Two Studies Help Us Understand How Children Learn

[Guest guest]

Two Studies Help Us Understand How Children Learn by Dobson

With all the talk about school-related money and budget shortfalls and teachers

unions and education reform and school closings and teachers’ arrests, what’s

more important – and what’s never addressed – is helping people understand how

children learn. Given that all this talk and political maneuvering and dire

threats of unemployment really miss the mark of true education, these two

studies can help parents think about how children learn, and how well the

government schools they attend support true education.

How Children Learn from Mistakes – Or Not

“Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from

twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive

feedback (‘Well done!’), whereas negative feedback (‘Got it wrong this time’)

scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to

process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do

the same, but more efficiently.” So says the post titled “Learning From Mistakes

Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests” at Science Daily.

How Children Learn – It all has to do with how the brain functions differently

at the age of eight than 12, according to Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues

from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab who used fMRI research for their

discovery. Within the cerebral cortex are areas of the brain responsible for

cognitive control. Researchers observed these areas were strong activated in

eight and nine year-old brains with positive feedback. Conversely, the eight and

nine year-olds responded “disproportionately inaccurately to negative feedback.”

When and How Children Learn from Negative Feedback

“But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case.

Their ‘control centres’ in the brain are more strongly activated by negative

feedback and much less by positive feedback.”

Crone herself was surprised at the outcome: ‘We had expected that the brains of

eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of

twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well. Children learn the whole time,

so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach

children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?’ ’

Ticks and crosses

The researchers gave children of both age groups and adults aged 18 to 25 a

computer task while they lay in the MRI scanner. The task required them to

discover rules.

If they did this correctly, a tick appeared on the screen, otherwise a cross

appeared. MRI scans showed which parts of the brain were activated.

Learning in a different way

These surprising results set Crone thinking. ‘You start to think less in terms

of ‘good’ and ‘not so good’. Children of eight may well be able to learn

extremely efficiently, only they do it in a ‘different way.’”

She is able to place her fMRI results within the existing knowledge about child

development. ‘From the literature, it appears that young children respond better

to reward than to punishment.’ She can also imagine how this comes about: ‘The

information that you have not done something well is more complicated than the

information that you have done something well. Learning from mistakes is more

complex than carrying on in the same way as before. You have to ask yourself

what precisely went wrong and how it

was possible.’

Interesting, isn’t it? When government schooling began, it was envisioned by

Jefferson to last three years, and not begin until a child was much older

than today’s tender ages. As parents, we need to put this information into the

context of practice in schools. Tests and scores and being told “you got 10

wrong” or “you failed” are not helpful until children get older.

If you have a younger child in school, you can take advantage of this research

in your home and provide more positive feedback when it’s of greater help in the

learning process.

Is that difference between eight- and twelve-year-olds the result of experience,

or does it have to do with the way the brain develops? As yet, nobody has the

answer. ‘This kind of brain research has only been possible for the last ten

years or so,’ says Crone, ’and there are a lot more questions which have to be

answered. But it is probably a combination of the brain maturing and

experience.’

How Children Learn – By Sleeping

At Physorg.com, we find an article titled, “As We Sleep, Speedy Brain Waves

Boost Our Ability to Learn.”

“Scientists have long puzzled over the many hours we spend in light, dreamless

slumber. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests

we’re busy recharging our brain’s learning capacity during this traditionally

undervalued phase of sleep, which can take up half the night.”

UC Berkeley researchers have found compelling evidence that bursts of brain

waves known as “sleep spindles” may be networking between key regions of the

brain to clear a path to learning. These electrical impulses help to shift

fact-based memories from the brain’s hippocampus – which has limited storage

space – to the prefrontal cortex’s “hard drive,” thus freeing up the hippocampus

to take in fresh data. Spindles are fast pulses of electricity generated during

non-REM sleep, and they can occur up to 1,000 times a night.

“All these pieces of the puzzle tell a consistent and compelling story – that

sleep spindles predict learning refreshment,” said , associate

professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley and senior author of the

study to be published March 8 in the journal Current Biology.

Lights Out Is How Children Learn

If human beings sleep less than six hours, they are getting short-changed in the

ability-to-learn department. Some may think it strange, but many homeschooling

parents allow their children the benefit of sleeping without an alarm clock. In

other words, the kids sleep until they’re not tired anymore which, quite often,

is a lot later than a child who needs to wake, dress, and eat breakfast before

running off to catch an early morning bus for school. I’ve long theorized that

this “sleeping freedom” is a large part of how children learn best when

following natural rhythms.

As for broader societal ramifications, researchers said evidence that brain

waves during the latter part of the sleep period promote our capacity to store

fact-based memories raises the question of whether the early school day is

optimal for learning.

“These findings further highlight the importance of sleep in our educational

populations, where the need for learning is great, yet late bedtimes and early

school start times prevent adequate sleep amounts,”

Mander said.

While you may not be able to change your child’s bus and school schedule, it is

possible to encourage the practice of an ol’ fashioned “good night’s sleep” that

lasts as much longer than six hours as possible. This research confirms the idea

that even if a teenager has a test the next morning, it helps more to get a good

night’s sleep than it does to stay up late and cram. (This is not to confuse

doing well on a test with true learning – they are not synonymous.)

“Our findings demonstrate that sleep may selectively seek out and operate on our

memory systems to restore their critical functions,” said.

“This discovery indicates that we not only need sleep after learning to

consolidate what we’ve memorized, but that we also need it before learning, so

that we can recharge and soak up new information the next day.”