Brain and Education

Thinking about our discussion and reading other people’s posts got me thinking about the purpose of higher education. It seems that many are trying to reevaluate how important it is for everyone to go to college when there are many jobs that do not require an education. This made me think about my own career path, and the fact that many of the courses that I’ve taken in my college career are not directly relevant to neuroscience or psychology. But then again, that’s not why I chose to take those classes. I took classes throughout my college career simply because I was interested in them and because I wanted to be challenged to think about those particular topics differently. I think that everyone, no matter what their eventual occupation, has the right to have this kind of educational experience if he or she chooses to, and that is certainly not a reality of today’s educational system.

As many others have pointed out, I think the goal of schools should be to teach children how to learn in the best way possible for that individual’s brain. We all think differently and learn differently. I am finding out in my studies of the acquisition of language that even how we learn to speak and understand speech varies from individual to individual, simply because our brains are structured differently in these areas. This leads to differences in how we learn to read, and as a result, how we best are able to learn. There are many attentional differences between individuals too that also affects learning styles. For this reason there should be many alternative means of acquiring knowledge available to children. I think many would argue that this is not plausible because of the way schools are currently structured, but I think Montessori schools are a good example of how this obstacle can be overcome. As I said during our discussion, I understand the need to standardize the material learned at lower levels of education, but think that as students grow older and learn more about their interests, they should be able to choose how to build on their foundation of core knowledge. At higher levels, there should be opportunities (such as there are in liberal arts colleges to diversify one’s own education, and the method of learning should as always be the choice of the individual. In a way, I feel like this is how college (at least at Bryn Mawr) currently works. Some students learn better through lecture, some through reading, and the way that we choose to study for exams is completely individualized. However, this system only works for those who know themselves and know how they learn best. For this reason, providing this basis of “learning how to learn” at early ages is important. Also, creating a society full of individuals who are experts at their own learning process would be useful no matter what profession is chosen as an adult. Every job is a learning experience as the world is constantly changing and all professionals must learn new skills and ideas in order to keep up with it.

Emily H. brings up an interesting point by asking questions about our “biological disadvantage” and its interplay with our motivation and early environment. This question references the difficulty in parsing out the different components of human intelligence, which educators are constantly assessing and trying to improve (i.e., who passes a course, who graduates high school, who gets into college). A topic I’ve been interested in exploring is the biological underpinnings of human intelligence. In defining intelligence, my question pertains to inherent versus acquired aspects of “being smart”. As I mentioned last week, many institutions rely on standardized intelligence tests to decide a person’s subsequent function. Early IQ tests (Terman 1911, Wechsler, 1944) were developed for placing military officers. Schools also use the WAIS and Raven’s Matrices to decide which students are eligible for special intensive or “honors” courses. But are these tests accurate in defining intelligence?

IQ testing is based on the fundamental belief that there is a single, unitary measure of intelligence. Furthermore, proponents of IQ and standardized (i.e., SAT or GRE) point to converging, independent criteria as indicators that the tests are accurate. I have trouble buying this argument, however, based on some points that people have mentioned. First, Jessica K. points out that taking a test is like any other task. Some people are better at sitting still, or are more motivated, or less intimidated to take a 2-3 hour exam. Furthermore, the “independent evidence” is iffy. While researchers have found that IQ score are more accurate in predicting an individual’s future job performance than references or an interview, correlations are still only .15. This is not an overtly strong correlation! The correlation also breaks down further when the jobs are not high-powered or require college education. Finally, Stephanie brings up Gardner’s research. If multiple intelligences do in fact exist, I believe it is the responsibility of educators to strengthen all of these diverse skills.

This evidence calls into question the relevance of standardized intelligence testing. Specifically, it is important to understand that the correlates measured by IQ evaluations is not “intelligence” in its complete and literal form, but is rather a sample of several components of the complex set of criteria we refer to as intellect. Thus, while institutions will no doubt continue to use IQ tests (after all, the evidence linking college retention or salary in high-level jobs is relatively strong), educators must not rely solely on universal benchmark tests to direct learning in the classroom. Rather, it is important to understand the multifaceted nature of human intelligence and cater to individual differences.

~Alex Tuttle

Haverford '08

I'd also like to respond to something else Natsu mentioned in her post.  As far as being taught to only solve a problem in one way, I think that while it may be the case in introductory classes, I've found that upper level science classes have all very much encouraged me to think about problems in various ways.  For example, in my Quantum Chemistry class tonight, we went through at least three different proofs of most of our homework problems.  All of us in the class come from different mathematical backgrounds, so we all think about our assignments differently, and there's never been any mention of the "right way" to do a problem.  I agree that it would be ideal to have a greater focus on the problem solving process itself instead of simply getting the right answer, but it seems our educational system is set up in a way that forces students to think homogeneously before we're allowed to branch out and think for ourselves.

