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Several researchers say that neurobiology and neuroscience mean the same to them. However, there’s a difference. While neurobiology focuses on the biology of the nervous system, neuroscience is concerned with anything related to the nervous system. Unlike the initial days of the domain, scientists working in the field of neuroscience today have a much broader scope of fields to handle. They study the functional, cellular, computational, evolutionary, medical, and molecular aspects of the nervous system.

Neuroscience is subdivided into several branches, the notable ones among which are cognitive, linguistic, developmental, and computational aspects.

Cognitive neuroscience refers to the study of higher cognitive functions that are present in humans, and the neural bases that trigger those functions. This branch of neuroscience draws from cognitive science, linguistics, psychiatry, and psychology. Cognitive neuroscientists can choose between two broad directions – computational/modeling or behavioral/experimental, the goal being to comprehend the nature of cognition from a neural viewpoint.

Linguistic neuroscience, also called neurolinguistics, deals with investigations by specialists to understand how the human brain enables people to gain, store, comprehend, and express language. Using it, speech therapists can devise strategies to help children suffering from speech difficulties or people trying to regain their speech after being affected by a stroke, for instance.

Developmental neuroscience examines how the nervous system and the brain develop and change over time, right from the point of conception till adulthood. Information obtained from such studies helps scientists understand more about the development and evolution of neurological systems. This branch of neuroscience also enables them to explain and understand an array of developmental disorders. Additionally, it provides them with clues about when and how neurological tissues regenerate.

Computational neuroscience tries to understand how human brains compute. Computational neuroscientists use computers to replicate and model brain functions, and apply techniques from physics, mathematics, and other computational fields to learn more about brain functions.

All these aspects place emphasis on diverse learning pathways. Neuroscience helps us understand the development of the human mind, what inspires higher education, and the best way to keep informed via the art of learning.

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The Two Hemispheres of the Brain

As you know, the brain comprises two hemispheres. Scientists have delved deeper into the theories associated with these hemispheres and found out how they work and control the body. Research has shown that right brain and left brain dominant people process information differently and respond differently.

According to the prevalent theories, the right hemisphere guides people whose right-brain is dominant. They are more intuitive and emotional. Those people whose left-brain is dominant are under the control of the left hemisphere. They think and respond sequentially and logically. On the whole, the personality of an individual is formed based on their brain type.

The Benefit of Knowing Your Brain Type

The fact that you are right-brained or left-brained can have a lot of impact on your homework habits, grades, and study skills. For example, you may find it tough to do some specific assignments or questions based on your brain type.

If you know which hemisphere of your brain is dominant, you can adapt your style of studying, perhaps choose and organize your coursework, and set up the most convenient schedule for your personality type.

Find Out Your Brain Type

You can answer a few questions and find out which part of your brain is more dominant. For instance:

• Do you keep looking at the time repeatedly?
             
• Are you surprised when the bell rings to end the class?
             
• Do people complain that you are too analytical?      
             
• Do others consider you to be dreamy?          
  
  

Answers to such questions can reveal the characteristics of different brain types.

Left-brained students are more organized, keep track of the time, analyze things, and process information sequentially. They keep up with the schedules, follow the rules and regulations, and are cautious. They are skilled in science and math and can give answers quickly. If they take part in the Jeopardy competition, they will perform excellently.

Right-brained are intelligent and can think deeply. But such people tend to get lost in their thoughts and are dreamers. They excel in the arts and social sciences. They are not as cautious as the left-brainers. Right-brainers tend to respond spontaneously and follow their gut feelings. They are intuitive and can see through lies and tricks. They can perform very well in a Survivor contest.

You may wonder what will happen if you have some characteristics of both brain types. Almost everyone has some qualities of the right-brain and some that exhibit dominance of the left-brain. People who have an equal amount of characteristics of the right and left brain have a middle-brain orientation. They are good contestants for the Apprentice.

If you have a middle-brain orientation, you can benefit from the qualities of both hemispheres. For instance, you can gain from the intuition provided by the right-brain and the logic offered by the left-brain. It can help you to be successful in various spheres of life.

