What Brain Research Teaches Us About Learning
Recent research in brain development and function provides parents and educators with significant insight into strategies that support learning as children develop. Some of these findings support theories as old as the art of parenting. We have always known, but sometimes reject in favor of mass education, that young children need experiences with concrete objects, ideas, and movements in order to thrive. Similarly, nearly every culture has a transition from childhood into adulthood near the age of 13. Now, however, researchers are actually able to look at the neurological evidence for this experienced phenomenon.
According to Margaret Semrud-Clikeman of the University of Michigan, during the early elementary years, fibers between neurons or “white matter” grows. Much of the learning that supports this growth tends to be rote in nature. For example, children learn the majority of their object (noun) vocabulary during these years. Short words and phonograms can be easily learned as well as the memorization of larger bodies of information such as songs, poems, and number sequences. The development of automaticity in these simpler tasks proves necessary for later complex academic tasks. The movement in education to push students towards higher level (inferential and complex) thinking too early is not supported by this research. Oftentimes we misplace our emphasis on complex thought when we should attend to a child’s storage capacity and efficiency of retrieval during the early years. Small bits of concrete information that are easily retrieved provides the young child with the foundation for future learning.
Semrud-Clineman also asserts that a key predictor of reading readiness is a child’s ability to understand rhyming (2006). This ability to recognize rhymes in turn predicts a child’s future success with phonics instruction, the building blocks of language. Early reading by the child is not nearly as important as early reading aloud by the parent. This reading should then be undergirded with phonics instruction to foster independent reading by the child.
As students move into adolescence, inferential and complex thinking is supported by brain development. As a child grows into adolescents the connectivity in the frontal section of the brain is also strengthened. Activities such as planning and organization, reasoning and logic, and personal expression become the focus of both schooling and the adolescent’s interest. Historically, these are the years when responsibility is shifted from the parent and teacher to the student. Coming of age rites are the symbolic representation of this natural development.
The key to coaching the adolescent student is to train him/her in logical and inferential thinking as well as metacognition—the ability to make insights into one’s own thought process. Recognizing the adolescent’s learning style and strengths and assisting him/her in how to maximize those strengths is the secret to successfully negotiating the middle school to high school years.