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.

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.