The second biennial conference of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society will be held May 28–30, 2009, at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The conference provides a forum to explore exciting new advances in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education. In the spirit of encouraging and supporting collaborative efforts among cognitive scientists, developmental scientists, neuroscientists, and educators, the IMBES conferences create a promising environment in which committed researchers and educators can together offer new insights into behavior and the brain that can inform both.
Click here to download a pdf of the program.
To view details, click on any of the events, below.
| Thursday 3:00 – 6:00 PM | PRECONFERENCE SESSION |
An optional short course offered Thursday, May 28, 3:00–6:00 p.m., by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California.
This workshop is designed to help participants become informed and critical consumers of brain research as it is portrayed both in technical reports and in the popular press. This is a dynamic and popular workshop with limited space, so register early.
| Thursday 4:00 – 5:30 PM | NATIONAL TESTING SURVEY LAUNCH |
From 4:00 to 5:30, on Thursday, May 28, IMBES will host the formal launch of the National Testing Survey (NTS). The launch, which is open to the public, will feature preliminary NTS results and presentations about their implications for MBE and the educational system. If you plan to attend, download a free ticket. (Due to limited seating, if you do not obtain a ticket, you may not be able to gain admission to the session.)
The National Testing Survey: overview of mission, instrument, and preliminary findingsZachary Stein, Harvard Graduate School of Education
The National Testing Survey (NTS) is part of a burgeoning effort to rethink and redesign crucial facets of our educational system. Motivated by perceptions that the existing testing infrastructure is not meeting the needs of those most affected by it, the NTS was designed to provide a sense of what Americans think about the impact of existing standardized tests and how they view the legitimate role of testing. The survey combines standard items with open-ended essay questions, thus providing insights into both large-scale trends and personal experiences. Preliminary results confirm the existence of a troubling disconnect between what current tests are perceived to do and what those most affect by them would like them to do. I will argue that data of the kind we are collectiong with the NTS should inform evidence-based redesigns of our educational assessment infrastructure.
Three reasons to be concerned about our current approach to standardized testingTheo Dawson, Developmental Testing Survice
Although different stakeholder groups are not entirely in agreement about the relative performance of current standardized tests and ideal tests, when it comes to the legitimate role of testing, their differences are minor. All groups agree that tests should help determine how well students are learning relevant skills and abilities, and all agree that tests should support learning and teaching. Moreover, all groups agree that current standardized tests are not doing well in any of these categories—especially with respect to their impact on learning. In this talk, I will discuss three ways in which our current approach to standardized testing contributes to the weaknesses identified by NTS respondents and provide a sketch of what is required to make tests that approach their ideal.
Why depth of study matters & and how testing undermines this pedagogyMarc Schwartz, University of Texas at Arlington
For years, educators have debated whether curricula should focus on depth or breadth of study. While the debate has been mostly philosophical, most educators have favored curricula that support depth of focus. This view is now also supported by recent empirical evidence, which I will introduce in this talk. We demonstrated that depth of study in high school science is associated with higher student grades in an introductory post-secondary science course. In contrast, we found no evidence that programs that focus on breadth convey any advantage to future work, and in fact there is some evidence to suggest that this pedagogical choice is negative. Unfortunately, state mandated testing has shaped the outcome of the debate in favor of breadth of study. This situation may be the unintended outcome of tests that focus on a wider range of material; but nonetheless, the impact on pedagogy is observable. Teachers are forced to seriously consider spending less time on any one topic to insure that students have visited all the material that might appear on an exam. This pedagogical strategy not only conflicts with what we argue for philosophically and what we can demonstrate empirically, but what teachers would prefer, especially as they gain experience teaching. Overall, depth of study in school supports what we know about how children learn.
