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Bo Adams

The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning | Brainscape Blog - 3 views

www.brainscape.com/...throughs-science-of-learning-2

learningsciences Mind-Brain-Education MV-How-We-Learn #MustRead

shared by Bo Adams on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
Chip Houston liked it
  • The brain is equipped to tackle a pretty hefty load of information and sensory input, but there is a point at which the brain becomes overwhelmed, an effect scientists call cognitive overload. While our brains do appreciate new and novel information (as we’ll discuss later), when there is too much of it we become overwhelmed. Our minds simply can’t divide our attention between all the different elements.
  • the brain’s wiring can change at any age and it can grow new neurons and adapt to new situations — though the rate at which this happens does slow with age. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity, and it has had major ramifications in our understanding of how the brain works and how we can use that understanding to improve learning outcomes.
  • The ability to learn, retain, and use information isn’t just based on our raw IQ. Over the past few decades it has become increasingly clear that how we feel — our overall emotional state — can have a major impact on how well we can learn new things.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Research is revealing why, as the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system has the ability to open up or shut off access to learning and memory. When under stress or anxiety, the brain blocks access to higher processing and stops forming new connections, making it difficult or impossible to learn.
  • research shows that failure is essential.
  • Information in the brain that isn’t used is often lost, as neural pathways weaken over time.
  • Researchers have found that novelty causes the dopamine system in the brain to become activated, sending the chemical throughout the brain.
  • Students may have preferences for how they learn, but when put to the test, students were found to have equivalent levels of learning regardless of how information is presented.
  • cater to the emotional and social needs of students and improves their ability to learn, is more important than styles
  • Neuroscience research suggests that the best way to learn something new isn’t to focus on mistakes, but instead to concentrate on how to do a task correctly. Focusing on the error only reinforces the existing incorrect neural pathway, and will increase the chance that the mistake will be made again. A new pathway has to be built, which means abandoning the old one and letting go of that mistake.
  • students who don’t get intellectual stimulation over the summer are much more likely to forget important skills in reading and math when they return to class.
  • Peer collaboration offers students access to a diverse array of experiences and requires the use of nearly all the body’s senses, which in turn creates greater activation throughout the brain and enhances long-term memory. Group work, especially when it capitalizes on the strengths of its members, may be more beneficial than many realize.
  • Aside from being able to see and hear patterns, the human mind has a number of innate abilities (the ability to learn a language, for instance) that when capitalized on in the right way, can help make learning any concept, even one that is abstract, much easier. Combining these innate abilities with structured practice, repetition, and training can help make new ideas and concepts “stick” and make more sense.
  • Learning can change brain structure.
  • Bo Adams on 01 Mar 18
     
    HT @MeghanCureton
Meghan Cureton

Neuroscience Should Inform School Policies - Education Week - 1 views

www.edweek.org/...ld-inform-school-policies.html

learning community neuroscience #mvifishares

shared by Meghan Cureton on 16 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • key secondary school reform efforts need to emphasize learning activities involving metacognition, goal-setting, planning, working memory, reflection on one's learning, and frequent opportunities to make responsible choices.
  • What is essential for kids at this time of life is to be engaged in real-life learning experiences and peer-learning connections that put them under conditions of "hot cognition," where educators can help them along in the process of integrating their impulsiveness (positively viewed as excitement and motivation) with their reasoning abilities.
  • The implications for reform of secondary school are clear. Schools should provide more opportunities for students to be involved in apprenticeships, internships, service learning, community-based learning, small peer-learning groups, entrepreneur-based programs, and student-directed project-based learning
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  • key part of the secondary school curriculum should involve the teaching of stress-reduction methods, such as mindfulness meditation, yoga, and aerobic activity; exercise breaks during class; a strong physical education curriculum; and a broadly based extracurricular sports program for all students, not just the star athletes.
  • prefrontal cortex, which is the region controlling inhibition of impulses and the ability to plan, reflect, self-monitor, and make good decisions, doesn't fully develop until the early 20s. This means that while the limbic system or "emotional brain" is working at close to full capacity by early adolescence, the areas of the brain that could temper those feelings and impulses are still in the process of being constructed.
  • Neuroscience Should Inform School Policies
  • Consequently, key secondary school reform efforts need to emphasize learning activities involving metacognition, goal-setting, planning, working memory, reflection on one's learning, and frequent opportunities to make responsible choices.
  • Classroom teaching that focuses largely on delivering content through lectures and textbooks fails to engage the emotional brain and leaves unchanged those prefrontal regions that are important in metacognition.
  • Locking students into a set academic college-bound program of courses takes away their ability to make decisions about what most interests them (a process that integrates the limbic system's motivational verve with the prefrontal cortex's decisionmaking capacity).
  • Neuroscience research tells us that the teenage brain is exquisitely sensitive to environmental influences. This neuroplasticity makes it vulnerable to a wide range of societal dangers—traffic accidents, drug abuse, suicide, violence. But it also makes it acutely sensitive to the influence of teachers, for good or for ill.
  • Bo Adams on 16 Oct 16
     
