Welcome to my new writing page. I hope to share some valuable thoughts in the posts to come.
I recently attended a daylong neuroscience and education symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C with the head of my research lab, Dr. Jay Giedd. The symposium focused on how scientists and educators can apply the findings of their research to classroom and learning practices. How effective can we be at incorporating our scientific knowledge into our teaching methods?
Our lab at NIH focuses on brain development with a particular focus on childhood and adolescence. If our research takes us to the point where we can trace the various learning capacities of the brain at specific ages, should we not use that knowledge? During her panel talk, Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, emphasized how much learning we expect our students to accomplish at very young ages when they are not yet built to develop certain forms of higher-level thinking. We have the developmental science in front of us but we do not collaborate enough with educators. Education models can and should be malleable.
Finnish students don’t start school until the age of 7. Their country values playtime for kids, even after they have started primary education. Despite the starting kids in formal schooling at an older age, Finnish students have learned to read, write, and work with mathematical concepts by the end of their first school year. Finland has some of the highest math testing scores in the world because the country puts great value on allowing kids to grow.
In the United States, schools are beginning to experiment with giving students a later school start time at least once a week. These school systems have been very successful in boosting student productivity. I cannot say that we will get so far as to tailoring education to each individual student, but through studying different learning methods and their cognitive advantages, we can build a policy of developing curricula that address different learning styles.