Susannne De Mooj, PhD student at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, tells us about the work she has been doing in collaboration with Dutch educational company, Oefenweb, using data from over 300,000 individuals using the company’s maths and language e-learning apps.    Online learning environments have the ability to continuously adapt and accommodate differences between learners, and changes within individual learners over time.  Susanne is investigating innovative ways these apps may be tailored to enhance different aspects of the online learning experience.

Learning is an inconceivably complex system, as many elements interact with each other; general mental ability, prior knowledge, learning styles, personality characteristics, motivation, anxiety, and many more. These interactions over time result in extensive individual differences in the cognitive trajectory, making it difficult for education and research to optimise learning for everyone. Online learning environments can have a positive impact on education and individual students in general by providing individualized computer adaptive practice and monitoring tools. Tracking the individual development of both accuracy and response time can shed some new light on the complexity of learning, which is illustrated below by three individual time series of children practicing single mathematical problems (i.e. 1 + 5) for a long period (adapted from Brinkhuis et al., 2018). For example, in the upper and low panel of this figure you see a three-stage pattern, moving from mainly incorrect response, to fast correct responses.  On the other hand, the middle panel shows a child who does not learn 3 + 4, while practicing this item for 61 times, with some correct responses alternated with errors. The highly variable patterns within and between the learners shows that tailoring and monitoring their learning experience is essential.

Cognitive profile and time perception. Any learning environment (offline or online) creates a certain cognitive load particularly to attention and working memory. This load can be increased through the presence of irrelevant objects/information (e.g. gamified sounds, flashing objects, alternative answer options), but also through external stimuli such as worried thoughts about performance. These stressors can either drive children to use more efficient strategies or it could compete with the attention necessary to learn new skills. One particular stressor used in a lot of game-based learning platforms and experiments, is time pressure. In one of our smaller sample studies we found that the presence of the time pressure on the screen has an impact on maths performance. Critically, we found that an individual’s ability to inhibit irrelevant information is key to whether this has an impact on the learning experience. Eye movement patterns in this study also showed that whether time pressure is visible or not in the learning environment in combination with their cognitive profile affects where and how much the children attend to. Although bigger studies are needed, time perception and individual cognitive profile are features that we might need to consider in adaptive frameworks.

Mouse tracking. In most educational tools, the most widely used indicators of learning are response time and accuracy, as shown in the individual time series figure. Although these measurements are well-suited to indicate the overall performance, they cannot be used as continuous measures of the underlying cognitive process. A promising online measure designed to track the timing of evolving mental processes is mouse tracking (Freeman, Dale, & Farmer, 2011; Song & Nakayama, 2009; Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich, 2005). For this paradigm, the speed and movement of a mouse point as well as where it is placed on the screen is tracked to see how much attention the user pays to certain stimuli. Mouse tracking is becoming popular on commercials website as a way to gain insight into behaviour, however it is also available and potentially useful for researchers, see for example the recent implementation in the online experiment builder Gorilla. One of our current studies tracks the mouse movements of 100.000 active users for a month while practicing arithmetic skills. Specifically, we are interested in the attraction towards alternative answer options, not selected as response, to get a better understanding of the user’s possible misconceptions. The aim of this online technology-based assessment of the misconceptions is to adapt feedback and instruction on an individual basis.

Large scale measure of (dis)engagement.

The way a student engages in learning is essential to their experience. Engagement is mostly defined as attentional and emotional involvement with a task (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012). However engagement is not stable, but fluctuates throughout the learning experience. Different measures are used to assess initial but also sustained engagement, such as self-report questionnaires, heart rate changes, pupil dilation and emotion detection. For large scale, online detection, head movement has been proposed as an estimate of the dynamics of the user’s attentional state. Generally, studies find that head size, head posture and head position successfully capture engagement, such that when the person is deeply engaged, movement is less and when distracted/bored more head movement follows. To measure engagement within an online learning platform or in typical psychological experiments, we use an automated detection algorithm where we track (multiple) faces with a simple webcam during the learning experience or afterwards from videos. Our current study (N=83 children, 8-12 years old) investigates how head movement relates to both emotional and cognitive engagement and whether we can predict whether children are in the ‘flow’ or are about to disengage from the task. Hopefully, this will enable us to prevent high dropouts and adapt the presentation and content to the individual learner’s state.

Alex Black has been a science teacher for over 30 years; for many of those he has been using the CASE teaching tools developed using Piaget’s theories.

