Deliberate Practice: How to Develop Expertise

• April 12, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Anyone who has ever conscientiously taken on the challenge of learning a skill – from playing a musical instrument to speaking a foreign language to simply improving one’s penmanship – understands the importance of practice.

As a neuroscientist, practice fascinates me because it is all about establishing pathways in the brain. The ability of the brain to form and re-form routes for specific thought patterns, and for those routes to become more deeply ingrained the more we exercise those thought patterns, makes it possible for us to learn and refine a multitude of wonderful skills throughout our lives.

The Best Practices

In her recent article “The Myth of ‘Practice Makes Perfect,’” Annie Murphy Paul reviews a book by Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University who studies how the brain acquires language. Marcus’ book, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning, discusses how learning a new skill, such as playing the guitar, requires practice—but the right kind of practice.

Certainly practice requires a commitment of time. But more importantly, to be truly effective it requires a commitment of the mind – a deliberate intent – for optimal learning to occur.

According to Marcus, “Studies show that practice aimed at remedying weaknesses is a better predictor of expertise than raw number of hours; playing for fun and repeating what you already know is not necessarily the same as efficiently reaching a new level. Most of the practice that most people do, most of the time, be it in the pursuit of learning the guitar or improving their golf game, yields almost no effect” (2012).

In other words, the best practice demands that the learner be attentive to his or her errors, weaknesses and deficiencies, and consciously work to remedy them.

From a neuroscience perspective, this observation points to a natural conclusion. Research has shown us time and again that the more we utilize certain neural pathways for building skills – such as throwing a ball or multiplying by fives or recalling all fifty state capitals – the more effectively we ingrain those patterns in our brains and the more automatic the correct skills become.

The Hardest Work

Imagine the budding guitarist bent over her instrument. At 11 years old, she focuses on learning three more chords beyond the three she learned last week. She’s having great trouble with that F, but she’s well in control of the other five. Should she spend her hour of practice playing the music she truly enjoys and save that F for another day, preserving her positive attitude? Or should she feel her frustration, work through it and spend her time on ironing out that problematic F, again and again and again?

Which is the better practice?

Researcher Anders Ericsson of Florida State University wrote that “deliberate practice requires effort and is inherently not enjoyable” (1993). Long hours spent repeating the easy or already-mastered work is simply not enough and not as effective. The best practice requires us to dig deep and uncover our weaknesses. With a greater focus on our faults, we become better able to find them and develop solutions to remedy them.

Robert Duke of the University of Texas-Austin demonstrated this effect when he and his team videotaped piano students as they practiced a challenging concerto, and then ranked the quality of their final performance. In the end, it was not the repetitions nor the hours of practice put in. The best performers zeroed in on their errors and strove to fix them before moving on. (2009)

Behaviors for Success

The students in our everyday classrooms have an advantage over the guitar student practicing at home. She has to work independently the majority of the time, interacting with her music instructor only once or twice a week; the lion’s share of reinforcing her learning and practicing behavior is her personal responsibility.

In our day-to-day classrooms, we get – relatively speaking – much more time to help our students devise strategies and establish behaviors for success. Through helping them learn how to face the hard work, to focus on what’s difficult or wrong and make it easier or right, we can help them to establish those all-important neural pathways that will lead to success.

For further reading:

It’s Not How Much; It’s How: Characteristics of Practice Behavior and Retention of Performance Skills by Robert A. Duke, Amy L. Simmons and Carla Davis Cash

Related Reading:

The Brain Gets Better at What it Does: Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

Musical Training and Cognitive Abilities

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: accelerate learning, attention, brain plasticity, brain training, cognitive skills, how adults learn, how children learn, language learning, memory, musical training

Language and the Reading Puzzle: Morphemes and Memory

• April 10, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

In the recent Scientific Learning webinar "Language and the Reading Puzzle Part 2:  Morpheme Awareness and Working Memory," cognitive scientist Dr. Virginia Mann continues the conversation she began in Part 1, this time focusing on the importance of developing working memory and morpheme awareness skills in order to attain the goal of fluent reading (the ability to read at the right speed with no mistakes and good expression). 

