Posts tagged education
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Myth-conceptions: How myths about the brain are hampering teaching
Teachers in the UK, Holland, Turkey, Greece and China were presented with seven so-called ‘neuromyths’ and asked whether they believe them to be true.
A quarter or more of teachers in the UK and Turkey believe a student’s brain would shrink if they drank less than six to eight glasses of water a day, while around half or more of those surveyed believe a student’s brain is only 10 per cent active and that children are less attentive after sugary drinks and snacks.
Over 70 per cent of teachers in all countries wrongly believe a student is either left-brained or right-brained, peaking at 91 per cent in the UK.
And almost all teachers (over 90 per cent in each country) feel that teaching to a student’s preferred learning style - auditory, kinaesthetic or visual - is helpful, despite no convincing evidence to support this approach.
The new research from the University of Bristol, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, calls for better communication between neuroscientists and educators.
Dr Paul Howard-Jones, author of the article from Bristol University’s Graduate School of Education, said: “These ideas are often sold to teachers as based on neuroscience – but modern neuroscience cannot be used support them. These ideas have no educational value and are often associated with poor practice in the classroom.”
The report blames wishfulness, anxiety and a bias towards simple explanations as typical factors that distort neuroscientific fact into neuromyth.
Such factors also appear to be hampering recent efforts of neuroscientists to communicate the true meaning of their work to educators.
Dr Howard-Jones added: “Although the increased dialogue between neuroscience and education is encouraging, we see new neuromyths on the horizon and old ones returning in new forms.
“Sometimes, transmitting ‘boiled-down’ messages about the brain to educators can just lead to misunderstanding, and confusions about concepts such as brain plasticity are common in discussions about education policy.”
The report highlights several areas where new findings from neuroscience are becoming misinterpreted by education, including brain-related ideas regarding early educational investment, adolescent brain development and learning disorders such as dyslexia and ADHD.
Hopes that education will draw genuine benefit from neuroscience may rest on a new but rapidly growing field of ‘neuroeducational’ research that combines both fields.
The review concludes that, in the future, such collaboration will be greatly needed if education is to be enriched rather than misled by neuroscience.
Literacy depends on nurture, not nature
A University at Buffalo education professor has sided with the environment in the timeless “nurture vs. nature” debate after his research found that a child’s ability to read depends mostly on where that child is born, rather than on his or her individual qualities.
“Individual characteristics explain only 9 percent of the differences in children who can read versus those who cannot,” says Ming Ming Chiu, lead author of an international study that explains this connection and a professor in the Department of Learning and Instruction in UB’s Graduate School of Education.
“In contrast, country differences account for 61 percent and school differences account for 30 percent,” Chiu says.
Therefore, he concludes, the country in which a child is born largely determines whether he or she will have at least basic reading skills. It’s clearly a case where “nurture” — the environment and surroundings of the child — is more important than “nature” — the child’s inherited, individual qualities, according to Chiu.
More than 99 percent of fourth-graders in the Netherlands can read, but only 19 percent of fourth-graders in South Africa can read, Chiu notes.
“Although the richest countries typically have high literacy rates exceeding 97 percent,” he says, “some rich countries, such as Qatar and Kuwait, have low literacy rates — 33 percent and 28 percent, respectively.”
The study, “Ecological, Psychological and Cognitive Components of Reading Difficulties: Testing the Component Model of Reading in Fourth-graders Across 38 Countries,” analyzed reading test scores of 186,725 fourth-graders from 38 countries, including more than 4,000 children from the U.S. Chiu and co-authors Catherine McBride-Chang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Dan Lin of the Hong Kong Institute of Education published the study in the winter 2013 issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities.
The educators used data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment.
Besides showing that the country of origin was a better predictor of reading skills than individual traits, the study also showed that other attributes at the child, school and country levels were all related to reading.
First, girls were more likely than boys to have basic reading skills, Chiu says. Children with greater early-literacy skills, better attitudes about reading or greater self-confidence in their reading ability also were more likely to have strong basic reading skills.
“Children were more likely to have basic reading skills if they were from privileged families, as measured through socioeconomic status, number of books at home and parent attitudes about reading,” says Chiu. “Also, children attending schools with better school climate and more resources were more likely to have basic reading skills.
