ScienceMaster

Creative Thinking - Part 5: Bringing Out the "Genius" in Us

2012-02-03T16:20:00.000-08:00

Daydreaming boosts creativity, when mental pictures reach the conscious mind and stimulate our limitless imagination. As a result, drawing can do for the brain during the day, what dreaming does for the brain at night.

During those times, we can open the mind to a floodgate of novel relationships and make interesting non-traditional connections.

Many of history's most prominent scientists were quite accomplished in the arts. MacArthur “genius” Robert Root-Bernstein, in his book Sparks of Genius, details a fascinating revelation. As he researched the lives of more than 150 renowned scientists from Pasteur to Einstein, he discovered a single common characteristic.

Nearly all of the greatest scientists, inventors and innovators, were also musicians, artists, sculptors, poets, or involved in the arts in one manner or another!

From Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrations of the human body to Gregor Mendel’s sketches of how the laws of heredity operated, their models, maps, and drawings were not only indispensable record-keeping tools, but they also blurred line separating the sciences from art. When examined closely, one must ask, "Were da Vinci’s paintings art or anatomy?" "Architecture and blueprints or art?"

Robert Marzano’s research would likely discourage any binary answer, because advanced visual organizers have been shown to increase student achievement by more than 20 percentile points regardless of the discipline to which one attributes the success.

In the final analysis, there is an enlightening answer to the question, "Why do the world’s leading universities boast of a College of Arts and Sciences?” The two go hand-in-hand to enhance classroom learning and human advancement.

In the proverbial equation of "a picture" and its 1,000-word equivalent, one must ask the intriguing question, “If a picture is indeed worth 1,000 words, then what is an experience worth, where a young learner can produce his/her own models, maps, and illustrations?” Perhaps, the answer is a "full dissertation!"

Collectively, visualized experiences with the arts help make the discipline of science comprehensible to all learners, opening the door to our developing young geniuses.

Creative Thinking - Part 4: The Creative Hippocampus

2012-02-03T16:12:00.000-08:00

The hippocampus is a sub-cortical brain structure that plays a critical role in laying down new memories. However, brain-imaging studies have shown heightened activations taking place in the hippocampus, not only when we are recalling memories, but also when we are daydreaming, which may constitute creating new memories.

For approximately 30% of our waking hours, we tend to drift off and our minds turn on a "default network" in the brain that is composed of a connected web of brain regions that we use when our mind shifts gears from "concentrate" to "wonder."

The unbridled excursions we take while daydreaming have multiple purposes. It is during these imaginative moments that we:

(1) tend to stretch the current boundaries of reality to new dimensions

(2) mentally rehearse future events

(3) tackle real or imagined challenges, a.k.a. “problem-solving.”

The evolutionary value of a complex creative human memory system rests not so much in our ability to store information, but in our capacities to use that information to predict future events and to imaginatively "create our own future."

Without a flexible and imaginative memory system, predictions, and planning our actions/reactions would linger just beyond our cognitive reach.

Creative Thinking - Part 3: Visualization and Human Cognition

2012-02-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

Visualizing is integral to reading for comprehension. To understand what they read, students must rely heavily on the “picture-making” mechanisms in the visual systems of the brain in order to extract meaning from the words on a printed page.

The association cortices in the brain are charged with the task of making sense of incoming information. Learners can only make sense of abstract information based on preexisting internal mental models.

Harvard University faculty member, Marc Hauser (2009) points to four human characteristics that distinguish our cognitive abilities from those of our primate cousins, who are only 1% genetically different from us.

1. Generative Computation: our ability to generate countless products from limited content (26 letters used to construct a limitless number of words, conversations, and concepts)

2. Promiscuous Combination of Ideas: taking disparate ideas from a wide range of domains of knowledge and creating new products, laws, and relationships

3. Mental Symbols: producing a complex communication system

4. Abstract Thought: the ability to reasonably imagine things beyond our immediate.

When we deploy non-linguistic models, maps, diagrams, simulations, and representations to assist with creative r abstract thinking, we enhance classroom success by taking advantage of some of the brain's longest-standing competencies.

We can safely assume that the law of gravity was well understood before Newton's formal theory was ever proposed or written down.

Creative Thinking - Part 2: The Value of Mental Imaging

2012-02-03T15:52:00.000-08:00

Advancements in the human condition were largely the result of our predisposition to create images for the purpose of future plans. When did our ancestors suddenly realize that creating pictorial representations had the power to evoke mental images of past experiences (defying time) and objects no longer present (defying space)?

Doing so, both now and eons ago, requires
(1) creating imaginative circumstances
(2) manipulating internal mental pictures
(3) engaging in abstract thinking.

Storing information in the brain for the sake of data accumulation would have forced early man to skip ahead to the final chapters of our species’ existence.

When we venture backwards on the timeline of human history to the "pre-literacy era," evidence abounds of our innate inclination to convey ideas, with images, illustrations, maps, and models (however crude they may have been).

Equally astonishing, the same human basic brain structures, processing mechanisms, and neuronal systems that sketched bison, horses, and deer on the Lascaux walls are used for learning in our classrooms today. Students decipher modern messages from paper, laptop screens, interpret computer-generated images on interactive whiteboards using precisely the same neurophysiological hardware.

Those ancestors who were best able to recreate significant events through visualizations, self-generated images and drawings passed those winning genes on to future generations includng the present generations. So, how should we incorporate this winning strategy into student learning?

While it may be no great feat to create pictures in the mind’s eye, translating an array of squiggly and straight lines on paper into mental images representing concrete objects is remarkable. But generating the exact same mental image, merely by a hand-drawn visual cue, in millions of other minds asynchronously (18,000 years later) is nothing short of astounding!

