How Girls Learn Better

The Atlanta Girls' School created this video underlining the differences that exist between boy brains and girl brains and how they learn differently:

Girls learn better at 24C and boys at 21C

An article in The Guardian today, about how to teach boys and girls.

The Juggler's Brain, by Nicholas Carr

After reading The Juggler's Brain, I cannot help but pass along some of its major thoughts.  I have copied and pasted most of the quotations straight from it.  A couple of Carr's ideas relate to topics I have mentioned in previous posts in this blog, but I will refrain from hyperlinking this time.

A few relevant points:

1) "The depth of our intelligence (I would add 'knowledge') hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas."

2) "Those elements that we are able to hold in working memory will ... quickly vanish unless we are able to refresh them by rehearsal."

3) "When the [information load in our working memory] (see a previous post on working memory in this blog) exceeds our mind's ability to store and process the information... we're unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term  memory."  The more complex the material we're trying to learn, the more difficult it becomes.

Carr's main point is that intense use of the internet is rewiring our brains, so we are gaining new skills, and losing others.

WHAT WE GAIN

• Neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening.
• We exercise the brain for certain cognitive skills: lower-lever functions, such as hand-eye coordination, reflex responses and the processing of visual cues.
• We gain widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.
• We can speedily locate, categorize, and assess disparate bits of information in a variety of forms > functions similar to those performed by computers.
• We learn to be skillful at a superficial level.

WHAT WE LOSE

• Neural circuits used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are eroding.
• We become easily distracted by environmental stimuli > it becomes harder to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information.
• We have less control over the contents of our working memory.
• We are less able to maintain concentration and focus.
• Our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow
• We lose deep learning and thinking.
• We lose calm, linear thought.
• The deep processing that underpins mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection is weakening.

The problem with hypertext: "evaluating links and navigating a path through them... involves mentally demanding problem-solving tasks that are extraneous to the act of reading itself.  Deciphering hypertext substantially increases readers' cognitive load and hence weakens their ability to comprehend and retain what they're reading...  Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read texts peppered with links."

Carr's CONCLUSION

The more our brains are being rewired as a result of heavy internet use, the more we process information rather than processing thought, the more we become "likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought."

I believe that this is something to seriously worry about.

Fix Schools - Dr. Tae

From Dr. Tae:


Dr. Tae — Building A New Culture Of Teaching And Learning from Dr. Tae on Vimeo.


http://drtae.org/
http://physicsofskateboarding.com/
http://universitae.com/

Again: Shorter Is Better

Sousa tells us that "another fascinating characteristic of the primacy-recency effect is that the proportion of prime-times to down-time changes with the length of the teaching episode."  Translation:

• In a 40 minute lesson, Prime Time 1 and Prime Time 2 combined total about 30 minutes of 'good learning time' (or 75% of the teaching time vs. 25% of down time.)
• If we double the length of the learning episode to 80 minutes, the down-time increases to 30 minutes, or 38% of the total time period.

As the lesson lengthens, the percentage of down-time increases faster than for the prime-times.

BUT if she shorten the learning time to 20 minutes, the down-time is about 2 minutes, or 10% of the total lesson time.  Therefore, there is a higher probability of effective learning in shorter teaching episodes.

• Four 20 minute episodes have 18min Prime Time x 4 = 72 minutes of effective learning.
• One 80 minute episode has 50 minutes of effective learning.

Therefore, if you have a big block of time to teach, it is best to divide it into smaller chunks.

So, once again, shorter is better :)

Primacy-Recency Effect

We already knew that when we need to memorize a list, our brain works in a way that will have us remember the words at the top of the list the best, and then the ones at the end of the list.  We generally have more trouble with the words in the middle of the list.

It just so happens that this pattern also takes place when we are learning.  During a learning episode, we remember best that which comes first, second best that which comes last, and least that which comes just past the middle.

What implications does this have for our teaching?

Clearly, we need to take advantage of our Prime Time 1 to introduce important material, and use our Prime Time 2 for closure.  The down time should be used to practice or review.