“Our U.S. culture values ‘can-do’ individualism, but we forget how much depends on being lucky enough to be born in the right place,” he says.
PET Finds Increased Cognitive Reserve Levels in Highly Educated Pre-Alzheimer’s Patients
Highly educated individuals with mild cognitive impairment that later progressed to Alzheimer’s disease cope better with the disease than individuals with a lower level of education in the same situation, according to research published in the June issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. In the study “Metabolic Networks Underlying Cognitive Reserve in Prodromal Alzheimer Disease: A European Alzheimer Disease Consortium Project,”neural reserve and neural compensation were both shown to play a role in determining cognitive reserve, as evidenced by positron emission tomography (PET).
Cognitive reserve refers to the hypothesized capacity of an adult brain to cope with brain damage in order to maintain a relatively preserved functional level. Understanding the brain adaptation mechanisms underlying this process remains a critical question, and researchers of this study sought to investigate the metabolic basis of cognitive reserve in individuals with higher (more than 12 years) and lower (less than 12 years) levels of education who had mild cognitive impairment that progressed to Alzheimer’s disease, also known as prodromal Alzheimer’s disease.
“This study provides new insight into the functional mechanisms that mediate the cognitive reserve phenomenon in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Silvia Morbelli, MD, lead author of the study. “A crucial role of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex was highlighted by demonstrating that this region is involved in a wide fronto-temporal and limbic functional network in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and high education, but not in poorly educated Alzheimer’s disease patients.”
In the study, 64 patients with prodromal Alzheimer’s disease and 90 control subjects—coming from the brain PET project (chaired by Flavio Nobili, MD, in Genoa, Italy) of the European Alzheimer Disease Consortium—underwentbrain 18F-FDG PET scans. Individuals were divided into a subgroup with a low level of education (42 controls and 36 prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients) and a highly educated subgroup (40 controls and 28 prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients). Brain metabolism was compared between education-matched groups of patients and controls, and then between highly and poorly educated prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients.
Higher metabolic activity was shown in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex for prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients. More extended and significant correlations of metabolism within the right dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex and other brain regions were found with highly educated than less educated prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients or even highly educated controls.
This result suggests that neural reserve and neural compensation are activated in highly educated prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients. Researchers concluded that evaluation of the implication of metabolic connectivity in cognitive reserve further confirms that adding a comprehensive evaluation of resting 18F-FDG PET brain distribution to standard inspection may allow a more complete comprehension of Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology and possibly may increase 18F-FDG PET diagnostic sensitivity.
“This work supports the notion that employing the brain in complex tasks and developing our own education may help in forming stronger ‘defenses’ against cognitive deterioration once Alzheimer knocks at our door,” noted Morbelli.“It’s possible that, in the future, a combined approach evaluating resting metabolic connectivity and cognitive performance can be used on an individual basis to better predict cognitive decline or response to disease-modifying therapy.”
(Source: interactive.snm.org)
Genes Contribute to How Long You Stay in School
There are a variety of factors that determine the number of years a person goes to school – personality, finances, life circumstances, country of origin and social norms. One factor that may be less obvious, however, is genetics. Around 40 percent of the variance in educational attainment can be explained by a person’s DNA, according to previous research. Now a new study is the first to identify specific genes that influence educational achievement.
This research falls under the category of social-science genetics, a topic that includes everything from genes for political affiliation to genes for criminality. Previous studies in the field, however, have found relatively weak associations between specific gene variants and behavior, since behavior is influenced by the accumulation of small effects from many genes.
To counteract that problem, this study was especially large – 125,000 Caucasian people from the United States, Australia, and 13 European countries. Researchers took blood samples and asked participants how many years of schooling they’d completed and whether or not they’d graduated from college. The researchers converted the answers to an international educational standard to allow accurate comparisons between countries.
Then, delving into subjects’ DNA, researchers found three mutations (called SNPs) at specific positions on the genome that were strongly associated with educational outcome – one that corresponded to years of schooling and two that corresponded to college completion. The mutations were found within genes believed to be associated with health, learning, memory and brain-cell mechanics, the researchers report today in Science.
Each mutation contributed only a small amount. In terms of the years of schooling, one copy of the SNP meant that an individual completed 1 month of additional schooling. (Each person can have up to two copies of an individual SNP, one from mom and one from dad.)
