Attention and consciousness

“What do mobile phones, loud radios and DVD players in cars, as well as high traffic, passengers, and other modern elements mean for driver attention to actual driving? If it is available to you, try going into a room that has a radio, TV, and any other distraction you can find. Now try to do your multiplication tables through 12. How much cognitive load can a driver handle while remaining effective at his/her task? Now, think about this in terms of the noise of an educational environment? How much noise is useful during learning? How much interferes with attention and consciousness. How should this impact the design of a learning environment? How much should it?”

Drivers who distract themselves with cell phones and dvd players might begin to develop an ability to process more audio and visual stimulation at a time, but there are other ways to develop that ability which do not involve the risk of rapid deceleration trauma. Auto insurance companies, when settling claims, will ask drivers about distractions they might have had at the time. There is no educational equivalent to auto insurance companies to try to determine what causes poor academic performance, and who should be penalized. At the moment, drivers (neighbor’s kid and his friends) are distracting me as I write this. They work to make their cars as loud as possible, which makes it harder to write this post. They also like to speed in what is otherwise a quiet residential neighborhood and they make me anxious for cats, dogs and kids in the neighborhood.

I find that it while it is difficult for me to do my multiplication tables while listening to a podcast and the radio, I don’t think that this would be difficult for everyone. Some educators claim that students can track more stimuli/media at a time than used to be the case. On the other hand, it may be more difficult for a student to stay focused on one task or signal if they become bored, even in the absence of distractions. Students with ADHD are easily distracted and can seem inattentive to directions and details.

Some noise in an environment may be healthy, to develop cognitive vigilance, selective attention, and the ability to search and filter information. These are skills that can be developed with practice. It is probably not necessary to install noise in an educational system because it will occur naturally in the process of putting a group of students together. My college library, when I was an undergraduate had a rather special set up . Orange and blue striped carpeting, purple couches, tree houses, were all rumored to have been part of some scheme to aid studying. They changed it during my senior year, perhaps because 19 years of bright colors probably did not correlate with improved graduation rates, but I don’t know. I found the library a rather distracting place to study when I was there. When the color scheme was updated, I remember that I started to sit nearer the front door to watch who came and went. This did not help me study, because I was able to chat with everyone I knew as they passed. It was as if I was trying to inject noise back into my personal educational system after the university had remodeled the library to reduce noise.

Many academic libraries have designated “quiet areas” in order to allow individuals to work quietly, while accommodating increasingly common group study/projects in other areas. This design is ideal, because it allows tiered levels of noise depending on the needs of the students.

Impact of human intelligence measurement on education.

SAT and GRE exams are basic application components for admission into many academic institutions. The College Board states that the SAT measures critical thinking skills that are needed for academic success in college. In the New York Times article, SAT Essay Test Rewards Length and Ignores Errors , Dr. Perelman of MIT asserts that teaching to the SAT actually encourages bad writing. He plotted essay length vs essay score on a graph and demonstrated that there is a very strong correlation between the two, meaning that students who simply write more are likely to perform better on the SAT writing section. He found that if you scored based on length without even reading the essay, you would match the College Board essay score 90% of the time. He also found that the College Board gives scorers the following guidance: “Writers may make errors in facts or information that do not affect the quality of their essays.” Fact checking, research, and concise writing are all skills needed for academic success

Multiple choice tests have no relation to practical problem solving skills. Life does not generally hand you an A,B,C,D,E to choose from… especially not in algebra, statistics, geometry, reading comprehension, grammar or vocabulary. Multiple choice is something you face with a vending machine, or when deciding to see a movie. Furthermore, 25 minute essays have no relation to the process of craft, research, and revision that are actually necessary in composing a persuasive essay.

Some measures that are sometimes used by educators for scoring students, such as a bell curve, unfairly penalize or rewards students when a high percentage perform either above average or below average. If an entire class fails a test, and the instructor plots the class along a bell curve, the final grades do not demonstrate that none of the students were prepared for the exam. If the entire class gets a 100% on a test, a bell curve does not demonstrate the hard work that the students and teacher put in to achieve such success, or alternatively, that the educator and the test did not sufficiently challenge the students.

Assessments that offer such skewed visions of “thinking skills” fool admissions counselors and students, placing them in institutions that might not be the best fit. The resources that schools use to prepare students for tests could be put to better use. The skills that the students learn to apply specifically to such standardized measures are not applicable elsewhere. Fortunately, some instructors, like my high school math teacher, are savvy to this, and teach skills that are only to be used as SAT strategies.

