Many factors boost a child’s chance of success in school — like having wealthy parents who can afford tutors. But recent research has raised another possibility — one that is discomforting to many — the idea that scientists might someday be able to spot the genetic markers associated with academic performance.

To do this, researchers are turning to a relatively new genetic approach called the polygenic score, which assesses a person’s likelihood for a specific future based on a combination of genetic variables. It’s a research technique that some scientists are using to assess obesity or cancer risk, for instance. Now, researchers are exploring this approach in non-medical contexts, like academic or athletic success.

The scientists studying genetic markers in education are trying to untangle how nature and nurture together explain school performance. In principle, genetic screening might enable teachers to tailor their approach to groups of students. Educators might then more effectively instruct kids together in one classroom, rather than separating students into accelerated and low-level courses, which can deprive Black and brown children and children from low-income families of academic opportunities.

But some researchers fear this gene screening work could be misapplied and used to further racist or eugenic thinking, even though race is a social, not a genetic, classification.  There’s an ugly history of proponents of eugenics, who believe in reshaping humanity by breeding “superior traits” and removing “inferior traits,” justifying their thinking with genetics. And there are debunked racist theories that have endeavored to falsely connect race and intelligence.

Related: College graduation may be partly determined by your genes, genome study of siblings finds

For now, the science is almost entirely based on data collected from people with European ancestry, which limits the conclusions that can be drawn from it, so researchers feel that they’ve at least temporarily sidestepped the issue.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worried about it — and about the other ways this research could exacerbate inequities in education. Screening is expensive, for instance, increasing the odds that privileged students will qualify for extra enrichment or support before their less privileged peers.

Indeed, the idea of predicting students’ academic performance based on their genes comes with such a raft of ethical questions and unknowns that scientists in the field are urging caution. “Polygenic scores are a potentially useful new scientific tool. At the same time, there are clear reasons to be concerned,” Stanford University social scientist Ben Domingue said. “We’re going to have the capacity, with a vial of spit, to be able to predict all these different things.”

Scientists and ethicists are also concerned about commercializing this work while the research is still evolving. Already, several companies sell reports to consumers that incorporate polygenic scores for health or various physical characteristics — despite the fact that the scores are not perfect forecasters of a person’s future.

Researchers in the field want to see more critical discussion of how their work could be applied in educational settings.“If we don’t pay attention now, systems will be created, constructed around us, responding to our genetic difference,” said Sophie von Stumm, a psychologist at the University of York, in the United Kingdom, who studies genetics and education. “It’s high time to have this discussion. Honestly, we’re late to the party.”

Related: College graduation may be partly determined by your genes, genome study of siblings finds

The polygenic score that could help predict academic performance aims to assess genetic markers related to educational attainment. In other words, it combines hundreds of common genetic variants that are linked to the number of years a person stays in school. In 2016, this score could explain about 5 percent of the variation in the level of education completed.

In 2018, researchers studied data from more than a million people across countries and found they could strengthen the polygenic score to explain 11 percent of the variation in educational attainment. That value puts the score on par with factors like a mother’s level of education attainment, which explains 15 percent of variation, and household income, which explains about 7 percent.

“There are genes that affect educational attainment — that is for certain now,” said Aysu Okbay, an economist at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands who contributed to the 2016 and 2018 studies.

The score’s ability to explain variation in years of schooling could improve with more data. Rough estimates indicate about 80 percent of the variation in educational attainment comes from environmental factors — the rest is genetic. With enough data, some scientists believe, the polygenic score could get close to explaining 20 percent of the difference in people’s level of education.

If so, the score would be an incredibly powerful single factor for making predictions about an individual’s academic future — even though the combined environmental variables still eclipse the role of genes. “It’s really not a puny predictor at this point,” Domingue said.

“Polygenic scores are a potentially useful new scientific tool. At the same time, there are clear reasons to be concerned”

Ben Domingue, Stanford University

In February, Domingue and his colleagues found that the polygenic score could help identify which groups of high schoolers had been placed into advanced math classes. The score could also point to students most likely to stick with advanced math courses across all four years of high school.

But polygenic scores also come laced with caveats. So many, in fact, that Okbay and her colleagues published a massive list of public FAQs — including how the study was designed and whether the research could lead to stigmatization of people with certain genes — to help readers interpret their research.

Paige Harden, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin — and a co-author on the math study — likens the polygenic score to a credit score. Neither the polygenic nor the credit score can really forecast what will happen to a particular person. Instead, they provide a rough sense of how people with that score will, on average, fare. The score is better at gauging a group’s overall performance than an individual’s performance.

Harden and others acknowledge that it’s still a mystery how the genetic variants behind the score contribute to how far a person gets in school. “We don’t know what the mechanisms are,” Okbay said. “We don’t know whether it’s causal or not.”

Some research suggests the genes associated with education are related to the nervous system and the brain, raising the possibility that they’re connected to cognitive functions — things like strong memory, creativity and perseverance — that serve people well in school.

But the relationship could be nuanced. Domingue pointed out that there could be genetic factors that make a person more likely to be a supportive parent, which, in turn, would correlate to better school performance in their children. Because the child and parent share DNA, the polygenic score could capture gene variants in the child that explain educational performance but actually reflect the parent’s behavior.

There is also an enormous shortcoming in the datasets used for this research: Virtually all are built with DNA from people of European ancestry. Although there are biobanks in the works in Asia and Africa that could address this omission, for the time being, the scores are essentially only applicable to people of European descent. “You’re basically developing a tool that’s only useful for one segment of the population,” Harden said.

“If we don’t pay attention now, systems will be created, constructed around us, responding to our genetic difference. It’s high time to have this discussion. Honestly, we’re late to the party.”

Sophie von Stumm, a psychologist at the University of York in northern England

Given all of these limitations, most scientists believe it would be unlikely, and inappropriate, for educators to use polygenic scores to determine student placement in specific classes or schools. “Will someone be mad enough to track or stream on the basis of genetic predispositions?” von Stumm said. “Fortunately, I think we’re far from that.”

