metacognition

Neuroeducation: Top findings to update education and learning

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neuroeducationNeu­roe­d­u­ca­tion: 25 Find­ings Over 25 Years (Inno­va­tion Excellence):

“To cel­e­brate the progress of this mon­u­men­tal dis­ci­pline, we have com­piled a list of the 25 most sig­nif­i­cant find­ings in neu­ro­science edu­ca­tion over the past 25 years..” [Read more…] about Neu­roe­d­u­ca­tion: Top find­ings to update edu­ca­tion and learning

Update: Harness Neuroplasticity with Enthusiasm, Exercise & Personalized Medicine

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Time for Sharp­Brains’ Feb­ru­ary 2012 eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing in this occa­sion mul­ti­ple and com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tives on how to har­ness neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty: with enthu­si­asm, BOTH phys­i­cal AND cog­ni­tive exer­cise, and (once tools become bet­ter stan­dard­ized and wide­ly avail­able) brain-based per­son­al­ized medicine.

Fea­tured Per­spec­tives:

What’s New and Mean­ing­ful:

Sharp­Brains News:

Final­ly, let us men­tion that Brain Aware­ness Week is approach­ing (March 12–18th, 2012), and that you can now add com­ments to Sharp­Brains arti­cles via Face­book (see below). Look­ing for­ward to a great month of March!

Enhance Metacognition and Problem-Solving by Talking Out Loud to Yourself

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The MC at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michigan’s reunion din­ner encour­aged audi­ence mem­bers to reveal the most sig­nif­i­cant take-away from their under­grad­u­ate nurs­ing edu­ca­tion. The great­est ben­e­fit was quick­ly clear to me — prob­lem-solv­ing think­ing. Mem­o­ry pro­duced a mind video: a short, dark-haired, nurs­ing instruc­tor lec­tur­ing a small group of first year stu­dents in an emp­ty patient room. “Don’t mem­o­rize the steps of ster­ile tech­nique. Use a prob­lem-solv­ing think­ing process.” She described the sequen­tial, cycli­cal process: define the prob­lem, gath­er infor­ma­tion, devel­op a solu­tion strat­e­gy, allo­cate resources, mon­i­tor progress, and eval­u­ate the solu­tion. [Read more…] about Enhance Metacog­ni­tion and Prob­lem-Solv­ing by Talk­ing Out Loud to Yourself

Do Crossword Puzzles Help to Counteract the Aging Process? If so, Which Ones and How?

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Recent­ly there has been an ongo­ing debate as to whether attempt­ing cross­words reg­u­lar­ly can stave off cog­ni­tive decline, which is the hall­mark of healthy aging and demen­tia. As with many areas of psy­chol­o­gy the answer to this ques­tion may not be as clear-cut as one would hope. Before con­sid­er­ing the evi­dence for whether cross­word par­tic­i­pa­tion can reduce cog­ni­tive decline in lat­er life, it is nec­es­sary to con­sid­er the dif­fer­ent types of cross­words avail­able and under­stand whether one or anoth­er type may be more cog­ni­tive­ly stim­u­lat­ing than the oth­er. Gen­er­al­ly, when we think of cross­words two kinds spring to mind, either gen­er­al knowl­edge or cryp­tic crosswords.

A gen­er­al knowl­edge cross­word typ­i­cal­ly has clues which are sim­i­lar to answer­ing gen­er­al knowl­edge quizzes, but the solver has the ben­e­fit of know­ing how many let­ters make up the solution.

For exam­ple: “the cap­i­tal of Peru (4)”… [Read more…] about Do Cross­word Puz­zles Help to Coun­ter­act the Aging Process? If so, Which Ones and How?

10 Brain Tips To Teach and Learn — Ideas for New Year Resolutions

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My inter­est in the brain stems from want­i­ng to bet­ter under­stand both how to make school more palat­able for stu­dents, and pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment more mean­ing­ful for fac­ul­ty. To that end, I began my Neu­rons Fir­ing blog in April, 2007, have been doing a lot of read­ing, and been attend­ing work­shops and con­fer­ences, includ­ing Learn­ing & the Brain.

If you agree that our brains are designed for learn­ing, then as edu­ca­tors it is incum­bent upon us to be look­ing for ways to max­i­mize the learn­ing process for each of our stu­dents, as well as for our­selves. Some of what fol­lows is sim­ply com­mon sense, but I’ve learned that all of it has a sci­en­tif­ic basis in our brains. [Read more…] about 10 Brain Tips To Teach and Learn — Ideas for New Year Resolutions

Needed: funding for innovative research on slowing cognitive decline via cognitive training

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I was real­ly inter­est­ed in the recent cri­tique of the BBC brain train­ing exper­i­ment by Dr. Eliz­a­beth Zelin­s­ki. I think Owens et al (2010) was a crit­i­cal piece of research which was not con­duct­ed in the right way and was focus­ing on the wrong sam­ple pop­u­la­tion.  I total­ly agree with the com­ments by Dr. Zelin­s­ki regard­ing the poten­tial for sam­ple bias and the use of some ques­tion­able cog­ni­tive mea­sures. How­ev­er, I would like to take this cri­tique fur­ther and ques­tion whether the study was val­ue for mon­ey when there are oth­er stud­ies which can­not achieve fund­ing but would, in my opin­ion, show the criticism/scepticism of the use-it-or-lose-it theory.

I think there is not enough crit­i­cism about the age of the sam­ple pop­u­la­tion used in Owens et al. (2010). We have con­clu­sive cog­ni­tive and neu­ro­log­i­cal evi­dence that cognitive/neurological plas­tic­i­ty exists in young adults. There is also ade­quate evi­dence that neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty is evi­dent in old­er adults. The crit­i­cal point which I want to make about the sam­ple pop­u­la­tion in Owens et al. study is that it did not tar­get the cor­rect sam­ple pop­u­la­tion, that is, old­er adults who are at risk of cognitive/neuronal atro­phy. It does not mat­ter if younger adults improve on brain train­ing tasks, or if skills picked up by younger adults from brain train­ing are not trans­ferred to oth­er cog­ni­tive domains, sim­ply because younger adults are good at these skills/cognitive func­tions. There­fore there is a pos­si­bil­i­ty that ceil­ing or scal­ing effects mask the true find­ings in Owens et al. (2010), as indi­cat­ed by Zelinski.

The recruit­ment of the sam­ple pop­u­la­tion is also very con­cern­ing and I do not feel that their con­trol group was appro­pri­ate. [Read more…] about Need­ed: fund­ing for inno­v­a­tive research on slow­ing cog­ni­tive decline via cog­ni­tive training