[I found this little mini-essay lying around. It's thematic with some of the older posts I had stuck here, so I thought I'd save it here too. Plus it's vaguely related to some of my current thinking about skill learning in cognitive training.]
A link took me to this post on a college teacher who's fed up with teaching and going to quit. I think it actually reflects a fairly common "teaching mid-life crisis" that hits a lot of professors in their 40's. But I jotted down some of my thoughts following his rant.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/31/smith
My sense is that JS's core problem is that he's become too entrenched in the minutia of teaching -- grading students for following the rules, turning things in on time, following the social norms he tries to lay out in class.
As a teacher, I think you need to periodically re-ask yourself, "what should the students be learning in class?"
Lately, I've become quite curious about the increasing amount of high-quality information you can get through Wikipedia or Google on the internet. If you can look up any fact nearly instantaneously via your phone, what facts do you need to memorize in college? Maybe just things that gain value by being recalled faster than you can type the search word into Google (things like jargon in the field you hope to work in -- you can't really have a conversation when you have to look up a lot of vocabulary terms).
So what else do students learn in college? Skills is one thing. How to think critically, evaluate evidence, come up with alternate hypothesis, creative solutions. Also how to communicate and present ideas convincingly. I don't think you can look up skills on Google.
I also think students also learn a bit more about the world, who they are and how they're going to live their lives afterwards. And I think the social networking probably has a bigger practical impact on everything that happens afterwards in life than anything (or everything) they actually learn from classes. I'm not sure I can affect social-networking much in typical classes, but it awareness of it's value makes my less critical of the consequences of socializing (e.g., if a student produces a lame assignment because socializing interfered with effort, it's not entirely clear to me that they have always made a bad decision).
So I try to teach skills and a few facts and I try to be reasonably entertaining. I have another pet idea that at a basic level, information = entertainment. I think if you're really learning something, it's going to generally be entertaining (somehow the 'entertainment' element arises from integrating acquired knowledge into existing knowledge -- I think). The students are paying a lot to be here and even though a lot of what they're paying for is the environment around the classes (self-discovery, social networking), it seems like making the classes enjoyable makes it more fun for all of us.
I don't really care about the entitled attitudes that lead them to negotiate constantly for higher grades. I never give in, but only to avoid penalizing the students who don't argue. Although, you could probably make a case that arguing on your own behalf is one of the more important skills to learn in college. I do echo JS's "I don't give grades, you earn them" idea. I point out their goal is to learn and I try to assess the quality of their learning via the exams & papers. If the assessment is fair, the assessment is fair. In the end, though, I don't really care that much about grades. They are mostly an effort indicator -- if you are willing to work hard, you can have your A. And if they all work hard, I think that's ok.
I suppose if there are students who are intellectually incapable of mastering the material even when they work hard, I'm supposed to mark them as such with lower grades to warn off professional schools and employers. It appears to correlate with effort most of the time, though.
OTOH, I don't teach as much as JS probably does. And I happen to teach only small classes (10-30). Teaching skills in a class of 300 is probably hard.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Mental weightlifting
"Of course it works. Didn't you ever do pushups before heading out to the beach?" I was listening to a well-known cognitive neuroscientist and fMRI guru explaining the close relationship between neuronal activity and blood flow that is the basic of functional neuroimaging of the brain. He wasn't talking to me, I was helping to explain the technique but I didn't get his example right away, so I had to inquire, "um, what?" He explained that pushups caused more blood to flow to the muscles of your arms, beefing them up and enhancing one's physique in anticipation of attracting hotties on the beach.
"Oh, well ok, then." Unlike this particular quite famous cognitive neuroscientist, I don't think my physique was ever within any reasonable number of pushups from attracting any positive attention at the beach. It's still a memorable example, though, and it certainly works in brain imaging: neurons doing "pushups" (e.g., firing electrical potentials) draw additional blood to active areas and blood flow changes can be picked up in MRI scanners to track changes in neural activity.
