PSYCHOLOGY AT SCHOOLIn one study conducted by Tracy and Ross Alloway at the Universities
of Stirling and Edinburgh, for example, two hundred children had their
IQ and working memory tested at age five and were then followed up at
age eleven. Working memory at age five was the strongest predictor of
the children’s reading, spelling and maths performance at age eleven,
accounting for between ten and twenty percent of the variation in their
performance – even more than IQ. Alloway said that working memory has
this predictive power because it measures a child’s capability for learning,
whereas IQ tests are more focused on what a child already knows. The
encouraging thing about this line of work is that preliminary research
suggests that working-memory capacity may be amenable to training.
T Look away from me when I’m talking to you When children avert
their gaze, adults often assume they aren’t concentrating. In fact,
gaze aversion is a useful strategy used by adults as well as children
to help block out unwanted visual stimulation when thinking hard
about something. Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon at the University of
Stirling has shown that gaze aversion in response to tough questions
is a skill that increases with age – it’s used less by five-year-olds than
eight-year-olds, the latter doing it as much as adults. What’s more,
Doherty-Sneddon has shown that teaching five-year-olds to look
away when thinking improves their performance on difficult maths
and verbal questions.
T Let children gesture On a related note, teachers used to tell
children to sit on their hands, to deter them from fidgeting.
However, research by Karen Pine at the University of Hertfordshire
and others has shown that children’s gestures help them think
and learn. For example, one study showed that children were able
to name twice as many pictures when their hands were free to
gesture, compared with when their hands were constrained by
mittens velcroed to a table (see also Chapter 9 on language).
T Hollywood films can help students There’s usually an audible sigh
of relief when a teacher tells pupils their double-history lesson is
going to be taken up with watching Elizabeth I or some other popular
historical film. Psychology research suggests such films really can help
pupils understand related material in a text book, with one caveat –
the teacher must point out in advance where the film deviates from
the true historical record. Andrew Butler demonstrated this in a 2009
study in which pupils’ recall of textbook facts was boosted by an
accompanying, related and accurate film clip. A clip with an inaccu-
racy could provoke mistakes in later testing, but this problem was
eradicated if the teacher pointed out any inaccuracies in advance.