Creative Thinking - Part 1: Bridging the Gap Between the Experience and the Mind

2012-02-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

Every organism interacts with the world in some way, but only human beings are capable of bridging the gap between "the experience and the mind" with the aid of representational thinking tools (illustrations, speech, concrete models, etc.). All abstract thoughts are grounded in concrete scenarios, and we can represent these abstractions on paper, whiteboards, or computer screens.

The human brain is capable of recreating at will an original event, modifying a past experience, or completely inventing a fabricated occurrence inside the mind. Vision and visual imagery have been essential to the evolving human brain far longer than the printed word has.

The celebrated petroglyphs found around the world, including the cave paintings discovered in Lascaux, France, represent some of the first cognitive leaps in the evolution of abstract thinking, but the $64,000 archaeological questions are:

1. What were these particular drawings used for?
2. Were these etchings prescient efforts to convey historical records to
future generations or just flights of artistic and imaginative fancy?
3. Were the illustrations intended for storytelling, or possibly teaching models
that were used to instruct prospective Paleolithic hunters?

The power of these two-dimensional illustrations resided not in the images themselves, but in what the human brain did and continues to do with those illustrations.

An Abbreviated Dictionary of Memory Types

2012-01-19T17:28:00.000-08:00

If someone tells you, "I think I'm losing my memory!" You might want to ask them, "Which memory?” We have several different types of memory and more than one pathway back to them.

Autobiographical memories are the specific memories about our personal lives that make us the unique individuals who we are.

Conditional memories represent our knowledge of when and where to deploy a skill to solve a problem or to produce additional knowledge (a “cognitive toolbox”).

Conceptual memory is knowing what something is, how it works, etc., which can be knowledge gained by learning (apprenticeship or mentorship) as well as through the analytical process sense-making.

Echoic memories are auditory memories (of songs, voices and sounds).

Explicit (declarative) memories are working (short-term) memories, which can be further divided into semantic (isolated words, facts, symbols, etc.) memories and episodic memories, which are memories of locations, events, circumstances and space. These particular memory "episodes" in life would include memorable moments (e.g., a 21st birthday celebration in Las Vegas) where the details of the memory are embedded in the broader experience.

Declarative memories are memories that can be articulated easily (dates, historical facts, telephone numbers, etc.) including what we can recall in our mind as imagery. They are easily established and the specific information easily forgotten, which leads to frustrations in the classroom.

Flashbulb memories are recollections of where you were when a historically or personally significant event took place (the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle, the assassination of JFK, the tearing down of the Berlin wall, the attack on the World Trade Center or your wedding day.)

Iconic memories are visual memories (pictures). Since human vision preceded writing, visualization is a powerful learning aid.

Implicit (non-declarative) memories include what we can “do” (typewriting, bicycle riding, tennis, etc.), which comprises procedural memories -- physical skills that require repetitive practice to learn them, such as the ability to dance, drive a car, tie one’s shoelaces or necktie. It constitutes the body's sensory-motor library of skills we have. Motor memory is the body of learned motoric habits (playing basketball) where "the mind is in the muscle." They are all described as non-declarative because we cannot say or "declare" how they are accomplished. How would you verbally explain riding a bicycle or dancing?

Permanent memory (formerly referred to a long-term) memory can be sub-divided into explicit and implicit memories.

Reflective memories or instinctive memories (e.g., knee-jerk response) are stored in the parietal lobes and the cerebellum. These memories can neither be trained for nor learned, since they occur naturally.

Sensory memory is the brief representation of a stimulus while it is being processed in one of the numerous sensory systems, most commonly with an origin in tastes, smells, touch/textures, sights or sounds.

Source memory is knowing when and where a particular fact or aspect of knowledge was originally learned and how you came about knowing it. (When and where did you learn the significance of the date “1776?”)

Working (short-term) memory has a limited capacity of 7 items and lasts approximately 30 seconds or less in duration.

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Prophylactic Value of a Good Education

2012-01-13T11:57:00.000-08:00

Educating our children to their maximum potential is a goal whose paramount importance can never be overstated.

Learning in today's world has become a lifelong requirement, no longer restricted to the childhood years. A strong early foundation for learning undergirds all academic advancement, as well as future success in complex learning. Not only does developing a fully-functioning brain increase the probability of success in school and in career aspirations, it also has a documented prophylactic value.

Numerous research studies have shown that attaining a college degree has the subsidiary benefit of protecting the brain from debilitating brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia in the later years of life. UCLA neuroscientist Dr. Robert Jacobs found that there were 40% more neural connections inside the autopsied brains of college-educated subjects than in their age-mates whose formal education terminated after receiving a high school diploma (or without ever completing high school at all).

Other neuroscientists have concluded that developing excessive numbers of intra-hemispheric and inter-hemispheric brain connections protects us from diminished cognitive capacities by making it easier for an injured or impaired brain to re-wire itself. Even in cases of brain trauma (due to auto accidents, missile wounds, etc.), better educated individuals, who have led challenging and stimulating lifestyles, typically enjoy a moderate neural advantage during recovery.

In January 2010, Arizona Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head during a deadly rampage in northwest Tucson, which left 6 other individuals dead and 12 more wounded. The neurosurgeons at Tucson’s University Medical Center, who operated on Congresswoman Giffords, were hopeful that she would survive, but offered a more dismal picture regarding any full recovery of her physical or mental capacities.

