K Birch's List: Neuroscience and education

"Can brain training really rewire your brain?"

"The study of the social brain offers a number of opportunities for enhancing classroom education. This review focuses on the mentalizing network, a set of brain regions that support thinking about the thoughts, feelings, and goals of others. This network typically competes with brain regions supporting analytical thought and memorization. Rather than treating classroom learning and socializing as antithetical to one another, this paper suggests our natural social tendencies can be leveraged to improve learning, by making the content and process of education more social. Recommendations are made for history and
English classes, as well as for STEM fields. Finally, it is proposed that educating adolescents about the social brain itself will reap educational rewards."

Our study has revealed that secondary school children experience MA. Importantly, girls showed higher levels of MA than boys and high levels of MA were related to poorer levels of mathematics performance. As well as potentially having a detrimental effect on 'online' mathematics performance, past research has shown that high levels of MA can have negative consequences for later
mathematics education. Therefore MA warrants attention in the mathematics classroom, particularly because there is evidence that MA develops during the primary school years. Furthermore, our study showed no gender difference in mathematics performance, despite girls reporting higher levels of MA. These results might suggest that girls may have had the potential to perform better than boys in mathematics however their performance may have been attenuated by their higher
levels of MA.

Explains why some of the more extreme claims about neuro-imaging need to be tempered. General level.

Research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology has revealed that people are more likely to learn and to remember if intrinsically motivated and emotionally engaged. In classroom settings, learning is promoted by 'learning cultures' in which all students are expected to learn successfully, are highly engaged and feel safe and supported in their learning. Conversely, negative emotions such as stress and fear of failure have been shown to impede learning and memory. In classroom settings, these emotions can be the result of 'performance cultures' in which learning is extrinsically motivated and students compete with each other for success.

brief summary of the difference between growth mindset and fixed mindset and the effect on attitudes to learning and, thereafter, to achievement.