His presentation described how researchers Shayer and Adey identified the difficulties that children learning sciences experienced, particularly 11 to 16-year-olds. The researchers wanted to develop an evidenced-based theory of science learning and teaching using Piaget’s model of developmental stages. This involved really getting to grips with students’ thinking and their understanding of the formal operational schemata essential for learning abstract scientific principles in the curriculum. The researchers developed and validated instruments for testing students’ understanding with a huge nationwide survey of 11,000 school students and were alarmed by the low proportion who had reached formal operational thinking by the age of 16. This led them to explore two strategies:

The first was to develop the CAT (Curriculum Analysis Taxonomy) to allow sequencing and matching of curriculum objectives to the cognitive readiness of the students. The second was to develop and validate a programme to accelerate the movement of students from concrete to formal thinking. The ideas of Piaget, Vygotsky and Feuerstein were incorporated into the teaching methodology and teacher training which led to the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) and later CAME in Mathematics with students in Year 7 and 8.

These programmes have since been extended across wider age ranges and put into practice in Finland, Pakistan, Israel, USA, Ireland, Australia, and Tonga. Further, the pedagogy has been extended to English as well as to more generic programmes such as Learn to Think in China.

Find out more about the resources available for teachers in English, Maths and Science on the group’s website letsthink.org.uk/

You can also follow Alex as well as Let’s think on Twitter

In this week’s excerpt from How the brain works we look at the central position of other people in the design of our brains. A growing body of research shows how, from very early infancy, even from birth, our brains are designed to recognise and give priority to social rather than non-social signals. Our ‘social brains’ are also key to understanding the prized human ability to communicate with language. We will go on to consider language and the other special human gizmos which make us, from a species point of view, unique.

As ever, if you want to binge and jump ahead, you can. Start here

People are a priority

A lot of what concerns the brain is other people.

Humans are social primates. Like gorillas and chimpanzees, we live in groups. There are families, friends, enemies, who’s in who’s out, who’s the boss. Social primates have the largest cortex relative to their body size across mammals. Humans have the largest cortex of all mammals, relative to the size of their brains. Across social primates, the larger the social group in which the primate lives, the larger its species’ cortex. This suggests that we have a big cortex to deal with the complications of interacting with the other members of the social group, be they partners, family members, friends, or rivals. Who did what to whom? Who knows about it? What should I do about that?

Anyone who has spent Christmas with their extended family will be unsurprised by this.

The visual system is also tuned to recognise movement that comes from people rather than objects (so-called ‘biological’ motion), including the gestures people make when they communicate. Multiple aspects of sensory information (form, location, motion) are brought together to allow us to recognise other people from different angles, in various places, and while they are in motion. The auditory system has specialised pathways for processing human speech sounds separate from other environmental sounds. The motor system allows us to speak to other people, to hug them, wrestle with them: all social motor actions. The limbic system generates emotions around social interactions, be they the bonding of child to parent, the approach–avoid decisions around possible friends and enemies, attraction, maintenance of personal space and defence of resources and territory.

More complex systems allow us to verbalise our thoughts, emotions and intentions, as well as remember factual knowledge of actors in our social group. For example, the front of the temporal lobe develops social scripts through experience – who tends to do what to whom and how does that feel? And factual knowledge of actors in the social group – what do I think of Jonny and what does Jonny think of me? How does Jonny tend to behave? Where am I compared to Jonny in the social hierarchy? (Hey, I think I’m way cooler.)

As we grow up, we create links between different types of knowledge, experiences and actions. For example, the body sensation (or ‘somato-sensory’) system can detect needs and arousal levels in our bodies, such as thirst and excitement. We link the feeling of thirst to the intention of drinking and the action of picking up a bottle. So, too, in our interaction with other people. We learn social scripts, such as the custom that when you meet a new person you introduce yourself, try to remember their name, shake their hand, and ask how they are. You’re in France, do you greet with a kiss on one cheek or two cheeks? Isn’t it awkward when you get it wrong?

Putting these types of knowledge together, we can guess what other people may be feeling and what they will do next, based on our own experience. This is called mindreading or mentalising. If we see someone grabbing a bottle, the neurons that respond to seeing a bottle and those involved in the action of picking up a bottle will activate in our own brain: it doesn’t quite trigger the action itself but it helps us figure out why the person might be making that action: they’re thirsty.

Similar systems allow us to empathise with the feelings of others. We may link certain actions and facial expressions with, say, sadness in ourselves (crying, walking slowly). When we see others crying, we feel sad. We flinch when we see others in physical pain.

