(Lia Commissar) Hi! This morning
I'm going to talk about education and neuroscience,
both generally as the field's developing
but also, the specific work that we've been doing in this field.
The Wellcome Trust -- OK --
the Wellcome Trust, for those of you who don't know,
is the second largest charitable foundation globally,
with the aim of improving health.
And it does that by funding lots of bio-medical research, but also
by funding work in the social science and humanities,
funding lots of education work, doing lots of engagement work
and also lots of policy work.
So I'm going to talk through a few things this morning.
Firstly, what has neuroscience got to do with education?
What impact is it having on education at the moment?
The work that we've been doing, and then thinking about the future.
So, what has neuroscience got to do with education?
Well, if education is about learning something,
be it knowledge or a skill,
and neuroscience is the study of the nervous system and the brain,
then they're pretty linked, in my opinion.
And it's not new to kind of talk about the brain, in relation to education.
People have been discussing this, critiquing it,
debating it for lots of years.
There's loads of research papers out there with titles such as
"A Bridge too far", "Its a Prime time to build a bridge",
"A two-way path is possible", "Buildng the bridge from both ends."
So lots of people have been talking about this bridge
but not many people have been building it.
And, this is kind of understandable
because it's probably only really in the last 10 years that neuroscience is,
the understanding from neuroscience has evolved significantly
that we can start to think about how it might have implications for the classroom.
And this is really exciting, and there is lots of potential
and its really understanding,
you can understand why teachers, why policy makers,
why technologists want to start applying some of these ideas to education.
But my word of warning that will go throughout this presentation
really is about waiting and doing the research and finding out
whether these things are actually going to be helpful and impactful
in the classroom.
And the other thing that I must say just before I go on
is that I am not saying in any way that neuroscience alone is the answer
and is going to solve all our problems
or can tell us everything about the classroom.
That's a very complex ecosystem.
But, neuroscience is a kind of a newish field
where we can start using that alongside psychology,
alongside educational research, and alongside teacher's knowledge
to build something really good for the future
and see if we can start improving learning in the classroom.
So, what impact is neuroscience having on education?
So, we're at an education conference --
I thought I'd wait and see what you guys think.
So, I'm going to put a few statements up on the board, as any good teacher does.
And what I would like you to do is just simply raise your hand
if you agree with the statement, if you think it's true.
So: "We mostly only use 10% of our brain."
Hands up if you agree.
OK. I will just show you this:
These are some stats, I'll show you the paper this comes from in a second.
This was a survey of teachers in five countries
and those are the percentages of the teachers that agree.
Hum -- it's not really working, but I can tell you that this is not true
-- uh, there we go -- even sat there now, you might think you're not doing very much
but your brain is still in control of your breathing,
in control of your heart rate, keeping you standing up, sitting upright,
perhaps paying attention, maybe not, maybe mind-wandering
but it's all using your brain, all parts of your brain.
So that's one of these myths.
Second one: "Individuals lean better when they receive information
"in their preferred learning style."
So visually, by seeing, auditory, by hearing,
or kinesthetically, by doing things.
Hands up if you agree with that statement.
OK.
You can see, across the board, teachers in lots of countries agree with this.
(Laughter) Yes. So (she laughs)
It is true that people have a preference.
You might prefer to learn something in a particular way,
you might feel that you are a visual learner,
and that you learn better in that, by using stuff visually:
you do have a preference; but researches show that you don't learn any better
if you are showing the material in that particular way, believe it or not.
One last one:
"Differences in hemispheric dominance, left or right brain, can help to explain
"individual differences amongst learners."
Hands up if you agree.
We might start to see a pattern, I don't know.
(Laughter) So, here is some stats.
Really high in the UK.
Again, it's not true.
If you hear things about integrating the right or left brain,
or if you hear things about one side of your brain is the logical side
and the other side is more mathsy -- sorry, creative, it's just not true.
And I'm going to skip the next one.
["Regular drinking of caffeinated drinks reduces alertness."]
But this one is true. (Laughter)
OK, I can tell you a little more about that.
If you want to see more about these neuromyths,
This is a really good paper written by Paul Howard Jones last year.
