How do people learn? How and where do they learn best? At what age? Why do some people find literacy and numeracy so difficult? What are the limits of the human brain? What is the role of emotion in learning?
Questions like these have interested humans for a long time - and we have never been so close to getting some sound, scientific answers.
A new book published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, whose members are the 30 most developed nations in the world, shows how scientists are beginning to understand how the young brain develops and the mature brain learns.
Several disciplines contribute to this advance in knowledge, says the 100-page report on the latest findings in brain research: "The most recently established, and probably the most important, is cognitive neuroscience."
The key to this advance in knowledge is the development of new brain imaging technologies, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which are enabling scientists to get a clearer look at the workings of the brain and the nature of mind.
"In particular, they can begin to shed new light on old questions about human learning and suggest ways in which educational provision and the practice of teaching can better help young and adult learners."
Indeed, one of the aims of the OECD's "progress report", entitled "Undertstanding the Brain - Towards a New Learning Science", is to allow different disciplines interested in education to discover what insights cognitive neuroscience might offer to education and educational policy.
"Education is not an autonomous discipline. Like medicine or architecture it relies on other disciplines for its theoretical foundation."
But, the report adds, "unlike architecture or medicine, education is still in a primitive stage of development. It is an art, not a science".
The report says cognitive neuroscience might in the future be able to offer a sounder basis for the understanding of learning and the practice of teaching.
That basis is already starting to emerge. These are a few of the main findings detailed in the book:
¤ Research has shown that the later grammar is learned, the more active the brain becomes when the learning is taking place. Now, more brain activation very often means that the brain finds that particular task more difficult to process: for example, expert readers will show less brain activation than novice readers in a word-recognition task.
This means that the earlier the child is exposed to a foreign language, the easier and faster the grammar is mastered. One clear educational policy consequence from this research area is that learning a second language (whose grammar markedly differs from one's own native language - for instance learning French for a native Maltese speaker) after 13 years of age is extremely likely to result in poor mastery of the grammar of this language. This result is at odds with the education practices in numerous countries where foreign language learning starts at approximately 13 years of age.
¤ Researchers have found that 10-year-old children with dyslexia fail to activate a particular brain region concerned with the sound structure of words during tasks associated with reading and phonological skills.
The understanding of how the brain breaks down skills into separate processes and functional modules is leading to efficient remediation programmes, such as a new method of teaching word pronounciation called the "Word Building Method" devised by Drs Bruce McCandliss and Isabelle Beck.
¤ Scientists are beginning to realise through experiments what educators have seen in schools: emotions are in part responsible for the overall cognitive mastery present in children and adults and therefore need to be addressed more fully.
For example, within the brain there is a set of structures collectively known as the limbic system, which has been referred to as the "emotional brain". This has connections with the frontol cortex. When these connections are impaired due to stress or fear, cognitive performance suffers, because the emotional aspects of learning, including responses to reward and risk, are compromised.
¤ Some children in new situations display fear, some frustration, others positive excitation. As neuroscientists become more able to demonstrate how emotional processing either helps or hinders the educational process, one goal of education would be to discover how to work effectively with students who have different emotional styles.
¤ Through neuroimaging techniques, it is being discovered how learners alter their emotional state by forming specific mental images. Possible applications of imagery to education include: imagery as a memory aid to remember words better by visualising objects associated with them, and imagery as a mental aid to overcoming test anxiety and phobias.
¤ At one point, neuroscientists thought that only infant brains were plastic, in other words able to change significantly as a response to learning experiences. This was due to the extraordinary growth of new synapses paralleled with new skill acquisition. However, data uncovered over the last two decades has confirmed that the brain retains plasticity over the lifespan.
Moreover, parts of the brain, including the all-important hippocampus, have recently been found to generate new neurons throughout the lifespan. Research has shown that older brains can adapt in order to overcome barriers in language processing and reading. These new findings are leading to:
- A better understanding of the different ways the brain can process language.
- Clearer ideas on how children and adults can naturally overcome language-processing obstacles (especially in dyslexia).
- Insights into how strategies may recruit different neural networks and help those with reading and speech disabilities.
- Ways to help second-language learners (both adults and children) improve their phonological understanding of the language.
The OECD's book also raises a number of provocative questions about the state of education in advanced societies.
It says that while the science of teaching and learning may still be in its infancy it is developing rapidly, and a number of factors suggest "that the status quo may be unsustainable".
Among these factors are the advance of cognitive neuroscience, the impending impact of new learning technologies, and "the relative failure of the great educational project of the late 19th and 20th centuries".
"For more than a century, one in six of young people (and adults reflecting on their childhood) have reported that they "hated school"; a similar proportion have failed to master the elements of literacy and numeracy successfully enough to be securely employable; a similar proportion have played truant from school, disrupted classes or quietly withdrawn their attention from lessons.
"Successive governments in many nations have made various attempts to improve the situation. But perhaps this is a problem that can't be fixed? Maybe traditional education as we know it inevitably offends one in six pupils? Possibly the classroom model of learning is "brain-unfriendly"?
"Issues like these, coupled with the advent of the computer, the growing doubts about the efficiency and effectiveness of state-controlled social provision of services, and the emerging findings of cognitive neuroscience call into question some of the fundamental building blocks of traditional education - schools, classrooms, teachers (as we understand the profession today), or even the curriculum, and even concepts like intelligence or ability."