Getting the Right Flow for Developing Talented Students

I played ultimate frisbee for a lot of years, and the best moments on the field were when you had "flow". All seven players knowing where each other were, moving the frisbee fluidly up the field, and finally into the end-zone. The absolute best was to have flow against a team that was really good and feel like despite their good defense we were still able to keep moving the frisbee in rhythm. I'm thinking of this because I just finished a book that tries to define this feeling of flow, and provides evidence that this flow is an important factor motivating students to develop their talents. The book had me considering whether the intuition we've developed at SimBiotic on how to write virtual labs is really an intuition about how to generate flow in a learning activity.

Talented Teenagers: The Roots of Success and Failure by Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen, describes a study these authors carried out in the 80's in a couple of suburban high schools outside of Chicago. Their goal was to find out what makes students who show talent in some area (they looked at music, science, math, athletics, and art) continue to develop that talent into adulthood. They picked 200 "talented" students and did a bunch of psychological tests and interviews with each student and their teachers and parents, as well as looking at grades, SAT scores, and the like. But the key original piece of data they gathered was clever. They gave each student a pager for a week and rang the pager 7 to 9 times a day. Each time they rang, the student was supposed to immediately fill out a form recording what they were doing, where they were, who they were with, and answer a set of questions about how they were feeling. They then followed these students for 2 years of high school, and at the end recorded several measures of how students were doing in their talent area. Although the whole study is based on correlations and so suffers from the issues of all such analyses, they have a lot of tantalizing and not necessarily intuitive results. For instance, they found talented teenagers tended to have fewer chores and jobs then "average" teenagers, be delayed in exploring their sexuality, and watch more television. Less surprisingly, they identified certain characteristics of the adults around the teen that were important, for instance a family that was both supportive and encouraged the kid to challenge themselves. But from my perspective, the most interesting results were on flow experiences the students had in their talent area.

Ellie Steinberg, our vice-president, just finished leading our part of the EcoScienceWorks project for the Maine laptop program, led by Walt Allan and Jeri Erickson at the Foundation for Blood Research. The capstone lab we developed, Program a Bunny, uses a vaguely ecological context to get students to program a little bunny to forage for lettuce and carrots. It uses the CodeBlocks graphical programming interface developed by the Klopfer lab at MIT to let students build the behavior of their rabbits. Students start with really simple programming tasks where they are basically told what to do. As they progress through the lab the bunnies face increasingly complex landscapes which challenge students to develop more sophisticated programs. About a dozen teachers in Maine middle schools used the lab during the testing phase and gave uniformly thumbs up reviews. Beyond just saying the lab worked well, they told us their students were very engaged and excited by using the lab, including some students who are rarely engaged in their classes otherwise. After reading Talented Teenagers, I'm now wondering if "flow" is a good way to describe what we achieved with the lab.

The authors describe a flow experience as one where you lose track of time and fatigue and everything else but the activity itself. The student would be in a "high skill, high challenge" state. To get there, the student must have "the opportunities for action match the person's capacity to act". It also helps if there are clear goals and immediate and unambiguous feedback. This state (so the authors claim, and we can probably all agree from personal experience) is so enjoyable that you want to repeat it. But to repeat it, you must do something harder than before, because the last challenge will no longer be challenging next time. So they hypothesize that a student who experiences flow in an area where they are talented will continually push their skills to try and get to the flow state again, and thus eventually become highly skilled in that area. In their study, students that had flow experiences did not necessarily get the best grades or impress their teachers the most. But those students were the ones that stuck with the talent through school, took the most advanced classes in the talent area, and had the highest commitment to continue focusing on that talent area.

The implication for a lab activity is, I think, that you want to make real challenges that grow in concert with the skills the students have learned in previous sections. If its not challenging, students don't have an opportunity for a flow experience. This in itself is pretty intuitive. But what are the rules for writing such a lab? And is flow really important, or just a consequence of something else? The Talented Teenagers study cannot say, since they did not conduct any actual experiments. Coincidentally, our next project with the Maine laptop initiative, again led by Walt and Jeri with Ellie Steinberg leading our piece of it, is to investigate exactly what kind of a lab is best for teaching students experimental skills. In our grant application, we put this in terms of open versus closed sets of instructions—how much guidance should students receive in the instructions for the lab versus how much should they just be set loose to explore for themselves? The outcome variables we planned to measure were related to experimental design such as control of variables and conducting multiple trials. But now I'm thinking we might want to look at flow as well (using the measurement questions from this study—do different formulations of the lab lead to more or less flow for different students, and does the degree of flow affect how well the students learn the skills? Assuming we get funded, I'm hopeful we can find concrete guidelines on how to write flow into a simulated lab.