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Current Issues in Educational Neuroscience: A workshop sponsored by the Bloomsbury and UCL Doctoral Training Centres

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Blog written by Annie Brookman. 

This post first appeared on Annie’s personal blog:
 
On Friday 20th November 2015, postgraduate students and early career researchers attended a workshop to hear about and discuss current issues in educational neuroscience. The day started with a keynote talk from Professor Daphne Bavelier from the University of Geneva. Daphne’s research has shown that video games can produce a wide range of improvements beyond just video game performance, for example in attentional control. This work has clear implications for possible educational training programmes. The first symposium of the day examined the potential for training executive functions from infancy to adolescence. Following a lunchtime poster session, the second symposium looked at environmental factors associated with learning and development. The final session was a panel discussion, where the panel summed up their thoughts on the day and took questions from attendees. This was a particularly fruitful part of the workshop, as the panel considered a number of important issues in the field.
 
Daphne Bavelier began the panel session by posing the question of how intervention resources should be divided between family and school. On the one hand, family interventions seem to be more effective, but on the other hand, school interventions are cheaper and can be done on a larger scale. Daphne espoused research that includes teachers from the outset, arguing that these are the best projects.
 
Jeremy Dudman Jones, an Assistant Headteacher, was able to use his experiences in school to give the perspective of teachers. Jeremy explained that teachers often look to neuroscience for silver bullets that don’t exist, or alternatively teachers may have no interest in finding out about relevant neuroscientific findings. This highlights the fine balance between presenting findings in a relevant and interesting way, but without hyperbole. Jeremy also discussed the importance of sharing scientific debates with teachers: informing teachers of the lack of consensus in new research areas may help to guard against myths infiltrating educational practice, as well as engaging teachers in the topic. Finally, Jeremy argued that it is crucial for research to get into teacher training programmes, which unfortunately does not happen at the moment.
 
Lia Commissar from the Wellcome Trust spoke about the six projects that were awarded funding last year from the Wellcome Trust and Education Endowment Foundation. Each of these projects focuses on improving educational attainment, particularly in terms of closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers. Lia mentioned a number of current activities within the Wellcome Trust that aim to provide free materials that are accessible for teachers. The online Learning Zone forum on I’m A Scientist: Get me out of here features questions asked by teachers and answered by scientists. This is an excellent start but the next iteration will be more of a two-way conversation. Lia hoped that the future of the field would lead to research questions informed by the classroom. Teachers are in the unique position of being able to try out something in the classroom, and suggesting it to scientists for rigorous investigation. Lia was keen to invite researchers from any allied field to get involved in the Educational Neuroscience dialogue.
 
Professor Emily Farran from the UCL Institute of Education and the Centre for Educational Neuroscience spoke about both the scientific and practical elements of intervention research. Intervention studies require active control groups to ensure that any observed effects are due to the specific intervention rather than simply focusing on something for twenty minutes a day. Emily also stressed the importance of investigating individual differences due to genetics and environment, and how these factors might influence the effectiveness of training. Finally, Emily urged scientists to go back to the schools where they carried out their research to share their findings and communicate with teachers.
 
The workshop proved to be a thorough investigation of the hot topics in Educational Neuroscience: the current areas of research and the key issues with conducting such work. The inclusion of non-researchers in the discussion was a useful reminder of the benefits of involving all stakeholders in the Educational Neuroscience community. Hopefully future conferences and discussions will follow in the footsteps of this workshop and invite scientists, teachers, funders, and even policy makers. It is clear that opening up this dialogue is the best way to work together to improve teaching and learning. 
 
 
Annie Brookman is a postgraduate student at Birkbeck, University of London, and a member of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience.
 
Links:
 
Centre for Educational Neuroscience:
 
Daphne Bavelier’s TED talk:
 
Learning Zone on I’m A Scientist: Get me out of here:
 
Wellcome Trust and EEF funded projects:
 
This post first appeared on Annie’s personal blog:

Adolescents and multi-tasking

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Blog written by Dr. Iroise Dumontheil and originally published here

Humans are social beings. We have evolved to function in groups of various size. Some researchers argue that the complexity of social relationships which require, for example, remembering who tends to be aggressive, who has been nice to us in the past, or who always shares her food, may have been an evolutionary pressure leading to the selection of humans with bigger brains, and in particular a bigger frontal cortex (see research by Robin Dunbar).

However, we do not always take into account the perspective or knowledge of a person we are interacting with. Boaz Keysar and laterIan Apperly developed an experimental psychology paradigm which allows us to investigate people’s tendency to take into account the perspective of another  person (referred to as the “director”) when they are following his instructions to move objects on a set of shelves. Some of the slots on the shelves have a back panel, which prevent the director, who is standing on the other side of the shelves, from seeing, and knowing, which objects are located in the slots. While all participants can correctly say, when queried, which object the director can or cannot see, adult participants, approximately 40% of the time, do not take into account the view of the director when following his instructions.

In a previous study, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (UCL), Ian Apperly (University of Birmingham) and I, demonstrated that adolescents made more errors than adults on the task, showing a greater bias towards their own perspective.  In contrast,  adolescents performed to the same level a task matched in terms of general demands but which required following a rule to move only certain objects, and did not have a social context.

The Royal Society Open Science journal is publishing today a further study on this topic, led by Kathryn Mills (now at the NIMH in Bethesda) while she was doing her PhD with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore at UCL. Here, we were interested in whether loading participants’ working memory, a mental workspace which enables us to maintain and manipulate information over a few seconds, would affect their ability to take another person’s perspective into account. In addition, we wanted to investigate whether adolescents and adults may differ on this task.

What would this correspond to in real life? Anna is seating in class trying to remember what the teacher said about tonight’s homework. At the same time her friend Sophie is talking to her about a common friend, Dana, who has a secret only Anna knows. In this situation, akin to multitasking,  Anna may forget the homework instruction or spill out Dana’s secret, because her working memory system has been overloaded.

Thirty-three female adolescents (11-17 years old) and 28 female adults (22-30 years old) took part in a variant of the Director task. Between each instruction given by the director, either one or three double-digits numbers were presented to the participants and they were asked to remember them.

Overall, adolescents were less accurate than adults on the number task and the Director task (combined, in a single “multitasking” measure) when they had to remember three numbers compared to one number. In addition, all participants were found to be slower to respond when the perspective of the director differed from their own and when their working memory was loaded with three numbers compared to one number, suggesting that multitasking may impact our social interactions.

Presentation of multitasking paradigm (published in Royal Society Open Science)

Presentation of multitasking paradigm (image published in Royal Society Open Science paper). For each trial, participants were first presented with either (a) one two-digit number (low load) or (b) three two-digit numbers (high load) for 3 s. Then participants were presented with the Director Task stimuli, which included a social (c) and non-social control condition (d). In this example, participants hear the instruction: ‘Move the large ball up’ in either a male or a female voice. If the voice is female, the correct object to move is the basketball, because in the DP condition the female director is standing in front of the shelves and can see all the objects, and in the DA condition, the absence of a red X on the grey box below the ‘F’ indicate that all objects can be moved by the participant. If the voice is male, the correct object to move is the football, because in the DP condition the male director is standing behind the shelves and therefore cannot see the larger basketball in the covered slot, and in the DA condition the red X over the grey box below the ‘M’ indicates that no objects in front of a grey background can be moved. After selecting an object in the Director Task, participants were presented with a display of two numbers, one of which corresponding to the only number (e) or one of the three numbers (f), shown to them at the beginning of the trial. Participants were instructed to click on the number they remembered being shown at the beginning of the trial.

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