But how far can we push the analogy? Can we build up and strengthen our neural functions by targeted programs of mental exercise? Practically, of course the answer is "yes." If we study chess, mathematics, music, or physical skills like sports we get better at them. That means we're learning and learning means there are physical changes in our brains reflecting this. But can we bulk up mentally?
If you accepted the idea that we don't grow new neurons as adults, you'd be inclined to say "no." You might even be tempted to make a disparaging remark about the thoroughly discredited 19th-century study of phrenology. Phrenology is a famous example of pseudo-science based on trying to assess mental abilities by measuring bumps on your head. The shred of scientific idea behind it was that your relatively more effective mental functions were bigger and this would show up as larger bulges in your skull. That turns out to be as silly as it sounds, but there's an important idea hiding in it, namely that cognitive functions in the brain are physically localized. That turns out to be true in many cases and was not well appreciated until much later.
It also turns out that we do grow new neurons in the brain. Rusty Gage and colleagues and subsequently many other neuroscientists have studied adult neurogenesis and found there is some addition of new neurons in the adult brain. And even better, it can be enhanced by rich environments with lots of mental stimulation. Most of that basic neuroscience is examined in animals, but Eleanor Maguire has reported some intriguing results about changes in the size of specific brain structures in London cabbies. That sounds odd, but London is a particularly difficult city to navigate within and Dr. Maguire has observed that cabbies with many years of experience appear to have relative increases in the size of a brain region associated with spatial memory. Don't chalk this one up as a vindication for phrenology, though, the region of the brain increasing in size is essentially in the part of the cortex furthest from the skull. You need an MRI to see it, not just looking for bumps on the skull.
There have been other reports of systematic differences in the size of specific brain regions like auditory cortex for musicians. Those results quickly lead one back to a nature/nuture style debate. Did the brain differences occur based largely on genes and lead those people to become musicians? Or did the differences in size occur due to extensive music practice?
An intriguing result along these lines was recently reported by Erickson and colleagues about learning rates in videogame play. Larger volume in the dorsal part of the striatum (a central and subcortical brain region) predicted faster learning of Space Fortress, a fairly simple video game. The nature/nurture question is intriguing here, too. Were the fast learners genetically advantaged by a larger part of the brain involved in learning this game? Or had they developed that part of the brain as a muscle by extensive prior experience with games?
Either account is very interesting (and they aren't mutually exclusive), but the brain-as-muscle possibility is particularly compelling. If we can strengthen the brain as a muscle, we have even more reason to believe in the "use it or lose it" hypothesis of mental activity being effective to hold off cognitive decline associated with aging. There's a decent accumulation of evidence that mentally active people age well, but it's also the case that aging well lets you stay mentally active.
Intervention studies have been fairly promising. A huge, multi-center study of more than 2k older adults found that providing just 10 hours of training in memory, attention or decision making produced gains and the gains lasted 5 years. On the downside, training in one area didn't help the other two abilities. Nor was there any evidence of slower overall decline, so "using it" may not generally prevent you from still "losing it." It might give you more to lose, so to speak, so you function better for longer.
So those "brain training" sites on the internet that offer to provide some mental weightlifting might actually be helpful. And you might not just have to work out like in a gym, another recent report by Chandramallika Basak (working with Arthur Kramer of Univ Illinois, who was also a contributor to the Erickson report above) found that "training" by playing Rise of Nations for 20 hours led to improvements in "executive control functions" like decision making, working memory and task switching in a group of older participants. Notably, those cognitive functions tend to be at least partly supported by the same region that was larger in the better Space Fortress learners.
So maybe you can grow your brain by mental weightlifting. And maybe you can even do mental weightlifting with video games. That'd be cool.
[Self-editing note: this essay doesn't have the cites or links to the background research, although they are all pretty easy to find on google scholar. Nor is it really written in a tight, accessible style you'd like to see in a media-oriented article on science. It seems natural to write in a semi-formal rambling style, but I wonder if it's useful.]
"Oh, well ok, then." Unlike this particular quite famous cognitive neuroscientist, I don't think my physique was ever within any reasonable number of pushups from attracting any positive attention at the beach. It's still a memorable example, though, and it certainly works in brain imaging: neurons doing "pushups" (e.g., firing electrical potentials) draw additional blood to active areas and blood flow changes can be picked up in MRI scanners to track changes in neural activity.
