Category: Educational Psychology

 — When a beginning reader reads aloud, her progress is apparent: Hunched over a book, little index finger blazing the way, she moves intently from sound to sound, word to word.

I do not like green eggs and ham!

I do not like them, Sam-I-am!

But when that same child reads silently, it's much harder to measure how much she is reading — or understanding. Yet as she advances through school, teachers will expect her to learn increasingly through silent rather than oral reading.

Researchers at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) at Florida State University will tackle that paradox over the next four years. Funded by a $1.6 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, a team headed by FCRR researcher Young-Suk Kim will examine a poorly understood area of literacy: the relationship between oral and silent reading, and how those skills, in turn, relate to reading comprehension.

"One of the reasons why silent reading has not been paid attention to sufficiently is that it is difficult to measure," said Kim, also an assistant professor in Florida State's College of Education. "The other piece is, people may just assume that, if you read well orally, then you'll also read well silently."

However, studies show that's not the case for all students, said Kim. Some may pretend to read, read inefficiently, or struggle over the bridge from oral to silent reading. That crucial transition will be the focus of the new project.

Kim and her team will follow 400 Leon County (Fla.) students from first to third grade, testing them three times a year to measure when and how they develop accurate oral reading and advance from oral to fluent silent reading.

"Initially, kids sound out each letter, then put all the sounds together, and then make a word," explained Kim, a former classroom teacher. "As their reading develops further, they will be able to do that in their minds. But initially, it's not going to be as efficient or fast."

Beginning silent readers often sound words out in their heads, a cumbersome process called subvocalization.

"What we ultimately want is instantaneous recognition without subvocalization because that's faster," Kim said. "But we don't know how that process happens."

Until recently, measuring silent reading was difficult: After all, you can't hear the child's progress. But researchers can now see this progress, with the help of advanced eye-tracking technologies that follow students' eye movements as they read text on a computer screen.

"It's very fascinating how precisely we can measure this," Kim said. "We can even determine exactly which letter a student is focusing on."

Kim and her team will also examine instructional strategies for promoting reading fluency, and hope that this new grant will be followed by a second one in which they will test these approaches. The ultimate goal is to help students read faster and better, a skill critical to their success throughout their years in school.

"Because children read faster in silent mode, we want to really promote that," Kim said. "But because we don't know how children transition there, it's still one big question."

Several other Florida State faculty members have key roles on the project. Yaacov Petscher, FCRR research associate, is co-principal investigator. Working as co-investigators are Carol Connor, FCRR researcher and associate professor in the Department of Psychology; Christian Vorstius, FCRR research associate; and Richard Wagner, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Psychology and associate director at the FCRR.

An important context for figuring out problems through reasoning is puzzle play, say researchers at University of Chicago.

Psychologist Susan Levine and colleagues recently conducted a study that found 2-4 year-old children, who play with puzzles, have better spatial skills when assessed at 4 1/2 years of age.

After controlling for differences in parents' income, education and overall amount of parent language input, researchers say puzzle play proved to be a significant predictor of spatial skills–skills important in mathematics, science and technology and a key aspect of cognition.

"As early as the preschool years and persisting into adulthood, there are individual and gender differences on certain spatial tasks, notably those involving mental rotation [of objects]," the researchers write in their report, published in Developmental Science. "These variations are of considerable interest because of their reported relation to mathematics achievement."

Improvements in math education are a point of emphasis for the National Science Foundation, which partly funded the study. "This study brings greater awareness of the learning opportunities for children in everyday activities," said Soo-Siang Lim, program director for the NSF's Science of Learning Centers Program. "It is important because this and follow-up studies could potentially lead to relatively easy and inexpensive interventions to improve spatial skills important for STEM education."

STEM education involves science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for development in these areas. In particular, the ability to mentally transform shapes is an important predictor of STEM course taking, degrees and careers, say researchers.