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Notably, neuroeducation encourages independence and autonomy in learning. Rather than rely on the educator for all learning experiences, learners discover how to be self-regulated and take ownership of their educational objectives. They learn how to prioritize their assignments, manage their time, and work with others.

What strategies should you include?

Using neuroeducation can seem overwhelming, but there are a few strategies to implement right away in your classroom.  

Macro strategies

• Physical movement. Physical movement aids instruction. When physical education is reduced in many schools, exercise oxygenates the blood that nourishes the brain. Learners who move during instruction internalize their learning more quickly. 
• Socialization. Humans are social. We need to interact with others, and instruction includes collaborative strategies that teach how to work with others. 
• Embrace differentiation. Many educators recognize that learners learn differently. It’s also critical to teach learners that these differences are ok.
• Chunk learning. The human brain can only process so much info at a time. That is why breaking multi-step tasks down into manageable chunks facilitate learning. Educators know that giving process directions one step at a time helps their learners focus. So does present info in small bites. Neuroeducation learning research indicates that learners are more likely to remember instruction presented in segments.
• Encourage creativity. Although schools are increasingly deleting arts programs, art teaches learners to think differently from sequential learning activities.  
• Develop emotional connections. The amygdala, a small organ in the middle of the brain, stores essential emotions for the brain to remember later. Emotional connection can help to cement concepts in learners’ brains.
• Teach stress management. Just like their educators, learners experience stress. Some stress is beneficial, like the type that motivates us to complete an assignment or perform well on an exam. Negative stress can make distractions and impair learning. Learners have to learn that everyone experiences stress, so they must learn stress management.
• Study brain development. Educators who learn about the brain and how it learns are best positioned to use and teach neuroeducation strategies. What we do know about the relationship between neuroscience and behavioral psychology is still in its infancy. Research creates new opportunities for reaching learners with neuroeducation teaching strategies.

By teaching your learners neuroeducation strategies like these, you also help them become more reflective about their growth. 

In Summary

Instructional tech maximizes learning opportunities by customizing learning experiences. Personalization gives learners unique experiences as well as boosts understanding. Online learning, virtual labs, and elearning make up part of the education experience in contemporary classrooms. 

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Still not convinced that our working memory is crucial to learning? Here are five ways kids utilize working memory to learn.

1. Accessing information

There are two kinds of working memory: auditory memory and visual-spatial memory. Think of the skills used in making a movie. Auditory memory records what you’re hearing, and visual-spatial memory captures what you’re viewing. That is where working memory’s similarity with making a video diverge.

As you make a video, visual and auditory information is stored and recalled when you need to access the content. You don’t need to pay attention to what when you’re filming. In contrast, working memory isn’t just stored for use on some future date and time. It has to be accessed and retrieved immediately—even as new info arrives and needs to be incorporated.

Imagine an educator reads a word problem in math class. Kids need to keep all the numbers in their head, figure out what operation to utilize, and create a written math problem simultaneously.

Kids with poor working memory skills have difficulty grabbing and holding on to that incoming information. This means they have less content to work with when they’re performing a task or assignment.

In math class, they may understand distinct kinds of calculations. They run into trouble with word problems. It isn’t easy to listen for clue words that indicate which operation to utilize while at the same time remembering the numbers that need to be plugged into the equation.

2. Remembering Instructions

Kids rely on incoming information and information stored in working memory to do an activity. If they have poor working memory skills, this isn’t easy to do. This can make it challenging to follow multi-step directions. Kids with poor working memory skills have trouble keeping in mind what comes next while doing what comes now. For instance, your kid may not be able to mentally “go back” and recall what sentence the educator wanted to be written down while also trying to remember how to spell out the words in that sentence.

3. Paying Attention

The section of the brain that governs working memory is also responsible for focus and concentration. Working memory helps kids remember what they need to focus on. For example, doing a long division problem. Your kid needs working memory to come up with the answer and concentrate on all of the steps involved in getting there.

