they want to have the lecture.

When she returned to her room, she opened her laptop and began writing her next lecture, which she would deliver in two weeks, at the law school of the University of Chicago. On the plane the next morning, her hands trembling, she continued to type. She wondered if there was something cruel about her capacity to be so productive. The lecture was about the nature of mercy. As she often does, she argued that certain moral truths are best expressed in the form of a story. We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the "concerned reader of a novel," understanding each person's life as a "complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles."

In the lecture, she described how the Roman philosopher Seneca, at the end of each day, reflected on his misdeeds before saying to himself, "This time I pardon you." The sentence brought Nussbaum to tears. She worried that her ability to work was an act of subconscious aggression, a sign that she didn't love her mother enough. I shouldn't be away lecturing, she thought. I shouldn't have been a philosopher. Nussbaum sensed that her mother saw her work as cold and detached, a posture of invulnerability. "We aren't very loving creatures, apparently, when we philosophize," Nussbaum has written.

When her plane landed in Philadelphia, Nussbaum learned that her mother had just died. Her younger sister, Gail Craven Busch, a choir director at a church, had told their mother that Nussbaum was on the way. "She just couldn't hold on any longer," Busch said. When Nussbaum arrived at the hospital, she found her mother still in the bed, wearing lipstick. A breathing tube, now detached from an oxygen machine, was laced through her nostrils. The nurses brought Nussbaum cups of water as she wept. Then she gathered her mother's belongings, including a book called "A Glass of Blessings," which Nussbaum couldn't help noticing looked too precious, the kind of thing that she would never want to read. She left the hospital, went to the track at the University of Pennsylvania, and ran four miles.

She admired the Stoic philosophers, who believed that ungoverned emotions destroyed one's moral character, and she felt that, in the face of a loved one's death, their instruction would be "Everyone is mortal, and you will get over this pretty soon." But she disagreed with the way they trained themselves not to depend on anything beyond their control. For the next several days, she felt as if nails were being pounded into her stomach and her limbs were being torn off. "Do we imagine the thought causing a fluttering in my hands, or a trembling in my stomach?" she wrote, in "Upheavals of Thought," a book on the structure of emotions. "And if we do, do we really want to say that this fluttering or trembling is my grief about my mother's death?"

Nussbaum gave her lecture on mercy shortly after her mother's funeral. She felt that her mother would have preferred that she forgo work for a few weeks, but when Nussbaum isn't working she feels guilty and lazy, so she revised the lecture until she thought that it was one of the best she had ever written. She imagined her talk as a kind of reparation: the lecture was about the need to recognize how hard it is, even with the best intentions, to live a virtuous life. Like much of her work, the lecture represented what she calls a therapeutic philosophy, a "science of life," which addresses persistent human needs. She told me, "I like the idea that the very thing that my mother found cold and unloving could actually be a form of love. It's a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it."

A few years later, Nussbaum returned to her relationship with her mother in a dramatic dialogue that she wrote for Oxford University's Philosophical Dialogues Competition, which she won. In the dialogue, a mother accuses her daughter, a renowned moral philosopher, of being ruthless. "You just don't know what emotions are," the mother says. Her father tells her, "Aren't you a philosopher because you want, really, to live inside your own mind most of all? And not to need, not to love, anyone?" Her mother asks, "Isn't it just because you don't want to admit that thinking doesn't control everything?"

The philosopher begs for forgiveness. "Why do you hate my thinking so much, Mommy?" she asks. "What can I say or write that will make you stop looking at me that way?"

Nussbaum is drawn to the idea that creative urgency-and the commitment to be good-derives from the awareness that we harbor aggression toward the people we love. A sixty-nine-year-old professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago (with appointments in classics, political science, Southern Asian studies, and the divinity school), Nussbaum has published twenty-four books and five hundred and nine papers and received fifty-seven honorary degrees. In 2014, she became the second woman to give the John Locke Lectures, at Oxford, the most eminent lecture series in philosophy. Last year, she received the Inamori Ethics Prize, an award for ethical leaders who improve the condition of mankind. A few weeks ago, she won five hundred thousand dollars as the recipient of the Kyoto Prize, the most prestigious award offered in fields not eligible for a Nobel, joining a small group of philosophers that includes Karl Popper and Jürgen Habermas. Honors and prizes remind her of potato chips; she enjoys them but is wary of becoming sated, like one of Aristotle's "dumb grazing animals." Her conception of a good life requires striving for a difficult goal, and, if she notices herself feeling too satisfied, she begins to feel discontent.

Nussbaum is monumentally confident, intellectually and physically. She is beautiful, in a taut, flinty way, and carries herself like a queen. Her voice is high-pitched and dramatic, and she often seems delighted by the performance of being herself. Her work, which draws on her training in classics but also on anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and a number of other fields, searches for the conditions for eudaimonia, a Greek word that describes a complete and flourishing life. At a time of insecurity for the humanities, Nussbaum's work champions-and embodies-the reach of the humanistic endeavor. Nancy Sherman, a moral philosopher at Georgetown, told me, "Martha changed the face of philosophy by using literary skills to describe the very minutiae of a lived experience."

Unlike many philosophers, Nussbaum is an elegant and lyrical writer, and she movingly describes the pain of recognizing one's vulnerability, a precondition, she believes, for an ethical life. "To be a good human being," she has said, "is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered." She searches for a "non-denying style of writing," a way to describe emotional experiences without wringing the feeling from them. She disapproves of the conventional style of philosophical prose, which she describes as "scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid," and disengaged with the problems of its time. Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns.

In several books and papers, Nussbaum quotes a sentence by the sociologist Erving Goffman, who wrote, "In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports." This sentence more or less characterizes Nussbaum's father, whom she describes as an inspiration and a role model, and also as a racist. He was prejudiced in a "very gut-level way," Nussbaum told me. "It was about shrinking and disgust."

For the past thirty years, Nussbaum has been drawn to those who blush, writing about the kinds of populations that her father might have deemed subhuman. She argues that unblushing males, or "normals," repudiate their own animal nature by projecting their disgust onto vulnerable groups and creating a "buffer zone." Nussbaum thinks that disgust is an unreasonable emotion, which should be distrusted as a basis for law; it is at the root, she argues, of opposition to gay and transgender rights. Her work includes lovely descriptions of the physical realities of being a person, of having a body "soft and porous, receptive of fluid and sticky, womanlike in its oozy sliminess." She believes that dread of these phenomena creates a threat to civic life. "What I am calling for," she writes, is "a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable."

Nussbaum once wrote, citing Nietzsche, that "when a philosopher harps very insistently on a theme, that shows us that there is a danger that something else is about to 'play the master' ": something personal is driving the preoccupation. In Nussbaum's case, I wondered if she approaches her theme of vulnerability with such success because she peers at it from afar, as if it were unfamiliar and exotic. She celebrates the ability to be fragile and exposed, but in her own life she seems to control every interaction. She divides her day into a series of productive, life-affirming activities, beginning with a ninety-minute run or workout, during which, for years, she "played" operas in her head, usually works by Mozart. She memorized the operas and ran to each one for three to four months, shifting the tempo to match her speed and her mood. For two decades, she has kept a chart that documents her daily exercises. After her workout, she stands beside her piano and sings for an hour; she told me that her voice has never been better. (When a conductor recently invited her to join a repertory group for older singers, she told him that the concept was "stigmatizing.") Her self-discipline inspired a story called "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," by the late Richard Stern, a professor at the University of Chicago. The story describes the contradiction of the philosopher's "paean to spontaneity and her own nature, the least spontaneous, most doggedly, nervously, even fanatically unspontaneous I know."

Nussbaum is currently writing a book on aging, and when I first proposed the idea of a Profile I told her that I'd like to make her book the center of the piece. She responded skeptically, writing in an e-mail that she'd had a long, varied career, adding, "I'd really like to feel that you had considered various aspects of it and that we had a plan that had a focus." She typically responded within an hour of my sending an e-mail. "Do you feel that you have such a plan?" she asked me. "I'd like to hear the pros and cons in your view of different emphases." She wasn't sure how I could encompass her œuvre, since it covered so many subjects: animal rights, emotions in criminal law, Indian politics, disability, religious intolerance, political liberalism, the role of humanities in the academy, sexual harassment, transnational transfers of wealth. "The challenge for you would be to give readers a road map through the work that would be illuminating rather than confusing," she wrote, adding, "It will all fall to bits without a plan." She described three interviews that she'd done, and the ways in which they were flawed. Among other things, they hadn't captured her devotion to teaching and to her students. One of the interviews, she said, had made her "look like a person who has contempt for the contributions of others, which is one of the biggest insults that one could direct my way."

