Bret Victor wrote an essay in 2012 that left me desperately wishing I were a computer engineer. “Learnable Programming” was a critique of 1) Khan Academy’s newly released intro course on programming, 2) the Processing language the course focused on, and 3) decades of stagnation in programming pedagogy. The essay was funny, visually stunning, provocative, and so convincing in its presentation of an effective foundation for how to teach programming to learners by showing them what their code was actually doing that one could easily be led to believe that anyone who’d even considered the question of how to teach programming before was asleep at the pedagogical wheel. The intellectual effect was something akin to a first encounter with Edward Tufte’s suggestion that graphs should show information instead of junky non-information. It was brilliant in a way that makes your temples burn and you mouth keep murmuring “Yes. Yes. Yes!” Computers are awesome. Education is awesome. Teaching students how to do powerful things with computers = Best. Thing. Ever.

Ergo, I desperately wished that I knew enough about programming to join whatever project Victor was about to suggest.

Pivotal to the essay was the (brief) intellectual history of older languages and computer environments explicitly designed to teach students about programming. In this, Victor was unequivocal on the importance of Mindstorms:

The canonical work on designing programming systems for learning, and perhaps the greatest book ever written on learning in general, is Seymour Papert’s ‘Mindstorms.’

Given the brainy rush induced by Victor’s essay, I had no other choice than to follow his direct instructions, “For fuck’s sake, read ‘Mindstorms.’” So I ordered a used copy within minutes of reaching the bottom of his article.

Mindstorms was published in 1980, while Papert worked at MIT, so he uses terms like “cybernetics” in earnest and offers astounding facts like “in the past two years, over 200,000 personal computers have entered the lives of Americans” (p 181). So in that sense, the jargon and computational enthusiasm resonates with Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. (I.e. it’s very dated, but remember that you’re reading this for history and theory.) Now set this in concert with Papert’s vision for the role of computers in building learning environments for children: it is grounded firmly in his years of work with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, a pioneer of constructivist education theory. The “build it yourself” and “ask lots of questions” spirit resonates with my 80s memories of LEGO sets and Sesame Street. Taken together, Papert’s ideas, read three decades later, crystalize for me a certain utopian fetish for the intellectual, cultural, and political possibilities of kids screwing around with boxy, green-screened Apple IIes.

But on a more practical level, the book is full of clear-eyed distillations of how tinkering with computers can help teachers and students make thinking visible. Take, for instance, Papert’s ideas here about the pedagogical power of “debugging” a computer program as a special case of tenacious learning-by-experiment:

The question to ask about the program is not whether it is right or wrong, but if it is fixable. If this way of looking at intellectual products were generalized to how the larger culture thinks about knowledge and its acquisition, we all might be less intimidated by our fears of “being wrong.” This potential influence of the computer on changing our notion of a black and white version of our successes and failures is an example of using the computer as an “object-to-think-with.” It is obviously not necessary to work with computers in order to acquire good strategies for learning. Surely “debugging” strategies were developed by successful learners long before computers existed. But thinking about learning by analogy with developing a program is a powerful and accessible way to get started on becoming more articulate about one’s debugging strategies and more deliberate about improving them (p 23).

Thirty years on, there’s a profusion of non-profits, projects, and start-ups trying to teach kids and adults alike to code. But what often goes unstated in the breathlessness about how cool it is to learn how to code is that fact that learning to code is, like learning to read and write, an extension of learning how to think. And learning how to think requires learning how to be “metacognitive”–that is, able to think about how your own ideas and thought processes work, so that you can find problems and correct them.

The LOGO interface allows users to draw using simple commands. Here’s one way to draw a square:

 FORWARD 100
 RIGHT 90
 FORWARD 100
 RIGHT 90
 FORWARD 100
 RIGHT 90
 FORWARD 100
 RIGHT 90

This code it easy enough to decipher: go forward 100 units, turn right 90 degrees, repeat 4 times, and you’ve drawn 4 straight sides at right angles to one another.

But I believe that part of Victor’s fascination with LOGO as a teaching tool lies in the simple metaphor of the Turtle. The Turtle is the stylus implied in the lines of code above. In LOGO, the “cursor” that moves around the screen, drawing your square (or whatever other shape) is called the “Turtle,” and all the written commands in the code are simply instructions to the Turtle for where to go and what to do. The Turtle is a little metaphor that helps to crystalize the fact that writing an effective program is nothing more than figuring out how to provide a cute, determined animal with the right set of instructions.