There could be other ways of using this genetic information. Once genetic variants are better understood and enough data is in hand, for example, it might be possible to identify children with a predisposition to learning disabilities and intervene early. In May, von Stumm and her colleagues published a paper exploring whether a toddler’s polygenic score for educational attainment could identify children at risk for language or literacy delays later in life. The conclusion: We’re not there yet.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

Critics caution that there is too much to establish ethically and scientifically before we confront those scenarios. “Someday we’ll understand the genetic contribution to educational success or to life success but it will be our grandchildren who understand it. It won’t be us,” bioethicist Arthur Caplan at NYU Langone Health, said.

And even if we understood this information, it’s not clear how to best use the scores in schools. Last year, Stanford’s Domingue and two colleagues wrote about a hypothetical case study: What happens when a parent tries to use genetic data, like a polygenic score, to make the case that their child deserves additional classroom support?

“I don’t know that I have good answers to that,” he said. But the scenario hints at another serious concern: inequality. Not everyone will be able to afford genetic screening, even when there are meaningful scores for people across ancestries.

Still, researchers are already using the polygenic score to explore long-standing conundrums like why children with very similar advantages follow different trajectories in life.

Using data from more than a million people across countries, researchers found the polygenic score could explain 11 percent of the variation in educational attainment. That value puts the score on par with factors like a mother’s level of education, which explains 15 percent of variation, and household income, which only explains about 7 percent.

“We are all subject to a big genetic lottery that corresponds to an environmental lottery,” von Stumm said. She added that research into the links between genetics and academic attainment could push people to examine “fairness” in meritocratic societies, given that some people may carry genetic strengths that give them a slight but significant academic advantage, that, in turn, improves other aspects of their lives.

Measuring a person’s genetic advantage (or disadvantage) also allows scientists to control for it in their studies. That is, they can better study factors that society can change, such as  spending on special programs, compulsory education and school interventions, without having their results biased by a sample of students who are genetically advantaged or disadvantaged.

And researchers can use the polygenic score to assess whether a school has failed students with high potential — or if an intervention helped retain children who were otherwise likely to drop out. In the math paper published in February, Domingue, Harden, and their colleagues found that some schools better supported high school students with low polygenic scores than others, ensuring those kids stayed in school.

Harden hopes to see the science applied in ways that emphasize social justice and provide resources to programs that need them: “That’s how I think we should be using the polygenic scores — if we use them at all.”

This story about the polygenic score was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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When principal Lasse Reichstein stands on the wide, wooden staircase in the middle of his school, he can see and hear more than 650 students — kindergarten through ninth grade — at work all around him. On each of the school’s three stories, teams of teachers huddle to discuss new pedagogies, while some students chitchat and others present their latest projects, all under the bright, clear light of the atrium windows. No classroom walls divide them.

“It really builds, in my view, a special feeling that this is a community,” Reichstein said.

Reichstein works at the Hellerup School in the suburbs north of Copenhagen, Denmark. Hellerup is an open-plan school. There are no classrooms but rather a series of contiguous, multipurpose spaces arrayed around the central stairs, which themselves double as social meeting areas or lecture seats. Furniture and temporary folding walls form moveable enclaves and nooks.

The innovative building, which allows teachers and students to create spaces together, is just one manifestation of the Hellerup School’s vision. Compared to children at a traditional school, students at Hellerup have a tremendous amount of freedom in how they work. Although their schedule is punctuated by brief periods of teacher-led instruction, much of the children’s day is flexible. Students carry out coursework in the manner and pace that suits them — whether it’s sprawled on a sofa in a quiet corner or within a gaggle of talkative classmates sharing a common computer. As a 2013 report from the EU Joint Research Center put it, the school emphasizes “learner choice and empowerment in every possible area.”

The school’s aim is to foster an environment in which student and teacher together are jointly responsible for learning. That heightened sense of ownership, which some research suggests could strengthen students’ desire to learn, is one of the many facets of an educational approach called “personalized learning.” Although definitions vary broadly, personalized learning endeavors to design educational experiences that suit an individual student’s abilities and interests. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction as technology offers new tools for both tracking student learning and customizing classwork based on past performance.

Hellerup, now in its 16th year of operation, is like a living laboratory for these ideas and one that has inspired other schools to take similar steps. Over time, the community has made adjustments, including increasing its emphasis on social development and collaborative work, in part to address concerns that personalized learning might be solitary learning. As the school continues to find its footing, it can offer lessons for other schools to follow, even if they do so on a smaller scale.

Related: Is the new education reform hiding in plain sight?

In many ways, Reichstein insists, Hellerup is “a completely normal public school, with the same goals as everyone else.” Like traditional schools, Hellerup’s student body is divvied up into grades; students are assessed based on projects, portfolios, and standardized tests; and teachers follow the national curriculum.

Teachers at Hellerup also prioritize developing their students’ interpersonal and social skills, a longstanding tradition in the country. In recent years, schools across the Nordic countries have also agreed to emphasize a set of “21st century skills,” such as creativity, metacognition and tech literacy, that should serve students as they become workers and citizens in a rapidly, changing knowledge-based society.

But on the ground at Hellerup, the school looks anything but ordinary. The 10 grades are each split into groups with a designated base (analogous to a homeroom) and teacher. Each morning, students check in with their teacher to discuss their strategies and goals for the day. When a class period begins, students assemble in an agreed-upon area and the teacher gives a brief introduction — often just 15 minutes — to the day’s lessons before students disperse to tackle the associated coursework.

“At first it looks really chaotic, but it’s not,” said Søren Lønstrup, a teacher by training, who is currently a counselor and parent at Hellerup. That’s because teacher-student dialogue, both in the morning and throughout the day, allows each teacher to negotiate with the student how he or she will handle schoolwork. Teacher and student agree in advance where and for how long the child’s work will be conducted — and the teacher helps students make decisions (work alone or in a group, for example) based on the individual skills and the assignment at hand.