However, on the first anniversary of the shooting, January 8, 2012, the congresswoman led a crowd of 3,500 people in the Pledge of Allegiance at 10:10 a.m., which was the same time of the morning that she and the 18 others were shot. Since the damage was to the left side of her brain, Congresswoman Giffords resorted to holding her left hand (instead of her right hand, as is traditionally done) over her heart during the ceremonies. Because the brain is contralateral, a left hemispheric wound to the congresswoman’s brain resulted in the debilitation seen in the right side of her body.

Every parent should make a special effort to assure that learning and cognitive development are given the highest priority in the home and school. Children should also understand the instant power of learning and the long-term protection of a well-educated human brain.

The 7 Steps to Language Learning

2011-04-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

Just as an infant must first drink milk, before eating solids, prior to the brain processing complex language abstractions, the networks for basic language foundations must be first laid down. All higher circuits build upon whatever the lower brain circuits have developed earlier, but those circuits must be pre-existing or there will be little on which to build. Infants and toddlers learn language in this recommended sequence of developmental events

1. Hear songs, children’s lullabies, and music, which teach infants the distinct phonemic elements – the building blocks – of the local language. To build a foundation in the language, an infant must hear the sounds that are most useful to their language. Songs for children, characteristically stress the high frequency/high utility sounds and grammatical patterns found in the local/regional language. (The sense of hearing goes “on-line” at 7 months in utero, when fetues begin eavesdropping on the language of the locality into which they will soon be born.)

2. Sing those songs themselves and learn how to produce the sounds via mimicry -- watching others. With their budding "mirror neurons" active, infants fixate on the lips and mouth of a singer (or speaker) and mentally “rehearse” how he/she would produce those same sounds well before the infant is capable of physically replicating the songs with voice. They begin to “babble,” or practice the language.

3. Listen to, repeat, and then recite children’s poetry where they begin to notice the similarities in sounds (words/word sounds that rhyme) by practicing the primary phonetic elements.

4. Listen to short stories emphasizing sentence structure, grammar, syntax, and the predictable nature of language (subject-verb agreement, the word order for adjectives and the nouns they describe, etc.) to learn language structure.

5. Repeat/re-tell stories in their own words making personal sense of words, content, and context. Oral language develops our “phonological loop,” where a child begins to listen to his own voice while speaking, and later, while reading. Words are used to think, not just to read, as we have learned. A limited vocabulary is a crucial factor underlying failure in school (particularly for disadvantaged students.) The “context processor” in the brain constructs an on-line, coherent interpretation of what is being heard. If he is fortunate enough to have a lengthy personal background where others have read to him, his phonological loop will more readily integrate those past language experiences into future language production. For that child, learning to read is a skill that develops considerably faster than for others. Children don’t learn exclusive from listening to stories. They benefit more from the give-and-take in discourse about the stories. That is where they learn how to use language.

6. Draw pictures of story events, objects, and characters, where children learn to create mental pictures in their “mind’s eye.” Nouns are typically more readily activated in the mind than words describing intangible concepts. Drawing will bring the abstract closer to mind. Drawing does for the brain during the day what dreaming does for the brain at night. Pictorial representations and symbols (art) have been part of the human experience for far longer than the printed word.

7. Begin reading and writing with symbolic language. Now, the child is ready. For boys, this may take 6-7 years.

Nobel Prizes and Synapses

2011-03-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

What do Nobel prizes and synapses have in common?

In order for us to move, feel and think, neurons in our brain relay messages to one another. When neurons "chat" among themselves, their means of communication relies on both electricity and chemistry.

Once incoming stimuli of a specific type reach a threshold point, a 270 mph electrical impulse “fires” and is transmitted down the axon of a neuron, the elongated portion of the nerve cell.

The chemical component of this informational exchange occurs by means of over 70 neurotransmitters (brain chemicals) and neuromodulators. Once the electrical impulse reaches the end of the axon, a tiny pocket of chemicals bursts releasing neurotransmitters (the “chemical couriers”), which travel across the synapse, a microscopic gap separating two theoretically “connected” neurons. The “apse” in synapse means binding, and “syn” meaning together.

Synapses in reality are contiguous rather than continuous contact points between the message-sending or pre-synaptic neuron and the post-synaptic or message-receiving neuron.

As neurotransmitters cross the synaptic gap they lock into receptor sites on the post-synaptic neuron (the next neuron on a neural pathway) and convey their chemical message only if their molecular properties fit the precise configuration of the receptor sites on the post-synaptic neuron. Over one quadrillion (1,000 trillion) synaptic connections can be established inside the human brain. Each neuron can make 15,000 to 200,000 connections with other brain cells.

Creating new synapses and delivering the appropriate types and quantities of neurotransmitters in these chemical communications, is the foundation of the event we generically call learning.

Although synaptic transmission is just one aspect of how the brain functions, three Nobel prizes have been awarded (to Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and Eric Kandel) for their research on this single portion of our complex brain transactions.

Linking Education and Economic Progress

2011-03-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

While education is enjoying a global resurgence, it continues to be the target of conservative politicians in the United States. The World Bank places a premium on education, and more specifically, the education of young girls in developing Third World countries.

Today, loans to poor nations are granted with this single factor used as an important criterion in the loan-granting process. Educated women typically give birth to fewer children (an average of two rather than eight). The two children hailing from the smaller households will typically receive an education, because of two primary factors:

(1) formal education (instead of daily survival) in smaller families rises to the level of a high "family priority," when monthly income leaves funds available for discretionary spending, and
(2) more family resources can be invested in schooling rather than in basic needs of food, clothing, etc., for a large number of family members, who are not making even modest contributions to the family income. The ultimate fiscal drain on limited family resources often spells foreclosure on financially out-of-reach educational opportunities.