‘We only feel other people’s pain if we like them’

But even here, frontal brain systems come into play, dosing empathy with context. We only feel other people’s pain if we like them. The frontal cortex applies this logic to modulate the sensory or emotional pain we experience in sympathy with others. We feel the hurt of other people’s misfortunes more if we take their perspective. A region at the junction of temporal (facts) and parietal (space) lobes plays this role. In its fashion, the brain takes the act of perspective-taking quite literally – it involves spatial computations to see the world from another point of view: to distinguish our view from the other, our self from the other.

Finally, the frontal cortex must combine the context, its own goals, and emotional states to select plans and control sensory and motor systems, in order to behave in the right way in social situations. Don’t slurp your tea in polite company.

So the social thing is very important and rather sophisticated. But there are other ingredients in the human brain recipe which are key to distinguishing us from even our closest apey relatives.

Human gizmos

Definition: Gizmo

A gizmo is a device or small machine that performs a particular task, usually in a new and efficient way

Birds fly, bees buzz, every species has something that it does well. What is the human speciality, what are its gizmos?

‘We don’t have the biggest brains – that’s elephants and whales’

We like to feel special; we like to feel we are apart from other animals. So what will it be? Do we have the biggest brains, the wettest blood? In the animal kingdom, our brains are not exceedingly special.¹ We don’t have the biggest brains – that’s elephants and whales. Sure, we have a high proportion of cortex (the outer layer) in our brains, but it’s on a par with chimps, horses, and short-finned whales. We have quite a lot of brain for our body size, but amongst primates, this proportion isn’t strongly linked with thinking ability. Now, we do have a decent number of neurons: over twice as many as gorillas. But even then, not close to the number that dolphins have.² And to be honest, we probably have the same number of neurons as our ancestors in the wider archaic homo family tree, including Neanderthals – and we like to think we’re specialer than them, don’t we?

Not sure about the wettest blood thing.

There are five human gizmos. Tool use, language, conceptual power, a clutch, and niche building. They are linked.

The first human gizmo is tool use. One of the things we do exceptionally well is to build and use tools, particularly to shape and interact with our physical world. As we saw in the previous section, evolution tends to innovate at the periphery, out in the body. We have dextrous hands and opposable thumbs. We don’t use them for walking. In the same way the bat has no special new part of the brain to support echolocation, we don’t have a special new part of the brain to support tool use. The motor functions are supported by the front part of the brain. We do have more ‘front of the brain’. Our brain develops using a similar recipe to other mammals and primates, but the front bit of the cortex grows for a longer time and becomes larger. The recipe is tweaked. The extra cortex allows us to develop fine motor control and coordinated movements to create and use tools.

The second gizmo is language. In one way, this is similar to tool use. Language is a sequence of complex movements, but now used to shape and interact with our social world. The innovation of evolution is in the articulators – lips, tongue, larynx – and mechanisms of airflow, which together enable us to make the range of speech sounds. In the brain, language also requires the extra cortex to learn the complex and precise motor movements to produce words. But there are no new special parts for language. Language utilises circuits used in making sequences of movements, circuits for perception, concepts, processing situational scripts, social intentions and agents. It fashions these together into a system that allows for fluent use of this motor skill. And if we want, we can use movements of the hands to communicate, in sign language. ³

Language is a great gizmo because it is an enabler. It allows you to acquire knowledge without direct experience. You can learn by being instructed. It supports building abstract concepts, by using a language label (like “six”) to bring together all the different situations involving six-ness (an Arabic numeral, a group of six things, an object with six parts, a sequence of numbers where six falls between 5 and 7, a pile of sweets bigger than 3 but smaller than 20, a length of 6, and so forth). Language can be used to bring to mind knowledge that is not automatically elicited by the current situation, via verbal analogies (e.g., ‘This football match is like David vs. Goliath’; ‘You can view electricity like the flow of water along a pipe’). Beyond the individual, language supports sophisticated socially coordinated activities, greatly increasing the potency of group behaviour.

The third gizmo is more conceptual power. With more cortex, especially in the front of the brain, more complex ideas can be developed. The evolutionary reasons for the larger cortex are murky. Maybe it was to support language, maybe tool use, maybe to support social cognition to deal with life in larger groups (keeping track of who likes whom, who did what to whom, what does everyone want, who’s lying, etc.). Maybe all these things at once. But once you have more power, the game changes.

