The capacity for intense focus in our students is a finite resource—a cognitive fuel tank that can, and does, run low. We see the results in the classroom: irritability, impatience, and a fraying of impulse control. But what if one of the most powerful tools for refueling that tank wasn't a new pedagogical strategy, but something far more fundamental?

Five years ago, I wrote about the profound impact that greenery can have on health and learning in The Influence of Greenery on Learning. When I recently listened to Dr. Marc Berman, Director of the Environmental Neuroscience Lab at the University of Chicago, expand on this research on the Many Minds podcast, it prompted me to revisit that post. I was humbled to realize how many of his foundational studies I had completely overlooked. This new understanding reveals that nature is not just an amenity, but a necessity for cognition.

At the start of the episode, Berman unpacks one of the theories I had very briefly mentioned on why greenery might be so rejuvenative: Attention Restoration Theory. According to Berman, the theory posits that our capacity for intense focus, or directed attention, is a finite resource—a cognitive fuel tank that can, and does, run low. When it’s depleted, we can see the results at home and in the classroom: irritability, impatience, and a fraying of impulse control.

Natural environments, on the other hand, engage our involuntary attention—the effortless, bottom-up engagement of our senses captured by the gentle rustling of leaves or the movement of light through the clouds, and it allows our depleted resources for directed, intense focus to restore themselves. Berman terms this “soft fascination.” This is wholly distinct from the “harsh fascination” of a chaotic urban scene, with its blaring horns and noise, which consumes our mental resources.

The cognitive benefits are significant. One of the studies that kickstarted Berman’s research showed a 20% improvement in cognitive performance after a walk in nature. This boost occurred even when participants didn't particularly enjoy the walk, demonstrating a powerful, mood-independent effect.

This research has profound implications for educational equity. A follow-up study found that individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) see even more significant cognitive gains from a nature walk. Conversely, a walk in an urban environment can actually worsen their cognitive performance. This suggests that the lack of green space in many under-resourced communities can be actively harmful to our most vulnerable students. Access to restorative natural environments should therefore not be seen as a luxury, but as a prerequisite for equitable learning.

But what is it about nature that is so restorative? Berman’s explication identifies specific “active ingredients.” It turns out my hunch about fractals was on the right track. His team analyzed what they call low-level visual features to quantify what makes a scene feel “natural.”

Key among these are:

• Fractalness and Compressibility: Natural scenes have high “fractalness”—the repetition of similar patterns at different scales. This visual structure means they are also more “compressible,” like a JPEG file. Our brains find this informational efficiency less demanding to process, which frees up cognitive bandwidth.
• Curved Edges: Natural environments have a high density of non-straight, curved edges, whereas our built environments are dominated more by rigid, straight lines. These curves are not only easier on the eyes, but as one study found, they are also correlated with a viewer's tendency to reflect on deeper topics like their life's journey and spirituality.

Berman furthermore points to additional sensory qualities of nature that go beyond the mere visual:

• Auditory Stimuli: Brief exposure to natural sounds like birdsong, wind, or flowing water has been shown to improve cognitive performance when compared to urban noise.
• Olfactory Stimuli: The air itself carries restorative properties. The scent of damp earth after rain or the airborne chemicals (terpenes) emitted by pine trees can impact our well-being through the olfactory pathway.

For restoration to occur, according to Attention Restoration Theory, an environment must provide a sense of “Being Away” from daily pressures, have enough richness to get lost in (“Extent”), and support a person’s intentions (“Compatibility”). When these elements combine, the mind can truly recharge.

Now pivot that to an educational setting. Imagine a school that embodies these principles. Instead of a long, featureless corridor (no “Extent”), picture a hallway that curves and uses natural materials with fractal patterns like wood grain. Imagine the school itself providing a space for “Being Away” from stressors, a place for creativity and inspiration. By incorporating more trees and natural design principles into our schools, we can improve learning.

