clair073

When it comes to improving learning and memory, motivation is way ahead of whatever is in second place. From my own experience and from observing hundreds of students, it is clear to me that people will learn when they WANT to learn. Even in the face of bad textbooks, bad schools, bad teachers, … whatever, motivated students will learn. If people with few learning resources, like Booker T. Washington or Abe Lincoln could do it in their day, our kids can certainly do it with all the information available in the millions of books in public libraries and web sites on the Internet. One of my blog readers called my attention to a recent post on NannyPro.com web site, entitled “24 Blogs Filled with Ideas on How to Motivate Your Kids to Finish the School Year Strong.” As author Michelle points out, motivation of students in school commonly falls in the Spring sinkhole of Spring break and end-of-year doldrums. Advice to parents includes specific ways to set goals, tips for getting kids to do ...

Ever try to read your physician’s prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t (or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed. When we adults went to school, one of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient skill.” [1] The primary schools that teach handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, accordi...

You have heard the saying, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” Well, when it comes to education, we commonly feed our children cold dead-fish curricula, which they mostly soon forget. The problem is not so much the curriculum as that it is too often delivered at the expense of teaching students how to learn on their own and become lifetime learners. What a lot of them do learn is to shun learning and even hate school enough to drop out. Fads come and go in education. There was “new math.” Then it was the self-esteem movement. There is the recent heavy emphasis on “hands-on” learning. Now the whole educational enterprise is obsessed with high-stakes testing. None of these things are bad in themselves. It is just that they disturb educational balance and emphasize teaching students WHAT to learn as opposed to WANT to learn and HOW to learn. The body politic stills insists we need to throw more money at education and that wi...

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...

In ancient times the ability to memorize was a prized skill. Whole cultures were passed down through the centuries by those who remembered the stories, legends, history, and taboos and laws. The advent of the printing press launched a new era of “looking things up.” Today, the Internet and its search engines may seem to be making memorization irrelevant in the modern world. What we don’t remember, we think we can always look up. Schools have generally abandoned requiring students to memorize poems, famous speeches, multiplication tables, and all sorts of academic material that used to be ingrained in the curriculum. A growing disdain for memorization emerged among the other intellectually damaging effects of post-modernism. Now the emphasis in education is on new math, critical thinking, inquiry learning, “hands-on” activity, and the like. There is nothing wrong with these new emphases, except that they come at the expense of children learning the mental discipline of memorization. Tea...