    "key secondary school reform efforts need to emphasize learning activities involving metacognition, goal-setting, planning, working memory, reflection on one's learning, and frequent opportunities to make responsible choices."
Meghan Cureton

Following the lessons of learning science in schools isn't convenient - The Hechinger R... - 0 views

hechingerreport.org/cience-schools-isnt-convenient

learning neuroscience schools #mvifishares

shared by Meghan Cureton on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Following the lessons of learning science in schools isn’t convenient
  • “The mind is a sheet of paper for a professor to write on.” But that’s the wrong way to think about education, he said. The right way, he argued, is to think of a human as a plant to which educators offer fertilizer and water and sunlight when it needs it, or wants it, most. “This is a very different model,” Sarma said, “but it’s so inconvenient we ignore it.”
  • cognitive load theory posits that working memory is limited. Students who hear new information store it first in working memory, but this is short-term memory, and all short-term memories will be forgotten. There’s no way around it. The key, according to Sarma, is reinforcing that information and getting it into long-term memory, where it will last. Students can only focus on new information for eight to 14 minutes before their minds start to wander, Sarma said, so the best method of instruction is to offer such new information in bite-sized chunks.
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  • information is stored in memories created by a chemical connection between neurons in the brain, Sarma said. Over time, that chemical dries up and the memory disappears. But if reminded of that information before the original memory disappears, the brain creates a new connection and one that is long-term. The best way to retain knowledge, according to memory research, is to learn about it once, wait until you’re about to forget it, and then learn it again.
  • Also in contrast to standard scheduling patterns in schools is the idea of interleaved learning. Sarma said the brain looks for contrast. Learning one thing and then jumping to another topic and back again is helpful for long-term retention,
  • Sarma sees the future of learning as blended, individuated, fluid and hands-on. Learning science supports his vision. The question is whether schools can be reorganized to do the same.
Meghan Cureton

Learning and the Brain Stories, #2 - Learning and the Brain blogLearning and the Brain ... - 1 views

www.learningandthebrain.com/...arning-and-the-brain-stories-2

learning brain curiosity neuroscience growthmindset #mvifishares

shared by Meghan Cureton on 07 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • the role of education is to help our children become who they are meant to be instead of  working towards an average which testing promotes.
  • We take this narrowed, biased model of success and try to replicate it in schools; yet these models further reduce diversity of thought, experience and creativity among our students.
  • If we are to support our children to become creative problem-solvers, then we need to move away from pursuing averages that are based on a single prescribed profile for all learners.
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  • By creating norms and averages we are drawn to comparison and rank–rather than to our children’s curiosities about what they want to learn, become or aspire to be.
  • If praise is tied to the child’s perception of success, and success is tied to narrow definitions of achievement, then children work towards that common standard against which Zhao cautioned us. If they are less likely to take risks then they will seek a single right answer rather than embrace both creativity and curiosity. The standardized test will always be the measure of success.
  • Meghan Cureton on 07 Apr 17
     
    HT @kkelly
Jim Tiffin Jr

The Backwards Brain Bicycle - Smarter Every Day 133 - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

SmarterEveryDay learning brain education knowledge understanding YouTube video fromPLN From@ransomtech neurology bike riding Brain Based Learning unlearning adult learning

shared by Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 May 15
     
    "Knowledge does not equal understanding." How difficult it is for adults to unlearn something, but not as difficult for children to do so. Emphasis is on how our brain works for storing ideas, but there are a multitude of lessons here for educators to consider.
Bo Adams

What's Going on Inside the Brain Of A Curious Child? | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

ww2.kqed.org/...e-the-brain-of-a-curious-child

Brain-based neuroscience HowWeLearn curiosity

shared by Bo Adams on 30 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • when kids are curious, they’re much more likely to stay engaged.
  • ‘Curiosity really is one of the very intense and very basic impulses in humans. We should base education on this behavior.’
  • brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.
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  • “But even people with really good memory will remember only a small fraction of what happened two days ago.”
  • When the participants’ curiosity was piqued, the parts of their brains that regulate pleasure and reward lit up. Curious minds also showed increased activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in the creation of memories.
  • dopamine
  • curious brains are better at learning not only about the subject at hand, but also other stuff — even incidental, boring information.
  • She says her students love exploring the mysterious unknowns in science: What happens when a car crashes? Why does one car get more beat up than the other? Why do some people look more like their aunt than their mom? How do rainbows work?
  • Bo Adams on 30 Nov 17
     