Memory’s impact on my (in)ability to draw a diagram of the brain.

“In a separate Blog Reflection, write about how you think memory impacts your ability to draw what you stared at for so long and which parts of the brain may be responsible.”

The thalamus relays what I see on the page to the cerebral cortex. The sensory information is processed and the hippocampus works to learn the patterns that I see on the page.

I have to conclude from my attempt to recreate the diagram of the brain (Sternberg. p. 42. fig. 2.6) that either I have a faulty hippocampus, or the original diagram is an ineffective tool for actually learning the anatomy and functions of the brain. Perhaps 5 minutes is not a sufficient space of time for learning something so complex. The hippocampus is my tool for forming new memories and supposedly helps me monitor the spatial relationships of the parts of the brain as I see them on the page. Sterberg’s diagram designates the parts of the brain in a cross section, diagramming the spatial relationships of the parts. Yet, after studying it for five minutes, there were parts that I could not recall either in name, function, or position.
The diagram, when I study it again in conjunction with the text, does not seem any more clear. There is nothing in the sketch to separate the pons from the midbrain, yet the pons is part of the hindbrain. Part of what prevented me from drawing an accurate sketch of the brain might have been the ambiguity of the original diagram.

brain function

What is the benefit to understanding how the brain functions when it comes to understanding how people learn? How do you think this knowledge can contribute to the way you shape your instruction and design your learning activities?

Understanding how the brain functions, and in some cases dysfunctions, is key to understanding when there is something wrong with a few students in the population.

It is also important to understand that different people have different strengths and weaknesses resulting in some ways from their anatomy.  An educator might try to design instruction that caters to peoples strengths some of the time, but also encourage them to develop their weaknesses.  Different people use different parts of their brain dominantly.  Instructional designers should keep this in mind…some students will be at a relative advantage or disadvantage based on cognitive style in a given learning environment, and cognitive style is partially a product of the brain’s structure.

Knowledge of brain structure and research methods can help educators understand student behavior during learning tasks.  If an educator believes that a certain behavior is characteristic of a certain neurological condition, the educator might refer a student to an expert to determine whether intervention is called for.

Sternberg. Chapter 1. continued…

With apologies to Freudian pop psychologists, inquiring about a user’s relationship with his mother is not likely to yield useful information for instructional design. Post modern scream therapy, on the other hand, may make users of a broken instructional system feel better for a short time. I have certainly screamed at WebCT over the last 4 years, yet I never detected an improvement in the design.

Research in cognitive psychology aims at discovering the ways in which people think: how they absorb, process, retain, and disseminate information, and how they use that information to make decisions. Understanding the principles of cognitive psychology benefits the designers of instructional systems. The findings from cognitive research can help designers issue products that benefit the user by taking advantage of his or her preferred learning style. Since an institution is likely to use only one instructional system (at a time [most of the time]), students with distinct learning styles from each other are likely to use the same system. Designers need to account for diverse learning styles, and give users the right to set preferences according to their own taste or need. More importantly, designers need to provide a product that does not inhibit a user with bugs that inhibit learning, or engender frustration.

Sternberg, Chapter 1…

…and my existing relationship to the concepts therein:
Structuralism, as understanding the elements of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into components, limits the imagination.  If I divide a flower into the components of color, form, size, I understand very little about the combined effects of these components, which lead a poet to call them the Earth’s laughter.  Radical behaviorism is just as silly for the same reason.  Gestalt, as explicated by Sternberg, makes more sense to me.

If we were to only combine observable behavior with associationism, we are left with bad statistical analysis, as pointed out by Steven Leavitt in his book Freakonomics.  “Oh look, people with lots of books at home have children that tend to do well in school.  Let’s give books away to everyone so they get smarter.”  Except that, as Leavitt pointed out, the people who own lots of books don’t necessarily read them.  There are other factors to consider, and the analyst/observer must consider the system as a whole rather than the components, which are mere symptoms.

Some members of my faculty insist that what Sternberg terms Pragmatism, leads to more funding for research.  If fewer people understand a field of research, and those few can not explain its significance to others, they are less likely to get funding for their research, especially if they can not demonstrate the social benefits.  As such, I have been encouraged to conduct research that I can explain to a generalist, and that has broad and perceivable positive contributions.  This idea has aided me in crafting research proposals.  If I have an idea that seems whimsical at first, I try to connect to some social need.  Often, my idea shifts in the process, but that develops into something I can be more passionate about.

That doesn’t make the Society for Improbable Research any less inspirational.