Zachary Stein, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Results from the NTS and the educational implications of global socioeconomic trends frame a discussion about how to take the first steps toward a radically new educational assessment infrastructure—one that is grounded in a growing body of knowledge about how students learn. I will suggest that educational assessments should be designed via interdisciplinary educational research that is carried out by mobilizing networks of research school collaborations. Such a poly-focal experimental effort should foster evidenced-based innovations, and provide a sense of the feasibility, validity, and efficacy of various assessment alternatives. If granted temporary immunity from certain types of standard accountability measures, a research school collaboration—involving schools or school districts in partnership with educational researchers from the academy—could provide an ideal place to conduct basic, formative, and ecologically valid research. I will further suggest that these efforts should be accompanied by broad discourse in the public sphere about what we need and want from our assessment infrastructure in light of the unique and pressing demands of the 21st Century.
| Thursday 7:00 – 8:15 PM | WELCOME AND GENERAL SESSION I |
Educating spatial intelligence: Nora Newcombe
Temple University
There are sex-related and SES-related differences in some (but not all) aspects of spatial skill. The reason for such differences is often debated. In this talk, I will argue that the causation of such differences is irrelevant to the question of whether spatial skills can be improved, present evidence that substantial improvement can be attained, and offer suggestions about how even larger gains could be achieved in the future.
| Thursday 8:15 – 9:30 PM | RECEPTION AND POSTER SESSION |
Reception and Posters sponsored by Temple University, complimentary wine and dessert
| Friday 8:30 – 10:00 AM | GENERAL SESSION II |
How Learning to Read Affects the Developing Brain: Stanislas Dehaene
Collège de France, Paris
Learning to read entails the specialization of a left occipito-temporal region, the visual word form area, which becomes attuned to orthographic regularities in the reader’s language. I argue that this specialization is best described as a process of “neuronal recycling”, whereby a visual area specialized for object recognition, with a long evolutionary history, reconverts to reading. Thus, reading invades an area that evolved for other reasons. Brain imaging of illiterates suggests that face perception may be one of the competitors of reading in occipito-temporal cortex. The peculiar phenomenon of mirror reading can be explained by the prior propensity of this region for mirror-image generalization, which needs to be unlearned during reading acquisition. According to my point of view, the brain did not evolve for writing – rather, cultural evolution adapted our writing systems so that they could be efficiently acquired given the structure of our visual brain.
| Friday 10:15 – 11:45 AM | CONCURRENT SESSIONS |
Marc Schwartz, University of Texas, Arlington
Christina Hinton, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Peter Kuriloff, University of Pennsylvania
Henderien Steenbeek, University of Groningen
Paul van Geert, University of Groningen
Jenny Thomson, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Education lacks a strong infrastructure for connecting research with educational practice and policy. A primary agent of the lasting connection between research and practice in medicine has been the teaching hospital, where researchers and practitioners work together to carry out research and train young professionals. Education needs analogous institutions – research schools or networks of schools within a community – that join researchers and teachers in living, community-based schools. This panel will explore the challenges and success in creating such a collaborative venture in various national and international settings. We expect the conversation to be a richly interwoven exploration of the needs and problem-sets that all interest groups face. The dynamic forces that shape the contexts in which these individuals live and work are likely to create unique situations, but also, perhaps, general patterns of behavior that might become lessons to all. The panel members will highlight the strategies they have explored and the degrees of success they have achieved in meeting the needs of the community and the students they serve. The panel will also share the challenges they continue to face in an attempt to invite the audience to join the dialogue to explore together new ideas, reconsider the work already accomplished, and reshape the way we all view the challenges of creating a stronger interaction between practice and research.