Kids with poor working memory skills have trouble remaining on task to get to the result. You could think of it as the learning equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting what you came in to get.

4. Learning to Read

Working memory governs many of the skills kids used to learn to read. Auditory working memory helps kids remember the sounds letters make, helping them learn to sound out new words. Visual working memory helps kids recognize those words and identify them throughout the rest of a sentence.

When working efficiently, these skills keep kids from having to sound out every word they see. This helps them become fluent readers. Learning to read isn’t an easy process for kids with poor working memory skills.

5. Learning Math

Solving math problems depends on several skills that build on one another, like building blocks. The block at the bottom—the essential one in the stack—is identifying and reproducing patterns. The next block’s foundation is seeing patterns in numbers to solve and remember basic math facts.

Kids build up to storing information regarding a word problem in their head; then they utilize that information to create a number sentence to solve the problem. This leads to the ability to remember mathematical formulas.

What keeps learning going is remembering, sequence, and visualizing information, all of which can be difficult for a kid with poor working memory skills.

Concluding thoughts

Having a poor working memory can create obstacles to learning. However, you can get around these obstacles. You can use working memory boosters like playing cards, chess, or other board games. With help from you and other educators at school, your kid can build up working memory skills, so learning is less of a struggle.

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The effects of positive motivation

Studies show that the best learning takes place when the subject matter is relevant to students’ lives. This helps students connect and relate to the subject matter and feel motivated to learn about it, rather than feeling stressed about a completely foreign idea that holds no apparent value to them. This suggests that teachers should always strive to put an emotional spin or “hook” on their lessons so that they resonate with students. Additionally, studies on the brain show that stress can inhibit the brain’s ability to retain new information. Simply put, a joyful and safe learning environment with reduced stress is essential and necessary to learning.

How stress helps and hurts

Stress has mostly negative impacts on learning and memory, with some exceptions. For example, a small amount of stress, particularly emotional (rather than physical) stress, during the encoding phase of memory can help a person retain new information. An example of this would be when a person witnesses a crime or accident. The well-known “fight or flight” response is triggered within the witness’s brain and body while the memory of the event is encoded, and the witness may retain the event in sharper detail than without this stress response. This may also explain why students retain a lesson better when they’ve made an emotional connection to the information.

However, chronic stress leading up to encoding a memory can inhibit memory encoding, and stress after a memory can block recall. If the same witness in this example was brought before a jury to testify, the witness could struggle to retrieve the memory.

How this works in the brain

In a stressful situation or even a perceived stressful situation that isn’t dangerous, our brains and bodies react to protect us. The amygdala sends a warning message through the hippocampus to the rest of the body. The hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine (also known as adrenalin and noradrenalin) react first and have short-lived responses. Cortisol is another hormone that reacts, but its effects can last for hours. While the occasional emotional stress reaction to an event can help sharpen our memories of the event, in general, stress inhibits our ability to store and retrieve memories. Chronic stress, in particular, where a student experiences this fight or flight response in the brain and body over and over throughout the school day, drastically lowers the ability to learn and retain information.

Parents and educators need to understand how stress affects learning and memory so that they can work to create safe and comfortable learning environments. They can also use this information to add an emotional “hook” to lessons to increase retention and make lessons applicable in the real world. A joyful and stress-free environment is scientifically proven to be critical to student success.

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What is Metacognition? 

Metacognition is defined as thinking about one’s thinking, or cognition, with the goal of enhancing learning. It is no surprise that metacognition plays an important role in psychology, but it is gaining traction in the world of education as well. John Flavell, a developmental psychologist who specializes in child cognitive development, is regarded as one of the pioneers as metacognition began being introduced in education. 