(Screengrab from the LOGO Foundation site)

But here’s were things get cooler. Papert’s team didn’t just build LOGO software and use it to help students experiment with mathematical principals while drawing shapes on green computer screens. The were also real Turtles students could control using the exact same instructions. These real Turtles were dome-shaped motorized robots with retractable styluses in them that would draw programed shapes and images on swaths of paper laid out on the classroom floor.

(Image from bfoit.org)

The link between the simple mathematics of a computer program and the real images a student could create is a perfect example of constructivist learning. Tinker with something abstract, see the results in the real world. Repeat over and over and the learner’s understanding improves.

Furthermore, the conceptual link between the instructions a student writes in a computer program and the visual results of that code is another fundamental element of how students learn. “An important part of becoming a good learner is learning how to push out the frontier of what we can express with words,” Papert writes (p 96). Essentially, he’s arguing that part of expanding what a student knows is forcing them to encounter the edges of their explanatory powers: the link between code and image is itself pushing that expansion. When a student’s words are insufficient to explain what he or she knows, a key element of the learning process is acquiring new words, new concepts, and new grammars to explain it. And when there is such an intimate link between the new words (code) and the concepts they express (the program output), the boundaries of what the student can express expand.

The illustrate this point, consider another example from the LOGO Foundation’s web page introducing the basics of the language. After explaining foundational concepts like how to draw a line and a square, the example introduces how to combine and repeat instructions to create a picture made by iterating a a drawing of a square over and over on top of itself, creating a pinwheel design that is difficult to describe in pure words, but which explodes onto the screen with just a few lines of code:

(Screengrab from the LOGO Foundation site)

Papert’s walks through several different analogies for how computational thinking can illuminate instructional situations. There’s an extended discussion of how learning to juggle is a process of “debugging”–correcting many small isolated errors to get a sequence of actions to work. There’s explanations of how computer environments to shape better physics instruction that helps students make connections between physical principles and their own experience of objects in the world–as opposed to simply forcing them to encounter physics through a set of abstract equations. But he also anticipates criticism of this push for teaching “computational thinking” with a powerful argument for how it expands cognitive ability:

In my view a salient feature of human intelligence is the ability to operate with many ways of knowing, often in parallel, so that something can be understood on many levels. In my experience, the fact that I ask myself to ‘think like a computer’ does not close off other epistemologies. It simply opens new ways for approaching thinking. … But true computer literacy is not just knowing how to make use of computer and computational ideas. It is knowing when it is appropriate to do so (p 155).

And perhaps most importantly, Papert believes that the process of learning computational thinking is necessarily a social process that facilitates and depends upon the interplay between student, learning objective, and teacher. Again, the process of debugging is powerful because it re-writes concepts about what it means to be “wrong” and helps students think metacognitively, but it also creates questions and topics of conversation for student/teacher interactions, where the student practices pushing out the frontiers of what he or she can express with words.

“In my vision the computer acts as a transitional object to mediate relationships that are ultimately between person and person,” Papert writes in one of the concluding chapters (p 183). In this case, Victor’s essay on Learnable Programming did just that: a maze of networked computers served up his ideas and enthusiasm for Mindstorms, and hopefully I’ve been able to capture some of that excitement for you, dear reader, on your computer.

Part II of my loooooong review of the Dept of Ed report on “Expanding Evidence” is up at Edsurge. (Part I here). This section is about what design research can look like in education action. I walk through some of the case studies in the report and link continual refinement through evidence gathering to teacher practice:

We should stop and emphasize that this process of data-driven continuous improvement is what highly effective teachers do in their classrooms everyday. Such teachers adapt their teaching to make it useful for everyday instruction and they gather data (usually as formative assessment results) to make constant improvements to their own pedagogy. In high-performing schools, teams of teachers collaborate to scale effective methods across departments and buildings.

I actually find it hard to summarize exactly what design thinking in education looks like (hence the tripartite review…), so take a gander at the post itself.

I’ve got a new review up on EdSurge this week. Instead of a product review, it’s a long look at a big report on new ways of thinking about how to evaluate and develop education technologies. Here’s the opening:

Late in December, the U.S Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology dropped a 100-page draft policy report on “Expanding Evidence Approaches for Learning in A Digital World.” While a key focus of the report is on the kinds of information that we should marshal to evaluate learning technologies, the more important lesson of the document is about people. Through case studies and reviews of current research, the report makes a lot of recommendations, but three stand out.

