Serendipity35

Bridging neuroscience and educational practice - brain scans and lesson plans - probably sounds like a good idea and a frightening one. I saw that Pearson asks two experts (one from higher education and one from K12) to apply principles from learning science to classroom practice. This is part one of a series of eight questions.

One question they asked was what was a surprising aspect of learning research.  Michael Britt said that he was surprised that "being curious is actually kind of a negative state. We seek to relieve ourselves of it by finding out the answer to the unresolved issue we’re concerned about. Not only that, but as we involve ourselves in finding the answer to what initially made us curious, we are also in a state that makes more open than usual to learning about other things–even if they’re aren’t very closely related to the original topic."

The neuroscience says that when our minds are in a “curious state” there is more activity in the hippocampus–an area of the brain involved in memory and regions of the brain that produce dopamine–the neurotransmitter involved in feelings of reward–is also released when curiosity is aroused and a resolution to the problem is found."

How do you use that in our lesson plans? One thing we could do is present learning objectives as questions rather than statements. Would headlights work at light speed? What if the earth stopped spinning? What if the sun disappeared? Encourage curiosity.

But Liane Wardlow would not like my title here. In a pst she responded to, she sees limits to the direct application of the science to the classroom. Brain scans cannot give rise directly to lesson plans, but she also sees the possibilities of expanding our knowledge about learning and translating that knowledge into practical methods for increasing learning in the classroom as still being enormous.

As is so often the case with research and data, it is the application of it that matters. We find that students who are good at complex math calculations show more activity in a certain part of the brain. Now what? Determining causality is a more difficult matter.