"The children who played with puzzles performed better than those who did not on tasks that assessed their ability to rotate and translate shapes," said Levine, a leading expert on mathematics development in young children.

The study was the first to look at puzzle play in a naturalistic setting. The researchers followed 53 child-parent pairs from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds for a two-year period. Researchers recorded parent-child interactions on video during 90-minute sessions that occurred every four months between 26 and 46 months of age.

The researchers asked the parents to interact with their children as they normally would and about half of the children in the sample played with puzzles at least one time. Higher income parents tended to engage children with puzzles more frequently. Both boys and girls who played with puzzles had better spatial skills, but boys played with more complicated puzzles than girls, and the parents of boys provided more spatial language during puzzle play and were more engaged in the play than the parents of girls.

The boys also performed better than the girls on a mental transformation task given at 54 months of age.

"Further study is needed to determine if the puzzle play and the language children hear about spatial concepts actually causes the development of spatial skills and to examine why there is a sex difference in the difficulty of the puzzles played with and in the parents' interactions with boys and girls," said Levine. "We are currently conducting a laboratory study in which parents are asked to play with puzzles with their preschool sons and daughters, and the same puzzles are provided to all participants.

"We want to see whether parents provide the same input to boys and girls when the puzzles are of the same difficulty," Levine said. "In the naturalistic study, parents of boys may have used more spatial language in order to scaffold their ability to put more difficult puzzles together."

Alternatively, the difference in parent spatial language and engagement may be related to a societal stereotype that males have better spatial skills. "Our findings suggest that engaging both boys and girls in puzzle play can support the development of an aspect of cognition that has been implicated in success in the STEM disciplines," Levine said.

Joining Levine in writing the paper are Kristin R. Ratliff and Janellen Huttenlocher of the University of Chicago and Joanna Cannon of the New York City Department of Education.

In addition to NSF, the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development provided funding for the study.

Researchers have found that parents who anger easily and over-react are more likely to have toddlers who act out and become upset easily.

The research is an important step in understanding the complex link between genetics and home environment. In the study, researchers from Oregon State University, Oregon Social Learning Center, and other institutions collected data in 10 states from 361 families linked through adoption — and obtained genetic data from birth parents as well as the children.

They followed the children at nine, 18 and 27 months of age, and found that adoptive parents who had a tendency to over-react, for example, were quick to anger when children tested age-appropriate limits or made mistakes. These over-reactive parents had a significant effect on their children, who exhibited "negative emotionality," or acting out and having more temper tantrums than normal for their age.

Genetics also played a role, particularly in the case of children who were at genetic risk of negative emotionality from their birth mothers, but were raised in a low-stress or less-reactive environment.

The study was published in the latest edition of the journal Development and Psychopathology.

"This is an age where children are prone to test limits and boundaries," said lead author Shannon Lipscomb, an assistant professor of human development and family sciences at OSU-Cascades. "However, research consistently shows that children with elevated levels of negative emotionality during these early years have more difficulties with emotion regulation and tend to exhibit more problem behavior when they are of school age."

Researchers also found that children who exhibited the most increases in negative emotionality as they developed from infants to toddlers (from nine to 27 months of age) also had the highest levels of problem behaviors at age two, suggesting that negative emotions can have their own development process that has implications for children's later behaviors.

"This really sets our study apart," Lipscomb said. "Researchers have looked at this aspect of emotionality as something fairly stable, but we have been able to show that although most kids test limits and increase in negative emotionality as they approach toddler age, the amount they increase can affect how many problem behaviors they exhibit as 2-year-olds."

Lipscomb said the take-away message for parents of young children and infants is that the way they adapt to toddlerhood — a challenging time marked by a child's increasing mobility and independence — can have an impact on how their child will develop.

"Parents' ability to regulate themselves and to remain firm, confident and not over-react is a key way they can help their children to modify their behavior," she said. "You set the example as a parent in your own emotions and reactions."

Researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, University of New Orleans, University of Minnesota, University of California, Davis and Yale Child Study Center contributed to this study, which was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

 While boys generally do better than girls in science and math, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the advantage comes from girls' superior verbal skills.

"People have always thought that males' advantage is in math and spatial skills, and girls' advantage is in language," says Xinlin Zhou of Beijing Normal University, who cowrote the study with Wei Wei, Hao Lu, Hui Zhao, and Qi Dong of Beijing Normal University and Chuansheng Chen of the University of California-Irvine. "However, some parents and teachers in China say girls do arithmetic better than boys in primary school."

Zhou and his colleagues did a series of tests with children ages 8 to 11 at 12 primary schools in and around Beijing. Indeed, girls outperformed boys in many math skills. They were better at arithmetic, including tasks like simple subtraction and complex multiplication. Girls were also better at numerosity comparison — making a quick estimate of which of two arrays had more dots in it. Girls outperformed boys at quickly recognizing the larger of two numbers and at completing a series of numbers (like "2 4 6 8"). Boys performed better at mentally rotating three-dimensional images.

Girls were also better at judging whether two words rhymed, and Zhou and his colleagues think this is the key to their better math performance. "Arithmetic and even advanced math needs verbal processing," Zhou says. Counting is verbal; the multiplication table is memorized verbally, and when people are doing multiple-digit calculations, they hold the intermediate results in their memory as words.

"Better language skills could lead to more efficient verbal processing in arithmetic," Zhou says. He thinks it might be possible to use these results to help both boys and girls learn math better. Boys could use more help with verbal strategies for learning math terms, while girls might benefit from more practice with spatial skills.

Students who were in a small class in grades 4 to 6 had better school achievement and higher wages as adults than those who were in large classes. This is shown in research done at IFAU, the Institute for Evaluation of Labor Market and Education Policy, in Sweden. Smaller classes are also found to be profitable to society.

Whether a large or small class size plays any role in student learning is heatedly debated. Previous (primarily American) research has shown that small classes improve school outcomes in the short term; students learn more in school. But it has remained unclear whether these effects make a difference in working life.

The authors of the report studied cognitive and non-cognitive skills in 10 percent of cohorts born in 1967, 1972, 1977 and 1982, nearly 31 000 students. Questionnaires in 6^th grade provided the students' own perceptions of their endurance, self-confidence, and expectations. These were combined with test results in 6^th and 9^th grade, educational attainment, and their income as adults (27-42 years of age).

The report shows that students from small classes in grade 4 to 6 consistently have better results than students from large classes. Those in small classes had better cognitive and non-cognitive skills, had better scores on standardized national tests in grades 6 and 9, perceived themselves as having more self-confidence and greater endurance. The differences in school outcomes persisted throughout the rest of their compulsory schooling. The probability of going on to higher education was also greater for students in small classes. Those who were in small classes also earned more money as adults. A reduction in class size of five students entailed more than 3 percent higher wages.

"These higher wages in adulthood indicate that students from small classes are more productive," says Björn Öckert, an economist and one of the three researchers behind the report. "The effects on earning power are sufficiently large for the surplus to outweigh the direct costs of having smaller classes. This means that society recoups the costs of small classes. School resources play a role not only for student achievement, which previous research has shown, but also for how things turn out later in life."

Prior to 1991 in Sweden there were rules for the maximum number of students in a class. In grades 4 to 6 the number of students in a class could not exceed 30. If there were 31 students in a school grade, they had to be divided into two classes. The rules entailed substantial differences in class sizes for schools with nearly identical number of students, which is what the researchers used to measure the impact of class size.

IFAU Working paper 2012:5 Long-term effects of class size was written by Björn Öckert, IFAU, Peter Fredriksson Stockholm University, and Hessel Oosterbeek, University of Amsterdam.

College students who frequently text message during class have difficulty staying attentive to classroom lectures and consequently risk having poor learning outcomes, finds a new study accepted for publication in the National Communication Association's journal Communication Education.