For our first meeting, she suggested that I watch her sing: "It's the actual singing that would give you insight into my personality and my emotional life, though of course I am very imperfect in my ability to express what I want to express." She wrote that music allowed her to access a part of her personality that is "less defended, more receptive." Last summer, we drove to the house of her singing teacher, Tambra Black, who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood with a view of the churches of the University of Chicago. It was ninety degrees and sunny, and although we were ten minutes early, Nussbaum pounded on the door until Black, her hair wet from the shower, let us inside.

Nussbaum wore nylon athletic shorts and a T-shirt, and carried her sheet music in a hippie-style embroidered sack. Her fingernails and toenails were polished turquoise, and her legs and arms were exquisitely toned and tan. She stood beside Black's piano with her feet in a ski-plow pose and did scales by letting her mouth go completely loose and blowing through closed lips.

The first aria she practiced was "Or sai chi l'onore," from "Don Giovanni," one of the few Mozart operas that she has never run to, because she finds the rape scene reprehensible. As she ascended in pitch, she tilted her chin upward, until Black told her to stop. She excelled at clarion high notes, but Black thought that a passage about the murder of the heroine's father should be more tender. "Can you make it a little more pleasant?" Black asked.

The next aria was from the final act of Verdi's "Don Carlos," which Nussbaum found more challenging. She had to embody the hopelessness of a woman who, knowing that she can never be with the man she loves, yearns for death.

"Put a little longing and sadness in there," Black said. "Don't give too much too early."

Nussbaum softened her tone for a few passages, but her voice quickly gathered force.

"You have too much power," Black told her. "Save a little for the end."

"I'll have to work on that," Nussbaum said, her eyes fixed on the sheet music in front of her. "It's difficult to get all the emotions in there."

Hours later, as we drove home from a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Nussbaum said that she was struggling to capture the resignation required for the Verdi piece. She couldn't identify with the role. "I feel that this character is basically saying, 'Life is treating me badly, so I'm going to give up,' " she told me. "And I find that totally unintelligible."

When Nussbaum was three or four years old, she told her mother, "Well, I think I know just about everything." Her mother, Betty Craven, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, responded sternly, "No, Martha. You are just one person among many." Nussbaum was so frustrated by this response that she banged her head on the floor.

Her father, George Craven, a successful tax lawyer who worked all the time, applauded her youthful arrogance. He thought that it was excellent to be superior to others. He liked to joke that he had been wrong only once in his life and that was the time that he thought he was wrong. The Craven family lived in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in an atmosphere that Nussbaum describes as "chilly clear opulence." Betty was bored and unfulfilled, and she began drinking for much of the day, hiding bourbon in the kitchen. Nussbaum's younger sister, Gail, said that once, after her mother passed out on the floor, she called an ambulance, but her father sent it away. Nussbaum's half-brother, Robert (the child of George Craven's first marriage), said that their father didn't understand when people weren't rational. "It was an emotionally barren environment," he told me. "You were supposed to just soldier on."

Nussbaum spent her free time alone in the attic, reading books, including many by Dickens. Through literature, she said, she found an "escape from an amoral life into a universe where morality matters." At night, she went to her father's study in her long bathrobe, and they read together. Her father loved the poem "Invictus," by William Ernest Henley, and he often recited it to her: "I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . . I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul."

Her father's ethos may have fostered Nussbaum's interest in Stoicism. Her relationship with him was so captivating that it felt romantic. "He really set me on a path of being happy and delighted with life," she said. "He symbolized beauty and wonder." Gail Busch found her father's temperament less congenial. "I believe he was probably a sociopath," she told me. "He was certainly very narcissistic. He was extremely domineering and very controlling. Our mother was petrified for most of their marriage." Busch said that when she was a young child her father insisted that she be in bed before he got home from work.

Nussbaum once wrote of Iris Murdoch that she "won the Oedipal struggle too easily." The same could be said of Nussbaum herself. Busch told me, "There were very few people that my father touched that he didn't hurt. But one of them was Martha, because they were just two peas in a pod. I know that he saw her as a reflection of him, and that was probably just perfect for him."

Nussbaum excelled at her private girls' school, while Busch floundered and became rebellious. In an interview with a Dutch television station, Nussbaum said that she worked so hard because she thought, This is what Daddy's doing-we take charge of our lives. Of her mother and sister, she said, "I just was furious at them, because I thought that they could take charge of their lives by will, and they weren't doing it."

Nussbaum attended Wellesley College, but she dropped out in her sophomore year, because she wanted to be an actress. Playing other people gave her access to emotions that she hadn't been able to express on her own, but, after half a year with a repertory company that performed Greek tragedies, she left that, too. "I hadn't lived enough," she said. She began studying classics at New York University, still focussing on Greek tragedies. She came to believe that reading about suffering functions as a kind of "transitional object," the term used by the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, one of her favorite thinkers, to describe toys that allow infants to move away from their mothers and to explore the world on their own. "When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy," she has written, "we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting."

Nussbaum felt increasingly uncomfortable with what she called the "smug bastion of hypocrisy and unearned privilege" in which she'd been raised. She had spent her childhood "coasting along with assured invulnerability," she said. In a class on Greek composition, she fell in love with Alan Nussbaum, another N.Y.U. student, who was Jewish, a religion she was attracted to for the same reason that she was drawn to theatre: "more emotional expressiveness," she said. She associated the religion with the social consciousness of I. F. Stone and The Nation. Her father, who thought that Jews were vulgar, disapproved of the marriage and refused to attend their wedding party. Robert Craven told me, "Martha was the apple of our father's eye, until she embraced Judaism and fell from grace."

Four years into the marriage, Nussbaum read "The Golden Bowl," by Henry James. She kept thinking about Maggie Verver's "wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been." She was so captivated by the novel that she later wrote three essays about the ways in which James articulates a kind of moral philosophy, revealing the childishness of aspiring to moral perfection, a life of "never doing a wrong, never breaking a rule, never hurting." Nussbaum told me, "What drew me to Maggie is the sense that she is a peculiarly American kind of person who really, really wants to be good. And of course that's impossible. She has a particularly demanding father, and, in order to be fully herself with her husband, she has to leave her father and hurt him, and she just had no way to deal with that. She was not prepared."

Nussbaum entered the graduate program in classics at Harvard, in 1969, and realized that for years she had been smiling all the time, for no particular reason. When her thesis adviser, G. E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about life's sadness, recited Auden, and reached over to touch her breasts, she says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him. "Just as I never accused my mother of being drunk, even though she was always drunk," she wrote, "so I managed to keep my control with Owen, and I never said a hostile word." She didn't experience the imbalance of power that makes sexual harassment so destructive, she said, because she felt "much healthier and more powerful than he was."

She soon drifted toward ancient philosophy, where she could follow Aristotle, who asked the basic question "How should a human live?" She realized that philosophy attracted a "logic-chopping type of person," nearly always male. She came to believe that she understood Nietzsche's thinking when he wrote that no great philosopher had ever been married. "I think what he was saying is that most philosophers have been in flight from human existence," she said. "They just haven't wanted to be entangled." She rejected the idea, dominant in contemporary philosophy, that emotions were "unthinking energies that simply push the person around." Instead, she resurrected a version of the Stoic theory that makes no division between thought and feeling. She gave emotions a central role in moral philosophy, arguing that they are cognitive in nature: they embody judgments about the world.

One of her mentors was John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher of the last century. He stuttered and was extremely shy. She said that one day, when they were eating hamburgers for lunch (this was before she stopped eating meat), he instructed her that if she had the capacity to be a public intellectual then it was her duty to become one.

Utilitarian and Kantian theories were dominant at the time, and Nussbaum felt that the field had become too insular and professionalized. She was frustrated that her colleagues were more interested in conceptual analyses than in attending to the details of people's lives. While writing an austere dissertation on a neglected treatise by Aristotle, she began a second book, about the urge to deny one's human needs. In "The Fragility of Goodness," one of the best-selling contemporary philosophy books, she rejected Plato's argument that a good life is one of total self-sufficiency. She argued that tragedy occurs because people are living well: they have formed passionate commitments that leave them exposed. She began the book by acknowledging:

I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one's good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them-all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of practical wisdom.

