In our last seminar, Lisa Fridkin and Jane Hurry presented their work investigating situational interest in children, asking whether improving intrinsic motivation through simple manipulations such as the arrival of a novel person in the classroom or being offered (apparent) choice in a reading book, could improve reading comprehension. Below, Lisa talks a bit more about the research:

Situational interest (SI) is described as the first stage of interest development (see Hidi & Renninger, 2006; 2011) and is potentially of high value to practitioners because it is an intrinsic motivator that can be externally manipulated. It is theorised to raise attention, effort and enjoyment in a task or activity and act as a forerunner to personal interest.

A series of three experimental studies were conducted to investigate the effects of three potential triggers of SI on reading comprehension performance and reported task enjoyment with children aged 8-9 years old. Interaction effects for gender and reading ability were also investigated. Approx. 100 children participated in each study which used a repeated measures, cross-over design, and the same central materials (two short stories, comprehension questions, enjoyment questionnaire).

Study 1 investigated choice, offering children a perceived but meaningful choice in storybook (control condition: allocated story); Study 2 investigated novelty where a story prologue was read aloud by a visitor (control condition: task administered by class teacher, without the prologue read aloud; Study 3 also investigated novelty, through non-textual features – scratch and sniff stickers interspersed in the text, (control condition: no stickers).

All three studies found significant effects on reading comprehension performance (medium to large effect sizes) and on reported task enjoyment (small effect sizes), suggesting that for this age group, these triggers are effective in changing the way the children interact with a reading comprehension task. Effects by gender were found for Study 3 only, where girls achieved higher scores on the reading comprehension task compared to boys. No effects were found by reading ability.

These results suggest that quite slight manipulations of a task can have a relatively large and immediate impact on comprehension task performance and enjoyment and suggest that SI may signal an effective way to introduce intrinsic motivation in the classroom. There is emerging evidence linking motivation to reward circuitry, indicating that our understanding of these processes could be supported with further research.

by Jessica Massonnié – https://sites.google.com/site/jessicamassonnie/

Between the 4^thand 6^thof June, The Wellcome Trust hosted the EARLI SIG22 conference on Neuroscience and Education, organised by Lia Commissar and Annie Brookman-Byrne.

Over two and a half days, various forums and opportunities were provided for teachers and researchers to communicate their work, reflect on their practice, and push the field forward. It is hard to summarise such a dynamic conference in a few words without going into over-heard generalisations, so here are some key moments. The full program as well as the list of attendees is available here.

The keynote talks reflected the interdisciplinarity and diversity of the topics addressed throughout the conference. Heidi Johansen-Berg talked about one of the neuroscience in education projects funded by the Wellcome Trust and Education Endowment Fund – studying the effect of physical activity on the brain and cognition. She also highlighted challenges the team have faced during the process of planning, piloting, and carrying out the study. Nadine Gaab, who develops models to understand the development of the reading brain, demonstrated how neuroscience can be used to inform and develop a reading skills screening tool enabling earlier intervention for children. Robert Plomin gave an interesting update of how the field of genetics has progressed, and how a genetic approach could be used to understand behaviour.

One key line of thought however was to further the collaboration between University research and educational practice. Paul Howard-Jones presented a MOOC, the Science of Learning, aiming to introduce key concepts about cognitive science to teachers. Creating such a platform raises several challenges, such as the understanding of teachers’ needs, the awareness of official guidelines and curriculum, as well as the need to find a compromise between the always evolving and controversial research findings and the delimitation of useful and consensual concepts. This session also highlighted the importance of incorporating the science of learning into initial teacher education, so that new teachers can further understand “why” things may (or may not) be effective for learning.

Slide from Paul Howard-Jones, giving examples of academic papers which have messages for classroom practice.

Echoing his talk, a symposium was focused on how to make science accessible to the public, teachers and policy makers. Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki from the Learning Scientists, Steve Cross, founder of the comedy network Bright Club, as well as Ben Bleasdale, policy advisor from Wellcome, provided some inspiring advice to remain flexible and creative in the dissemination process. Youtube videos, podcasts or stand-up comedy can all help to reach broader audiences and help researchers to reflect on their work by avoiding jargon and thinking about practical applications. Key messages here included being clear about who the audience is that you are aiming to reach, and ensure you plan opportunities that suit that audience (rather than suiting the researcher).

From left to right: Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki, Steve Cross, and Ben Bleasdale

As dissemination and educational applications should be more than a “potential” or “desirable” by-product, a second symposium presented teacher-led research. The booklet “Evidence that counts: 12 teacher-led randomized controlled trials andother styles of experimental research”, edited by the Education Endowment Trust, provides concrete examples of such initiatives. One advantage of teachers carrying out research in their own setting is that it empowers them to design specific research that’s relevant to them. It’s important to remember that there is no “1 size fits all” in education, and teachers should feel empowered to try things out, evaluate, and make changes as appropriate.