National instability and political oppression, coincidentally, often accompany high levels of poverty and low levels of education. Countries with a substantive middle-class population typically enjoy greater political stability, which allows them to make good on their World Bank loans.

The current attack on public employees in general, and public education in particular can be disastrously short-sighted recognizing the high correlation that we all acknowledge between a quality "education for all" and global economic standing.

There are no "internal winners" in the senseless assaults on public education. In both the long-term and the short-term, our entire nation will suffer when we don't support public education and maximize learning for every child who walks into our doors.

The First Ph.D. in Psychology

2011-03-24T18:36:00.001-07:00

The first Ph.D. ever awarded with the term “Psychology” in its title was granted at Harvard University in 1878.

Barely fourteen years later, the American Psychological Association was the center of this fledgling discipline, which was quite “undisciplined” since it was not driven by any precise methodological or scientific focus. One hundred years later, Pres. George Bush declared the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain.”

During the intervening decades, our understanding of the human brain mushroomed as our knowledge base catapulted from mere conjecture, guesswork, and speculation to a domain grounded in biology, medicine, and science.

Parenting and education were two areas of the modern human experience that seemed almost impervious to the incredible findings in neuroscience until recently. Remarkably, no two arenas are better positioned to put this research into daily practice. To our collective good fortune, today we see educators, parents and neuroscientists seeking to understand the aspects of behavior, learning and memory.

The Science of Learning

2011-02-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

We receive questions frequently about student learning. One question that has been asked several times and in numerous different ways is, "Can you recommend a short list of priorities for learning?" Those items should always include the following:

• Hands-on, minds-on, heart’s-in learning experiences (experiential learning)

• Relevance to the student’s personal life whenever possible (it is relevance that makes "rigor" achievable)

• Active learning, which is how the brain learns best and remembers most effectively (engagement)

• Student-centered learning, which increases the probability of student achievement

• Technology, manipulatives, and simulations followed by student writings on those experiences

• Metacognitive learning where students analyze, reflect on, and discuss their thinking processes

• Differentiated learning, since students learn at different rates and by different means

• Diverse learning styles using multiple intelligences to address the different ways of knowing and different ways of learning

• Build from the concrete experience to the pictorial/representational to the abstract/symbolic

• Provide a physically and emotionally safe learning environment• Build upon past learning and prior knowledge (schemas)

• Learners must apply their learning in order to establish long-lasting neural connections

• Capitalize on a child’s interests and strengths for motivation (requiring “Emotional Intelligence”), while helping a child learn how to “manage” his/her “emerging talents” (a.k.a. "weaknesses") competencies, and skills.

The Achievement Gap and Testing: Understanding standardized Testing Below Its Deceptive Surface (Part III)

2011-02-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

When two youngsters are administered the same timed-test and each receives a score of 6/10 correct, we assume that they are working at the same achievement level. Student “A” may have responded with six correct answers after completing only six of the 10 items. Student "B" may respond knowledgeably and correctly to only three test items. He guesses at the remaining seven questions of which four are coded “incorrect” and only three are correct. If Student “A” had more time, he may have received a perfect score of 10 out of 10, because he actually knew the concept well, while Student B's score might continue to fluctuate solely based on the mathematical probabilities associated with guessing at four random multiple-choice items.

Don't our children also deserve to be measured by more than high-stakes test? When making decisions that have a long-term impact on our lives (college attendance, a home purchase, or which car should we buy), numerous factors are frequently entertained and multiple measures are used before we arrive at a final conclusion.

The American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education advocate using multiple resources for student assessment. There should be multiple types of information used from assessments, multiple formats of assessment, more reliance on formal and informal testing occasions where proficiency can be demonstrated, and multiple opportunities for students to “show what they know" in a risk-free, stress-free environment where the actual demonstration of knowledge is more important than what the clock says.

The Achievement Gap and Testing: Understanding standardized Testing Below Its Deceptive Surface (Part II)

2011-02-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

Pay scales for classroom practitioners are characteristically governed by (1) the degrees earned, and (2) the length and quality of job experiences, which is comparable to most other professional occupations.

However, a suburban high school, where 80 highly qualified and experienced teachers are paid an average of $1,000 more per teacher, per month than their cross-town colleagues in the inner-city, is investing in excess of $1 million dollars more per year in salaries and benefits for those educators. Yes, that substantial difference in investment certainly should yield an expected return annually.

While formal assessment and standardized testing can serve a worthwhile mission, all tests are not necessarily accurate indicators of knowledge attainment, skills acquisition, scholarly competence, or "school quality." Yet, we have faith in the erroneous equation...

more pressure on teachers = more learning = better test scores.

When the multifaceted processes of teaching and learning can be reduced to “a bubble” on a multiple-choice test item, we have significantly degraded cognitive development and the intrinsic importance of intellectual exploration. Innovative thinking has never been stimulated by standardized testing.

Even more important, many of the most beneficial human traits, dispositions, and attributes (ingenuity, persistence, compassion, creativity, dependability, controlling impulsivity, adaptability, flexibility in thinking, integrity, originality, self-sufficiency, etc.) that have sponsored the greatest advances in human development, go untested and completely ignored by standardized tests.

These characteristics typically determine the success in life and the quality of one's life, although they are most unwelcome on standardized tests.

Albert Einstein once said, "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted” or calibrated on a standardized test. As adults, our "character" is informally assessed daily, where it counts -- our professions and our entire lives.

What do you think?