Through questions and prompts, the teacher also tries to help students develop greater insights into their individual abilities and the skills they need to build. Teachers might, for instance, help a student think through the stages of a group project or they might greenlight a student’s request to work outside, provided the student agrees to make progress reports at regular intervals. While older students typically enjoy the most autonomy, teachers have to attend carefully to students’ performance and struggles at all grade levels to make sure they are coping well with the added responsibility the freedom brings.

Another major component of the school’s curriculum is project-based work. Several times throughout the academic year, other classes are suspended, and students focus exclusively on their cross-disciplinary projects while working on small teams. At the end of a week devoted to a given project, groups present their work to teachers and peers.

Getting the balance between project-work, which allows students to tackle complex problems that draw on diverse skills, and lesson-based instruction can be tricky. When Reichstein joined Hellerup in 2015, project weeks exceeded regular instruction weeks. At that time, however, Reichstein also noted that students, despite performing well across subjects in their final exams, showed some weaknesses in reading and writing. In response, teachers have opted to increase the number of instruction weeks versus project weeks (it’s now roughly 50:50). “We still want to be a project-based learning school,” Reichstein said, “but we need to make room to learn the basic skills.”

Related: What’s school without grade levels?

When the school opened in 2002, it made headlines not only in Denmark but across Europe for its daring design and pedagogy. Education researchers flocked to visit and observe teachers and students at work. The central staircase, meanwhile, has become a reference point for architects around the world.

Hellerup is not the first or only open-plan school (a concept that’s existed since the 1960s). Nor was it the first school in Denmark to explore philosophies to support personalized, student-directed learning (Reichstein previously worked in another Copenhagen school with similar goals). But the Hellerup project was noteworthy in how ambitiously it combined new teaching and architectural ideas.

Speaking of the building itself, Prakash Nair, an architect and president of the school-planning firm Fielding Nair International, called Hellerup “an adventure in change.” Nair, who has helped design many open-plan schools, explained that these buildings resemble contemporary working environments, but also enhance student autonomy and teacher collaboration.

In fact, Lønstrup, the counselor, points out that the open design at Hellerup requires cooperation. Without walls, the space creates total transparency: Everyone always knows what colleagues are doing and all must coordinate to share common areas. (No one would yell at a student in this environment, he explains. The teachers have agreed that is not a practice they want in their school — and everyone would know if someone broke that rule.)

That style does not appeal to every teacher, Lønstrup acknowledges. And it takes time for people to adjust. The week before school starts, therefore, is a crucial time for teachers and administrators to review, discuss and strategize for the coming year. Teams spend time firming up their techniques and approaches, to prevent backsliding into more traditional methods.

Students also have to adjust to the school. In Denmark, families have “free choice”: Parents can select, and children attend, any public school, provided there is room for new students. “I’ve been here since kindergarten and I like it a lot,” explained Anna, an eighth-grader, but, she added, her brother did not enjoy the school’s unusual space. He transferred, preferring a traditional classroom with assigned rooms and desks.

Related: A year of personalized learning: Mistakes, moving furniture and making it work

Hellerup is still, in many ways, a young school. But it’s already had an impact. Louise Tidmand, who is studying personalized learning as part of her graduate work at Denmark’s Aarhus University, points out that Hellerup’s scale of innovation has inspired other communities and educators. “Hellerup School was all out there, changing rooms, everything,” she said. “Now baby steps are being taken in other schools.” Other Danish schools have since adopted more flexible Hellerup-like student schedules, for example, and project-based learning is increasingly popular.

Hellerup has also had to wrestle with challenges familiar to those who’ve experimented with personalized learning. For instance, critics question whether hyper-individualized learning experiences deprive students of opportunities to interact with each other.

Reichstein believes the school has already made shifts to alleviate this issue. “We have also moved a little bit away from the very individualized perspective and now we are focusing on building strong learning communities,” he said.

In practice, this change has been gradual. When the school opened, building on then-current trends in education that emphasized the idea that each child has a learning style, teachers used daily dialogues to help students identify their preferences and make the most of their personal style. As research challenged the ‘learning styles’ concept, teachers turned to newer ideas, guiding students in identifying strengths and targeting weaknesses. Today, teachers spend a significant amount of time encouraging students to develop interpersonal and collaborative skills, which are strengthened through team-based work.

Overreliance on technology is a recurring concern about personalized learning. Apps that serve up classwork based on student ability, for instance, risk putting each child in a separate learning bubble, isolated from others.

“It’s quite a dilemma,” Tidmand said, noting research suggests that too much time online could hurt social development.

The Hellerup School, meanwhile, has always emphasized student access to technology, although it has adjusted policies over time. Students spend much of their school day on computers, which they use to conduct research, work on assignments and, occasionally, communicate with each other.

Until recently, many students were also free to use cell phones. Initially, the school tried to reduce phone use, by allowing phone access only to students in grades 7 to 9, for example. Last year, however, a ban on smart phones was extended to all students, a decision driven by the desire to decrease student reliance on virtual interaction.

“We are always making changes here,” Lønstrup said. “Sometimes it’s two steps forward and one step back.” He added, however, that this flexibility is an ideal mindset for students and teachers alike, “We’re learning all the time.”

This story about personalized learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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With just two words, a classroom can be thrown into chaos. Anne Gregory, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, recalls just such a scenario when an angry high school student shouted an expletive (“F— off!”) at his teacher, bringing class to a halt.

Gregory, who studies school discipline, wasn’t present for the outburst itself but she saw its aftermath. At many schools, she explains, the response would be simple: send the student straight to an administrator to mete out punishment, probably a suspension.

Instead, the vice principal came to the classroom. He dismissed most students for their lunch break while inviting anyone who felt personally affected by the incident to remain in the room with the teacher and the outspoken student. Then that smaller group, under the vice principal’s guidance, discussed what had just happened.

Gregory was witnessing a restorative circle. It’s a practice derived from a movement in education known as restorative justice, an approach to discipline that replaces punishment with repairing harm. And it is sweeping across schools nationwide.