Elena Grigorenko, Yale University
Patrick Kyllonen, ETS
Carolyn MacCann, University of New South Wales, Australia
Richard Roberts, ETS
Peter Swerdzewski , College Board
Many cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and educators rely on data gathered from instruments that are low stakes for examinees but high stakes for the various programs or research interests for which the data are gathered. This symposium will focus on constructs that predict successful learning for all forms of education and in all types of pedagogical environments, but do not assess ability or knowledge. Among these constructs are personality, motivation, and study skills. The symposium will present a framework for identifying personal attributes, based partly on the Big 5 personality model, but also on motivational processes. It will review meta-analytic data showing that measures of personal attributes can predict success in education beyond cognitive test scores and grades. Drawing on these data, presenters will discuss the ETS® Personal Potential Index (PPI), a rating system for assessing a graduate school applicant's suitability for graduate study. In the PPI, faculty members rate student applicants and provide comments along six dimensions: Knowledge and Creativity, Communication, Teamwork, Resilience, Planning and Organization, and Ethics and Integrity. The ongoing work on PPI will be linked to other relevant research, such as investigations of the construct of conscientiousness; understanding of how low-stake assessments are taken by low-motivated students and what the quality of their performance means for the interpretability of the data; and potential links between these assessments and formative ideas on how to enhance learning skills.
Antonio Battro, Battro & Denham, Buenos Aires
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California
Josef Parvizi, Stanford University
In this session, we will discuss the cases of two high functioning hemispherectomized young men (Battro, 2000; Immordino-Yang, 2007) from a medical perspective and from an educational perspective, in order to explore possible connections that could be helpful in one or both fields. We will begin the session with a brief introduction to these two remarkable young men, Nico and Brooke, who have successfully compensated for right and left hemispherectomies, respectively. Next, we will have a presentation from Josef Parvizi, M.D., Ph.D., in which he will show and discuss structural MRI scans of Brooke’s and Nico’s brains, and discuss the interesting, clinically significant aspects of Brooke’s recovery. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.D., will then present the educationally relevant studies of these boys’ compensation and functioning, including an overview of her work on these boys’ production and comprehension of prosody (intonation) in language, and her and others’ work on the boys’ emotional functioning. We will conclude with a discussion of the educational implications of the ways these boys appear to have compensated for their relative weaknesses by capitalizing on remaining strengths, with a particular focus on how the medical and developmental perspectives on this can be integrated to form a set of testable educational and scientific implications.
| Friday 12:00 – 1:15 PM | LUNCH |
Provided
| Friday 1:30 – 2:30 PM | POSTER SESSION 1 |
Posters will be on display between 9:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
Presenters will be available to discuss their posters with participants
between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m.
| Friday 2:45 – 4:15 PM | CONCURRENT SESSIONS |
Jiaxian Zhou, Beijing Normal University
Todd Rose, Center for Applied Special Technology
Christina Hinton, Harvard Graduate School of Education
The participants in this panel are from America, OECD, and China and are working in the trans-disciplinary field of educational neuroscience. Our panel focuses on building educational neuroscience cross-culturally.
Because of limited research methods and technologies, nearly 200 years passed after the first efforts to bridge brain research with educational practice and policy with little progress.
However, this changed rapidly during the “decade of brain.” In 1999, Harvard University started the first Mind, Brain, and Education training program in the world, which provided a model for similar programs to emerge. The OECD launched the Learning Sciences and Brain Research project, bringing together 25 countries interested in connecting neuroscience with education. In 2000, the Chinese government began to launch research institutes in Beijing Normal University and the Southeast University. This new field is now advancing at an amazing pace around the world. As the field takes shape, cross-cultural research should be a fundamental part of its agenda. In this panel, we will discuss:
Katrien Mondt, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Maurits Van den Noort, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Marko Wilke, Universitätsklinikum Tübingen
Piet Van de Craen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
That the brain undergoes changes as a result of learning is no longer debatable (Blakemore & Frith 2005) and the effect of language learning on brain activity as well as cognitive function has been attested (Bialystok, 2009; Mondt 2007). However, (1) what influences different learning modes and states have on what aspects of structural or functional neurology, (2) what precise functions and aspects of neuroscientific enquiry can inform better educational practice, and (3) how educational practice could inform neuroscience is still very much under debate (Bruer, 1997; Fisher, 2007). To illustrate the special role language learning, CLIL, and bilingualism can play in this scientific debate, a wide range of original research within this framework will be presented. First, the influence of bilingualism on functional processing during language activity will be illustrated. Second, its influence on functional processing during non-linguistic activity will be illustrated by a study of mental calculation in bilingual and monolingual children and adults. Thirdly, possible robust influences of bilingualism, in terms of structural changes in the brain, will be discussed. Finally, the impact of affect and motivation in the brain will be illustrated by a look at what happens in a CLIL classroom.