The Achievement Gap and Testing: Understanding standardized Testing Below Its Deceptive Surface (Part III) follows tomorrow.

The Achievement Gap and Testing: Understanding standardized Testing Below Its Deceptive Surface (Part I)

2011-02-04T14:37:00.000-08:00

There are several predictable and pernicious economic factors that impact learning and development, which, collectively, skew standardized test results.

Parents are often dismayed by assessment scores reflecting their child's lack of success in academic progress. Yet we must remember that children grow and mature at dramatically different rates physically, emotionally, socially and academically.

Variability in cognitive development gets reflected in significant differences that we see within members of the same family. So, why is there any surprise that broad achievement bands would be found between disparate economic and ethnic groups? Strikingly different patterns of growth and development are the expected norm, not the exception.

An expectation that children should learn and master the same new content or skill at precisely the same rate is comparable to hoping that all children will grow in height and weight at exactly the same rate regardless of diet, health, genetics, or environmental circumstances.

“Performance uniformity” might be a reasonable expectation in product development and manufacturing models, but not in child development and the incredible complexities associated with human learning.

We often lament the plight of the disadvantaged student, but we seldom acknowledge what being "advantaged" really means. Comparable to a 100-meter track race, where one sprinter clearly benefits by receiving a 40-yard head start, the outcome should surprise no one.

The greatest surprise is that we continue to operate under an uncomfortable pretense that a conversation about the benefits of gross economic advantages are forbidden in our candid public discussions. Talking about the economic advantages that pave the way to academic advantages is impolite.

What we find most amazing is that the “achievement gap” isn’t considerably wider given what we know today about brain development, child development, and the correlations between social status, family income and test scores.

In Dennis Littky’s book, The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone's Business, he offers the following quote from Ken Wesson, a founding member of the Association of Black Psychologists: "Let's be honest. If poor inner-city children consistently outscored children from wealthy suburban homes on standardized tests, is anyone naïve enough to believe that we would still insist on using these tests as indicators of success?"

What do you think?

The Achievement Gap and Testing: Understanding standardized Testing Below Its Deceptive Surface (Part II) follows tomorrow.

Fordlandia: What Happens When We Work Against Nature? (Part II)

2011-01-31T23:03:00.000-08:00

Most of the heveas brasilis trees succumbed quickly to a local fungus that would have normally been curtailed by the natural vegetation, which was now absent. Healthy trees also need space between one anther, which they also lacked in Fordlandia. The subsequent flooding, caused by depleting the area of vegetation, washed away the few surviving trees.

Almost no trees were harvested, since they could not reach maturity. In the unforgiving nature-driven rainforest, manufacturing schedules and carefully planned production levels were the priorities, in spite of what nature had in store. The results were physically and financially disastrous.

Ultimately, Ford's $20 million agricultural fiasco was terminated and the now-useless land was sold back to the government of Brazil for $250,000. This relegated Fordlandia to the classic "case studies" list of prime examples of the high price paid for ignoring, rather than working with, nature.

On countless occasions in our human history, we have demonstrated how defying Mother Nature can be a sin that is accompanied by severe punishment. Contemporary classrooms are not exempt. Force-fitting more than 4 million years of brain evolution into a 150 year-old American classroom model has also been punished by conspicuous academic shortcomings. This is evidenced by an abundance of "brain antagonistic" educational practices that yield consistently poor learning results.

As the 20th-century British leader Winston Churchill once said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing one’s enthusiasm.” Many of the instructional failings about which we’ve been most enthusiastic for several generations should be substituted with “brain-considerate” approaches that reflect how our brains have developed over the past 4 million years of evolutionary enhancements.

Fordlandia: What Happens When We Work Against Nature? (Part I)

2011-01-31T11:22:00.000-08:00

In 1927, Henry Ford negotiated the purchase of 2.5 million acres of lush tropical land in the Brazilian jungles. That land became the home site of a massive Ford Motor Company rubber plantation aptly named “Fordlandia.”

Thousands of fertile acres of rich rainforest land were slashed and razed as the first step in creating Fordlandia. Since time was of the essence, rubber tree saplings were immediately planted. But, they were unwisely crammed together in neat (but extremely narrow) little rows in the now-barren stretches of rich soil. To maximize production yields, the customary planting distances between trees were abandoned so space usage could be maximized.

In their native surroundings, rubber (heveas brasilis) trees thrive best in wide patches of roomy green terrain. However, the production techniques utilized in carefully-controlled, crowded, man-made, factory-like conditions were forced upon Mother Nature with a less than comparable success to put it mildly.

The assembly-line models, which were effective for automobile production, were met with an extremely hostile reaction by the biological principles governing rainforest environments.These models were no match when put to a test of wills with Mother Nature.

What do you think happened to Fordlandia? Do you see any parallels with our schools?

Fordlandia: What Happens When We Work Against Nature? Part II will appear tomorrow.

Attention Span Revisited

2011-01-29T13:10:00.000-08:00

There have been numerous formulas proposed for calibrating the attention span of children, adolescents and adults.

Some contemporary researchers advocate gauging children’s attention spans by multiplying chronological age by 3 to 5 minutes for each year of age. Others have set the human attention span at a maximum of 20 - 22 minutes of learning time for upper adolescence and adulthood.

Still other child development researchers have concluded that a child’s attention span is typically equivalent in minutes to the chronological age of that young boy or girl.

However, from working with educators, parents, and children over the past four decades, the following instructional attention spans seem most accurate and useful.