Morpheme awareness is the ability to recognize and contextualize the basic semantic building blocks of the English language.  Here’s an example of how it works:

Can you fill in the blank with the most appropriate fictional word from the multiple-choice list below?

She is very __________.
a) lorialize
b) lorial 
c) lorify
d) lorialism

Most experienced English speakers will be able to select the nonsense word "lorial" (choice b) to complete the sentence above, as it is the only adjective on the list. Completing this exercise also requires working memory, the ability to temporarily retain information long enough to complete a new task.

MORPHEMES

In her presentation, Dr. Mann compares morphemes to Legos, the interlocking toy building-block system, describing morphemes as vocabulary-building roots for language. One example she gives of a morpheme is the root word “play,” which can morph into the words “plays”, “played,” “playpen,”  “replay,” and “unplayfully,” (to name a few) with the help of prefixes and suffixes.

In the webinar, Dr. Mann refers to a study which showed that normally developing children between the ages of 4 and 5 already understand this kind of morphological activity and are able to build new words in this manner. Research has also shown that young readers who do not develop strong morpheme awareness skills can sometimes end up with "frozen" reading skills, typically around the 3rd grade, just before morpheme awareness become central to a student's journey towards fluent reading.

WORKING MEMORY

Working memory is also explored in-depth in this webinar. Dr. Mann connects the dots between the importance of working memory and oral comprehension difficulties in school, and clearly identifies the kinds of classroom challenges (e.g., difficulty following directions, problems with multiple choice tests) students with poor working memory skills eventually face.

“If you can’t retain what is said, you can’t comprehend it,” Dr. Mann succinctly states, demonstrating the very real connection between poor working memory skills and diminished comprehension, which are common barriers to fluent reading.

All parents and educators can benefit from a deeper knowledge of morphemes and working memory (even if you selected the correct word in our little pop quiz above). Click here to view the full webinar.

 

Dr. Mann has collaborated with Scientific Learning on our learning acceleration products since the year 2000, playing a crucial role in the development of the Fast ForWord READING series.

Related Reading:

Language and the Reading Puzzle: 5 Steps Toward Fluent Reading

Why You Should Read With Your Child

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Reading & Learning

Tags: child reading development, early learning, fluency, improving reading skills, language learning, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, reading comprehension, struggling readers, vocabulary, webinar

Using Poetry to Teach Reading: Rhythm, Rhyme, and Choral Reading

• April 5, 2012 by PC Munoz

Poetry is a powerful vehicle to teach children to learn and love language, reading, and writing. In some ways, using poetry to teach reading is analogous to sneaking highly nutritious (and occasionally child-repellent) vegetables into otherwise kid-friendly dishes. By making use of creative devices like rhythm, rhyme and choral reading, educators can help students learn about phonemes, morphemes, grammar, and other language-based skills, all while having a great time with poetry.

RHYTHM
Many poems written for children have some sort of meter, or basic rhythmic structure, that is catchy and relatively easy for kids to copy orally. This provides a great opportunity for classroom teachers (particularly at the primary-grade level) to go line by line through a poem and focus on the number of syllables (or "beats") in a given word, and demonstrate how each sound and word plays a part in maintaining the meter of the poem. Asking students to swap out one of the words in a highly rhythmic poem for an appropriate new word (which has the same number of beats and a similar sound as the original) is a fun activity that exercises phoneme awareness, vocabulary, and creative writing skills. Haiku and its established structural confines, which require detailed syllable counting on the part of students, is a favorite for students of all ages to read and write.