We talked about sensory and motor systems in terms of towers. The lower floors see patterns, each higher floor sees patterns within a patterns. The larger cortex means humans have higher towers. In sensory systems, they can see deeper patterns of meaning in what they perceive, in motor systems they can plan motor sequences that reach farther into the future.

The deeper patterns of meaning include mental models of how the physical world works. This can include inventing invisible forces to explain physical events (electrons, germs, gods, ghosts). In the social world, it can include more sophisticated knowledge of social scripts, episodes, situations, and motivations. Although our basic emotions are probably similar to other social primates, we can attach these to more complex social scripts (W does X under Y circumstances and feels Z; Sophie snubs Bill at the party and feels guilty). This leads to a wider palette of emotions: pride, hubris, dignity, honour, admiration.⁴ Our mental simulations can include ideas about ourselves, in so-called meta-cognition, self-awareness, where I form a theory about how I behave, and use this knowledge to alter my future behaviour. More pre-frontal cortex, where the modulatory system lies, also gives the modulatory system more precise control over the meaning systems in the rest of the brain. It can separately control bits of ideas. I’ll have this bit of the idea, but not that bit. It allows for thinking about ‘what-if’ counterfactuals, about hypothetical situations. I mean, what if the moon was made of cheese?

One particular advantage of more precise internal control is that it gives us a clutch.

Definition: clutch – a mechanism for connecting and disconnecting an engine and the transmission system in a vehicle, or the working parts of any machine

The fourth gizmo is a clutch. Part of the modulatory system (sitting in the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex, sigh) is a disengage system. Brain activity can be decoupled from perception and turned to internally focused thought. You hear a sad story, and it makes you _think_… When disengaged from the present moment, the brain can run mental simulations. Fantasy and imagination. It can retrieve memories of past experiences to envision future and alternative perspectives and scenarios, conceive the perspective of others, simulate the navigation of social interactions, ruminate, generate and manipulate mental images, decide on moral dilemmas. All the things we do when we sit and think rather than perceive and respond to our immediate environments. The brain can even disengage while it carries out automatic activities. You daydream while you do the washing up. When the clutch is pressed down, we have the opportunity to learn not from the world but from our imaginations.

The final gizmo builds on all the other four: tool use, the social coordination enabled by language, the planning and imagining of other worlds enabled by greater conceptual power. It is a gizmo that most marks us out from other similar species: niche construction. A niche is the particular environment that a species lives in, and to which it is adapted. Unusually, you can find humans almost anywhere. Jungles, swamps, savannahs, mountains, deserts, tropics, icy wastes. Birmingham. Humans use their gizmos to adapt to all these environments, to build their own niches. Clothes, dwellings, modes of transport, hunting and farming equipment. We change our environments to fit our biology.⁵

So there you have it. Human do have some gizmos, without being biologically particularly special.

Unfortunately … these gizmos aren’t enough to explain how the modern human brain works. And that’s because you can’t explain how the modern human brain works just by looking inside it.

To get to the bottom of that, we need to go back. A long way back. And that’s what we’ll do in the next excerpt. If you can’t bear the suspense, you can jump ahead instead

[1] See this book for what makes humans smart in an evolutionary context: Paul Howard-Jones: “The evolution of the learning brain: Or how you got to be so smart” (Routledge, 2017)

[2] See who wins the my-brain-is-specialer-than-yours competition

[3] You may have heard theories that various abstract properties of human language, like grammar, are special genetic features of our species (‘grammar is innate’). All I can say, for the purposes of this resource, is that these theories are probably wrong.

[4] See Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s book on “Emotions, Learning and the Brain”, for an idea of how this works. Chapter 9 covers admiration!

[5] For the enthusiast, here’s a scientific paper that debates the special human ability of niche construction.

Welcome to our blog series where we ask teachers about their experiences of accessing and using research. We are delighted to introduce Tom Colquhoun who is Assistant Headteacher, Teaching & Learning at The Blue School in Wells and Director of West Somerset Research School.

What does educational neuroscience mean to you?

I believe that those with an interest in educational neuroscience aim to try and better understand how the brain works, how we learn and how this can help teachers and learners to be more successful.  The core business of all teachers and educationalists is to improve the life chances of those in their care.  This is best done through helping children to learn, develop knowledge, skills and understanding and to develop as a person.  If we can become more informed about some of the challenges involved and the potential barriers to learning, we can start to become even more effective in our work.