In the classroom Gregory observed, all those gathered shared their perspective. The teacher expressed remorse for reacting to the student’s outburst with so much frustration. Another student reflected on her own struggles with anger management. And the young man whose words sparked the incident apologized and described how the stress of a difficult morning had boiled over in his behavior. He then agreed to help his teacher set up her Powerpoint and distribute textbooks at the beginning of each class as a way of compensating his classmates’ lost instructional time.

Related: Has video killed the dreaded red grading pen?

The incident neatly illustrates how the restorative process brings a community together at a moment when, traditionally, conflict might divide the classroom. But is it worth all of that effort? Evidence from the court system, school surveys and controlled experiments suggests restorative justice can indeed do a lot of good. Although more studies are needed to explore its full effects on schools, the research thus far hints that this approach to discipline helps people feel respected and that they, in turn, show greater respect for rules.

To understand restorative justice, it’s worth looking at its roots. About forty years ago, criminal justice scholars and reformers in North America and Europe began exploring justice across cultures and studying the perspectives of perpetrators. “Eye for an eye” thinking, they found, may be a longstanding part of Western society, but that’s not true everywhere: some communities place reconciliation above retribution. Inspired by this realization, the restorative justice movement was born.

Restorative justice courts in countries including New Zealand, Rwanda and South Africa, for example, developed restorative practices based on the traditions of indigenous communities to address issues as diverse as genocide and petty theft. Much like the restorative circle Gregory witnessed, these courts bring victims and offenders together in dialogue to discuss each person’s perspective. Offenders have to take responsibility for their actions and commit to a plan to mitigate the damage they’ve caused.

Behavioral science hints at many advantages of this approach. First, although punishment has its uses — for instance, it warns everyone in a community that there are consequences to bad actions, which in turn make us more willing to cooperate with one another — it is also an imperfect deterrent. In criminal justice, after all, experts broadly recognize that people convicted of crimes have a high likelihood of reoffending.

Furthermore, research reveals that punishing offenders may not necessarily meet victims’ needs. Oriel FeldmanHall, an assistant professor of psychology at Brown University, has discovered — using simple scenarios where a person cheats another out of a payout — that most “victims” would rather receive compensation than see offenders punished. (In fact, it’s often third parties who were not personally harmed that are most eager for punishment on the victim’s behalf.)

Restorative justice, meanwhile, with its emphasis on community, empathy and perspective-taking, may make up for some of the shortcomings of traditional disciplinary action. In the U.S., for example, juvenile courts that practice restorative justice have significantly reduced recidivism compared with those using traditional approaches.

“It’s incredibly amazing what can happen in these courts,” FeldmanHall says. “They’ve been very good at keeping young teenagers from going back to jail.” The thinking goes that the highly participatory process that characterizes restorative justice requires offenders to engage with and understand how their actions have affected others; in turn, the community has to reckon with what drove a perpetrator’s behavior.

Related: Piqued: The case for curiosity

Encouraged by such successes, psychologists and educators have attempted to translate this work to school discipline. One such translator is Kathy Evans, an associate professor of education at Eastern Mennonite University, co-author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice in Education. She sees three central priorities at the movement’s core: relationship-building, repairing harm and creating more equitable environments.

“Restorative justice can’t just be a set of things that we do,” Evans says. “It has to be a framework for how we view teaching and learning.” For example, whereas traditional school discipline emphasizes managing bad behaviors, restorative approaches start by encouraging students and teachers to embrace the idea that all members of the school community should be treated with dignity and fairness. The circle process, in which every voice is heard and multiple perspectives considered, is one example. As a result, proponents argue, students take the school’s rules more seriously because they feel more invested in that community and their school relationships.

And there’s evidence for that effect. In 2016, a study led by Jason Okonofua, a professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, found that a brief empathy training program for middle-school teachers not only changed their behavior but shifted student perspectives. Post-intervention, the team found, middle schoolers felt more respected and motivated to behave better.

Another study from Anne Gregory and her colleagues surveyed 412 students across 29 classrooms where teachers had received restorative justice training specifically. The researchers found that the more teachers immersed themselves in restorative practices, the better students rated their relationships with these teachers. And the strong relationships in turn linked to a greater sense of respect between teacher and student and fewer disciplinary referrals.

Given these findings, it’s perhaps unsurprising that restorative practices are popular with students. In fact, at least some teens and kids adopt the techniques for their own use. A 2016 study from researchers from the University of Maine at Farmington and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that many students liked restorative circles so much that they used circles as alternatives to fights in out-of-class disputes.

However, further study is needed to explore all of the possible effects. For example, supporters of restorative justice sometimes tout its potential to reduce racial disparities in discipline. Recently, Gregory and several colleagues studied suspension data from a Colorado school district to explore that question. They found that schools employing restorative responses to disciplinary problems issued fewer out-of-school suspensions than those without such interventions. Yet restorative justice did not, in fact, alter the fact that black students receive disproportionately more suspensions. Additional research will be needed to suss out why.

One factor that co-author Yolanda Anyon, an assistant professor at the University of Denver School of Social Work, flags is that schools implement restorative justice in various ways. “What’s happening that’s unfortunate is that restorative justice is being seen as just an alternative to suspension,” she says.

Instead, because restorative justice is really, fundamentally, meant to entail a shift in mindsets, it’s a substantial investment of time and energy. “People at every level of the school community need to be on board and fully immersed in both the practice and philosophy of restorative justice,” Gregory says.

Or as Evans points out: “We define restorative justice as a shift in culture. We don’t change culture quickly.”

This story about restorative justice was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Jamie Jirout was not the sort of student who simply took a textbook at its word. In her first semester of college, she asked her psychology professor if she could assist in the professor’s research. Jirout’s interest wasn’t fueled by the fact that she found the coursework convincing — quite the opposite.

“I’d read something in the textbook and then I’d think, that doesn’t really make sense with what I’ve seen, how do they know that?” she recalls. She wanted to reconcile that gap and so, threw herself into research.

Her quest for answers has propelled her career to the present day. Jirout is now an assistant professor of education at the University of Virginia, where one of her primary research interests is studying curiosity in the classroom.

