And now for the first in a new series of blogs where we ask teachers about their experiences of accessing and using research. We are thrilled that our first teacher-chat is with Mark Enser.

Mark is a key stage 3 geography teacher, Head of Geography, and Research Lead at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex.
He tweets @EnserMark and blogs at www.teachreal.wordpress.com.
His first book, Making Every Geography Lesson Count, is soon to be published by Crown House.

Mark, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Firstly, how do you keep up-to-date with the latest education research?

It is very difficult to keep up to date as there is so much being produced and so much of variable quality and of variable practical use. I am a member of The Chartered College of Teachers and have found Impact to be very useful and the access to academic articles online invaluable.

I also attend education conference such as ResearchEd and read books on education. I follow up the references in footnotes and check out the original research for myself. I also make use of the EEF toolkit and again follow up by reading the research they have used. TES (formally Times Educational Supplement) are also running more and more articles about education research and Jon Severs Pedagogy Podcast in which he interviews academics is excellent.

Is it important to you whether the research uses particular methods (eg neuroscience, classroom-based)?

I need to be able to see an application for the research in a classroom setting but this doesn’t mean the research has to have come from a classroom. I think findings from neuroscience can be very useful to teachers and it is something I wish my training and early-career CPD had focused on more.

Could you tell us how research has influenced your teaching?

The main way that research has influenced by teaching is to simplify what I do. It has allowed me to cut out a lot of the complications that made my teaching less effective and efficient. I no longer try to plan activities to take into account different learning styles or try to differentiate learning objectives. I started to teach at a time in the early 00’s when it felt that a lot of what we did in the classroom was done to please various outside observers and to meet their criteria for what a good lesson would look like. Reading research has given me the ability and confidence to strip away a lot of the bad practice I was trained in.

Reading and applying research has helped me to make my explanations more memorable and I use principles of dual coding to help support working memory. I also use more structured retrieval practice to make sure that pupils are recalling material from much earlier in the course and not assuming that because they have done it they have learnt it.

What do you think researchers should focus on next (i.e. what are the gaps in our understanding, from a teacher’s perspective?)?

I would interesting in seeing more research into high and low achieving pupils and understanding more about the difference. When does the gap between them begin, what causes it, and what can be done to close it?

I would also like to see more work done on the transition between key stages. It feels as though a lot of what was learnt at primary school is unavailable to pupils when they arrive in a new setting. I hear from teachers in further and higher education that much is the same for pupils leaving secondary school. I think anything that can improve retention between schools could lead to a dramatic improvement in education. We just need to know what those thing are!

Do you have any suggestions of how communication and collaboration could be improved between teachers and education researchers?

The first issue is access. Too much research is expensive to access. If we want an informed profession it needs to be free to teachers.

Secondly, we need to find a way of bringing useful research into schools. There is a huge amount out there and teachers at the chalk face don’t have the time to sift through it and search for the pearls. Research leads in schools can help with this as they can be given the time and space to do this searching and disseminating. It would be useful if researchers can get access to the contact details of research leads to improve communication.

Thirdly, teachers need to be given time for this communication and collaboration with researchers. A teacher’s time is expensive and with crushing real time funding cuts coming from central government it is hard to see how many schools are going to manage to give staff the time to sit and read and discuss.

It would be useful if education researchers got on twitter and started blogging and discussing their work informally with teachers. Although they may initially be talking to a small group of the profession, it will help to get their work out there more widely.

Please could you describe a research-informed idea that you feel has had a positive impact in your classroom, so that others could try it as well if they feel it’s relevant. 

Retrieval practice has made a huge difference to my pupil’s ability to retain information to use. I usually start a lesson with a short quiz and ensure that the questions go back over several previous topic. This means that pupils are having to think back and bring something back into their working memory, making recall in the future easier. However, I also make sure that the questions relate to the work they are about to do. This helps to make this new learning’s place in their schema more explicit and helps to avoid the misconceptions that arise when new learning is de-coupled from what has gone before.

Although I keep the quizzes low stakes, I do go through the questions and ask for a hand-up for who got that question right. I allows me to quickly ascertain any gaps in their knowledge and anything that might need re-teaching before I move on.

Thank you very much for your time! 

Annie Brookman-Byrne is a final year PhD student at the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, at Birkbeck, University of London. She has kindly taken a break from writing her thesis to chat to us about the work she does, and about educational neuroscience more generally.

Annie summarises her research in this short video:

Hi Annie

I’d like to start off by finding out a bit about how you came to be a PhD student in the field of educational neuroscience. What made you decide to study that particular subject?

I became interested in educational neuroscience as a result of conducting research in both psychology and education departments. I loved aspects of both environments and felt that educational neuroscience was the perfect way to combine the two. Educational neuroscience takes a scientific approach to education, which seemed like a great way of conducting psychology research with application to the real world. Of course there is much more to the science of education than psychology, so it’s also fascinating to think about the role of other disciplines within education (such as genetics or learning technologies), and educational neuroscience considers all of these disciplines.