For college completion, the most indicative SNP corresponded to a 1.8 percentage-point rise in the likelihood of graduating from college. If a person had two copies of this SNP, then, their likelihood would rise by 3.6 points.
These are small effects but meaningful because they held up on such a large scale. The findings support the general consensus that our behavioral traits are influenced by a large number of genes, each of small effect. Overall, each SNP in this study altered educational attainment by only about 0.02%. In comparison, for a complex physical trait like human height, a single SNP can influence the outcome by 0.4%.
Ongoing genetic research keeps reinforcing this idea that genes aren’t destiny – there’s no gene for graduating college. But it’s good to keep in mind that genes are part of the list of contributors that make us who we are.
Look! Something Shiny! How Some Textbook Visuals can Hurt Learning
Adding captivating visuals to a textbook lesson to attract children’s interest may sometimes make it harder for them to learn, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that 6- to 8-year-old children best learned how to read simple bar graphs when the graphs were plain and a single color.
Children who were taught using graphs with images (like shoes or flowers) on the bars didn’t learn the lesson as well and sometimes tried counting the images rather than relying on the height of the bars.
“Graphs with pictures may be more visually appealing and engaging to children than those without pictures. However, engagement in the task does not guarantee that children are focusing their attention on the information and procedures they need to learn. Instead, they may be focusing on superficial features,” said Jennifer Kaminski, co-author of the study and research scientist in psychology at The Ohio State University.
Kaminski conducted the study with Vladimir Sloutsky, professor of psychology at Ohio State.
The problem of distracting visuals is not just an academic issue. In the study, the authors cite real-life examples of colorful, engaging – and possibly confusing - bar graphs in educational materials aimed at children, as well as in the popular media.
And when the authors asked 16 kindergarten and elementary school teachers whether they would use the visually appealing graphs featured in this study, all of them said they would. Intuitively, most of these teachers felt that the graphs with the pictures would be more effective for instruction than the graphs without, according to the researchers.
The findings apply beyond learning graphs and mathematics, the authors said.
“When designing instructional material, we need to consider children’s developing ability to focus their attention and make sure that the material helps them focus on the right things,” Kaminski said.
“Any unnecessary visual information may distract children from the very procedures we want them to learn.”
The study appears online in the Journal of Educational Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.
The main study involved 122 students in kindergarten, first and second grade. All were tested individually.
The experiment began with a training phase where a researcher showed each child a graph on a computer screen and taught him or her how to read it. The children were then tested on three graphs to see if they could accurately interpret them.
The graphs in the training phase involved how many shoes were in a lost and found for each of five weeks. Half the students were presented with graphs in which the bars were a solid color. The other students were shown graphs in which the bars contained pictures of shoes. The number of shoes in the bars was equal to the corresponding y-value on the graph. In other words, if there were five shoes in the lost and found, there were five shoes pictured in the bar.
After the training phase, the children were tested on new graphs in which the bars were either solid-colored or contained pictures of objects such as flowers. However, the number of objects pictured did not equal the correct y-value for the bar. In other words, the bar value could equal 14 flowers, but only seven flowers were pictured.
“This allowed us to clearly identify which students learned the correct way to read a bar graph from those who simply counted the number of objects in each bar,” Sloutsky said.
Sure enough, children who trained with the pictures on the graph were more likely than others to get the answers wrong by simply counting the objects in each bar.
All of the first- and second-graders and 75 percent of the kindergarten children who learned on the solid-bar graphs appropriately read the new graphs.
However, those who learned with the more visually appealing shoe graphs did not do nearly as well. In this case, 90 percent of kindergarteners and 72 percent of first-graders responded by counting the number of flowers pictured. Second-graders did better, but still about 30 percent responded by counting.
All the children were then tested again with graphs that featured patterned bars, with either stripes or polka dots within each bar.
Again, those who learned from the more visually appealing graphs did worse at interpreting these patterned graphs.
“To our surprise, some children tried to count all the tiny polka dots or stripes in the bars. They clearly didn’t learn the correct way to read the graphs,” Kaminski said.
The researchers conducted several other related experiments to confirm the results and make sure there weren’t other explanations for the findings. In one experiment, some children were trained on graphs with pictures of objects. But in this case, the number of objects pictured was not even close to the correct value of the bar, so the students could not use counting as a strategy.
