New Child Concussion Treatment Recommendations

The New York Times reports that there is some controversy surrounding new recommendations on how to react when a young athlete is thought to have suffered a concussion. The new recommendations were developed and approved by a group at the 3rd International Conference on Concussion in Sport, sponsored by FIFA and held at their campus in Zurich in November of 2008. The British Journal of Sports Medicine published a supplement to their May 2009 issue devoted to concussion research (particularly that information shared at the aforementioned conference), though unfortunately the full text of the articles is only available to journal subscribers.

However, the abstracts are available for free, and as reported in the Times, the abstract of Purcell's "What are the most appropriate return-to-play guidelines for concussed child athletes?" states the the recommended practice is to wait at least one day before allowing children to return to play after they have suffered (or are suspected to have suffered) a concussion. Also identified as problematic in Purcell's abstract are the developmental influences on the psychometric assessment of child concussion, as well as the lack of child-specific assessment instruments. The Times suggests that Purcell's article also recommends that students avoid cognitive stress immediately following a concussion, including staying away from the classroom as well as technological stimulation.

Although there may be some merit to the potential for controversy surrounding these recommendations, specifically the concerns that players will not report concussion events to coaches / staff when they initially occur and therefore make it more likely for a severe second concussion to occur, I hope that these fears do not bear more weight for schools and athletic organizations as they develop policies for best practices surrounding children who suffer from concussions. We must develop child-specific instruments to assess cognitive changes following a suspected concussion, and we must err on the side of child safety and limit the athletic, scholastic, and other physical and cognitive demands on children who have suffered concussions - at least for one day, or until symptoms go away - so as to be sure to avoid dangerous back-to-back concussions. Given the mounting evidence of the short- and long-term damage done by concussions, it is imperative that we follow the advice of experts in protecting the brains of student athletes.

Webinar Series on PBS' "The New Science of Learning"

Scientific Learning Corporation, maker of education software, provider of education consulting services, and sponsor of PBS' recent special, "The New Science of Learning", is also sponsoring a series of free webinars   (registration required) on topics that may be of interest to readers of this blog.  I've registered for all three and would encourage you all to take advantage of this great opportunity to interact and learn with some of the leaders in the movement to integrate neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and pedagogy.

• Dr. Paula Tallal will host "How the Brain Learns: From the Laboratory to the Classroom" on May 27 at 1pm ET.
  
• Dr. Michael Merzenich will host "Brain Plasticity, Child Development, and Learning" on June 4 at 1pm ET.
  
• David Boulton will host "Stewarding the Health of our Children's Learning" on June 10 at 12pm ET and 4pm ET.
  

Dr. Merzenich gave a talk at TED in 2004 on neuroplasticity, which was recently posted online and I'm embedding here as a "sneak preview" of what we might have a chance to learn in June.

Attention and Multiple Intelligences Theory

I've endeavored over the past few months to exercise my "network literacy" (Will Richardson) and build a personal learning network with other educators using Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to post 140 character messages ("tweets"). Twitter users can follow each other and grow a personally-tuned information stream. Notably, each user's stream of tweets also gets an RSS feed, and Twitter also provides RSS feeds for searches - this is very powerful! Howard Rheingold recently posted a tweet seeking feedback on his blog post entitled "Attentional Literacy", a subject important to educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists alike. A debate ensued as to whether "literacy" was the appropriate word to describe attention, which prompted me to do some thinking (which is exactly why a personal learning network is so valuable).

Recently I've been reading about Howard Gardner's theory on Multiple Intelligences (MI). Gardner defines an intelligence as "a biopsychological potential of our species to process certain kinds of information in certain kinds of ways." There are a variety of reasons I find his work captivating:

• it fits with the modular model of the brain-mind
• it defines intelligence as a brain-based capacity
• it provides a model for instruction and assessment

Below are a few links to read through to get a sense of the past, present, and future of MI theory, as well as to see how it is being incorporated into education:

• Inside Higher Ed - Multiple Intelligences at 25
• Brain Leaders & Learners (Blog) - Target MI, Run From Lectures
• NY Teachers (Blog) - Incorporating MI Into Your Classroom
• Project Zero - Adult Multiple Intelligences
• Key Learning Community

In what I've read so far (only a small sample of Gardner's work, let alone all the related studies and critiques), it appears that the 8 intelligences he's identified so far do not exhibit a hierarchical pattern. Although this is valuable in terms of maintaining equity among the many ways of demonstrating intelligence (vs. the more traditional assessments that focus almost completely on verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical), a lack of such organization would be unusual if there is a strong relationship between the organization of the brain and the intelligences.