I also unfortunately could not attend class last week, but have certainly found a number of topics from the articles and previous posts quite interesting. First of all, I would like to focus on Gillian’s post. She brings up a fantastic point that definitely was thinking a lot about. For the most part, education in our country caters to a specific type of student. Therefore, students in under privileged areas not only often receive a lower quality of education, but may also be receiving a type of education not truly tailored to helping them learn and grow to fulfill their intellectual potential. (I realize I’m focusing on a specific type of education, that for intellection learning, rather than the broader sense of education that incorporates all types of learning at all ages). This educational disparity among socio-economic classes is undeniable and deserves much greater attention.

Also, I’m not exactly sure what we’re talking about when we say “neurodiversity.” People seem to be using it in many different ways, seeming to reference cultural diversity, diversity in thought process, and everything in between. Therefore, I think it’s difficult to discuss its relationship to the equally ambiguous “education.” I do think neurodiversity (whatever it means) in the classroom has value – much of education is learning how others think, whether its facts and figures or subjective opinions. This basically means that much of education, and I personally feel this applies to my own experiences, has focused on learning how to learn and think critically so that I can use this crucial skill in all aspects of life, current and future. In Eileen Haas’ article she states, “Of course, every kid needs to know certain things as a member of society, in preparation for life and for being part of our culture. But beyond that, the most important thing is teaching the brain to learn how to learn. That enables every kid, no matter what their interest is, no matter what their profession eventually becomes, or what hobbies they develop, to make the most of it.” This ties in the point discussed in many of the previous posts addressing the idea of occupation that do not require our conventional idea of higher education. I think filtering out into jobs that fit one’s personality, lifestyle, and interest is perfectly natural and people should be supported in finding their niche. However, I think some jobs do not encourage continual education and neurological stimulation (which in turn foster the ability to critically think). Therefore, finding ways to help support a community in which all people have ways to continually learn and grow seems crucial in generating this “neurodiversity” we so desire.

Finally, I found the Gaab article to present some interesting ideas, particularly the potential for fMRI to change the way in which we can learn. How will this and other technological advances change our thoughts about education in the future? How much should we value the findings in this type of translational research? Should this expensive research be supported, or should the money be allocated directly to improve our current educational system?

As I was thinking back to our discussion last week on education as it is involved with emotion, I found it particularly interesting with respect to the readings that children and adults who suffer from emotional disorders were said to be impaired academically. However, numerous times in the articles it was mentioned that as far as test scores went, these students were comparable to other students in the class, and did not seem to suffer from a lack of intelligence or test taking ability. This teased out an important distinction for me that, although an obvious one, was not something I had really contamplated before. While beginning the readings, it did not seem obvious to me why a concept of morality or emotionality was so intrinsically connected to academic performance. Surely math skills are not linked to a concept of right and wrong. However, as I thought about the issue longer and in our discussion in class, it became clear that emotionality, while perhaps not intrinsic in the accumulation of skill, is rather completely connected to the application of those skills. One may not need a sense of emotion to learn theorems, but it is much more likely that emotion could be used in the application of those skills. However, this still does not explain the average test scores of students with emotional problems.

Perhaps it is not ability itself which is being altered by a lack of emotion, but rather the motivation. As was discussed in class, people have a multitude of reasons to acquire and perform academic skills well, from pleasing parents to getting in to a good college, all of which seem tied to some emotional base. It seems that skills which are acquired passively, or maybe even intelligence, requires little motivation, and therefor even people who have little emotional motivation to perform well may do so on tests of these types of abilities. However, when it comes to real world application and decision making skills, these students are sorely lacking.

Although, after thinking this through, this concept seemed obvious, it points to a crucial problem in our assessment of students and in our education system. I think most would agree that the basic idea of education is to increase a student's ability to think through problems and make choices of all kinds, mathematic as well as ethical. However, how is it that when testing students who perform poorly on rational decision making skills, they still perform at an average level. Perhaps our education system, by putting emphasis on acquiring and "spitting back" equations, facts and figures, is really testing the wrong thing, and that instead we should be modifying our assessments and teaching styles to encompass a more broad, theoretical, decision making focus. This is not to say that the basic fundamentals of every discipline are not important, but rather that we should be using these fundamentals in more application-based ways from an early age, rather than emphasizing the "cramming" that seems to dominate middle and high school education today.