Another appealing aspect of this field is that researchers share a common goal of improving teaching and learning, so it really feels like everyone is working together to see how best to achieve that goal. Educational neuroscience is more than just research: there are lots of resource-sharing and public engagement activities that aim to bring researchers closer to educators and learners. These efforts are essential in making sure the latest findings are fed back to have the greatest impact.

Why do you think educational neuroscience, generally, is an important area of research?

Teachers have a wealth of knowledge about different techniques that work in the classroom, but we don’t necessarily know why they work. One of the aims of educational neuroscience is to get to grips with why different strategies work; if we can find out the science behind these successful techniques then we may be able to use that knowledge to make them even more successful. Equally, there may be techniques that work but not for the reasons we think they do, so we may be able to find a way of streamlining them. And of course, finding out more about the science behind learning enables us to try out new techniques.

All of this is important in helping students to be more successful learners. This doesn’t necessarily mean achieving higher grades, but may mean learning in a way that is more enjoyable, less anxiety-inducing, and more efficient. Many researchers are interested in individual differences in learning. By finding out more about how different people learn, it is hoped that learning experiences can be better tailored to give everyone the best possible chance in school, including those who struggle to learn.

What are the particular challenges you’ve encountered during your research?

Anyone who conducts research in schools will tell you that recruitment is a challenge, and I’m no different! It can be difficult to find schools with the time and resources to let a researcher in to see a large number of children one at a time over the course of a few weeks. Even with a very enthusiastic school, the parents need to give consent, and children need to remember to bring back their consent forms. It can be a long process! Nonetheless, I have been lucky enough to work with teachers who are fascinated in the research and keen to help out—they have made a huge difference.

For me, another challenge has been developing the language to explain my research to teachers and students. Over the course of my PhD I have spoken to teachers about my research through focus groups, teacher training day talks, and conferences. I have also given a number of talks to groups of students. This has been a challenge because I have had to think hard about the best way of explaining my research to different groups who are not already familiar with the background. I have adapted the language I’ve used based on the feedback I’ve received, and now feel much more comfortable in explaining what my research is all about and why it’s important.

And what positive experiences or opportunities have you had when carrying out your research studies?

Speaking to teachers and students have been positive experiences, just a little nerve-wracking at times! I also had a really great time collaborating with teachers to design a series of small-scale classroom-based studies. To me this felt like what educational neuroscience is all about—working with teachers to find a research question of common interest and conducting the research together.

You are also very busy with creating opportunities for educationalists and researchers to communicate and share ideas. Can you tell us a bit about these projects, and why you consider them to be important?

I am a coordinator for the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) special interest group on neuroscience and education, also known as SIG 22. I worked with Lia Commissar from the Wellcome Trust to put on the biennial SIG 22 conference in June which was a great chance to bring together educators and researchers. In addition to the usual conference activities like talks and poster sessions, we also had an “open space” event, where anyone could suggest a topic to discuss, and small groups got together to talk about them. I am looking forward to seeing what comes of those discussions—initial feedback was positive and suggested that some new ideas for projects came from discussions between researchers and educators.

I also spent January to June this year working with the team behind “I’m A Scientist” to put on an online event called the Learning Zone to connect teachers and researchers. The website hosted content for teachers that outlined the latest science in this field. Educators and researchers also chatted in the zone which was a great opportunity for sharing of expertise in both directions.

These kinds of activities that bring together teachers and researchers are so important because they help to build a common language. Educators need to understand what researchers are working on, and what the latest scientific findings are. It’s also important to communicate to teachers what the science hasn’ttold us yet, and where findings reported in the media may be misleading. Researchers need to understand what teachers already know, and what teachers want to know. This helps drives the research in a direction of interest to teachers, and also helps researchers frame their engagement activities, based on what teachers already know.

Congratulations on your recent ‘Exceptional Trainee’ award from IMBES (International Mind, Brain, and Education Society) – very well-deserved. In your experience, do you think there are differences in the study of educational neuroscience / mind, brain, and education between the UK and USA?

The main difference I have come across between the UK and USA is simply the different term used to describe the field. While it is typically called educational neuroscience in the UK, it is usually called mind, brain, and education (or MBE) in the US. My understanding is that this does not reflect any differences in the type of research conducted, but may alter the public perception of the field. I don’t know why this difference emerged, and I have heard it suggested that MBE better reflects the nature of the field, which is not simply education and neuroscience. A common criticism of the field is that education and neuroscience are too far removed for neuroscience to have anything useful to offer education. Perhaps if we called it MBE in the UK, those not in the field would have a better understanding that it is not simply about connecting education and neuroscience. However, now that educational neuroscience has gained some prominence in the UK, the term may be here to stay!

