How Your Child Learns Best
There are disturbing changes underway in today’s school systems. Funding is frequently tied to scores achieved on standardized tests, which primarily evaluate rote memory. Teaching “to” tests like these inevitably focuses resources and curriculum on the lower-scoring students.
The pressure to bring up test scores for these struggling students limits time for the kinds of individualized learning that challenges all students to reach their highest potential, and teachers have less opportunity to encourage creative thinking and incorporate hands-on activities. When education is not enriched by exploration, discovery, problem solving, and creative thinking, students are not truly engaged in their own learning.
Because teachers are required to emphasize uninspiring workbooks and drills, more and more students are developing negative feelings about mathematics, science, history, grammar, and writing. Opportunities to authentically learn and retain knowledge are being replaced by instruction that teaches “to the tests.” Neuroimaging and new brain-wave technology provide evidence that rote learning is the most quickly forgotten, because the information is not stored in long-term memory.
As students lose interest in lecture and-memorize classes, their attention wanders, and disruptive behaviors are a natural consequence. Even for children who are able to maintain focus on rote teaching, the disruptive responses of their classmates are encroaching more and more on teachers’ instruction time as they try to maintain order. The good news is, there is hope for education.
This is an exciting and pivotal time in brain research. Neuroimaging and brain mapping are being used outside the confines of medical and psychological study, and the resulting work has opened windows into the functions of the thinking brain. We now can view what happens in the brain as information from the senses is categorized and organized into short- and long-term memory—scans can literally show learning taking place! My personal revelations about education came to me not as a classroom teacher, but as a neuroscience researcher.
In 1970, as a pre-med college student, I was using one of the first-generation electron microscopes to examine synapses connecting brain cells in baby chicks. My heart still races as I recall one particular night. As I sat alone in the darkroom of the science center developing my electron micrographs, I noticed a greater collection of protein in the synapses of some chicks that had been trained to follow a moving light. It was visible proof of something that had been, until that moment, only an abstract concept: the idea that learning changes the brain’s structure.
Throughout twenty-one years of education, including college at Vassar and Williams and medical school at UCLA, and fifteen years of neurology practice and research, I have been vitally interested in the neurology of learning. I fi nally realized I could apply the growing body of research about how the brain learns best to develop sensible, scientifi c strategies to help improve students’ attitudes and academic success— “neuro-logical” strategies, as it were. To best achieve my goal, I knew I would need professional training in education. I returned to college to obtain my teaching credential and masters degree in education.