Part I of this review provides a backdrop for current “evidence-based” research and focuses on the first of those recommendations: the notion that technologists, educators, and education researchers must collaborate to share techniques and evidence-gathering and analysis approaches from their respective fields. Parts II and III of the review, to be published separately, advocate two other major themes woven throughout the report: 1) the need for design thinking and continual improvement processes when building digital learning tools; and 2) the need to forge stronger lines of communication between education researchers, technologists, and educators, and to share insights that might otherwise remain siloed in existing disciplines.

You can read the rest of the report here: “Latest Department of Education Report Urges More Collaboration“

I love talking to people about the exciting work they’re doing. I love it more when their work resonates with something I’m doing. I love it the most when finding people whose exciting work resonates with my own is part of my professional responsibilities.

While teaching, I realized that the willingness to ask people to share their thoughts or products or expertise wasn’t just stimulating for me–it actually helped me do better work and allowed me to be a bridge between otherwise unconnected people doing work that resonated. Essentially, alongside teaching, I started doing a lot of networking. Just by asking, I got to beta test products like ShowMe and ThreeRing and ClassDojo to support my students. Just by email-introducing two people, I connected edtech startups building data tools with researchers looking for data.

Connecting with others working in education and education technology started to seem like more than just a way to make me a better teacher and keep myself intellectually stimulated–it started to seem like a necessary and important part of working in education and technology. That’s why danah boyd’s distillation of networking similarities between startup employees and teens struck me as particularly astute (emphasis mine):

Networks of people are being mediated such that people are easily able to see who is connected to whom and leverage loose ties to achieve all sorts of work-related goals. Individual knowledge is often less important than being connected to the right people. And technology makes a lot of this easier. Social networks aren’t technologies. They’re relationships between people. And those relationships might be mediated through technology, but it’s the relationships that matter more than the technology. Success in today’s workforce isn’t simply about having hard skills; it’s about being networked in all sense of the word.

The point about connections over individual knowledge takes me right to another current intellectual obsession: the problem-solving power of diverse groups. Scott Page is an economist whose research demonstrates that collaboration among a diverse set of problem solvers yields more potential approaches to tackling complex problems than collaboration among homogenous groups. Now, having a strong social network does not guarantee that you’ll be able to leverage it to solve complex problems. Having a network at also doesn’t mean that your network can solve problems in the first place. But working on complex problems (like many in education), I think that doing good work depends upon having a strong network.

Image: folks talking at an Edtech Meetup, via joshkehn on flickr

One of my consistent educational mantras is that students have to read independently to get smarter. The stats on this are clear: According to the U.S. Department of Education, of the 8th-grade students who scored in the top one-quarter on a national reading test in 2011, 36 percent read for fun almost every day. Of the students who scored in the bottom one-quarter on the same test, a mere 8 percent read for fun almost every day. I’ve argued before that ebooks and ereaders are potentially powerful tools for educators trying to push their students to read more. But ebooks weren’t conceived as education tools. Rather, digital publishing is the most recent cycle in a long history of reading revolutions. If it’s important to get more students to read more books to grow their literacy skills, then it’s important to understand how changes in the publishing industry will shape the ways educators can deliver books into the hands of students and how students can access books for themselves. The shape of the publishing industry plays a significant role in the books students read.

Publishers determine the quality of books, their availability and pricing, and the gender, race, religion, and socioeconomic status of authors and protagonists. In turn, technologists determine the cost and ubiquity of ereader software and hardware. So it was with interest and confusion that I read this portion of a recent interview with tech publishing guru and digital trend-spotter Tim O’Reilly in Wired (emphasis mine):

Wired: You’re a publisher and big reader as well as a technologist. What is the future for books?

O’Reilly: Well, what kind of book do you mean? Because there are many, many things that were put into codices that have no particular reason to be books. Things like paper maps and atlases are just gone. Online dictionaries and online encyclopedias have killed printed dictionaries and encyclopedias. I collect how-to books of various kinds just because I want to have them. And certainly if there were a major disaster, a book could be a useful thing to have. But I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.

On one hand, O’Reilly is making an important point that the literature from previous eras that ends up being canonized wasn’t necessarily popular or well-received at the time it appeared. But I was struck by his suggestion that novels are an ephemeral media form that are on the wane.

