clair073

I began beating the drums for applying neuroscience to educational practice in a 9/28/11 blog post (see archives). Now I am delighted to announce that Elsevier publishers has started a new scholarly journal, Trends in Neuroscience Education. The title is a little misleading because it implies that articles will focus on teaching of neuroscience. On the contrary, all seven articles in the first issue dealt with applying neuroscience information to the practice of teaching and learning. Two of the first issue articles deal with movement feedback and its affect on cognitive development. These have particular relevance to the teaching of handwriting. The present emphasis on keyboarding and the elimination of penmanship in the curriculum are apparently educationally unwise. This is particularly destructive in schools that are dropping cursive altogether. I will blog about these findings soon. For now, reader should know that this neuro-education movement is well under way, that I will follo...

Snore a lot? Get up frequently at night to urinate? Wake up at 2 A.M. with bright ideas or worries? All these disruptions of sleep are common and more so as we get older. Does it matter? Well, of course such awakenings disrupt our sleep, and maybe it is just inconvenient. But disrupted sleep not only is more likely with age, it may promote deterioration in mental functioning. A recent study compared the effects of sleeping behavior in young adults and seniors. The study involved assessing the memory after sleeping of 18 young adults in their 20s and 15 older adults in their 70s. The subjects were tested on 120 word sets before they went to bed, and an EEG machine monitored their brain activity while they slept. Upon awakening, they were tested once again on the word pairs, but this time they took the tests while undergoing functional  magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The quality of deep sleep among the older adults was 75 percent lower than the younger ones, and their memor...

Of the many factors that influence a student’s ability to learn, ATTITUDE is way ahead of whatever is in second place. Attitude includes interest, confidence, and initiative. One of my readers steered me to a web site pointing out that how a student deals with bad test scores or failure also has an enormous impact on learning. The key seems to be the student’s self-stereotype. One common problem is learned helplessness. That is, past experiences of failure become generalized into believing the problem reflects innate limitation. Thus, the student doesn’t try to overcome poor performance because of a lack of confidence. Developing such a self-defeating attitude begins with in small steps. For example, if a student makes low test scores in a given course, the student may think she just doesn’t have talent for this particular subject. If this happens in several courses over several years, she comes to think she just doesn’t have ability, period! Unfortunately, such responses typically oc...