By Sammy Mack

At Miami Carol City Senior High in Florida, a handful of teachers, administrators and coaches are gathered around a heavy wooden table in a conference room dubbed the “War Room,” looking through packets of information about several students.

There are others at the table, too: analysts from the group Talent Development Secondary, which monitors student data; City Year, a nonprofit that provides mentors; and Communities in Schools, which connects kids with health care and social services.

It’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but they’re all here to help students who are just starting to show signs of trouble.

The process works like this: analyst Jennifer Savino gathers information on attendance, behavior and performance in math and English. Then, based on some dropout risk studies from Johns Hopkins University, she flags kids who are on a downward trend. Those names show up on PowerPoint slides at these weekly War Room meetings.

Today, there are three kids on the list. A projector beams one student’s image on a screen, accompanied by a spreadsheet of his grades so far this year. His most recent report card shows a lot more D’s and F’s than in the first part of the year.

“He came to me last week and he said, ‘I’m hungry. I haven’t had anything to eat all day,’ ” says one teacher. “I had a bag of chips and I gave them to him.”

“If that happens again … we keep snacks in the office,” offers another.

A third person points out something not everyone knows about this student: Turns out, he’s spent more than a week this semester living in a car.

The team then discusses some potential options, like strategies for helping the student manage his time and putting him in touch with homeless services. A sports coach volunteers to coordinate everything.

This kind of interaction between different school departments didn’t happen before.

“If we don’t get to the core of the problem, we can’t teach them,” says Tracy Troy, who teaches math and special education.

USING DATA TO CREATE EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

When these meetings were first introduced three years ago, Troy, who has been on staff at Carol City for 14 years, was apprehensive about getting involved with students’ problems outside her classroom.

“Not that I don’t care, but I care too much,” she says. “And sometimes, it weighs on you. Because those are your children while you’re here.”

Now, she says, the War Room meetings help her help the kids.

The program, called Diplomas Now, identifies 150 to 200 students a year at Carol City. It costs about $600 per student annually to run.

Last school year, one-third of students flagged for missing school got back on track to graduation. Two-thirds of the students who were having behavioral problems made a turnaround.

“The point of all this isn’t to collect data. It’s to change what’s happening for individual kids,” says Paige Kowalski, a state policy director for the Data Quality Campaign, a group that advocates for better use of all that student information the states collect.

Kowalski says about 20 states have developed early warning systems like the one here at Carol City. Schools, she says, can learn a lot from the medical field, in particular.

“[They] don’t just put out reports saying, ‘The hospital lost all these patients and saved these people,’ ” she says. “They actually look at it and say, ‘What can we do better?’ ”

FINDING KIDS WHO MIGHT GET MISSED

Earlier this year, Mack Godbee, a soft-spoken Carol City High 10th-grader, was the subject of a War Room meeting. The first quarter of the school year, Godbee’s report card was littered with D’s and F’s.

Today, it’s report card time again, and Godbee is going over his most recent grades with his mentor, Natasha Santana-Viera. Now, there are more C’s and B’s, and he got an A in English.

Godbee says his life would be very different if he had not participated in the Diplomas Now program. “No lie — I think I would have ended up dead,” he says.

That’s because he was spending a lot of time on the street. When his dad left home, he explains, he wanted to show his mom that they didn’t need him. So Godbee started selling drugs. He was 6.

By the time he got to high school, Godbee says, he was affiliated with a gang. He skipped classes, didn’t study and was angry all the time.

That might have been easy for teachers and administrators to miss. But earlier this school year, after looking at Godbee’s data, Santana-Viera sat him down and asked, “Are you OK?”

“I sat right there and thought about it. Like, am I really OK?” Godbee recalls.

And for the first time in his life, he said no.

Even with his improvements this year, Godbee doesn’t want to be the person he is now. “I want to be a different person. I want to be that kid that makes straight A’s and B’s on his report card,” he says. “Be in school every day on time. Be on that honor roll list. Go on field trips.”

Godbee has a lot to work on, but according to the data, he’s on an upward trend.

Using the Internet is an easy way to feel omniscient. Enter a search term and the answers appear before your eyes.

But at any moment you’re also just a few taps away from becoming an insufferable know-it-all. Searching for answers online gives people an inflated sense of their own knowledge, according to a study. It makes people think they know more than they actually do.

“We think the information is leaking into our head, but really the information is stored somewhere else entirely,” Matthew Fisher, a doctoral student in cognitive psychology at Yale University, tells Shots. Fisher surveyed hundreds of people to get a sense of how searching the Internet affected how they rate their knowledge. His study was published Tuesday in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Fisher began with a simple survey: he asked questions such as “How does a zipper work?” or “Why are there leap years?” He allowed just half of his subjects to use the Internet to answer the questions.

Then he asked the subjects to rate how well they thought they could answer a question unrelated to the first question, such as “Why does Swiss cheese have holes?” or “How do tornadoes form?” People who had been allowed to search online tended to rate their knowledge higher than people who answered without any outside sources.

