Tag Archives: Evidence

CEN publishes new overview of progress and prospects in educational neuroscience

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Educational Neuroscience (EN) is still a fledging field, with plenty of critics. Director of CEN, Professor Michael Thomas takes on the naysayers and addresses their concerns in his latest commentary for Current Directions in Psychological Science.  Below, he gives us a little taster of his reply…


“The challenge in translating neural insights in learning mechanism into practical implications, can only be done via a well supported dialogue – classroom ready neuroscience not likely to ever exist. Critics generally say that either this can’t be done (perhaps individuals resistant to interdisciplinary research) or they muddy the waters by complaining of neuromyths or the dubious merits of commercial ‘brain training’ packages.

There are two main pathways via which neuroscience can interact with education: either directly or indirectly via psychology. The direct route appeals to brain health, viewing the brain has a biological organ with certain metabolic needs (nutrition, energy), response to stress hormones, or impacted by environmental pollution (air, noise). Here goal is to try to ensure that children’s brains are in the best condition for learning when they enter classroom, no need for psychology.

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The indirect route argues that the psychology of learning will make greater progress when it takes account of the mechanisms the brain has to support learning. Some of these advances concern specific domains, such as reading or maths, and the current focus is on identifying core skills required for academic disciplines, which may be trainable and/or limiting factors on performance (e.g., maths, recognition of number symbols, representations of numerosity and manipulation of quantities, spatial abilities, and knowledge of principles and procedures, which are dealt with by separate interacting brain areas).


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Brain evidence supports the idea that maths is many things in the brain. Other areas of focus in the indirect route are executive functions, social cognition, and the effect of emotions on learning; the specific developmental changes that take place in adolescence; the causes of developmental deficits and what these mean for Special Educational Needs; age-related changes in learning mechanisms and implications for adult learning; the genetic and environmental factors producing individual differences in learning ability and educational outcome; and the quest for activities that produces general improvements in intelligence (such as, meditation, or learning a musical instrument) – a quest that is ongoing but as yet produced few great innovations.


The future of EN involves addressing some challenges (how to improve quality of dialogue of teachers, psychologists, educators); answering some questions (identity crisis: should Educational Neuroscience be a basic science of phenomena relevant to education or intrinsically translational?); and addressing a conundrum (how to advise policymakers before a solid, convergent, evidence base exists). EN needs to encourage evidence-informed policymaking. It needs to avoid overselling the evidence but underselling the importance of science. But its main goal is to furnish teachers with new tools and insights into learning, and the factors that affect it, that will be useful in the classroom. The reality may be that large education gains are available, but only by combining many small improvements, each of which must be separately identified and validated.”

Read Professor Michael Thomas’ commentary in response to Dougherty and Robey: Enough Bridge Metaphors—Interdisciplinary Research Offers the Best Hope for Progress

The Frontier of Translation: Teacher and Researcher

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amy-fancourt_croppedDr Amy Fancourt head of Psychology at Queen Anne’s school and head of research at BrainCanDo, merges the world of research and teaching in an interesting example of how translation can work.

Could you tell us how research has influenced your teaching?
One of the areas of research that has had the greatest impact upon me as a teacher is the research around motivation and the impact of emotional contagion on learners motivations within the classroom. Queen Anne’s School are working with Prof. Kou Murayama and Prof. Patricia Riddell at Reading University on a long-term research project exploring the impact of emotional contagion on motivation and learning. Through this work I have considered my own behaviour and attitudes and the consequence this has on the emotional reaction of the students sitting in my classroom. If I expect my students to be motivated and engaged in the lesson then I have to communicate to them that what I have to teach them is something to be interested in! This has led me to really think about how I present myself and how I’m feeling when working with my students.

Another area of research that has had a great impact on my teaching is the work on memory and retrieval practice. For durable learning to happen it is vital to provide regular opportunities for students to retrieve the information that they have learned. Therefore, in my department we have adopted regular quizzing and consistent assessments to give students the opportunity to regularly retrieve the content we have covered during lessons.

What is the focus of your research?
BrainCanDo is working with university partners on three main research projects at the moment. The first of these is a longitudinal project with Professor Daniel Mullensiefen, Goldsmiths University, exploring the impact of extra-curricular activities on adolescent outcomes over time. The second project we are involved with is in collaboration with Professor Patricia Riddell and Professor Kou Murayama, University of Reading, exploring the role of social networks in emotional contagion. We are also working with Dr Fran Knight, Bristol University, exploring the impact of a later school start time on attention and impulse control in older adolescent girls.