From left to right: Richard Churches, Sharon Baker, Charlotte Hindley, Daria Makarova, and Glenn Whitman

Discussions about how to move the field forward culminated on the third day of the conference, offering attendees the opportunity to create group discussions on their topic of interest. The open space sessions fostered the creation of partnerships and the elaboration of concrete action points. Some specific research topics, such as motivation, sleep, or inhibition, were addressed. Discussions about the process of connecting researchers and teachers were also brought to the table / floor. Among others: Cognitive neuroscience into initial teacher education; the creation of a database for researchers and schools who want to work with each other; and ways to measure the effects of teacher neuroscience knowledge on their practice.

In sum, the engaging mix of posters, oral presentations, and discussions means that this conference will remain very memorable, but will also hopefully lead to concrete actions for the future, closer collaboration, and greater understanding about the role of educational neuroscience in teaching and learning.

In yesterday’s CEN seminar, we heard Lorcan Kenny discuss some of the problems with commonly used lab assessments of executive functions, particularly for neuro-atypical populations. He presented his recent work assessing a novel test for executive functions in a more real world setting. You can see a short summary of his talk here.

We were delighted to welcome Rae Snape, headteacher at The Spinney Primary School in Cambridge, and Dr Sara Baker, University of Cambridge, to the CEN yesterday. They shared their experience of working together, and what they’ve learnt from that process about developing projects together as researchers and educators. Here is a short summary of their talk:

Yesterday’s CEN seminar considered creative cognition in primary school age children and particularly the double-edged sword of cognitive control. You can see a 1 minute video summary of Cathy Rogers’ talk here.

By Su Morris, PhD student

Debate at UCL IoE on 15^th May 2018

Panellists:

Becky Allen, Director of the Centre for Education Improvement Science, UCL Institute of Education (IOE)

Steven Rose,Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience, the Open University

Cat Sebastian,Reader in the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London

Michael Thomas, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, and director of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience (CEN)

Discussion chaired by:

Becky Francis, Director, UCL Institute of Education

This fascinating debate set out to explore what can be expected from educational neuroscience for policy and practice, as well as how to recognise ‘neuro snake oil’ (see here for the CEN series on neurohits and neuromyths). Each panellist introduced their viewpoint and initial thoughts:

Michael Thomas began by saying that we learn because the brain is plastic, i.e. pathways and connections in the brain are made and changed based on our experiences. The problem is that learning is a complicated process with seven systems interacting in the brain, all varying in their development and in their sensitivity to socio-emotional factors. Understanding learning is also challenging as it is only one aspect of a very complex educational system. There are two main ways that neuroscience can be translated into something useful for teachers – understanding brain health so students are ready to learn, and understanding how learning takes place in different subject areas. He concluded by saying that although it is a challenge, it is one worth pursuing.

Becky Allen highlighted the impact of having an incomplete understanding of cognition, particularly the lack of confidence in cognitive theories, which are important for generalising across different groups of children and classrooms. Currently, ideas such as pretesting, redundancy, and desirable difficulties are being promoted by some influential figures in education, however these run the risk of being the new myths – they are based on a small number of studies with short-term outcomes. The key question is whether ‘learning how we learn’ will help us know how to teach. Each class group has around 30 individual learners, meaning that teachers spend the majority of their time with the group rather than considering learning at an individual level.

Cat Sebastian outlined the positive influence of neuroscience on understanding the adolescent age group; why teens behave like they do, and how connectivity in decision-making and emotional regulation continues to mature in this age group. This can help both teachers and students understand changes in risk-taking behaviours and the changing influence of peers. Neuroscience can also help explain why different interventions may be more successful with some groups than others, and can even motivate wider research in particular areas; e.g. there had been very little research on adolescence until neuroscience showed that development continues into and beyond this age group.

Steven Rose began by making the point that it is children who learn, not brains. Brains are embedded in children who are embedded within a school and society. He questioned whether answering questions about the brain can really help with learning and teaching. It may even distract from things that we do know and need to respond to, e.g. food banks in order to meet the current needs of students. Many of the neuromyths, including VAK (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic learning, or learning styles) and brain gym were considered ‘good science’ a couple of decades ago. He closed by predicting that some of the current developments in techniques and technologies may well turn out to be neuromyths of the future.

Becky Francis summed up the opening comments as three important considerations: 1) risks of early adoption of scientific ideas and fads; 2) the importance of interaction between different disciplines, and 3) considering the wider educational context.