Thankfully, we don’t need a week-long immersion in a forest; studies confirm that a restorative “dose” of nature can be as short as 20 minutes. In a world of education reform obsessed with short-term metrics, this research demands we look at a more fundamental input: the physical environment itself. It forces us to ask a provocative question: could 6 hours of instruction plus 2 hours in a park be more productive than 8 straight hours behind a brick wall? The science increasingly suggests that the answer is yes.

For a full, fascinating dive into the research, I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast episode, and then poking around into some of Berman’s studies!

#greenery #learning #attention #neuroscience #schools #ecosystems #wellbeing #AttentionRestorationTheory #environmentalneuroscience #equity

(Note: this was cross-posted on my other blog, Schools & Ecosystems)

Before we venture into the wilds of the possible relations between language and thought, I wanted to build on this idea of how our inner scaffolds are most fully realized through speaking, listening, reading, and writing by geeking out about the beauty and wonder of multilingualism. There was a beautiful study I came across recently that provides a great way to visualize this.

The researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine neural connectivity during English word processing in bilingual (Chinese-English and Spanish-English) and monolingual children.

The study groups included children (ages 5-10 years, Grades K-4) who were English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, or Spanish-English bilinguals, all receiving English-dominant education in the US (recruited from southeast Michigan, USA).

The researchers found that the greater proficiency a child (across all groups) had in both spoken and written language, the stronger the farthest connections across their brains were. In other words, spoken and written language exposure and use made longer distance connections across the brain, and then strengthened and reinforced those connections.

Children who were older and more proficient in spoken and written English showed more long-distance connections within the broader language network and across the two hemispheres, suggesting that advancements in language skills are supported by more integrated neural networks. In other words, the development of short-distance connections supports more basic language functions, while long-distance integrative connections mark more advanced or efficient language processing in older and more proficient children.

Furthermore, among bilinguals they found that the greater proficiency a child had in two languages, the greater the neural density those language networks were. In Spanish bilinguals, the network density was associated with Spanish vocabulary, whereas in Chinese bilinguals, the network density was associated with Chinese character reading. Both groups showed greater network density in English in relation to their heritage language skills (most likely due to greater time spent in instruction and use with that language).

These findings suggest that language development is supported by both short and long distance connectivity in a child’s brain. Moreover, long-distance connections are likely critical in integrating different and more complex aspects of language processes such as phonological and morpho-semantic analyses.

What a wonderful visualization of how our inner scaffolds – the nascent neural networks in our brains – are developed by language and literacy! The more we use language across oral (or signed) and written modalities, the more we refine those networks across our brains. And the more languages we speak (or sign) and write, the more we further strengthen those networks based on the unique features of those languages.

We see this with students who are in dual language programs for multiple years – they begin to outperform their monolingual peers. We see with students who are former English language learners (ELLs) who achieve English language proficiency – after achieving proficiency, they begin to outperform their monolingual peers.

So not only do we want to provide our children with daily textual feasts – but furthermore, with linguistic knowledge-building feasts.

#language #research #neuroscience #brains #literacy #reading #writing #multilingualism #bilinguals

I think there’s something in the nature of presenting to a general audience of educators that compels researchers to attempt to derive generalized implications of their research that can all too easily overstep the confines of their very specialized and specific domains. For example, Mary Helen Immordino-Yano gave a powerful keynote on her ongoing research into emotions and their relation to learning. There were intriguing implications for education from brain scans and surveys of individual children, such as the insight that emotional engagement activates the same part of the brain (the brain stem) that keeps us alive at a subconscious level. This reflects a deeper form of learning that changes consciousness and is only accessed when attention is directed internally, rather than outwardly. Furthermore, and counterintuitively, such emotional engagement is most activated by admiration for others based on the nature of their virtue, rather than merely by a demonstration of their ability.

Her talk was accompanied by useful and trenchant guiding questions for us to consider as implications for education:

• What might this mean for emotional well-being? Character development?
• What might it mean for how we use technology?
• How might this change how we think about productivity? critical thinking?