Attention Span: Under Optimal Conditions*
• Between ages 2 and 3 children have an attention span ranging from 3-4 minutes
• When children begin Kindergarten (approximately age 5), attention spans rise to a maximum of 5 to 10 consecutive minutes
• Between ages 6 and 8, the maximum time for focused attention, during instructional time, can stretch to 15-20 minutes when children are engaged in a single learning task.
• From age 9 to 12, the best estimates of an adolescent’s “focused attention” do not exceed 22 to 35 minutes, when they are engaged in learning.

*Caveat: Attention spans for children at play and when socially engaged will often exceed the maximum figures established for formal instruction.

Given today’s technological toys and tools for entertainment and productivity, sizeable increases in attention spans correlate with interactive involvement and far exceed traditional figures for customary instructional time spans. Extensions in attention spans are correlated with children are
• challenged (eustress)
• emotionally engaged (“fun”)
• receiving on-going feedback and support

Anyone with just a modest degree of experience working with children has noticed that when children are fully “immersed in enjoyment,” they frequently lose track of time and our chart-based expectations are repeatedly obliterated.

Technology and the Internet have prompted a new phenomenon referred to as “CPA” -continuous partial attention - where children and adults devote less-concentrated attention to two or more tasks that are attempted simultaneously without one’s full attention committed any single one of those endeavors.

As an expected outcome, the quality of execution in each task frequently suffers significant performance erosion. For example, a five-year-old can talk and he can also tie his shoe, but talking while tying his shoes concurrently can even lead to “performance paralysis.” One of the two tasks must reach the perform threshold of “automaticity” (where one task can be performed without actively and consciously thinking about each step in the process of execution) before we can successfully engage in the second task with some degree of expected roficiency.

Consequently, many American states have recently passed laws intended to curtail the hazardous practice of driving while using a cellular phone (and texting). Even the most reliable statistics on attention spans are meaningless when the brain is distracted. The charts presented here are most applicable under optimal conditions in the learning environment. They become distorted once distractions become a factor whether in a car or in a classroom.

The Human Brain

2011-01-10T11:21:00.000-08:00

The human brain the most complicated multifaceted organ in the human body and composed of over 150 different types of cells -- the largest number of diverse cell types found in any single organ. It is the most adaptable and the most complex single object in the known universe. If a more complicated entity exists on Earth, no one has broken its confidence.

At the drop of a hat, most bodily systems and organs quickly divulge their fundamental duties during the most cursory examination. Watching the repetitive expanding and contracting of a muscle reveals its primary purpose. The pipe-like arteries and vessels that enter and exit a blood-pumping heart, leave little wonder as to the heart’s basic function. Our lungs inflate and deflate in perfect synchrony with each breath, as we respectively inhale and exhale –no mystery there either. Each of these organs honors a “transparent anatomy policy,” where vital organs avoid any disguise of their labors.

However, inside the human cranium lies a brain whose inner operations have remained tightly classified secrets housed in the best-protection (hair, skin, muscles, and solid skull bones) our bodies are capable of constructing.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), a leading thinker of his day, was an advocate of a cardiocentric view of human learning. The heart at that time was believed to be central to all cognitive responsibilities including higher intelligence. Taking a backseat to the heart in this theory, the brain was relegated to the more humble undertaking of cooling the warm blood circulated by the heart – demoting the brain to a menial “radiator” status. Contemporary phraseology continues to reflect vestiges of that early perspective.

Nearly 2400 years later, we still refer to successfully memorized content as information we know “by heart.” However, it is the hippocampus that serves as the primary brain structure that permits us to learn from experience based on stored memories.

Vocabulary Development is Key to Learning

2011-01-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

The human sense of hearing begins to function two months prior to birth in a full-term baby. During those last eight weeks, fetuses are learning the essential sounds of the local language into which they will soon be born. All human competencies become fine-tuned following birth depending on the richness of the environmental in which they find themselves. Following delivery, infants begin a quest to perfect their language abilities based on the supportive verbal interactions that newborns and infants with their primary caregivers.

While reading to children is considered indispensable in language development, it is the supplementary verbal give-and-take (the questions, comments, related prior experiences, etc.) taking place during the informal sidebar conversations that are as important as the reading itself. Hart and Risley’s research on language development found that from ages zero to 3, children are dependent upon their immediate families for developmental experiences, including language.

When tests of language fluency are administered during second and third grade, those exams are better reflections of (1) the richness in the vocabulary a child hears in the first three years of his/her life, and (2) the quality and quantity of language interactions that have taken place with and around him/her, than anything the schools may have achieved during formal language instruction. According to science writer Ron Kotulak, the average number of words spoken daily in professional, middle-class and low-income homes are as follows:

• A professional household = 1500-2500 words
a total of 3.5 million words heard by age 3
• A middle-class household = 1000-1500 words
a total of 2.0 million words heard by age 3
• A welfare-recipient’s household = 500-800 words
a total of 1 million words heard by age 3

What is the most reliable predictor of vocabulary development and reading comprehension for children in 3rd grade? His/her verbal abilities at age three. What is the most accurate means of forecasting 11th grade reading scores? Merely using a teenager’s 3rd grade reading and language test scores.

The academic challenges facing children with limited vocabularies are compounded over time. These children are correspondingly limited in their ability to think, due to a limited database from which to select words needed for speaking, thinking, listening, understanding, reading, and writing with accuracy. Although it is often said that we use words primarily for interpersonal communications, according to Stahl’s research, “Words are used to think. The more words we know, the finer our understanding of the world.”

A robust “vocabulary tool chest,” or conversely, an extraordinarily barren one, will determine the language to which that child has access for interpreting a concept, discussing an experience, or writing about an event. His/her recollection of any of these experiences is largely dependent on the development of linguistic precision.

