Video Games: A New Perspective on Learning Content and Skills

• July 22, 2010 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

Being in the business of e-learning, I am fascinated by video games. No, I’m not a big player myself, but they amaze me for what they can do in terms of teaching and learning. While their primary goal may be to entertain, the core of what they do is perform a continuous process of teaching, simulated practice and assessment, all while engaging learners in learning from worlds rich with content and experience.

As teachers, we’ve always looked to various types of non-interactive content to engage and instruct students. Prior to the 20th century, we depended upon print. In the 1970’s, I remember cassette tapes and film strips coming into the classroom. In the 1980’s, it was video cassettes. Now, we show DVD’s and online video.

Today our digital native students are looking for the kind of interactivity that they experience in their lives outside of school—and that includes the video games that they play. But what skills and experiences can students gain through interactive gaming environments?

• Learning to try. According to James Gee of Arizona State University, the essence of gaming is that, by its nature, it integrates learning with embedded assessment. With textbooks and lectures, a learner gains knowledge by reading and hearing about subjects. In simulated environments, learners experience situations and content first-hand. They attempt solutions, experience failures and learn from mistakes to proceed to higher levels. They are rewarded for pushing the envelope.
• Thinking about the big picture. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink discusses six different senses essential for success in our age, one of which is "symphonic thinking," or the ability to see the big picture of situations, manipulate multiple variables and add invention to solve problems. In today’s rich and detailed game environments, players must successfully learn to do exactly that to achieve the goals of the simulation.
• Collaborating and cooperating. With the introduction of online video games, successful achievement of objectives requires communication and collaboration amongst multiple players. In today’s world, these are clearly skills that one needs to achieve success.

While the so-called edutainment market is small, educators and entrepreneurs alike are in the process of bringing the true educational value of computer games into the classroom.

Is the shift going to be rocky? Absolutely. As an example, look at the debate around a "historical action" game called Six Days in Fallujah and the mainstream discussion that has taken place on NPR and in Newsweek. Will this genre of game become a new form of documentary? If contextualized appropriately by a teacher, can this breed of games represent a serious way for students to experience the civics, political science or world history first-hand? After considering that, check out Games for Change, an example of a new breed of online games for teaching and learning a wide variety of topics with significant human impact. This is a challenging and productive debate, one that will take the marriage between computer games and the instruction of content and skills to the next level.

Edutopia recommends many resources for further exploration of the value of computer games in education, including:

• Let the Games Begin offers a wonderful perspective on the educational value of games.
• Schools Use Gaming for Learning and Assessment (video) presents an overview of the benefits of computer gaming simulations.
• In Big Thinkers, Professor James Gee (mentioned above) discusses the opportunities and advantages that gaming provides for learning and assessment.

What role do you think video games should play in education?  Share your perspective on our Scientific Learning Facebook page!

Categories: Education Trends, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: assessments, decision making, digital natives, innovation, learning environment, learning through play, motivating students, novelty, play, social studies, technology in education

Announcing Our Spring Webinar Series--Register today!

• April 27, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

It’s almost here!  I’m happy to announce Scientific Learning’s Spring Webinar Series 2010 featuring five must-hear presentations by experienced, committed educators. 

Register for one or all five of the webinars and stimulate your own brain while you absorb ideas and techniques that you can use with your own students.

1) Building Brain Fitness for Struggling Students to Succeed

Presenter: Dr. Deborah Kolonay, Superintendent at Penn Trafford SD
Date & Time: Wednesday, May 12 at 10:00am Pacific

2) Teaching Fluency:  The Neglected Goal of the Reading Program

Presenter: Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.
Date & Time: Wednesday, May 19 at 11:00am Pacific

3) Moving Students to Proficiency

Presenters: Dr. Mark Keen & Cindy Keever at Westfield Washington SD
Date & Time: Wednesday, May, 25 at 10:30am Pacific

4) Autism:  Support and Interventions

Presenter: Ann Osterling
Date & Time: Thursday, May 27 at 10:00am Pacific

5) Autism:  What is the Latest Research?

Presenter: Ann Osterling
Date & Time: Tuesday, June 15 at 10:00am Pacific

For a fuller description of each session, please visit our webinars page.  And be sure to follow @scilearn on Twitter for updates as the webinar dates approach!

Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Fast ForWord®, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant™, Special Education

Tags: academic problems, academic success, autism, behavior, below grade level, child reading development, cognitive skills, fluency, high school learning, how children learn, Indiana, intervention, learning to read, literacy, Pennsylvania, phonics, reading intervention, struggling readers, technology in education, increased test scores, webinar

The Technological Lives of Today’s Students

• April 16, 2010 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

Today, students’ lives are steeped with technology in all its shapes and sizes and forms. They don’t stop to ask directions. They have iPhones and GPSs and they just keep going forward at full tilt. If we wish to understand our students so we can affect their lives and their futures, we—as parents, as educators, as mentors—must not only understand that mindset, but embrace it.

Think about how different the education experience is today from what it was in the 1960’s, 70’s and even a brief 20 years ago in the 80’s. Back then, learning materials were still delivered in print. Biology and chemistry labs were performed in labs or in the field. Students, side-by-side with educators, really got in and got their hands dirty.

Today’s students are likely to be reading their lessons online, performing those same experiments in simulated environments, and turning in their lab reports via a class website as opposed to writing out assignments, and looking their teacher in the eye as they hand them a written report on paper. While we might feel nostalgic for those kinds of interactions, we can—and must—take a different mindset. Essentially, this represents a new aspect of the challenge that every educator has faced: ours is to uncover ways of connecting with our students in ways that are meaningful to them. Technology has provided a new paradigm for the classroom, redefining how, when and where learning happens. Now, educators have a limitless library of tools to add depth to learning experiences. No doubt about it, technology presents challenges, but it has also added great variety to teaching and learning, making it more exciting, interactive and, yes, fun.

A number of insights can help us understand this world where our students reside:

• Our students experience their world through technology. This is one of those simple, undeniable facts that we can rail against or embrace. According to a new Kaiser Family Foundation study, the average 8 to 18 year-old spends more than seven and a half hours a day using smart phones, computers and other devices. Include texting and cell phones and the number jumps to nine and a half hours. (Levin)
• The use of technology and electronic media in K-12 education is on the rise. Every year, more wonderful, brave educators are adding more technological arrows to their classroom quivers. A research report that Grunwald Associates created for PBS indicates that almost three quarters of K-12 teachers use downloaded or streaming content from the Internet as an instructional tool. (Grunwald Associates) If you’re one of these educators, kudos to you for implementing ways to connect with your tech-savvy students!
• It has been said that our school systems are, in general, behind the rest of society. "Most students say they ‘step back in time’ when they enter the school building each morning." (Project Tomorrow) This is a hard fact to swallow, but we must accept it and deal with it, head on. If our task is to prepare students for a technology-driven, knowledge-based global economy, the mastery of technology they are getting outside of school must be just as important a part of their education as the content and skills they are learning in school.

Of course, access to technology is not a given; the economic health of the communities where our nation's students live and learn is not a constant, and we must challenge ourselves at all levels of society to ensure that every student gets a quality, relevant education. If we are to prepare our students for the world that awaits them, educators need to not only welcome technology, but we must approach the world using the high-tech eyes and speak the high-tech languages that our students use every day. As we do that and gain an increasingly deeper understanding of their technological lives, we will be able to more effectively connect them, educate them, and send them forward with the knowledge and skills that they will need to sail on to success.

Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, high school learning, how children learn, innovation, learning environment, learning through play, motivating students, technology in education

How Important is Memory in the Phonics Approach to Reading?

• April 6, 2010 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

All of us measure our intelligence, to some extent, by how well we remember things. When a young child enters school there is a tremendous premium on the ability to memorize. From learning the alphabet to memorizing math facts, success in school is measured by memory.

Parents intuitively understand this and encourage their children to demonstrate their mnemonic skills. Reciting a poem, repeating the alphabet, counting to 100, or listing other facts like state capitals, can be a badge of “knowledge” that parents will ask their children to perform to demonstrate their intellectual prowess. But, sadly, many children who are significantly behind in some aspects of development can recite and memorize.

It is interesting, that from a neuroscience perspective, memorization is not really a very advanced skill. Memorization of facts, poems, or lists is accomplished by one of the most primitive and, from an evolutionary perspective, oldest parts of the brain, the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is a horseshoe-shaped area situated deep in the center of the brain in one of the oldest parts of the brain, the medial temporal lobe. All animals with a spinal cord have a hippocampus.