How do you keep up to date with the latest research?

As Director of one of 22 Research Schools across England, it is a requirement that I remain well-informed of the latest education research and the evidence that is generated.  Fortunately, this has become so much easier in the last five years with organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Institute for Effective Education (IEE) on the scene. Here, some very good people spend considerable time and effort producing clear, accessible summaries that busy teachers and school leaders can use to help inform their decision-making and to improve classroom practice.  If you haven’t done so already, I would strongly recommend that you register to receive ‘Best Evidence in Brief’ from the IEE – a fortnightly mail shot with all of the key education research headlines from across this country and indeed the world. This is an excellent example of how teachers and school leaders, with little or no time and effort involved, can keep abreast of the latest developments. I would also urge colleagues to sign up for the EEF’s ‘News Alerts’ and to consider becoming a member of the Chartered College of Teaching.  In particular, the College’s Impact Journal comes through the door each quarter, packed on every page with interesting, evidence-informed writing from some of the world’s leading researchers and writers.  One last signpost is to The Learning Scientists who have helped many teachers across the world to access some really useful strategies and resources for improved teaching and learning.  Sign up to receive their weekly digest too, for an interesting and thought-provoking read!

Can you give some examples of how neuroscience understanding has helped you and your school?

At The Blue School in Wells, a large comprehensive secondary school, we have invested heavily in improving the quality of teaching and learning in all lessons.  All teachers are members of a group of fellow professionals who work closely with one of ten appointed teaching coaches.  With a focus on sharpening up the first ten minutes of lesson, the coaches have encouraged their group members to be innovative in their practice and to implement the recommendations of the EEF’s Guidance Report on Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning.  As part of this new model of CPD, colleagues have been supported to read more about memory, cognitive load theory and effective modelling and to consider how this could improve their practice.

How do you get teachers and students involved?

All teachers are assigned a teaching coach who will visit lessons, offer feedback and facilitate the sharing of effective practice across the school.  We have included the engagement in this new type of CPD as a target in this year’s cycle of Performance Management.  We’re not expecting all of this innovative practice to work, but we are hoping that our staff will become more comfortable to engage with and believe what the best evidence suggests.  They will hopefully then consider what might be the ‘best-bets’ for our children, going forwards.  Our students have already been quizzed about the impact of these changes in practice through our system of regular student voice interviews.  We were mightily relieved to hear that the feedback from them was overwhelmingly positive!

Are there areas where you think research should focus next?

The field of educational research is huge and growing by the day.  The EEF have already published ten guidance reports on high-priority issues for schools (literacy, maths, parental engagement, etc) and plan to publish many more in the coming months (feedback, digital learning, etc).  One that I particularly look forward to reading is their offering on ‘Behaviour’, due to be released very soon.  Many teachers question their ability to help children learn effectively when the behaviour presented is so difficult to manage.  I look forward to reading what the experts recommend and to thinking about how I can bring that practice in to my own teaching.

To find out more…

If you’d like to find out more about The Research Schools Network, visit the website to track down your nearest school, read their blogs and view their training and events calendar.  Register to receive their monthly newsletter, which will be packed full of research findings and opportunities to get involved.

“The Research Schools Network.  School-led support for evidence-based practice”

You can also follow West Somerset Research School, where Tom is director, on Twitter @WSomResearchSch

Last time we looked at the outer layers of the brain and how they worked together to be able to work out what stuff was and where it was.  Today we’re looking at those deeper layers underneath the cortex..

DEEPER LAYERS

Cingulate cortex

Let’s move a layer deeper into planet Earth. The next layer, underneath the cortex, is called the cingulate cortex. We combine two ideas to understand what’s going on here. The deeper in you go, the closer you get to the emotions, what matters for the organism. And in terms of content, once more where you are is what you do. The cingulate cortex is a system that negotiates between the content of the cortex above and the emotions of the layer below.

In the cingulate cortex, content is now more coloured by emotions and goals. Cingulate cortex under parietal cortex (processing space) will deal with emotions for space (sense of self in space). Cingulate cortex under motor cortex will deal with emotions for action (the drive to act). Cingulate cortex under frontal cortex will deal with emotions around decision-making and the initiation of behaviour (am I doing it right? is this fun?). However cold the processing of information is in the cortex, it simply cannot be separated from the emotional dimension that lies in the cingulate cortex underneath.