One of the benefits of metacognition is that it is not necessarily age or grade dependent. This allows it to be taught to any student at any time. Though the sooner it is taught, and strategies utilized then the bigger role it can play for students in helping empower their learning as they can build upon the different approaches being used. It can fit seamlessly into any of the four cognitive stages of childhood development:

1. Sensorimotor Stage: Birth through about 2 years
2. Preoperational Stage: Ages 2 through 7
3. Concrete Operational Stage: Ages 7 through 11
4. Formal Operational Stage: Ages 11 and older 

Metacognition Strategies

Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers in their book Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains share various tips about how to introduce metacognition into the classroom:

•         Introduce the terminology, define it, and use it often.
•         Begin with an explicit lesson on metacognition
•         Use metaphors to explain and explore how metacognition works
•         Catch students being metacognitive
•         Lead discussions encouraging students to share examples of how metacognition can be employed inside and outside the classrooms

Other common strategies are the use of self-reflection, planning a project and focusing on what the individual thinks they will have trouble with and modeling through thinking out loud through a problem. These strategies align perfectly with normative educational strategies, but the added benefit is that making them a regular part of the classroom instills these practices in the students. 

Benefits of Teaching Metacognition

Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching succinctly describes how teaching metacognition can be helpful by “helping students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses as learners, writers, readers, test-takers, group members, etc.  A key element is recognizing the limitations of one’s knowledge or ability and then figuring out how to expand that knowledge or extend the ability.”

With an increase in the inundation of dubious sources (“Fake News”), it is becoming more vital that students to be taught not what to think but how to think. The ability to understand one’s limits or knowledge in a certain area and be able to use metacognition strategies to find the correct answer or facts is a skill that transcends the classroom and empowers an individual.   

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What is Cognitive Neuroscience?

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of how the brain enables the mind which makes its use in the field of education a no brainer. The more we learn about the brain, how it works, processes information, retain information and then recalls that information can empower students and teachers alike and enhance the practices and strategies used in the classroom. 

There is a growing push to implement more neuroscience approaches in teacher preparation programs. Donna Coch’s paper, Reflections on Neuroscience in Teacher Education focuses on this growing trend specifically with the importance of understanding neuroplasticity in children and teens:

“any input—all experience, including good teaching or bad—shifts the strength of connections between neurons, such that the brain is constantly changing. Plasticity is a core concept in neuroscience and is fundamental to learning and development”

Simply put, education literally changes the brain. MeTEOR Education, a leader in creating dynamic learning environments, heavily utilizes neuroscience in their business and listed the five key advantages of using neurological research in education summarized as:

1.   Supporting already established education strategies 
2.   Aids in helping reach students with learning disabilities and learning problems
3.   Utilization of technology regarding how it affects the brain
4.   Using new research to enhance teaching
5.   Fine-tuning the ability to bring research, no matter the field, into the classroom when applicable

Neuroscience in the Classroom

In Richard Guy’s and Bruce Byrne’s study Neuroscience and Learning: Implications for Teaching Practice they studied the importance of working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM) in regards to student’s academic success and how teachers can use WM and LTM to tailor activities and lessons towards one or the other. WM has limitations of being able to process a small amount (3-5) of items, or pieces of information, at a time until one of those items is knocked off as new information is introduced. 

With teachers becoming aware of these natural limitations, they can be more cognizant of how much new information they’re providing their students and avoid overloading them. If they are inputting too much information that it can’t be processed correctly or long enough in the WM and that information will be lost and not transition into the student’s LTM. This creates a situation where the students are lacking vital learning goals when it comes to assessments. 

The relationship between memory and knowledge retention is a small but powerful example of the relevance to neuroscience in the classroom. As more educators begin to see the benefit of keeping up to date with our growing understanding of the brain the better, they will be able to maximally instruct students. 

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Encourage Different Feelings

Instead of trying to direct kids away from negative emotions, let them know that it’s okay to experience different feelings. Take time to talk about different emotions with them and let them know that everyone has different feelings at times. That way, if they do get upset or angry, it will be less extreme because they will understand that it is okay to feel that way and it won’t feel like it’s coming out of nowhere for them.