"We know from our past research that college students who are regular text users habitually engage in text messaging during class lectures," said the study's principal author, Fang-Yi Flora Wei, Ph.D., assistant professor of broadcast communications at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. "Now we see that in-class texting partially interferes with a student's ability to pay attention, which prior studies show is necessary for effective cognitive learning."

In the new study, University of Pittsburgh-Bradford students who were enrolled in selected undergraduate general education classes completed an anonymous questionnaire at the end of the semester. The questionnaire asked about the class that they attended immediately before their general education class. Students reported how many text messages they sent or received during the class, on average.

Participants also rated themselves on specific learning variables regarding their class. These variables included self-regulation, which Wei defined as "self-control in directing one's learning process"; sustained attention; and outcomes of cognitive learning — both self-reported grades and the perceived amount learned.

Because it is difficult to demonstrate that texting alone can have a direct impact on students' cognitive learning, Wei said, she and her co-investigators used path model analysis to describe the relationships between texting, as a "mediator" or intervening variable, and cognitive learning.

Among 190 completed questionnaires from students who attended a lecture-based class lasting 50 or 75 minutes, the average number of text messages students viewed in class was 2.6, Wei's team reported. Students sent, on average, 2.4 texts while in class. The researchers found no difference between the two class lengths in the extent of texting or students' sustained attention to classroom learning.

They did find a direct positive relationship between self-regulation and sustained attention, with students who possessed a high level of self-regulation being more likely to keep their attention focused on classroom learning. In turn, sustained attention to classroom education was positively related to improved cognitive learning, in terms of better grades and especially the perceived amount of learning, the authors reported.

These highly self-regulated students were less likely to text message in class than students with lower levels of self-regulation, Wei said.

On the other hand, students who frequently texted during class were less likely to sustain attention to their instructor. The results suggest that texting diverts students' focus from the main learning task, the authors write in their article.

"College students may believe that they are capable of performing multitasking behaviors during their classroom learning, such as listening to the lecture and texting simultaneously," Wei said. "But the real concern is not whether students can learn under a multitasking condition, but how well they can learn if they cannot sustain their full attention on classroom instruction."

Students should consider limiting their texting during class, Wei suggests. She said she does not think that university bans on texting during class would be as effective as instructors using interactive instructional techniques or other strategies to keep students' attention.

The University of Pittsburgh at Bradford does not have a policy banning mobile phones during class, according to the authors.

The article, "Rethinking College Students' Self-Regulation and Sustained Attention: Does Text Messaging During Class Influence Cognitive Learning," will appear in the July 2012 print issue of the Communication Education. Co-authors are Y. Ken Wang, Ph.D., assistant professor of management and education, and Michael Klausner, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology, both at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

In testing the effects of the controversial chemical bisphenol A (BPA) on zebrafish, UW-Milwaukee scientist Daniel Weber found himself in familiar territory.

The results he observed were similar to those he'd seen when exposing the fish to mercury during their early development — profound behavioral changes occurred not only immediately after hatching, but also in adulthood.

Like developmental exposure to mercury, adult fish that had been exposed to tiny amounts of BPA as embryos had learning and memory problems, compared to fish that had not been exposed.

Weber, a researcher with the NIEHS Children's Environmental Health Science Core Center at UWM, collaborated with Robert Tanguay at Oregon State University. Their pilot study, funded by the center, is the first to identify a neurobehavioral effect of BPA using a zebrafish model exposed to concentrations comparable to what humans might encounter in the environment.

"What was amazing is that exposure only happened at the embryonic stage," says Weber, "but somehow the wiring in the brain had been permanently altered by it. It's an example of why children are not just little adults when it comes to gauging the effects of contaminants."

Zebrafish as sentinels

BPA is widely used in plastic food containers and container liners. Conflicting reports of its safety have made it the subject of vigorous public debate. Amid the debate, the Campbell's Soup Company recently announced it would be removing BPA from the linings of the company's soup cans as soon as a viable alternative is found.