And finally, what do you consider to be the most important ‘next steps’ for educational neuroscience, and the science of learning?

This is said time and again but communication and collaboration between educators and researchers is essential. I hope to see more networks that allow for this to happen, ensuring that both parties are given the time and resources needed to make fruitful collaborations. There has been a real rise in the sharing of information and I also hope to see more of this, and I think we need to get creative in sharing the latest science in accessible and interesting ways. Finally, my view is that as a field we need to take steps to ensure that research is replicated, and that we are carefully considering issues of sample size and power in study design. Pre-registration of studies is becoming a widely used way of reporting psychological research, whereby study design and analysis is registered and sometimes peer reviewed prior to the data collection. This ensures that researchers are not biased in their analysis. In order to ensure we are making robust claims about science I think our field should follow suit. The way in which students learn and are taught has lasting impact so it’s important that we make sure decisions related to their learning are based on the best possible scientific evidence.

Thanks very much Annie – we wish you all the best with your future research!

Annie can be contacted on abrook07@mail.bbk.ac.uk and via Twitter @abrookmanbyrne

Annie regularly writes blog posts for:

• Blog on Learning and Development (BOLD)
• NPJ Science of Learning community
• Her own website

Her recent papers include:

• Inhibitory control and counterintuitive science and maths reasoning in adolescence, written with her PhD supervisors Dr Iroise Dumontheil, Professor Denis Mareschal, and Professor Andy Tolmie
• Neuroscience, psychology, and education: Emerging links, written for teachers with Professor Michael Thomas
• IMBES Pre-conference: Using insight from research to improve education, written with Lia Commissar from the Wellcome Trust

In this week’s blog, Dr. Sam Wass from University of East London tells us about his research into socio-economic status and stress, and how this relates to teaching and learning.

What is the focus of your research?

At the moment I am working mainly on my ESRC fellowship, which looks at how the early living environment affects stress and concentration abilities in babies growing up in socio-economically challenged households. We know that children from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to develop mental health problems later in life, and we think that early-life stress might cause this. But we understand very little about what exactly causes stress in infants. The project is looking at two areas – environmental noise (how physically noisy the living environment is) and stress contagion (how our stress levels are influenced by people around us).

What led you to this area of research? 

There is a personal story behind this. A few years ago, my sister wanted to get two of her children into a good primary school that had a small catchment area – so she moved with her partner and her four children into a much smaller flat, that was all they could afford in the area. The effect on the children of moving from a more spacious to a much more cramped living space was, all the family felt, enormous – it seemed to affect their general stress levels, even when they weren’t at home, and their concentration. It was that that got me interested – because there is very little formal research in this area.

Could you summarise your findings?

It’s too early to know what our main findings are – we’re still collecting the data. But, based on other research, it may be that the picture that emerges is more complex than a simple case that ‘stress/noise is bad’. One big theory doing the rounds in developmental psychology at the moment is the orchids/dandelions theory – that some children (‘orchid children’) are more naturally sensitive, which makes them more sensitive to ‘bad’ things, such as background noise, but also makes them more sensitive when interesting/ memorable learning events happen. So being more sensitive is a double-edged sword. It may be that our findings fit in with this theory.

What do you think this means for teachers in the classroom?

I think there is a tonne of useful material for teachers here. First, the idea that the external environment – how noisy, chaotic and cluttered things are – can affect children’s levels of physiological stress – which, in turn, can affect their concentration. Second, the idea that some children might be more sensitive to this than others. There is also the idea of ‘stress contagion’ – that my own levels of physiological stress are affected by the people around me. And finally, the idea that not all stress is bad.

Could you give one tip to teachers, based on your work?

I think – ‘imagine what the world feels like from the child’s point of view’. Children naturally experience more intense mood swings than adults. As adults we have been highly trained at filtering out background distractions – so much so that we hardly notice them sometimes – but children find this much harder. Being a little child often feels like being a speedboat with a very powerful engine and a small rudder – you might know where you want to go but spin off uncontrollably in a different direction. And understanding this can help, I think, in how we interact with young children.

You can find out more about Sam’s work here: https://www.uel.ac.uk/staff/w/sam-wass

For the second in our series of headteacher interviews, we are very pleased to introduce Julia Harrington, Head of Queen Anne’s School and Founder of BrainCanDo https://braincando.com/ to share her thoughts on educational neuroscience.

What does educational neuroscience mean to you?

The developments in neuroscience in the last two decades have given us a much improved understanding of the human brain and its functions, albeit the brain is still very much a mystery!  I believe that this greater knowledge and understanding has direct and indirect applications for the educational sector which, after all, is based in the ‘engine room’ of so many young brains, working to help them develop to flourish both in terms of mental health and their learning and development. Not to have a knowledge and understanding of this is not just a missed opportunity, it is arguably at best bad practice and at worst downright negligent!