It got a lot of interest on social media
and it goes through lots of what these common neuromyths are.
So, neuromyths: Where do they come from?
Are they a problem? And what to do about them?
So, generally they often come from some kind of science
that's been over- or misinterpreted, and they tend to stick around (excuse me)
because they are easy to understand or
easy to kind of implement in the classroom.
Are they a problem?
Well, if you think you only use 10% of your brain, is that a problem?
Possibly not, it's not accurate,
but when I first started teaching about nine years ago,
and this was common in lots of schools across the UK,
I'm not sure about in other countries,
students were asked to fill a questionnaire about how they learned,
and did they like learning in this way.
And teachers were given a spreadsheet with students
and which were their preferred learning styles.
And teachers were encouraged to make sure that they were providing
information for those students in that particular way.
And I'd say that is a bit of a problem,
because teachers were potentially wasting time
or feeling that they should be doing something
that was not actually benefiting the students.
A positive outcome was that lessons became more diverse,
............... (check) about a range of activities
but at the same time, students would say things like:
"Miss, I'm not doing this activity because I'm a kinesthetic learner."
And so students were themselves limiting themselves
and not getting the benefit of learning in multiple modalities,
which is the way you learn best,
by using different ways of learning the same information. 7:19
So, what to do about them?
Well, I might come on to that a bit later in what we're going to do.
So, the research is carrying on, but lots of research in this area
is still at the stage of it's about cells in a Petri dish
It might be about finding out about what's going on in animals,
or very small-scale trials of humans, but maybe in a lab.
Not much is going on in the classroom.
And so we set p this initiative, Education Neuroscience Initiative
with the Education Endowment Foundation,
who are the What Works Centre of Education in the UK.
And we did it for two reasons:
we wanted to build the evidence of what works in education,
informed by neuroscience,
and we also wanted to help support teachers and general educators
with what we do and don't know. (check)
So, we firstly launched a funding round,
to get people to apply for money to do research in the space,
and all the projects had to have some evidence that they will -- that they work,
some pilot data.
But they also had to be scalable and affordable,
so that if we find that these things worked,
that they could be rolled out, that they could lead to policy changes,
that they could be available to everybody.
And there is particular emphasis as well around disadvantaged students.
We want to do something that would benefit all,
and try and close the socioeconomic gap.
And all of our projects are also paired with an independent evaluator.
So, you have your project team and you also have an evaluation team.
And that evaluation team helps to shape the methodology that's used,
make sure it's robust, educationally.
They also collect some of the first data and they also report on that data first.
So there is no chance for the project team to maybe overstate claims
about what they found.
So we funded these projects and these are all taking place
in around 50 to 100 schools, each in the UK.
I won't talk about all of them, but I'll just whiz through a couple.
Fit to Study is looking at great research around how more vigorous activity
can influence learning, short- and long-term.
We know this from lots of research in animals and from small-group studies,
but nobody has done anything in the UK on this scale.
And so we're looking at changing what happens in P.E. lessons,
and then measuring the short- and long-term outcomes of those students.
Teen Sleep has had a certain media coverage.
And that's looking at we know, researchers know,
neuroscientists will tell you,
we know that teens have a different sleep-wake cycle,
their circadian rhythm is altered by a couple of hours.
So they don't feel tired in the evenings,
it's really hard to get them up in the morning,
they are not fit and ready to start learning early in the morning.
So we're studying, at a late school start time against a sleep education program,
where we just teach them about the importance of their sleep,
how to get good sleep, about using technology just before bed
and about how that might affect their sleep -- not in a positive way --
and looking again at their academic outcomes.
These are two projects which are both in primary schools.
They're training very young children: one, a different way to learn reading,
one, about training their inhibitions that they're better equipped
when they learn science and maths, when they come across
these kind of counter-intuitive ideas.
Engaging the brain's reward system from Paul Howard Jones.
This one is maybe of particular interest because it's taking ideas from gaming,
the idea of why games are so engaging and motivating.
Neuroscientists have discovered it's this idea of uncertain rewards,
so not the consistency that we see in schools around the world
of you get something right, you get a point,
but you get something right and you can game that point.