Kurt Fischer, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Joe Blatt, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Susan Magsamen, The Johns Hopkins School of Education Neuro-Education Initiative
Learn: Connecting Mind, Brain, and Education is an initiative created to develop the first international comprehensive communications, professional development, and training initiative providing timely, accurate, and useful information about how we learn and how to effectively use this knowledge. The goal: To transform the lives of children in the classroom, at home, and in the community from researchers and educators around the world. Learn is the new way to exchange, communicate, and converse about the learning sciences which educators and others dedicated to help our children learn to learn. Imagine new tools that responsibly connect science to education, vetted and monitored by leading scientists and educators to ensure legitimate, responsible content. Developed for public and private pre-K-12 educators, researchers, home schoolers, parents, child and educational psychologists, pediatricians, education advocates, policy makers, and other invested stakeholders, Learn successfully integrates what we know in the learning sciences and communicates it with a wide group of constituencies. The power of Learn doesn’t come just from the mere reading or use of these tools. Instead, Learn changes the way we see the educational landscape, our goals and responsibilities, our opportunities, and our individual role in making a difference. By first identifying common educational themes around learning and then connecting the dots between research and practice, skills needed for the 21st Century, across the age continuum, and from school to home, Learn invites us to be partners in a practitioner model that assumes life-long learning. Understanding how we truly learn in all aspects of our lives influences profoundly how we teach and work with others.
| Friday 4:30 – 5:45 PM | GENERAL SESSION III |
The Teaching Brain: The New ChallengesAntonio Battro
President of IMBES – Battro & Denham, Buenos Aires
Education is based on the dynamic interaction of teaching and learning. Only the human species has developed a systematic pedagogy as a system of passing along information from one generation to the next. In a profound sense we are "Homo sapiens docens" (Teaching and Thinking Man). Our teaching capacities start early in life, where children naturally teach children. We already know much about the learning brain of children and adults, but now neuroeducation is offering new tools to explore the "teaching brain". I will discuss some recent studies to explore this emergent property of man, society, and technology.
| Saturday 8:00 – 9:00 AM | IMBES MEMBER MEETING |
Open to all IMBES members
| Saturday 9:15 – 10:30 AM | GENERAL SESSION IV |
Minds, brains, and early learning: How Infants ‘Crack the Speech Code'Patricia Kuhl
University of Washington, Seattle
Some of the most revolutionary ideas in brain science and education are coming from cribs and nurseries. In this talk I will focus on new discoveries about early learning and the neural coding of learned information with special attention to language. Infants are born ‘citizens of the world’ and can acquire language(s) easily. However, by the end of the first year of life, infants’ skills begin to narrow. As infants’ abilities to discriminate phonetic differences in their native language increase, their universal ability to do so for all languages declines. Moreover, the age at which this transition occurs—from citizens of the world to more language-bound listeners—predicts a child’s rate of language growth to the age of 3 years. Infants use computational skills to crack the speech code, but social interaction appears to play a critical role. Thus, the ‘social brain’ may somehow ‘gate’ the computational mechanisms underlying language learning. In the next decade, the techniques of modern neuroscience will play a significant role in our understanding of how children learn, with impact not only on the science of learning, but on society at large.