What led you to this area of research?
Each of these projects came about because we had questions about various aspects of education. There has been a lot of discussion concerning the value and importance of co-curricular programs for pupil development and we wanted a way to systematically measure the impact of such pursuits on school children over time. Working with teachers, every teacher knows that motivating your pupils to want to learn is one of the biggest challenges and therefore we chose to work with motivation experts at Reading University to help us to understand what factors are most influential when it comes to pupil motivation. There is now a wealth of research to show that adolescent sleep cycles shift and there may be detrimental consequences on educational outcomes if this shift leads to a chronic state of sleep deprivation in our adolescent pupils. We opted to work with Dr Fran Knight to implement a later school start trial and measure the impact of this within the particular context of Queen Anne’s School.

Could you summarise your findings?
Each of these projects has yielded interesting and thought provoking findings so far and there is more data to be analysed. Our work with Goldsmiths has shown that active participation in music is related to changes in attitudes and mindset associated with conscientiousness and higher academic outcomes. The work with Reading University has demonstrated that there are clear social networks in operation in different year groups and they exert different influences on the attitudes and behaviours of those in the groups. What is perhaps the most interesting finding to emerge from this research so far is that those pupils who scored highly on measures of GRIT or resilience were those pupils who acted as the central hubs within the social networks. Further longitudinal analysis is needed to understand whether the similarities we see within networks is a product of homophily or contagion. Finally, our work with Dr Fran Knight demonstrated that after shifting the school start time for just one week pupils showed improved impulse inhibition which supports previous research showing the positive benefits of enabling older adolescents to have more sleep by shifting back the start of the school day.

How do you tell if something is working in the classroom?
My students are participative and asking good questions. If something is working and durable learning is happening then I would also expect this to be reflected in exam performance.

Which research-informed idea do you feel has had a big positive impact in your classroom
The research-informed idea that has had a big impact in my department has been retrieval practice. As a department we have integrated regular assessment and quizzing into our schemes of work and this has become central to our teaching. Anecdotally we have found that our students feel more confident with the material going into their examinations and are now using this technique much more in their own revision. We also actively encourage students to regularly recall the information they have learned on blank whiteboards during lessons and this too has become a standard revision practice for many of them now.

What do you think other teachers might find useful?
For teachers in the classroom there are some very direct applications that they might consider:

  • Encourage pupils to participate in co-curricular pursuits wherever possible
  • Be aware of the impact of emotional contagion in your classroom. This contagion can spread through pupils but also transfer from teacher to pupil: how you behave in front of your class matters.  Understand the power of emotional contagion!
  • Teenagers are not lazy but most of them are chronically sleep deprived. Teachers may need to think more creatively about how best to engage the learners in front of them in those early lessons in the day

How do you keep up-to-date with the latest education research? 
I subscribe to updates from The Learning Scientists and the CTTL and they send around regular newsletters and articles that focus on one aspect of education research. I am also a member of the Chartered College of Teaching and so receive their quarterly ‘impact’ journal which is filled with digestible articles relating to the application of research in teaching and learning. As a school we are keen to remain research-informed and so I am also involved in learning study groups in the school and write my own summaries of educationally-relevant research to disseminate to other staff and pupils in the school. I also try to come along to the CEN seminars when my timetable allows

Do you have any suggestions of how communication and collaboration can be improved between teachers and education researchers?
It is important to create opportunities for teachers to meet with researchers and talk to them about their research and to allow teachers the time needed to really consider how this they could use this research to inform their own teaching practice. Creating space and opportunities for teachers to come together to share ideas and experiences of education research is also important.

Finally, if you could share one piece of advice about research-informed practice with other teachers and trainee teachers, what would it be?
Try it for yourself. Taking the time to read around research-informed practice is not wasted time as it has the potential to transform the way you teach and how your students learn.

Adult literacy across the globe: challenges and opportunities

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At this week’s CEN seminar, PhD student Cathy Rogers presented findings from a recent report into adult literacy she co-authored with Dr Victoria Knowland and Prof Michael Thomas. The full report will be published here as soon as it is available.

