Changing the brain through instruction

I attended my second Transforming Online Pedagogy and Practices Symposium (TOPPS) this past May. The event is sponsored and hosted by UNCG's University Teaching and Learning Commons (UTLC). Like the 2018 symposium, this event was well worth it.

This year's theme was "Science and the Art of Changing the Brain through Instruction and Instructional Design," and the UTLC brought in Dr. Kristen Betts as the event's keynote speaker. Dr. Betts is a Clinical Professor in the School of Education at Drexel University and specializes, among other things, in how we can harness brain science to improve teaching. Her presentations, which revolved around the theme "Leveraging Psychology to Create Compelling Learning Experiences," was spread across two morning sessions on May 13th and 14th.

The first session was entitled "Neuropedagogy: Changing the Brain through Instruction and Instructional Design." Dr. Betts first asked us to go through a list of statements about learning and the brain and mark whether we thought the statement was correct or incorrect. Here they are:

1. Listening to classical music increases reasoning ability. 
2. Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning styles (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic) 
3. Some of us are "left-brained" and some are "right-brained" due to hemispheric dominance and this helps explains differences in how we learn 
4. We only use 10% of our brain 
5. Normal development of the human brain involves the birth and death of brain cells 
6. Learning is due to the addition of new cells to the brain 
7. There are critical periods in human development after which certain skills can no longer be learned 
8. Learning occurs through changes to the connections between brain cells
9. The left and right hemispheres of the brain work together
10. Production of new connections in the brain can continue into old age

Now, this screamed "top 10 myths about the brain and learning," so my guard was up immediately. Nevertheless, I was sure that 1-4 were incorrect since I had discovered previously that these, including approaches based on "learning styles" and "left hemisphere/right hemisphere," are among the most commonly debunked myths, and the 10% fallacy is also well-known. What is interesting, though, is that when an instructor invokes a "learning style" approach and, in doing so, validates a student's preconceived notions about their own learning style, they create a fixed mindset in the learner--"well, I'm a visual learner, so that's the only way I can learn." The other list she had us look at included statements that highlighted how emotions can affect cognitive processes and the fact that human memory does not operate like a recording device.

With learning myths suitably punctured and learning truths duly identified, Dr. Betts then moved on to a discussion of feedback. I think we all know how important meaningful feedback is--the peer-review process in academia is an excellent example--but I never really thought deeply about why it is so important. It turns out that feedback, when it is done right, helps us to identify and reduce the gap between our current performance and some desired goal, be it an A on a research paper or a scientifically legitimate research study. Dr. Betts asked the audience to define feedback and its relationship to assessment. Our group described feedback as a response that allow students to see the difference between what they do and what they are trying to do (or, at least, what we as instructors are trying to get them to do). We also argued that feedback helps students identify biases, incorrect statements, and their overall strengths and weaknesses. It also quickly became clear that, for us, feedback and assessment are very distinct processes. While for former tracks the development of a skill, the latter evaluates whether a skill has been attained or not. We wrapped up the discussion by identifying the challenges of giving feedback. The most commonly cited one is time: do we have enough of it to provide substantive feedback? Others included the question of whether or not learners take the feedback into account (if not, why waste the time giving it?) and whether or not instructors are able to craft an assignment that can produce meaningful feedback in the first place. (One suggestion to ensure that students heed instructor feedback is to require it as part of an assignment's rubric.) Dr. Betts then outlined best practices for instructor feedback, which should be:

• Understandable. Use language that the student can understand.
• Selective. Choose two or three issues that the student can do something about without feeling overwhelmed.
• Specific. Point out the areas in the student's work to which the feedback applies.
• Timely. It should be provided so that the student has enough time to improve for the next assignment. Students need time to reflect, address misunderstandings, and seek support from the instructor and/or academic services. A lack of feedback, or even delayed feedback, often leads to (di)stress, which in turn creates anxiety and poorer performance. 
• Contextualized. Comments should be framed in reference to the assignment's learning outcomes and/or rubric. 
• Non-judgmental. The focus should be on learning goals rather than just performance and comments should be descriptive rather than evaluative. Even the terms we use can impact the way that students perceive, and thus react, to our feedback: give "feedback" rather than "criticism"; provide "constructive" rather than "critical" feedback; areas of "weakness" can become areas "to develop"; and "rewrites" turn into "revisions." 
• Balanced. Point out both the strengths and weaknesses.
• Forward-looking. Provide suggestions for how future work can be improved.
• Transferable. The focus should be on the process and skills, not just the knowledge content.
• Personal. Refer to what is already known about the student based on previous assignments.

The problem for many students is that they have not received thoughtful feedback in an educational context. As instructors, we'd of course love to provide this for everyone, and we should strive to do so within the constraints set by our class sizes and learning objectives. This workshop was designed specifically for online instruction, and one practice that Dr. Betts engages in, and one that I never thought about, was recording her feedback and sending the video to students. It turns out that this can be accomplished in two to three minutes and might take less time than red-marking a paper.

Dr. Betts went on to share some basic principles of learning science during the second day:

• Human brains are as unique as human faces.
• Everyone's brain is also uniquely prepared, based on their personal experiences, to learn different tasks. This is significantly influenced by one's developmental environment. It has been shown, for instance, that chronic toxic stress can affect the ability of the prefrontal cortex to process information. Of particular importance to us as instructors is students' prior educational experience: while some students have had extensive feedback and have been held accountable, others have had little or no feedback and have not been held accountable; while some students have been held to high standards, others have not been held to high standards. This sets an individual's "default mode network," which projects that experience into the future (e.g., "I've never been held to high standards, so I won't ever be held to high standards.")
• The brain changes in light of new experience, so neuroplasticity occurs throughout one's lifetime. Every time a new fact or skill is learned, the brain creates new neural pathways and, possibly, about 700 new neurons a day. Practice actually thickens the myelin sheaths surrounding the brain's axons, which in turn permits more efficient signal (that is, information) transfer. 
• Learning cannot occur without some form of attention and memory.
• The brain seeks novelty and patterns.
• Repeated practice and rehearsal of learned material across multiple modalities helps to consolidate information in long-term memory.

The overall take-home message is that because the brain physically changes every time learning happens, we, as instructors, are quite literally brain changers. A powerful thought indeed.