That research is sorely needed. Despite the centrality of curiosity to all scientific endeavors, there’s a relative dearth of studies on the subject itself. Fortunately, scientists such as Jirout and others are actively unraveling this concept and, in the process, making a convincing case that we can and should teach young minds to embrace their inquisitive nature.

Far from driving the demise of cats, curiosity comes with many benefits. Studies suggest it’s linked to joy on the job, social skills and even a happy disposition. And in an academic context, greater curiosity generally predicts greater success.

In April, for example, Prachi Shah, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, published findings from a study of 6,200 children and found that elevated curiosity was linked to higher math and literacy skills among kindergarteners. That effect remained strong even when researchers compared kids with similar levels of “effortful control,” or the ability to concentrate and pay attention. Even more surprising, she discovered that students from impoverished backgrounds with a strong thirst for knowledge performed as well as those from affluent homes.

“At high levels [of curiosity], the achievement gap associated with poverty was essentially closed,” Shah says. That finding hints that promoting inquisitive thinking could reduce differences in school performance related to socioeconomic disadvantage. In future work, Shah hopes to identify parenting styles that help explain why some students are so driven to learn, which might lead to interventions benefiting economically disadvantaged children.

Related: Has video grading killed the dreaded red pen?

Meanwhile, neuroscience is starting to explain curiosity’s power. When we’re hungry for answers, our brain activity changes in ways that help us retain new information. For one, the curious mind engages processes and brain regions associated with anticipating a reward. We want to learn more because the answers are satisfying. In addition, the hippocampus, a memory hub, ramps up activity, preparing to store information. The more we want to know an answer, research suggests, the more memorable it becomes.

“It’s also probably tied to depth of processing,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. In ongoing research, she has found that curiosity can predict not only how much teens will remember about a story they’ve read, but also how thoughtfully they reflect on the story’s characters. “They can take multiple perspectives, try to integrate and reconcile them, [and] they appreciate the feelings people have that drive their actions,” she says.

But unraveling the factors that shape a curious mind has long been a daunting prospect. “It’s so difficult to study,” says Shah of the University of Michigan. Not only is the concept difficult to measure, she explains, but also “there isn’t a well-defined or recognized definition of what curiosity is.”

Rather than being clear-cut, curiosity overlaps with other psychological constructs such as intrinsic motivation and an open personality. And there’s evidence for both the idea that curiosity is a trait (not unlike extroversion or neuroticism) that’s pretty stable within each person and that it is a state (akin to happiness or hunger) that can wax and wane based on context.

“Curiosity is automatic, it’s in our DNA … We’re born curious about so many things,” says psychologist, author and researcher Scott Barry Kaufman. But we’re not equally curious about everything, he says. Instead we each have special interests and natural proclivities.

When we talk about curiosity in an academic context, Kaufman points out, we are describing a desire to acquire very specific kinds of knowledge. “You don’t need to be more curious about eating pizza,” he says.

Indeed, an as yet unpublished study of 92 kids from grades 1 through 6 found that all of the students exhibited some level of curiosity. But for the most part their curiosity was directed towards social and extracurricular interests — not schoolwork. The challenge for teachers is finding a way to encourage interest in what’s happening in class.

Related: Are science fairs unfair?

One way to do that, Kaufman argues, is allowing kids to follow their interests. Immordino-Yang, for example, has found that when classwork connects to topics that students care about, they engage more deeply. She points to a New York City school where teachers connected chemistry coursework to discussions of lead in the water in Detroit. “The science and societal implications inform and drive one another so kids can connect to the bigger purpose of these academic skills,” she says.

Another option is for teachers to model curious behavior. Curiosity, as it turns out, is contagious. In 2015, for example, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that a robot that expressed enthusiasm for learning and actively speculated about a story’s outcome during a reading activity with a child could inspire that youngster’s desire for knowledge.

For her part, Jirout suspects that a teacher’s language can encourage kids to think like creative detectives about their schoolwork. “It really can be subtle differences,” she says. “Not just answering a student’s question but acknowledging ‘thank you for asking that question.’”

She also believes teachers can be models of how to be comfortable with uncertainty. That idea stems from the fact that, in her work, Jirout defines and measures curiosity in terms of how people respond to gaps in their knowledge. Teachers can demonstrate through their own mistakes or uncertainty that admitting to not knowing something opens up an opportunity for learning.

They can also adjust the levels of freedom and handholding they give students. With curiosity, you need just enough information to be intrigued — too little can make a situation bewildering and too much robs you of the opportunity to explore a topic and learn for yourself. Curiosity, then, like so many things, is all about balance.

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A decade ago, English teacher David Narter had a revelation. One of his students had asked for extra guidance on her writing. She and Narter, a teacher at the Leyden High Schools, outside Chicago, sat down to review an essay of hers that he’d marked up. Narter started by simply reading his comments aloud. To his surprise, that process made a big difference.

In an article for the English Journal, Narter recounts how the student found his feedback more encouraging when he expressed it orally. As his student explained to him, “When I see the writing all over the paper, it just sounds like you’re saying, ‘You’re a bad writer.’ But now I feel like I can actually write this.”

Feedback is a funny beast. We all need pointers on our performance, but giving and receiving feedback can be fraught with misunderstanding. Take red pens. Social psychologists and sociologists have found that, as opposed to blue ink, grading in crimson can lead to more aggressive critique. The recipients of these mark-ups, meanwhile, may see their teacher as less approachable.

Fortunately, some simple, creative changes can help. Although Narter could not provide one-on-one counseling to every student, he has found a way to simulate such tête-à-têtes to reach a larger audience: by replacing written comments with personalized, five-minute video reviews of each assignment. The videos, he has found, allow him to provide useful, big-picture commentary. They also keep students feeling motivated rather than deflated — and the task takes Narter less time than writing out his notes.

The implication, then, is that the more we know about a speaker or writer, the better we’ll interpret his or her meaning. Riordan has studied text messages and email where, broadly, we struggle to communicate fully. In 2016, she found, for instance, that we tend to overestimate how well we share our feelings via email — even among friends. Happily, the study also hinted that this confidence was slightly more warranted when people have known each other longer. (It also found that people were more likely to accurately interpret negative emotions than positive ones.)

