Learning and Brain Conference Fall 2019 - Sunday Notes

Keynote: The Secret Life of the Teen Brain
Sarah-Jayne Blackmore PhD

(British accents always make people sound smarter and more credible.)  

(She looks like Jaime Hartley.)

• Studied schizophrenia for seven years before changing her field of study to the adolescent brain because symptoms of schizophrenia start between 18-26.  
• As little as 20 years ago, we believed the brain stopped developing in childhood.
• Almost 75% of mental illnesses and disorders start in adolescence.  
• The onset of adolescence is well defined by hormonal changes in the body, but the end is a more social definition - when an individual establishes an independent life.
• Adolescence is the time when you figure out how you define yourself and the way you want the world to view you.  It’s why they become so self-focused during this time.
• It is when their brains are the most social.
• Societal expectations of adolescents vary wildly from culture to culture.
• One thing they have in common in all cultures is that “sensation seeking” and risk-taking peaks in the late teens. (The leading cause of death in people 10-24 years old is preventable accidents caused by risk-taking.)
• We can’t learn without taking some risks.
• The social component is strong.  They are much more likely to take risks when they are with their friends.  The risk of fatal car accidents increases exponentially with the number of passengers for drivers under 21.  The opposite is true for drivers over the age of 26.
• Young adolescents’ perception of risk is influenced more by the opinions of other teenagers.  For every other age group, their perception influenced more by the opinions of adults.
• For 10-14-year-old students (5th-9th grade), peer-led interventions are more effective than adult-led interventions.  (Study led by Pauck teal. PNAS 2015)
• Being excluded has an outsized impact on adolescents as compared to children and adults.  This impacts their decision making to avoid taking social risks by taking the real risks that their friends are taking.
• MRI studies have changed much of our understanding of how the brain works and develops.  Myelination happens into your 40s, not stopping at puberty as we once believed.
• There is a part of the brain (or four interacting parts) that activate when you think about what other people are thinking.  Even toddlers are able to understand other people’s minds and what they want to do.
• Grey matter volume decreases in adolescents, but it is not a mental decline.  It has to do with the development that increases efficiency is processing.
• Social deprivation has more damaging effects on behavior and brain development for adolescents than it does with children or adults.  They need social interaction to learn.  Time out is a terrible idea after the age of 9. 

Personal note:  Almost every study she cites was done by one her of Ph.D. or post-doc students.  She tells the sample size and summary of the methodology each time.  This is credibility.

Keynote Address: The Science of How We Learn 

John Gabrieli, PhD

(Studies the neural basis of memory, thought, and emotion.  I’m sorry the original speaker has the flu, but I am very interested in this topic, so I’m happy to hear him.  It’s a very technical speech.  It’s more about MRI research than practical application.)

• All babies born are participants in a large neurobiological study.  They are born with different genetics, environments, and brain structures.
• What happens in a child’s brain and mind (both cognitively and socio-emotionally) while learning? His studies were with 4-6 year-olds.
• Socio-economic status influences the thickness of the gray matter.  High cortical thickness of gray matter correlates with higher test scores.  Those who qualify for free/reduced lunch have a lower thickness of gray matter.  This has to do with nutrition as well as access to developmental materials and people you spend time with.
• More advantaged families tend to be the first to volunteer to participate in studies, so much of what we know is based on studies of high socio-economic students. We are now working harder to include those in less educationally supportive environments.
• Brain differences do NOT indicate fixed biological or cognitive differences.
• Early exposure to adult language (parents speaking to their children) correlates to higher IQ and higher academic success in school.  This is likely because hearing more words gives more advantages in language development.  Parents should talk to their children a lot when they are very young.  Back and forth talking (even when the child is babbling) increases development in the language and social parts of the brain in addition to increasing their vocabulary.
• Forward and backward speech was played for 4-6 year-olds in an F-MRI.  Kids who had had more conversational speech at home had more language areas activated by both kids of speech, no matter what their socio-economic status.  Kids of the same age who experience 1200 conversation turns per day have MUCH more activations than those who experienced 600 conversational turns, no matter what the socio-economic status.  This is because conversation grows white matter between the two parts of the brain that are most involved in language development.  
• They increased conversational turns in 4-6-year-olds and measured them 9 weeks apart.  In that short time, it increased their vocabulary.  Imagine if this were happening over months or years.  It also increased the activity in Broca’s area of the brain.
• It’s not just about the number of words.  It’s about the conversational turns.
• (Personal thought: It seems to me that the best way to have conversational turns is to ask a lot of open-ended questions.  That will ensure turns.)
• This is something ANYONE can do.