Yet there was a moment – a very small moment that was more of an aside – when Immordino-Yano drew out themes around “meaningful learning” (i.e. personal connections to ideas, rather than emotions related to outcomes) to make a critique of our entire system of education. There is plenty to critique in our motley assortment of localized systems in the U.S.– but it was a moment that activated my own skepticism, as it must be remembered that Immordino-Yano’s research involves individual kids at a clinic watching a video and responding to questions, and then receiving an fMRI while rewatching the video. Hardly the conditions of a classroom, and extrapolating from such findings to the education system at large may be overstepping those specific findings.

To be clear, I found Immordino-Yano’s keynote to be the most intriguing and powerful of the entire conference – but thus I found it all the more instructive to attempt to maintain that “Goldilocks” balance of a healthy mix of openness and skepticism when considering how findings from research may apply to schools and classrooms.

Another presentation from neural scientist Andre Fenton also made me reflect on the lines between specialized research and extrapolations to classroom practice. Fenton provided a very detailed overview of his research into cognitive control training with mice in a laboratory, and to his credit, he did not make many general extrapolations beyond a few analogies, such as the quote, “What we think we become,” and some general advice such as considering how labs in science class can give kids an opportunity to “discover what is salient and ignore what isn’t” — to give “kids an opportunity to be judicious in how they process the information given to them.”

Relevant to such findings, Andrew Watson warned during his presentation to “never change your practice from research based on non-human animals.” There are indeed intriguing aspects of executive function and cognitive control training as it relates to mice we can consider from Fenton’s research, but until we have psychological studies with humans related to such findings, there may be little we can yet extrapolate on to classroom practice.

As I grappled with this, I realized that this was perfectly OK. We don’t always NEED to immediately overgeneralize specialized findings to classroom practice! We can be intrigued, we can be provoked, we can learn about the specific conditions and findings in relation to the research, and ruminate on what they might mean – but we must resist jumping to overzealous conclusions, and instead maintain our thirst for further research and learning.

Speaking of zealotry, in his keynote, Steven Pinker acknowledged that humanity et al. seems to be losing its collective mind, and provided a call for a cool-headed commitment to rationality and that “cognitive tools should be at the fingertips of every kid.” Pinker doesn’t believe people are irrational; he believes we are “logical about content relevant to our own lives and subject-matter knowledge,” but that we “have more trouble with formal rationality,” the “abstract rules and formulas that can be applied to any content.” We therefore need to make the tools of rationality “second nature,” and ensure the norms of rationality are upholded by our organizations and institutions, including educational ones. How we do this, however, wasn’t entirely clear beyond perhaps explicitly teaching concepts such as confirmation bias, systems of logic, and game theory.

There was something tucked into his talk that I found echoed in other talks as well, including by Andrew Watson, Ulrich Boser, and Jonathan Gottschall, which is that rather than seeking confirmatory evidence for our beliefs, we must acknowledge our own fallibility and instead seek evidence that challenges our thinking. We must seek to falsify our own beliefs to rationally interrogate their veracity.

In Jonathan Gottschall’s talk, he presented the paradox of stories for our species, which is that we possess a unique power that we can harness to expand our perspectives, knowledge, and empathy, but that there is a dark side to storytelling in that we are all too easily captivated by them on venues such as social media, and these seemingly innocuous stories often promote in-group and out-group dynamics through the casting of a villain. To combat this negative undertow of stories, Jonathan Gottschall urges us to maintain skepticism towards our own narratives, not just “the other side’s.”

With that wise advice in mind, I should note that my narrative account of the conference leaves out some truly insightful and compelling insights and information that I gained from talks such as from Carolyn Strom, Daniel Willingham, Ulrich Boser, and William Stixrud, not to mention some further implications from Immordino-Yano’s research findings.

There’s always more to learn! I hope I get an opportunity to attend another Learning and the Brain conference in the future.

#conference #learning #brain #research #neuroscience #skepticism #empiricism #narratives

The project is cool — the researchers have started a cross-linguistic database of brain scans, and their initial findings demonstrate a strong universal neural basis for language across multiple languages. Here’s the key finding that stood out to me:

In summary, we have here established that several key properties of the neural architecture of language—including its topography, lateralization to the left hemisphere, strong within network functional integration, and selectivity for linguistic processing—hold across speakers of diverse languages spanning 11 language families; and the variability we observed across languages is lower than the inter-individual variability. The language brain network therefore appears well-suited to support the broadly common features of languages, shaped by biological and cultural evolution. (Ayyash et al., 2021)

I found out about this paper from this Twitter thread from one of the researchers, Ev Fedorenko, and her thread also provides a neat summary of the project.