Nussbaum describes motherhood as her first profound experience of moral conflict. Her pregnancy, in 1972, was a mistake; her I.U.D. fell out. She had just become the first woman elected to Harvard's Society of Fellows, and she imagined that the other scholars must be thinking, We let in a woman, and what does she do? She goes off and has a baby. Nussbaum carried on for nine months as if she weren't pregnant. She ran several miles a day; she remained so thin that her adviser told her she must be carrying a "wind egg"; she had such a rapid delivery-with no anesthesia-that doctors interviewed her about how she had prepared for birth. She told them that "Lamaze was for wimps and running was the key." She brought Aristotle's Politics to the hospital. Her husband took a picture of her reading. She was at a Society of Fellows dinner the next week. "I wanted everyone to understand that I was still working," she said.

Alan Nussbaum taught linguistics at Yale, and during the week Martha took care of their daughter, Rachel, alone. "Among the good and decent men, some are unprepared for the surprises of life, and their good intentions run aground when confronted with issues like child care," she later wrote. They divorced when Rachel was a teen-ager. When Nussbaum joined a society for female philosophers, she proposed that women had a unique contribution to make, because "we had an experience of moral conflicts-we are torn between children on the one hand, and work on the other-that the male philosophers didn't have, or wouldn't face up to." She rejected the idea, suggested by Kant, that people who are morally good are immune to the kind of bad luck that would force them into ethically compromised positions. She told me, "A lot of the great philosophers have said there are no real moral dilemmas. Well, we were saying, 'No woman would make that stupid mistake!' "

Nussbaum left Harvard in 1983, after she was denied tenure, a decision she attributes, in part, to a "venomous dislike of me as a very outspoken woman" and the machinations of a colleague who could "show a good actor how the role of Iago ought to be played." Glen Bowersock, who was the head of the classics department when Nussbaum was a student, said, "I think she scared people. They couldn't wrap their minds around this formidably good, extraordinarily articulate woman who was very tall and attractive, openly feminine and stylish, and walked very erect and wore miniskirts-all in one package. They were just frightened."

This was the only time that Nussbaum had anything resembling a crisis in her career. I was eager to hear about her moment of doubt, since she always seemed so steely. Projecting a little, I asked if she ever felt guilty when she was successful, as if she didn't deserve it. "No-none of that," she said briskly. "I think women and philosophers are under-rewarded for what they do." After she was denied tenure, she thought about going to law school. "The doubt was very brief," she added. "I thought about law school for about a day, or something like that."

Instead, she began considering a more public role for philosophy. One of her mentors, the English philosopher Bernard Williams, accused moral philosophers of "refusing to write about anything of importance." Nussbaum began examining quality of life in the developing world. She was steered toward the issue by Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, who later won the Nobel Prize. In 1986, they became romantically involved and worked together at the World Institute of Development Economics Research, in Helsinki. At the institute, she told me, she came to the realization that "I knew nothing about the rest of the world." She taught herself about Indian politics and developed her own version of Sen's capabilities approach, a theoretical framework for measuring and comparing the well-being of nations. Her earlier work had celebrated vulnerability, but now she identified the sorts of vulnerabilities (poverty, hunger, sexual violence) that no human should have to endure. In an Aristotelian spirit, Nussbaum devised a list of ten essential capabilities that all societies should nourish, including the freedom to play, to engage in critical reflection, and to love. The capabilities theory is now a staple of human-rights advocacy, and Sen told me that Nussbaum has become more of a "purist" than he is. When it comes to judging the quality of human life, he said, "I am often defeated by that in a way that Martha is not."

Nussbaum went on to extend the work of John Rawls, who developed the most influential contemporary version of the social-contract theory: the idea that rational citizens agree to govern themselves, because they recognize that everyone's needs are met more effectively through coöperation. Nussbaum argued that Rawls gave an unsatisfactory account of justice for people dependent on others-the disabled, the elderly, and women subservient in their homes. For a society to remain stable and committed to democratic principles, she argued, it needs more than detached moral principles: it has to cultivate certain emotions and teach people to enter empathetically into others' lives. She believes that the humanities are not just important to a healthy democratic society but decisive, shaping its fate. She proposed an enhanced version of John Stuart Mill's "aesthetic education"-emotional refinement for all citizens through poetry and music and art. "Respect on its own is cold and inert, insufficient to overcome the bad tendencies that lead human beings to tyrannize over one another," she wrote. "Public culture cannot be tepid and passionless."

By the late nineties, India had become so integral to Nussbaum's thinking that she later warned a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education that her work there was at the "core of my heart and my sense of the meaning of life, so if you downplay that, you don't get me." She travelled to developing countries during school vacations-she never misses a class-and met with impoverished women. She said she felt as if she were "a lawyer who has been retained by poor people in developing nations."

In the sixties, Nussbaum had been too busy for feminist consciousness-raising-she said that she cultivated an image of "Doris Day respectability"-and she was suspicious of left-wing groupthink. Once she began studying the lives of women in non-Western countries, she identified as a feminist but of the unfashionable kind: a traditional liberal who believed in the power of reason at a time when postmodern scholars viewed it as an instrument or a disguise for oppression. She argued that the well-being of women around the world could be improved through universal norms-an international system of distributive justice. She was impatient with feminist theory that was so relativistic that it assumed that, in the name of respecting other cultures, women should stand by while other women were beaten or genitally mutilated. In "Sex and Social Justice," published in 1999, she wrote that the approach resembles the "sort of moral collapse depicted by Dante, when he describes the crowd of souls who mill around in the vestibule of hell, dragging their banner now one way now another, never willing to set it down and take a definite stand on any moral or political question. Such people, he implies, are the most despicable of all. They can't even get into hell because they have not been willing to stand for anything in life."

In 1999, in a now canonical essay for The New Republic, she wrote that academic feminism spoke only to the élite. It had become untethered from the practical struggle to achieve equality for women. She scolded Judith Butler and postmodern feminists for "turning away from the material side of life, towards a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest connections with the real situations of real women." These radical thinkers, she felt, were focussing more on problems of representation than on the immediate needs of women in other classes and cultures. The stance, she wrote, "looks very much like quietism," a word she often uses when she disapproves of projects and ideas.

In letters responding to the essay, the feminist critic Gayatri Spivak denounced Nussbaum's "civilizing mission." Joan Scott, a historian of gender, wrote that Nussbaum had "constructed a self-serving morality tale."

When Nussbaum is at her computer writing, she feels as if she had entered a "holding environment"-the phrase used by Donald Winnicott to describe conditions that allow a baby to feel secure and loved. Like the baby, she is "playing with an object," she said. "It's my manuscript, but I feel that something of both of my parents is with me. The sense of concern and being held is what I associate with my mother, and the sense of surging and delight is what I associate with my father."

She said that she looks to replicate the experience of "surging" in romantic partners as well. She has always been drawn to intellectually distinguished men. "I suppose it's because of the imprint of my father," she told me one afternoon, while eating a small bowl of yogurt, blueberries, raisins, and pine nuts, a variation on the lunch she has most days. Her spacious tenth-floor apartment, which has twelve windows overlooking Lake Michigan and an elevator that delivers visitors directly into her foyer, is decorated with dozens of porcelain, metal, and glass elephants-her favorite animal, because of its emotional intelligence. "I used to observe that my close female friends would choose-very reasonably-men whose aspirations were rather modest," she told me. "That works out nicely, because these men are really supportive of them. I've thought, Wouldn't it be nice to have romantic and sexual tastes like that? But I certainly don't."

After moving to the University of Chicago, in 1995 (following seven years at Brown), Nussbaum was in a long relationship with Cass Sunstein, the former administrator for President Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and one of the few scholars as prolific as she is. Nussbaum said that she discovered her paradigm for romance as an adolescent, when she read about the relationship between two men in Plato's Phaedrus and the way in which they combined "intense mutual erotic passion with a shared pursuit of truth and justice." She and Sunstein (who is now married to Samantha Power, the Ambassador to the United Nations) lived in separate apartments, and each one's work informed the other's. In an influential essay, titled "Objectification," Nussbaum builds on a passage written by Sunstein, in which he suggests that some forms of sexual objectification can be both ineradicable and wonderful. Straying from the standard line of feminist thought, Nussbaum defends Sunstein's idea, arguing that there are circumstances in which being treated as a sex object, a "mysterious thinglike presence," can be humanizing, rather than morally harmful. It allows us to achieve a state that her writing often elevates: the "abnegation of self-containment and self-sufficiency."