    HT Kelly Kelly
Meghan Cureton

Assessment, Choice, and the Learning Brain | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...d-learning-brain-glenn-whitman

assessment brain learning #mvifishares

shared by Meghan Cureton on 14 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • If you really want to see how innovative a school is, inquire about its thinking and practices regarding assessment.
  • students who develop mastery goals are motivated by the actual learning experiences. Their rewards arise from the challenges of acquiring and applying new knowledge and skills.
  • students who are motivated by mastery goals are more likely to persevere in the face of such challenges. Difficult tasks or setbacks do not diminish their motivation or self-esteem
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  • Timely feedback has been shown to deepen one's memory for the material assessed
  • Finally, studies suggest that marking answers right or wrong (as in multiple choice tests) has little effect on learning. However, providing the correct response only after a student has spent time "struggling" to find the correct answer significantly increases retention of the material
  • having students reconstruct what they know through alternative assessments leads to deeper understanding and consolidates learning in more powerful ways than traditional testing
  • While students manage to keep enough dates, facts, and formulas in their head to pass the test, this knowledge never made it to long-term declarative memory, it was never truly learned at all (only memorized in the short term).
  • Meghan Cureton on 14 Dec 16
     
    Great read as we are in the throes of final exams...
Nicole Martin

This Neuroscientist Wants to Know Your Brain On Art-and How It Improves Learning | EdSu... - 0 views

www.edsurge.com/...t-and-how-it-improves-learning

brain neuroscience

shared by Nicole Martin on 16 May 19 - No Cached
  • teach for mastery? And mastery means memory
  • toxic stress
  • one of the most important protective factors for kids is a relationship with a caring adult in a school building.
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  • So how can the arts help to reinforce content, and then how can it help to teach it in the first place? And so we started embedding the arts into every Brain-Targeted Teaching learning unit.
Meghan Cureton

Why Empathy Holds the Key to Transforming 21st Century Learning | MindShift | KQED News - 2 views

ww2.kqed.org/...sforming-21st-century-learning

#mvifishares empathy designthinking idiploma PBL transformation School Change

shared by Meghan Cureton on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
Bo Adams liked it
  • Empathy has the potential to open up students to deeper learning, drive clarity of thinking, and inspire engagement with the world—in other words, provide the emotional sustenance for outstanding human performance.
  • Empathy lies at the heart of 21st century skillfulness in teamwork, collaboration and communication in a diverse world.
  • The frontal lobes of the brain, at least as much as we know now, are the seat of planning, execution, problem solving and creativity—and when the frontal lobes are working well, so are we.
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  • Setting up a culture of care is very much an exercise in making empathy central to daily work.
  • Empathy is now identified as the first step in the design process, whether crafting new software for a user or creating form-factors that inherently please the consumer.
  • empathy is described as ‘step.’ But that easy designation belies a very deep process in which a designer must, for lack of a better term, ‘sink into the mind of another and take on their persona’. That is a deep descriptor of an ultimate form of empathy—and it may be a necessary component of an educational system increasingly tilted toward design and inquiry.
  • Ready or not, education is entering an age in which social learning is the new norm. Pure academics are giving way to increased opportunities for students to work together; teachers increasingly take on the role of co-learner and facilitator; listening, learning, and teaming are the new core skills. At the heart of this new skillfulness for everyone is the ability to forge deep connections lead to creative problem solving and positive pursuits. Taken all together, this makes empathy critical to schools. In fact, very soon we will need to invent a new taxonomy of learning that makes empathy the base of the learning pyramid.
Jim Tiffin Jr

'Maker' movement inspires hands-on learning | The Seattle Times - 0 views

www.seattletimes.com/...ent-inspires-hands-on-learning

maker Maker Movement tinkering pedagogy learning constructionism article #LiquidNetworkSpill #mvifishares School Change

shared by Jim Tiffin Jr on 19 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Tinkering is being promoted on college campuses from MIT to Santa Clara University, as well as in high schools and elementary schools.
  • The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands.
  • Constructionist Approach
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 19 Aug 16
       