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

At BrainCanDo we are involved in active research with our university partners. I also keep up to date through journals, conferences, websites which I seek out on this topic. I would particularly recommend the journal Impact [produced by the Chartered College of Teachers] which is excellent.

How has neuroscience understanding helped in your school?

We have written our own Teacher’s Handbook.  It covers topics such as memory, stress, music and the brain, biological rhythms and flipped learning.   This explains the neuroscience and psychology behind these areas and then gives ideas and guidance on how to apply in the classroom.   Our teachers also conduct their own small scale research through Learning Study Groups, analysing their findings and feeding back to students and staff.

How do you get students and teachers involved?

Firstly through making sure that BrainCanDo is firmly rooted in all of our practices and training for our staff. The Handbook has helped with this, but it is supported by inset training and work around sharing good practice.  The students are also given training throughout the year on different strategies for learning and mental health and how this relates to understanding the brain. This is delivered by our in-house team.  We also talk about brain function at assemblies, tutor sessions etc.

Are there areas where you think the research should focus next?

We are continuing with our work on music and the brain, looking at ‘character’ education and what this actually means and links to brain function/psychological belief systems/emotional contagion and regulation. I would like to see more work on education for adolescents on emotion regulation feeding into positive mental health.

This is the first in an exciting new series of CEN blogs, where Dr. Vic Knowland asks researchers to tell us a bit about their work and how it relates to teaching and learning.

This week, Professor Emily Farran from UCL-Institute of Education tells us about her research into spatial cognition, science and mathematics.

 What is the focus of your research? 

I am interested in spatial ability and how it relates to science and mathematics abilities in children. Spatial ability involves being aware of the location and dimensions of objects and their relationships to one another. It is core to everyday living (e.g., giving directions, packing a suitcase), and is also a strong predictor of a person’s science and mathematics abilities, i.e., people who perform well on spatial tasks show strong science and mathematical abilities. Despite the everyday importance of spatial ability, spatial thinking is given little emphasis within the National Curriculum, particularly when compared to the importance placed on literacy skills. Through my research I aim to encourage policy makers and educators to recognise the importance of improving children’s spatial abilities.

What led you to this area of research? 

Originally, the main focus of my research was on spatial cognition in neurodevelopmental disorders. Specifically, I work with groups for whom spatial ability is impaired or atypical (e.g., Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, Cerebral Palsy). I am interested in whether limitations in spatial cognition can be compensated for in these groups, and what the downstream impacts of differences in spatial thinking are on other domains, such as number and mathematics. This kind of knowledge not only informs us about development in these atypical groups, but provides an important window into how individual differences in spatial cognition impact development in the typical population. It also enables us to understand the underlying mechanisms that are necessary to support optimal development of spatial cognition in typical development. Armed with this knowledge, I became interested in spatial cognition in typically developing children. Importantly, spatial ability is very malleable and thus can be trained, with impact not only on spatial ability but on science and mathematics performance. This relationship has predominantly been investigated in adolescents and adults. My research focuses on primary school children.

Could you summarise your findings?

Credit for the bulk of this research goes to Alex Hodgkiss, Katie Gilligan and Su Morris, who are PhD students in my lab (http://cogdevlab.weebly.com/). We have found associations throughout the primary school years between spatial ability and both science and mathematics. For science, mental folding ability (imagining what a piece of paper would look like when folded along pre-specified dotted lines) and spatial scaling ability (mapping two corresponding locations between maps of different sizes) are important spatial skills. This relationship is consistent across the 7 to 11 year old age range. Spatial scaling is also important for mathematics across the 6 to 10 year old age range. We also demonstrated a developmental transition regarding which other spatial skills are important for mathematics. That is, mental rotation (imagining a shape rotating) and disembedding (identifying a smaller shape embedded within a larger image) were important at 6-7 years, but perspective taking (visualising a scene from a different viewpoint) was identified as a significant predictor of mathematics ability for 9-10 year olds. We have also found that different spatial skills are differentially important for subdomains of science (physics, chemistry, maths) and mathematics (geometry, shape, arithmetic). Having established these associations, we are now investigating the impact of training spatial skills using instructional videos, how differences in cognitive style (measured using eye-tracking) impact mathematics performance, the impact of gesture use on science learning and the impact of spatial thinking skills on science reasoning within a taught lesson.

What do you think this means for teachers in the classroom?

Understanding science and mathematics depends heavily on being able to use, understand and co-ordinate models, read diagrams, rearrange formulae, and interpret representations at different scales. At the core of science is an understanding of processes and cause and effect relationships, which are often illustrated through dynamic representations. This learning through and from various kinds of visualisations requires spatial skills. Equally, mathematics requires an understanding of shape, symmetry and numerical relationships all of which require spatial skills. By recognising the spatial elements of science and mathematics tasks, teachers will be in a position to foster the development of these concepts via the use of spatial tools (e.g., diagrams, graphs, spatial language), with positive impact on the learning of science and mathematics abilities.