Nussbaum is preoccupied by the ways that philosophical thinking can seem at odds with passion and love. She recognizes that writing can be "a way of distancing oneself from human life and maybe even a way of controlling human life," she said. In a semi-autobiographical essay in her book "Love's Knowledge," from 1990, she offers a portrait of a female philosopher who approaches her own heartbreak with a notepad and a pen; she sorts and classifies the experience, listing the properties of an ideal lover and comparing it to the men she has loved. "You now begin to see how this lady is," she wrote. "She goes on thinking at all times. She won't simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument."

Nussbaum isn't sure if her capacity for rational detachment is innate or learned. On three occasions, she alluded to a childhood experience in which she'd been so overwhelmed by anger at her mother, for drinking in the afternoon, that she slapped her. Betty warned her, "If you turn against me, I won't have any reason to live." Nussbaum prayed to be relieved of her anger, fearing that its potential was infinite. "I thought it would kill somebody," she said.

Anger is an emotion that she now rarely experiences. She invariably remains friends with former lovers, a fact that Sunstein, Sen, and Alan Nussbaum wholeheartedly affirmed. In her new book, "Anger and Forgiveness," which was published last month, Nussbaum argues against the idea, dear to therapists and some feminists, that "people (and women especially) owe it to their self-respect to own, nourish, and publicly proclaim their anger." It is a "magical fantasy," a bit of "metaphysical nonsense," she writes, to assume that anger will restore what was damaged. She believes that embedded in the emotion is the irrational wish that "things will be made right if I inflict suffering." She writes that even leaders of movements for revolutionary justice should avoid the emotion and move on to "saner thoughts of personal and social welfare." (She acknowledges, "It might be objected that my proposal sounds all too much like that of the upper-middle-class (ex)-Wasp academic that I certainly am. I simply deny the charge.")

For a long time, Nussbaum had seemed to be working on getting in touch with anger. In the nineties, when she composed the list of ten capabilities to which all humans should be entitled-a list that she's revised in the course of many papers-she and the feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon debated whether "justified anger" should make the list. Nussbaum was wary of the violence that accompanies anger's expression, but MacKinnon said she convinced Nussbaum that anger can be a "sign that self-respect has not been crushed, that humanity burns even where it is supposed to have been extinguished." Nussbaum decided to view anger in a more positive light. "I thought, I'm just getting duped by my own history," she said. In an interview a few years later, she said that being able to express anger to a friend, after years of training herself to suppress it, was "the most tremendous pleasure in life." In a 2003 essay, she describes herself as "angry more or less all the time."

When I asked her about the different self-conceptions, she wrote me three e-mails from a plane to Mexico (she was on her way to give lectures in Puebla) to explain that she had articulated these views before she had studied the emotion in depth. It was not full-fledged anger that she was experiencing but "transitional anger," an emotional state that embodies the thought: Something should be done about this, in response to social injustice. In another e-mail from the air, she clarified: "My experience of political anger has always been more King-like: protest, not acquiescence, but no desire for payback."

Last year, Nussbaum had a colonoscopy. She didn't want to miss a workday, so she refused sedation. She was thrilled by the sight of her appendix, so pink and tiny. "It's such a big part of you and you don't get to meet these parts," she told me. "I love that kind of familiarization: it's like coming to terms with yourself."

Her friends were repulsed when she told them that she had been awake the entire time. "They thought it was disgusting to go through the procedure without their consciousness obliterated," she said. She wasn't surprised that men wanted to be sedated, but she couldn't understand why women her age would avoid the sight of their organs. "Here are the same women who were inspired by 'Our Bodies, Ourselves,' " she told me. "We said, 'Oh, let's not shrink from looking at our vaginas. Let's not think, Our periods are disgusting, but let's celebrate it as part of who we are!' Now we get to our sixties, and we are disgusted by our bodies again, and we want to be knocked out."

Nussbaum believes that disgust "draws sharp edges around the self" and betrays a shame toward what is human. When she goes shopping with younger colleagues-among her favorite designers are Alexander McQueen, Azzedine Alaïa, and Seth Aaron Henderson, whom she befriended after he won "Project Runway"-she often emerges from the changing room in her underwear. Bodily functions do not embarrass her, either. When she goes on long runs, she has no problem urinating behind bushes. Once, when she was in Paris with her daughter, Rachel, who is now an animal-rights lawyer in Denver, she peed in the garden of the Tuileries Palace at night. (Rachel was curt when we met; Nussbaum told me that Rachel, who has co-written papers with her mother on the legal status of whales, was wary of being portrayed "as adjunct to me.")

Nussbaum acknowledges that, as she ages, it becomes harder to rejoice in all bodily developments. Recently, she was dismayed when she looked in the mirror and didn't recognize her nose. Sinking cartilage had created a new bump. She asked the doctor who gives her Botox in her forehead what to do. "He is a minimalist," she told me. "He's very artistic." He fixed the problem by putting filler above the tip of her nose. It wasn't that she was disgusted. "But I do feel conscious that at my age I have to be very careful of how I present myself, at risk of not being thought attractive," she told me. "There are women like Germaine Greer who say that it's a big relief to not worry about men and to forget how they look. I don't feel that way! I care how men look at me. I like men."

In a new book, tentatively titled "Aging Wisely," which will be published next year, Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, a colleague at the law school, investigate the moral, legal, and economic dilemmas of old age-"an unknown country," which they say has been ignored by philosophy. The book is structured as a dialogue between two aging scholars, analyzing the way that old age affects love, friendship, inequality, and the ability to cede control. They both reject the idea that getting old is a form of renunciation. Nussbaum critiques the tendency in literature to "assign a 'comeuppance' " to aging women who fail to display proper levels of resignation and shame. She calls for an "informal social movement akin to the feminist Our Bodies movement: a movement against self-disgust" for the aging. She promotes Walt Whitman's "anti-disgust" world view, his celebration of the "lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean. . . . The thin red jellies within you or within me. . . . O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul."

At a faculty workshop last summer, professors at the law school gathered to critique drafts of two chapters from the book. Nussbaum wore a fitted purple dress and high-heeled sandals, and her blond hair looked as if it had recently been permed. She appeared to be dressed for a different event from the one that the other professors were attending. As she often does, she looked delighted but not necessarily happy.

In one of the chapters, Levmore argued that it should be legal for employers to require that employees retire at an agreed-upon age, and Nussbaum wrote a rebuttal, called "No End in Sight." She said that it was painful to see colleagues in other countries forced to retire when philosophers such as Kant, Cato, and Gorgias didn't produce their best work until old age.

The libertarian scholar Richard Epstein raised his hand and said that, rather than having a national policy regarding retirement, each institution should make its own decision. "So Martha, full of vim and vigor, can get offers from four other places and go on and continue to work," he said.

"Sure, I could go and move someplace else," she said, interrupting him. "But I don't want to." If she were forced to retire, she said, "that would really affect me psychologically in a very deep way. And I have no idea what I'd do. I might go off and do some interesting thing like be a cantor. Or I might just get depressed."

"Martha, it's too autobiographical," Epstein said. His concern was not that "Martha stays on. It's that a bunch of dead wood stays on, as well, and it's a cost to the institution."

When another colleague suggested that no one knew the precise moment when aging scholars had peaked, Nussbaum cited Cato, who wrote that the process of aging could be resisted through vigorous physical and mental activity. Her celebration of this final, vulnerable stage of life was undercut by her confidence that she needn't be so vulnerable. She said that her grandmother lived until she was a hundred and four years old. "Why do I have my outlook?" she said. "It's a matter of the habits you form when you are very young-the habits of exercise, of being active. All of that stuff builds to the sense of a life that can go on."

Not long ago, Nussbaum bought a Dolce & Gabbana skirt dotted with crystal stars and daisies. "It had a happy look," she told me, holding the hanger to her chin. She planned to wear it to the college graduation of Nathaniel Levmore, whom she describes as her "quasi-child." Nathaniel, the son of Saul Levmore, has always been shy. Saul told me, "Of my two children, this is the one that's the underdog, and of course Martha loves him, and they talk for hours and hours. Martha has this total belief in the underdog. The more underdog, the more charming she finds them."

