Multiple Methods of Assessment

• You have 100 billion neurons in your brain.
• Each of these neurons has between 5,000 and 50,000 connections to other neurons.
• That means one quadrillion connections between neurons in the cortex.

• During the first 28 weeks of pregnancy, 250,000 neurons are developed every minute.
• These neurons are formed in the base of the brain.  They migrate to where they will be used.  Alcohol interferes with this migration.

• The hippocampus is associated with long-term memory.  It is like the trapdoor to long-term memory.  It is triggered by emotion.
• The amygdala is involved in memory formation and our emotions.  That is why our memories and emotions are so interconnected.

• Dr. Clyde Hertzman writes: Over time, the physiological aspects of less than optimal neurophysiological development, chronic stress and its physiological impacts, a sense of powerlessness and alienation, and a “social support” network made up of others who have been marginalized will create a vicious circle with short-term implications for education,  criminality, drug use, and teen pregnancy, as well as long-term implications for the quality of working life, social support, chronic disease in midlife, and degenerative conditions in later life.  It is most closely associated with the findings from long-term follow-up studies of newborn babies, adolescents, working populations, and the elderly.  These studies can be put together in a time sequence to reconstruct the life cycle.  A pattern emerges that highlights the enduing impact of status on health, well-being, and competence from cradle to grave.  In a highly-abbreviated form, it goes like this:

• Status differences at birth are associated with different levels of stability and security in early childhood, which are, in turn, associated with different levels of readiness in schooling.  Lack of school readiness leads to an increased risk of behavioural problems in school and ultimate school failure.  Behavioural problems and failure sin school lead to low levels of mental well-being in early adulthood.  Meanwhile the status of one’s parents helps to determine the community where one grows up in, which by the early school years starts to influence the child’s life chances through the social networks, community values, and opportunities that present themselves.  By early adulthood, individuals start to define their own status.  Already, differences begin to emerge wherein those who are doing better report higher levels of well-being.  As adulthood unfolds, lower-status individuals tend to end up in jobs that make relatively high demands on them but offer low levels of control of the pace and character of the work.

• “Dr. Hertzman discusses how early childhood intervention programs can have a very significant effect on education, health, and well-being in later life.  He has shown that there is a high correlation between the health of a 30-year old and whether the parent read to the child when s/he as 4 and 5 years old.  In Canada, a dollar spent on early childhood intervention programs will save $2.00 down the road.   In Texas, a dollar spent on intervention will save $7. down the road.  Politicians who are always telling us we must cut taxes, remind me of people who refuse to build a fence at the edge of a cliff because it would cost a few hundred dollars.  They will wait for a few years and then find they have to build a 50-million dollar hospital at the bottom of the hill  to care for all those who have fallen over the cliff.

Windows of Opportunity as a Child’s Brain Matures

What Do We Attend to?

We attend to things that involve

• emotion
• meaning.

Anything that captures learners’ attention and gets their minds engaged has the potential to produce meaning.  if there is no attention and no engagement, there will be no learning.  It is biologically impossible to learn anything unless you pay attention to it. 

• Emotion drives attention which drives learning.

Robert Sylwester says:  “I think educators ought to be interested in brains because they teach brains.  If you are an instructor, you have about 30 of them in your room, and I can’t imagine somebody who would teach a room full of brains and who wouldn’t be interested in brains.  New developments are helping us to understand the teaching and learning process in ways we couldn’t have imagined before this. … If you are involved in the development and maintenance of a brain, you need a kind of knowledge that is more than folklore knowledge.  –Robert Sylwester, ASCD Interview, 1997

• Our job as teachers is to help students experience things so they can construct meaning from them!

Mindful Learning

A mindful approach to any activity has 3 characteristics:

• the continuous creation of new categories;
• openness to new information;
• an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.

Mindlessness, in contrast, is characterized by an entrapment in old categories; by automatic behaviour that precludes attending to new signals; and by action that operates from a single perspective.  Being mindless, colloquially speaking, is like being on automatic pilot.   [The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen Langer].

The Trivial Pursuit Model of Education

• Overwhelming emphases on factual knowledge
• Tests focuses on facts and procedures
• Textbooks contain little “language of thinking
• Emphasis is on “coverage
• Example: Remember the Battle of Hastings?

