Brain rules
This book is very easy to read. The most interesting and useful bit I learn from the book is not the content itself, but the style of story telling. The author makes difficult ideas, concepts easy to understand. He uses a lot of what neuroscientists know about brain, learning and memory and apply it in his content delivery style. Essentially, he practices what he teaches. He makes usually bland scientific concepts come to life by connecting them to real-world applications. Everything seems so relevant and this is why the book is so engaging.
Cultural or genetic difference
Asians pay more attention to context and to the relationships between focal (foreground) objects and background in their description visual scenes, whereas Americans mentioned the focal items with greater frequency.
Effective teaching back up by neuroscience
Experts’ knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organised around core concept or big idea that guide their thinking about that domains. If you want people to be able to pay attention, Don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.
People don’t pay attention to boring things. our attention span can last only 10 minutes. That means lecture should be organised in segments and that each segment should last 10 minutes. Each segment should cover a single core concept always large always general and always explainable in one minute. The brain processes meaning before detail. The best way to communicate meaning is to use a lot of relevant real-world examples, real-world situations familiar to the learner, so peppering main learning points with meaningful experiences. Examples work because they take advantage of the brains natural preselection for pattern matching.
The brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concept naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. Give the general idea first before diving into details. Use the other nine minutes in the segment to provide a detailed description of that single general concept. Go to ensure that detail could be easily traced back to the general concept with minimal intellectual efforts. Regularly pause to explicitly explain the link. In addition to walking through the lecture plan at the beginning of the class, sprinkled liberal repetitions of where we are throughout the hour.
At the end of the segment provide hooks to engage students to pay attention further.
1 The hook has to trigger an emotion (fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity). Describing a threatening event, a reproductive event (tastefully, of course) or something triggering pattern matching. Example would be a case history of unusual pathology or patient reactions/stories.
2 The hook must be relevant.
3 The hook must go between segments. You could place in at the end of the 10 minutes, looking backwards, summarising the material, repeating some aspect of content. Or you could place it at the beginning of the module, looking forward, introducing new material anticipating some aspect of content.
Memory
People usually forget 90% of what their learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.
The more meaning something has, the more memorable it becomes. The trick for educators is to present information so compelling that the audience provides this meaning on their own, spontaneously engaging in the elaborate encoding. The more a learner focuses on the meaning of the information being presented, the more elaborately he or she will process the information. When you’re trying to memorise something make sure you understand exactly what that information means.
Thinking and talking a lot about information soon after we encounter it (elaborate rehearsal) helped committed to memory. Allowing time between repetitions is better than cramming.
Content and learning
Our evolutionary ancestors were already champions at experiencing a multi sensory environment so it makes sense that in a multi sensory environment our muscles react more quickly, our eyes react to visual stimuli more quickly and our threshold for detecting stimuli improves.
Our learning ability are increasingly optimised the more multisensory the situation is. Learning is less affective in a unisensory situation.
Cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer conducted a study dividing the room into three groups. One group gets information deliver via one sense, for example hearing, another the same information from another sense, say sight and the third group the same information delivered as a combination of the first two senses. The multisensory environments group always do better than the group in the unisensory environments.
Smell can evoke memory. It’s called the Proust effect. The French author of the profoundly moving book Remembrance of Things Past, talk freely 100 years ago about smells and their ability to elicit long lost memories.
Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on screen text.
If information is presented orally, people remember by 10%, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure it goes up to 65% if you had a picture. Visual is more accurate more detailed and longer lasting. Less text more picture. It takes less effort to comprehend.
We pay attention to moving image. Animation is good even if it’s simple 2-D animation more complex and life-like animation may actually distract students from the message you want to convey.
Effective content delivery in descending order
Animation and narration
Animation and on screen text
Picture and text and narration
Orally presented information
Picture and text
Picture
Text
From the look of it, as an academic we might be better off converting all of our lectures to an animation plus narration (think of a good documentary film i.e. moving image and compelling narration) as this would fit better with how people learn from neuroscience point of view. If it leads to more effective learning, we should be aiming for it.