The CEN joined with thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology to sign a letter to the Guardian newspaper voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach amongst some teachers:

“Teachers need to be armed with up-to-date evidence of what has been shown to be effective so that schools are not wasting time or money on unsubstantiated practices that do not help students,” the letter says. “It is hard to establish the cost to the education system of using learning styles. Some schools have it as part of their teaching ethos whereas others bring in external consultants or send teachers on training courses. Aside from the cost in terms of time and money, one concern is that learning styles leads to belief that individual students are unable to learn because the material is inappropriate.”

The letter continues: “The brain is essential for learning, but learning styles is just one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education.”

See the original letter, the accompanying Guardian article, and CEN’s neuro-hit or neuro-myth resource.

Studentship applications are now invited for PhD study in educational neuroscience at Birkbeck and UCL Institute of Education, open to UK students or EU students with UK residency.

Applications are open for ESRC studentships via the UBEL Doctoral Training Partnership, which offers a training route in Educational Neuroscience within its Psychology Pathway.

The closing date for PhD applications within the preferred institution is Friday 6 January 2017, for degrees to start October 2017. Interested candidates should approach relevant possible supervisors to discuss their proposed research projects in the first instance (see CEN faculty members). Alternatively, interested students should contact a representative within the relevant department: Birkbeck: Professor Michael Thomas. UCL Institute of Education: Professor Emily Farran.

Two papers published by CEN member Chloe Marshall and her colleagues at City University of London and UCL’s Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre stress the importance of language for deaf children’s cognitive development. Deaf children are at risk of having delayed Executive Function (EF) development. It is well established that EFs play a critical role in children’s academic success and social and emotional wellbeing, and that they are closely associated with language skills. A long-standing debate in the research literature concerns whether language supports the development of EFs, or whether EFs support language development.

Marshall and her colleagues argue that deafness, a sensory impairment that negatively impacts children’s ability to take up language from the input, offers a unique way of testing the developmental relationship between language and EF. In a paper just published in the leading journal Child Development, they show that deaf children perform more poorly than hearing children on EF and vocabulary tasks, and that vocabulary level mediates EF performance (but not vice versa). In other words, deaf children’s poor EF can be explained by their low vocabulary levels, whereas their poor vocabulary cannot be explained by difficulties with EF tasks.

In an earlier paper published last year in Frontiers in Psychology, Marshall and her colleagues showed that poor working memory (an important component of EF) is not an inevitable consequence of deafness; deaf children who are native signers (i.e. grow up from birth in a home with parents who use a sign language) have comparable performance on working memory tasks to hearing children, but both those groups perform better than deaf children who are non-native signers.

Taken together, these studies suggest that growing up in an environment that offers a rich and accessible language input can protect deaf children from delayed EF development.