Memory Spaces

• The capacity of the short-term memory appears to develop with age.  The number of spaces increases by one unit every other year beginning at age three.  Thus, by 15, we have 7 memory spaces.  We end up with 7 plus or minus two memory spaces.  Adults can work on 7 bits of information, plus or minus two. 

Chunking

• A chunk is any coherent group of items of information that we can remember as if it were a single item.  For example, if we have a chunk of letters that have meaning, they can be remembered as easily as a single letter [but carry much more information].
• The difference between novices and experts in a field appears to be that experts tend – because of a great deal of experience in a field – to organize information into much larger chunks, while novices work with isolated bits of information.  Benjamin Bloom

The Cocktail Party Effect

• The mind can pay attention to only one train of thought at a time.  What are the implications of this while you are teaching or studying?

Moving Something from Short-Term to Long-Term Memory

When you want to move something from short-term to long-term memory, think of all the ways you could:

• describe it
• use it
• define it
• explain it.

This will create rich, logical, emotional connection in your brain.

Types of Memory

1. Procedural Memory:  Habits, Motor Skills, Conceptual Skills like driving a car, typing or “keyboarding”, decoding and computing.  It does not involve conscious thought.  Rote rehearsal works in helping people to develop procedural memories.
2. Declarative: two types – {a} Semantic: our general knowledge of people, places, things, and what we learn in school: facts, concepts, generalizations – acquired by learning; {b} Episodic Memory: Our life experiences – specific events – when and where.  Reconstructed over time.  Details are not necessarily accurate. 

My memory of events improves with age, whether they happened or not.  Mark Twain.

Mindful, elaborative rehearsal works well in helping people to develop semantic memories.

Cognitive Rehearsal Theory

Slavin says that research in Cognitive Psychology has found that if information is to be retained in memory and related to information already in memory, the learner must engage in some sort of cognitive rehearsal, restructuring, or elaboration of the material.  For example, writing a summary or outline of a lecture is a better study aid than simply taking notes, because the summary or outline requires the student to reorganize the material and sort out what is important in it.  [Cooperative Learning – Theory, research, and Practice, Slavin, 1990]

One of the most effective means of elaboration is explaining the material to someone else.  By asking your students to turn to their neighbour and explain what you just explained to them, you allow them to cognitively rehearse or process the information.  This helps the person who is receiving the information as well as the person who is giving the information.  The research shows that students who listened learn more than students who worked on their own, but students who took the role of elaborator learned the most of all.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence [EQ] is a much better predictor of a person’s success in life than a person’s IQ.  The subscales of emotional intelligence outlined by Dr. Reuven BarOn are as follows:

Intrapersonal                                              Adaptability

      Self-Regard                                                      Reality-Testing

      Emotional Self-Awareness                                Flexibility

      Assertiveness                                                    Problem-Solving

      Independence

      Self-Actualization                                  Stress Management

Stress Tolerance

Interpersonal                                                          Impulse Control

      Empathy                                               General Mood

      Social Responsibility

      Interpersonal Relationships                    Optimism

                                                                  Happiness

Emotional Intelligence skills can be learned throughout our lifetime.

EQ usually peaks when people reach their 40’s or 50’s.

·        We are hired for our qualifications.

·        We are promoted for our performance.

·        We are fired for our lack of interpersonal skills.

The more levels of education you have, the more likely you are to engage in mentally stimulating activities, and that’s usually good for your brain.  A study of more than 1,000 people from age 70 to 80 showed that four factors seem to determine which oldsters maintain their mental agility:

• education, which appears to increase the number and strength of connections between brain cells.
• strenuous activity which improves blood flow to the brain.
• lung function, which ensures the blood is adequately oxygenated.
• the feeling that what you do makes a difference in your life.

The brain is designed to process knowledge and information just as the digestive system is designed to process food or the lungs process oxygen.  If food, oxygen, or knowledge is cur off, the organism dies.  It’s that simple!   Richard Restak – Older & Wiser – How to Maintain Peak Mental Ability for As Long as You Live

How to Age-Proof Your Mind: or How to Make dendrites Grow!