Still, these children did not do as well on subsequent tests as did those who learned on the graphs with single-colored bars.
“When teaching children new math concepts, keeping material simple is very important,” Sloutsky said.
“Any extraneous information we provide, even with the best of intentions, to make the lesson more interesting may actually hurt learning because it may be misinterpreted,” he said.
The researchers said these results don’t mean that textbook authors or others can never use interesting visuals or other techniques to capture the interest of students.
“But they need to study how such material will affect students’ attention. You can’t assume that it is beneficial just because it is colorful; in can affect learning by distracting attention from what is relevant,” Sloutsky said.
(Source: researchnews.osu.edu)
Learning disabilities affect up to 10 percent of children
Up to 10 per cent of the population are affected by specific learning disabilities (SLDs), such as dyslexia, dyscalculia and autism, translating to 2 or 3 pupils in every classroom according to a new study.
The study – by academics at UCL and Goldsmiths - also indicates that children are frequently affected by more than one learning disability.
The research, published in Science, helps to clarify the underlying causes of learning disabilities and the best way to tailor individual teaching and learning for affected individuals and education professionals.
Specific learning disabilities arise from atypical brain development with complicated genetic and environmental causes, causing such conditions as dyslexia, dyscalculia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder and specific language impairment.
While these conditions in isolation already provide a challenge for educators, an additional problem is that specific learning disabilities also co-occur for more often that would be expected. As, for example, in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, 33 to 45 per cent also suffer from dyslexia and 11 per cent from dyscalculia.
Lead author Professor Brian Butterworth (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) said: “We now know that there are many disorders of neurological development that can give rise to learning disabilities, even in children of normal or even high intelligence, and that crucially these disabilities can also co-occur far more often that you’d expect based on their prevalence.
"We are also finally beginning to find effective ways to help learners with one or more SLDs, and although the majority of learners can usually adapt to the one-size-fits-all approach of whole class teaching, those with SLDs will need specialised support tailored to their unique combination of disabilities."
As part of the study, Professor Butterworth and Dr Yulia Kovas (Goldsmiths) have summarised what is currently known about SLD’s neural and genetic basis to help clarify what is causing these disabilities to develop, helping to improve teaching for individual learners, and also training for school psychologists, clinicians and teachers.
What the team hope is that by developing an understanding of how individual differences in brain development interact with formal education, and also adapting learning pathways to individual needs, those with specific learning disabilities will produce more tailored education for such learners.
Professor Butterworth said: “Each child has a unique cognitive and genetic profile, and the educational system should be able to monitor and adapt to the learner’s current repertoire of skills and knowledge.
"A promising approach involves the development of technology-enhanced learning applications – such as games - that are capable of adapting to individual needs for each of the basic disciplines."
(Source: eurekalert.org)
Innovative neurology text includes patient videos
Practical Neurology Visual Review, a powerful educational tool for mastering the clinical practice of neurologic diagnosis, is now available in a fully revised and updated Second Editon.
Co-authors are neurologists Jose Biller, MD, of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and Alberto J. Espay, MD, of the University of Cincinnati.
The book previously was known as Practical Neurology DVD Review. It includes online videos of 131 real-world scenarios, and more than 370 multiple-choice questions. QR codes in the book allow easy access to videos via smart phone scanning.
Neurological problems are increasing due to the growing elderly population. But current assessment formats for the education of resident doctors, fellows and medical students underemphasize bedside teaching, Biller and Espay write in the introduction. “Faculty members strained by the pressures of many competing demands may not be in a position to oversee trainees performing physical examinations during their training.”
Practical Neurology Visual Review provides new venues for teaching and learning the essentials of neurology. The videos show patients with both common and unusual neurological problems, ranging from very easy to extremely challenging. The videos are used to teach five fundamental principles of bedside neurology: description and localization of findings, differential diagnosis, evaluation, management and counseling. Each clinical vignette is accompanied by a succinct written discussion.
"This audiovisual electronic teaching format may be somewhat unorthodox," Biller and Espay write. "However, it is actually more effective in its approach because the technology lends itself to displaying the skills necessary for a physician to form a patient’s neurological diagnosis."
How can we stlil raed words wehn teh lettres are jmbuled up?