Making Connections: Connect and Reflect

2011-01-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

Author Joseph Epstein stated that, "We are what we read." Neuroscience would contend instead that “We are what we experience,” neural circuits are constantly reorganized and rerouted based on the quantity and timing of our experiential transactions.

We have 100 billion neurons (the "gray matter" consisting of neural cell bodies). Their primary purpose is to link brain cells together into the circuits that represents who we are and what we know. Inside the brain, there are over 1,000,000 miles of nerve fibers (the “white matter” connections), linking together over one quadrillion neurons with one another. Through this process, we access a remarkable ability to make sense of an extraordinarily complex ever-changing world. In his book The Mind's Best Work, Harvard educator David Perkins says, "Good thinking is a matter of making connections, and knowing what kinds of connections to make."

As parents and educators, the sequence of “cognitive rehearsals” below shows that making connections is not just a useful description of the dynamic learning process, but is indeed quite a natural progression for constructing how we think. The distinguished educator John Dewey once said, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn by reflecting on it.” In the following series of learning events each sets the stage for the next level of thinking.

• Doing is a rehearsal for thinking
• Thinking becomes a rehearsal for dialogue and discourse
• Discourse becomes a rehearsal for writing
• Playing with objects and ideas, exploring and experimenting, thinking, talking, and writing become rehearsals (developing the necessary background knowledge) for reading comprehension.
• Writing and reading clarify one’s thoughts, generate coherent thinking, cultivate precision for expressing one’s thoughts, and prepares a youngster for abstract thinking
• Discourse, reading, and writing become rehearsals for eventual formal assessment

If we are to build meaningful conceptual links for students (and connect “meaning” with "print") we must make the most of opportunities to foster "good thinking" with logical connections. When students later hear the target word in context, or if they encounter it while reading, they are capable of relating that word back to the family of concepts and words to which it belongs based on the student’s experiences with the meanings, interpretations, and connections they have already learned.

The repeated use strengthens the verbal, visual, auditory, tactile and abstract interconnections that are physically represented by specific intricate brain circuitry.

Creating SMART Schools and Becoming STREAM Schools

2010-11-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

Beginning in the mid-20th Century, the United States became the world's dominant leader in science, technology, and innovations. However, in our contemporary "Flat World," the United States needs to produce 400,000 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates by 2015, not to regain that premier position, but merely to resume a competitive status.

America's high levels of funding for public education once led to high levels of competence in science. Scientific knowledge paved the way for highly successful research and development. Research led to the discoveries that preceded new innovations and thousands of patents, which created products, markets and jobs. The results were seen in rapidly growing American industries, an unprecedented standard of living, international competitiveness, and relative stability in economic growth, prosperity, and national security.

Last year, Pres. Obama launched a nationwide campaign to "Educate and Innovate" over the next 10 years, because the United States has fallen behind not just the major industrialized nations, but also below countries like Latvia, Chinese Taipei, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, and the Netherlands. When American eighth-graders are compared to their international counterparts from these countries on academic performance in math and science, they continue to fall short. It has been predicted that even blue-collar and factory occupations will require post-secondary education by the year 2012.

Replenishing our pool of American scientists has become a concerted national effort in words, deed and investments. However, more than 40% of the doctoral students in U.S. colleges and universities in 2009 were foreign nationals, and in some fields of science that figure far exceeded the fifty percent mark.

The goals of No Child Left Behind diverted our collective attention to reading and math although our broader educational needs go well beyond just these two areas in the academic curriculum. Consider the following points:

• The SMART disciplines of Science, Mathematics, Arts, Reading and Language Arts and Technology (merged through Thematic interdisciplinary learning) should be morphed into "S.T.R.E.A.M." - Science, Technology, Reading and Language Arts, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics, a modest expansion of the STEM model.

• While STEM makes sense, we apply the skills of reading, writing, language, and art in the pursuit of STEM knowledge. Math, to be completely honest, is a "skill" to be deployed rather than a "content area" to be learned for its own sake.

• New learning/new information is "integrated" in the SMART school scenario, not "acquired" via the more traditional notion of the "acquisition of knowledge."

• Technology includes the highly sophisticated computer-based "tools" for the capturing, manipulating, simulating, and storing of information (previously accomplished via the pencil-paper and printed materials routes). It should also encompass other forms of science equipment used to measure, monitor, and model principles in science.

• Knowledge comes by way of how the brain processes subject matter content with (1) the tools to which we have access, and (2) the skills that one has previously attained to understand science.

• The individual components of SMART and STEM, in reality, should be regarded as essential in the service of developing an understanding of the "Sciences."

• The architects of Bush-era N.C.L.B. program approached the educational challenges of the 21st Century with clearly laudable intentions by identifying the foundational skills for learning. They were "just looking for knowledge in the all the wrong places" to say nothing of the wrong direction. The foundational skills for learning (the tools) were unfortunately mistaken for the foundational goals of knowledge – i.e., content understanding and application, and ultimately, creativity and innovation – for which the prerequisite “tools” were confused with the mission of education. Applied knowledge that advances our species is knowledge put to its best use.

In addition to graduating more students in the fields of science, we need to commit ourselves to generously supporting K-12 education, because it is in our own best long-term self-interests. Nations around the globe witness daily the perils of no commitment to Science, Technology, Reading and Language Arts, Engineering, and Mathematics education. Those countries are competitively and economically marginal at best. Getting into that STREAM-less hole is certainly easier than exiting it. The world's poorest nations annually serve as "Exhibit A," which should prompt us to support K-university level science education at any cost.

