Kids who are doing well in school know it; when they write down their answer, they know whether or not their answer is correct. They have a subtle sense, a recognition of whether they’ve gotten it right. Children who are struggling are genuinely unsure; they might get the right answer, but lack such awareness. So to develop this awareness, when a Tools teacher writes a letter on the board, she writes four versions of it and asks the kids to decide which is the best D.
Leong explained, “This is designed to trigger self-analysis of what a good D looks like and what would they like their own D’s to look like. They think about their work, when they think about hers.” Tools children are also frequently responsible for checking each other’s work. In one class Ashley observed, pairs of kids were practicing their penmanship, after which they were to take turns circling which of their partner’s letters were best. After one child raced through his checker duties too quickly, the other boy complained. This five-year-old actually wanted his supervisor to be more critical of his work.
Many of the exercises are chosen because they teach children to attend background cues and control their impulses. The simple game of Simon Says, for instance, entices a child to copy the leader, yet requires the kid to pay close attention and exercise intermittent restraint. Similarly, when the teacher plays the clean-up song, the children have to notice where they are in the music in order to make sure they’ll be finished before the song ends. In buddy reading, the natural impulse is for every kid to want to read first; the child who holds the ears and listens patiently is learning to quell this impulse and wait.
The upshot of Tools is kids who are not merely behaved, but self-organized and self-directed. After just three months of a pilot project, Tools teachers in New Mexico went from averaging forty reported classroom incidents a month to zero. And Tools kids don’t distract easily. During one lunch period in a New Jersey school cafeteria, the Tools kindergartners watched the entire rest of the student body become embroiled in a food fight. Not one Tools kid picked up as much as a scrap of food to throw, and when they returned to class, they told their teacher that they couldn’t believe how out of control the older children were.
While Tools’ techniques might sound fuzzy and theoretical, the program has strong support in neuroscience. In other chapters of this book, we’ve often touched upon the development of a child’s prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs executive function—planning, predicting, controlling impulses, persisting through trouble, and orchestrating thoughts to fulfill a goal. Though these are very adult attributes, executive function begins in preschool, and preschoolers’ EF capability can be measured with simple computerized tests.
During the easiest stage of these tests, a child sees a red heart appear, either on the left or right side of the screen, and then pushes the corresponding button—left or right. Even three-year-olds will do this perfectly. Then the child sees a red flower and is instructed to press the button on the opposite side of the flower. The new task requires her brain to toss out the old rule and adopt a new rule—this is called “attention switching.” It also requires the child to inhibit the natural urge to respond on the same side as the stimulus. For three-year-olds, this switch in rules is very hard; for four-year-olds, it’s a challenge but somewhat doable. Now the real test begins. The computer begins randomly showing either a red heart or a red flower, and the child needs to hold in her working memory both rules: heart = press same side, flower = press opposite side. The hearts and flowers are shown for only 2.5 seconds, so the kid has to think fast, without getting switched up. It requires attentional focus and constant reorienting of the mindset. For children’s brains, this is very difficult. Even thirteen-year-olds will push the wrong button 20% of the time.
The foremost expert on executive function in young children is Dr. Adele Diamond at the University of British Columbia. A few years ago, she was approached at a conference by Bodrova, who told her about the experiment in the Passaic preschool. Diamond wondered if the success of Tools might be because it was exercising children’s executive function skills. So Diamond went to Passaic to visit.
Diamond recalled, “In the regular classes, the children were bouncing off the walls. In the Tools classrooms, it was like a different planet. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She decided to return the next year and test the children’s executive functioning. “I could see the difference with my own eyes, but I wanted hard data,” she said.
To do this, Diamond ran the Passaic children through a number of the executive function computer tasks. She found a huge gap between the regular kids and the Tools kids on executive function. On one task, the regular kids tested not much above chance, but the Tools kids scored at 84%. On a very difficult task, only one-quarter of the regular kids could complete the test, while over half the Tools kids completed it.
“The more the test demanded high executive function,” Diamond noted, “the bigger the gap between the kids.”
Every parent has observed a young child and wondered, with some frustration, when he’ll be able to sit still (other than in front of the television). When will he be able to sustain an activity for a solid half-hour? When will he be able to stay on task, rather than be distracted by other children? When will he be able to truly apply himself? At times, it seems that a child’s cognitive ability, which might be very high, is at war with his distractability.
Usually we concern ourselves only with the detrimental end of this spectrum—the kid who can’t learn because he’s easily distracted. What we overlook is that being at the beneficial end of the spectrum—being able to concentrate—is a skill that might be just as valuable as math ability, or reading ability, or even raw intelligence.
So why are some kids better able to direct their attention? What are the neural systems that regulate focus—and is this perhaps why Tools is getting such good results?