If you could give one tip to teachers based on your work, what would it be?

Spatialise your teaching. That is, embed spatial thinking within your teaching. Construction toys are important; blocks, for example bolster understanding part/whole relationships, symmetry and measurement. Equally, number lines are a spatial tool that can make abstract concepts like fractions and negative numbers more concrete; they help children to visualise the relationships between values and amounts. Teachers could also teach children how to use maps and diagrams, and direct children to visualise a structure (e.g., the respiratory system) whilst learning from a diagram. Encouraging children to use gesture, sketching and diagrams during problem solving will also enhance their science and mathematical understanding via spatial thinking. Spatial language is also an important tool because it has high communicative value (describing patterns of data on a graph, conveying the location of plant roots relative to the plant stem) and capacity to enhance spatial understanding (words like ‘parallel’ and ‘converging’ succinctly communicate otherwise difficult spatial concepts).  Children’s use of spatial language is influenced by the amount of spatial language that they hear, and is also positively related to their spatial abilities.

In the first of a new series of blogs, we will be hearing from headteachers about their views on educational neuroscience. First up is Steve Baker, Principal of the Aspire Schools Federation and Member of the Learnus Advisory Group.

What does educational neuroscience mean to you?

Educational neuroscience is about developing a better understanding of the development of the brain, and its plasticity, and the underlying mechanisms that shape our cognition and behaviours.  I once heard a professor of psychiatry suggest that trying to understand learning through neuroscience is like trying to understand the plot of East Enders by taking the back off your television set.  I wholeheartedly disagree and believe that although the field of educational neuroscience is relatively new, medical advances and ongoing research will allow us the opportunity to better understand how we can develop our brains, and ultimately shape our understanding of how we learn.

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

I endeavour to read as much as possible around the subject, including books, articles and published research papers.  In addition, I am incredibly fortunate to be on the advisory board of the think tank Learnus whose vision is to bring together the fields of neuroscience research and practice.  They are currently doing this by developing a community of teachers, psychologists, neuroscientists and academics in order to bring the insights of neuroscience and the learning sciences into the classroom.  I would certainly recommend having a look at their website: www.learnus.co.uk

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

We are very fortunate to have been working with Dr Alice Jones Bartoli for a number of years.  Alice is the Director of Unit for School and Family Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is also a member of the Learnus Council; she has supported our efforts to focus on a non-confrontational approach to behaviour modification at my secondary setting, Kilgarth School, which supports young men with Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) difficulties.  We are also currently working with a clinical psychologist who is undertaking research into the role of limited prosocial emotions on responsiveness to punishment (and reward), and the mediating role of emotional memory in children and young people.

At Gilbrook School (my primary SEMH setting) we are supporting the research of a member of staff with a background in psychology.  He is undertaking an MSc in Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Psychological Practice and his latest literature review has focused on attachment in infancy and developmental well-being.  We have been focusing on developing the use of outdoor space to promote positive mental health and resilience in our children; in May we were used as a best practice case study by the Department for Education for our outstanding mental health work.  We are also currently liaising with Professor Francis McGlone’s team at the University of Liverpool, who are investigating the importance of affective touch in the development of the social brain.

How do you get people involved?

I work with an incredible group of staff who have always been keen to get involved with our research focus and this was celebrated during our latest Ofsted inspection.  In their final report, the inspectors commented on the positive impact of our engagement with research:

“Your professional curiosity and determination to do the best for every child mean that you never rest on your laurels. You and your staff keep up to date with the latest developments, both nationally and internationally. You have established innovative partnerships in international research. Staff research what works for pupils and use this to develop best practice at Gilbrook.”

We have a relatively small number of staff, yet in the last three years we have supported members of the team to undertake further learning and research at both a Master’s and Doctorate level and we use research opportunities to engage staff and support their professional development.

Are there areas where you think research should focus next?

There are a number of key areas of research that I believe would be of huge benefit, including developing our understanding of growth mindsets, mindfulness and how to promote and incentivise good behaviour, instead of using punishment. Indeed, research has shown the importance of developing non-cognitive skills in order to achieve educational success.

There also needs to be a clear drive to ensure that research is made accessible to members of the teaching profession; workload and stress are key issues affecting the profession and we are constantly inundated with new education “silver bullets” and fads.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

I would recommend that people get involved in school-based research themselves and, where possible, keep up to date via social media platforms such as twitter.  There is also a lot of information available at websites such as www.learnus.co.uk and www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk

• Brain plasticity is a term describing changing connections between neurons and neuronal networks in the brain, based on experiences.
• Deficits in low-level skills (such as perception and motor abilities), resulting from deprivation in the early years of life, are unlikely to be overcome through brain plasticity.
• In contrast, the development of high-level skills (such as reading, writing, and mathematics) is not limited to specific, sensitive periods, and can therefore continue to develop over the lifespan.
• Brain plasticity reduces earliest in sensory and motor domains, and latest in regions associated with higher cognition.