| Saturday 10:45 AM – 12:15 PM | CONCURRENT SESSIONS |
Debrah Hall, The Monarch School, Houston, Texas
Mark Tramo, Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard
Anthony Brandt, Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music
Jefferson Todd Frazier, The Center for the Performing Arts Medicine
What is music’s role in cognition and behavior? What is the connection between music and academic performance? Can music help students with autism learn self-regulation skills? Anthony Brandt, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music: By relating a composer’s insights into classical music to the research and theories of scientists such as Dr. Mark Turner of Case Western, Dr. Michael Gazziniga of UC-Santa Barbara, Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran of UC-San Diego, Dr. David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine and others, Dr. Brandt will show how science could develop more refined and effective means for establishing classical music’s cognitive richness. The success of such research could have a major impact on the role of classical music in education and in how music is taught. Mark Jude Tramo, M.D., Ph.D. – Director of the Institute for Music & Brain Science, Harvard University: “Functional Brain Organization in Relation to Emotion and Meaning in Music.” Debrah Hall, Ph.D. – The Monarch School – “Music therapy as a tool for teaching students skills in self-regulation and self-awareness.” Documentation will support that after participating in music therapy sessions focused on goals to enhance self-regulation and self-awareness, at a rate of once a week, students showed an increase in their ability to access skills necessary for self-regulation. Future directions indicate a need to conduct fMRI studies to explore what effect these practices have on temporal dynamics.
Heikki Lyytinen, Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Ulla Richardson, Agora Center, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Emma Ojanen, Niilo Mäki Institute, Jyväskylä, Finland
Fiona Kyle, Faculty of Education, Cambridge University, UK
Three independent studies examined the use of new scientifically sound educational technologies for the acquisition of reading skills. These technologies have been developed on the basis of the knowledge gained from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). In the JLD, children with and without familial risk for dyslexia have been followed from birth to school age. The knowledge gained from JLD underscores that one of the strongest predictors of reading skills is letter-sound knowledge. Another relevant recent discovery is that the orthographies of the languages have a significant effect on both the method for and rate of learning to read. Taking onboard these central issues for learning to read, the new training methods were developed in Jyväskylä. The method aims to preventively strengthen the readiness to acquire reading skills among at-risk children by focusing on training the connections between items of written and spoken language. The preventive training of the association building is administered in the context of enjoyable computer and mobile games. It is hypothesized that the intensive practice during short but frequent playing sessions 1–2 months before school entry helps to minimize the lag behind peers that is faced by at-risk children without such preventive practice. Overall, our recent results of such preventive training among thousands of Finnish children have been promising. In the panel, findings from behavioural as well as brain studies will be presented from intervention studies using the technologies in five different language contexts.
David Daniel, Todd Rose, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
| Saturday 10:45 AM – 3:30 PM | NTS TESTING WORKSHOP |
Theo Dawson, Zachary Stein, Marc Schwartz, and Kurt Fischer
The most basic form of educational testing takes the form of a "conversation" between an individual student and a teacher in which the student reveals what he or she is most likely to benefit from learning next. This kind of conversation increasingly takes a back seat to standardized forms of assessment that are designed to rank students for purposes that are dissociated from learning itself. Testing has lost its roots. The statistically generated rankings of standardized tests tell us very little about the specific learning needs of individual students. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that the kind of knowledge required to succeed on a typical standardized test bears little resemblance to the kind of knowledge required for adult life. The challenge we now face is creating the kind of mass-customization that revives the educative role of assessments in the local dialogue between teachers, students, and the curriculum, while maintaining the advantages of standardization. Simply stated: we need tests that help teachers meet the learning needs of individual students—tests teachers ought to teach to. In this workshop, we explore perspectives on these issues from the classroom, cognitive developmental science, psychometrics, and philosophy and introduce a concrete vision for the future of assessment.
| Saturday 12:15 – 1:30 PM | LUNCH |
On your own
| Saturday 1:30 – 2:30 PM | POSTER SESSION 2 |
Posters will be on display between 9:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.