Nussbaum has taken Nathaniel on trips to Botswana and India, and, when she hosts dinner parties, he often serves the wine. When I joined them last summer for an outdoor screening of "Star Trek," they spent much of the hour-long drive debating whether it was anti-Semitic for Nathaniel's college to begin its semester on Rosh Hashanah. Their persistence was both touching and annoying. Just when I thought the conversation would die, the matter settled, Nathaniel would raise a new point, and Nussbaum would argue from a new angle that the scheduling was anti-Semitic.

Recently, when I had dinner at Nussbaum's apartment, she said she was sorry that Nathaniel wasn't there to enjoy it. We sat at her kitchen island, facing a Chicago White Sox poster, eating what remained of an elaborate and extraordinary Indian meal that she had cooked two days before, for the dean of the law school and eight students. She served me heaping portions of every dish and herself a modest plate of yogurt, rice, and spinach.

I mentioned that Saul Levmore had said she is so devoted to the underdog that she even has sympathy for a former student who had been stalking her; the student appeared to have had a psychotic break and bombarded her with threatening e-mails. "I feel great sympathy for any weak person or creature," she told me. She mentioned that a few days before she had been watching a Webcam of a nest of newborn bald eagles and had become distraught when she saw that the parent eagle was giving all the food to only one of her two babies. "The other one kept trying to eat something, and didn't get it!" she said. "I thought it was possible that one of the eagles was getting weaker and weaker, and I asked my bird-watcher friend, and he said that kind of sibling rivalry is actually pretty common in those species and the one may die. I was really upset by this."

"Isn't that the sort of dynamic you had with your sister?" I asked.

"Yeah, it probably is," Nussbaum said, running her finger along the rim of her plate. "It is, I guess." She said that her sister seemed to have become happier as she aged; her musical career at the church was blossoming. "Well, this is what we'll have to talk about in class tomorrow," she said. "Can guilt ever be creative?" She licked the sauce on her finger. " 'Guilt' might not even be quite the right word. It's a kind of sorrow that one had profited at the expense of someone else."

We began talking about a chapter that she intended to write for her book on aging, on the idea of looking back at one's life and turning it into a narrative. "Did you stand for something, or didn't you?" she said. She said that she had always admired the final words of John Stuart Mill, who reportedly said, "I have done my work." She has quoted these words in a number of interviews and papers, offering them as the mark of a life well lived. The image of Mill on his deathbed is not dissimilar to one she has of her father, who died as he was putting papers into his briefcase. Nussbaum often describes this as a good death-he was doing his work until the end-while Nussbaum's brother and sister see it as a sign of his isolation.

She said, "If I found that I was going to die in the next hour, I would not say that I had done my work. If you have a good life, you typically always feel that there's something that you want to do next." She wondered if Mill had surrendered too soon because he was prone to depression.

"It does sound a little bit final," she went on, "and one rarely dies when one is out of useful ideas-unless maybe you were really ill for a long time." She said that she had been in a hospital only twice, once to give birth and once when she had an operation to staple the top of her left ear to the back of her head, when she was eleven. It poked out, and her father worried that boys wouldn't be attracted to her. "I just enjoyed having this big bandage around my head," she said. "I was acting the part of Marley's ghost in 'A Christmas Carol,' and it made quite an effect."

She stood up to clear our plates. "You're making me feel I chose the wrong last words," she called out from the sink. She returned with two large cakes. "I think last words are silly," she said, cutting herself a sliver. "Probably the best thing to do with your last words is to say goodbye to the people you love and not to talk about yourself." ♦

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Rachel Aviv writes a Profile of the University of Chicago professor and the author of "Upheavals of Thought" and "The Fragility of Goodness."

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Like many seekers of happiness, I once aspired to feel good as much as possible. There's probably a part of everyone that would prefer to avoid life's more difficult, or even mundane, feelings-and self-help books assure us that we can, if only we adopt the right attitude.

Yet most of us know that perpetual joy is not a practical goal-and recent research is starting to suggest that it may actually be a harmful one. Scientists are discovering that feel-good states can be detrimental to our problem-solving, judgment, morality, and empathy in the moment.

The upshot? Context matters.

On the whole, it's absolutely beneficial to be someone for whom feeling good comes easy, who can appreciate a good meal, connect warmly with others, and dream up sunny possibilities for the future. But our whole spectrum of different feelings, from anger to elation, evolved for a reason: to help us confront and handle challenges to survival. There are times in life when feeling positive won't help-and could even hurt.

1. When you're working on critical reasoning tasks

Research suggests that positive feelings can help us be more productive at work overall and more adept at creative tasks, particularly those that involve brainstorming responses and ideas. But a positive mood isn't conducive to the best performance on certain analytical tasks.

In a 1989 study, researchers induced a positive mood in half the participants by either giving them $2 or showing them a funny video. Then, everyone read an editorial they disagreed with-except some editorials contained strong, thoughtful arguments, and others contained weak arguments.

Under time pressure, the amused participants were equally persuaded by the strong and weak arguments, couldn't remember as many of the points made, and relied on shortcuts more in their evaluations (whether the author was a scholar or not) compared to the control, non-amused group. (When amused participants had more time, these patterns disappeared: They read for longer, and then they were more likely to be persuaded by strong arguments, remembered more details, and didn't tend to rely on shortcuts.)

In a 1995 study, a group of around 60 undergrads solved syllogisms-logic problems that ask you to deduce conclusions from statements like "All A are B" and "Some B are C." Again, a group that had been induced to feel amused performed worse. They spent less time working on the syllogisms and drew fewer diagrams to help solve them. They also gave riskier "all" or "none" answers (rather than "some"), perhaps indicating that they were overoptimistic about their problem-solving abilities.

The authors of a different study from 1994 offered this interpretation:

"Happiness is a kind of safety signal, indicating that there is no current need for problem solving....Unhappy people will think more deeply about their social environment (in an effort to solve their problems), whereas happy people can contentedly coast on cruise control, not bothering to think very deeply about surrounding events unless they impinge directly on their well-being."

A 2000 study complicates the picture a bit, though. Here, students read moral dilemmas and had to pick the best arguments to solve them; their performance was rated more highly if they chose arguments that were more principled and abstract, rather than concrete and simple. In this situation, amused people took longer and performed worse. But this wasn't always the case: When students imagined themselves in the moral dilemma, or when the moral dilemma was serious and disturbing, involving war or racism, the amused students performed just as well as those in a neutral mood.

In the end, the type and even the content of the task we're working on matter. For some parts of the work we do, particularly tasks that involve logical reasoning and critical thinking, positive emotions may not be the best helper. In other words, don't expect yourself to feel joyful proofreading a document or formatting a spreadsheet; serious focus may not be pleasant, but it may be the optimal mood for certain tasks.

2. When you want to judge people fairly and accurately

Cognitive psychologists classify stereotyping as a form of "heuristic processing": using general knowledge about a group to efficiently make predictions about individual members. In this sense, stereotyping is a kind of superficial thinking-and people in a good mood may be prone to it.

In a 1994 study, participants were asked to make judgments about student misconduct; some had been induced to feel good by remembering and writing about a happy event from their past. The researchers were trying to find out if participants feeling good would make more stereotyped judgments: judging the Latino student guilty of assault or the track-and-field athlete guilty of cheating.

And so they did. (Notably, researchers were able to overcome this bias by telling happy participants that they would be held accountable for their judgments and should be able to justify them-effectively increasing their motivation to make good judgments with external accountability, and eliminating stereotypical reasoning in the process.)

People feeling amused also made more stereotypical judgments in a 2000 study: Here, they were more likely to (incorrectly) identify African-American-sounding names as belonging to criminals or basketball players. They didn't make the same mistakes with European-sounding names. Participants in a neutral mood weren't as likely to fall back on stereotypes.

However, other research has shown that white people in a happy mood show less implicit bias toward African-American faces-so, again, the effects may be complex. Perhaps it matters whether we come face to face with the people we're judging, where a happy mood may help dampen our fear response to unfamiliar faces.