Half a Brain Is Good Enough

2010-05-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

In the category 'truth is stranger than fiction', a young girl has been thriving on just one half of her brain. To stop life-threatening seizures doctors removed one half of the three year old's brain, and years later she is thriving.

I was amazed by the story so I did a Google search and found more than a few similar stories. Here's another.

Will Mozart Music Boost Your Child's Intelligence?

2010-05-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of the journal Intelligence, University of Vienna researchers arrived at completely different conclusions about “the Mozart Effect” than UC Irvine professor Frances H. Rauscher and her colleagues reported in a 1993 issue of Nature magazine.

Gross misinterpretations have lead to exaggerated claims -- the “Mozart Effect.” So, we were encouraged to play Mozart in math and science classrooms.

Is it fact or fiction?

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

Is the 19th Century Agrarian School Model What Our 21st Century Kids Need?

2010-05-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Today's schools face challenges light-years away from hiring “hands” and producing crops. Shouldn't we be more focused on answering the question, "How do we develop the best minds during a child's elementary and secondary school years?" That is the new window that parents, educators, and policymakers should be looking through to create a 21st-Century school model.

What can we do?

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

What Do All Learners Need?

2010-05-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

All parents and teachers need to remember "S.A.I.L." when working with learners of any age.

The environmental preconditions that should be experienced by students prior to initiating formal instruction include:

S afety
A cceptance
I nclusion, interactions and involvement.
After satisfying these vitally important prerequisite neurophysiological and hierarchical conditions (Abraham Maslow's research), only then are students neurobiologically ready for...

L earning

An environment dominated by fear is one in which learning and development are guaranteed to be among the first casualties.

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

Brain Care: Preserving the Most Diverse of All Organs and Your Greatest Asset

2010-05-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

There are over 150 different kinds of cells in the human brain rendering it the organ with the greatest amount of cellular diversity in the entire human body.

The neurons that we are born with are the very same neurons that we must rely on for the balance of our lives --80-85 years! So, the important care of each brain cell and system, "brain care," is virtually impossible to overstate.

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

Should We Wait Until High School to Teach Foreign Language?

2010-05-21T15:54:00.000-07:00

At birth, each brain comes fully equipped with the capacity to learn any of the 6,000 languages spoken on earth today. However, the “window” for language learning begins to close with the onset of puberty. After that point in his/her development, learning a second language will become more difficult and will typically accompanied by a mild to strong accent.

Why do we still insist on teaching foreign language in high school?

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

Neuroplasticity: Nature vs. Nurture

2010-05-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

Author Joseph Epstein stated that "We are what we read." Neuroscientists would delare instead that “We are what we experience.” This second statement should drive all activities planned by parents and educators.

Experience drives brain development and directs all of our neural traffic.

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

The Achievement Gap? Where Should Our Nation's Focus Be -- On the Causes or the Effects?

2010-05-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

Many of the problems directly associated with poverty make significant contributions to the so-called "Achievement Gap," which does exist. However, achievement differences will not be reduced or eliminated by the simplistic solutions being currently advocated -- more high-stakes testing, punishing each teacher for her students’ test performances, firing the principal, linking teachers' salaries to test results, etc. -- rather than attempting to address the well known economic factors that have been widely acknowledged for their impact on learning and development, as well as for skewing standardized test results. (See ScienceMaster for full article)

What we find most amazing is that the “achievement gap” isn’t much wider!

Want to Improve Test Scores? Prepare Students for the Fall, Before the Summer Begins!

2010-05-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

The last week of any school year is a notoriously unproductive one. Here is a radical, but rational, idea for our public and private schools.

Students should spend the last week of each school year with a teacher from the next grade level. During that time, a propsective teacher would introduce the curriculum, books, key concepts and skills the students will need to learn next year in order to be successful. Student learning would get an early “head start” on the content and learning standards critical for the next year.

…for more see www.ScienceMaster.com

"Technology Makes Kids Smarter." True or False?

2010-05-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Many parents are proud to say, "My Billy spends 3 hours a day on his computer" There is an assumption that, if whatever Billy is engaged in has something at all to do with ‘technology,’ then it must be beneficial to his learning and development.”

But, is technology helping or hurting contemporary youngsters?

An article appeared in the Bend (OR) Bulletin newspaper: "A high-tech route to smarter kids?; It's pricey and of unknown value in boosting achievement, but local districts say this: It gets kids interested and involved" The Bulletin

…for more see http://www.sciencemaster.com/

Getting Mom Flowers for Mother’s Day? Buy Her Chocolate Instead!

2010-05-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

Getting Mom flowers for Mother’s Day? Buy her chocolate instead!

In addition to the love-inducing chemical phenyl-ethylamine (PEA), chocolate makes the body feel good via changing the brain to poise it for pleasurable experiences. While PEA is naturally produced, it gives the body-brain system a nice “boost.” When placed into an attractive heart-shaped candy box, the visual appeal of the packaging adds to the experiential pleasure.

How Dark Chocolate May Guard Against Brain Injury from Stroke
ScienceDaily (May 5, 2010) — Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a compound in dark chocolate may protect the brain after a stroke by increasing cellular signals already known to shield nerve cells from damage.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100505163242.htm

Kicking the Tires

2010-05-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Does anyone kick the tires anymore? Why do we use expressions that describe dated life experiences? Does anybody toe the line? Count their chickens? Have their cake? Split the baby?

Even when the original meaning is obscured we find comfort in well-worn phrases. The brain likes novelty but loves often used neurons.