You might double it. You might get nothing.
And they've shown that that ramps up dopamine
in your brain and the rewards system makes it very engaging, motivating,
and hopefully, a very teachable moment for students.
And the last one is spaced learning, and this is being actually led by
a school in collaboration with neuroscientists and psychologists.
And they're looking at ideas from neuroscience and psychology
and trying to work out what really works in the classroom
in terms of repeated learning and what the spaces are between that learning.
So that's just a quick oversight.
If you want more information, I'm happy to talk about it.
Um, very quickly I'll mention the Education Endowment Foundation
has a very useful toolkit that talks about different interventions.
It talks about the cost of those interventions
and the level of the evidence and how effective it is.
And they've got a set of projects all around digital technologies
which you might be interested in.
So, that's the research.
We have to sit and wait now for four years
to find out how some of the outcomes of some of those studies,
what they'll be.
And we're just as interested to find out if they're effective as if they're not,
because we'll then know to say to teachers, "Don't bother changing
"your school start time. It has no impact."
So what we're doing.
We're trying to support teachers with what we know
because we don't want these neuro-myths being perpetuated.
We think teachers need to be empowered with really what we do know.
So we did something earlier this year, a very quick, set up very quickly.
And it was an online event where we had neuroscientists
and psychologists online.
And teachers could log on and ask them any questions
about the brain or learning.
And we had about 7,000 people engaged with it,
but we know that that's not enough.
So what we're doing is we're currently crowdsourcing information
from neuroscientists, psychologist, educational academics across the globe.
And we're going to develop, hopefully, some really good resources
for teachers that give them a summary of the research area,
be it reward, motivation, about learning differences.
But it will also give them an idea of how developed that research is.
Is it just in cells in a lab or is it being tested in the classroom?
And finally, it gives them also some other reputable sources of information
to go to, so that people are finding out about research
and scientific findings are factual, hopefully.
And then we're gonna do another online event where we get
neuroscientists, psychologists, educational academics.
And hopefully, by enabling this conversation,
scientific findings won't be over- or misinterpreted.
People can ask the questions about the research.
If you want to be involved in that, follow us on Twitter.
Find out what we're doing.
So, the future, very quickly.
There were a couple of journals already in this space:
Mind, Brain, and Education and Trends in Neuroscience and Education.
Two more are coming out this and next year.
This is very much a developing, building area of research.
The Education Endowment Foundation did a lit review,
so this paper gives lots of ideas about all the bits of areas
of neuroscience that could be applied to education,
the distance from the classroom, and how solid that evidence is.
So you can find out a bit more there.
We also had a phone call with the White House earlier this year.
They're very interested.
They're working out what they should be doing in this space.
So it's very exciting but early stages.
Um, so more about the future.
Quickly flipped to my notes cause I can't remember all of this.
There's lots of interesting areas that are very promising
in this field of research:
things about stimulation of young children
and how that actually has a huge impact on their development.
And that might have big implications in lower and middle income countries.
Recognizing that teenagers and adolescence is a very distinct time,
and they might need different things in terms of
to support their learning compared to adults.
We are learning lots more about reward, motivation, attention,
about neuroplasticity, how our brains are very plastic
and how they can continue to learn throughout life,
and how that actual cognitive demand on your brain might be good
at staving off neurological degenerative diseases later in life.
There's work around fostering better creativity,
around specifics in maths, English, and science,
the impact of stress on learning,
earlier screening for learning disorders,
and hopefully also, this will become something that is much more embedded
and ingrained in teacher training.
So very quickly, the issues I think, are that research takes time.
We shouldn't over-interpret in individual studies.
And this translation is a new work-in-progress.
But there's loads of potential, lots of exciting opportunities.
But we need multi-disciplinary teams working on this,
including educational technologists.
We need to get good information out to teachers.
We also need to give them the tools to ask the right questions
so that they can ask what things are based on,
of their studies, has research been done.
And we might end up with some things that lead to
some very interesting policy changes.
But that's a few years down the line.
So I'll just leave you with this quote which I quite liked.
I won't read it. I'll let you read it.
Thank you very much.
(applause)