Learnus UK supports the communication of research to enrich learning and inform curriculum development. In this interview, Birkbeck researcher Dr Iroise Dumontheil presents her own research about the teenage brain, and discusses current advances in Educational Neuroscience. Educational Neuroscience is still a recent field which develops gradually. Yet, our understanding of psychology and brain development suggests some interesting ways to capitalise on adolescents’ sensitivity to peer influences, and on their propensity for risk-taking, to create positive learning experiences and socio-emotional outcomes.

Iroise is currently working on the Unlocke project. More information about her research is available on her personal website.

Birkbeck researchers Dr Georgina Donati and Dr Annie Brookman-Byrne (now Deputy Editor of The Psychologist) have created this short video about the Adolescent Brain, that might be useful for teachers or parents willing to know more about the topic, or to discuss it together with teens.

Our world is noisy and distracting, filled with a multitude of sights and sounds; the television is on while we talk on the phone, there are street sounds as we navigate a map, and people talking to each other as we try to attend to a specific conversation.   To walk into a toy shop is to be overwhelmed with sights, sounds, and even smells. Clearly, children are stimulated and excited by information from multiple sensory modalities.

But what is best for their learning? Research from psychology has shown that adults learn better if they are given information in different sensory modalities at the same time. This fact has been used as the basis for many childhood educational programs in literacy and numeracy. But there has been no systematic investigation into whether children learn better from information presented in different sensory modalities. Or if, in fact, there are individual differences in this ability.  To take advantage of multimodal stimuli a learner has to be able to pay attention to one thing and not another, and to switch attention when required. These sophisticated skills – inhibitory control, selective attention and cognitive flexibility – are developed slowly throughout the course of childhood, and some children develop slower than others. Preliminary results show that, as a consequence, children can struggle to learn from multimodal information.

The ‘Multisensory’ grant, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, aimed at identifying when and where children have difficulty with multlimodal information, and to  help develop materials that are tailored to their cognitive and perceptual development.

Four main research questions have been addressed by the project, and a summary of the findings can be found in the presentation below.

Broadbent, H., Osborne, T., Mareschal, D., Kirkham, N.Z. (under review). Are two cues always better than one? The role of multiple intra-sensory cues compared to multi-sensory cues in children’s learning. Cognition.

Broadbent, H., Osborne, T., White, H., Mareschal, D., Kirkham, N.Z. (2019) Touch and look: The role of visual-haptic cues for categorical learning in children. Infant and Child Development, doi:10.1002/icd.2168.

Broadbent, H., Osborne, T., Mareschal, D., Kirkham, N.Z. (2018) Withstanding the test of time: multisensory cues improve the delayed retention of incidental learning. Developmental Science, doi: 10.1111/desc.12726 

Broadbent, H., Osborne, T., Rea, M., Peng, A., Mareschal, D., Kirkham, N. (2018) Incidental category learning and cognitive load in a multisensory environment across childhood. Developmental Psychology, 56(6), 1020-1028. doi: 10.1037/dev0000472.

Broadbent, H., White, H., Mareschal, D., Kirkham, N. (2017) Incidental learning in a multisensory environment across childhood. Developmental Science, 21(2) e12554, doi:10.1111/desc.12554.

Kirkham, N. Z.,  Rea, M., Osborne, T., White, H. & Mareschal, D. (2019) Do cues from multiple modalities support quicker learning in primary school children? Developmental Psychology, 55, 2048-2059. doi: 10.1037/dev0000778

Massonnié, J., Rogers, C. J., Mareschal, D. & Kirkham N. Z. (2019) Is classroom noise always bad for children? The contribution of age and selective attention to creative performance in noise. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 381.  doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00381.