Jessica and Rebecca discussed something somewhere up there ^ that I'd like to sort of bring back into the conversation because I feel like we, as students at an institution of higher education, should consider. Jessica asked, "What's wrong with allowing students to filter themselves out?" The problem, as I see it, is that it's not the students who are filtering themselves out -- it's that our educational system caters to a very specific sector of the population (usually white students from privileged backgrounds with educated parents). So when a student drops out of high school in favor of pursuing a job that requires less formal education, there's more at work there than the student's choice. There's a good chance this student's parents aren't educated, and that the student doesn't come from a privileged background; there are a lot of circumstances other than what a student is interested in that can land them in a job that doesnt require a high level of formal education. Basically my point is that our education system currently favors a certain type of student, so I feel like it can't support neurodiversity (or, diversity in mental functions/skills) until that changes.

Also, I just want to clarify that I don't think we as a group view those occupations that require less formal education as "lower" or "less good" or inferior in any way (at least, I don't). I recognize that people working in these occupations require an entirely different set of skills in order to succeed, and that their success is defined in an entirely different way from what we fourth-year college students are used to. This could get us into a really interesting discussion on intelligence, and different types of intelligence, etc., but as far as education goes, I think higher levels of formal education are generally preferred/looked upon more favorably just because they are less limiting/open up a wider range of careers. (And actually, is this even true? I'm starting to doubt it, after having several discussions with seniors in various humanities fields who have no idea what they're doing after they graduate, or what career goals they have in mind.)

Reading over the last couple of comments prompted me to start thinking about what I really believe the purpose of education to be.  I certainly agree that higher education does not have to be a goal or priority for everyone, and I don’t see anything wrong with teaching kids how to take tests.  However, I don’t think that knowing how to take standardized tests should be the primary skill that kids coming out of elementary school possess.  The overall reason that we go to school is to learn, and it seems to me that the general goal of a classroom should be to make sure that the students are learning and retaining as many skills/as much information as is possible.

I went to a Montessori school for kindergarten and the first couple years of elementary school.  Like Rebecca said, I remember the focus of the classroom being primarily on everyone figuring out in their own way how to solve problems creatively.  For some exercises teachers actually put us in groups of kids who all tended to do things differently, and let us all explain to each other different ways to do the tasks.  In contrast, in my later years of elementary school I remember math problems being counted as wrong if students didn’t write them out exactly how the teacher wanted, even if the ideas and answers were correct.  I talked to a relative recently who is currently teaching 4^th grade, and she said that it is understood at her school that kids coming from Montessori programs are generally (academically speaking) around two years ahead of the other students in the class.  Clearly something about the way the Montessori classrooms are run helps the students to learn skills and retain information in a stronger, more efficient way than in traditional classrooms.  In class last week I brought up the example of the “jigsaw classroom”, where researchers found that getting the kids of different ethnicities to cooperate led to more cohesion and friendships in the classroom.  In order to promote this cooperation, they gave each student a part of the day’s lesson plan to be responsible for, which meant that they all had to listen to and learn from each other.  In addition to the social factors, the researchers also found that in this type of classroom the kids tended to have significantly greater recollection of what they had covered and learned in class.  If the goal of education is to allow students to learn the most in the most efficient way possible, it seems to me that there are changes that could be made to our current general education system that would bring us closer to this goal.  For example, it seems to be helpful to allow the students themselves to be responsible for teaching or explaining some part of the material.

One topic I'd hope we'd hit during this discussion on education and the brain was academic doping, but it seems our focus has gone elsewhere.

It seems to me that we've been engaging in a lot of feel good discussion about encouraging individuals and increasing neurodiversity. We want to honor each student's individual learning style, and we want to increase "neurodiversity" by introducing more variety into classroom. Okay. I can't quite put a finger on it, but something about the tone of this discussion annoys me.

We need to consider the goals of education. What is wrong, exactly, with teaching kids how to take tests? Test-taking is a skill, like writing a paper or reading a computer screen detailing engine function and knowing which wrench to use to resolve the issue. Instead of focusing on self-development and trying to push children towards the academic ivory tower, shouldn't education be about getting a set of esential life skills across to students? Is university education really essential for everyone? Does every automechanic need to be able to situate Sapphic poetry in an 18th century context or does every Latin professor need to know how to fill a red top and a purple top vaccutainer for a CBC SuperChem? Would it really improve the quality of their lives? Or are we just expressing a preference bias to our lifestyles in considering our choices and values superior?

What's wrong with allowing students to filter themselves out? During the K-12 years, we're dealing with human beings during the most tumultous times of their lives, childhood and adolescence. It's a rare breed who will sit and focus through those raging hormones, so why not let track programs fill with self-selected students willing to dedicate their time to pursuing higher education, while allowing other students to "aim lower" as it were? Would pushing students through material and skill sets they don't consider valuable increase neurodiversity? If so, at what cost? Why not let students who value their free time now serve as worker bees in the soceity? Is there anything wrong with being satisfied as a career assembly-line worker, janitor or M.D. PhD?