RHYME
Rhyming poems are ripe with abundant classroom activities. Students can examine the sounds in each rhyming line, identifying the rhyming sounds and coming up with alternate rhyming words that could work in the poem. As an oral activity, creating "silly" substitute rhymes that have the correct matching sound but make absolutely no sense within the poem can also be a lot of fun for students of all ages, while flexing their phoneme awareness and vocabulary skills.

CHORAL READING
Choral reading of a poem (reading aloud in unison with a group of students or whole class) gets students to use their voices, collaborate with their classmates, gain an understanding of the potential dramatic power of the written word, and strengthen their understanding of punctuation. Leading students through a choral reading session can include a significant emphasis on punctuation and how it affects oral reading (pausing when there's a period, inflecting upwards in pitch when there's a question mark, etc.) and affords opportunity to work on enunciation skills as well. Breaking up a choral reading poem so all students have a chance to read a line or phrase on their own can also get the whole class to participate and feel positive about their relationship to the written word.

Using poetry to teach reading is a fun way to inspire students of all skill levels to engage with the subtle beauty and nuances of a language, encourage expression and creativity, and become excited about words, reading, and writing. The possibilities for using poetry in the classroom to teach valuable concepts and skills are almost as boundless as the potential combinations of words in a poem.

*I am the author of the haiku in this post. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my second grade teachers, Tina McCarter and Sharon Kamimoto, helped kick-start a lifelong love of words...for which I am grateful.

Related Reading:

Using Fiction Writing Activities to Develop Creative Thinking in the Classroom

5 Reasons Why Your Students Should Write Every Day

 

About the author:  PC Muñoz is a San Francisco-based writer, recording artist, and educator. Information on his past and future projects can be found at http://www.pcmunoz.com

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: arts, child reading development, creativity, language learning, learning to read, literacy, motivating students, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, phonics, play, reading comprehension, teacher impact, writing

Language and the Reading Puzzle: 5 Steps Towards Fluent Reading

• April 3, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

Dr. Virginia Mann's recent Scientific Learning webinar, "Language and the Reading Puzzle – Part 1" focused on the way families, schools, researchers, and technology can work together to create a "circuit for success" by helping students attain the goal of fluent reading (reading at the right speed, with few or no mistakes and good expression).  The information in Dr. Mann's webinar is extensive, covering both the research data on the barriers to fluent reading and the various solutions parents and educators can employ to demonstrably improve reading readiness and fluency.

Here are five steps that can help steer beginning readers and struggling readers of all ages towards fluent reading:

1.   Identify barriers.

Most readers begin as "hearers" of language, and written language is fundamentally a transcription of spoken language.  Dr. Mann identifies poor oral/spoken language skills as a common barrier to fluent reading, a barrier that involves a lack of phoneme awareness and morpheme awareness (the subject of a separate webinar to be covered in a future post).  She also dispels any lingering belief in the myth that visual "reversals" in writing or reading (e.g., mistaking a b for a d, confusing bad with dad) are a predictor or cause of poor reading skills in any way. Identifying the real barriers to fluent reading is the first step in determining how to best assist struggling readers.

2.  Build phoneme awareness. 

The data Dr. Mann presents in this webinar tell us that phoneme awareness, which develops with age and exposure, is directly related to reading ability. Activities which promote phoneme awareness include learning the ABCs (especially the letter sounds), matching and sorting words by phonemes (e.g., noting that the beginning sounds of cat and cup match, while the beginning sounds of cat and dog do not match), and manipulating phonemes (e.g., substituting an s for the c in cat to create a new word with a new beginning sound—sat). Understanding how the letters c-a-t spell the aural word cat takes a kind of “mental surgery” which can only occur with strong phoneme awareness.

3. Enrich vocabulary exposure and oral language skills.

Research shows us that students with weak oral language skills in kindergarten have a substantially more difficult time learning to read or reaching the appropriate reading level for their age group. A difference of 5.2 years between age and reading level is not uncommon in young people who begin kindergarten with deficient oral language experience. A great way to support and build on a strong foundation of phoneme awareness is through cumulative oral language experiences, which provide new and struggling readers with incremental exposure to letter sounds and vocabulary, laying the groundwork for better language comprehension and reading.