The Q&A session drew out further themes and practical applications, but an important first question was about different timescales. Translation into practice needs to be evidence-based, and it is important to have intervening stages between neuroscience and practice – perhaps this is a new profession in itself? An analogy was drawn with medicine, which has taken 200 years to get to a position of being research-led but where doctors still treat the person. Scientists may take years to develop understanding; policy-makers have about 18 months; teachers need something for Monday morning! A way of managing this is to balance the time and disruption of changing practice, against the risk factors. For example, spaced learning has a one-off disruption and time cost, but it is not likely to be damaging, and therefore on balance may be something teachers could introduce.

The panel then responded to questions from the floor.

When asked about mental health, they highlighted the importance of shaping policy for allocating resources, but that neuroscience has a role in identifying risk factors, understanding of resilience, and how early life stresses can have long-reaching impacts on brain development.

A question on cognitive load theory (amount of information that can be held in working memory) highlighted the fact that some ideas may be introduced more easily because they are easily implemented, and help to make sense of the wide variation across a class. However, it may also lead to inappropriate expectations about how behaviour can be changed; e.g. training working memory does not lead to gains in other areas.

Finally, a question about funding research emphasised the importance of multidisciplinary research, where funding could be allocated on the basis of a problem to be solved, rather than being discipline-focused.

The session concluded with an opportunity for attendees to identify areas they would like neuroscience to answer, such as concerns parents may have about whether they have passed on difficulties or challenges to their children e.g. in maths.

This well-attended event emphasised once again the interest people have in understanding how knowledge about the brain may inform teaching practice and improve children’s learning. One important outcome from the discussion was the importance of multidisciplinary research; not only between education, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, but also with social disciplines. The context of students’ learning is important and needs to be considered. Also, many are aware of neuromyths which has led to a certain amount of cautiousness about adopting new ideas before they are fully researched. Therefore, there is a balance to consider between time commitment and disruption vs risk. Overall, there was general agreement that it is useful and important to understand ‘why’ – why some interventions are more successful with some than others; why some children respond to certain teaching methods better than others; why there is such variation within and between each class. Through exploring answers to these questions, educational neuroscience will have something to offer to teachers and learners – but it is unlikely to be ready for Monday morning!

Click below to watch the video of the event:

Thank you to Dr Sveta Mayer for a fascinating discussion about her journey towards designing and evaluating an education intervention. The intervention involves computer-based activities which encourage children with autism to work out what animated characters are feeling and why. They can then relate this understanding to comparable social interactions in the real world.
Here is a summary of her talk.

Design and evaluation of an education intervention for children with autism targeting social and emotional engagement through observation.

by Dr. Sveta Mayer, Lecturer.  UCL Institute of Education

Sveta Mayer (PhD), lecturer at UCL Institute of Education, discussed her recent research project called See+ Autism at yesterday’s CEN research group session. The project involves the design and evaluation of a computer-based educational tool to support autistic children’s social and emotional engagement. This involves children observing animations of virtual characters engaged in social scenarios.

Sveta discussed how she met the challenge of evidence-based research, policy and practice related to educational neuroscience to inform her research by drawing upon a multidisciplinary review of literature to inform her work.  She also discussed why a participatory research approach involving practitioners-as-researchers is invaluable to address the challenge of ecological validity, i.e. supporting transfer of children’s computer-based learning into their lived experience of the social world around them.

Sveta hopes to draw on her findings to establish a blended learning education tool incorporating computer-based learning augmented by practitioner-based support. Sveta carried out foundational work for this project as part of the UnLocke project (http://unlocke.org) and also received UCL seed funding.

Blog written by Prof. Michael Thomas for the HMC (Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference) introducing educational neuroscience.

If you’re of a nervous disposition, it’s not a good time to read the news. Even the technology pages, once a place of respite, now tell us that artificial intelligence is a danger, at risk of taking over the world, or at the very least, stealing our jobs. Its powerful learning algorithms can sift through mountains of data to log our every move.

Are computers now better at learning than humans? How much do we now know about human learning itself, given our greater understanding of how the brain works? And are these insights of use to educators?

Educational neuroscience is a scientific field that seeks to address these questions, by bringing together researchers from neuroscience, computer science, psychology, and education to explore how new insights into brain mechanisms of learning can inform educational practice (see https://impact.chartered.college/article/brookman-byrne-neuroscience-psychology-education/).

Human learning is (trusting somewhat in evolution, here) well adapted to the natural environments we have found ourselves in, but it nevertheless appears somewhat idiosyncratic when applied to education. Consider these questions:

• Why am I liable to forget that the capital of Hungary is Budapest, but not forget that I’m afraid of spiders?
• Why do I find I have learned things better after a good night’s sleep?
• Why does my mind go blank when I’m stressed in an exam?
• When I became a teenager, why did I sometimes do stupid, occasionally dangerous things just to impress my friends?
• Why can I learn a new language so much more easily when I’m 5 years of age than when I’m 50?