In any case, it's still true that people who are in a good mood are sometimes more likely to jump to conclusions about others-and less likely to consciously correct for any stereotypical notions they harbor.

3. When you might get taken advantage of

The 2000 study also found that feel-good participants were prone to applying European-American names to politicians-a (theoretically) positive bias.

If feeling good inclines us to see certain people in a positive light, does that mean it might make us more likely to be manipulated? Maybe.

In a 2008 study, nearly 120 students were induced to feel amused, neutral, or sad (by watching a comedy video, a nature documentary, or a film clip about cancer). Then, they watched interrogation videos where other students lied or told the truth about stealing a movie ticket. Overall, the negative-mood group was better at detecting deception than the neutral or positive groups, correctly identifying the liars more often.

Researchers believe this is because a negative mood makes us process information in more detailed, systematic ways, and also makes us more likely to recall other negative information (like when our roommate lied about stealing our Pringles).

People intuitively seem to realize this: When we express high levels of happiness, research suggests, we are perceived as more naive and are more likely to be targets of exploitation than when we express moderate happiness. This explains why we wait for people to be in a good mood before we ask for favors, hoping that they won't be as critical and careful in considering our request.

4. When there's temptation to cheat

In some cases, feeling good may also compromise our morality.

In a 2013 study, 90 students were induced to either feel positive or neutral by watching clips from a cartoon or something resembling a screensaver. Then, they were instructed to complete a crossword-puzzle-type task, grade their own work with an answer sheet, and compensate themselves 50 cents for each correct answer. Although the worksheets appeared to be anonymous, invisible ink let the researchers figure out who was honest and who wasn't-and the amused group stole more money than the neutral one.

In surveys, the amused group reported being more morally disengaged-more apt to come up with justifications for immoral actions without judging themselves harshly. In this case, for example, they might think, "I'm not getting paid enough for this boring experiment, and I could have found more words if I tried harder."

Interestingly, these effects disappeared when the researchers put mirrors in their workspace, making them more self-aware.

"Although conventional wisdom would suggest that happy people are less likely than unhappy people to be dishonest, our work suggests that anyone who buys into this simplistic cliché might be blindsided by the stealth behind the smile," the researchers write.

5. When you're empathizing with suffering

Research suggests that being happier in general makes us kinder and more generous. But people who try to feel good all the time, at all costs, can miss some opportunities to connect with others.

A 2014 study, for example, found that positive people less accurately empathize with certain negative emotions. Over 120 young adults watched four videos, where people described good or bad events in their own lives (e.g., winning a scholarship or having a dispute with a landlord). During the videos, the participants continuously rated how they believed the storyteller was feeling on a scale of one to nine, changing their rating any moment they sensed an emotional shift. Those ratings were compared to the storytellers' ratings of their own feelings over the course of the video.

In general, positive participants-those who reported experiencing positive emotions more in general-were more confident in their empathic skills but weren't actually any better at identifying the storytellers' emotions than other participants.

In fact, when the storyteller was describing a high-intensity negative event, like the death of a parent, positive people were less accurate than their peers. For whatever reason, they seemed unable or unwilling to engage with such difficult emotions.

"It perhaps takes more sacrifice to 'drop down' and focus on another person's high-intensity negative emotions, and this may be particularly difficult to do" for positive people, the researchers explain.

If there's anyone in your life with inveterate positivity, you've probably experienced something similar. When I share my anxiety or sadness with a hyper-positive friend of mine, he usually insists that the situation doesn't merit despair, or reassures me that everything will turn out okay-neither of which make me feel better (or understood).

Should we give up on feeling good?

Clearly, while feeling good does feel good, it doesn't always bring us the success and connection we desire. It doesn't seem ideal in all situations for all outcomes, meaning-as evolutionary psychologists could have already told us-that other, less-blissful feelings serve a purpose.

Indeed, according to a survey of more than 35,000 people, those who reported high levels of positive emotion weren't as protected against depression as those with high emodiversity -who experienced many positive and negative emotions, from awe and amusement to anger and sadness.

And that's another point worth making: "Feeling good" doesn't always refer to the same feeling. Much of the research focused on amusement, induced by watching a cartoon or a standup comedian. And none of the studies looked at warmer, more interpersonal feelings like love and compassion.

In a quest for more happiness, I once tracked my mood every hour for a month, hoping to identify the downers in my life and try to eliminate them. But instead, I came away from that experiment a little less concerned about my negative moods-because they never lasted! Each hour brought a new feeling with a different cause, and I realized I didn't have to stress so much.

Similarly, this research might help you relax about yesterday's bad mood-and give you a greater appreciation for all sorts of feelings.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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Five Ways Feeling Good Can Be Bad for You

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Like many seekers of happiness, I once aspired to feel good as much as possible. There's probably a part of everyone that would prefer to avoid life's more difficult, or even mundane, feelings-and self-help books assure us that we can, if only we adopt the right attitude.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett: You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them

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Can you look at someone's face and know what they're feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are.

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This week Greater Good editor-in-chief Jason Marsh is reporting on highlights from the recent Being Human conference in San Francisco, including a round-up of some of the key themes and speakers, and an interview on the evolutionary roots of altruism with Yale psychologist Laurie Santos. Today, we present an interview with neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran on mirror neurons, the subject of his Being Human talk.

Did you ever have that sensation where you're watching someone do something-serve a tennis ball, say, or get pricked by a needle-and you can just feel exactly what they must be feeling, as if you were in their shoes?

Scientists have long wondered why we get that feeling, and more than two decades ago, a team of Italian researchers thought they stumbled on an answer. While observing monkeys' brains, they noticed that certain cells activated both when a monkey performed an action and when that monkey watched another monkey perform the same action. "Mirror neurons" were discovered.

Since that time, mirror neurons have been hailed as a cornerstone of human empathy, language, and other vital processes. But there has also been something of a mirror neuron backlash, with some scientists suggesting that the importance of mirror neurons has been exaggerated.

V.S. Ramachandran has been one of mirror neurons' most ardent scientific champions. Ramachandran (known as "Rama" to friends and colleagues), a distinguished professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, conducted early research on mirror neurons; he has since called them "the basis of civilization" in a TED talk and touted their significance in his recent book The Tell Tale Brain.

"I don't think they're being exaggerated," he said a few days ago at Being Human. "I think they're being played down, actually."

In his presentation at Being Human, Ramachandran discussed how research on mirror neurons and "phantom limbs" suggests an extraordinary human capacity for empathy. (See this post for more details.)

After his Being Human talk, I sat down with Ramachandran to discuss what we know-and what we don't-about these celebrated brain cells. Below is a condensed version of our conversation.

Jason Marsh: First, could you explain a little bit about what mirror neurons are and how they were discovered?

V.S. Ramachandran: Well, basically Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese and some of their colleagues in Italy discovered mirror neurons. They found these neurons in the frontal lobes of the brain-the pre-frontal areas of the brain-among what were originally found as motor command neurons. These are neurons which fire when I reach out and grab a peanut, another set of neurons which fire when I reach out and pull a lever, other neurons when I'm pushing something, other neurons when I'm hitting something. These are regular motor command neurons, orchestrating a sequence of muscle twitches that allow me to reach out and grab something or do some other action.

A subset of these neurons also fire when I simply watch another person-watch you reach out and do exactly the same action. So these neurons are performing a virtual reality simulation of your mind, your brain. Therefore, they're constructing a theory of your mind-of your intention-which is important for all kinds of social interaction.

JM: So you've talked about the role of mirror neurons in motor skills. I wonder if you could elaborate on the role of mirror neurons in affective experiences, in emotional experiences.

VR: Well, people have asked me that already, and I don't know much about it. All I know is they are involved in empathy for, say, touch or a gentle caress or pain.

For example, pretend somebody pokes my left thumb with a needle. We know that the insular cortex fires cells and we experience a painful sensation. The agony of pain is probably experienced in a region called the anterior cingulate, where there are cells that respond to pain. The next stage in pain processing, we experience the agony, the painfulness, the affective quality of pain.

It turns out these anterior cingulate neurons that respond to my thumb being poked will also fire when I watch you being poked-but only a subset of them. There are non-mirror neuron pain neurons and there are mirror neuron pain neurons.