4.  Encourage literacy activities.

A powerful example of a literacy-oriented activity that can boost phoneme awareness and reading readiness is dialogic reading, a practice that encourages interactivity over passive listening when engaging with the written word. The main technique when practicing dialogic reading is the "PEER Sequence," which asks the adult reader to:

• Prompt the child to comment about the book
• Evaluate the child's response in some way
• Expand the child's response by adding new information
• Repeat the prompt to reinforce what has been learned

Dialogic reading is an active, dynamic workout for hearing, speaking, critical thinking, and working memory skills, which all play a part in building a better reader.

5.  Use technology.

In the fast-moving 21st century, technology has an important role to play. Today, cutting-edge educational tools can help accelerate reading acquisition, with enormous benefits for learners and busy educators. Educators will benefit by embracing the available technology that produces better readers who can learn more effectively in the classroom.

Fluent reading is a significant goal: a challenge for beginners, and a persistent problem for some struggling students. These five steps are really just a glimpse of what Dr. Mann covers in her presentation. Click here to view the full webinar!

Related Reading:

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

Students Who Struggle in the Mainstream: What Their Homework Patterns May Tell You

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, achievement gap, child reading development, early learning, how children learn, language learning, learning to read, literacy, memory, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, vocabulary

How to Support Social Development in Young Children

• March 29, 2012 by Corey Fitzgerald

As early as first grade, a child’s social skills are a compelling predictor of his future success both in and out of school.  Like any developing skill, burgeoning social skills require support, practice and repetition.  The desired behaviors are learned and taught through a variety of accumulating experiences stemming from the earliest years of childhood, between birth and age 6, when children grow and develop faster than during any other stage in their lives. 

Children rely heavily on adults and other caregivers to help them acquire social skills and establish pathways for meaningful learning.  To that end, researchers have found that when children are provided with positive and caring experiences in these early years, the connections in the brain for feeling good and learning are strengthened, self-esteem and confidence rise, and children are more equipped to cope with life’s challenges. 

So whether you’re a parent or an educator, the following strategies will help promote social development in young children, while helping them learn to use their own minds:

 Model Appropriate Social Behavior

Take advantage of everyday routines to “show and tell” children what your expectations are for appropriate behavior—for example, how to greet someone new or how to share a toy during play.  By talking about what you’re doing as you’re doing it the child will better understand how to manage the situation and replicate it, even when you’re not there.

Support Self-Esteem

Positive self-esteem is critical to healthy social development.  Make it a point to compliment children on their behavior, how they look, and progress they have made toward goals.  When you acknowledge these attributes, children learn how to perceive and act upon their feelings in a healthy way.

Build Problem Solving Skills

Problem solving is a skill that employs reasoning, creativity, inhibitory control and decision making.  Because children do not have fully mature executive functions, they are prone to making mistakes as their abilities emerge and the frontal lobe develops.  Exploring solutions to problems by asking children “What would you do?” or offering alternative strategies will help them develop effective reasoning skills and mental flexibility.

Encourage Exploration

Infants and young children explore their environment through movement and interaction.  As a child develops confidence and control over her body in motion, she becomes more and more eager to venture into the world around her.  Aid her natural curiosity by organizing activities that promote safe exploration, both at home and while out.  Examples include asking children for help while preparing a meal or tasking them with finding an item at the grocery store.  When you gradually extend opportunities to be involved with more complex activities, children will rise to the occasion.

Play! 

Time spent playing with children can be one of the best investments you make in their educational future.  One of the easiest ways to help children develop socially is by the simple act of playing.  Joining in play builds relationships in a climate of fun and puts you in a great position to teach skills for sharing and cooperation, introducing concepts like winning or losing, and it also gives children a chance to learn about more subtle social cues, like body language and vocal intonations.  So don’t be afraid to turn up the music for a little song and dance, put on a puppet show, or pull out some favorite board games and have fun! 

