What parents do with their children at home through the age range, is much more significant than any other factor open to educational influence.
Professor Charles Desforges with Alberto Abouchaar, The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support and Family Education on Pupil Achievements and Adjustment, published in 2003
Normal human instinct makes us want the best for our children because, at the most primitive and unsentimental level, we want them to survive and perpetuate our genes or thatâs at least what a gene centred view of evolution would argue. But at the deepest level, we love them and want the best for them.
We know they need enough food to eat, a safe place to live and the opportunity to learn well. For most people itâs really obvious what enough food to eat means, itâs enough of the right kind to help the child thrive and that includes being neither too fat nor too thin; we know about BMI, we know what a healthy weight should be. The same goes for a safe place to live. It has to be somewhere warm and dry and protected from physical and moral dangers; where parents are unable or unwilling to provide that, society should step in to support the child.
But what about the opportunity to learn well? There are schools, of course, where bodies of knowledge deemed significant by society are transmitted to children by professional teachers, along with the means to assimilate that knowledge. And parents are bombarded with advice on how to turn their children into geniuses or at least super learners, some of it as wildly conflicting as the advice given to parents of at least one new-born baby we know by two health visitors in the same clinic, sequentially â âWhy not try swaddling?â âNo! Donât tell them that. We donât swaddle anymore.â
But how do children â and for that matter we adults that care for them â learn best? What does the research science say? A child born in the nineteenth century, when national education systems promoting literacy and numeracy for the masses began to emerge would have had a very different experience, at least of school learning, than a child of today yet those teachers from the past would have thought they were doing the right thing.
Those nineteenth century children would have been taught by rote how to read and write and do some basic arithmetic in large classes. Only in very rural areas where pressure of numbers was not so heavy would any one-to-one tuition have been possible. Their teachers would more likely have been authoritarian and, at least in more rural areas, untrained â perhaps a literate farm worker who could no longer work on the land because of injury.
The teachers would have been aided in many parts of the world by pupil monitors, abler and slightly older children who had already learned the lesson being delivered. The pupil monitors would sit at the end of the rows and reinforce what the teacher said to the children who didnât quite get what was being barked at them. Poor behaviour, or any difficulty with learning, may well have been met with humiliation, some of it ritual â think of the Dunceâs Cap â and or physical violence, a modus operandi that extended long into the twentieth century.
Schools in the developed world are now very different, in part because of how childrenâs place in society has altered for the better but also because of the findings of education research that has been going on world-wide into childrenâs learning for the last 150 years or more.
But research findings that were once seen as a key to good learning for all can be overturned as something else arrives on the scene contradicting it. The last 30 or 40 years are littered with what once were seen as miracle boons for learning but were later dismissed by researchers or scientists as fads of little or no consequence or merit.
Perhaps you remember a brain gym craze at the end of the twentieth century when there were water bottles on primary school childrenâs desks so the children would never get dehydrated. During their lessons, children might do rapid intermittent exercise such as star jumps on the spot to exercise their brains and pressed âbrain buttonsâ â varied parts of their anatomy â to improve blood supply to their brains. This would all help children learn anything faster and more easily said the commercial schemes which schools across the world paid for.
Regardless of the fact that the brain isnât a muscle, so the idea of giving it a quick gym work out seemed somewhat bizarre, it was also an idea which has subsequently been debunked by scientists who understand how blood flows to the brain. Significantly, it has lacked high quality, peer reviewed research supporting it. Peer review involves scientists independent of the research checking on whether an academic study has been set up fairly and correctly and so can pass the tests of quality academic inquiry which will support the credibility of its findings. Yet the idea of gym for your brain was one which quickly caught on and blazed a trail around the world.
You donât need a great memory to remember all this. Today if you google the words brain and gym you will get helpful videos about it. In one from the United States a grown up asks a child to demonstrate his âbrain buttons.â He obliges by putting his right palm apparently above his heart, as if pledging allegiance to the US flag first thing in the morning at elementary school, rather than putting his finger on the âbrain buttonâ in his neck. Maybe he was more patriotic as a result. Or more honest â there is actually Polish research which has found that we are likely to speak more honestly if we put our hand over our hearts. Who knows, maybe the human instinct to do that to persuade the person you are talking to that what you are saying â however unlikely â is true, may be a very old one.
But returning to a much newer idea, gym for the brain, some elements of it make plenty of sense â we all know quick exercise breaks can be a good idea to help anyone doing some concentrated work to improve focus, even if itâs just a walk to get a cup of tea from the canteen or the kitchen. We also know water is good in reasonable amount because homo sapiens needs it to keep hydrated. But if reputable scientists say blood circulation doesnât work this way and a learning approach doesnât pass scientific tests for efficacy, in other words there is insufficient scientific proof it works, why do people keep doing it?
Going back to the beginning of this chapter, when it comes to childrenâs education, maybe because teachers and parents want to do their best for children and if something looks like a simple activity that will help children learn better that no-one over the last few thousand years of human evolution has spotted before, they may well want to give it a go â particularly if at least some of it sounds like common sense. And particularly if they go online and find lots of testimonials from people saying how well it has worked for their children. After all, scientists are making potentially life-changing discoveries all the time so why shouldnât this be one of them?
Because experts tell you it isnât.
The elixir of education
In December 2018, Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of schools in England, launched her annual report as head of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) with advice to teachers and policymakers to get the basics right rather than relying on the latest educational gimmicks. The top basic she cited was early literacy.
The London office of The Guardian newspaper reported Spielman advising against âgimmicks like brain gymâ and when asked later to elaborate on other gimmicks, she came up with a list including interactive whiteboards, adherence to learning styles â more to come on that later â and a growing enthusiasm for âfidget spinners,â a small hand held toy which children can fiddle with that is meant to help concentration. It became a craze. Some schools banned them.