Most brain scientists regard the hippocampus as the part of the brain that allows us to learn anything new. And, in fact, when it is permanently damaged in humans, they become unable to learn anything new although they can recite without error information they learned before this part of the brain was damaged. So, it turns out that the hippocampus is like the “tape recorder” of our brain. It enables us to memorize new information but does not appear to be essential for retrieving information we learned years ago or information we know well.¹

A great deal of learning in the elementary grades involves the hippocampus. Memorization of spelling rules likes “i before e except after c,” math facts, reading of “sight” words that cannot be sounded out, and geographical facts, just to name a few, demand good memorization skills (hippocampus function.). Reading curriculum used before 1970, like those used when the goal was memorization of the “Dolch” sight words, also stressed memorization skills.²

Children who were not particularly good at memorization in the 1950’s or 1960’s were at a great disadvantage in the early grades. But the 1980’s ushered in a new approach to reading, phonics. The phonics approach to teaching reading went through a slight reversal in the 1980’s and early 1990’s with an academic approach called “total language” that stressed reading speed and ease through use of contextual information like pictures and story³ familiarity, but the phonics-based approaches are now quite strong in most American academic curricula as research pointed to its overall superiority for teaching young readers.

The phonics reading approach places far fewer demands on memorization because a child can read many words without having to memorize them. But phonics does require a kind of memory – working memory – that involves a much more advanced part of the brain and is different from memorization.

¹There is considerable debate about how important the hippocampus is in retrieval of different types of stored information. Squire, et al., discuss some of this debate in an excellent summary article: Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8, 872–883 (1 November 2007) | doi:10.1038/nrn2154

2 Anyone who was educated with “Dick and Jane” books was taught to memorize a list of Dolch sight words at each grade level.

3 The National Research Council now recommends that all reading curricula in U.S. schools stress phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, comprehension and vocabulary building.

Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, learning to read, literacy, memory, phonics, teacher impact

Brain Fitness Summit in Utah

• March 30, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

More than 60 people from Utah's state legislature, school districts, and education organizations congregated in Salt Lake City recently to learn about literacy, neuroscience in education, and brain fitness at the March Brain Fitness Summit presented by Scientific Learning.

Dr. Martha Burns gave a presentation about brain plasticity and how boosting the brain's processing efficiency accelerates quality learning.  Guest speakers gave insightful and often emotional presentations about their experiences and how they funded and implemented Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ software.

If you are a Superintendent, District/School Administrator, or Legislator and are interested in attending a Brain Fitness Summit, or if you wish to be placed on the mailing list to receive further information, email our Events team at brainevents@scilearn.com.

 

Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Funding, Grants, and Stimulus, Education Trends, Fast ForWord®, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant™

Tags: accelerated learning, early learning, elementary learning, elementary school learning, high school learning, how children learn, innovation, intervention, literacy, processing, processing rate, reading intervention, struggling readers, technology in education

Educational Video Games

• February 25, 2010 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

Video games in the classroom? Yes, indeed according to Jim Brazell who recently gave the keynote speech at the Florida Education Technology Conference. Video games can be effective learning and teaching tools, not just entertainment.

We all know that mammals learn best through play. Video games have learning embedded in playing. They are very motivating with their interesting graphics, sounds and strategies. They have built in reward systems where players move up a level after achieving certain results.

Students in a new class called "Videogames & Learning," offered at the University of Michigan, are exploring how video games can be used in the classroom and are looking at the connection between video game technology and social science research in education. Traditional educational video games have been used to teach hand-eye coordination and drill skills such as spelling or math. One student, a junior in the class, points out that video games that are typically used solely for entertainment can be used to teach many different skills and concepts from time management to forward thinking and planning.

The military is at the forefront of using technology for teaching, using simulators and virtual experiences to present situations that cannot be recreated live. In the classroom, video games can incorporate tremendous amounts of data giving the students an opportunity to make decisions and apply knowledge in very complex environments that integrate virtual, physical and imaginary realities. This level of complexity cannot be achieved with other classroom teaching tools. Brazell has used video games and gaming technology for career simulation with K-12 students.

He has noted a tremendous amount of interest by teachers in using gaming in the classroom. His recommendation? Start by determining what it is you want the students to learn. "Never start with the idea that you're going to use a video game (as a teaching tool). Decide what you want to teach and then find the right application."

Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: how adults learn, how children learn, innovation, learning through play, motivating students, technology in education

Building a Fit Brain: The Serious Work of Play

• February 12, 2010 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

In the world of education, especially in the early grades, we have great debates about the skills that we wish to impart to students. What do kids need to learn to do early on so they can be successful as they move forward? When it comes down to it, one of the biggies is self-control.

"Executive function"—the ability to order and control our thoughts—refers to those mental processes that allow us to process information coherently, hold and refer to items in our short term memories, avoid distractions and stay on task. Executive function takes self control. It depends upon the individual’s ability to control and filter emotions and cognitive impulses in order to get a job done.

As it turns out, research indicates that higher executive functions demonstrated early on are indicators of short as well as long-term success, both in academics and in life. According to Paul Tough in his September 27, 2009 New York Times article, "In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests."

One program called Tools of the Mind is working to improve self-regulation abilities in young children. Now being used to teach 18,000 preK and kindergarten children in twelve states, the Tools of the Mind curriculum, created by child development scholars Deborah Leon and Elena Bodrova, is purported to teach self-regulation skills to essentially any child, regardless of socioeconomic status. At the core of their methodology is the idea that the key to developing self regulation is dramatic play, with complex, long-lasting make-believe scenarios.

While the research continues into the effectiveness of these techniques, there is no question that self-regulation is a central skill that kids need to develop early on. More information about Tools of the Mind is available at www.mscd.edu/extendedcampus/toolsofthemind/

Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, attention, early learning, executive function, how children learn, memory, processing

Educating Kids about Nutrition and the Brain

• February 2, 2010 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Whether you’re a parent or an educator, you know that getting kids to eat well is a challenge. Getting them to truly understand enough to care about what they eat can be even harder. But did you know that the subject of "health literacy" is an important element of the national education conversation? While the debate continues as to the extent of the role of education in teaching nutrition, there is little argument that we as educators truly do have a responsibility in helping our nation’s young people understand and take charge of their well-being.

Focusing the story on nutrition and the brain, here is a fun way to talk about "brain foods" with your young folks—that may give you a little insight, too.

What if students were challenged to formulate meals to affect specific systems of the body? Here’s an example: The "Brainiac Blue Plate Combo"—the ultimate brain-health meal.

Start with two slices of whole-grain bread for carbohydrates; these will get converted into glucose to power the brain’s electrical activity. (Did you know that the brain uses about 20% of our total energy every day?) To that, we might add some lean turkey, roast beef and tuna fish (mmmm!) to supply the proteins and fats that make up the basic building blocks of our neural tissues. Then, we could top it all off with a light smattering of cheese and serve it with a side of roasted potatoes and a banana to give it the perfect zinging balance of neurotransmitters, from aspartic acid to tyrosine.

Now, whether this meal might not appeal to a youngster’s gastric sensibilities, the activity of creating such a menu would be an engaging application of knowledge to a practical task, as well as a way to have some fun in the process. Let them offer their ideas in a "cooking class" setting with all the supporting scientific explanations, and you’ve introduced presentation skills into the lesson. (It goes without saying that kids would not be able to resist the "gross-out" potential of such an activity—especially if you allow them to actually make and serve such a meal.)

For more great facts and information on neuroscience and nutrition for kids, check out Dr. Eric H. Chudler’s site, Nutrition and the Brain.

 

Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: health and well being, how children learn, nutrition

Davenport, IA, Succeeds with State-Funded Preschool

• January 26, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

Three years ago, Iowa's Davenport School District created a state-funded preschool program for 4-year-olds. Enrolled students spend 2 or more hours a day in the classroom learning letters, colors, numbers, and more from a licensed teacher.

The program's curriculum is designed to prepare the students to succeed in kindergarten.  So far, the program seems to be working: 90% of the Davenport students attending early childhood programs began kindergarten achieving at grade level, compared to 66% of students who did not participate.

Categories: Education Trends, Fast ForWord®, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, attention, early learning, memory, processing rate, sequencing, vocabulary, writing

Brain Fitness Webinar: Disrupting Class

• January 19, 2010 by Denise Ruvalcaba

Michael Horn spoke about disruptive innovation in the classroom at one of our live webinars in early October.  If you missed the live webinar, you can catch a replay via our brain fitness podcasts.  Horn is co-author of the influential book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

Categories: Brain Fitness, Education Trends

Tags: Disrupting Class, innovation, Michael Horn, webinar