At issue is the amount of exposure with some studies concluding BPA is a health risk only at concentrations that are higher than environmental levels. Results of this study, however, suggest that lower concentrations may be more potent during early-life exposures. This study tested three different small amounts considered environmentally relevant.

The compound, which mimics the hormone estrogen, was added to the aquatic environment of fish embryos in their first two days of life. Then they were returned to clean water for the ensuing 10 months while they grew into middle-age adulthood.

Since zebrafish mature in only a few months, they are a useful model to test effects of toxicity over a lifetime. Scientists also can control the conditions and timing of chemical exposure with zebrafish because the embryos can live outside the mother.

Tanguay says the low concentrations of BPA they used don't cause physical malformations or cardiac defects. But even without physical abnormalities, behavioral deficits can still occur, as this study indicates.

The exam

Using a T-shaped maze, Weber freed adult fish that were exposed to BPA as embryos at the base of the T and conditioned them choose the left arm of the intersection. He then reversed the task, conditioning them to choose the right.

It took seven to ten trials for an unexposed fish to learn this. But the exposed fish took two to three times as many trials to learn it. Almost none of the fish exposed to the highest levels of BPA Weber used learned even the first part of the task.

For comparison, the team also exposed some of the zebrafish embryos to two other substances — one a natural estrogen and the other a synthetic version. Similar to equal amounts of BPA, the other two substances caused hyperactivity at the larval stage.

Weber says multiple behavioral outcomes are not only changed by BPA, but those behaviors — immediate hyperactivity and later-stage learning impairment — may be inter-related.

"Being hyperactive — or even hypersensitive to an environmental stimulus — makes it difficult to learn," he says. "We've seen that with children."

In the next step of the work, Tanguay's lab will investigate the molecular mechanism that links BPA exposure to interference in normal neurodevelopment.

More behavioral research also is needed, says Weber. He expected to see differences in the resulting behaviors of the sexes since BPA is a kind of estrogen. But he found no evidence of that. Social behaviors, however, may show a sex-based effect due to BPA exposure and that is the subject of his next experiments.

American students need a dramatically new approach to improve how they learn science, says a noted group of scientists and educators led by Michigan State University professor William Schmidt.

After six years of work, the group has proposed a solution. The 8+1 Science concept calls for a radical overhaul in K-12 schools that moves away from memorizing scientific facts and focuses on helping students understand eight fundamental science concepts. The "plus one" is the importance of inquiry, the practice of asking why things happen around us — and a fundamental part of science.

"Now is the time to rethink how we teach science," said Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor of statistics and education. "What we are proposing through 8+1 Science is a new way of thinking about and teaching science, not a new set of science standards. It supports basic concepts included in most sets of state standards currently in use and complements standards-based education reform efforts."

The group of scientists has met with Schmidt in an effort to rethink how science should be taught since 2006, when it was originally part of the PROM/SE research project (Promoting Rigorous Outcomes in Mathematics and Science Education) funded by the National Science Foundation.

The 8+1 concepts were derived from two basic questions: What are things made of and how do systems interact and change? The eight concepts are: atoms, cells, radiation, systems change, forces, energy, conservation of mass and energy, and variation.

Traditionally, science in the United States has been taught in isolated disciplines such as chemistry, biology and physics without clear connections being made between the subjects. The 8+1 effort encourages K-12 teachers to use the eight science concepts to build understanding within and between their courses as students advance through the grades.

"The natural world seems to operate through these laws and concepts, but when it comes to schooling we don't teach children these laws and then show how these apply in different situations," Schmidt said.

Simon Billinge, an 8+1 committee member and professor of applied physics and mathematics at Columbia University, said the aim is for students to see, for example, the physics within biology and the chemistry within physics, so they can gain an understanding of science that transcends disciplinary lines.