• Mindfulness:  Are more mindful students better learners?  The answer seems to be yes based on self-reported mindfulness surveys correlated with grades, test scores, attendance, and suspension rates.  It has about the same amount of impact as growth-mindset and grit.  
• (There are so many programs for mindfulness that it is hard to know which ones are good, so be careful.)
• The Amygdala (the part of the brain that determines what you fear) responds to fearful facial expressions with high activity in children who are at risk for depression (have at least one parent with a history of depression).
• Mindfulness training (Calmer Choice) and coding training (Scratch) were done every day for a class period fo 8 weeks.  Students filled out perceived stress scales before and after study.  The more stress they self-reported, the more response the amygdala had to fearful faces.  Mindfulness training resulted in less self-reported stress and made the amygdala less active in response to fearful faces.
• Helping kids to put the past and future in perspective and focus on the present moment will have an impact on their stress and their performance.

It seems like I didn't write much of his talk down.  It wasn't because he had less to say.  It was because he had so many pictures and brain scans that it would be harder to communicate as text.

Session 7 –  The Learning Brain, Lessons for Education - Sarah-Jayne Blackmore 

• An increase in awareness and a decrease in stigma is part of the reason for the increase in reporting of adolescent mental health issues, but it is also a reflection of a real problem.  We don’t know what the proportion is, but it involves both.
• The entire cortex changes in massive ways during adolescence.
• Gray matter decreases y about 1.5% each year (but not uniformly, back develops first, the frontal brain is last) between 10 and 25 and increases after 25 but not quite back to the level they had at age 10.
• Losing this grey matter happens at the same time that white matter increases (about 1% each year).  The loss of grey matter doesn’t mean loss of function.  It has to do with functional development.
• The prefrontal cortex is bigger in humans than other species.  It is also the latest to develop.  It involves judgment, short and long term planning, inhibitions of inappropriate actions, self-control and problem-solving.  It doesn’t become fully matured until the early to mid-twenties.  

My question:  Does asking kids to solve problems help develop the prefrontal cortex or are we unfairly asking them to do something they are neurologically unable to do?

• When you think, learn, or do anything, the axon grows in diameter and the myelin becomes thicker.  Both of those things make signals travel faster.  (This starts in the second trimester of pregnancy and continues through your late 30s.)  This process shows up in MRI scans as increases in white matter and decreases in grey matter.
• We also undergo synaptic pruning, a process in which energy and resources are conserved by taking away unassigned connections in the brain to reallocate the energy and resources to the connections that are actually used.  This is why the environment is so critical to brain development.
• A lot of these studies are done on animals because it requires depriving them of certain factors and studying the effect on the brain.  This would be unethical to do with humans.
• Using the Matrix Reasoning Task (non-verbal pattern games) shows that daily training for 20 days works better in older adolescents and adults.  This means learning reasoning improves with age.  We should not be accelerating kids in complex math classes.  The 14-15-year-old brain is not ready for it.
• Since there is no average person, it is important to look at individual differences.  
• ABCD study (NIH study on adolescent brain cognitive development)

Wrap Up Session – Putting it All Together - John T. Almarode

(I have no idea how these notes turned green, but I can't get them back to black.)

I actually got to talk to him before the session started.  

- We talked about Southern stuff.  

- He high fived me when I said I taught physics.  - He was even patient enough to take a picture with me and Talon.  

- He's the best.  I follow him on Twitter now.

Every technique must be adapted, depending on local context and timing.

1. We remember what we encode.

• Rote encoding (just knowledge)
• Elaborate encoding (explanations of meaning)
• Individuals need multiple ways of representing information
• Encourage students to FIND patterns, not repeat patterns.
• Emotional engagement (can be achieved with something as little as providing choice)

2. We remember what we retrieve,

• The place for a worksheet is retrieval practice.
• Spaced retrieval practice (Use professional judgment to decide when)
• Right when they are about to forget it is the best time to do retrieval practice.  A forgetting curve becomes a remembering curve if we space out retrieval practice.
• Make thinking visible:
• Ask students to observe and describe what they see.  
• Have them build examples.  
• Don’t let them just give an answer without a reason. 
• Have them make connections.  
• Promote asking questions.
• Note-taking should short and followed up with a question that requires them to retrieve from their notes.  Turn to a neighbor and make adjustments to your notes based on the answer to your question.

3. Learning takes time.

• Play $100000 Pyramid - Students have to describe what something is and get someone else to guess.
• Interleaving (distributed practice) is more effective than blocked practice, but it is also more uncomfortable.  This is a desirable difficulty.  The struggle is real and valuable, and helping them get through it is part of the instruction.  It causes them to discriminate between characteristics, which helps them understand it better and have it stick around a lot longer.

4. Give and receive feedback.

• None of this works without feedback.
• If a person slips and falls, you will help them up and then go around wherever they just walked.  You live every day on feedback.
• Where am I going?  Prompting is feedback for students.  “Remember, today we are doing . . .”
• How am I going?  Can you give me an example?  Can you show me how you . . .?”
• Where do I go next?  Give some guidance about what they can do to make it right and then bring it back to you.  Sometimes it means giving them the answer, but usually, it means pointing them in the direction where they can find the answer.