Presenters will be available to discuss their posters with participants
between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m.
| 23. | The interface of affect and cognition: Primal function, appraisal, and regulation prompt pedagogical revision Kathryn Patten, Simon Fraser University |
| 24. | Emotional connections: A student centered approach to experiential education Bryan Hains, University of Kentucky; Brittany Wilkinson, University of Kentucky |
| 25. | Teaching for innovation through open-inquiry learning Jean Knodt, Inspired Minds, LLC |
| 26. | Impairments in persons with Parkinson's disease: Planning interventions for the affected and their caregivers Sangeeta Bhatia, Gargi College, University of Delhi |
| 27. | The relative contribution of phonological skills and memory in reading in profoundly deaf readers Elizabeth Hirshorn, University of Rochester; Matthew Dye, University of Rochester; Peter Hauser, RIT/NTID; Daphne Bavelier, University of Rochester |
| 28. | On the verge of permanent affective splitting: The dynamic organization of development in a girl with ADHD Leonor X. Perez, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 29. | Scientists with dyslexia exhibit visuospatial strengths Matthew H. Schneps, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; L. Todd Rose, CAST; Lincoln Greenhill, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
| 30. | The educational relevance of stress physiology Samantha Daley, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, CAST |
| 31. | A framework for interdisciplinary understanding in mind, brain, and education Jamie O’Keeffe, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Priya Kalra, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 32. | Fostering critical thinking through mathematical discourse in a globalized society Nancy Schoolcraft, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 33. | Building a functional model of multiple intelligences theory Carlo Cerruti, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 34. | Does the owl fly out of the tree or does the owl exit the tree flying? How L2 learners overcome their L1 lexicalization biases Lulu Song, University of Delaware; Christina Infiesta, Towson University; Roberta Golinkoff, University of Delaware; Rachel Pulverman, Temple University; Kathy Hirsh-Pasek |
| 35. | Applying MBE in emerging adulthood: Program design and evaluation findings of a postsecondary academic support service Laura E. Vanderberg, Tufts University |
| 36. | Towards an understanding of cognition and writing: The effect of writing mode upon discourse processes Dianne Samuelson, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 37. | Event-related potentials: A window on external representations Theo van Leeuwen, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, University of Twente, Netherlands; Jan van der Meij, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, University of Twente, Netherlands |
| 38. | Neural dissociation associated with hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-understanding in learning science: Evidence from an fMRI study Jun-Ki Lee, Korea National University of Education; Yong-Ju Kwon, Korea National University of Education; Jin-Su Jeong, Daegu University |
| 39. | Enhancing metacognitive learning processes to integrate learning to learn and wellbeing Tessy Britton, University of Chichester, UK |
| 40. | Fraction magnitude processing in adults relies on an intuitive understanding of quantity Lisa Sprute, Dartmouth College; Rebecca Rapf, Dartmouth College; Neera Chatterjee, Dartmouth College; Elise Temple, Dartmouth College |
| 41. | Shaking hands on the “roadway”: Visual arts and neuroscience Read Diket, William Carey University |
| 42. | Mindful teaching: Towards a more conscious pedagogy David Lee Keiser, Montclair State University; Aditya Adarkar, Montclair State University |
| 43. | Get SMART: The evolution of an adolescent reasoning program Jacquelyn Gamino, University of Texas at Dallas Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Elizabeth Hull, University of Texas at Dallas Behavioral and Brain Sciences |
| 44. | Vowel perception and spelling of children with dyslexia Rachel Currie-Rubin and Jenny Thomson, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 45. | Oshkosh’s Jacob Shapiro Brain Based Instruction Laboratory School Lynn Brown, Jacob Shapiro Brain Based Instruction Laboratory School; Berttram Chiang, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh |
| 46. | A design study: How developmental pathways of logical thinking and literacy acquisition and might interact Sharon L.Y. Khoo, Harvard Graduate School of Education |
| 47. | The importance of initial conditions: SERP approaches to educational R&D E. Juliana Paré-Blagoev & M. Suzanne Donovan, Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute |
| Saturday 2:45 – 4:15 PM | CONCURRENT SESSIONS |
Kurt Fischer, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Matthew H. Schneps, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
L. Todd Rose, CAST
Stanislas Dehaene, College de France
Children with learning differences are sometimes written-off because they are categorized as people whose capabilities are impaired. This view disregards the fact that abilities and disabilities are measured against tasks, and that neurology responsible for a disability when measured against one task, can turn out to be an asset if the task is changed. In this panel we will explore mounting evidence suggesting that learning differences, such as dyslexia, are associated with advantages for spatial learning and global visual inference, skills that are potentially advantageous in contexts that are important in science and mathematics. Our discussion will consider the possibility that a reason these advantages associated with dyslexia have gone largely unnoticed is due to a bias inherent in education: Schooling prizes performance on focused tasks (important in reading) that are in some sense the categorical opposite of the global/holistic tasks in which these individuals excel. We will discuss preliminary results from a new study of astrophysicists with dyslexia (NSF HRD-0726032) that demonstrates how differences in neurology associated with reading deficits can lead to advantages for science.
