Yesterday’s NPR feature, Students’ View of Intelligence Can Help Grades is fundamentally important. If you think that’s exaggerated praise, consider what it’s really saying.

As regular readers know, Grow With the Flow presents evidence that intelligence is dynamic, multi-dimensional, and eminently influenceable. Its goal is to help parents see why that is true, and how they can use that knowledge.

Carol Dweck’s research gives us a new sense of how important our influence can be: Teaching kids that their brain can become smarter leads to improvement in their performance – actually helps them become smarter:

By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

She shows not only that intelligence is influenceable, but that if we teach kids that they can influence their brain’s development – that they can become smarter through effort – their new knowledge leads to better achievement.

I’m reading Michael Pollan’s fascinating (and sometimes terrifying) look at food in the U. S., The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He says (p. 147):

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.

To assume that what you can measure is all that really matters. Hmm, must be time for the CSAPs again.

The Marino Mission: One Girl. One Mission. One Thousand Words.
Karen B. Chapman
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Alexa McCurry, an everyday kid who happens to know a lot more about DNA than you or I ever will, combines romance, astute lab work, and gutsy if sometimes ill-considered actions to solve a mystery during a summer internship at a marine biology lab in Central America.

In the course of the summer, Alexa uses a lot of big words. An even thousand of them are defined for the reader, as a painless way to prepare for the SATs.

Karen Chapman, the author, holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics, and puts her knowledge of the field to good use in the descriptions of the lab work. (She also graduated from Cornell; our heroine is a student at Ithaca High School, which I’ve often passed driving from downtown Ithaca up to Sid and Minna’s – fond memories.)

I wonder how adolescents of SAT-prep age will react to the book? Some indignant intelligentsia will withhold their endorsement, asserting that the patently pervasive punditry precludes or perhaps preempts profundity. (Did I mention that there’s a handy Vocabulary List in the back, as well as chapter-by-chapter vocabulary quizzes?) In truth, the device is necessarily heavy handed; at the end of Chapter 12, I read a few lines of Pride and Prejudice to cleanse my palate. But I agree with the blurb: seeing the words embedded in a story beats going brain dead studying word lists. I’d add that it is almost certainly more effective.

I’ll put it out in the waiting room tomorrow, and if I overhear spontaneous reviews, I’ll let you know.

I’ve been talking about massively multiplayer online role play games, focusing on World of Warcraft (WoW). Here’s a potpourri of further thoughts, mostly points that my young-adult informants wanted other adults to consider.

• In the real world, actions have consequences. Parents and educators reading this may note with distress, as I do, how little the consequences of poor school performance matter to some kids. I’d speculate that most gamers care about the consequences of their play.
• My informants especially wanted parents to notice an implication of the intersection of Real Time play and “actions have consequences.” Much of the play in WoW is based on coordinated actions among a group of players. There’s a strong sense of obligation to team members – surely a quality we’d like to encourage. When players answer the repeated call to come to dinner, or to Get to Bed!, they may have to abandon friends n the middle of an action, and the friends may get hurt as a result. My informants aren’t saying kids shouldn’t sleep or eat. But they think the negotiations between parent and child may go better if both sides of the negotiation see that the other has a good point.
• That idea expands: They want readers who don’t play to understand that there’s a remarkable variety of game types. It’s important to understand that the MMORPGs are played in a universe that continues 24-7, where you know only a small fraction of the players, and that all play is in Real Time (RT). There are other, important, turn-based games, like Civilization 3, where you can think as long as you want. There are games you play by yourself, against the computer; and others where you get together online with a group of firiends, where you agree to meet online at a certain time and play until someone wins. There are blends: See, for example, Starcraft, where you can play the computer, or agree to go online with a group of friends at an agreed-on time. Once you’re on, the play is RT. But there’s an end point, where someone wins, just like a board game. These are all different from MMORPGs, where the game goes on, with you or without you – there’s no end point where someone wins. (All these game types seem to me to have real-world parallels.) It’s important for parents and teachers to understand the distinctions, because the characteristics influence when, how, and how long kids typically play them.
• I said to Paul, “Games reflect the future world of work: working online, remotely, nongeographically; often working with people you’ve never met, half way around the globe; communicating by IM, voice and email, making extensive use of codes that allow efficient communication, maps, data, facts…” He said, “Future? Look at how I work right now.”
• Here’s an intriguing real-life example of real-world effective intelligence increasing as a result of gaming – Thanks, Laura:

  Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.

• I was worrying about grades and sleep. A disgruntled gamer said to me, “At least we aren’t out getting drunk, then driving home.”
• What I call “My Pinball Epiphany": May, 1958, I’m playing the pinball machine at the Ecoma, at the corner of Main and Lake, North East, PA. I suddenly think “Boy! If I studied as hard as I play this, I’d be amazing.” Then I go back to my game.
• For many kids, and some of my informants know this firsthand, gaming is one of the few contacts in which they’re valued, one of the few places where they can excel. (See my post, The Social Life of Dungeons and Dragons.
• And this kicker from Paul: “If a kid gets social and cognitive stimulation from a game more than from school, and insists on playing at the expense of school, is he necessarily addicted?”

My goal in these two long posts? To encourage you, talking with your kids about gaming, to ask not “Why does he play this game?” but rather “Why does he play this game?”

Here’s a general introduction to the variegated world of video games, and the differences among them.

Also from Wikipedia, here’s some background on World of Warcraft (commonly abbreviated as WoW).

Thotbot: World of Warcraft intrigues me. It describes itself as “a database for quests, mobs, spells/abilities, maps, items and more, being constantly updated through players transmitting data from an in-game interface…” When I read that, I hear “cooperative research” and other real-life skills.

There hasn’t been much scholarly work about video games. I own James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, but haven’t read it. Here’s a review.

Online games, and especially MMORPGs, are a major part of our cultural landscape. We need to understand a lot more about them. We need research fact more than we need unformed opinions like mine. But so far, we don’t even know what questions to ask.