1.      Do puzzles.  Crossword puzzles are great for you.

2.      Try a musical instrument – new one if you already play.

3.      Fix something.

4.      Try the arts.

5.      Dance.

6.      Go out with friends or find new playmates.  Date/marry provocative people.  Be socially involved.

7.      Turn off the TV.

8.      Stock your life with rich experiences of all kind.

9.      Play with toys.  Lots of them.  Different ones.

10.  Skip bingo.  Play bridge or chess instead.

11.  Learn to roll with the punches.

12.  Stay physically healthy.

13.  Keep your job.  Don’t retire --  ever!  If you must retire, look upon retirement as an opportunity to begin a new life.

14.  Become an expert on something – anything.

15.  Search for truth rather than settle for a good fantasy.

Give your implementation Ideas for these Brain-Compatible Instruction Ideas

1.      Focuses on student understanding of content and ability to use information rather than on mastery of relatively isolated knowledge of items and skill components.

2.      Requires learners to actively construct meaning, to make their own sense of information, to generate examples and relate the content to what they already know rather than passively receive or copy data.

3.      Focuses on authentic tasks that call for problem solving, critical thinking, and/or creativity rather than just memorizing information.

4.      Requires teachers to limit the breadth of content addressed and structure what they do teach around important ideas rather than trying to cover everything.

5.      Takes place in a non-threatening environment enabling students to think rationally and creatively.

Checklist of Useful Questions

1.      Are students involved and challenged?

2.      Is there clear evidence of student creativity and enjoyment?  Are students dealing appropriately with dissonance?

3.      Are students being exposed to content in many ways that link content to life?

4.      Are students’ life themes and metaphors being engaged?

5.      Are there “hooks” that tie the content together in a big picture that itself can make sense to students?

6.      Is there some sort of continuity, such as through projects and ongoing stories, so that content is tied together and retains interest over time?

7.      Is there a sign of continuing motivation or student interest that expresses itself above and beyond the dictates of the class?

8.      Is the physical context being used optimally.

9.      What do the setting, decorations, architecture, layout, music, and other features of the context actually say to students?

10.  What sort of group atmosphere is emerging?

11.  Are there any signs of positive collaboration, and do they continue after class and after the college day?

12.  Do students have opportunities to reorganize content in creative and personally relevant ways?

13.  Are there opportunities to reflect in an open-ended way on what does and does not make sense?

14.  Are students given the opportunity to apply the material in  very different contexts?

15.  Do students consciously and deliberately examine their performances in those different contexts and begin to appreciate their own strengths and weaknesses?

-         ASCD Making Connections – Renate and Geoffrey Caine.

Conditions and Strategies for Eliciting Intrinsic Motivation

1.      Meet perceived needs and goals:  The brain is designed for survival.  Find out what your students need.

2.      Provide control and choice.  Learner feels valued.  Opposite is manipulation.

3.      Positive social bonding.  Reduces stress and helpfulness.

4.      Curiosity.  Inquiring minds want to know.

5.      Engage strong emotions.  Compelling stories, games, personal examples, celebration, role plays, debates, rituals, music.

6.      Nutrition: good balanced diet improves brain function.  8-10 glasses of water a day.

7.      Use Multiple Intelligences.  Can really hook learners into learning.

8.      Success Stories.  Have any of your past students been inspiring?

9.      Acknowledgements.  Assemblies, certificates, group notices, appropriate praise.

10.  Frequency of feedback.  Give immediate, dramatic feedback.

11.  Physiological states.  No such thing as unmotivated learners, only unmotivated states.  Learn to manage your own states.

12.  Provide hope of success.  Every learning context must provide some kind of hope.

13.  Role Model the Joy of Learning.  The more you get excited about learning, the more excited about learning your students become.

14.  Celebrations.  Peer acknowledgements, parties, food, hi-fives, cheers, etc.  These create the atmosphere of success and can trigger the release of endorphins that boost further learning.

15.  Physically and emotionally safe.  Safe to ask questions, safe to contribute.  No tolerance for racist, sexist, etc., remarks.

16.  Use  learner’s learning style.  Provide choice in how learners learn.

17.  Positive beliefs [capability and context].  Reinforce to learners that they can succeed.   Eric Jensen – Brain-Based Learning

“The school environment, for most learners, is quite antagonistic towards the brain.  Educators would literally be astonished by the motivated learning accomplished in a brain-compatible environment.”   Eric Jensen