Debrah Hall, The Monarch School, Houston, Texas
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California
Mark Tramo, Institute for Music & Brain Science at Harvard
Social emotions like admiration and compassion play a critical role in interpersonal relationships and moral behavior, and often lead to a sense of heightened self-awareness — e.g., the desire to be virtuous and gratitude for our good circumstances. Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang will share results from a study of the brain and psychophysiological correlates of experiencing admiration and compassion, which revealed that the feeling of these complex, culturally constructed moral emotions involves the neural systems for the feeling of one’s own body, especially the gut and viscera, with distinct time profiles. The experience of these emotions was also associated with increased blood flow to brain systems related to consciousness and self-awareness. These findings provide an interesting jumping-off point for the discussion of several educationally and developmentally relevant topics, including, for example, the role of the self in social interaction, the development of the self in social contexts, how one virtuous person can inspire others, and how the pace of a social interaction may change its emotional effect.
By way of application, Dr. Debrah Hall will discuss these findings in relation to the curricular model of the Monarch School (TMS), a school for students who struggle with neuropsychological differences such as autism, ADD, learning disabilities, and anxiety and seizure disorders, among others. At TMS, teachers are working to incorporate information about emotional and social relational development into pedagogy, with the aim of increasing student engagement and fostering learning within social contexts. The focus of the presentation will be on implications of neuroscientific findings on social emotion for students’ learning.
Dr. Mark Jude Tramo will review recent advances in the neuroscience of learning and emotion, highlight those relevant to Immordino-Yang and Hall's empirical observations, discuss the importance of future laboratory and classroom research on the emotional brain's contributions to learning, and formulate a conceptual and methodological framework for a new multi-disciplinary branch of neuroscience, Educational Neuroscience.
Roberta Golinkoff, University of Delaware
Kenneth Ginsburg, Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania
Joan Almon, Alliance for Childhood
Wilkey Wong, University of Delaware
Kelly Fisher, Temple University
This symposium will present theory and data on the importance of play and guided play for children’s learning. The first paper by Kenneth Ginsburg sets the stage by noting how children’s play has been curtailed. The second paper takes up Ginsburg’s claims by discussing the sorry state of today’s kindergartens. Joan Almon will present data on how the last 10 to 20 years of kindergarten education has shifted from a play-based, experiential approach to a heavily didactic approach including daily preparation for standardized tests. The third paper by Wilkey Wong makes the case that play and guided play with parents and caregivers is essential for children learning spatial terms such as the names of geometric forms (e.g., circle, square) and spatial vocabulary such as “next to” and “behind.” Finally, the last paper answers the question of “Why play?” by presenting a new theory of how children learn through play. Based on the theorizing of Livingston, Fisher argues that the self-directed learning that characterizes play refers to emergent contexts where children initiate their own learning, such as in exploratory and symbolic play activities. Thus, this symposium unites the developmental and learning sciences to consider powerful new evidence in favor of pedagogy and informal play experiences that best foster child development. At a time when the nation is promoting early academic readiness, it is vital that we understand how young children learn and what contexts create optimal learning environments.
| Saturday 4:15 – 5:30 PM | RECEPTION AND CLOSING REMARKS |
Reception, sponsored by Wiley/Blackwell
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