Blog written by Professor Michael Thomas

Brain plasticity was an early pre-occupation of educational neuroscience, perhaps not surprisingly given that education is predicated upon it. Learning can be characterised as the changing and strengthening of neural connections and networks in the brain. The initial focus was on changes in brain plasticity with age and the possible implications for the time at which education should commence and various skills should be taught. But this focus was not inevitable, or perhaps even the most pertinent. It makes as much sense to investigate the different constraints on plasticity that operate in different brain systems – the amount of experience each requires, the optimal schedule, the requirements for consolidation, the rate of forgetting, modulatory factors such as emotional state and stress, and so forth – along with the mapping of these brain systems to the learning of specific academic skills.

Bruer (1997) was highly critical that the research on sensitive periods in brain plasticity in the 1990s was inappropriately and prematurely extended to policy implications, in particular the conclusion that the first 3 years were crucial for a child’s educational outcomes (so-called ‘early years determinism’), which he felt to be erroneous. The neuroscience of the time was mainly based on low-level perceptual and motor skills in animal models, and the impact of early sensory deprivation. The extrapolation of these findings to high-level cognition in humans was far from clear (Howard-Jones, Washbrook & Meadows, 2012) – indeed, age-related molecular constraints on plasticity in perceptual systems do not appear to be found in higher-level association cortex (areas of the cortex which are involved in more complex functions such as recognition, thinking and planning) even in animals (Takesian & Hensch, 2013; see Cooper & Mackey, 2016).

The current view is that there are few lifespan brain constraints on plasticity with respect to high-level cognitive skills, unless these higher skills are reliant on the acquisition of new low-level motor and sensory skills where sensitive periods are found. However, there are other age-related factors which, together, blur direct comparisons of learning speed over age – these include correlated changes in modes of learning with age (e.g., from implicit to explicit), increasing strategic ability to achieve goals while minimising new learning, and changes in motivation. These age-related changes can be exemplified by language learning, whereby the ability to discriminate sounds outside a first language is reduced after the first 6-months of life. This does not prevent the learning of new languages later in life, but adults may require greater amounts of practice to achieve automaticity, and there may be a lower ceiling of ultimate proficiency that can be reached (Thomas, 2012; Knowland & Thomas, 2014).

While the early years represent a period of vulnerability for the long-lasting impact of deprivation and abuse, there is now less emphasis – at least amongst researchers – for their educational importance in cases of typical development. The order of acquisition of knowledge and skills is important, but it seems less likely that evidence from age-related changes in brain plasticity will tightly constrain whendifferent academic skills should be taught. 

References

Bruer, J. T. (1997). Education and the brain: A bridge too far. Educational Researcher, 26(8), 4-16.

Cooper, E. A., & Mackey, A. P. (2016). Sensory and cognitive plasticity: implications for academic interventions. Current Opinion in Behavioural Science, 10, 21-27.

Knowland, V. C. P., & Thomas, M. S. C. (2014). Educating the adult brain: How the neuroscience of learning can inform educational policy. International Review of Education, 60, 99-122. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/dnl/personalpages/Knowland_and_Thomas_2014.pdf

Takesian, A. E., & Hensch, T. K. (2013). Balancing Plasticity/Stability Across Brain Development. Progress in Brain Research, 207, 3-34.

Thomas, M. S. C. (2012). Brain plasticity and education. British Journal of Educational Psychology – Monograph Series II: Educational Neuroscience, 8, 142-156. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/dnl/personalpages/bjep001.pdf

Environmental and genetic causes of individual differences in educational achievement

Blog written by Professor Michael Thomas

The nature-nurture issue is well-known amongst teachers: children differ, and some of these differences are due to the children’s nature, some due to the environment they are raised in, and some a combination of children’s different natural reactions to the environments they are raised in.

Gaps in educational achievement between children are a key issue for society, and their causes have been a focus for research in the social sciences. These gaps have spurred educational neuroscience investigations into possible underlying brain mechanisms, with separate work in the areas of environmental influences and genetic mechanisms.

Nurture

With respect to environmental influences, research has focused on the effects of socioeconomic status (SES), one of the environmental measures showing most predictive power on cognitive and educational outcomes. SES is usually measured by parental levels of education and income. Notably, SES differences in cognitive abilities are already observable when children start school, and tend not to narrow with age (e.g., Hackman et al., 2015), and may even widen. For example, von Stumm and Plomin (2015) reported that in a large sample of almost 15,000 UK children followed from infancy through adolescence, children from low SES families scored on average 6 IQ points lower at age 2 than children from high SES backgrounds but by age 16, this difference had almost tripled. Notably, the differences in cognitive ability in school-age children associated with SES tend to be larger than the effects produced by different schooling (e.g., Walker, Petrill & Plomin, 2005). The greater effects of the home than the school on cognitive ability suggest that educational neuroscience must retain a focus on developmental factors beyond the classroom.