Today's frontiers in science often occur at these disciplinary edges. Aided by the explosion in technology and scientific discoveries, new fields are arising that were hardly imagined a generation ago such as synthetic biology, digital organisms and genomics.

Most states are participating in a process to develop new K-12 science standards that are more relevant, coherent and based on international benchmarks.

Stephen Pruitt, vice president of Achieve, a nonprofit organization managing the state-led effort, said 8+1 Science can work hand-in-hand with his organization's effort — called Next Generation Science Standards — "to change the way we think about science education."

"The emphasis is about helping students learn key concepts in science, rather than just facts," Pruitt said.

Results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress show only 34 percent of fourth-graders and 21 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in their science knowledge. Internationally, U.S. students ranked a mediocre 23rd in their science knowledge among countries studied by the Program for International Student Assessment.

NewsPsychology (Jan. 12, 2012) — UC San Diego researchers say the best studies reflect only the best schools and must be boosted with ‘value-added’ approaches for all the rest.

Some two decades into the grand national experiment with charter schools, how much do we really know about them? Not all that much. And not nearly as much as we easily could, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences.

Writing in the journal Science, UC San Diego educational economist JuIian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, find that most studies of charter schools “use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal effects.”

The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, as well as many members of the general public (not to mention the makers of the popular 2010 education documentary “Waiting for Superman”) have embraced charter schools as the saviors of a broken educational system. But does going to a charter school improve student outcomes? We don’t really know, argue Atkinson and Betts. Which charter schools, or even types of charter schools, are more effective than others? We don’t really know.

Ideally, charter schools — which are funded publicly but are granted charters by school districts or other authorizing bodies to operate outside many of the strictures of regular neighborhood schools — would be hotbeds of innovation. They could try out different curricula, different teaching methods, different training or reward systems for the teachers. The best and most effective schools would inspire imitation. The worst would have their charters revoked and would go away.

“But most policymakers don’t have sufficient data on charter schools to decide whether they’re successes to be replicated or disasters to be shut down,” said Betts, who, in addition to being an economics professor at UC San Diego, is also executive director of The San Diego Education Research Alliance at the university, a Bren Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Most studies take a simple snapshot of achievement at a charter school, reading and math scores in the spring, say, and compare these to scores at a nearby traditional public school. A study of this sort, Betts said, is “naïve and essentially meaningless.”

Self-selection is the problem. A snapshot study might give you a picture of the students who selected a particular charter but says little about that school’s effectiveness. In a recent meta-analysis of the available literature on charter schools, coauthored by Betts (with UC San Diego economist Emily Tang) and published by the University of Washington’s National Charter School Research Project, 75 percent of studies were discarded because they failed to account for differences in the backgrounds and academic histories of traditional public-school students and those who chose to go to a charter.

Some of the best, most rigorous studies are based on analyses of charter-school lottery winners and losers, write Betts and Atkinson. Charter schools that are popular enough to be oversubscribed are usually compelled by law to hold lotteries. As dramatized by the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” lottery winners differ from losers only by the luck of the draw. That is to say, students who lose a lottery are an ideal control group, and comparing outcomes for lottery winners and losers is the closest we can get to a randomized controlled experiment.

Lottery-based studies suggest that charters do as well as or better than traditional public schools. But, write Betts and Atkinson, these studies have, to date, only examined about 90 charter schools — or just 2 percent of charter schools nationally.

As good as lottery-based studies are, they contain some major impediments. One is that most charter schools don’t hold lotteries. They’re not oversubscribed. A recent and major nationwide U.S. Department of Education study of charter middle schools found that only 130 out of 492 held lotteries. (And of these, only 77 agreed to share their lottery data so researchers could study them.)

It also very likely, Betts said, according to evidence from Texas and elsewhere, that the oversubscribed, lottery-holding schools are better than average to begin with. Put another way, parents are smart and there’s a reason some charter schools are popular.

The lottery-based studies, Betts and Atkinson conclude, are not very representative.