References:

Bierman, K.L., et al., Promoting academic and social-emotional school readiness:  The Head Start REDI Program.  Child Development, 79(6), 1802-1817, 2008.

Katz, Lilian and Diane McClellan. Young Children’s Social Development: A Checklist. World of Education. March 26, 2012.

Knitzer, Jane and C. Cybele Raver. What Research Tells Policymakers About Strategies to Promote Social and Emotional School Readiness Among Three- and Four-Year-Old Children. National Center for Children in Poverty. July, 2002.

Peters, Zrinka. Support Social and Emotional Development – Through Play! Education.com. March 26, 2012.

Supporting Social Development. Best Beginnings: Alaska's Early Childhood Investment. March 29, 2012.

Related Reading:

Building Your Child’s Self-Confidence

Recognizing Emotions After Brain Injury: Re-Learning a Critical Social Skill

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, brain development, cognitive skills, decision making, early learning, emotions in learning, executive function, how children learn, learning through play, play, self-esteem, teacher impact

Keeping in Mind: The Task of Working Memory

• March 27, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Just about everyone has had the experience of going grocery shopping with a small list of purchases in their mind, only to forget one or more of them upon arriving at the store. Similarly, we all have left one room to retrieve something from another room, forgetting what we are after before we have even arrived. The ability to hold information in mind for a few minutes to a few hours is called working memory. It is essential for everything from language learning in children to following a book chapter from beginning to end.

Working memory was first defined by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974. It is a form of memory that may distinguish humans from many other animals (with the exception of several primates). Working memory, commonly referred to as short-term memory, allows a person to hold on to information for a period of time (minutes or perhaps hours) long enough to do something new with the information, like take notes or solve a problem.

A typical situation in which we rely on working memory is watching an informational program on television, like a segment on a news program, and discussing it later with a friend. We may forget about the specific news event later in the week, but for a period of time we “keep it in mind,” thinking about it and perhaps talking about it with others. Each time we share the information with another person or think about it ourselves, we select details that interest us and alter them slightly to keep them interesting to us. Other examples of tasks that require good working memory in adults include taking notes during a lecture or paraphrasing information we hear or read about. 

Alan Baddeley elaborated on the original concept of working memory in 1992, noting that unlike other kinds of short-term memory (such as rote repetition), working memory requires us to focus and maintain our attention on the task at hand. To keep our attentional focus, we must be goal-directed, ignoring distractions that might interfere with goal attainment. Baddeley stressed the importance of the “central executive” system for maintaining attentional focus in working memory tasks.

For children, working memory is essential for learning language. Unlike vision, where we can often study an image as long as we need to, everything we hear occurs in time. The speech signal moves very quickly: an average sentence is about 14 seconds long, an average single syllable word lasts only a quarter of a second, and the average consonant sound may last only 1/12 of a second.  

We are all made aware of how fleeting the speech signal is when someone is talking to us and we become distracted, which consequently requires us to ask the speaker to repeat what was just said. In that way, speech is like a billboard that appears briefly in our peripheral vision as we travel at 55 miles per hour along a highway. It we are not paying specific attention in that instant to that part of the road, we will miss it, or only retain small bits of the message on the billboard. In a similar way, information we hear leaves us as soon as it arrives. We are not able to hold it in view like a drawing or photograph, or study it like a person’s face, so we must keep the information in our mind. 

For some, improving working memory can be as simple as getting more sleep or more exercise or learning to avoid distractions.  For others, whose working memory is weak enough to significantly impact learning, more help may be needed. Fortunately, the brain is a malleable structure and cognitive skills like working memory can be improved by strengthening key learning pathways in the brain (as regular readers of this blog know—working memory is one of four cognitive skills rapidly strengthened by the Fast ForWord program). 