I jumped into the debate and suggested that, per Gardner's definition, that attention might be better labeled an "intelligence" than a "literacy". There is a lot of brain research happening to improve our understanding of the nature of attention, but there is no question that it is a biopsychological potential, and that it is related to information processing. Here are but a few examples of current literature on the neuroscience of attention:

• Electrical neuroimaging reveals timing of attentional control activity in human brain
• Defining a link between perceptual learning and attention
• Mental training affects distribution of limited brain resources
• Learning to pay attention

As I thought more, I wonder if, in fact, attention may not be just an intelligence, but an example of a heirarchichal intelligence. I don't know if "meta" is the appropriate word to use here - is attention "above" and providing top-down influence on other intelligences, or is attention more of a foundation, lower-order intelligence which other intelligences must gain in order to activate? Perhaps as neuroscience research improves our understanding of the brain-based nature of intelligence, a clear picture of the intelligence heirarchy will emerge based on the brain structures involved and their relationship to information input / output patterns. However, whether the location is "above" or "below", it seems clear that attentional intelligence is on a different level than the others already identified.

I'm also now realizing that Will Richardson's "network literacy" could also be thought of as an example of Gardner's "interpersonal intelligence", though with the context shifted to the digital realm. What's also been on my mind as I learn more about MI theory is how it might be similar or different to other cognitive theories I've learned about in the past, particularly p-prims, facets, and cognitive resources. It's clear that educational systems have room for improvement with regard to instruction and assessment of all 8 intelligences. Thinking of attention as an intelligence within the MI theory also helped me to realize that we educators - except Howard! - tend not to provide direct instruction on how to develop and use intelligence. Regardless of whether it is accurate that attention is an intelligence or a literacy, Howard's point is well made that our increasingly multi-tasking and digital students will benefit greatly from direct instruction on how to pay attention.

Rubrics: The Keystones of Standards-Based Academics

I'm cross-posting here a response I wrote to the post "Settling the Score" over at What It's Like on the Inside, which discusses standards-based grading and references a recent article in the NY Times called "Report Cards Give Up A's and B's for 4s and 3s".

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Great post, SG ... I've been chomping at the bit to find some time to leave a comment, and I hope it's not the case that the discussion here has already come & gone.

From my perspective, I think the 1 - 4 grading system for standards is a bad idea, for a few reasons. First, the 1 - 4 system is, I would suggest, so similar to the GPA system that they are easily confused. If using the 1 - 4 system is a matter of using shorthand symbols for communication efficiency, we could just as easily use shapes ... a circle for not meeting expectations, a triangle for partially, a square for meeting, and a star for exceeding. We could also just use the narrative definition of what each number is intended to represent, as others have mentioned.

Of course, those narratives and/or shapes don't necessarily have the simple ordinal inference that the number symbols do, which help the consumers of the information to determine their position in the continuum of learning. This leads to my second concern: the 1 - 4 system breaks the learning continuum into too few categories, one of which (the highest) is not available to all students at all times. The example used about simple addition skills is perhaps better critiqued from a curricular organization standpoint, but it'll serve as a good example about the problem with the grading system, too: if the concept / skill ("standard") is defined with such specificity that it can't be measured other than in a binary nature, it should not be considered a standard (it also opens the question about "scripted" teaching when standards are excessively narrow and numerous). I think teachers deserve multiple tools for assessing student learning, and trying to squeeze everything into the four categories represented by the 1 - 4 system makes an inherently difficult task even more difficult; furthermore, I think it gets us away from the most important goals of standards-based reform.

Nothing, to me, reveals the complexity and difficulty of the standards-based reform hypothesis more than the commonly-used but poorly-formed phrase "meeting the standard". The word standard is being used in two different ways: first, as an articulated concept or skill that should be learned as a result of the class; second, as an articulated expectation of a learning outcome. Therein lies my third concern with the 1 - 4 system: it's a "solution" to the wrong problem. The problem is that it is difficult to describe what we want students to learn and how we expect them to demonstrate to us that they've learned.

The 1 - 4 grading system doesn't solve that problem, it makes it worse because it confuses (and potentially alienates) parents and other consumers of our outcome reports like college & university admission officers. It's important that we acknowledge that our students are moving through a continuous educational system; it is our folly and detrimental to students to ignore the importance of good communication among all constituents in the educational community. While it's possible that parents and colleges might become savvy over time, it's just as likely that parents might become disengaged from their child's educational progress earlier or that colleges might mis-translate information in the process of trying to compare student learning outcomes. The 1 - 4 system doesn't inherently improve student-teacher communication, either - the critical component here isn't a grading system, it's rubrics.

Rubrics act as the map for students to navigate what they need to learn and how they need to demonstrate that learning. Rubrics can be aligned with the 1 - 4 system, to be sure, but they can as easily be aligned with grading systems such as A - F or percentages. The point, I think, of standards-based reform is to improve our communication of the concepts and skills that we want students to learn, and to provide students with clear guidelines on how they are to demonstrate their abilities. Rubrics, not grading systems, should be the focus, since they are the key communication tools bring together learning goals, demonstrations of learning, and achievement results.