TikTok Effect: Make Math Addictive for Kids.

As parents, we know math anxiety and frustration in some children is real.  Academic performance and self-confidence often suffer when kids struggle with attention deficits or grapple with foundational math concepts.  Dr. Lana Israel, the creative mind behind Muzology.com, explores methods to inject fun and high energy into math learning. Gain invaluable insights on effectively managing and supporting your child's math education in surprisingly accessible ways.

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Transcript

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GUEST: LANA (00:00):

Middle school kids, literally say at the beginning of the summer, I am dumb. I hate math, and they have bad math scores too.

HOST: JENNIFER (00:07):

When you were in elementary, middle, or high school, was there a subject that you struggled with, and was that subject math today, do you have children or grandchildren who also struggle with learning math? Dr. Lana Israel is on finding inspiration today and she has cracked the code on how to keep kids interested and keep paying attention to learn math skills. The

GUEST: LANA (00:34):

The heart of the platform is that we've come up with a highly effective way to use music videos to present math topics that draw a kid in and are like a music video that's accessible. I get a music video. Music directly activates brain regions that are critical for sustained and successful learning.

HOST: JENNIFER (00:53):

Dr. Lana Israel, I am very excited to hear what you've done with a subject that I never liked, which was math. Math in school was tedious. I really struggled to understand it and I don't think that I'm alone.

GUEST: LANA (01:07):

You're not alone. Math is typically the most challenging subject for students. For many students, believe it or not. It can be an impediment to graduating from high school. Success in college career opportunities. It's really a high stake subject that is hard sometimes, not taught in a way that resonates with kids or engages them. Parents talk about math meltdowns when it's time to do homework, the impact on a child's self-esteem, and pride when they feel like they can't achieve or succeed with math. The United States, which is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, typically ranks in the thirties or so when it comes to global assessments of math performance against both other developed and underdeveloped countries. There's a lot more we can do to supercharge math learning in our country.

HOST: JENNIFER  (01:57):

You touched on a couple of things. One is personal self-esteem. Math is your Achilles heel. Kids say I feel so dumb. I'm so stupid. I can't even get a good math grade. I don't understand anything and it spirals.

GUEST: LANA (02:11):

Bingo. Yep. So we did some testing on the platform when we first launched ology, which is our highly engaging math learning platform that uses music videos to teach math and 300 summer school students in a school district in Tennessee. And we had kids, middle school kids, literally say at the beginning of the summer, I am dumb. I hate math. Think about the internalization of a teenager who believes I am dumb. Then what happens? Well, you don't apply yourself. You don't pay attention in class. You don't study hard because you are dumb and math is hard. And so what continues to happen, is you get confirmatory evidence that you're dumb and math is hard in the form of bad math scores. And so these kids get stuck in this negative self-reinforcing feedback that has pretty treacherous implications on self-worth and self-esteem inside and outside of math class.

GUEST: LANA (03:03):

And what we found our platform does is it stops that spiral in its tracks, draws a kid in and they're like a music video that's accessible. I get a music video and they watch the music video and we teach math in a way that for a lot of these students just connects and makes sense and for the first time they get it and then they take a math quiz and to their astonishment, they get an 80 or a 90 or a hundred. Well, that's weird cuz that's disconfirming evidence of I am dumb and math is hard. And so what happens is the kid gets drawn in and they apply themselves more and suddenly they see this pattern selling and achieving and at that point, it's like a light bulb goes off. It's like you flip a switch, and everything changes for that learner. We have had a kid say, ology has not just given me confidence in my ability to do the math, it's given me confidence in my ability to do anything.

HOST: JENNIFER (03:55):

That's amazing. Muzology is your baby, you're the founder, and you're the creator. This program makes math fun by gamifying math, connecting the rhythm to the music, connecting that to math, and making those lyrics stick in the heads of each student. Is that how you describe it?