If a student doesn’t know his teacher well, Riordan points out, it may be easier for him to misinterpret her feedback. What’s more, without cues like tone of voice or facial expression, a reader’s mood can easily color his interpretations. If a student is feeling anxious and distressed, it’s probable he’ll take corrections critically. (Thus, it’s easy to imagine why Narter’s student was so reassured by his spoken commentary.)

Of course, we receive even more cues when we communicate in-person. Mahdi Roghanizad, an assistant professor of management and organizational studies at Canada’s Western University, has demonstrated that we’re more persuasive when we make requests face-to-face than via email. He has also found that people are better at gauging a stranger’s potential generosity when chatting in person, rather than in a video-to-video format (a la Skype). This in-person advantage disappears, however, when people wear mirrored sunglasses, obstructing eye contact.

Evolutionary psychology, he says, offers a possible explanation: “Our brain has evolved to communicate face-to-face, the more we go away from that specific channel, the less efficient we are.”

That logic might also explain why online-only courses, including much-vaunted MOOCs, struggle to retain students. But could video technology enhance these courses by adding more human elements?

Another Chatham professor, Meigan Robb of the nursing department, is trying to find out. Robb teaches an online course to experienced, degree-holding nursing professionals. Yet, just like Narter, she’s found that many pupils take away far more from a brief video than a densely edited manuscript. “I was pouring my heart and soul into [written feedback],” she recalls. But the students, she says, “didn’t do anything I asked them to do.”

To remedy that, she now combines written edits, audio files and narrated presentations to comment on her students’ work, both at the level of individual assignments and their overall progress in the course. Although it’s time-consuming, Robb believes the approach makes the class more engaging.

Back at Monash, Phillips reports that students in classes with video feedback seem to take greater responsibility for their work. “It’s the only time ever that I’ve had a student apologize for failing,” he says of a recent class in which he used video. He suspects the rich, individualized feedback helped the student form a more personal connection to the course. That may be a small fail for the student but a big win for video.

This story about video grading was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up here for our newsletter.

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Springtime is science fair season. Thousands of kids across the country, from elementary through high school, spend weeks or months coaxing seedlings to grow, building devices to harness solar energy and carefully mixing acids and bases.

Often, as was certainly the case for me as an eighth grader in suburban Pennsylvania, the result is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise. Parents regularly join in the effort, helping students design their experiments and test their results — not to mention ferrying them back and forth from stores to pick up supplies.

For many, the task is stressful, but also formative. My science fair project, which involved investigating how compressing insulation affects its ability to block heat, was hardly glamorous but it was far and away the most memorable experiment of my first 13 years of school.

As educational opportunities, science fairs let students tackle the scientific method hands on. Classically that process begins with identifying a question, developing a hypothesis to answer it and then devising an experiment to test that hunch. In principle, kids who participate will not only learn about science but may also be inspired to join the next generation of scientists and engineers. But the fairs also have problems.

For starters, there’s a growing sense among some scientists and educators that many science fairs aren’t actually very good at teaching kids about, well, science. The field of science is ever changing and advancing, but the fair sticks to fairly rigid, traditional rules. Real scientific research can be observational, collaborative and creative — approaches that are sometimes verboten to science fair participants. For example, students often have to design experiments that involve manipulating a situation in some way, whereas many actual scientists, such as primatologists and astronomers, simply study their subjects over time, looking for patterns in that data.

“Jane Goodall would not have had her science fair project accepted,” said William McComas, a professor of science education at the University of Arkansas, at the February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “There’s a sort of archaic notion about how science works that’s embedded into a lot of the judging.”

And too often the fair is a burden on families and teachers. Jackie DeLisi, a research scientist at the Education Development Center, a Massachusetts nonprofit, has found that schools and families invest a lot of time and money in these fairs; teachers may spend as much as six weeks of class time preparing for them. Furthermore, if the fair becomes a contest between kids with financial resources and plenty of parental help, and students without access to fancy supplies or a grown-up’s guidance, it’s worth asking whether science fairs are fair.

Related: Teaching kids not to be scared of math might help them achieve

The good news is that some schools are conducting truly radical experiments on the science fair itself. Among the most intriguing: taking the competition out of science fairs. Under this model, students are evaluated based on their mastery of the scientific method rather than being pitted against one another.

It’s a solution that could certainly reduce stress for parents. Susan Messina is a mother in Washington, D.C., whose parody science fair poster, entitled ‘How much turmoil does the science project cause families?’ went viral a few years ago. As she wrote in a Huffington Post article: “[B]y getting rid of the stupid competition aspect, we wouldn’t have kids (or, let’s be clear, parents) competing to see who does the coolest project.”

And, argues bioethicist Frederick Grinnell of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the shift might enhance a student’s mastery and enjoyment of science. In a study published last year, Grinnell surveyed 302 students (from high school through graduate school) about their experience with science fairs. As part of his analysis, he uncovered that while the students generally enjoyed participating in science fairs, they didn’t care for the competition. “None of the kids like requiring the competitive science fair,” he said.

Grinnell even suspects that competitive science fairs might hinder learning — and there’s some research to back him up. For three decades, researchers have been scrutinizing how competition motivates student behavior. Experiments by Carol Dweck in 2003, then a professor of psychology at Columbia University, suggest that students who are driven to learn for its own sake or for personal growth tend to stick to their studies longer than their highly competitive peers. People who want to outperform others, it turns out, get an emotional boost when they succeed, but any negative feedback stymies their interest in a subject. Individuals who value learning seem to be more resilient, persisting despite failures.

Another downside to competition? It’s distracting. In a pair of studies from 2015 and 2016, Rutgers University psychologists found that competition can harm how well our memories perform. Using neuroimaging, the researchers discovered that when people in the study were told how they were doing on memory exercises relative to other participants, areas of the brain typically associated with how we think about ourselves fired up while actual memory performance weakened. “Participants are so worried about focusing on how the other person is doing they’re not adequately learning,” said Brynne DiMenichi, a research fellow and an author of both papers.