Researchers in the UK have taken an important step towards understanding how the human brain ‘decodes’ letters on a page to read a word. The work, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will help psychologists unravel the subtle thinking mechanisms involved in reading, and could provide solutions for helping people who find it difficult to read, for example in conditions such as dyslexia.
In order to read successfully, readers need not only to identify the letters in words, but also to accurately code the positions of those letters, so that they can distinguish words like CAT and ACT. At the same time, however, it’s clear that raeders can dael wtih wodrs in wihch not all teh leettrs aer in thier corerct psotiions.
"How the brain can make sense of some jumbled sequences of letters but not others is a key question that psychologists need to answer to understand the code that the brain uses when reading," says Professor Colin Davis of Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research.
For many years researchers have used a standard psychological test to try to work out which sequences of letters in a word are important cues that the brain uses, where jumbled words are flashed momentarily on a screen to see if they help the brain to recognise the properly spelt word.
But, this technique had limitations that made it impossible to probe more extreme rearrangements of sequences of letters. Professor Davis’s team used computer simulations to work out that a simple modification to the test would allow it to question these more complex changes to words. This increases the test’s sensitivity significantly and makes it far more valuable for comparing different coding theories.
"For example, if we take the word VACATION and change it to AVACITNO, previously the test would not tell us if the brain recognises it as VACATION because other words such as AVOCADO or AVIATION might start popping into the person’s head,” says Professor Davis. "With our modification we can show that indeed the brain does relate AVACITNO to VACATION, and this starts to give us much more of an insight into the nature of the code that the brain is using – something that was not possible with the existing test."
The modified test should allow researchers not only to crack the code that the brain uses to make sense of strings of letters, but also to examine differences between individuals – how a ‘good’ reader decodes letter sequences compared with someone who finds reading difficult.
"These kinds of methods can be very sensitive to individual differences in reading ability and we are starting to get a better idea of some of the issues that underpin people’s difficulty in reading," says Professor Davis. Ultimately, this could lead to new approaches to helping people to overcome reading problems.
(Source: esrc.ac.uk)
A how-to manual for fruit fly research has been created
The first ever basic training package to teach students and scientists how to best use the fruit fly, Drosophila, for research has been published. It’s hoped it will encourage more researchers working on a range of conditions from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease to use the humble fly.
The unique scheme has been put together by Dr Andreas Prokop from the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester and John Roote from the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.
John Roote said, “In 1910 Thomas Hunt Morgan isolated the first Drosophila sex-linked mutation, white. Since then many thousands of research workers have realised the potential of the humble fruit fly.
“The powerful research tools that we have today combined with a century of background knowledge, the vast collections of stocks that are available to everyone and the fortuitous ‘pre-adaptation’ of the fly for life in a laboratory ensure that Drosophila melanogaster maintains its position as the pre-eminent model organism for research in genetics. However, until now a comprehensive teaching programme to guide students through the often daunting first few steps has been surprisingly absent.”
Dr Prokop said: “People don’t realise just how useful the tiny fruit fly can be when it comes to research. Fellow scientists are often not aware of their genetic value for research. For example, about 75% of known human disease genes have a recognisable match in the genome of fruit flies which means they can be used to study the fundamental biology behind complex conditions such as epilepsy or neurodegeneration.”
Fruit flies have been used for scientific research for more than a hundred years. They have allowed scientific breakthroughs in genetics, body structure and function. The first jet lag gene and the first learning gene were identified in flies as well as breakthroughs in neuroscience, such as the discovery of the first channel proteins.
Training package: How to design a genetic mating scheme: a basic training package for Drosophila genetics
Big Picture: Inside the Brain
The Spring 2013 issue of Big Picture, Inside the Brain, is now available online. This issue, explores the technologies that are helping us to understand the brain, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT).
About the cover:
This photograph, taken by Robert Ludlow, shows the surface (cortex) of a human brain belonging to an epileptic patient. The image displays the bright red arteries that supply the brain with nutrients and oxygen and the purple veins that remove deoxygenated blood. This photograph was taken before an intracranial electrode recording procedure for epilepsy, in which electrical activity is measured from the exposed surface of the brain. To find out more about Robert’s image and its creation, view this video on the UCL Institute of Neurology’s website. (Wellcome Image Awards 2012)