The truth is, we live in an exciting time.  Scientists are learning more all the time about how cognitive skills like working memory operate.  We can look forward to these discoveries yielding more insights and tools that we’ll be able to use to optimize learning throughout our lives.
 

Related Reading:

The Mirror Neuron System

Toddler Vocabulary Development: Shopping With Your Child

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Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, auditory processing, brain training, language learning, oral language skills, processing

5 Fluency and Comprehension Strategies That Every Reader Can Use

• March 22, 2012 by Wendy Mathieu

Every student seeks to be a confident, competent reader—regardless of grade level or starting fluency—and parents, teachers, and tutors want to help. To be fully functional in our society, we need to be capable of engaging with a variety of texts, some of which may be more technical, more abstract, or in some other way more challenging than our regular reading diet.  When encountering an unfamiliar kind of text, even “good” readers need to learn how to read it and practice reading it in order to read it fluently and actually understand it.

Whether the text exists on paper, as a website or even as an e-book, the strategies for developing fluency and comprehension are the same. When students encounter an unfamiliar, difficult, or unusual piece of text, coach them through these fluency and comprehension strategies:

1. Preview the text – Examine its structure, any illustrations, and unfamiliar vocabulary words before reading;
2. Listen to a fluent reading – If possible, listen to a model for correct pronunciation and expression;
3. Engage in the act of reading – Make predictions, ask questions, and reread confusing parts. Students can “talk to the text” to get a better understanding.
4. Practice reading it aloud – Read the text out loud (sometimes repeatedly) and attend to phrasing and punctuation as guides;
5. Answer/Ask questions about the text – Check comprehension after reading to ensure that the meaning of the text has been understood.

Using a similar approach can be helpful for students today as they endeavor to meet the Common Core Standards that set requirements for reading not only for English language arts, but also for reading in the content areas of history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. This means that students need to be able to read a variety of genres – and not only narrative text, but informational text as well. By doing so, they can gain familiarity with various text structures and elements, as well as literary, cultural and background knowledge that can be applied in their subsequent reading experiences.

Through instruction and practice in reading a variety of texts, students will become fluent and able to comprehend all genres and all school subjects - and achieve the vision of what it means to be a literate person in the 21^st century!
 

 

Related Reading:

Building Fluent Readers: How Oral Reading Practice Helps Reading Comprehension

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

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Categories: Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant

Tags: child reading development, fluency, how children learn, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, oral language skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary

5 Reasons Why Every Parent Should Be Familiar with Executive Function

• March 20, 2012 by Carrie Gajowski

The brain's executive function is a kind of internal "air traffic control system" that is a a group of skills that helps us to focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, monitor errors, make decisions in light of available information, revise plans as necessary and resist the urge to let frustration lead to hasty actions.  The development of solid executive function is one of the key learning tasks of early childhood, and a significant contributor to later success in life.

In his recent webinar on the topic, Scientific Learning Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder Dr. William Jenkins dug deep into the three interrelated skills which comprise this air traffic control system: working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive/mental flexibility. These three skills help us keep information in mind, master our impulses, and remain flexible in the face of change—and are crucial building blocks for the development of both cognitive and social interaction skills in young children.

Dr. Jenkins outlined a number of reasons that parent should take an interest in helping their children develop sound executive function skills in early childhood:

1. Strong executive function skills provide the best possible foundation for school readiness.

In many ways, executive function skills could be called the "biological foundation" for school readiness. It has been shown that children with strong working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive/mental flexibility skills make greater gains in academic areas than peers with weaker executive function skills.  Coming to school with these foundational skills well-developed is just as important, if not more important, than fluency with letters and numbers.