GUEST: LANA (04:11):

So what we're doing is we're using the intrinsic learning properties of music to create music videos that teach math themes and topics and concepts. Think back to Schoolhouse Rock. We all remember that. Imagine a modern-day schoolhouse rock and steroids. Part of the platform is we've got quizzing and it's gamified so kids can put their new learning to the test and they can see how they're progressing. The heart of the platform is that we've come up with a highly effective way to use music videos to present math topics and it does a couple of things. One is you present the information in a multimodal way so kids are seeing it, they're hearing it. We have choreographed dance moves in the video. They're moving to it and dancing to it facilitates more robust learning. The other thing is there's a body of research in neuroscience that demonstrates that music directly activates brain regions critical for sustained and successful learning.

GUEST: LANA (05:11):

Those brain regions are memory, attention, motivation, and emotion. What's the biggest challenge that teachers face in the classroom and that parents face with their kids at home? Paying attention. Attention span. And so by using a medium of learning and presenting information that triggers those attentional centers of the brain to draw the learner in, we're working at a huge advantage when it comes to teaching and learning. That's the heart of the platform and we've really been able to crack this code of how to create really clear and compelling music videos and music-based learning content that teach challenging math topics very simply.

HOSTL Jennifer (05:51):

Who is your customer? The school district? Do they buy the platform and use it in the classroom or is it your parent?

GUEST: LANA (05:58):

We started Muzology by focusing on selling the platform to the school district. What became clear to us is every time we mentioned Muzology to a parent, two statements were made. Gee, I wish I had this when I was a student. And my son or daughter is struggling with math but loves music.  Good news, we just launched a direct-to-consumer at-home version of Neology. So now parents can get the platform directly to parents.  Now kids can use it at home anytime, anywhere. It’s a fun music video-based tutor at home. 

HOST: Jennifer (06:31):

Math is fun. It doesn't feel like they're learning. You're seeing real differences in their math scores.  What results Muzology has seen?

GUEST: LANA (06:40):

We started Muzology by conducting a small-scale randomized controlled trial. My background is in cognitive psychology. I've got a doctorate in psychology with a focus on memory. So I come out of an experimental background. So if you're gonna have the audacity to say to a parent or teacher --  put this in your classroom or your home, you better make sure it works first, right? We started by conducting a small-scale randomized control trial, teaching students a gateway bottleneck topic in math -- fractions. We worked with research professors at the University of Tennessee and we found that students who used Muzology significantly outperformed their counterparts who learned the same information using conversational videos with no music. And not only did they outperform other students, but they also showed sustained retention of the information. So what happened after a week we tested students again and students who had used the conversational videos with no music almost returned to their baseline measure in terms of how much they remembered.

GUEST: LANA (07:43):

It was kind of like you taught students something one week and the next week they forgot it all. We saw the same sustained outperformance after a week in the physiology group, which was very fascinating cuz it indicated not only as this approach leads to outperformance initially, but it's also bolstering retention of the information, which is critical for kids, especially with math, right? You learn it and then you forget it. That's a problem. You learn it this year over the summer, you experience the summer slide, and you come back to school next year. You're like having a way to not just learn the information but retrieve it is very powerful. And if you think about it, how many songs do you still know the words to that you haven't heard for decades? Right? Music works as a mechanism for really triggering long-term retention and memory. We've done other studies, and we've seen in a four-week period, 87% of students increase their diagnostic test scores by 50 points or more through using ology. A very astonishing finding that's been replicated all over the country in every classroom that chooses Muzology. Once students watch a Muzology video, the first time they take an in-platform post-test, the most frequently occurring score is a hundred percent changed.

HOST: JENNIFER (08:56):

Is there a way for parents to coordinate Muzology at home with the teachers in the classroom?

GUEST: LANA (09:02):

That's a great question. That would take place by a parent is a little bit proactive in terms of, hey, what's the outline of the curriculum that your child is studying? What are the names of the kind of math topics that they're learning?

HOST: JENNIFER (09:18):

Your Harvard educated, Oxford-educated, and a Rhodes Scholar  -- so you have spent a lot of time in academia.  Then you made an about-face and headed into the music industry.  Why?