So these [mirror] neurons are probably involved in empathy for pain. If I really and truly empathize with your pain, I need to experience it myself. That's what the mirror neurons are doing, allowing me to empathize with your pain-saying, in effect, that person is experiencing the same agony and excruciating pain as you would if somebody were to poke you with a needle directly. That's the basis of all empathy.

JM: Just to clarify: When you talk about mirror neurons and non-mirror neurons, what percentage are you talking about?

VR: Between 10 and 20 percent [are mirror neurons]. For motor neurons, I think it's a higher percentage-maybe about 20 percent. For sensory neurons, it's about 10 percent. But these numbers are not all that accurate.

JM: So could you elaborate on the social implications and broader practical implications of mirror neurons?

VR: Well, [mirror neurons] enable me to see you as an intentional being, with purpose and intention. In fact, we suggested nearly a decade ago that mirror neuron dysfunction may be involved in autism. People with autism, ironically sometimes they mimic constantly what you're doing, but it's also true that they're bad at imitation and they don't have empathy, they don't have a theory of mind, they can't infer your intentions, they don't engage in pretend play. In pretend play, what I do is temporarily say, "I'm going to be this superhero," so you do role play. That requires a theory of mind.

So take all the properties of mirror neurons, make a list of them, and list all the things that are going wrong in autism-there's a very good match. Not every symptom, but many of the symptoms match beautifully. And it's controversial: There are about seven papers claiming that it's true, using brain imaging, and maybe one or two claiming that there's no correlation [between mirror neurons and autism].

JM: From your perspective, what do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions around mirror neurons-speculations that have yet to actually be validated by science?

VR: Well, I think as with any new scientific discovery, initially people are very skeptical. When people discovered that these neurons do exist, and that they exist in humans, then people went overboard and said they do everything. And I myself am partly responsible because I made this playful remark, not entirely serious, that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology and open up a whole new field of investigation. Turned out I was right, but it's overdone-I mean, a lot of people, anything they can't understand, they say it's due to mirror neurons.

JM: And what are some of those things that people attribute to mirror neurons that we don't yet know to be true?

VR: Well, I think my own theory about autism hasn't been proven. It's a plausible theory-it's better than any other theories that are out there-but it still has not been proven. But the popular person latches onto it and says that autism's caused by mirror neuron deficiency.

The other important thing I want to say is that mirror neurons are obviously the starting point for things like empathy, but that's all it is-I mean, you need much more. If mirror neurons are involved in things like empathy and language and all of that, then monkeys should be very good at these things. One of the things I argue, and others have argued, is that mirror neurons are important in transmitting skills from generation to generation. I need to put myself in your shoes to observe what you're doing, and to mime it accurately. Mirror neurons are important in that.

JM: Right, and that's what culture's about-the transmission of those learned skills.

VR: Exactly. That's one of the proposals I made on the Edge website in an essay I published 10 years ago. But if that were true, it they were responsible for all that transmission of skills and culture, monkeys should be very good at those things because they have mirror neurons.

So clearly mirror neurons provide the substrate [for those skills], and maybe there are more sophisticated mirror neurons in humans than in monkeys, but they're not by themselves [responsible].

Those kinds of errors are quite common, but that's okay.

JM: Why do you say it's okay?

VR: It's how science progresses. People make overstatements, and then correct them.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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This week Greater Good editor-in-chief Jason Marsh is reporting on highlights from the recent Being Human conference in San Francisco, including a round-up of some of the key themes and speakers, and an interview on the evolutionary roots of altruism with Yale psychologist Laurie Santos. Today, we present an interview with neuroscientist V.S.

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( iStock/Wavebreakmedia)

Michelle Joyce doesn't shy away from politicized science topics such as climate change. In fact, she works to equip seniors at Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Florida with the skills to accurately evaluate those topics on their own. Along with teaching chemistry and physics, she offers a class called "thinking skills" where students solve logic and math puzzles while also enhancing their media literacy. Students go beyond just learning about legitimate sources of information on the internet and delve into just how the information is put together in the first place.

But teaching students those critical thinking skills only as they're about to depart for college can be too little too late.

"It's a really hard thing to teach within the space of everything else that you need to teach in a classroom," Joyce said. "It's crucial that we teach it as early as we can."

The internet has no shortage of dubious information; and the ability to evaluate health and science claims is a subset of media literacy. With the abundance of health/science content students may only see via social media, kids are ill-equipped to discern hype from real science.

In one recent study by the Stanford History Education Group, 170 high school students were shown a photo of flowers growing fused together and asked if that provided strong evidence on the conditions outside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Students with mastery of media literacy would argue this was not sufficient evidence because there is no information on the source of the photo or where the flowers were photographed. However, less than 20 percent of the students responding made that argument. Nearly 40 percent argued that the picture alone was strong evidence for conditions outside the nuclear plant.

"We are swimming in bullsh-t and lots of different claims about what helps or harms us," said Dr. Andrew Oxman, director of research at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. "Everybody needs to figure out which claims are trustworthy."
START EARLY
Many of these critical thinking concepts are not difficult but need to become habits adopted early in life, which is why Oxman first tried them out in his children's elementary school classrooms. One way to teach how science is made is to let the children experience and figure it out for themselves.

Oxman gave students a bag of M&Ms and told them that some kids thought the red ones helped them study better but others got stomach aches. He instructed students to evaluate these claims.

"They figured out very quickly, you have to compare like to like," said Oxman.

The most revealing aspect of this lesson was how quickly students understood the pitfalls of setting up a randomized study. The teacher mentioned they could set random assignments much like they do in gym class where they set up teams by alternating students in line.

"The kids started laughing because they understood right away that doesn't work," said Oxman. Students learned they can sabotage randomization in picking teams by setting up a line so they are one student away from their friend.

"In research jargon, we referred to that as 'concealed allocation' and it's a concept that takes time to explain to health professionals but the kids understood it right away intuitively."

Through this experiment students quickly figured out they had to measure things exactly same. They discovered the flaws of using small samples and being misled by games of chance, he added.

Oxman has since taken this idea of teaching young children concepts of evaluating science to a much larger scale.
Teaching Health Claims
He and a global team of researchers at Informed Health Choices developed a study of some 10,000 Ugandan fifth-graders to see if a simple comic book on evaluating health claims could provide students with the skills to make better choices about their health. The comic book begins by describing how one child - who has burned his finger - sticks his wound into dung to heal it. The finger gets infected and he visits Professors "Fair" and "Compare" and begins to learn about how to question and evaluate the health advice he receives.

The workbook had a convincing effect, Oxman said. The students who received the workbook and those who did not receive it were then tested on how to evaluate health claims. Fifty percent more children in the workbook group had a passing score on that critical thinking test. Twenty percent of the students receiving the workbook even showed mastery of the concepts.

As a follow-up to the study, researchers are asking children and adults what they learned and how they've used it. Responses so far have been very promising, he added.

One girl talked about going shopping with her mom, who picked up an expensive new brand of toothpaste, but the girl picked up an older brand of toothpaste and found the ingredients were the same. During the pilot studies, Oxman said it was fun to see kids walking out of class talking to each other about claims. Recognizing a claim, and being able to determine if it's trustworthy is the critical first step to appraising all the claims people hear every day, he said.
EVALUATING CLAIMS
Palmetto Ridge High School science teacher Michelle Joyce said she uses a process called "claim, evidence and response."

First students recognize a claim or a hypothesis. Next, they look at evidence: the original data; who calculated the data; where the study was conducted; if the researcher would be inclined to benefit from a certain result; if researchers did multiple trials or tested on many people and more. Finally, students must come up with a response: a determination of the validity of the claim.

Joyce uses resources from a variety of places including Common Sense Education*, a nonprofit that provides free curriculum in media literacy for grades K-12.

When teachers tackle the subject of media literacy they may think about social media etiquette or cyberbullying - that's a component of media literacy called digital citizenship. But teaching media literacy can also go into specific domains such as health and science. To understand the science news they see online, kids need to understand basic concepts like sample sizes or what "peer review" means, said Jeffrey Knutson of Common Sense Education. Through this curriculum, students learn how information is created and distributed.

"It gives them an insider's view of how information we get is created and how we receive it," said Knutson.

Digital citizenship and media literacy is often taught as something extra and not necessarily embedded in curriculum, said Knutson. However, health or science claims seen online can be easily incorporated into science or health class.

