Learning & the Brain will hold a one-day symposium in New York City on April 10 that will explore the mindsets and motivation in student success. According to the website,
This one-day symposium will bring cognitive scientists, psychologists and educators together to explore the role that mindsets, attitudes, anxiety, goals, optimism, dopamine, intentions, resilience, persistence and character play in student success and achievement in life and school. Learn strategies you can use to make students more successful, motivated and resilient.
Regular registration ends April 5, so be sure to sign up before then to avoid paying an additional fee.
The Dana Foundation is a co-sponsor of the symposium, and will have a table at the event. Please stop by and say hello and pick up some of our free literature.
At 3pm EST, Thursday, March 14,Science magazine will be running a free live chat called Do the Arts Make Us Smarter?, exploring the effects of arts education on the brain. Moderated by Science staff writer Emily Underwood, guests will be Daniel Levitin, who runs the Lab for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, and Keith Oatley, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who studies the effect of fiction on our emotions.
What sorts of questions will they answer? How about: Does learning the violin actually increase IQ or translate to better grades? Can drawing help students learn geometry? What other benefits can the arts provide, both in and beyond the classroom?
For those of you can’t tune in live, it will be archived on that same web page.
As
the son of a former high school English teacher, I am always keen to hear the latest
policies, theories, and research in education. One of the most fascinating
areas of research in education is its intersection with neuroscience. As our
understanding of the brain changes, our theories on teaching have changed
as well. However, this change is often delayed because information does not
flow easily from the neuroscience lab to the classroom.
The Dana Foundation has long been interested in education and the arts. The advent of the field of neuroeducation, or mind, brain, and education science, led to several free Dana publications, which are still available online and in print.
One of these resources, Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain, published in 2009, reprinted a keynote address given by Dana Alliance Member Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., of Harvard University. Kagan spoke to the educators attending a summit co-sponsored by The Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Neuro-Education Initiative on “Why the Arts Matter.”
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.