As this database of brain scans across languages is built out, it will be interesting to see what specific variations between languages and neural architecture may arise. For example, another recent paper, “Difference Between Children and Adults in the Print-speech Coactivated Network,” examined the brain scans of native Chinese speakers and found some variations from past studies in the brains of developing readers, most likely due to the difference in writing systems in terms of the lack of grapheme-phoneme correspondence for Chinese characters, as well as how a single pronunciation can have many different meanings represented by different visual characters.

Taken together, our findings indicate that print-speech convergence is generally language-universal in adults, but it shows some language-specific features in developing readers. (He et al., 2021)

Overall, it’s fascinating to see how current research converges on the significant universality across languages in terms of how literacy develops, and exciting to see that specific differences between languages and writing systems are beginning to be studied with greater specificity.

As Perfetti and Verhoeven tidily pointed out in their paper:

The story of learning to read thus is one of universals and particulars: (i) Universals, because writing maps onto language, no matter the details of the system, creating a common challenge in learning that mapping, and because experience leads to familiarity-based identification across languages. (ii) Particulars, because it does matter for learning how different levels of language – morphemes, syllables, phonemes – are engaged; this in turn depends on the structure of the language and how its written form accommodates this structure. (Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2021)

#speech #language #literacy #universal #reading #multilingualism #orthography #brain #neuroscience #research

Discuss...

Oral language is baked into our brains. We are born to learn to speak.

Similarly, reading our visual surroundings is second nature. Our eyes are neurally attuned to pick out fine-grained distinctions and patterns amidst the noise.

But written language is something we graft onto our existing circuitry. Graphemes get bootstrapped onto our auditory and visual processing neural networks. We need repeated exposure to letters and words and sentences in print to finetune the fluent mapping of letter sequences and syntactical constructions into comprehension. And if our brain’s existing pathways are resistant to these changes—because our prior experiences with oral language do not well align to the written language (we speak a dialect that diverges more in sound from the spelling, or we haven’t had much exposure to the type of vocabulary and syntax more frequently encountered in written language)—than we may need additional explicit instruction and practice to take us to the point that decoding is fluid and effortless.

But unfortunately, children who may need that extra bit of clear and structured practice often do not receive it. Instead, they are allowed to skip over words they can’t read, and passed onto the next grade.

How can we pave the pathway to proficient reading for all our children?

What We Can Hear Is What We Can Read

There is a reciprocal process between learning letter-sounds and reading letter sequences within words.

As we learn more graphemes, we refine our phonemic awareness, and as we refine our phonemic awareness, we further develop our ability to recognize words in print.

Yet whether we should directly and explicitly practice and teach phonemic awareness itself (apart from phonics) is an area of contention amongst reading specialists, it seems. Furthermore, whether we should teach larger units of letter patterns within words (sometimes called ‘word families’ or ‘rime units’ or ‘phonograms’), is another area of contention, which you can see most explicitly in debates about synthetic vs. analytic phonics. There’s also arguments about when to introduce deeper aspects of word study, such as etymology and morphology (some Structured Word Inquiry proponents claim it should start from the very beginning). And an even further area of debate is whether we should teach phonemic awareness to proficiency beyond blending and segmenting to the advanced levels of deletion and substitution of phonemes.

Since beginning my journey into reading research, I’d come across these debates, and dug quite a bit further into more research and still feel conflicted. From a research perspective, the weight does seem to land primarily on the side of teaching the key aspects of phonemic awareness first and foremost, and not bothering with other phonological skills like onset-rime or advanced phonemic awareness activities (see the last issue of The Reading League Journal and the latest findings on PA for more).

And yet I still resist hardline rigidity against phonological awareness instruction and onset-rime practice. I believe these practices have their place. I should preface this by saying that I’m open to further critique and research that will challenge my suppositions.