So how to study all the other charter schools, the majority, that don’t hold lotteries? Atkinson and Betts propose that “value-added” research — research that follows individual students’ trajectories, comparing how they test before/after entering or leaving a charter — is a close second-best to lottery-based research. For that, though, researchers need access to individual student test-score data over time. This access is not easy to come by and is often fiercely contested.

Betts and Atkinson add that for the fullest account of educational impacts it would also be important to look at and supplement testing data with measures of higher-order learning and behavior as well as such longer-term outcomes as graduation rates and college attendance.

The way forward is clear, Betts said, but whether there’s political will is another matter: “We need more lottery-based studies and we need to be able to do longitudinal work,” he said.

Researchers need routine access to individual student data. And charter laws should be overhauled so that charters schools have to share their lottery data with authorizing bodies and with state departments of education. (To do good research, researchers would also need to know how wait lists are administered.) This last wouldn’t be costly, Betts said, and could be accomplished by simple fiat.

It might be a tall order for all 51 states to implement the suggested reforms at once, the researchers write, but federal initiatives like the No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top fund could make financial support to schools contingent on these requirements.

“Taking these steps,” Betts said, “would improve research, not only on charter schools but on all public education.”

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

Other bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California – San Diego.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. J. R. Betts, R. C. Atkinson. Better Research Needed on the Impact of Charter Schools. Science, 2012; 335 (6065): 171 DOI: 10.1126/science.1205418

These days, we hear a lot about the disorder of autism, but researchers at the University of Utah have created a program that helps kids with autism focus on building their skills and utilizing an aptitude for visual-spatial thinking, computers and other electronic media.

One of the program participants is 12-year-old Christopher Charles, who was diagnosed with what's now known as high-functioning autism when he was 18 months old. His parents started him in therapies early on, but hadn't found something that seemed to hold Christopher's interest or accommodate his behaviors.

Chris has participated for the past year and a half in workshops at the University of Utah to teach 3D modeling software by Google called SketchUp. Cheryl Wright, associate professor of family and consumer studies, coordinated the workshops in partnership with Google's Project Spectrum, an initiative to teach job skills to kids with autism. Steve Gross, a certified SketchUp instructor and designer for Universal Creative theme parks, leads the workshops.

Wright and her team soon found far greater benefits to these workshops than acquiring a skill set for potential employment, however. The sessions facilitated social engagement among the students and their peers, parents, siblings and even grandparents.

They have published a study about these findings in the December issue of Family & Consumer Sciences Research Journal. The study focuses on the effects of the workshops on individual students involved as well as on multiple generations within their families — an uncommon opportunity in the research on social interactions of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

After just weeks in the workshops, Christopher Charles' parents noticed a big difference. "Christopher spends hours on his design projects," says his father Nik. "There are few activities that have been able to hold Christopher's attention like SketchUp." In fact, Christopher once noted that he wouldn't miss the SketchUp sessions "even if aliens invaded the Earth."

Each session was two hours long and included hands-on training in the use of the design program as well as time for students to share their design projects. At the end of six weeks, the participants, all boys, presented their designs to classmates at their schools and at community events.

"One of the most compelling parts of this program came from when the boys presented their findings to their classmates," says Wright, who notes that children with autism sometimes struggle in a regular school setting, where their disability is highlighted more than their talents.

"Their talents are often invisible. In our program, we provided a platform for their talents to shine," she says. Many of the parents of participants were pleased that the workshops had developed self-confidence in their children, and noted that this made the parents more confident about what their children will be able to accomplish in the future.

Parents enrolled their children in the workshops with a bit of skepticism. Like Christopher's parents, they had experienced prior failures and had found few activities their sons enjoyed. The parents soon noticed that these workshops were different than other extracurricular activities, and seemed to be more aligned with their son's interests.

In turn, the success of the workshops led to greater self-confidence in parents, who began to rethink what they expected of their parenting ability and began to feel more effective.