Dr. Silvia Bunge is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her newest research is on a region of the brain called the rostral lateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of human brains that is most different from ape brains. It’s responsible for maintaining concentration and setting goals. “This is only speculative, but having kids plan their time and set weekly goals, like they do in Tools,” Bunge told me, “in effect wires up the RLPFC, building it, strengthening it.”
The broad term Bunge uses for a child’s regulation of focus is “cognitive control.” Cognitive control is necessary in many contexts. In the simplest, the child is trying to avoid distractions—not just external distractions, like another child making funny faces during class, but internal distractions. “Like the thought, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” Bunge explained.
Cognitive control is required whenever the brain has to manipulate information in the mind; this might be holding a phone number in memory just long enough to dial it, or planning chess moves in advance, or weighing the pros and cons of two choices. But it isn’t just about managing information: it’s also part of the process of squelching frustration and anger, and stifling an inappropriate or impulsive response.
An impulsive social response might be giggling in class, but there are impulsive academic responses, too. On multiple-choice achievement and IQ tests, there’s always a “distractor” in each list of answers, a choice that is almost right. Children with weak cognitive control are tricked into selecting it. Their final score will dock them for intelligence, or reading comprehension, but they’re perfectly intelligent and read just fine—they just can’t regulate their impulsivity.
According to Bunge, cognitive control is not “on” all the time. Rather, the brain can allocate more or less cognitive control as it sees fit. This works as a feedback loop between two subregions in the brain. One subsystem is supposed to measure how well you’re doing on whatever you’re supposed to be doing. When it senses you’re not doing well enough, it signals another subsystem, which allocates more cognitive control: it improves your concentration. When a child seems to be lacking
in control, it’s not just that her brain can’t concentrate—she’s not aware she even needs to concentrate. The first part of the feedback loop isn’t doing its job. She’s literally not paying attention to how well she’s doing.
Think back to the Tools curriculum, where children are routinely asked to check and score their own work against answer sheets, and are always buddied up with a partner, checking each other’s work (even in preschool). Bodrova and Leong can’t emphasize enough how crucial it is for children to develop an awareness of how well they’re doing and when their work is completed accurately. This sensitivity is required for the feedback system to function, and for concentration to be increased.
Bunge’s specialty is putting school-aged children into fMRI scanners and monitoring brain activity while they take tests similar to the heart and flower task described above. She’s found that the adult brain has a specialized region of the frontal lobe devoted to regulating rules—all sorts of rules, from heart and flower rules to the rules of grammar to the rules of driving. (When this region is damaged, people speak and write ungrammatically.) This rules region allows people to be proactive: they recognize circumstances where rules will apply, as if glancing ahead in time, preloading the brain for what to do. This proactive response is very much like private speech—telling yourself what to do, a step ahead of doing it. Decisions are made instantly, and correctly. Schoolchildren taking the same tests don’t yet have this rules region to draw upon; rather than proact, their brains react. Stumbling, trying to get the rules straight, their error rate is high.
That the children in Tools choose their own work is also significant, said Bunge. “When a child gets to choose, they presumably choose activities they’re motivated to do. Motivation is crucial. Motivation is experienced in the brain as the release of dopamine. It’s not released like other neurotransmitters into the synapses, but rather it’s sort of spritzed onto large areas of the brain, which enhances the signaling of neurons.” The motivated brain, literally, operates better, signals faster. When children are motivated, they learn more.
This chapter began with the statistical science of Driver’s Ed, and progressed to the neuroscience of preschool. The two are indeed connected, by the neural systems that regulate attention and cognitive control. Teenage drivers can score 100% on a paper test of the rules, but when driving, their reaction times are delayed because they have not yet internalized the grammar of driving—they have to think about it. This increases the cognitive load, and their ability to maintain attention is stressed to capacity. They are on the verge of making poor decisions. Put a friend in the car and the attention systems are easily overloaded—the driver’s brain no longer proactively anticipates what could happen, glancing seconds ahead and preloading the rules. Instead, he is left to react, and can’t always react accurately, no matter how fast his reflexes are.
Performing amid distractions is a daily challenge for students. In a previous chapter, we wrote about the predictive power of intelligence tests. One reason IQ tests don’t predict better is that in a child’s school life, academics don’t take place in a quiet, controlled room, one-on-one with a teacher—the way IQ tests are administered. Academics occur among a whirlwind of distractions and pressures. Psychologists call this the difference between hot and cold cognition. Many people perform far worse under pressure, but some perform far better.
This notion comes under many names in the research: effortful control, impulsivity, self-discipline. Depending on the way it’s measured, the predictive values of self-discipline in many cases are better than those of IQ scores. In simpler words, being disciplined is more important than being smart. Being both is not just a little better—it’s exponentially better. In one study, Dr. Clancy Blair, of Pennsylvania State University, found that children who were above average in IQ and executive functioning were 300% more likely to do well in math class than children who just had a high IQ alone.