On the contrary, while the overall size of the book industry in total dollars has remained relatively stable in the past couple of years, the growth of ebooks (which have a lower unit cost than paper books) are helping grow the total number of books that consumers buy. And sales of fiction ebooks in particular are explosive, according to the annual BookStats survey of the publishing industry, which was last released in mid-2012. From 2010 to 2011, ebook sales in the adult fiction category rose 117 percent, to $1.27 billion.

During the same time period, the rise of young-adult fiction helped grow the total size of the children’s book market by 12 percent, from $2.42 billion in 2010 to $2.78 billion in 2011.

Maybe O’Reilly meant “literary novels” in a more strict sense: the more “challenging” titles that win Pulitzers and Booker prizes. Or maybe his response was more about his personal dislike of novels. Either way, it struck me as a complete mis-reading of the future of the novel as an important driver of the future of the book. Novels are not going away. In fact, the data on the grow of the ebook sector of the publishing industry suggests the opposite: fiction ebooks are a major area of growth for publishers, so that’s an area where money will flow. More authors will write books, and more technologists will develop more efficient tools for distributing and reading those titles.

Moreover, the growth of the young-adult fiction market is driving the publishing industry to expand its offerings to young readers, which gets us back to the point that students need lots of opportunities to read independently to hone their literacy skills. The more high-quality fiction targeted at younger readers, particularly those in middle school, the better. The opportunity is there for educators to channel that growing volume of YA lit into the hands of their students.

Image: The Hunger Games on Kindle by flickr user TheBrady

Aliya Bhatia (New Orleans – Delta ’10) didn’t plan on building edtech tools after teaching. But as she was grading papers in a coffee shop one day, she got frustrated with the fact she couldn’t recall which parents of her 130 students she had spoken with on the phone. She needed a tool to manage all the phone-based communications she used to support her scholars, and she needed that tool to be based on her phone. That was the birth of Dash4Teachers, an iPhone app that lets teachers manage parent contacts, log calls, and track analytics on the positive and negative calls they’re making. Bhatia’s team recently released the iOS 6 version of Dash, and I spoke with her about what it was like to build the tool. She’s recently moved from New Orleans to Atlanta, where she will be transitioning into a role as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group, while staying heavily involved in the future of Dash.

What does Dash do for teachers, for students, and for parents?

Dash came out of a number of frustrations that we knew teachers were having in classrooms, and those frustrations were trickling down to students. One of those frustrations was that we have lots and lots of students with lots and lots of stakeholders, and keeping track of the right stakeholder was becoming an overwhelming task for the teacher.

That meant that contact with stakeholders was infrequent. That was happening, in part, because of all the different places teachers make calls from. You’re not always sitting in front of your Excel tracker or your Kickboard, or your ClassDojo when you’re making parent phone calls. Ideally, the way that you keep track of all that information and sort through all that information should be directly on your phone.

With that in mind, we wanted to build an application that handled that. As a result, when you now make a phone call to a parent or a guardian [with Dash], you know exactly the relationship with the scholar. Before you call, you have a list of everything that you said to that parent before, so you get an idea of what the tone of this conversation should be. And you get a very clear picture of whether you’ve been making positive or negatives calls beforehand, so you can make sure that your call is going to be taken the right way, and so that you can make more of those positive calls.

Because of the difficulty of tracking down the right number—and because of the difficulty of having to deal with so many students’ families you need to keep in touch with—teachers are making a lot of negative calls instead of a lot of positive calls. We’ve created a system that gives you a lots of incentives and a lot of nudges towards making those positive calls.

What are some positive outcomes that you’ve seen as a result of using this app?

We’re seeing a couple of different types of teachers being particularly receptive. The first thing that we’re seeing is that for a special education teacher, a product like Dash is really incredible because they can log and track the data from every call they make, which is extremely important to them—both for the documentation purposes and for serving their special education students properly. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from that particular subset of teachers that this has been a really transformative tool for them.

Another group is teachers who are all working at the same school and can upload the same contact information and then be able to collaborate on the information about the phone calls that they’re making. We have a couple schools where we have pockets of people who have purchased the tool so they can use it together. One of my friends was showing me that they’ve now uploaded phone numbers and can all edit them from the same exact account, and that’s been really helpful for the teachers to keep track of all the information.