To reveal factors that might explain why the Internet group rated their knowledge higher, he designed follow-up experiments using different groups of people. First, he asked people to rate their knowledge before the test; there was no difference between subjects’ ratings. But afterwards, the Internet-enabled subjects again rated their knowledge better than the others.

Next, Fisher tried to make sure that people saw the exact same information. He told the Internet-enabled group, “Please search for the scientificamerican.com page with this information.” The non-search group was sent directly to the page. Fisher checked that the two groups used the same URL. Still, the people who could actively search rated their knowledge higher than those who simply saw the information.

And this is just a taste of the experiments Fisher ran. He also:

• Compared different search engines.
• Reworded his questions to make it clear that he was asking for only the subjects’ knowledge, not the Internet’s.
• Made the online searchers use filters that would keep any relevant results from showing up.
• Asked questions for which there were no answers online, such as “How do wheat fields affect the weather?”
• Asked people to choose one of seven brain scans that most resembled their brain. The people who had been searching online picked the image with the most activity.

The results kept coming back the same: searching online led to knowledge inflation.

There are practical consequences to this little exercise. If we can’t accurately judge what we know, then who’s to say whether any of the decisions we make are well-informed?

“People are unlikely to be able to explain their own shortcomings,” says Fisher. “People aren’t aware of the quality of explanation or the quality of arguments they can produce, and they don’t realize it until they encounter the gaps.”

The more we rely on the Internet, Fisher says, the harder it will be to draw a line between where our knowledge ends and the web begins. And unlike poring through books or debating peers, asking the Internet is unique because it’s so effortless.

“We are not forced to face our own ignorance and ask for help; we can just look up the answer immediately,” Fisher writes in an email. “We think these features make it more likely for people to consider knowledge stored online as their own.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

When students use their bodies in the learning process, it can have a big effect, even if it seems silly or unconnected to the learning goal at hand. Researchers have found that when students use their bodies while doing mathematical storytelling (like with word problems, for example), it changes the way they think about math. “We understand language in a richer, fuller way if we can connect it to the actions we perform,” said Sian Beilock, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.

Consider this word problem:

Two hippos and two alligators are at the zoo. Pete the zookeeper feeds them at the same time. Pete gives each hippo seven fish. He gives four to the alligators.

In an experiment on third graders, students were divided into two groups. One group read through the problem twice. The other group acted out the story as they read it, physically pretending to feed fish to the hippos and alligators as they read the problem. Both groups of students were asked how many fish the zookeeper fed to the animals.

The answer:

“Kids who acted out the story did better on this problem,” Beilock said. The kids who read the problem often got “eleven” as a solution. They had missed the word “each” in the problem. But because the acting kids had physically mimed giving each hippo seven fish before moving on, the difference was ingrained.

“What was important was matching the words with specific action; that led to enhanced learning,” Beilock said. “And after they’d acted it out they could actually do it in their head and get some of the same benefits.”

THE BODY AND THE BRAIN

Scholarly study goes back a long time in history, but in terms of human evolution, many of the academic skills now required for successful functioning in the world are fairly new to the human brain. As neuroscientists investigate how humans learn, they often find that newer skills and aptitudes are mapped onto areas of the brain that also control basic body functions. Increasingly, this work is helping to illuminate neurological connections between the human body, its environment and the process of learning.

“In order to really engage our students and help them perform at their best we have to move beyond what’s happening in the head,” said Beilock at a Learning and the Brain conference. “We have to go beyond that.”

This area of study, called “embodied learning,” is not new to many educators. Maria Montessori highlighted the connection between minds and bodies in her 1936 book The Secret of Childhood: “Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.”

Increasingly scientists are proving Montessori right. Researchers are studying the body movements of children as young as four-to-six months old and have found earlier and more frequent movement correlates with academic learning down the road. Kids who could sit up, sustain “tummy time” longer and walk were all correlated with future academic success, even when researchers controlled for socioeconomics, family education and type of future education, among other mitigating factors.

“A very strong predictor of academic achievement was how early kids were moving, exploring their world,” Beilock said. “When kids can explore their surroundings, all of a sudden, things change.” Once kids are on the move the adults in their lives use directives and other more complicated language forms. As kids are coached by their parents, they begin to understand the directions and change behaviors. And once a child can do something on her own, she’s more likely to internalize what’s happening with others. “There is evidence that our ability to use our hands affects the structure and functioning of the brain,” Beilock said.

As young children move and explore their worlds, they are learning through touch. Early bimanual training correlates with the robustness of the corpus callosum, a part of the brain that facilitates quick communication between the left and right brain hemispheres, Beilock said. This connection between using ones hands and swift communication in the brain may be part of the reason learning to play music is often correlated with math ability.

“Math is a very recent cultural invention,” Beilock said. The part of the brain responsible for numerical representation also controls finger motion. Many children first learn to count on their fingers, a physical manifestation of the connection. The studies of very young learners have solidified Beilock’s conviction that academic learning is inherently connected to the body.