But how far can we push the analogy? Can we build up and strengthen our neural functions by targeted programs of mental exercise? Practically, of course the answer is "yes." If we study chess, mathematics, music, or physical skills like sports we get better at them. That means we're learning and learning means there are physical changes in our brains reflecting this. But can we bulk up mentally?
If you accepted the idea that we don't grow new neurons as adults, you'd be inclined to say "no." You might even be tempted to make a disparaging remark about the thoroughly discredited 19th-century study of phrenology. Phrenology is a famous example of pseudo-science based on trying to assess mental abilities by measuring bumps on your head. The shred of scientific idea behind it was that your relatively more effective mental functions were bigger and this would show up as larger bulges in your skull. That turns out to be as silly as it sounds, but there's an important idea hiding in it, namely that cognitive functions in the brain are physically localized. That turns out to be true in many cases and was not well appreciated until much later.
It also turns out that we do grow new neurons in the brain. Rusty Gage and colleagues and subsequently many other neuroscientists have studied adult neurogenesis and found there is some addition of new neurons in the adult brain. And even better, it can be enhanced by rich environments with lots of mental stimulation. Most of that basic neuroscience is examined in animals, but Eleanor Maguire has reported some intriguing results about changes in the size of specific brain structures in London cabbies. That sounds odd, but London is a particularly difficult city to navigate within and Dr. Maguire has observed that cabbies with many years of experience appear to have relative increases in the size of a brain region associated with spatial memory. Don't chalk this one up as a vindication for phrenology, though, the region of the brain increasing in size is essentially in the part of the cortex furthest from the skull. You need an MRI to see it, not just looking for bumps on the skull.
There have been other reports of systematic differences in the size of specific brain regions like auditory cortex for musicians. Those results quickly lead one back to a nature/nuture style debate. Did the brain differences occur based largely on genes and lead those people to become musicians? Or did the differences in size occur due to extensive music practice?
An intriguing result along these lines was recently reported by Erickson and colleagues about learning rates in videogame play. Larger volume in the dorsal part of the striatum (a central and subcortical brain region) predicted faster learning of Space Fortress, a fairly simple video game. The nature/nurture question is intriguing here, too. Were the fast learners genetically advantaged by a larger part of the brain involved in learning this game? Or had they developed that part of the brain as a muscle by extensive prior experience with games?
Either account is very interesting (and they aren't mutually exclusive), but the brain-as-muscle possibility is particularly compelling. If we can strengthen the brain as a muscle, we have even more reason to believe in the "use it or lose it" hypothesis of mental activity being effective to hold off cognitive decline associated with aging. There's a decent accumulation of evidence that mentally active people age well, but it's also the case that aging well lets you stay mentally active.
Intervention studies have been fairly promising. A huge, multi-center study of more than 2k older adults found that providing just 10 hours of training in memory, attention or decision making produced gains and the gains lasted 5 years. On the downside, training in one area didn't help the other two abilities. Nor was there any evidence of slower overall decline, so "using it" may not generally prevent you from still "losing it." It might give you more to lose, so to speak, so you function better for longer.
So those "brain training" sites on the internet that offer to provide some mental weightlifting might actually be helpful. And you might not just have to work out like in a gym, another recent report by Chandramallika Basak (working with Arthur Kramer of Univ Illinois, who was also a contributor to the Erickson report above) found that "training" by playing Rise of Nations for 20 hours led to improvements in "executive control functions" like decision making, working memory and task switching in a group of older participants. Notably, those cognitive functions tend to be at least partly supported by the same region that was larger in the better Space Fortress learners.
So maybe you can grow your brain by mental weightlifting. And maybe you can even do mental weightlifting with video games. That'd be cool.
[Self-editing note: this essay doesn't have the cites or links to the background research, although they are all pretty easy to find on google scholar. Nor is it really written in a tight, accessible style you'd like to see in a media-oriented article on science. It seems natural to write in a semi-formal rambling style, but I wonder if it's useful.]
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