Lastly, at what level do we want this neurodiversity? The classroom? The school? The districit? The state? The field of work? Wouldn't a track system, with schools pushing various different focuses, actually increase neurodiversity in the population overall? How are we so sure we haven't already attained this proverbial "neuraldiversty"? How are we so sure that students aren't already developing their own approaches and re-wiring their own brains when given the same sets of materials and skills? How do we quantify this? Are there ways of thinking that may actually be detrimental to certain goals? Do you really want a physician to be contemplating the various schools of thought on heart health when your father is coding on the table? Do grocery cashiers really need special, tailored train to teach them how to stock a shelf or check out a patron?

I guess what I'm detecting in some of these discussions is a bias against "lower" occupations and educational goals within our group. Of course we want to think academia and the university are the best life paths to select, we selected them afterall. What's wrong with letting students drop-out and pursue their own learning? What's wrong with teaching Creationism, if not as a science then as an alternate way of thinking about things? What's wrong with letting girls forgo calculus in lieu of home-economics classes? Wouldn't these increase neural diversity? Not that I ascribe to any of the arguments proposed here (I personally align myself with Heinline with regard to specialization) but I feel like these questions hadn't yet been raised and are important to the discussion. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I wasn't able to make it to class last week because of the weather, but I would like to post some of my thoughts about the readings we had done for class and hopefully spark some conversation that way.

I find it interesting that all of our discussions seem to have the same general underlying issues, this idea of cultural and social codes, what is socially acceptable and how has our (and others') culture influenced how we make decisions (about race, education, psychopharmacology, etc etc). In the Immordino-Yang article, the authors stress the importance of emotions in learning, a relationship that is rarely spoken about from an academic standpoint. While we are biological creatures, it is our social world that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom and unifies us to one another. This culture, whatever it may be, influences our emotional responses and ethical decisions, "what is good or right within our cultural fram of reference" (7). Thus, emotions (by way of culture) are actually seen to have effects on how we learn, and later, how we live. This was pretty fascinating to me. I also liked the authors' idea of Emotional Thought because we often don't think of our emotions in terms of thought processes, especially rationality. As far as the education aspect of this article, the authors made it clear that there needs to be a change in how we teach kids because right now they are not using their full potential, however I wish they would have clarified how exactly the education system should change and what specific changes can be implemented to improve our schools. A general problem with our schooling system is an abundance of critics and a lack of actual ideas.

I personally found the Gaab article to be incredibly interesting, being a linguistics minor. It really amazed me that a program has been developed that can actually reverse the effects of dyslexia. I would have liked to learn more of the specifics of developmental effects on the effectiveness of the program; is there a certain stage of development after which the program doesn’t work? Is it possible that dyslexia can be permanently reversed? What other speech problems can be fixed with similar computer programming? This same program was used in the research talked about in the Haas article in terms of retraining the brain in adults. Since this is clearly NBS-related material, perhaps a discussion could be had of the implications of rewiring the brain (with regards to ethics, possible risks involved, etc). We had a long, intense discussion about genetic "enhancement" and alterations, how is this much different?

Professor Grobstein proposed some very interesting questions in our last seminar that I feel need to be addressed further:

- Does education currently enhance or diminish neurodiversity?

- Should education enhance or diminish neurodiversity?

- What practices do/ would contribute to either objective?

I never quite thought about how objective and narrow minded education has evolved into. I feel that as a child, in lower school (pre-school and kindergarten), teachers and academia focus on developing a child’s independence and creativity through a non-structured teaching environment. As a child it is important to develop mentally and emotionally by interacting with the environment with minimal academic structure. Why does academia feel the need to make teaching environments structured and even more narrow minded in high school and professional schools? Academia always rewards individual and independent thought, but does not promote this in classroom teaching methods. Education has diminished neurodiversity but embraces and praises those individuals who can break from the mold that academia has created. A lack of neurodiversity in education has inadvertently evolved from the need to keep the learning environment as efficient as possible. Independence of thought has been overcome by the need to be efficient in the classroom environment. I think education should be more focused on teaching people to develop independence of mind and thought, while simultaneously teaching important subject matter. Diversity of perspective can only come about if students are allowed and encouraged to explore their individuality and develop their own opinions and visions about the world. I think the key to increase neurodiversity in academia is to make more seminar like courses, in which discussions are prompted by important subject matter to the given academic department.