GESTURING TO LEARN

A colleague of Beilock’s at the University of Chicago, Susan Goldin-Meadow has done extensive research into how student gestures can indicate a more nuanced understanding of math than students are often able to articulate verbally. Goldin-Meadow did a lot of work around problems of equivalence, which children often struggle to understand. She found that often students gesture in ways that indicate they understand how to solve the problem even if they are simultaneously describing an incorrect solution.

“It’s particularly helpful for teachers because it may give you insight into things students may not be able to express,” said Goldin-Meadow at the same conference. Not only could gestures be a good clue for teachers, but when students produce what Goldin-Meadow calls “mismatches,” meaning they are saying one thing and gesturing a different understanding, it indicates they are primed to learn. And, when teachers produce “mismatches” in their own speech and gestures, it helps students already in that primed state to learn by offering several strategies.

“Encouraging kids to use their hands brings out unsaid, and often correct ideas, which then makes them more open to instruction and more likely to learn,” Goldin-Meadow said. She also found that showing two ways of doing a problem with speech had very little effect on learning, but showing two methods when one was in gesture helped learners.

And the connection between bodies and learning doesn’t stop with the younger grades. Beilock studies how well students comprehend abstract concepts in high school physics. Many classes focus on listening to lecture, reading a textbook and doing physics problems. Beilock hypothesized that if students could feel an abstract concept like angular momentum on their bodies, they would both understand and remember it better.

She and her colleagues used a rod with two bicycle wheels attached to test their ideas. Students spun the wheels and then tilted the rod in different directions. As they changed the angle, the force they felt changed dramatically. In her experiment, one set of students got to hold and experience the wheel. Another group just watched the first group and observed the effects they were feeling. They were all quizzed on the material a week later.

“Those students who had more motor activation did better on the test,” Beilock said. “And those students were the ones who got the experience.” But what if one set of students was just better at physics? Researchers at DePaul University have replicated this experiment, strengthening the scientific link between hands-on experimentation and powerful learning.

ENVIRONMENT MATTERS

Just as body movement and involvement can have a huge impact on learning, so too can the spaces where we learn. While neuroscientists are starting to be able to prove this link with their experiments, this concept is nothing new. Philosophers, writers and practitioners of Eastern religions have long made the same connection between the power of nature to relax the mind and readiness to take on the world.

“When we are in nature, our directed attention has time to rest and replenish,” Beilock said. That’s important because focus is like a muscle that gets tired. One researcher asked students to take a walk through the downtown of a college town. They weren’t asked to do anything in particular, but they naturally encountered a lot of stimuli. The other group took a walk in a natural setting. The nature walkers were better able to focus when they returned.

Visual distractions apply to the classroom as well. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently found that when students learn in highly decorated classrooms, their gazes tend to wander, they get off task and their test scores suffer. Limiting visual stimulus is particularly important for very young learners who are still learning how to focus, and yet kindergarten classrooms are often the most brightly and densely decorated in an effort to make institutional buildings feel more cheerful.

THE BODY AND ANXIETY

One way to help students reduce test anxiety is to let them work it out through their bodies beforehand. Beilock did an experiment with freshmen high school students before their first final. She asked them to write down concerns about the test and connect to other times when they felt similar. They were told to be as open as they wanted and that their writing would be confidential. A control group of kids were told to think about what wouldn’t be on the test.

This activity had little effect on kids who didn’t experience much test anxiety. But students experiencing high levels of anxiety saw a six percentage point gain on their test scores. And, when Beilock analyzed those students’ writing, she found the strategy was particularly effective for students whose writing revealed an eventual acceptance that the test was a minor hurdle, not the big scary all-consuming event they’d been worried about.

“We can start leveraging the power of our bodies to help us learn, think and perform at our best,” Beilock said. Too often students are cooped up inside for six or more hours, sometimes without an adequate recess ,and more likely than not, with little attention paid to how their bodies could be powerful learning tools in the classroom.

Thanks to the rapid developments in education technology, there is an abundance of teaching tools available to educators: videos students can watch at home, lesson plans that can be easily downloaded (and for free), courses that can be completed at one’s own pace. With so much information available, much of it on platforms developed by private companies, high school English teacher Michael Godsey asks what this all means for the future of the teaching profession in this post in The Atlantic, and what the role of “facilitator” could mean in the future classroom that’s closer to five years away instead of 20.

In the Atlantic:

“I don’t have many answers in this brave new world, but I feel like I can draw one firm line. There is a profound difference between a local expert teacher using the Internet and all its resources to supplement and improve his or her lessons, and a teacher facilitating the educational plans of massive organizations. Why isn’t this line being publicly and sharply delineated, or even generally discussed? This line should be rigorously guarded by those who want to keep education professionals in the center of each classroom. Those calling for teachers to “transform their roles,” regardless of motive or intentionality, are quietly erasing this line—effectively deconstructing the role of the teacher as it’s always been known.”