2. Executive function skills begin at home.

Executive function skills are not automatic. These skills are built over time through practice, and can be observed in infants as early as six months, when some infants can understand and obey a simple directive such as "don't touch that plate." Parents can support (or "scaffold") the development of these skills from early childhood by teaching and reinforcing common concepts such as taking turns and using "inside" and "outside" voices. In addition to the home, executive function skills continue to be developed in childcare programs, pre-schools, elementary school classrooms, and other social settings, into adolescence.

3. Understanding executive function helps parents collaborate with educators.

As Dr. Jenkins notes in the webinar, elementary school teachers are keenly aware of the importance of executive function. Parents who are actively, consciously participating in the development of their child’s executive function skills will have a richer understanding of the importance of all activities and expectations revolving around classroom life, from the way one lines up for lunch to the way one studies for a spelling  test.  This has the potential for a dynamic, integrated educational experience for the student, teacher, and parents, working together to build a better brain for each child.

4. Executive function skills help lay the foundation for the kind of student, citizen, and social being a child will become.

Ultimately, the skills that cohere into executive function are the skills we use to navigate family, school, and work settings for our entire lives: retaining and using information, filtering thoughts and impulses, focusing on a task at hand, recognizing errors, changing plans, and understanding how different rules apply in different settings are all skills that require stewardship from birth to adulthood. Parents armed with this knowledge are more apt to take an active part in the development of these skills from an early age. 

5. Understanding executive function gives parents a fuller understanding of a child who is struggling.

It is a mistake to immediately brand a child who struggles with things like inhibitory control as a "bad kid". Understanding the concepts behind executive function gives parents a fuller picture of what is happening with their child when he or she is having difficulty controlling impulses, focusing on a given task, or understanding that different rules may apply at different times. This will help parents decide if outside help may be needed to help their child (studies show there is at least short-term effectiveness in interventions that support executive function development).

Interested in learning more?  Listen to Dr. Jenkins’ webinar here for more in-depth information on all aspects of executive function and its importance in early childhood development and brain fitness.

Related Reading:

The Curious Mind: Interest, Drive, and the Road to Academic Success

5 Things Every Parent and Educator Should Know About Early Childhood Brain Development

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain development, cognitive skills, early learning, executive function

The Reading Brain: How Your Brain Helps You Read, and Why it Matters

• March 15, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an accomplished reader.  In fact, you’ve most likely forgotten by now how much work it took you to learn to read in the first place.  And you probably never think about what is happening in your brain when you’re reading that email from your boss or this month’s book club selection.

And yet, there’s nothing that plays a greater role in learning to read than a reading-ready brain.

As complex a task as reading is, thanks to developments in neuroscience and technology we are now able to target key learning centers in the brain and identify the areas and neural pathways the brain employs for reading. We not only understand why strong readers read well and struggling readers struggle, but we are also able to assist every kind of reader on the journey from early language acquisition to reading and comprehension—a journey that happens in the brain.

We begin to develop the language skills required for reading right from the first gurgles we make as babies. The sounds we encounter in our immediate environment as infants set language acquisition skills in motion, readying the brain for the structure of language-based communication, including reading.

Every time a baby hears speech, the brain is learning the rules of language that generalize, later, to reading.  Even a simple nursery rhyme can help a baby's brain begin to make sound differentiations and create phonemic awareness, an essential building block for reading readiness. By the time a child is ready to read effectively, the brain has done a lot of work coordinating sounds to language, and is fully prepared to coordinate language to reading, and reading to comprehension. 

The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain working together, like sections of instruments, to maximize our ability to decode the written text in front of us:

• The temporal lobe is responsible for phonological awareness and decoding/discriminating sounds.
• The frontal lobe handles speech production, reading fluency, grammatical usage, and comprehension, making it possible to understand simple and complex grammar in our native language.
• The angular and supramarginal gyrus serve as a "reading integrator" a conductor of sorts, linking the different parts of the brain together to execute the action of reading.  These areas of  the brain connect the letters c, a, and t to the word cat that we can then read aloud.

