Dana Foundation Blog

ADHD, Multi-Tasking, and Reading

This weekend, more than 900 teachers, researchers, and other education experts met to share what they know about how we learn. At a session of the Learning & the Brain conference titled “The Web-Connected Generation: How Technology Transforms Their Brains, Teaching and Attention,” we heard a lot about multi-user virtual environments, enhanced reality, the myth of multitasking, and individualized web-based learning. But the tech story that most caught my attention was a slightly older one: reading.

Why do many kids with ADHD “suddenly” start to lag in reading comprehension by the fourth grade? They seem to have acquired the basic skills at the same rate and competence as their peers; they recognize and use phonemes, they can recall words at sight. One part of the reason is that we’ve been assuming that once kids master all the basic language skills they need, fluency just comes naturally, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case. Another is that the act of reading itself is a form of multitasking, and in some ways kids with ADHD have a harder time doing it.

Education as Digital Immersion

Compared with the interesting world outside school and even the phones often in their hands, the current average classroom could seem like a boring place for some of today's students.

"How do we handle barren classrooms?" Harvard professor Chris Dede asked several hundred teachers, educators, researchers, and others during a summit on "Technology, Cognition, and Learning" at Johns Hopkins University on Thursday. One potential solution, Dede said, is to "bring 'situated learning' into the classroom."

Situated learning is learning that takes place in the same context in which it is applied. A workplace example might be getting promoted to manager and learning Excel to handle new budget decisions. Since that's the way we spend most of our life learning, Dede said, he and others are in the early stages of figuring out how to get such context-based learning into a schoolroom.

Why Do We Play?

Why do we play?” asked Sam Wang, Ph.D., at Thursday’s Learning and the Brain conference at Columbia University in New York.

Play is a “fairly universal biological impulse,” explained Wang, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. It’s a kind of memory that is passed along biologically through generations, which prompts young animals (including humans) to practice skills and scenarios they may face in life.

A Komodo dragon playing tug-of-war with its handler. Kind of like a dog, but in slow motion.

Of course play is not only a learning tool—play is fun! As Wang explained, play activates certain systems in the brain, including the substantia nigra, which through the release of dopamine leads people to experience feelings of reward.

Brain Bee Study Sessions a Success

Our guest blogger is Florence Varodayan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University. Florence helped organize two study sessions in preparation for Saturday's New York City Regional Brain Bee Competition.

If a patient comes to a hospital ER complaining of general weakness and a “clumsy” right hand, what would you, the doctor, do? What tests would you perform to diagnose the patient?

This scenario was presented to high school students preparing for the NYC Regional Brain Bee by a Columbia University M.D./Ph.D. student. The ensuing discussion covered the topics of identifying different causes of movement disorders and interpreting the results of neurological tests. The final diagnosis, after an MRI scan, was multiple sclerosis.

The Brain Bee is an international competition that aims to inspire the next generation of neuroscientists by teaching them about the brain. The Dana Alliance has been running the NYC area competition since 2002, and this year decided to bring the Brain Bee to Columbia University by teaming up with two student groups: the undergraduate group, the Columbia Neuroscience Society; and the graduate student group, Columbia University Neuroscience Outreach. The 2012 NYC Regional Brain Bee will be held from 1-5 pm on Saturday February 4^th, at Roone Arledge Auditorium, Alfred Lerner Hall, Columbia University.

To help the participants prepare for the competition, Columbia undergraduate and graduate students hosted two workshops in January. At the first workshop, held on Columbia’s medical campus, neuroscience graduate students gave presentations on each of the key areas covered in the competition. The competitors learned things as varied as how optical illusions work, what happens when we sleep, and what approaches scientists are taking to model the brain. What made these presentations truly special is that the graduate students discussed material directly related to what they study in the lab. As a result, the presenters were delighted to answer the competitors’ numerous and often complex questions. In fact, several of the graduate students later commented to me on the passion and intelligence of the competitors. Several told me, “We weren’t that smart back when we were in high school!”

Two weeks later, the Brain Bee participants attended a second workshop at Columbia’s main campus to engage with neuroscience as a process that involves investigation, discussion, and often a lot of controversy. The competitors learned how to diagnose patients with neurological disorders and then viewed (and touched!) real human and animal brains. They also discussed the scientific and legal ramifications of several neuroethics case studies with Columbia undergraduate and graduate students.

In one scenario, students were presented with a case study modeled after the issue of whether Science & Nature should release all the details of the controversial H5N1 study, while risking the information landing in the hands of bioterrorists. Another case, about the potential use of memory-enhancing drugs in preparation for a test, was particularly contentious. Some students pointed out that if the goal of (illegally) using drugs such as Adderall is merely to improve concentration, using a substance that has similar effects, such as coffee, could be a viable (legal) alternative. The day ended on a high note with tours of some of Columbia’s neuroscience research laboratories.

Thank you to all the wonderful undergraduate and graduate student volunteers who organized and ran these workshop sessions. We are really excited to celebrate neuroscience next Saturday and wish all the Brain Bee competitors good luck!

--Florence Varodayan

Learning About Learning

How does school work, brain-wise? Do children teach themselves or is it something about the instruction that gets their brains firing and wiring faster? Last fall, a few hundred neuroscientists, teachers, and curriculum-makers met for a weekend to hash out what we know about learning and how we could use it to help every child succeed at school. One early answer: Play. 

The Aspen Brain Forum was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, which has posted an extensive summary of the event as well as slides and audio from eighteen of the sessions. For an introductory taste of the event, though, try the 18-min podcast (which we sponsored). Science and the City's Nadja Popovich talked with three of the presenters, who sketch the growing field and describe a few surprising results.  

Many of these results are connected to the cognitive properties of executive function, especially attention: inhibiting distraction, focusing on the correct aspect of a task, and maintaining focus. For example, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia describes the "red-pencil technique" for children who are writing their letters or numbers the wrong way (mirrored). Asking them to remind themselves to stop before they have to write a "6" and switch from their regular pencil to another one to write that number slows them down enough that they write the number correctly, a change that seems to last. Diamond also points out that learning programs that include social, emotional, and physical components (such as play) "are better for academic achievement and executive function" than those that focus solely on academics. "Addressing only the cognitive seems to be less beneficial," she says.

On the subject of play, Daphne Bavalier of the University of Rochester offers tantalizing research into the benefits of often-denigrated video games. Studies done on undergraduate non-gamers who played games for the first time for a few dozen hours seem to show they have improved vision acuity and speed as well as attention. How might programmers tweak games to foster improvements that could last?

Bruce McCandliss of Vanderbilt University describes research that suggests that differences in learning abilities and styles may have a grounding in attention, too—or rather, what we focus our attention on. Brain scans of young people focusing on the beginnings and endings of spoken words differ in predictable ways from the scans of those who focus on the melody of the sentences, for example. Might "poor" readers be focusing on a less-helpful aspect of the language, perhaps enjoying the music of the language and missing its meaning? "Different learning styles may rely on different styles of attention," he says, and might benefit from different methods of instruction.

Like most of neuroscience, questions are more plentiful than answers. We do know some things work better than others, though; Diamond cites the Montessori, Tools of the Mind, and Path curriculums; Jump Math also seems to be making mathematicians of entire classrooms, not just a lucky few, according to John Mighton (who was not on the podcast but did attend the meeting).

The main take-away? Everyone learns a little differently, so relax about it. As Diamond says, "stress impairs executive function."

--Nicky Penttila