Transcript Brain-Based Learning / Teaching

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
Sight
Sound
Smell
Taste
Touch
R
E
C
E
Sensory
P
Memory
T
O
R
S
Rehearsal
Elaboration &
Organization
Initial
Processing
Long-Term
Memory
Working
Memory
Retrieval
Not transferred to the next stage and
therefore forgotten
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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 might you say to a teacher who
simultaneously talks and presents overheads to
their class?
What would you say to a child who wants to
study with music or a TV playing?
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Emotion and Attention
Emotion drives attention, and attention
drives learning.
Robert Sylwester (1995)
What’s the significance of this sentence?
Emotions create the relationship between the
importance of an event and how well we
remember that event.
One shot learning
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Emotion and Attention
Accident Scene Studies
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Meaning and Attention
Does this stimulus match a previous one for you?
The notes were sour because the seams split.
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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?
Subjects told to memorize lists of 60 nouns in a
random order (names, animals, professions, and
vegetables)
When people wrote out their recollection of the
list, it came out organized. The stimulus was the
same, but people’s organization differed.
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Ebbinghaus’ Curve of Forgetting
What’s the significance
for teachers?
Patricia Wolfe. Brain Matters.
2001.
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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 = rote learning.
First associations are the strongest.
Changing established associations can be
difficult.
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Ausubel
According 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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Let’s Review – So what?
• What might you say to a teacher who is
having trouble gaining their students’
attention?
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Let’s Review – So what?
• 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 Misinterprets things; can distort
efficiently; can assimilate lots of reality when interpreting
information.
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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Evaluation
Making a judgment
Example:
Critiquing a short story or
poem.
Form Deep
Connections
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Synthesis
Creating something new
by combining deferent
ideas
Example:
Analysis
Breaking down
information into parts to
see relationships and
importance
Example:
Application
Using information in a
new situation
Example:
Comprehension
Understanding facts or
information
Example:
Knowledge
Knowing facts or
information
Rewriting Goldilocks and
the Three Bears from the
perspective of the bears.
Analyzing a short story or
poem to find the theme.
Using knowledge of letter
sounds to read.
Knowing the sounds the
letter a represents
Example:
Knowing that a is the letter
a.
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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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Form Multiple Connections
Dual Coding - Paivio
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Form Multiple Connections
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Form Multiple Connections
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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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Strengthen the Connections
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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Strengthen the Connections
5. Articulate relationships between concepts
A. Examples / nonexamples
B. Charts
C. Matrices
D. Models
E. Outlines / flowcharts
F. Graphs
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Strengthen the Connections
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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Strengthen the Connections
7. Active student elaboration.
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Let’s Review – So what?
• 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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Let’s Review – So what?
• 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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Let’s Review – So what?
• 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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Piaget: Stages of Development
Allyn & Bacon, 1998
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Piaget: Stages of Development
• 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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Let’s Review – So what?
• What might you say to a teacher who
dismisses the use of an anticipatory set
as a waste of time?
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Let’s Review – So what?
• What might you say to a teacher who is
giving a long set of verbal directions to
her kindergartners?
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Let’s Review – So what?
• 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?
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