Vana Avgerinou is a classroom assistant at Putney High School. She completed an MSc in Educational Psychology at UCL IoE and is currently studying for an MA in Specific Learning Difficulties (Dyslexia). In this video, she presents her new research paper, investigating the role of inhibitory control in learning counterintuitive fractions and decimals, among primary school children. Her results indicate a more nuanced relation between inhibitory control and counterintuitive fractions and decimals than presumed by previous research. They suggest that the role of inhibitory control when reasoning about counterintuitive fractions and decimals is not constant, and it is only drawn on at high levels of cognitive load.

You can follow Vana on Twitter @AvgerinouVana

‘Lovely cabaret style set-up and relaxed mood. Excellent quality of content.’

For its public engagement event on the origin of human language, the ‘Me, Human’ team chose an intriguing yet straightforward title: ‘Blah Blah Blah’. This leaves some room for interpretation. So, what was it all about?

On stage, Dr. Gillian Forrester, Dr. Natasha Kirkham, and Dr. Simon Green shared some fun facts about the development of human language, both at the scale of evolution (e.g. from chimpanzees to humans), and at the scale of a human life (e.g. from babies to the elderly). Let’s start with an example of our extraordinary language skills… Can you understand this?

The middle-aged lady who was wearing a long red scarf was eating a chocolate ice-cream in front of the shop that was very busy and situated in the main street, because it was Christmas and she liked the squared bubbly vibes of the end-of-the-year celebrations.

Weird and long sentence? Maybe, but it is still plain English. The capacity to generate an infinite number of sentences, expressing various events in the past, present and future, is one of the unique characteristics of human language. Although other species, such as chimpanzees, use vocalisations to share information about specific things, such as food or predators, their language does not seem to have generative properties. Most importantly, their language is not necessarily voluntary: they cannot always inhibit their screams even if there is no one around. Imagine if you were shouting ‘chocolate!’ every time you saw a chocolate bar, even when you are alone in the house…

But since we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, we still have a lot in common. Tool use, for example. Chimps can do crazy things such as cracking nuts with stones. Over the course of human history, multiple tools have been used to transform our natural environment (e.g. lighting up a fire), process food and create necessities (e.g. clothes). Fine motor skills, such as the ones used to manipulate tools, actually recruit the same areas of the brain as language. Have you ever found yourself sticking your tongue out as you were trying to put a thread into a needle?  Well, that’s it. As humans evolved to use tools more and more frequently, it became useful to not only use gestures but also oral language to communicate. This way, hands could be kept free for manual work. The development of language skills occurred in parallel with changes in the configuration of the mouth and of the larynx, as well as with the adoption of a bipedal posture.

‘Excellent knowledgeable presenters. Fun vibe, not too heavy.’

One of the disadvantages of being bidpedals is that human hips are relatively narrow – and are brain-body ratio is proportionately larger than other primates. Although the brain is folded like a little nut within the cranium, a baby’s head is still relatively big relative to the size of the cervix. Mothers, you know that… When babies are born, they are still quite early in their development. They are dependent on other people’s help. Babies need eye contact to communicate. Being progressively helped by adults’ scaffolding, they use and understand pointing to share their attention to external objects. They learn to be aware of their facial expressions and to progressively shape their vocalisations in a specific language. Until 6 months of age, babies are not yet ‘tuned it’ to any specific language. Then, they get accustomed to the specific sounds and boundaries of their native language. Learning where words start and end in a given language actually requires quite a lot of expertise. A great deal of statistical learning occurs here – with experience, children compare different sentences and learn that some words and sounds can, or cannot follow each other. ‘This is a pretty baby’. You could understand: ‘this is a prettyba by’, but this is not very frequent, is it? The importance of segmentation is quite obvious when we hear a foreign language. When hearing people speaking another language, does it seem to you to be like an endless sentence, or just a blurry ‘BlahBlahBlah’? Well, that is it.

Furthermore, as if it was not complex enough, language is multisensory. Most of the time, we establish visual contact with the people we talk to. We see their lips and can follow the movements of their mouth to get more cues if we have difficulties to hear what they say. But what happen when the sound we hear and the lips movements are not congruent? We start to hear funny sounds. Try it by yourself. This shows that we integrate both visual and auditory information when we process language.

