SharpBrains

Schools are beginning to offer an increasing number of courses in social and emotional intelligence, teaching students how to better understand their own emotions and the emotions of others.

It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it's a trend backed up by hard data. Today, new studies reveal that teaching kids to be emotionally and socially competent boosts their academic achievement. More precisely, when schools offer students programs in social and emotional learning, their achievement scores gain around 11 percentage points.

That's what I heard at a forum held last December by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). (Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of CASEL.) Roger Weissberg, the organization's director, gave a preview of a massive study run by researchers at Loyola University and the University of Illinois, which analyzed evaluations of more than 233,000 students across the country.

Social-emotional learning, they discovered, helps students Continue Reading »

My natural rhythms are in cycle with the school calendar. January 1st takes a back seat to my new year, which gets ushered in with the month of September when there is crispness in the air that gradually shakes off the slower, more relaxed pace of summer.Conveniently, my career in teaching meshes with my natural cyclical year. And as this year draws to a close, I am re-energized by the pace of summer, knowing that anything may pop in to my mind as I engage in activities not directly related to school. But before that happens, I’d like to reflect on this past year, in particular as it was my first year of blogging about the brain.

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 Continue Reading »

Cognitive training is showing a tremendous potential to expand working memory, a capacity once thought limited and untrainable.

If you have enough working memory to both be processing this information and developing your own thoughts, you may be thinking now, a) what exactly is Working Memory?, and b) why do we even care?. Well, Dr. Bill Klemm answers those questions, and more, below. Please enjoy one of the most insightful articles on the subject we have seen in a long while, which we are proud to bring to SharpBrains readers.

- Alvaro

How Well People Think Depends On Working Memory

- By  Dr. Bill Klemm

Imagine dialing a phone number by having to look up each digit one at a time in the phone book. Normally, you look up the number and remember all seven digits long enough to get it dialed. Even with one digit at a time, you would have to remember each digit long enough to get it dialed. What if your brain could not even do that! We call this kind of remembering, “working memory,” because that is what the brain works with. Working memory is critical to everyday living. 

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Last year, Jeffrey Gonce, a Psychology teacher at Red Land High School (West Shore School District, PA) asked his students to "complete a project describing a recent brain (or genetic) study that affects behavior." The students could opt to post their articles online, and Jeffrey was kind enough to send us a link to read the results. We enjoyed reading them all, and published in our blog this beautiful essay, titled "Tis better to give than receive", written by Alexandra, which  was subsequently included in a number of neuroscience an psychology blogs. Earlier this year we highlighted this piece on Musical training as mental exercise for cognitive performance, written by Megan.

This quarter, Jeffrey also sent us his students' essays, and we are going to recognize and publish this great essay by high school student Kristin H.

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Alzheimer's Disease

-- By Kristin H.

Alzheimer's is a disease which causes people, generally of an older age, to lose memory and forget how to accomplish simple tasks. Dementia is the disease which Alzheimer's is a part and about four million Americans were diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1999, a number which is expected to grow (Altman 8-9). Dementia is an unspecific brain disease commonly associated with memory loss and another serious brain dysfunction. Dementia is an incurable disease ("Dementia"). A new drug treatment that replaces the enzyme missing in an Alzheimer's brain may be able to cure Alzheimer's disease in it's late stages (Coghlan).

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Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

Thank you for stopping during recess for a quick study session. 35 educators have collaborated to present this Carnival of Education as a useful lesson plan for you and your education policy team on what our real concerns and suggestions are.

In case this is your first visit to our SharpBrains blog, let me first of all point out some useful resources to stay sane during the rest of the campaign: selected Brain Teasers, a list of 21 great Brain Books, over a dozen interviews with leading scientists on learning and brain-based topics, and more.

Without further ado, let's proceed to the issues raised. We hope they provide, at the very least, good mental stimulation for you and your advisors.

Education as a System