Identifying different types of cognitive ability in scientific thinking…

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PhD student Selma Coecke shares with us a summary of her recent CEN seminar titled: An undefined form of fluid intelligence: how its trajectory differs from conceptual development in the context of science 

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Intelligence tests measure two forms of cognitive process: verbal – representing declarative knowledge – and nonverbal -aiming to eliminate the influence of socio-cultural knowledge.
However, my research demonstrates that there are multiple cognitive processes in the context of scientific thinking.  Spatial-temporal cognition for example, is one of these and it consistently explains unique variance in science beyond verbal-nonverbal distinction.
 
Furthermore, although it is often considered part of the verbal domain, scientific vocabulary is another unique measure.  It lies at the interface between the verbal and nonverbal as it draws heavily on imagery. During this talk I explained how my data demonstrates that neither verbal nor nonverbal abilities are unitary. Spatial-temporal cognition in particular, may be a good candidate independent component of fluid intelligence.  This form of thinking appears to satisfy three major requirements: it has a (1) unique predictive/ecological validity, (2) capacity to support abstract thinking, (3) unique qualitative and quantitative characteristics. 

The role of teacher training in promoting evidence-based education

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david-westonAt CEN, we are keen to hear views from all the stake-holders of an evidence-based approach to education. In this blog, we are delighted to welcome David Weston, founder and CEO of the Teacher Development Trust. David is also Chair of the Department for Education’s Teacher Development Expert Group. He is an author, school governor, a former secondary maths and physics teacher and a Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching.

To what extent is evidence-based practice at the heart of teacher training?

I think we’ve seen people quoting evidence as a basis for recommendations for many years now. What seems different, more recently, is that people are beginning to quote systematic reviews of the evidence and that teachers themselves are more frequently exploring the evidence base and blogging about it. The recent spate of books that bring together findings from educational, psychological and cognitive sciences seems quite promising, though perhaps some recent very plausible ideas could do with being tested in the field a little more before being rolled out.

What enables teachers to take a more evidence-based approach?

For any profession, the most important thing is to have mechanisms where neutral and trusted organisations can summarise evidence in an accessible way, supporting others to embed these ideas in tools, resources and guidance. There is a benefit in helping to develop some teachers to play a role in this, though not all teachers will want or indeed need to be reading original research. I would love to see greater availability and use of curriculum schemes with really practical and evidence-based teacher handbooks and resources.

What are the barriers?

I would say that time and access to expertise are the biggest barriers. It’s difficult to find time for teachers to even complete their classroom-based jobs, let alone finding time to collaborate within their institutions and more widely across the profession or to read and digest research. It’s also difficult for teachers and leaders to identify local, knowledgeable and affordable experts who can come to their school and help them access and translate the best evidence into practice.

Can you give some specific examples from your experience of how a move to more evidence-based teaching has changed practice for the better?

We’ve worked with hundreds of schools and school leaders to help them understand the evidence about how teachers most effectively develop. By then supporting them to re-evaluate their schools’ practices and apply the evidence to make changes, we’ve seen some wonderful examples of change where teachers are more excited and engaged in their jobs, where children are achieving more and where the school is developing a reputation as a beacon of great practice for others to copy.

Is there an example in which neuroscience findings have contributed?

Perhaps not neuroscience per se, but certainly cognitive and psychological sciences are having a great impact – one need only look at the most recent draft of the new proposed Ofsted framework to see how findings about memory are becoming mainstream, at last.

Are there examples from other countries which we should be considering?

Other countries tend to have more centralised systems of knowledge review, summarisation and dissemination. This is often paired with more time for teachers to read and collaborate. The trade-off for these choices is that there is much less drive and innovation from the ground-level and class sizes are often bigger. Singapore and Shanghai are interesting examples to look at here.

I am a teacher who wants to know more about the research evidence; where should I start?

I would suggest starting with Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds book: Effective Teaching.

What areas of teaching and learning are in most need of better evidence?           We need to know much more about how school leaders bring about effective and sustained change within and across schools. In particular, I think it would be helpful to have more evidence on the role of performance management, curriculum materials and the role of facilitators, coaches and trainers.

David has co-authored a book with Bridget Clay ‘Unleashing great teaching‘ for those who would like to know more. David also blogs for TES and you can follow him on twitter @informed_edu and the Teacher Development Trust @TeacherDevTrust