The ‘Me, Human’ event was the opportunity to be bewitched by the fantastic skills primates and humans have developed throughout history. From the new-born babies who needs vocalisations to express their needs, to the mature adults who are playing with words with a Scrabble, there is a lot to learn, and to share.

So if you have not been to this event but are interested in attending the next one about lust(!), you can book you ticket here. You can follow the team @Me__Human  #MHPsyched.

Written by: Jessica Massonnié

Dr Roberto Filippi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at University College London, Institute of Education. He is the Director of the Multilanguage & Cognition Lab at UCL, Institute of Education, part of the Centre for Language, Literacy and Numeracy: Research & Practice. His research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, focuses on second language acquisition and its effects on attention, memory, executive functions and metacognition across the lifespan.

As Roberto explains it, the issue of whether bilingualism/multilingualism is beneficial or detrimental to cognitive development has been an area of research interest for decades and, understandably, a concern for parents and educators of bilingual children.

Despite the initial belief that learning a second language early in life can delay cognitive development, there is now a general consensus that multilanguage experience is inherently advantageous for communication in modern multicultural societies.

However, one of the most exciting yet controversial current scientific debate is based on some reported evidence that the lifelong use of two languages may have positive effects on attentional processing and executive functions (e.g., Bialystok Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2010) and even protect the brain from age-associated cognitive decline (e.g., Bak, Nissan, Allerhand & Deary, 2014; Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010). Remarkably, the positive effects of being raised in a bilingual environment are observed even before children begin to talk, suggesting that comprehension processes alone may be sufficient to trigger such advantages (Kovács & Mehler, 2009).

However, recent evidence has challenged the bilingual advantage hypothesis. In particular, the work of Paap in the USA, and Duñabeitia in Spain, has questioned the validity of previous findings and generated a heated debate among the scientific community.

In this video, Roberto summarises the current debates and shares some of his own findings.

You can follow Roberto on Twitter @psyrob

As part of our series of blog posts written with/for educators and school leaders, we had the pleasure to interview Nathan Morland. Nathan is the Director of the Staffordshire Research School. As such, he infuses his work with educational research, while being aware of and attentive to his staff’s needs and aspirations. In this interview, he shares his experience and key resources with us.

What does educational neuroscience mean to you?

For me, it means expanding foundation in our level of understanding about cognitive development and how young people acquire and enhance knowledge and skills, and more importantly…remember them! It also means a number of opportunities and challenges for teachers and school leaders too.

I cast my mind back to when I started out in teaching 15 years ago and I don’t recall the word ‘neuroscience’ featuring in CPD or department meetings. Enhancing or evolving practice seemed to be much more organic, based upon feedback from a middle or senior leader, with little evidence or research from neuroscience used to back it up.

On occasions the term ‘research-informed’ can be carelessly misused or superficially applied to strategies without the true depth of research findings being fully explored or understood. There are many green shoots though with growing traction and a sense of enthusiasm in research-informed practice in the profession. Pleasingly, the drivers of this movement are from both bottom up (Research Schools Network, twitter, new authors, researchED events) and top down perspectives (School Inspection Framework overview of research).

The Challenges are very apparent too. The NFER’s recent report on teachers’ engagement with research indicated that only 16% of the teachers surveyed said decisions about their CPD were based on academic research and, ‘teachers were most likely to draw on their own expertise, or that of their colleagues, when making decisions about teaching and learning or whole-school change’. (NFER, 2019)

So there is still a great deal of work to do. How do we distil complex and specialist research into a digestible format, that enables our time-strapped teachers to apply them effectively in their bespoke contexts?  The EEF’s Guidance Reports do a great job of the distillation process, alongside the Research School Network in mobilising the research and providing the practical tools for their application.

What does that mean for you to be involved in a Research School?

