How The Memory Works In Learning

Teachers are the caretakers of the development of students’ highest brain during the years of its most extensive changes. As such, they have the privilege and opportunity to influence the quality and quantity of neuronal and connective pathways so all children leave school with their brains optimized for future success.

This introduction to the basics of the neuroscience of learning includes information that should be included in all teacher education programs. It is intentionally brief such that it can be taught in a single day of instruction. Ideally there would be additional opportunities for future teachers to pursue further inquiry into the science of how the brain learns, retrieves, and applies information.

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A little science goes a long way: Engaging kids improves math, language scores

A Washington State University researcher has found that engaging elementary school students in science for as little as 10 hours a year can lead to improved test scores in math and language arts.

Samantha Gizerian, a clinical assistant professor in WSU’s Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology and Physiology, saw improved test scores among fourth-grade students in South Los Angeles after students from the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science gave 10 one-hour presentations on science.

"A lot of students say things like, ‘I didn’t know science was fun,’” says Gizerian, who helped with the classes while on the Drew faculty. "And because they think it’s fun, all of a sudden it’s not work anymore. It’s not homework. It’s not something extra that they have to do.”

Brain connectivity predicts reading skills

The growth pattern of long-range connections in the brain predicts how a child’s reading skills will develop, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Literacy requires the integration of activity in brain areas involved in vision, hearing and language. These areas are distributed throughout the brain, so efficient communication between them is essential for proficient reading.

Jason Yeatman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues studied how the development of reading ability relates to growth in the brain’s white-matter tracts, the bundles of nerve fibres that connect distant regions of the brain.

They tested how the reading skills of 55 children aged between 7 and 12 years old developed over a three-year period. There were big differences in reading ability between the children, and these differences persisted — the children who were weak readers relative to their peers at the beginning of the study were still weak three years later.

The researchers also scanned the brains of 39 of the children at least three times during the same period, to visualize the growth of two major white-matter tracts: the arcuate fasciculus, which conects the brain’s language centres, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which links the language centres with the parts of the brain that process visual information.

Differences in the growth of both tracts could predict the variations in reading ability. Strong readers started off with a weak signal in both tracts on the left side of the brain, which got stronger over the three years. Weaker readers exhibited the opposite pattern.

Open access will change the world, if scientists want it to

While the Australian Research Council considers its policy on open-access publication and others within the scientific community call for the increased sharing of scientific data, the British are already a step ahead.

They are implementing plans to make all publicly funded scientific research available to anyone by 2014 – for free. This signals a dramatic change for British universities and academics whose current scientific research is only available through expensive subscription-based journals.

But as we edge closer to open-access publishing, there has been much hand-wringing among the scientific community.

The dilemma is this: all scientists want to publish in high-impact journals but we also want our work accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In other words we want the prestige, but we also want the popularisation of our work that open-access publication can bring.

But for scientists in developing countries, the open access movement could mean the world.

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A new font tailored for people afflicted with dyslexia is now available for use on mobile devices, thanks to a design by Abelardo Gonzalez, a mobile app designer from New Hampshire. Gonzalez, in collaboration with educators, has selected a font that many people with dyslexia find easier to read. Even better, the new font is free and has already been made available for some word processors and ebook readers. The font, called OpenDyslexic, has also been added to the font choices used by Instapaper—a program that allows users to copy a web page and save it to their hard drive.

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A Neurologist Makes the Case for Teaching Teachers About the Brain

Do you recall some of your college professors who knew their subject matter but had zero teaching skills? Staying awake in their one-way-directed lecture classes required Herculean strength (or lots of coffee). They were never trained to develop the skillset of engagement strategies.

Even though I was a physician with a strong science background, when I decided to become a classroom teacher (and thought I’d teach science), I did not want to make that career change without the benefit of instruction and guided student teaching. The year I spent in my graduate school of education program was invaluable in my transition to becoming a professional educator. 

Aesop’s Fable Unlocks How Crows and Kids Think

Scientists have used an age-old fable to help illustrate how we think differently to other animals.

Lucy Cheke, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Experimental Psychology, expanded Aesop’s fable into three tasks of varying complexity and compared the performance of Eurasian Jays with local school children.

The task that set the children apart from the Jays involved a mechanism which was counter-intuitive as it was hidden under an opaque surface. Neither the birds nor the children were able to learn how the mechanism worked, but the children were able to learn how to get the reward, whereas the birds were not.

The results of the study illustrate that children learn about cause and effect in the physical world in a different way to birds. While the Jay’s appear to take account of the mechanism involved in the task, the children are more driven by simple cause-effect relationships.