The Guardian report quoted Spielman telling an audience of education professionals and policy experts in Londonâs Westminster, that although many fashionable educational gimmicks had been debunked, there was still an appetite among educationalists to find the next âgreat white hope.â She went on:
Some policymakers and practitioners are constantly looking for the next magic potion that will infallibly raise standards. Indeed, despite the history of snake oil, white elephants and fashionable gimmicks that have in the main been debunked, there remains a curious optimism that the elixir of education is just around the corner.
But the truth is, we donât need an elixir to help raise standards, because we already have the tried and tested ingredients that we need ⌠Instead, to put all children on the path to success, the most important thing is to get the basics right, which begins with early literacy.
Weâll come back to early literacy but perhaps the education gimmicks have the space to catch on because education researchers as a whole are less good at marketing than commercial organisations. Neither are they often as successful as academics from other key disciplines in communicating and promoting their work and they sometimes struggle to influence schools and policy makers.
Scientists from a leading discipline like medicine, for example, have access to world renowned journals in which peer reviewed research of the highest quality is published. If a piece of research appears in The Lancet, for example, and has a particularly populist appeal â a new cure for cancer say, newspapers and broadcasters all over the world will cover it so if you follow general news on a daily basis you are likely to know about it whether you work in the medical profession or not, even if you donât subscribe to The Lancet.
Thatâs because The Lancet, which is published weekly in London and New York, is the leading general medical journal in the world and journalists know that. If there could be a polar opposite to snake oil, this would be it. Itâs as far removed as you can get from one of those ads you donât click on that pop up from nowhere on your computer screen telling you how you can banish back pain with a simple method the mystics knew all about. The Lancet is an authoritative source that can be trusted implicitly.
How does it do it? Itâs trusted where it counts. Itâs one of the oldest publications of its kind in the world. By aiming to publish the highest quality research on all aspects of human health from across the globe, The Lancet gives physicians world-wide a reliable source with which they can build their subject knowledge and better help their patients.
Of course, if a researcher chooses to produce fraudulent evidence to back up findings, bad research can end up published even with this trusted seal of approval. This happened when research claiming to prove a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination and autism and bowel disease was published in The Lancet in 1998. MMR vaccination levels dropped across the world because of the scare that followed. More children got sick; some of them died. In 2010 the research paper was fully retracted by The Lancet after the UKâs General Medical Council ruled that Andrew Wakefield, the lead author of the research, was guilty of serious professional misconduct during his research for the paper. He was subsequently struck off the register as a UK doctor.
But this inaccurate story â that there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and bowel cancer â has developed a life of its own on social media and there are still large numbers of people across the world who believe this particularly pernicious piece of fake news, and refuse to let their children be immunised, despite governments and medical professionals trying to get the truth across.
Millions of children around the world have missed MMR vaccination and cases of highly contagious measles, which can kill or seriously disable, rose by an estimated 300 per cent in the first four months of 2019, compared with the same period in 2018.
There are even now outbreaks of measles in countries like America and the United Kingdom which have high overall vaccination rates because of the refusal of increased numbers of parents to allow their children to be vaccinated. The UK was one of four European countries, along with Greece, Albania and the Czech Republic to lose their âMeasle Elimination Statusâ in August 2019. The US narrowly averted losing its measle elimination status in 2019 with the ending of measles outbreaks in New York City and New York State. Had they lost it, measles would have been endemic in the country for the first time in a generation. Measles breaks out among the unvaccinated, usually young children who can be very hard hit by the illness. It can be a killer. You have to be careful about who you believe.
This kind of falsified research is, thankfully, rare. You have to be very good to be published in The Lancet. Only about five per cent of submissions are chosen for publication and the research it publishes is acknowledged as ethical and credible and of the highest quality. There is nothing approaching that as a world resource for general education research.
There are some very fine education journals but they generally specialise and there isnât one for all aspects of human learning with the profile of The Lancet. It is reassuring that there is a journal of such prestige for health but learning, and being able to fulfil your potential because of that learning, is arguably as important as being healthy. Regardless, education research is more scattered and less well communicated to the general public despite real efforts by academics, journalists and publishers to tackle this.
Successful communication of education research is often down to the skills of a particularly media savvy education researcher or university press office with an education specialist â and they are thinner on the ground than you would expect. A reduction in the number of skilled journalists covering education in significant parts of the mainstream media, and thus fewer education stories published, hasnât helped either.
But the communication problems are not just because education research findings get a low or non-existent profile in the national mainstream media when they are released. Sometimes complex and nuanced findings are just not properly understood. As with all kinds of new technologies, some early adopters of new education research can be almost messianic about it and the word can quickly spread exponentially by word of mouth that there is a kind of education nirvana abroad, even when the truth is something different. Teachers want the best for the children they teach and they will try things if lots of other teachers swear by them. Can you blame them?
A new education idea can become a craze like those fidget spinner toys. Indeed, there can be a cycle of birth and decay of an idea which begins with early adopters proselytising, continues as large numbers of schools embrace the idea, falters as critics emerge questioning it and ends when it finds its proper place after the original researcher hits back and says their findings have been misinterpreted anyway.
It is also not unheard of for findings from one academic to become conflated with other research because the complexity of a theory is not fully grasped by the people implementing the ideas. Then original ideas can lose their true meaning altogether. The fault need not be in the research but in the wrong-headed application of it. Learning styles which were on Amanda Spielmanâs list of fads is one of the bigger and more recent ones of these so letâs take a look and see what that exemplifies for understanding what really works in education â what the evidence actually is.
Learning styles
The idea of learning styles goes back a...