One thing that I don’t think we’ve exploited well enough is that we have now created a Google Docs system where you can import all of your Dash information and constantly update it. I wish that more of our users recognized that they could use that as collaborative tool to see when was the last time one of them made a call, or what was the best number to call. So we need to do a better job of getting the word out about that.

You worked through TFA summer institute to pilot the application—what did you learn?

We ended up beta-testing over the summer with the [New Orleans] institute group, and a number of teachers at institute used the app.

I remember one of our beta testers being extremely frustrated because she moved to her region and her school gave her an Android phone. She emailed me and asked, “Do you have an Android version of Dash? Because I can’t teach without it.” It was the most flattering thing in the world to hear, yet at the same time very frustrating. [Dash is currently only available on iPhone.] Fortunately, it ended up being alright for her to make a new account and use her personal phone.

Before we expand to the Android platform, we need to have a really clear vision of how we integrate with other systems. Right now the good thing about being on iPhone is that our target audience is still individual teachers—in part because schools don’t institutionally use iPhones, and many teachers do. In fact, somewhere around 50 percent of the TFA population is on iPhones for their personal phone.

Once we have a clearer vision of how Dash could integrate into other data management tools, it would be much more meaningful for us to deploy on another platform. Then, no matter which platform a school is using—or if they’re not using any system—then all their teachers would be able to access the app and funnel data into the other systems that the school use.

What is it like leaving the classroom to do an edtech startup?

It was not at all something I was expecting, yet at the same time I think that it was really great that it turned out this way. Because I do really struggle with the amount of things and tools that my school used to buy that weren’t actually created by teachers that I din’t find very applicable or useful for me personally. I would just think about the dollars that went into buying that particular tool, and say to myself, “I don’t actually use this, ever.”

It was really cool to flip the situation. I took all my complaints about the system and was able to be part of the system, but create something and get teacher feedback.

At the same time, as an entrepreneur, you start to realize where some of the constraints came from for some of the tools you used in the past. You start to realize that you have to pick which features are going to be available. You have to pick which stakeholder is more important—the school or the teacher. For the moment, we’ve made the clear decision that the teacher is the more important stakeholder out of the two of those.

There are all sorts of decision points where you realize how difficult it is to make these tools. There are people in all different regions of the country with all different restrictions on what they can do. So I definitely have a new appreciation for all of the things that I used to be very frustrated about.

How did you get started?

In the fall [of 2011], were were part of the Teach For America pilot program in entrepreneurship. At first, I didn’t really want to create something. And then I was just grading papers in a coffee shop and I was so frustrated at not being able to remember some of the parents that I’d been in touch with and remember the information about those calls. I was also thinking about the sheer number of different stakeholders that I had, as I had 130 students. I thought, “You know what? Maybe it’s time to make something.”

So I brought two other teachers on to my team and we went to a Startup Weekend and built a prototype. We wanted really strong talent to build the app. Our designer was from our Startup Weekend team—he’s an Emmy-award-winning film editor; he’s extremely talented on the design side. Then we contracted for the programming side because we really wanted strong developers to be working on our product, and I think that we made the right choice in that sense.

The prototype was built at a Startup Weekend, but none of the code from the prototype is being used at this point in time. We completely redeveloped it from scratch using best-in-class developers.

What support do you find for a product like this in the New Orleans area?

It’s so interesting. There’s support for sure in the sense that everyone really wants entrepreneurship to be a part of the fabric of New Orleans, but it’s such a young community that I was struggling to find others who have done similar things.

I would say that a lot of our most rewarding conversations have come from sitting with Jen Medberry, the CEO of Kickboard. Discussions with her were some of the highest value-add conversations that I’ve had because she’s been there and done that.

I think that it was difficult to find others within the New Orleans community who didn’t just want to help us, but who also had the background knowledge and the resources to help us. I thought that was interesting, because I thought that part of the intent of being part of an incubation system or a pilot program is that there’s a lot of support. But what does “support” mean? If you’re building something in the tech world, then a lot of the support you need is knowing how to deal with tech. That’s something that I don’t think is as prevalent as we originally thought it would be.

You’re part of the 4.0 Schools incubator, correct?

Yes. I think that they’ve really got some great ideas about how to how to break out of traditional structures. And I think they’ve got some really great thoughts about how to make it so that teachers and school leaders and people all up and down the ranks of education in New Orleans can have a dramatic structural impact on the work that they do.