If one were designing a machine to learn (of the sort intended to one day take over the world), one could imagine designing it without any of these properties. For example, the machine could store Capitals-of-European-Countries and Animals-I’m-Scared-Of as similar types of memories, and it need not forget either. One could build the machine without emotions like ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’, which on the face of it seem to detract from human learning performance. And, battery life permitting, one could build a machine that didn’t need to sleep to achieve efficient learning. The reason why humans show these particular idiosyncrasies in learning lies in the particular way our brains work, because of its particular biological origins.

Educational neuroscience as a field is still in its early days. It is building a foundation of basic science of neural mechanisms of learning. One place to start is to understand the reasons why some of the best methods that teachers use are indeed so effective. Perhaps there will also be insights that offer new techniques to teachers.

The field is not without risks. The complexity of learning in the brain and the state of current scientific knowledge mean that there is a risk of premature translation before the foundation is established. The risk is heightened by the legitimate desire of policymakers to use scientific evidence to inform their education policies, the enthusiasm that educators have to inform their teaching with insights into how the brain works, and the desire of commercial companies to sell new techniques to schools using the latest neuroscience findings merely as window dressing (for some fun reading, see http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/resources/neuromyth-or-neurofact/).

Nevertheless, projects are underway to evaluate new potential teaching techniques based on neuroscience insights (see http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-research-to-investigate-if-neuroscience-can-improve-teaching-and-learni/). And the science of learning is far enough progressed to begin to draw a broad picture for teachers relevant to the classroom (e.g., https://impact.chartered.college/article/howard-jones-applying-science-learning-classroom/, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neuroscience-Teachers-Applying-research-evidence/dp/1785831836).

I’ll give an example of the kind of work currently underway in my research centre, the Centre for Educational Neuroscience (http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/). The UnLocke project (http://unlocke.org/) was inspired by the observation that learning in maths and science sometimes involves inhibiting prior beliefs or direct perceptual information. For a child to learn that the Earth is round requires inhibiting or suppressing his or her previous experience that it seems to be flat (at least when you play football on it). Experts in science and maths get better at inhibiting prior knowledge rather than overwriting prior concepts with new ones.

The fact that we can visualise the brain operating with modern scanning methods provides key insights here, because it’s hard to see people inhibiting knowledge in their overt behaviour. Inhibition is the brain stopping us doing things. We know the sorts of tasks that require inhibition. Say you’re shown a sequence of cards that either have a heart shape or a circle on them, and you’re asked to press a button onlywhen the heart appears. The sequences of cards flashes up, you’re ready to press the button, but if the circle appears, you have to stop yourself from pressing the button. Or say you’re shown a series of colour names (BLUE, RED, GREEN) printed in different coloured text, and you’re told to name the colour of the text, not name the colour word. It’s so easy to name the colour word, you want to say the colour word … but you have to stop yourself, and name the text colour instead. We can see regions at the front of the brain working harder in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan when adolescents are asked to do these tasks (see below). Annie Brookman-Byrne, a PhD student at Birkbeck College, asked the same teenagers to solve counter-intuitive maths problems while in the scanner. They might be asked, is one tenth less than nine hundreds? The answer is YES, but part of you wants to respond NO, because the numbers in nine hundreds are bigger. When Annie analysed the results, she found the same inhibitory brain areas become active in solving the counter-intuitive maths problems as when stopping pressing buttons or reading colour names.

Taken from: Brookman, A., Tolmie, A., Mareschal, D., & Dumontheil, I. (2016). Science and maths reasoning and inhibitory control in adolescence: An fMRI study. Poster presented at IMBES conference; Toronto, Canada.

It’s one thing to gain insights into the brain mechanisms involved in learning maths and science, another to make suggestions about how this may translate to the classroom. Insights must be transformed by pedagogical principles into learning techniques that may be useful for teachers in the classroom, which in turn must be evaluated for their effectiveness by behavioural trials.

In this way, the UnLocke team have design a computer-based learning activity for use in science and maths classes to encourage 8 and 10-year-old children to ‘stop and think’ when they are reasoning about maths and science problems, and we are currently evaluating its effectiveness in 90 schools around the country (https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/learning-counterintuitive-concepts).

A word of warning. Don’t believe in a teaching method just because there’s a brain image next to it! (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778755/).

Educational neuroscience is part of an evidence-based approach to education, which means you should believe nothing until you see evidence that a teaching technique really works. In this case: that improving kids’ inhibitory control skills when thinking about maths and sciences problems will improve their end of year performance on science and maths tests! Keep your eyes peeled for the results of our study.

Meantime, back to killer robots…

Watch Prof Chloe Marshall’s one minute summary of her talk on Montessori education. To find out more about the existing evidence, you can read her review paper here.