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Yet competition has its uses. It is a powerful motivator, one that many people enjoy, and, as Dweck, now at Stanford University, points out, learning how to win or lose is valuable. “It’s too extreme to say competition is never good because it also could imply we shouldn’t hold children to standards,” she said.

The best approach, argues Dweck, foregrounds the goals of learning and mastery. To do that, she says, science fair judges would evaluate student projects based on the scientific process behind them rather than the flashy final product or spectacular results. Careful interviews with each child, she says, would push students to reflect on scientific inquiry itself. By this logic, a very simple study or an experiment with negative results could still be a winner.

The model she describes resembles the “Standards-Based Science Fair,” developed by Peter Rillero, a professor of science education at Arizona State University in Phoenix. Judges evaluate budding scientists not against each other but based on their performance in certain categories: how well they form a hypothesis, for example, or analyze their data. Grinnell says this approach is now used by many schools that forgo competitive science fairs. Students who do want to push onward to district- or state-level competitions could still “opt in” to that experience, he notes.

Making science fairs noncompetitive is just one possible tweak on the classic model, but it’s a reminder that the science fair needs to be flexible to serve diverse communities. In one school DeLisi studied, for example, instructors decided to make the fair an entirely in-class project, thereby leveling the playing field for students from families with limited means. Other schools de-emphasize the scientific method entirely. They may instead prioritize students’ project management skills or focus on making science more interesting to kids by, for instance, inviting scientists to discuss their work.

“Ultimately the schools need to figure out what they want their students to get out of the experience and how to structure the fair and invest resources to achieve those goals,” DeLisi said. That process may take some trial and error — but that, too, is in the spirit of the scientific method.

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Imagine a device that in just 30 minutes makes your brain more receptive to new information, cutting the time it takes to learn in half. Some neuroscientists say they have demonstrated this very feat.

Their work is part of an effort to explore how low levels of continuous electrical current, delivered to the brain via electrodes placed on the scalp, could alter neural activity and improve a person’s performance.  In one experiment, for example, electric stimulation accelerated how quickly participants learned to spot concealed bombs or snipers in a military training simulation.

“We almost doubled people’s learning rate,” says Vincent Clark, a professor of psychology and clinical neuroscience at the University of New Mexico who conducted this research with his colleagues. Since the 2012 publication of that research, he and other scholars have replicated the study several times with similar results.

Clark’s study is not a lone example. Findings suggest this form of electric stimulation — known as transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS — could make you better at math, more creative and even boost memory. Last year, the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced it would support a program using this technique in order to explore whether tDCS could accelerate foreign language learning by 30 percent. (The Department of Defense also financed the University of New Mexico team’s research.) And some members of the U.S. ski jumping team competing in the Winter Olympics trained using electric stimulation headbands from the company Halo Neuroscience, which sells their headsets to the general public.

The technique, which has existed for nearly two decades, is relatively simple. People place electrodes over regions of the brain relevant to a given task, then activate the electric stimulation while practicing that task. Researchers believe the electricity can encourage brain cells to form new connections and that such connectivity is fundamental to the process of learning. Transcranial direct current stimulation is one of several non-invasive approaches used to stimulate the brain, but it’s unique in that brave do-it-yourself-ers are trying out tDCS at home. That’s because the equipment is fairly cheap and safety concerns are minimal. At its most basic, the electrodes and a nine-volt battery can cost less than $100. Several studies have found only minor side effects: at worst, skin discomfort under the electrodes.

There’s evidence its popularity is steadily growing. For several years, Reddit has hosted a forum on DIY tDCS; it attracts as many as 10,000 visitors each month who trade opinions on topics such as which headset to purchase or how to use stimulation to help with mastering the guitar. On Youtube, enthusiasts share how they experienced “euphoria” during stimulation or improved their chess performance.

But more recently, companies have made it easier for people to try tDCS at home. On Amazon, the Halo headset, which costs $719, features more than 100 reviews and a four-star rating. Caputron, which sells tDCS equipment, has noted a surge in sales around exam time, leading the company to suspect that college students are zapping their brain to boost study sessions. (In light of that pattern, CEO Robin Azzam notes that the company now sends out discount codes during those timeframes.)

Related: How to study smarter

But for all of the excitement about this approach to mind enhancement, there’s a lot that’s still unknown. And that’s especially true for students who are seeking an edge during cram time.

“The evidence base, as far as the ability to make you perform well on exams and other things, is absolutely incomplete, which is not to say it does or does not work,” says Marom Bikson, a professor at the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York, who has studied tDCS.

Bikson says the research on how tDCS might affect attention, behavior and cognition is still young. He also suspects that, as when students take Adderall or down coffee during exam time, those using tDCS “off-label” are influenced more by anecdotes about the experience than by hard data.

And there are plenty of reasons to be wary of the claims surrounding electric stimulation, according to Emiliano Santarnecchi, a Harvard Medical School instructor in neurology. He says, “It’s not as simple as it seems.”

Santarnecchi employs electrical stimulation in his research and sees it as a powerful tool for learning about the brain. But he says the strongest evidence of tDCS’s effectiveness as a cognitive enhancer comes from studies that pool data from multiple published papers, looking for an overall effect. Unfortunately, that strategy often involves combining many small studies of poor quality to yield a seemingly more significant result. It also means unpublished data that did not find an effect associated with stimulation are neglected.

Santarnecchi says he is also concerned by the lack of knowledge surrounding the effects on other brain regions as a particular area is stimulated. It’s possible, for example, that there might be a hidden cost, such as damage to an unstimulated part of the brain. Nor do we know much about the long-term effects of repeated use of tDCS or if the brain habituates to stimulation over time.

He also emphasizes that every brain is different and it’s hard to know how any one person might react to tDCS. Some data suggest that people may respond differently based on their genes or even their skill in the domain they’re trying to improve. For example, in 2016, one research team found that stimulating part of the prefrontal cortex — an area of the brain that’s involved in thinking and decision making — could improve improvisational ability in amateur jazz musicians but might harm the performance of experts.

