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 a field
that'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 does it have 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 is 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",
"Booting the bridge from by thence". (check)

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 its 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 may 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 its 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 new-ish 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 class room. 2.51

So, what impact does neuroscience
have 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. 10:25