SES as a measure of the environment is only a proxy for the actual experiences of the child and therefore the actual causal mechanisms. These mechanisms may operate along multiple pathways, and those pathways may differ depending both on the absolute level of poverty across countries and the level of inequality. These pathways include prenatal factors, such as maternal diet, smoking, alcohol consumption, and stress; postnatal nurturing factors, such as early caregiver sensitivity; and the richness of postnatal cognitive stimulation (Hackman, Farah & Meaney, 2010; Sheridan & McLaughlin, 2016). Notably, the effects of SES are uneven across cognitive profiles, with relatively greater effects on language development and executive functions, and weaker on visuo-spatial cognition (Farah et al., 2006), although the reasons for this unevenness are unknown.

In a large US sample, Noble et al. (2015) demonstrated differences in structural brain measures of cortical thickness and cortical area correlated with SES measures, in regions that fitted with the cognitive abilities showing largest effects (temporal regions for language, prefrontal regions for executive functions). Investigations of causal mechanisms are compromised by the fact that so many correlated environmental factors are associated with differences in SES (Hackman et al., 2015); but in theory, an understanding of mechanism would suggest most effective points to intervene to alleviate the effects of poverty and deprivation on educational outcomes (Thomas, 2017).

Nature

With respect to genetics, work in behaviour genetics has begun to impact on education. Most obviously, evidence points to the heritability of differences in educational achievement. Heritability is defined as the amount of variation in behaviour explained by genetic similarity. Heritability is either inferred on the basis that achievement is more similar the more genetically similar individuals are (e.g., the idea that ability runs in families); or it is measured directly by correlating variation in individual letters of DNA (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) to educational outcomes in large samples (though the variation in behaviour explained by direct measures of DNA variation is typically much smaller, perhaps only ~10% instead of the ~50% explained by observing patterns that run in families; e.g., Okbay et al., 2016). For example, within the last five years, papers have been published showing that the heritability of educational achievement aged 16 is up to 60%, and that controlling for IQ, it appears to be the same genes that explain variability in different academic disciplines (Krapohl et al., 2014; Rimfeld et al., 2015); that social mobility (measured as children achieving higher educational levels than their parents) is itself around 50% heritable (Ayorech et al., 2017); that, on genetic grounds, there is little evidence that selective schools produce better educational outcomes than non-selective schools (Smith-Woolley et al., 2018); and that educational achievement may be a causal protective factor against Alzheimer’s disease (Zhu et al., 2018).

There is insufficient space here to evaluate these types of claims (see Thomas et al., 2013; Ashbury & Plomin, 2014; Meaburn, in press). However, we can simply note that a genetic perspective on education emphasises that not all differences between children are environmental in origin; but as yet, does not point to specific implications for teaching. Somewhat counter-intuitively, environments that optimise learning will increase the extent to which educational success is heritable. For example, greater heritability is observed in classes with better teachers (Taylor et al., 2010), as it is in affluent families compared to impoverished ones (Turkheimer et al., 2003). This is because heritability acts as an indicator of where limiting factors lie: when better school environments reduce limits on learning, variability between children is more readily explained by their genetic make-up (Asbury, 2015; Thomas, Kovas, Meaburn & Tolmie, 2015). Increasing heritability rates could therefore be a useful indicator of reducing educational inequality.

Effects linked to genes or changes in the brain are not inevitable

The risk with both neuroscience evidence of the effects of poverty on brain development, and of genetic effects on educational achievement, is that these will be construed by educators as ‘deterministic’ or inevitable outcomes. Yet many cognitive effects of poverty can be ameliorated by intervention, such as training executive functions, because the brain is plastic (Neville et al., 2013); and previously measured genetic effects may disappear when environments are altered. Indeed, the future potential of genetics would be to predict the best, tailored environment for each child to reach his or her genetic potential. However, currently, genetic studies are focused on maximising predictive power (such as by the use of polygenic risk scores, which combine the effects of all measured DNA variation to predict differences in behaviour) – rather than informing a neuroscientific understanding of the brain mechanisms of learning that would enable such tailoring of environments.

References

Asbury, K., & Plomin, R. (2014). G is for Genes: The Impact of Genetics on Education and Achievement. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

Ayorech, Z., Krapohl, E., Plomin, R., & von Stumm, S. (2017). Genetic Influence on Intergenerational Educational Attainment      . Psychological Science,28(9), 1302 – 1310.