GUEST: LANA (09:27):

My two childhood passions were memory and music. I actually wound up writing a book on an innovative approach to learning and memory. When I was 13 years old. I got invited to present the research that underlies that book, which was my eighth-grade science project at a global conference in Sydney, Australia. I wound up being all over the media in Australia. Within two weeks I had a book publishing deal and that started a little business for me as a teenager. I was invited to present my research and this approach to learning and its applications of it in K-12 education all over the world. I continued to research innovative approaches to learning. I wound up publishing the book all over the world. And so I had a little mini career as a teenager in the applied learning space. And then I, as you mentioned, went to college and graduate school and really dug into the theoretical underpinnings of all of this with a focus on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and memory.

GUEST: LANA (10:24):

And then decided to take a significant departure from my trajectory and follow my other childhood passion, which was music. And I wound up moving to Manhattan, going into the music business. And at that time I was working for a really great music producer and something occurred to me, I was like, wait a second. On any given day someone comes into our studio, and they write a song that didn't exist when they walked in the door. At the end of the day, this song exists, and if an artist decides, Hey, I'm gonna record that song, and it got played again and again on the radio and millions of people with know all the words to this song that didn't exist a month prior. So as a memory researcher, this was a pretty earth-shattering idea that like, wait for a second, if you embed information in this musical form, it has this learning effect at scale, which is tremendous. And then the next thing that occurred to me was like, and that holds over decades, right? As I mentioned before, if if, if you hear a song that you haven't heard since childhood, all the words come right back to you. 

HOST: JENNIFER (11:24):

That is so true. Yeah. It's a step that I mean Captain & Tneal. Okay, that's going back a long, long way. It is very, very true. I just saw Grease.   Remember Grease? I knew every word of Greece. It, I'm totally tracking where you're going with it. You drew the connection between memory recall and adding the math component to it. That's where Muzology came from.

GUEST: LANA (11:45):

Imagine in the same way that anytime you hear a song from Greece, you know all the words even decades later. Imagine for a kid, anytime they want at their fingertips, they can pull back math information.

HOST: JENNIFER (11:56):

Okay, I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Can you give me a real quick song? A pop video with math? Go!

GUEST: LANA (12:02):

SINGING: To solve one-step equations. What you've got to do is find values for the variables that make quality. True variables are the unknown. You need to find their solutions. When the left and environment are equal, you have a resolution. Equations are math and method statements within the equal sign and you've got to solve them for the variables each and every time. And then we actually show a kid how to solve a one-step equation and all of the steps to do that. So we're kind of setting it up with some background conceptual math knowledge, what's in the equation, how do you identify it? Then we actually step through the music video and the song, the procedure or more math algorithm to solve it. So in the video, the learner is now actually seeing the problem getting solved and they go pretty deep.  

HOST: JENNIFER (12:49):

It gives instant recall for a sustained period of time.

GUEST: LANA (12:52):

Repetition is important here, just like it's important in any type of learning. So you know, you didn't hear the songs from Greece once and then go 20 years later, you remembered it. You've heard those songs again and again and that's when they start to stick in your head. 

HOST: JENNIFER (13:06):

Music sticks in kids' heads, it lights up different bulbs inside the brain. What are you hearing from the kids? What's their feedback?

GUEST: LANA (13:14):

I'm learning and I'm having fun. In three minutes I can learn what is typically taught over one to two weeks. I wish I had always had this. I probably would've gotten straight A's if I was failing math. Now I'm getting A's and B's we're hearing Muzology has given me a sense of pride. I never got hundreds and now I'm getting hundreds all the time. I mean, we're hearing the most wonderful feedback from students.

HOST: JENNIFER (13:41):

Muzology for a parent is probably the cost of a video game. Making math fun through music is an absolute home run. Really looking forward to seeing how you roll this out, not just to school districts, but to parents. Dr. Lana Israel, thank you so much, and keep the good ideas flowing. The world needs more good ideas to teach students.

GUEST: LANA (14:02):

Well, thank you so much.