And there are those who doubt the efficacy of tDCS altogether. Some scientists argue that many of the gains people attribute to brain zapping could be chalked up to a placebo effect. (A tingling sensation at the scalp, after all, would surely cause many of us to believe something interesting is happening.) There are even researchers who challenge whether the electrical current used in these studies can reach the brain at all.

None of these caveats diminish how exciting brain stimulation could be as a possible tool for studying the brain and even a new form of medicine. Stimulating the motor cortex, for example, could help stroke patients make greater gains during physical therapy. Already, tDCS is approved in Europe to help people suffering from pain conditions and depression, and scientists are exploring its potential to help people with epilepsy, schizophrenia and other conditions. (In fact, many DIY-ers are trying to self-treat their depressive symptoms.)

But until more is known about how it works and the best ways to use it, at-home tDCS is very much an “at your own risk” experiment. For some people, that uncertainty is part of the appeal. For the rest of us, it’s worth remembering that we already have some low-risk “biohacks” for learning: eating healthy, staying hydrated, exercising regularly and getting a good night’s sleep.

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Tending toddlers can require endless reserves of energy. Just ask Huyen Le, supervisor of a family resource center in San Jose, California. After a full day’s work managing children’s reading programs and parenting workshops, she returns home to her own two-year-old daughter, Katelynn.

“We do a lot in our center. Sometimes, I forget to do it with my kid at home,” Le says. Seeking inspiration, she turns to her phone where, for the last 10 months, she’s been receiving text messages with simple educational games, tips on how to engage with Katelynn and reminders of simple learning activities they can do together.

The texts come from a team of researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) Labs. Each message goes out to parents or other caregivers and reminds them of the skills young children will eventually need for school and how to help kids build them.

The approach is inspired in part by “nudge” techniques, that is, behavioral interventions that push a person during decision-making towards a certain goal. For example, many employers nudge you to save for retirement by contributing a portion of your paycheck to a 401k. You could always opt out, but making saving a default decision spares you the task of regularly choosing how much to put away – it lightens your cognitive load, so to speak.

Nudges could have a powerful effect on education. Parental engagement can be a major factor in a student’s success or failure – and parents tend to have a lot on their minds. So several researchers are exploring how a simple text-based nudge to parents could improve their kids’ academic performance by making engagement easier and even habitual for parents.

For instance, Peter Bergman, at Teachers College, Columbia University, found that in one West Virginia school district, simply keeping parents in the loop, through texting, as to their child’s absences and grades could cut course failures for middle and high school students by nearly 40 percent. (The Hechinger Report is an independently funded unit of Teachers College.) Reminders made monitoring a child easier, thus increasing the odds mom or dad would stay involved in a kid’s educational life. Texting, Bergman explains, while not the only communication option, is a wide-reaching, effective and inexpensive medium.

The program Le participates in aims at parents of much younger children. Three times a week, researchers from CEPA Labs send parents and other caregivers suggestions on how to support children’s literacy, numeracy and social and emotional skills. Bath time, walks in the park and familiar household interactions become opportunities for children to learn and practice concepts they will later use in school.

For example, a Monday message might flag an important domain (“children need to know the letters to learn how to read & write”); a Wednesday text might provide a related learning activity (such as asking a child to find the first letter in his or her name on signs or labels); and a Friday message might offer encouragement (“Keep pointing out the letters. You’re preparing your child 4 K [Kindergarten]!”).

Results thus far are encouraging. In an analysis of 935 families with children in preschool in the San Francisco Unified School District, Loeb and her colleagues found that after eight months, teachers noted that text-receiving parents asked more questions about their child’s progress than other adults, and the kids themselves improved their literacy skills.

“In the long run it tells us we can positively affect parenting, particularly for kids who have traditionally not been as well served,” says Stanford professor of education Susannah Loeb. In fact, language skills advanced most among kids who started the program with the lowest scores in a literacy assessment.

These approaches work, explains University of Chicago professor Ariel Kalil, because they gradually reshape a parent’s routine and habits. Kalil, who co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab, has found that low-income parents know what they should do with their kids – such as reading more books or practicing counting – but fail to follow through as other parts of their life get in the way. “The issue is basically habit formation, you have a gap between wanting to do something and actually doing it,” she says.

Along with the lab’s other co-director, University of Chicago professor Susan Mayer, Kalil is also exploring text-based nudges for low-income families. For instance, in a six-week study involving 169 parents, Kalil and Mayer gave families tablets preloaded with more than 500 children’s stories.

Half of participating parents were asked to set weekly goals for how much time they would spend reading to kids, and then received texts with reminders of those targets, progress reports on meeting the aims and even notification when they spent the most time reading of any parent in the study in a given week. The other families received a tablet but no additional reading prompts. At the end of the intervention, the adults who had received the extra nudges spent more than twice as much time reading each week with their kids – a difference of 89 minutes on average.

If all of this reminds you of FitBit, but for family time, you’re right. In fact, both Loeb and Kalil make that comparison. Regular reminders of your progress, tips to achieve goals and, yes, gentle social pressure are all nudges that fitness trackers use to not just get you moving but also make walking habitual. If your device breaks, perhaps you won’t make 10,000 steps a day, but you’ll have created a routine that makes it likely you’ll hit, say, 7,000.

In that respect, the texting-based education interventions can also stick. Kalil and Mayer found that three months after their experiment had wrapped up and the tablets had been taken away, the parents who had received nudges were still spending twice as much time reading to their kids as the other families who participated. Building on those successes, Kalil and Mayer are exploring interventions aimed at parents’ math skills, math anxiety and improving preschool attendance.

Perhaps because these interventions help parents achieve their goals in a collaborative, not paternalistic, spirit, families across these programs seem to appreciate the reminders. Le, who has helped enroll other caregivers at center where she works into the Stanford program, says, “They really enjoy receiving the texts.”

She herself likes having a record of activities to try with Katelynn.

“It’s good to have it in the phone,” she says, where she can save a message for later if she can’t act on a tip right away. Given the many demands of parenthood, it can be nice to know that even when things become overwhelming someone will gently nudge you back on track.

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