The Secret to Student Engagement
People want to say, 'I'm not seduced by repetition! I like new things!' But disguised repetition is reliably pleasurable, because it leads to fluency, and fluency makes you feel good.
The following quote, from The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, started me down the forthcoming rabbit hole:
The curriculum that Brownsword [schoolmaster at Stratford-upon-Avon and poet in his own right] left behind gives us a clear idea of what Shakespeare learned at school and how he learned it, and common-placing played a key role [common-placing is the model for this blog, incidentally]. The habit stood the young poet in good stead. Nearly every play adapts existing source material such as Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's Lives and Boccaccio's Decameron, using their plots, characters and imagery in fresh ways – 'a style that mixes multiple sources and transforms them' . . . Shakespeare's peers—Jonson, Marlowe and Webster among them—all worked in similar ways. As another contemporary, the polymath Francis Bacon, put it, 'there can hardly be anything more useful' than a common-place to supply 'matter to invention'. Without Erasmus's invention, London's theatres would have offered much poorer fare.
The last sentence definitely stopped me for a second: "would have offered much poorer fare"—connoting actual enjoyment of and seeking out repetition (repeated source material, in entertainment!) rather than tolerating it and suffering through it occasionally to improve oneself (do the reps, drill and kill). Is it possible that a lot of repetition is something humans actually like and look for?
As I considered that question as if for the first time, I realized that this was not the first time I had considered it. We looked at Arnold Schönberg's mostly unsuccessful turn-of-the-century experiments with disallowing tonal repetition in his music. And we saw an experiment in which both "PhD-holding music theorists" and lay listeners rated repetitive music selections composed by "brute stimulus manipulation without regard to artistic quality" as more enjoyable than their unrepetitive counterparts, "crafted by internationally renowned composers."
Now, thanks to repetition, we can add another dimension to it: repetition is a big part of the recipe for engagement:
David Huron is a prominent musicologist at Ohio State University, and if you ask him about pop music, he'll tell you about mice. Take a mouse and play a loud noise—call it B. The mouse will freeze. Perhaps he'll turn that tiny pointy white face in a look of sheer surprise. Play B again, and again he will be adorably startled. But eventually the mouse will stop reacting. The noise will no longer interest him. He'll become "habituated." Habituation is common with music. Repetition might be the God particle, but it's far from the only particle. You probably don't want to hear "Three Blind Mice" right now, and you certainly don't want to hear it seven times in a row. You liked the song once—when you were five?—but now it does nothing for you. That's habituation, and it happens with every song and almost any stimulation. It's the brain's way of saying, "Been there, done that."
In many aspects of life, habituating is normal and good. If you can't focus at work because of construction noise but you soon forget it's there, you'll be more productive. But in entertainment, habituation is death. It's "I’ve seen enough dark and shadowy comic book movies—no, thanks." It's "This new rap album is interchangeable with the artist's last two albums, so nope." If it's true that audiences like repetition, and it's true that audiences can be bored by too much repetition, how do you get people hooked without making them habituated?
Let's return to our poor mouse. Rather than play B notes to the little guy forever, scientists can play several B notes in a row and then, just as he's about to figure out the pattern, hit him with a new sound—C!
The C note will startle the mouse, too. But more important, the introduction of a new note will make the mouse forget a little bit about the B. This is called "dishabituation." The single serving of C preserves the potency of the B stimulus. Eventually, the mouse will become habituated to both the B and the C. But that's okay. Scientists can further slow the habituation process by introducing a third note—D!
To scare a mouse for the longest period of time with the fewest notes, scientists have found success with variations on the following sequence: BBBBC–BBBC–BBC–BC–D.
Huron's research has found that this sequence of repetition and variation reflects global music patterns—from European sonatas to Inuit throat singing to American rock. "Across the world, music is consistent with early repetition," he said. . . .
When one stops to think about how repetitious people's favorite pop songs are, how they reliably alternate verses, choruses, verses, choruses, bridges, and amplified choruses, it's undeniable that great music offers anticipation within specific lines of expectation. "People find things more pleasurable the more times you repeat them, unless they become aware that you're being repetitive," Huron said. "People want to say, 'I'm not seduced by repetition! I like new things!' But disguised repetition is reliably pleasurable, because it leads to fluency, and fluency makes you feel good."
The sequence BBBBC–BBBC–BBC–BC–D is interesting for a few reasons. It shows, first of all, how much novelty depends on the familiar—i.e., one needs 'a familiar' to even know what 'novelty' is. Second, it is worth noting that the pattern of Cs and Ds in the entire fifteen-note sequence (CCCCD) replicates the initial five-note pattern (BBBBC). Third, the part of the sequence that goes BBC–BC–D is something you're no doubt familiar with, even if you don't know it:
This structure might not seem obviously familiar to you. But let's call B a verse, C a chorus, and D an alternate verse, or bridge. Replace the notes with their corresponding words and you get the following song structure. I think you'll recognize it, because it might be the most common pattern of the last fifty years of pop music: Verse-verse-chorus—verse-chorus—bridge.
Finally, counting from left to right just the novel notes in the sequence (as described in the passage), we wind up with a sequence that is (over) 80% familiar and 20% novel:
Research suggests that an 80% success rate is optimal. A high success rate like this indicates that students are learning new material but also being challenged enough. There are no surprises in this finding. If students have a high success rate, it is evident that teachers have been teaching in small, manageable steps and have checked for understanding . . . along the way. Also, not surprisingly, these teacher effectiveness studies found that a high success rate in guided practice leads to high success rates when students work independently on their own tasks. . . . As well as improving learning outcomes, high rates of success are also motivating for students. I’d argue that increasing student success is the most motivating thing we can do for students.