Limbic System

The next layer in combines a set of different structures, together called the limbic system. It’s the lava world of the emotions. Unlike the cortex, which is mainly the same across the sheet, the limbic system has a set of structures with specific functions. The set of structures are pretty similar across the primates. In fact, my neuroanatomist friend said if someone gave him the limbic system of a human and a limbic system of a chimpanzee (casually, perhaps at a dinner party), he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

WARNING: BRAIN NAMES COMING UP. The structures in the limbic system are (roughly) the amygdala, the insula, the septum, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus. Latin and Greek names again. Almonds, islands, partitions, seahorses, and below-the-bed, respectively. There’ll be a quiz on these later.

‘Emotions are the way evolution has built long-term goals into the structure of the brain’

Here’s how to think about what’s going on. Emotions are the way that evolution has built long-term goals into the structure of the brain to give an organism the best chance of surviving and reproducing (two things evolution especially likes). The structures of the amygdala, insula, and septum are specialised for specific roles in emotion. For the amygdala, it’s about fear, aggression, whether to approach or avoid, to fight or fly or freeze. For the insula, it is about the bodily basis of emotion, what the body wants and what the body needs, the bodily self, feeling emotions in your guts. For the septum, it is about pleasure. These structures compete with each other for who is going to take control of the body, putting it in a state for whichever emotion wins. The structures compete to drive the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus in turn communicates with the distant bodily organs, by releasing chemical signals (called hormones) into the blood stream, putting the organs in the correct state to carry out different behaviours. ¹

The hippocampus, by contrast, is a memory system, which brings together information from all the senses to create snapshot memories. The emotion structures can command the hippocampus to lay down strong memories. ‘Remember this situation, it’s important, it’s where we saw that scary spider!’

The idea that different parts of the limbic system deal with different emotions shouldn’t be taken too literally. Emotions are functions carried out by circuits, which involve detectors (of particular situations), modulation (of the activity of other brain regions, of the state of bodily organs), and memorisation (of experiences). Emotions themselves are sets of highly variable instances, which depend on the current situation, your own history of experiences, and your response. Fear may revolve around the amygdala as a threat detector, but fear isn’t just fear: you can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, gasp in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, even laugh in the face of fear. ²

Lastly, the limbic system likes to talk to the front of the cortex. The frontal cortex provides the emotions with some context. The two systems are always chatting to each other. The limbic system might say, ‘Eeeek! A spider! Panic!’ and the front of the cortex might say, ‘Calm down. The spider you’re seeing is on TV. Should I change the channel for you?’

The conversation can go the other way. The front of the cortex, with time on its hands, might start to imagine the public speech that you have to give tomorrow and conjure up a nightmare of forgetting what to say. The limbic system hears this and plays along helpfully by setting the heart racing and stomach churning at the very thought of it.

The Basal Ganglia

Okay, let’s go deeper, to the next layer down, to the basal ganglia. Up top, there are lots of parts of the brain competing to decide what to do. Look at this! Pick this up! Scratch your nose! Check your email! Smile at your neighbour!

At the bottom of the basal ganglia, there’s a structure called the striatum. It’s a stop-go system with looping connections to and from the cortex up above. What each loop processes depends on the cortex overhead. Again, where you are is what you do. The striatum decides what actually gets done: it’s the driver pressing the brake or the accelerator. Do an action or don’t do an action. Have a thought or don’t have a thought. Have an emotion, don’t have an emotion. The striatum decides. Its default is to leave the brake on, and only a winning signal will press the accelerator and drive a voluntary action. ³

The Core

Lastly, we reach the core of the planet. Here, we have the structures that relay basic sensory and motor information into and out of the brain (the thalamus), and structures that control basic functions like heart rate, breathing, sleeping, and eating (brain stem).

Dr Laura Outhwaite talked about her research testing early years maths apps. Here’s a short video summary of her talk:

The apps were developed by re developed by onebillion, a not-for-profit organisation; find out more here https://onebillion.org/

Laura and her team have also written about their research both on the onebillion maths apps and on the possible benefits of app-based learning more generally. Check out their articles in the Chartered College of Teaching Educational Technology Special Issue and in the Conversation

Keep up to date with Laura’s work by following her on twitter @LAOuthwaite

Dr Emily Smith-Woolley talked to the CEN about her research looking at genetics and the role it plays in education. Below is a short video summary of her talk. Following it is a link to another video based on TEDS (Twins Early Development Study) findings about genes and educational outcomes in different types of secondary schools.

For more from Emily, follow this link to watch a video about her latest paper on genetics and schooling