How Brain’s Learn

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How Brain’s Learn

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Teaching vs. Learning

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Brain Anatomy

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Brain Hemisphericity

Allyn & Bacon, 1998

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Flow of a Neuron Impulse

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Information Processing Model

Working Memory

Long-Term Memory

Not transferred to the next stage and therefore forgotten

Sight

Sound

Smell

Taste

Touch

RECEPTORS

Sensory Memory

Initial Processing

Retrieval

Elaboration & Organization

Rehearsal

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Working Memory Limits

What’s the meaning of Miller’s 7 +/- 2?

Age Can Remember

15 7

13 6

11 5

9 4

7 2

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Attention

• Stimuli bombardment

• Mental filtering in sensory register and short term memory

• Attention is paid to things that are:– Novel– Intense– Move

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Attention Limitations

What is the cocktail party effect?

What would you say to a child who wants to study with music or a TV playing?

What might you say to a teacher who simultaneously talks and presents overheads to their class?

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Emotion and Attention

Emotion drives attention, and attention drives learning. Robert Sylwester (1995)

Emotions create the relationship between the importance of an event and how well we remember that event.

One shot learning

What’s the significance of this sentence?

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Emotion and Attention

Accident Scene Studies

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Meaning and Attention

The notes were sour because the seams split.

Does this stimulus match a previous one for you?

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Meaning and Association

What happened in your brain when you saw this figure?

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Brain’s Make Associations

• What color is this screen?

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Explore Your Neural Network

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Active Organizer of Information

Humans create organization – Bousfield (1953)

What was the study?

When people wrote out their recollection of the list, it came out organized. The stimulus was the same, but people’s organization differed.

Subjects told to memorize lists of 60 nouns in a random order (names, animals, professions, and vegetables)

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Ebbinghaus’ Curve of Forgetting

Patricia Wolfe. Brain Matters. 2001.

What’s the significance for teachers?

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Ausubel

The best predictor of what and how much you’ll learn is what you already know about a topic.

No association =

First associations are the strongest.

Changing established associations can be difficult.

rote learning.

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AusubelAccording to Ausubel, for instruction you must:

1. Activate prior learning

2. Make similarities and differences clear between new and existing information

3. Analogies: How is this the same? How is this different?

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Let’s Review – So what?

• What might you say to a teacher who says they’re going to teach art to stimulate their students’ right hemispheres?

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• What might you say to a teacher who is having trouble gaining their students’ attention?

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• In what ways could teachers raise the level of emotion associated with a given assignment?

• How can teachers keep levels of emotion at a productive level?

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Multiple Int. vs. Schema Theory

• No clear evidence to date of brain structures or functions that support multiple intelligences.

• New tools reveal how memories are stored.

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PET Scans

• PET scan showing mental activity

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Storing Info. Long Term

Schema: An organized knowledge structure reflecting an individual’s knowledge, experience and expectations about some aspect of the world.

Simpler definition = a complex neural network of connected information.

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Whale Schema

Allyn & Bacon, 1998

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Recalling Information

• Recall is the simultaneous activation of all the neurons associated with a memory within a schema.

• A given neuron may be part of multiple memories.– Efficiency– Letters / words.

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Schema for Bison

Allyn & Bacon, 1998

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Schemas Affect Recall

Story about a house from two perspectives:

• Real estate agent

• Burglar

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Schemas Affect Recall

Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts (1932).

Recall errors revealed subjects interpreted the story through the lens of their own experience:

• Canoe and paddle became boat and oar

• Plot become more conventional

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Schema: Memory Distortions

Allyn & Bacon, 1998

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Schema: Advantages / Disadvantages

Advantages Disadvantages

Allows the brain to operate more efficiently; can assimilate lots of information.

Misinterprets things; can distort reality when interpreting experience through a schema.

Allows better comprehension (bagpipe)

Can constrain thought processes

Helps you to infer to fill in gaps. Difficult to overcome or change.

Allows better interpretation – can sense if something doesn’t “seem” right.

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Supporting Robust Schema

• Form connections to prior learning– Anticipatory Set

• Focuses attention on relevant existing schema• Motivation

– Starting a lesson with what students know and having students build understanding

• Fossils

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Supporting Robust Schema

• Strengthen the connections through repeated activation– Daily Oral Language– Spelling Quiz

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Form Deep Connections

EvaluationMaking a judgment

Example:

Critiquing a short story or poem.

SynthesisCreating something new by combining deferent

ideas

Example:

Rewriting Goldilocks and the Three Bears from the perspective of the bears.

AnalysisBreaking down

information into parts to see relationships and

importance

Example:

Analyzing a short story or poem to find the theme.

ApplicationUsing information in a

new situation

Example:

Using knowledge of letter sounds to read.

ComprehensionUnderstanding facts or

information

Example:

Knowing the sounds the letter a represents

KnowledgeKnowing facts or

information

Example:Knowing that a is the letter a.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

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Form Multiple Connections

• Involve multiple senses.

• Each path / connection makes the schema more robust.– Learning about the ocean:

• Look (this is the usual focus)• Taste• Sound• Smell• Touch

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Dual Coding - Paivio

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Strengthen the Connections

1. Create Associations – hook the unfamiliar to the familiar:

A. Analogies

B. Similes

2. Identify Patterns

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3. Mnemonic Devices

A. Treble clef: Every Good Boy Does Fine

B. Acronyms: SCUBA

4. Have students restate the learning in their own words

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5. Articulate relationships between concepts

A. Examples / nonexamples

B. Charts

C. Matrices

D. Models

E. Outlines / flowcharts

F. Graphs

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6. Repetition.

A. Restate / model the learning during lesson

B. Include guided and independent practice within lessons

C. Provide distributed practice over time

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7. Active student elaboration.

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• How might you respond to the criticism that the use of flashcards to learn the times tables is “drill and kill”?

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• Based on what you’ve learned so far, why might students learn more about turtles by having a real turtle in the classroom as opposed to reading about turtles?

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• Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher.

• Based on what you’ve learned today, why is describing a rectangle as just like a square that’s been squeezed likely to support student learning?

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Piaget: Stages of Development

• Children aren’t miniature adults.

• Cognitive development occurs in stages.

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Allyn & Bacon, 1998

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• Developmentally appropriate instruction

• Make instruction real / concrete– Realia– Manipulatives– Scaffolds – Videos – images

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Making Earthquakes Concrete

• Video• Photographs• Web site

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• What might you say to a teacher who dismisses the use of an anticipatory set as a waste of time?

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• What might you say to a teacher who is giving a long set of verbal directions to her kindergartners?

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• In a job interview, a principal says that students at the school have multiple learning challenges before asking how you might address that.

Based on what you’ve learned today, how might you answer?

Documents

How Brain’s Learn