Thursday, March 14, 2013

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cell Phones

Cat on the Phone
In the past I wrote about some big problems I have with cell phones:

  1. Students are rude with their cell phones
  2. Cell-phone bans cause students significant anxiety.

Science is the best way to understand the universe and solve our problems; I wanted to tackle this problem scientifically. So I applied The Method.

First step: ask an answerable question. This is a bit harder than it might at first seem, since whatever question I ask will need some definitions so that it can be answered. Simply asking, "What is best?" is not sufficient unless we all agree on what "best" is. So here is what I came up with:
How much cell-phone use in class results in the greatest academic achievement, course engagement, and student satisfaction?
That question has three measurable outcomes, as long as I define how I will measure those results. So for the purposes of this experiment I used the following operational definitions:

  • Academic achievement was measured by overall course grade (points out of 1000).
  • Course engagement was measured by counting good-questions asked per class.
  • Student Satisfaction was measured by an end-of-course evaluation by students.

The next step is to do background research so I read a multitude of articles about cell-phones and attention, cell-phones and learning, anxiety and learning, cell-phones and anxiety, and many other permutations of the key-words: cell-phone, learning, anxiety, engagement, classroom, and teaching. After weeks of literature review I thought I was ready to design my study.

Since I was teaching three sections of Introduction to Psychology on the same day that semester. I planned a different cell-phone policy for each class and put the relevant information in the syllabus.

VERBOTEN!
1. Verboten: "There will be NO cell-phone use during class. Phones must be off or on silent, remember that vibrations are sounds, turn your phone off.. If I see your phone out I will take it and put it on my desk for the duration of class. If you are expecting an emergency call inform the caller ahead of time to wait and call after class time, or do not come to class until your anxiety about your potential emergency has been resolved. After your third offense I will begin to penalize your course grade. " (Note: Thankfully no students called my bluff on the harshness of this policy.)

2. Permissive: There was no statement about cell-phones in the syllabus and I ignored completely any use or ringing of cell-phones.

3. Interval: "The class will be organized into roughly 20-minute blocks of activity (20 minutes of lecture, 20 minutes of video, 20 minutes of group work, 20 minutes of an in-class activity, etc.). During these times you may not use your cell-phone, not even for texting. However, between blocks there will be 2-5 minutes of transition time during which you are free to check your messages, send a tweet, update your status, or whatever it is you do on your phones. I will make clear announcements about when it is cell-time and when it is class-time before and after these transitions."

I generated a lot of usable data from this semester and went about analyzing the results. As far as academic achievement was concerned there was no significant difference between all three courses. The Interval section had significantly greater course engagement and student satisfaction (even out scoring the cell-phone permissive section). So to interpret and speculate a bit, I think this shows that good students are still good students regardless of cell-phone policy (they probably weren't using their phones even when allowed) and bad students are still bad students even if they aren't texting. But, students engage with the course more when they are not anxious about their missed messages while remaining free from texts for large blocks of class time. I also speculate that student satisfaction is directly influenced by higher classroom engagement.

The last step will be to share my results, which I suppose I am doing here, but I'm also preparing a manuscript to share with the larger scholarship of teaching and learning community. In the mean time I have adopted the interval policy in all of my courses since. Thank you Science!


Wednesday, March 6, 2013

A Little Bit of Unpredictable Stress Everyday

ResearchBlogging.orgThat is the recipe for depression. Chronic Mild Stress (CMS). Or at least it is the recipe I used to depress rats. As I mentioned earlier I worked with rats to research the mood-effects of Salvia. One important piece of this research was the idea that a depressed brain is different than a healthy brain and may respond differently to drug exposure. So in order to apply that in rats, I needed a way to create depressed rats. For me, that meant using CMS.

In the CMS model, developed first by Richard Katz, rats exposed to mild stressors everyday showed a decrease in sucrose consumption that was later reversed by administration of an anti-depressant (Katz, 82). Let me explain.

Chronic (happening regularly over time) Mild (not severely traumatic) Stress (a feeling of strain to adapt to changing environmental (or psychological) conditions). Practically this means doing things to rats to make them a little bit uncomfortable everyday. In my research, inspired by work that came out of Paul Willner's lab, this involved the following: overnight strobe-light (2Hz),  cage tilting at 45 degrees, forced paired housing (a strange rat was put in the subject rats cage separated by a wire mesh), continuous illumination (there is no night), overnight food deprivation, overnight water deprivation, and empty water bottle exposure. These were all done briefly enough not to cause excessive stress, remember I was going for uncomfortable not traumatic.

A Long-Evans Lab Rat
There is a hallmark feature of human depression called anhedonia. Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from pleasurable stimuli. Or joylessness. Anhedonia is the reason that depressed people don't laugh at jokes, or smile when a baby giggles, or enjoy doing any of the things they used to enjoy doing. Pleasure doesn't feel good anymore. If you or someone you know has ever been depressed it is likely you witnessed anhedonia.

Happy rats love to drink sugar water. Even when dissolving a very small amount of sugar in water (less than 1% sucrose solution), rats show a strong preference for sweet-water over regular water. We can measure that by giving the rats two water bottles, one with plain drinking water and one with sweet-water. Come back 24-hours later and measure how much of each the rat drank. Happy rats drink around 90% sweet-water. We might say that sweet-water has a greater hedonic value; it is more pleasurable for the rat.

After three weeks of CMS my rats exhibited anhedonia. After three weeks of exposure to the mild stressors listed about the rats no longer show a preference for sweet-water. Again we present the rats with two water bottles, one with plain drinking water and one with sweet-water. 24-hours later we see that they drank about 50% sweet-water. This shows no preference for the sweet-water. Even though the sweet-water might taste better (have a higher hedonic value), the rats don't care. Because they are joyless. They have developed anhedonia. They are depressed (or at least they are now a robust animal model of human depression).

Katz, R. (1982). Animal model of depression: Pharmacological sensitivity of a hedonic deficit Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 16 (6), 965-968 DOI: 10.1016/0091-3057(82)90053-3
Willner, P. (2005). Chronic Mild Stress (CMS) Revisited: Consistency and Behavioural-Neurobiological Concordance in the Effects of CMS Neuropsychobiology, 52 (2), 90-110 DOI: 10.1159/000087097