Just like the science of intelligence, the science of self-control has shifted in the last decade from the assumption that it’s a fixed trait—some have it, others don’t—to the assumption it’s malleable. It’s affected by everything from parenting styles to how recently you ate (the brain burns a lot of glucose when exercising self-control). The neural systems that govern control can get fatigued, and—according to one study—those with higher IQs suffer more from this kind of fatigue.
“Due to a multitude of empirical evidence, there is now consensus on the effectiveness of self-regulated learning on academic achievement, as well as on learning motivation,” wrote Dr. Charlotte Dignath, in a recent meta-analysis of self-control interventions.
Both Ashley and I have borrowed some of the Tools of the Mind strategies. Children of every grade show up in the evenings at Ashley’s tutoring facility; she now makes them write down a plan for how they’ll spend their two hours, to teach them to think proactively. When they get distracted, she refers them back to their plan. She no longer simply corrects children’s grammar mistakes in their homework; instead, she first points to the line containing the mistake, and asks the child to find it. This makes them think critically about what they’re doing rather than mechanically completing the assignment. With kindergartners who are just learning to write, Ashley has them use private speech as they form a letter, saying aloud, “Start at the top and go around….”
I use similar techniques with my daughter. Every night, she comes home from preschool with a page of penmanship, filled with whatever letter she learned that day. I ask her to circle the best example on each line—so she’ll recognize the difference between a good one and a better one. At bedtime, she and I do a version of buddy reading: after I’ve read her a book, I hand it to her. Then she tells the story back to me, creatively narrating from the illustrations and whatever lines she remembers verbatim. Occasionally, when she and I have the whole day together, we write up a plan for what we’ll do. (I wish I did this more, because she loves it.) I also give her prompts that extend her play scenarios. For instance, she loves baby dolls; she’ll collect them all, and put them to bed—this might take five or ten minutes. At that point, she no longer knows what to do. So I’ll encourage her to wake the babies up, take them to school, and go on a field trip. That’s usually all it takes to spark her imagination for over an hour.
In Neptune, New Jersey, one of the kids in the first Tools preschool class was Sally Millaway’s own three-year-old son, George. “He had special needs,” Millaway said. She was convinced Tools would work for the normal children, but would it work for George? “My son had speech and language delays, very severely—he didn’t speak at all. He wasn’t yet diagnosed with autism, but he had all the red flags of it.” Later that fall, George was instead diagnosed with a hearing problem—he could hear tones, but it was like he was hearing underwater, the sounds blurred. “In November, his adenoids were taken out. He began talking within three days of the surgery.”
“I suddenly went from thinking he would have a lifelong disability to realizing he had all this time he had to make up for,” Millaway said. “Would he ever catch up to the other kids?”
Millaway’s concerns were short-lived. She couldn’t believe the rapid progress he made, and she attributed it entirely to Tools. After three years of the program—two in preschool, one in kindergarten—he completely overcame his early deficits. George is now in a second-grade gifted program, and Tools is taught in all Neptune kindergarten classes.
NINE
Plays Well With Others
Why modern involved parenting has failed to produce a generation of angels.
A couple years ago, an expert on preschool children’s aggression, Dr. Jamie Ostrov, teamed up with Dr. Douglas Gentile, a leading expert on the effects of media exposure. The two men spent two years monitoring the kids at two Minnesota preschools, cross-referencing the children’s behavior against parent reports of what television shows and DVDs the kids watched. Ranging from 2.5 to 5 years old, these were well-off children, from well-off fami
lies.
Ostrov and Gentile fully expected that kids who watched violent shows like Power Rangers and Star Wars would be more physically aggressive during playtime at school. They also expected kids who watched educational television, like Arthur and Clifford the Big Red Dog, would be not just less aggressive, but the kids would be more prosocial—sharing, helpful, and inclusive, etc. These weren’t original hypotheses, but the study’s importance was its long-term methodology: Ostrov and Gentile would be able to track the precise incremental increase in aggression over the course of the preschool years.
Ostrov had previously found that videocameras were too intrusive and couldn’t capture the sound from far away, so his researchers hovered near children with clipboards in hand. The children quickly grew bored with the note taking and ignored the researchers.
The observers had been trained to distinguish between physical aggression, relational aggression, and verbal aggression. Physical aggression included grabbing toys from other children’s hands, pushing, pulling, and hitting of any sort. Relational aggression, at the preschool age, involved saying things like, “You can’t play with us,” or just ignoring a child who wanted to play, and withdrawing friendship or telling lies about another child—all of which attack a relationship at its core. Verbal aggression included calling someone a mean name and saying things like “Shut up!” or “You’re stupid”—it often accompanied physical aggression.
Ostrov cross-referenced what his observers recorded with teacher ratings of the children’s behavior, the parents’ own ratings, and their reports on how much television the children were watching. Over the course of the study, the children watched an average of eleven hours of media per week, according to the parents—a normal mix of television shows and DVDs.
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