Here’s my argument:

What we know about “the reading brain” is that reading is unnatural, and that as I outlined in the narrative at the start of this piece, we are essentially bootstrapping reading onto existing visual and aural brain architecture. For some kids, this process occurs smoothly and implicitly, but for many other students, it doesn’t, and they require not only more practice, but more explicit instruction and practice.

A fluent reader can move almost instantaneously between letter sequences and larger chunks of words (smaller and larger “grain sizes”), depending on the context of the sentence. For students that do not have such fluency, their cognitive energy is taxed by disentangling the sounds and meaning for each word.

Furthermore, for students who are learning English as a new language alongside of learning to read, or for students who speak an English dialect that has greater differences from the written form of English, their brains are doing additional work. For such students, it seems to me that providing more opportunities to gain fluency and move from phonemes to larger grain sizes and back would support the formation of their written English brain. For example, consider a second grade student who speaks Spanish as his first language who just arrived in the U.S. and is learning to both read and speak in English. Spanish is a primarily syllabic language, and phonemes map more directly onto spellings. Providing this student with more opportunities to practice hearing, speaking, and mapping phonemes, onsets, rimes, and morphemes into written words will support his reading development and his language development.

So I argue that the progression and practice of our word-level instruction should move recursively from a hearing a word as a whole, to hearing and seeing its chunks (by “chunks” I mean rime units and roots/affixes), to seeing and hearing its individual letters and sounds, to seeing its chunks, to seeing the word as a whole. Through this recursive movement, we can support the neural connections that need to form in the fluent reading brain.

Honestly, I find the rigidity of some against phonological awareness instruction and onset-rime unit practice misplaced. We’re not talking significant instructional time here. A systematic program for phonological awareness, such as Heggerty, for example, is 10-15 minutes a day. That’s a small investment for a potentially huge payoff in prevention of later reading difficulty for the kids who need it the most.

Since writing this, I have changed and revised my thinking about the teaching of phonemic awareness and of the practice of phonology that is not connected to letters. Read more here

Graphic from Is It Ever Too Late to Teach an Older Struggling Reader? Using Diagnostic Assessment to Determine Appropriate Intervention by Carrie Thomas Beck

On the trajectory of beginning reading skills, onset-rime practice may possibly provide an onramp, though this is contested and some (I think convincingly) argue that focusing on phonemic awareness first and foremost is better bang for the buck. But after phonics instruction has begun and students have acquired their letter sounds to proficiency and are learning the various generalizations and irregularities of the English language in print, I believe that rime units have a critical role to play, along with beginning inflectional morphology like the plural ‘s’, past tense, ‘ed’, etc.

Why is this? It’s because as readers develop fluency in decoding unknown words, they also began to develop greater efficiency in moving between smaller and larger grain sizes within words. For example, a 3rd grade reader encountering a new multisyllabic word in an informational text, such as “additional,” will slow themselves down and pay attention to the word parts, using their knowledge of syllabication and morphemes and word families as needed to break it up and recognize its sounds and meaning.

So gaining proficiency in advanced phonemic awareness alongside onset-rime and morphological awareness can potentially boost those students who are showing up in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades as struggling readers, even if they have received systematic phonics instruction K-1.

Here’s a few pieces of research aligning with my claims:

• Reading Acquisition, Developmental Dyslexia, and Skilled Reading Across Languages: A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory
• Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture
• David Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency hypothesis” (read pretty much anything by him to learn more about this, he has tons of lectures posted online as well. His Essentials book is essential reading indeed

Don’t agree? Fire away! But one thing I want to stress is that you consider the student populations that have been assessed or worked with in your experience or research. Are they historically marginalized and underserved populations? Are they learning English as a new language? Are they struggling with a learning disability? I’m less interested in arguments that center students who typically benefit from the existing methods of instruction.

Since writing this, I have changed and revised my thinking about the teaching of phonemic awareness and of the practice of phonology that is not connected to letters. Read more here

#phonemicawareness #phonology #sounds #speech #reading #literacy #language #neuroscience #research