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Follow a typical student through her day at school-from the perspective of her brain.
Julie seems like a bright kid. At least that's what her aptitude tests say. You can count her absences on one hand, and she's not a discipline problem. As far as the teacher knows, she comes from a fairly typical home. So why is she-and countless others in her school-driving her teachers crazy? Why do teachers have to go over things twice and even three times for the information to sink in?
We've known for years that teaching does not equal learning. But today we have a better idea of what's going on in Julie's brain. Julie's teacher spends a lot of time reteaching because she doesn't teach in ways that match how Julie's brain learns. This mismatch creates frustration, underperformance, and hopelessness.
Fortunately, new knowledge in neuroscience is redefining possibilities for education. There are five critical variables in the brain's learning process: neural history, context, acquisition, elaboration, and encoding. To find out where neuroscience and the classroom link up, let's explore these from the perspective of Julie's brain.
Neural History
Julie's brain is not blank like a tabula rasa but customized by her life experience. Julie's neural history includes more than her grades and test scores. A seemingly trivial accident-a fall and bump on the head at summer camp-has created a brain insult in her temporal lobe, an area responsible for Julie's semantic memory. That means that although Julie's memory might be good for names and places, it's weaker for numbers and formulas. This behavior puzzles teachers who often think she's simply not trying hard enough in math classes.
Our neural history is founded on a dynamic interplay between nature and nurture called emergentism. At each development stage, different genes are affected by the environment and are uniquely expressed (Elman et al., 1998). Genes, however, are not templates for learning. For example, if there really were a "language gene," then a child raised in isolation would automatically speak. Prior learning, character, the environment, peers, and life experience also influence how we learn.
For instance, many students who have spent too much time in car seats and not enough time on swings, merry-gorounds, and seesaws have insufficient early motor...