      This is the term that we are missing in our current MDE nomenclature!
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Yes, tinkering is now a pedagogy.
  • “You’re exploring creativity, you’re exploring design thinking, you’re developing a sense of persistence,” she says. Building something new requires planning, trying and, yes, failing, and then trying again. “These are incredibly important mind-set for today’s world,” she says.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 19 Aug 16
       
      Music to my ears!
  • talks excitedly about students who have designed child prostheses. “That’s what they’re going to remember their entire life,” she says. “They aren’t going to remember sitting in an electronics lecture.”
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 19 Aug 16
       
      It is about creating experiences that help students see the world as a malleable place.
  • Alexandra Garey, who graduated from Rutgers last year, credits tinkering with changing the course of her studies, and life: “I went from somebody who was majoring in Italian and European studies to someone who was designing and prototyping products and realizing any product that came into my head.”
  • “U.S. schools are very good at finding the brain-smart people,” he says. “They are also very good at finding the best athletes.” But they are not so good at finding and nurturing people who, he said, describing himself, think with their fingers.
  • Jim Tiffin Jr on 19 Aug 16
     
    A fabulous article full of stories about the impact of maker-centered learning experiences, and the growing number of places that provide them - elementary schools, high school, colleges, public. Perhaps most gratifying is the use of distinctly maker-centered AND educational terminology in the same article. A great sign of things to come!
Meghan Cureton

Aligning Assessment to Brain Science - 1 views

www.youcubed.org/...gning-assessment-brain-science

#mvifishares #mustread assessment math testing learning

shared by Meghan Cureton on 03 May 16 - No Cached
  • The most powerful learners are those who are reflective, who engage in metacognition – thinking about what they know – and who take control of their own learning
Meghan Cureton

How Exercise May Help the Memory Grow Stronger - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-memory-grow-stronger.html

brain learning exercise movement

shared by Meghan Cureton on 21 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Exercise may help the brain to build durable memories, through good times and bad.
  • In general, the stronger the messages between neurons, the sturdier and more permanent the memories they hold.
  • It was immediately clear that three days of chronic stress had reduced the effectiveness of the synapses in the stressed-out, sedentary animals, compared to those from the control mice. Their intracellular connections were much weaker.
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  • The unstressed runners, on the other hand, now had the strongest, busiest synapses, suggesting that their ability to learn and remember would be higher than in the other animals.
  • Perhaps most interesting, the animals that had run and also experienced chronic stress had synapses that resembled those from the normal, unstressed control group.
  • It is not yet clear, though, she says, how exercise changed the animals’ synapses at a molecular level.
Nicole Martin

Applying Learning in Multiple Contexts | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...ing-learning-multiple-contexts

shared by Nicole Martin on 28 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • New learning is fragile until something is done with it.
  • Providing students with directed opportunities to employ multifaceted manipulation of information promotes strong, transferrable memory creation.
  • This engages multiple regions in the brain in the processing of new learning, generating a more expansive, interconnected network of communication among stored memories. This cross-referencing strengthens memory creation in several ways.
Meghan Cureton

Grades Suffer When Class Time Doesn't Match Students' Biological Clocks - Inside School... - 1 views

blogs.edweek.org/...es_suffer_when_class_time.html

Learning schedule neuroscience sleep brain

shared by Meghan Cureton on 04 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • "An important piece of the story is that it's not just about making the life of a teenager easier by saying maybe we can make classes later," said Benjamin Smarr, a postdoctoral psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies circadian rhythm disruptions and learning.
  • As it turned out, taking a class schedule mismatched to your biological clock took a toll on students' grades, as the chart below shows. 
  • Early-rising "larks" had a grade advantage in morning classes, they found. Night owls performed better in afternoon and early evening classes, but the researchers also found these students tended to struggle more than those with earlier circadian rhythms in general. The researchers believe this was because their schedules were the farthest off "normal" class schedules, and the actual class times often varied significantly from day to day, making it difficult for these students to develop any consistency.
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  • Most high schools don't really have the option to make multiple sessions of the same class at different times, but Smarr said for those who use software that can track the timing of students' activity, it may be worth getting a sense of when different groups of students are likely to be most alert when scheduling core classes. Other forms of technology may also help, he said, allowing students to access classes or rewatch lectures at different times of the day.
Meghan Cureton

Can You Resist the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience? |Education & Teacher Conferences - 1 views

www.learningandthebrain.com/...ductive-allure-of-neuroscience

mind brain education learning neuroscience research

shared by Meghan Cureton on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • kellybkelly on 01 May 18
     
    I loved this!
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