Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads
- By Nora Schultz, Berlin
- New Scientist, 16 September 2009
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NEUROSCIENCE could do for schools what biomedical research has done for healthcare. That's the conclusion of the Decade of the Mind (DOM) symposium last week in Berlin, Germany, to discuss how the latest findings could be used to improve education.
"In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom," says Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany, one of the conference organisers. With brain imaging and, increasingly, genetic studies now complementing psychology research, a host of new findings could inform teachers about the conditions in which our brains can be primed to learn best.
One of the main themes emerging at the DOM meeting was that the foundation of successful learning is improving executive function - a collection of cognitive processes important for self-control and focusing on the task at hand. Brain-imaging studies have mapped executive function to several regions, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, which also lights up during error detection and when children learn numeracy and literacy.
Various studies presented at the meeting showed that improving a child's executive function could be achieved with relatively small changes, for example, by altering the timetabling of exercise sessions or encouraging the learning of a musical instrument (see "Stretch and learn" and "The Stephen King effect")
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