Emerging readers can build strong reading skills through focused, repetitive practice, preferably with exercises like those provided by the Fast ForWord program, that "cross-train" all the reading-relevant areas of the brain.

Independent research conducted at Stanford in 2003 and Harvard in 2007 demonstrated that Fast ForWord creates physical changes in the brain as it builds new connections and strengthens the neural pathways, specifically in the areas of reading. After just eight weeks of use, weak readers developed the brain activity patterns that resemble those of strong readers.  And, as brain patterns changed, significant improvements for word reading, decoding, reading comprehension and language functions were also observed.

It’s never too early to set a child on the pathway to becoming a strong reader.  And it’s never too late to help a struggling reader strengthen his or her brain to read more successfully and with greater enjoyment. 

It’s all about the brain.  Have you hugged your brain today?

Related Reading:

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function

Why You Should Read With Your Child

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Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain training, child reading development, crosstraining, early learning, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, oral language skills, reading comprehension, technology in education

The Curious Mind: Interest, Drive, and the Road to Academic Success

• March 13, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Good grades and high achievement test scores are very real portals to success in life. Given the weight society grants such measures in evaluating individuals for everything from college to graduate school to entrance into the professional world, we cannot ignore the essential role of these traditional measures of success.

But that’s tradition; does the science support the idea that intellect and academic mastery ensure later success? What are the true determinants of triumph in school and life? Traditionally, intelligence and effort have been the two traits identified as the golden keys to future achievement. Still, there is a third variable that has long gone under-analyzed; in their 2011 paper, Von Strumm, Hell and Chamorro-Premuzic posit that yet another “pillar” of the mind must be taken into consideration: curiosity.

Back in 1963, Fiske and Butler stated that ability test scores measure what a person can do at a given time, whereas personality scales “provide a measure of what a person is most likely to do” in the future. (Fiske and Butler, pp. 258-259)  This difference is fascinating, and one which we all too often fail to differentiate when working with and evaluating our students.

In their research, Von Strumm, Hell and Chamorror-Premuzic reviewed and analyzed multiple studies that investigated the relationships between academic performance and intelligence, as well as those between academic performance and personality traits such as curiosity. They found, among other results, that the combined effects of curiosity and effort equaled the impact of intellect on academic performance. In other words, their analysis played out scientifically what Dewey suggested back in 1910: “The curious mind [is] constantly alert and exploring [and] seeking material for thought, as a vigorous and healthy body is on the qui vive for nutriment. . . . Such curiosity is the only sure guarantee of acquisition of primary facts…” (Dewey, 1910, p. 31)

For educators, the implications of such conclusions represent a refreshing perspective on both how we perceive our students’ abilities and how we imagine and implement strategies to nurture their success. All too often, we fall into the trap of seeing our students and evaluating their performance in terms of their intellectual abilities.

But what if we could see them just as well for their possibilities? What if we could focus our gaze ahead and perceive their potential in those areas of knowledge that they were most hungry to pursue?

Because of brain plasticity research, we know that through finding strong existing neural pathways and thought patterns, we can connect them to the creation of new thought patterns; we can use existing strengths to cultivate new ones. For example, a child might not have excellent math skills, but a deep curiosity for space and the solar system. If we can use that passion for outer space to introduce mathematical concepts, the child is more likely to successfully learn those essential skills.

With this knowledge on our side, if we can tap into and cultivate our students’ curiosity, we can help them turn their immediate educational obstacles into opportunities, as well as help them to establish habits of mind that will serve them long into their futures after that last exam has come to a close.

For further reading: Von Stumm, Sophie. Hell, Benedikt. Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. The Hungry Mind: Intellectual Curiosity Is the Third Pillar of Academic Performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(6) 574–588.

Related Reading:

6 Steps to Help Students Ask Better Questions

Using the Power of Optimal Timing to Improve the Brain’s Ability to Learn

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, behavior, effort, how children learn, motivating students, teacher impact