LEARNING AND THE BRAIN

Learning and the Brain

Human Brain & Learning

It's important for educators to understand how the human brain works. The human brain is constantly learning, acquiring, and thirsting for knowledge. Why, then, do so many children "hate" school? Could it be that educators don't understand the brain?

When people learn, they are changing the structure and chemistry of their brains. To make connections, dendrites--threadlike fibers that extend from the neuron--reach out and grow together. If information can be processed in many different ways, the connections will be stronger. Teachers need to understand how the brain makes these connections in order to fully teach their students.

It's also been proven that attention is controlled by emotion. If students are embarrassed, sad, or angry, their attention will be somewhere besides the classroom. Teachers can make students pay attention by doing things like making a subject relevant, including mystery in their presentation, using public demonstration, challenging students, and making sure the learning environment is comfortable. It is not easy to find the balance between just enough stress to motivate and too much stress, which will overload a student, but that is what teachers have to do.

Martin (1988) estimated that each year, 1 million children experience sustained closed-head injuries. A plethora of research on TBI has escalated in an attempt to understand the full ramifications of cerebral insult. Depth and duration of consciousness and age at the time of injury are factors in neurodiagnostic and neuroprognostic decisions regarding recovery and ultimate outcomes of head injury (Martin, 1988). Age of onset, for example, can significantly alter the course of growth, and qualitative differences can be found not only between children and adults but between adolescent and preadolescent youth with TBI. (DiScala, Gans & Grant, 1991)Although technological advancements have provided new information about brain structure and function with adult samples, the absence of demonstrable changes is common on CT scans of children with head injury (Conners, 1973; Dalby & Obrzut, 1991) . However, the lack of such evidence should not lead to the assumption that there is no brain damage, because behavioral differences and cognitive changes in postmorbid functioning have been documented in cognitive and neuropsychological assessments of children with TBI. (Dennis & Barnes, 1990; DePaepe & Lange, 1994)From a less structural point of view, TBI has been found to be associated with a variety of neuropsychological outcomes in children, including poor performance on speeded tasks, memory impairment, decreased recall, and difficulties in processing novel or complex visual-spatial stimuli.

More recently, 5- to 16-year-old patients have been found to display inadequate perceptual processing , with specific impairment of visual memory. A strong relationship was found among declines in adaptive functioning, measures of intelligence, motor and language abilities, and the extent of severity of head injury (impaired consciousness for a 24-hour minimum). In addition, motor and expressive language functions were compromised the most from head injury in 4-month-old to 5-year-old children, regardless of the severity of injury. Other studies with children who have sustained TBI have also indicated such ...