They also noticed their sons' sincere concern about friends in the workshops — something that hadn't happened in other social interactions. The parents and grandparents who noticed these changes began to feel optimistic that the boys would be able to develop genuine relationships with children and adults in the future.

"Many of the boys were in inclusive, regular educational settings so when they presented to their peers, it was the first time some of their classmates had seen the boys in control of a situation and teaching something the other kids didn't know," Wright says.

She uses the example of a 10-year-old in the program who taught his class how to use SketchUp in a 40-minute training session. "It was great; he kept saying, 'I need to hear from someone else,' modeling his teacher's behavior. That modeling is something not always seen in these kids, and it showed their peers that kids with autism can contribute too."

Chris' mother Kay notes, "Chris was always off-task, but it's been amazing to see him develop the ability to stay on task for something, even with different groups of kids, not just in the SketchUp workshops. He is now very comfortable in front of a group of people, and he even will wait his turn to answer questions if he's with other presenters."

A second-grader who attended the workshops and who had struggled on a daily basis with attention issues and self-esteem problems was asked about his presentation and he said simply, "It went great. I was awesome."

Just as an engineer might use SketchUp to design a bridge from one side of a canyon to another, Wright and her team noticed that the SketchUp sessions were building bridges between generations within a family.

"This is a very exciting outcome of this study," Wright explains. "We were really given a wonderful opportunity to study a different aspect of ASD with the multi-generational model that we used in the workshops."

Wright says that there were different types of intergenerational relationships that the researchers were able to analyze: parent-to-child, grandparent-to-grandchild, and grandparent-to-adult-child. In addition, the sibling relationships of the boys were studied.

The parents of the workshop participants mentioned a greater ability to connect with their child with ASD. As Chris's father noted, new conversations were sparked in speaking about what they learned and in sharing their designs. "He now teaches me how to do things with SketchUp. The other day, we designed a wall for his bedroom. I don't see us doing that before the workshops, even if we had the technical ability to use the software."

Similarly, the boys' siblings no longer viewed their brother as a source of embarrassment, but as someone who could teach them and others how to use the design tool. "You can just see the pride on his sister's face when Chris is presenting his work," Kay says. "She even acts as his assistant sometimes in the presentations. That did not happen before."

Wright's program provided many opportunities for grandparents to participate in the workshops. Six grandparents were labeled by the researchers as "active" grandparents and had a particular investment in their grandsons with ASD.

The researchers noticed that the communication between the grandparents of the boys with their adult child (the boys' parent) increased significantly after the workshops. There seemed to be less shame associated with the child's autism. One parent noted the grandparents now had something "they could be proud of."

The researchers explain that grandparents often feel added frustration when coping with a grandchild with autism because they empathize with their own child as well as their grandchild and are concerned about the well-being of both.

A parent of one of the participants said the program gave her parents a renewed hope for her son's future, and also gave them a forum to discuss their feelings in coping with their grandchild's ASD.

In October the team presented their research at a Google Tech Talk in Colorado.

"Cheryl and her team have brought an amazing amount of professionalism, data, credibility and excitement to the SketchUp/autism connection and, because of it, people in the larger ASD community are taking note and wanting to learn more," said Tom Wyman, leader of the SketchUp team in Boulder and business development manager for Google, after their presentation. "We're excited to be partnering with the University of Utah on this project."

Wyman says he looks forward to a continuing partnership between Google and the University of Utah's project, now named iSTAR.

Wright and her colleagues have served 18 students in a school-based version of their program. The researchers surmise that workshops that incorporate familial participation with multiple generations will likely be most successful in affecting the social engagement and computer skill development of the children.

The research team also plans to replicate this program with larger samples of children and incorporate additional types of technology and software. They hope to soon create a virtual community that will provide resources by way of learning tools and a support system for youth with ASD and their families. They have presented their program at national conferences and developed a free teacher-training toolkit so that educators may start a similar program in their own classrooms.