An edtech teacher friend emailed to get my reaction to this recent NYT article on a survey of how teachers think technology is changing the way students learn. Since I typed up my reply and spellchecked it, I figured I’d share:

My reactions:
1) Gee–these are essentially the same questions about how cheap information technology influences productivity and the quality of communication that adults in knowledge-work professions and college students have been dealing with for years. (Is Wikipedia a source? Does getting on Facebook/Twitter/Myspace in the middle of the workday slow people down? Etc Etc Etc…) No surprise at all that the same questions finally filter down to elementary and secondary education.

2) It’s opinion data on the behavior of students in classes from the only person in the room more distractible than a student–the teacher. This tells me precisely nothing about the actual impact of digital technology use on student learning.

3) Since I know how to use the Internet to find reliable information on scholarly research, I wonder how long it would take me to find academic work on the impact of another technology, television, on student attention spans and academics? Wait. It took less time than it did to write the preceding sentence:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?
q=research+television+children+academics&hl=en&as_sdt=0&
as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=QpGaUN_FIunl0gH92oGIBQ
&sqi=2&ved=0CCkQgQMwAA&surl=1&safe=active

4) Wait, Matt Richtel… is that the same reporter who uncovered the shocking truth that dropping microchips into existing classrooms had as much impact as placing a new textbook on a table? It is!

5) There’s a conflation of “attention span” and “research skills” going on here. See this section:

In interviews, teachers described what might be called a “Wikipedia problem,” in which students have grown so accustomed to getting quick answers with a few keystrokes that they are more likely to give up when an easy answer eludes them. The Pew research found that 76 percent of teachers believed students had been conditioned by the Internet to find quick answers.

“They need skills that are different than ‘Spit, spit, there’s the answer,’ ” said Lisa Baldwin, 48, a high school teacher in Great Barrington, Mass., who said students’ ability to focus and fight through academic challenges was suffering an “exponential decline.” …

For her part, Ms. Baldwin said she refused to lower her expectations or shift her teaching style to be more entertaining. But she does spend much more time in individual tutoring sessions, she added, coaching students on how to work through challenging assignments.

This is bad reporting, bad editing, or both. The phrase “Wikipedia problem” doesn’t tell me if the problem is insufficient academic stamina to pursue an answer, a lack of skills to do effective research, or a combination of the two. Consequently, the passage makes it look like Ms. Baldwin is refusing to dance because her student’s don’t have stamina or skills. Well duh she doesn’t need to dance in that face of that challenge.

She doesn’t need to shift her teaching style to be more entertaining; she needs to teach her students how to develop a high-quality research question and differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources–a skill that is very easy to drop from a middle-school ELA curriculum b/c it’s higher order and kids probably haven’t seen it on NCLB assessments, but oh man will it be all over the CCSS tests. Incidentally also a major stumbling block for even high-achieving high school students who don’t know how to do research when they get to college.

Getting students used to the act of reading silently and attentively for a stretch of time is important because it helps them develop it as a skill if they’re not used to doing it. For those that are, it helps solidify it as a habit. But there’s some emerging research in “literary neuroscience” showing what happens in your brain while you’re doing focused, close reading: it activates numerous corners of the mind that aren’t working when you’re reading with less focus.

Michigan State University literature professor Natalie Phillips teamed up with some neuroscientists to do fMRI scans on folks doing casual, distracted reading, and compared that with scans of subjects who were concentrating while reading long passages of a Jane Austen novel. The scientists warned her there would be some minor differences, but nothing remarkable. NPR reports on the findings:

But in a neuroscientific plot twist, Phillips said preliminary results showed otherwise: “What’s been taking us by surprise in our early data analysis is how much the whole brain — global activations across a number of different regions — seems to be transforming and shifting between the pleasure and the close reading.”

Phillips found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts of the brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analyzed it.

So helping young readers–particularly reluctant young readers–learn the habit of focused reading is important. But here’s evidence of 1) how that focused reading activates parts of the brain that otherwise aren’t lit up during casual reading; 2) why that close reading is more of a cognitive workout than distracted or more sporadic reading; and 3) how that sustained reading should feel: it should engage corners of the mind that a reader normally associates with movement and touch. Perhaps even teaching kids how it should feel in your mind to read a book closely will help them build reading stamina and learn more as they read.