The most common question we were initially asked upon becoming Research School was ‘What does that involve?’ One of our first steps was to paint a clear picture of what Research Schools do, and do not do. This can be seen in our concise infographic and blog here.  This question is then increasingly being followed up by, ‘so how can we work together?’

It is a privilege and provides an additional sense of purpose. It means there is an additional (and non-judgemental) avenue of support for schools to enhance outcomes for their students, particularly in areas of deprivation, that are free from Multi Academy Trust, Local Authority, Teaching School or geographical alliances and loyalties.

How do you keep up to date with new neuroscience research?

 It is a challenge with the amount of emerging research.

• As the Director of the Staffordshire Research School, being part of the Research Schools Network enables us to learn directly from the colleagues at the EEF and the IEE. It also means we are directly engaged in working with schools to apply research in a range of settings, which will only be effective if we have a broad foundation of knowledge ourselves.
• I receive a range of newsletters and journals including ResearchED, The Chartered College Impact Journal, ASCD (in the USA) and Best Evidence in Brief from the IEE.
• In the John Taylor Multi-Academy Trust and via the National Forest Teaching School we invite the researchers to share expertise at our training and conferences. The value of face-to-face interaction and training with researchers can be underestimated, as some schools can be cautious about releasing staff for training to save cover costs the risk can be a lack of depth of understanding and possible weaker implementation models.
• Twitter is great. I rate it as one of the best sources of information and collaboration I have and would encourage any non-users to take the plunge.
• I also have a set of go to organisations that I check in with regularly for updates. You can find these in a free handout and hyperlinked infographic here.

From a practical point of view, I take a fairly methodical approach using two IT tools called Pocket and Padlet. Whilst these are not evidence based, they are simply practical tools that help me filter and organise the sources of research and reports that I come across and leave a breadcrumb trail back to where I found them. I put sources of research, reports or blogs in the Pocket app (a simple tap and drop feature), either to read or come back to at a later date. When ready, I then upload the link to a Padlet page. Padlet is virtual pinboard that enables people to bring together and store a range of e-resources in one place. I can then categorise it for colleagues, delegates or for personal use into aspects of research, evidence, pedagogy or school focus area and save time in having to search the internet all over again. Its power is in its simplicity and you can see an example here.

 How do you get teachers and students involved?

• Each Monday we hold short briefing that is supported by a takeaway resource (maximum of one page of A4 or a postcard) that covers a ‘nugget’ of research-informed practice and links with one of the T&L principles in our ‘inside-out’ CPD model (see question below). It keeps the flow of research regular and digestible for staff.
• Staff receive a ‘DNA’ paper each half term. A deeper insight into an element of research, again linking to one of our key T&L principles (e.g. Long Term Memory) or school targets (e.g. Pupil Premium students). This introduces the research concisely and provides a number of signposts to journals, white papers, podcasts or guidance reports.
• Practical teaching methods and templates are created and provided to staff each half term to model how to turn the research into a tangible teaching methods or resources and how to articulate them to students.
• In addition to the training courses, free twilights and more sustained work with schools across the West Midlands, colleagues also receive the Staffordshire Research School’s newsletter which is free to sign up to here.

In all honesty, the students get involved through their lessons. We keep it simple, they already have a lot on their plates. We do not necessarily teach them explicitly about neuroscience research but we do model practices for learning and help them to experience what successful learning feels like through well-designed lessons and tasks.

Can you give some examples of how neuroscience understanding has helped you as a school leader?

It has allowed me… no us, as a leadership team… to:

• Provide precise informed feedback where practices have been less effective e.g. a retrieval practice starter done with books open or resources is not retrieval practice, in turn allowing staff to adjust and improve.
• Upskill staff in their pedagogical knowledge through the design of a CPD model that is built upon a solid foundation of emerging research.
• Consider the extent to which staff are engaging with research and provide a range of timely tools that allow staff to do so at different depths (briefings, 15 minute reads, full reports, extended CPD)
• Provide focussed training opportunities at John Taylor High School, the National Forest Teaching School and the Staffordshire Research School.