Don’t Try to Automatically Fix Certain Feelings

At first thought, you may want to fix negative feelings with a child, but not all feelings should be fixed right away. Sometimes kids are having a hard time and it can’t necessarily be fixed that easily. Plus, if students don’t express all their emotions, then they can get bottled up inside and make them more miserable. It is important for children to express and understand how they’re feeling before someone tries to fix it for them. Try to encourage students to learn how to adjust their emotions on their own to help them become better at controlling those feelings in the future.

Don’t Tell Them How to Feel

While some people may like to jump to conclusions and assume how someone else is feeling, this is not a good thing to teach children. A huge part of emotions is allowing students to learn from them and discover them on a daily basis. If you tell them how to feel, then they may just listen to what you say instead of learning to deal with their emotions on their own. However, if you help them figure out what’s going on mentally, then this can lead them to be more emotionally healthy in the future and help them to make mindful choices about their emotions.

Respect Their Space

If a child needs some time to themselves to work through a problem, it is a good idea to respect that. No matter how badly you want to talk to them and help them out, at least give them a few minutes to cool off and take a breath before you try to step in. While kids can learn a lot from adults, they also learn a lot through experience. If they take some time to themselves to try to understand their emotions, then they will likely be able to better control their feelings in the future. It is perfectly fine for you to talk to them about it from time to time, but if they ask for some time to themselves, then don’t be afraid to give them that.

Conclusion

Emotions can be a difficult thing to understand, especially for young children. That’s why parents need to be mindful when trying to raise their children to be emotionally healthy and resilient. Kids don’t always need someone looking over their shoulder and telling them how to handle their feelings. Sometimes, you need to give them space and avoid trying to always take control of the situation. By learning about emotions at an early age, kids can learn to make smarter decisions in the future.

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What’s a learning modality, you ask?

A learning modality is how students employ sensory information to learn new information.  Some people have one predominant modality. Others have a combination between two or three of them.

There are three basic modalities:

1. Visual students learn from seeing 

1. Auditory learners learn from hearing 

1. Kinesthetic students learn from touching, doing & moving

Some experts also add “tactile” to the list but, for the purposes of this article, we will keep it simple with the 3 main types of learning.

The following chart outlines the characteristics of the learning modalities so you can look for them in your students.

Characteristics of Learning Modalities

Auditory learners…

• are talkative

• talk to themselves aloud (especially when studying or reading)

• enjoy music

• are great with names

• can be easily distracted

• hum or sing often

Visual learners…

• like to read

• spell well

• have nice handwriting

• find verbal instructions difficult to understand or follow

Kinesthetic learners…

• dress for comfort rather than style

• tap feet or pencils when ready or studying

• touch people during conversation

• do not like to read

• are poor spellers

• enjoy physical rewards

• express emotions physically

Children are too often expected to rely on their visual skills and sight to look and read information. Hearing is sometimes integrated when teachers speak. However, multisensory learning is much more than that.

Multisensory teaching attempts to employ all of the senses. It is not possible that every single lesson will use all of a child’s senses but engaging in at least more than one way is the goal.  In multisensory teaching, the instructor shares information through as many senses as possible.

Here are a few examples…

Suggested Aids for Learning Modalities

Visual learners may benefit from….

• note-taking

• mind maps

• acrostics

• color codes

• flashcards

Auditory learners may enjoy…

• discussion

• rhythmic sounds

• theatre

• mnemonics

• rhymes and poems

Kinesthetic learners will like…

• walking as they read

• dancing

• role play

• stretch breaks

It is essential to note, however, that teachers shouldn’t build in a sensory activity for the sake of adding it but to rotate through the modalities as they make sense in the context of the subject matter. You want to keep the instruction varied and exciting but don’t throw in a movement activity (for example) for no good reason. It is also essential not to instill any concrete ideas into kids’ heads about what type of learner they are. This can limit their growth and development.

When done right, multisensory instruction helps kids tap into their learning strengths because it allows them to make connections and form memories in their own way. It also allows them to utilize a variety of ways to demonstrate mastery over what they’ve learned.

Multisensory teaching, at its heart,  takes into account that all students learn in different ways, and it helps meet the varying needs of all kids.  Multisensory lessons allow every student to learn and succeed in your classroom.

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