The brain, communication, and education

I recently had the opportunity to attend a lecture about the brain, neuroscience, and education. It again struck me how brain unfriendly the classroom and much of our current education system is. The scientist giving the talk, Dr. John Medina, author of the book “Brain Rules” pointed out that one thing we do know about the brain is its operating envelope, it is “designed to solve problems related to survival in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion”. Could anything be further from many of our classrooms today!

So what can education learn from brain research. Unfortunately this is not a simple question. But there are several great researchers tackling this issue such as Marcia Tate and Eric Jensen. I think we can also add John Medina to that list. Unfortunately we don’t know nearly enough to really put many of the theories of brain research in action in the classroom, this is simply because the kinds of studies need to guide teachers are hard, expensive, and take a long time to carry out. For example an article was recently published in Psychological Science where a panel concluded that there wasn’t evidence support the learning styles hypothesis (that learners are primarily auditory, visual, or kinesthetic). It has since then mushroomed to the point where educators are saying research shows that we shouldn’t worry about learning styles. Really? Let’s look back at what the Psychological Science panel said, that there wasn’t evidence to support the hypothesis, not that the hypothesis was wrong, the learning styles hypothesis may be right or maybe wrong, we just don’t know, because doing the study that would prove it is really hard and expensive. This is the case with much of what we think we know about the brain and learning.

So what should educators do?

Go with what we do know. For example, regardless of what type learner a student might be, if one explanation of something doesn’t resonate or make sense to that student for some reason, we have to use a different way of explaining it to that student. This is sometimes called adaptive instruction and is a big piece of RtI (response to intervention). Simply put school and classroom practice must shift based on the needs of students. For this to be effective educators must constantly gather evidence on how their students are progressing toward mastery of a concept or skill. But beyond this, educators also need to know the early signals that students may be having problems, so that they can make informed instructional decisions and modify their day to day lessons to adapt to the needs of the students. This is the role of formative assessment, which plays a key role in evidence based science education.

We also know that the brain seems to have a working memory, but information in this memory is lost if not repeated in 2 hours. If the information is repeated within two hours it is recruited for long term storage. Think of the implications of this to the school schedule and for homework, how can schools use this notion of a 2 hour window to its advantage? Also it can take years for concepts (especially complex one) to be cemented into long term storage in such a way that it can be recalled and used accurately. Yet in education we often go over complex processes only once and expect students to master it.

We also know that the brain won’t pay attention to boring things for very long, and is particularly interested in how information connects to a storyline. A stimulus (be it in or out of the classroom) has less then 600 seconds to attract and keep the brains attention. If it fails to do so in that time, the brain will wander off on its own. We also know that brains working memory can only hold and work on 5 – 7 ideas at a time. Any more than this and the brain purges information without committing it to long term memory.

What all this means for education is that we need to rethink our information dense and brain unfriendly classrooms. We need to get our students moving and talking and thinking. We need to connect information into coherent story lines. We need to make sure that important information is repeated and students understand the themes that connect one content area with another. Most of all we need to recognize that learning and remembering things is an active process that specific rules, and for teachers to be successful they must follow those rules.