It has helped significantly, however the amount I learn from our most innovative and well-read staff means that they help me equally in return.

Can you give some examples of how a scientific approach to education has helped your school?

At John Taylor High School we operate an ‘inside-out’ CPD model whereby, informed by previous student outcomes and middle leader guidance, staff select an area of T&L to improve from a range of T&L principles (the Rosenshine Principles feature heavily). It is a ‘bottom up’ model that is very personalised and takes inspiration from Huntington Research School’s ‘Disciplined Inquiry’ and Durrington Research School’s six principles of evidence-informed teaching. This year alone, 48 staff have chosen Long-Term Memory & Retrieval Practice foci and 30 more have chosen modelling, scaffolding or the teaching of disciplinary literacy. Each member of staff has a Coach to engage in reflective practice, alongside the use of Iris. A key component of our ‘inside-out’ model is that staff are expected to engage with reading research (supported by the Padlet example here) and implement the strategies in their classrooms, with key milestones calendared over the course of the academic year. Autonomy remains with the teacher and they are encouraged to trial and test methods – but the curriculum design, craft of lessons and decision making have to a rationale in that they are informed by research.

Are there areas where you think research should focus next (ie what are the important gaps in our understanding)?

The evidence behind dual coding and cognitive load theory is sound. However, some teachers’ interpretation of how they combine this research to design/present their teaching resources can be varied and cause the two to be in conflict with each other. The desire to include dual coding can unintentionally cause some teachers to create cognitive overload for students. Finding the balance and optimal combination of each is less understood. I’d like to see more exploration of how the design and presentation of teaching resources that integrate different ratios of both cognitive load theory and dual coding. Having the same teacher, teaching the same content, using resources designed with these in mind would be interesting.

That said, the variables of the students themselves and over 240,000 bespoke school contexts across the country will always remain, rendering any research a ‘best bet’, not a ‘sure bet’ of what could work with the correct implementation.

Thank you very much for your time!

You can follow the work of Nathan’s research school @JTStaffsRSch

Dr. Rebecca Gordon is Academic Head of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education. Her work focuses on executive function and how it might explain individual variation in academic attainment and cognitive profiles of people with developmental disorders such as dyslexia.

Rebecca has recently published a new paper in which she investigates the relationships between processing time, working memory and academic performance. You can find a summary in the video below.

We had the pleasure to receive @DrRebeccaGordon yesterday. For those who missed the talk, she summarises her new paper in this video.
Paper -> https://t.co/kz4heKNZHA pic.twitter.com/cnOpmX0CQc

— CEN (@UoL_CEN) November 29, 2019

You can follow Rebecca Gordon on Twitter @DrRebeccaGordon.

Sue Whiting earned a doctorate in Astrophysics from Oxford University and later became a chartered accountant and chartered tax adviser. While on a career break, looking after her three young children, she entered the World Memory Championships for mental stimulation, becoming a Grand Master of Memory and achieving the title of the Women’s World Memory Champion on five consecutive occasions. She became fascinated about how the brain works and in particular on how stress affects learning. In 2017 she completed an MSc (Distinction) in Educational Neuroscience at Birkbeck College, London University. She is continuing her research on transferable benefits from whole classroom interventions involving memory techniques that manipulate vivid mental images in working memory. Sue is a school governor.

In her CEN seminar, she discussed Hölzel et al.’s (2011) paper: “Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density”.

 You can find a summary of what she discussed in the video below:

In last week's seminar, Dr. Sue Whiting discussed Hölzel et al.'s (2011) paper: "Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density".

She shares her thoughts in this short video. pic.twitter.com/mJQYgiPTpw

— CEN (@UoL_CEN) November 27, 2019

UCL researchers Michael Hobbiss and Jessica Massonnié contribute to the current debates in educational neuroscience^* with their new collaborative paper: “Unified: Bridging the Researcher-Practitioner Divide in Mind, Brain and Education”.