One example Knutson provided was a recent New York Times article about health hazards of chemicals used in packaging such as boxed macaroni and cheese. The article stirred up some controversy because it didn't offer specifics on what dose of these chemicals can do damage. The study was financed by an environmental advocacy group, not an unbiased source. The Times reported on this study and other journalists reported on it and then reports about the reporting came out, noted Knutson.

"The best thing teachers can do is to use these examples in their class with their students," according to Knutson. "It's important to model how you would go about reading an article like that."
BREAKING DOWN THE FACTS
High school science teacher Michelle Joyce says that if teachers start in elementary school, and build on these concepts in middle and high school, "we have significantly more chance over a period of time to build this common sense, this media literacy," said Joyce.

"If I'm only seeing them in 11 th and 12 th grade, many of their opinions are already formed," she added.

When Joyce really breaks a scientific topic into its component parts, she can sometimes convince skeptical students.

For instance, students were learning the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, which stems from water temperature and salt-level or salinity increases. They researched where the increased salinity or temperature could be coming from, including climate change and waste dumped near the ocean.

One student said, "I can't believe one degree in temperature makes this much a difference for these animals," recalled Joyce.

Instead of rehashing the reef data, Joyce brought the conversation back to a different perspective and explained pH levels in the human body. Even a slight change in pH could shut down a person's bodily functions. Suddenly the minor change to water temperature and salinity, which affects pH, didn't seem so minor.

"I have to bring it back to something they can relate to," said Joyce.

Joyce can't go into such detail with every science lesson but she hopes by equipping students with the skills to question what they read, they'll be able to pursue these questions on their own.

"Teaching them those skills on how to think like a scientist and how to analyze information that they're receiving is just as important as teaching them to use the periodic table, for example."
Additional resources:
Common Sense has several strategies to help debunk false claims, such as those listed on " Turn Students into F act-Finding Web Detectives." They also offer digital citizenship and information literacy curriculum.

Health News Review covers often-hyped health stories.

Retraction Watch highlights retractions of studies and other pitfalls of the peer review system, which rarely gets attention.
*Common Sense Education contributes reviews of educational tools and other content to MindShift.
Critical Thinking Skills to Help Students Better Evaluate Scientific Claims

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Critical Thinking Skills to Help Students Better Evaluate Scientific Claims

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Michelle Joyce doesn't shy away from politicized science topics such as climate change. In fact, she works to equip seniors at Palmetto Ridge High School in Naples, Florida with the skills to accurately evaluate those topics on their own.

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While an important advance, the new atlas is hardly the final word on the brain's workings. It may take decades for scientists to figure out what each region is doing, and more will be discovered in coming decades.

"This map you should think of as version 1.0," said Matthew F. Glasser, a neuroscientist at Washington University School of Medicine and lead author of the new research. "There may be a version 2.0 as the data get better and more eyes look at the data. We hope the map can evolve as the science progresses."

The first hints of the brain's hidden geography emerged more than 150 years ago. In the 1860s, the physician Pierre Paul Broca was intrigued by two of his patients who were unable to speak.

After they died, Broca examined their brains. On the outer layer, called the cortex, he found that both had suffered damage to the same patch of tissue.

That region came to be known as Broca's area. In recent decades, scientists have found that it becomes active when people speak and when they try to understand the speech of other people.

In the late 1800s, a group of German researchers identified other regions of the cortex, each having distinct types of cells packed together in unique ways. In 1907, Korbinian Brodmann published a catalog of 52 brain regions.

Neuroscientists have relied on his hand-drawn map ever since, adding a modest number of new regions with their own research. "This is the standard for where you are in the brain," said Dr. Glasser.

Three years ago, Dr. Glasser and his colleagues set out to create a new standard. They drew on data collected by the Human Connectome Project, in which 1,200 volunteers were studied with powerful new scanners.

The project team recorded high-resolution images of each participant's brain, and then recorded its activity during hours of tests on memory, language and other kinds of thought.

In previous attempts to map the cortex, scientists typically had looked only at one kind of evidence at a time - say, the arrangements of cells. The Human Connectome Project has made it possible to study the brain in much greater detail.

In addition to looking at the activity of the brain, the scientists also looked at its anatomy. They measured the amount of myelin, for example, a fatty substance that insulated neurons. They found sharp contrasts in myelin levels from one region of the cortex to the next.

"We have 112 different types of information we can tap into," said David C. Van Essen, a principal investigator with the Human Connectome Project at Washington University Medical School.

Using these variables, the scientists trained a computer with data from 210 brains to recognize discrete regions of the cortex. Once the computer profiled the distinctive combinations of myelin, activity and other characteristics, they tested it on 210 other brains.

The computer pinpointed the regions in the new brains 96.6 percent of the time. The scientists found that only a small number of features were required to map the brain. That means that researchers will be able to use their method to map an individual's brain in a little over an hour of scanning.

The map produced by the computer includes 83 familiar regions, such as Broca's area, but includes 97 that were unknown - or just forgotten.

In the 1950s, for example, German researchers noticed a patch on the side of the brain in which neurons had little myelin, compared with neighboring regions. But the finding was soon neglected.

"People tended to ignore it, and it was lost in the literature," said Dr. Van Essen.

The computer rediscovered the odd territory, and Dr. Van Essen and his colleagues found that it becomes unusually active when people listen to stories. That finding suggests the region, which they call 55b, is part of a language network in the brain, along with Broca's area.

In other parts of the cortex, the scientists were able to partition previously identified regions into smaller ones. For example, they discovered that a large region near the front of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, actually is made up of a dozen smaller zones.

The region becomes active during many different kinds of thought, ranging from decision-making to deception. It's possible that each of the newly identified smaller parts is important for one of those tasks.

The computer program developed by the scientists became so adept at mapping the cortex that it could identify hidden regions even when they took on unusual shapes. Twelve of the research subjects, for example, have a 55b region that's split into two isolated patches. (The researchers don't know whether this affects how the subjects use language.)

Other neuroscientists hope that the new map will sharpen their experiments, allowing them to discover how the brain's cogs mesh.

"The next big step is seeing what this can do for us in terms of buying more power," said Emily S. Finn, a graduate student at Yale University who has used Human Connectome Project data to find links between brain activity and intelligence.

Dr. Kleinfeld predicted that other researchers will find ways to verify the new map's accuracy. Genetic testing, for example: If 180 regions of the cortex really are distinct, then the neurons in each should share a distinct combination of active genes.

"You can imagine going to these 180 regions, taking a punch of tissue, and seeing if you can really genetically differentiate them," said Dr. Kleinfeld.

Many experts believe that the brain, on closer inspection, will turn out to be an even greater collective of regions that somehow cooperate for the common good.

"It's very clear that many of those regions are likely to be composed of smaller pieces," said Danielle S. Bassett, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Van Essen said that he and other scientists will be using the map to track the development of young brains and to look for changes caused by disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

"We shouldn't expect miracles and easy answers," he said, "but we're positioned to accelerate progress."

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Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions

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While an important advance, the new atlas is hardly the final word on the brain's workings. It may take decades for scientists to figure out what each region is doing, and more will be discovered in coming decades. "This map you should think of as version 1.0," said Matthew F.

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Ever since their chance discovery back in 1992 mirror neurons have captured the imagination of both scientists and nonscientists, but their actual role remains mostly speculative. In The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition Dr. Gregory Hickok (UC-Irvine) explains why the most popular theory is probably wrong. He also provides a fascinating account of how science is really done and the sobering lesson that scientists can fall prey to the same cognitive biases (and tendencies toward laziness) that plague all humans.

I first discussed the discovery of mirror neurons back in BSP 35 when I featured Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions, emotions, and experience (2008) by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia. At that time what I found most fascinating was that since mirror neurons fire both when a subject (usually a monkey) performs an action and when a similar action is observed, this proves that single neurons are not necessarily purely motor or purely sensory. This surprising discovery seems to have been overshadowed in the rush to use mirror neurons to explain everything from autism to language evolution.

The latest Brain Science Podcast (BSP 112) features an interview with Dr. Gregory Hickok. BSP 35 is also available for FREE via the Brain Science Podcast Mobile APP.

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What Do Mirror Neurons Really Do? (BSP 112)

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Greg Hickok, PhD (Click on photo to hear his interview) Ever since their chance discovery back in 1992 mirror neurons have captured the imagination of both scientists and nonscientists, but their actual role remains mostly speculative. In The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communic