Farah, M. J., Shera, D. M., Savage, J. H., Betancourt, L., Giannetta, J. M., Brodsky, N. L., …  & Hurt, H. (2006). Childhood poverty: Specific associations with neurocognitive development. Brain Research, 1110, 166 –174.

Hackman D.A., Gallop, R., Evans, G.W. & Farah, M.J. (2015). Socioeconomic status and executive function: Developmental trajectories and mediation. Developmental Science, 18(5), 686–702.

Hackman, D.A., Farah, M.J. & Meaney, M.J. (2010). Socioeconomic status and the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 651– 659.

Meaburn, E., (in press). Genetics and education. In: M. S. C. Thomas, D. Mareschal, & I. Dumontheil (Eds.), Educational Neuroscience: Development Across the Lifespan. London, UK: Routledge.

Noble, K.G., Houston, S.M., Brito, N.H. et al. (2015). Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. Nature Neuroscience, 18, 773–778.

Okbay, A., Beauchamp, J. P., Fontana, M. A., Lee, J. J., Pers, T. H., Rietveld, C. A. et al. (2016). Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment. Nature, 533, 539–542.

Rimfeld, K., Kovas, Y., Dale, P. S., & Plomin, R. (2015). Pleiotropy across academic subjects at the end of compulsory education. Scientific Reports, 5, 11713

Smith-Woolley, E., Pingault, J-B., Selzam, S., Rimfeld, K., … Plomin, R. (2018). Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them. npjScience of Learning, 3, Article number: 3 (2018).

Thomas, M. S. C. (2017). A scientific strategy for life chances. The Psychologist, 30, 22-26. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/dnl/personalpages/Thomas_Psychologist_May17.pdf

Thomas, M. S. C., Kovas, Y., Meaburn, E., & Tolmie, A. (2015). What can the study of genetics offer to educators? Mind, Brain & Education, 9(2), 72-80. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/dnl/personalpages/Thomas_etal_2015

von Stumm, S. & Plomin, R. (2015). Socioeconomic status and the growth of intelligence from infancy through adolescence. Intelligence, 48, 30–36. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/

Walker, S. O., Petrill, S. A., & Plomin, R. A. (2005). A genetically sensitive investigation of the effects of the school environment and socioeconomic status on academic achievement in seven-year-olds. Educational Psychology, 25(1), 55-73.

By Matt Slocombe

In my talk at the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, I discussed my research looking at how children learn using analogies. Using analogies can be a very powerful teaching and learning strategy in the classroom since analogies allow children to rapidly learn new knowledge by seeing how something new is similar to something they already know about. In a biology lesson, they might hear the analogy ‘mitochondria are the power source for a cell’. By using this analogy, children can use their knowledge of the causal relationships between something they know about – perhaps a battery and a mobile phone – to quickly understand the causal relationships between mitochondria and a biological cell.

The study I discussed investigated how the strength of children’s existing knowledge affects their ability to use it in an analogy. To use the mitochondria-power source example, the results indicate that just knowing about power sources is not enough; children need a strong abstract concept of power source to successfully make the analogy. When presented with the mitochondria-power source analogy, children with weaker abstract concepts may well be thinking of irrelevant features of a concrete example (such as how a battery looks or the sound of an engine) rather than the necessary abstract power source concept.

For teachers, one way to help children with weaker abstract concepts use analogies may be to briefly discuss the existing knowledge you want to use in an analogy first. For example, discussing the functional role of batteries in phones and engines in cars prior to introducing the mitochondria-power source analogy would highlight the relevant causal features of power sources necessary for understanding the functional role of mitochondria in cells.

For more information or to stay up to date with Matt’s research, please see his website at matthewslocombe.com  or follow him on twitter @matthewslocombe

In yesterday’s CEN seminar, Dr Sue Whiting talked about the complexities of the human stress response. She explained how each individual’s stress response – the strength and duration of each person’s response, their base stress levels, what constitutes a ‘stressor’ – is highly variable, presenting challenges for teachers to pitch lessons in a way that will be effective for all learners. At the end of her talk, Sue gave some tips for teachers which might help moderate the effects of children vulnerable to high levels of stress:

Supervised breakfast clubs could potentially serve a dual purpose: in addition to providing good nutrition, they could also allow a longer period of time for delayed cortisol effects, arising from stressors outside the school environment, to dissipate.
Deep diaphragmatic breathing, which appears to balance the nervous system by stimulating the parasympathetic system, sometimes characterised as the ‘rest and digest’ system. This could be used with whole classes on a regular basis to help control all the children’s stress levels.

If teachers learn to recognise signs that children are beginning to be overwhelmed, then they could reassure them and take some of the pressure away by reducing the complexity of a task, particularly reducing the load on working memory.

For some children, rewarding effort may help. Others may respond to adopting a mindset which repositions stress as an enhancing agent. Some children find it helpful simply to say ‘I am excited’, as a way of recognising their stress and casting it as something positive.