OEB 2015 - Tomorrow's New World: Extending the Reach of Learning - Lia Commissar

(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)