The paper aims to offer practical solutions to “bridge the gap” between research and practice, or, if you have enough of bridge metaphors, to better connect educators with researchers so that they can construct research projects together.

The paper was born from the 2018 EARLI SIG 22 “Education and Neuroscience” conference. In an innovative Open Space Session, educators and researchers could share their concerns, questions, and advances within the field of educational neuroscience. Attendees from various backgrounds were interested to reflect on the creation of a common “Database for Schools and Researchers”. A working group emerged, composed of educators (Charlotte Hindley, Sharon Baker, Alastair Gittner), researchers (Michael Hobbiss, Jessica Massonnié, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Megan Sumeracki, Alice Tovazzi, Ignatius Gous and Thomas Wassenaar), and of a school psychologist (Mónica Lemos). The group worked together during, and after the conference in order to: 1) review the current tools available for researchers and educators to communicate; 2) identify what was needed for collaborations to be further facilitated and flourish; 3) propose a web platform aiming to answer these needs. These three processes are fully described in the paper, and summarised below.

1) The current tools designed to facilitate communication in educational neuroscience were classified into three categories, according to their primary goal: to transmit academic findings, to receive information about educators’ expertise, to promote collaboration between educators and researchers. Most of the resources were classified as transmitting information from researchers to practitioners, which corresponds to a somewhat unidirectional model. The group noticed the scarcity of resources aiming to foster collaborations. Although Research Schools in the US and in the UK form notable exceptions, there are difficulties to find a unified resource to promote large-scale, and bi-directional collaborations.

2) In order to better understand how such collaborations could be facilitated, the working group then carried out a SWOT analysis of transdisciplinary partnerships in educational neuroscience. This type of analysis, borrowed from business project planning, allows to classify the current Strengths and Weaknesses, as well as more long-term Opportunities and Threats of transdisciplinary partnerships. The Strengths and Opportunities are numerous. Research in Psychology and Neuroscience feed each other, while also informing, supporting and/or questioning current classroom practices. Conversely, teachers’ input helps to build more impactful and “real-world” projects, increasing the potential benefits for learners. Ultimately, lab-school partnerships can increase scientific support for good practice in classroom interventions, while empowering teachers as “learning scientists”. However, current Weaknesses and anticipated Threats seem to prevent the field from reaching its full potential. The obstacles are both conceptual (there is a risk of implementing “evidence-informed” interventions that would not be fully contributed by teachers), and practical (such as increased ethical and logistical considerations, and increased time commitment).

To offer practical solutions to these problems, and not only to discuss them conceptually, the working group developed a web platform aiming to directly connect educators and researchers, so that they can develop projects together. On their profile, users can define their interests. The information they provide includes space and time practicalities (e.g. where and how often they would like to be involved in research), the population they would like to work with (e.g. elementary school children, high school students, adults), and the topic they would like to investigate (e.g. memory, stress). The working group worked on some practical solutions to address conceptual issues related to lab-school partnerships, such as difficulties to share a similar vocabulary. Research topics are organised into tags. Each tag consists in a short word (e.g. memory) with a hyperlink showing the profiles of all the users interested in the given topic. This way, users from an educational and a research background can specify their interest from a common bank of words.

As commented by Michael Hobbiss (former secondary school teacher, now researcher at UCL): “The platform seemed necessary because currently both researchers and educators are desperate to meet professionals from the other side, but they don’t quite know how to make the first step to find others with similar interests. UNIFIED aims to bridge that gap. As well as hopefully allowing for research partnerships to be created more easily, this system will let teachers and schools become involved in research at a much earlier stage, allowing them to shape it more successfully to meet their needs”.

The platform is now in a piloting phase. We are happy to receive feedback from new users, and will have a larger scale launch in January!

If you do not manage to access the paper, please email:

j.massonnie@ucl.ac.uk 

^* For the purpose of this blog, we will consider the phrase “educational neuroscience” to be equivalent to “Mind, Brain and Education”, which is most often used in the American literature (and in the published research paper).