DO NOT WASTE THE FIRST 20 MINUTES OF CLASS with attendance, distributing homework, and other minutiae.  Some teachers use the first few minutes of class to ask students what they know about the subject.  Unfortunately, some students will provide wrong information at that time, and because the rest of the students will be hearing this information during Prime Time 1, unfortunately, many of them will retain the mistaken information.  When the precious first few minutes of class are wasted on logistics, by the time the teacher gets to the new information or material, students are in their 'down time,' in the valley of Retention..

DO NOT WASTE THE LAST 5 MINUTES OF CLASS giving students free time.  Use it wisely for closure.

Therefore, Souza's advice is to use this knowledge to plan our lessons.  No Prime Time 1 wasted on logistics or potentially erroneous information, and no Prime Time 2 wasted on "OK, now you can take the last 5 minutes of class to do a quiet activity until the bell rings."

We need to introduce new, important, correct information during Prime Time 1, and make sure we do closure during Prime Time 2.

Presenting Material vs Learning the Material

I have known for a long time that retention varies with teaching method.  As a student, so much of my classroom experience revolved around the lecture format!  Although while suffering it I did not know the data, I now know that the average retention rate after 24 hours of content presented in lecture format is about 5%.
:(
My teachers were so very conscientious about presenting the material.  But the question is not what is presented.  The question is: 'What is learned?'

At the same time, this data does not mean that the lecture format should never be used.  It comes in handy sometimes.  Just as with food we need a balance diet, we also need a variety of approaches to teaching: lecture, reading, audiovisual, demonstration, discussion group, practice by doing, teaching, etc.  These are just a few, and we know that successful teachers use a variety of methods.

Right and Left Hemisphere and Language

I have been studying Chapter 5 of How the Brain Learns, by David Souza.  This has been a particularly exciting chapter for me because it touches on language learning.

A few main points to keep in mind:

• Although each hemisphere has specialized functions, both usually work together when learning.  It is impossible to educate only one hemisphere.
• There is no evidence that people are purely left or right brained.  The two hemispheres work together as an integrated whole.
• We should avoid using hemispheric preference to stereotype individuals.  The cause of hemispheric preference, for all practical purposes, is not relevant.  It is our response that really matters.
• Most K-12 schooling inadvertently favors left-hemisphere-preferred learners.

Then, on page 171 Souza writes: "Most of us can carry on a conversation (left-hemisphere activity) while driving a car (right-hemisphere and cerebellar activity.)" (yikes!  It is not because we can that we should.)

What follows is about language, specifically :

• The total number of phonemes in all the world's languages is around 90, which represents the maximum number of sounds that the human voice can create (Beatty, 2001.)
• Before they reach teh age of 12 months, many babies can learn words in one context and understand them in another (Schafer, 2005).  They begin to acquire new vocabulary words at the rate of about 8 to 10 a day.
• By the age of 3, over 90 percent of sentences uttered are grammatically correct.
• The more children are exposed to spoken language in the early years, the more quickly they can discriminate between phonemes and recognize word boundaries.  Just letting the toddler sit in front of a television does not seem to accomplish this goal, probably because a child's brain needs live human interaction to attach meaning to the words.  Television may actually impair a toddler's brain development.
• Proficiency in learning a second language depends not on how long nonnatives have been speaking the language, but on how early in life they began learning it.
• Scanning studies using fMRIs show that second language acquired in adulthood show some spatial separation in the brain from native languages.  However, when acquired in the preteen years, native and second languages are reprsented in the same frontal areas (Broca's area).  Hence, younger and older brains react to second language learning very differently.
• It should not be assumed that youngsters will become fluent solely by studying a second language a few hours a week in the primary grades.  Like learning any skill, continuous practice is needed for fluency.
• Is reading a natural ability?  Not really.
• There are no areas of the brain that specialize in reading.
• The degree to which children experience literacy at home determines whether they begin school not just able to learn to read, bur ready to learn to read.

 Practitioner's Corner - Teaching to the Whole Brain: General Guidelines

• Deal with concepts verbally AND visually.  When using video presentations, show the smallest segment with maximum meaning, then stop the tape and have students discuss what was shown.
• Design effective visual aids.  Avoid writing information in visual aids in a haphazard way whenever a parallel or hierarchical relationship amongs the elements is important for students to remember.
• Discuss concepts first, logically, and second, intuitively.
• Design activities and assessments for both hemispheres.  Give students options in testing.  Also, simulations, role-playing, designing computer programs, and building models.